The World in Pieces

by Bart Midwood

  A Futile Intervention

  “Give me a minute,” said Lo Yadua. “This is a very complicated thing you’re asking.”

  “Why are you making such a production out of it? There’s nothing, really, that you have to do. Nobody will question you, as your Rubin did with me. Believe me, Bob and Myra are not that kind of people. When they refer to Anchel and me as your aunt and uncle, all you have to do is let it pass. Do you understand me? Lo Yadua, I’m asking you a question. Do you think maybe you could give me the courtesy of an answer?”

  “If you don’t mind,” said Cesare, “I’d like to interrupt this interrogation for a moment.”

  “Stay out of this, Cesare,” said Frieda. “This is between a mother and a son.”

  “But look what she’s doing!”

  “What ‘she!’” said Surah. “By this ‘she’ are you referring to me?”

  “Who else! Listen, for twenty-five years I’ve never criticized you, Surah, but now, here, when you bring this kind of suffering into my own house, I cannot let it pass in silence.”

  “Cesare, let it go,” said Lo Yadua. “I’m not a little boy anymore. I can handle this myself.”

  “Of course you can, Yaddie. What I have to say, I say for my own peace of mind!”

  Here Cesare got up from his chair breathing heavily, looking all of a sudden like a wild man.

  “Cesare, sit down, please!” said Frieda.

  But Cesare ignored her completely, so wrapped up he was now in his anger.

  “For twenty years,” he said looking fiercely at Surah, “you and Anchel you don’t visit your son, and now finally when you do visit, you tell him he should pretend to be not your son. Can’t you see how hurtful this is?”

  “I don’t tell him to pretend,” said Surah. “I tell him only not to contradict!”

  “But don’t you see that comes to the same thing?”

  “So what does that matter? He has to pretend only for two minutes! And don’t I pretend for him? Don’t I pretend in front of a whole kibbutz to be a married woman, so that everyone will think my son is a normal man? Do you know what kind of sacrifice that is for me?”

  “I don’t believe that you’re saying such a thing.”

  “Why not? I too have made a sacrifice. But do I throw it in your face and puff myself up into some kind of hero out of a movie? No, unlike you, Cesare, I make my sacrifice in silence and ask nothing in return, except one little favor, which everyone here, even my own flesh and blood, refuses to do for me!”

  “Do you hear this, Ila?” said Cesare, turning to me in angry bewilderment. “How does she do this?”

  “How do I do what?” demanded Surah.

  “How do you manage to twist this whole business into an injury against yourself?”

  “It is not I who’s twisting, Cesare, but you!”

  “Surah, you’re an amazing woman. You should have become a counselor in the law, not a clerk in a shop. If Hermann Goering could have had you as legal counsel at Nuremburg, today no doubt he would be living in a villa on the Riviera, and with a big cash settlement from the Israeli govern ment.”

  “This is too much, Cesare. Are you comparing me to a Nazi?

  “Not a Nazi. A lawyer for a Nazi.”

  “Enough, both of you!” cried Lo Yadua, so explosively that he startled all of us; then he stood up.

  Riddles

  “This thing that you’re asking of me,” he said, “it’s too complicated.”

  “No,” said Surah, “it’s only a simple matter.”

  “For you it’s simple, but for me complicated. Look, if I don’t contradict this fairy tale, that you and Anchel are my aunt and uncle, still there’s the danger that one of the kibbutzniks will contradict. So how do I take care of this danger? One way, I suppose, is that I could stay very close to this Bob and Myra, follow at their heels the whole time of their visit, and try to prevent them from talking to anyone but myself, Ila, Cesare and Frieda. Now, this would be awkward, yes, but possible, but only if I’m able to invent still another fairy tale; no, two other fairy tales, one for Bob and Myra, and one for the kibbutzniks, to account for why I’m working so hard to prevent conversation!

  “If I cannot manage to invent such fairy tales, of course, then I should try a different strategy. For example, I might ask the kibbutzniks to give these two American tourists a silent treatment. But then how would I justify such a collective cruelty? Maybe I could think of a justification, but then this would be yet another fairy tale. And then the fairy tales will go on and on, and where they may end I can’t see. All I can see is that you’re tying me up in like a net with this problem.”

  “We don’t want to tie you in a net,” said Surah. “What we want is only that you go along with one more little fairy tale, this one for the Christophers, that’s all, which is much easier than the fairy tale we had to go through for Rubin, believe me. Did you see what kind of tortures your Rubin inflicted on me and your father?”

  “I saw, Surah.”

  “And for who did we endure such tortures? For ourselves?”

  “No, for me. I see that.”

  “Good! So then, now you see what you must do, don’t you?”

  “Yes. Now I must put a stop to these tortures. I must go to Rubin and tell him the truth, that you and Anchel are sister and brother.”

  “Ah, God! Do you hear this, Anchel?”

  Because Surah was pleading to her brother with her eyes, here he put in a few words at last. But first he arranged a condescending smile on his face, where you could see a nervous epidermal twitch around the jaw and the cheekbones. “You and I should sit down with a pencil and paper, Lo Yadua, and make a list of the various difficulties here. Then I think you’ll see that this whole business is a lot simpler, more manageable, than it seems to you at the moment.”

  “A list?” said Lo Yadua.

  “A list is an excellent idea,” said Surah eagerly. “A thousand times I’ve seen your father solve even bigger problems with a list.”

  “But to make such a list you have to ask, ‘Which fairy tale should I tell to this one, and which to that one? And what would be the consequence here, and what there?’ And this is the just the kind of thinking that is itself the torture that I want to stop! If I go right now to Rubin, though, and tell him that my mother and father are sister and brother, then I don’t have to make lists. Also I don’t have to worry anymore that somebody might find out what I really am!”

  At this, Surah stood up. “You don’t know what you’re saying, Lo Yadua. You don’t know what kind of shame you could bring on yourself.”

  “Forget shame. Come with me to Rubin. You too Anchel. Both of you come with me and let’s tell Rubin the truth.”

  “Do you hear this, Anchel? The truth.”

  “Why do you sneer, Surah, when you say this word ‘truth?’”

  “Because who are you to say what is the truth? Are you God?”

  “I don’t have to be God to know that you and Anchel are brother and sister, and that I’m your son.”

  “How can you be so sure? Maybe Anchel and I are not brother and sister. Maybe our parents lied to us. Maybe one of us was adopted from another family.”

  “Do you have a reason to believe such ideas?”

  “All I tell you is that they’re possible, so that you should never be so sure, so arrogant, that you can say, ‘This is the truth.’”

  “It’s incredible that you think this way, Surah.”

  “Why? To think this way is just humility. Anyway the main thing is this: that no matter what is the truth, now Rubin has in his mind a picture of you; and if you change this picture, he’ll see that all these years you’ve been deceitful, and then he won’t ever again believe anything you tell him. Better to leave his picture alone and let life go on in the usual way.”

  “Your mother’s right,” said Anchel.

  “Maybe,” said Lo Yadua. “but I’m going.”

  And with this he went and took his cap from the rack by
the door.

  “What’s this?” cried Surah. “Cesare, stop him!”

  “I?” said Cesare. “What makes you think I’d want to stop him?”

  “Ila! Talk to him. Make him see what he’s doing!”

  “I think he sees very well what he’s doing,” I said.

  “So,” said Surah, again with that lift of the chin, “I see now how it is. All of you, against us.”

  With this tears appeared in her eyes.

  On Lo Yadua the effect of Surah’s tears was considerable. He himself being so inhibited in the tear ducts, he was inclined to attribute to tears an excessive weight of meaning. For him they were not just some salty water from the eyes, not simply a physiological expression of some kind of sadness, but already in themselves a whole classical tragedy; and directly you could see all his fervor and lust for truth wash away and sink, as he took off his cap and held it in both hands.

  By contrast Frieda responded to these cunning tears of Surah’s with a cold fury. What was remarkable here was not the fury itself, but the fact that Frieda was showing it so openly in the eyes, just like an ordinary person, which was for me very welcome, as I too was feeling such a fury.

  “Why do you cry, Surah?” said Lo Yadua.

  “Why do I cry,” said Surah, echoing her son ironically.

  “Yes, this is what I ask. I don’t understand. Can’t you see that I must go to Rubin and be done with the lies?”

  “No. What is this Rubin to you that you need to go to him and make a confession?”

  “Rubin is our highest executive here. For me, if I tell Rubin, it’s as if I tell the whole kibbutz.”

  “To tell the whole kibbutze is a mistake and will just bring shame on you.”

  “But why? Am I supposed to be ashamed that I was born?”

  “You don’t know people, what they can do to you.”

  “Tell me then. What can they do?”

  “Do you hear this, Anchel? Do you hear how he asks questions like a child?”

  “I’m not ashamed of this either,” said Lo Yadua. “Much can be learned in this way.”

  “But now you’re thirty years old, Lo Yadua. It’s time you stop asking questions like a child, and ask instead like a man!”

  “And how does a man ask questions, Surah?”

  “A man doesn’t ask questions, he gives answers!”

  “But you just said …”

  “I said, I said! Why do you torture me with every little word?”

  The Name of Action

  For a moment Lo Yadua studied the carpet, a worn but spotless Persian carpet that the Levis had bought twenty-five years ago in Bologna.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll give up this hope that you go with me to Rubin.”

  “Yes?” said Surah.

  “Also I’ll give up the idea to go even on my own.”

  “Thank God!”

  “I don’t say I’ll never go. But this minute I won’t. When you leave Israel, then I’ll go. For my own peace of mind. Then there can be no chance of humiliation for you, because you’ll be far away.”

  “So you still intend to confess to Rubin?”

  “But not while you’re here, Surah. This I do out of respect for your fears, even though I think they’re mistaken.”

  “And what do you intend to do about the Christophers?”

  “This I have already said. Don’t make a face, Surah. Believe me, if I could do what you ask, I would.”

  “So! I see you’ve heard nothing of what I’ve said to you. Halfway around the world we came to ask one little favor, and you won’t give us even that. Where does this come from, Lo Yadua, this stubbornness? Is it from a resentment that we sent you away?”

  “Resentment has nothing to do with this matter of the Christophers.”

  “But you do have resentment, Lo Yadua. I can see it. Since the moment we arrived, I saw you were teeming with terrible resentment against me and your father.”

  Well now, I thought, here he’ll explode like a bomb. But this was not to be, on account of still he was so deeply invested in the hope of having some kind of reasonable engagement. How pathetic such a hope is will be easy to see from the outside, from where you and I sit, Mister Midwood, but for Lo Yadua it was another matter altogether.

  “Listen, Surah,” he said, “I do have resentment that you sent me away. This is only natural. But it has nothing to do with this business of the Christophers. Why do you roll your eyes again? Listen to me! When you return to America, you and Anchel go to the Christophers and tell them the truth, that you have a son. I’ll give you a photograph. Take it and show it to them. Tell them, ‘This is our son, Lo Yadua. When he was a little boy, we sent him away. We were young, confused, afraid of what he might suffer as a result of gossip, cruelties from school-mates. Whether we did right or wrong we don’t know. All we know is that he has grown up into something that looks like a man, that he has a productive life, and that he forgives us.’ I don’t say you should tell all of America your secret; but your close friends, them you could tell, and they’ll thank you.”

  “But you never even met the Christophers, Lo Yadua, so how can you say how they’ll react?”

  “If they’re good friends, they’ll react just as I say. And if they’re not good friends, they’ll react in a way that’s hurtful to you; and then you can tell them to go to the Devil, because such friends you don’t want in the first place.”

  “Everything in your mind is so simple. Black and white. If this, then that. If that, then this. But life is not like your mind, Lo Yadua. Not so simple!”

  Maternal Pride

  Now there came a peculiar eerie sound in the room. At first I thought that this sound was originating from under the floor and I looked at the carpet; but then immediately I felt foolish, realizing that the sound was Frieda, muttering something at the table-cloth.

  “Frieda darling, what’s wrong?” said Cesare, with an overly tender feeling-tone, as if maybe to bring her back from some fantasy that he supposed she was retreating into.

  As it turned out, he needn’t have troubled himself with such worries, for in a moment we were all to discover that fantasy was not what Frieda was here going into, but just the opposite. All the same his voice it did bring her out of the solipsistic muttering, and now she looked up and fixed her eyes on Surah.

  “You need to listen to your son,” she said gently. “He is saying something that could help you.”

  “You can’t make such a judgment, Frieda,” said Surah. “You know nothing about our life in America.”

  “All right, Surah, but I do know something about people,” said Frieda and she rose from the table and went and lifted one of Lo Yadua’s hands in both of hers, with a gesture that intimated to me, somehow, that she was wanting to lift not just his hand but his whole body.

  Here she had a nice sympathetic point to make; namely, that since to produce a child Surah like all mothers had to go through a painful labor, she should at least take some credit for him and enjoy whatever honor there was to enjoy. But all Surah apparently heard here was the word “labor,” and at once she began to recollect, flinging at us every little banal detail, from the taxi to the hospital. And this we let her do without interruption.

  “Then came the nursing,” she said.

  “And this too was difficult?” said Lo Yadua with intense curiosity, releasing himself carefully from Frieda’s hands.

  “No milk would come. But the doctor said I should keep trying and it would.”

  “And did it?”

  “Yes, but so little that I was afraid you might starve to death. So finally your father bought a nursing bottle. By that time, though, the breasts were so tender and painful that for a month I had to treat them with Vaseline, also goosefat, and wrap them in bandages.

  “Then one day the doctor came to check up. And right away he began yelling at me. ‘What are you doing with bandages and bottles!’ ‘I couldn’t nurse anymore,’ I told him. ‘It hurt! And the baby was starvi
ng.’ ‘You gave up too soon,’ he told me. ‘You’re going to make a little weakling with this bottle!’ When he said this, I was terrified, full of guilt, and I looked at your father, and he was staring at me in that angry way that he can do, so I thought, ‘Oh, my God, now he too is angry, that I’m making our son a weakling with a bottle!’ But I was wrong. That’s not what he was angry about. Right, Anchel?”

  “Right, Surah darling,” said Anchel.

  “And this I learned right away. Because at once your father stands up and he says to the doctor, ‘Get out of my house! Who asked you to come here?’ And he grabs the doctor by the arm and pulls him to the door and pushes him into the street! Well, that’s your father, brave and strong. You have to remember too that he was only seventeen at the time, and I only sixteen. Children we were, just children, but we stood up to the doctor, and to everyone else. Family, friends, neighbors, everybody! Do you know what kind of loneliness that is?”

  “I can imagine.”

  “How can you imagine? Here you have such a cozy life, everybody working together, eating together, and no landlord coming to ask for the rent every month! For us it is different. Since you were born, your father and I have nobody. Only two friends. And now, on account of your stubbornness, we’re going to lose even them.”

  “But there’s no need for you to lose them,” said Lo Yadua.

  “He’s right,” said Cesare. “Besides, why do you have to be lonely in the first place? Why can’t you have more friends? Why can’t you have family?”

  “You don’t know what we’re up against with people,” said Surah.

  “People have nothing to do with this. It’s your own shame that keeps you in such a loneliness.”

  “That’s easy for you to say, Cesare, you who have a normal marriage, everything so simple, so neat, in a place where everybody worships you for every little stone you put in a wall.”

  “Is that what you think, Surah? That everybody worships me here?”

  “I saw it in their eyes! All your friends in the dining hall, they looked at you as if you were some kind of god! You don’t have family and friends telling you that you are criminals. The day I brought my baby home from the hospital, my father he spat on the doorstep and said he would never again visit our house! Do you know what that means, when a father does that to you?”