You’re a great storyteller, she says to him, I listen to you and it seems to me that I’m hearing a passage from a book.
From a movie, he corrects her.
What? she asks in surprise.
We’re characters in a movie script by an amateur barman and a novice, completely irresponsible scriptwriter, who hasn’t yet decided where to take us, he says to her.
And suddenly he lets out a deep sigh, and she asks him why, and without realizing it he starts taking about himself in the first person:
Once I wrote. I was then eleven and a half, and I was in love with a girl from my class, and I wrote a serial story for her, which I would read to her at recess, and all the girls in the class would gather round and listen.
While the boys played ball outside? she guesses.
Yes, he remembers. She would sit opposite me, this little girl I was in love with, cupping her sweet face in her hand, looking at me with her brown eyes, with the fingers of her other hand playing with her golden hair.
What was the story about? she asks and he answers:
It was a story about a young woman who escapes with her baby to the forest through the sewage canals, after her husband was murdered in front of her eyes at the entrance to their house, next to their photography studio in Szpitalna street, which was called after the municipal hospital at the end of the street.
Through the sewage canals? she wonders.
Yes, he confirms. Under the town is a network of sewage canals and catacombs and tunnels dating from the Middle Ages, and she waits for nightfall, and all the time her husband’s body is lying in a pool of blood in the street, in front of their house, and when night comes, she wraps her baby in a blanket, and walks like a shadow along the walls until she reaches a convent, and the Polish abbess of the convent takes her down to a secret tunnel and gives her a flashlight and tells her go straight down the main tunnel until she meets the people who have been living underground for two years, and they will help her, and on the way she encounters an underground burial chamber full of open coffins, containing the skeletons of adults and children. And she passes through the skeletons with her baby and walks on. And in the next chapter she meets the people who have
been living in the sewage canals since the outbreak of the war. Whole families who have been living under the ground for over two years.
How do they live there? she wonders.
They lead perfectly normal lives, he says. Friends visit friends, one family has dinner with another family. There are also solitary people who have lost everyone, and they exist there without God and without hope—he quotes the voices of the women he heard so many years ago speaking in Yiddish on their porch,
‘un a Got un a hofnung’
, but there are also young men and young women there who fall in love and get married and bring children into the world in the sewage tunnels. And on one summer night when the moon is full the moonlight filters into the tunnels through the iron grille, and a pair of young lovers go to seclude themselves in the moonlight in the pit under the grille, and they begin to kiss and embrace and they forget themselves, and they begin to utter sounds, and the soldiers who are passing in the street right above them, hear the voices rising from under the ground, and they realize that there are people there, and they go down into the pit and throw grenades, but the boy and girl succeed in escaping and disappearing into one of the sewage canals.
And what happens to the woman with the baby? she asks curiously.
She doesn’t stay down there. She succeeds in reaching the forest, and joins a group of partisans. They go out to blow up trains and she cooks for them and washes their clothes. But her baby sickens with diphtheria, and there are no medicines in the forest, and the baby dies in her arms and she buries her in the forest, she digs a little grave for her in the loose soil, and covers her with rotting leaves, and there aren’t even any stones there to put up a little headstone for her.
And what happens afterwards? Tell me, she requests.
The war ends, he says. People emerge from the forest, start going back to their towns and villages to look for relatives and acquaintances, to see what remains of their homes, their neighborhoods, their towns. The roads are full of survivors.…
But what about the woman? she asks.
The woman joins a convoy of refugees, and they have to cross a bridge, and next to the bridge are soldiers who search the men, order them to take off their shirts, and there’s an officer there who examines each of the men, and anyone who has a skull tattooed under his armpit is taken aside and given a bullet in the head and thrown into the river.
But what about the woman? she insists.
The woman returns to her town, and finds neither the house nor the street. Everything is in ruins. And then she joins another convoy of refugees, and they reach a DP camp, and young soldiers come and put her on an army truck and take her to the port, and put her on a little ship, together with hundreds of refugees like her, and they set sail for the Land of Israel, and when they’re in the open sea a British plane flies over them, and when they approach the shore two warships come and British soldiers jump onto their little ship, and they pelt the soldiers with potatoes, but it doesn’t help them, and the British soldiers put them on their ships and take them to Cyprus, and there they are imprisoned in camps again, and in the camp she meets a man who lost his wife and two children in the war, and the relations between them are far from simple, because she is torn between longings for her husband, who was the love of her youth and was murdered before her eyes, and the man she meets in the camp, who is also a person whose life has been broken, and it isn’t easy for them together, and they don’t talk much, because each of them is burdened
with a terrible past, and only sometimes, when they sit outside in the evening, in the cool breeze, she speaks a little of what she has been through, in short sentences, hesitantly, afraid that perhaps she is talking about herself too much, knowing only a little about what he went though, and that little too is terrible, and therefore she is afraid of burdening him with the weight of her past, and he is a shy, reserved man, a short, sturdy man, withdrawn into himself and very sparing of words. His silences embarrass her, but since she knows what lies behind these silences, she is silent too, and thus they sit there in the evening on a tree stump next to the fence of the camp, two broken people, full of memories and pain, and are silent together, until they feel cold, and then they get up and part with a handshake which she initiates. Not even a kiss on the cheek.
In the meantime the United Nations decides on the partition of Palestine between the Jews and the Arabs, and the Arabs refuse to accept the decision and declare war on the Jewish population and one evening he comes and tells her that he has found a way to escape from the camp and stow away on a Greek ship sailing to Eretz-Israel, and he is going there to fight. And again they sit on their tree stump next to the fence of the camp, two shy people who can’t find the words to dissolve the lumps stuck in their throats, sit until they feel cold and get up, and she accompanies him to his tent and parts from him with a handshake which she initiates, and the next day he sails for Eretz-Israel to join the Jewish army.
In the first weeks she doesn’t hear from him, but one day a short letter arrives. He writes that the war is fierce, dozens of young men are being killed, his unit is fighting in the Judean hills, and they gave him a German MG machine-gun with a little swastika engraved on it, and he is fighting like a lion, because he is sick and tired of all the
bastards pursuing him and wanting only to kill him, we’ll win because we have no choice. We have a country, and if you want it you will have a home of your own at last.
And when she recounts these things her eyes fill with tears, and tears stream from the eyes of the other women too sitting on the porch with her and knitting.
This is my mother’s story, he says.
Tell me about her, she asks.
She leaves Cyprus with the last group of prisoners. She disembarks from the ship at the port of Haifa, a small harbor town in the North of Eretz-Israel, a small, solitary woman, with a little bundle holding everything she has left in the world. And who does she see there in the quay, but a small man in a soldier’s uniform, standing and looking anxiously at the people coming down the gangway of the ship. She recognizes him before he sees her. She waves at him. Now he sees her. Recognizes her. It seems to her that he even smiles, this reserved man.
She runs towards him. Embraces him. Laughs and cries. He too is moved, but he doesn’t cry, her iron man. This is what she calls him in her language when she talks to her neighbors from the farming village on the porch.
‘Mein aizener man
’, or simply
‘der aizen’
. And the nickname sticks, so that he too, the son, calls his father by it when he comes home from school, and later from the army: ‘Mom, is the Iron at home?’ and she answers naturally: ‘No, Huneleh, the Iron is in the fields.’ Or: ‘Today the Iron is lifting crates in the packing plant. Let me give you a thermos with tea for him, take it to him, he’ll be pleased.’
And after the army, when the son is attached to the special unit whose teams are sent all over the world to hunt down airplane hijackers and terrorists and murderers of all kinds and close accounts with them, and he calls home after the operation, and her anxious voice answers: Huneleh! Are you well? Are you all right? and he hears the sigh of relief breaking out of the depths of her soul tortured by terrible memories—he hurries to ask her: how’s the Iron? And she replies: the Iron is the same as always, yesterday he went to cut the grass in the plantation. Maybe you can persuade him to take a little more care of himself, and he says: let me talk to him for a minute, and he hears her telling him that Huneleh wants to say something to him, and he hears the Iron grumble: what did you say to him already? And he hears her justifying herself: nothing, I swear, he just wants to say hello. And then the Iron’s sandals clatter on the floor, and he hears his voice, strong and firm as always, as if the disease which is spreading throughout his body has nothing to do with him and exists only in the morbid imaginations of the doctors, who despaired of his life three years ago and gave him no more than two months, maybe three, to live, and when he hears the strong ‘Hello?’ he hesitates for a second before saying: Dad? How are you? and the Iron almost rebukes him for even asking the question, and raises the same metallic voice that organized the uprising of the body burners, most of whose participants were killed before they succeeded in getting away from the camp, and only he and five of his comrades succeeded in escaping their pursuers and reaching the forest: I’m fine! announces the Iron, are you all right?—I’m fine, Dad, but I hear that you’re going off the rails a bit.—Nonsense! The Iron cuts him short, if I’d listened to the doctors I’d have been rotting in the ground a long time ago. And in order to leave no room for argument, the Iron immediately changes the subject: Did you do the
job? And after he receives confirmation, he sums up: very good. One bastard less.
And if you knew him, you would have heard in his voice the reserved pride in his son, who is doing exactly what he himself would have liked to do.
And that’s what turned you into a professional killer? she asks.
No, he says. It was the feminine side of my character again.
How come, she wonders, you’ll have to explain that to me.
It was the look in my mother’s eyes, when she came across strangers.
Tell me about it, she asks and curls up in his arms and nestles into his chest.
It’s hard for me to talk about it, he whispers.
Try, she urges.
She had this look … he begins after a long silence, but the lump sticks in his throat. He had never spoken these words. He had never spoken of his mother’s eyes, which are looking at him now out of the void, and he feels that if he says one more word he will burst into the tears that have been seething inside him ever since he can remember himself and which he has never allowed himself to weep.
What kind of look did she have? She won’t let go.
He makes a gesture with his hand for her to wait a minute. That in a minute he will open is mouth and speak. He swallows his saliva, but the lump is still stuck there. And suddenly he can’t contain it any longer. He gets up from the carpet and walks naked through the luxurious hotel room,
takes a glass from the magnificent bar and pours into it the golden liquid from the green bottle of Laphroaig which he bought at the liquor store crowded with New Year’s Eve revelers, and goes over to the big window where the vast ocean stretches silver in the moonlight painting in phosphorescent green and white the strip of sand along which they ran that afternoon. He takes a hefty gulp of the fierce liquid suffused with the smells of iodine and carbolic acid, and leans his forehead on the freezing windowpane, and she comes and stands behind him, leaning her slender body against his, and he feels her pubic hair on his buttocks, the plums of her breasts tickling his back, her arms enfolding him and her hands stroking his chest and stomach, and the words start coming out of his mouth, carefully feeling their way round the picture he sees before his eyes.
It was a shamed look, as if she was ashamed of not being able to prevent what they did to her, ashamed that they took her parents one morning, with other old people, and put them on a truck and drove them to the forest and stripped them naked and stunned her father with blows to the head, like stunning a pig before the slaughter, and afterwards they shot them. And she was ashamed for her husband who stepped empty-handed out of their little photography studio to wipe the display window clean of the eggs people had thrown at it, and a drunken soldier kicked him to his knees, and put a pistol to the nape of his neck and shot him and spat and walked away to join the band of soldiers on the other side of the street, who were standing and drinking schnapps from a bottle passed from hand to hand, and laughing loudly. And she was ashamed of not being able to save her little baby
from death by suffocation from diphtheria, and Dr. Gottlieb’s explanations didn’t help, the devoted country doctor who sat one day on their porch overlooking the Judean hills and while sipping steaming tea and fanning himself with his handkerchief tried to persuade her in a gentle voice that in those years, before the discovery of antibiotics, and all the more so in the conditions of life in the forest, there was almost no hope of saving a baby from the Corynebacterium diphtheria bacillus. And the attempts by the good doctor to console her, and even the giving of a name and identity to that bacillus, only increased the disgrace of her failure to perform her role as a mother. And this suppressed shame, which settles inside a person and has nowhere to go, was reflected in her eyes and in all her body language whenever she met strange people for the first time. She would shrink into herself like a wounded body round its wound, as if trying to make herself invisible, her whole being one mute plea not to be noticed, not to be looked at, not to be seen in the disgrace of her survival.