Listen to My Voice (22 page)

‘Spoiled plants, like spoiled children, have only one path ahead of them: the path of their ego.

‘I make these assertions, but I know I’m alone. The modern world’s evolving, but in a different way from before, and I certainly can’t do anything about that. But I would like it if people would think more about trees, if they’d learn to care for them and be grateful to them, because (even though no one seems to remember this) without trees, our lives could not exist; it’s their breath that allows us to breathe.

‘Do you know what aspect of the modern world I’m most afraid of? The spreading sense of omnipotence. Man is convinced he can do anything because he lives in an artificial world, built with his own hands, and he believes he has total dominion over it. But whoever does what I do, whoever grows plants and trees, knows that’s not the case.

‘Of course, if I want to guarantee regular deliveries of water to my trees, I can construct a sophisticated irrigation system – we’ve cultivated practically the whole country like that – but if it doesn’t rain for days, for months, for years, at some point the earth will grow so dry it’ll crack, plants will die, and animals will die with them. We can’t manufacture water, you see. And we can’t manufacture oxygen, either. We’re dependent on something that’s out of our hands. If the sea rises, we’ll be overwhelmed; if locusts arrive, they’ll devour the harvest and the seedlings exactly the way they did in the days of the pharaohs. But those are the kinds of things we don’t know any more, enclosed as we are by our artificial lights.

‘The only sure horizon is that of our dominion over the material world. We’re curing more and more diseases and using more and more sophisticated methods to do so. This, obviously, is an extraordinary accomplishment. But then again, we freeze pigs alive to see if it might be possible for us to fall asleep and wake up again, at several reprises, over an extended period – in short, to see whether we can counterfeit death and come back to life. We dismember the bodies of the dead and keep the pieces on ice for use as spare parts.

‘See here? My kneecap hardly moves any more because of arthritis – it’s always swollen, and I have a hard time walking. Do you know what a physician at
the
hospital said to me one day? He said, “If you want, we can replace it with another kneecap.” I said, “And where are you going to get another kneecap?” And he calmly replied, “At the bank.”

‘In other words, somewhere in the world, there’s a giant freezer that contains all possible spare parts; instead of courgettes and peas, it holds kneecaps and hands, tendons and eyes, waiting there to be used as replacements like car doors in a body shop.

‘I saw the expression that came over the doctor’s face when I gave him my reply, which was, “I’d rather be a cripple than profane another person’s body.” He looked at me in a way that let me know he thought I was just an old fanatic. But I’ve never been fanatical about anything. Doubt and perplexity have accompanied my every step. I would have liked to go back and tell him so, but then I realised it wasn’t worth the trouble. Enclosed spaces cause incredible obtuseness in people. You have to stand out in the open in order to admit that there’s something you can’t understand. That new awareness isn’t a defeat; it makes it possible for you to grow.

‘From that point, you can go on some extraordinary journeys, as my son always says, and if you don’t, whatever road you undertake to travel on will only lead you in a circle, around and around.

‘When you’re holding your newborn child in your
arms
, how can you think he’s an assembly of spare parts? You feel his tender flesh, entrusted to your care; you see his eyes – if you could read what’s in them, you’d be able to understand everything – and you realise that those few pounds of matter incorporate the greatest of mysteries. It’s not your intelligence that tells you this, but your guts, which have produced that mystery. Do you know this psalm? “My frame was not hidden from thee, when I was being made in secret, intricately wrought in the depths of the earth.”

‘And then I’m supposed to saw up those bones and put them in a freezer? No thanks, I’d rather let them go back to the depths of the earth. I’d rather think that “in thy book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them,” to continue the psalm. I’d rather bow my head and accept my fate.

‘I often discuss these things with my son when he and his little girls come to visit me. He and I stay up late and talk when everyone else has gone to bed. Sometimes he laughs and says I’ve become more religious than he is, but I tell him he’s wrong, because I’m like a shopkeeper who has an account with someone, an account he hasn’t settled yet – my mother’s death, my father’s, the extermination of millions of innocents throughout history – and since I’ve got that account, I can’t give myself heart and soul to a faith, but by the same token,
I
can’t pretend there’s nothing there, either. I can’t say that all’s well under the sun or that the heavens are filled with anything other than masses of matter in motion. Anyone who makes declarations like that either can’t see or pretends not to see what’s under his nose.

‘Like every city boy, when I first started planting trees, I was convinced they weren’t much different from posts, except they could put out leaves. As time passed and I listened to them, observed their growth, watched them get sick and die or bear fruit, I realised that they weren’t much different from children, that they needed care and love but also a firm hand. I realised that every one of them, incredibly, had its own individuality – some were stronger and others were weaker, some were generous and others were stingy, and some were even capricious.

‘I tended all of them with the same dedication and intensity, but they all responded differently. This made me see that they weren’t posts, but creatures with a destiny unto themselves. And if there’s a mystery about them, how much greater must be the mystery that envelops human beings?

‘If I had reached my present age convinced I’d spent my life planting mere posts that happened to be capable of generating fruit, what would I be by this point? Foolish? Wicked? What do you think? In any case, I’d be a person who’d lived from day to day without knowing how to listen, without knowing how to look. Instead of
thoughts
and questions, my head would be filled with something like wet, burning leaves. The smoke from their poor combustion would have prevented me from seeing how similar the tree’s destiny is to man’s.’

I told Uncle Jonathan about my own passion for trees; I described the walnut tree you’d so casually had removed and the devastation that followed. It was as if a tree had been chopped down inside of me, too. The wound was always open, and my anxieties gushed forth from it continuously.

We also talked about your illness, and about how I still hadn’t been able to come to terms with our relationship: too close and over-protective in my childhood, too full of conflict afterwards. The fact that you had loved me but hadn’t been able to love your daughter left me hanging, suspended in utter ambivalence as far as you were concerned.

Then I told him about my father as well, and about his affair with my mother and their years in Padua. After I was finished, and perhaps by way of turning down the drama a little, we started playing the plant game.

‘What kind of plant was Ilaria?’ I asked Uncle Jonathan.

‘Surely, some sort of aquatic plant,’ he replied. ‘Her floating roots didn’t let her form a stalk or live a long
life
, but as often happens with plants of that kind, she produced a most beautiful flower.’

‘How about my father?’

Taking his cues from the stories I’d told him, Uncle Jonathan compared my father to one of those plants that one sees rolling about in desert country. They don’t resemble bushes so much as crowns of thorns, he said; pushed along by the wind, they dance on the sand, clamber up dunes, and roll back down, without ever stopping. Since they have neither roots nor the possibility of growing them, they can’t even offer nourishment to the bees, and their destiny is an eternal and solitary drift into nothingness.

When I was a little girl, I told my uncle, I’d wanted to have the solid strength of an oak or the fragrance of a lime tree, but recently I’d changed my mind. I was as much troubled by the lime trees’ imprisonment along avenues and in gardens as I was saddened by the fate of the oaks, condemned to solitude. Therefore, I now wanted to be a willow and grow my long tresses beside a river, dip my roots in the stream, listen to the sound of the current, offer the hospitality of my boughs to the nightingales and the reed warblers, and watch the kingfishers appear and disappear in the water, like little rainbows.

Then I asked him, ‘How about you? What kind of tree would you like to be?’

Uncle Jonathan concentrated for a little while before answering. ‘As a young man, I would have liked to be some kind of bush – a wild rose, say, or a hawthorn, or a prunus of some kind – and blend into the middle of a hedge. After I came to Israel, I would have liked to be one of those majestic cedars that grow on the slopes of Mount Hermon. But in recent years, the tree I always think about, the one I’m most nostalgic for, is one that grows back in our part of the world, the beech. I remember beeches from my excursions in the mountains: the silvery-grey trunks, covered with moss, and the leaves lighting up the air like little flames . . . So yes, there you are, now I’d like to be a beech.

‘Or better yet, I feel like a beech, I am a beech, because when life’s about to go out, it burns high with emotions, with memories, with feelings, just as the foliage of those trees turns to flame in the autumn.’

17

SHORTLY AFTER THE
feast of Shavuot, someone in Italy tried to get in touch with me. The call was transferred to the dining hall, but I was already at work. When my shift was over and I finally carried an overloaded tray to a table and sat down, a young soldier handed me a note that read, ‘A call from your
abba
.’

It was my father, looking for me for the second time in his life. What had prompted him to do that? I had no idea. Maybe the view of Tiberias really appealed to him, I thought, and he wants to ask me to find him a flat there, or maybe he just wants to let me know he’s leaving Grado Pineta and taking up residence in some other outpost for the summer. After all, it had been more than six months since I left Italy.

Knowing him as I did, I figured it mustn’t be anything urgent. I put the scrap of paper in my pocket, thinking
that
I’d buy a phone card and call him the next time I left the kibbutz.

That same evening, Arik, Uncle Jonathan’s elder child, came for a visit from Haifa, where he worked at the university. He looked about thirty, with a bright, open face.

In my honour and in honour of the country which (except for a handful of kilometres) had given us birth, we stayed home that evening and cooked spaghetti with tomatoes. Arik described for his father the most recent exploits of his little twins, mysteriously adding that soon he’d have another piece of good news to share with him, but he wanted to wait until his wife arrived. Then he mentioned something about his sister, whom he’d met a week earlier in Beersheba; whereupon Uncle Jonathan said sadly, ‘If I didn’t call her, I wouldn’t talk to her. She never calls me.’

‘She’s too caught up in her work,’ Arik replied promptly. ‘She never stops. She’s convinced her task is to save humanity. If she keeps on like this, she’s going to make herself ill.’

Uncle Jonathan shook his head. ‘It’s strange,’ he said. ‘Usually girls take after their fathers. In our case, however, she’s more like her mother: practical, realistic, ready to pitch in no matter what the situation without ever getting even slightly upset.’

Arik didn’t completely agree. ‘That’s not how it is. She pretends not to be upset so she won’t have to confront the reasons why she is. She’s decided that the world must go the way she wants it to go, regardless of anyone else.’

‘Is she a very self-confident person?’ I asked. I’d always envied people like that.