by Yaël Dayan
I desperately needed my brothers. Assi’s phone had a recording machine on it, and I was, with a tremendous sense of humiliation and anger, made to dictate to a tape a tearful message saying our father was dead (I said it again now, still not believing) and to please come to Zahala.
Back in the little room, it was peaceful now. He lay there, covered to his neck with a sheet, as if asleep. In a short while, they would take him away. I knew, and I will never … never … never a million things … The ring of the word sufficed to send a painful shiver through my body. Every minute of the hours and days that followed froze with the word “never,” and that served as a full stop to every thought and feeling.
The garden in Zahala was lit, as on many festive occasions, and people began to gather. Whether out of respect or frustration, they left me alone, as I couldn’t stop crying and every handshake or hug produced a new stream of tears. I touched the pillars and stones in the garden, the plants, the tree trunks, searching for support. My brothers arrived, handsome and young and lovable. In all the years, I never felt as close to them as I did that evening. I was the oldest, they were my kid brothers, and here I drew from them strength and courage and a gentle guideline to reality. I couldn’t talk to my children but had to. My son knew already; he was answering phone calls, composed and distant. As for my daughter, the sweet dear child my father loved, I tried to spare her till morning.
Faces floated around me; hands touched me; women cried with me; they were wise to offer no comfort, and I sought none. My growing sense of loss could not be shared. My mother would arrive tomorrow, I was told, and the funeral would take place in Nahalal on Sunday. Jews don’t have burials on the Sabbath.
TWO : FIRST KADDISH
Saturday morning, I went to Zahala with my daughter, who was torn between her own sadness and a desperate desire to console me. I returned there for eight days, clinging to something that wasn’t there, pretending it was home. Did I expect to see my father, dressed in shabby khaki clothes, reconstructing a broken jar? There were Rahel, her daughters and her grandchildren, her friends, and a few people who were discussing funeral arrangements. I walked in the garden with the strange sensation of being watched, constantly, almost suspiciously. I was quite unapproachable, and between me and the group around the garden table there was a curtain of tears, distorting and impenetrable.
As if trespassing, I entered my father’s room. It used to be mine, then mine and the children’s when they were born. When he married Rahel, the kitchen was enlarged—incorporating my parents’ bedroom—and he moved to my room, Rahel using my brother’s room as her own separate bedroom.
I was still being watched through the open door, but I sat on the bed. Above his desk was a large oil portrait of me, painted a few years back. It was moved, appropriately so, to his room from the living room when Rahel moved in. A photo of my grandmother—his mother, Dvorah—another of his sister Aviva, and a colored one of Rahel were on other walls. Surrounded by women, as befitted him. Rahel was standing next to me. She had tears in her voice when she talked. He wanted you to have the painting. He was so proud of the fact you needed nothing and were independent, but he told me to make sure you had the painting. In my state of mind, nothing sank in. I should have realized there and then what was to come, and run away, never to come back. If there was ever embarrassment, it was contained in that sentence. But I froze, irritated by the sound of Rahel’s grandchild hopping around, repeating, “Moshe is dead, Moshe is dead …”
The phone was ringing constantly. People were coming and going, and a good number were still due from abroad. The cables were piling up, and time-consuming activities helped push away reality. For a second, with people coming in with food and cakes, it seemed as if we were preparing for some festive event. Who will go in which car, were the ambassadors notified, will there be room in the helicopter for a close friend of Rahel’s? Where in Nahalal can people gather before going to the cemetery, even what to wear. I promised Moshe never to wear black, said Rahel. Some big national party in which my father will be the honored guest. He is in Tel Hashomer mortuary, I kept saying to myself. He is being washed and cleaned and covered in white shrouds. He will not know if we wear black or red, and all the promises and vows and even memories are one-sided now, acts without a partner, a broken link dwindling into limbo.
Back in our own apartment, we found the atmosphere not much different. Friends who felt uncomfortable in Zahala and chose to come to us; my brothers; some groupies who rotated between Zahala and Ramat Aviv to make sure they didn’t miss anything, reporting in each house what they saw in the other. But my mother was here, warm and large-hearted and embracing. She let me cry with her while holding me. In a sense she had already mourned the loss of him. The love she felt for my father had never diminished, but she was stronger for having courageously faced her own period of mourning. Hers was over, while mine was beginning. Mother was almost cheerful, or carried away with stories of her last voyage. I was amazed at this remarkable woman. She preserved the image of my father at his best, while we were left with shreds and a sense of deterioration from which we had to reerect our hero.
Had my children ever seen me cry before? I was touched by their helplessness as they watched me. Suddenly I was their size, a daughter, a child rather than the all-able mother, and they were delighted my mother was staying with us, someone who could cope. If only I could stop crying. Someone was kind enough to give me a sedative. It was a warm night, but I was shivering when Dov covered me and Raheli cuddled next to me, holding me very gently.
I woke up drained and dehydrated Sunday morning, into reality. Not one second of—maybe it’s all a dream, just a big bland hangover, as if this very moment a new era, a new count began. We were going to Nahalal to bury my father. From this moment, as I heard my mother in the kitchen, everything had a dual quality, like a broken lens or a cracked mirror where the scene is twice reflected, doubled into two different entities. It was, strange to say, comic.
A large black car, supplied by the Foreign Ministry, waited for my mother and Raheli and me. Rahel and others went in a helicopter. Dov and Dan joined the helicopter to be split again in Nahalal. My mother went to my brother’s house, where oldtimers gathered, village people, old war comrades, my cousins and family. Rahel went to the village “club”; there was the coffin, draped with the blue-and-white flag of Israel. With her were close friends and her family, as well as government officials and dignitaries. Between these two centers, for several hours, moved thousands of people who gathered from all over the country to pay their last respects. City people and farmers, soldiers and civilians, Arab and Druse, priests and rabbis, some in black formal clothes, others in working outfits and sandals; old ones supported by others, and children sitting high on parents’ shoulders.
I found no place for myself. I went from the house to the club and back, meeting the same people, shaking hands or embracing, listening to banalities or to touching words, feeling near collapse when I noticed how lonely the coffin was, separated from the crowd by a police rope, a barrier, away from the club, up on a small black stage not yet close to the earth. And I sat by it on the dry grass, weeping and alone, half touching the flag, which was just a cloth then, forcing myself to accept.
Nahalal is shaped like a circle. The houses are its perimeter, the public buildings in its midst, and the farmland stretches behind each house to form yet a larger circle. The procession moved along the circular road, passing in front of Udi’s house, stopping there and moving on with people joining from each house. Behind the command car carrying the coffin walked Rahel and her daughters, supported by an elegantly dressed man—a leader in the Jewish community in Spain—her local friends and others behind her. Government people followed, and the Dayans, like a strong solid wave, together. My cousins from Nahalal, my mother and brothers, a few older people who had known my father when as a child he had run barefoot in the muddy circle, our own children, his grandchildren.
I couldn’t bring
myself to walk in the procession. I kept to the edges of the road, choosing my own path, walking my own Nahalal circle, stopping in front of my grandparents’ house and looking at the cypresses piercing the cloudless skies, not quite remembering being there at another time and age, in slow motion. The circle seemed to be pouring itself out into a dark line, emptying itself and being pulled upward along the narrow road to the cemetery hill where the good brown end-of-summer dry earth was awaiting my father, the way it engulfed his parents, his brother and sister, the way it awaited us all.
The cemetery of Nahalal was not designed for state funerals, so it was necessary to limit the number of people who could enter it. The thousands who walked past the coffin in the village stayed behind or along the road, and only a few hundred drove up to where the empty, newly dug grave held a promise of inevitable rest.
The coffin was carried on the shoulders of six generals in uniform, along the earth path. Preceding it walked an officer holding medals and insignia in an open black velvet box. The cantor chanted something, and the wooden box, still covered with the flag, was carefully lowered into its cradle. I didn’t walk but was propelled, Raheli holding my hand tightly, Dov just behind me. We stood in a tight circle as the horribly cruel sound of dry gravel on wood overwhelmed the soft murmurs and tearful sighs. Spades resolutely dug in the unyielding soil, small clouds of gray dust, dust unto dust, and in seconds the earth was heaped and piled up.
A white wooden marker bearing my father’s name and date of death was quickly set in it when the Chief Chaplain of the Army read the customary psalm. It all happened with amazing speed. It takes longer to plant a tree, or tuck a child in for an hour’s sleep. As if covering up a crime, as if ashamed. Almost for the first time now, I looked around, bewildered but focusing. Now the earth had sealed my father in. Rahel was standing, composed and erect, dark glasses and dark silk two-piece suit, held by her daughters, dust covering her open sandals. Next to her stood Assi and his daughter. Udi wiped his forehead and face, sweat or tears—I didn’t know. The Prime Minister, who even on happy occasions looked slightly funereal, and the President and his pretty, overdressed wife were next to my mother. My mother didn’t wear dark glasses; tears came easily to her, and her eyes were shining. She looked at the valley below with acceptance and serenity. Assi’s first wife, Udi’s first wife and children, Rahel’s mother—a beautiful, gentle lady who loved my father—my own grandparents, well into their eighties; my uncle and aunt, cousins, Arik Sharon—wet-eyed and emotional, a gallery of loving and loved. Udi was given a piece of paper to read from and was made to approach the microphone. He pushed it aside. He was going to say Kaddish, a first Kaddish, and this was between him and his father, not for the world to hear. He whispered it, almost inaudible. “Yitgadal veyitkadash shmei Raba … Magnified and sanctified be his great name in the world …”
Kaddish is a doxology, read in Aramaic. A mourner’s Kaddish is read by the son or next of kin, and the crowd recites with him and says Amen. The words held no meaning whatsoever for Udi or myself. They were a symbol of duty rather than love, a declaration of tradition, of belonging and continuity. Udi was whispering his first Kaddish, the words artificially muttered, but there was tenderness in his voice. My father’s parents’ tombs were a few yards away, barren, almost deserted. So were my father’s brother’s and sister’s. Not a flower, not a visitor, dull stones scorched by the summer sun and eroded by winter torrents.
Udi’s Kaddish, barely heard, was meant for them, too. This was our hill, our village and valley. My feet felt rooted as I looked at my brother’s hands and watched his lips moving.
The cantor took over and sang “El Maleh Rachamaim, God is full of mercy,” a beautiful chant, but from another world, another faith. The prayers and the lamentations had to do with God, his mercy, his glory, his benevolence, and his forgiveness. We were not lucky enough to find peace and comfort in God’s glory or to be consoled by his mercy. We understood rainfall and drought, birth and blossom, hatred, love, and envy, and when the end came, there was earth and pine roots and worms, and soon the first rain would wash away the dust and give life to seeds and dormant bulbs, and next spring the hill would be covered with anemone and cyclamen and young lovers would seek privacy among the pines. This was our faith, not the Aramaic litanies and the Amens. My father had not said Kaddish each year over his parents’ graves.
Wreaths were being placed now, by young soldiers saluting the fresh grave, accompanied by the various dignitaries. “The wreath of the Knesset,” the announcer proclaimed … “Of the Israeli Army” … “Ministry of Defense” … “American ambassador” … German, French … Prime Minister, President … There was no room, and the flowers were placed in layers, colorful and bright, until the soil could not be seen and even the wooden marker was almost hidden.
The ceremony was over. Rahel bent down, picked a flower from one of the wreaths, and turned away. My mother was surrounded by friends. Udi disappeared the minute he could, and I couldn’t move for many long moments.
We flew back home in the helicopter. My eyes were swollen and red and I felt numb. Through the window I could see the valley, a tapestry of fall colors. White cotton and green corn, evergreen orchards and red-tiled roofs. The circle of Nahalal was empty but for a single tractor, and buses were leaving from the parking lot at the foot of the hill. We flew over the slopes of Mount Carmel and along the waterfront, where the huge body of water touched the fertile coastline. In the airport, and later back at home, I sensed a shameful new feeling. Not quite clear or dominant, barely present perhaps, but still there. A feeling of relief. As one feels when a tragic event is anticipated, finally erupts, and is over. I lay awake and regained an ability I seemed to have lost for three days, that of disassociating myself from what was happening to me. Slightly schizophrenic, but very useful, ruinous or constructive, depending on the circumstances.
I was anxious to comprehend this uncomfortable new feeling. Relief? Not quite, more the disappearance of a dreadful fear, as if for a few years, certainly the last few months, I had carried a clue to the unknown yet bound to happen, and now that it had come to pass, all options were closed. I was tossed from a suspended board, and finally fell and hurt, and as bad as the pain was, I was on solid ground, not on the top of an abyss. I have always derived security from the certain and known. I also noticed I’d stopped crying. The rabbis in their learned books say: “Three days for weeping, and seven days for lamenting …” They must have known the limits of the tear glands to produce, and excessive grief was forbidden by them, being considered indulgence and God’s exclusive privilege.
PART
Two
THREE : BEFORE MEMORY
Four generations of Dayans found eternal rest in the Nahalal cemetery. My great-grandparents, my grandparents Shmuel and Dvorah, my father, his brother and sister, and my cousin Nurit. Of the four, only my generation could look across the valley from the graveyard and, on a bright day, see the Hill of Moreh, where the maternity ward of the central hospital is still located. There I was born, on the eve of the Second World War.
My grandparents came to Palestine from the Ukraine, soon after the turn of the century, and settled in another valley, where the Jordan River flows south out of Lake Tiberias. There they founded Deganya, the first kibbutz, where my father, Moshe, was born, less than a year after the First World War began. Most people on this globe are born, live, and die within a few miles’ diameter. The roots are where the home is, where the grave is, where some of the children are to live and be buried. The human cycle of permanence and stability. I was born on the Hill of Moreh, lived in Nahalal, and will be returned to Shimron—overlooking it. My father was born in Deganya, grew up in Nahalal, and despite the long, complex, eventful, and rich route his life followed, he was returned, as he wished, to rest near where the roots are. The reclaimed land, the fertile valley, the Bedouin herds, the droughts were his home territory. The real miracle was the story of his parents. From the Dnieper and the Bla
ck Sea to the Jordan and the Sea of Galilee was more than a journey, and my father and I, who were born into the Zionist struggle, could never quite stop admiring, without ever fully grasping, the strength and determination that sparked and motivated their move to the malaria-ridden, Ottoman-governed valley.
Shmuel came from a poor family. His father was a peddler of cheap merchandise, moving with horse and cart from village to village. Dvorah’s background was affluent. Her father was a lumber merchant. She herself had been a student in Odessa, well versed in Russian literature and deeply impressed by the 1905 revolution. The world was aflame with war when these two good-looking youngsters stood under the canopy and were married on the bank of the Jordan River.
My grandmother’s intellectual aspirations made it difficult for her to integrate into the commune. It was not the scorching heat at 650 feet below sea level, or the locust or malaria, or the trachoma my father contracted, that made them leave Deganya with their child, but the new idea of a moshav—a cooperative settlement, where some privacy could be retained without compromising the ideals of Jewish farming, mutual aid, and equality. In the fall of 1921, the small family arrived on foot in the Valley of Jezreel and settled with a few others in a tent encampment. The marsh had to be drained, the undrinkable water was infested with malaria and typhoid, and the winter rains turned the valley into a quagmire of black, sticky mud.