Читать книгу The Book of Stone - Jonathan Papernick - Страница 14

6

Stone read for three days straight, not leaving his room to eat or shower. Reading his father’s books galvanized some triumphal life force within Stone, made him feel a small temporary victory over the ever-lurking Angel of Death. He pissed in the vomit bucket and dumped it out his window when it was full. He slept in twenty-minute snatches, just long enough to jumpstart his brain before returning to the books. Change a couple letters in Stone, he thought, you had alone; change another, you had atone; split that word, you had at one. When he was with the books, he was at one with them—alone, but not alone. His father’s handwritten marginal notes made it easy to focus his attention, the Judge’s script curling out with the same confident tone he had used when he spoke: “This is hypocrisy,” triple underlined; “Check your facts,” written in red; “Smilansky agrees,” appended with a furious exclamation point. His father, with his emphatic jottings, exercised more influence over Stone now than he had in life, his voice as clear as a bright spring day. Something was under the robe with him as he read, massaging his skin, soothing his muscles, the whispers like oxygen breathed into his lungs. Once or twice in the middle of the night, the street outside silent, it dawned on Stone that he might be losing his reason. He couldn’t go forever without sleeping, but an inner urgency drove him to read these books as quickly as possible. He didn’t need to eat; he devoured the words, and they filled him. He rationed water from a gallon jug and smoked cigarettes and refused to answer the door when Pinky knocked. Pinky slid periodic scrawled notes under the locked door telling him to stop feeling sorry for himself, he just needed to get laid, his mother had called twice and wanted to speak with him, and some giant, bearded man in a black suit and hat had been looking for him each of the last three mornings. Stone found a store-bought birthday card from his mother among the notes and lit it on fire, together with the notes, watching with fascination as they burned to nothing.

A leather-bound book by Henry Ward Beecher was of particular interest to Stone, considering he had studied at the school the preacher had founded near the end of his life. A quotation had been underlined by the Judge in reference to the Sharps repeater rifles abolitionists had shipped to Kansas in crates labeled BIBLES: “There is more moral power in one of these than in one hundred Bibles.”

Stone had spent six years at Beecher Academy in downtown Brooklyn, but he hardly recalled a single thing he had learned. The school was housed in an old Tudor Gothic structure, its brownstone facade covered in creeping ivy, the school’s maroon-and-white flag hanging limply on its pole beside a dispirited-looking Stars and Stripes. Beecher Academy had been established after the Civil War by Henry Ward Beecher as an institution of higher learning “founded upon the principles of abolitionism, liberalism, and faith,” but clearly the school’s mission had changed by the time Matthew arrived. Beecher Academy had been on the verge of going broke throughout the sixties and seventies, as enrollment dropped and drugs found their way into the classrooms. Students graduating with inflated grades and poor skills became known as Beecher bums, fit only to work in the service industry or, at best, to join the white-collar assembly line of corporate America. Infusions of private money, particularly from the Jews of Brooklyn Heights, turned Beecher around during the eighties, and by the end of the decade, it was one of the top-rated independent schools in the tristate area, boasting a 99 percent graduation rate and college acceptances at the top schools across the country. After Stone’s mother left, the Judge had chosen Beecher because of its proximity to the courthouse and its graduates’ high acceptance rate at Ivy League schools. Matthew had refused to go to an Ivy League school, but now, thinking back, he had no idea why.

There was one day at Beecher Academy that stood out from all the others, a day that would define his father, and Matthew’s broken relationship with him, forever. It was a Friday afternoon in early September of Matthew’s sophomore year. He had been dozing through math class when he heard sirens in the streets, filling the air, layer upon layer, in a rising pitch.

Matthew would soon learn that Menachem Wuensch, an Orthodox Jew driving a truck for Court Street Medical Supplies, had run over and killed a seven-year-old Arab boy as he sped down Atlantic Avenue. Wuensch, afraid to get out of his truck in the heart of Brooklyn’s Arab shopping district, rolled down his window, saw the boy’s broken body, and drove off. Within minutes, the store shutters all along Atlantic clanged shut and dozens of Arabs charged toward the medical supply shop shouting, “Kill Jews!” They threw rocks and bottles, smashed windows, pulled the teaching skeleton into the street, and burned it in effigy.

Court Street was burning. A fire engine blocked the entrance to Joralemon Street, where Beecher Academy was on lockdown, and a police officer called out instructions through a megaphone. “Please lock your doors and stay inside until order has been restored. Please stay away from windows, and do not open your door for anybody.” There were rumors Molotov cocktails were flying in front of Borough Hall.

The riot became a media sensation, another link in the narrative of Brooklyn’s racial strife. Only this time, the spin was new: African Americans were not at the boiling center. The oldest conflict in the world, as old as Isaac and Ishmael, was playing out on Brooklyn’s mean streets, and the media descended hungrily.

A boy had been run over on Atlantic Avenue, and in the ensuing riot one Arab man had been killed, almost a dozen injured.

A twenty-two-year-old yeshiva student named Isaac Brilliant, who worked as a part-time stock boy at the medical supply shop, was charged with aggravated assault and the murder of Nasser Al-Bassam, a sixty-three-year-old Palestinian-born shopkeeper who died of his injuries.

The case went before the Supreme Court of the State of New York; Walter J. Stone presiding.

The flamboyant Reverend Randall Roebling Nation, a preacher who claimed to have been ordained at the age of eight, took up the fight in his daily soapbox orations: “The elucidation of the struggle is coming to a head; the judges will be judged and the people will have justice, freedom, and liberty at last!”

Matthew knew Nation, with his tailored suits and gold jewelry, was full of wind, politicking simply to get his face in the papers. Every day in front of the courthouse, he took aim at the Judge, shouting, “I beseech you all to listen to R. R. Nation, as Nation speaks God’s truth. Judge Stone is a criminal, a crook, and a thief, and if he is not punished in this life, God will punish him in the next.”

Even as Brooklyn’s Arab community protested Walter Stone’s selection, picketing outside the Supreme Court building, the Judge said nothing. A spokesman stated, “The Judge’s record speaks for itself.”

Matthew heard nothing from his father, who had receded into his study with his law books for days on end, leaving only to dump his full ashtray into the toilet. By the time the case went to trial, Matthew had developed constant canker sores in his mouth; he found it difficult to speak, his mouth a piece of tenderized meat. Some days he didn’t even want to leave his room. He gargled salt water, apple cider vinegar, peroxide; nothing helped.

One evening, his mouth on fire, sucking on ice cubes to numb the pain, Matthew knocked on his father’s study door. “I want to go to the emergency room,” Matthew said through the closed door.

“Fine,” his father said after a moment.

Matthew remained at the door, his fist poised to knock again.

“I said fine.”

How wretched, how awful Matthew felt knowing he was just a repulsive, inconsequential insect in the pitiless eyes of his father. That night, Matthew burned himself for the first time. He realized, as he stood, match in hand, in his bathroom, that out of all things in the entire universe, he truly had control only over his own body. He could cause pain whenever he wanted and remove it just as easily. What a release!

MURDER INC. KIN TO RULE was headlined the day before the trial, and the story was picked up by the national media. The trial had all the makings of a Movie of the Week, said a Los Angeles Times columnist, who joked that Marlon Brando as Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now should be cast to play Judge Walter Stone. Matthew was amazed by the shallowness of some of the coverage, at the reporters playing casting director as if this trial were first and foremost a commodity to be gobbled up by Hollywood.

The Judge broke his silence the day before the trial was to begin. Appearing on the front steps of the Supreme Court, wearing his gray three-piece suit and half-moon glasses, he read from a prepared statement: “I am addressing the spurious canard that appeared in this morning’s paper in relation to my father. What my father may or may not have done before I was born holds no bearing on today’s proceedings, and I expect to hear nothing more on this matter.”

The jury was comprised of seven women and five men, three of whom were African American, four Hispanic, four white, and one Korean American. There was one Jew on the jury: Emile Alcalai, a teacher from Sheepshead Bay.

Brilliant, flanked by his lawyer and the court bailiff, wore a black suit, a white shirt, and a black silken yarmulke on his head. He smiled from behind his beard and nodded his head confidently at the court assembly, as if he knew all along he would soon be free.

When friends and family members attesting to the character of Al-Bassam were cross-examined by Brilliant’s lawyer, the courtroom buzzed. “Is it not true Mr. Al-Bassam, a fervent Muslim, has three times made the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca—”

“The question is not relevant,” the prosecutor interjected.

Judge Stone flatly said, “Answer the question.”

Later, Brilliant’s lawyer said, “Mr. Al-Bassam left the Samarian town of Tulkarm in June of 1971. Local records show he had his daughter killed two years earlier in what is known as an honor killing—”

“Objection. The question is inflammatory and improper,” the prosecutor said.

“The question is allowed,” Judge Stone answered.

When Brilliant took the stand, he was unable to fully explain how the bloodstains on his shirt had come by self-defense, but when grilled by the prosecution he claimed he was attacked by a vicious Nasser Al-Bassam, whom he identified in a photograph as the man he had tried to stop from throwing a garbage can through a plate-glass window. Brilliant maintained that Al-Bassam had turned his fury on him.

“Considering the victim’s chronic epilepsy,” the prosecuting attorney replied, directing his comment toward the jury, “where convulsing seizures strike in moments of exertion and stress, it is unlikely, almost impossible to believe, that Mr. Al-Bassam, a very careful man who was in fact so impaired by his condition that he did not drive, was capable of posing a threat toward Mr. Brilliant. In addition, witnesses at the scene testified Mr. Al-Bassam was turned away from Mr. Brilliant when he received the deadly blow to the back of his head.”

Judge Stone commenced his charge to the jury after lunch. Quoting Gibbon, the Judge said, “‘In every deed of mischief he had a heart to resolve, a head to contrive, and a hand to execute.’ Here we are absent the heart and the head, so I ask you, is there an act of mischief, a crime?” He spoke at length into the early evening, explaining the nuances and minutia of the law until the jury retired to deliberate. The jury reached a decision shortly before midnight. The press was confident Brilliant would be found guilty of murder. But instead he was found guilty of the lesser charge of aggravated assault and not guilty of murder. The headlines screamed the next morning: NOT SO BRILLIANT VERDICT.

Now, Stone puzzled over the words his father had underlined in Beecher’s book: “There is more moral power in one of these than in one hundred Bibles.” Stone was captivated by the quotation, the violence of it, the self-assurance of it, and he flipped through the pages to see if his father had marked anything else; he had not. The book was an old hardcover with crisp yellowed pages, bound in soft leather. He pressed his nose to the cover and breathed in deeply, the smell rich and luxurious and soothing. Something told him to open the book again, and he spread the pages wide before him on the floor, cracking the spine. It was a terrible sound, like a tiny bone breaking. He had destroyed something beautiful and it sickened him. Henry Ward Beecher smiled an inscrutable half smile from a black-and-white photograph on the book’s frontispiece. How could a simple photograph terrify? There was something haunting about those old daguerreotypes—the eyes especially—as if the subjects had already crossed over to the other side, even as their pictures were being taken. A surge of panic rose in Stone as he regarded the naked spine of the book. The cover lay limp on the floor like wings, grounded forever. The glue had dried out and cracked, and he brushed aside the amber bits of residue with his finger when he noticed something had fallen out of the binding and onto the floor. It looked like a small blank business card, but when Stone picked it up he realized it was a little envelope—something was inside. He pinched the envelope open and held it upside down, and a bank card embossed with Chase Manhattan Bank’s symbol clattered to the floor. The account number was printed across the laminate front of the card, above the name Walter Stone and the raised words THE ERETZ FUND. Underneath was the expiration date. The card would not expire for another four years. The card was practically brand-new, showing no damage or wear.

That magnetic force was close enough now to touch him, but when Stone turned around there was nothing, just a sort of abstract whisper guiding him, directing him toward a book about one of the former prime ministers of Israel. The book opened to a page on which a quotation was underlined in his father’s hand: “A man who goes forth to take the life of another man whom he does not know must believe one thing only—that by his act he will change the course of history.” Then, as if by instinct, he sifted through the pile, discarding the heavy biography of Moses Montefiore and Émile Zola’s J’accuse, his hand reaching for a book by his father’s friend Rabbi Avraham Grunhut. Stone flipped from page to page until he found this single sentence circled again and again and again, the ink on the page whirling like the eye of a tornado around the frightening words: “Nothing is more righteous than revenge administered at the right time and place.”

The card burned in Stone’s hand, heavy as a piece of iron. He knew this bank card was the vehicle for that revenge.

Was he crazy? He closed his eyes against the words his father had highlighted in these books. The room closed in on him, the walls pressing in. His father had brought all his intellectual power to bear to ensure Isaac Brilliant would get away with murder. Why would he risk his entire career, his reputation, so a Jewish man would not be found guilty of murdering an Arab man? And Demjanjuk, the accused prison guard from the Treblinka death camp—his father had been instrumental in sentencing him to death, only to have the judgment overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court. And who else had there been over the years? There had to be others, there had to be.

Stone had always assumed his father was a man of law and order, operating in good faith from the bench, acting as a moral and honest broker. But now, tearing off his father’s robe, Stone was beset by doubts. The card had been planted in the book for Stone to find, for him to complete his father’s work. But it was not right. He knew whatever it was he was tasked to do with that card involved terrible violence. Stone’s stomach lurched, but he had nothing inside himself to throw up. He began shouting at the books, railing at them, tossing them about the room. Why did he ever take those books, when he might have left them at his father’s apartment and been free of him forever? He had not slept in three days, had not left his room in six, and his head was a storm of confusion. Was he losing his mind? Was his exhausted brain making connections that did not exist, or had he reached some higher level of understanding? He knew he couldn’t stay in this room forever, and, casting around for an excuse to leave the fetid bedroom and his father’s books behind, Stone remembered he had an appointment the next day (or was it today, or yesterday?) with his father’s lawyer to discuss the Judge’s will. He stretched a trembling hand for the nearest book, something by Horace, and opened it to the middle pages, hoping to find something benign, meaningless. He read: “Wisdom is not wisdom when it is derived from books alone.”

“Who are you to say when wisdom is wisdom and when wisdom is not wisdom? You’ve been dead over two thousand years.” Stone laughed and laughed until his sides ached and he tumbled onto his mattress and into a dead sleep.

He slept for sixteen dreamless hours and awoke the following morning, cleansed of whatever madness had overtaken him the night before, with the bank card still clutched in his grip. He had found a bank card, that was all; nothing about that discovery constituted an obligation or marching orders of any kind. Dozens of books still lay tossed about the room; he gathered up the scattered books and stacked them back on top of the piles. The sun shone in through his windows, and Stone desired to be out in the fresh air. He found the lawyer’s card in his wallet and discovered his appointment was for that day—in two and a half hours. The homeboys from the Whitman Houses laughed on the pavement outside his window. The fact that joyous laughter still bloomed made him feel unaccountably hopeful. Stone decided he would walk the mile or so to Brooklyn Heights. He slipped the card into his pocket, ate some dry cereal while standing over the sink, and drank three glasses of water. He was prepared to handle whatever came his way. His mother had left a long handwritten note for him taped to the back of the front door, but he disregarded it and locked the door behind him.

ZOHAR WAS WAITING in the street for Stone. His suit was rumpled, tie knotted loosely at his neck, face unshaven—he looked as bad as Stone imagined he himself looked after his marathon tangle with the Judge’s books. “Good morning, Matthew,” Zohar said, approaching, a crushed Styrofoam cup in his hand.

Stone wanted to be irritated by Zohar’s intrusion on his privacy at a time like this, but now that he had seen what was in his father’s books, he was also curious to know what Zohar had to say. Who was his father after all, and what did he expect of Stone? His father’s legacy would become his own, in the same manner the Judge had been obliged to carry his own father’s bad name around with him like a yellow star pinned to his chest. Stone knew whatever Zohar was up to concerned his own future and that his prospects depended on the past and how it was framed. This was an opportunity to gain perspective, to understand how the critics and haters saw Walter Stone. He needed to know what Zohar was up to if he was going to fight back and defend his father’s name, his own life. Stone said a curt good morning and turned onto Myrtle Avenue. Zohar, at his heels, burned-coffee breath in his face, said, “Going somewhere, Matthew?”

“You certainly are observant.”

Zohar stepped in front of Stone and blocked his way with his body, arms crossed. “Maybe you can tell me why Zalman Seligman’s man, Moshe Reisen, has called on you three mornings in a row.”

“I have no idea what you are talking about.”

“But you do know Zalman Seligman.”

Stone continued to walk. Let Zohar beg.

“I know you know Zalman Seligman. You’re not going to deny that, are you?”

“If you know the answer, why are you asking me?”

“Do you know who Zalman Seligman really is? He is not some kindly old rabbi living out his golden years in Miami Beach. He is a violent criminal, hiding behind his faith, who has been arrested more than a dozen times in the past twenty years in relation to violent incidents throughout the West Bank.”

Stone couldn’t help but roll his eyes at Zohar’s intensity.

“Maybe this laundry list will put things in perspective for you. Seligman is alleged to have assaulted a Palestinian mother of two while her children watched; he has been arrested for overturning shopkeepers’ carts in the Hebron casbah; he has been cited for firing his pistol in front of a mosque on numerous occasions; he has been fined for trespassing, harassment, arson, vandalism of property. He was arrested for shooting a Palestinian man’s donkey, for which he spent fifteen days in prison. The list goes on and on: harassment, intimidation, violence . . . Rabbi Seligman will stop at nothing to advance the cause of a Greater Israel.”

“That’s quite a resumé,” Stone said, “but it means nothing to me. Sounds like you know Zalman Seligman a lot better than I do.”

“Does the name Avraham Grunhut mean anything to you? Another rabbi—also connected to your father and the Eretz Fund, the foundation Seligman and your father co-founded. He was a controversial religious leader until he was assassinated.”

“Assassinated?” Stone said, amused at how a subtle shift in language could so alter meaning. “That’s sort of gilding the lily, isn’t it? I’d say he was murdered. He wasn’t exactly a head of state or Nobel laureate.”

“He was close friends with your father.”

“What exactly are you suggesting?”

The words his father had circled in Rabbi Grunhut’s book certainly gave credence to whatever Zohar was implying. But there was a disconnect, a misreading of intention. The Judge and Grunhut had been friends and partners, but that had all ended when the rabbi was killed.

Stone picked up his pace, his languid blood circulating throughout his body and awakening some desire deep within him to fight, to punch back hard.

“Matthew, just hear me out.”

“I’m not my father’s keeper, and you’re nothing but a parasite. Why don’t you go home and get some sleep? You smell like shit.”

Zohar laughed. “So Grunhut was ‘murdered’ by whom? The common belief is that he was killed by a Palestinian terrorist—a bullet in the back of the head. Yes, they arrested a Palestinian, put him on trial, and convicted him, but he wasn’t the killer; he wasn’t even involved. He had gotten himself in trouble elsewhere, so the killing was pinned to him to avoid reprisals and to close the book.”

“You sound like a crazed conspiracy theorist.”

A bus roared past, blowing a huge cloud of exhaust in their faces.

“You know, Matthew, I hated my old man,” Zohar said. “He used to hit me with a belt when I was a kid. If I struck out in baseball, if I came in second, if I got a B in school, out came the belt. Strict immigrant father trying to make it in America through his son. Nothing was ever good enough for him. I always let him down. I prayed for him to die, prayed for it as I lay in bed at night. What did I know? Then one day he was gone—but I’m never rid of him. He’s always there, an indelible print I can never wash off.”

“Are you trying to suggest I hated my father? Are you trying to make some sort of false connection with me, one disgruntled son to another? I’m sorry you hated your father, and I’m sorry for you that you can’t get over him, but that’s not me. You’ve got it all wrong. You don’t know me, and you don’t know my father.”

Zohar pressed on, undeterred. “I know about him. I know his life, the milestones, the ins and outs, the facts of his life, his accomplishments and failures. I know he was a tenacious bulldog. At the age of twenty-two, he prosecuted organized crime figures as the state’s youngest assistant district attorney—notably street gangs in Hell’s Kitchen. He doggedly nailed down prosecutions after the theft of priceless jewels from the Museum of Natural History. Wouldn’t Dr. Freud have a field day with that knowledge?”

In the sky above the park, to their left, a red kite flew against the pure blue sky, flashing back and forth like a streak of blood.

“I know your father received a Bronze Medal for Meritorious Service after serving as a judge advocate general in the Twenty-Fifth Infantry Division in Vietnam from 1966 to 1968. By all accounts, he sounds like a good man. Doesn’t he?”

“Am I supposed to be impressed?” Stone said. “Are you going to tell me about his kindergarten crayon drawings next? The past is past.”

“Matthew, you are smart enough to know the past is never past, especially when it comes to Israel and the Palestinians. I want you to help me know him, the flesh-and-blood man he really was. I want you to help me complete the picture before something terrible happens. I know Walter Joseph Stone, but I know him academically, the way you know Whitman—intimate yet distant.”

“Whitman?” Stone stammered. Now Zohar had hit the mark, finding that tender spot behind Stone’s heart that made it hard to breathe, his failure writ large for everyone to see. He’d heard enough from Zohar.

“I know you were halfway through your graduate thesis on the universal spiritualism of Walt Whitman’s work before you took a leave of absence from your studies to tend to your father. I know it was to be called ‘Perennial with the Earth’ and that you’ll never go back and finish it, will you? I know you took a leave of absence as an undergraduate five years earlier after suffering a psychotic break in which you spent a month in a mental health facility.”

“Enough,” Stone said, covering his ears. “That’s enough.”

But Zohar continued, keeping pace with Stone. “I know of your predilection for self-mutilation, burning in particular. I know your father sent you to Israel when you came out of the psych ward, and I know you spent time with Zalman Seligman at Giv’at Barzel. But most importantly, I know all about your relationship with a Palestinian girl named Fairuza Freij and I know what happened to her after you left.”

This was too much for Stone to handle, her name in his ears after all this time. A hot knife of shame plunged into his lungs. Gasping for air, he ran down Myrtle Avenue, past the toppled trash bins, past the black albino rapping on the corner, past the fried-chicken joint, and, howling some barely articulated curse, he crossed busy Flatbush Avenue against the light, not caring if he was struck down by a speeding car.