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  A FLASH OF BLUE SKY

  A THIRTOVER NOVEL

  Alon Preiss

  Copyright © 2015 by Alon Preiss

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  ISBN 978-0-9913274-3-0

  Front cover illustration and book design by Daniel Middleton

  Chickadee Prince Logo by Garrett Gilchrist

  Visit us at www.ChickadeePrince. com

  Alon preiss

  A FLASH OF BLUE SKY

  A Thirtover Novel

  Alon Preiss is a middle-aged writer and former attorney. He lives on the American east coast.

  A FLASH OF BLUE SKY

  A Thirtover Novel

  Chickadee Prince Books

  New York

  To Isabel

  A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION

  Some of the dialogue in this book is spoken by Russians. In some cases, they speak English with a Russian accent. In other cases, they speak Russian, which of course I have translated into English. In those cases, I have translated the Russian idioms literally. While understandable, they may be jarring at first. Believe me, with a bit of effort, you will get the hang of it.

  A FLASH OF BLUE SKY

  This is a story about a little boy named Daniel and a little girl named Susan, who shared the same birthday, although separated by more than ten years, who both had influential life experiences at the age of eight, and who grew up and fell in love when Daniel’s marriage was on the rocks. And this is also a story about Emmett, a little boy who saw a terrifying thing in the mirror when he was five years old, then grew up and had pleasant conversations with Daniel over sun-dried tomato pasta in the office cafeteria, and once, at the age of sixty, saw Susan’s daughter on the street and thought, What a beautiful young woman. Finally, this is a story about a little Russian girl named Irina, for whom the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, and a coincidental meeting with Emmett, would have unusual and unexpected repercussions.

  Daniel started out on New York’s West Side on June 17. 1952. For the better part of a decade he played in the warm smog of Riverside Park, went to Synagogue on 68th Street and tripped and fell on hard concrete at least every other day.

  A few weeks before Daniel’s eighth birthday, his father packed up their belongings, sublet the apartment and moved the family out-of-state. Daniel stared sullenly out the window of the U-Haul as the concrete cracked open and nature burst into being. Only for a year, his father told Daniel, over and over. We’ll be back home before you turn nine.

  And, he added, it won’t be so bad anyway.

  His family rented a little house nestled in the woods, and Daniel couldn’t sleep at night. He missed the sound of cars whizzing by his window and horns blaring. When Daniel looked out into the empty darkness, he imagined monsters and murderers slinking through the forest, climbing nimbly up the gnarled branches. He would sit bolt-upright whenever the house creaked or a twig snapped outside.

  A few weeks after Daniel arrived in the state, a yellow bus pulled up in front of his house to take him to school He was shorter than the other children, they laughed at his accent and he couldn’t swim. Each day, class would begin with a prayer that he didn’t know. He would mumble along, staring at the floor.

  His third grade teacher was named Miss Jay. Daniel thought that she was the oldest person he had ever seen in his life; every year she’d lived seemed to have been carved into her face with a pocketknife. She was painfully thin, she seldom laughed, and she towered over the children. She made them sit on the floor as she lectured them about math and English, and Daniel often returned home with a stiff neck. At night he would dream about Miss Jay and wake up screaming into the darkness of a country night. Was her heart filled with hatred? Was she an evil person? It made Daniel feel better to imagine that she was.

  Miss Jay’s class began rehearsals for the school’s Christmas pageant in late November. Miss Jay gave Daniel the role of Christ’s father. Jenny Smith’s baby brother was to play Jesus. Daniel tried to hide his reluctance to participate, and his cowardly acquiescence in class made him loath to broach the topic at home. During the day, he was ashamed to admit to being a Jew; at home, he was ashamed to admit that, by any real definition, he was now a practicing Christian.

  Every day for two weeks he tried to find the courage to tell Miss Jay that he did not want to be in the pageant, and every day he failed.

  Finally, after the dismissal bell rang on one particular Wednesday, and the hallways of the little school echoed with the cheers of liberated children, Daniel nervously approached Miss Jay, who sat behind her desk, frowning. “Miss Jay,” he said, and she looked up and took off her glasses. He told her that with all his heart he would like to participate in the Christmas pageant, but that he couldn’t.

  “My mom and dad won’t let me. You see,” he explained, “they’re Jews. And they’re from New York.”

  He paused, staring at Miss Jay, hoping that no further explanation would be necessary. Her wrinkled face softened.

  “There’s nothing wrong with being Jewish,” she said gently. “Christ the Savior was Jewish. He was the King of the Jews.”

  Daniel said he didn’t think his parents would see things that way. Miss Jay said she understood.

  “We’ll give someone else the role of Joseph,” she said. “And we’ll come up with some other – ” she struggled for the right word “ –nondenominational way for you to participate. OK?”

  Daniel nodded. It sounded like an improvement.

  “Now hurry,” she said, “or you’ll miss the bus.”

  Daniel thanked her and ran from the room, elated.

  The next day Miss Jay told Daniel that she’d like him to perform a Jewish ritual at their Christmas pageant. Daniel nodded, confused, as Miss Jay moved to the front of the room. She announced, beaming, that not everyone celebrated Christmas, but that was all right, because there were other religions with their own rituals and their own deeply held spiritual beliefs. “Daniel, for instance,” she said, “does not celebrate Christmas, because he is Jewish.”

  The class turned as one towards Daniel, who stared up at Miss Jay, his neck aching. Miss Jay went on to explain that, despite what many of the children might have heard, Jews did not have horns. That disgusting rumor was not true, she said. Absolutely false. She pointed to Daniel. No horns, she said again. Daniel had no horns. Daniel’s forehead, she pointed out, was a forehead much like any other forehead.

  The other children, who had clearly never heard this rumor and had probably devoted little thought to Jewish issues, now tried to come up with possible explanations. Bobby Nelson shouted, “Maybe he had his horns removed,” and Jenny Smith suggested that perhaps Daniel was not a real Jew. Miss Jay told the class to hush.

  She continued her dissertation by remarking that, although Jews believed “very different things from what we believe,” the United States of America stood for the right to express any of a broad range of ideas, and that Jewish views were deeply held and sincere. For instance, she said, Jews did not believe in God; she glanced at Daniel for approval. Daniel, blushing and practically trembling, said that he thought Jews believed in God. “So far as I know,” he added.

  Miss Jay disagreed and explained that Jews worshiped Yahweh. Distrustful eyes glowered at Daniel.

  “Yahweh is the devil!” Jenny Smith said.

  “He worships the devil!” shouted another angry young voice. Someone punched Daniel in the back of the head.

  “No, no,” Miss Jay admonished them. “Yahweh is just the Jewish god. It’s important to understand these things.”

  The class quieted down, but the tension remained. Daniel was near tears.

  Miss Jay went on to explain that the Jews don’t celebrate Christmas, that they celebrate a holiday known as Hanukkah, in which, before worshiping Yahweh, they gamble with little clay tops. One student asked whether gambling was a sin, and Miss Jay replied, “Not to the Jews.”

  Miss Jay asked Daniel to come to the front of the room, and he reluctantly complied. She stood behind him and put both hands on his shoulders. “One more thing,” she said. “After the Jews play with tops, they dance a little dance. This dance is known as the hora.” She took a few steps away. “Daniel,” she asked. “Would you please demonstrate the hora for us?”

  Tears began streaming down his cheeks. He could feel the redness in his face. Sobbing, he told Miss Jay that he did not know the hora.

  “He’s Jewish,” Jenny Smith called out, “and he doesn’t even know how to dance the hora!” The class burst into laughter.

  Miss Jay kneeled down and whispered to Daniel, “It’s OK. There’s nothing to cry about. Listen, it’s easy. You put your right foot in, you take your right foot out, you put your right foot in and you shake it all about all right?” Daniel nodded. Miss Jay stood up and told the class that Daniel was just nervous, that of course he knew the hora, he had just forgotten out of nervousness, and she asked how many of them could honestly say that they’d never been nervous and forgotten something, and she begged the class to quiet down and to understand; and so, while Miss Jay sang in her cracking, old lady voice, Daniel, confused and alone, danced Miss Jay’s version of the hora for a class of 27 eight-year-old children.

  But the friendly looking, red-brick elementary school did not complete its humiliation of the Jewish people until one month later when Daniel appeared on stage in the auditoriu
m in front of around 300 parents at the annual Christmas pageant. First, Miss Jay announced proudly that Daniel, “our Jewish student,” would perform a cultural dance. Exactly what next transpired is subject to some debate. Daniel’s parents refused even to discuss the incident for the next three years, and their sudden deaths would soon silence them forever; Miss Jay’s fate would remain forever unknown to Daniel, but surely she must have died in the 1960s. Daniel’s recollection would remain the definitive version of events mainly by default, and Daniel would continue to insist that he had wandered out on stage wearing a yarmulke (actually, Daniel recalled, a somewhat mutilated baseball cap, painted dark black), cloaked in a prayer-shawl (really one of Miss Jay’s scarves, dyed white) and with artificial side-burns glued to his face. These false side-burns, Daniel would contend, hung well below his knees, and he tripped over them while he made his long journey to the center of the stage. Next, in a trembling, sobbing voice, he sang “I Have a Little Dreydl,” then, to piano accompaniment, but, otherwise, utter, dead silence, he performed a stumbling, historically inaccurate rendition of the hora. Finally, halfway through the dance, crying and wailing with embarrassment, he ran from the stage and was never seen again. Daniel later learned of a local legend in which he’d leapt to his death immediately after his silly but somehow haunting performance, but, in reality, Daniel’s horrified parents had pulled him from the local elementary school and, for the next six months, woke up at the crack of dawn to drive him to a Jewish day school just over the state line. From his public school humiliation he acquired a distrust of southerners, a passionate grudge against Miss Jay that could still raise his blood pressure twenty-six years later, and a view of Christianity as little more than a pretext for oppression; from his subsequent education he gained a lasting hatred of the Hebrew language and an unhappy suspicion that, for his teachers at the private school, religion, with all its incessant mumbling in a strange, foreign tongue, was just an incurable habit, like chronic knuckle cracking, with no genuine purpose underneath.

  And so at the age of nine, when Daniel and his family returned home, he refused to accompany his parents to synagogue on 68th Street, and he walked about the concrete sidewalks of New York city with his head held not quite as high as before.

  *

  Susan lived a fairly ordinary childhood out on Long Island, but in her eighth year also had an experience that she would never forget. She awoke on June 17, 1973, the day of her eighth birthday, to the sounds of construction work in the backyard. She ran down to breakfast where her parents told her, with smiling faces, that her birthday present was a new swimming pool. Even at the tender age of eight she recognized this as something of a fraud; she would one day leave for college, and her parents would keep the pool.

  Nevertheless, each day as work progressed, a precocious young girl stood at a safe distance, watching and imagining.

  They threw a party to celebrate the new swimming pool at which friends and relatives stood by idly, a few swimming, most drinking, and the precocious young girl had the sinking feeling that the pool, even sooner than she’d expected, had ceased to belong to her. All pretence was crumbling.

  Susan couldn’t really remember what happened next. All she knew was that she’d been wandering around and around the pool, pouting, moping; a while later, relieved faces were staring down at her, and her father was smiling widely and clenching his fists. She’s OK, he was saying, she’s really OK.

  Her parents explained that she had somehow fallen into the deep end, but that no one had seen it. Uncle Bob had pulled her up from the bottom of the pool, unconscious, not breathing.

  Susan didn’t remember falling into the pool, but she distinctly remembered a strange sensation just before waking up. She had felt herself floating, looking down at everything, watching all the adults attend to the needs of one small, helpless, nearly dead little girl.

  One other detail of significance, actually. She was bobbing on what she thought were clouds, and someone was holding her hand. Even when she admitted having what might be called an “out-of-body experience,” she never admitted that someone was there with her. Someone kind, comforting, and the person’s hands felt like those of her grandmother, her recently deceased grandmother, whose death still left an ache in the little girl. But when she turned to look at the old woman, to ask for one more hug, she found herself staring into the eyes of a magnificently benevolent face, a man’s face, she thought, a smiling face, probably, and for just a moment she was held captive in the man’s beautiful eyes, and then she awoke, and right away she missed him and wanted to follow him, wherever he had gone. And if, as she lay between life and death, the face that had given her strength had not actually been the face of God ... well, Susan would think, as she remembered the incident often in the intervening years, God should have such a face.

  *

  When Emmett was born in a hospital in Brooklyn in 1961, his father had just graduated from college and was beginning his PhD work. When the boy had reached the age of four, his father was staying at home to work on his dissertation, picking Emmett up from nursery school and trying to keep the young boy occupied and still get some work done. Emmett’s mother earned money as a legal secretary, and she often worked late. Emmett would sometimes wander into the living room while his father was working, hunched over his calculations, numbers and symbols that meant nothing to the little boy, and his father would shoo him away with one hand without looking up from his papers. Often, his father would send him across the hall to play with Brian, the mean little kid who lived in apartment 4H, who would taunt and punch Emmett all afternoon.

  One evening, his father’s old friend from college, Stephen Solomon, came over for dinner. Emmett’s mother brought her son dinner in his room, told him that he could eat at the dinner table if he wanted to. Emmett shook his head and covered his eyes. Mr. Solomon was a scary man, gangly, skinny, with a mean-spirited grin, and Emmett was afraid of him.

  In his bedroom, Emmett could hear Mr. Solomon’s harsh, cigarette-stained Brooklyn voice, telling dirty stories, giggling, a little too drunk for a man sitting in a living room, visiting his married friends, with a kid upstairs. Emmett got up from the bed, looked at himself in the mirror on his wall, a fat little kid with big eyes. He made faces at himself, tried to pay attention to himself instead of to Mr. Solomon down the hallway. He pushed his nose upward, so that he looked like a pig, he pulled at the edges of his eyes so that he looked Asian. He pushed his lips up so that his teeth looked really big, like a chipmunk’s teeth.

  His father called out, “Emmett,” and knocked gently at the door. “Emmett.”

  The boy ignored him. He squinted at himself in the mirror. “Hello out there in TV land,” he said.

  “Emmett,” his father said through the doorway. “Mr. Solomon wants to say hello to you.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Emmett said. “On today’s show: dancing elephants, dancing clowns. Dancing monkeys.”

  “Emmett,” his father said again. “I’m bringing Mr. Solomon in. He wants to give you a lollipop.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, at the edge of his mirror, Emmett saw his bedroom door opening. His father walked in first. Emmett just stared at his own nose in the mirror. He started humming. His father stood behind him and tried to meet his young son’s eyes in the mirror.

  “Say hello to Mr. Solomon, Emmett,” his father said. “Just say hello.”

  Emmett shook his head, no.

  “Anyway,” his father said, “here’s Mr. Solomon.”

  He moved away, and a man in a wrinkled suit moved into Emmett’s view in the mirror.

  “Hi there, Emmett,” the man said. “I’ve brought you some candy.”