A Tale of Love and Darkness (30 page)

Take a look at this, please: I've got something here that I can show you and you can feel it with your fingers, so you'll know that everything I've told you isn't just stories. Look at this please—no, it's not a tablecloth, it's a pillowcase, embroidered the way young ladies from good homes learned to embroider in the old days. It was embroidered for me as a present by the Princess—or Countess?—Lyubov Nikitichna. The head that's embroidered here, she told me herself, is the silhouette of the head of Cardinal Richelieu. Who he was, that Cardinal Richelieu, I don't remember anymore. Perhaps I never knew, I'm not clever like Haya and Fania: they were sent off to get their matriculation, and then to Prague, to study at the university. I was a bit thick. People always said about me: that Sonichka, she is so cute but she's a bit thick. I was sent to the Polish military hospital to learn how to be a qualified nurse. But still I remember very well, before I left home, that the princess told me it was the head of Cardinal Richelieu.

Perhaps you know who Cardinal Richelieu was? Never mind. Tell me another time, or don't bother. At my age, it's not so important to me if I end my days without the honor of knowing who Cardinal Richelieu was. There are plenty of cardinals, and most of them are none too fond of our people.

Deep down in my heart I'm a bit of an anarchist. Like Papa. Your mother was also an anarchist at heart. Of course, among the Klausners she could never express it: they thought her pretty strange as it was, although they always behaved politely toward her. In general with the Klausners manners were always the most important thing. Your other grandfather, Grandpa Alexander, if I didn't snatch my hand away quickly, would have kissed it. There's a children's story about Puss-in-Boots. In the Klausner family your mother was like a captive bird in a cage hanging in Puss-in-Boots's drawing room.

I'm an anarchist for the very simple reason that nothing good ever came from any Cardinal Richelieu. Only Ivanuchka Durachok, do you remember, the village idiot in our maid Xenyuchka's story who took pity on the ordinary people and didn't begrudge the little bread he had to eat, but used it to stop the hole in the bridge and because of that he was made king—only someone like him might take pity on us, too, occasionally. All the rest, the kings and rulers, have no pity on anyone. In fact, we ordinary people don't have much pity for each other either: we didn't exactly have pity for the little Arab girl who died at the road block on the way to the hospital because apparently there was some Cardinal Richelieu of a soldier there, without a heart. A Jewish soldier—but still a Cardinal Richelieu! All he wanted was to lock up and go home, and so that little girl died, whose eyes should be piercing our souls so none of us can sleep at night, though I didn't even see her eyes because in the papers they only show pictures of our victims, never theirs.

Do you think ordinary people are so wonderful? Far from it! They are just as stupid and cruel as their rulers. That's the real moral of Hans Christian Andersen's story about the emperor's new clothes, that
ordinary people are just as stupid as the king and the courtiers and Cardinal Richelieu. But Ivanuchka Durachok didn't care if they laughed at him; all that mattered to him was that they should stay alive. He had compassion for people, all of whom without exception need some compassion. Even Cardinal Richelieu. Even the Pope, and you must have seen on television how sick and feeble he is, and here we were so lacking in compassion, we made him stand for hours in the sun on those sick legs of his. They had no pity on an old, very sick man, who you could see even on TV could stand upright only with terrible pain, but he made a supreme effort and stood in front of us saying nothing at Yad Vashem (the Holocaust memorial) for half an hour without a break, in a heat wave, just so as not to bring us dishonor. It was quite hard for me to watch. I felt sorry for him.

Nina was a very good friend of your mother Fania, they were exactly the same age, and I made friends with the little one, Tasia. For many years they lived in our house with the princess, Maman they called her. Maman is the French for Mama, but who knows if she was really their Mama? Or just their nanny? They were very poor, I don't think they paid us even a kopek in rent. They were allowed to come into the house not through the servants' entrance, the
chyorny khod
, but through the main entrance, which was called
paradny khod.
They were so poor that the princess, the Maman, used to sit at night by the lamp sewing paper skirts for rich girls who were learning ballet. It was a kind of corrugated paper, and she glued lots of glittering stars on, made from golden paper.

Until one fine day that princess, or countess, Lyubov Nikitichna, left her two girls and suddenly went off to Tunis, of all places, to look for some long-lost relative called Yelizaveta Franzovna. And now just look how my memory is making an idiot of me! Where have I put my watch? I can't remember. But the name of some Yelizaveta Franzovna that I've never seen in my life, some Yelizaveta Franzovna that maybe eighty years ago our Princess Lyubov Nikitichna went off to Tunis, of all places, to look for, that I can remember as clear as the sun in the sky! Perhaps I lost my watch in Tunis, too?

In our dining room hung a picture in a gilded frame by some very expensive
khudozhnik
(artist): I remember that in the picture you could see a good-looking boy with fair hair, all disheveled, looking more like a spoiled girl than a boy, like something between a boy and a girl. I can't remember his face but I do remember very well that he was wearing a kind of embroidered shirt with puffy sleeves, a big yellow hat hanging by a string on her shoulder—perhaps it was a little girl after all—and you could see her three skirts, one under the other, because one side was raised a little and the lace peeped out from underneath, first a yellow underskirt, a very strong yellow like in a Van Gogh, then under that a white lace underskirt, and the bottom one—her legs were covered apparently by a third underskirt in sky blue. A picture like that, it seemed modest but it wasn't really. It was a life-size picture. And that girl who looked so much like a boy was standing there in the middle of the field, surrounded by pasture and white sheep, there were some light clouds in the sky, and in the distance you could see a strip of forest.

I remember once Haya said that a beauty like that shouldn't go out herding sheep but should stay inside the walls of the palace, and I said that the bottommost skirt was painted the same color as the sky, as though the skirt had been cut straight from the sky. And suddenly Fania burst out in fury against us and said, Be quiet, both of you, why are you talking such nonsense, it's a lying painting that is covering a very great moral decay. She used more or less these words, but not exactly, I can't repeat your mother's way of speaking, nobody could—can you still remember a little how Fania spoke?

I can't forget that outburst of hers, or her face at that moment. She was maybe fifteen or sixteen at the time. I remember it all precisely because it was so unlike her: Fania never raised her voice, ever, even when she was hurt, she would just withdraw inward. And anyway, with her you always had to guess what she was feeling, what she didn't like. And here suddenly—I remember it was Saturday night or the end of some festival, maybe Sukkot? or Shavuot?—she suddenly burst out and shouted at us. Never mind me, all my life I've been just the silly little one, but to shout at Haya! Our big sister! The leader of the youth group! With her charisma! Haya, who was admired by the whole school!

But your mother, as though suddenly rebelling, started to pour scorn on that artistic painting that had been hanging there in our dining room all those years. She ridiculed it for sweetening reality! For lying! She said that in real life, shepherdesses are dressed in rags, not in silk, and they
have faces scarred by cold and hunger, not angelic faces, and dirty hair with lice and fleas, not golden locks. And that to ignore suffering is almost as bad as inflicting it, and that the picture turned real life into some kind of Swiss chocolate box scene.

Maybe the reason your mother was in such a rage about the picture in the dining room was that the
khudozhnik
who painted it had made it seem as if there were no more disasters in the world. I think that's what made her angry. At the time of this outburst she must have been more miserable than anyone could have imagined. Forgive me for crying. She was my sister and she loved me a lot and she's been ravaged by scorpions. That's enough: I've finished crying now. Sorry. Every time I remember that prettified picture, every time I see a picture with three underskirts and a feathery sky, I see scorpions ravaging my sister and I start to cry.

SO THE
eighteen-year-old Fania, following in the footsteps of her elder sister Haya, was sent in 1931 to study at the university in Prague, because in Poland the universities were virtually closed to Jews. Mother studied history and philosophy. Her parents, Hertz and Itta, like all the Jews of Rovno, were witnesses and victims of the anti-Semitism that was growing among their Polish neighbors and among the Ukrainians and Germans, Catholic and Orthodox Christians—acts of violence by Ukrainian hooligans and increasingly discriminatory measures by the Polish authorities. And, like the rumble of distant thunder, echoes reached Rovno of deadly incitement to violence and the persecution of Jews in Hitler's Germany.

My grandfather's business affairs were also in crisis: the inflation of the early 1930s wiped out all his savings overnight. Aunt Sonia told me about "loads of Polish banknotes for millions and trillions that Papa gave me, that I wallpapered my room with. All the dowries that he had been saving for ten years for the three of us went down the drain in two months." Haya and Fania soon had to abandon their studies in Prague because the money, their father's money, had almost run out.

And so the flour mill, the house and orchard in Dubinska Street, the carriage, horses, and sleigh were all sold in a hasty, unfavorable deal. Itta
and Hertz Mussman reached Palestine in 1933 almost penniless. They rented a miserable little hut covered with tar paper. Papa, who had always enjoyed being near flour, managed to find work in the Pat bakery. Later, when he was about fifty, as Aunt Sonia recalled, he bought a horse and cart and made his living first delivering bread, then transporting building materials around Haifa Bay. I can see him clearly, a darkly suntanned, thoughtful man, in his work clothes and sweaty gray vest, his smile rather shy but his blue eyes shooting sparks of laughter, the reins slack in his hands, as though from his seat on a board set across the cart he found some charming and amusing side to the views of Haifa Bay, the Carmel range, the oil refineries, the derricks of the port in the distance, and the factory chimneys.

Now that he had stopped being a wealthy man and returned to the proletariat, he seemed rejuvenated. A sort of perpetual suppressed joy seemed to have descended on him, a joie de vivre in which an anarchistic spark flickered. Just like Yehuda Leib Klausner of Ulkieniki in Lithuania, the father of my other grandfather, Alexander, my grandfather Naphtali Hertz Mussman enjoyed the life of a carter, the lonely, peaceful rhythm of the long slow journeys, the feel of the horse and its pungent smells, the stable, the straw, the harness, the shafts, the oat bag, the reins, and the bit.

Sonia, who was a girl of sixteen when her parents emigrated and her sisters were studying in Prague, stayed on in Rovno for five years, until she had qualified as a nurse at the nursing college attached to the Polish military hospital. She reached the port of Tel Aviv, where her parents, her sisters, and Tsvi Shapiro, Haya's "fresh" husband, were waiting for her, two days before the end of 1938. After a few years she married in Tel Aviv the man who had been her leader in the youth movement in Rovno, a strict, pedantic, opinionated man named Avraham Gendel-berg. Buma.

And in 1934, a year or so after her parents and her elder sister Haya and four years before her younger sister Sonia, Fania too reached the Land of Israel. People who knew her said that she had had a painful love affair in Prague; they couldn't give me any details. When I visited Prague and on several successive evenings walked in the warren of ancient cobblestone streets around the university, I conjured up images and composed stories in my head.

A year or so after she arrived in Jerusalem, my mother registered to continue her history and philosophy studies at the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus. Forty-eight years later, apparently with no notion of what her grandmother had studied in her youth, my daughter Fania decided to study history and philosophy at Tel Aviv University.

I do not know if my mother broke off her studies at Charles University only because her parents' money had run out. How far was she pushed to emigrate to Palestine by the violent hatred of Jews that filled the streets of Europe in the mid-1930s and spread to the universities, or to what extent did she come here as the result of her education in a Tar-buth school and her membership in a Zionist youth movement? What did she hope to find here, what did she find, what did she not find? What did Tel Aviv and Jerusalem look like to someone who had grown up in a mansion in Rovno and arrived straight from the Gothic beauty of Prague? What did spoken Hebrew sound like to the sensitive ears of a young lady coming with the refined, book-learned Hebrew of the Tar-buth school and possessing a finely tuned linguistic sensibility? How did my young mother respond to the sand dunes, the motor pumps in the citrus groves, the rocky hillsides, the archaeology field trips, the biblical ruins and remains of the Second Temple period, the headlines in the newspapers and the cooperative dairy produce, the wadis, the hamsins, the domes of the walled convents, the ice-cold water from the
jarra
, the cultural evenings with accordion and harmonica music, the cooperative bus drivers in their khaki shorts, the sounds of English (the language of the rulers of the country), the dark orchards, the minarets, strings of camels carrying building sand, Hebrew watchmen, suntanned pioneers from the kibbutz, construction workers in shabby caps? How much was she repelled, or attracted, by tempestuous nights of arguments, ideological conflicts, and courtships, Saturday afternoon outings, the fire of party politics, the secret intrigues of the various underground groups and their sympathizers, the enlisting of volunteers for agricultural tasks, the dark blue nights punctuated by howls of jackals and echoes of distant gunfire?