Free The Watchmaker's Daughter: A Memoir by Sonia Taitz Page A

for staring.
    “Doncha wanna get wet?”
    Oh, yes. Yes. I did want to get wet, muddy, and wild. All that spoke of the world outside, the world that increasingly drew me. But what was I to do, tethered (literally) to my elders, who feared wildness in both its natural and human forms, who could take a chicken and boil it to whiteness and serve it with limp, exhausted vegetables and a fifty-pound potato kugel, thus stopping all impulses to sense, to lust, to budge? And how could I explain all this, when the only language I could speak was Yiddish—forged from millennia of exile from my own precious, base nature?
    Bubbe spoke for both of us. Grudgingly, she opened her mouth and muttered: “Gey aveck, du vilde chayes!” (Go away, you wild beasts!) Not looking at them, she would make shooing motions with her hands, as though to say, “Why do they keep tormenting us, these goyim; what do they want from us now? Does it hurt them to see us alive, in one piece, resting and enjoying the sun? Or do they want to help us break our bones?”
    Loretta and Charlotte did not speak Yiddish, but they understood. Looking back, it is more than likely that their fathers and uncles were the very men who came into our buildings and fixed the boilers and the water pipes. I am sure there was plenty of Yiddish in their lives in that neighborhood. After staring some more at both of us, pityingly, without hostility, searchingly, the girls would resume their wild, wet frolics.
    And I would be left alone again, to look at Billy.
    Billy was the one who rode the faucets—rode them, I tell you. I did not have the vocabulary yet, but this was Nietzchean, primal, anarchic, audacious.
    Shall I compare him to a stormy day? Was my image of my people so set already, with the idea of “trouble”—in the form of chaos, pogroms, machismo, already counterpoised? No Jewish boy would ride the faucets like that. They wore yarmulkas and glasses, and sounded out the ancient letters, their heads buried in books (literally; the way to study was literally to hunch over a holy book and bury your head between its hard, embossed covers as though making a brain-sandwich with God at the center). But my father had a streak of this wildness in him, in his temper and in his vaunted exploits of the past.
    And Billy had this streak of wildness that I can now unabashedly term goyish. The word goy, so often misunderstood, literally means “nation.” It comes from the Bible—and it simply means the nations of the world. Jews are goyim too, in that sense. But in my book, it will always mean “free of restraint and free of pain.” We Jews can fake it, but no one who has been touched by the Holocaust, my father and myself included, can actually and consistently make it. We are too sad, too worried and exquisitely broken into facets.
    Billy would sit on the fountain spigots and water would spray from all directions, its power nearly blowing him off, but no, like a mad rodeo star he’d maintain his seat, squashing down the waters that would nonetheless rise around him in a cloud of mist and power.
    This boy’s eyes were smudgy and blue, even the lids seeming dirty, narrowed, full of the smoke of the cigarettes that he would likely pick up within a few years. There was a sense of pale fire within, a virile appraisal and direct approach to the game. Thor with a thunderbolt, all of six years old. His knees were covered with scabs, his chest visible under his pathetic thin and sleeveless undershirt, his lean arms already muscled. He was barefoot, of course he was, barefoot with large flat feet that splashed through the water and got where they needed to go. How did I know his name? Everyone was shouting it, especially the other boys; he was the alpha male of the Washington Heights (at 173rd Street) playground sprinkler.
    I needed Billy, I wanted Billy; he would be the antidote for me. If I was the Jose of the picture, the Ricky Ricardo, Billy could provide the American ballast to my