Say Oh,
"Oh"
Now say Ah
"Ah"
You see the "Ah" opens you up to the world, the O shuts you away from it, they lived in cold countries, in the snow, they lived in villages disconnected from the outside world, we were always outside, in the sun, maybe in the salt, but we kept in touch with the Arabs,
"We were murdered everywhere"
That's not true, they were some incidents maybe, but Christians killed Arabs too, and Arabs killed Christians as well, and Catholics killed Protestants, I don’t remember no pogroms, and my father never told me about no pogroms, neither did my grandfather, there might have been some in Agadir, or in Meknes, I'm not saying there wasn't, and I can't really say we felt totally secure, but there is no such thing as total security, I heard they killed someone in Agadir after we won in 1967, and killed five Jews in Rabat or something, but we can now see our Jews killed a few Arabs in Dir Yassin as well, and destroyed quite a few of their villages, there's a difference between religious conflicts and the Polish Anti-Semitism, in Russia, and even in France, it was something completely different, anyway, I'm eighty years old already, so if they want to kill me, they should go ahead and do it, "But you won't get to be buried in Israel, to die in Jerusalem is a great privilege too, as you always said that your ancestors always hoped to be buried in Jerusalem, I will bring your bones to Israel, just like Joseph's bones", do whatever you want when I die, but know that my wish is to be buried here and lay here until the resurrection, this is my wish, I want to be stepped on, I want people to step on the ground I used to step on, "But there are no more Jews here, how will we say Kaddish over your grave, how will we visit your grave", say Kaddish wherever you are at, the soul has no land, it will hear you everywhere, don't worry too much, once a man dies, he is nothing but bones, he can't talk no more, and as you say, he can't praise, but this is my wish. Shmuel was very serious, he lacked a sense of humor, I'm not sure how that happened, what you could definitely say about our family is that everyone of us had a great sense of humor, and maybe he's suppressing it, he didn't even laugh of Yussiko Lankry's stories that get me laughing every time I tell them, he is inside the man he should be, an impossible man of course, like a Chinese who wants his eyes straightened, or a French wanting to learn yoga or something, the words run faster than me, faster than my thoughts, faster than I can type on this computer, the words run and I can't catch them, every word, every name reminds me of something I didn't remember for years, my father, the age of sixteen, the allowance I used to get from him, which was quite a bit, and that was dependent on the justification of what I would spend them on, I needed to make up a lot of stories about buying books or playing chess or going to the Zarzuela in order to cover up money I spent on Billiard, that was considered an inappropriate game for high classes, on candy and cakes, or on less wealthy friends I used to pay for, my father, Moshe, who's name my son carries, Moshe Benzimra, was a very strict man, we were afraid to move while sitting to the dinner table, a strong man, and honest, and every time something didn't seem right and fair he would get up and leave, sometimes even with deals over millions, like the debts of 1929, just like my son Mois, that was his Spanish name, Moisito, his nickname, and Moshe when he came to Israel, "I decided not to go to countries where a man cannot state his opinions fearing he might get killed or put in prison, I came to see you only because this is the city I was born in and because this is where you live", as if you can state your opinions in Paris, they just have different methods of dismissing unpopular opinions, "I totally agree, I didn't say Democracy is the ultimate solution, but at least they don’t arrest me like your king does", he doesn't arrest me, that's enough for me, even western countries kill their opponents, and you're satisfied with not getting killed as well, you're a writer so they leave you alone, because writers over there are not as dangerous to the regime as they are here, Democracy,Democracy,Democracy, I lived here for forty years before I came to the only Democracy in the middle east, and my life here was better, yours too, admit. "yes, but I was only thirteen then, it was clear I can't stay here, study here, develop, it's a city on its way to extinction, what is there to do here, maybe to come to die here, on the Israeli pension, just like you do" with my money, too, "and with your money, that might sound nice, but to develop here, that's not easy", here, and do you find it easy to develop in Israel?... there they treat you like a monkey, and your brother Samuel, look what came out of him, if his Rabbi doesn’t tell him to come here, he won’t leave his Yeshiva, lives on pennies, David needed to pay for his trip here, "you always said, and so did mom, money is not the most important thing, when you have it, then it's not very important, but when you don’t", and in Paris, did you develop, what became of you there, spending two years in Paris, two years in Jerusalem, working so hard so you can publish your book and nobody read it, not in Paris and not in Jerusalem, "yes, you're right, so what, but I did evolve, the readers will come later, it's literature, not a shoe store, not a toy store, you remember the red Mercedes you brought us from the shop down the street" the unbreakable one, the one you and David broke, and that you used to laugh at Mercedes, who has the name of a car, I particularly remember the house that was two floors above us, that you used to rent, and one day Mercedes came in with one of the potential tenants, and stayed there when you left, and then all of us children went in there to play, we left a little rope there, that would pull the lock from a side window and hid it", I really did ask myself what would thieves look for in an empty house, so it was you that went in there.
I told him we will take a taxi and go to the holiday town Restinga, we stopped in Rincon on the way there, a small place in the middle of nowhere where they served excellent Italian ice-cream, the place stayed the same, and you could notice a tear he couldn't stop shed of his eyes, then we went to Restinga, the sea was calm, just like a pool, and a wind coming from the mountains made some sort of waves going into the sea, contrary to nature's way, Moshe saw that and went in straight away, we used to call this Levant, the water was as cold as the water of the northern sea, maybe colder, and clear, almost transparent, Moshe came out, and you could see in his eyes that every sea he swims in is this one, or at least is compared to this one, "it's not the same Mediterranean sea as the one in Tel Aviv, or in Nice, not at all", we went on to Kabyla, another holiday town where we spent several summers at, these two places became expansive holiday destinations for European travelers, especially Spanish and French, than we went to the old sea where I swam with my old-fashioned swimsuit, that looked like one piece swimsuit, the beach is called Rio Martin, do you remember Rio Martin? "I remember you and mom used to pick us up from school at launch breaks, we used to take the sandwiches she made to the beach and then go back to school at half past three or four, the Alliance school" La Alliance, "That in my time was already called Itihad Maroc... and who knew that name anyway, everyone called it La Alianza"
Names to cover things up, the Moroccans wanted to express their independence here so they changed the name of the Alliance Frances, a school that existed even before the French and Spaniards came to Morocco, to a Moroccan name, as if this is what will make them feel free, people always change names, the Polish Jewish who came to Israel to feel like natives, the names of Arab villages, and they even offered David to change his name once, only it was hard to change a name like Benzimra, what's more Hebrew than Benzimra, they wanted him to have a more Israeli name, Maybe Zemer, that would have solved all of our problems, but we would have felt even more detached, with no choice, just like the rest of the Moroccans that changed their names to Hebrew names, detached, and years later they run back to their original names, Sabah, Elmakias, instead of Eyal and Segev, they want to but it's too late, twenty or thirty years have passed with names they didn't own, just so they can be part of society but they know they didn't become part of it, that they will never be able to explain their hearers the meaning of a different sun color, the meaning of different air, different view, of wind
coming from the Mediterranean Sea, yes, I know, Israel is on the Mediterranean as well, but it's wind is different there, only the moon looks fairer in Jerusalem, but it is different too, and Israelis don't look up to the skies anyway, they are afraid that if they won't look straight ahead they might find god, or Jerusalem of above, we, there, we looked to the skies, because if we look straight we see more and more Ashkenazim that can't find their own nose, we see them busy with their petty little businesses, bureaucracies, forms, considering themselves enlightened people, what does a few children getting killed here matter, a couple of hundreds in Lebanon, bombs over Egyptian cities, they're enlightened, the most enlightened, and stupid, as if a country should be enlightened, as if it matters to anyone but themselves, ah... every time I think of them... you get to Israel thinking you found a country of wise people, people like Kissinger, and end up finding such small time politicians, so narrow minded, people that are so wrapped around themselves, you watch the news and you see less foreign news than you do on Moroccan TV, so self-centered, too afraid to look at the world, badly needed to be loved, me, if I was the world, I wouldn’t be able to understand why do they keep looking for my attention, whatever cost, here, Moshe will tell you, "They are running after the Arabs as if they will bring them to salvation, all those writers, they didn't even sign half an agreement, they go begging the Jordanian Writers Association for acceptance, same with the Egyptians for years, and the Saudis, begging to be permitted to talk to them, so insecure, can't wait until they get attention, what is that, the people of the Bible, the Talmud, the Hassidic literature, Kafka and hundreds more writers begging to every writers association, I don’t get it." I don’t either, but I've stopped trying to long ago, I try to understand my son Shmuel who became Orthodox, how does a man that came from the Mediterranean, from an Arab country, to a Mediterranean country, start dressing and acting as if he grew up in Poland, maybe it's a resurrection thing, or some kind of magic trick, I don’t get it, and he is a good man, I love him very much, and I feel good when he is around, maybe even more than with Moshe, who is distant sometimes, or David that barely share his thoughts, always answers yes, or no, mostly yes, he hardly never speak, they are all wonderful and I love them all, but Samuelito, he gets mad when I call him Samuelito, maybe I should call him Shmulses, or Shmulik... all the houses I owned, the buildings, I walk around them, in the wide courts, I probably owned sixty apartments, which I used to let, that was how I made my living, more than with my businesses, the houses were inherited to me by my father, some from my uncles, and other relatives, some of the buildings were owned by me and some of my cousins, and I also had a field in Bai’t Vagan in Jerusalem that my grandfather bought, and a cousin in Israel insisted on selling it in 1970, how much would it be worth today, and what a shame my father didn't invest all his money in real-estate in Israel and not in this wiped out city, I tell these things for the sake of telling, but these things don't matter anymore, it's hard to describe how years affect people, what can years change in someone, like a stamp that fades out over the years up to a point you can't recognize any of its original text, and everyone can imagine what was written on it the way they want, I went to see my dad's big warehouse, it's neglected, there is no industry here whatsoever, only poverty, just like in Spain after the Jews left, they come and hurry things, moving everything, and when they leave nothing moves, to think that Tetouan was once a vivid center of trades, where people could have made millions of dollars, like my father in law David Sananes, his warehouse and its name "Almacenes Sananes" still exist, a warehouse for building materials, there were times when money kept pouring in there, and when my wife that used to help him with the bookkeeping, got paid by hand, he used to open the safe, grab a pile of notes, and hand them to her, he was a wailing wall for all those in need too, and nobody left there without remedy to his financial aches, my mother in law who was actually my distant cousin too, was a hard lady, she saved as much money as she could, but he couldn't stop giving, this need to give and help carried on with the majority of his eight sons, the need to give, my wife used to throw money away, she was obsessed with getting rid of it, spend it, and just like the way it works with money, it finally ran out, the money from the houses I sold, sometimes I think that what happened here was an extension of the Spanish golden age, a great culture was present here, a culture that included Jews, Muslims and Christians, this time it was the Spanish Christians that ruled, but they didn't really rule, the necessity of trading together, living together, got them closer to one another, the Jews were not isolated in separated neighborhoods, since the day they left the Juderia, although there were more Christians than Muslims around, but there were Muslims all right, there, my next door neighbor, Ibrahim, the butcher, he was a very funny man, with bad temper, every time he was fighting with his wife, well, maybe not every time, but twice a year at least, he would simply throw her out, he used to shout at her in crooked Spanish "Corta La Papela" which means "I'm tearing the papers", and then tear the Ktuba, but he probably loved her, because two weeks or a month later he would get back with her and they would marry, they did it at least six times while they were my tenants, he bought the apartment from me before I left, but he left too, probably to Casablanca or Rabat, that's where the rest of the money this country has to give is, we had culture here, we had life, we had a Jewish community, pluralist community, we had everything and there's nothing, who's to blame? The colonialists, the Arabs that never fix anything broken, the monarchist regime that learned a lot from the European Fascism, especially about how to oppress a whole nation, the rich that won't upgrade the education of the poor, as this is a wonderful country, with beaches, with wild nature, with treasures, with agriculture, good climate, so why isn't it like France, why aren't people willing to die for Democracy here, or for their own future, as the French did, or like the Russian revolutions, or maybe they do, just that in the technological means of today, it is much harder to organize a rebellion against a tyrant regime system, I don't know why I write this, maybe it's convenient to be poor, who said money brings happiness, all those boys that gather around outside the hotels in Tangier, and around the Taxis and the tourists, they look much happier to me than those covered up boys in London or in Paris, if you see them at all, because you don’t get to see kids in London and Paris, no babies and no pregnant ladies, I spent a whole month in Paris once and only after twenty one days, next to the Concord, on Sunday, I saw a mother with two kids, and suddenly realized how rare this sight was, that sight that I got so used to see here and in Israel, of kids, of strollers, of babies, was missing, where is life, the next generation, maybe they don’t need it, the Europeans, they want everything for themselves and leave nothing behind, maybe this progress is nothing but a charade, matter keeps you in need for more and more matter, this sounds more like Moshe's letter, having children has a big effect on us, he sometimes reminds me of a quote by Bernard Show I used to say "sons fathers to fathers", I see him and I think of him when he was a boy, always looking for something, the shoes, the glasses, and that always reminds me of Marcelo Mastroianni saying "when they are little, we see them as adults and when they become adults we see them as little children", especially in this house, they are the running kids, David that keeps hitting his head, bumping into everything, the kid we had to take to the hospital three or four times, and Moshe was always looking for something, or having an asthma attack, at night, right here, with his mom next to him, fearing he might suffocate, for two to three hours, then falling asleep, or Mercedes, that used to get mad when I sang the songs I used to sing to her to Moshe or David, because they were her songs, her private songs, songs that belonged to her and no other, maybe she always felt like she was the eldest and that everything was taken away from her, so she wanted to keep her songs to herself at least, keep her dad to herself, for her mom went straight to the boys, the younger ones, and the baby girl was some kind of a mistake on the way to having a baby boy, later my wife will become the first feminist here, when s
he starts working, with her dad though, and only once a week, but that was revolutionary in 1960, then she settled in Israel beautifully, better than I did, maybe society there suited her better, I go back and think about my kids, my grandchildren, and ask myself, what will they know, what will they pass on from this wonderful past, where does this past go after I forget it, nowhere, to the grave, what will my grandchildren remember, my eldest granddaughter used to tell me that she dreamt about my housesometimes, she imagined it really weird, and as for me, anything other than my house seems weird, as this is not just a house, it's the house my father built, day by day, it took more than two years to finish, I remember him coming home and saying we will soon move to Ensanche, and leave the small home in the Juderia, move to the big city, move to the rich area, I was five then, is this my first memory? No, my first memory is from before I was born, it is the cholera plague that wiped out more than half of the city's population, six years before I was born, in 1911, my memory is of people going to the cemeteries, skinny, knowing they are about to die, and digging their own graves so they will be buried, rich and poor, because there was no one around to bury them, my father lost two brothers in those years, and hence the story about the scream herd from my grandfather's room, the one he didn’t enter for years, I can see these things in my own eyes, later, when I was two, I remember my dad coming back from the room my mom had a miscarriage in, something terrible happened, at least she's OK, said my father, with no hair left on his head, and I don't have a brother, a scene that will repeat itself eight more times, I don’t have a brother, everybody else has a brother and I don't have one, but my mom is still alive, maybe I'll get a brother next year, like for the next year in Jerusalem, but I didn't have a brother, my mom had miscarriages and they were the ones that subdued her, I'm sure about that, because all of her sisters outlived the age of eighty five, and she was the only one that died when she was only sixty two, and I wasn’t allowed to enter the room and see her back then, I just knew something terrible happened, there were maids, and a servant, and the midwife, and the doctor, the doctor is the man that always shows up in terrible moments, years later he will come to tell me that my son is sick and there is no way to save him, years later he will come to tell me about my wife's death, my son's death, my father's death, same doctor, same face, same understanding look, but no one can understand his fellow man, how can one understand other people when he can't even understand his own sons, his offspring, he just can't, I remember "Yagdil Torah" after that, that was the kindergarten we used to go to before the Alliance, from age three to five, endlessly reciting phrases, that’s where I learned my first letters, Hebrew letters, before Spanish and before French, the incomprehensible Hebrew, that is endlessly recited in the synagogue, and then years later in Israel understand it's meaning and watching the letters lose their charm, because the letters were made of fire here, each and every letter had an endless meaning I gave it over the years, it was fire in gold, but ever since I understood the words of the prayers, the letters became sand, sea sand, and that sand would go in my eyes and prevent me from reading them, preventing me from seeing their magic, there were some phrases I knew and would recite with love, I remember "many are the thoughts in one's heart and the word of the lord will rise", I used to quote this phrase in Hebrew and then explain it in Spanish, full of pride, of knowing some phrases from the bible and understanding them, "many are the thoughts", maybe the motto of my life, how much time did I spend thinking and dreaming and I eventually became a victim of circumstances, I learned to accept the notion that I'm an only child, and my lack of ability to leave my parents, even when I was offered a position in the foreign ministry in Madrid, by someone I met in a bar here and was charmed with my analytic skills, I couldn’t go, my mom wept about her misfortune, about her only child, about her miscarriages, she mentioned my grandfather who used to go to Brazil and come back, my father then told me about his trip he was supposed to take to the US, the one that didn't happen, after he was offered partnership in "Black Blacker" in its early days, and he stood there with his suitcases next to the door, when his mom and wife started crying, even if the plan was that they will join him after a six months trial period, but then places were very distant, California was the moon, a lot of thoughts had passed through my mind about how rich I could have been today if I accepted the offers I was given, if my dad would have moved to the US, or to Holland, who knows, I thought about the wealth I could have had, and I used to regret the big miss, and today, today all of this seems so irrelevant, maybe what I needed was to stay here, thinking about the things I didn't do was just homesickness, just like my brothers in law that got so rich in Madrid took so much pride with their new money just to cover up the longing for those amazing mountains outside my window, for the houses and corridors they ran in with their brothers, for the house where their children were born, for the streets they took their first walk with the love of their lives, for the streets where they watched their eldest take his first steps, for the place where they buried their father, can you cover all that with money, with fancy houses, with swimming pools and tennis courts, who can cover up these kind of memories, what can cover up these kind of memories, they spread all over, in Spain, in Madrid and in Barcelona, in Malaga, in nearby Ceuta, they moved to Paris, Marseille and Nice, to Caracas, to NY, they went to Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Netanya and Ashdod, but just mentioning the word Tetouan made them react in a strange way, some reacted like they were dismissing their past, some reacted like they were in mourning, some reacted like they remembered wonderful things, wondrous secrets no one knows, some as if remembered their great poverty here and the simplicity of life, some as if remembered their wealth. That was an unforgettable placefor all of them, a look that will never stop staring at them for the rest of their lives, a mother's look, a grandmother's look, a look of a daughter or a friend they left here, a look of understanding and compassion, a look of a never-ending fullness. But don't get me wrong, my grandson who might be reading this now, don’t get me wrong, life here wasn't easy, relationships here didn't lack tension, there were wars too, especially the Spanish Civil War that was very present here, the World War and the Moroccan Liberation War, there was constant fear that the king will die and we will all be executed, we feared that the Spaniards will do the same things they did before, there was fear, we didn’t talk about it a lot and it wasn’t always present, but there was a shadow of exile with every step we made, all this fear could not overtake the unity and the feeling of belonging we had, the belonging to the Jewish people, but also to the new Spaniards who came and whose language we learned very fast, at start they used to laugh of our Ladino, and we used to tell them it is Cervantes's Spanish, but soon enough we started speaking better Spanish than they did, wanting to prove our skillfulness, and it wasn't very difficult to change from Ladino to Castellan, they sometimes laughed about the Andalucías, and their Spanish, and surely about all the South Americans, who don't even speak Spanish the way they see it, we felt a belonging to them, like a distant uncle that came to visit, there was also some kind of a sign language we knew, even with the four hundred years of disconnection, as I presume that at least twenty percent of the Spaniards who came were descendants of Marranos, if we assume that ten to twenty percent of the population in Spain before the expulsion was Jewish, and that most of them converted at one stage or another, lately, whenever I go to Spain and tell people I'm from Israel, they all try to prove that their father or grandfather was called The Jew in their village, they show their noses as proof, and they consider it very convincing, and I believe many of them are right, but it's funny they take pride in that, one day will come and a million or two Spanish people will convert to Judaism, I find it very likely, because even five hundred years can't erase one's Jewish roots, this reminds me of our Jews in Israel, their will to be the same as everybody, their wish to persuade everyone that this is where the solution to Judaism lays, to stop being Jews and start being Israelis, as if this is even possible, as i
f hundreds of years will be enough for it to happen, you may convert to Christianity, or to Islam, and then maybe grandchildren will forget, like it happened throughout the history, but once you say the word Jew, somehow it will come back at you like a boomerang, like Trotsky's great grandson that converted to Judaism and moved to Kiryat-Arba, or the thousands of assimilators whose grandchildren came to the Yeshivas, but even this Yeshiva Judaism as well as Samuel's Judaism, they too share the idea that being Jewish is the complete opposite of belonging to the world, one puts the wall on one side and the other puts it on the other side, like the Jewish German I once taught Spanish for two years here and couldn’t stop feeling German, each and every one is a branch that belongs to a tree with no chance of escaping it, I always asked myself what does the man is the tree of the field mean, a real tree of the field, it doesn’t say that he is similar to the tree of the field, a man is a tree and a tree can't really move from where it's at without hurting itself, and still, I don't have an answer for the man being the tree of the field, but the Jews in Israel were not the same as the Jews here, as much as I tried to find resemblance between them, it's just that there are no more Jews here, they are everywhere but here, homesick and looking for their place in the field in fields their tree can't grow in, or might grow beautiful fruits but with no taste, a place where the land is fertile for other trees only, they wander around the world and the world wanders with them but they are far away from the land.
Keys to Tetouan Page 7
