In the Land of the Living Read Free

called you Tateh.”
    “After.”
    “After what?” Isidore said.
    “After the dirty towel that you wish it doesn’t touch your foot! Sir Isser!”
    “I called you Tateh!” Isidore said loudly.
    “You said Ezer!”
    “Okay, Tateh,” Isidore said quickly, “I’m sorry!”
    Ezer looked into the living room, where Burt was standing on the steps with Dennis behind him. “This doesn’t concern you!” Ezer said. “For once!” Again, he chopped at the air.
    “ You’re wrong, not him!” Burt yelled, leaning forward into the yell and stepping halfway up into the kitchen.
    “Zol zein shah!” Ezer yelled.
    Burt scrambled up the steps, ran into Ezer, and slapped at his arms. Ezer swung Burt around in a sort of awkward dance step and Burt fell against the stove and got back up. Then, employing a technique he’d presumably learned at the Kishinev School of Cossack Child-Rearing, Ezer picked up a pot and knocked Burt in the head with it.
    “Don’t you trip! Don’t you stumble, you actor!” Ezer yelled. “Don’t you cry! A boxer, I’m not! I didn’t hit you hard. I didn’t touch you.”
    The sun was gone now. The yard had rapidly capitulated to a darkness that sealed the boys and their father up tight in the small kitchen as inside a coffin ship: the windows became dim, distorting mirrors, and displayed not the outdoors, but a bad replica of the kitchen instead. The yard and the glass seemed to collaborate to encircle them with warped images of themselves.
    “Don’t look at me with hate!” his father yelled.
    “I’m not!” Isidore said.
    “Do not judge me, Isser! You know nothing! You’re a child!”
    “He didn’t mean to, Tateh!” Dennis cried out from the bottom of the steps into the kitchen. “I asked him to get me some milk.”
    “I have a terrible headache,” Ezer said, suddenly quiet, and he clutched his head. “I am going to bed.”
    He mumbled some Yiddish curses, things about dark dreams for devils such as his sons, and he said the word chaloshes and said it again. As he went up the stairs, he mumbled on, about weakness, shvachkeit, and what happens to weakness in this world, which he said like “oiled” with a “V” on the front. The word made Isidore think of a valley with its “V,” the voiled, valley of darkness and toil.
    They did not see their mother. She was already dead.
      
    It would have been a good time to get help from the boys’ aunt and uncle, Sophia’s brother and sister-in-law, Mo and Mara, but Ezer wouldn’t speak to them anymore, because Mo said Ezer owed them money. It would have been a good time to get help from Ezer’s brother, Hermann, who was a furrier in New York and made a decent living, but Ezer had cut Hermann off years ago, and pointedly hadn’t even spoken to him when Sophia went to New York for her treatments. Ezer had a sister who might have helped too, but Ezer hated her husband. And while he was on speaking terms with his other sister, who ran an antique shop, she and her husband had no kids and they said they wouldn’t know what to do with one, let alone three. For a time the Jewish family service sent housekeepers to look after the boys.
    Then one day Ezer told them Burt would be sent to Bellefaire, an orphanage on Fairmount Boulevard. Isidore and Dennis, he said, would go to a foster home in University Heights. The brothers stood together before their father and one and all held on to each others’ shirts.
    At times like these, their father surprised them. He didn’t care what they wanted, but he also didn’t fight. Instead he called the foster home, as if it merely hadn’t occurred to him that there might be room for Burt.
    So an old woman came in a green car with a bent antenna and all three boys climbed in. Ezer kissed Dennis hard on the head, but he didn’t kiss Isidore or Burt.
    As the car rolled slowly backward toward the street, the old woman repeatedly slammed on the brakes, which slammed the boys’ heads into the unforgiving