The World in Pieces

by Bart Midwood

  At this point he wakes from the dream, gasping for air and trembling, like a man just saved from drowning.

  So, this was the dream. Naturally he did not tell it to me like I tell it to you. To get this dream out of him I had to go through you can’t imagine what kind of resistance.

  At first he told me only that he had a terrible dream about a ship, the same dream three times already, and he was very annoyed with it. This was at breakfast, over the coffee.

  “Who needs a dream like this?” he said.

  “If you have such a dream,” I told him, “then you need it.”

  “Listen, Ila, when I go to sleep, what I need is a little rest. I don’t need such a dream.”

  “In that case, maybe God needs to give it to you.”

  “Since when are you on such intimate terms with God that you know what He needs?”

  This is how he talked that morning, very nasty and provocative, but I could see he was at an extremity, and suffering terribly, so I kept my head. Ordinarily I wouldn’t let him talk to me like this, but then ordinarily he didn’t talk to me like this in the first place.

  “Listen, Yaddie, what happened on this ship in the dream?”

  “Nothing. It was pulling away from the dock.”

  “That’s all? This is what upset you?”

  “Of course not. Who could be upset by such a nothing? You think I’m a madman?”

  “What kind of ship was it?”

  “What does that matter? An old ship.”

  On and on like this the conversation went, until soon I wanted to do some violence to him, because, really, he appeared to be holding me to account not just for nagging him about the dream, but also for the dream itself. Well, he was in a state. Beside himself, as the saying goes. And I too was beside myself. Moreover, the harder I had to work to get the dream out of him, the more beside myself I got.

  “Fine,” I thought. “If he’s going to blame me for his own dream, let him. But at least then I’m going to find out what it is.”

  And in the end, as you can see, I did. But it took me nearly half an hour and the effort gave me a splitting headache.

  When I supposed I’d gotten everything I could from him, I said, “Let’s see if I have the complete picture. I’ll tell it to you and you tell me if I have it right.”

  To this he agreed, but cautiously.

  Now, at first while I’d been trying to get the information, I felt nothing in particular about his dream one way or another, but once I began to give it back, telling it aloud as something like a little story, I could see the whole drama in a clear way, and so naturally I was affected, a little weepy.

  “So, do I have the dream right?” I said.

  “That’s it, Ila. Just the way it was. But why is it you have wet eyes?”

  “On account of the dream.”

  “The dream! What for? It’s just a lot of nonsense. Are you crazy or what?” Well, this was too much. He’d gone too far now. And my heart, boom, like a machine it started to pound in my throat, boom, boom, and everything on the table I swept onto the floor, with both hands. First the right, then the left, and one-two, all the dishes and the silverware and the pitcher of juice and the pitcher of milk and the yogurt and the jam and the coffee-pot, everything went flying.

  In that early period of our marriage whole wells of tears that my Lo Yadua could not or would not shed, I shed on his behalf, and then I scooped them up in buckets and carried them everywhere, from one room to the next, and across the fields, and through the orange groves.

  In retrospect I think that maybe he had begun to resent me for appropriating the well of his sorrow and bearing it as if it were my own, and this maybe is why he lashed out at me so cruelly. But in the moment I did not think about the justice of his resentment or the cause of his cruelty. I thought only about my own pain, so acute was it, and threw at him my whole outrage like a wounded animal.

  When I was done, I collapsed in a chair, exhausted, and there was a terrible silence, terrible; after which, all of a sudden, he got on his knees and began to clean up the mess, first picking up the shattered dishes, then sopping up the milk, the yogurt, the jam, all of it.

  “Forgive me,” he said. “Can you forgive me?”

  “I’m too tired. If you want forgiveness, ask from God.”

  “But I want to make this up to you.”

  “Then look at the dream.”

  “This I already did. Three nights I looked at it.”

  “To look when you’re asleep isn’t enough. You must look also when you’re awake.”

  “I did, believe me, but it makes no sense to me.”

  “And you know why? Because you’re a stupid man!”

  Well, as soon as I said this, I regretted it.

  Tristan

  In the first year of our marriage Lo Yadua and I had fights in which I called him all sorts of things, but never stupid, the main reason being that stupid is not something he was. Another reason though is that I knew that he was very vulnerable on this point and could be wounded in a way that would be too horribly damaging. This is because in the center of his heart he had a fear, an absolute fear, that he was in his essential nature not merely stupid, but hopelessly so.

  This fear was planted in him like a bad seed in childhood, when he heard that inbreeding can produce inferiority in the intellect of the offspring. Who told him this I don’t know, but he never got over it. Always he was putting his mind to the test. Every single day he did the crossword in the paper like a religion, also chess problems; and always he had a difficult book to read, something in science, mathematics, philosophy.

  Often you find in cultivated individuals past middle age that the exercise of the intellect develops into something like an erotic pleasure, but in Lo Yadua such a development could never occur. No matter how many crosswords and chess problems and books he conquered, still he had the fear to contend with.

  In his thirteenth year, however, a shadow of doubt was cast over the authority of this fear by an article in The National Geographic Magazine.

  This article it was about Tristan da Cunha.

  I don’t know if you know this place, a small island, no more than seven miles from one end to the other, and in the middle is a volcano. The population now is about thirty, all descendants of the original eighteen settlers, a mixture of Europeans, Asians and Africans, who came on a Portuguese ship two centuries ago. The closest neighbor is Australia, two thousand miles away.

  Naturally over so many years and with such a tiny isolated group you have inbreeding. So from such people you can make inferences about what inbreeding may produce. A popular idea is that inbreeding produces dimwits, but this apparently is not the case on Tristan, where, according to The National Geographic, “the intellect in general is perfectly normal.”

  The one who brought this article to Lo Yadua was his best friend, Orsino, Cesare’s son.

  “It’s just like I’ve been telling you for years,” said Orsino. “These people are just as smart as anyone else, and they’ve been inbreeding for two centuries!”

  If Lo Yadua had been content just with the information that the people on Tristan were not dimwits, then maybe he would simply have said to himself, “Well, maybe I’m not so stupid after all,” and he would have been rescued from a certain kind of hopelessness, and that would have been that. However, he insisted on reading the entire article through to the end, and here and there he found new things to worry about, mainly the emotional character.

  According to the article, the Tristan people are “emotionally child-like.” What is meant by “child-like” here is this. The adults, if they play a game and lose, they cry and sometimes sulk for days on end. And if one of them speaks a harsh word, the others blush and walk away trembling with embarrassment. When the author was leaving, everyone on the island came down to the ship weeping and wailing so much he was afraid. “A violent grief,” he called it. All in all, so sensitive are these people, that no arguments are tolerated, and the
re is a very elaborate, only partly conscious social code that you can see comes from a will to avoid even the slightest disagreement.

  As for the politics, they’re anarchic, no leaders or systematic body of law, which, I think, is just right for sensitive people. I don’t believe that you can have such an arrangement everywhere, but with such people, yes, you can have it.

  Now to me all this is very pleasant, very amusing, to think about such a place, an island of such people, but to the thirteen-year-old Lo Yadua the idea of this Tristan was terrifying, terrifying.

  Like many adolescents he was still very vulnerable in the emotions, and this article it put in him a fear that maybe he could stay this way, and become like one of these Tristan men, always blushing and weeping and what-not; i.e., the exact opposite of what he wanted to become, a Maccabee, rough and tough, a macho man. Naturally!

  Well, so you can see that this article it was for him a coin with two sides. On the one side it gave him courage finally to put up a fight against this monster in his mind that was always whispering to him that he had something wrong in the cognition, and on the other side he got now a new crazy worry, that maybe his perfectly ordinary boyish vulnerability, his basic sweet nature, was some kind of a morbid character flaw, a whole congenital affliction!

  As it turned out, this new worry didn’t last long, not anyway on the conscious level, because just a few weeks before his sixteenth birthday, he proved himself one night with such ruthless precision in a brief but terrible gunfight, that in one stroke his worries about the masculine capability appeared on the surface to be dispelled, and he found himself suddenly regarded by all as the best soldier on the kibbutz.

  More About The Dream

  Now I go back to the dream, and to the whole tumult I made in my mind that I called him stupid.

  So badly I wanted to undo this word, but I saw at once that I could not.

  I could not just say, “I didn’t mean what I said,” and expect that the insult would be erased from his mind.

  So what was I to do?

  There he was standing before me, absolutely defenseless, you see, and I thought to myself, “On this moment hangs the whole universe.”

  Of course now I see that I was in a state where the objective situation is fantastically exaggerated, but at the time it did not occur to me at all that I might be exaggerating, not in the least, and so I was desperate.

  “Listen to me,” I said. “Just now I called you stupid.”

  “So who cares?” he said.

  “You care. And I care. But you know what? Not only are you stupid, but you’re so stupid, you don’t even know what you’re stupid about! You think I’m talking about the intellect, don’t you?”

  “Of course. What else?”

  “You think there’s nothing else?”

  “Where else could a man be stupid except in his intellect?”

  “In his feeling.”

  “And you think I’m stupid in my feeling?”

  “Yes.”

  “So when I feel love for you, I’m stupid?”

  “Look, Yaddie, don’t break my heart with such a question right now. Just listen. Are you listening?”

  “Yes.”

  “You need to understand something. This dream it’s a symbol. You see? A symbol of your feeling.”

  “My feeling.”

  “Yes. About your mother and father.”

  “No, Ila, you’re wrong about this. In this dream I’m trying to leap into their arms, but believe me, in real life this is the last thing I was wanting to do. Why can’t you understand this? I hated them for what they did to me, that they sent me away on a ship across the ocean. I remember!”

  “Yes, you remember what was in the conscious mind.”

  “And then also the dream is wrong about Cesare. I love Cesare. I would give my life for Cesare! But in the dream he’s an evil thing, just a big hand that I throw in the water. But I would never do this, never. To me even one little finger of Cesare is worth more than the whole body and soul of both my mother and father put together.”

  “Yes, but when you were a little boy and you first got on the ship with him, then he was just a hand on the shoulder, a complete stranger.”

  “Of course, but I soon came to love him.”

  “In time, yes, but not the day you got on the ship. And the dream, it shows you this, in this queer image like out of a surrealist painting. Do you see this?”

  “All right! This makes sense. I see it. I see what you say about Cesare is true. But I tell you, listen, I remember very clearly how I felt about my parents that day. I remember that I hated them, and that I told myself I would hate them forever.”

  “But before they sent you away, you loved them, didn’t you?”

  “But what did I know, Ila? I was only a little boy. Just out of his diapers.”

  “So where did this love go?”

  “Who knows? Wherever it went, it didn’t go to Palestine on the ship. This much I can tell you.”

  “The dream tells me something else. The dream tells me the love went into the unconscious. The dream tells me that when you were a little boy, you wanted to jump off the ship to Anchel and Surah even if you could not jump far enough and fell instead into the water and drowned.”

  “But I didn’t jump. I didn’t even try.”

  “Of course not! Only an idiot would do such a thing!”

  Round and round this dream we went before we came to some sort of resolution together. We never did entirely agree on every point, but we got close enough, and in the end he made some sort of joke, I forget what, and we laughed a bit; then he got up from his chair and announced that he had an urge suddenly to go down to the school and give Cesare a hand with the work on the kindergarten room.

  Orsino

  Now you need to know something about Cesare’s son, Orsino. I begin here with a passage from the voyage chapter in Lo Yadua’s book:

  The Levis had a son, Orsino, seven years old, just two years older than Lo Yadua. This Orsino had swarthy skin, dark hair and dark almost black eyes. Not only was he uncommonly strong and agile for a boy his age, but also he was uncommonly independent and self-sufficient. Though he never argued with his parents and in fact demonstrated sincere respect and affection for them, he generally did as he pleased as soon as they were out of sight. In this regard he was distinctly different from Lo Yadua, who had never had the confidence to undertake any enterprise without his parents’ approval. Therefore when Orsino one day suggested they make a little secret exploration of the ship’s engine room, Lo Yadua refused.

  “Your mother and father said we must never go even near the engine-room,” said Lo Yadua.

  “Don’t bother about them,” said Orsino. “We’ll be all right.”

  “Maybe we could go and ask them.”

  “They’ll just say no.”

  “We could argue.”

  “No,” said Orsino, “that would just upset them.”

  This idea, that the Levis would be upset by such an argument and would therefore be more kindly served if one kept one’s mouth shut and secretly did as one pleased, struck Lo Yadua with such force that he joined his new friend in the exploration of the engine-room at once. And as the boys were never caught in this disobedient act and moreover had a wonderful exciting adventure, Lo Yadua forthwith adopted Orsino’s attitude to adult authority as a general principle. Whether or not he’d have so readily taken up this new attitude if his own parents had been aboard the ship is of course a moot point. In later years though he came closer and closer to the opinion that the presence of his own parents would have mattered very little when weighed in the balance against the charm and energy of the great Orsino. Then again, to Lo Yadua nothing on that ship mattered as much as Orsino, not even the idea of Palestine, that grand destination that occupied so much of the conversation of the other passengers. In Lo Yadua’s mind the ship was not a means of transport to Palestine, but a destination in itself, a place where he might pursue his advent
ures with Orsino. This is why, when Lo Yadua at last disembarked and stepped onto the sun-baked dock at Haifa, amid a clamoring crowd of peddlers, beggars, urchins, people of all stripes and colors—some half naked, some wrapped from head to foot in thick cloth, and all chattering away in strange tongues—his only concern was to keep a firm grip on Orsino’s hand.

  On the night of April 12, 1941, Orsino was killed.

  Lo Yadua was then fifteen, Orsino seventeen.

  Both of them that night were on guard duty, as was everyone else over thirteen. An Arab friend had told us a raid was coming so we took precautions. A few nights earlier already a raid came. Ourselves we had no casualties, no wounded, but five of our enemies were killed, so even without the warning from our Arab friend we knew another raid would come soon.

  In those days all the homes on the kibbutz were clustered together for safety, and around the homes was a stone wall three-and-a-half feet high. In the wall we had little chinks to look through or to shoot through. At night the guards used to lie on their bellies and peer through the chinks in the wall. Sometimes the view was too narrow, though, or too dark, and often a guard would take a chance and poke his head above the wall.