by Bart Midwood
After that he was quiet. And he sulked. And this was good enough for me, that he was no longer shouting and looking for something to break! Of course, still he refused to take Mordecai’s money, but, after all, I didn’t really expect I’d be able to change his mind on this point.
I have not been able to write to you, my diary, for a week, more than a week, ever since the day that Shmuel passed away. I thought maybe I would never write to you again or to anyone, that I have no business speaking to anyone, but now Anchel has told me that I am not so useless and evil as I think I am, and though I know he is wrong about me, still he makes me see that either I must give up altogether and put an end to my life or I must live, that it is no good to be always wondering should I live or should I die.
How Shmuel died I don’t know. In the afternoon he took a nap. Often he takes a nap in the afternoon. At five I call him for dinner, but he doesn’t answer. I go into the bedroom and touch him and I see he’s dead. Then I run into the street without a coat or a sweater or anything and I don’t even notice how cold it is, and I run to the corner to Dr. Kindler, and he comes right away.
Why I do such a stupid thing as call a doctor when Shmuel is already dead I don’t know.
When I asked the doctor later, why did Shmuel die, he says, “He was a frail boy. On top of the polio he had also a weak heart and maybe some lung damage from the pneumonia last year. All this was too much. But the polio, the legs, they were getting better. You did very well with the legs, Surah. Just like your Mama. I heard all about how good you were with your little brother, just as good as your Mama. You should be proud of yourself.”
“Who told you I was good with Shmuel?” I said.
But he didn’t answer. He just looked at me with pity and shook his head.
“Why do you shake your head at me?” I said.
“Because you’re so suspicious and you can’t believe that anyone might have said something good about you!”
“You’re right,” I said.
He tried to talk more with me and draw me out but I was mean and sullen. Naturally! A perfectly useless person! So he soon gave up and then Anchel came home.
Whenever I feel bad, I light candles. This helps me.
Anchel said, “Candles cost money.” But then he was ashamed of himself at once and said, “If the candles help, light as many as you want. What’s a candle? Not even a penny. Also you should buy something sweet for yourself. Buy cake.”
“No. I’ll bake a cake, though. A honey cake.”
“Good,” he says. “But you must promise to eat some of it. You mustn’t get too thin.”
And he looks at me in that way that I love. Looks at my breasts that are so full now, and my hips. Well, so I promise yes, I will eat some honey cake, and I tell him come straight home from work and I will make also the pot roast he loves so much.
So when he comes home, this was yesterday, everything was ready for him. I was so busy I hadn’t even time to light one candle all day. And I didn’t even think to light one. First there was the shopping and then the cooking, and also I mopped the floors and washed the windows. I didn’t do so much cleaning in a long time, not since Mama died. I even had time to sew, to fix a nice dress that Mrs. Perewski gave me last week, a nice cotton dress with a colorful flowery print. With a few stitches here and there I took it in to make it tight around the hips and the bosom, just like in the movies.
And Anchel loved it, loved the way I looked, and he loved the dinner too, and we laughed and laughed, and he even made me eat a second piece of cake.
“Come and sit on my lap,” he said, and I did, and he fed me the second piece of cake very gingerly.
And then afterward we washed the dishes together and then we went in the living room to listen to the radio and he sat on the sofa and I sat beside him and put my head in his lap and took his hand and put it on my breast, as I have often done. Only this time, when he began to draw his hand away, I wouldn’t let him but held it tightly and pressed it even harder to me and kissed his arm where he had made the picture of the heart, and then he turned me and lifted my head and kissed my mouth for a long time. This was a kiss from which there was no return. The rest of the night I cannot speak of.
Last Letter From Lo Yadua
Kibbutz Bet Lev
July 2, 1983
Dear B.A. Midwood,
Interesting is not the word. This new L.H. story and the diary are much more to me than interesting, and Ilana and I have been talking about them all week.
One thing I never knew about was Shmuel, never even suspected such a person ever existed. That Surah never mentioned this poor little brother of hers is perfectly consistent with her secretive character, of course, but still, still she should have told me. It would have been good for me to know. I would have understood something about her that I could not understand all my life. I think though that maybe she could not talk about this, not to anyone. In the diary, though, she talked, and this at least was something, and I am grateful that she made this diary. Otherwise I would never have known. Imagine!
Anyway, now that I know, this is what I think: I think she never got over this tragedy of the death of Shmuel, and that all her life she was trying to make for herself a wall to shut out the guilt and the shame, on account of that always she held herself responsible for Shmuel as if she were a murderer. Well, I can’t prove this, of course. How could I prove such a thing! But still, I feel it to be so.
My Ilana, who is a psychological professional, she has other more complicated ideas about all this, but I cannot say I understand them completely. We have had many good arguments on the subject, however, and I am still turning her ideas over in my mind, so who knows, maybe I will begin more to agree with her on certain points. To tell you the truth, I think my wife is a little worried about me, about the effect on me of this new information that is now jumping out of a cardboard box, but I tell her, “Look, Ilana, don’t worry. What we have here is truth. And truth can set you free! Isn’t that what you always say?”
She knows of course that I am completely correct on this point, so always she concedes it at once, but at the same time she keeps the worried look, so always I feel as if I have lost the argument anyway.
Well, many more things I have to say about all this business, but I will save them for another time.
What is next from this box?
Lo Yadua
A New Correspondent
Something in the tone of Lo Yadua’s last letter put me on guard and I hesitated for about ten days before I made a response. In the end I just sent one of the photos of Blima from Surah’s album and a brief note, “Thought you might enjoy this.”
Seven weeks later a reply came, not from Lo Yadua, but from his wife, Ilana.
Kibbutz Bet Lev
August 20, 1983
Dear Mr. Midwood,
Forgive me for not writing to you sooner, but it was only yesterday that I was able to bring myself to attend to your last letter. At first I was going to return it to you unopened and with a brief explanatory note, but when I felt the envelope and held it up to the light and saw that a photograph was inside, my curiosity became very strong and I gave in to it. I hope you don’t mind. It was for me a big treat to see this picture of the famous Blima.
I am sorry to have to tell you now sad news, that my husband Lo Yadua has been taken from the world, very suddenly, very cruelly, by a bullet, two bullets, that came to him in Samaria almost a month ago, just on the day before the postmark on your letter.
Probably you cannot imagine how powerfully Lo Yadua was affected by the stories and other documents you sent and by the exchange of letters with you, so I ask you to take my word that the experience was important for him, and also did him much good, making more consciousness. I am unsure about how much more you want or need to learn about my husband for the purpose of your project, but if in some way I can be of use, to provide information or something like this, please let me know.
Ilana
In the next two or three months, Ilana and I exchanged a few letters, and also a few phone calls. In the last call I asked her about the shooting in Samaria and if she could tell me the particular circumstances.
“This is complicated,” she said.
“In what way?”
“Many ways. This shooting it was eccentric … also not.”
“You don’t want to talk about it. Forgive me.”
“No, no, Mr. Midwood. It’s only natural for you to ask. But this question about ‘circumstances,’ as you call them, I can’t answer in two words.”
After that call, we lost touch for a while, as I had an assignment that required some travel that took me away from early November until the end of February. When I returned home, I found among my mail a manila envelope, which contained a rather hefty manuscript bearing the signature “Ilana Abrams” and accompanied by a note from her eldest daughter, Leah.
Kibbutz Bet Lev
February 7, 1984
Dear Mr. B.A. Midwood:
My mother, who passed away on January 23rd, left instructions to send this manuscript to you in the event of her death, which apparently she anticipated, though believe me, nobody else did, not one friend or member of the family. I am sorry to have taken so long with the mailing, but she left many, many papers, and my sisters and I we can only spend an hour or two a week on this business as we all have families and also jobs and therefore so many duties.
In her instructions my mother said to remind you about some question you asked her about circumstances. She said you would understand and that I should be sure to use this specific word “circumstances,” and not some other word that maybe means the same thing. Well, she was very fussy about words, my mother, and so now I tell you: “Circumstances!” And there I have done my duty.
If somehow, though, you cannot after all understand what she meant here by this word, don’t bother to ask me, because really I don’t know what she was talking about.
This manuscript she left for you I can tell you she worked on for more than two months, writing every day and all day, locked up in her little house like a hermit until dinner time, and did not even anymore go once in a while for a visit to the children’s clinic, from which she had taken an indefinite leave of absence.
This was not the first time she had locked herself up in this manner to write something. Ever since I was a little girl, I remember episodes like this, where everything she put on a shelf, all her daily ordinary life and duties, and she would disappear and write and write. Sometimes for a whole month we would not see her in daylight. Always though she would come and have dinner in the dining hall, so it wasn’t so bad, except in these periods always she was preoccupied and so you could feel somehow that though she could hear and understand everything you were saying to her, still she was paying more attention inside her head to something else entirely that was of course completely invisible to you. My father he was very good about all this in these periods and thank God they occurred not more often than maybe once in three years. Five years ago was the last. In that period she wrote the story of her childhood. Seven weeks it took her, and that manuscript she left to me and my sisters. Do you believe that I have not yet had time to sit down and read it, and that neither have my sisters?
Well, I am rambling and rambling, so enough!
I hope you enjoy what my mother has written. She said that I and my sisters could read it before we sent it to you, but who has time? I did read a few pages here and there, though, and it does look interesting. Anyway I have made myself a copy in the hope that some day I will have the time and the patience to sit down with it.
Leah Zabar
As Leah’s letter and the manuscript had already been sitting for several weeks in my post office box, I wrote a reply immediately and sent it by express mail.
Brooklyn, New York
March 1, 1984
Dear Leah,
I had judged by the sound of your mother’s voice on the phone, and the liveliness of her letters, that I had found in her a wonderful vigorous new correspondent who would go on exchanging ideas with me for many years to come, so the news that she has passed away not only grieves me but comes as an unhappy surprise.
The manuscript you sent also comes as a surprise, though in this case a consolatory one, and I thank you for your kind attention to it. I will write you again as soon as I have read it. In the meantime please accept my sympathy and extend it to the rest of your family.
B.A. Midwood
To this letter I got a prompt response, in which Leah assured me that she too was surprised by her mother’s death, and that so was everyone else, all the family and friends and so on. She went on at length in fact about this surprise phenomenon, and then she wrote the following:
My mother’s death it came in the middle of the night during sleep. What was the cause of this death I cannot say. It was not physical illness, this I can tell you. Till the end she was healthy as a horse. Some say it was grief for the loss of my father, but I don’t know, I don’t think so, because always she had such a pleasant disposition. I don’t say she did not grieve for my father. This she did. As did we all. Many tears. But the grief it did not hold her. Always she was so good with other people, never occupied with her own concerns. Always curious, helpful. With the most wonderful sparkling eyes like stars in the whole world. I cannot tell you how I miss her …
The Manuscript of Dr. Ilana Abrams
EDITOR’S NOTE:
Ilana Abrams was born in Beersheba, March 8, 1926. In 1955 she married Lo Yadua, keeping her maiden name, as he had dropped his surname, Brody, in his youth. In the first five years of marriage Ilana bore three daughters. Previously, from 1947 to 1953, first in Jerusalem and then in Basel, she had studied for a career as a psychotherapist; then for most of the rest of her life she worked in a mental health clinic for children in the Negev and also maintained a private practice for adults.
Ilana’s manuscript is reprinted here in its original form, except the chapter titles, which are my own.
B.A. Midwood
My husband was shot and killed on a settlement near Samaria on July 16, 1983, just two and a half months ago. This I have already said. But what is it to say such a thing? It is to say in one breath everything and at the same time nothing.
And yet this is what I have been saying to myself over and over since I got the news. “Shot and killed near Samaria. Shot and killed near Samaria.” Like a broken record. And what good is that? Where will it lead me? And what good can I do anybody with it?
To do good for myself I don’t care anymore. But after all I have three daughters, one pregnant with my first grandchild. And I have my patients, wonderful children who rely on me to bring some light into their dark souls; and I have my friends, my fellow kibbutzniks who are so kind to me, who worry over me so, you would think God knows what depended on my recovery.
“You must climb up out of Lo Yadua’s grave, Ilana!”
This is what Haggai said to me yesterday with tears in his eyes. Haggai I know since he was born. Now already he is seventeen and a giant. A real Goliath with the soul of a little girl. Every afternoon he comes to me with soup and scolds me. Where he gets the soup I don’t know. He says he makes it himself. But who knows. This Haggai he is a pathologic liar. This I know from the inside. For three years I treated him twice a week, and every time he came, he had another lie to confess.
At last I told him, “Listen, Haggai, it’s okay to lie. If it gives you pleasure to lie, then lie. Only be sure that your lies promote the general good. Can you do that? Only good lies, okay?”
“I’ll try,” he said.
And soon I saw that he began to mediate his lies, to question them.
“Is this lie going to do good or bad?”
This is what he asked himself each time a lie occurred to him, which was quite often, so he kept himself busy, believe me. All day he was asking himself about the Good and the Bad, and eventually he developed a very keen ethical sense.
Which only goes to show that even out of a compulsion to lie, something of value may be produced.
Well, I don’t mean to make too much of this. Maybe another way might have been found to help Haggai out of his suffering. I don’t know. It was the best I could think to do at the time.
In any case no doubt he has now decided that if he lies about making the soup, this might do me some good. And who can say it doesn’t?
When my Lo Yadua first went to the Samarian settlement three months ago, he intended, he said, to stay for only a short time.
“A week or two, that’s all,” he said, “and I’ll call you every day.”
“It’s dangerous,” I told him. “At your age what do you need with danger?”
Of course I knew he would do as he pleased in this matter but still I had to speak my mind.
Cesare
Lo Yadua went to Samaria for one reason only: Cesare. So you need to know who is Cesare.
Cesare, Cesare Levi, is an Italian, originally from Bologna. Now he is quite old, eighty-eight. For many years he was our master stone-mason. Here at Bet Lev we have the loveliest brick and stone in all of the Negev and all on account of Cesare, who is a great artisan of the old school, with hands such as you can’t find anymore, big calloused hands, with the biggest knots at the joints you ever saw.
In the thirties we had an occultist on the Kibbutz who was versed in palmistry, Chaim Ozersky. This Chaim he told Cesare, “You have the hands of an architectural genius. You should go to university and study, cultivate your gift. With hands like this, Cesare, you could transform the world.”
“And while I’m studying at the university,” said Cesare, “who’ll take care of my family, and who’ll build the kibbutz?”
