—
That night I was once again enveloped in a deep slumber. Every time I was in distress, it came to my assistance and swaddled me. Its contours changed over time, but its power was undiminished. Sometimes it isolated me, and I felt completely alone.
I saw Father again. This time he wasn’t writing but engraving. His back was bent, and his hand held a chisel firmly.
“Father,” I said, “you’re exerting yourself more than I do in my fitness training.”
“It’s a chisel stylus. I have to get used to it.”
“It would be better for you to exercise than to subdue the paper with a chisel.”
“That’s my fate, my dear. My fate led me to attempt the impossible and told me to persevere. You’re right. It would be better to exercise. A person who exercises knows how to breathe properly. His body is sturdy and flexible. Eventually, he will reach old age in good health.”
“The exercise is changing me, and it hurts.”
“Let it change you.” Father’s voice was full of despair.
8
Toward evening, I went to the refugee camp to look for the man who had seen his relative in me. The men were short and broad. The years in the camps made them all look the same. Now they beheld the world with indifference and a touch of irony, as if to say, Nothing can surprise us anymore. Man is a lowly creature.
But then one of them raised his head and spoke directly to me.
“A little exercise and running don’t change a person,” he called out. “Don’t get so arrogant. Your parents were with us in the camps, and they were no different from us. A little courtesy, a little modesty.” He didn’t expect me to answer him and went on his way.
I walked in the alleys of the camp. A stubborn feeling had been with me for days. If I returned here, I would easily mingle with these men. But, I kept repeating to myself, in a few months I’ll change, the war years will be erased, and I’ll be a new creature. The more I repeated those words, the more I saw their foolishness, and anguish mixed with sorrow consumed me.
I stopped and waited for the man who tried to find his relative in me. It seemed he was on his way to me. Meanwhile, another man approached and asked me what I was doing there. I didn’t conceal that I was in the training group.
He looked at me sternly. “You ran away from us.”
“I didn’t run away. I’m close by. Just a few meters.”
“And yet you ran away. Everyone who trains himself to travel to a faraway land—what is it called?—abandons us. Youth won’t save you forever.”
“I don’t intend to abandon you.”
“You have already abandoned us.” He came closer, and I thought he was going to slap my face. But he just went away.
At this hour the comrades were already gathering at the campfire. I overcame my embarrassment at having abandoned the refugees and ran back to our area.
This time Ephraim spoke about manual labor, about the need to make our hands used to working. To demonstrate this, he brought us a hoe and showed us every side of it.
“A tool with many uses,” he said, “one that every farmer is glad to have. In the next few days we’ll bring you other tools and teach you how to use them,” he promised. “By means of the tools, we are linked to the earth. The earth is the mother of all living things. It isn’t love at first sight. You have to learn to love the earth; over time you become devoted to it and seek to be nearer to it.”
It occurred to me that this was the way monks trained novices before they joined monasteries. But that thought also seemed preposterous to me because most of our training was physical. We weren’t taught how to meditate or pray, only how to speak and argue.
With words they had acquired over the past few months and a few they had brought from home, some of the fellows among us already began to express their own opinions. It was hard for me to combine words into sentences. Every time I was asked, I became deeply embarrassed.
When I went for a shower, I looked at myself in the mirror: I saw that my body had filled out, and my muscles were thicker. But would my thinking change as well? Would I no longer think like my parents? Get excited by what excited them? Sit in an armchair in the afternoon and drink in the evening light? Would I become instead a man of the soil who was forbidden to contemplate? Who just worked and brought forth bread from the earth?
Ephraim was sure that bodily changes would also bring changes to the soul. A man who worked in an orchard—who harrowed, pulled out weeds, watered, plowed, pruned, propped up a fallen trunk, ate his meal in the shadow of a tree—he was the new Jew.
At first Ephraim sounded like an army man, but the more you listened to him, the more you grasped that he wanted to plant us into the soil of the Land even now. He was a member of the Haganah and served as a scout for them; the roads and footpaths of the country were familiar to him. But more than anything, he loved the orchards.
I asked Mark for his impressions of Ephraim’s words. Mark made a dismissive gesture, as if to say, What is there to say? In any event, I have nothing to say. I felt that he was well enclosed in his fortress and that no one dared to approach the gate. I was sad for this handsome, talented fellow who could have been a faithful friend, but who shut himself off and didn’t allow anyone to get close to him.
One of the boys asked Ephraim where he had been born.
“In the Land,” he answered immediately.
Amazing, I said to myself. He didn’t say in a ghetto or in the camps or in the forests. Every one of us had been in one of those places, but not Ephraim.
9
The language drills got harder by the day. Everything was oral, without notebooks or books. According to Ephraim’s system, you had to learn the language with your senses, naturally, and the sound was especially important. As we ran, we recited the poems of Rachel, of Leah Goldberg, and of Natan Alterman. And here and there, a verse from the Bible.
“Don’t worry. Writing and reading will come later,” Ephraim assured us.
A few were already fluent in Hebrew. I tried but found it difficult. Still, I felt that the words were seeping into me and doing their secret work within my body.
Several times I promised my mother that I would guard her language with vigilance and that the bond between us would abide. Mother feared that the language of the sea would drown my mother tongue. Mother’s speech was soft and fearful. I tried to console her, but I didn’t know how.
She told me once that the division between this world and the one where she dwelled is much thinner than we imagine. “We will always be together,” she said, using an expression I hadn’t known.
I was pleased by that revelation and promised that at every opportunity I would tell her what I was experiencing. As an aside, I told her that Mark, the boy with whom I shared my tent, was a fine fellow, but it was impossible to converse with him. His soul was imprisoned in a fortress, and he seldom uttered a word.
“You must watch over him,” she said, sounding frightened.
“How can I watch over him?”
“Be by his side, just be by his side as much as possible.”
My connection to Mother wasn’t continuous. Sometimes the night exercises were so exhausting that I could barely drag my feet to the tent, and I immediately fell into a closed, dreamless sleep, with no sights or visions.
Ephraim started talking about the traits we had to acquire before going to the Land. First was to make do with little. Making do with little was the absolute opposite of living in luxury. Pioneers who lead their camp don’t need luxuries. Eat bread and salt. Lust for wanton women is unacceptable and has to be avoided. You should know that whores wander along the seashore. You mustn’t approach them and you mustn’t resort to them, even when they offer their services for free.
That evening Ephraim spoke about purity of the body—not without a hint of preaching—and about interested and disinterested love. Someone who goes to a whore contaminates not only his body but also his soul. We were chosen, and we had to insist
on cleanliness of mind. It was the first time this came up, and it had an ascetic sound.
“What are you doing, and what is it for?” Mother kept asking. She didn’t understand the word “pioneer.” Nor could I, to tell the truth, get to the bottom of its exact meaning. But since we had spoken the day before about the obligations incumbent upon the chosen ones, it occurred to me to explain to her that pioneers were the chosen of the nation.
“Is it a religious order?” she wondered.
“We don’t pray, Mother, and we don’t say blessings. We run all day and try to attach the new words to our bodies. Anyway, it’s not a religious order.”
“Is it an experiment? I hope it’s harmless,” she said, then added in a jocular tone of voice, “and is there food?”
“Plenty of it: vegetables and dairy products and Italian bread of the crispiest kind.”
“Take care of yourself, my dear,” she said and went away.
—
After six months of training—physical exercise and language drills, swimming, rowing, and, in the greatest secrecy, familiarity with two pistols—Ephraim told us that we would soon get on a truck that would take us to the port. Though our training program hadn’t been completed, the first stage was behind us, and we could do the next, advanced stages in the Land.
From now on we were in service to the nation. Speaking in Hebrew was obligatory, day and night. In the Land, we would bind speaking Hebrew to the soil. A nation without land was a wretched nation.
10
We spent the final weeks on that concealed seacoast in intense training, leaping over hurdles and climbing walls. I was sorry that we would soon be leaving that place, which had sown previously unknown words and thoughts in me. But I mainly regretted that in the Land I would be separated from the refugees who had borne me on their shoulders and brought me to Naples.
Ephraim never ceased reminding us that we had to keep apart from the refugees and not even look at them, but I felt that this expression of reserve was ingratitude and a grave sin. I wanted to say that we mustn’t be separated. We were a single body.
One of the refugees came to our training camp to remind us of that. He stood defiantly and called to Ephraim, “These boys are ours. You can’t take them away from us. They are part of our experience. Your running and your drilling words and poems won’t change them. They are flesh of our flesh.”
Ephraim didn’t respond. The man stood quietly and finally went away.
I stopped deluding myself. I knew that the day when we would be parted from the refugees was not far off.
I took advantage of every free moment—or “letup,” as they called it—and stole over to the refugees. I was increasingly drawn to that forbidden place. There were already little kiosks there and spots with awnings where people gathered.
A few days earlier I had seen a woman making a gesture with her right hand that reminded me of my aunt Bettie. I approached her. She was indeed very similar.
Aunt Bettie suffered a lot in her life, but she never uttered a discouraging or reproachful word. She always found something positive in every situation and every person. To express her heartfelt beliefs, she always spoke with encouraging hand gestures—not exaggerated, but emphatic—and this was part of her charm. Even when she went to her death, together with dozens of other women, she parted from those remaining behind with an emphatic gesture, as if to say, Don’t worry; our separation won’t be long, and soon we will meet again.
I was glad that there was a woman in the world whose features resembled Aunt Bettie’s, who used her gestures, and who shed light and warmth even in that remote place.
I wanted to say, You are very similar to my aunt Bettie. In your eyes there is the same light of the love for your fellow man.
But I didn’t. It was nearly seven, and I ran back to our area, because at that hour we went out for night training. Night training was very exhausting, but it didn’t expose us to the beating of the sun, as did our daytime training. The darkness, the coolness, and the sea breeze made crawling easier. We would get scratched and wounded, but the wounds toughened us. It was too bad the whores on the beach were forbidden to us. Some of them were tall and pretty, beguiling us at night in our dreams.
I struck up a conversation with a boy named Robert. Unlike Mark, my tent mate, he spoke without inhibition, mixing in German and Ukrainian words, and not insisting on pure Hebrew.
I noticed that Robert had about him an air of astonishment, like that of a person who discovers something new even in monotonous daily life. He did everything, as we all did. It was impossible not to like him. He had a pleasantness that the war years hadn’t snuffed out.
I asked him whether he was excited about the voyage.
“The future always bears within it some failure or defeat.”
“In the Land, we’ll be on a kibbutz,” I said.
He didn’t reply.
—
Ephraim’s chief joy was the future. The past was worthless in his eyes. When he was informed that we would be departing soon, his eyes gleamed. He was apprehensive about the other refugees, who lay in wait and sought a way to reclaim us. “It’s impossible to fight against that swarm,” he said, and then explained the meaning of the word “swarm.”
11
The truck came at midnight. Ephraim issued his final instructions to us with great excitement.
“The truck will take us to the wharf. The ship will probably be full of refugees. You must set an example and help the weak, the sick, and the wounded. On the ship, too, you must take care to speak in Hebrew. You must obey the captain’s orders and those of his officers, and make yourselves useful to them.”
We listened with pride. We were no longer boys lingering about after the war whom everyone tried to exploit and maltreat, but an auxiliary force in the nation’s service.
To our disappointment, reality was entirely different. Hundreds of refugees crowded on the wharf, surrounded by packages and cardboard boxes. No one obeyed instructions regarding the arrangements for boarding the ship and the size of the baggage. The quarrels were bitter and were accompanied by threats and shouts. Visions of the ghetto constantly appeared before our eyes. We, too, were forced to shove, but sturdy refugees pushed us aside.
Because of the disorder and quarrels, we were delayed, and the ship sailed only after two days of rioting.
The very next day a storm struck, and everyone began vomiting. No first-aid workers were at hand. Shouts of “Help! Help!” went unanswered. Everyone took care of himself. The feeling was that here, too, as in the ghetto, the strong and violent would survive.
Ephraim was very upset. All our preparations and training for the voyage were of no use. The idea that we would be a good example and help the weak and the sick was quickly disproved. We lay prostrate on the deck, vomiting. Only Ephraim stood strong during the storm. Every time one of us fainted, he hurried to take care of him.
The ship was tossed about for three days. The sea did what it wished with us. The violent refugees had no consideration for either children or old people. The officers begged in vain, “Help the weak.” Their cry fell upon deaf ears.
Abashed, we gathered around Ephraim. We hadn’t done what we were supposed to do. Ephraim didn’t demand the impossible. He asked only that we keep apart from the awkward refugees and make a corner for ourselves. We were so weak that we couldn’t even obey this small request properly.
Surprisingly, in that mass of humanity, I discovered a family friend, a man as close to us as an uncle, Dr. Max Weingarten, the Latin teacher in the secondary school. He used to come to our house from time to time to play chess with Father. I couldn’t believe my eyes and stood there, dumbstruck. I finally grasped his hand and said, “Dr. Weingarten.”
I didn’t tell him what had happened to me during the war. I told him a little bit about our physical exercises and language training, and about Ephraim’s method for teaching Hebrew. Dr. Weingarten was surprised.
“Without notebooks
or textbooks, everything orally?” he asked. For a moment, his surprise set him apart from the mass of humanity and made his face glow. “In medieval monasteries,” he told me, “they employed similar teaching methods.”
I asked him whether he had studied Hebrew in his youth. He said yes and immediately declaimed a few sentences. I was so moved that I cried out loud, “Dr. Weingarten!” I wanted to gather up all my joy at finding that precious man, but I was so weak that I couldn’t find the words to express my happiness.
But then Dr. Weingarten recovered and said, “Wait, wait. I want to tell you some things you have to know.” I didn’t know what he meant. I was so weak that I couldn’t stand up. I collapsed alongside him and said, “Once this storm is over, we can sit and talk. I want to spend time with you.” But Dr. Weingarten was afraid of the storm that was raging, or perhaps he was afraid he wouldn’t see me again. In any event, it was important for him then and there to reveal to me things that I might not have known.
“Did you know that when he was young, your father wanted to go to Berlin and study in the rabbinical seminary?” He spoke loudly, to drown out everyone’s noise and the din of the sea.
“Was he religious then?” I was surprised.
“He was seeking his way to faith.” Dr. Weingarten spoke to me with great intensity.
“Why didn’t he go?”
“Because he started to write.”
“Did he think writing would bring him to faith?”
“I guess so.”
“I didn’t know this,” I said with my last bit of strength.
I was so weak that I couldn’t absorb any more. I asked Dr. Weingarten’s pardon and dragged myself to the corner where my comrades had gathered and collapsed.
Just then the storm died down, and I fell into a deep sleep that lasted two straight days.
The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping Page 3