The World in Pieces

by Bart Midwood

  Well, I could see I would get nowhere with him, so I didn’t push.

  At dinner Surah talked in a fluttery complimentary way about what she had seen of the kibbutz.

  And Anchel at one point said in a solemn formal tone, “You have all certainly done a very good job here. You should be proud of yourselves.”

  Lo Yadua said practically nothing until the end, when he announced that he would wash the dishes. As he began to clear the table, Surah offered to help.

  “Sit,” he replied. “You’re my guests.”

  This word “guests” had a scraping sound to my ears, something unfriendly and bitter, and as I could see the mother was wounded, I could not help but to feel sorry for her. On the tip of my tongue I had a reproof for my husband, but I kept silent, thinking that this would not be a good idea, to scold him at this moment.

  Instead I made an effort to comfort the mother with an extra friendly feeling in my voice. What exactly I said I can’t remember, and it isn’t important anyway. The main thing here was the effort I was making with the feeling, because this was the thing that kept me in a state of fatigue the whole time Anchel and Surah were in the house.

  The Pleasure of The Gods

  That first night we all went to bed early, and Lo Yadua began to snore as soon as his head hit the pillow; but me, my mind was racing, racing, and I could not fall asleep for a long time, even though I was exhausted and had aches in my whole body like you get from a flu.

  The whole time I lay on my side staring at Lo Yadua’s big back and wondering about my in-laws, and what they might be up to in the guest room. Previously they had hardly ever crossed my mind, except when Lo Yadua got a letter from them, or mentioned them in passing for one reason or another, and at these times I thought of them only in a dispassionate academic sort of way; but now, on their first night in my house, I was obsessed.

  Why am I so worked up? I thought. Sleep, I told myself. You’re tired, exhausted. If you don’t sleep, tomorrow you’ll be miserable.

  For the next day I’d scheduled an afternoon visit to the children’s clinic, a fifteen kilometer drive. Even though I was on a pregnancy leave of absence, I had gotten today a call from Engel, the director of the clinic, to look in on Yitzak, an eight-year-old boy with such a terrible case of asthma every day was a life-and-death crisis.

  “He was asking for you,” said Engel.

  So I thought, well, I’d better go.

  In short, this is what I had to deal with tomorrow. All the same, I continued to lie awake in an obsessive turmoil for more than an hour, maybe two, until, just when I began at last to doze off, I heard a noise, at first just a little sigh, then a rapid knocking, like something on wood, and at once I was awake again, starting with horror.

  I don’t know if it was my own voice (I think I whispered, “Oh, my God!”) or the noise in the guest room, but right away Lo Yadua woke up too.

  “What, what!” he said, and he ran and grabbed his rifle from the shelf by the door.

  This is how he was, a light sleeper, always poised for catastrophe, ready for a fight even when he was snoring.

  “What’s the knocking?” he whispered.

  “From the guest room,” I answered, also whispering.

  Then we heard suddenly a big sigh or groan of some kind of ecstatic pleasure, first from Surah, then Anchel, and here Lo Yadua he stopped his breath, standing as if frozen. Then he put one ear to the wall, and the way he held the rifle now, it scared me. My God, I thought, he’s going to go into their room and kill them.

  I cannot tell you how I knew that he wanted to go into their room and kill them. All I can tell you is that I had the sense he could, and that if he did, he would not have been able to say why. Here you had a moment, a sinister moment, in which somehow such a murder could take place, and then you could write ten books and still not get to the bottom of it.

  “Put the rifle away and come back to bed,” I told him.

  At first he did not respond, but a minute later he blinked his eyes like he was waking from a hypnotic trance, and he put the rifle back on the shelf and lay down again in the bed, pulling the covers up to the chin.

  “You’re all right?” I said.

  He nodded his head but kept silent, and soon the banal ecstasies resounding in the walls diminished and died.

  Public Opinion

  The next morning we were supposed to have breakfast at home, but as soon as I woke up, I said to myself this is a bad idea to sit in a little kitchen with just the four of us and try to make polite conversation after such a night, so I decided to take our visitors to the dining hall.

  “I understand,” said Surah. “You don’t need the extra work to cook for company now. In your condition you need rest. You should let me cook the breakfast.”

  “It’s not that I need rest,” I said. “It’s that everybody here is dying to meet you.”

  In the dining hall such a fuss was made you can’t imagine. Well, this was 1956, just a few months before The Sinai Campaign, and in those days the spirit was something like you don’t see anymore. Here and there among individuals you can still find such a spirit, a fire, a joy in generosity, but in the collective life, no; too much water is now under the bridge, too much blood. Well, what can you expect? Even in the Holy Land a people can lose their innocence. This is Nature.

  Along with much noisy affection the kibbutzniks welcomed Anchel and Surah with many compliments, first on their good looks, and second on their son.

  Compliments on their good looks already they were used to. You could tell this. Not that they took such compliments casually, mind you. No, you could see that every word they were sucking up like vampires. But compliments on their son, this was new. In America, you have to remember, nobody they had to do with had any idea they even had a son, so who there could give compliments, or for that matter even acknowledge his existence?

  Now I want to say something about an awkward piece of business.

  At the breakfast table a few of the kibbutzniks remarked that Anchel and Surah they looked alike.

  And Rubin, who all his life had a reputation for putting a foot in his mouth, said, “You look like a brother and sister.”

  “Many people have said that,” said Anchel at once with a phony smile.

  “Even the same color hair!” persisted Rubin.

  “So what’s the big deal, Rubin?” I said. “You and your wife, you too have the same color hair.”

  “Of course, but we have ordinary brown hair. But this hair that Anchel and Surah have, look at it! It’s jet black! How often do you see such hair? And look at the skin, and the mouth, and the eyes! You see? It’s all the same!”

  You have to understand that Rubin was speaking here not with suspicion or guile, but with a boyish wonder, and it was obvious he saw in this handsome look-alike couple something deep, something maybe like what is suggested by the Adam-and-Eve, or the primal hermaphrodite that you get from Aristophanes in the Symposium.

  The radical longing at the bottom of such ideas, though, was in Rubin unconscious; and given who he was, believe me, unconscious it would remain. If you were to have asked him the basis of his wonder, he would have looked at you as if you were lunatic. To him the basis was self-evident. To him Anchel and Surah were the basis. Period. An objective flesh-and-blood basis, you see, and that’s all there was to it.

  I don’t say Rubin was stupid, just one-sided, from head to toe preoccupied with particulars, and this is why, partly, he was able without the least compunction to be very nosy here, to nag and nag with one question after another about the family history, specially the geographical details (i.e., the birthplace of the parents, then the grandparents, even the great-grandparents) presuming, you see, that since Anchel and Surah looked so alike, they must have some common point in what he supposed were their separate family lines, and that all he needed to discover this point was the name of a village, a city, whatever!

  Now, at first Anchel and Surah they answered calmly, which w
as to me incredible on account of they had to invent on the spot a whole complicated set of facts about a mythical second family, but eventually they began to lose their way and to contradict themselves. A few times I tried to change the subject, but without success. Rubin to this day he doesn’t take in what you say. Like a wall he is. With a mouth.

  Then too there was a crowd. This was after breakfast and everybody had dragged their chairs to where we were sitting and it was a whole big public event. So then I started to regret that I had changed the original plan to have a private breakfast at home. As uncomfortable as it might have been, this was worse.

  You can’t imagine what it was like to be surrounded by fifty crazy kibbutznik socialists in a dining hall in 1956. That world, the whole mentality, is gone now, and I miss it, but in the moment I wished they would drop immediately into a hole in the floor and disappear.

  It was for the sake of Lo Yadua mainly that I wanted Anchel and Surah to succeed with their fairy tale. Not that any of the kibbutzniks would have said anything against him if they were to have discovered the truth. The truth in fact might even have enhanced his status, giving a boost to their already high regard for him, because the idea of something funny and unconventional in the parental configuration always we like in a hero. Think of Moses, Oedipus, the Christ, many others. However, this wasn’t the right moment to speak of such matters.

  Besides, the truth about the parents was transmitted to the kibbutzniks anyway. From the wonder and delight in everybody’s eyes you could see that something marvelous had been potentiated here. Such an excitement there was, and such a lot of questions, I thought they would never stop.

  In time though they did, thank God, and by and by we got into a history lesson, now a proper one, about Lo Yadua’s heroic deeds.

  Something of what Lo Yadua did in the wars and in the general day-to-day defense of the kibbutz I have already told you. This isn’t much, I know, but if you keep in your mind what I told you about the night that Lo Yadua killed the three Arabs that killed Orsino, and you multiply the horrors of this night a hundred times, you’ll have the idea.

  When I was young, I too fought and killed human beings. Two years I served in the Army, and there the killing was obligatory. Also I once shot a saboteur at night by the wall. All this killing is on my hands, but I wouldn’t want to write to you about it. To myself I have written about it, so that I could see what is what and put away illusions, and for me that is already almost too much.

  Now, at first, when Rubin and the others began to tell the stories of Lo Yadua and his brave deeds, he kept quiet, because he was grateful that the topic had been changed. However, soon the hoohah about how he killed this one and how he killed that one began to swell the blood vessels in his head and I could see he might any moment make a scene that he would regret.

  So I myself said something; I don’t remember what, but the idea was: Enough with the war talk.

  Well, you can’t imagine the response I got. What kind of a wife is this, who objects to talk about the brave deeds of a husband? You see? This was the idea they threw at me, that maybe I was envious of my husband.

  But thank God, Lo Yadua intervened.

  “If I’m such a hero,” he said, “you should respect my wife.”

  “Everyone here respects Ila,” said Rubin. “But listen, Yaddie, your parents should know what you did in the war.”

  “If you feel they should know, then tell them, but later, when I’m somewhere else. Such stories they only make me sick.”

  “But why? They bring honor to your name.”

  “What kind of honor is it to kill human beings? Am I some Hector out of a Greek fairy tale?”

  “Maybe even greater than Hector!”

  “Rubin, you’re like a child.”

  “If I’m like a child because I believe in honor, then I pray to God I never become like an adult!”

  “This is one prayer you can be sure that God will answer, believe me.”

  “You see what a son you have?” said Rubin, turning to Anchel and Surah. “So modest is he, that the minute I pay him a compliment, he shuts me up. Well, only a real hero, as the saying goes, will silence the voice of praise.”

  “I never heard of such a saying,” said Lo Yadua.

  “Well, it’s a famous one.”

  “So who was the author?”

  “Who can remember? Maybe a Greek.”

  “I don’t think so. More likely a Litvak.”

  Here came a good-natured laugh at the expense of Rubin, who was a Litvak. The thing with Rubin was that he himself did not feel internally very authoritative, so he was always putting forward these crazy appeals to a purely fictitious higher authority by way of “famous sayings” that he would invent on the spur of the moment to support whatever it was he had to say. Such a comic confusion around the authority issue we all understood instinctively, believe me, but still we kept re-electing him to our highest office, and this maybe can tell you something about the collective attitude toward authority here.

  “Well,” he said, looking at Surah dolefully, “you can see what I have to put up with.”

  “I can see it’s very difficult,” said Surah, “but at the same time, you know, my son has a point.”

  “So you too don’t believe in honor?”

  “I don’t know. I never gave it much thought.”

  “So then what is the point he has?”

  “The point about killing human beings.”

  At this came a hush over everyone. Surah she looked at the faces staring at her; then she lifted her chin importantly.

  “It’s not right to kill people,” she went on. “People everywhere are the same.”

  Here still was the hush. And you could feel now that everybody was trying not to look at Lo Yadua. Even I was trying, but I couldn’t resist a quick glance, in which I saw lifeless eyes, the lips parted and no breath going in and out.

  So then I turned my eyes to Surah again and I said, “You mean that since people, in this case Arabs and Jews, are all the same, they shouldn’t kill each other?”

  “That’s it exactly, Ila,” she said.

  Now, in a talk where there is good will and everyone is trying to make sense, you could take such a statement that is so beside the point and you could maybe put it in its place with a sarcastic question, like, say: “So if people were different from one another, could they kill each other more justifiably?”

  But of course such a talk was not what we were in the middle of here, and the fact is I was stupefied, and I just sat there, gazing at that beautiful face of hers. And not only I was stupefied, but also the other kibbutzniks, all of them, and these were people believe me who were not easily stupefied. These were maybe the most argumentative oral types in the whole creation. This I tell you so that you can have an idea of what a powerful creature was this Surah, who could have such an effect on such people.

  “Well, it’s only my opinion,” she added anxiously, as if she were afraid that she might be swallowed up by the terrible hush, which was now sitting in the room like a wounded animal.

  “I don’t understand,” said Rubin, who was the first to find his tongue. “I mean, what is it, your opinion, exactly?”

  “That there is too much killing,” said Surah.

  “Nobody will argue with this except a madman.”

  “So then, you can see why I would have been happier to hear that Lo Yadua is a peace-maker instead of a warrior. Then he would be a real hero. I mean, in my opinion. And in his opinion too, I think.”

  “To make peace with the Arabs, Missus Brody, this is at the present time impossible. Not only the government has tried, but also many of us here on the kibbutz. And your son he has tried harder than all the rest of us put together.”

  “Then he has to try harder, Mister Rubin.”

  “Forgive me, Missus Brody, but you don’t understand what sort of people we are dealing with. In the daytime they will talk to you, and smile, full of warmth and philosophy, and the
n in the night they will steal into your house and kill your children.”

  “This is your opinion.”

  “No. This is a fact of the life here.”

  “In your opinion this is a fact of the life here. And you should say that, Mister Rubin.”

  “Listen to me, Missus Brody. An opinion is an opinion. And a fact is a fact.”

  “And that too is only an opinion.”

  At this Rubin opened his mouth wide like with astonishment, but also rage, and for a moment I feared he was going to explode with something and embarrass us all, but thank God he caught himself. “Hah!” he said, slapping his knee; then he gave me a sly little wink. “Do you hear this, Ila? Do you hear this lesson in logic I’m getting from your mother-in-law?”

  “Yes, Rubin,” I said. “I hear.”

  “Careful, Ila. Better you should say that in your opinion you hear. Because maybe someone could disagree with you that you hear. Isn’t that right, Missus Brody?”

  “It’s not necessary to say, ‘This is my opinion,’ with every statement,” said Surah, “but only with statements that are big and important.”

  “Listen to me, Surah,” I said, straining against my irritation and speaking in as gentle and friendly a tone as I could manufacture under the circumstances, “I know you mean well by insisting on this business of saying, ‘In my opinion,’ but, really, strictly speaking this is not a useful idea.”

  “Useful to whom?” said Surah, lifting her chin and jutting it out at me.

  “To reasonable people, Surah.”

  “And who is to decide who is reasonable?”

  “This is a question I cannot answer for you.”

  “You see, Mister Rubin? She cannot answer.”

  “I don’t say I can’t answer. I say only that I can’t answer for you.”

  “So for yourself you can answer?”

  “Yes.”

  “So I suppose then that I’m not a reasonable person.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because you say that this idea of mine about opinion won’t be useful to reasonable people.”