The World in Pieces Page 9

  As usual Lo Yadua and Orsino did the guard duty together. Three hours they lay side by side and talked in whispers. Mainly they talked about sex, about girls. Orsino at this time was in love with a Sabra from a kibbutz five kilometers to the north. He’d been going to visit her every Saturday for a year and already they were talking about marriage. Lo Yadua was much impressed by this love affair. He too wanted to have a girlfriend and to be talking of marriage.

  “Maybe your girlfriend has a friend,” he said.

  “She has a lot of friends,” said Orsino.

  “Maybe she could introduce me to one.”

  “I’ll ask her tomorrow.”

  “You’re going to see her tomorrow?”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Tomorrow is too soon.”

  When Lo Yadua told me about this conversation, he laughed.

  “Well,” he said, “I was very confused. Orsino tried to help me, but I kept saying, ‘Too soon.’ That’s the way I was in those days.”

  In any case, here you had two boys, a fifteen-year-old and a seventeen-year-old, talking hour after hour about love, sex, romance, the mystery of the feminine, and then out of the dark comes a bullet that hits the older boy in the head and kills him in one instant. All night, you see, this boy is making talk to prepare himself for Eros and instead what comes is Thanatos.

  Birth of A Hero

  As soon as the bullet hits Orsino, Lo Yadua turns to his right and sees the killers, three men. Somehow they’ve come over the wall. They’re not far off, maybe fifteen meters. He aims his rifle and he shoots three, four, five times and he kills them.

  Then right away the rest of us, who are posted at other points, we all converge. We hear the shots, you see, and we converge.

  I too was out there that night, also by the wall, but on the far side of the circle, so that by the time I come to where everybody is rushing, already some of the men are inspecting the three dead Arabs.

  One of them we knew. He used to come by the kibbutz, maybe once a week, to peddle this and that, sandals, sweets, pencils. You never could predict what he’d bring.

  And always he had an ingratiating manner, as if to say, “Forgive me for disturbing you with my worthless merchandise.”

  The other two murderers we didn’t know.

  Some men attended to the three Arabs that Lo Yadua shot, but everyone else gathered around Orsino and Lo Yadua.

  Oskar Rubin, who was in charge of defense at the time, barked at us to go back to our posts. He was afraid that more Arabs would come any minute, but we all somehow knew he was mistaken, and so we disobeyed, huddling together in little groups to quiet our hearts with talk.

  Much of this talk was about Lo Yadua. A hero we called him, and a great warrior, and compared him to Jonathan and King David and even Hector, and Ajax, and Achilles. Well, in those days we were all full of the classics, and it was a point of honor to know such things. Orsino, for example, had taken a vow recently to memorize all the surviving epigrams of Heraclitus.

  Nowadays the younger generation are interested in other matters and wouldn’t know The Iliad from The Dunciad, but then everyone knew of such things, even the very young among us. Well, we were all socialists then, old-style, very passionate for literature, art, philosophy. Book people. And most of us we even still had high hopes for the socialist experiment in Russia. Though Trotsky was already dead, we believed that still his ideas, the spirit of the man, was alive and would soon triumph. How naive we were is now easy to see, but still, such a naiveté is not altogether useless.

  As for Lo Yadua, everyone sensed a crisis in him, fearing that he could do God knows what to himself, unless he were persuaded at once that the killing he did was a good and not a bad thing, and that he had the right to continue living after Orsino’s death. And this really in my opinion is what gave rise to all the inflated praise and the comparisons with classical heroes.

  Frieda

  Now at the same time that you had going on the praise of Lo Yadua, you had the weeping and the wailing from Orsino’s mother, Frieda, who from this night did not come back for nearly fifteen years.

  In my clinical work I have something to do with grief every day, so now I have some familiarity with it, but on the night Orsino was killed, I was still a young girl, and I had not yet seen such grief as consumed Frieda. And she frightened me. But then too she frightened even those with experience. As she knelt by Orsino, cradling his head in her arms, at first everyone, even her husband, kept from her a distance of at least two or three meters, as if she were some crazy fire crackling and hissing on the ground.

  The next day we buried Orsino.

  Then the following day Frieda began a new ritual, one that she was to continue daily for the next fifteen years. Before dawn she would rise and go into the little studio that Cesare had built for her in the backyard, and there she would paint, mostly with oils, but also water colors and pastels.

  Never in this fifteen-year period did she do any of the common work as she used to, the farming or the construction or the kitchen chores. And nobody bothered her about this. Or even thought to bother her. That she consented to continue living, this was enough.

  Some years ago, before she left Italy, she had been the protegé of Malfi, the great Bolognese master, who, according to Cesare, had judged her gifts as a painter to be of the highest order. An expert draftsman, she could draw any figure in the most convincing realistic manner, and yet her art always it had a magical haunted quality, and this was so even before Orsino’s death; afterward, however, this quality took over altogether and indeed became so extreme that the pictures used to frighten everyone who had eyes to see.

  What inspired such fright was never the literal subject, but the way the paint was applied, as if the mere motion of the hand had left on the canvass an abstracted imprint of terror itself.

  And from the painter too you got a fright. Only with Cesare and Lo Yadua and sometimes myself could she now and then bring herself to engage, but with others she was almost always aloof, the body present, but the mind continually coming and going.

  Cesare used to make sure that Lo Yadua visited her for a tea at least once a week and Lo Yadua was happy to oblige. As a rule she kissed both his hands on his arrival and then, sitting him down to eat, would at once demand that he tell her everything he had been doing since she last saw him. To her Lo Yadua was not just the best soldier on the kibbutz, as he was to the rest of us; to her he was the best in the world, the one who avenged the murder of her Orsino.

  One day, in the fourteenth year after Orsino’s death, Cesare came to me for what he called “some advice about a problem.” Some of the families on the kibbutz, you see, had lately begun to pressure him to commit Frieda to a psychiatric hospital, and naturally he was troubled and somewhat indignant, though maybe not as much as he might have been.

  “They say she’s dangerous,” he said. “They say that you never know with someone who is so strange, that she could do anything, maybe hurt someone.”

  And what did he think about such a possibility?

  “Ridiculous. She couldn’t hurt a fly. This is the whole problem! If she could hurt a fly, maybe she wouldn’t be so crazy!”

  “You have a good point here, Cesare,” I told him. “But tell me, if she’s so crazy, why do you want to keep her? This must be a terrible strain on you, to live night and day with such a woman. Maybe your neighbors are right. Maybe you should send Frieda to a hospital.”

  “What are you talking about, Ila?” he said. “Is she just some kind of object like a brick that I can pull out of a wall and replace? More than thirty years we’ve been together. Through everything. Do you know what that means, thirty years? Besides, the truth is I could not live without her. I could survive, yes, go from day to day like a zombie, do my work, eat, sleep, make excrement, but to live, to feel magic, the holy ecstasy, this I could not experience without Frieda.”

  “Then what’s your problem, Cesare? Forget the neighbors and live yo
ur life.”

  “Is that your advice?”

  “It is.”

  “You see? I knew it. I knew I could rely on you to figure out this whole complication for me.”

  One more point about Frieda. Though it is true she was almost completely indifferent to much of the mundane business of everyday life, still she was quite attentive to her dress and her personal cleanliness. The dress and the cleanliness, however, they were mere accessories to a grander design. The real end at which the organism was aimed, the deeper demonic motive, was to make of herself a living reproach against the world, the world that had killed her son whom she worshiped like a god. Consequently her physical beauty, which had already been remarkable in her youth, took on something you could only call a shimmering. It became unearthly.

  At the time Cesare came to me about the problem with his neighbors, already Frieda was nearly fifty, but the eyes were clear, the skin glowed and the hair was abundant and lustrous and still the same light shade of red as when she was twenty. But all this unseasonable beauty it had something of the quality of her paintings, insofar as when you looked at her, you did not feel good, did not even feel envy, for there was no joy in her, but only fire and terror.

  The Return of Anchel and Surah

  A few days after my talk with Cesare about the neighbors, Anchel and Surah came to Israel. Lo Yadua was then thirty years old and had not seen his parents since he was a boy. Over the years he got letters, a few packages and phone calls, but only once before had they come for a visit.

  That had been in the thirties. How they had managed to come in the thirties I can’t tell you. In those days it wasn’t so easy. But still they came, for two weeks.

  I remember that first visit, the way they walked about everywhere. All us children were very curious about them, and I think Lo Yadua must have told a lot of lies to make his parents seem grander than they were. I don’t remember any of these lies specifically, just the general tone he took, that sort of boastful everything-is-just-wonderful tone that boys will take when they’re undergoing a personal tragedy and that can be so touching.

  When Anchel and Surah came for the second visit, though, this was in ‘56, and Lo Yadua was by now a grown man, married already more than a year and about to be a father, for then I was in my seventh month with Leah, my first.

  Before they came, they called twice on the phone, and in the second call there was a little argument. Lo Yadua he wanted to go and pick them up at the airport in Tel Aviv but no, they said he shouldn’t bother. It was such a long drive, they said, and besides they wanted to spend first a day in the city before they came to the kibbutz.

  “So I’ll show you around Tel Aviv!” said Lo Yadua.

  “No, no,” said Surah. “What would be the point of that?”

  The next morning they called again and now changed from a one-day to a two-day look at Tel Aviv, because there was, they said, so much to see.

  Finally on the third day they came to the kibbutz.

  Handsome people they were, in their late forties at the time, very well cared for, the clothes, the fingernails, the hair, the skin.

  When they arrived, Lo Yadua had been working already six hours, and it was about one o’clock in the afternoon. They arrived earlier than they said they would (two days late, but two hours early). Not until three were they expected, so he thought he would have time to bathe and change clothes. As it happened, the very moment he was coming toward the house from the cabbage field, his whole body caked in dirt and sweat, one knee of his overalls ripped from a nail in a fencepost, here they come driving up in a rented car.

  So he runs to greet them and opens the door for the mother. All this I saw through a window in the house. Well, naturally they didn’t know him. How would they know him? In every letter they wrote, they asked for a photo, but he never sent one. A photo it always made him wince, just as when he looked in a mirror.

  Even from a distance I could see what was what with these visitors of ours, that they were astonished, also distressed, that this man, this big burly dirty bearded man with the crow’s feet around the eyes, was the same person as the quiet sensitive little boy they had shipped off to the other side of the world. All this and more I could deduce from the movement, the gesture, as in a pantomime. For example, Lo Yadua did not embrace them. This I knew was partly from a fear that his farmer dirt might give offense, but also maybe from other feelings as well. When the mother put out her hands to him, he even drew back a step, and she for her part was clearly not eager to press the matter and dropped her hands at once.

  One thing that struck me here was how young this couple looked for their age; in fact, though they were now in their mid-forties and their son was just thirty, he could have been taken for the oldest of the three.

  In a minute he took their bags from the car and led the way to the house. “Come, come, you’ll meet Ila. Ila, Ila! Look who’s here!”

  So, already I saw who was here.

  And what I wanted to do was run out the back door, but instead I put on my smile.

  The way they looked at me that first moment they saw me in the house I will never forget. A pain in the eyes they had. Specially Surah the mother. But they were very polite. They had the kind of manners you could call irreproachable, like the English.

  In the English of course such manners are born of the culture; but here, in Anchel and Surah, they were personal, the product of an eccentric family dynamic, and consequently had a certain edge, a sort of nagging inauthenticity, specially with regard to the cultures from which these in-laws of mine actually had sprung, namely, the Jewish and the American, about which you can say many things, but not that overbearing politeness and an air of irreproachability are for them characteristic.

  Politics Is A Room

  A big problem I had with Anchel and Surah was the sleeping arrangement. For a week before they arrived I worried how should I arrange the bed. We had only one little extra room in those days, and already we had in it a double bed, but I worried that maybe a double bed would offend them.

  I hope you can appreciate the grotesque ambiguity I was faced with here. The question I was asking myself all week was this: How did they wish me to think of them, as brother and sister, or as husband and wife?

  Strictly speaking they were not husband and wife. From a legal point of view in America or any other civilized country they would not be allowed to marry. Also, in America they were known to their neighbors as brother and sister. Where Lo Yadua lived in Brooklyn the first five years of his life, the neighbors of course knew what was what, but after he was sent away, Anchel and Surah moved to another neighborhood. And here they took up a new persona, without scandal. Just a brother and sister sharing an apartment. Nice, quiet people who paid the rent on time and kept to themselves.

  But now here in Israel they had still another persona. Here they were “the parents of Lo Yadua.” That they were also brother and sister, this was known on the kibbutz only by Cesare and Frieda and Lo Yadua and myself, though not only did we four maintain a secrecy about this matter, we didn’t even talk about it much among ourselves. Given such a situation, you can see maybe why I was reticent about the question of the beds, and why I might have felt obliged to figure out what was the right thing to do without asking outright.

  Nowadays of course I would just come out and ask: “What do you want, a double bed or two single beds? If it’s a double bed, then tell me. This I have already in the room, so it’s no bother. But if for appearances you want single beds, I can get them.”

  But in those days I couldn’t have said such a thing. Even though I had plenty of book knowledge and even some clinical experience with the destructive consequences of collaborating in such protocols, I was still unable in this particular situation to be a mensch and speak up.

  Well, such things take time.

  In the end I decided on the two single beds, which I borrowed from Cesare. The two single beds seemed right because, well, you could interpret them to signi
fy whatever you liked, the brother-sister arrangement or the marriage arrangement, either way.

  The first thing I did after I greeted Anchel and Surah was I told them to come to their room and put down the things they were carrying, the little overnight bags and the magazines. So Lo Yadua led the way with the big suitcases and we all went into the guest room.

  I had put a vase of flowers, lilies, on the night table by the window and a fresh towel on each bed. And on the dresser I had put a bowl of sesame candies that I buy from the Arab peddlers, crunchy and not too sweet.

  “Well,” said Surah, “this is very nice, Ila.”

  The First Supper

  The rest of the afternoon Lo Yadua took his parents for a tour around the kibbutz and I stayed at home. I wanted to give him time alone with them and also I was already exhausted and needed to lie down and sleep. Even on a normal day near the end of a pregnancy I needed to sleep in the afternoon, but on this day my whole body was like a stone.

  We had decided that this first night we would eat at home instead of the dining hall, so at five o’clock I prepared a meal, simple, rice, yogurt, cucumbers, a little chicken, and when Lo Yadua returned with his parents, I had everything ready, even a good humor. But Lo Yadua looked grim, morose. As for Anchel and Surah, they came back with the same imperturbable air they had when they left.

  The moment they disappeared into their room to change clothes, I took Lo Yadua to the kitchen. “Did you fight with them?” I said.

  “Fight? No.”

  “Then what’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with me.”