Panther in the Basement
Page 12
Silence.
Phantom footsteps.
Suddenly the toilet cistern roared. Then the murmur of water rushing along the pipes in the wall. Then more dim voices and bare feet passing the door of my room; that was definitely Yardena whispering to her injured fighter, "Wait a minute, shut up, wait there." Then a grating sound from my parents' bedroom: furniture being moved? A drawer? And suddenly there was a sound of stifled laughter, and perhaps of sobbing, as though under water.
When I am a wounded Underground fighter fleeing hot pursuit, will I also have the strength of character to laugh, like this man, when my wound is being cleaned and treated with a burning, stinging liquid and wrapped tightly with a bandage?
I suspected I wouldn't. And in the meantime the laughter on the other side of the wall turned into a groan and a few moments later Yardena groaned, too. Then more sounds and whispers. And then silence. After a lot more darkness, stray shots started up in the distance, spaced out as though they, too, were tired. And I may have fallen asleep.
twenty-two
The essence of treachery does not lie in the traitor suddenly getting up and leaving the close circle of the faithful. Only a superficial traitor does that. The real, deep-down traitor is the one who is right inside. In the heart of hearts: the one who most resembles and belongs, who is most involved. The one who is most like the others, even more so than the others. The one who really loves the ones he is betraying, because what betrayal is there without love? (I admit this is a complicated matter that belongs in another story. A truly organized man would cross out these lines or transfer them to a suitable story. Nevertheless, I am not going to cross them out. You can skip, if you like.)
That summer came to an end. At the beginning of September we started seventh grade. A new phase began, that of the empty oil drums, from which we tried to construct a subcontinental submarine that could travel freely through the ocean of molten lava under the crust of the earth's surface, from where it could strike without warning and destroy whole cities from underneath, from below their foundations. Ben Hur was appointed captain of the submarine and, as usual, I was his second in command, inventor, and chief designer, and responsible for navigation. Chita Reznik, as ordnance officer, collected dozens of yards of old electric wire, together with coils, batteries, switches, and insulating tape. Our plan was to sail in our submarine to a point beneath the royal palace in London. Chita had a further, private, objective, which was to use the submarine to capture his two fathers, who spent two or three weeks alternately with his mother, and take them away to a desert island. He loved and respected his mother, and he wanted her to have some peace and quiet because in her youth she had been a famous opera singer in Budapest and now she suffered from attacks of melancholy. (Somebody wrote in red paint on their wall: "Chita should be very glad—most kids have only one dad. Gladder still is Chita's mother: first she has one, then the other." Chita scratched the writing with a nail, scrubbed it with soap, painted over it, without success.) In Bible class Mr. Zerubbabel Gihon taught us about how the Babylonian beasts conquered Jerusalem and our temple and razed them to the ground. As usual he joked at his wife's expense: if Mrs. Gihon had lived in Jerusalem in those days, the Babylonians would have escaped by the skin of their teeth. He took the opportunity to explain the expression "the skin of their teeth."
My mother said:
"There's a little girl at the institution, an orphan called Henrietta. Must be five or six. Covered with freckles. She suddenly started calling me Mamma, not in Hebrew, in Yiddish, and she tells everybody I'm her mother, and I can't make up my mind what I ought to do: whether I should tell her I'm not her mother, that her mother's dead—but how can I kill her mother for the second time?—or not react, wait for her to get over it. But then what about the other children's jealousy?"
Father said:
"That's difficult. From a moral point of view. Either way someone will suffer. And think of my book: who will read it? They're all dead."
I didn't find Sergeant Dunlop at the Orient Palace. I looked for him again after the festivals, three times; I still couldn't find him. Not even when the autumn came and low clouds enfolded Jerusalem to remind us that not everything in the world is summer and submarines and underground fighters.
I thought: Maybe he's found out through a complex network of informers and double agents that I was betraying him. That I told Yardena about him and she told her wounded fighter that night, and he told the Underground, and they may have kidnapped him. Or the opposite: Maybe the CID was shadowing us when we met and Sergeant Dunlop has been imprisoned for treason, and maybe because of me he has been removed from his beloved Jerusalem and banished to some far-flung outpost of the Empire, to New Caledonia, New Guinea, or perhaps Uganda or Tanganyika?
What did I have left? Only a little Bible in Hebrew and English that he gave me. I still have it. I couldn't take it to school, because it contained the New Testament, which Mr. Gihon said was an anti-Jewish book (but I read it, and I found, among other things, the story of the traitor Judas).
Why didn't I write to Sergeant Dunlop? First of all, he didn't leave me an address. Second, I was afraid that if he got a letter from me it might get him into worse trouble and they might punish him more. Third, what did I have to say to him?
What about him? Why didn't he write to me? Because he couldn't. After all, I hadn't even told him my name. ("I'm Proffy," I had said to him, "a Jew from the Land of Israel." That's not a sufficient postal address.)
Where in the world are you, Stephen Dunlop, my shy enemy? Wherever you are, in Singapore or Zanzibar, have you found yourself another friend to take my place? Not a friend, a teacher and pupil. Even that is not the right description. What then? What was there between us? To this day I cannot explain to myself what it was. And what do you still remember from the homework I made you do?
I speak as I may.
I have a couple of acquaintances who live in Canterbury. Ten years ago I wrote to them asking them to see if they could find out about him.
Without success.
One of these days I shall pack a small bag and set off for Canterbury myself I'll hunt through old telephone directories. I'll check in the churches. I'll inquire in the municipal archives. PC 4479. Stephen Dunlop, asthmatic, fond of gossiping, a pink cotton-wool Goliath. A solitary, gentle enemy. A believer in the Prophets. A believer in signs and miracles. If by some miracle, Stephen, this book finds its way into your hands, please drop me a line. Send me a picture postcard, at least. A couple of lines, in Hebrew or English, whichever you prefer.
twenty-three
In September there were more searches. There were imprisonments and a curfew. A lever from a hand grenade was found in Chita's apartment and one of his fathers was taken away for questioning (the other one turned up the same evening). Our teacher Mr. Zerubbabel Gihon denounced the Babylonians again in class, and also expressed his doubts as to whether the prophet Jeremiah spoke as befitted a prophet in days of war and siege. In Mr. Gihon's view, when the enemy is at the gate, the duty of a prophet is to raise the people's spirits, to unite their ranks, and to pour out his wrath on the foe outside the walls, not on his brethren inside. Above all, a prophet worthy of his name must not insult the royal family and the national heroes. But the prophet Jeremiah was an embittered man and we must try to understand and forgive him.
My mother put up two orphans in our apartment for a few weeks. They were clandestine immigrants and their names were Oleg and Hirsch, but Father declared that henceforth they were to be known as Tzvi and Eyal. We laid the spare mattress out for them on the floor in my bedroom. They were eight or nine years old; they themselves did not know how old they were. And we mistakenly took them for brothers because they had the same surname, Brinn (which Father Hebraized as Bar-On). But it turned out that they were not brothers, they were not even related; in fact, they were enemies. However, their enmity expressed itself quietly, without violence and almost without words: they knew no Hebrew and it seemed
as though they could only talk a little in another language. Despite their hatred of each other, they fell asleep at night on their mattress curled up together like a couple of puppies. I tried to teach them Hebrew and to learn from them something that I could not identify and still cannot explain today, though I knew it was something that those two orphans understood a thousand times better than I did, and better than most grown-ups. After the festivals they were taken away in a pickup truck to a pioneer youth village. Father gave them our old suitcase and my mother packed it with clothes that I had outgrown, asked them to share them without quarreling, and stroked their heads, which had been shorn for fear of lice. When they were sitting huddled up in the far corner of the truck, Father said to them:
"A new chapter is beginning in your lives."
And my mother said:
"Come and see us. The spare mattress will always be waiting for you."
Yes, I told my parents about Yardena. I had to. That is, about the night they went to the commemoration in Tel Aviv and she slept in their room and after midnight a wounded man turned up and Yardena dressed his wounds and before the day dawned he slipped out of the apartment and was gone. I heard it all but saw nothing.
Father said:
"Ho, my Kinneret, were you there or was it all just a dream?"
I answered angrily:
"I wasn't dreaming. It really happened. There was an injured man here. I'm sorry I told you about it, because you only make fun of me."
Mother said:
"The boy's telling the truth."
And Father:
"Indeed? If that is so, we shall have to have a word with that young lady."
Mother said:
"It's none of our business."
And Father:
"But it was definitely a betrayal of trust."
Mother said:
"Yardena isn't a child any more."
And Father:
"No, but this child is a child. And in our bed, too, and who knows what sort of vagrant it was? Anyway, we'll talk about this later, just you and I. As for Your Lordship," he said, "off to your room with you and get on with your homework." Which was unfair, because my father knew perfectly well that I always did my homework as soon as I came home from school, first thing, sometimes even before eating the food that was waiting for me in the icebox. But I deserved it because it was unfair of me to tell them about Yardena and the injured man. On the other hand, how could I not tell them? Wasn't I doing my duty? Third. Fourth. Everything I told that I shouldn't have; everything that I should have told but didn't. So I went to my room, and this time, too, I locked the door on the inside and I refused to open it and hardly answered them till the next morning. Even when they knocked on the door. Even when they threatened me with punishment. Even when they were alarmed (and I was quite sorry for them but didn't let on). Even when my father said to my mother, on the other side of the door, raising his voice on purpose:
"Never mind. It's not so terrible. It won't hurt him to think things over in the dark." (He was right about this.)
That evening, alone in my room, hungry but proud and resentful, I thought something like this: Surely there are other secrets in the world apart from liberating the Homeland and the Undergrounds and the British. Hirsch and Oleg, who were taken away in a truck to become pioneers, were they perhaps really brothers who were pretending, for some reason of their own, to be strangers and enemies? Or were they strangers who sometimes pretended to be brothers? One must observe and keep quiet. Everything has a shadow of some kind. Maybe even a shadow has a shadow.
twenty-four
Less than a year after that summer, the English left our Land. The Hebrew State was established. The night it was created it was attacked from every direction by invading Arab armies, but it fought and won and since then it has fought and won over and over again. My mother, who once studied nursing at the Hadassah Hospital, tended the wounded at the first-aid station at the Shibboleth newsstand. At night she was sent to inform the next of kin of those who had been killed, together with the young doctor, Magda Gryphius. In between dealing with the wounded and the dead, she lived at her institution, looking after her orphans. She slept two to three hours a night on a camp bed in the storeroom. She hardly ever came home. During the war months she took up smoking, and from then on she always smoked, with a bitter expression, as though the cigarettes filled her with disgust. My father continued to compose slogans, but now he also drew up manifestos and leaflets for the fighting units, and he also attended an accelerated course on the use of the mortar. Setting his glasses at a slight angle by raising the arms and thus lowering the lenses a little, he would, responsibly, logically, and correctly dismantle, oil, reassemble a homemade mortar, screwing each screw sternly, as though he was adding a particularly significant footnote to his book. Ben Hur, Chita, and I filled hundreds of sandbags, helped to dig trenches, and carried messages in a crouching run from one position to another in the days when Jerusalem was besieged and being heavily shelled by the guns of the Kingdom of Transjordan. One shell decapitated an olive tree and the younger of the Sinopsky brothers as he was sitting under the tree with his brother, eating sardines. After the war the elder brother moved to Afula, and the grocery shop was taken over by Chita's two fathers in partnership.
I remember the night at the end of November when the radio announced that in America the United Nations, at a place called Lake Success, had decided to let us set up a Hebrew State, albeit a very small state divided into three blocks. Father came home at one o'clock in the morning from Dr. Buster's, where they had all gathered to hear what the radio said about the result of the vote at the UN, and he bent over and stroked my face with his warm hand:
"Wake up. Don't sleep."
With these words he lifted up my sheet and got into bed next to me fully dressed (he who always insisted so strictly that one must not get into bed in day clothes). He lay in silence for a few minutes, still stroking my face, and I hardly dared to breathe, and all of a sudden he started to talk about things that had never been mentioned in our home before, because it was forbidden, things that I had always known one mustn't ask about and that was that. You couldn't ask him, you couldn't ask my mother, and in general there were a lot of subjects about which the less said the better, and there was an end to it. In a voice of darkness he told me about how it was when he and Mother lived next door to each other as children in a small town in Poland. How the ruffians who lived in the same block abused them, and beat them savagely because the Jews were all rich, idle, and crafty. And how once they stripped him naked in class, at the Gymnasium, by force, in front of the girls, in front of Mother, to make fun of his circumcision. And his own father, Grandpa that is, one of the grandparents that Hitler later murdered, came in a suit and a silk tie to complain to the headmaster, but, as he was leaving, the hoodlums grabbed him and forcibly undressed him, too, in the classroom in front of the girls. And still in a voice of darkness Father said this to me:
"But from now on there will be a Hebrew State." And suddenly he hugged me, not gently but almost violently. In the dark my hand hit his high brow, and instead of his glasses my fingers found his tears. I never saw my father cry, either before that night or since. In fact, I didn't even see him then, only my left hand saw.
twenty-five
Such is our story: it comes from darkness, wanders around, and returns to darkness. It leaves behind a memory combining pain and some laughter, regret, wonderment. The kerosene cart went past in the mornings, the kerosene seller sitting on top with the reins hanging slackly in his hands, ringing his handbell and singing a long-drawn-out song in Yiddish to his old horse. The boy who helped at the Sinopsky Brothers grocery had a strange cat that followed him everywhere and wouldn't let him out of its sight. Mr. Lazarus, the tailor from Berlin, a nodding, blinking man, shook his head in disbelief: who ever heard of a faithful cat? He said: Perhaps it is a Geist, a spirit. The unmarried doctor Magda Gryphius fell in love with an Armenian poet, and followed
him to Famagusta in Cyprus. A few years later she returned, bringing with her a flute, and sometimes I would wake up in the night and hear it and a kind of inner whisper said to me, Never forget this, this is the heart of the matter, everything else is only a shadow.
And what is the opposite of what has really happened?
My mother used to say: "The opposite of what has happened is what has not happened."
And Father: "The opposite of what has happened is what is going to happen."
Once, when we bumped into each other in a little fish restaurant in Tiberias, on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, some fourteen years later, I asked Yardena. Instead of answering me, she burst into her luminous laughter, that laugh that belongs to girls who enjoy being girls and who know pretty well what is possible and what is doomed. Lighting a cigarette, she replied: "The opposite of what has happened is what might have happened if it weren't for lies and fear."
These words of hers took me back to the end of that summer, to the sound of her clarinet, to Chita's two fathers, who went on living there after his mother died, to Mr. Lazarus, who raised hens on the roof and a few years later decided to remarry, made himself a dark-blue three-piece suit, and invited us all to a vegetarian meal, but that evening, after the wedding and the reception, suddenly jumped off the roof, and to PC 4479, and the panther in the basement, and Ben Hur and the rocket we never sent to London, and also the blue shutter which may be floating on the stream to this day on its circular journey back to the mill. What is the connection? It is hard to say. And what about the story itself? Have I betrayed them all again by telling the story? Or is it the other way around: would I have betrayed them if I had not told it?