The Story of a Life (15 page)

AT THE AGE of eighteen, I still couldn’t write properly. At the army induction center in Afula, standing half naked by the door of a room where the medical committee was to examine me, I filled out a form and the clerk corrected two spelling mistakes in it. It was not the first time this had happened. Whenever I was corrected, I’d feel slightly wounded. It seemed to me that I would never know how to write, and that there would always be someone who’d find mistakes in my writing.

I was then asked to take off my undershirt. The three doctors stared at me as I stood before them. They were different from the doctors that I remembered from home. One of them approached me, checked my pulse and my blood pressure, and asked me to get up on the scale and to give him my glasses. The other two doctors also checked my glasses and their thick lenses.

I stood there while they consulted in whispers. It seemed to me they were commenting on how skinny I was, on
my poor eyesight, and on the curvature in my back. Although they whispered, it seemed to me they wanted me to hear.

“Have you had any illnesses?” I was asked.

“Typhus,” I replied immediately.

Anyone who’d been in the camps had contracted typhus. It was also a sign of the approaching end. Children lasted only a few days, as they curled up and faded away.

“Where and when were you born?” Always the same question.

“Czernowitz, 1932.”

“Your parents’ names?”

“My mother was Bonia and my father, Michael.”

“Elementary school?”

“First grade.”

“High school?”

“No.”

These frequently asked questions now seemed to resonate all the more, as if they were revealing something for the first time.

The doctors again looked hard at me, and one of them asked, “When did you come to Israel?”

“In 1946.”

“And what have you been doing?”

“Two years in the Aliyat Hano’ar Youth Movement, and two years’ apprenticeship in the orchards.”

“Do you want to serve in the army?”

“Yes.”

For some reason, this made all three of them chuckle.

“Get dressed,” I was ordered.

My nakedness and the questions that I was asked made me uneasy. It seemed to me that serious flaws in my body and my state of mind had just been found, and that I would soon be told that I couldn’t serve in the army. I was sure
that the announcement would be accompanied by severe condemnation.

I looked at them again. They were speaking among themselves. I understood nothing of what they were saying, but the thought that they were talking about me in secrecy increased my anxiety.

“And did you have any brothers or sisters?”

“No.”

For a moment it seemed to me that they were trying to solve a riddle. The riddle was me, and they lacked only a few details, but soon the complete condemnation would be announced.

I’m healthy
, I was about to say.
My shortsightedness doesn’t prevent me from reading. It’s important for me to serve in a fighting unit. Being placed in a fighting unit would do away with all the injuries and insults that I have sustained. I’m sure I’ll be able to handle any mission I’m given. Just let me have the chance to prove it.
While I was still preoccupied with these thoughts, the doctor who’d checked me lifted his head from his papers and declared, “Fit for service,” as if he’d finally solved the riddle.

Fit for service, but not for fighting.

In the months before the exam, I had made a huge effort to toughen up, or, more accurately, to appear tougher. I ran, I worked out, I climbed hills, and I lifted weights. Perhaps because of all this, I lost weight. Not for nothing did they ask if I ate well. I trained because I wanted to be accepted into a fighting unit. The notion that one day I’d be a regular soldier alongside other soldiers, or perhaps even an officer, took up a great deal of my thoughts. It seemed to me that the army framework—the training and the actual combat—would change not only my body but my character as well. The sensitivity that had caused me such suffering would disappear, and I would become tall and rugged. I would look like a soldier.

Now this dream was gone. The army did take me, but on a very restricted basis: Fit for Service. An “FFS” is really half a soldier, or even a quarter of a soldier—one who serves those in active combat, supplies their uniforms, feeds them, but is never one of them.

We all stood outside in the sun and waited for the truck that would take us to the camp for basic training. The noncombatants were grouped in one corner, and the fighters stood next to a eucalyptus tree. One had to admit that the difference was striking. The fighters were taller, and attractively self-confident. They spoke in rough voices, were better built, and were even hairier. The noncombatants gave themselves away by their mannerisms, which were slack and sloppy. But beyond these mannerisms was what the eyes revealed: there was no sparkle to them, no fire of determination. A dullness appeared there instead. It was clear: the FFSs hadn’t been born to heroic deeds; they were going to sit out their time on bases in the rear and serve the soldiers who were destined for heroism. I was full of regret that fate couldn’t have prepared something better for me. Henceforth the division was clear: some of us for dazzling deeds and some for dull service. It took me no time at all to see that those who had been called up with me knew one another. Most were local, from Afula, and had studied together in grade school and in high school. I was the only foreigner, an outsider, carrying within me the landscapes of a foreign country, another language, and experiences about which I was unable to speak.

A soldier came up to me. “What’s your name?” he asked.

I told him.

“Where did you go to school?”

“I didn’t go to school.”

“You must be joking.”

The young man looked at me with a mixture of pity and scorn. I knew that I had come to a crossroads, but it wasn’t within my power to change anything. A soft body and lack of education are handicaps everywhere. In the army they determine everything. I tried for some time to get accepted into various training programs, but nothing came of it. All doors were closed to me.

At the induction center I met S., a recruit who, unlike me, had spent the war with his parents in hiding in a Belgian village. During the long years of the war, his parents had taught him everything that’s studied in high school, and more. His father was a famous linguist, his mother a scientist. For S., the war years were years of intensive study. In addition to French, he spoke German, English, and apparently other languages, too. His very appearance indicated that he was talented and studious. He was tall and fragile-looking, and his long fingers hinted at a certain refinement and sensitivity. He spoke to me in my mother tongue, German, and his phrases were elegant, chosen from a broad vocabulary. I didn’t understand all of it. That was how my family had spoken, but because of the war, I had lost everything. Even words I once knew had been forgotten.

I was with S. throughout basic training. It was from him that I first heard names like Kafka, Sartre, and Camus, and words such as “intensive,” “dramatic,” and “integral.” He was always talking about famous people, historic places, and, of course, books.

“And you studied throughout the entire war?” I would ask him, unable to restrain myself.

“I studied and I was tested.”

“Who tested you?”

“My father.”

S. was pleasant, but at the same time there was something
frightening about him, as if he were of an altogether different breed. Basic training was not easy for him, either, but he always had some ironic response, some sarcastic comment that made light of the sergeant major’s shouts. Though his parents had not equipped him with a strong body, they had given him an abundance of words, which protected him and helped him along when he carried mortars or ammunition. His irony and contempt, though not directed at me, hurt me nonetheless.

I was jealous of S. Of all the languages that I had spoken at home, there was not even one in which I was still fluent. The books that I remembered were those of Jules Verne, but, if truth be told, I had forgotten them, too.

I made no friends during basic training, and S. was the only person with whom I spoke. One could see that the war years had somehow passed him by, and had only broadened his knowledge. He had studied and he had absorbed what he had studied. He was always sprinkling his conversation with French or English words. Had it not been for the war, I would have been like S., but I had spent the war in a ghetto, in a camp, and on the Ukrainian steppes. Even if I were to devote the rest of my life to studying, I would never be able to attain S.’s level of erudition.

“And were you really in hiding for all the years of the war?” I couldn’t keep the envy out of my voice.

“Correct.”

“And you never left the hiding place?”

“At night we would go upstairs to the living room.”

“And you had food?”

“Plenty of it.”

There was no doubt about it: S. would emerge victorious from any war. His frail body was full of confidence, belief in himself, and scorn for an army that had placed him in such
harsh surroundings. After basic training, he was plucked from our midst and assigned to one of the secret units. From that point on, we saw no more of each other. It was said that after his army service he sailed with his parents for America. Another rumor had it that he returned to Belgium, and that he teaches at a university there.

MY DIARY FOR 1950 TO 1952, my years of army service, is almost empty. During that time, I did not have so much as a corner I could call my own, and the diary reflects this. In the army, and in particular during the long stretches of waiting, I would read anything that came to hand. I say that I “read,” but it would be more accurate to say that I devoured—quite indiscriminately, as if I was trying to catch up on all I had missed. There was no getting around it: my lack of education pained me.

It was not, however, from books that I drew knowledge and understanding, but from life itself. I had been placed within the rigid environment of the army: inspections morning and evening, rules about our appearance, about how our beds were to be made up, and about how to clean and maintain our rifles. I had known suffering in the ghetto and in the camp, but the suffering I experienced in the army was different: it was not from hunger and thirst, but from emotional pressure. In the army I was like an animal that attempts to
make itself as small as possible, to disguise itself, to sneak away, or to disappear. I experienced the kind of secret relish felt by those who have tiptoed around the rim of an abyss without falling into it. In this hidden delight was the triumph of the weak.

I was now eighteen years old and slightly clumsy. The uniform that was meant to fill me with pride somehow failed to do so. On the contrary, I felt trapped and constricted. In the early 1950s, the army was strict and inflexible. After years of underground activity, it wanted to be recognized as a regular military force, just like any other. As is the case with all revolutions, this was carried to the extreme. Humiliation and arbitrary behavior came along with discipline. I suffered from the confinement and the coercion, and to overcome my distress, I adopted a stratagem familiar to me from my childhood: close-range observation.

There are a few noteworthy aspects of observation: when you observe, you’re on the outside, a little higher up, and distant. From this perspective you can understand that whoever’s shouting at you is perhaps really shouting at his father or his mother. It’s only by chance that you’ve crossed his path. But a person who doesn’t shout can sometimes be worse than one who does. To curry favor with his superiors, he drags us out on night marches and orders us to dig square holes—all just to prove to his superior officer that his company isn’t idling about. Obsequious people tend to grovel, and, to my surprise, I discovered they have certain telltale characteristics: in the army, they tended to be overweight and, despite their youth, already padded with quite a layer of fat. Through observation, you can shake off some of your sadness and self-pity. The more you observe, the less pain you feel.

Even as a child, I loved to observe. For hours I would sit
by the double-glazed window and watch the falling snow. In summer I would sit in the garden, looking at the flowers and watching the pets stretched out in the yard. Observation always brought me pleasure—the pleasure of blending in with whatever I was looking at. Only later, at age six or seven, did I start paying attention to form and detail. For example, I noticed that our neighbor’s cat wore a pink ribbon, and our neighbor herself—not a tall woman and curvaceously plump—wore a long dress with a deep décolletage and a ribbon in her hair that was very similar to the one worn around the neck of her cat. She wasn’t married, but she had a lover, an officer in the Romanian army who visited her every night. He had spurs on his boots, which meant that he was in the cavalry.

Ours was a two-family house. Our master bedroom abutted her master bedroom, and our bathroom was next to her bathroom. She spent much of the day in her bathroom, primping and perfuming herself for her lover’s visit that night. When she walked out the front door, wearing a rose-pink gown and a ribbon in her hair, she reeked of heavy perfume. Mother couldn’t stand her, but I actually loved watching her. Like an actress, she changed her dress almost every hour, but her most resplendent clothes were kept for the night. She resembled an animal, but I’m not sure which one. Her lover had the gait of a stallion, and when he went up the stairs, I half expected to hear a neigh.

Our neighbor and her lover are among the most detailed images that remain in my memory: her softness, the couches and the sofas that she plumped with scores of cushions, the heavy rugs, the candles stuck into china saucers, the walls on which were hung oil paintings filled with angels. Our home, by contrast, seemed gloomy and monastic to me, and lacking in decoration. Had it not been for some sketches that
Mother had bought after great deliberation, the walls would have been almost completely bare.