From Chapter Two
The owner of our building was a man of Germanic extraction and temperament named Emery Deutsch. He lived on the ground floor, at the back, and he spent much time outside on his concrete patio during the warm months, tending to his shrubs. He was the building’s super as well as our landlord, and my father had several run-ins with him about one thing or another: there was no heat, there was too much heat, there was no hot water, the water was too hot, and on and on. I have to admit, though, that Mr. Deutsch ran a tight ship: the stairs and hallways were always spotless. He detested anything that made noise or created a nuisance or attracted dirt or clutter – like pets, or, in truth, like me; he would probably have forbidden children in the building if he could have. None of the tenants (all Jews, I think) liked him and his Teutonic ways. This was only a few years after the Holocaust, after all.
I had never had a pet, and I desperately wanted a puppy. One day when I was home in bed with the flu, my father went downstairs to ask Mr. Deutsch if he’d make an exception to his no-animals rule. He came back and did his best Sid Caesar imitation of the answer: “Nein, no! No dogz! Zay piss und shit everyvare!” I was devastated. The next day, attempting damage control, Dad came home with a hamster in a cage. It was not what I’d had in mind. I was picturing a cocker spaniel that curled up in bed with me; the hamster had no ability to relate to humans at all, and watching it run around its little wheel got old fast. To my mother, whom Dad had not consulted in advance, the hamster was just a rat without a tail, and when I came home from school a few months later and she told me that it had disappeared, I was sure that she had flushed it down the toilet. She was always getting rid of things she didn’t like that belonged to me. When I was about ten, someone gave me a used, falling-apart but complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica, the prized 11th edition, all 29 volumes. I felt very important owning such a scholarly tome, and I read widely in it, but it took up half my bedroom and collected dust. As soon as I went off to boarding school, Mom admitted to me much later, she threw it out – but, she also confessed, she had stuck a wad of cash in the “M” section for safekeeping and forgotten about it. Who says there’s no karma?
Justice was what I wanted – justice for Mr. Deutsch and his bad karma. “Revenge is a kind of wild justice,” wrote Francis Bacon in the 17th century, and though I was twenty years away from being a Renaissance scholar, I intuited the wisdom of that maxim, and also that of the Italian proverb from the same period to the effect that payback is a dish that the man of taste prefers to eat cold. Accordingly, I bided my time for several months, thinking up and rejecting various torments. Strew garbage on the stairs? Too messy, even for me. Sneak into the basement and steal fuses from the electrical box, plunging his apartment into darkness? But what if I blacked out the whole building, or electrocuted myself? Set the building on fire? Too extreme, but . . . something along those lines on a smaller scale? I had been told, by some kid at school, that if you dropped a wooden match from any height onto a hard surface, it would fall head-first and ignite on contact. My bedroom was four stories above Mr. Deutsch’s spotless concrete patio. What if I drove him crazy by bombarding him, one or two missiles at a time, while he was inside? He’d rush out, but I’d duck back inside my window and he’d =be baffled. Perfect! Or so it seemed.
I couldn’t wait to try it out. My mother kept a full box of Diamond wooden kitchen matches next to the stove. It was late in the afternoon, sometime around October or November; I remember that the leaves on the trees in all the back yards were turning brown. I was home alone. Mr. Deutsch was nowhere to be seen. I wasn’t certain the kid at school was right, so I decided to drop a single match, as a test. I opened the box and, holding it in my left hand, pushed up on the window with my right. But it had been painted over so many times that it wouldn’t budge. I put the matchbox down on the sill, and with both hands yanked up as hard as I could on the handholds at the bottom. The window lurched open, and I lurched with it, nudging the whole open box of matches into space.
The kid at school wasn’t lying. Two hundred matches went tumbling down, as in the air-raids that the newsreels had shown. It was my own miniature version of the fire-bombing of Dresden. The whole patio seemed to ignite at once, accompanied by a devastating crackle. I was awestruck, and forgot to retreat as planned from my perch when Mr. Deutsch burst out into his yard. The matches went out as soon as they flamed, but the patio was blanketed with little smoldering sticks. Mr. Deutsch tipped his head back and there I was, staring down at him. With determined strides, he went back inside; in a minute, I could hear him pounding up the stairs. Our apartment door was locked, but I knew he had a passkey, and – thinking clearly, for the first time that day – I threw the deadbolt on the front door and cowered in my bedroom. Mr. Deutsch hammered on our front door for a while and then, sure enough, I heard his key slip into the lock, but the deadbolt defeated him. Eventually I heard his retreating footsteps and I started to breathe again.
When my father got home, Mr. Deutsch was waiting for him. Dad later told us that there were threats of eviction and even criminal action for what was certainly an act of vandalism. I don’t know how Dad talked him down; maybe he reminded Mr. Deutsch that being a German in a predominantly Jewish New York neighborhood, he didn’t have much social capital. I don’t even remember whether I was punished. I do remember how proud I was of myself for engineering a Resistance attack that was spectacular while it was going on and left no collateral damage behind.