Listen to My Voice (23 page)

‘Self-confident?’ Arik repeated. ‘Maybe. But she’s more than confident; she’s authoritarian. Once she’s made up her mind about something, the discussion is over; whatever she’s decided must necessarily be right. It’s really a form of fragility.’

I asked Arik many questions about his life in Arad, and he described it to me in some detail. In the beginning, he said, it hadn’t been easy for him to settle in – the climate and the landscape were completely different from what he’d known – but now he couldn’t live anywhere else. He needed the stones and the clean, dry air and the flowers that grew in the wadis, the ones that exploded into a symphony of colours after the first rain. He always took his daughters to see those flowers, even though the girls were still little and couldn’t really understand. He wanted to accustom them, from the start, to delighting in natural wonders.

‘In the tropics, you probably get tired of flowers and end up not noticing them, but a desert that bursts into bloom only once is an unexpected gift. It makes us realise how much light is shut up inside matter.’

Then he told me the story of the siege of the fortress at Masada and mentioned that the week before, he’d seen two Japanese tourists on a bicycle pedal all the way up to the top of the fortress. He also talked about the oasis of Ein Gedi, near Masada, where even some leopards lived (if you walked up the wadi at dawn, sometimes it was possible to see them), and about the cave where David hid from Saul. If I’d like to go to Arad one day, he said, he’d take me to visit all those places.

Around eleven o’clock, Uncle Jonathan went to bed, and Arik and I went out for a walk.

After a couple of turns around the cowsheds, we started walking along the edge of the citrus orchards. The orange blossoms had opened, and they were diffusing an extraordinarily intense perfume into the mild night air. We sat down on a rock, the same one I had selected for my meditations, and talked all night long about many things: about our families, about his grandfather and his tragic end, about how he, Arik, had been troubled ever since childhood by the fact that Ottavio had loved beauty without loving Him who established it in our hearts.

‘Beauty and harmony,’ Arik said, ‘exist to the extent that we’re able to perceive them and delight in them. That’s the only way for them to become nourishment for the soul. Otherwise, they’re only a dazzling
distraction
, like the flashing hazard lights of a stopped car we have to drive around; they inevitably cause us to deviate from our intentions, to blend white and black, to transform everything into a grey sludge.

‘The heart is where the battle takes place. There, good intentions and bad intentions engage each other in a no-holds-barred contest. We have to be aware of this; otherwise, we’ll wind up surrendering without even putting up a fight, succumbing to the opacity of the indistinct, which is the great enemy of our time. Opacity takes the joy out of life, deprives the things around us of light, and consigns our existence to darkness.’

Around us, jackals howled to one another, occasionally accompanied for a few bars by a barking dog. Then the roosters started to crow, saluting the arrival of the new day.

Arik pointed to a little tree tied to a stake. ‘Like trees,’ he said, ‘we have a natural desire to rise up, to ascend. Maybe it’s buried under a large pile of debris, but it exists. It’s a kind of nostalgia that dwells in the deepest part of every human being. Life, however, is messy and filled with conflict, and if we confide uniquely in our own judgement, we risk going in the wrong direction and being dazzled by some fake sun. That’s why the Torah exists; like that young tree’s stake, it helps us to rise up straight, to grow toward heaven without being broken by windstorms.’

From amid the branches of the trees came the rustling sound of sparrows’ wings. As the birds woke up, their chirping grew louder and louder.

The darkness in the east steadily gave way to the light. The bright azure was already changing into orange-gold when Arik stood up and, in a low voice, started praying. I imitated him and stood beside him, but I didn’t know what to say. No one had ever taught me a prayer. I searched desperately for some word that would give voice to my state of mind.

The hoopoes had already begun their erratic flight through the rows of trees when a prayer of thanks finally rose to my lips. Thanks for life, thanks for splendour, thanks for the ability to apprehend it.

The following week, I received another telephone call from Italy, but this one wasn’t from my father.

It was the Mestre police, calling to announce their discovery of a dead man in an underground passage near Marghera. His name was Massimo Ancona, and in his jacket pocket they’d found a letter addressed to his daughter, with my telephone number. Did I know him? Was I really his daughter? His documents contained no mention of her, but if the implied relationship was in fact true, I was enjoined to present myself at the Mestre morgue as soon as possible to identify the body.

That same afternoon, I went to Haifa to make an airline reservation. The first available seat was on a Tel Aviv–Milan flight three days later. I booked a ticket and returned to the kibbutz.

That night, I couldn’t sleep a wink. I cursed myself for not having called him back. The police couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me how he died, so I suspected he might have killed himself: in desperation, maybe, having tried in vain to tell me something, and I hadn’t returned his call. Even though he’d never felt any sense of responsibility for my beginning, I nonetheless felt responsible for his end.

It took the wisdom of morning to make me realise how absurd such thoughts were. My father, protected as he’d always been by his unaffectionate nature and his selfishness, would never have killed himself because of an unreturned telephone call.

The following day, I was too upset to perform my usual tasks, so I took a bus to the Mount of Beatitudes.

It was lunchtime when I arrived. The big gardens surrounding the basilica were almost deserted. Below in the distance, the Sea of Galilee gleamed like a bright, bright mirror, while the wind occasionally carried up the sounds of the approaching cars on the road below.

Within those few dozen kilometres, Jesus had spent
a
significant part of his brief existence. The crowd was following him everywhere; every step of the way, there were people begging him to heal them. It wasn’t hard for me to imagine how exhausted and solitary he must have felt, constantly importuned by petitioners. After thirty years of silence, he spent three years immersed in constant confusion.

Besides, what did that mean, ‘heal them’? To make them see, or walk, or feel differently, but to what end? To have a good appetite, to sleep better, to be able to run fast? Or maybe to reach a new level of awareness? And what connection was there between the cloying words I’d heard from the TV priests and the force, the rigour, the severity of those pronounced by the rabbi of Nazareth? One day, would those words be able to heal me, too?

I walked along the pathways, following the white marble tablets incised with the Beatitudes. Everything was in luxuriant blossom around me, and the golden orioles hurled their songs into the air as though they were questions. When I read
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy
, I thought about my father. Where was he now? Was he hovering nearby, watching me, or had he sunk into some dark place from which he would never emerge? Would there be mercy for the sterility of his life? What was an act of mercy, really? Wasn’t it a participation in the compassion of Him who created us?

Arik’s words came back to me: ‘The strictness of the law and divine mercy always walk side by side, but in the most important decisions, mercy always gets the upper hand; it’s impossible for a mother to be pitiless towards the child born out of her womb.’

The notion of God’s maternity had struck me profoundly.

‘But in the end, what does He want from us?’

‘He wants growth, transformation, repentance. He wants to live in our hearts, as we, from the beginning, live in His. It’s not power He desires to share with us, but fragility.’

18

TWO DAYS LATER
, Uncle Jonathan drove me to Ben Gurion Airport in a clapped-out Subaru.

We said goodbye with a long embrace. I invited him to visit me in Trieste, and he promised to come as soon as possible; naturally, my invitation included Arik and his family.

The flight was uneventful.

In Milan, I took the train for Venice and got off at Mestre. Immediately after I presented myself at police headquarters, a young corporal accompanied me to the morgue. As we walked, he explained that an autopsy had already been performed, and that my father had died of natural causes. From one moment to the next, his heart had stopped beating.

At the morgue, the person in charge went ahead to
show
us the way. Her rubber clogs produced a strange sucking sound on the linoleum floor.

A draft of frigid air struck me as I entered the cold chamber. Three corpses were lying on stainless-steel tables. He was on the middle one. His feet were sticking out from under the green sheet – it was the first time I’d even seen him without shoes – and one arm was hanging down.

The morgue official lifted the sheet. ‘Do you recognise him?’

Instead of his usual sneering smile, his lips were parted in what looked like an expression of astonishment.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He’s my father, Massimo Ancona.’

‘I’m sorry,’ the corporal said.

‘So am I,’ I replied, and that was the moment when I felt the tears running down my cheeks.

While the young policeman filled out some forms, the morgue official, impatient to leave the cold room, chewed her gum vigorously. Her working mandibles produced the only sound in the unreal silence.

On an impulse, I grabbed the white hand hanging down from under the sheet and squeezed it. The skin felt cold like a snake’s, the weight and density not much different from those of a living hand, and the fingernails had been trimmed hastily.

‘Here’s your last outpost,’ I whispered, bending down
to
kiss him, and then I added, ‘Thanks, nevertheless. Thanks for the life you gave me.’