Adam Levin - The Instructions

“The belt is a story for itself, I will leave it alone. As for this ‘Stop trifling’ that he said, it was a thing he shouted to me only one other time, years before, when I was twenty, in Beirut. My father was not at all a shouter — he was a loud, loud man, but he did not often shout, and it happened that in Beirut, we were waiting inside a building for something to happen, it is not important what, but we were waiting in this building, on an upper floor, the fifth if memory is serving me, and there was a young woman on the ground, crossing the street, holding the hand of her daughter, who was so fumbly and small she must have just learned to walk, and because of this thing we were waiting for, and how beautiful they were, amidst all the hideousness, the wreckage that Beirut had become, like a bruise on a scar was Beirut, and how gorgeous the mother and daughter, and this thing we were waiting for to happen… I fired a few rounds out the window, in the air, so that they would take cover. And my father, he shouted at me, ‘Stop trifling!’ and by the time the last of the three syllables was out, I’d been struck in the shoulder by sniper fire. What we’d been waiting for to happen, it happened then, and there was no more sniper fire, there were no more enemies left breathing in the vicinity, and I was evacuated, and I went back home, where I had to spend two months recovering before returning to Beirut. It is the only time I was ever shot, right after my father yelled at me ‘Stop trifling!’ And in the dream, as he says it for the second time, I tense suddenly, and awaken, and the sheets are soaked. My water has broken.

“Now, Judah has not yet even fallen asleep. He is up and he has me up, and we get to the hospital, and I go into labor for, what, Judah, for eight hours?”

“Ten hours,” my father said.

“Ten hours of labor, and the whole time I am thinking: ‘This is not because of the fingernails. This is because of some guilt I feel about the fingernails. I feel some guilt about scaring my husband white, and I have a dream about my father, and he tells me something horrifying about my son, it is nothing. Maybe my water broke because of the shock of the dream, maybe I had the dream because my water was about to break… These things can be explained, okay? Right?’ That is what I think.

“And then this guy is born. And it is not just that he is born with a full head of hair — and I do not mean to imply the fine, silky baby kind, but the very same coarse, uncombable mess that you see before you, though much more of it than he has now: this hair he is born with, all wet, it hangs to his shoulders — all I think of the hair is: ‘Strange, nu? What isn’t strange? Life is strange.’ And the obstetrician, he is cradling this newborn son of mine, and telling me to look at the full head of hair, it is amazing, the hair, ‘Amazing, amazing,’ he carries on, and then he strokes the hair, the obstetrician, and the moment he strokes the hair, this newborn son of mine bites him on the neck , right where it meets the shoulder, and the obstetrician lets out a little scream, but I think it is just surprise, and I think, ‘Well, my baby does not like strange men to touch his head — okay, neither do I.’ But then, you see, Yuval, blood starts coming through the white of this obigynie’s doctor-jacket. My son has drawn blood. My son, he has a mouth full of teeth. And these teeth — these are the last nails in the coffin of naming my boy Michael, of naming him anything other than Gurion. I tell this to Judah, and what is he going to say? The whole way to the hospital, he is convinced I am miscarrying. He could care less what we call the boy. So that is why Gurion, and not Michael nor Dovid.”

“This is true?” Yuval said to my father. “About the teeth and the hair?”

“He had four teeth,” my father said, “not a mouthful, but they were the right four teeth — that doctor was bleeding . The hair, as I remember, was even longer than she said, but what do I know?”

“Amazing,” Yuval said, not really believing what he’d been told.

“Tell us more stories about Judah,” my mother said to him. “It is good for Gurion to hear.”

My mother left a part out of the story of my birth. That Seder was a long night of leaving parts out of stories. I knew the part she left out because she’d told me the story hundreds of times. She used to put me to sleep with it when I was younger. The part she cut picks up right after I bit the man for touching me on the head, right after he started bleeding:

“…But then you see, Gurion,” she’d tell me, “blood starts coming through the white of the guy’s doctor-jacket, and this worries me a little, because now I am going to feed you, and what will your teeth do to me? It turns out they do nothing — you know you have teeth, you know I am your ema, you love me, you do not want to hurt me. And you are laying there against my chest, and you stretch your arms up like babies sometimes will, you stretch them so your hands are just under my chin, and my first impulse, I have a strong impulse to put your little fists inside my mouth, to see if I can fit them both, and I see that you have pressed them together, your tiny little fists, as if that is what you want, too, you have pressed them together for me I think, and as I take hold of your wrists to guide your hands inside my mouth, I see you have these birthmarks, these yud-shaped birthmarks, and this stops my heart. These birthmarks are the last nails in the coffin of naming you Michael, of naming you anything other than Gurion. And I tell this to your father, and what can he say? The whole way to the hospital, he is convinced I am miscarrying you. I knew I was not, but he was convinced. So he could not care less what I wanted to call you, just that you were alive. And that is why you are Gurion.”

And this is why my mom left that part out at the Seder: because, of course, I still had the birthmarks. If she told about the birthmarks, then Yuval might have asked to see them. Then I might have had to scrub the makeup from my knuckles and shown him. And then he would maybe suspect that everything my mother had just said was not only a story to tell about your son in front of your son to make him feel like there was no one else like him in the world; Yuval might suspect it was not merely a pretty way to dress up the fact that I was born rough and ugly, like how they call retarded and handicapped people “differently abled” (and it was those things as well, surely, for she’s my mom, and she’s a psychologist)…My mom has always been scared that if Yuval, or anyone else, were to learn about the birthmarks, it would somehow lead, as her dreamed father warned, to my being trampled beneath the feet of my brothers.

I do not believe that is true. I never have. My brothers will never trample me, and if ever they do, I don’t see how my birthmarks could cause it. But my mom — she is my mom, and the thought of me getting trampled spooks her. When I used to complain about the makeup, she’d get very worried- and scared-looking, and she’s a killer, my mom. She has killed a lot of people, and she won’t say that, but she will tell me that her dad did, and but what was she doing in Beirut? What was she doing getting shot in a building with her dad’s special forces team? She wasn’t cooking chicken for them. She was killing enemies with them, lots of enemies, and at the same time, all of those enemies were trying to kill her, but she didn’t die and the enemies did, because my mom was a much better killer. If you know your mom is a great killer, and you think of your mom as a great killer, and you know she would kill for you, not just metaphorically, but really end lives for you, without hesitation, you don’t want to make her sad and worried because how can you repay her for all the things she’s willing to do? You can’t. So the least you can do is make it so she worries less and doesn’t get all sad-looking about some birthmarks. That’s what I think. So I put the makeup on every day and I don’t complain or make faces, and if I believed that anyone were, anytime soon, going to read this Story of Stories as the scripture that it is, then I wouldn’t even mention the birthmarks. So it is good that you read it as fiction for now — my mom can relax. By the time you know it’s scripture, I will have proven, even to her, that I am untramplable.