Free Son of a Smaller Hero by Mordecai Richler

frenzied tug, and the sign broke loose. The man was about twenty feet away and already swinging his paddle. His eyes were wild. “You son-of-a-bitch!” Noah swerved, and raced swiftly for the bushes. A shower of pebbles bounced off his back. The paddle swooshed through the air behind him. But he was fast. Once in the bushes he scampered madly off into the mountain. He ran and ran and ran. Until finally, clutching the sign in his hands, he tumbled down on the pine needles, his heart thumping wildly.…
    Noah sat down on the window-sill of his rented room. I couldn’t find Gas, he remembered, but Hoppie was waiting for me in the bushes. It got dark fast, and – of course – we got lost. I wasn’t frightened. I had the sign, didn’t I? But Hoppie was scared. We didn’t have a flashlight. For all we knew we might come out of the woods again back at Lac Gandon. We had stopped climbing and had reached a level bit of ground when suddenly we heard many voices. Light beams shot through the darkness. We hid the sign under a mess of leaves and climbed up the nearest tree – our pockets filled with stones. The voices and the lights came nearer. Remembering, Noah laughed warmly. I think every Yid in Prevost was on the mountain that night. Where they got all those pitchforks and clubs and sticks, God knows. Hoppie and I never thought we’d be grateful to Pinky’s Squealer, but we were that night. We slid down the tree and uncovered the sign, and that was our night of glory in Prevost. Nothing was too good for us. Sunday morning, Noah remembered, he, Mort Shub, Gas, and Hoppie had planted the sign on the beach. They had got some paint first. When the people had come out to swim, they had read:
    THIS BEACH IS RESTRICTED TO LITVAKS
    That was some time, Noah thought fondly. It really was. He leaned back on the bed, and smiling almost imperceptibly, smoked with his hands clasped behind his head. Pinky’s Squealer, he thought, is studying to be a rabbi now, like his cousin Milton Pinky Fishman. Noah got up. Miriam, he thought, resembles those pretty women on the beach at Lac Gandon.
I did not make my mother to suffer or my father bewildered, or my grandfather hard. I should have had the right to begin with my birth
. He sat up and rubbed his jaw absently.
It’s all absurd, but here I am
. Glancing out of the window he saw a blackboard of sky with several stars chalked up in yellow and an imperfectly rounded moon done up in orange. It would be all right, he thought, to reach out and pull down a star or two to look at. They can’t be as big or as far away as they say. They’re only stars, he thought. If you were tall enough you could pick them like berries. “Miriam,” he said softly.
III
    Something was happening to the old man. His anger and his words were still law for the family, but Shloime and Ida disobeyed him behind his back, something they would not have done so freely before. He complained of rheumatism and a weight on his heart and sometimes he did not go down to the coal yard in the mornings. He had a nap after lunch. He felt the damp November days in his bones. During the afternoon he read Talmud and in the evening he studied with the other old men in the synagogue. Had I been willing to let my children fend for themselves, he thought, had I followed my natural bent, I could have been a scribe – and Noah would have had respect.…
    “Max wants for us to move into an apartment in Outremont. I should retire, he says. What should I do, I ask, if I retire. What …”
    “He means only good, Melech. Thank God we haven’t got for children such bums as Edelman. You know de Edelman boy was injail again? A Yiddish boy. Now they will say we are robbers on top of everything. As if we didn’t have enough. So what would you like? Sons like Panofsky has? Communists yet. You see his Aaron? Everybody loved Aaron. So. What is? He sits in front of de store in that wheelchair smoking cigarettes like a chimney. Where are his legs?