A Tale of Love and Darkness (62 page)

And once more I went to school each morning at the Tachkemoni Religious Boys' School on Tachkemoni Street. The pupils were poor children, schooled to beatings, whose parents were artisans, manual workers, and small traders; they came from families of eight or ten, some of them were always hungry for my sandwiches; some had shaved heads, and we all wore black berets at an angle. They would gang up on me at the water fountains in the playground and splash me, because they quickly discovered that I was the only only child, the weakest among them, and that I was easily offended or upset. When they went out of their way to devise new humiliations for me, I sometimes stood panting in the middle of a circle of my sneering tormentors, beaten up, covered with dust, a lamb among wolves, and suddenly to the astonishment of my enemies I would start to beat myself, scratch myself hysterically, and bite my arm so hard that a bleeding watch shape appeared. Just as my mother did in my presence two or three times when she was overwhelmed.

But sometimes I made up stories of suspense for them in installments, breathtaking tales in the spirit of the action films we used to watch at the Edison Cinema. In these stories I never hesitated to introduce Tarzan to Flash Gordon or Nick Carter to Sherlock Holmes, or to mix the cowboys-and-Indians world of Karl May and Mayne Reid with Ben Hur or the mysteries of outer space or gangs of thugs in the suburbs of New York. I used to give them an installment each break, like Scheherazade postponing her fate with her tales, always stopping at the moment of greatest tension, just when it seemed as though the hero was doomed and beyond hope, leaving the sequel (which I had not invented yet) ruthlessly to the following day.

So I used to walk around in the playground during breaks like Rabbi Nahman with his flocks of students eager to drink in his teachings; I
would turn this way and that surrounded by a tight crush of listeners afraid of missing a single word, and among them would sometimes be my leading persecutors, whom I would make a point of magnanimously inviting into the innermost circle and favoring with a precious clue to a possible twist in the plot or some hair-raising event that would figure in the next installment, thus promoting the recipient into an influential figure who had the power to reveal or withhold invaluable information at will.

My first stories were full of caves, labyrinths, catacombs, forests, ocean depths, dungeons, battlefields, galaxies inhabited by monsters, brave policemen and fearless warriors, conspiracies, terrible betrayals accompanied by wonderful acts of chivalry and generosity, baroque twists, unbelievable self-sacrifice, and highly emotional gestures of self-denial and forgiveness. As far as I recall, the characters in my early works included both heroes and villains. And there were a number of villains who repented and atoned for their sins by acts of self-sacrifice or by a heroic death. There were also bloodthirsty sadists, and all sorts of scoundrels and mean cheats, as well as unassuming characters who sacrificed their lives with a smile. The female characters, on the other hand, were all, without exception, noble: loving despite being exploited, suffering yet compassionate, tormented and even humiliated, yet always proud and pure, paying the price for male insanities yet generous and forgiving.

But if I tightened the string too much, or not enough, then after a few episodes, or at the end of the story, at the moment when wrongdoing was confounded and magnanimity finally received its reward, that was when this poor Scheherazade was thrown into the lions' den and showered with blows and insults to his ancestry. Why could he never keep his mouth shut?

Tachkemoni was a boys' school. Even the teachers were all male. Apart from the school nurse no woman ever appeared there. The bolder boys sometimes climbed onto the wall of the Laemel Girls' School to get a glimpse of life on the other side of the iron curtain. Girls in long blue skirts and blouses with short puffy sleeves, so the rumor went, walked around the playground in pairs during break, played hopscotch, braided each other's hair, and occasionally splashed each other with water from the fountains just like us.

Apart from me, almost all the boys at Tachkemoni had older sisters, sisters-in-law, and female cousins, and so I was the last of the last to hear the whispers about what it was that girls had and we didn't, and vice versa, and what the older brothers did to their girls in the dark.

At home not a word was spoken on the subject. Ever. Except, perhaps, if some visitor got carried away and joked about bohemian life, or about the Bar-Yizhar-Itselevitches who were so meticulous about observing the commandment to be fruitful and multiply, but he would immediately be silenced by the others with the rebuke:
Shto's toboi?! Vidish malchik ryadom's nami!!
(Can't you see the boy is here!)

The boy may have been there, but he understood nothing. If his classmates hurled the Arabic word for what girls have at him, if they huddled together and passed a picture of a scantily dressed woman from hand to hand, or if someone brought along a ballpoint pen inside which was a girl dressed for tennis, and when you turned it upside down, the clothes disappeared, they would all chortle hoarsely, elbowing each other in the ribs, trying hard to sound like their older brothers, and only I felt a terrible dread, as though some vague disaster was taking shape far away on the horizon. It was not here yet, it did not touch me yet, but it was already blood-curdlingly frightening, like a forest fire on the faraway hilltops. Nobody would escape from it unscathed. Nothing would be the same as it was before.

When they whispered breathlessly in recess about some "halfwitted Tali who lives down the alley," who hangs around in the Tel Arza woods and gives it to anyone who hands her half a pound, or the fat widow from the kitchen goods shop who takes a few boys from class 8 to the storeroom behind her shop and shows what she's got in exchange for watching them jerk off, I felt a pang of sorrow nibbling at my heart, as though some great horror was lying in wait for everybody, men and women alike, a cruel, patient horror, a creeping horror that was slowly spinning a slimy invisible web, and maybe I was already infected without knowing it.

When we got to class 6 or 7, the school nurse, a gruff, military woman, suddenly came into our classroom, and stood there for a whole double lesson, alone in front of thirty-eight dazed boys, revealing to us all the facts of life. Fearlessly she described organs and functions, drew diagrams of the plumbing in colored chalks on the blackboard, she
spared us nothing: seeds and eggs, glands, sheaths and tubes. Then she moved on to the horror show and treated us to terrifying descriptions of the two monsters lurking at the gateway, the Frankenstein's monster and the werewolf of the world of sex: the twin calamities of pregnancy and infection.

Dazed and shamefaced, we left the lecture and went out into the world, which now appeared to me as a gigantic minefield or a plague-ridden planet. The child I was then grasped, more or less, what was supposed to be pushed into what, what was supposed to receive what, but for the life of me I could not understand why a sane man or woman would want to get caught in those labyrinthine dragon's lairs. The bold nurse who had not hesitated to lay everything bare for us, from hormones to rules of hygiene, had forgotten to mention, even obliquely, that there might be some pleasure involved in all those complicated, dangerous procedures, either because she wanted to protect our innocence or because she simply did not know.

Our teachers at Tachkemoni mostly wore threadbare dark-gray or brown suits or ancient jackets and constantly demanded our respect and fear: Mr. Monzon, Mr. Avisar, Mr. Neimann Senior and Mr. Neimann Junior, Mr. Alkalai, Mr. Duvshani, Mr. Ophir, Mr. Michaeli, the imperious Mr. Ilan the headmaster, who always appeared in a three-piece suit, and his brother, also Mr. Ilan but only in a two-piece suit.

We had to get to our feet when each of these men entered the classroom, and we could not sit down until he had graciously indicated that we were worthy to do so. We addressed the teachers as "my teacher," and always in the third person. "My teacher asked me to bring a note from my parents, but my parents have gone to Haifa. Would he please let me bring the note on Sunday instead?" Or: "Please, my teacher, doesn't he think he's laying it on a bit thick here?" (The second "he" in this sentence does not, of course, refer to the teacher—whom none of us would ever have dared accuse of laying it on a bit thick—but merely the prophet Jeremiah, or the poet Bialik, whose blazing anger we were studying at the time.)

As for us, the pupils, we lost our first names completely from the moment we crossed the threshold of the school. Our teachers called us
only Bozo, Saragosti, Valero, Ribatski, Alfasi, Klausner, Hajaj, Schleifer, De La Mar, Danon, Ben-Naim, Cordovero, and Axelrod.

They had a plethora of punishments, those teachers at Tachkemoni School. A slap on the face, a ruler blow across an outstretched hand, shaking us by the scruff of the neck and banishing us to the playground, summoning our parents, a black mark in the class register, copying out a chapter from the Bible twenty times, writing out five hundred lines: "I must not chatter during class" or "Homework must be done on time." Anyone whose handwriting was not neat enough was made to write pages upon pages at home in calligraphic writing "as pure as a mountain stream" Anyone whose fingernails were untrimmed, whose ears were not immaculate, or whose shirt collar was a bit grimy was sent home in disgrace, but not before being made to stand in front of the class and recite loud and clear: "I'm a dirty boy, being dirty is a sin; if I don't have a wash, I'll end up in the bin!"

The first lesson every morning at Tachkemoni began with the singing of "Modeh ani":

I give thanks unto thee, O living and eternal King,
who hast restored my soul unto me in mercy: great is thy faithfulness.

After which we all trilled shrilly but with gusto:

O universal Lord, who reigned ere any creature yet was formed ...
And after all things pass away, alone the dreaded one shall reign...

Only when all the songs and the (abbreviated) morning prayers were complete did our teachers order us to open our textbooks and exercise books and prepare our pencils, and generally they launched straight into a long, boring dictation that went on until the bell for recess rang, or sometimes even longer. At home we had to learn by heart: chunks of the Bible, entire poems, and sayings of the rabbis. To this day you can wake me up in the middle of the night and get me to recite the prophet's reply to Rab-shakeh, the envoy of the king of Assyria: "The virgin, the daughter of Zion / hath despised thee, and laughed thee to scorn; / the daughter of Jerusalem / hath shaken her head at thee. / Whom hast thou reproached and blasphemed? / and against whom has thou exalted thy voice?... I will put my hook in thy nose, / and my bridle in
thy lips, / and I will turn thee back by the way by which thou camest." Or the
Ethics of the Fathers:
"On three things the world stands ... Say little and do much ... I have found nothing better for a body than silence ... Know what is above thee ... Separate thyself not from the congregation, neither trust in thyself until the day of thy death, and do not judge thine associate until thou comest to his place ... and in a place where there are no men endeavor to be a man."

At Tachkemoni School, I studied Hebrew. It was as if the drill had struck a rich vein of minerals, which I had touched for the first time in Teacher Zelda's class and in her yard. I was powerfully drawn to the solemn idioms, the almost forgotten words, the exotic syntax, and the linguistic byways where barely a human foot had trodden for centuries, and the poignant beauty of the Hebrew language: "And it came to pass, that in the morning, behold, it was Leah"; "ere any creature yet was formed"; "uncircumcised of heart"; "a
seah
of suffering"; or "Warm thyself by the fire of the wise; but beware of their glowing coals, lest thou be burnt, for their bite is the bite of a fox, and their sting is the scorpion's sting ... and all their words are like coals of fire."

Here, at Tachkemoni, I studied the Pentateuch with Rashi's witty, light-winged commentary, here I soaked up the wisdom of the sages, lore and law, prayers, hymns, commentaries, supercommentaries, Sabbath and festival prayer books and the laws of the
Prepared Table.
I also encountered familiar friends from home, like the wars of the Maccabees, the Bar Kochba Revolt, the history of Jewish communities of the Diaspora, lives of the great rabbis, and Hasidic tales with the moral attached. Something too of the rabbinic jurists, and of the Hebrew poetry of Spain and Bialik, and occasionally, in Mr. Ophir's music lessons, some song of the pioneers in Galilee and the Valley, which was as out of place in Tachkemoni as a camel in the snows of Siberia.

Mr. Avisar, the geography teacher, would take us with him on adventure-laden trips to Galilee, the Negev, Trans-Jordan, Mesopotamia, the pyramids, and the hanging gardens of Babylon, with the aid of wall maps and occasionally a battered magic lantern. Mr. Neimann Junior declaimed the fury of the prophets at us in thunderous cascades, followed at once by gentle rivulets of comfort and consolation. Mr. Monzon, the English teacher, hammered into us the eternal difference between "I do,"
"I did," "I have done," "I have been doing," "I would have done," "I should have done," and "I should have been doing": "Even the King of England in person!" he would thunder like the Lord from Mount Sinai, "even Churchill! Shakespeare! Gary Cooper!—all obey these rules of language with no excuses, and only you, honorable sir, Mister Abulafia, are apparently above the law! What, are you above Churchill?! are you above Shakespeare?! are you above the King of England?! Shame on you! Disgrace! Now please note this, pay attention all the class, write it down, get it right:
It is
a shame, but you, the Right Honorable Master Abulafia,
you are
a disgrace!!!"

But my favorite teacher of all was Mr. Michaeli, Mordechai Michaeli, whose soft hands were always perfumed like a dancer's and whose face was sheepish, as though he was forever ashamed of something; he used to sit down, take off his hat, put it on the desk in front of him, adjust his little skullcap, and, instead of bombarding us with knowledge, he would spend hours telling us stories. From the Talmud he would move on to Ukrainian folk tales, and then he would plunge suddenly into Greek mythology, Bedouin stories, and Yiddish slapstick, and he would go on until he came to the tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen and his own stories, which he composed, just like me, by telling them.