17
SHORTLY AFTER THE feast of Shavuot, someone in Italy tried to get in touch with me. The call was transferred to the dining hall, but I was already at work. When my shift was over and I finally carried an overloaded tray to a table and sat down, a young soldier handed me a note that read, ‘A call from your abba.’
It was my father, looking for me for the second time in his life. What had prompted him to do that? I had no idea. Maybe the view of Tiberias really appealed to him, I thought, and he wants to ask me to find him a flat there, or maybe he just wants to let me know he’s leaving Grado Pineta and taking up residence in some other outpost for the summer. After all, it had been more than six months since I left Italy.
Knowing him as I did, I figured it mustn’t be anything urgent. I put the scrap of paper in my pocket, thinking that I’d buy a phone card and call him the next time I left the kibbutz.
That same evening, Arik, Uncle Jonathan’s elder child, came for a visit from Haifa, where he worked at the university. He looked about thirty, with a bright, open face.
In my honour and in honour of the country which (except for a handful of kilometres) had given us birth, we stayed home that evening and cooked spaghetti with tomatoes. Arik described for his father the most recent exploits of his little twins, mysteriously adding that soon he’d have another piece of good news to share with him, but he wanted to wait until his wife arrived. Then he mentioned something about his sister, whom he’d met a week earlier in Beersheba; whereupon Uncle Jonathan said sadly, ‘If I didn’t call her, I wouldn’t talk to her. She never calls me.’
‘She’s too caught up in her work,’ Arik replied promptly. ‘She never stops. She’s convinced her task is to save humanity. If she keeps on like this, she’s going to make herself ill.’
Uncle Jonathan shook his head. ‘It’s strange,’ he said. ‘Usually girls take after their fathers. In our case, however, she’s more like her mother: practical, realistic, ready to pitch in no matter what the situation without ever getting even slightly upset.’
Arik didn’t completely agree. ‘That’s not how it is. She pretends not to be upset so she won’t have to confront the reasons why she is. She’s decided that the world must go the way she wants it to go, regardless of anyone else.’
‘Is she a very self-confident person?’ I asked. I’d always envied people like that.
‘Self-confident?’ Arik repeated. ‘Maybe. But she’s more than confident; she’s authoritarian. Once she’s made up her mind about something, the discussion is over; whatever she’s decided must necessarily be right. It’s really a form of fragility.’
I asked Arik many questions about his life in Arad, and he described it to me in some detail. In the beginning, he said, it hadn’t been easy for him to settle in – the climate and the landscape were completely different from what he’d known – but now he couldn’t live anywhere else. He needed the stones and the clean, dry air and the flowers that grew in the wadis, the ones that exploded into a symphony of colours after the first rain. He always took his daughters to see those flowers, even though the girls were still little and couldn’t really understand. He wanted to accustom them, from the start, to delighting in natural wonders.
‘In the tropics, you probably get tired of flowers and end up not noticing them, but a desert that bursts into bloom only once is an unexpected gift. It makes us realise how much light is shut up inside matter.’
Then he told me the story of the siege of the fortress at Masada and mentioned that the week before, he’d seen two Japanese tourists on a bicycle pedal all the way up to the top of the fortress. He also talked about the oasis of Ein Gedi, near Masada, where even some leopards lived (if you walked up the wadi at dawn, sometimes it was possible to see them), and about the cave where David hid from Saul. If I’d like to go to Arad one day, he said, he’d take me to visit all those places.
Around eleven o’clock, Uncle Jonathan went to bed, and Arik and I went out for a walk.
After a couple of turns around the cowsheds, we started walking along the edge of the citrus orchards. The orange blossoms had opened, and they were diffusing an extraordinarily intense perfume into the mild night air. We sat down on a rock, the same one I had selected for my meditations, and talked all night long about many things: about our families, about his grandfather and his tragic end, about how he, Arik, had been troubled ever since childhood by the fact that Ottavio had loved beauty without loving Him who established it in our hearts.
‘Beauty and harmony,’ Arik said, ‘exist to the extent that we’re able to perceive them and delight in them. That’s the only way for them to become nourishment for the soul. Otherwise, they’re only a dazzling distraction, like the flashing hazard lights of a stopped car we have to drive around; they inevitably cause us to deviate from our intentions, to blend white and black, to transform everything into a grey sludge.
‘The heart is where the battle takes place. There, good intentions and bad intentions engage each other in a no-holds-barred contest. We have to be aware of this; otherwise, we’ll wind up surrendering without even putting up a fight, succumbing to the opacity of the indistinct, which is the great enemy of our time. Opacity takes the joy out of life, deprives the things around us of light, and consigns our existence to darkness.’
Around us, jackals howled to one another, occasionally accompanied for a few bars by a barking dog. Then the roosters started to crow, saluting the arrival of the new day.
Arik pointed to a little tree tied to a stake. ‘Like trees,’ he said, ‘we have a natural desire to rise up, to ascend. Maybe it’s buried under a large pile of debris, but it exists. It’s a kind of nostalgia that dwells in the deepest part of every human being. Life, however, is messy and filled with conflict, and if we confide uniquely in our own judgement, we risk going in the wrong direction and being dazzled by some fake sun. That’s why the Torah exists; like that young tree’s stake, it helps us to rise up straight, to grow toward heaven without being broken by windstorms.’
From amid the branches of the trees came the rustling sound of sparrows’ wings. As the birds woke up, their chirping grew louder and louder.
The darkness in the east steadily gave way to the light. The bright azure was already changing into orange-gold when Arik stood up and, in a low voice, started praying. I imitated him and stood beside him, but I didn’t know what to say. No one had ever taught me a prayer. I searched desperately for some word that would give voice to my state of mind.
The hoopoes had already begun their erratic flight through the rows of trees when a prayer of thanks finally rose to my lips. Thanks for life, thanks for splendour, thanks for the ability to apprehend it.
The following week, I received another telephone call from Italy, but this one wasn’t from my father.
It was the Mestre police, calling to announce their discovery of a dead man in an underground passage near Marghera. His name was Massimo Ancona, and in his jacket pocket they’d found a letter addressed to his daughter, with my telephone number. Did I know him? Was I really his daughter? His documents contained no mention of her, but if the implied relationship was in fact true, I was enjoined to present myself at the Mestre morgue as soon as possible to identify the body.
That same afternoon, I went to Haifa to make an airline reservation. The first available seat was on a Tel Aviv–Milan flight three days later. I booked a ticket and returned to the kibbutz.
That night, I couldn’t sleep a wink. I cursed myself for not having called him back. The police couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me how he died, so I suspected he might have killed himself: in desperation, maybe, having tried in vain to tell me something, and I hadn’t returned his call. Even though he’d never felt any sense of responsibility for my beginning, I nonetheless felt responsible for his end.
It took the wisdom of morning to make me realise how absurd such thoughts were. My father, protected as he’d always been by his unaffectionate nature and his selfishness, would never ha
ve killed himself because of an unreturned telephone call.
The following day, I was too upset to perform my usual tasks, so I took a bus to the Mount of Beatitudes.
It was lunchtime when I arrived. The big gardens surrounding the basilica were almost deserted. Below in the distance, the Sea of Galilee gleamed like a bright, bright mirror, while the wind occasionally carried up the sounds of the approaching cars on the road below.
Within those few dozen kilometres, Jesus had spent a significant part of his brief existence. The crowd was following him everywhere; every step of the way, there were people begging him to heal them. It wasn’t hard for me to imagine how exhausted and solitary he must have felt, constantly importuned by petitioners. After thirty years of silence, he spent three years immersed in constant confusion.
Besides, what did that mean, ‘heal them’? To make them see, or walk, or feel differently, but to what end? To have a good appetite, to sleep better, to be able to run fast? Or maybe to reach a new level of awareness? And what connection was there between the cloying words I’d heard from the TV priests and the force, the rigour, the severity of those pronounced by the rabbi of Nazareth? One day, would those words be able to heal me, too?
I walked along the pathways, following the white marble tablets incised with the Beatitudes. Everything was in luxuriant blossom around me, and the golden orioles hurled their songs into the air as though they were questions. When I read Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy, I thought about my father. Where was he now? Was he hovering nearby, watching me, or had he sunk into some dark place from which he would never emerge? Would there be mercy for the sterility of his life? What was an act of mercy, really? Wasn’t it a participation in the compassion of Him who created us?
Arik’s words came back to me: ‘The strictness of the law and divine mercy always walk side by side, but in the most important decisions, mercy always gets the upper hand; it’s impossible for a mother to be pitiless towards the child born out of her womb.’
The notion of God’s maternity had struck me profoundly.
‘But in the end, what does He want from us?’
‘He wants growth, transformation, repentance. He wants to live in our hearts, as we, from the beginning, live in His. It’s not power He desires to share with us, but fragility.’
18
TWO DAYS LATER, Uncle Jonathan drove me to Ben Gurion Airport in a clapped-out Subaru.
We said goodbye with a long embrace. I invited him to visit me in Trieste, and he promised to come as soon as possible; naturally, my invitation included Arik and his family.
The flight was uneventful.
In Milan, I took the train for Venice and got off at Mestre. Immediately after I presented myself at police headquarters, a young corporal accompanied me to the morgue. As we walked, he explained that an autopsy had already been performed, and that my father had died of natural causes. From one moment to the next, his heart had stopped beating.
At the morgue, the person in charge went ahead to show us the way. Her rubber clogs produced a strange sucking sound on the linoleum floor.
A draft of frigid air struck me as I entered the cold chamber. Three corpses were lying on stainless-steel tables. He was on the middle one. His feet were sticking out from under the green sheet – it was the first time I’d even seen him without shoes – and one arm was hanging down.
The morgue official lifted the sheet. ‘Do you recognise him?’
Instead of his usual sneering smile, his lips were parted in what looked like an expression of astonishment.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He’s my father, Massimo Ancona.’
‘I’m sorry,’ the corporal said.
‘So am I,’ I replied, and that was the moment when I felt the tears running down my cheeks.
While the young policeman filled out some forms, the morgue official, impatient to leave the cold room, chewed her gum vigorously. Her working mandibles produced the only sound in the unreal silence.
On an impulse, I grabbed the white hand hanging down from under the sheet and squeezed it. The skin felt cold like a snake’s, the weight and density not much different from those of a living hand, and the fingernails had been trimmed hastily.
‘Here’s your last outpost,’ I whispered, bending down to kiss him, and then I added, ‘Thanks, nevertheless. Thanks for the life you gave me.’
I took the train to Trieste. After I got home, I opened the plastic bag the police had turned over to me. Inside I found the keys to his house and car, a regional motorway pass (which had expired a month previously), a small address book, a wallet with worn edges, and a white envelope with my name written on it.
The wallet contained a few coins, a 50,000-lire note, two 5,000-lire notes, a national health insurance card, a little card from a supermarket in Monfalcone with stamps (he had only four to go) accumulated towards the longed-for prize: a towelling bathrobe, and, sticking out from a side compartment, a little photograph, showing its age. An elegant woman, not tall, distractedly holding a child’s hand, stared at the photographer with an expression between haughty and annoyed. The picture must have been taken in Venice, in the Piazza San Marco or on the banks of the Grand Canal, facing the Giudecca. The child, a little boy, was smiling and pointing at something that had surprised him. A ship? Some seabird he’d never seen? The mother’s ego, her unique focus on herself, shone through her eyes, while the boy’s pupils gleamed with insatiable, joyous curiosity. On the back of the photo, written in ink faded by time, these words: Venice 1936. Mama and I on the embankment. Massimo Ancona and his mother, the philosophy of language professor and the indefatigable canasta player, my father and my grandmother, closed up in a wallet like the great majority of common mortals.
The name of a restaurant in Monselice was imprinted on the green plastic cover of the address book, which contained only a few telephone numbers. Under D, the doctor’s and the dentist’s numbers; under T, the numbers of three or four trattorias; here and there, contact information for some publishing houses and two or three feminine names; and on the first page, my number in Trieste, and below it, written in pencil in a more tremulous hand, my number in Israel.
The same unsteady hand had scrawled my name on the front of the envelope. I opened it. Inside were two yellowing sheets of paper (with the letterhead of a hotel in Cracow), filled with writing on both sides.
Grado Pineta, 13 May
I don’t know whether this letter will ever come into your hands – if you’re reading it, that means I’m no longer a part of this world. You know how much I detest sentimentality; nevertheless, I can’t help writing you these lines. After all, you were the unhoped-for.
The dreaded and the unhoped-for.
You arrived at the end of my days, and, like one of those plants that thrust out their thin (and extremely forceful) roots to colonise the surrounding territory, you opened a crack in my life with your eyes, your voice, your questions, and ever since then, those eyes, that voice, those questions – I’ve been unable to free myself from them.
Is it the call of the blood or the weakness of senility? I don’t know. I don’t have enough strength or time left to answer you. It’s not very important, all in all. At this point, I don’t have to defend myself or explain anything any more.
Today I tried to kill myself.
There’s nothing remarkable or melodramatic about this. The decision eventually to take my own life is one I made when I first began to use my reason. Since we haven’t chosen to be born, determining where and how we die is the only true freedom granted us. My body is in obvious decline, and unfortunately my mind is following right behind it.
This morning, the security shutter on the window to my room broke, and I couldn’t open it. I stayed in the dark until five o’clock in the afternoon, uselessly trying to track down the repairman by telephone. His office kept saying things like, ‘Try calling back a little later, or we’ll call you,’ but nothing happened, so in the end I decided to take a
walk. I stepped out into the soft May air, accompanied by the tireless flights of birds bringing food to their nests; I saw little yellow flowers everywhere, growing up out of cracks in the cement. The month of May, I thought, is the most extraordinary time of year to leave the earth forever, the time that requires the most nerve, because that’s when life is in the fullness of its splendour. It can’t take much courage to kill yourself in November, when the sky is covered with gloomy rain clouds. Now, you may think depression has pushed me to this point, but in fact I’m completely lucid and fully aware of my choice.
After I got home, I tried to call you. I wanted to hear your voice one last time, but I had no luck. At the other end of the line, there was a succession of different people, speaking a little English, a little Hebrew, and a little Spanish, but none of them managed to find you.
Then I climbed up on a chair to retrieve my revolver, which has been on top of the bookshelf, wrapped in a dark cloth, for many years. I loaded the gun and waited for the night to end, reading my favourite poems. I had no wish to die inside, like a rat; I wanted to take my leave in an open space, facing the sea, to watch the dawn one more time, to see the sun coming up and flooding the world with light.
Around four o’clock, I went down to the beach. As I walked along in the darkness, I could hear the seashells crunching under my shoes. I sat down on the same rowboat you chose one day when we stopped to rest. I could feel the cold metal against my thighs.
A little after five, the eastern sky over Trieste and Istria began to lighten. The air was filled with the cries of seabirds, and the sea, still at low tide, lapped gently at the shore. I looked around and slipped the revolver out of my pocket, waiting. When the top of the orange disc showed over the horizon, I pointed the gun at my temple and pulled the trigger. There was a loud click, and nothing happened. I rotated the cylinder and tried again: another click.