The Boxer (29 page)

For example: Mark never pursued his studies. Aron can only assume why, he thinks lack of interest is out of the question. Even if one considers, he explains, that the
cities over there
hold many distractions, distractions capable of thwarting his son’s thirst for knowledge had still to be invented. The only evident explanation: money problems. Mark worked all the time and earned a decent living but never enough to allow him to concentrate on his studies part-time. All those trips? I mustn’t think Mark booked them through travel agents. During every trip he had a job — in France as a waiter, in Morocco as a tour leader; in Sweden he looked for snails in the woods with a friend and then sold them to restaurants in Stockholm. Not one of these trips had been what one usually considers a holiday, and yet Mark never complained about his financial situation. Aron only learned of it indirectly, in that Mark wrote constantly of new jobs he had. A person changes jobs over a period of several years only if he has money problems, of this he’s quite sure. That Mark didn’t study, Aron also inferred, since the word “studying” never appeared in his letters. Mark wrote that now he was doing this, now he was doing that; unfortunately he never wrote that he was studying.

A
ron describes the contents of Mark’s letters so thoroughly that I ask myself why he doesn’t let me read them. Mark delivers the plot from afar and Aron comments. Of his whole long story only Mark remains, and since Aron seems determined to drag out the end as long as possible, all he has left is thoroughness. I’m free to interrupt when I want, but I don’t for several reasons. For one, I think that digressions also contribute to complete the image of a narrator. Second, an expanded story isn’t such a headache; no one is forcing me to take note of it, and it isn’t boring — there are worse ways of passing time. Third, the longer I know Aron, the more I tend to think that it doesn’t make sense to be impatient with people like him. I can’t say what makes me so sure, perhaps I don’t want to know, out of fear, or it could simply be pity. I hear long commentaries about Mark’s affairs; to this day Aron can’t stop wondering why his son went to Israel.

He could understand that old fart Kenik, and in general those people who through experience and education, identified themselves Jews, but how did Mark come up with such an idea? In his estimation, Mark’s experiences during the war could not have been an influence; Mark had simply been too young, the experience factor was ruled out. Likewise the education factor — one could surely find fault in him, accuse him of having made many mistakes regarding Mark, but in no case that of having
made a Jew out of him
. What is that anyway, he asks me, a Jew, what is it if not a creed? Or aren’t we finally living in times, he asks, in which everyone can decide for himself which party to join? Whether he is Turkish or German — of course he has no influence over that — but not even over the fact that he is a Christian or a Jew? The son of Catholic parents can, when he reaches maturity, freely choose whether or not he wants to become a Catholic like his parents. Why does one, he asks me, refuse the same right to the children of Jewish parents?

Since Aron cannot imagine that the decision to go to Israel had sprung from Mark’s own head,
out of thin air
, the only possible explanation was other people’s influence. They must have confused and convinced him, perhaps there was a girl behind it all; but in his letters there was no clue to support either hypothesis. Mark didn’t even mention Israel until he was ready to go, and even when the
fateful
step was taken, he didn’t give his reasons. He only communicated that he was there.

Apparently, Aron presumes, Mark liked life there, at least he didn’t dislike it enough to leave. He didn’t even leave when he couldn’t find a
decent
job in Haifa, his first stop. He went to the countryside, a decision that, to hear Aron, nobody in his right mind would have even considered. He became a member of a kibbutz,
my son the farmer;
in one of the letters he wrote that he had decided for the time being to postpone his plans for the future, which Aron didn’t know anyway; at the time he was occupied with the secrets of cultivating orange trees. And that’s what he did till his death, says Aron.

N
o,” he says, “I don’t have an official notification. But I have common sense. How should the authorities have known about me in the first place?”

“That doesn’t mean anything,” I say.

“Think,” he says. “For seven years he writes letters, regularly once a month, and suddenly he stops?”

“At most it’s strange,” I say, “but it isn’t proof.”

“Not proof? Didn’t you see when he sent the last letter?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Tell me.”

“In May ‘sixty-seven.”

“So when should the following one have arrived?”

“In June ‘sixty-seven.”

“And what was going on then?”

“No idea.”

“War. That’s the proof.”

I admit, Aron’s conclusion is not completely unfounded, Mark probably did not survive the war. And yet a hint of uncertainty remains; surely there must be some way to make absolutely sure, a letter to the Red Cross ought to do it. But suddenly I ask myself, What’s the point of making sure, how would that help Aron? With me he acts as if Mark’s death were a foregone conclusion, but that doesn’t mean much. Perhaps he doesn’t want me to pressure him into an investigation, the consequences of which he fears. I remember his joke about the right pocket in the brown coat.

“You still have doubts?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say.

“Then doubt.”

W
e won’t discuss anything that we can’t prove here and now anyway; for the rest of the conversation Mark is dead. Probably fallen, Aron says; he died for a country, he says, in which he was lost. To my ears, it certainly sounds very self-possessed, callous perhaps, when he talks about the death of his son as if he were talking about a mathematics equation. Mark’s death, he admits, was a conclusion that he
forced
himself to accept over the years. His pain had been really strange, at first a crawling one with a sliver of hope, a pain that grew from month to month but never as unbearable as it would have been if he had learned for sure in one blow. For instance, in the form of an official notification.

Once again, he started asking himself if Mark was really his son; for weeks he thought that doubt might alleviate his pain. There were just as many arguments for it as against it, except in the meantime Aron was a different man. He was no longer prepared to cheat and answer every undecided question to his advantage. For example, the question still open to this day — why it said Mark Berger on the papers. Mark may well be an uncommon name, but Aron increasingly tended to believe that Paula had
talked him into
a son. It must have been all the more easy for her, since he craved her truth, preferably this son than none at all, but in the meantime the situation had changed. Meanwhile, one had to ask oneself if one wasn’t mourning the wrong person. An adventurous thought: Mark had found his parents, the Bergers, abroad.

Then Aron realized that Mark’s family tree had no influence on his mourning, that he was mourning Mark independently of whose son he was. And if God, he says, would have appeared to him in person and proved to him that Mark was the son of a Greek goatherd, it wouldn’t have changed an iota of his suffering. Once he was aware of this, he stopped the pointless questioning; Mark was without doubt his dead son.

In a certain way, Aron says, parents are always responsible for their children’s actions. Above all when they are actions that emanate from free will and cannot be seen purely as reactions to someone else’s actions, he must not ignore that. He meditated for a long time in order to fathom how important his role was in Mark’s
escape
, in his move to Israel and, in the end, in his death. This had nothing to do with self-destructive brooding, rather I must understand that we are now dealing with the last important question that, to him, is still worth thinking about. And not for Mark’s sake,
no one can help him anymore
— but exclusively for his own sake, for purely egoistic reasons.
What use is recognition to me?
I might ask, Aron says, since no one expects him to achieve great things, to rouse himself to notable actions anymore, yet that’s not what it’s about either. The degree of his guilt or innocence interests him because the
spirit
in which he will die isn’t irrelevant to him. Parents easily tend, he says, to consider their children’s intelligence, their intellectual activity, as a personal merit, while this rarely proves to be the case. No matter how uncomfortable it was to him, he had to admit that his influence on Mark’s intellectual development was rather modest, it basically took place behind his back, and his
whole contribution
consisted of paying attention to Mark’s physical well-being. Mark had been forced to draw from other sources, from sources that were beyond Aron’s control and that might not always have been among the purest. A devilish mechanism was at the base of this course of events, a mechanism perhaps that someone else would have recognized at an earlier stage, but among all the things he was, Aron wasn’t clairvoyant.

The worst thing was, he never succeeded in making Mark desire a specific lifestyle. Succeeded isn’t even the right word, because it implies an attempt and Aron didn’t even make a serious attempt. One is always wiser afterward, but assuming, he asks, that he had recognized the problem in time, how could he have made Mark desire a certain lifestyle? Such an intention can be fulfilled
credibly
only by those who desire a specific lifestyle themselves, and he didn’t belong in that category. Wisely he says it’s unfortunate, because he would be an idiot if he didn’t recognize that the absence of this desire is a great disadvantage for him. Naturally every person yearns to give his life some deeper purpose than simply growing old.
But for the life of me
, he couldn’t find that desire anywhere inside of him, he says; perhaps he hadn’t looked hard enough.

*  *  *

S
ince I’m used to long silences from him, I wait awhile and think that this is just a silence like all the others — Aron is sorting out the sentences that will follow. But this time I’m mistaken; he says we should stop now, we’ve tormented ourselves long enough; he says, “This is getting boring.”

He stands up and takes the teacups to the kitchen; the empty table should look like a conclusion, like the way chairs are turned upside down on the tables in a restaurant at closing time; the teapot is still half full. I understand. Everything that is to come, he wants me to feel, is a new story. Till now our relationship was nothing more than a mutual favor — that was our only connection. I think Aron is the proudest person I know.

When he comes back from the kitchen and finds me still in the chair, he asks me what I’m waiting for, he wants to know if I’m very disappointed. I laugh and reply, how could he think that, one can only be disappointed if one has expectations. Only expectations, I say, can be disappointed.

“Yes, you’re right,” he says. “So you came here without any expectations, and that’s why you can’t be disappointed now?”

“That’s exactly right,” I say.

Aron looks at me as if I were someone who’s always making fun of him. He takes some cognac out of the cupboard, and as he pours he asks, “Tell me, how does someone normally react when he realizes that people think he’s an idiot?”

“He gets angry,” I say.

“Why do you think I’m any different?”