by Meir Shalev
“And what if there are three people?” Benjamin asked derisively when I recounted what she had told me.
“And what if there are three people?” I asked Tirzah.
“Tell your brother that figs should be eaten only by couples,” Tirzah said, and she told me that her mother and father trickled arak on their half figs; then, she whispered, they shut the door and ate them in bed, “and after that they giggle.”
“It’s really delicious,” she said. “Sometimes they let me and Gershon taste figs with arak, but only a little. Meshulam says, Arak is arak and kids are kids. So just one such fig with arak, and only on the Sabbath.’”
“Why do you call him Meshulam?”
“Just because. Gershon calls him Father and I call him Meshulam. That’s what Meshulam calls himself Didn’t you ever notice that?”
After that she announced, “And my mother calls him Shulam, and me she calls Tiraleh, and Gershon she calls Geraleh, and she told my father to call you Iraleh. She likes giving names. She even made up the word peepot for a girl’s sex and for a boy’s, too.”
Tirzah swatted the prickly pears with the branch of a pine tree to get rid of their prickles, then climbed a tree like a small and sturdy bear cub and laughed heartily Gershon, on the mend, sat pale and weak on the verandah, and waved to us with Yordad’s color lamp in his hand. “He’s alive, but how he looks,” Meshulam had grumbled. “Preventive measurements I should have taken on that doctor.”
Like Tirzah and me, Gershon had the short, thick body and the flattened fingernails and the thick, bristly hair, but unlike ours, his scalp sported a double crown, two small whorls of hair. Yordad, who had spotted them immediately, told me that with identical twins the crown always spirals in opposite directions and that there are some twins that are so identical that this is the only way to tell them apart.
Years later, when Benjamin’s giant twins were born, I waited for their hair to grow and saw that Yordad had been right. The two are absolutely identical, but the crown of Yariv’s hair spirals clockwise while Yoav’s spirals counterclockwise.
“That’s how my girlfriend knows which of us has come home for the weekend,” Yariv said on one of his last leaves from the army “But Yoav’s girlfriend gets mixed up sometimes, and that’s really nice.”
2
“THAT’S THAT, Mr. Fried,” Yordad said. “Your son needs to exercise and eat well, but he’s healthy There is no need for me to pay any more house calls.”
Meshulam was overcome with emotion and reacted in the manner in which he was accustomed to expressing his emotions: he rushed to the large safe in the cellar and returned with a thick wad of bills in his hand.
“This is for you, Professor Mendelsohn,” he said. “This is for making cured Meshulam’s son for him. I thank you.”
“Mr. Fried, please,” Yordad said, refusing the money and restraining himself from laughing. “You’ve already given me a check and I’ve given you a receipt. That’s quite enough.”
Meshulam was offended. “The check was for the work—the cash is something different altogether. It’s my thanks, and thanks don’t have no receipt. To Meshulam Fried there’s no saying no.”
“Here, I’m quite capable, Mr. Fried,” Yordad said. “You have already paid my fee, so no, I am unable to accept such gifts.”
Meshulam lifted his eyes to Yordad’s face, held his pale, delicate hand in both his own dark, thick ones, and said, “Professor Mendelsohn, today you saved not one but two people: my boy and that doctor, who nearly killed him. You earned a gift from me, whatever you want.”
“If that’s the case,” Yordad said, “I would like a few more figs from your orchard, and perhaps three or four pomegranates — the dark kind. My wife and I are particularly fond of them.”
Meshulam was even more overwhelmed with emotion. He removed a large blue handkerchief from his pocket and said, “I need to cry a little,” a remark we shall all hear again. And after he had cried a little he hung the handkerchief to dry on a branch and spread his hands wide. “Not just fruit, for you, Professor Mendelsohn—a whole tree I’m gonna bring you! Tomorrow morning a tractor and a truck are gonna come to your house. Tell me now which fig tree you want. This one? Maybe this one? Maybe that pomegranate? Whatever you need, just ask. If you need to move a wall in your house or put in a new kitchen, if you got something heavy to move from one place to another, if something in your house breaks down. If some neighbor in your building is making trouble and needs to calm down a little, I got a fighter from Bielski’s partisan battalion who does scaffolding work for me now He can put a nail through a plank in one hit—not with a hammer, with his fist! Just say what you need and Meshulam comes and does it.”
“Truly, no,” Yordad said. “Please Meshulam, there is no need.”
The tears returned to Meshulam’s eyes. A new blue handkerchief was produced from his pocket. “You even need a story told to your kids before bedtime and you and the missus are too tired—Meshulam will come. Right, Gershon? Right, Tirzah? Tell them what beautiful stories we got.”
Once again Yordad said it would not be necessary, but Meshulam was not giving up. “No good for a professor like you to drive around in a little Ford Anglia like that. I’m gonna give you my car—you drive around in that and you can show off to the other docs at Hadassah and to your relations. Anyway, I was gonna change cars in honor of Gershon getting better. I’ll give you my Ford for yours.”
Yordad chuckled. “I don’t have the money to buy gasoline for a car like yours.”
“No need for money with my car. You fill the gas with coupons from Meshulam Fried, Inc. And what’s this you were saying before about not needing to come to visit us anymore?”
“I meant that Gershon is well.”
“So you don’t come as a doctor, you come now as a friend. And Iraleh comes, too,” he said, pointing at me. “Look how nice Tiraleh and him play together. I’m putting already a little something aside for her dowry”
And indeed, Yordad—who in general did not like paying visits — brought me to the Frieds a number of times, and Meshulam brought Tirzah and Gershon to my house, and in spite of Yordad’s protestations, Meshulam would check and examine electrical switches and hinges and faucets in the apartment and the clinic—“This guy’s dripping, we’ll have to give him a new gasket soon”—just like he still does today, with my mother dead and Gershon too, the child Yordad saved, who grew up and was killed in the army, and Yordad himself is old and weak and lives in the ground-floor apartment that was once the clinic. Meshulam renovated it for him: he turned the waiting room into a living room and kitchen, the treatment room into a bedroom. He managed to expunge the smell that every clinic has, but he left the diplomas and certificates and citations on the walls, and moved the nameplate Y. MENDELSOHN, PRIVATE from the upstairs apartment door.
“It’s good like this,” Meshulam told him. “Down here you won’t have to put up with so many rooms and stairs and memories as upstairs. Everything’s small and easy to reach, and you can even go out and sit in the garden.”
He found “good, quiet people who will pay on time and won’t make trouble” and rented them the large flat on the second floor, and at every opportunity he shows up, prepares tea for the two of them, and they sit and chat. Yordad, whose old age has made him more pleasant to be around—“Not all the time,” Benjamin notes, “but at least some of the time, which is very kind of him”—tells Meshulam jokes and lets him win at chess. And when he tires and falls asleep—Yordad dozes off like a child, all at once—Meshulam gets up and scans the apartment once again “to make sure everything in the professor’s house is okay, no breakdowns, no troubles.”
And later he leans for one short and concentrated moment next to the living room wall, where today there stands a pretty chest of drawers in place of the examination table where so many children, including his own son, were examined. He extracts the large blue handkerchief from the depths of his pocket and uses it to wipe his eyes. Sometimes
he removes the handkerchief from his pocket because his eyes are tearing and sometimes his eyes tear because he has removed the handkerchief from his pocket. Either way, Meshulam cries a little and remembers that time when his son was saved from death, and another time when he was not.
3
YORDAD’S HANDS were stable and sure when he took care of his little patients, but for everything else, especially home maintenance, they were terribly clumsy Even the brass nameplates he screwed to the doors of the apartment and the clinic were, according to my mother, crooked, and with every other kind of job, from changing a light bulb to unclogging a drain, he had neither the will nor the time. She did not hesitate to contact Meshulam from time to time to ask for his help, and his workers paid occasional visits to our house. They fixed everything that needed fixing, brought a truckload of earth to the garden, took our Ford Anglia to the garage for repairs.
Only the spring house-painting she kept for herself. Yordad would rush off to the clinic, Benjamin would pack a bag and announce that he was “going to stay with friends,” and I remained with her. Together we would go to the store to purchase whitewash and paintbrushes, together we would drag the paint cans up the stairs —“You’re so strong, Yair, a real ox-rocks!”—and together we would move the furniture and cover it with newspapers and old sheets. She would climb the ladder and begin painting—swiftly her arms moving expansively a kerchief folded over her golden head—and she was so skilled that she could walk the ladder from corner to corner of the room like a clown on stilts.
“Maybe you want to work for me?” Meshulam teased her. Then once, while Yordad was in the clinic and Benjamin was playing outside and I was helping with the painting, he came and sat whispering with her in the kitchen. In spite of my best efforts I was unable to hear a word, but two days later Meshulam said to Yordad, “The big kid and the missus are coming with me for an hour or two to meet Goldie and the kids and to pick a few green almonds from the garden.”
We took the same route we always did, from Beit Hakerem to the entrance to the city; then just a little before the Mekasher bus company garage Meshulam turned right onto Rupin Street, which was then just a narrow road that passed between open, rocky hills. He told my mother that soon he would begin building “something big here, for the government and for the Hebrew University,” and she patted him on the shoulder and said, “Who would have believed that something would come of you, Meshulam? Good for you.”
We made a curving descent into the Valley of the Cross and a curving ascent into the Rehavia neighborhood, but this time we did not continue toward the train station and from there to the Fried home in Arnona. Instead, Meshulam suddenly veered off his usual course, and we entered a neighborhood I had never seen before.
A parade was marching down the street. People were carrying red flags and signs. Meshulam snorted several times; he derided “those good-for-nothing Socialist machers,” and their habit of organizing work holidays whether they were necessary or not. We drove up hills and down until the pavement ended; then we turned right and climbed a dirt road. The large, soft tires of the Thunderbird made a pleasant sound on the gravel. A mound of dirt suddenly scraped the bottom of the car, and Meshulam said, “Don’t worry—this guy isn’t just any old car and Meshulam isn’t just any old driver.”
“We’re not worried,” my mother said. “You’re the best driver in the world.”
A large stone building and another, smaller stone building topped by a bell tower stood at the crest of the hill nearby, both encircled by tall pine trees. We got out of the car and walked around and my mother said a lot of people had been killed there during the war, young people who hadn’t had time to make a child or build a home or plant a tree.
“Or tell a story,” she added. Suddenly a small door in the stone wall opened and a tiny woman, nearly a dwarf, dressed head to toe in black, emerged from the courtyard and poured us water from a bottle dewy with cold.
“Nero … new …” she said, and Meshulam, who had been walking wordlessly behind us the whole time, explained to us that new meant “water” in Greek, and to her he said, “Efharisto” and bowed. The nun returned his bow and reentered the courtyard, closing the door in the stone wall behind her. I was overcome with worry: what would we do now with the glasses?
“That’s all right,” my mother said. “We’ll put them next to the door before we leave.”
“But what if somebody takes them? She’ll think we stole them.”
“Don’t worry, Yair; nobody will take them, so she won’t think we stole them.”
And when we returned home Meshulam removed a small basket of green almonds from the trunk of his car and handed it to my mother. “Here. So you have something to bring home and show”
Chapter Four
1
THAT DAY BEGAN as many others in the Baby’s life, with his eyes opening as always before those of the other children. With his skin feeling the coolness and warmth of the air, so pleasant to the senses in the early morning hours as they chase one another, mixing and separating. With his ears listening to the male pigeons squabbling on the roof, their nails scraping the drainpipes, the hands of the woman in charge of the kibbutz children’s house toiling in the small kitchen. With his nose smelling that the porridge is already cooking in there, the margarine softening, the jam reddening in little dishes. With his heart constricting with images that visited him in his dreams but whose identities he cannot recall on awakening.
The Baby covered his head: a small darkness. The blanket swallowed the sounds. For a kibbutz child there are few moments like these that are solely his. “On a kibbutz, even time is shared collectively,” I was once told by my sister-in-law, Zohar, who grew up in a children’s house “exactly the same.” And lying in ambush behind those few short private moments is everything that is about to take place and cannot be prevented or postponed: the morning cry of “Good morning, children, everyone wake up!” and the parting of the curtains and the tumult of the awakening and the uproar of washing and dressing. And after the meal, the collective departure to the road to wait for the collective ride to the collective schools of the Jordan Valley kibbutzim.
“He was what we called ‘an external,’” I was told years later by an old man from that kibbutz, someone who would have been the Baby’s own age if he had not been killed in battle. “We didn’t pick on him like other externals because he had an aunt and uncle here. But an external is an external. That’s just the way it is.”
“Just like you in your family” Zohar said, chuckling. “You’re kind of an external, too.”
The Baby had a mother and father, but the mother could not bear life in the Land of Israel—not the people, not the heat, not the poverty and not the demands. She left him in the hands of his father and returned to the country of her birth, where she was greeted by the theater and music she loved and had missed, by the language and climate, and by the death that claimed her early, her punishment several years later.
The father married another woman, who kept him apart from his friends and demanded that his son be sent away “You have an older brother on a kibbutz,” she said. “A little old, but a good man. He can take him in. The kibbutz is a good place and the people are good. It will be good for us and good for him.”
And so, surrounded by all that goodness, he was exiled to his new home. He was seven years old, and the backs of his hands — still dimpled like an infant’s —and his dark, chubby cheeks earned him the nickname “the Baby” I know nothing of his feelings at that time, and there is a limit to what I can guess or verify, particularly since everyone from the Baby’s early life is long dead: he himself in the War of Independence, his aunt and uncle in the same year from the same illness in the same old-age home. His father in his bed, next to his third wife, about whom, apart from the fact of her existence, I know absolutely nothing. His mother in a concentration camp, from hunger and cold, pondering both the child she had left behind and that unbearable sun and the possibility that the
entire Second World War had broken out for the sole purpose of paying her back for what she had done to him. And his stepmother in a traffic accident on Gaza Street in Jerusalem: for her punishment, fate brought together rain, a bus, and a motorcycle with a sidecar full of flowers, which ended up scattered on the pavement.
But at that time, all these people were still alive, and the Baby’s aunt and uncle took him in and raised him with love. They were elderly, their only son already married and living on another kibbutz. The stepmother was right: they were good people and enjoyed a certain status on the kibbutz. The aunt was the first woman in the country to head an entire branch of production on a kibbutz—a cowshed of milking cows —and the uncle ran hither and thither on kibbutz movement matters, always returning with a report for the general assembly and “a little something” for his wife and nephew
Visits by his father grew shorter and less frequent, and the Baby began to call his aunt and uncle “Mother” and “Father.” Every afternoon, when he came to visit them in the family apartment, they hugged him and kissed him and told him a story They asked him what he had learned that day at school, and they taught him to stick two cookies together with jam and dip them in tea and to play checkers at the same time. The uncle knew how to imitate the galloping of horses by rapid drumming of his fingertips on the tabletop, and the aunt taught him tongue twisters. When he tried repeating them, the words clogged in his throat and made him laugh.
After that he would ask to leaf through the Album, a French picture book they kept in the cabinet of their bookshelves. He did not understand the words —truth be told, neither did they—but there were beautiful photographs and pictures there of castles and mountains, of butterflies and reptiles, of flowers and crystals and winged creatures, and the uncle thought to himself that they should take care, that this album was just as likely to awaken in the heart of the young reader a welcome passion for learning as it was a dangerous passion for collecting.
