My Michael (16 page)

From the first day a close friendship grew up between grandfather and grandson. They would both get up at six in the morning, taking care not to wake Michael and me, dress and eat a light breakfast, and then go out together to stroll in the deserted streets. Yehezkel took pleasure in initiating his grandson into the mysteries of the municipal services: the ramifications of the electricity lines from the central transformer, the circuit of the water supply, the headquarters of the fire brigade, and the alarms and hydrants disposed at various points around the town, the sanitation department's garbage disposal arrangements, and the network of bus routes. It was a whole new world, with a fascinating logic of its own. Another amusing novelty was the name Grandpa called the child.

"Your parents may call you Yair, but I shall call you Zalman, for Zalman is your real name."

The child did not reject the new name, but in accordance with a code of fair play known only to himself, he began calling the old man by the very same name, Zalman. At half past eight they would return from their walk, and Yair would announce:

"Zalman and Zalman have come back."

I laughed till my eyes filled. Even Michael could not suppress his smiles.

When Michael and I got up we would find breakfast ready for us on the kitchen table—salad, coffee, and white bread already sliced and buttered.

"Zalman prepared your breakfast with his own hands, clever boy that he is," Yehezkel would declare proudly. Then, so as not to distort the facts, he would add, "I merely offered him a few words of advice."

Afterwards Yehezkel would accompany the three of us to the bus stop, warning us about the currents or about sunburn. Once he ventured to remark, "I would have joined you, but I should not wish to be a burden."

At midday, when we returned from the beach, Yehezkel would make us a vegetarian lunch: fried eggs, vegetables, toast, and fruit. Meat never appeared on his table, out of some principle which he refrained from explaining, for fear of boring us. During the meal he was at pains to entertain us with anecdotes of Michael's childhood, such as something Michael had once said to the Zionist leader Moshe Shertok, who was visiting his primary school, and how Moshe Shertok had suggested publishing Michael's remark in a children's newspaper.

At mealtimes Yehezkel would tell his grandson stories about bad Arabs and good Arabs, Jewish watchmen and armed Arab gangs, heroic Jewish children and British officers maltreating children of illegal immigrants.

Yair turned out to be an attentive and devoted pupil. He did not miss a word or forget the slightest detail. It was as if he combined Michael's thirst for knowledge with my depressing aptitude for remembering everything. The child could be tested on everything he had learned from "Grandpa Zalman": The electricity lines are linked to Reading Station; Hassan Salame's gang was firing into Holon from the hill of Tel Arish; the water supply comes from the spring at Rosh Haayin. Bevin was a bad Englishman, but Wingate was a good one.

Grandpa bought us all little presents. Five ties in a box for Michael, for me Professor Shirman's
Hebrew Poetry in Spain and Provence,
for his grandson he bought a red clockwork fire engine with a siren that really worked.

The days were calm.

Outside, on the grounds of the workers' housing project, ornamental trees were planted around neat, square lawns. Birds sang all day. The town was bright and sun-drenched. Towards evening a breeze blew in off the sea, and Yehezkel would throw the shutters and the kitchen door wide open.

"There's a refreshing wind," he would say. "The sea air is the breath of life."

At ten o'clock, when he came home from the club, the old man would lean over the bed and kiss his sleeping grandson. Then he would join us on the balcony, and we would sit together on the fraying deck-chairs. He refrained from talking to us about the Party, on the grounds that we would probably not be interested in the things which interested him. He mustn't bore us during our short holiday. He steered the conversation instead to topics which he thought would be nearer to our hearts. He spoke about Yosef Hayyim Brenner, who had been killed not far away thirty-four years previously. Brenner, in his opinion, had been a great writer and a great socialist, even though he was looked down on by the professors in Jerusalem as having been too much involved in politics and too little interested in literature for its own sake. "You mark my words," he said, "sooner or later Brenner's greatness will be recognized again even in Jerusalem."

I did not venture to contradict him.

My silence pleased Yehezkel, who took it as further evidence of my good taste. Like Michael, he considered that I was gifted with a sensitive soul. "You must excuse my indulging in sentiment when I say that you are as dear to me as a daughter."

To Michael he would talk about the natural resources of the country. "The day is not far off when oil will be discovered in our land. Of this I entertain not the slightest doubt. I still recall how skeptical the so-called experts were about the verse in Deuteronomy, 'A land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills you may dig copper.' And now we have Mount Manara and we have Timna: iron and copper. I am quite convinced that soon we shall find oil, too. Its existence is explicitly mentioned in the Tosefta, and the ancient Rabbis were thoroughly practical and realistic men. What they wrote was based on scholarship, not mere sentiment. I believe, my son, that you are not just another unimaginative geologist; your destiny lies, I am convinced of it, among those who seek out and find new things...

"But now I must stop wearing you both out with all this chatter. You are supposed to be on holiday, and here am I, foolish old man that I am, jabbering on about things which are part of your work. As if there were not intellectual effort enough waiting for you back in Jerusalem. What a long-winded old nuisance I am. Why don't you both go off to bed now, and wake up in the morning bright and fresh. Good night to you both, my dears. Sleep well, and don't pay any attention to the ramblings of an old man who lives alone and rarely has the chance to talk to anyone."

The days were calm.

In the afternoon we would stroll down to the municipal gardens, where we would meet old friends and neighbors who had all prophesied a great future for Michael and who were now pleased to share in his brilliant success. They were proud to shake hands with his wife and pinch his son's cheek, and tell amusing stories about the days when Michael was a babe in arms.

Every day Michael bought me an evening paper. He also bought me color magazines. We were bronzed by the sun. A sea smell clung to our skins. The town was small, with whitewashed houses.

"Holon is a new town," said Yehezkel Gonen. "It has not been restored to some ancient splendor, but sprang clean and pleasant out of the sands. And I, who remember its earliest days, take renewed pleasure in it daily—even though, of course, we haven't a fraction here of what you have in your Jerusalem."

On the last evening the four aunts came from Tel Aviv to see us. They brought presents for Yair. They hugged him roughly and delivered brisk kisses. For once, they were all pleasant; even Aunt Jenia spared us her usual complaints.

Aunt Leah was spokesman:

"On behalf of us all, I think I can say that you haven't disappointed us in our hopes for you, Micha. Hannah, you should be glowing with pride at his success. I still remember how Micha's friends made fun of him after the War of Independence for not going off with them like a numskull to some kibbutz in the Negev. Instead he sensibly chose to go to Jerusalem to study at the University, and to serve his people and his country with his brains, with his talents, and not with his muscles like a beast of burden. And now that our Michael is nearly a doctor, the same friends who made fun of him then are coming to him to ask him to help them with their first steps at the University. The best years of their lives they have wasted like imbeciles, and now they are sick and tired of their kibbutz in the Negev, while our Micha, who was so smart right from the start, is in a position to hire those old braggarts, if he wants to, to move his furniture for him from the old apartment to the new one you're bound to be getting soon."

When she said "kibbutz in the Negev" Aunt Leah screwed up her face; she pronounced the word "Negev" almost like a curse. Her last remark reduced all four aunts to gales of shrill laughter.

"You should never feel scorn for any man," old Yehezkel said.

Michael pondered for a moment, then agreed with his father, adding that in his opinion education does not alter a man's basic worth.

This comment delighted Aunt Jenia. She drew attention to the fact that Michael's success had not gone to his head or affected his modesty.

"Modesty is a very useful commodity. I have always maintained that a wife's duty is to encourage her husband on the road to success. It is only when the husband is a good-for-nothing that his wife is forced to follow the cruel path of fighting a man's fight in a man's world. Such has been my fate. I am glad that Micha has not inflicted a similar lot on his wife. And you too, my dear Hannah, you too should be glad, because in this life there is no greater satisfaction than a determined effort which achieves success, and will bring, I am sure, even greater success in the future. That has always been my creed from childhood on. All the troubles I have experienced have done nothing to weaken my faith; on the contrary, they have strengthened it."

On the morning of our return to Jerusalem Yehezkel did something I shall never forget. He climbed up on a stepladder to a high cupboard and brought down a large box, from which he extracted an old watchman's uniform, faded and crumpled. He also pulled out of the chest the old watchman's hat, the
kolpak,
which he put on his grandson's head. The hat was so big it almost came over the child's eyes. Grandpa himself put on the watchman's uniform, over the pajamas he was wearing.

All that morning, until it was time to leave, the two of them stormed round the apartment enacting battles and maneuvers. They sniped at each other with sticks from entrenched positions behind the furniture. They called out "Zalman" to each other. Yair's face was lit with frenzied joy as he discovered for the first time the delights of power, and the old private obeyed every command with steadfast devotion. Yehezkel was a happy old man on that final morning of our last visit to Holon. For a single searing moment I felt that the scene was familiar, as if I had already seen it long, long before. It was like a blurred copy of a much sharper, much clearer original. I could not remember where or when. A cold shiver ran down my spine, and I felt a strong compulsion to put something into words, to warn my son and my father-in-law perhaps against a danger of fire or electrocution. But there was no suggestion of either of these risks in their game. I felt an urge to suggest to Michael that we leave immediately, that very minute, but I could not bring myself to say this. It would have sounded foolish and rude. What was it that made me feel so uneasy? Several flights of fighters had flown low over Holon that morning. I do not think that was the reason for my feeling of unease. I do not think "reason" is an appropriate word to use in this context. The aircraft engines roared. The windowpanes rang. I felt that this was by no manner of means the first time.

Before we left, my father-in-law Yehezkel kissed me on both cheeks. As he did so, I noticed that his eyes seemed changed, as if the clouded pupils had spread to cover the whites. His face was gray, too, his cheeks drooping and furrowed, and the lips which touched my forehead were not warm. His handshake, by contrast, was amazingly warm; it was firm and almost frantic, as if the old man were trying to give me his fingers as a present. Four days after our return to Jerusalem all this came back to me with a blinding flash when, towards evening, Aunt Jenia arrived to inform us that Yehezkel had collapsed by the bus stop opposite his home.

"Last night still, only just last night poor Yehezkel came home to us to visit," she gabbled apologetically, almost as if to dispel an ugly suspicion. "Only last night he came to visit us and didn't complain of any discomfort. On the contrary. He talked to me about a new medicine for infantile paralysis which has just been discovered in America. He was ... normal. Quite normal. And then suddenly this morning right in front of the eyes of the Globermans next door he fell on the floor by the bus stop." Suddenly she sobbed, "Micha an orphan!" As she sobbed she curled her lips like an elderly scolded child. She clasped Michael's hand to her shriveled breast, stroked his forehead, then stopped.

"Micha, how can it be that a man suddenly, just like that, for no reason, on the sidewalk, just like a bag or a parcel falls from your hands, just like that on the sidewalk, and ... it's terrible. It's ... it's not right. It's disgusting. As if poor Yehezkele was just a bag or a parcel, to fall like that and burst open ... it's ... think what it looks like, Micha ... the shame of it ... with the Glober-mans next door sitting back watching from their veranda like in a box in the opera and total strangers coming and lifting by the arms and legs out of the way not to block the traffic and then going and taking up his hat and his glasses and the books he dropped all over the road ... And you know where he was going anyway?" Aunt Jenia raised her voice to a shrill, outraged wail. "He was only just going out to the library to return some books and he never even meant to take the bus and just by chance he fell down right at the bus stop, opposite the Globermans'. Such a gentle man, such a sweet ... such a gentle man, and suddenly ... just like in the circus, I tell you, like in a movie, a man is walking along peacefully in the middle of the road and suddenly someone comes up from behind and with a stick on the head they hit him and he just folds up and collapses like if a man was just a rag doll or something. I tell you, Micha, life is just a filthy heap of dung. Leave the child with the neighbors or somewhere, quick, and come back with me to Tel Aviv. Leahle is left all alone there, Leahle with her two left thumbs, to do all the arrangements. And thousands of formalities. A man passes on and with all the formalities you'd think he was going abroad at least. Bring your coats or something and let's go. I'll just go round to the drugstore in the meantime and call for a taxi, and ... yes, Micha, please, a dark suit or at least a jacket, and hurry up, both of you, please. Micha what a disaster oh what a terrible disaster Micha."