A Tale of Love and Darkness (68 page)

For a couple of seconds the man stood motionless, with head bowed, shoulders drooping, as if to say: "I do not deserve this accolade," or "My soul is bowed down to the dust under the burden of your love" Then he stretched out his arms as if to bless the crowds, smiled shyly, silenced them, and began hesitantly, like a novice actor with stage fright:

"Good Sabbath to you all, brothers and sisters. Fellow Jews. People of Jerusalem, our eternal holy city."

And he stopped. Suddenly he said quietly, sadly, almost mournfully:

"Brothers and sisters. These are difficult days for our beloved young state. Exceptionally difficult days. Awesome days for all of us."

Gradually he overcame his sadness, gathered his strength, and continued, still quietly but with a controlled power, as though behind that veil of quietness there lurked a subdued but very serious warning:

"Once again our enemies are grinding their teeth in the dark and plotting vengeance for the shameful defeat we inflicted on them on the battlefield. The Great Powers are devising evil once again. There is nothing new. In every generation men rise up against us to annihilate us. But we, my brothers and sisters, we shall stand up to them again. As we have stood up to them not once or twice but many times in the past. We shall stand up to them with courage and devotion. Holding our heads up high. Never, never shall they see this nation on its knees. Never! To the last generation!"

At the words "Never, never" he raised his voice to a resounding cry from the heart, full of pained vibrations. This time the audience did not shout, it roared with rage and anguish.

"The Eternal One of Israel," he said in a quiet, authoritative voice, as though he had just come from an operational meeting at the Eternal One of Israel's headquarters, "the Rock of Israel shall rise up again and frustrate and dash to pi-eces all the schemes of our enemies!"

Now the crowd was flushed with gratitude and affection, which they expressed by a rhythmic chant of "Begin! Begin!" I too leaped to my feet and roared his name with all the power I could muster in my voice, which was breaking at the time.

"On one condition," the speaker said solemnly, sternly, raising his hand, and then he paused as though pondering the nature of this condition and wondering whether it was proper for him to share it with the audience. A deathly hush spread through the hall. "One sole, crucial, vital, fateful condition." He paused again. His head drooped. As though bent under the terrible weight of the condition. The audience listened so intently that I could hear the hum of the fans on the high ceiling of the hall.

"On condition that our leadership, brothers and sisters, is a national leadership and not a bunch of panic-stricken ghetto Jews who are scared of their own shadows! On condition that the feeble, enfeebling, defeated, defeatist, despicable Ben-Gurion government makes way at once for a proud, daring Hebrew government, an emergency government that knows how to make our foes quake with terror, just as the very name of our glorious army, the army of Israel, puts fear and trembling into the hearts of all the enemies of Israel wherever they may be!"

At this the whole audience boiled over and seemed to burst its banks. The mention of the "despicable Ben-Gurion government" roused snorts of hatred and contempt on every side. From one of the galleries someone shouted hoarsely "Death to the traitors!," and from another corner of the hall came a wild chant of "Begin for PM, Ben-Gurion go home!"

But the speaker silenced them and declared slowly, calmly, like a strict teacher rebuking his pupils:

"No, brothers and sisters. That is not the way. Shouting and violence are not the right way, but peaceful, respectful, democratic elections. Not with the methods of those Reds, not with deception and hooliganism, but with the upright and dignified way that we have learned from our great mentor Vladimir Jabotinsky. We shall soon send them packing, not with hatred among brothers, not with violent upheaval, but with cold contempt. Yes, we shall send them all packing. Those who sell the soil of our Fatherland and those who have sold their souls to Stalin. Those bloated kibbutz hacks, and the arrogant, condescending tyrants of the Bolshevik Histadrut, all the petty Zhdanovs together with all the big thieves. Off with them! Aren't they always spouting to us smugly about manual labor and draining the swamps? Very well then. We shall send them off, ve-ery respectfully, to do some manual labor. They've
long since forgotten what the word labor means. It'll be interesting to see if any of them can still hold a shovel! We, my brothers and sisters, shall do a great job of draining swamps—very soon, brothers and sisters, very soon, just be patient—we shall drain the swamp of this Labor government once and for all! Once and for all, my brothers and sisters! We shall drain it irreversibly, with no return! Now repeat after me, my people, as one man, loud and clear, this solemn vow: Once and for all! Once and for all!! Once and for all!!! No return! No return!! No return!!!"*

The crowd went mad. So did I. As though we had all become cells in a single giant body, blazing with rage, boiling with indignation.

And it was at this point that it happened. The fall. The expulsion from Paradise. Mr. Begin went on to speak about the imminent war and the arms race that was in progress all over the Middle East. However, Mr. Begin spoke the Hebrew of his generation, and was evidently not aware that usage had changed. A dividing line separated those under the age of twenty-five or so, who were brought up in Israel, from those above that age or who had learned their Hebrew from books. The word that for Mr. Begin, as for others of his generation, of all parties, meant "weapon" or "arm," for the rest of us signified the male sexual organ and nothing else. And his verb "to arm" for us signified the corresponding action.

Mr. Begin took a couple of sips of water, scrutinized the audience, nodded his head a few times, as though agreeing with himself, or lamenting, and in a harsh, accusing voice, like a prosecutor sternly enumerating a series of unanswerable charges, launched into his tirade:

"President Eisenhower is arming the Nasser regime!

"Bulganin is arming Nasser!

"Guy Mollet and Anthony Eden are arming Nasser!!

"The whole world is arming our Arab enemies day and night!!!"

Pause. His voice filled with loathing and contempt:

"But who will arm the government of Ben-Gurion?"

A stunned silence fell on the hall. But Mr. Begin did not notice. He raised his voice and crowed triumphantly:

*Begin's speech is reconstructed from memory and experience.

"If only I were the prime minister today—everyone, everyone would be arming us!! Ev-ery-one!!!"

A few faint claps rose from the elderly Ashkenazim in the front rows. But the rest of the vast crowd hesitated, apparently unable to believe their ears, or perhaps they were shocked. In that moment of embarrassed silence there was just one nationalistic child, one twelve-year-old child who was politically committed to the roots of his hair, a devoted Beginite in a white shirt and highly polished shoes, who could not contain himself and burst out laughing.

This child tried with all his might and main to restrain his laughter, he wanted to die of shame on the spot, but his contorted, hysterical laughter was irrepressible: it was a choked, almost tearful laugh, a hoarse laugh with strident hoots, a laugh that resembled sobbing and also suffocation.

Looks of horror and alarm fixed on the child from every direction. On every side hundreds of fingers were laid on hundreds of lips, as he was hushed and shushed. Shame! Disgrace! All around important persons fumed reproachfully at a horror-smitten Grandpa Alexander. The child had the impression that far away at the back of the hall an unruly laugh echoed his, followed by another. But those laughs, if they occurred, had broken out in the outer suburbs of the nation, while his own outburst had struck in the middle of the third row, which was full of veterans of Beitar and dignitaries of Herut, all well-known and respectable figures.

And now the speaker had noticed him and interrupted his speech; he waited patiently, with an indulgent, tactful smile, while Grandpa Alexander, blushing, shocked, and seething like someone whose world had collapsed around him, seized the child's ear, lifted him furiously to his feet, and dragged him out by his ear, in front of the whole third row, in front of the massed lovers of the Fatherland in Jerusalem, bellowing desperately as he tugged and pulled. (It must have been rather like this that Grandpa himself was dragged by the ear to the rabbi in New York by the formidable Grandma Shlomit when, having been engaged to her, he suddenly fell in love with another lady on the boat to America.)

And once the three of them were outside the Edison Auditorium, the one who was doing the dragging, seething with rage, the one who was being dragged, choking and weeping with laughter, and the poor ear
that was by now as red as a beet, Grandpa raised his right hand and administered the grandfather of a slap on my right cheek, then he raised his left hand and slapped my other cheek with all the force of his hatred for the Left, and because he was such a Rightist, he did not want to let the left have the last word, so he gave me another slap on the right, not a feeble, obsequious Diaspora slap in the spirit of the worm of Jacob, but a bold, hawkish, patriotic slap, proud, magnificent, and furious.

Jotapata, Masada, and besieged Beitar had lost: they might indeed rise again in glory and might, but without me. As for the Herut movement and the Likkud Party, they lost someone that morning who might have become in time a little heir, a fiery orator, perhaps an articulate member of the Knesset, or even a deputy minister without portfolio.

I have never again blended happily into an ecstatic crowd, or been a blind molecule in a gigantic superhuman body. On the contrary, I have developed a morbid fear of crowds. The line "Repose is like mire" seems to me now to attest to a widespread, dangerous illness. In the phrase "blood and fire" I can taste blood and smell burning human flesh. As on the plains of northern Sinai during the Six Day War and among the blazing tanks on the Golan Heights in the Yom Kippur War.

The autobiography of Professor Klausner, Uncle Joseph, which I have drawn on for much of what I have written here about the history of the Klausner family, is entitled
My Road to Resurrection and Redemption.
On that Saturday, while kindhearted Grandpa Alexander, Uncle Joseph's brother, was dragging me outside by my ear and making furious noises that sounded like sobs of horror and madness, I seem to have begun to run away from resurrection and redemption. I am still running.

But that was not the only thing I ran away from. The suffocation of life in that basement, between my father and mother and between the two of them and all those books, the ambitions, the repressed, denied nostalgia for Rovno and Vilna, for a Europe that was embodied by a black tea cart and gleaming white napkins, the burden of his failure in life, the wound of hers, failures that I was tacitly charged with the responsibility of converting into victories in the fullness of time, all this oppressed me so much that I wanted to run away from it. At other times young people left their parents' homes and went off to find them-selves—or to lose themselves—in Eilat or the Sinai Desert, later on in New York or Paris, and later still in ashrams in India or jungles in South
America, or in the Himalayas (where the only child Rico went in my book
The Same Sea
following the death of his mother). But in the early 1950s the opposite pole to the oppressiveness of the parental home was the kibbutz. There, far from Jerusalem, "over the hills and far away," in Galilee, Sharon, the Negev, or the Valleys—so we imagined in Jerusalem in those days—a new, rugged race of pioneers was taking shape, strong, serious but not complicated, laconic, able to keep a secret, able to be swept away in a riot of heady dancing, yet also able to be lonely and thoughtful, fitted for life in the fields and under canvas: tough young men and women, ready for any kind of hard work yet with a rich cultural and intellectual life and sensitive, contained feelings. I wanted to be like them so as not to be like my father or my mother or any of those gloomy refugee scholars of whom Jewish Jerusalem was full. After a while I signed up for the scout movement, whose members in those days intended to enlist in the Nahal, the military formation that specialized in creating new kibbutzim along the border, when they had finished at school, and to go on to "labor, defense, and the kibbutz." My father was not pleased, but because he yearned to be a true liberal, he contented himself with remarking sadly: "The scout movement. Very well. So be it. Why not. But the kibbutz? The kibbutz is for simple, strong people, and you are neither. You are a talented child. An individualist. Surely it would be better for you to grow up to serve our beloved state with your talents, not with your muscles. Which are not all that developed."

My mother was far away by then. She had turned her back on us.

And I agreed with my father. That is why I forced myself to eat twice as much and to strengthen my feeble muscles with running and exercises.

Three or four years later, after my mother's death and my father's remarriage, in Kibbutz Hulda, at half past four one Saturday morning, I told Ephraim Avneri about Begin and the arms. We had gotten up early because we had been detailed for apple picking. I was fifteen or sixteen. Ephraim Avneri, like the other founder-members of Hulda, was in his mid-forties, but he and his friends were called—by us and even among themselves—the oldies.

Ephraim listened to the story and smiled, but for a minute it seemed he had trouble understanding what the point of it was, because he too
belonged to the generation for whom "arming" was a matter of tanks and guns. After a moment he said: "Ah yes, I see, Begin was talking about 'arming' with weapons and you took it in the slang sense. It does come out rather funny. But listen here my young friend," (we were standing on ladders on opposite sides of the same tree, talking while we picked, but the foliage was in the way so we could not see each other) "it seems to me you missed the main point. The thing that's so funny about them, Begin and all his noisy crew, is not their use of the word 'arm' but their use of words in general. They divide everything up into 'obsequious Diaspora-Jewish' on the one hand and 'manly Hebrew' on the other. They don't notice how Diaspora-Jewish the division itself is. Their whole childish obsession with military parades and hollow machismo and weapons comes straight from the ghetto."