Free Natasha and Other Stories by David Bezmozgis

it was the money.
    –Take the money from my salary.
    –You want to redo the kitchen. That’s also from your salary.
    –If that’s my choice, I can live without the kitchen.
    My mother was resolute. Nothing I said helped my case. So that April, just after Passover, I put Jerry Ackerman in the hospital.
    Most days, on his way to the office, my father would drop me off at school in his red 1970 Volvo. On a Friday, after gym, Jerry Ackerman said something about Solly Birnbaum’s small hairless penis and Solly started to cry. Solly was fat, had webbed toes, and was reduced to tears at the end of every gym class. I had never defended him before but I seized my chance.
    –Ackerman, if I had your tweezer-dick I wouldn’t talk.
    –Why are you looking at my dick, faggot?
    –Ackerman thought he had a pubic hair until he pissed out of it.
    –Fuck you, Berman, and that red shitbox your father drives.
    In Rabbi Gurvich’s office, Dr. Ackerman said that I had banged Jerry’s head so hard against the wall that I had given him a concussion. Dr. Ackerman said that Jerry had vomited three times that night and that they’d had to drive him to the hospital at two in the morning. Dr. Ackerman asked, What kind of sick person, what kind of animal would do this? When I refused to answer, my mother apologized to Dr. and Mrs. Ackerman and also to Jerry.
    This wasn’t the first time my mother and I had been called into Gurvich’s office. After our move into the new neighborhood I had begun to affect a hoodlum persona. At school, I kept to myself, glowered in the hallways, and, with the right kind of provocation, punched people in the face. Less than a month before I gave Jerry Ackerman his concussion, I’d gotten into a fight with two eighth graders. Because of dietary laws, the school prohibited bringing meat for lunch. Other students brought peanut butter or tuna fish, but I—and most of the other Russians—would invariably arrive at school with smoked Hungarian salami, Polish bologna, roast turkey. Our mothers couldn’t comprehend why anyone would choose to eat peanuts in a country that didn’t know what it meant to have a shortage of smoked meat. And so, I was already sensitive about my lunch when the two eighth graders stopped by my table and asked me how I liked my pork sandwich.
    For my fight with Jerry Ackerman, I received a two-day suspension. Sparing words, Gurvich made it clear that this was never to happen again. The next time he saw me in his office would be the last. To hit someone’s head against a wall—did I ever think what that could do? If I got so much as within ten feet of Ackerman he didn’t want to say what would happen. He asked me if I understood. My mother said I understood. He asked me if I had anything to say. I knew that what I had to say was not what he wanted to hear.
    On the drive home my mother asked me what I was trying to do, and when my father got home he came as close as he ever had to hitting me.
    –Don’t think you’re so smart. What do you think happens if you get expelled? You want to repeat the grade? We already paid for the entire year.
    On the street, I told Boris, Alex, and Eugene, but they weren’t impressed.
    –Congratulations, you’re the toughest kid in Hebrew school.
    I returned to school the week of Holocaust Remembrance Day—which we called Holocaust Day for short. It was one of a series of occasions that punctuated the school year beginning with Rosh Hashanah in September and ending with Israeli Independence Day in May. For Chanukah, the school provided jelly donuts and art class was spent making swords and shields out of papier-mâché; for Purim, everyone dressed up in costume and a pageant was organized during which we all cheered the hanging of evil Hamman and his ten evil sons; for Passover, every class held a preparatory seder and took a field trip to the matzoh bakery; for Israeli Independence Day, we dressed in blue and white and marched around the school yard