A Tale of Love and Darkness (75 page)

AT THE END
of that summer I changed my name and moved with my bag from Sde Nehemia to Hulda. To start with I was an external boarder at the local secondary school (which modestly called itself "continuation classes"). When I finished school, just before I started my military service, I became a member of the kibbutz. Kibbutz Hulda was to be my home from 1954 to 1985.

My father had remarried about a year after my mother's death, and then a year later, after I went to live in the kibbutz, he and his wife moved to London. He lived there for about five years. It was in London that my sister Marganita and brother David were born, that he finally—with immense difficulty—learned to drive, and that he gained a Ph.D. from London University for a dissertation on "an unknown manuscript by I. L. Peretz." Periodically we sent each other postcards. Occasionally he sent me copies of his articles. He sometimes sent me books and little
objects intended as gentle reminders of my true destiny, such as pens and pen holders, handsome notebooks, and a decorative letter opener.

Every summer he used to come home on a visit, to see how I really was and if kibbutz life really suited me, and at the same time to check on the state of his apartment and how his library was feeling. In a detailed letter my father announced to me at the start of the summer of 1956:

On Wednesday of next week, provided it is not too much trouble for you, I plan to come and visit you in Hulda. I have made inquiries and ascertained that there is a local bus that leaves the Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv daily at 12 noon and arrives at Hulda at approximately 1:20. Now here are my questions: 1. Would you be able to come and meet me at the bus stop? (But if it is a problem for you, if you are busy for example, I can easily ask where you are and find you by myself.) 2. Should I eat something before I board the bus in Tel Aviv, or would it be possible for us to eat together when I reach the kibbutz? Only on condition that it is no trouble for you, naturally. 3. My inquiries show that in the afternoon there is only one bus from Hulda to Rehovot, from where I can take a second bus to Tel Aviv and then a third bus back to Jerusalem. But in that case we would only have some two and a half hours at our disposal. Would that be enough for us? 4.Or, alternatively, perhaps I could stay the night and leave Hulda on the 7 o'clock bus in the morning? That is, if three conditions are met: A. that you would have no difficulty finding me somewhere to stay (a very simple bed or even a mattress would suffice); B. that this would not be viewed askance in the kibbutz; and C. that you yourself feel comfortable with such a relatively long visit. Please let me know at once, either way. 5. What should I bring with me, apart from personal effects? (Towel? Sheets? I have never stayed on a kibbutz before!) Naturally I will give you all the news (there is not much) when we see each other. And I will tell you about my plans, if you are interested. And if you like you can tell me something of your plans. I hope you are in good health and spirits (there is a definite connection between the two!). As for the rest, we'll talk very soon. With love, yours, Dad.

***

That Wednesday I finished school at one, and I asked to be let off the two hours' work we had to do after lunch (I was working in the chicken coop at the time). Nevertheless, after my last class I dashed back to change into dusty blue work clothes and heavy work boots, then I ran to the tractor shed, found the keys of the Massey-Ferguson hidden under the seat cushion, started the engine, and roared up to the bus stop in a cloud of dust a couple of minutes after the Tel Aviv bus got in. My father, whom I had not seen for more than a year, was already there, sheltering his eyes from the sun with his hand and waiting nervously to see where his help would come from. He was dressed—to my utter amazement—in khaki trousers, a light-blue short-sleeved shirt and a kibbutz-type hat, without a trace of a jacket and tie. From a distance he almost looked like one of our "oldies." I imagine he had thought hard before dressing in this way, as a gesture of respect to a culture that he felt some esteem for, even if it did not conform to his own ethos and principles. In one hand he was carrying his battered briefcase, and in the other he held a handkerchief with which he was mopping his brow. I roared up to him, braked almost in front of his nose, and, leaning toward him with one hand on the wheel and the other posed proprietorially on the wing, I said:
Shalom.
He looked up at me with eyes magnified by his glasses so that he looked like a frightened child and hurriedly returned my greeting, although he was not entirely sure who I was. When he did identify me, he looked startled.

After a moment he said:

"Is that you?"

And after another moment:

"You've grown so much. You're looking healthier."

And finally, when he had recovered himself:

"Permit me to remark that it wasn't very safe, that stampede of yours. You might have run me over."

I asked him to wait there, out of the sun, and returned the Massey-Ferguson to the shed: its role in the drama was over. Then I took my father to the dining hall, where we suddenly both became aware that we were the same height now; we were embarrassed, and my father made a joke about it. He felt my muscles curiously, as though he was wondering whether to buy me, and he made another joke about the dark color of my skin, compared to his pale skin: "Little Black Sambo! You're as dark as a Yemenite!"

In the dining hall most of the tables had been cleared; there was only one that was laid, and I served my father some boiled chicken with carrots and potatoes and a bowl of chicken soup with croutons. He ate very carefully, with meticulous table manners, ignoring my own deliberately noisy, peasantlike way of eating. While we drank sweet tea from plastic cups, he struck up a polite conversation with Tsvi Butnik, one ofthe old-timers, who was sitting at our table. Father was very careful not to touch on any topic that might degenerate into an ideological argument. He inquired which country Tsvi had come from, and when he said he was from Romania, my father's face lit up and he started speaking Romanian, which for some reason Tsvi had trouble understanding from the way my father spoke it. Then he moved on to the beauty of the landscape of the coastal plain, the biblical prophetess Hulda and the Hulda Gates in the Temple, topics that must have seemed to him beyond any risk of disagreement. But before we parted from Tsvi, Father could not resist asking him how they were enjoying having his son here. Was he managing to acclimatize? Tsvi Butnik, who had not the faintest idea whether or how I was acclimatizing in Hulda, said:

"What a question! Very well!"

And Father replied:

"Well, for that I am most grateful to you all."

As we were leaving the dining hall, he remarked to Tsvi without sparing my feelings, like someone collecting a dog from a boarding kennels:

"He was rather out of condition in some ways when he came, and now he seems to be in tip-top form."

I dragged him off for a comprehensive tour of the length and breadth of Hulda. I did not bother to ask if he would rather rest. I did not bother to offer him a cold shower, or show him the toilets. Like a sergeant-major on a base for new recruits I rushed my poor father along, red-faced, panting, mopping his face all the time, from the sheep pens to the chicken coops and the barns, and then on to the carpentry shop and the locksmith's shop and the olive-oil plant at the top of the hill, and all the time I lectured him about the principles of the kibbutz, agricultural economy, the advantages of socialism, the contribution of the kibbutz to Israel's military victories. I didn't spare him a single detail. I was possessed by a kind of vindictive didactic zeal that was too
strong to contain. I did not let him utter a word. I rebuffed his attempts to ask questions. I talked and I talked and I talked.

From the children's block I dragged him, with his last remaining strength, to see the veterans' quarters, the clinic, and the schoolrooms, until finally we reached the culture hall and the library, where we found the librarian Sheftel, the father of Nily, who was to become my wife a few years later. Kindhearted, smily Sheftel was sitting in blue work clothes, humming a Hasidic melody under his breath and typing something with two fingers on a wax stencil sheet. Like a dying fish that by some miracle has been thrown back into the water at the last minute, my father, who was gasping from the heat and dust and stifled by the smell of manure, revived: the sight of books and a librarian suddenly brought him back to life, and at once he started pouring forth opinions.

They chatted for ten minutes or so, the two future in-laws, about whatever librarians talk about. Then Sheftel's shyness got the better of him, and Father left him and turned to inspect the layout of the library and all its nooks and crannies, like an alert military attaché observing with a professional eye the maneuvers of a foreign army.

Then we walked around a bit longer, Father and I. We had coffee and cakes in the home of Hanka and Oizer Huldai, who had volunteered to be my adoptive family. Here Father displayed the full extent of his knowledge of Polish literature, and after studying their bookcase for a moment, he even had a lively conversation with them in Polish: he quoted from Julian Tuwim, and Hanka replied by quoting Slowacki; he mentioned Mickiewicz, and they responded with Iwaszkiewicz, he mentioned the name of Rejmont, and they answered with Wyspianski. Father seemed to be treading on tiptoe as he talked to the people in the kibbutz, as though being very careful not to let slip something terrible whose consequences might be irretrievable. He spoke to them with great delicacy, as though he saw their socialism as an incurable disease whose unfortunate carriers did not realize how grave their condition was, and he, the visitor from outside who saw and knew, had to be careful not to say something accidentally that might alert them to the seriousness of their plight.

So he took care to express admiration for what he had seen, he showed polite interest, asked a few questions ("Are your crops doing
well?" "How is the livestock doing?"), and reiterated his admiration. He did not drown them in a display of his erudition, nor did he attempt any puns. He kept himself under control. Perhaps he was afraid he might harm me.

But toward evening a sort of melancholy descended upon him, as though his witticisms had run out and his fountain of anecdotes had dried up. He asked if we could sit down together on a shady bench behind the culture hall and wait for the sunset. When the sun was setting, he stopped talking and we sat together side by side in silence. My brown forearm, which already boasted a blond fuzz, rested on the back of the bench not far from his pale arm with its black hair. This time my father did not address me as Your Highness or Your Honor, he did not even behave as though he were responsible for banishing any silence. He looked so awkward and sad that I almost touched his shoulder. But I didn't. I thought he was trying to say something to me, something important and even urgent, and that he was unable to get started. For the first time in my life, my father seemed afraid of me. I would have liked to help him, even to start the conversation instead of him, but I was as inhibited as he was. Eventually he suddenly said:

"Well then."

And I repeated after him:

"Well."

And we fell silent again. I suddenly remembered the vegetable garden we had tried to create together in the concrete-hard ground of our backyard in Kerem Avraham. I remembered the letter opener and the household hammer that were his agricultural equipment. The seedlings he brought from the Pioneering Women's House or the Working Women's Farm and planted in the night behind my back to make up for the failure of the seeds we had sown.

My father brought me a present of two of his own books. On the title page of
The Novella in Hebrew Literature
he had written this dedication: "To my chicken-breeding son, from your (ex-)librarian father," while the inscription he wrote in his
History of Literature
may have
contained a veiled reproach expressing his own disappointment: "To my son Amos, in the hope that he will carve out a place for himself in our literature."

We slept in an empty dormitory with two children's beds and a packing chest fitted with a curtain for hanging clothes. We undressed in the dark, and in the dark we talked for ten minutes or so. About the NATO alliance and the Cold War. Then we said good-night and turned our backs to each other. Perhaps, like me, my father found it hard to get to sleep. His breath sounded labored, as if he did not have enough air, or as if he were breathing through his mouth with his teeth clenched. We had not slept in the same room for several years, not since my mother's death, since her last days when she moved into my room and I ran away and slept next to him in the double bed, and the first nights after her death, when he had to come and sleep on a mattress on the floor in my room because I was so terrified.

This time, too, there was a moment of terror. I woke up in a panic in the early hours, imagining in the moonlight that my father's bed was empty and that he had silently pulled up a chair and was sitting by the window, quiet, motionless, his eyes open, staring all night at the moon or counting the passing clouds. My blood froze.

But in fact he was sleeping deeply and peacefully in the bed I had made up for him, and what had looked like someone sitting quietly on the chair with open eyes staring at the moon was not my father or a ghost but his clothes, the khaki trousers and plain blue shirt that he had chosen so thoughtfully so as not to seem superior to the kibbutz members. So as not to hurt their feelings, heaven forbid.

In the early 1960s my father returned to Jerusalem from London with his wife and children. They settled in a suburb called Beit Hakerem. Once more he went to work every day in the National Library, not in the newspaper department but in the bibliographical section, which was started at that time. Now that he finally had a doctorate from London University and a handsome yet modest visiting card attesting to the fact, he made another attempt to obtain a teaching post, if not in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, his late uncle's fiefdom, then perhaps at least in one of the new universities: Tel Aviv, Haifa, Beersheba. He even tried his
luck on one occasion at the religious university, Bar Ilan, though he saw himself as an avowed anticlericalist.