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CHAPTER ONE
I have been called a traitor many times in my life. The first
time was when I was twelve and a quarter and I lived in a
neighborhood at the edge of Jerusalem. It was during the
summer holidays, less than a year before the British left the
country and the State of Israel was born out of the midst of
war.
One morning these words appeared on the wall of our
house, painted in thick black letters, just under the kitchen
window: PROFI BOGED SHAFEL, "Proffy is a low-down traitor."
The word shafel, "low-down," raised a question that still
interests me now, as I sit and write this story: Is it possible for
a traitor not to be low-down? If not, why did Chita Reznik (I
recognized his writing) bother to add the word "low-down"?
And if it is, under what circumstances is treachery not
low-down?
I had had the nickname Proffy attached to me ever since I
was so high. It was short for Professor, which they called me
because of my obsession with checking words. (I still love
words: I like collecting, arranging, shuffling, reversing,
combining them. Rather the way people who love money do
with coins and banknotes and people who love cards do with
cards.)
My father saw the writing under the kitchen window
when he went out to get the newspaper at half past six that
morning. Over breakfast, while he was spreading raspberry
jam on a slice of black bread, he suddenly plunged the knife
into the jam jar almost up to the handle and said in his
deliberate way:
"What a pleasant surprise! And what has his Lordship
been up to now, that we should deserve this honor?"
My mother said:
"Don't nag him first thing in the morning. It's bad
enough that he gets nagged by other children."
Father was dressed in khaki, like most men in our neighborhood
in those days. He had the gestures and voice of a
man who is definitely in the right. Dredging up a sticky mass
of raspberry from the bottom of the jar and spreading an
equal amount on both halves of his slice of bread, he said:
"The fact is that almost everyone nowadays uses the
word `traitor' too freely. But what is a traitor? Yes indeed.
A man without honor. A man who secretly, behind your
back, for the sake of some questionable advantage, helps the
enemy to work against his people. Or to harm his family
and friends. He is more despicable than a murderer. Finish
your egg, please. I read in the paper that people are dying
of hunger in Asia."
My mother pulled my plate toward her and finished my
egg and the rest of my bread and jam, not because she was
hungry, but for the sake of peace. She said:
"Anyone who loves isn't a traitor."
My mother addressed these words neither to me nor to
Father: to judge by the direction she was looking, she was
talking to a nail that was stuck in our kitchen wall just above
the icebox and served no particular purpose.
CHAPTER TWO
After breakfast my parents hurried off to catch their bus to go
to work. I was free, with oceans of time ahead of me till the
evening, because it was the summer holidays. First of all I
cleared the table and put everything away in its proper place,
in the icebox, the cupboards, or the sink, because I loved being
at home on my own all day without anything to do. I washed
the dishes and left them upside down to drain dry. Then I went
around the apartment closing the windows and shutters, so as
to have a shady den till evening. The sun and the dust from the
desert were liable to damage my father's books that lined the
walls, some of which were rare volumes. I read the morning
paper, then I folded it and put it on the kitchen table, and I put
my mother's brooch away in its case. I did all this not like a
repentant low-down traitor but from love of tidiness. To this
day I make a habit of going around the house every morning
and evening putting everything in its right place. Five minutes
ago, as I was writing about closing the windows and shutters, I
stopped writing because I remembered to get up and close the
bathroom door; though it might have preferred to stay open, to
judge by the groan it made as I closed it.
All that summer my mother and father went out at eight
o'clock in the morning and came home at six in the evening.
My lunch was waiting for me in the icebox and my days were
clear as far as the horizon. For instance, I could start the
game with a small group of five or ten soldiers on the rug, or
pioneers, surveyors, road makers, and fort builders, and step
by step we could tame the forces of nature, defeat enemies,
conquer wide-open spaces, build towns and villages, and lay
out roads connecting them.
My father was a proofreader and sort of editorial assistant
in a small publishing house. At night he used to sit up till two or
three o'clock in the morning, surrounded by the shadows of his
bookshelves, with his body immersed in darkness and only his
grey head floating in a ring of light from his desk lamp, as
though he was laboriously climbing the gulley between the
mountains of books piled up on his desk, filling slips and cards
with notes in preparation for his great book on the history of
the Jews in Poland. He was a principled, intense man, who
was deeply committed to the concept of justice.
My mother, on the other hand, liked to raise her half-empty
glass of tea and stare through it at the blue light in the window.
And sometimes she would press it to her cheek, as though
drawing warmth from the contact. She was a teacher in an
institution for immigrant orphans who had managed to hide
from the Nazis in monasteries or remote villages and had now
reached us, as my mother said, "straight from the darkness of
the valley of the shadow of death." At once she would correct
herself: "They come from a place where men behave like
wolves to each other. Even refugees. Even children." In my
mind I would associate the remote villages with horrifying
images of wolf-men and the darkness of the valley of the
shadow of death. I loved
the words "darkness" and "valley" because they immediately
conjured up a valley shrouded in darkness, with monasteries
and cellars. And I loved the shadow of death because I didn't
understand it. If I whispered "shadow of death," I could almost
hear a kind of deep, ghostly sound like the note that comes
from the lowest key on the piano, a sound that draws after it a
trail of dim echoes, as though a disaster has happened and
now there is no going back.
I returned to the kitchen. I had read in the paper that we
were living in a fateful period and therefore we must engage
all our moral resources. And it also said that the actions of the
British were casting a deep shadow, and that the Hebrew
nation was called upon to withstand the test.
I left the house, looking all around me, as in the movies, to
make sure no one was watching me: a strange man in
sunglasses, for instance, who might be concealed behind a
newspaper, lurking in the doorway of one of the buildings on
the other side of the road. But the street seemed absorbed in
its own preoccupations. The greengrocer was building a wall
of empty crates. The boy who worked at the Sinopsky
Brothers grocery was dragging a squeaking handcart.
Childless old Pani Ostrowska was sweeping away at the
walk in front of her door, probably for the third time that
morning. Doctor Gryphius was sitting on her balcony filling
out filing cards: she was a spinster, and Father was helping
her to gather material for her memoirs of Jewish life in her
native town of Rosenheim, in Bavaria. And the kerosene
seller went by slowly in his cart, the reins lying slack on his
knees, ringing a handbell and singing a plaintive Yiddish
song to his horse. So I stood there and scrutinized intently the
black words "PROFI BOGED SHAFEL," "Proffy is a low-down traitor,"
in case there was some tiny detail that could shed a new
light. From haste or fear the last letter of the word "BOGED,"
"traitor," had turned out more like an R than a D, making me not
a lowdowntraitor, BOGED, but a lowdownadult, BOGER. That
morning I would gladly have given everything I had to be an
adult.
So Chita Reznik had "done a Balaam."
Mr. Zerubbabel Gihon, our Bible and Judaism teacher,
had explained to us in class:
"Doing a Balaam. When a curse comes out as a blessing.
For instance, when the British minister Ernest Bevin said in
Parliament in London that the Jews are a stubborn race, he
did a Balaam."
Mr. Gihon had a habit of seasoning his lessons with
witticisms that were not funny. He often used his wife as the
butt of his jokes. For instance, when he wanted to illustrate the
passage from the Book of Kings about whips and scorpions,
he said: "Scorpions are a hundred times worse than whips. I
afflict you with whips and my wife afflicts me with scorpions."
Or: "There is a text that says, `As the crackling of thorns
under a pot.' Ecclesiastes, chapter seven. Like Mrs. Gihon
trying to sing."
Once I said during supper:
"You know my teacher Gihon, hardly a day goes by when
he isn't unfaithful to his wife in class."
My father looked at my mother and said:
"Your son has definitely taken leave of his senses." (My
father was fond of the word "definitely." And also of the
words "indubitably," "evidently," "yes indeed.")
My mother said:
"Instead of insulting him, why don't you try to find out
what he's trying to say? You never really listen to him. Or to
me. Or to anybody. All you ever listen to is the news on the
radio."
"Everything in the world," Father replied calmly, refusing
as usual to be drawn into an argument, "has at least two sides.
As is well known to all but a few frenetic souls."
I didn't know what "frenetic souls" meant, but I did know
that this was not the right moment to ask. So I let them sit
facing each other in silence for nearly a full minute--they
sometimes had silences that resembled arm wrestling--and
only then did I say:
"Except a shadow."
My father shot me one of his suspicious glances, with his
glasses halfway down his nose, nodding his head up and
down, one of those looks that conjure up what we learned in
Bible class, "he looked that it should bring forth grapes, and it
brought forth wild grapes," and his blue eyes above his glasses
shone at me in naked disappointment, with me and with young
people in general and with the failure of the educational
system that had been entrusted with a butterfly and had sent
back a chrysalis:
"What do you mean `shadow'? It's your brain that's the
shadow."
My mother said:
"Instead of silencing him, why don't you find out what he's
trying to say? He must be trying to say something."
And Father:
"Right. Yes indeed. Well then, what is Your Lordship
getting at this evening? What mysterious shadow are you
deigning to report to us about this time? `Thou seest the
shadow of mountains as if they were men'? `As a servant
desireth the shadow'?"
I got up to go to bed. I didn't owe him any explanation.
Nevertheless, beyond the call of duty, I said:
"Except a shadow, Dad. You said a moment ago that
everything in the world has at least two sides. And you were
almost right. But you were forgetting that a shadow, for
instance, has only one side. Go and check, if you don't believe
me. You could even do an experiment or two. Didn't you
yourself teach me that it's the exception that proves the rule
and that one shouldn't generalize? You've forgotten what
you taught me."
So saying, I cleared the table, then went to my room.