Don't Ask Me If I Love

by Amos Kollek

  Don’t Ask Me If I Love

  DON’T ASK ME IF I LOVE

  a novel by Amos Kollek

  M Evans

  Lanham • New York • Boulder • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

  M. Evans

  An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

  4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

  http://www.rlpgtrade.com

  10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom

  Distributed by National Book Network

  Copyright © 1971 M. Amos Kollek

  First Rowman & Littlefield paperback edition 2014

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval system without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may qu passages in a review.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available

  ISBN 13: 978-1-59077-368-0 (pbk: alk. paper)

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Design by Paula Wiener

  for Yigal Wilk

  Contents

  Part One: RAM

  Part Two: ASSAF

  Part Three: JOY

  Part One

  RAM

  Chapter One

  I KICKED the door shut behind me. It made a long, dull echo in the big house, and then silence prevailed again. From the pale walls of the large, luxurious hall the paintings stared at me. All Impressionists and all originals. I didn’t look back at them. I crossed the hall and started climbing the stairs, unbuttoning my shirt as I walked. My uniform was all wet with sweat and it clung to my body. The idea of a cold shower made me almost gleeful. The summer was coming to an end, but it didn’t have to be summer to be hot in Israel. Some part of my brain, which didn’t share the obscure, exhausted numb ness of the rest of my mind, remarked coldly that it didn’t actually feel like coming home.

  It had always been the same. Through the weeks in the camp that dragged on endlessly, I would yearn for time off. And when it came, it didn’t seem to mean anything.

  I heard my mother rushing from the living room to the bottom of the stairs. I could even hear her excited, heavy breathing, and in spite of myself I grimaced.

  “Assaf!” she cried.

  “Hi, Mom. How’s life?” I said quietly, over my shoulder.

  I walked into my room and closed the door behind me, without looking back. I was in a bad mood that Friday afternoon. I had been in a bad mood for many days and it made me sick of myself. I had no admiration for Hamlets and didn’t think there was anything impressive about people posing as being complicated, but I couldn’t seem to straighten myself out.

  My family was not a typical one. We were very rich. According to the papers my father was the richest man in the country. Papers may exaggerate somewhat, but anyway you looked at it, he wasn’t doing badly.

  First of all, there was the bank. It belonged almost entirely to him and had branches in the four bigger cities. He started with the bank, but he didn’t stop there. My father never stopped at anything. His will and energy were unlimited and they didn’t let him ever stop going. He didn’t believe in rest; I think he was scared of it.

  During the first few years of the new state, after the bank had been well established, he built two factories for military equipment. In those he put all his money, thought, and effort. They were the only enterprises of that kind in the country, and my father, who was a keen patriot, had foreseen the vital necessity for their existence. He was of the generation that had undergone the terrors of the Nazi regime and he didn’t believe in depending on anyone, or on any nation. He was a self-made man who believed only in self-made men—and in self-made countries. If Israel was to survive it had to be able to support itself and supply its own weapons. Once he made that observation there was nothing else he cared about but seeing it carried out. So he built the factories. They also earned him a lot of money. The government was not blind to any of that. It helped the project to prosper, and Israel in turn was rewarded with something to lean on on a rainy day.

  In 1958 and in 1966 my father won the Israel Prize for the most resourceful and distinguished manufacturer. After the Sinai Campaign in 1956, the papers praised him as one of the main civilian contributors to its success.

  We lived in a three-story house in Talbiyeh, one of the two fanciest quarters in the new city of Jerusalem. It had eleven rooms, and was richly furnished, but it wasn’t extravagant. My father didn’t have to boast of anything. In a way, money didn’t mean much to him, and my mother was simply modest.

  I stepped out of my clothes and into the bathroom off my room. I took a cold shower. It made me feel refreshed and a lot cleaner, but it still didn’t make me feel good. I went back to my room and crawled between the white sheets on my bed. I tried to analyze my state of mind.

  The main thing was that there had been a change. I had never been a happy type, but to a certain extent I got used to it. As far as I could remember, I had always felt guilty and disappointed. In the first eighteen years of my life these feelings had formed an undercurrent which I could accept and live with, but in the last four years they had risen to the surface and it made me restless.

  People around me—both children and grownups—had always hammered into my head how lucky I was. Not every boy had so many toys, not everyone lived in such a fancy house, not everyone could go abroad every year, not everyone had such a celebrated father. Everything, people would explain to me, everything I had came to me easily because of my family. I did not deserve it and it didn’t belong to me. It was just another manifestation of the inequities of the system.

  This, I thought clearly, lying on my back with my eyes closed, was the essential reason for both the guilt and the disappointment. I felt that there was really something wrong with the fact that I had more than others, and I couldn’t really enjoy any of it any more. The last years, especially those in the army, brought with them a shrewder outlook. I still felt guilty and I still felt disappointed, but the reasons had changed. I blamed myself now for wronging myself, not other people. I blamed myself for not doing everything I could to achieve something. You can’t blame yourself for being born a certain person, in a certain position, but you can damn well blame yourself for not doing all you can to make the most of it.

  I was aware that it was bothering me more and more to listen to people telling me how fantastic my father was and how proud I should be of being privileged to be his son. There was just one way out of this, and that was beating him at his own game.

  Maybe it would have been different, I thought dreamily and more relaxed now, if we had been closer to each other. But it was too late. I had to pass too many offices and too many secretaries to reach him.

  As I was falling asleep my thoughts shifted to my mother. For the thousandth time I wondered vaguely how it was possible for two such different people to be married. My mother was small and shy and considerate and mellow. She wasn’t really good looking, but she was efficient and clever. My father was handsome and strong and charming. He could be the swinging star of any social event. He was six feet tall, just like me.

  At half past seven my mother woke me up by knocking softly on my door and told me that dinner was about to be served. I kicked away the sheets and grunted my annoyance. I had a headache and I wasn’t hungry, but attending Friday night dinners was a tradition that even my father kept
.

  I slipped into some clean clothes and went down to the dining room. As I entered, Mom was calling my father to come to the table. She was standing by the two unlit candles with a box of matches in her hand and an expression of everlasting patience on her face. I knew that my father was probably sitting in his study reading the papers, and as the minutes passed by I felt the old familiar annoyance rising in me. Mother was telling me quietly how good it was to see me and how worried she had been. I stuck my hands in my pockets and stared blankly at the wall, trying to decide what the hell I was going to do tonight and not succeeding. Then, my father came in and sat at the head of the long wooden table. He nodded his head at me and smiled briefly. I nodded back, not smiling, and not sitting down. Handsome devil, I thought, shifting my gaze from him to my mother, and hoping my face didn’t reflect my thoughts. He had a jet of black hair, icy blue eyes, and a thinly cut mustache à la Clark Gable. His skin was tanned by his private electric sun. He looked a lot younger than his fifty-five years.

  My mother lit the candles and said the prayer. She wasn’t religious but this was a habit with her. Father yawned and took a bite from a big red apple that was placed in a bowl before him. I remained standing, with my eyes fixed stupidly on the wall in front of me. When she had finished we sat down and started eating. Mom launched her traditional attack.

  “O.K.,” she said to me, “tell us all about what you’ve been doing.”

  I tasted the fish and disliked it immediately.

  “Doing?” I spat a bone on my fork. “Haven’t been doing anything.”

  She eyed me reproachfully. “Come on, Assaf, you know we haven’t seen you for five weeks.”

  My father ate busily, not looking up from his plate.

  I looked back at my mother’s sad face and smiled at her.

  “Missed me?”

  “Oh, Assaf. You know we did.”

  We? I stuffed some potatoes in my mouth so I wouldn’t have to talk. At least my headache was going away.

  “Tell us what you’ve been doing.”

  I shrugged. “We’ve been hanging around the camp. You know how it is.”

  “Anyone killed?” my father asked. He looked at me briskly and then returned to the bones on his plate.

  “Nobody you know.”

  He placed his fork slowly on his plate and then he looked up at me again. “Got any plans?” he asked, searching his mouth with his thumb.

  “Plans?”

  “You are being released in six weeks, aren’t you?”

  That had been my hope and belief. “I’ll probably take it easy for a while,” I said casually.

  “That’s not much of a plan.”

  I could see what he was up to. I could see it coming. Cool hand me. “I’ve had things planned for me the last three years,” I told him flatly. “I am going to see for myself once I’m out.”

  His cold blue eyes were still investigating my face, making observations and writing them down. “Shouldn’t waste time when you are young,” he said placidly. “Those are the best years.”

  “They keep telling me that,” I said. I looked at my watch. It was ten to nine. “Well, I’ve got to go.”

  “You haven’t finished eating yet,” Mom protested. “What about your dessert?”

  “I’m not that hungry.” I got to my feet. “I told Ram I’d pick him up at nine, so—see you.”

  As I was walking toward the door my mother said, “Oh that boy! I could die.”

  “I’ll go and have a look at my papers,” my father said.

  Evenings in Jerusalem are cool, even in the summer. In the whole of Israel it is probably the place with the best climate. I welcomed the cold breeze that brushed my face as I stepped out of the house. I walked to the small garage where my white Triumph was parked and got into it. My father had given it to me as a present for my eighteenth birthday. It was only his time he wasn’t generous with.

  I pulled out slowly and then stepped on the gas and sped away. I loved driving fast. I drove crazily. I loved to hear the engine roaring and the tires screaming, and to feel the wind slap fiercely on my face. My father used to say that I was going to end up killing someone before too long, but he was a nut driver himself. Anyway, I told him, I hoped his money would be good enough to bribe the judge if and when needed. He didn’t react to that.

  Ram had been my best friend for fifteen years. I didn’t have many others. I wasn’t friendly and I could do without the company of people. When I was younger I believed that people couldn’t be after anything else except my father’s money.

  Gradually I developed the belief that most people just weren’t worth my while. I wasn’t going to be an ordinary human being and so I wouldn’t be interested in anyone who just happened to be around.

  With Ram it was different, at least for me. There was nothing usual about him. I idolized him consciously and deliberately.

  He was my age, six feet three inches tall, and very strong. He was also the best-looking guy I’d ever seen, in or outside of the movies. Someitmes it almost hurt, I thought. He was so handsome.

  He had the strong, masculine beauty of a Greek statue. His hair was slightly curly and brown, the same color as his eyes. When he smiled, his teeth sparkled and glinted together with his eyes in the smooth bronze of his face. It was the most disarming smile I had seen on anyone’s face, but Ram rarely used it.

  He had a peculiar quality I often wondered about. He was always serious minded and solemn. A born leader, the center of any group he belonged to and yet never completely there.

  Ram took everything seriously, he never played. He was a good pupil and an outstanding soldier. He had an obsession about the army. I thought I knew the reason for that. His father had been killed in 1952, in a clash with terrorists on the southern border. Ram had been five years old at that time. He told me that the last time his father had been home before his death, he stood and looked at his small son who lay quietly in his bed and said to his wife, “It’s worth our while to fight so his generation can have this country free when they are old enough to understand what it means.”

  After that, he kissed her and went away.

  Ram could not remember any of this, but years later when his mother told him about it he could picture it all in his imagination as if it had always been there, somewhere in the depths of his memory. In a strange way, it filled his mind. He admired the father he hadn’t known and wished to live up to the glorious image he had of him. For Ram the homeland was a sacred cause, the fighting wasn’t over yet—and he had his obligations.

  Ram was a lieutenant in the paratroopers. In the summer of 1965, after we had finished high school together, he was drafted. I went to the United States with my parents. My father had to be there for his work and he persuaded me to come. He fixed it with the Defense Ministry, so that I wouldn’t have to go into the army for a year. He believed that being in America was a necessary part of one’s education.

  “You have to see projects on a scale found only in America in order to really understand how this world is run,” he said to me. “It will broaden your horizons.”

  I let him talk me into it. I let him talk me into it because I wasn’t at all anxious to go into the army. I never enjoyed discipline and the idea of being a small, unimportant part in a huge machine didn’t appeal to me. I went to the States and I regretted it. Stalling for time only meant losing time in the long run.

  I went into the army a year later. After five months of training I broke both legs falling from a rock during a divisional exercise. I was sent to a hospital in Tel Aviv. It was April 1967. A month and a half later all my classmates and friends were either living or dead heroes. The Six Day War had passed me by without my hearing one single shot.

  It was a very bitter pill to swallow but there was nothing I could do about it. Life went on. By the end of 1968 I was a sergeant in a paratroopers’ company that was stationed in the Jordan Valley, not far from the river. Ram, who had signed for an extra year as an officer,
was in the same company. He was the company commander’s second-in-command.

  Being a platoon sergeant made life a lot easier for me. It wasn’t that Ram gave me any special treatment or rights, he just did all the work he could do, even if it wasn’t strictly his job. He had an uneasy feeling about not signing up for still another term. It made him feel disloyal. But even he wanted something other than a soldier’s life. Ram didn’t really like the army. He wanted to study, but with other young men getting killed every day on the Suez Canal or in the Jordan Valley, it just didn’t seem right to him to be on the outside. I spent many hours, during weekends in the camp, trying to prevent him from changing his mind. I pointed out to him that he could always re-enlist if the situation got really tough. It wasn’t an easy job persuading Ram; he liked making his own decisions.

  I had a few other friends, but they meant less to me. Sometimes I wouldn’t see them for months. There was Eitan, who was cynical, and smart, and always mocking, and there was Gad who was cynical, and smart, and always mocking, too. Despite those shared traits, they were not alike. Eitan was a nice guy and Gad was a son of a bitch. At least neither one was boring.

  I zoomed toward Ram’s house through the almost empty streets. The tires screeched at every corner.

  What could one do on vacations except drive like crazy?

  Girls.

  But neither Ram nor I knew anything about that subject. It was quite surprising, actually.

  A good-looker like him and a rich smarty like me. That was really strange, when you came to think of it.

  I drove into a small, narrow alley, and brought the car to a halt. I blew the horn.

  After a few minutes I saw him coming out of the house. He jumped lightly over the gate and then over the car door into the seat beside me. I pulled away.

  We drove around for a while through the main streets of the city and watched the young men walking with their arms around their girl friends and generally having a good time.