Free Timebends by Arthur Miller

and me in preparation for our bar mitzvahs, still years off. This bearded ancient taught purely by rote, pronouncing the Hebrew words and leading us to repeat after him. In the book, the English translations of the passages from Genesis faced the Hebrew, but there were no English translations of the English: what did
firmament
mean? The worst of it was that when I spoke a passage correctly, the old man would kiss me, which was like being embraced by a rosebush. Once he leaned over and, laughing, gave my cheek a painful pinch and called me
tsadik,
wise man, a compliment whose cause I understood neither then nor later. I would have to pump up all my self-control to appear to welcome his furry arrival. The lessons were boring and meaningless, but my rebellion may simply have been caused by an undisciplined spirit: I hated piano lessons, too, or any set of rules that interfered withfantasies of magically quick accomplishment. When the violin suddenly became “my” instrument, as mysteriously and irrevocably as second base had become my position, my mother found a teacher who, poor man, loaned me a small violin to begin on. I found that a rubber ball would take a lively bounce off the back of it as well as causing all the strings to hum, and I went downstairs to use it as a tennis racket until the neck broke in my hand. My mother carefully laid the pieces in the case and returned the instrument, and I went back to walking in my sleep, which was far more interesting than studying. So the root of that choking fear that suddenly gripped me as I looked into the face of the kindly librarian is so deeply buried that I can only imagine I had been denying, quietly and persistently, what I surely must have been hearing from my position on the floor—stories, remarks, fear-laden vocal tones that had been moving me by inches into a beleaguered zone surrounded by strangers with violent hearts.
    Mikush was doubtless one of those, the sole mythic enemy who had a face and a name, as far as I knew. But fears of Mikush sprang far less from mythic antagonisms than from the cat-and-mouse game all the boys in the building played with him on the roof. A favorite sport, of which my brother was a master, was to stand up on a parapet and leap across a shaftway to the other side over a drop of six stories. Terrified as I already was of such a drop from my sleepwalking experiences, I could not bear to watch Kermit standing tall on the parapet. Mikush was endlessly popping up out of the hatchway to chase us, not that he cared if one of us went into the abyss, but our heels made holes in the tar roofing material. “No touch-a roof!” he would roar as we dodged him and clattered down the iron stairway into the building. As we flew down into the lower stories, his Polish war yells echoed along the ceramic-tiled floors of the hallways.
    Because he was a Pole, the Jews in the building had to believe he hated them just as his countrymen for the most part had in Radomizl, where pogroms and tales of pogroms were woven into the very sky overhead, and where only the Austrian emperor Franz Josef and his army kept the Poles, egged on by their insatiable priests, from murdering every last Jew in the land. But I nevertheless had an ambiguous relation of sorts with Mikush; I brought my badly bent almost-new bike to him after an experiment of no-hands riding banged the front fork into a lamppost in the park. He straightened it with his bare hands, a memorable feat of strength that I imagined no one else in the whole world was capableof. I must have had some faith in his goodwill toward me, Pole or no Pole; my fear of him was less than total. Such a relationship made it understandable, a decade or so later, that German Jews—even those who could afford to—did not immediately leave when Hitler came to power. Had we lived in Germany, Mikush would likely have been the Nazi representative in the building, but it would have been hard to imagine even