A Tale of Love and Darkness (73 page)

In Verne's
The Mysterious Island
a group of survivors from a shipwreck manage to create a tiny patch of civilization on a barren desert island. The survivors are all Europeans, all men, all rational, generous-hearted
men of goodwill, they are all technologically minded, bold and resourceful: they are the very image of the way the nineteenth century wanted to see the future: sane, enlightened, virile, capable of solving any problem by the power of reason and in accordance with the tenets of the new religion of progress. (Cruelty, baser instincts, and evil were apparently banished to another, later island: the one in William Golding's
Lord of the Flies.)

By their hard work, common sense, and pioneering enthusiasm the group manages to survive and to build up from scratch, with their bare hands, a prosperous homestead on the desert island. This delighted me, imbued as I was with the pioneering ethos of Zionism that I had received from my father: secular, enlightened, rationalistic, idealistic, mil-itantly optimistic and progressive.

And yet, there were moments when the pioneers of
The Mysterious Island
were threatened by catastrophe from the forces of nature, moments when they had their backs to the wall and their brains were of no further use to them, and at such fateful moments a mysterious hand always intervened in the plot, a miraculous, all-powerful providence that time and again delivered them from certain destruction. "If there be justice, let it shine forth at once," Bialik wrote: in
The Mysterious Island
there was justice and it did shine forth at once, as quick as lightning, whenever all hope was lost.

But that was precisely the other ethos, the one diametrically opposed to my father's rationalism. It was the logic of the stories my mother used to tell me at night, tales of demons, of miracles, the tale of the ancient man who sheltered an even more ancient man under his roof, tales of evil, mystery, and grace, Pandora's box where at the end hope still remained beyond all despair. It was also the miracle-laden logic of the Hasidic tales that Teacher Zelda first exposed me to and that my storytelling teacher at Tachkemoni, Mordechai Michaeli, took up from the place where she had left off.

It was as if here, in
The Mysterious Island
, there was at last some kind of reconciliation between the two opposing windows through which the world had first been revealed to me, at the beginning of my life: my father's commonsensical, optimistic window, over against my mother's window, which opened onto grim landscapes and strange supernatural forces, of evil but also of pity and compassion.

At the end of
The Mysterious Island
it turns out that the providential force that intervened over and over again to rescue the "Zionist enterprise" of the survivors of the shipwreck whenever they were threatened with destruction was actually the discreet intervention of Captain Nemo, the angry-eyed captain from
Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea.
But that in no way diminished the pleasure of reconciliation that I got from the book, the elimination of the contradiction between my childish fascination with Zionism and my no less childish fascination with the Gothic.

It was as though my father and mother had finally made peace and were living together in perfect harmony. Admittedly not here in Jerusalem but on some desert island. But still, they could make peace.

Kindhearted Mr. Marcus, who sold new and secondhand books on Jonah Street, almost at the corner of Geula Street, also ran a lending library, and eventually he allowed me to change my book every day. Sometimes twice on the same day. At first he would not believe that I had really read the whole book, and when I brought a book back only a few hours after I had borrowed it, he used to test me on it with all sorts of crafty trick questions. Gradually his suspicion turned to astonishment and finally to devotion. He was convinced that with such an amazing memory and the ability to read so fast, particularly if I also learned the major languages, someday I could become the ideal private secretary for one of our great leaders. Who knew, I might end up as Ben-Gurion's secretary, or Moshe Sharet's. Consequently he decided that I was worth a long-term investment, that he should cast his bread upon the water: who knew, he might need some permit one day, he might need to jump a line or oil the wheels of the publishing business he was planning to join, and then surely his ties of friendship with the private secretary of one of the greatest of the great would be worth its weight in gold.

Mr. Marcus sometimes used to show my crowded reader's ticket proudly to selected customers, as though gloating over the fruits of his investment. Just look what we have here! A bookworm! A phenomenon! A child who devours not just books but whole shelves every month!

So I got special permission from Mr. Marcus to make myself at home in his library. I could borrow four books at a time so as not to go hungry over the holidays, when the shop was closed. I could leaf—
carefully!—through books hot from the press that were intended for sale, not for lending. I could even look at books that were not meant for someone of my age, like the stories of Somerset Maugham, O. Henry, Stefan Zweig, and even spicy Maupassant.

In the winter I ran in the dark, through showers of piercing rain and driving wind, to get to Mr. Marcus's bookshop before it closed, at six o'clock. It was very cold in Jerusalem in those days, a sharp biting cold, and hungry polar bears came down from Siberia to roam the streets of Kerem Avraham on those late December nights. I ran without a coat, and so my sweater got drenched and gave off a depressing, itchy smell of wet wool all evening.

Occasionally it happened that I was left without a scrap to read, on those long empty Saturdays when by ten in the morning I had finished all the ammunition I had brought from the library. Frantically I grabbed whatever came to hand in my father's bookcases:
Till Eulenspiegel
in Shlonsky's translation, the
Arabian Nights
translated by Rivlin, the books of Israel Zarchi, Mendele Mocher Sforim, Sholem Aleichem, Kafka, Berdyczewski, Rahel's poetry, Balzac, Hamsun, Yigal Mossensohn, Feierberg, Natan Shaham, Gnessin, Brenner, Hazaz, even Mr. Agnon's books. I understood almost nothing, except perhaps for what I could see through my father's spectacles, namely that life in the shtetl was despicable, repulsive, and even ridiculous. In my foolish heart, I was not entirely surprised by its terrible end.

Father had most of the key works of world literature in the original languages, so I could hardly even read their titles. But whatever was there in Hebrew, if I didn't actually read it, at least I sniffed at it. I left no stone unturned.

Of course, I also read the weekly children's section of
Davar
, and those children's books that were on everyone's dessert menu: poems by Leah Goldberg and Fania Bergstein,
The Children's Island
by Mira Lobeh, and all the books by Nahum Guttmann. Lobengula's Africa, Beatrice's Paris, Tel Aviv surrounded by sand dunes, orchards, and sea, all these were destinations of my first hedonistic world cruises. The difference between Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv-that-was-joined-to-the-rest-of-the-big-wide-world seemed to me like the difference between our wintry, black-and-white life and a life of color, summer, and light. One book
that particularly captured my imagination was
Over the Ruins
by Tsvi Liebermann-Livne, which I read and reread. Once upon a time, in the days of the Second Temple, there was a remote Jewish village, tucked away peacefully among hills, valleys, and vineyards. One day the Roman legionnaires arrived, slaughtered all the inhabitants, men, women, and old folk, looted their property, set fire to the buildings, and went on their way. But the villagers had managed before the massacre to hide their little children, the ones who were not yet twelve and could not take part in the defense of the village, in a cave in the hills.

After the calamity the children emerged from the cave, saw the destruction, and instead of despairing they decided, in a discussion that resembled a general assembly in a kibbutz, that life must go on and that they must rebuild the ruined village. So they set up committees, which girls sat on too, because these children were not only brave and industrious but also amazingly progressive and enlightened. Gradually, working like ants, they managed to recover the remaining livestock, repair the pens and cow sheds, restore the burned houses, start working the fields again, and set up a model community of children, a sort of idyllic kibbutz: a commune of Robinson Crusoes without a single Man Friday.

Not a cloud darkened the life of sharing and equality enjoyed by these children of the dream: neither power struggles nor rivalries and jealousies, neither filthy sex nor the ghosts of their dead parents. It was exactly the opposite of what happened to the children in
Lord of the Flies.
Tsvi Livne certainly intended to give the children of Israel an inspiring Zionist allegory: the generation of the wilderness had all died, and in its place there arose the generation of the Land, bold and brave, raising itself up by its own efforts from catastrophe to heroism and from darkness to great light. In my own, Jerusalem version, in the sequel that I composed in my head, the children were not content with milking the cows and harvesting the olives and grapes; they discovered an arms cache, or better still they managed to devise and construct machine guns, mortars, and armored vehicles. Or else it was the Palmach that managed to smuggle these weapons a hundred generations backward in time to the outstretched hands of the children of
Over the Ruins.
Armed with all these weapons, Tsvi Livne's (and my) children hurried to Masada and arrived at the very last minute. With a devastating barrage of fire, from the rear, with long, accurate salvos and deadly mortar fire they
took the Roman legionnaires by surprise—the very same legionnaires who had killed their parents and were now engaged in building a ramp to storm the rocky citadel of Masada. And so, at the very moment when Eleazar Ben Yair was about to conclude his unforgettable farewell speech and the last defenders of Masada were on the point of falling on their swords so as not to be taken captive by the Romans, my young men and I burst onto the mountain and saved them from death, and our nation from the ignominy of defeat.

Then we carried the war to enemy territory: we positioned our mortars on the seven hills of Rome, smashed the Arch of Titus to smithereens, and brought the emperor to his knees.

There may well be another sick illicit pleasure concealed here, one that no doubt never occurred to Tsvi Livne when he was writing the book, a dark, oedipal pleasure. Because the children here buried their own parents. All of them. Not a single grown-up was left in the entire village. No parent, no teacher, no neighbor, no uncle, no grandpa, no grandma, no Mr. Krochmal, no Uncle Joseph, no Mala and Staszek Rudnicki, no Abramskis, no Bar-Yizhars, no Aunt Lilia, no Begin, and no Ben-Gurion. And so a well-repressed desire of the Zionist ethos, and of the child that I was then, was miraculously fulfilled: that the grown-ups should be dead. Because they were so alien, so burdensome. They belonged to the Diaspora. They were the generation of the wilderness. They were always full of demands and commands, they never let you breathe. Only when they are dead will we be able to show them at last how we can do everything ourselves. Whatever they want us to do, whatever they expect from us, we'll do the lot, magnificently: we'll plow and reap and build and fight and win, only without them, because the new Hebrew nation needs to break free from them. Because everything here was made to be young, healthy, and tough, while they are old and shattered and complicated and a bit repulsive, and more than a bit ridiculous.

So in
Over the Ruins
the whole generation of the wilderness has evaporated, leaving behind happy, light-footed orphans, as free as a flock of birds in the clear blue sky. There is no one left to nag them in a Diaspora accent, to speechify, to enforce musty manners, to spoil life with all kinds of depressions, traumas, imperatives, and ambitions. Not
one of them has survived to moralize all day long—this is permitted, that is forbidden, that is disgusting. Just us. Alone in the world.

The death of all the grown-ups concealed a mysterious, powerful spell. And so at the age of fourteen and a half, a couple of years after my mother's death, I killed my father and the whole of Jerusalem, changed my name, and went on my own to Kibbutz Hulda to live there over the ruins.

I KILLED HIM
particularly by changing my name. For many years my father had lived under the wide shadow of his learned uncle with his "worldwide reputation" (a concept that my father would voice in piously hushed tones). For many years Yehuda Arieh Klausner had dreamed of following in the footsteps of Professor Joseph Gedalyahu Klausner, the author of
Jesus of Nazareth, From Jesus to Paul, A History of the Second Temple, A History of Hebrew Literature
, and
When a Nation Fights for Its Freedom.
In his heart of hearts my father even dreamed of succeeding the childless professor when the time came. That is why he learned no fewer foreign languages than his uncle had mastered. That is why he sat huddled over his desk at night while the little cards piled up around him. And when he began to despair of being a famous professor someday, he may have begun to pray in his heart of hearts that the torch would pass to me, and that he would be there to see it.

My father sometimes jokingly compared himself to the insignificant Mendelssohn, the banker Abraham Mendelssohn, whose fate it was to be the son of the famous philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and the father of the great composer Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. ("First I was my father's son, then I became my son's father," Abraham Mendelssohn once said jokingly.)

As though in jest, as though he was making fun of me out of stunted feelings of affection, my father insisted on addressing me, from an early age, as "Your Honor," "Your Highness." It was only many years later, the night of the day he died, that it suddenly occurred to me that behind this fixed, irritating joke there may have lurked his own disappointed ambitions, and the sad necessity to reconcile himself to his own
mediocrity, as well as the concealed wish to entrust me with the mission to achieve in his name, when the time came, the goals that had eluded him.