To America and Back
Page 20
Kaplansky’s shop has become a meeting place for those searching their missing ones.
One day an Inteligence Officer has arrived there and delivered to Solomon new photos to watch and let others see. The photographer has mentioned, like being resented:
“In my opinion none of these youths that we see here was existing in the previous photos given to us. Thses guys here are not from our town at all, for sure… Or they are among those, whose parents told in the past that no figure of their sons had been shown on the previous photos… Go to them. Why have you come to me with these photos? Mister Weinberg, please take care of these, I have neither time nor wish to hold them. Oh, what do I see? Look here! Something is written in English on the back of this photo! I am bad in translating from English”…
Old Mr. Weinberg was alreay grabbing the phootos with trembling fingers. He placed the most clear ones on the round table and began to investigate the writing: “From afar I see that they are different in their standing position or background from the previous ones, but this time I understand the English written on their back. It’s the name of the photographer stamped, but also a full description in handwriting:
“These photographs were taken inside the Jewish prisoners’ camp in Mafraq, Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan”.
Weinberg had translated into Hebrew the meaning of the text.
Then he turned the photo and watched it very carefully from right to left and his lips were tightened. He took a second and third picture and was gazing at them too, watching them for a long time. He tried to memorise or calculate something while mumbling:
“My son is not here, I’m sure”, and when Kaplansky heard him say that- he was looking at the third one, and suddenly his eyes were shining:”This guy whose head is shaven,” he said, “is very likely to my son. It seems that he has gained some more weight. But it’s Elkano, really”…
“Oy Vey”, he suddenly mumbled, “please hold me, I feel I’m fainting –like two weeks ago.”
They brought water to him and he seemed to recover. But he continued to mumble- and no one understood.
A third bereaved man arrived from outside, and pushed the others:
“why haven’t you announced loudly in town,” he said, ”that you’ve got new photos? The loudspeaker is in the town Mayor’s hands”.
Mr. Weinberg persuaded Kaplansky to sign- to the High ranked officer- a Receipt for the four new photos he had brought. Kaplansky will enlarge them, and hopefully they will remove the doubts if this youth is Elkano or Joab or Mishka Kovalsky, the poultry grower’s second son.
‘But the enlarged pictures will be ready only tomorrow, my friends.’ said the photographer. ‘They have to be dry, if you know anything about my craft.”
In the evening Kaplansky grabbed again one of those photos, his hands trembling. ‘But I cannot remember well the face of my dear son, he said to himself. Everything is suddenly vague in my perceptive memory. I’ll compare this figure with Elkano’s last photos that I have shot. Here he is in some military course with two comrades. And here is his upper body – head and shoulders- that I have photographed. Here he is on the horse in the stable – in the last visit he paid to me, before running back to the battlefield, to the mass..a.. c.. No, He’s there with a soldier’s shirt which my son was never wearing. His face is quite similar, but he is shown in Profile- and I say : No! Maybe. No. Maybe….But what are those trees in the horizon there? They aren’t dark orchard, like we have here. Where is my magnifying glass?… These are needle shaped leaves, that we don’t know here! That is a proof that it was taken in the enemy’s land.. But who knows if this is Elkano? … And the father of the real solider should hold it and be happy, not me. .. I reckon that till the end of this war- my son won’t be found. I am unlucky. Such things happened and will happen in history. The Devil’s Act. At the end, our Army will nominate an inquiring Committee which will conclude that those photos were not covering all the missing ones, and that is the end. Period… Oh, woe to me , the angel of death is nearby, thirsty to suck my blood, like a vuilture, feeding on the dead ones. Woe to my elder years’.
His hands dropped the photos, or the photos slipped from them.
Solomon’s head fell on the round small table, yet he didn’t feel the knock of his cheen on the board, which did not break the glass covering it.
A huge dark shadow was like falling on wise Solomon.
It has come with a feeling of light sweetness of surfing on the clean air without any weight. How good and merciful is the power of unconsciousness…
Kaplansky tried to rise up from his seat, on which he had bent down in a cruel sleepy-swooning pose, but he could not wake up.
Splinters of sweat were covering his quivering body, and bitter tears were dropping from his eyes, and he felt like a heavy block of freezing ice and burning fire weighing down on his temples and head. His breath was short and his face became sallow like a rock in desert. Maybe in his internal eyes he saw how his complicated labyrinth ‘folds’ in his brain were had boiled to a dark soup. His eyes were like fixed in their sockets and as then as strolling in the air, disconnected from his body… In the silence that was enhanced in his little shop, where he was, it seemed to him that he hears as a long scream coming out of his internal weep: It was rising and growing – and then were mumbling and uttering stupid words, and he was feeling rage and shame and a strange sensation of preaching to his dead son, who had not been conscious that he would be going to vanish from the land of life. Elkano was not egotistic enough to rescue himself, and could not accept the idea- that he had to obey his loving Pa. His vague consciousness, that he regarded as pure sanity, told him to refuse. Oh, you innocent pigeon, who will return you to your dove-cote? And what is awaiting you, father of this little sheep, still in this world?…My life circle has ended with your end, my son… And why hadn’t I gotten another son or daughter? I have only you, it’s terrible. Everything had been entangled…What value has the life of a simple photographer, who has no influence on what’s going around him and within him. He thinks that he secures an eternal shape of something, by his photomachinery; but it’s all vanity. The hell with dynamite and other explosives. Let me leave this doubled-multiplied world of good and bad, life and death… Enough, horrible life!
He was lying half-conscious for a few minutes, and was lucky that a woman client entered his shop, whose door had been left open. She was in an urgent need for passport photos, in order to sail abroad, but when she found the photographer rolled over the table, grey and quivering, unsuccessfully trying to say something to her, she turned out and began shouting: ”Please, people! Who knows where we can find a Doc. The photographer has fainted!”
The shouts were heard by Mike’s mother, and she immediately went downstairs from her apartment and also entered the shop, that was on the main street. She saw her neighbor’s severe condition, and phoned from a Cafe nearby – to the Medical Organization Room in town. Doc Priver arrived very soon, checked the weak heart beating and ordered the Fiat Physician’s Car. There was no ambulance at hand, as the bloody battlefields required more than could be available.
CHAPTER 21