Is this the reason why my soul’s like a dog’s soul? Is this the reason why I’ve always roamed the streets so anxiously, plagued with the ferocious restlessness of those who have no master?
Roots
12
AFTER SIX DAYS of tranquil navigation, we arrived in the port of Haifa.
Standing on deck, watching the city grow larger, I had the impression that it was strangely familiar, that it reminded me of Trieste. Behind it, instead of the Kras, but equally rocky, rose the spurs of Mount Carmel; multi-storey buildings jutted up everywhere – the newest ones were also the most horrible. On the left, where the hilly ground yielded to the plain, dense smoke from a series of industrial plants rose into the air and mingled with the flames of a refinery.
But Haifa doesn’t have a seafront like Trieste’s. Instead of the coast road and the Piazza d’Unità, there were mooring docks for cargo ships, and over them towered a range of yellow cranes with their long arms hanging down. At their feet, dozens of container ships from all over the world were piled up, one on top of another.
Although the counter-terrorism officers had already come on board at Limassol in Cyprus, the disembarcation took forever. While waiting for clearance to go ashore, I loitered on the deck for a while, staring at the outline of a strange building that stood atop the hill, framed by terraced gardens sloping down toward the sea; the building’s round, golden cupola suggested a mosque, but without a minaret next to it.
‘What’s that?’ I asked a lady from Ashkelon whom I’d met during the voyage.
‘That? It’s the Bahá’í temple,’ she said, smiling as if to add, Just what we need. In fact, it housed the tomb of Bahá’u’lláh, a Persian who broke away from Islam in the latter half of the nineteenth century and founded his own syncretic religious movement, based on universal love among men of all faiths and races.
As I stepped on to dry land, I became aware of the great weight of the knapsack on my back, as heavy as the century that was drawing to a close, and I knew that the time had come for me to stop and examine the contents of my burden, to take out all the stones, one by one, and finally give them names, to catalogue them, and then to decide which I should continue to carry and which I should leave behind.
All at once, on that unknown yet somehow familiar soil, I understood that our personal story is also the story of those who preceded us and of the choices they made. Those choices have formed us; like calcium carbonate inside a cave, they’re the invisible structure of each individual.
Rather than a blank slate on which anything at all can be written, a newborn baby is a tablecloth into which someone has already woven a pattern. Will the child follow the path already marked out by others, or will he choose a different one? Will he keep treading the familiar furrow, or will he have the nerve to spring out of it with both feet? And why does one person tear out the pattern while another blindly, diligently follows the design?
And then, is this life really the only one we have? Is this the sole lighted space given us to cross? Is it not perhaps too awful and cruel to gamble everything in a single existence? To understand, to not understand, to mistake, to collide? One heartbeat separates birth from death; we open our mouths to say, ‘Oh!’ in horror, then ‘Oh!’ in wonder, and then everything’s over? Must we resign ourselves to keeping quiet and stretching out our necks like the latest in a long line of sacrificial victims? To coming into the world and then sinking into death like a house of cards that silently falls in on itself?
And who decides the roles before the performance? Which one will be assigned to me: the victim, or the executioner? Or is everything just an endless succession of light and shade?
To kill or to be killed: Who decides that? Maybe those who find themselves in the pool of light. But the ones in the shadows, what do they do? And how about me? Where am I supposed to stand? Is it true that everything takes place as though on a stage – entrances, exits, blown or forgotten lines? And what happens to the victims’ death rattles and the cold sweats of their final agonies and their wretched nights, inhabited only by their physiology? Is there some place in heaven that contains all that, a catalogue, an archive, a cosmic memory? And, along with the mere record, a scale, and maybe someone who weighs existences? How do the right- and left-hand weighing pans balance each other: actions on one side, with judgement as the counterweight on the other? Does Michael’s sword flame out, darting here and there, or is it the whirr of nothingness that reverberates through space?
Or is the universe perhaps just a vast rumen, filled with black holes that grind up and absorb all forms of energy? Is the meaning of the world to be found in this indefatigable motor, in this mastication-absorption-excretion engine, in this symphony of gastric juices?
But when the rumen closes, the cow dies.
And what about the universe?
Are we proteins, minerals, amino acids, fluids, enzymatic reactions, and nothing else? Whitish larvae, wiggling about, devouring, and being devoured? But even the larva can know the dignity of transformation; its soft tissue can produce the unexpected splendour of a butterfly.
And what if the magic word were indeed ‘transformation’? If the darkness existed precisely in order to welcome the Light?
13
OF ALL THE family stories, the one about Uncle Ottavio was the most famous.
You gave me only a hint of it one evening when we were sitting on the sofa and looking at some family photographs you’d taken out of a chest. How old was I? Ten or twelve – I’d already reached the stage where the absence of a face (my father’s) had started to torment me. You couldn’t show me his picture, as you didn’t know who he was, and maybe you were trying somehow to fill the empty space that was spreading inside me.
I remember a succession of anonymous images, harking back to a period that seemed to me to have taken place shortly after the disappearance of the dinosaurs.
The most frequently photographed location was the big white villa, surrounded by a park, where you grew up. It was the setting for a family reunion, servants included, posing before a cricket match, and for many other snapshots, including several of your dog Argo, he of the intelligent eyes, stretched out in front of the entrance to the greenhouse. There were images of the villa in its summer splendour, with rose-covered arbours scattered around the lawn and shutters open on flowery balconies, and then there was a shot of the villa after the bombers destroyed it: a pile of debris under a cloud of black smoke.
Many of the photos showed you as a child with a big ribbon in your hair, or with your parents in a photographer’s studio, posed before a bombastically painted backdrop; then there was a picture of your mother alone, posing as she sang. There were photographs of various other children – all of them in the obligatory sailor’s costume, holding hoops or miniature violins and wearing little boots buttoned up above the ankle – whose names and degree of kinship you declaimed to me with the best of intentions but without arousing the slightest interest. What did I care about all those characters, who to my eyes looked as though they’d stepped out of a period film, or about that luxurious villa, which had gone up in smoke the day Mike from Alabama or someone like him, piloting his fighter-bomber, decided to press the button and release the bombs?
Once, while we were driving past the place where the villa used to be, you showed me a solitary cedar, surrounded by dozens of dismal blocks of flats blackened by smoke from the ironworks. ‘You see that tree?’ you said. ‘My seesaw was balanced on its lowest branches.’
That soot-covered conifer was the only survivor from the large park that had surrounded your family’s villa.
Uncle Ottavio was your mother’s brother; you showed me a photograph of him, sitting at a piano while his sister stood beside him, singing a romantic song. In a family where more or less everyone played a musical instrument for pleasure, he was the only one who made music his profession. A much-admired pianist, he gave concerts throughout Europe. He toured continually, and when he was home, he spent m
ost of his time practising in the living room.
You couldn’t stand him, you told me, but you added that perhaps you were only jealous of his talent, seeing that you had no talents at all. He married – rather late for those days – a harpist from Gorizia, and they had two children, a girl and a boy, several years apart. The girl, Allegra, inherited her parents’ musical aptitude, and after graduating from the conservatoire in Trieste, she moved to America to perfect her viola studies. Her younger brother, Gionata, moved to Israel at the end of the Second World War.
‘Why Israel?’ I asked, with my customary anxiety. ‘Had he fallen in love?’
You stiffened at that question. ‘In love?’ you repeated. Then, with a faraway look in your eyes, you added, ‘Yes, maybe so . . . in a way . . . but it’s a long story, and it’s also a little sad: too long and too sad for a little girl who has to go to bed.’
My protests availed me nothing. I loved sad fairytales; every evening I fell asleep hugging the Little Mermaid, repeating the most desperate tales underneath the sheets while the Ugly Duckling watched me from the bedside table.
‘But this isn’t a fairytale,’ you said, cutting me off, and that was all there was to it. And so my great-great uncle, his wife, his piano, the harp, the viola, Allegra, Gionata, and his (to me) strange destination all disappeared into the pitch-black well of non-time.
I brought three letters I’d found in the attic on the trip with me. Two of them came from the United States; the first was from Allegra, and the second was signed by Sara, one of her daughters, who wrote to announce her mother’s death. The third letter had arrived from Israel: In a few unadorned lines, your cousin Gionata congratulated you on Ilaria’s birth and announced that he’d got married and settled permanently on a piece of land north of the Sea of Galilee. The letter contained his complete address, just in case you might want to visit him someday.
That address was my destination after I disembarked in Haifa. Given that Gionata was the son of the youngest of your mother’s brothers, I figured he would be in his seventies and most probably still alive. In this part of the hemisphere – which left out the bunch of mulatto cousins I probably had on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro – your cousin Gionata was my only surviving relative, apart from my father. I thought of him as more of an uncle than a cousin.
The bus that would carry me to my destination didn’t stop very far from where I was. I waited for less than an hour, and then I was able to climb aboard. Air conditioning and music were both going full blast, and most of the seats were taken by young men and women in military uniforms. With great nonchalance, some of them carried submachine guns slung over their shoulders.
The bus left Haifa from the north, the side opposite Mount Carmel, and crossed the industrial zone, which was dominated by great viaducts. I looked through my window, watching warehouses, workshops, supermarkets and car dealerships file past. The traffic was fairly chaotic, and the drivers gesticulated threateningly through their open windows, blowing their horns again and again. Strangely, I felt not agitated but rather suspended; soon I’d reach the kibbutz indicated in the letter. I had no idea whether I’d really be able to find my uncle; maybe he’d been dead for a long time or maybe he’d changed his address. Maybe I’d find some cousin who’d stayed behind, or maybe – the worst possibility – I’d find nobody at all.
Not even that hypothesis sufficed to worry me, because I was certain of one thing: my trip wasn’t an escape (as my trip to the States had been). This time, I was moving towards something; I was going to confront something I had no knowledge of but which nevertheless concerned me deeply.
I stepped out of the bus – the only passenger who did – and on to the shoulder of a road that ran through fields. In front of me, a gate reinforced with barbed wire protected a construction that was a cross between a sentry box and a porter’s lodge.
I walked up to the armed guard, a young man, and told him my name and the name of the person I was looking for. The guard and I stepped into the field together. While I was on the bus, I’d tried to imagine what a kibbutz would look like; my mental image, based on stories one of your friends had told me, featured an arrangement of spartan shacks huddled together on a plot of parched land.
But as I followed the young soldier, I thought that the kibbutz I was entering looked less like a pioneer village and more like a university campus. Small, one-storey houses, each of them graced with a lawn and a small garden, were scattered here and there. The communal amenities even included a swimming pool and a tennis court. In the centre of the field rose a building taller and more spacious than the others; this, my guide informed me, was the dining room.
The only real differences between this place and a campus were the pervasive smell of manure and the presence, in the distance, of several large silos.
Bougainvillea with bracts of every colour, from fuchsia and magenta to yellow and white, adorned practically every wall. The vines spread out exuberantly, almost arrogantly. Large numbers of sparrows flitted among the flowers and leaves.
My young companion indicated that I should wait. I slipped off my backpack and sat down on a bench, looking around uncertainly. I wasn’t completely sure he’d understood who it was I was looking for; maybe I didn’t explain myself very well, I thought. However, after waiting for about fifteen minutes, I saw a white-bearded man of average height detach himself from a small group of people, and I recognised him (thanks to the mysterious laws of genetics) at once and unequivocally as Uncle Gionata.
My uncle was visibly taken by surprise, but he didn’t seem particularly disturbed by my presence. Although his original given name was Gionata, he hadn’t spoken Italian for many years. As far as he was concerned, his name was now Jonathan, but he addressed me in the same rather old-fashioned idiom that you would use every now and then when you were ill.
He insisted that we should go to his house – a squat, prefabricated dwelling facing a small, blooming garden – to have a cup of tea. Despite his age, my uncle maintained a strong, lean physique. His manner of speaking was very direct.
I told him about you – I said you had died about a year ago – about my mother, who’d passed away when I was four years old (I omitted any allusion to the voluntary nature of her death), and finally about my father, a philosophy professor who lived in Grado and who had nothing to do with me when I was growing up.
Uncle Jonathan had recently lost his wife, who’d passed away a couple of months after being diagnosed with what’s become the most common of diseases. Two children had been born of their marriage: the older, Arik, was an engineer living in Arad; his younger sister worked as a psychiatrist in the hospital at Beersheba.
Uncle Jonathan was the proud grandfather of twin girls, Arik’s daughters, now seven years old; both of them had begun playing the violin at a very tender age, and thanks to the method invented by the Japanese violinist Shin’ichi Suzuki, they’d already been able to show that they’d inherited in the highest degree the musical talent of two of their great-grandparents, Uncle Ottavio and his harpist wife. Jonathan had recently returned from Arad, where he’d attended, with great emotion, a performance by the two little girls.
Strangely enough, he told me, the music that had nourished his childhood had suddenly disappeared when he left Italy; he’d stopped listening to records and going to concerts. The only music that accompanied his daily life in Israel was the sound of tractors. In fact, from the day he’d moved there, the land had been his sole occupation. It was he who’d planted the long rows of grapefruit trees that extended all the way to the slopes of the hills, and he was also responsible for the avocado orchards.
Before Jonathan and his fellow kibbutzniks arrived, there had been nothing here but rocks and weeds. They’d spent the first years loosening and spading the soil by hand, and then they’d brought in the tractors. Since Jonathan had always been passionate about mechanical things, he’d taken a course in tractor repair. The kibbutzniks wanted to be self-sufficient in everything; this
was the philosophy that had inspired them to build their community bit by bit, year by year.
The younger generation no longer cared anything about these ancient choices made by their forebears. They wanted everything, right away. They didn’t know how to wait; they weren’t capable of self-sacrifice for the future of the community – or perhaps they didn’t have enough strength of character. ‘That’s why I’m bitter,’ Uncle Jonathan confided to me. ‘And so are the other people of my age. Whose fault was it? Was it our fault, or was it just the times? I shouldn’t take it so hard. Ever since the world began, the young have tended to destroy everything their parents built, and life goes on all the same . . . Ah well, maybe these are just the sad grumblings of an old man.’
He put me up in what he called the ‘guest room’: a narrow space with plywood walls, where there was barely enough room for a chair and a camp bed. A single window framed the aromatic branches of a eucalyptus tree.
I’d never heard hoopoes and turtle-doves sing so ebulliently. It was as if the sun, which beat down on that land with greater intensity, had infused everything with greater vigour. The flowers were bigger and more colourful; the birds sang at a more stirring pitch. Did the same hold true for feelings, perhaps – for love and for hate, for the violent power of memory?
I fell asleep pondering that question.
When I heard knocking at my door, I thought it was still the middle of the night. It was my uncle, wanting to have breakfast with me. As it turned out, it was almost five o’clock, and the sun was already high in the sky. When Uncle Jonathan saw my dismayed face, he excused himself, explaining that he had to be in the fields as early as possible, before it became too hot to work.
The big dining room was already filled with people. Their voices mingled and echoed like the chatter of guests at a wedding banquet.