A Tale of Love and Darkness

  26

  IN ROVNO, your mother had a boyfriend, a deep, sensitive student whose name was Tarla or Tarlo. They had a sort of little union of Zionist students that included your mother, Tarlo, my sister Haya, Esterka Ben Meir, Fania Weissmann, possibly also Fania Sonder, Lilia Kalisch, who was later called Lea Bar-Samkha, and a few others. Haya was the natural leader until she went off to Prague. They would sit around concocting all sorts of plans, how they would live in the Land of Israel, how they would work there to reinvigorate the artistic and cultural life, how they would keep the Rovno connection alive. After the other girls left Rovno, either to study in Prague or to emigrate to the Land, Tarlo started courting me. He would wait for me every evening at the entrance to the Polish Military Hospital. I would come out in my green dress and white headband, and we would stroll together down Trzecziego Maya and Topolyova Streets, which had been renamed Pilsudski Street, in the Palace Gardens, in Gravni Park, sometimes we walked toward the River Ostia and the old quarter, the Citadel District, where the Great Synagogue and the Catholic cathedral stood. There was never anything more between us than words. We may have held hands two or three times at most. Why? That's hard for me to explain to you because your generation would never understand anyway. You might even make fun of us. We had a terrible sense of modesty. We were buried under a mountain of shame and fear.

  That Tarlo, he was a great revolutionary by conviction, but he used to blush at everything: if ever he happened to utter a word like "women" or "suckle" or "skirt," or even "legs," he would flush red to his ears, like a hemorrhage, and he'd start apologizing and stuttering. He would talk to me endlessly about science and technology, whether they were a blessing or a curse for mankind. Or both. He would talk enthusiastically about a future where there would soon be no more poverty or crime or illness or even death. He was a bit of a Communist, but it didn't help him much: when Stalin came in '41, Tarlo was simply taken away, and he disappeared.

  Of the whole of Jewish Rovno there's barely a soul left alive—only those who came to the Land while there was still time, and the few who fled to America, and those who somehow managed to survive the knives of the Bolshevik regime. All the rest were butchered by the Germans, apart from those who were butchered by Stalin. No, I have no desire to go back for a visit: what for? To start longing again from there for a Land of Israel that no longer exists and may never have existed outside our youthful dreams? To grieve? If I want to grieve, I don't have to leave Wessely Street or even set foot outside my own apartment. I sit here in my armchair and grieve several hours a day. Or I look out the window and grieve. Not for what once was and is no more, but for what never was. I have no reason now to grieve for Tarlo, it was nearly seventy years ago, he wouldn't be alive now anyway: if Stalin hadn't killed him, he'd be dead from this place, from a war or a terrorist bomb, or else from cancer or diabetes. I only grieve for what never was. Only for those pretty pictures we made for ourselves, and now they've faded.

  I embarked from Trieste on a Romanian cargo boat, the ConstanŢa it was called, and I remember that, even though I didn't believe in any religion, I didn't want to eat pork—not because of God, after all God created pigs, they don't disgust him, and when a piglet is killed and it squeals and pleads with the voice of a tortured child, God sees and hears every grunt and has about as much pity for the tortured piglet as He does for human beings. He has neither more nor less pity for the piglet than He does for all His rabbis and Hasidim who keep all the commandments and worship Him all their lives.

  So it wasn't because of God but merely because it didn't seem appropriate, on my way to the Land of Israel, to gobble smoked pork and salt pork and pork sausages on board that boat. So I ate wonderful white bread instead, bread that was so fine and rich. At night I slept belowdecks, in third class, in a dormitory, next to a Greek girl with a baby who must have been no more than three weeks old. Every evening the two of us used to rock the baby in a sheet so that she'd stop crying and go to sleep. We didn't speak to each other because we had no common language, and maybe that's the reason we parted from each other with great affection.

  I even remember that at one moment I had a fleeting thought, why did I have to go to the Land of Israel at all? Just to be among Jews? Yet this Greek girl, who probably didn't even know what a Jew was, was closer to me than the entire Jewish people. The entire Jewish people seemed to me at that moment like a great sweaty mass whose belly I was being tempted to enter, so it could consume me entirely with its digestive juices, and I said to myself, Sonia, is that what you really want? It's curious that in Rovno I'd never experienced this fear, that I was going to be consumed by the digestive juices of the Jewish people. It never came back once I was here, either. It was just then, for a moment, on that boat, on the way, when the Greek baby fell asleep in my lap and I could feel it through my dress as though at that moment she really was flesh of my flesh, even though she wasn't Jewish, and despite the wicked Jew-hating Antiochus Epiphanes.

  Early one morning, I can even tell you the precise date and time—it was exactly three days before the end of 1938, Wednesday, December 28,1938, just after Hanukkah—it happened to be a very clear, almost cloudless day, by six in the morning I'd already dressed warmly, a sweater and light coat, and I went up on deck and looked at the gray line of clouds ahead. I watched for maybe an hour and all I saw was a few seagulls. And suddenly, almost in an instant, above the line of the clouds the winter sun appeared and below the clouds there was the city of Tel Aviv: row after row of square, white-painted houses, quite unlike houses in a town or a village in Poland or Ukraine, quite unlike Rovno or Warsaw or Trieste, but very like the pictures on the wall in every classroom at Tarbuth, and the drawings and photographs that our teacher Menahem Gelehrter used to show us. So I was both surprised and not surprised.

  I can't describe how all at once the joy rose up in my throat; suddenly all I wanted to do was shout and sing, This is mine! All mine! It really is all mine! It's a funny thing, I'd never experienced such a strong feeling before in my life, of belonging, of ownership, if you know what I mean, not in our house, our orchard, the flour mill, never. Never in my life, either before that morning or after it, have I known that kind of joy: at long last this would be my home, at long last here I'd be able to draw my curtains and forget about the neighbors and do exactly as I pleased. Here I didn't need to be on my best behavior the whole time, I didn't have to be shy because of anyone, I didn't have to worry about what the peasants would think of us or what the priests would say or what the intelligentsia would feel, I didn't have to try to make a good impression on the Gentiles. Even when we bought our first apartment, in Holon, or this one in Wessely Street, I didn't feel so strongly how good it felt to own your own home. And that was the feeling that filled me at maybe seven in the morning, looking out at a city I'd never even been to, and a land where I'd never set foot, and funny little houses the like of which I'd never seen before in my life! I don't suppose you can understand this. It must seem rather ludicrous to you, doesn't it? Or foolish?

  At eleven o'clock we climbed down with our luggage into a little motorboat, and the sailor who was there, a big hairy Ukrainian, all sweaty and slightly scary, the moment I thanked him nicely in Ukrainian and wanted to give him a coin, he laughed and suddenly said in pure Hebrew, Darling, what's the matter with you, there's no need for that, why don't you give me a little kiss instead?

  It was a pleasant, slightly cool day, and what I remember most is an intoxicating, strong smell of boiling tar, and out of the thick smoke coming from the tar barrels—they must have just asphalted some square or pavement—there suddenly burst my mother's face, laughing, and then Papa's, in tears, and my sister Haya with her husband, Tsvi, whom I hadn't met yet, but right from the first glance I had a flash of a thought like this: what a boy she's found herself here! He's quite good-looking, good-hearted, and jolly too! And it was only after I'd hugged and kissed everyone that I saw that my sister Fania, your mother, was there too. She was standing
slightly to one side, away from the burning barrels, in a long skirt and a blue hand-knitted sweater, standing quietly there, waiting to hug and kiss me after all the others.

  Just as I saw at once that my sister Haya was blooming here, she was so animated, pink-cheeked, confident, assertive—I also saw that Fania was not feeling so good: she seemed very pale and was even more silent than usual. She had come from Jerusalem especially to greet me, she apologized for Arieh, your father, but he hadn't been able to get a day off, and she invited me to come to Jerusalem.

  It was only after a quarter of an hour or so that I saw that she was uncomfortable standing up for so long. Before she or some other member of the family told me, I realized suddenly for myself that she was finding it hard to bear her pregnancy—that is to say, you. She must only have been in her third month, but her cheeks seemed slightly sunken, her lips pale, and her forehead clouded. Her beauty had not vanished, on the contrary, it just seemed to have been covered with a gray veil, which she never removed right to the end.

  Haya was always the most glamorous and impressive of the three of us, she was interesting, brilliant, a heartbreaker, but to any sharp-eyed observer who looked carefully it was clear that the most beautiful of us was Fania. Me? I didn't count for anything: I was just the silly little sister. I think our mother admired Haya most and was proudest of her, while Papa almost managed to hide the truth, that he was fondest of Fania. I was not the pet of either my father or my mother, maybe only Grandpa Ephraim, yet I loved them all: I wasn't jealous and I wasn't resentful. Maybe it's the people who are the least loved, provided they're not envious or bitter, who find the most love in themselves to give to others. Don't you think? I'm not too sure about what I've just said. It may just be one of those stories I tell myself before I go to sleep. Maybe everybody tells themselves stories before they go to sleep, so it'll be a bit less frightening. Your mother hugged me and said, Sonia, it's so good you're here, so good we're all together again, we're going to have to help one another a lot here, we'll especially have to help our parents.

  Haya and Tsvi's apartment was maybe a quarter of an hour's walk from the port, and Tsvi was a hero and carried most of my luggage himself. On the way we saw some workmen building a great big building, it was the teachers' training college that still stands in Ben Yehuda Street just before the corner of Nordau Avenue. At first sight I took the builders for Gypsies or Turks, but Haya said they were just suntanned Jews. I'd never seen Jews like that before, except in pictures. Then I started crying—not just because the builders were so strong and happy, but also because among them there were some small children, twelve years old at most, and each one was carrying a sort of wooden ladder on his back laden with heavy building blocks. I wept a little when I saw that, from joy but also from sorrow. It's hard for me to explain.

  In Haya and Tsvi's tiny apartment, Yigal was waiting with a neighbor who was looking after him until we got there. He must have been about six months, a lively, smily little boy, just like his father, and I washed my hands, picked up Yigal, and hugged him to me, ever so gently, and this time I didn't feel any desire to cry, and I didn't feel a wild joy as on the boat, I only felt a sort of reassurance, from inside, from the innermost depth of my being, as though from the bottom of the well, that it was very good that we were all here and not in the house in Dubinska Street. And I also felt that it was a great pity after all that the cheeky, sweaty sailor had not got the little kiss from me that he'd asked for. What was the connection? I don't know to this day. But that's how I felt there at that moment.

  That evening Tsvi and Fania took me out to see Tel Aviv. We walked to Allenby Street and Rothschild Boulevard, because Ben Yehuda Street was not considered really part of Tel Aviv then. I remember how clean and nice everything looked at first glance, in the evening, with the benches and street lights and all the signs in Hebrew: as if the whole of Tel Aviv was just a very nice display in the playground of the Tarbuth school.

  It was late December 1938, and since then I have never been abroad, except maybe in my thoughts. And I shall never go. It's not because the Land of Israel is so wonderful, it's because I now believe that all journeys are ridiculous: the only journey from which you don't always come back empty-handed is the journey inside yourself. Inside me there are no frontiers or customs, and I can travel as far as the farthest stars. Or walk in places that no longer exist, visit people who no longer exist. Inside, I can even go to places that never existed, that could never have existed, but where I like being. Or at least, don't dislike being. Now can I make you a fried egg before you go, with some tomato and cheese and a slice of bread? Or some avocado? No? You're in a hurry again? Won't you have another glass of tea, at least?

  It was at the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus, or perhaps in one of those cramped rooms in Kerem Avraham, Geula, or Ahva, where poor students crowded in those days two or three to a room, that Fania Muss-man met Yehuda Arieh Klausner. It was in 1935 or 1936. I know that my mother was living at the time in a room at 42 Zephaniah Street that she shared with two friends from Rovno who were also students, Esterka Weiner and Fania Weissmann. I know she was much courted. But, so I heard from Esterka Weiner, she had also had one or two passing affairs.

  As for my father, I've been told that he was very keen on the company of women, he spoke a lot, brilliantly, wittily, he attracted attention and perhaps some mockery. "A walking dictionary," the other students called him. If anyone needed to know, or even if they didn't, he always liked to impress on them all that he knew—the name of the president of Finland, the Sanskrit word for "tower," or where oil is mentioned in the Mishnah.

  If he fancied any student, he would take a fussy pleasure in helping her with her work, he would take her out walking at night in Mea Shearim or the lanes of Sanhedriya, buy her a fizzy drink, join trips to holy sites or archaeological digs, he enjoyed taking part in intellectual discussions, and he would read aloud, with pathos, from the poems of Mickiewicz or Tchernikhowsky. But apparently most of his relationships with girls only got as far as serious discussions and evening strolls: it seemed that girls were attracted only to his brains. Probably his luck was no different from that of most boys in those days.

  I do not know how or when my parents became close, and I do not know whether there was still any love between them before I knew them. They were married at the beginning of 1938 on the roof of the Rabbinate building on Jaffa Road, he in a black pinstripe suit and a tie, with a triangle of white handkerchief peeping from his top pocket, she in a long white dress that accentuated the pallor of her skin and the beauty of her black hair. Fania moved with her few belongings from her shared room in Zephaniah Street to Arieh's room in the Zarchi family's apartment in Amos Street.

  A few months later, when my mother was pregnant, they moved to a building across the road, to the two-room semibasement apartment. Here their only child was born. Sometimes my father joked in his rather anemic way that in those days the world was decidedly not a fit place to bring babies into (he was fond of the word "decidedly," as well as "nevertheless," "indeed," "in a certain sense," "unmistakably," "promptly," "on the other hand," and "utter disgrace"). In saying that the world was not a fit place to bring babies into, he may have been uttering an implied reproach to me, for being born so recklessly and irresponsibly, contrary to his plans and expectations, decidedly before he had achieved what he had hoped to achieve in his life, and hinting that because of my birth he had missed the boat. Or he may not have been hinting anything, just being clever in his usual way: quite often my father made some joke or other just to break the silence. He always imagined that silence was somehow directed against him. Or that it was his fault.

  27

  WHAT DID poor Ashkenazim eat in Jerusalem in the 1940s? We ate black bread with slices of onion and olives cut in half, and sometimes also with anchovy paste; we ate smoked fish and salt fish that came from the depths of the fragrant barrels in the corner of Mr. Auster's grocery; on special occasions we ate sardines, which were
considered a delicacy.

  We ate squash and eggplant, boiled or fried or made into an oily salad with slivers of garlic and chopped onion.

  In the morning there was brown bread with jam, or occasionally with cheese. (The first time I went to Paris, straight from Kibbutz Hulda, in 1969, my hosts were amused to discover that in Israel there were only two kinds of cheese: white cheese and yellow cheese.) In the morning I was given Quaker Oats that tasted of glue, and when I went on strike, they replaced it with semolina and a sprinkling of cinnamon. My mother drank lemon tea in the morning, and sometimes she dunked a dark biscuit in it. My father's breakfast consisted of a slice of brown bread with thick yellow jam, half a hard-boiled egg with olives, slices of tomato, green pepper, and cucumber, and some Tnuva sour cream that came in a thick glass jar.

  My father always got up early, an hour or an hour and a half before my mother and me. By five-thirty he was already standing at the bathroom mirror, brushing the snow on his cheeks into a thick lather, and while he shaved he softly sang a folk song that was hair-raisingly offkey. Afterward he would drink a glass of tea alone in the kitchen while he read the paper. In the citrus season he would squeeze some oranges with a little hand squeezer and bring my mother and me a glass of orange juice in bed. And because the citrus season was in the winter, and because in those days it was thought that you could catch a chill from drinking cold drinks on a cold day, my diligent father used to light the Primus stove before he squeezed the oranges and put a pan of water on, and when the water was almost boiling he carefully lowered the two glasses of juice into the pan and stirred them well with a spoon so that the juice close to the edge was not warmer than the juice in the middle of the glass. Then, shaved and dressed, with my mother's checked kitchen apron tied around his waist over his cheap suit, he would wake my mother (in the book room) and me (in the little room at the end of the corridor) and hand each of us a glass of warmed orange juice. I used to drink this lukewarm juice as though it were poison, while Father stood next to me in his checked apron and his quiet tie and his threadbare suit, waiting for me to give him back the empty glass. While I drank the juice, he would look for something to say: he always felt guilty about silence. He would rhyme in his unfunny way: