Shhh!
There’s the sound of your grandfather’s axe. Good, good, all is good. He’s here, everything’s in order. No! Don’t touch me! I’m calm now … I apologize, synulya. It’s been so long since I’ve opened my mouth to speak, a long time since I’ve revisited all that. Kfar Malal. Galevencici. The anguish.
The anguish of not hearing my father’s axe in the morning. Mornings when the wind blows so loudly it buries the sound of his chopping. Not knowing if the sun is going to rise. If I’m to live for another day. You feel it, profoundly, the anguish. Come too soon, Arik. It’s our fault. Mine, your father’s. We raised you with a gun in your hand. The more I think of it, the more I understand how much our childhoods were alike. We’re nothing but mice on a wheel.
A whole life rubbing shoulders with death. Going out into the woods, following its echo. Sometimes in the songs of the birds, sometimes in the galloping of wild horses. Waiting for the day when death will come. Immersing myself in the rustle of leaves. Brooding over the conversations of the day before, the whisperings of friends come from cities filled with horror stories of Jews beaten in the streets. Odessa, Minsk, Brest.
They visit us at Yom Kippur or at Easter, the only Jews we see throughout the year. We feel less isolated when they’re with us. But they arrive encumbered with bad news and never stop discussing imminent, terrible massacres! They talk excitedly about the gangs invading Odessa and sullying the reputations of the Jews. The bandits of King Benia Krik, and Phroïm Gratch, and Kolka Pakovski. We call them shtarks, strongmen — count on Yiddish to ennoble the mobsters who intimidate the authorities, terrorize the shopkeepers of their own people, and who, the next day, defend these same shopkeepers with fists and guns against the pogrom’s hatchet men. It’s enough to drive you crazy, to make you want to abandon everything. And they do abandon everything. They leave in droves, the shopkeepers and children of the Jewish ghetto. As if the arrival of the twentieth century had started a countdown. In order not to identify as exiles, they call themselves pioneers. They make aliyah. They haven’t immigrated — no, no — they’ve returned to the Promised Land. When it’s not gangs that drive them to Palestine, it’s the hatred of their neighbours. And when it’s not the hatred of their neighbours, it’s the dream of being pioneers.
Not a Yom Kippur goes by without the name of Herzl echoing in the room. Yes, Arik, the same Herzl who’s called Chozeh HaMedinah. The Visionary of the State. That brings nothing to mind? Ah! To you, to all the children of pioneers born in Palestine, he’s a legend, a hero. Eyes wide as saucers, chin resting on your hands, you listen to your father tell stories of this Hungarian who realized the Utopian dream of gathering all the Jews of the world together in Jerusalem, so they might have a state and a homeland.
Eretz Yisrael. The Land of Israel!
Once you’re in bed, watching the rats course along the roof-beams of the house in Kfar Malal, you repeat the word: visionary, visionary, visionary, as if to absorb its power. To provide yourself the strength to stand against the fear, against the horrors of the Second World War spat out of the radio day and night, against the anger of the Arabs and the spite of the English.
You wonder how I know this?
I’m your mother, Arik. When I was your age, I too had dreams, hopes, nightmares. I also dreaded the day when the tide of blood would reach us. At any rate, in this sorry shack of Kfar Malal, nothing happens without our knowing about it. Even thoughts make noises here.
A cabin built on a patch of sterile land, surrounded by a dozen others given to couples, like your father and me, foolish enough to accept being the guinea pigs of ideologues. A putrid cabin with walls built of mud and manure, shared with a mule and a cow. It’s your idea to name the cow Tikvah. Hope! I laugh at that when I’m not crying. Two fools, a cow, a mule, and a couple of children in Kfar Malal. Oh, yes! And a dog. Crammed into a beautiful middle-of-nowhere kibbutz.
Sof ha’olam smola. Turn left at the end of the world. The only words in Hebrew that help me let off steam.
Smack in the middle of nowhere!
During the day, we stare at the baking sun; at night, at the beam that separates us from the granary and rats. You mumble the name Herzl, thinking we’re asleep. Me, I never sleep.
I mull over all the things that this man has destroyed in my life. Because there’s no getting around it, Arik, he’s just a man. A man with a single idea. A man either lucky or astute enough to die before witnessing the consequences of his idea. In 1904, he dies. In 1921, Shmuel and I are already in Palestine, parachuted into this alien land, confronting all the pitfalls Herzl’s dream did not anticipate.
During the sleepless nights of Kfar Malal, I drift far from the nauseating odour and lowing of the beasts back to Galevencici. To before your birth, to before Israel is born. Towards festive nights and my parents’ house filled with visitors. Towards the dinner guests who, from the moment they take their places at the table, repeat what Herzl has said word for word, reporting on the stormy debates and disputes of the Zionist councils. In Basel. In Switzerland. The outrage when he proposes establishing a Jewish homeland in Uganda. In Uganda, of all places!
Four years after his death, Herzl is crowned as the Chozeh HaMedinah. Uganda? Forgotten! Everyone is looking to Palestine. That legendary territory where miracles fall from the trees. A Chosen Land for a Chosen People. A land without people for a people without land. Except no one told the Arabs already living there. Well, they were there! I’ll end up with enough of their blood on my club to know. Whatever. Herzl and his disciples concocted a mix of myths and utopias irresistible to every disillusioned Jew on Earth.
Ah, those nights in Galevencici … My father nods his head. From time to time he sighs deeply as he listens to his dinner guests praising Eretz Yisrael, the place where all our problems will be resolved. One guest vaunts the donations he has made to the National Jewish Fund. Another advises my father to quit Russia as quickly as possible. Your grandparents stay out of politics. We, the Schneeroff family, know we are Jews. But never, never, not for a moment, did we ever doubt we were also Russians. That we belonged to this forest, witness to our coming of age in its birches, climbing the tentacle-like hop vines concealing their trunks.
Touch them, Arik. In winter the vines are dry and dead, but in the spring they crawl all the way up the thin silhouettes of the forest pines and reach their tops and strangle them with their stems.
Izvinite! I’m sorry, I’m losing my train of thought … What were we talking about? Yes, yes, the dinner guests.
The dinners always end on the same note. My father thanks the guests for their generosity, then politely asks about books. Did you bring that new edition of Tolstoy? What about the Chekhov? Still can’t find it? What do you have of Gogol’s, or Gorky’s? And so it goes until the last drop of vodka is drunk: a catalogue of writers I come across later, rummaging in my father’s library. Worn out, the guests leave without quite getting a handle on my father’s views, or his opinion of Herzl the visionary.
If only they’d asked me!
They depart, mouthing the traditional “Next year in Jerusalem,” and the evening’s names, retorts, and disagreements reverberate in the room behind them. Their words embed themselves in me, transform me without anyone paying heed. But for the Mongolian fold of my eyes, I am just one girl among seven brothers and sisters.
No one notices me at the table, or pays attention when I leave to empty my head of their adult words.
No one sees me climb up onto the roof to gaze at the stars.
No one knows that even though I’m only five years old, and despite my fear of the world, I dream of accomplishing great things. To be a part of the stories recounted by the Yom Kippur visitors. Of the rebellions that implode as suddenly as they explode. Of the killings that carpet entire villages with blood as red as the field of poppies in front of our house. Streets filled with broken glass, with the murdered bodies of str
ikers and dissidents executed by the Tsarists. And if, unfortunately, you are a dissident, a striker and a Jew … Katastrofa!
This is before there’s any talk of Bolshevik revolutions and world wars. When the workers of St. Petersburg are shot down. The time of the General Strike. Of mutiny in the port of Odessa. Demonstrations demanding a new social order. Promises of a more just constitution. And then the Tsar’s vengeance. Reprisals such as have never been seen before! All in a single year: 1905. The year that puts into play the Revolution and all the wars that come after.
The Yom Kippur dinner guests turn out to be right. The Russian Empire crumbles. The same merciless Tsar ends up pleading for his own life and that of his children. In vain. They are slaughtered, one after the other, like cattle.
These events burrow into my gut like a worm in fertile soil. I want to be a part of them, even though I understand so little. Secretly, though I’m terrified by the idea of being shot at by the Tsarist army or an enraged mob, I envy those living in the rebelling towns, those who flee them for other places, and even those who are killed there. The urge to be alive even at the risk of dying, that’s what I want with all my being. With the dawn of the new century, everything is possible in Russia, the best as well as the worst, and I don’t want to miss any of it!
Oh, Arik, can I admit something to you, now that you’re finally here with me, in this place where we owe nothing to anyone? I’m glad you’ve lost your memory. The Vera who emigrates to Palestine to build Israel, who raises you without ever tenderly kissing or even hugging, who does what she has to do without complaint, the woman who locks herself in her room to write long letters to friends and brothers and sisters scattered everywhere, this Vera would never truly confide in you, never have let you know the young peasant girl from Belarus who wanted to conquer the world.
Forget your mother. Forget that miserable woman exiled in the country of Herzl. I am a child of the century! Febrile. Ambitious.
1900. One-nine-zero-zero. The year of my birth is proof of it: everything starts with me. The double zero of my birthday keeps the world running on time. Measures the passing seasons. Divides history into centuries and half-centuries. A sign of destiny. A reminder of the time flashing by. Of all the great things still left undone!
Ha! Idiot. Child. Naive little girl. How could I not be a prisoner of my age, those two zeros so clearly there, so precise, so easily counted? How could I add a year or two when it suits? Or leave one or two out when old age catches up with me?
Do you find my coquetry amusing, Arik? Coquetry is a luxury I’ve never had the right to indulge in. My life does not belong to me but to the cycle of history. I’ve been at the mercy of everything it throws at me, good or bad, start to finish, right from day one.
1905: the year of pogroms and strikes, I’m five years old.
1917: the year of the Russian Revolution and the fall of the Tsar, I’m seventeen.
1921: the year I arrive in Kfar Malal, I’m twenty-one.
1928: the year of your birth, twenty-eight.
1948: the birth of Israel, I’m forty-eight.
1988: the year of my death, at eighty-eight.
I’m an echo. Empty. As full of holes as the twin zeros of my birth year.
If only I could take it all back, Arik … Be content with the hard, spartan life that was mine in Galevencici. If anyone had warned me of what awaited me in Palestine I would never have followed your father, never have given up my medical studies. Look. All this beauty surrounding us. Far from the world. From its cruelty. To live in a village, neither poor nor unhappy. To live. Without friends, without enemies. Just live! With winter. Its silence.
Ah, synulya … How I missed the cold when we moved to Palestine. This dry cold that stings your cheeks. In Kfar Malal, I spend my nights dreaming about it. To be far from the humidity. To float. High. High above the Mediterranean. Above its salty air, its intolerable odour of fish. I fly back to the forest. Sweep the snow that clings to the tree trunks. Lick snowflakes off my red mittens. Return. Return to nature. Bury my feet in a blanket of white, white snow! Listen. The ice squeaks under my boots. Breaks up, refreezes. Crick, crack, crick.
You feel warmer already, don’t you Arik? The forest is in you. Here, no one can hurt you. The children of the village stay out of the woods, especially the part that’s ours. In school, they tell stories of a bearded giant who roams among the spruces. They mean my father. He frightens them. I’m proud of him. The fearful respect you inspire in your allies as much as your adversaries, Arik, is something you inherited from your grandfather.
The caution of the children reassures me, because I’m also afraid of them. The village is as dangerous to me as the forest is to them. I walk to school as if into battle. Ready to challenge malicious looks. To return injurious words. But my schoolmates keep their distance. No one provokes me. They’re neither kind nor mean, just indifferent. And when hostility is everywhere, indifference isn’t such a bad thing. On the day that the pogroms strike nearby villages and towns, we are left alone. And this even though, as the only Jews in the region, we’d make an easy target. Our family isn’t touched.
Wait! Let’s stop here for a minute, Arik. The river is singing … it’s singing to us.
I wonder now why I was so afraid of the village children. They invent rumours about my father as they would about anyone who is different. Anyone too short, too tall, too ugly, too smart. Maybe they miss their own fathers. Galevencici empties of men during the winter, when they go away for months on end to find work in the cities. Some go as far as Baku, across the wild mountains of the Caucasus. They have no choice. If they did not, the village would starve. They leave following the river.
And the women wait for them.
And the children wait for them.
Often the men they wait for never return. Like the river, they travel in just one direction. They die on the roads, in avalanches, in accidents at the factory …
My father, a landowner, never needed to migrate or endure the sufferings workers did. I wonder if the villagers spare us the pogroms, not out of fear for us, but because my father is the only man left in the village. His presence reassures them. Or perhaps they simply don’t feel part of the hysteria sweeping through the towns.
Tell me, Arik, how do we know whether the mean stares are directed at me, or at my history? Is it my haughty personality that irks them, or the way I look? If I’d let them get close to me, would they have extended a hand or shoved me away? When a fish surrenders to the currents of a river, does it know what it will find in the ocean? A bird born in a cage, does it know what it means to be free? The struggle. Always a struggle for survival. Fish or bird, that’s what’s in store for them. That’s what I taught you.
But I was wrong, my son. I was always that trapped bird who hops about in its cage to avoid the claws of onlookers. The bird who, once freed, takes refuge in another cage out of habit.
Aha! Bread crumbs on the path. Careful! Don’t step on them. Gather them up. Follow their trail back to the beginning. What was the exact moment that brought me to Kfar Malal?
Is it this crumb?
That one?
When did it all start to come apart? The day I met your father? Or later, when I agreed to marry him? Or later still, when the Red Army knocked on our door in Tiflis and forced us to make the choice? To leave with the rest? Take our chances in a country that doesn’t even exist yet?
So there it is! The bread crumb that is Tiflis. Go on. One mouthful for you, one for me. Mmm! It tastes sweet, does it not? The taste of the most beautiful years of my life … Today we call the capital of Georgia Tbilisi, but for me it will always be Tiflis.
I’m seventeen. When I finish high school, your grandfather Mordecai asks me what I want to do with my life. The question is so unexpected I just stare at him with my mouth hanging open.
— Vera, a Jewish family from Odessa — the
Babels — has asked for your hand for their son Isaac. It’s time to choose, my girl. Get married, start a family, or continue your studies. This forest can protect you no longer.
I stare at my father incredulously. Perhaps I’m not as invisible as I think. Did Mordecai see me rummaging in the library for a book? Your grandfather is an exceptional man, Arik, a modern man.
— The legacy that matters is not anything you receive, but the knowledge feeding your mind. It’s the only inheritance that will never abandon, betray, or imprison you.
He hammers these words into my head constantly. Your grandfather is not, as his dinner guests imagine he is, a man divorced from reality. He sees the clouds at the tops of the mountains. He who reads Gorky instead of the newspapers knows what storms lurk on the horizon. Soon the Tsar will fall and those like us, people scattered at the edges of the empire, will bear the brunt of it. The forest won’t protect us from the winds of history, your grandfather knows that. We must arm ourselves. Not with guns and illusions, but with knowledge. With knowledge! Your grandfather makes sure that we have it, my brothers and sisters and me. When I tell him I want to be a doctor, he says:
— Then it’s Tiflis for you.
1917. I’m seventeen. The Tsar’s family massacred, there’s war between those who want to seize power. With the dawn of the Red Revolution, there’s no possibility of travelling to Moscow or St. Petersburg. Not even our corner of Belarus is safe from the battles and reprisals. White Monarchists versus Red Bolsheviks. Red versus Green nationalists. The Greens versus the Revolutionary Socialists. Komuchs versus Cadets versus Anarchists versus Mensheviks. There’s no end to it!
The countryside is in flames. The fields are flooded with the blood of factions. And the famine, Arik, the famine! War swallows up everything. The people die of hunger when they aren’t killed by bayonets. Militias ransack the farms and empty the barns. All in the name of freedom, all in the name of peace. There’s never a shortage of justifications. Freedom for whom? Peace according to whom? The answers change as quickly as the weather.
I Am Ariel Sharon Page 2
