A Tale of Love and Darkness (67 page)

After my military service, in 1961, the Committee of Kibbutz Hulda sent me to Jerusalem to study for two years at the Hebrew University. I studied literature because the kibbutz needed a literature teacher urgently, and I studied philosophy because I insisted on it. Every Sunday, from four to six p.m., a hundred students gathered in the large hall in the Meiser Building to hear Professor Samuel Hugo Bergman lecture on "dialectical philosophy from Kierkegaard to Martin Buber." My mother Fania also studied philosophy with Professor Bergman, in the 1930s, when the university was still on Mount Scopus, before she married my father, and she had fond memories of him. By 1961 Bergman was already retired, he was an emeritus professor, but we were fascinated by his lucid, fierce wisdom. I was thrilled to think that the man standing in front of us had been at school with Kafka in Prague, and, as he once told us, had actually shared a bench with him for two years, until Max Brod turned up and took his place next to Kafka.

That winter Bergman invited five or six of his favorite or most interesting pupils to come to his house for a couple of hours after the lectures. Every Sunday, at eight o'clock, I took the No. 5 bus from the new campus on Givat Ram to Professor Bergman's modest apartment in Re-havia. A pleasant faint smell of old books, fresh bread, and geraniums always filled the room. We sat down on the sofa or on the floor at the feet of our great master, the childhood friend of Kafka and Martin Buber and the author of the books from which we learned the history of epistemology and the principles of logic. We waited in silence for him to pronounce. Samuel Hugo Bergman was a stout man even in old age. With his shock of white hair, the ironic, amused lines around his eyes, a piercing glance that looked skeptical yet as innocent as that of a curious child, Bergman bore a striking resemblance to pictures of Albert Einstein as an old man. With his Central European accent he walked in the Hebrew language not with a natural stride, as though he were at home in it, but with a sort of elation, like a suitor happy that his beloved has finally accepted him and determined to rise above himself and prove to her that she has not made a mistake.

Almost the only subject that concerned our teacher at these meetings was the survival of the soul, or the chances, if there were any, of existence after death. That is what he talked to us about on Sunday evenings through that winter, with the rain lashing at the windows and the wind howling in the garden. Sometimes he asked for our opinions, and he listened attentively, not at all like a patient teacher guiding his pupils' footsteps but more like a man listening for a particular note in a complicated piece of music, so as to decide if it was right or wrong.

"Nothing," he said to us on one of the Sunday evenings, and I have not forgotten, so much so that I believe I can repeat what he said almost word for word, "ever disappears. The very word 'disappears' implies that the universe is, so to speak, finite, and that it is possible to leave it. But no-o-othing" (he deliberately drew the word out) "can ever leave the universe. And nothing can enter it. Not a single speck of dust can appear or
disappear. Matter is transformed into energy, and energy into matter, atoms assemble and disperse, everything changes and is transformed, but no-o-othing can ever change from being to not-being. Not even the tiniest hair growing on the tail of some virus. The concept of infinity is indeed open, infinitely open, but at the same time it is also closed and hermetically sealed. Nothing leaves and nothing enters."

Pause. A crafty, innocent smile spread like a sunrise across the wrinkled landscape of his rich, fascinating face: "In which case why, maybe someone can explain to me, why do they insist on telling me that the one and only exception to the rule, the one and only thing that is doomed to perdition, that can become nothing, the one and only thing that is destined for cessation in the whole wide universe in which not so much as an atom can be destroyed, is my poor soul? Will everything, every speck of dust, every drop of water continue to exist eternally, albeit in different forms, except for my soul?"

"Nobody," murmured a clever young genius from a corner of the room, "has ever seen the soul."

"No," Bergman agreed at once. "You don't meet the laws of physics or mathematics in a café either. Or wisdom, or foolishness, or desire or fear. No one has yet taken a little sample of joy or longing and put it in a test tube. But who is it, my young friend, who is talking to you right now? Is it Bergman's humors? His spleen? Is it perhaps Bergman's large intestine speaking? Who was it, if you will excuse my saying so, who spread that none-too-pleasant smile on your face? Was it not your soul? Was it your cartilages? Your gastric juices?"

On another occasion he said:

"What is in store for us after we die? No-o-obody knows. At any rate not with a knowledge that is susceptible of proof or demonstration. If I tell you this evening that I sometimes hear the voice of the dead and that it is much clearer and more intelligible to me than most of the voices of the living, you are entitled to say that this old man is in his dotage. He has gone out of his mind with terror at his impending death. Therefore I will not talk to you this evening about voices, this evening I will talk mathematics: since no-o-obody knows if there is anything on the other side of our death or if there is nothing there, we can deduce from this complete ignorance that the chances that there is something there are exactly the same as the chances that there is nothing there. Fifty percent
for cessation and fifty percent for survival. For a Jew like me, a Central European Jew from the generation of the Nazi Holocaust, such odds in favor of survival are not at all bad."

Gershom Scholem, Bergman's friend and rival, was also fascinated and possibly even tormented by the question of life after death. The morning the news of his death was broadcast, I wrote:

Gershom Scholem died in the night. And now he knows.

Bergman too knows now. So does Kafka. So do my mother and father. And their friends and acquaintances and most of the men and women in those cafés, both those I used to tell myself stories about and those who are forgotten. They all know now. Someday we will know too. And in the meantime we will continue to gather little details. Just in case.

I WAS A
fiercely nationalistic child when I was in the fourth and fifth grades at Tachkemoni School. I wrote a historical novel in installments called
The End of the Kingdom ofJudah
, and several poems about conquest, and about national greatness, which resembled Grandpa Alexander's patriotic verses and aimed to imitate Vladimir Jabotinsky's nationalistic marching songs such as the Beitar Anthem: "...Spill your blood and offer up your soul! / Raise high the fire: / Repose is like mire; / We fight for a glorious goal!" I was also influenced by the song of the Jewish partisans in Poland and the ghetto rebels: "...What if our blood we spill? / Surely our spirit with heroic deeds shall thrive!" And poems by Saul Tchernikhowsky that Father used to read to me with wavering pathos in his voice: "...a tune of blood and fire! / So climb the hill and crush the vale, whate'er you see—acquire!" The poem that excited me most of all was "Nameless Soldiers," by Avraham Stern, alias Yair, the leader of the Stern Gang. I used to recite it with pathos but in a whisper in bed after lights out: "Nameless soldiers are we, we must fight to be free; / all around is the shadow of death. / We have signed up for life to do battle and strife—/ we must fight till we breathe our last breath.../ In the day that is red with our blood that is shed, / in the blackest despair of the night, / over village and town our flag shall be flown / for we fight to defend what is right!"

Torrents of blood, soil, fire, and iron intoxicated me. Over and over again I imagined myself falling heroically on the battlefield, I imagined my parents' sorrow and pride, and at the same time, with no contradiction, after my heroic death, after tearfully enjoying the rousing funeral orations pronounced by Ben-Gurion, Begin, and Uri Zvi, after grieving over myself and seeing with emotion and a lump in my throat the marble statues and songs of praise in my memory, I always arose healthy and sound from my temporary death, soaked in self-admiration, appointed myself commander-in-chief of Israel's armed forces, and led my legions to liberate in blood and fire everything that the effeminate, Diaspora-bred worm of Jacob had not dared to wrest from the hand of the foe.

Menachem Begin, the legendary underground commander, was my chief childhood idol at that time. Even earlier, in the last year of the British Mandate, the nameless commander of the underground had fired my imagination. In my mind I saw his form swathed in clouds of biblical glory. I imagined him in his secret headquarters in the wild ravines of the Judaean Desert, barefoot, with a leather girdle, flashing sparks like the prophet Elijah among the rocks of Mount Carmel, sending out orders from his remote cave with innocent-looking youths. Night after night his long arm reaches the heart of the British occupation force, dynamiting HQs and military installations, breaking through walls, blowing up ammunition dumps, pouring out its wrath on the strongholds of the enemy who was called, in the posters composed by my father, the "Anglo-Nazi foe," "Amalek," "Perfidious Albion." (My mother once said of the British: "Amalek or not, who knows if we won't miss them soon.")

Once the state of Israel was established, the supreme commander of the Hebrew underground forces finally emerged from hiding, and his picture appeared one day in the paper above his name: not something heroic like Ari Ben-Shimshon or Ivriahu Ben-Kedumim, but Menachem Begin. I was shocked: the name Menachem Begin might have suited a Yiddish-speaking haberdasher from Zephaniah Street or a gold-toothed
sheitel
and corset maker from Geula Street. Moreover, to my disappointment, my childhood hero was revealed in the photograph in the paper
as a frail, skinny man with large glasses perched on his pale face. Only his mustache attested to his secret powers; but after a few months the mustache disappeared. Mr. Begin's figure, voice, accent, and diction did not remind me of the biblical conquerors of Canaan or of Judah Mac-cabee, but of my feeble teachers at Tachkemoni, who were also men flowing with nationalist fervor and righteous wrath, but from behind their heroism a nervous self-righteousness and latent sourness occasionally burst through.

And one day, thanks to Menachem Begin, I suddenly lost my desire to "spill my blood and offer up my son" and to "fight for a glorious goal." I abandoned the view that "repose is like mire"; after a while I came around to the opposite view.

Every few weeks half of Jerusalem assembled at eleven o'clock on a Saturday morning to hear fiery speeches by Menachem Begin at gatherings of the Herut movement in the Edison Auditorium, which was the largest hall in the city. Its facade bore posters announcing the imminent appearance of the Israel Opera under the baton of Fordhaus Ben-Zisi. Grandpa used to dress himself up for the occasion in his magnificent black suit and a light blue satin tie. A triangle of white handkerchief protruded from his breast pocket like a snowflake in a heat wave. When we entered the auditorium, half an hour before the meeting was due to start, he raised his hat in all directions in greeting and even bowed to his friends. I marched beside my grandfather, solemn and well combed, in a white shirt and polished shoes, straight to the second or third row, where seats of honor were reserved for people like Grandpa Alexander, members of the Jerusalem committee of the "Herut Movement—founded by the Irgun, the National Military Organization." We would sit between Professor Yosef Yoel Rivlin and Mr. Eliahu Meridor, or between Dr. Israel Sheib-Eldad and Mr. Hanoch Kalai, or next to Mr. Isak Remba, the editor of the newspaper
Herut.

The hall was always packed with supporters of the Irgun and admirers of the legendary Menachem Begin, almost all of them men, among them the fathers of many of my classmates at Tachkemoni. But there was a fine invisible dividing line between the front three or four rows, which were reserved for prominent members of the intelligentsia, veterans of
the National Front campaigns, activists in the Revisionist movement, former commanders of the Irgun, who mostly came from Poland, Lithuania, White Russia, and Ukraine, and the throngs of Sephardim, Bukharians, Yemenites, Kurds, and Aleppo Jews who filled the rest of the hall. This excitable throng packed the galleries and aisles, pressed against the walls, and spilled out into the foyer and the square in front of the auditorium. In the front rows they talked nationalist, revolutionary talk with a taste for glorious victories and quoted Nietzsche and Mazzini, but there was a dominant petit-bourgeois air of good manners: hats, suits, and ties, etiquette and a certain flowery salon formality that even then, in the early 1950s, had a whiff of mold and mothballs.

Behind this inner circle extended an ocean of fervent true believers, a loyal, devoted throng of tradesmen, shopkeepers, workmen, many of them sporting skullcaps, having come straight from synagogue to hear their hero, their leader Mr. Begin, shabbily dressed, hard-working Jews trembling with idealism, warmhearted, hot-tempered, excitable, and vocal.

At the beginning of the meeting they sang Beitar songs and at the end they sang the anthem of the Movement and the National Anthem, Hatikva. The dais was decorated with masses of Israeli flags, a gigantic photograph of Vladimir Jabotinsky, two razor-sharp rows of Beitar Youth resplendent in their uniforms and black ties—how I longed to join them when I was older—and stirring slogans such as "Jotapata, Masada, Beitar!," "If I forget thee O Jerusalem may my right hand lose its cunning!," and "In blood and fire Judaea fell, in blood and fire Judaea will rise again!"

After a couple of warm-up speeches by committee members of the Jerusalem branch, everyone suddenly left the stage. Even the Beitar Youth marched off. A deep, religious silence fell upon the Edison Auditorium like a quiet whirring of wings. All eyes were fixed on the empty stage, and all hearts were primed. This expectant silence lasted for a long moment, then something stirred at the back of the stage, the velvet curtains parted a crack, and a solitary small, thin man stepped daintily to the microphone and stood before the audience with his head humbly bowed, as though he was overwhelmed by his own shyness. Only after a few seconds of awestruck silence did a few hesitant claps rise from the audience, as if the crowd could hardly believe its eyes, as if they were stunned, every
time, to discover that Begin was not a fire-breathing giant but a slightly built, almost frail-looking man. But at once they burst into applause, and at the back the applause quickly turned to roars of affection that accompanied Begin's speech almost from beginning to end.