Besides the bookcases and Gershom Wald’s narrow bed, the room held a heavy, old-fashioned wardrobe, a bedside table, and a small round table covered by a cloth, with a vase of purple everlasting flowers on it. On either side of the table stood two identical chairs, their legs carved in the shape of plants. On the seat of each chair was an embroidered cushion with light brown tassels. The chairs contrasted with the simple, clean lines of the bookcases, the round table, and the bedside table. Beside the table stood a standard lamp with a brown shade, which shed a warm, soft light over the whole room. On the wall between the bookcases hung an old clock, made of walnut apparently, with a heavy pendulum of shiny brass that moved back and forth in a slow, dull rhythm, as if it had had enough. And in a corner of the room a paraffin heater burned all through the day and evening with a quiet flame that resembled a single blue eye.
At the head of the bed a pair of wooden crutches leaned against a chest of drawers. With the help of these crutches, the invalid moved from room to room or from his bedroom to the adjacent toilet, though in the library he always insisted on moving from the desk to the wicker couch and back without crutches, using the muscular strength of his shoulders and arms.
On the only empty wall, opposite the bed, facing the man who lay in it, Shmuel saw a small photograph in a plain wooden frame. This was the first thing he had seen on entering the room, but something had made him quickly look away. Again and again his eyes avoided the photograph, which aroused in him conflicting feelings of dread, shame, and envy. It showed a thin, fair-haired, somewhat fragile-looking young man with a long, introspective face and a shy look, as if he were deliberately avoiding the lens of the camera. As if his gaze were turned inward. One of his eyebrows was raised, skeptically, and this was the only feature that father and son shared. He had a high brow, and the fair hair that framed his face had not been cut for a long time and looked as if the photograph had been taken out of doors with a strong headwind blowing. He was wearing a creased khaki shirt, which, contrary to the fashion of the time, was buttoned up to the neck.
Gershom Wald sat up in bed facing his son’s photograph, his back resting on a pile of pillows. He was wearing brown flannel pajamas with lighter stripes, which Shmuel had changed for him earlier, and a gray scarf around his neck. His silvery mane spread out on the top pillow. When he noticed Shmuel looking at the photo on the wall, he said quietly:
“Micha.”
“I’m sorry,” Shmuel murmured. And at once he corrected himself:
“I’m very sorry.” His eyes filled with tears. He turned away so the old man would not see.
Gershom Wald closed his eyes and said in a hoarse voice:
“The father of the grandchild I never had. And he had lost a parent when he was a child. He grew up with me without a mother. He was only six when his mother died. I brought him up on my own. I took him myself and led him to Mount Moriah.”
He was silent for a moment, then he said with his lips, not with his voice:
“On April 2, ’48. In the battle for Bab el-Wad, on the Tel Aviv-to-Jerusalem road.”
His face suddenly twisted and he added in a whisper:
“He was a lot like his mother, he wasn’t like me. From the time he was ten he was also my best friend. I never had a closer friend. He and I could talk for hours, or not talk for hours. There was hardly any difference. And sometimes he tried to explain things to me, higher mathematics, formal logic, which were beyond me. Sometimes he would laugh at me, old scripture and history teacher that I am, and call me a dinosaur.”
Again Shmuel murmured:
“I share your pain.”
And he corrected himself again:
“No. It’s impossible to share pain. There’s no such thing.”
Gershom Wald fell silent. Shmuel poured him some hot tea with lemon and honey from the thermos on the table, laced it with a little brandy, supported the old man’s back, and put the glass to his mouth while pushing an APC tablet between his lips. Gershom Wald took two or three sips, swallowed the tablet, and brushed Shmuel’s hand and the glass away.
“When he was nine, because of an illness, they took out one of his kidneys. At the end of ’47 he went and lied to the recruitment board. In the days of tumult and anarchy on the eve of that war it wasn’t difficult to lie to the recruitment board. They were happy to be lied to. Atalia told him not to go. She forbade him to go. She made fun of him and said he was like a child running into the playground to play cowboys and Indians. She said he was ridiculous. She always considered the entire male sex ridiculous. She thought all men were eternal adolescents. Shealtiel also tried to make him swear not to go. Shealtiel said over and over again that this war was all Ben-Gurion’s lunacy, the lunacy of the whole nation. In fact, the lunacy of two nations. In his view, the youth on both sides ought to drop their weapons and refuse to fight. He used to go at least twice a week to converse with his Arab friends. Even after the bloodshed began, in the autumn of ’47, with roadblocks and sniper fire, he did not give up going to see his friends. The neighbors called him an Arab-lover. They called him Haj Amin, the Grand Mufti. And some people called him a traitor, because he justified, to some extent, the Arab opposition to Zionism and because he fraternized with Arabs. And yet he always insisted on calling himself a Zionist and even claimed he belonged to the small handful of true Zionists who were not intoxicated with nationalism. He described himself as the last disciple of that Zionist visionary Ahad Ha’am. He had known Arabic since his childhood, and he loved to sit surrounded by Arabs in the coffeehouses of the Old City and talk for hours on end. He had close friends among the Muslim and the Christian Arabs. He pointed to a different way. He had a different idea altogether. I argued with him. I stuck to my view that this war was sacred, a war of which it is written, ‘Let the bridegroom go forth of his chamber,’ et cetera. My child, Micha, my only son, Micha, might perhaps not have gone to this war had it not been for his father’s talk of a sacred war: I had brought him up from an early age on tales of the heroic defenders of Tel Hai and Orde Wingate’s Special Night Squads and the brave guards of the Jewish villages and the need for the courageous ancient Hebrew warriors to come back to life. I programmed him. Not just me. All of us. His nursery school teachers. His schoolteachers. His friends. Girls. In those years we all used to recite passionately the words of Hannah Senesh: ‘Then a voice called and I followed.’ A voice called him and he got up and went. I too was speaking with that voice. The whole country sounded that voice. ‘No nation ever retreats when its back is to the wall.’ ‘This battle is for life or death.’ He is gone and I am still here. No. I’m not still here. Micha is gone and I am also gone. Look at me: the man sitting opposite you is not alive. A dead chatterbox is sitting opposite you, chattering.”
The old man began coughing again. He gurgled, nearly suffocated on his sputum, his distorted body twisted on the bed, and he started to bang his head against the wall. Shmuel hurried to stop him. He slapped his back a few times and tried to feed him a few more drops of tea. The old man choked, and spat into a crumpled handkerchief. After a while Shmuel realized that behind the cover of his coughing and hawking the man was sobbing, in a gasping, strangled voice. Then he wiped his eyes angrily with the handkerchief he had just spat into and scolded himself in a whisper.
“You must forgive me, Shmuel.”
It was the first time since Shmuel Ash arrived in this house, a couple of months earlier, that the old man had addressed him by his name, and also the first time he had apologized to him.
Shmuel said gently:
“Rest. Don’t talk. It isn’t good for you to get excited.”
The old man stopped beating his head against the wall and merely wept feebly, with frequent, shallow sobs that sounded like hiccups. Shmuel looked at him and realized how dear to him that rough-hewn face, whose sculptor seemed to have given up halfway, with its sharp jutting chin and unkempt white mustache, had become. He found the old man’s ugliness fascinating, captivating, so fierce that
it almost approached beauty. He was smitten with a powerful urge to comfort him. Not to distract him from his pain—there was no possible way of doing that—but to assume, to suck into himself, something of that pain. The old man’s broad, rough hand lay on the quilt, and Shmuel delicately, hesitantly put his own hand on top of it. Gershom Wald’s fingers were large and they clasped Shmuel’s cold hand in a warm embrace. The old man’s hand enfolded the young man’s fingers for two or three minutes. At the end of the silence, Wald said:
“I know that people usually say about those killed in the fighting in ’48 that their death was not in vain. I always said that myself. Everybody said it. Yes. How could I not have said it? The poet Alterman wrote, ‘Maybe once in a thousand years our death has a meaning.’ But it’s harder and harder for me to repeat these words. Shealtiel’s ghost makes them stick in my throat. Shealtiel used to say that in his opinion everyone who has ever died, not only in wartime but in an accident or from an illness or even in ripe old age, has died completely in vain.”
From the mountains and valleys of the wrinkles on the twisted face, from under the thick white eyebrows, small, piercing blue eyes fixed on Shmuel. And below the bushy mustache the upper lip trembled. Gershom Wald’s face suddenly screwed up as though in pain, but in the midst of the pain a sort of smile spread, which was not a smile.
“Listen, boy. It’s possible that despite myself I’m starting to grow quite fond of you. Sometimes you seem like a tortoise that’s lost its shell.”
Toward evening Shmuel went out in the windswept rain to the pharmacy on the corner of Keren Hakayemet and Ibn Ezra Streets and bought Gershom Wald an electric humidifier to ease his breathing. He bought himself a new pocket inhaler. On the way back, he also bought a can of paraffin for the heater and a new bottle of cheap brandy called Cognac Médicinal.
When he got back to Gershom Wald’s room, he found the old man lying curled up, wrapped in the quilt, which he had pulled up almost to his nostrils. He seemed to be breathing more easily. Shmuel prepared the humidifier and plugged it in. It hummed quietly and filled the room with mist. Suddenly the old man said:
“Listen to me, Shmuel. Be careful. Don’t fall in love with her. You’re not strong enough for that.”
Then he added:
“There were three or four lads here before you, to keep me company. Most of them fell in love, and apparently she may have pitied one or two of them for a night or two. Then she sent them packing. In the end they all left here brokenhearted. But it was not her fault. Truly not. You cannot blame her. She has a kind of cool warmth, some kind of aloofness that attracts you to her like a moth to a flame. Sometimes I’m sorry for you. You’re still a bit of a child.”
37
* * *
ATALIA ENTERED THE ROOM without knocking. Shmuel could not tell whether she had heard the old man’s last words. She brought with her the porridge that the neighbor had made. She sat down on the old man’s bed, plumped up the pillows under his head, asked Shmuel to support his back, and fed him five or six spoonfuls. So the three of them sat there for a few minutes with their heads so close they were almost touching. As though they were all bending over to peer at some rare object. Shmuel saw from close up the unusually deep furrow that extended from her nostrils to her upper lip. He felt a powerful urge to trace the line of this furrow gently with his finger. Then the old man pursed his lips like an obstinate child and refused to eat any more. She did not press him, but handed the bowl and spoon to Shmuel and said:
“Take this to the kitchen. And then wait for me in the library.”
He went to the kitchen, finished the rest of the porridge standing up, took a pot of yogurt from the refrigerator and ate it, then ate a handful of olives and peeled and ate an orange, washed the bowl and the jar and the spoon, dried all three, and put them away in the drawer and the cupboard. There was a warmth in his whole body now of the kind he had not felt since Yardena left him.
Atalia was waiting for him in the library. Stretched out on the couch, she motioned to Shmuel to sit behind the desk, on Mr. Wald’s high-backed, padded chair. He gazed at her with his sad, shy almond eyes. She was wearing dark red woolen slacks and a green pullover that matched her greenish-brown eyes. Brown with a fleck of green. She lay relaxed, her knees together, hands resting on the couch on either side of her hips, not exactly slim but with a long, slim neck.
“You were talking about Micha,” she said, not as though asking a question but as though making a declaration. “You and Wald were talking about him.”
“Yes,” Shmuel admitted. “I’m sorry. It was my fault. I asked about the face in the picture and that’s how I caused him pain. Or perhaps I didn’t ask. Perhaps he started talking to me about his son.”
“Don’t be sorry. It doesn’t matter. He talks and talks for days, weeks, months on end, preaches, argues, and in fact he never says anything. If this time you managed somehow to make him say something at last . . .”
She did not finish her sentence. Shmuel, suddenly brave, said:
“You don’t say much either, Atalia.”
He went on to ask if he could ask a question.
Atalia nodded.
Shmuel asked how old Micha was when he died. She hesitated, as if uncertain of the correct reply to the question, or perhaps the question was too personal. After a short silence, she said that he was thirty-seven. Then she fell silent again. Shmuel did not speak either. Then she spoke quietly, almost to herself:
“He was a mathematician. He had published articles in journals about mathematical logic. He was set to become the youngest professor in the history of the Hebrew University. Until he was infected with the madness that always rages here, and dashed off excitedly one day to be slaughtered. Just like the rest of the herd.”
Shmuel sat on Gershom Wald’s chair and placed his hands on the desk in front of him. The fingers were too short: they all seemed to be lacking one knuckle. He was suddenly short of breath, but he mastered himself and did not reach for the inhaler in his pocket. Atalia eyed him slantwise from the couch, from bottom to top, and seemed to spit her words:
“You wanted a state. You wanted independence. Flags and uniforms and banknotes and drums and trumpets. You shed rivers of innocent blood. You sacrificed an entire generation. You drove hundreds of thousands of Arabs out of their homes. You sent shiploads of Holocaust survivors straight from the quayside to the battlefield. All so that there would be a Jewish state here. And look what you’ve got.”
Shmuel was alarmed. After a moment he stammered politely:
“I’m afraid I don’t entirely agree with you.”
“Of course you don’t agree. Why should you? You’re one of them. You may be a revolutionary, a socialist, a rebel, but you’re still one of them. Even Micha changed overnight into one of them. By the way, excuse me for asking, but how exactly did it happen that you weren’t killed?”
“I was too young for that war. I was only thirteen.”
Atalia did not let go:
“How come you weren’t killed afterward? In the reprisal actions? Or in the Sinai campaign? Or in a raid? Or some special operation across the border? Or even in a training accident?”
Shmuel blushed. He hesitated for a moment, then he said:
“I was a noncombatant. I have asthma, and also an enlarged heart.”
His eyes filled with tears, which he made an effort to conceal from Atalia, because he was ashamed of them.
“Micha only had one kidney. His left kidney was removed when he was nine at the Hadassah Hospital in the Street of the Prophets. He was an invalid like his father. He forged a medical certificate, and he also forged his father’s signature. He cheated them and they were only too happy to be cheated. Everyone was being cheated. Even the cheats were being cheated. Wald, too. A whole herd of cheated people.”
Shmuel said sheepishly:
“Don’t you believe that in 1948 we fought because we had no alternative? That we had our backs to the wall?”
&nbs
p; “No, you didn’t have your backs to the wall. You were the wall.”
“Are you trying to tell me that your father seriously believed that we had so much as a shadow of a chance to survive here by peaceful means? That it was possible to persuade the Arabs to agree to share the land? That it is possible to obtain a homeland by means of fine words? And do you believe that too? At that time, the entire progressive world supported the creation of a state for the Jewish people. Even the communist bloc supplied us with arms.”
“Abravanel was never impressed by nationalism. At all. Anywhere. He was totally unimpressed by a world divided into hundreds of nation-states, like rows and rows of separate cages in a zoo. He didn’t know Yiddish—he spoke Hebrew and Arabic, he spoke Ladino, English, French, Turkish, and Greek—but to all the states in the world he applied a Yiddish expression: goyim naches. Gentiles’ delight. Statehood seemed to him a childish and outdated concept.”
“So he was a naïve man? A dreamer?”
“It was Ben-Gurion who was the dreamer, not Abravanel. Ben-Gurion and the herd who followed him like the Pied Piper of Hamelin. To the slaughter. To violent expulsion. To eternal hatred between the two communities.”
Shmuel shifted uncomfortably in Mr. Wald’s upholstered chair. What Atalia had said seemed wild, menacing, almost hair-raising. The well-known replies, Wald’s replies, were on the tip of his tongue, yet he could find no words. The thought that all nation-states were like cages at the zoo made him want to hurl in Atalia’s and her father’s face that if people treated each other like wild beasts, it might indeed be necessary to keep them in separate cages. But he reminded himself that Atalia was a war widow, and decided to say nothing. What he desired far more than to defeat her in an argument was to hold her, even for a moment, in his arms. He tried to imagine in his mind’s eye her father struggling to block the waterfall of history single-handed. How could someone who did not believe in a Jewish state possibly have called himself a Zionist, and even sat for several years on the Zionist Executive Committee and the Council of the Jewish Agency? As if reading his mind, Atalia said, in a voice that blended contempt and sadness: