Today, I think about it with amusement: our professor thought it useful and necessary to teach us how to make people laugh and how to make them dream—making them dream was more complicated because it was more subtle. How to look on in silence and make this silence be part of the spectacle. How to embrace one another and even how to kiss. Our first kiss was directed; it had no spontaneity. I don’t recall whether I enjoyed it. But I acquired a taste for it. Later on.
And, one evening, it happened.
It happened thanks to Alika’s cousin, Sharon. She was working on a film in Hollywood and had come to New York for a few days. The three of us dined together in the Village, in a small restaurant popular with students. We had a long discussion about the latest best-selling novel adapted to the screen. Alika was against it on principle, Sharon for. I was against it, too, but I supported her cousin’s point of view. I liked her spirit and enthusiasm. At the end of the stormy meal, the young woman said she was tired and wanted to return to her hotel.
As it was on my way, I offered to walk her back. Alika objected. We had course work to do for the next day—on the subject, as I recall, of the blind man in drama and the modern transposition of his nightmares. Script in hand, we worked on our parts. Suddenly she stopped and stared at me for a long time. Was she jealous? In any case, her agitation added to her charm. But to this day I have no idea whether she suddenly found me attractive or was afraid of my leaving her.
The rest, as they say, was an event staged in heaven.
The Talmud says that having completed the job of creation, God, suddenly unemployed, set to work arranging marriages. Sometimes, though not always, it’s love at first sight. At other times, the process can last years. Yedidyah wonders about the heavenly marriage broker’s method: What are his criteria in making his choices? And what about divorces—who is responsible for divorces?
And what about the crimes of men?
Did Hans, Werner’s uncle, believe in God? Did Werner? At the trial he was asked many questions, but not that one. It’s a shame.
——
My annual medical exam. Dr. Feldman doesn’t utter a word from beginning to end. He lets the body express itself in its own way. Its language is more familiar to him. He receives its signals with his hands. If he smiles, that’s good. If he remains impassive, it’s because something is troubling him.
Today he isn’t smiling.
He wants to know if I sleep well; no, I sleep badly. I always have. Do I exercise every morning? No. Never. I don’t have the time or the patience.
“Well, all of this is going to change,” he says. “I’m prescribing a diet for you. It’s in your best interest to follow it.”
I tell him that I don’t feel sick, but that if he insists, I could play the part of Molière’s “imaginary invalid.”
“That’s not funny,” he says.
Yedidyah and his uncle Méir were very close. As a child, he liked to play chess with him, get his advice, listen to his stories of fallen angels and laughing demons.
Méir and his brother had escaped the horrors of the great turmoil. Yedidyah’s grandfather, in his premonitory wisdom, had sent them to a distant relative in Brooklyn, supposedly as yeshiva students. He said, “Before facing Esau, his brother and enemy, Patriarch Jacob separated his relatives into two camps. So if one were to die, the other would survive. Just in case.” Clearly he was right. But did the two brothers feel guilty for having “abandoned” or “betrayed” their parents in obeying them? If so, they never showed it.
Méir was madly in love with his wife. In fact, she called him “my big lunatic” in the morning and “my little lunatic” at night. Hence the nickname the family gave him: “Méir the little lunatic.” It was claimed that whenever he wanted to he could blind himself to reality in order to better discover invisible worlds: his blindness and his clairvoyance went hand in hand. But he wasn’t at all mad. Or blind. Little Yedidyah had a thousand and one proofs of this.
Admittedly, he had a fertile, passionate imagination: he saw some things more clearly and more farsightedly than anyone else. But is that madness? Couldn’t it be regarded instead as a power that Wise Men pride themselves on having? Occasionally he abolished time; past and future were equally important to him and he slid from one to the other with disconcerting ease. This was because he liked to catch people off guard.
One day, as Méir and Yedidyah were strolling down the street—sometimes he would pick up his nephew at school—he pointed to a hurried passerby.
“Take a good look, my child,” he said. “He has no idea where he’s going, but he’s running. Whereas I know where he’s going. One look at his face and I know everything about his life. Do you want me to tell you? His wife doesn’t love him; he keeps suspecting she’s unfaithful to him. He has two children who fight over every little thing. A neighbor who hates him. He’s plagued with insomnia. He’s had a great tragedy in his life: his first child, a daughter, was born handicapped. Ever since, he’s been cursing himself day and night.”
“Can we help him?”
“Yes. You could.”
“How?”
“You could sing a song for him. Go on, run, catch up with him. You’ll change the star controlling his life.”
Yedidyah looked around for the passerby. Too late. He had disappeared. And Méir noted, “That’s the misfortune. We never do things in time.”
The words of a lunatic? No, those of a wise man.
Another day, Méir noticed an old woman in tears. “She’s lost her handbag. It contains all her papers. And all her remaining money: she’d just withdrawn it from the bank. But don’t worry. I’ll help her. She’ll get everything back. And she’ll laugh. And then cry. Out of happiness.”
“How will you do it?”
“We’ll do it together.”
And the amazing thing was, an hour later, Yedidyah saw the old lady again.
She was laughing.
Yedidyah finally asked the question bluntly: “Tell me, Méir. They say you became blind, but I know you’re not. They also say you’re mad. Is it true?”
“It is, my child. I’m mad, a blind lunatic, blinded by madness, blinded by the thick, dark light that envelops this world where we’re condemned to live. And this light affects my reason to the point of diverting it, perturbing it, directing it against itself, against its source. Do you understand what I just said?”
“No, Méir. I don’t.”
“Very good. Bravo. You could have lied. To please me. You chose to tell the truth. Beware—one day, you, too, might be called a lunatic.”
With the years, he stopped being interested in newspapers. He didn’t even ask Drora or Yedidyah—when he came to visit—to read the papers to him. He used to say: “What’s the point? I know what’s in them. The situations and events are always the same; the names alone change. Therefore we might as well leaf through the phone book, right?”
He recounted how he had met Drora. In a museum in Paris. They were admiring the same Rembrandt painting: Abraham being stopped from sacrificing Isaac. She was oriental, simultaneously stern and dreamy. They left together and, without a word, sat down at the terrace of a café. She asked him to tell her a story. He invented more than one; but he spoke differently to Yedidyah.
“It was during the Occupation, a boy and a girl. Courageous. Their mission: to follow a traitor and track down where he lived. They saw him go home one night, a summer night. They went back to her house. They made love and were happy for a very long time: for a whole night. A small fragment of eternity. For others, eternity is what comes after death; for lovers, it’s what precedes it.”
“Who was it? Drora?”
He smiled but didn’t answer.
Yedidyah loved him.
And he loved being loved.
As for me, I love children. And of course, my twins are the children I love most in the world. Intelligent, respectful of others, they embody the joy of ever-renewed surprises. I need only look at them or listen to them and I thank God for ha
ving invented life and happiness and the family. Thanks to them, more than once, Alika and I grew close after a quarrel, big or small.
Leibele and Dovid’l: the same delicate face, the same dark eyes, the same penetrating and peaceful gaze, the same husky voice. And, give or take a few tiny differences, the same character and the same fondness for medieval music. They’ve always been very close even if each one had his own temperament. Leibele, being pragmatic, studied architecture, whereas Dovid’l chose philosophy of science. The former always sought the company of people, while the latter shied away from them, taking refuge inside his books.
Misfortune struck when they both fell in love with the same woman, a beautiful brunette full of talent, humor, and surprises. When she shared our meals, the dining room radiated with warmth and wit. What happened next? It was to be expected: each spared the other’s feelings; the two brothers broke up with her at the same time. Together they succeeded in overcoming feelings of guilt, but Dovid’l left for Israel to complete his studies. He was wounded in a bomb attack. Leibele departed immediately to be at his bedside. A few weeks later, Dovid’l sent us a reassuring letter from the Tel Hashomer hospital:
My dear parents,
I know you’re worried about me. I can understand—I would be worried, too, if I were in your position, but I’m getting better. I’m being taken care of by marvelous physicians. The nurses are gentle and beautiful. When Eve smiles at me, I don’t feel the pain of the injection. I’m almost tempted to request a second one. If this continues, I’ll fall in love with her.
My accident? Leibele must have told you everything. I was strolling in the narrow streets of Jerusalem, near the main market. I like the brouhaha and the odors. The crush of people. The kids running from one stall to another, trying to filch a candy or a fruit while the merchants find it amusing and let them get away with it. The Talmudists going over the morning class. The housewives with their shopping bags. The place is teeming with people; everyone is bustling about. Here life is simple.
And suddenly everything disappeared in the explosion. All I remember is I fell. I woke up in the hospital. What had happened? A terrorist had just accomplished his suicide mission. Five dead. Sixteen wounded. Including me. Shrapnel in my stomach and in my right leg. Operation successful. A few weeks in the hospital. Everything will be okay. Later.
As usual, the attack aroused anger and frustration throughout the country. How is it possible to justify the cult of death so many young Palestinians adhere to? Forensic scientists, working on the autopsy of the terrorist, found that he was smiling as he set off the destructive device. His face reflected neither hatred nor terror but a kind of anticipation; he welcomed death, his and his victims’, with a smile.
I don’t understand.
Leibele, who comes to see me every day, thinks the man was brainwashed and believed in the legend of the seventy virgins promised in heaven by the Koran. Fanaticism? Let’s not pass judgment on religion, though we’re allowed to condemn people who pervert it for political ends.
I was told that two hours after the explosion, the market was back to its normal activity. The pupils in the neighboring schools were already quietly sitting and listening to their teachers.
The market … I’m eager to return to it. With a bit of luck, I’ll manage to persuade Eve to come with me.
Your Dovid’l who loves you
P.S. Mom, a suggestion: someone should make a film about these young assassins who think they’re making God happy by killing His children. And you, Dad: How about coming to Jerusalem and doing a story for your paper?
Yedidyah was considering going to join the twins, whom he missed more than anything in the world, when Leibele informed his parents that he was dropping out of university and enlisting in the Israeli army. He quickly became a member of a commando, filling his parents with a mixture of pride and fear.
Some time later, a Hebrew newspaper ran an article in his praise. The title: “Honor to Leibele! Bravo!” He was commanding an operation in Gaza; the aim was to capture a terrorist leader responsible for several attacks in Tel Aviv and bring him back alive. A spectacular success. With no loss of human life.
“You see?” Yedidyah said to Alika. “Theater isn’t the only thing to live for.”
“You’re right,” she answered. “The papers allude to the ‘theater of operations,’ but war isn’t theater. On that particular stage, the dead don’t get back up.”
Yedidyah made a gesture of discouragement. “Unfortunately, among those who declare war, there are surely some, here as elsewhere, for whom it’s a game staged by believers far away who claim to be acting in the name of their God.”
One of his son’s comments filled him with emotion and convinced him to make the trip to Israel: “Let it not be said,” Leibele had recently written, “that the descendant of the great Rabbi Petahia failed to join his people when they were in danger.”
And Yedidyah said to himself that, clearly, history was not a game.
And yet. He wondered how so much suffering could be explained in this world, a world hidden under the mask of hatred, like a shroud, as a way of extinguishing the last sparks of sensibility and hope from it. How is one to act so this suffering would successfully transcend history by humanizing it?
Recalling the past, his grandfather had said to him one day, “You often hear people say, regarding some event, history will be the judge. Actually, history itself will be judged.”
“In other words,” Yedidyah noted, “Creation may be just one big, lengthy court proceeding?”
“Yes, you might say that.”
“And where does God fit in, Grandfather?” Yedidyah asked.
His grandfather didn’t answer.
Each time Yedidyah hears the word “trial,” inevitably Kafka’s trial is the one that comes to his mind: “Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K.”
Lies, many lies, were told about the young German Werner Sonderberg. How had he managed to cope? As he faced the huge, all-powerful judicial apparatus, he had remained impassive, as if immunized in his isolation. Yedidyah described the young man, but he didn’t really understand him. Many events had filled his memory since then, from both the general situation and his private life, but the trial had receded in his mind without fading away. Had his approach to things changed, his trajectory? Had the defendant’s behavior made him sense something that might have influenced his conception of justice, if not of good and evil? If he had changed, at what precise moment? And what part had Alika played in all of this? Had he grown closer to her, or drifted away from her?
There was one incident that could have turned into a disaster.
Alika was playing in Chekhov’s The Three Sisters.
“Do me a favor,” she said to Yedidyah. “Don’t come to see the play.”
Afraid he would be ashamed of her? He had gone nevertheless. Secretly. With a pang of anguish, he had waited in the dark for the curtain to rise and had slipped into the silent theater. He took a seat in the next-to-last row. Alika lives for the theater; her dream is to go onstage. Will she live up to the challenge? Will she thrill the audience, tense in its quest for beauty and truth, for the old to become new, alternating between the known and unknown? Will she act well? And if not, how could he tell her without wounding her and endangering their love? She acted well, in fact very well. But it was not the right part. Instead of playing the part of Masha, the unfortunate, unhappy wife, she had chosen the part of the youngest sister, Irina, who was nervous, restless, and scatterbrained. Alika was not very good at incarnating a character that did not suit her.
Would she find out that he had disobeyed? The subject never came up.
Dr. Feldman and I see each other often. This morning he makes me open my mouth and examines my tongue.
“I don’t like it,” he says.
“I’m sorry, Doctor, but it’s the only one I have.”
He doesn’t appreciate my humor.
Actually, the good doctor doesn’
t like anything about me. And even less my heart. He doesn’t like the way I’m breathing. He thinks I tire too quickly. He wants to know whether, by any chance, my parents had heart conditions. No, not as far as I know. Perhaps someone else in my family? No one.
“Still, you ought to be careful,” the doctor says insistently.
It is imperative, he says, that I treat my body as a friend. Otherwise, it might become my enemy. And then it would be a nuisance for my physician, and even more so for me.
ISRAEL: I DIDN’T EXPECT such emotion to arise in me from being there. I saw my two sons again and wept: my heart overflowed with pride. We spent a week together. I thanked heaven for each hour, each sigh, and each gaze. Suddenly turning sentimental, I catch myself using religious terms. What the Besht and the Gaon of Vilnius, Rabbis Berdichev and Wischnitz, in exile, could see only in their dreams, I am enjoying in reality.
Jerusalem: as I climbed up its hills, monuments of green vegetation soaring up to a blue sky, my heart began to race and I almost forgot to breathe. This is what my distant ancestors must have felt when they made their pilgrimage to the Temple three times a year. In the Talmud it says that the pilgrims could number one million, yet no one complained of lack of space or discomfort. My grandfather believed this. Were there any journalists in those days?
This trip still leaves its stamp. As incomparable as the city of David itself. Wherever I walk, said Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, each step brings me closer to Jerusalem, the city that, more than any other, embodies what is eternal in the memory of my people.
After the Sonderberg trial and its unexpected outcome, Paul, my boss and friend, appointed me, at my request and for a very brief period, special correspondent in Israel. You need a change of scenery? The choice was Europe or Israel. Just as in the past when it came to theater and journalism, it was my grandfather who suggested the Holy City.
“Go there as my ambassador,” he urged me. “As my personal family representative. Remember carefully: like my father and his father, I live with the feeling of having lived in Jerusalem; I’m eager to return there with you, through you; I’ve prayed in front of the Wall, and I’d like to see it again through your eyes. Through you, I’ll reimmerse myself in my memories. Don’t forget: my memory and yours must blend into his.”