A Tale of Love and Darkness (77 page)

Oizer combined the intellectual acumen of a Lithuanian Talmud scholar with a dithyrambic Hasidic ecstasy that could make him suddenly screw up his eyes and burst forth in a rapturous song straining to break free from the trammels of the corporeal world. In a different time or place he might have become a revered Hasidic
rebbe
, a charismatic wonder-worker surrounded by a packed court of entranced admirers. He could have gone a long way if he had chosen to be a politician, a Tribune of the Plebs, leaving behind him a foaming wake of visceral admiration in some and no less visceral hatred in others. But Oizer Huldai had chosen to live as a kibbutz schoolmaster. He was a hard man of uncompromising principles who enjoyed a fight and could be domineering and even tyrannical. He taught, with an equal degree of detailed proficiency and almost erotic zeal, like a wandering preacher of the shtetl, Bible, biology, Baroque music, Renaissance art, rabbinic thought, principles of socialist ideology, ornithology, taxonomy, the recorder, and subjects like "the historic Napoleon and his representation in nineteenth-century European literature and art."

My heart pounded as I entered the one-and-a-half-room bungalow with a little front porch in the northern block at the edge of the veterans' quarters, opposite the alley of cypresses. The walls were adorned with reproductions of pictures by Modigliani and Paul Klee and a precise, almost Japanese, drawing of almond blossoms. Between two plain
armchairs a small coffee table bore a tall vase that almost always contained not flowers but a tasteful arrangement of sprigs. The bright, rustic-style curtains were hand-embroidered in a faintly orientalizing pattern, reminiscent of the modified and adapted orientalism of the Hebraic folk songs written by German-Jewish composers seeking to incorporate the captivating Arab or biblical spirit of the Middle East.

Oizer, if he was not pacing briskly up and down the path in front of his house with his hands behind his back and his jutting chin slicing the air in front of him, would be sitting in his corner, smoking, humming to himself, and reading. Or inspecting some flowering plant through his magnifying glass while leafing through his botanical handbook. Hanka, meanwhile, would be striding vigorously around the room with a military gait, straightening a mat, emptying and rinsing an ashtray, her lips pursed, adjusting the bedspread, or cutting ornamental shapes out of colored paper. Dolly would welcome me with a couple of barks before Oizer startled her with a thunderous rebuke: "Shame on you, Dolly! Look who you're barking at! Look who you're daring to raise your voice at!" Or sometimes: "Really! Dolly! I'm shocked! I'm truly shocked at you! How could you?! How come your voice didn't tremble?! You're only letting yourself down with this shameful performance!"

The dog, at the sound of these torrents of prophetic rage, shrank like a deflated balloon, looked around desperately for somewhere to hide her shame, and ended up crawling under the bed.

Hanka Huldai beamed at me and addressed an invisible audience: "Look! Just look who's here! Cup of coffee? Cake? Or some fruit?" No sooner had these options left her lips than, as if a magic wand had been waved, the coffee, cake, and fruit landed on the table. Meekly but with a warm glow inside I politely drank the coffee, ate some fruit, in moderation, and chatted with Hanka and Oizer for a quarter of an hour about such pressing matters as the death penalty, whether human nature was truly good from birth and only corrupted by society, or whether our instincts were innately wicked and only education could improve them to some degree and in certain conditions. The words "decadence," "refinement," "character," "values," and "improvement" often filled that refined room with its white bookshelves, so different from the shelves in my parents' home in Jerusalem, because here the books were divided up by pictures, figurines, a collection of fossils, collages of pressed wildflowers,
well-tended potted plants, and in one corner a gramophone with masses of records.

Sometimes the conversation about refinement, corruption, values, liberation, and oppression was accompanied by the mournful sound of a violin or the quiet bleating of a recorder: curly-headed Shai would be standing there playing, his back to us. Or Ron would be whispering to his violin, skinny Ronny who was always called "the little one" by his mother, and whom it was better not to try to talk to, even how-are-you-what's-new, because he was always entrenched in his smiling shyness and only rarely treated you to a short sentence like "Fine" or a longer sentence like "No problem." Almost like the dog Dolly who hid under the bed until her master's rage had subsided.*

Sometimes I found all three Huldai boys, Oizer, Shai, and Ronny, sitting on the grass or on the steps of the front porch, like a klezmer group from the shtetl, stirring the evening air with long-drawn-out, haunting notes on the recorder that gave me a pleasant sense of longing tinged with a pang of sadness for my worthlessness, my otherness, for the fact that no suntan in the world could make me really one of them, I would always be just a beggar at their table, an outsider, a restless little runt from Jerusalem, if not simply a wretched impostor. (I endowed Azaria Gitlin in my book
A Perfect Peace
with some of this feeling.)

At sunset I took my book to Herzl House, the cultural center at the edge of the kibbutz. There was a newspaper room here where on any evening you could find a few of the older bachelors of the kibbutz, gnawing their way through the daily papers and the weeklies, engaging each other in fierce political debates that reminded me a little of the arguments in Kerem Avraham, with Staszek Rudnicki, Mr. Abramski, Mr. Krochmal, Mr. Bar-Yizhar, and Mr. Lemberg. (The "older bachelors of the kibbutz" when I arrived were in their early to mid-forties.)

Behind the newspaper room there was another, almost deserted, room called the study room, which was sometimes used for committee meetings or for various group activities but was mostly unoccupied. In a glass-fronted cabinet stood row upon dreary row of tired, dusty copies
of
Young Worker, Working Woman's Monthly, Field, The Clock
, and
Davar Yearbook.

*Ron Huldai has been mayor of Tel Aviv since 1998.

This is where I went every evening to read my book until nearly midnight, until my eyelids were stuck together. And this is also where I took up writing again, when no one was looking, feeling ashamed of myself, feeling base and worthless, full of self-loathing: surely I hadn't left Jerusalem for the kibbutz to write poems and stories but to be reborn, to turn my back on the piles of words, to be suntanned to the bone and become an agricultural worker, a tiller of the soil.

But it soon dawned on me in Hulda that even the most agricultural of agricultural workers here read books at night and discussed them all day long. While they picked olives, they debated furiously about Tolstoy, Plekhanov, and Bakunin, about permanent revolution versus revolution in one country, about Gustav Landauer's social democracy and the eternal tension between the values of equality and freedom and between both these and the quest for the brotherhood of man. While they sorted eggs in the hen house, they argued about how to revive the old Jewish holidays for celebration in a rural setting. While they pruned the rows of vines, they disagreed about modern art.

Some of them even wrote modest articles, notwithstanding their dedication to agriculture and their total devotion to manual labor. They wrote mostly about the same topics they debated with each other all day long, but in the pieces they published every fortnight in the local newsletter they occasionally allowed themselves to wax lyrical between one crushing argument and an even more crushing counterargument.

Just as at home.

I had tried to turn my back once and for all on the world of scholarship and debate from which I had come, and I had jumped out of the frying pan into the fire, or "as when a man flees from a lion and meets a bear." Admittedly, here the debaters were more suntanned than those who sat around Uncle Joseph and Aunt Zippora's table, they wore cloth caps, workaday garb, and heavy boots, and instead of bombastic Hebrew with a Russian accent they spoke humorous Hebrew with a juicy flavor of Galician or Bessarabian Yiddish.

Sheftel the librarian, just like Mr. Marcus, the proprietor of the bookshop and lending library on Jonah Street, took pity on my unquenchable
thirst for books. He allowed me to borrow as many books as I wanted, far in excess of the library rules that he himself had compiled and typed in eye-catching letters on the kibbutz typewriter and pinned up at various prominent points in his fiefdom, whose vague dusty smell of old glue and seaweed attracted me to it like a wasp to jam.

What did I not read in Hulda in those days? I devoured Kafka, Yigal Mossensohn, Camus, Tolstoy, Moshe Shamir, Chekhov, Natan Shaham, Brenner, Faulkner, Pablo Neruda, Hayyim Guri, Alterman, Amir Gilboa, Leah Goldberg, Shlonsky, O. Hillel, Yizhar, Turgenev, Thomas Mann, Jakob Wassermann, Hemingway,
I, Claudius
, all the volumes of Winston Churchill's
The Second World War
, Bernard Lewis on the Arabs and Islam, Isaac Deutscher on the Soviet Union, Pearl Buck,
The Nuremberg Trials, The Life of Trotsky
, Stefan Zweig, the history of Zionist settlement in the Land of Israel, the origins of the Norse saga, Mark Twain, Knut Hamsun, Greek mythology,
Memoirs of Hadrian
, and Uri Avneri. Everything. Apart from those books that Sheftel did not allow me to read, despite all my entreaties,
The Naked and the Dead
, for example (I think that even after I was married, Sheftel hesitated to let me read Norman Mailer and Henry Miller).

Arch of Triumph
, a pacifist novel by Erich Maria Remarque set in the 1930s, opens with a description of a lonely woman leaning on the parapet of a bridge at nighttime, about to end her life by jumping into the river. At the last minute a strange man stops and speaks to her, seizes her arm, saves her life, and spends a torrid night with her. That was my fantasy: that was how I, too, would encounter love. She would be standing alone on a deserted bridge one stormy night, and I would turn up at the last moment to save her from herself, and slay the dragon—not a dragon of flesh and blood like the ones I used to slay by the dozen when I was little, but the inner dragon of despair.

I would slay this inner dragon for the woman I loved and receive my reward from her, and so the fantasy developed in directions that were too sweet and awesome for me to contemplate. It did not occur to me at the time that the desperate woman on the bridge was, again and again, my dead mother. With her despair. Her own dragon.

Or take Hemingway's
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, a book I read four or five times in those years, populated by femmes fatales and tough-looking men who concealed a poetic soul behind their rough exterior. I
dreamed that one day I would be like them: a gruff, virile man with the body of a bullfighter and a face full of contempt and sorrow, perhaps a little like the photograph of Hemingway himself. And if I did not manage to be like them someday, at least I would learn to write about such men: courageous men who knew how to scoff and to loathe, or how to punch some bully on the chin if the need arose, who knew precisely the right thing to order in a bar, and what to say to a woman, a rival or a comrade in arms, how to use a gun and how to make love superbly. And also about noble women, vulnerable yet unattainable temptresses, enigmatic, mysterious women, who lavished their favors generously but only on selected men who knew how to mock and despise, drink whisky, punch hard, etc.

The films that were shown every Wednesday in the hall at Herzl House or on a white cloth set up on the lawn outside the dining hall gave firm evidence that the big wide world was peopled mainly by men and women out of the pages of Hemingway or Knut Hamsun. The same picture emerged from the stories told by the red-bereted soldiers of the kibbutz who came home on weekend leave straight from reprisal raids by the famed Unit 101, strong, silent men resplendent in their paratroopers' uniforms, armed with Uzis, "clad in workaday garb, shod in heavy boots, and wet with the dew of Hebrew youth."

I almost gave up in despair: surely to write like Remarque or Hemingway you had to get out of here into the real world, go to places where men were as virile as a fist and women as tender as the night, where bridges spanned wide rivers and the evenings sparkled with the lights of bars where real life really happened. No one who lacked experience of that world could get even half a temporary permit to write stories or novels. The place of a real writer was not here but out there, in the big wide world. Until I got out and lived in a real place, there was not a hope that I could find anything to write about.

A real place: Paris, Madrid, New York, Monte Carlo, the African deserts, or the Scandinavian forests. In a pinch one could write about a country town in Russia or even a Jewish shtetl in Galicia. But here, in the kibbutz, what was there? A hen house, a barn, children's houses, committees, duty rosters, the small supplies store. Tired men and women who got up early every morning for work, argued, showered, drank tea, read a little in bed, and fell asleep exhausted before ten o'clock. Even in
Kerem Avraham where I came from there did not seem to be anything worth writing about. What was there there, apart from dull people leading gray, tawdry lives? Rather like here in Hulda. I had even missed the War of Independence: I was born too late to get more than a few miserable crumbs, filling sandbags, collecting empty bottles, running with messages from the local Civil Defense post to the lookout post on the Slonimskys' roof and back.

True, in the kibbutz library I did discover two or three virile novelists who managed to write almost Hemingway-like stories about kibbutz life: Natan Shaham, Yigal Mossensohn, Moshe Shamir. But they belonged to the generation that had smuggled in immigrants and arms, blown up British headquarters, and repelled the Arab armies; their stories seemed to me swathed in mists of brandy and cigarettes and the smell of gunpowder. And they all lived in Tel Aviv, which was more or less connected to the real world, a city with cafés where young artists sat over a glass of liquor, a city with cabarets, scandals, theaters, and a bohemian life full of forbidden love and helpless passion. Not like Jerusalem or Hulda.