The first three pages of Good Blood

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. ~ Albert Einstein

As soon as I looked into his blue eyes, every cell in my body bubbled up with joy. Yes, this must be love. I am in love for the first time. His are the bluest eyes I have ever seen. They are like the deep blue of the ocean on a clear and sunny day. My mom is sitting to my left, my sister, Edna, to my right, and I am falling in love.

Ari Ben Canaan is his name. He is in charge of taking a boatload of people to Palestine. The boat, Exodus, is filled with Jewish Europeans planning to make their home in the soon to be independent state of Israel.Unfortunately, the British authorities have detained the boat in Cyprus. They are not allowing Exodus to complete its voyage to Palestine, and Ari has to take charge. His confidence is portrayed in his thin and muscular 5’9” frame.

“We can go back or we can go on a hunger strike,” he says, “but before we vote, we must reflect in our hearts.” I close my eyes and can hear everyone starting the most important prayer there is in the Jewish religion, the first prayer that we are taught in first grade: the Shema, the holiest prayer, the holiest song. “Shema Yisrael Adonai Elohanu Adonai Echad.” Even Jews that don’t speak Hebrew typically know these words.

The first six words of the Shema are all I can remember by heart. We learn the whole prayer but most people typically only remember the first six words. The rest of the prayer does not seem as important, especially to me, because I know about this prayer in ways no one else does, except my sister of course. The Shema, the first six words, saved my dad’s life.

My eyes go back to Ari’s face on the screen, and before I know it, the credits are rolling and Exodus has become my new favorite movie.
This must be what love is, I think again, but of course I decide to keep that thought a secret from everyone. Love is not something I am supposed to talk about because I am only nine years old.

I look out the glass doors of our apartment building. My family and I live in apartment four at 4634 Dupuis Street in Montréal, Québec, Canada. I like coming out to the foyer and looking at the stars through these glass doors. I feel like the smartest person in the whole world out here, smarter than my mother, smarter than my father, but this is just another secret of mine.

It is 7:30pm and my dad just got home from work. He is a plumber, so he often works late. My mom is washing the dishes while my dad is eating the breaded chicken, mashed potatoes and onions she made for him. It is his favorite. I sit at the table and watch as he scarfs down the food. Dad is the fastest eater in the whole wide world. Edna, my sister, says it is because he was in the war, and he had almost nothing to eat for so long. I bet if there were a fast eating contest, he would win first prize.

I look at my dad‘s hands. They are so big and always chapped from working outside. The dirt on his hands never seems to disappear. I have seen him try soap after soap, but always with the same lack of results. “Why don’t you just wear gloves?” I had once asked. He laughed and said, “I’ve tried as many gloves as I have tried soaps. I can’t do the job properly with gloves.”

I love looking at hands. I’m not sure why, but somehow I feel like I understand things better when I do. My mom’s hands, for example, reflect her childhood. Her left pinky is bent permanently, with a big scar from a graft on her palm. She says it is from when she was a little baby. That is one of the only stories from her childhood that she has told me. Her older sister had pushed her, and a pot of hot water fell off of the stove onto her hand and burnt her badly. She went to the hospital for it, but the scar never went away. When I first heard that story it helped me finally understand why my mom had always yelled at my sister and me so much whenever we got anywhere near the stove. Now if I could only understand why she yelled at me so much for everything else.

My mom, Alise, is only 5’2”, but she has a husky voice from smoking, and she can yell louder than anyone I know. My dad, Zoli, on the other hand, is a tall man at 6’2”, and his voice is always gentle. My mom gets upset easily, so she yells quite a lot. My dad almost never gets upset. Maybe that is why he never raises his voice at us.

We have a television, but we don’t watch it much. I am afraid of television shows that are scary. I will only watch them if my Dad is sitting right beside me. Tonight, my dad is sitting beside Edna and me while Elliot Ness and his men look for bad guys, members of the mafia like Al Capone. As the show progresses, one of the mobsters takes out an automatic rifle and begins shooting into a crowd of people on the street.

“Iritka, Ednooka, that was the gun they used on me when I got shot,” my dad tells us.