To America and Back

by Mordechai Landsberg

Let us return to the photographs.

  The townsfolk were grouping mainly at the Central Circle, near the bus station. They were viewing together those photos, and mumbling to each other:

  ”Don’t you see? A wonder, but here he is clearly. Hundred percent. Who else has had such a half bald head and a curvy nose and blinking eyes and thick lips and robust shoulders? And have a look at that long throat of the guy standing by him: He is his friend Elkano, sure. Who else has such a boasting chest and muscled arms and… Ah, the blond hair? It’s an optical illussion, due to the certain angle of the sun at that time, beaming on his head. But even if that is not Elkano- the one that I’m talking about is Ron Mekler, don’t deny that. And there at the right side is Simon- the son of the chicken grower Mathilda. O’key, maybe not. Simon was thicker. And he would never laugh about something like the guy here. But why are you saying that I am mistaken all along the road? You should feel ashamed to say that about my judgement…

  Nahumik came again to the Photographer’s apartment. Kaplansky asked how his mother was and how the hens were, as he had heard only now about the great damage that Ramona had suffered.

  “Mom says, that even though half were perished,” said Nahumik,”We have to be happy that half has remained.”

  “A clever saying,” said Kaplansky.

  “The horse is neighing,” said the boy, returning to the purpose for which he has come.

  “It’s waiting for you,” smiled Kaplansky, but his face looked sallow and tortured, “He remembers you and happy that you have come. I haven’t ridden him for two weeks. I can’t enjoy it these days.”

  “Well, I’m going out,” said Nahumik and turned to the front door.

  “Just a moment. Have you seen the last photos from the imprisonment camp?”

  “Mom has told me,” said the boy, ”something: She heard that there is a good chance that in one of them”…

  “Why d’you say only: a good chance?” roared Kaplankky’s voice, “there are two pictures in which Elkano is seen clearly. Here!”

  He pulled out a photo from his pocket and the boy turned to look at it – and then gazed at the photographer.

  “Do you identify him?” asked the man with a fire of some strange hatred or great confusion in his eyes.

  “Yes,” said the boy, after having viewed the guys there thoroughly.

  His lips trembled and his heart jumped. Not a long time ago – it seems- he has seen a very similar picture in the Album of Kaplansky. Elkano had still been alive there.

  Nahumik was stoned to his place for a while. He wanted to understand- and couldn’t. He took the picture and asked:

  ”May I show that to my mom?”

  “Yes, of courese. And from now on I’m sure you will ride the horse again with my Elkano. He is alive and will be soon released with all his friends.”

  The boy was too shy and too childish to oppose this sentence, and he was frustrated and mumbled to himself: “He’s alive. Is he?” …

  “Be cautious while you are on the horseback,” mentioned Kaplansky when Nahumik has turned back to go outside.

  When Nahumik was standing in the stable he wanted to weep. The man- Elkano’s papa, has become mad. A month before Elkano has gone to the army, he was telling his little friend an interesting thing. His Pa, the veteran photographer, is an expert of sophisticated in ‘image super imposition’ in the Photos. It’s called “photomontage” – maybe a French word.

  ‘Imagine, for example,’ said Elkano ‘that our Intelligence service wants our enemies to think that we – like them- are also helped by British Officers in this war. We delude the enemy- by fabricating a British Officer in faked picture that we’ll scatter. Or we’ll secretly render it to a newspaperman that will publish it. D’you understand? Or we can plant such a fake picture in the battle field, and one or more ‘irresponsible Israeli fighter’ will ‘lose’ it near the enemy lines, and it will be picked up by an enemy soldier; and this guy will persuade others, that we have much more power than we actually have.’

  “If I want to boast before my friends,” said the boy, “that I am a wonderful horse rider, I’ll ask your father to mix a photo, showing me fighting with the ‘Horserider Without a Head’. And I’ll tell all my friends: Look, I have cut his head with my sword.”

  Elkano’s ghostly figure has disappeared form the boy’s imagination. He seemed to listen again to the voice of Solomon Kaplansky. He spoke normally, his words sane, but something was not regular. Maybe I am mistaken, said Nahumik to himself. And those in the new photo were not exactly the same as in the previous photo of Elkano and his friends- that I have seen in the past... So, is Kaplansky a lier? He is full of self pity – and pitiful of the other parents of his son’s collolegues, who are really so wretched. In this act of faking, he has intended as ‘to stretch the rope of expectation’! To delay thel truth about the terrible fate of those missing. Oh, terrible and awesome- what I am thinking… I won’t tell it to Mom. I don’t dare. It seems that she would tell me that I’ve fallen from ther roof – as sometimes she says about a nonsense. Or… maybe I tell it to Rabbi Aaron. He will know if I am right in my assumption. He sometimes long for the days he was younger and challenged the dictator Stalin, cheating the Russian Regime in order to go out of the ‘Evil State of communism’. These words he used, in order to justify his pretence as a lunatic – that at last made the wicked Regime drive him out of the Russian state…

  In the afternoon Nahumik went to his Rabbi as usual. They were studying already not in the butchery hut, as before- but in the big synagogue’s side room. Five pupils had been learning there, and repeating with the Rabbi the first Chapter in ‘Baba Metsia’ Talmud.

  At the end of it- was a word “Anpuria”, taken from ancientg Greek. Nahumik asked what does it mean, and the Rabbi rebuked him, but was well aware he should explain it just right.

  ”It means new belongings of a man, tools or utensils, that the eye has not yet been satiated by them. And it is related to signs, that a man who has lost something – has to give to the honest finder, in order to get back his loss.”

  “And if that person is unreliable?” asked the boy, “for example, if this man has seen the thing before in his friend’s hand, and he comes to claim it?”

  “Ah, you mean that someone dishonest might claim this finding?”

  “Yes, there are such people,” answered Nahumik. The wise Rabbi has known that must be something personal of Nahumik connected with his saying, and he ordered him to remain alone with him, after the rest of the pupils would go home.

  Nahumik told him shortly about what he had seen at Kaplansky’s flat. The Rabbi, as usual, was attacking it indirectly, and did not say what he was going to do about the pupil’s suspicion. Maybe Nahum is erroneous, but on the other side- maybe he is right.

  “The Superpower of Almighty will help,” said the Rabbi(he used his Yiddish language: Der Eibershter muss uns helfen). He moaned a litle bit, and from all that Nahumik undersood that he had not found a solution to the problem. But the Rabbi said: ”Please call your Mom to come here and see me.”

  ‘The families of the missing ones had been dealt a terrible blows, – said the Rabbi to himself, ‘It is like one of the strikes of God on the Egyptians … So, what should we do?’

  Next evening Ramona was very angry on Nahumik. Why hasn’t he told about his ‘discovery’- first to her? To his mom, who is so closed to him and has always cared for him, that has born him? And he knows that she is the best consultant for solving hard problems. So why hasn’t he hidden his secret inside his heart? This is an unbased suspect, my dear child…Instead of believing what the eyes see, you have a dark doubt, you suspect. And whom? Elkano’s papa. the dear brave chap’s father… To be cruel to Kaplansky like that- and to all of us. “We all are painfully bearing this disaster!” she said.

  “O’key, Mom,” said Nahumik, “Enough with that. I was mistaken. I see you are sad and nervous about that.”

  “You have behaved like a
fool. I’m sorry to say that. Can’t you understand that the whole town will gossip about Kaplansky, this bereaved person? We are all bereaved now. And you have no evidence to what you calim. So, don’t talk about that any more…

  You are a grown up boy, what happens to you?” – she was silent for a moment.

  “I can’t order you,” she added, ”ultimately not to think; but any

  human being, including a child like you, should hold his mouth shut these days. God forbid- if he utters something not based on true facts and reasonable evidence. What sadness and grief might bring out baseless rumors, Oy Vey!”

  “But you have always said,” answered the boy, ”That the Rabbi is a clever and responsible man. So how d’you know he will spread out vile rumors or assumptions that have no solid ground?”

  “Ah, I have seen him already today,” said Ramona,”I told him the same- to shut up! I asked him not to tell all this even to the great Rabbi Rinik, in the central synagogue. O’key, to our great luck, your Rabbi has not told him, so he assured me.”

  Nahumik felt that his mother is still angry at his bad behavior. He should tell the truth to himself: Sometimes the behavior and sayings of mature people are a riddle to him. They seem to sternly show inner calm and serenity. They wish it as well to others that they like. They prefer to pretend that everything is O.k. –instead of telling and thinking the real, pure, sacred truth. They refuse to admit that, and to check and verify real facts… So, why has Rabbi Aaron, when he admitted me to be his pupil, said that he’would be proud to teach me only the truth? And he added that from reading and debating in Talmud and Torah I will see how already our fore- -fathers have already discussed the hard questions of life and death, right and wrong, and by that I’ll know the reality in ‘its purity and its profoundness,’ so he said.

  “There is hardly anything in life and nature,” he exclaimed boastfully to me and to my Mom, when I’ve first met him, ”that our wise Rabbies have not touched in their discussions. You have to look and watch their words and read the Torah, because eveything is to be found in it. Even pay attention even to things that seem unimportant and marginal… In which nation’s holy book can you find a debate about: ‘These are the findings of a man, that occasionally finds something somewhere?… or: in what circumstances – a man is desparate from ownership of a thing he had lost ?’ …

  I’ll take a long deep breath, said Nahumik to himself, and think.

  ‘People don’t dare to do that. They put aside the idea of bereavement, wanting to postpone a sorrow about the passed away who’ll join Hell or fall into Abyss. Mom told me that. I am lucky that I’m only a child.

  All is just open to me. I will not cover anything untill it is very clear to me and I’ll trace each of its trees, from its root up to top. Yeah, I said that in a nice style. But it’s hard to achieve. No… Once Elkano has told me: ‘the fact that you endevour to get something very important for you- is in itself a proof that your childhood has ended’. And Rabbi Aron Hittin has formulated it in his way: ‘ It’s said in Psalms – “You have seen a thief- and you were running with him”. It is not only that you are chasing him – but he’s running from himeself, from his humane roots. Therefore if he has that root – of course you have to find your internal root, of truth and fairness and integrity.- and go forth with it”.

  At that night Nahumik woke up from a dream: Elkano’s horse was waiting somewhere– and soon his hoops were trampling on the grounsels wide field. On it was a knight without a head from the book of Mine Rid. from that field he passed to an area full of dry crevices and deep valleys, that could hide a sophisticated enemy- and from there he found himself on a blue black mountain, that no one has ever passed to its other side – except Elkano, who told the boy that he had been there with three of his comrades. The decapitated night was Elkano himself, yes, and therefore he could not speak, but ‘Horsy’ was talking instead of the youth, trying to uplift his mood, getting out of the spectre that he had just seen. ‘You ride everywhere you can,’ said the horse. Don’t think that your riding on me is so definite and limited to this small town and countryside. No, you won’t ride at a distance of two-three courtyards, boy. Be patient, – and you’ll gallop far away”. The horse ended his words and the decapitated knight was thrown from his back onto the air, and said that he is ready to gallop with Nahumik to search and find Elkano intact and uninjured. Even if he gallops to the sky, like Prophet Elijah – we’ll return here, back to earth. You are not dreaming, dear boy, You take off and fly with me’.

  CHAPTER 20