Listen to My Voice (19 page)

‘I came here after the war to escape my memories. No pleasant tie bound me to Europe any more, and I wanted to understand who I was, to rebuild a kind of identity for myself, and I slowly succeeded in doing so.

‘I have no regrets. I wouldn’t go back for anything
in
the world, but it’s not like I was struck down by some vision. I’m a sceptic, as I always was. A sceptic with good will, but still a sceptic.

‘You see that?’ my uncle continued, pointing at a sort of rectangular box attached to the door. ‘My son put that there. It’s a mezuzah. Arik has always been a very religious boy, even though we never encouraged him in that direction. At home, we confined ourselves to strictly respecting the traditions, but that’s all. Naturally, we didn’t discourage him either, but every now and then his mother and I, together or separately, would look at him as though he were a stranger and wonder, “Where did he come from?”

‘We couldn’t arrive at an answer.

‘Sometimes I found myself thinking that his grandmother’s soul really must have transmigrated into his body. I thought Arik’s deep piety could only be a way for my mother to expiate her passion for Madame Blavatsky and for all the rest of her cockeyed spiritualistic readings.

‘My wife used to say that being born is like getting dropped off the top of a very high building. Therefore, falling is our destiny, and so we must try to hold on to something. One person may cling to a window sill, another to a balcony, another will clutch a shutter, and yet another will manage, at the last possible moment, to grab the edge of the gutter. If you want to live, you
have
to look for something to hold on to, and it doesn’t much matter what that something is. But my wife saw things differently. She came from an observant family, and she’d never got on with her father, who was a rather rigid man. At bottom, you always want what isn’t in the house, and maybe that was one of the reasons why my wife couldn’t hide her irritation at that son of ours, who was trying to push the traditional ways she’d managed to kick out back in through the window.

‘I, on the other hand, have always been convinced that Arik’s beliefs are truly and deeply held. I remember an episode that goes back to when he was thirteen or fourteen. It was the Sabbath, and at some point he came into the house and found his mother on the telephone with her sister in Tel Aviv. He burst into desperate tears and shouted, “Why can’t you live a holy life?”

‘You see? Human affairs are always extraordinarily complex. That’s why I say that the most important issue is honesty. If you start from there, you can go anywhere.’

Although it was barely six o’clock, night had already fallen, and a light breeze, blowing seaward from the hills, had arisen with the darkness. Outside the window, the bougainvillea moved with a rustle like tissue paper; from the nearby cowsheds came the mooing of a young calf, a desperate appeal to which there was no response. Maybe its mother had already been taken to the slaughterhouse. Uncle Jonathan poured himself a glass of water and
drank
it down in one breath. The air conditioner was off, and it was very hot. It must have been a long time since my uncle had talked so much; with a sigh, he let himself fall against the back of the sofa and looked at me hard. ‘How about you?’ he asked. ‘What do you believe in?’

14

THE WEIGHT OF
night is the weight of unanswerable questions. Night is the time of the sick and the anxious; there’s no escaping its tyranny. You can turn on a light, open a book, search the radio for a comforting voice, but the night still remains, lying in wait for you. We come out of darkness and return to darkness; before the universe was formed, all space was darkness.

Maybe that’s the reason why cities are always bright and filled with distractions: at any hour of the night, if you wish, you can go out to eat, buy something, have a good time. Silence and darkness are relegated to those few hours when you’re about to keel over from exhaustion and need to recuperate a bit before you can go on, but what you fall into isn’t a restless slumber shot through with nagging questions; it’s a faint – that’s the proper word for it – a brief period of time during which the
body
is compelled to yield to physiology. And then you wake up in front of a bright screen, and the only person who can operate the remote control is you.

My uncle had asked me what I believed in. Surrounded by the nocturnal silence, I twisted and turned in my bed and found no rest. I knew sleep wouldn’t come, but I hoped (in vain) I might at least grow somewhat drowsy. Uncle Jonathan’s question revolved in the air around me, towing in its wake many other questions, chief among them its twin: Why do you live?

What do you believe in? Why do you live? At birth, every child should receive a parchment sheet with those two questions written on it, awaiting answers. Later, when all the actions of his life have been performed, the former child will have that same sheet with him when he presents himself for death.

In fact, if we could cancel out night and silence, then there would be no place left for questions – and so the purpose of the parchment sheet would be to ensure that no child believes himself an object, even the most perfect of objects, and that every former child knows (should he chance to spend a sleepless night in later years) that he’s not being kept awake by a sickness, but by his nature; because man alone, and no other creature, has the ability to ask himself questions.

What do you believe in?

You can believe in so many things, including the first
thing
you come across. For example, when a child eats his pap, he’s convinced it’s the best in the world, never having tasted any other; if an egg hatches in front of a cat, the newborn chick thinks the feline is its parent and solicits it for food.

You can consent to eat the same pap all your life, or at a certain point you can refuse it, turning your face aside like a child who’s had enough.

Or maybe you can realise that no one’s handing out any food, and after that realisation you’re hungry and thirsty and afflicted with non-stop nervousness. When you’ve reached this point, the only way to calm down is to move, to take a walk, to wander around asking others – and yourself – questions, looking for a knowing face, for someone who can answer them.

So what do you believe in?

I believe in pain, which is the master of my life. Pain is what possesses me from the moment I open my eyes, pervades my body and my mind, electrifies, devastates, deforms; it’s what has made me unfit to live; it’s what has put a ticking time bomb in my heart and set the fuse for a probable explosion.

My first memories are filled with pain instead of joy, with anxiety and fear instead of the tranquil security of belonging. While I prowled around our flat, searching for my mother among people who had passed out from various excesses, while I watched her sleeping beside a
companion
who was never the same as the last one, how could I feel anything but lost? Even then, I knew instinctively that I was a child begotten not by love but by accident, and this perception, instead of making me bitter or resentful, stirred in me a strange desire to protect my mother. I always detected a hint of sadness under her forced cheer; I felt she was adrift, heading for disaster, and I would have given my life to avoid it.

Where does my soul come from? Was it formed when I was, or does it spring from the mystery of time beyond time? Did it perhaps descend to earth, contravening the laws of nature, in order to help a body that had summoned it inadvertently and thus condemned it to a life of suffering and alienation, to the uneasiness of belonging nowhere, of thinking that, as my father once said, ‘It doesn’t matter from what or for whom I’m here, since everything, from mould to elephants, reproduces itself inexorably’?

Was I, therefore, a daughter of inexorability?

Often, on the nights when the bora is blowing in Trieste, a small crowd of demonstrators gathers in front of the Palazzo di Giustizia, the court, to protest some abuse of power, and inveighs against it with ever-increasing anger until dawn.

Is it fate that’s locked up inside the Palazzo di Giustizia,
protected
by bars and guards? Is it hiding there because it’s afraid? Must we address our questions to fate? And what should it hide from, if not human questioning? What should shame it, if not the inexorability it’s flung upon the stage of the world, without so much as a hint of explanation?

Fate stayed on my mind, so I decided to get up. It was still dark; the clock radio flashed 3 a.m. In a few houses, the lights were already on. At night, fate has to confront a great many supplicants; every lamp signals some disquiet, some fracture, an incomplete bridge. Every light’s a restless memory, I thought, walking along the perimeter of a citrus orchard.

I reached the far end of the field and sat down on a rock. The night breeze had died down; everything, including noises and smells, was immobile. I felt as though I were in an auditorium before the beginning of a concert; the members of the orchestra were all in position, the conductor was poised on the podium, but his arm had yet to move. Eyes, minds, hearts, muscles – all were standing by, ready to burst into a harmony of sound.

It was still dark when a cock crowed in the Arab village up on the slopes of the hill. A short while later, a glimmer of light began to suffuse the dark vault of the sky.

As I went back into the field, I heard modulated singing coming from one of the cottages. Someone was praying in the solitude of the dawn. Was it a prayer of thanksgiving or a plea? I wondered about that on the way back to my bed. Didn’t all nocturnal questions arise in the same way? Suppose questions were nothing but the only form of prayer that has been granted us?

The following week, I began working on the kibbutz, lending a hand wherever one was needed. It was a period when there was little activity in the fields, so for the most part I helped in the kitchen or the big laundry room.

One evening, Uncle Jonathan told me his father’s story, the story you never wished to include among the stories you preferred, such as
The Little Mermaid
or
The Ugly Duckling
.

The atmosphere in Trieste had grown heavy with menace. Uncle Jonathan’s parents had many friends who’d already emigrated to safety, not before advising the two of them to do the same. But Ottavio, Uncle Jonathan’s father, didn’t want to leave; he rebelled at the very thought of the word ‘flee’. He said, ‘Why should I run away? That’s what thieves do, and murderers, wrongdoers, cowards, people with something to hide. But what wrong have I done?’

‘That absolute tranquillity didn’t come from knowing that he was a baptised Christian,’ Uncle Jonathan explained. ‘It was due to a genuine interior distance from what was happening around him. He couldn’t grasp that it was possible for one man to kill another solely because of his surname.’

‘I’m an Italian citizen!’ Ottavio declared when they came to get him, as if his geographical affiliation entitled him to a magical safe-conduct pass.

Uncle Jonathan was out at the time of the arrests. As he was returning home, he realised what was going on and fell into step with a lady who was coming down from the Carso, as she’d done for years, to bring his family butter. Counting on his blond hair and blue eyes to save him, he’d pretended to be her son and watched in mute helplessness as his parents were brought out under arrest.