Loud and Clear

by Iftach Spector

  “No,” said Mussa, and a quick smile crossed his face. “Just Potosia cuprea—an ordinary pest.”

  He turned the specimen over and over again, checking plants’ leaves and testing names: Hizzanit. Arzaff. Laana. And maybe shkhelet? Or khelbna? His black eyes glowed over the Eretz-Israel Plant Guide, which didn’t have an answer. After a while I thought he might be attaching ancient biblical names to species of plants he couldn’t recognize.

  THEN WAR CAME TO THE northern valley. Our kibbutz was shelled. One day an airplane appeared and scored a direct hit on the cowshed. When we emerged from the trench the elders took us away, so that we didn’t see the cows. There were rumors. Apparently the Syrians had taken a nearby settlement, Mishmar HaYarden, killing settlers, taking some prisoners, and destroying everything. Faces of men and women we used to see, we saw no more.

  One morning we were hurriedly packed up, clothes and toys bundled into blanket covers, and a truck backed up to our door. The children and the caretaker climbed into the truck and for the next year, 1948, we lived in different places. One day somebody came and told me that Aronchik was badly wounded. I thought Aronchik was dead. After all, this was the way they told you, right? I had experience with this. And then again they came and told me that my mother had gone to America.

  The war ended, and we returned to Hulatta. The lower camp was deserted. The kibbutz began resettling in a new place in the fields, a little farther away from the lake. The Arab village, Tleil, didn’t exist anymore, and the mud building blocks from its houses were taken for secondary use or were left to melt in the winter rain, returning bit by bit to dust and ashes.

  It turned out that Aronchik didn’t die. I was taken to visit him. He was in a hospital in Haifa, on the slope of Mount Carmel. He sat on his bed with his leg in traction, and smiled at me with an obvious effort. Dvorah was also there, taking care of him. We returned to Hulatta, and another couple adopted me temporarily. After some months Aronchik arrived, limping badly.

  SCHOOL STUDIES RESUMED. Somebody said that Shosh was the highest-ranking woman in the army and that David Ben-Gurion proposed that she become the staff officer for women in the newly established Israeli Defense Force. I know why she refused. She told me more than once that she opposed different military organizations for men and women. I was very proud of her.

  In the final photo of the Palmach, a moment before its dissolution, the staff officers stand in a half circle. Major General Yigal Alon is in the middle, and around him the men I admired: Uri Brenner, Nahum Sarig, Mulla Cohen, young Yitzhak Rabin, and others. Among them all, shorter than the men but an equal among them, stands Shoshana Spector, in a midcalf skirt with a duty belt around her waist. All the men look like serious sourpusses, but she has a wide smile, clearly refusing to give in to the general sad mood.

  IN 1951 MY MOTHER RETURNED from America and took me with her to another kibbutz, Givat-Brenner, in the South. There, there was neither lake nor mountains, just orchards and burning sandy trails between acacia fences, and the kibbutz was a huge community, noisy and full of people.

  My mother was a special person, very capable and with lots of personality. When she arrived at the kibbutz she was a woman in full bloom, about thirty-five years of age, extremely smart and good-looking. But she didn’t know how to compromise and never deferred to men. Once she told me that after she finished school in Ben Shemen she found work in the offices of the Jewish Agency, an organization that advised the British on issues involving the Jewish homeland, and actually functioned as a government of sorts. She was then a nineteen-year-old girl, and was sent with some documents to one of the bosses. When she entered his room her hands trembled and the papers slipped to the floor. The great man watched her, smiling, and said, “My girl, calm down. Perhaps you think I am a big shot, but when I go to the restroom my shit is as brown as anybody else’s.” She remembered this lesson and took pains to remind me of it every now and then.

  A strong, single woman, she was an odd duck at Givat-Brenner. Men saw her as one kind of threat and women saw her as another kind. Like other war widows I knew later in my life, she radiated threat. Life in the kibbutz did not suit her. Indeed, though the kibbutz was a society of high ideals, in fact it was just a suburb full of petty, personal quarrels. Large clans controlled the social life at Givat-Brenner: The warm, vulgar Polish were different from the crafty Litvaks from Lithuania, and the Yekes—immigrants from Germany—were something else again. Shosh Spector, and accordingly I, didn’t belong to any of these cultures. We were outsiders—different.

  In Givat-Brenner my own situation was rather better than hers. I was thrown into the seven-hundred-strong children’s society, to sink or swim among them. But I was young and still flexible. Actually, what happened to me at Kibbutz Givat-Brenner was similar to what happened to Shosh herself twenty years earlier. When she was fourteen, her father—who couldn’t support his family—sent her to a youth institution. There, in the children’s village of Ben Shemen, she found her way and her friends for life.

  This is exactly what happened to me at Givat-Brenner. The beginning was tough, but eventually I made friends. The youth society I became a part of—the “brigade,” in the semi-military jargon of the kibbutz—was stormy, zealously Zionist, and naively socialist. So, like all the kids, I vowed to defend Israel, save the Jewish people, and fight for social equality and for peace and fraternity among nations. Like all of us, I was unaware of the contradictions among those conflicting goals. To find favor in the eyes of the girls, and perhaps to compensate for my incompetence on the basketball court, I became a “cultural promoter.” I became the editor, publisher, and sometimes the art director of our weekly magazine, which was displayed on walls. This was a wonderful periodical with stories and poems of local talents, such as “Captain John Marley Flies to the Moon” by Daniel Vardon, or political commentaries discussing the problem of who was going to inherit Comrade Stalin’s job when the black day would arrive. The editors bet on Georgi Malenkov, since he had no mustache. We were wrong. Khrushchev was clean- shaven, too.

  On summer vacations I took every course I could get into: a month of premilitary scouting in which we traveled by foot some six hundred kilometers; a course in building model airplanes; a gliding course, and the next year piloting light aircraft. I led hikes with heavy backpacks to the three craters (unique geologic formations in the Negev Desert), and hitchhiked to Eilat on the Red Sea. Soon I was selected as a scoutmaster, and invested my evenings and weekends in my young pupils, teaching them to tie knots and make fires in the rain.

  ‡

  SHOSH YEARNED TO LOVE ME, but the situation had become impossible for us. My mother’s social problem, and the fact that she was a stranger in this big kibbutz, threatened my standing in the children’s society. Sometimes she tried to make me her confidant and poured her toils and troubles on my head. She described her encounters with people (she was a great mimic), but this put me in an awkward situation: I had to choose whether to be on her side, or on the side of my friends. These people were their parents and elder brothers and sisters. So I listened, dissociating myself, and saw how hurt she was, but I couldn’t really sympathize enough. Soon I stopped listening to her stories and sealed myself off from her. I rolled up like a hedgehog toward my mother.

  The hurt feelings between us became stronger. I began hiding to avoid being seen with her. Instead of going to her room after school, as was normal kibbutz custom, I went out to the fields or to the vacant sports arena, where I worked long hours on the horizontal bar and the parallel rings. I became the kibbutz shepherd. I took the animals out to pasture. Once in the fields, I spent many hours alone composing endless poems while my four hundred sheep ran wild and raided people’s gardens. Sometimes I woke up to the cries of furious farmers whose crops had been destroyed, and sometimes I got hit. I walked the fields and prayed for somebody to come and take me away from this place back to my real home, to Hulatta.

  IN 1953, WHEN I WAS THIRTEEN, I ran away from Gi
vat-Brenner and my mother. Before the running experiment, a dream was visiting me in the nights: I lay on a vast plain all striped in gray lines. Beyond it, heavy black lumps towered, their heads vanishing up. When I woke up I didn’t know whether this was my bed with the mattress and the lumps of blankets, or that I was on the coast of a huge marsh, and the lumps were the black mountains over it. Anyway, I felt I was home.

  I decided, and at supper I filled my pockets with bread. At ten o’clock in the evening, while the kibbutz slept, I slipped out of bed and sneaked in the shadows to the entrance of the kibbutz. The road that led down to the highway to Rehovot was dark. I ran through the orchards crazily, dying of fear. I hoped to hitchhike north on the highway, to Dvorah and Aronchik and my sweet Ronnie in Hulatta.

  I got to the road. It was silent and dark. Tall cypress treetops swished in the light wind. I sat on the ground beside the road and waited, accustoming my eyes to the night. I thought if the way north proved long, I would find work, and if my foster parents in Hulatta tried to bring me back to my mother in Givat-Brenner, I would run away from them, too, and hide, and no one would find me again.

  It began to get cold.

  After some time I saw lights in the distance. I jumped to my feet, gripping the signpost at the bus stop. A bus came and stopped, orange light shining dimly through its windows. I climbed in, but the driver demanded money and I had no money. I got off and the bus left, the whining of its tires fading in the distance.

  Dogs were barking. I thought perhaps I should begin walking. And then the sound of approaching footsteps was heard in the distance, coming toward me down the road from the kibbutz. I recognized the ticking of those sandals; there was only one person who ran like that. I fled and hid among the orange trees in the dark orchard. From my hideout I saw Daniel Vardon coming, halting and turning around, shouting my name as loud as he could. Daniel got farther away, and his voice diminished. Another car passed. And then Daniel returned down the road. He was a boy from my own class, a year older than I. He was very dark-skinned, tall and strong. He could sing beautifully, and run faster and farther than anybody else. And he didn’t give up on me.

  At last I came out of my hiding place. I tried to argue, to convince him, but he just caught my hand and dragged me after him all the way back, not letting my hand free, while I sobbed, flooded with a mix of failure and relief. At age fourteen, Vardon radiated charisma and physical power, and he could subordinate anyone to his will. On our way back he promised me with dignity, swore, that he would never tell about this to anybody, ever. Danny kept his word, but throughout the years we grew up together I felt the eye of this special young person watching me, making certain that I did not go astray.

  Not a long time was left for him. In 1958 we all were drafted, and Danny began as a soldier in the Golani Division. His first decoration for valor came almost immediately, when he stood out in the attack on the Syrian position at Tel-Dan. A friend of his told me how he skipped across the trenches, fearlessly, almost happily. In 1962 Lieutenant Vardon got his second medal after taking the Syrian outpost Nukeib above the Sea of Galilee; the outpost used to snipe at Israeli fishermen and the kibbutzim below it. Danny excelled in fighting, and more so in his human behavior. He rose up under Syrian fire and stopped the firing of his own men, to let Arab citizens from the nearby village, who were caught in the crossfire, run away. Only then did he lead his soldiers down to the trenches. The commanding officers of that time saw this action of his as a shining example. Daniel Vardon won his third medal postmortem, in the Six-Day War. On June 8, 1967, he consciously risked his life to save wounded soldiers, and fell in a battle in an alley at the Egyptian town of El-Arish.

  AS A RULE, THE GROWN-UPS in my family didn’t tell stories about their past. Aronchik would dismiss the past with a disdainful wave of his hand, and Dvorah would just grin and change the subject. My mother, on the other hand, had an exception to this rule. While I was a small child, before going to bed, she liked to tell me stories of her youth.

  Shosh knew how to tell stories that were alive, detailed, and full of color. Many a time she made me, and herself, laugh to tears. On such occasions there was strong affection between us. But anything that happened after the end of school in the youth institute of Ben Shemen was hidden behind a curtain of silence. She didn’t tell and I was afraid to ask, and gradually the conversations between us ended. Her true, thrilling life was hidden from me.

  She never talked to me about Zvi, the father I never knew, but his name was always hanging between us, an open wound. Once I took courage to ask, and she dismissed me.

  “A true gentleman,” she told me, “doesn’t intrude in other people’s privacy.” And when I flinched, she cleared it once and for all, “even when he is left alone in the room.”

  ‡

  ONE DAY, AFTER ONE OF HIS RARE visits, my Uncle Israel—the eldest of the four brothers—left me a picture of Zvi. It was a copy of a copy, a very grainy photograph. I hid the photograph under the folded clothes in my compartment of the common cupboard, the second one from the top. At nights, when my three roommates in the children’s houses of Givat-Brenner were asleep, I would take a light under the blanket and study it for a long time. I saw the head and shoulders of a young man, very good-looking, somewhat similar to his brother Aronchik. The young man’s head was tilted to one side. His hair was blowing in the wind and a slight smile, really just a hint of smile, played on his lips. Sometimes I talked to him, but his face was turned away from me. He seemed listening to something else in the distance. I knew he was smiling at the songs of Sirens of unknown seas.

  This picture is still on my table.

  Chapter

  4

  By Myself

  IMAGINE ODYSSEUS DECIDING to write his story in the first person. Would that be possible?

  Not a simple question.

  And that’s not just because Odysseus was too busy between Scylla and Charybdis to take up pen and paper. After all, he might have taken to writing later in calmer times, say, when he returned to his always-waiting Penelope from his second voyage, the more magical voyage of the two—to remote lands where the inhabitants didn’t know what the sea was and couldn’t recognize an oar. Well, then?

  No, that’s still not it. Because there is another difficulty, arising from the limitation of Odysseus’s own viewpoint. While blind Homer sat with the gods and saw everything, Odysseus was struggling against the wine-dark sea and saw very little.

  And there is another problem, small but irritating, the writing in the first person: me, and again me, me. I know well that behind every word I write are many friends who were there with me, fought, laughed, acted, lived, and died near me, but can I tell all their stories?

  AND INDEED IN ANOTHER BOOK that I wrote—its title was A Dream in Black and Azure—I wanted to tell about a small odyssey of mine (forgive me, dear reader, for the immodest metaphor), which occurred in 1973, in a very difficult and terrible war. But at the time I wrote it I was still young and afraid to expose myself. And so it came to pass that eventually I wrote the entire book in the third person.

  And this is what happened as a result of my reservations about using “me”: I invented a person and sent him out to replace me. I gave him a name: Toledano. Just like that, without much thought.

  Toledano was the name my father, Zvi, adopted in his youth, the name of his deceased mother. Zvi Toledano is the name written on the few documents he left behind, papers from school and such. Somehow the name Toledano didn’t pass to me.

  And so I wrote a book, and in page after page about that war in 1973, I kicked this guy, Toledano, around in the same way all of us were kicked around. Toledano kicked back, and he developed his own point of view, and he was stressed, sometimes to the breaking point. And I watched him from above through the microscope, and saw him struggling down there, the same way I waged my own Yom Kippur War. I controlled him and his actions, and he was dependent on me. I could pull the strings and operate him at will.


  But then something strange happened: This guy Toledano, whom I invented to serve my needs, developed a will of his own. From the moment he received his name from me, Toledano grew more powerful and drew from me things I had no intention of giving to anybody, ever, and he reacted spontaneously in ways that nobody could have instilled in him, definitely not me. You see, I never knew my father. I invented him.

  And so, throughout the year when I wrote that book, I felt as if my clothes and then my skin were gradually peeled away. And in the end I found myself running around naked in the small, empty flat I was working in, looking for clothes to cover myself. This process extracted from me things that people don’t talk about, even things I never knew I ever knew. There were days when I fled my writing desk and ran into the street, being driven half crazy by the devil pushing my pencil across the page.

  Time and again I decided to retake control of my book and to return it to the path I had chosen for it—just a simple war story—but Toledano wouldn’t submit. He was there, he had a forceful personality, and he wanted to speak. So whenever I returned to that small flat and the piles of scribbled pages, I found that my control of the situation was at best partial, and I couldn’t do with my hero what I initially planned. There came a moment when I considered killing him off, but I failed. It was Toledano’s fault that the entire book charged off in another direction, and other characters began their own revolution, and also tried to rewrite their stories through me.