by Nomi Eve
It’s not that he wanted to do away with the numbers. He loved them intensely. He said them over and over again, staring at them, scratching their slim uncomplicated bodies with a stick into the earth. They never rebuked him. They never made fun of him. Then never stayed away, or looked at him strangely, or refused to look at him at all, averting their eyes, afraid to say the wrong thing. The numbers had nothing to say anyway except for the occasional gossiping about adding or subtracting or some other dry mathematical operation. The numbers couldn’t hurt him. They couldn’t yell, they couldn’t shriek, and they couldn’t fight. But when he tired of them, Eliezer could turn them into living words again. Not living words that rebuked. Living words that stood not for his family’s tragedy but for random things in a random world of nonsensical juxtapositions. And yet, the juxtapositions all had the same value. And so the two lists were somehow equal. He wrote in four columns:
“She had conceived”
Harta
610
They ran far away (Ratzu rahok)
“And there was born”
Vayivaled
56
He donated (Nidev)
“My brother”
Achi
19
Enemy (Oyev)
“But the hands”
Aval hayadayim
102
Deer (Tzvi)
“And the soul”
Vehanefesh
441
They joked around (Hitlu)
“Were afflicted”
Hakuh
37
The heart (Halev)
“And she nursed him”
Vatenikehu
577
Hard heel (Akev kasheh)
“Until five years old”
Ad gil hamesh
465
The support root (Hatemech)
“They quarreled”
Hem ravoo
253
Carpenter (Nagar)
“And the father’s brother”
Veach haav
23
Pain (Ke-ev)
“Was killed”
Neherag
258
He snored (Nahar)
“Mourning”
Evel
33
A wave (Gal)
“The mother and the father”
Haem Vehaav
60
He will go (Yelech)
“Quarreled some more”
Ravu od ktzat
878
A salty rainbow (Keshet melach)
“Mourning and quarreling”
Evel umerivot
697
You will spread (Tfasri)
“Until they cast him off”
Ad shehotziu oto
1362
In favor of drinking drugs mehabayit (Be-ad lishtot samim)
“They fought some more.”
Vhem himshichu lariv
674
He taught a lie (Limed sheker)
“And some more.”
Veod
86
To us (Lanu)
“Now, there is a scar”
Achshav, yesh tzaleket
1326
Eli sat under the tree (Eli yashav tachat haetz)
“Through our generations.”
Bechol dorotaynu
734
The fruit of the orchard is pretty (Pri hapardes yafe)
“A scar”
Tzaleket
620
Crown (Keter)
“In secret”
Besod
72
Dialect (Niv)
“I will hide it.”
Ani achbi et zeh
496
Finished chapter (Perek muchan)
“But it says, ‘Remember me.’”
Aval hoo omer, ‘zichruni’
585
Sack of coffee (Sak kafeh)
“But I say, ‘I lie.’ ”
Aval ani omer sheani meshaker
1342
And they walked slowly on the city walls (Vehen halchu le-at al hahomot shel ha-ir)
“He is forgotten.”
Hu nishkach
380
A wooden shed (Tzrif)
“Of memory”
Mehazikaron
338
Weak (Halash)
“I was afraid.”
Pachadeti
502
A heat wave (Sharav)
“And I am still afraid.”
Veani adayin poched
299
Living fruit (Pri chai)
“He was afflicted.”
Hu hayah mukeh
103
Was erased (Nimchah)
He read the list of equivalencies over and over again. “Carpenter, Pain, He snored, A wave.” He would run through the lanes of the orchard at night, saying the words over and over again—one word for each pounding stride: “Carpenter, Pain, He snored, A wave.” It seemed to Eliezer that even the darkness took delight in their lack of meaning. They were a kind of poem. They were a secret communiqué about something distant and ridiculous. “Deer, They joked around, The heart, Hard heel.” The words felt comfortable on his tongue, more comfortable than any words had ever felt on his tongue before. He thought that the way the words casually rubbed up against each other, without worrying about who was who or what was what was courageous. And he wanted to come from the planet where this alternate list was the real story. He stopped in the middle of a small clearing of lemons and twirled round and round with his hands held out, palms up, eyes open to the stars. “A wooden shed, weak, A heat wave, Living fruit!” It was an epic, it was a comedy, it was an epic comedy, and he wanted so much to come from the country where such things were spoken. He twirled around and around. “He will go, A salty rainbow!” He wanted to come from the poem’s own planet. Then the other side of existence—the one that spoke the language that made his tongue heavy and life seem at times devoid of happiness or light, would be the nonsensical one; this life they were now living would simply be a list of random vocabulary that no one cared about because it made no sense.
Eliezer did not give up trying to conjure the golem. Sometimes he got frustrated though, and with his foot, blotted out the figure he had so carefully drawn. He would kick the lines away, and then he would kick the ground some more until nothing was left but smears where a soul might have been, but then he reminded himself that golems weren’t supposed to have souls. He decided that in his own sacred text, in his personal Book of Formation, golems would not only have souls but would also tell good jokes. His golem would tell jokes like a professional. He kept kicking at the outline until it was almost invisible. And then he stood back and surveyed his work. He was angry at himself, angry at the golem. Angry at the thought that the empty outline could ever be filled in.
And yet, he kept trying. After work in the evening, or late, in the middle of the night when everyone else was long asleep, he would slip out of the house and run into the orchard. When he got to the mango tree he cleared away the leaves on the ground, he kicked away shriveled-up rotten lemons whose peels were turning white with mold. Then he would find a good stick and crouch down. Holding the stick like a pencil he drew the figure of a man. He had not become religious, he had not studied in the yeshiva, he had not stayed up nights searching secretly in the Book of Formation for the proper arrangement of the letters of the Name. And no matter how good he was at math, the more he learned, the more he feared that there were no numbers—real or imaginary—that could give him the sum he needed. But he drew the figure anyway and tried anyway, shutting his eyes and whispering any one of a number of secret incantations that he imagined would do the trick. He walked the seven circles, though. This was easy enough. And as he walked he bid fire and water and earth and air to come forth and animate his creation. But this time, like all the other times, nothing happened. And Eliezer was disappointed that no golem rose up to keep him company, save the
village, or do odd jobs.
And when the days were dark and nights were violently cold in the old stone house, Eliezer would wonder if perhaps he had it all wrong. Maybe the creature had conjured them all up. Maybe he and Tomer, his mother and his father, and his missing little brother were the golem’s golem, if there was such a thing. But what wasn’t entirely clear to Eliezer was why. For what purpose had the golem created them? For protection? From what? For revenge? From whom? The only thing he could come up with was that all the screaming and yelling that his parents did served to frighten someone away. The golem’s enemies perhaps, evil spirits who wouldn’t dare come near because—everyone knows— evil spirits are scared of loud noises. But then he would get very confused, because everyone knows that the golem is a mute creature, and if they were golems, too, then what were all these words doing coming out of their mouths? It didn’t make sense. If we are the golem’s golem, he thought, then are we really speaking when we think we are speaking? Are my parents really yelling when they think they are yelling? Or are we really all silent?
Chapter 15
THE CODE OF VILLAGE BOYHOOD
I WRITE:
The seasons changed abruptly in Shachar. While in the rest of the valley it seemed that autumn gave way to winter reluctantly, in Shachar the cold just barged in. Even the city next door always seemed warmer, although there was no scientific evidence to support this fact. The villagers saw their breath in bed at night, little white puffs floating out of their mouths, and they curled closer to their husbands and wives; children slept with parents too, and whole families became used to dreaming similar dreams, a phenomenon no one could explain but all attributed to the very cold weather and the way it made them embrace each other somewhat more tightly than they normally would have.
Eliezer shifted his weight from foot to foot, and tried to keep warm by breathing on his own cupped hands. But he didn’t really mind the cold. He had spent the night with his friends, and they, as a rule, were not so affected by the weather. For them, the coming of the cold meant the coming of the fruit, and for them, this was cause for celebration. But that was at the beginning of the evening, and now, at the end of it, Eliezer could not feel the celebration inside him. Instead, as he stood behind his house, watching his parents’ dark sleeping window, he felt afraid.
Eliezer tried to be as quiet as he could as he contemplated walking up the back porch stairs and opening the door and sneaking into his bedroom. But he knew that even his thoughts were too loud, and that his footsteps would be even louder, and that consequently he was doomed. His father would wake up. And so Eliezer didn’t go into the house. He just stood there behind it. It was very, very late, probably close to three a.m. As he stood there, shifting his feet, watching his breath leave his mouth in little clouds, he thought back to the events of the night that had brought him here.
They were a group of boys, bored on an early winter’s late night. It was already far past midnight when they had gathered. They had all stolen out of their houses and met at the bus station behind the bomb shelter. This is where they came when the village was sleeping. There was Eliezer and his friend Yoni who had freckles and could kick a ball incredibly far. Eliezer had known Yoni almost since they were babies. There was Moti Peleg whose family had moved in just three years ago. He was a skinny boy who didn’t run very fast but usually won when they played cards. There was Micky Anderson whose parents were American, and there was Amos, who had huge blue eyes and dark skin and who was the most “mature” among them—Amos’s voice was changing and he even had some facial hair.
They hadn’t been at the bus stop for more than five minutes. Usually they weren’t there for long. Because every twenty-five minutes or so the village watchman would come by and they would have to scatter. Or sometimes they would just stay in place, and the father of a friend or someone’s own older brother would just nod at them and let them be.
But tonight they had no plans just to stay at the bus stop. Amos turned to Micky and said, “Happy times?” Micky ignored him for a minute and then shook his head and said, “Time to do what we do best.” Eliezer nodded. Moti sighed and looked down at his feet. The bus stop had a metal frame, and Yoni was swinging by one of the bars that defined its roof. He was swooshing his body through the air like a gymnast. Yoni swung back and forth a couple of times and then dropped down to the sandy ground with a hollow, heavy thud. “What we do best,” Yoni repeated. Then slowly, with a lackadaisical shrug and a look on his face that seemed like a cross between a question and a grimace, Micky held out pieces of straw to the small crowd. The ends were in his fist. One by one, all except for Eliezer chose the lots.
In the unwritten Code of the Orchard—which all of them, Eliezer, Moti, Micky, Amos, and Yoni—knew by heart, stealing fruit was an almost capital offense. Their fathers, the pardesanim, the orchard men, treated their groves like favored children, and each orange, each mango, each lemon, each grapefruit, was a precious prize that would lift not only their individual lives out of the sand, but also their whole country out of an epoch that should have been different than what it was. Stealing fruit was an almost capital offense. And yet, they were about to do it. Because in the unwritten Code of Village Boyhood, stealing fruit was a necessary delight. They couldn’t resist. The codes clashed. All of the boys did it once they turned twelve or thirteen; it was a regular part of their adolescent play, their collective adventure. They even termed the night one of them first stole fruit as his “bar mitzvah.” Honors were bestowed upon the taker of the biggest haul, the boy who executed the most daring escape, the boy who made off with the ripest bounty or a bounty from a new tree, a rare variety. They all knew which trees ripened first, Tzimmie’s mango, Mordechai’s clementine, Smilansky’s apricot, Goldschmidt’s blood orange. They could tell you exactly where the trees were, in what grove, in what quadrant, and what row; they could tell you which side of the tree tasted better, the north or the south; they could probably tell you the owner’s habits—who slept soundly, who was given to the occasional midnight ramble, who had a vicious dog, who didn’t, who would notice if a single fruit were missing, who wouldn’t notice if his own nose were missing. Older boys passed on the information to their younger brothers, and younger brothers hero-worshiped the older boys whose exploits they told and retold. How Micky had outrun the German shepherd, one ripe grapefruit in each hand, how Yoni had run right into Goldschmidt in the middle of a particularly ripe summer night, how Yoni had thrown the fruits high up into the air and then made a dash for it, knowing full well that Goldschmidt, who loved his fruit like babies, would have to catch the grapefruits rather than chase him, and that by the time they landed either on the earth with a thud or in his grasping, old-man palms, Yoni would be far away, racing across other orchards, so many denials and alibis already sprouting on his tongue. They told these stories to each other as they bit into pieces of fresh fruit that no one had tasted in an entire year, the juice running down their faces, their fingers so sticky. There was magic in these first stolen bites. It was as if the fruit were created anew each year, each season, especially created anew for them by a God who loved boys and mischief.
Smilansky was a particularly favorite target, even though the boys were terrified of him. He was big Lithuanian with huge hands and a fat, bulbous nose and eyes that were as gray as the winter ocean. His nose, which was as long as it was fat, looked remarkably like a cucumber for which reason they sometimes referred to him in code as “Mr. Salad.” Smilansky was a favorite target because of his prized apricot trees. There weren’t many other apricots in the village, and certainly none like Smilansky’s, which were as perfect as they were unusual. An apricot is a fruit whose appeal lies in the way it has both a sour taste and a sweet taste. In regular apricots, the sweet taste wraps around the sour—the tongue delights in the fleshy sugar and then, lulled into a false sense of security, the sour infiltrates the mouth, biting back for having been bitten. But Smilansky’s apricots were different. In his fruit, the sou
r wrapped around the sweet, giving the tongue first a tarty challenge and then an ethereal mellow reward for having made it past the outer orbit. Smilansky’s apricots were famous as far away as Haifa, where his sister lived and where a sister grove to his own bore perfect fruit on exactly the same day and minute. Smilansky knew that his apricots were a target, and so he usually checked on them once or twice a night from the time they were almost ripe until they had made it safely through the harvest.