The following week, I began working on the kibbutz, lending a hand wherever one was needed. It was a period when there was little activity in the fields, so for the most part I helped in the kitchen or the big laundry room.
One evening, Uncle Jonathan told me his father’s story, the story you never wished to include among the stories you preferred, such as The Little Mermaid or The Ugly Duckling.
The atmosphere in Trieste had grown heavy with menace. Uncle Jonathan’s parents had many friends who’d already emigrated to safety, not before advising the two of them to do the same. But Ottavio, Uncle Jonathan’s father, didn’t want to leave; he rebelled at the very thought of the word ‘flee’. He said, ‘Why should I run away? That’s what thieves do, and murderers, wrongdoers, cowards, people with something to hide. But what wrong have I done?’
‘That absolute tranquillity didn’t come from knowing that he was a baptised Christian,’ Uncle Jonathan explained. ‘It was due to a genuine interior distance from what was happening around him. He couldn’t grasp that it was possible for one man to kill another solely because of his surname.’
‘I’m an Italian citizen!’ Ottavio declared when they came to get him, as if his geographical affiliation entitled him to a magical safe-conduct pass.
Uncle Jonathan was out at the time of the arrests. As he was returning home, he realised what was going on and fell into step with a lady who was coming down from the Carso, as she’d done for years, to bring his family butter. Counting on his blond hair and blue eyes to save him, he’d pretended to be her son and watched in mute helplessness as his parents were brought out under arrest.
Uncle Jonathan told me he didn’t return to the villa. The woman from the dairy took him back to her place on the plateau, and he stayed there until the end of the war. Lost in thought, he added, ‘Maybe that was when I made my choice between the earth and books. I chose the earth. In printed language there were questions and nothing else, but in the fields there was life, and life went on. It simply went on.’
In the following weeks, the bishop, a longtime admirer of Ottavio’s musical talent, had managed with the help of pressure from influential friends to win his freedom, but as the safe-conduct was valid for only one person, Ottavio had refused it.
On Yom Kippur in 1944, his parents had left Italy for the desolate plains of Poland, where his mother soon vanished without a trace. As for his father, three months after the end of the war, the Red Cross had informed Uncle Jonathan that his father Ottavio was still alive.
‘In the autumn of 1945,’ Uncle Jonathan continued, ‘my father returned to Trieste, almost unrecognisable physically but apparently unchanged in spirit. He immediately summoned his former piano tuner; after the old fellow left, Ottavio sat down and began to play. It seemed that he needed nothing else. He wasn’t interested in eating, drinking, sleeping, or taking a walk – all he wanted to do was play music, and that was enough for him. At first, I thought that music and its central role in his life had probably made a major contribution to his survival, but I was soon forced to change my mind on that score.’
One month after his return, Uncle Ottavio started announcing – insistently – his desire to perform in concert. His request was soon granted.
Jonathan’s memory of the evening had remained vivid. The auditorium was packed and the audience attentive; not a fly buzzed, no one sneezed, no one coughed. Everyone seemed carried away by the almost metaphysical intensity of his father’s performance. The pianist’s very face seemed transfigured. As the audience watched him, an uneasy feeling came over everyone, including his son.
Who was this person playing? Was it his father, the man he’d always known, or did he merely resemble him? His hands ran up and down the keyboard, but there was no joy left in his eyes; a cold, distant light seemed to be drawing him far, far away, into a place where it was impossible to reach him.
When it was over, the audience rose to its feet and gave him an ovation ten minutes long, demanding an encore, but Uncle Ottavio returned to the stage, bowed gravely, and then froze the hall with a sharp, slashing, one-handed gesture from left to right, as if to say no, it’s impossible. Don’t insist. I’ve finished.
Many people murmured, ‘Unforgettable, truly unforgettable,’ as they retrieved their overcoats in the lobby. It wasn’t clear whether they were referring to the concert or to its unusual close.
The following day, Uncle Ottavio got up, threw all his scores into the stove, closed the lid of his piano, slipped on his overcoat, and went out.
From that day forward – including all winter long – going out was his sole activity. He’d leave the house at dawn and return long after nightfall. Every now and then, someone who knew him reported that they’d seen him walking along the seashore in Muggia or Aurisina. He strode along with his head down and never recognised anybody. Friends greeted him and he marched straight on without acknowledging them. His lips moved constantly, as if he were having an animated discussion with himself. He stopped bathing, stopped shaving, and wore the same filthy overcoat and hopelessly ruined hiking boots and a cap pulled down over his eyes. He kept several lengths of rope wrapped around his waist.
After a few months, he began to use that rope to bring dogs home.
The first two were a couple of mutts of the hunting-dog variety; he made a place for them at the back of the yard, in the area near the garage. He stayed home for a week, building some rudimentary mesh kennels; once they were finished, he took up his wanderings again. He went out in the morning and came home in the evening, always leading a new dog tied to the end of one of his ropes.
‘It didn’t take long,’ Uncle Jonathan recalled, ‘before the situation became intolerable. The animals made messes everywhere, they barked and howled and mangled one another scrapping for food. Admittedly, my father didn’t feed them regularly, only when he remembered to or felt like it, and no one else was allowed to give them food in his place. He caught me feeding them once and rushed at me like a madman. If the dogs fought, he’d throw himself into the fray, deal out blows left and right with his stick until the fighting stopped, and fall to the ground exhausted; however, if they’d eaten their fill and settled down, he’d spend hours stroking them, all the while speaking to them in a calm, soothing voice. He’d sit in their midst, talking to them as if they were children: “You’ve got loving hearts,” he’d say, “loving hearts. Not like some . . .” And the dogs would wag their tails and brush his hand softly with their quick tongues.
‘It was obvious that he needed to be hospitalised and treated, but how? He would never have agreed to enter a hospital, and I couldn’t force him to.
‘It was a very delicate matter. How could we help him? Was it still possible? And, above all, was it right? Did he really want to go back to being the pianist of old, or had that peremptory gesture at the end of his last concert marked a definitive watershed between before and after, between what he’d been and what he’d been forced to become? That dividing line, which marked the death of beauty – that line must also have signalled the beginning of his posthumous life.
‘Probably, we shouldn’t have tried to cure him but rather ourselves, our inability to tolerate devastation, to bear the sight of good being corrupted into evil. After all, in the beginning we’d all deluded ourselves into thinking we’d be able to go on as if nothing had happened. If there’s a little evil, you can stand it, you can even observe it, but is that possible when evil’s so dark and dense it covers the whole horizon?
‘Fortunately, death, at least sometimes, is merciful. One day when I came home, I didn’t hear the dogs barking, but I didn’t give it much thought. It was only a little later, when I looked out the bathroom window and noticed how still they were, that I rushed out into the yard and found him.
‘There he was, lying with his eyes open among the kennels. He seemed to be smiling. His heart had stopped suddenly and painlessly. Instead of biting him and tearing at him, the animals were watching over his body in silence, wagg
ing their tails in turn, as if communicating with one another. They say that dogs are able to see the angel of death. At that moment, I believed the saying was true. I thought maybe the dogs themselves were angels, because of the way they offered their hearts to their master. In any case, I had the consolation of seeing that he had died calmly. A modest relief, which vanishes into thin air at night, when I reflect that, in all probability, even the most vicious criminals die with such an expression on their faces.’
15
AFTER DINNER THAT evening, when I was back in my room, I started reading the Bible. As my education hadn’t prepared me for Bible study, my reading didn’t proceed in any very orderly fashion. I confined myself to opening the volume at random, scanning the text, and then repeating the process, looking for a passage that would resonate. With all the reading that we did together, I wonder why you never suggested the Bible. Were you afraid of influencing me too much? Or did you fear you wouldn’t be able to answer my questions firmly and truly?
And was that the reason why you never spoke to me about Uncle Ottavio?
You probably decided to put off any reference to that subject until I was old enough to understand it; later, when I’d finally reached the appropriate age, you were overwhelmed by how restless and unhappy I was, and soon all that violent emotion was followed by the devastation of your illness, and so the right time for evoking these memories never came.
What roots did you provide me with?
You gave me love, certainly, but what was its foundation, what nourished it, what pushed it beyond natural genetic impulses?
And why weren’t you able to love my mother? What caused you to let her go adrift, like a rudderless boat?
Wasn’t there anything you could have done?
Or does the flow of time, of history, always drag lives along, always carry them away? Was my mother just a daughter of her time, as you were of yours and I am of mine?
And suppose history is indeed a flowing current, I thought, but one that can be resisted, one whose course can be altered? And suppose it’s precisely in history that the mystery of salvation is hidden? Suppose salvation lies in following the luminous path of truth?
But what truth?
Up to that point, all I’d heard was that truth didn’t exist.
‘Truth depends on your point of view,’ my father told me one day. ‘And given that points of view are infinite, there must be an infinite number of truths. Anyone who says he’s holding the truth in one hand already has a knife in the other, ready to defend his truth. Anyone who claims to have God on his side makes the claim so he can kill you later. Remember what the Nazis had engraved on their belt buckles: Gott mit uns, God with us. Remember the stakes where Catholics burned alive the people who didn’t think the way they did. Truth and death always walk hand in hand.’
Spurred on by my Bible reading, that weekend I finally made up my mind to leave the kibbutz and see the country.
I took a bus to Safed. When I got there, I sat down on a low wall to eat some of the provisions I’d taken from the kibbutz kitchens. Thumping music was coming from some nearby tourist bars, while a guide speaking fluent English pointed out the beauties of the place to a small group of tired, bored Americans.
‘In its early centuries, Safed was above all a fortress, a stronghold of the resistance against the Roman invaders. It wasn’t until the sixteenth century that Safed became one of the most important centres of Jewish mysticism. This period also saw the building of the most important synagogues, which can still be admired today.’
His words were punctuated by strange, metallic, repetitive sounds. Not far away, a child, the son of a couple no longer in their first youth, was frantically pressing the buttons of a video game. Three times, his father told him to stop. At the fourth, he snatched the game from the boy’s hands, shouting angrily, in English, ‘These are your roots!’
The hot air bestirred itself and rose from the plain, weakly moving the leaves of various plants. Farther off, two swans – wings spread wide, feet dangling, taking advantage of the rising air currents – flew great circles in the air.
Early in the afternoon, I took a bus down to Tiberias, on the Sea of Galilee. I expected a poor fishing village, but instead I landed in a tourist town, part Rimini and part Las Vegas. The dreariness of holiday spots in the low season had settled on the place, lingering in the smell of grease, cooked and cold; glimmering in the bright signs, with half their lights burned out; and permeating the souvenir shop where I bought a postcard.
On the back, I wrote Here’s an outpost that would suit you . . . and sent the card to my father.
I spent that first night in a small hotel in Tiberias. The following day, I set out for the ruins of Capernaum.
The wind had come up, and threatening waves roiled the vast expanse of the lake.
I made a brief detour to visit the archaeological site of Tabgha. There were already three coaches waiting in its parking lot.
As I reached the steps leading to the site, I ran into a variegated crowd of my countrymen, for the most part retired couples whose accents suggested they were from the provinces of the Veneto. They all wore identically coloured scarves around their necks and visor caps. Many of them bore the marks of a lifetime spent working the land. Some of the women were elegantly dressed – skirt, blouse, little cardigan sweater – carrying antiquated purses and sporting permanent waves untouched by the anxieties of the new millennium.
A middle-aged cleric, probably the priest of their parish, accompanied them. He was as anxious as a schoolteacher bringing her small charges on a field trip, and he kept repeating the same directions: ‘Come over here . . . get closer . . . listen . . .’
But apart from the three or four parishioners who didn’t budge from his side, the group seemed to pay him little attention and showed greater interest in the place’s potential as a playground. The boldest of them, in fact, kicked off their shoes and waded into the lake, noisily splashing one another like a bunch of kids.
Scattered persons immortalised the scene with the most sophisticated and technologically advanced systems of visual reproduction. They focused, filmed, and photographed without ever removing their eyes from their cameras.
In the meanwhile, two other coaches had pulled up to the shore of the lake and discharged new waves of pilgrims, this time German and Korean.
‘One of the earliest historical references to this place comes from the pilgrim Egeria,’ said a German guide. She had begun speaking at once, all the while holding aloft a sign with the name of her tour. ‘Here’s what she wrote in the year 394 AD: “Not far from Capernaum can be seen the stone steps where Our Lord stood. There also, above the level of the sea, is a grassy field where many herbs and palm trees grow. Nearby are seven springs, each flowing with abundant water . . .” Look to your left. Under that octagonal construction, you can still see the principal spring. The water – part sulphurous, part salty – flows out at thirty-two degrees Celsius. This is, therefore, a thermal spring.’
The news about the spring’s salubrious qualities seemed to excite the German ladies, who quickly swarmed about searching for a rivulet they could dip a finger into, trying to recapture the same sensations they’d felt in the hot springs of Abano Terme.
The Korean group was more orderly and compact. They all turned their eyes at once to whatever their priest pointed out to them, as if they were part of a single organism.
Finally, the Italian priest’s efforts were rewarded as well. After having gesticulated and raised his voice in vain, with a few blasts on a little whistle – probably the same one he used on the playing fields at the parish recreation centre – he succeeded in gathering his flock around him and read them the Gospel story set in that very place: ‘In those days the multitude being very great, and having nothing to eat, Jesus called his disciples unto him, and saith unto them, “I have compassion on the multitude, because they have now been with me three days, and have nothing to eat. And if I send them away fasting
to their own homes, they will faint by the way; for divers of them came from far.” And his disciples say unto him, “Whence should we have so much bread in the wilderness, as to fill so great a multitude?” And Jesus saith unto them, “How many loaves have ye?” And they said, “Seven, and a few little fishes.” And he commanded the multitude to sit down on the ground. And he took the seven loaves and the fishes, and gave thanks, and brake them, and gave to his disciples, and the disciples to the multitude.’
At the end of this passage, the priest raised his eyes from the page and said, ‘How many of us would be capable of following Christ for days without eating? Would we be able to give proof of so much devotion just for the sake of hearing his word? And how many of us would be inclined to accept it? Does his word upset us, or is it a word we can rest upon, the way you rest on a soft pillow?’
At the end of his discourse, he exhorted his audience, saying, ‘So let’s collect our thoughts for a moment of meditation and prayer that may help us understand the underlying meaning of our pilgrimage.’ Some of his parishioners assumed painfully rapt expressions, while others looked around, slightly embarrassed or distracted, as if they were thinking about how long it would be before they could eat their packed lunches.
Meanwhile, the wind coming off the lake had intensified, sending a few visor caps scooting along the ancient stones; scarves flapped like flags, while from the branches of the eucalyptus trees we could hear the dry rustle of the leaves mixed with the passionate chirping of the sparrows.
I sat on the steps of the amphitheatre and attentively scrutinised the faces around me. If they chose to come all the way here, I thought, they must believe in something. Otherwise, they would have preferred to bake in the sun of the Canary Islands.