by Nomi Eve
But of course, his remoteness did not work to conceal his true pain. As Eliezer spoke, Rebecca saw the twin tragedies in his eyes. Rebecca could not see Gabi in her fiancé’s arms, and she could not sense Moshe’s blasted spirit wrapping his strong arms around the family’s every moment, but she took Eliezer’s arms and put them around her own body and hugged him so close that the brother he thought he was holding turned right back into a figment, a forgotten, and the uncle who was holding the whole family in his grip turned, if only for a moment, into a benign and genial regular ghost. Eliezer could feel Rebecca’s warm breath on his neck. He kissed her nose and then her lips and then pressed his fingers into her back, holding on to each of her bones, her ribs, her spine, her shoulder blades, separately, tracing them, pressing down on her inside edges. He was so glad he had finally told her. He breathed quickly and deeply, relieved. He hadn’t told her everything. He hadn’t told her about the butterflies, and he hadn’t told her about the photographs disappearing from the pages of the family albums, and he hadn’t told her what it feels like to have to pretend away an entire brother, even if the brother isn’t entire himself. Eliezer hadn’t told her about the golem. He had only told Rebecca the essence of things. But that was enough. Or at least it seemed to be.
At the end of that summer, the day before they left for America, Eliezer got out of bed in the middle of the night and wandered to the mango tree, as he had done over and over again when he was just a boy. The night was cool but not too cool, the sky was light with an almost full moon, but not too light. As he made his way through the orchard he felt himself both followed and led, watched and remembered. Cold dewy leaves brushed against his face as he made his way forward.
Eliezer thought back to when he had first come to the mango tree when he was ten, eleven, twelve years old. He had been so determined. Determined to perform an alchemy. Not to turn stones into gold but to turn earth into living flesh.
On the eve of their leaving he was tempted to draw the figure again. Leaving on his own to sail to America two years ago had been temporary, a youthful adventure. But now, leaving with Rebecca was a different and much deeper kind of leaving. He bent down to his knees and reached for a stick that he knew would engrave a fine sharp image. But he stopped short of doing it. Instead he just twirled the stick in his hand and wondered. He asked himself, “When it came time, if it ever came time, what would I actually do?” He wondered if, in his studies or casual observing of the world, he did one day come across the right way to rearrange the letters of the divine name, would he actually come back to this place and conjure a golem? Or would the figure he traced in the ground be a familiar one? Would he draw an uncle’s face? Would he dare inscribe in the earth an uncle’s body? And would he dare recite the Name while walking seven times around the uncle’s familiar figure, caressing the magic on his tongue, loving the emerging Moshe with his breath? Would he? Or would he write a different story in the soil? Would he take the stick and draw Gabi there, but not the Gabi he had known as a boy, rather, the Gabi who might have been. Would Eliezer grip the stick like an artist’s pencil and fill in the eyes, replacing the emptiness with a soul deep and bright? Would he walk around the form saying the proper words as his brother passed through the proscribed stages from glowing coals to soothing waters, passed from the earthy realm to the realm of the actual, passed through until his naked form rose up from the earth and separated from it in a ceremony so sweet that the birds and the flowers and the clouds and the night itself burst into song, so joyful to be bearing witness to this reunion of brothers, this banishment of ghosts.
Eliezer imagined that this actually happened and that he and Gabi left the orchard together. They walked up the back porch steps and into the house, into the happy open arms of their mother. And life was good then. But then he imagined that things went horribly wrong in the orchard, and that the creature who rose from the ground looked like Gabi but was really an evil golem in disguise—a mute soulless monster of tremendous strength who wandered the village wreaking havoc ever after. And then he imagined that the creature he had conjured was Moshe indeed, but not a living Moshe, not a Moshe before the catastrophe, but a dead one with bullet holes blasted all through him. And he too, having been awakened, would walk the world, bearing little resemblance to the uncle he had been, or to the twin he had left behind—and Zohar would stagger backward in horror.
Eliezer leaned against the mango tree, his forehead pressing against the wood, his right arm hugging the trunk, his left arm hanging by his side. The house behind him in the distance was dark and quiet. Rebecca was sleeping there. Eliezer remembered how when he was little, he had pulled his pants down and pressed his naked backside into the earth. He remembered how he and Yoni and the other boys had fooled Moti Peleg, scaring him almost to death. He told himself, and he told the mango tree, and he told Moti Peleg, who was now studying to be an electrical engineer at the Technion in Haifa, and he told golems near and far that he would return. Eliezer imagined that every one had a special place like this. A place that seemed like an anthem your whole world was always singing. He left the mango tree behind. And as he walked farther away, over an ocean and into a life so far off and different from the one he left behind, he would sometimes unconsciously find himself back in the orchard. He would find himself crouching down to the sandy earth listening to the noises of the golems.
So he left the land of his stories. He would return, yes. They would return, with devotion and regularity for two months each summer. But always to leave again, and to fly to a place he couldn’t really read at all. Its pages were blank to him. But Eliezer loved the blankness and he loved the bakery, and he even began to love Boston. He loved his new country. He built a life there. And he was so grateful to have found a far-off place whose lack of legible letters saved him from having to live again and live forever the end of his tale.
MY FATHER WRITES:
We decided that we would live in Boston, but that we would spend our summers in Israel with my parents. We were married in Boston on February 19, 1965. My brother, Tomer, was married three years later, on August 21, 1968, to Sheila Barowski, our neighbor’s South African niece.
I TELL:
No, Jeremy, there is no way to match my consciousness to the history I am trying to tell you. But perhaps that is the history itself, a patchwork of seeing and not seeing, a collage of knowing and not knowing, a full cloth made up of many intricate, differently colored tatters. Family chronology defies consciousness. Things happen that we don’t know about, and by happening affect the very molecules of our own perception. And so we come to know our own lives as if through a prism: all is distortion. But we do not see the prism, all we see are the bends in light that make the faces of our loved ones seem at times much too beautiful, and at other times, much, much less than pretty.
Chapter 19
ROUGH ENCLOSURE
MY FATHER WRITES:
Our son, Boaz, was born on January 16, 1966. Our daughter, Nomi, was born on March 13, 1968. We named our children after the biblical story of Ruth. In the Bible, Nomi was Ruth’s mother-in-law, and Boaz was Ruth’s husband. Their second names are Aviel and Chava—after my late grandmother Avra, and my late cousin Chaim. They are Boaz Aviel and Nomi Chava.
I must explain who Chaim was. In order to do so, I must digress and return to an earlier point in our family history. It is important for me to do so, not only to explain the origins of Nomi’s second name, but also because Chaim was a beloved member of our extended family.
Although my father’s family came from Russia, we also had many relatives in what is today Eastern Poland. Most of this family died in the Holocaust. But, after the war, my father and uncle learned that two children of their younger Polish cousins had survived and were living in a displaced persons camp in the British zone of western Germany. Their parents had died in the early days of the war. And they had made their way alone across Europe, often hiding from the Nazis. They wandered for three years. Nobody knows ho
w they stayed alive. In 1947 they were found by the Chabad Social Service Committee in a displaced persons camp. Chabad contacted my father and uncle, who, from Palestine, had been actively seeking information about their family in Europe. The children, an eleven-year-old boy and thirteen-year-old girl, were named Chaim and Sima.
In March 1945 my father and his twin decided that one of them would sail to Europe, find the children, and bring them back to Palestine. This was a very dangerous proposition. Because even though tens of thousands of survivors were struggling to leave Europe, the British had placed strict quotas on the immigration of Jews into Palestine. Consequently, the children would have to enter illegally. Anyone trying to enter illegally would be immediately deported, and anyone caught aiding them would be sent to prison for lengthy terms.
The Haganah was very active in illegal Jewish immigration. They advised that either Zohar or Moshe travel to Europe with my passport and Tomer’s passport. The plan was for them to bring the children into Palestine on our documents. I was eight years old, Tomer was just one. This was a good plan, but there was an obvious and significant problem. The Polish cousins didn’t match our passports. Sima was thirteen years old and female, Chaim was eleven—and though he looked much younger than that, he was certainly not an infant. So there was a tremendous and terrifying probability that the immigration officer at the port in Haifa would notice that the passports didn’t belong to them. But since there was no other choice, this was the plan that my father and uncle eventually adopted. And though I don’t know exactly why, in the end Moshe was the twin who sailed to Europe. My father stayed in Palestine anxiously awaiting news. Moshe returned safely with the children in three months. He never told us how he made it into the country with the children, but I always assumed that there was someone from the Haganah waiting for them at the dock in Haifa. Somehow, this person must have helped them through customs. All I really know is that it was a very dangerous undertaking and Moshe was very brave to attempt it.
The boy, Chaim, grew up as a member of our extended family in Shachar. I was very close to him. Chaim was killed in 1967. He was a paratrooper—a member of the elite advance guard of the Israeli army. When the country went to war, Chaim’s unit was the first unit sent into Jerusalem. He was killed almost immediately. He rushed onto a bus in which he thought there were wounded Jewish soldiers. But there were no wounded; instead, the bus was booby-trapped. It exploded as Chaim entered it. When he died, Chaim’s wife was pregnant with their first child. We named our daughter after Chaim. Her name is Nomi Eve. Eve in Hebrew is Chava, the feminine of Chaim. And our son is Boaz Aviel, after my grandmother Avra.
I TELL:
In the Garden the first couple was Adam, whose name means “Earth,” because he came forth from the ground, and Chava, whose name means “Life,” because she came from Life and would bring forth life from her body. We walk into my grandfather’s groves. Citrus graft. We walk to the place where the double tree stands. Bending down, I hold back the branches on the blood side and then I walk, crouching, underneath the boughs, toward the twinned trunk. Once inside, I wrap my hands around the silver-gray bark. I say out loud, “Pardess.” The air all around us smells like the skin of an orange. I breathe in deeply, and I tell you that the word for orchard in Hebrew is pardess. It comes from the ancient Persian root, “Pairi daeza,” which means “enclosure,” and from which we derive, in English, the word paradise. I tell you that when I learned this I smiled and thought, No, this does not surprise me. In the Garden the first couple was Adam, whose name means “Earth,” and Chava, whose name means “Life.” Chava, Chaim, Eve I am, my beloved Adam you are, in this paradise of family stories: rough enclosure of heat and words.
Chapter 20
THE PHOTOGRAPH
MY FATHER WRITES:
Rebecca and I lived with the children in Boston. I am a professor of mathematics at Boston College, and Rebecca is curator of the Museum of Judaica at Hebrew College.
We took Boaz to Israel for the first time when he was five months old. We took Nomi for the first time at three months. We returned every summer for two months and lived with my parents in Shachar. Boaz and Nomi attended summer camp in the village for many years. They learned to speak Hebrew and became very close to their Israeli grandparents and our large extended family.
I WRITE:
In the photograph, Zohar is on the right, Moshe on the left, but there is no way to tell this unless someone has told you who was who. Both brothers are smiling; their faces are suffused with confidence and affection. They are approximately twenty-five years old and are facing each other, their foreheads inclined. Zohar is lighting Moshe’s cigarette. The picture, in an old wooden frame, is hung halfway up the right-hand wall of the salon.
Boaz and Nomi were mesmerized by this photograph of their grandfather and his identical twin, and from the time they were little, one of the first things they would do when they got to Shachar every summer was to go into the salon and just stand in front of it quietly. Their ritual went mostly unnoticed by the grown-ups in the house. They didn’t stand in front of the picture for very long, just long enough. Nor did they speak, not to each other or to the image itself. They just stood there, and then walked away.
Throughout the summer they would return to this spot, just to the left of the television, just to the right of the window. They would never plan on meeting there, but every so often in the middle of a Sabbath afternoon, or early in the morning before they left for camp, they would find themselves drawn to it. Looking back they would see themselves as pilgrims paying homage at a strange shrine and they would see the brothers in the photograph as a pair of wounded sages who had much to tell them. For as long as they could remember they had known the story of how, when Moshe was killed, their grandfather had felt the bullet entering his own back. They never remembered who told them the story, and in fact, they would never remember actually hearing another human being talk about it, but the story seemed always to be told constantly in Shachar. The very walls of their grandparents’ house seemed to whisper about the whizzing sound the bullet made as it passed through the pardess, the orchard trees seemed to fill in details such as how Zohar had looked up stunned to the heavens when the phantom bullet hit him, and then how he had fallen face down under the double tree with a horrible thud that made the roots deep underground twist more tightly around each other. The photograph of those twins told Boaz and Nomi this one tragic story, but it also told them many others. Mostly it described happy plots, small tales of the mischief the brothers made when they were children. They would listen earnestly. And no matter how many times they returned to it and stood there together, Nomi and Boaz never felt as if they had learned enough.
While Miriam and Eliezer and Rebecca didn’t pay attention to the children’s affinity for that picture, Zohar noticed it early on, when they were still toddlers. He would often see them standing there while they were growing up, and from the doorway or from across the room he would quietly watch his grandchildren—the little boy, the little girl, staring up at the old faded image of himself and his long-dead brother. Zohar knew that he was speaking to the children from the photograph, but he did not know exactly what he was telling them. He wondered if he was telling them about running on the walls of the Old City with his brother when they were children. How much fun it was! Grandfather Eliezer running with them, his baggy pants flopping in the wind, the neighbors waving to them, shouting “Hello!” Zohar wondered if he was telling Nomi and Boaz about how he and Moshe used to play soccer together in Petach Tikvah. How they would run down the field so fast side by side, kicking the ball back and forth, and how if they ran fast enough sometimes he himself would grow confused by who was who and which was which and unsure of whether the breath pounding in his lungs and even his lungs themselves belonged to himself or to his twin brother. When he would have these thoughts, these memories, he would smile and the nectar of a past life would fill him up with a warm radiant feeling.
But more
often, Zohar did not feel the least bit radiant while he watched the children watching him and Moshe on the wall. More often, he would grow angry seeing Boaz and Nomi standing close together, and would feel a sharp distaste, a palpable hostility, even a little bit of hate for them well up inside of him. The feeling he had was like a barricade in his soul. A barricade blocking out the deep love he felt for these children.
While the children were still entranced, Zohar would slip away. Usually he went out into the orchard where he would bend down low to the earth more urgently than usual, digging holes that didn’t need to be dug or pruning trees that did not need pruning. He would work for hours, trying to forget about photographs and grandchildren and barricades and brothers. But the effort was always too much, and by the time he would come back into the house for dinner he would be too exhausted to smile. The grimace on his face would make it hard for Nomi and Boaz to understand how the smiling young man on the left of the photograph and this very angry old man sitting across from them eating tomato salad could both actually be the same person. Sometimes, after dinner, they would steal back into the salon to take another look at the picture on the wall, in order to check that they had not been mistaken.