The Book of Daniel Read Online Free Page B

started to yell. Daniel understood that everyone was nervous. He took his sister by the hand and led her into the doorway of a shoe store. Here they were protected from the wind. He took off his gloves and lifted the back of his mackinaw and dug into his pocket for a handkerchief. “Take your glasses off,” he said. “Don’t rub it. Take your hand away—that’s it. Look up.”
    Her little red face was squinched up around the closed eye. “How can I see what it is if you don’t open your eye,” Daniel said.
    “I can’t.”
    Daniel laughed. “Come on, Susyanna—you should see what a funny face you’re making.”
    “I am not!”
    “Please, children, we are late. This is very important! Quickly, quickly!”
    “Just a minute, Mr. Ascher,” Daniel said. “She’s only a little girl, you know.”
    The poignancy of this description so affected Susan that she began to cry. Daniel put his arms around her and said he wassorry. Ascher muttered in Yiddish and lifted his arms. Then he dropped them, with a smack, against his sides. He walked away and came back.
    “Come on, Susan, let me get it out and when we get home I’ll play with you. I’ll play Monopoly with you.” That was a treat because it was such a long game.
    Susan opened the afflicted eye, blinked and blinked again. She discovered that whatever it was was gone.
    “Gottzudanken!”
Ascher said.
    “Will you still play with me?” Susan wanted to know.
    “Yes.” Daniel wiped away her tears, wiped her nose, and then wiped his own.
    “Hurry, hurry !” Ascher said.
    When they reached the corner of Broadway the wind wasn’t so bad because the street was filled with people. They were moving into a crowd. More police on horseback, in ranks of two, stood along the curb. Other policemen, on foot, were diverting the Broadway traffic east and west on 42nd Street, which is what made the traffic jam. Horns sounded and a policeman blew his whistle. In the surge of people Ascher held Susan and Daniel by the wrists and crossed with them through the spaces between the cars. Two entire blocks from 40th to 42nd on Broadway were cordoned off. People stood in the street. It was an amazing sight. The center of attention was down at 40th: a man on a platform was shouting through a microphone. Two loudspeakers on the tops of trucks beamed his voice at the people but it was hard to hear what he was saying. The crowd, which was attentive, seemed by its massiveness to muffle the sound. A man saying something quietly to someone next to him destroyed the amplified words. Only the echoes of the unintelligible voice bounced off the buildings. Some people in the crowd held placards aloft, and at moments in the speech when applause rattled like marbles spilling on the ground, these were poked upwards rhythmically.
    Ascher led the two children into the edges of the crowd, keeping near the buildings where it was thinnest. They went single file, Ascher preceding Daniel and holding his wrist and Daniel pulling Susan behind him. “Pardon me,” Ascher said. “Excuse me.”
    But at 41st Street the crowd became too thick for this stratagem. People were packed together right up to the building line. Daniel could not see the sidewalk except where he stood. Ascher’s response was to wade right into the crowd, cutting diagonally into the street and bulling his way through the overcoats. “Let me through, please. One side, one side.” Now it was stiflingly hot. Daniel felt the crowd as a weight that would crush him to death if it happened to close the path made by Ascher. An elbow came up and knocked his hat askew. His hands occupied, he couldn’t set it right. Finally it fell. Susan squatted to retrieve the hat and his hold on her hand was broken. Ascher was pulling him on and Susan disappeared in the closing ranks behind him.
    “Wait!” he shouted, struggling in Ascher’s grasp. His wrist burned in the steel band.
    “Daniel, Daniel!” his sister called.
    Panicking, he shouted and dug