After dinner, Joshua helped his father to the sofa in the living room while Socorro and his mother stayed in the kitchen with the boys. Joshua sat in his own chair, but he did not recline it.
“The visions—you have them, too?” The old man looked at Joshua with a puzzled expression.
“Too?”
“What did you see?” his father asked.
“See. Hear. Smell. Everything. Massacres, pogroms, murders, mass executions.”
“Names?” the old man asked quietly. “Did you receive names?”
“No. What do you mean, names?”
His father smiled painfully. “You may receive names. You will. You must act when you do. You must.” He was as serious in this as in anything Joshua could remember. He slumped back into the sofa when he finished speaking. Old, Joshua thought. He was so old. In the ten years he had aged, gone from a vigorous seventy to this.
“Why? What did you see?”
His father grimaced noticeably, took a deep breath. “It is very distressing. I was no Joseph. I could not tell a true dream.”
“I know.” Joshua did know what the old man meant. He wished that he wouldn’t couch it in such Biblical terms. Everything had to come from the Bible. His own visions had seemed real—in certain ones he had verified certain facts. But still, he could not, would not say they were “true.”
“Tell me of the last one,” his father said, leaning forward again, “the first one and the last one.”
Joshua told his father about the early pogrom. His father nodded his head but kept silent as Joshua struggled with the words. He told him of the machine-gunning in the ravine. When Joshua finished speaking, his father sat back onto the couch to think. He closed his eyes and tipped his head forward onto his steepled fingers. A gesture which had not changed in ten years. Except for the exceptional thinness of the fingers and the liver spots on his hands. His father did not speak for many moments. This also had not changed. Joshua remembered having to tiptoe around the house while his father thought with his eyes closed. He didn’t rest his eyes, like Uncle Morry, just thought with them closed.
“The first one I recognize,” his father said, leaning forward. “It is the same as the first one I had. In Poland. The last, I did not see. It sounds like Babi Yar. In the Ukraine.”
“Could be,” Joshua said.
“And the others?” his father asked. “Are they sequential? Do they follow a pattern?”
“A pattern through time, yes, but there are gaps. Do you still have them?” Joshua asked.
The old man leaned back in the chair. “Like David, I have been denied the way to God.”
The simple statement brought chills to Joshua’s neck. The way to God. He had not thought of God at all in any of this. Jew, yes, he had been forced to think of Jews, but not of God. He had not thought seriously of God since—he did not know how long. The God of the Old Testament. The Old Testament—his father would have gone through the ceiling if he heard Joshua say that. The Holy Scriptures! They are not Testaments—an old implies a new. That, and “B.C.” “B.C.E.” was all right—before the common era. The old man had his little ways.
The Old Testament God. The God of Vengeance. Was he suffering the Wrath of God? Bruce Silverstein in Hebrew class used to mock: there is no God and Jesus is his son, there is no God and Mohammed is his prophet. With no God how could there be a Wrath of God?
Benjamin huddled into himself and wept quietly. The way to God. Denied the way to God. This was enough to make his father cry. Joshua felt the distance between himself and his father as if it were a solid object. A solid, brick wall. His father had sought the way to God ever since Joshua could remember. And he had been denied. While Joshua, the apostate, had been rewarded. What kind of God was it that would do that to His believers?
Joshua did not know how to react to his father’s tears. He wanted to console the old man but knew the resentment that would follow.
“In 1916,” the old man said without raising his head, “in a vision of awful clarity, I was given the name of the little Austrian.” Hitler—his father never called him anything but “the little Austrian.”
“What?”
“I did nothing about it. At the end of the vision I was told what to do—where to find him during the Great War, and how to kill him. But I did nothing.”
“You were only thirteen at the time,” Joshua said.
“It was my first vision of the future, of atrocities that could have been prevented, and I did nothing. Thirteen was old enough.” He stared at the ground. “Old enough. Thirteen is old enough to be a man. And later, that chance was gone. The little Austrian lived—and six million Jews died. Six million.”
“You couldn’t have done anything,” Joshua said.
Benjamin looked up at Joshua. “Yes, I could have. I could have changed everything.”
Everything. Changed everything. The words reverberated in Joshua’s head. Everything. He had seen—and done nothing.
“Did you ever change the future?” he asked his father bluntly.
“Ah,” the old man replied, raising his finger stiffly to make his point, “the import sinks in.” This was the same gesture he had seen his father use in making a thousand points. The Talmudic finger.
“Yes,” Joshua said. Getting information from his father was a tiresome, trying thing. “The import sinks in! Did you?” His father nodded. “How do you know it worked?”
“You never heard of the Fairfax Massacre—1958? And why not? Because I prevented it. I took the blueprint that God gave me, and I prevented it. Fairfax Massacre, Bronx Butchery of 1977, Tel Aviv Crater, the Rio River of Blood—none of them took place. Because I acted.” The effort of the speech caused Benjamin to sit back in the sofa, to rest again.
“How did you do it?”
“God showed me a way. In every case, God showed me a way.” Now Joshua was uneasy. God showed him a way. Of course. If he were not himself having the visions, he would suspect that his father was crazy. He would know it. Maybe they both were crazy.
“You were seeing into the future in 1916?”
“Yes, since 1916 when I could have done so much. So much.”
Benjamin said he couldn’t speak anymore. He was obviously worn out by his efforts. Joshua helped him back to his car, rediscovering the frailness. Harlow went unbidden to the old man and kissed him good-bye. Kevin remained in the house watching a rerun of “Three’s Company” on television.
Standing naked in the bathroom with the light and fan on, Joshua was brushing his teeth. He was trying to figure out what his visions meant. Before, they had just been, but now he wondered if there was some meaning to them, some purpose behind them. And what had his father told him—if he had told him anything? The old man was so oblique. All he knew for certain was that he had visions and his father had them.
Socorro said something from the bedroom. Joshua stuck his head around the corner. “What?”
“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Socorro said. She was reading another Harlequin Romance, leaning against a pillow propped against the headboard of the bed. Her summer nightgown had slipped high up her legs. Her right leg was bent. The shadows beneath and between the legs, as always, beckoned. Promised. Her breasts flattened comfortably in the shiny blue material.
Joshua removed the toothbrush and said, “I’ll make you talk with your mouth full.”
“Ain’t never that full, white boy!”
Joshua returned the toothbrush to the cabinet and rinsed his mouth.
Socorro had not moved. She didn’t have to move. The blue nightgown rested lightly on her brown legs. Joshua moved, slid onto the bed.