The Story of a Life (10 page)

It would have been easier had it been possible to pray alone. But what can one do? Jews are commanded to pray together.

At the entrance to each barrack, a short, drab man, quite undistinguished, would stand, morning and evening, exhorting men to join the prayers. However, since this lobbying didn’t work, others would add to it the threat of divine
punishment, awakening old feelings of guilt. It was no wonder that such people were scorned. They were abused, called all kinds of names, and, when they continued to threaten God’s wrath, beaten without mercy.

And yet, somehow, a
minyan
would always be formed in the morning and in the evening. Men did come, either willingly or through coercion. This perseverance drove people crazy. Not a day went by without arguments, mutual recriminations, and curses. And, as is the case with every battle, words that hadn’t been heard for years were dredged up from oblivion. I was then thirteen years old and keenly felt the need to pray. Those praying did not take kindly to my presence, looking askance—even scornfully—at me, but I, for some reason, did not skip even one
minyan.
The melody—the mournful, monotonic melody—enchanted me.

“Perhaps you could teach me to pray?” I asked one of the men.

“Whatever for?” he said, without even glancing in my direction.

Another person who heard my request added, “It’s no simple matter—it’s a whole business. Why would you need it?”

At that time, again, children were in danger. Handlers, moneychangers, smugglers, and ordinary thieves made them carry out dangerous missions. On more than one occasion, a child fell into the hands of the police and often was beaten because he was afraid to inform on those who had dispatched him. There were also the daredevil children who worked in gangs, moving goods from place to place and spending their nights in the whorehouses of Naples. No one dared to raise a finger against them. Anyone who harmed them put himself in danger, for they were absolutely fearless. Three gangs of children roamed around Naples at that time. Sometimes war would break out among them. These were real battles that left
people injured and dead, but most children were weak and passive and did what the grown-ups told them to do.

I once again summoned up my courage and asked one of those praying to teach me. He looked at me sharply and asked, “Why didn’t you learn at home?”

“My parents weren’t religious,” I said truthfully.

“If they weren’t religious, why should you be religious?”

I didn’t know what to answer, so I simply said, “I want to pray.”

“You don’t know what you want,” he said, and turned his back on me.

As fall approached, the barracks began to empty. Some of the survivors sailed off to Palestine; most went to Australia and America. It was cold outside. The poker games heated up, and some fights broke out. One of the smugglers tried to get me to join his gang, to earn fifty dollars on one run. I had heard a lot about these sorties, about the clashes with the border police, and about informers who turned in the smugglers. They would mostly go out in groups of seven, of whom one was always caught or killed.

The desire to pray grew stronger within me from day to day. It became an unslakable, unaccountable thirst, one that would return anew every day to torment me. One of the men in the
minyan
noticed my distress and spoke to me quietly. “You’ll be sailing to Palestine soon,” he said. “In Palestine they work on kibbutzim and they don’t pray.”

Finally, one of the dealers agreed to teach me. He was a sturdy fellow with an unpleasant appearance who would hum and gabble his words. He read the large letters at the beginning of the faded prayer book to me a few times, and then said offhandedly, “Now go practice.”

I practiced for two days. Apparently without success. Whenever I made a mistake, he would slap my face. I could
have left the place and gone to another camp, but for some reason I was convinced that learning to pray was bound up with suffering, so I accepted it. One of the worshippers saw the slaps I was being dealt and turned to my teacher. “Why are you hitting the orphan?” he asked.

“To get the letters into his head.”

“Orphans shouldn’t be hit.”

“Ach, it won’t hurt him.”

Learning the Hebrew alphabet was hard for me, and I was often close to leaving both the place and the man, but for some reason I didn’t. Another one of the refugees who saw my distress couldn’t restrain himself. “Boys your age are already doing more important things,” he said. “Haven’t you learned your lesson?”

I didn’t know which lesson he meant. At any rate, I loved to pray. The thought that one day I, too, would be able to stand, prayer book in hand, and pray, was stronger than the humiliation. That strong man had no pity on me. Sometimes it seemed to me that he was hitting me in order to uproot my desire to pray.

For two months I studied prayers with this man, whose name was Pini. Then he obtained a visa and sailed off to Australia. He parted from the
minyan
with a bottle of liquor. His friends in the black market didn’t seem particularly happy for him. Me, he avoided.

I was glad that he had sailed off. His indifference and his cold anger continued to scare me long after he had gone, although the prayers that he had left me with gave me great pleasure.

A month after he departed, prayer started to flow out of my mouth. The feeling that I was able to follow the man who led the prayers, to repeat his verses along with everyone else, infused me with courage. Even the drab dealers, indifferent and selfish, seemed friendly to me.

I was mistaken, of course. One of those who came to pray suggested that I smuggle cigarettes to Sicily. When I refused, he said threateningly, “You watch out! If I catch you here, you’ll regret it.”

The threat sounded real to me, and I stopped coming to
minyan.
Fortunately for me, later that same week we moved to another camp, and my desire to pray was sent into hiding.

THE WAR SPAWNED many strange children, but Chico was one of a kind. His memory, it was said, was phenomenal. He could repeat thirty numbers as if they were but three, and he would do so without making a single error. The first time I saw him was in the refugee camp in Italy, on the way to Palestine. He was part of a troupe of child performers between the ages of seven and eight. Among them were jugglers and fire-eaters, and a child who walked a tightrope that he had strung between the trees. There was also a girl singer, Amalia, who had the voice of a nightingale. She did not sing in any particular language, but in one all her own, a mixture of words that she remembered from home, sounds from the pastures, noises from the forest, and prayers from the convent. People would listen to her and weep. It was hard to tell exactly what she sang about. It always seemed as though she was telling a long story full of hidden details. Her seven-year-old friend would dance alongside her, or sometimes he would dance alone. Amalia loved watching him and, though she was his
age, or perhaps even younger, she would gaze at him like an older sister. Her look was mature and full of concern, as if she wanted to shield him under her wing. There was also a child who played sad Russian songs on his harmonica. He was six years old, but looked younger. They made a crate for him, and he’d stand on it and play.

These little troupes sprang up on the roads and wandered from camp to camp, and at night they would entertain those who were tired of the war and of themselves. At that time people didn’t know what to do with themselves, with lives that had been so unexpectedly spared. There were no words; the ones left over from home sounded hollow. Sometimes a man would appear and words would flow from his mouth. But the words he used were from before the war, and they sounded like coarse scraps, devoid of all taste. Only the speech of the small children still had some kind of freshness. I say small children, because the twelve- and thirteen-year-olds were already corrupt: they traded, changed money, pilfered, and robbed like the grown-ups. But, unlike the grown-ups, they were agile. The years in the forests had taught them how to move quickly, how to climb and to scurry about. They had learned much from the animals they had observed there.

We did not yet realize that the children had created a new language. Their language emerged from their very being, from the way they stood or sat, sang or spoke. It was straightforward, and it hid nothing.

CHICO WAS THEN seven years old, and his memory astounded his audience. His handler eventually taught him to tell stories, and he would perform them without slipping up at all. But the streetwise handler quickly understood that Chico was a gold mine, and he acted accordingly. He taught Chico
some of the psalms and the Kaddish. He taught him to pray in the old-fashioned way, for the handler was himself a cantor’s son.

Within a short time, Chico knew the verses by heart, and he soon overshadowed all the other children in the troupe. He always appeared at the end and stole the show. Chico’s prayer was admittedly different from anything that had ever been heard before. Neither a lamentation nor a supplication, it was an utterly simple devotion known only to our forefathers.

All eyes were fixed on Chico. He gave them what they needed at that moment: a little of that sense of belief that they had almost forgotten, a connection to the dear ones they had lost. It was hard to know if Chico understood what was coming out of his mouth. In any case, his prayer was so lucid and artless and pure that people hearing it wept like children.

Because Chico was such a success, his fellows in the troupe stopped appearing, and Chico’s act filled the entire evening. “He’s just a baby,” people said. “He’s a
Wunderkind
, a prodigy, a reincarnation. In your entire life, have you ever seen a child of seven who knew the entire prayer book by heart?!”

His handler raked in the cash and hustled his little troupe from place to place. Chico appeared evening after evening, and sometimes during the day as well. The handler took care to provide him with food and drink, and if Chico refused to eat, he would reprimand and force him. Chico ate and grew fat. But, wonder of wonders, despite growing fat and despite having to give so many performances, Chico didn’t lose the purity of his prayer.

From week to week, his voice became purer. Anyone who heard Chico once would be drawn to him again. And so it went on for the entire summer. In the winter the handler
fixed up an abandoned hut, filled it with benches, and posted a guard at the entrance. He was sure that now his earnings would only increase.

But the hut, which had held out great promise, didn’t bring luck. On the opening night Chico caught a cold, took to his bed, and burned with fever. His fever raged on for two weeks, and when he finally rose from his sickbed, the prayers had been erased from his memory. In vain did the handler try to teach them to him all over again. A blue, bewildered sort of gaze now settled in Chico’s eyes, as if he didn’t understand what people were saying to him.

“Chico! Chico!” The handler would shake him. But Chico was never the same again.

Out of sheer desperation, the handler put Amalia and her partner back onstage, with the child who played the harmonica. They were excellent, surpassing themselves, but they were unable to compete with Chico. “Where’s Chico?” rumbled the audience. The handler had no choice but to put him onstage, so that everyone could see that he was still alive. But Chico, who only a month ago had climbed nimbly onto the stage and launched straight into a prayer, stood there frozen. His blue eyes were filled with a frighteningly vacant expression.

And thus was Chico’s star extinguished. Amalia and her partner and the other members of the troupe made tremendous efforts, but people were not prepared to pay a lot of money for their performances. At night the handler would blast Chico for his laziness and for not even trying to make an effort. Finally, he threatened to send him to Palestine, where it was tremendously hot and people worked from morning till night. It was hard to know what Chico was thinking. The handler’s words apparently hurt him, because his mouth puckered up and his right shoulder jerked uncontrollably. Though
the troupe suffered at the hands of their impresario, the children did not leave him. “Run away!” people would urge them, but they seemed to be used to him and his excesses.

At the end of the winter, some people set upon the handler and beat him up. He didn’t give in easily. He whined and shouted, “The children are mine, and mine alone. I’m their mentor, and I’ve looked after them since the end of the war.”

But his entreaties were useless. While he was lying on the ground, bleeding profusely, the children were hoisted up onto a truck and taken straight to the shore, where a ship was anchored.

Throughout the entire trip from Naples to Haifa, evening after evening and sometimes during the day as well, the troupe would perform on the deck. Although Chico’s memory never returned, he would recite the prayer “God Full of Mercies” with great feeling. His face matured, so that he looked older than he actually was—more like a nine-year-old. A large woman from Transylvania wrapped him in a sweater and did not move from his side during the entire voyage.

WORLD WAR II WENT ON for six straight years, but sometimes it seems to me that it lasted only one long night, from which I awoke a completely different person. Sometimes I felt that it wasn’t I who was in the war, but someone else, someone very close to me, and that he was going to tell me what exactly occurred, for I don’t remember what happened or how it happened.

I say “I don’t remember,” and that’s the whole truth. The strongest imprints those years have left on me are intense physical ones. The hunger for bread. To this very day I can wake up in the middle of the night ravenously hungry. Dreams of hunger and thirst haunt me almost on a weekly basis. I eat as only people who have known hunger eat, with a strangely ravenous appetite.

During the course of the war, I was in hundreds of places—in railway stations, in remote villages, on the banks of rivers. All these places had names, but there’s not one that I can remember. Sometimes I see the war years like a large
pasture that blends into the horizon; sometimes it’s like a dark and gloomy forest that goes on interminably; and sometimes it’s like a long line of people weighed down with bundles and knapsacks. From time to time some of the people collapse onto the ground, only to be trampled by all the other feet.