My father’s damaged leg lay across two chairs, swollen and braced in elastic. My mother reached over the table, stole the cigarette from his lips.
He reached for the pack in his jacket.
“Do not have conniptions,” she told him. “I only wanted one puff.”
“No, have it,” he said. He shook out a fresh one.
“You say this like you are being generous, but in fact—”
“Not now, baby,” he said.
“‘Not. Now. Baby,’” she said. “Should I feel offended or charmed? It is hard to say, no?” She dragged and the cigarette crackled, but she kept it there in her mouthcorner. “On the first hand, it is a kind of brush-off: he does not want to hear the affectionate small jab I was about to make regarding his mood. On the second hand, he calls me ‘baby’ which is sweet, but on the third hand, it is precisely because ‘baby’ is sweet and he is using it to brush me off that saying to me ‘baby’ is a little condescending. Do I decide that he is sweet for painting with honey the brushoff, or cruel for pretending to me that a brush-off is honey?”
Here, a chunk of ash fell off the end of her cigarette, exploding on impact with the placemat. She might have paused because she noticed or she might have noticed because she paused. It was impossible to tell, but now she addressed herself to the ashes, and my father didn’t notice — he just kept looking at his lap.
“Let us assume that I truly love him, this Judah Maccabee, and that I call it honey on a brush-off. Say that I can even empathize with his need to exercise a brush-off, that I understand he has had a trying day and needs to enjoy an uninterrupted cigarette in its entirety before he can feel human again. The question then becomes: How do I get across to him that despite all of that, he is not the only one who has had a trying day, that I have also had a trying day, and that if I empathize it is at least partly because I need someone to do the same for me? How do I get it across?”
She blew the ashes into the cup of her hand.
“Do I drop the lit cigarette down the back of his shirt and then become alarmed? Do I just thank him for the cigarette and continue to smoke it while I fetch him an icepack from the freezer?” She was at the freezer now, the icepack in her hand; noticing its softness, she gave it dirty looks. “Do I attempt to return the lit cigarette to his lips? Maybe continue to soliloquize until he reacts, until he tells me how sexy my accent still is to him, or until he tells me in a prideful, almost fatherly way how little my accent inflects my speech anymore? Maybe he will pay me the compliment I want to hear but he will mean the opposite and I will know it. Maybe it is only a sentimental kind of love we have now, a warm thing, but not fiery. Maybe he knows I want him to tell me how sexy my accent still is and he tells me, or maybe he knows and so he tells me the opposite, to tease me, for teasing is more youthful, less porch-swinging, a more convincing denial. Teasing is fierier.” She set the icepack on his knee, said, “Is this a word? Fierier? It should be. That is not the point. What is the point? Maybe it is all a put-on, is the point. This teasing. Maybe this teasing is all a put-on, a clever double-feign arranged, however lovingly, to confirm that he—”
“This icepack isn’t very cold,” said my father. I couldn’t see his face.
“He broods!” she said, “and she continues to speak. What does this make her? What else but a twit? Is not a twit one who twitters? And what is it called in the American language when a foreign wife ceaselessly banters into the ear of a husband who is brooding cross-armed with a burning cigarette in his fingers? What is it called, Judah? What, if not twittering?”
“Baby, come—”
She kissed him on the cheek and he dropped his cigarette and grabbed her wrist and she giggled a syllable.
They started making out.
All the other times I’d come across them making out in the kitchen, I’d snuck away quietly. This time I smacked the wall, because who were they trying to kid?
My mom, still kissing, opened her eyes.
“A spy,” she said.
Again I smacked the wall. A couple of the scabs from the remote control opened on impact and the blood left dots.
“Boychic—” my dad said.
Why didn’t you set those people on fire?
“Not even a hug first?” he said.
I came down the stairs. I could see his crutches leaning on the fridge.
Why didn’t you? I said.
“Even if I could still—”
Did you try? I said.
“Gurion!” my mother snapped.
My dad set his hand on her arm. He said to me, “I hurt my knee a little, Gurion. I bumped my head. Men should die for that? I fell and they left me alone.”
Before they left you alone, they were coming for you and you didn’t—
“They were coming for Patrick Drucker.”
You were in their way, and you didn’t know what they would do. You could not have known.
“And?”
And what? You should have stopped them.
“I should have killed them, you’re saying.”
They might have done the same to you.
“I fell and they left me alone.”
You didn’t know they would, though.
“And I didn’t know they wouldn’t. To pre-emptively—”
They didn’t leave your client alone, I said.
“My client?” he said. “You would expect me to— What can you possibly think of me, Gurion? Do you think we’re that different?”
Who?
“You and I.”
I don’t understand you.
“Nor I you. Patrick Drucker is a Nazi in a cheap suit. You would expect me to kill Jews—murder Jews — to protect a Nazi?”
I sat where I’d stood. I sat on the floor, not knowing how to answer. Because that was, actually, what I’d have expected of him. It hadn’t been what I’d have expected — not for the last ten years it hadn’t; not until the previous few hours. Not until the expectation was useful. When I saw him get hurt I was angry at him for getting hurt, at least as angry at him as I was at those who’d hurt him, and at Adonai. I was angry because it is right to be angry at people who are guilty. People who are guilty should have — which means that they could have — done something different from what they did. To be guilty, you have to have had some control over the thing you did, and if he had had some control, my father… if he had deserved the enmity of those Israelites… if he had brought it on himself… if he had gotten himself attacked, then it only followed that in the future he could avoid getting himself attacked. In the future, he could keep himself safe. And I wanted to believe he could keep himself safe. That was why I had decided he was just as his attackers claimed he was; it would have been easier to love him despite his being an enemy of the Israelites than to have to worry about him getting killed for being righteous; less world-shattering to lose my trust in him than my faith in Adonai; more tolerable to be angry at him than to fear for him. And if these reflections seem too complicated for me to have had in the middle of an argument with my parents, while my mother, who was rising by then, puffing up warriorstyle to deliver me a rhetorical slap that would not, as it would turn out, bring me pain, but relief — if this all seems too complicated a stream of thoughts for me to think in the moment my entire understanding of the previous six months of my life was getting re-arranged, that’s because it was. Too complicated. I didn’t think these things then, not all of them, not nearly, and certainly not in this order. All I thought was: You are good, Aba, and they trampled you anyway. And struck as I was by the implications, I only managed to speak a bastardized version of the predicate.