by Nava Semel
The trees in the movies looked very tall. It was hard to believe that a person could climb them. Imri laughed and said that what I saw wasn’t what was really there. If I had known the word then, I would have said it was a “fictitious” jungle. Cardboard trees, paper leaves, and Johnny Weissmuller used a ladder to get to the top, just the way I did, only they didn’t film that. An old man sitting behind us scolded Imri, telling him to be quiet. I was jealous of you, Imri. You’d already seen lots of movies in your life. Too bad you never had the time to tell me about all of them.
It was raining in the movie, and the large drops sounded like drumbeats. But even so, I was completely dry, waiting for the downpour to end, the way we were waiting for Imri now. I sat there calmly, even at the most suspenseful moments of the movie, because I knew that soon, in a minute, an hour, maybe more—they would overcome all the obstacles. In the dark, it seemed possible to move time around. Except that sometimes, I was sorry I couldn’t get inside the head of the person who made the movie to really find out what would happen. Imri said I was in for a few surprises. Even if you plan every little thing, nothing happens they way you want it to.
That kid. That kid. We heard whispering behind us. A few other angry people had joined the old man. “Take the kid out!” The usher bent down to us and asked, “Is that your child?”
Imri said yes, and took my hand.
Johnny Weissmuller roared, and I roared with him.
The Rabbi
Man must prepare for the coming of the Messiah by giving birth to all the souls that were meant to be born. Those who are not fruitful and do not multiply delay the coming of the Messiah. I will proclaim that publicly in our synagogue, Miriam, for even after the Bar Kokhba uprising, the Jews of Eretz Israel were required to strictly observe the commandment to multiply and be fruitful in order to increase their numbers. This is all the more necessary in this time of the second return to Zion.
If the world was created by the Almighty, may His name be blessed, then nothing that has been created is ugly or worthless. Adam and Eve were not ashamed of their nakedness, because their reproductive organs were like eyes or hands, parts of their body.
The mating between Anna and Imri was not a mockery. If they were married in the presence of witnesses, their marriage is sanctified in all respects, and it can be nullified only by a formal divorce. He is divorced and she is divorced. There is nothing to be done about it, and whatever they did, if they did, was permitted by God, may His name be blessed, for only a short period of time.
Our mentor, Rabbi Avraham Itzhak Kook wisely reminded us that we are just as much flesh as we are holy spirit. Man is forbidden to be alone, and I, Miriam, am not Ben-Azai, that most well-known bachelor in the Talmud. His friends attacked him for preaching the need to have offspring, while he himself remained an ascetic. He countered their attack by saying, “And what can I do if my soul desires the Torah?”
My soul desires the Torah, but I also wish to fulfill the commandment. Come, Miriam, let us both follow the wisdom of Rabbi Kook, for the weakened soul will be illuminated by the power of the sanctified flesh.
Chapter 23
“The dog is staying home,” Aunt Miriam declared firmly. Johnny Weissmuller stared at her with his moist eyes, but she didn’t back down.
I tried to console him. An emergency meeting at the village committee house would be very frustrating for a dog. Everyone is tense and excited and carries on about the common enemy, and you, Johnny, will want to attack him, only to find that the enemy is somewhere else.
Aunt Miriam said to me, “When will you learn that dogs do not understand what you say to them?” and I muttered into Johnny’s fur, how does my aunt know that dead people understand better?
I still made an effort to explain to him that the meeting of the elected officials of the Hebrew community had declared it a legal holiday for everyone in protest against the cutback in the number of immigrants. That obviously had nothing to do with him, because dogs never change their habits and would never be new immigrants, but something else happened that is bothering me, Johnny, I whispered to him. Smuggled guns were found in a shipment of barrels of cement that arrived in Jaffa, and members of the Arab delegation were demanding that the English step up their searches.
It was really was a state of emergency, Johnny. How lucky you are that you don’t dream. Last night, Zionka had a nightmare that woke her up. She saw herself being killed instead of the Jewish sergeant Moshe Rosenfeld from Kibbutz Ein Harod, who was shot by the gang of Arab raiders, called the Az a-Din el-Kasam. Zionka refused to go to the meeting, and nothing I said about a nightmare being only a nightmare helped.
At first, Aunt Miriam had been surprised that I was willing to go with her and Anna, but she didn’t hide how happy she was, because she thought it was a sign that I was starting to be “fixed.” That’s what Anna told me.
Fixing things, Johnny. How can you fix a torn film? I don’t know how to paste it together. It happened twice in the Beit Ha’Am. Most of the people in the audience gave up the second time and got their money back. Imri wanted to leave too, but I insisted we stay, and after a short break, they really did start to show the movie again. To this day, I’m not sure if a scene wasn’t missing. I’ll have to see the movie again, Johnny, and not only for that reason.
* * *
In the middle of the meeting, when the committee chairman slammed his fist down on the table, his face red with excitement, and announced the steps that had to be taken, because “They shall not prevail,” I left the hall and tiptoed through the towards the chairman’s room, where the telephone was. A real telephone, a telephone I had never dialed, and already, the whole conversation was running through my mind.
“The Bristol Garden Guest House?”
I would ask them to call Miss Tonka Greenbaum to the telephone. She was staying there, a new immigrant from Poland. You couldn’t miss her. She was wearing the latest fashions from Paris.
Who is calling?
Her “fictitious” brother-in-law.
And I would tell her that she had to go away and leave us alone. No one had taken the marriage seriously. Listen, Tonka Greenbaum, sometimes things happen backwards in life. Sometimes a couple that really intended to get married discovers after the ceremony that the marriage was “fictitious.”
And I had another argument to convince her. If marriage was such a great thing, why didn’t the Almighty, may His name be blessed, create a mate for himself out of His rib? What else could I say to her that would convince her to divorce Imri? Believe me, Tonka Greenbaum, you’ll find better men than Imri in Eretz Israel. Taller, better looking men, who know how to dance the tango and who go to the movies not only as a favor to their younger brothers. You have no idea how much I had to beg him to take me. Meir, the charming butcher, could be an ideal husband for you.
The door to the committee chairman’s room was open. The telephone was beckoning to me. It was exactly the way I imagined it. Its dial was gleaming, and silvery numbers completed the picture. I was so excited. I pulled a Players I’d stolen from Imri out of my pocket and pushed it between my dry lips. The old tobacco was falling out of it, but the cigarette made me feel stronger. Imri said he liked to see movies alone. He dragged along behind me to Tel Aviv last summer against his will. Only because Aunt Miriam ordered him to, and he always obeyed Aunt Miriam’s orders. He also said he got the greatest kick out of sneaking into a movie theater. Why pay if you can get it free? What could I offer you in exchange for a divorce, Tonka Greenbaum? A Jewish National Fund blue box full of coins, and a dog, that was all I owned in the world. And I would never give away Johnny Weissmuller.
I picked up the receiver, heard a sharp sound, and then the operator asked what number I wanted to call. I opened my mouth and the cigarette fell onto the floor. This was no tin can on the end of a string connecting only Zionka and me. I could talk to the whole world from this telephone. “Hello, hello, Miss Operator, do you know how to call Johnny Weissmull
er in Hollywood?”
“Johnny Weissmuller? You idiot, don’t you know that movies are pure lies?”
That wasn’t the voice of the operator. Herzl Fleischer was standing behind me, laughing. He had followed me. Excited voices were coming from the hall. The voting had started. Herzl Fleischer knocked the receiver out of my hand. Wrapped in the wire, it fell to the floor, the operator’s voice coming out of it, irritable or frustrated,
“Hello, hello.”
Herzl Fleischer punched me in the face. I touched my cheek, and my fingers were covered in blood.
“I’ll tell everyone,” Herzl yelled, “and when they expel you, Zionka will be mine.”
Chapter 24
Darkness again. Something is wrong with the movie. The hallway filled with the sound of people walking and I knew the emergency meeting was over. I managed to put the receiver back in its cradle and run outside. Herzl Fleischer had disappeared.
I grabbed the matchbox, stolen with Imri’s Players, lit the cigarette, inhaled the smoke mixed with blood and choked. Two guys were waiting for me at the back of the committee house. I recognized them immediately. They were the ones from the van. Although I didn’t like them and didn’t know their names, I walked towards them because I hoped they had some news from Imri. Was Lutsk close to the city of Radom, where they made the guns? I didn’t dare ask Anna.
The tall one pointed to me and said, “You should do something for the sake of the homeland too.”
The homeland demanded too much, I thought, saying, “ I’m only twelve and a half, and you can’t get married at this age.”
The short one burst out laughing. “A smart kid, a real beekeeper. He already smokes cigarettes, and now he wants to get a taste of women. Are you interested in airplanes too? We want you to sniff around the English base. No one’ll suspect you. After all, you don’t even know how to read and write.”
In the distance, I saw Zionka walking towards the committee house. Soon, the people would be coming out and she would disappear in the crowd. I wanted to run to her, but the tall guy blocked the way.
“Bees lose their way. You can say you got lost chasing after Hawkers. You know how to count, don’t you, or do you have a problem with that too?”
I stopped trying to get past them.
“The British have storerooms full of weapons. You report to us when the sentries change shifts at the gate, and how many military policemen walk around the base at night.”
The tall one bent down to me. I saw Zionka walking along the path and Herzl Fleischer walking towards her. “Ask him,” I pointed to Herzl Fleischer, “He’d be happy to do something for the sake of something.”
The tall one said to his friend, “The kid’s not as innocent as he looks.” And then he said to me, “Do you know why your brother goes to Europe?”
“I don’t give away secrets.”
The short one tapped the tall one on the arm. “A model of loyalty, a tough guy with principles.” He was making fun of me. He was using Mohammed’s fancy words, but I felt that he meant just the opposite.
Herzl Fleischer put his arm around Zionka’s shoulders. My cheek, where he had punched it, was swelling up. I pressed all my fingers up against the pain. The blood had clotted. Zionka would tell him about her nightmare and he would promise to protect her. There was a huge collection of guns from all periods of history in his house.
The tall guy wanted to leave. “I told you the boy wasn’t the right person,” he explained to his friend. “They say in the village that he’s wild and lazy. He can’t learn anything. He can’t be trusted.”
Zionka and Herzl Fleischer looked like two dots disappearing in the distance. I couldn’t see whether she had put her arm around his shoulders.
The short guy wouldn’t give up. He lowered his face to my ear and whispered, “We’ll talk to your teacher about not keeping you down a grade. It’ll be worth your while. Your brother won’t have to travel any more. We’ll fill our storerooms with weapons. Do it for his sake and not for the sake of the homeland.”
I wanted to yell that the homeland was a joke. I’ll try really hard. I’ll write the sentence a hundred times, without Zionka’s help, until my hand aches.
Even though I ran after Zionka and Herzl Fleischer, I didn’t catch up to them. They were too fast. The kids said he would skip a grade at the end of the year. I sat on the ground. The cigarette fell apart before I could smoke it to the end. Imri wanted to smoke in the movies, but the usher wouldn’t let him. When I asked Anna to tell me about the movies in Poland, she argued with me. She said she preferred books, and tried to convince me that what the eye doesn’t see is a thousand times more powerful. In a book, Anna said, you can even turn yourself into an animal. A dog, perhaps. And your Tarzan, she said, could be tall or short, with black curly hair like Imri’s, or golden hair like Meir the butcher’s, and you could even make the roar so loud in your mind that it would be deafening.
Anna hadn’t see Tarzan. She only knew Shirley Temple, the little girl who danced and sang, and the dog Rin Tin Tin, and the western movies where the white men fought the Indians and the cowboys shot each other in gunfights. Even though Anna didn’t like those kinds of movies, I thought I would really enjoy them.
For whose sake did Johnny Weissmuller do what he did? I had a feeling that if he roared for anyone’s sake, then it had to be the person watching the movie. And maybe it was for me.
Zionka, I yelled, wait for me, but the path was empty.
Zionka’s Mother
As his teacher, you should have him sent to an institution. That’s your duty as an educator. It’s a hard thing to do, but there is no choice. You have to remove the plague before it afflicts us all.
Now that his older brother is in Europe on a mission for the homeland and we don’t know whether he’ll come back, now is the opportunity to get rid of that boy.
I don’t blame anyone, not even poor Miriam who did everything in her power to teach him properly. Who would have thought she’d waste her life that way.
The boy is hopeless, I’m telling you. Socializes with Englishmen and Arabs, and he’ll bring disaster down on our heads. He bewitches my Zionka with his pranks. He whispers buttery words from the other side of that string he stretched between our windows.
My husband disagrees with me. He’s naive enough to think the boy will surprise us all yet. He only plays pranks so others will feel sorry for him, but I’ve been watching him from the day he was born and his mother died, and I know he’s a lost case.
No one doubts your intelligence. But if you don’t do something soon, I won’t hesitate to talk to the principal, and I’ll even bang on the committee chairman’s desk, because there is no place in our community for that little devil.
And in the meantime, separate him from the others, sit him on the left side of the classroom, far from my Zionka. If you want my advice, it would be better if you sat Herzl Fleischer next to her. He’s such a talented boy, and we are all amazed at what a gifted collector he is. Someday, he’ll be a great leader.
The boy must leave the village. I shudder at the thought that my only daughter might some day have such an illiterate, ignorant husband.
Chapter 25
One morning, when Anna was sweeping and raking dry leaves that had piled up in our yard over the winter, the photographer who took pictures in all the villages of the area arrived, leading an old horse carrying a huge camera on its back. Someone had sent him, the photographer wouldn’t say who. He’d heard there was a young, recently married couple here. He was offering a family picture at a special price, boasting that only he included second and third cousins in his frame, because his camera has a wide lens, the most modern lens there was, like a movie camera. Even neighbors, or “family friends” might find themselves in the picture.
Anna offered the photographer a deal. He could photograph her whole family, which included her mother and father, her little sister, all her sisters- and brothers-in-law and nieces and nephews, and she
explained who was related to whom, a long, complicated list. The photographer’s eye glittered and his nose quivered, because he smelled a fat fee. Anna didn’t leave out a single member of her tribe. She just neglected to mention a small detail—they were all in Poland.
In exchange for letting him take this family picture with his modern camera, she asked the photographer to lend her his scrawny horse for one day. That was how I found out, to my surprise, that Anna was a really good rider.
“A horse,” I asked, puzzled. “What do you need a horse for?” And I started suspecting that lonely people, like Aunt Miriam, looked for strange things to occupy their time.
Without a second thought, the photographer shook her hand, and the deal was made. Anna patted the horse, helped me up, and jumped onto its back behind me.
“You said to the Englishman ...”
“What I said to the Englishman doesn’t matter.” She slapped the horse’s back and galloped forward.
We rode to Mohammed’s village to buy new queen bees. That kind of visit to his village always meant the beginning of spring. Anna said it was the last duty she had to fulfill. I didn’t want to ruin her illusion by telling her that the duties have to be fulfilled every day all over again. And besides, I was very happy to be visiting Mohammed, who we hadn’t seen since Johnny Weissmuller was wounded.
I was sitting in front of Anna, her hair flying in the wind, slapping against my ears, and I showed her the way to the village. The road wound between the hills, and the old horse’s hooves raised dust.
I pointed to the terraced hills covered with vineyards, to the ancient olive trees with their silver-gray leaves, and the tomb of the Sheik, who the Jews also considered a holy man. People came to his grave to make wishes. I’d made some wishes too, when I visited with Mohammed, and I was still waiting for the Sheik to grant them.
