1948

by Yoram Kaniuk

  I came to the battles and to death straight from the Palyam’s Course No. 9, where we learned to swim, tie knots, and sail boats. On the course I took part in a grand total of one firing-range session in the sand dunes, and after it—right into the war. After the first massacre at Hulda I knew more about war than my commanders. You see, you’ve got to be a crazy youngster to fight a suicidal war for someone you don’t know and for something about which you haven’t the faintest idea. Only after the war were we to discover, and not always sympathetically, that we had established a state for the dead who would not live in it.

  Three

  One day a man was standing at the door of our apartment on Ben-Yehuda Street. He didn’t ring the doorbell but banged loudly on the door. I looked through the peephole and didn’t see anyone. I strained, and a moment later a man whose face looked squashed appeared in the peephole. I was alarmed and opened the door for him. He stood erect. Beforehand, when I didn’t see him, he had evidently been bending down. He wore a faded blue peaked cap askew on his head. He looked pale. His eyes were lifeless. When he recognized me, his mouth twisted in a kind of anger, but at the same time there was an impish twinkle in his eyes, an impish-gloomy twinkle, like I’d once seen on the face of a boy standing with his hands raised in a film about the Warsaw ghetto. With his wretched impishness he seemed both defeated yet strong. His eyes half closed, and with a sudden movement, as if he were trying to hide beneath the small doormat, he knelt on the floor like a dog.

  Miss Gross the English teacher, who had just finished her second shave of the day, heard the noise. She opened her door, which adjoined ours, and on seeing the man she seemed threatened and shouted, “I told you the Nazis would come!” and as usual when the Nazis came, she quickly hid in the electrical cabinet in the building’s entrance downstairs. Her father had been a lion hunter in Africa for zoos in Germany. He was beaten to death on Kristallnacht, when he had hidden in a big electrical cabinet in a restaurant on Fassane Strasse.

  The man in the doorway turned his head toward her and fixed her with a brief, evil look, and I saw the blood drain from her cheeks. His half-closed eyes followed her as she hurried downstairs, but then she changed her mind and didn’t go down as far as the electrical cabinet but came back up and fled into her apartment to stand on her balcony overlooking the sea and want, again and again, to swim to Berlin.

  The man’s eyes opened fully and he got up from the floor, and with an even more downcast look roughly asked me if I was the sohn of “the bastard.” I said I’m Moshe’s son. He said, That’s what I asked, boy. And Yiddish you surely kennen*. I said I didn’t. He said, The first thing in this land here was to kill the Jews mehr than they were killed there. I said I was sorry I don’t speak Yiddish, and he smiled sweetly and said, You’re not, but tell me, in your traumen* don’t you dream in Yiddish? Because a Jew cannot dream in anything but Yiddish and cannot count in another language. I said I don’t speak Yiddish and I dream in Hebrew and count in Hebrew, and he said, Don’t worry, when you die you’ll die in Yiddish. Every Jew when he dies will die in Yiddish. Hebrew is a language of Arabs masquerading as Jews.

  He continued in his funny accent, Hebrew Ich kennen only a little, I learned in your Moshe’s Tarnopol, and I say “hafeytz” for “want” and you won’t say anything because you say “roytzeh*,” and we’ll see who laughs last or first, but your bastard of a father’s bastard Deutsch I will not speak. And anyway, where is he? I said that he isn’t a bastard, and he said, And how he’s a bastard, and he shouted, Listen, don’t be so froilich*. I replied that I’m not happy, and he said, But despite that, a hendshake from me you won’t get, you sabra* bastard, and go already and tell Moshe I’m here.

  I asked him who he was so I could tell my father, and he shouted, He’ll know who I am. And surely enough, my father heard the commotion and evidently recognized his voice, and he came out of his room and found the man facing him, and they both froze as if struck by lightning. They looked like waxworks in a profound moment that burst from within them, and they began measuring each other up, and the blank-faced man moved toward my father and halted close to him and then moved away momentarily, as if it were a Rina Nikova ballet I’d once seen with my aunt Esti. Then they fell upon each other and began hitting each other. They really struggled soundlessly, and the shouts could be seen but remained silent, although their mouths were moving and their bodies screamed. Then they shifted into Yiddish, and that was the first time I’d heard my father speak Yiddish and the first time I’d seen him hit someone and the first time I’d seen him hug anyone. He didn’t even hug his wife or us, my sister and me.

  My father didn’t even see me. He didn’t glance at me. He looked toward the neighbor’s door and muttered something, and a few moments later they both took a few, almost identical steps back and moved away from each other, and the strange man spat. Then my always well-groomed father, whose clothes were Bohemian, elegant, and handmade by Neumann the tailor, my father who even wore a tie to go to the toilet, that poor dandy, crouched like an animal, took a starched white handkerchief from the pocket of his blue shirt, wiped up the man’s spittle, and afterward carefully refolded the handkerchief and returned it to his pocket. That was my father, who was capable of polishing cakes of soap so they would be cleaner. He drew the man into his room, slamming the door behind them.

  They were closeted in my father’s room for a long time. After a while, raised voices were heard and I heard the man shouting in somewhat odd Hebrew, but it was Hebrew intended for my ears. What, Moshe? You don’t vant your uncircumcised son, the shaygetz fon Eretz Yisrael, your not-only-child to hear? Tell me, what about Yoshka? And what about Bomek? And what about Yetka? And that friend, Nathan, of your brother Dov-Ber, who before he disappeared they said he killed some Cossack? And what about Naftuli the poet of “Bo-ee Tzion ve-Sha’alu Shloma”? And my father asked, What, the one who played for the HaKoah Vienna football team? And the man said, And how he played, and wasn’t there a rose of Sharon? And Hassia, and how is it that you haven’t got some heart, a bissel herz? How Mottele ran away when he went looking for your dear brother in Siberia, and where were you? They search for you in heaven. You’re a bastard, and not because of the Torah because it died there with us when you ran away, but a bastard because of your father, Mordechai, whom you abandoned, Moshe.

  My mother hurried in and asked if the man would like coffee or tea or something cold, and he shouted at her, I don’t vant anything from you, Missus Moshe, go to the devil, I don’t vant cold, or hot, or water, I don’t vant anything.

  My mother stood mesmerized by what she would later describe as an epiphany and didn’t know how to interpret it and say of what. She was not a spoiled girl from a Swiss boardinghouse, she grew up in poverty, and when she was a little girl she came to Palestine on a reeking boat from Odessa, and later was expelled from Tel Aviv to the fields of Ein Ganim near Petach Tikva, and the Turks, who she always referred to as “May their name be erased,” beat her. She saw a lot of wonders. In her Ein Ganim exile she lay in a field of thistles and looked for goats in the nearby Arab village to bring milk to her sick father. When they returned to Tel Aviv, she would sit by the door as he taught young girls Hebrew, which was forbidden by order of the Turks, and barked like a dog when a Turkish policeman approached, and when the girls heard the barking they began singing as if they were attending a singing lesson, which the Turks permitted. They all died: her father, mother, her two brothers, the jackal, her friends, Bograshov the teacher, Brenner the teacher, Nesher the teacher. And in the 1921 riots she tended the charred bodies of Brenner and his friends. My mother knew wars, in 1929 and 1936, and the world war, but facing that man I saw how her mouth pursed, as if she again was her father’s dog, and she left the room, and there were a few moments of silence.

  She went into the kitchen and wept and at the same time heated water for nobody, since my father never drank coffee that she had made, only coffee he made himself in a strange machine he’d brought wi
th him from Germany, and he detested tea because it was too Jewish. The sound of the waves could be heard and they sometimes shouted and sometimes spoke in whispers. And the man said, Moshe, kim aherr, come here and bow to me, bastard of an angel’s son, and I realized that my father had fallen to the floor, which today seems to me an impossibility, but I remember, I remember it well. After two hours the door opened, they both stood there crying, my father, whom I’d never seen cry, and the pale man, whose tears flowed like water from a faucet. They came out of the room, and the man moved closer to me. He didn’t have many teeth, and he shouted, Dust, you, you all are dust, and for no purpose, your father is for no purpose, your mother is for no purpose, you are for no purpose, that kind of Hebrew I do know. How does a nation of Jews become dust? Since when have Jews lived in a country of their own? There will not be a state. Jews are not the Jewish National Fund and not Ben-Gurion. Herzl understood that and so he died outside of Eretz Yisrael, what was he looking for in a country of Jews? He despised Jews like us. And your father, where was he born? He was born in Tarnopol in Galicia, an Austrian only because Emperor Franz Josef’s bastards reached there. And he fought for them and became an officer and wanted to join forces with the German army. And you, who are you? A kind of Arab who doesn’t know what a Jewish language is, and you’ll kiss the tuchess of the Germans here, who this time are dressed up as Arabs, and you’ll bring here all the bones of the Jews to be buried, and you’ll be a cemetery for the dust of dead Jews. You know, mein kind, what kind of a man your grandfather was, and your father doesn’t want me. He’s ashamed of a man like me, but he’s good with Germans. Them he likes. He left us to die in Tarnopol. He dressed up as a German and kissed the tuchess of Germans in Nazi bars in Berlin and played there, and not with me. With me he didn’t play. I’m too Jewish. I, as you say, am of the Diaspora. And then he smiled sweetly and kissed my father on the lips, and my father kissed him back, and all at once he drew away from my father and continued weeping quietly, straightened his cap, and before he left he looked toward my father’s room with all his German books, and said, Your son will die young but he looks the way his handsome grandfather did.

  The man skipped quickly down the stairs and my father watched him go. I was mesmerized by that man. He was the fallen statue of a dead king. He was a dead man walking. He was a crumbling ancient palace. My father went back into his room right away and I heard him playing the Monteverdi opera he loved on his gramophone. I thought about the man for many days and my father tried to ignore me. I finally asked him who the man was, and my father asked, Who? What do you mean, “who”? I asked. The man who was here, who spoke Yiddish to you, whom you kissed, and my father suddenly seemed confused, as if a cloud had entered his head. Who? There was nobody here, he said repeatedly, and looked embarrassed and went into what was then called the water closet, from where I heard choked sobbing.

  I was a youth back then. A sixteen-year-old half man. I’d never seen scenes like that—the most I’d seen was Oedipus Rex directed by Tyrone Guthrie at the Habima National Theatre, while outside the Lehi* people and the British were firing at each other and something was blown up not far away—and I longed for an innocence that was gradually leaking from me, as it was from everybody. The streets began filling up with wretched creatures that resembled the man who’d visited my father, dressed as beggar princes. The city was filled with broken people.

  I started seeking them out, searching for the man I thought was my father’s cousin. They crowded together and spoke in whispers and bought and sold, and one carried a bundle and shouted, Thermometer, thermometer going cheap, and he was told, Who needs a thermometer, and he’d say, Buy it so you won’t need it. I thought, Who is the man who came to our house? I wanted to carry him to the Land of Israel again, to be a hero for his people. I was filled with the awful feeling that I, not he, was human dust. I was to blame because I’d eaten sour cream in the war when I traveled to Gedera, while they died. I remember the teacher Zvi Katan once saying angrily that when his family was murdered in the ghetto, the economy here in Palestine was the best. There was food. There was money. Everybody did business with the British.

  Then I came across a man who cleaved to me. He said in the old Hebrew of translations from many years ago, with its gendarme and posta and piaster, that I looked familiar and that I’d been with him in the DP camp near Frankfurt, and I said I hadn’t. He said that he remembered my eyes well and couldn’t forget because I and his son who had died in that damned place were like two peas in a pod, and how dare I not know him, and that his son was dead? How, when I am he? I told him that it’s not me. I’m just a shitty Palestinian native, a sabra, a good family, my father’s a museum director, when the Jews died he was holding chamber concerts and they played all his Germans: Bach. Beethoven. Quartets. Sonatas. And the man came close to me and embraced me and shouted, Don’t forget your father, mein kind, and suddenly he straightened up and started running, and then, I swear to my loyal readers who have come this far, he flew, or that’s how I recall it, and hovered over the Mugrabi Cinema and touched the roof that started to move and open, and the fat German who sold hot dogs in the square below, who in the meantime has been murdered, shouted, Tell me, who is better, Goethe or Shakespeare, and when I said Goethe’s better, he gave me a hot dog and I fled in great shame.

  I went to the dunes. I wanted to touch them against the fat German who sold hot dogs in Mugrabi Square with his and my father’s Goethe. I wanted to be me, for the sabras, for the Land of Israel citrons we were, for the sweet and prickly sabras that we were created to be, against the ugly and mistaken Diaspora Jews, and against them I wanted sabras, soda pop, and the howling of jackals, and I thought about someone who’d said back then that we’d begged them to come here to save themselves, there was a pro-Jewish high commissioner, and the Germans wanted them out of Europe because they stank and were a wretched race, and there was an office for Jewish immigration in Vienna, with an expert on Jews called Eichmann, and it was possible but they didn’t want to. And when I first heard about the camps I said, That’s good, they’ll learn for the next time, and then got frightened by what I’d said and I cried.

  Like most of us I was a fool and thought that perhaps I don’t know much about my father. How is it that he hasn’t got any family here, except for a sister and one cousin in Safed who runs a small hotel on the mountainside, and there were lots of uncles and aunts and cousins. I went to see his friend Ernst who lived on Yoash Street, where I sat facing one of my father’s bosom friends, and told him about the man who was my father. I knew that Ernst’s wife, Lili, the gentlest of women, Lili, had been my father’s love and he had been hers, and everybody knew that she was the only woman he’d ever loved. I don’t know how I knew that when I was sixteen, but I did. Ernst was married to Lili because of the inferiority complex of my father, Moshe the Ostjude*, who due to his terrible need to respect only failure and out of his love for failed heroes, out of his failure to play the violin like Huberman and out of his demand of himself to be only great and out of the knowledge that he isn’t really great and can’t be and because of his feeling, like so many others, that he isn’t as distinguished as Ernst, who was born rich in Berlin, thought he wasn’t good enough for Lili, who loved him so much—that sweet putz, my father, gave his only love Lili to his beloved friend Ernst.

  Ernst told me what my father, Moshe, had never told me. That he had all these relatives in Tarnopol, and that most of them lived on Baron Hirsch Street, until all of them, sixty men and women, were taken on the same day to a nearby forest and forced to dig a pit, and when they’d finished digging they were driven into it by shooting and were shot again and again in the pit and buried there one on top of the other, and they say that one, the son of Uncle Menashe, survived and came to Palestine via Syria, and the man I’d seen was perhaps that cousin. I felt sadness and shame that my father hadn’t invited the man to live with us and didn’t want to know where he would live. Ernst said that the man was angry wit
h my father for not staying there. For betraying them and not being in the piles of bodies with them.

  A little later I heard from a friend of my mother’s, Ze’ev Shiffman, that the man had started work at the refineries in Haifa, and after a time when the riots began, we heard he’d been killed in an Arab attack on the refineries, and my father said drily, That man you asked about was murdered. He was saved when his family died over there in order to die here in the Land of Israel.

  On the floor below us lived our neighbor Mrs. Kramsky. A few days earlier she had an elderly lady visitor whom I met in the hallway, and when I asked her if she’d like me to switch on the hall lights upstairs, she seemed confused and said, I don’t understand Hebrew, and she asked, Why? I said, Just because. She said, What’s just because, is just because against why? I said, Why’s the opposite of just because. She said, I don’t understand anything here. Our neighbor Mrs. Kramsky liked me, and once I even drew her late husband for her using an old photograph hanging on her wall. I told her that I wanted to know about her elderly visitor. I told her I’d seen a man who thought I was somebody else, that someone had come to see my father, that perhaps he really was a cousin, and that my father had said he wasn’t, and I want to know.

  Mrs. Kramsky smiled. You’re a sabra and you want to know? Very much, I told her. She called to the old lady. The old lady looked at me and asked, Why just because? and smiled toothlessly. Mrs. Kramsky said something to her in Polish and the old lady moved closer to me, touched my face gently, and laughed. It was cold in the room. The old lady sat bent at the window and above her a sudden shaft of sunlight distorted her appearance. Mrs. Kramsky said that the old lady wouldn’t want to talk to me, but she told me herself at great length how the old lady had escaped and how she was in the hands of a man and how she’d pushed wheelbarrows in the snow barefoot, and how they’d wanted to put her to death but they needed her because she knew how to calculate. Her eyes closed, the old lady listened to her history as it was related to me and she began declaiming numbers in German. I knew some German, and she added and subtracted big numbers and said, Ja, ja, Gottenyu gayt schlafen—our God went to sleep—and SS tore off my ear. How whole family killed. How whole town killed. And then she said to Mrs. Kramsky that I wouldn’t understand what she was talking about, and Mrs. Kramsky told her that I would understand, and we sat there until my father came downstairs in his slippers, which back then were called pantofles, and he knocked on the door and said angrily, Don’t talk his ears off with who suffered more.