“What can be more facile than your Palestinians-good-and-Israelis-bad approach?” Mustapha asked. “We had our collaborators, our traitors and even our hotheads who made things worse by believing too much, by hating like you do. But I repeat: it’s all over. The battle has been. We have a secular, multicultural state in which all citizens have equal rights.”
Baruch laughed an uncomfortable, bitter laughter, “You’re a bit of a collaborator yourself.”
Mustapha flinched but said nothing.
“Look around you,” Baruch continued. “Do you really think that justice has been done? Who lives in the smart west Jerusalem suburbs? Jews, that’s who. Okay, there’s the odd token Arab lawyer who made money from turning a blind eye to stolen property – the stolen land that should have been given back. And who do you find in the slums of east Jerusalem where those housing estates – some unfinished at the time of the Change – are overcrowded with those who returned from equally squalid refugee camps? Arabs. All Arabs. That’s not justice. Not when the criminal still enjoys the fruits of his crimes.”
“Young man, I don’t disagree with you. That is an injustice, but there has always been injustice. It is part …”
“I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want your homilies on how the world works. I will never learn to live with injustice. I don’t want to be just another Palestinian Jew who maybe even wears a keffiyeh during his university years and hangs out in the bars of the bidonvilles, but knows that Daddy’s got him a nice position ready in the family firm or an internship at the Knesset. I want Justice. I want to shake this country up and make it look at its past, which it has forgotten now it’s so busy making money. They dropped the macho military thing and then became even more powerful through their control of the economy.”
“You don’t want justice; you want to be justice!”
On their way home, Leon and Mustapha sit for a long time in silence. “Today, I have learnt how little I knew,” Leon eventually says.
“And you’ll have to go back and see your young cousin. Stop him from getting into trouble.”
“He is already, I think. And I don’t really blame him.”
“My daughter has got her way, but I’m not sure she’ll like the new, more politicised you.”
“I think you’re right, and when we act in the present, we never think about the past we are bequeathing to our children and grandchildren. Each generation is a different country, and when we dream, we should dream sensibly.”
Outlook
Day One
I meet here with my thoughts. An appointment with introspection and the populations of my brain. When I sit down I can still hear the wind that rushes up the valley and shakes the wooden building that is my home and hermitage, and I can still smell the dampness of the books whose many words are slowly rotting on their arching planks. All is mine as far as the eye can see, for even the ramblers avoid this lonely and unexceptional place.
In this mineness, I sink into a snowstorm of words that come from afar, living words that come from the dead, meaningful words deprived of their creator’s meaning. A dialogue with experiences not experienced. Such is the soul of the writer.
I am not an original mind. By which I mean that I can never start from nothing. In the rush of empty activities that filled my youth, I often didn’t think for weeks on end. But give me a sentence and I will produce a thousand. Words spring from words like one-celled creatures relentlessly reproducing under a microscope.
I am not a discerning mind. By which I mean that I can never really decide what I choose, I can never grasp the criteria that really matter, least of all at the time when they have some relevance. I generally decide in a completely arbitrary manner. I choose because a choice must be made, but having chosen, I can be forthright in the opinions which that choice produces.
I can remember what I thought but not why I thought it. That was an emotion that has been lost in the meanders that my mind has covered since.
I cannot remember how I happened to find myself here. This is not the place I dreamt of, this is not the destination that I charted, when disdainfully I shut the door of childhood behind me and set off, as though in search of adventure.
Today I was reminded and disturbed by the past. My ex-wife rang me. I was disturbed for many reasons. Not only had I forgotten about the existence of a wife, I had forgotten the existence of the phone, hidden by the waste-paper basket and covered with old newspapers.
“It’s your ex-wife,” she announced in a proprietorial manner. She had something of mine that she could never wholly relinquish – my past.
“I was sure you were dead,” I returned with the frankness of a child. “Cold and dead.”
“Exactly what we thought of you. What have you done with yourself, you anti-social old fool. It’s time you started thinking about the practicalities of old age, it’s time you came down from your mountain, from your ivory tower, and faced the reality of survival.”
“Up here, survival is easy.”
“For the moment, perhaps.”
Usually I read, scribble and muse. Usually I leave alone time, youth and old age, and gather around the voices of my doubts. Here was a specific woman with a specific voice reminding me of my specific nature, telling me of its ageing, its impending death. One day I would no longer be able to look out of this mind, just as I would no longer be able to look out of the window and down to the stony slope of the valley. I rarely do either, but I am always comforted by the fact that I could if I wanted to.
Have I wasted my life? I cannot remember what I was supposed to do with it. At school, headmasters, teachers, priests and other figures of authority often explained the purpose of life, the duties to be carried out, the rewards, and the dignity to be derived, but I can’t remember the things themselves, only that they were and we believed them.
“I am ringing you for your own good, but if you’re going to be stubborn, be it on your own head,” said my ex-wife who was now adopting a threatening tone.
Was I responsible for my presence here? For my existence on the margin of everything? Or did they send me here? I believe, or should I say that I believed, that we are each responsible for ourselves, that we create our own nature, our own purposes, our own rules. How did I arrive at that certainty? If I followed logical steps, does it matter that I no longer remember them? Everything always slips away, our grip is extremely weak. Did I make a moral decision? Did I decide what people should be like and infer from that some kind of code? Why did I think such a thing could be important? Because society needs such individuals or because of the aesthetics of self-reliance, the image of the hero, the superman who is his own demiurge?
I transferred some of my question marks to my ex-wife: “Am I up here because I rejected society or because society rejected me? Did I perhaps reject it because I was aware that it was rejecting me? Did I drop out or was I thrown out? I hope that I just drifted out unseen.”
“Oh, all of those things, I suppose,” replied my ex-wife from her own doubts, “but it’s all forgotten now. The important thing is that you will soon need looking after.”
How threatening is society’s amnesia. What is it that has to be forgotten by a society that is only interested in me for my oncoming death, because it abhors the idea that someone could die alone, but is unconcerned if they live alone. The reality of my ex-wife’s voice which had travelled from God knows where as an electrically encoded signal, was harder than the stones outside that waited to be dislodged by the winter rains.
“Leave me in peace! The flood of time will wash us all into oblivion, but I stand on the ebb and do not feel its passing.”
“You haven’t changed. You answer in riddles, affect the intellectual to cover up for your ineptitude. Small wonder the director arranged for your dismissal while appearing to hold you in esteem and the manager spoke openly of your bizarre nature. ‘He might be good at his work, but he doesn’t care about the company.’ That’s what he used to say about you. He said
you didn’t care about anything.”
This really reminded me of something. They accused me of affecting the intellectual and not caring. These were possibly the same thing, but seen from different viewpoints. I, too, accused myself of not caring. I didn’t care about things that others cared about and needed to care about. On the other hand, I had never understood the other accusation, as what I really wanted to affect was not an intellectual, but someone just like them. I wanted to affect their normality. I was extrovert in my attempted normality. I would do normal things very purposefully, as though to say: “Look at me, I’m normal too!” But they would only look at me with shock and accuse me of playing the part of the eccentric. In short, I could never perceive things in the same proportions as other people.
“If you don’t come down, we will have to come and get you,” threatened my ex-wife. Now I remember her. She was always threatening me with some punishment. She would say things like: “If you don’t go to see the director about your promotion, I’ll have to speak to him myself”, “If I can’t buy that dress, I won’t be able to come to the office party” and “If you don’t pull yourself together, I’ll divorce you”. Yes, I remember her; she had artful expression, and smoked continuously. She smelt of stale tobacco and had the strength of an ox. If she said she would come, she would quite definitely come.
“How long will you give me?”
“A week.”
“Is that all?”
“How long do you need?”
“Long enough to forget this phone call.”
“You were always such a sweet man. Forever rejecting those who try to help you. Unfortunately somebody has to be responsible. Get your things ready, we will be there in a week.”
So I have a week in which to recover my amnesia, to shrink the universe to my circle of stones.
Day Two
I am free to work, to plough the fields of my imagination, to sow the seeds of future thoughts. I remember, too, how the academics enclosed my mind, took the common land for private use, and said: ‘You cannot go there! Think this way and survive, or go and beg in the restricted corners of your restricted time.’ The literary landlords were so leisurely in their reply to the queries of this depleted earth, while I laboured in a factory of words produced in standard sizes, and only the friendship of fellow toilers filled the day with a sense of living.
But now the day is free, and frightens with the quickening pace of time. I realise my emptiness and the empty circle of my dreams. They will come for the skeleton of my soul, and the empty land will lose even my loneliness.
Good is a laborious task, a stone tower against the chaos of our warring wants. Or is that the state? – that holds the whole machine together and bids me leave the fertile field where my youth dreamed equality. And I do still, but alone in this stony place.
Evil has a more stable base, lurks in the scattered stones of history, and scattered hopes. They always win, the men who act the powerful parts with conviction of their own true worth. Or is it only winning that makes them so? I cannot recall the cause of my disquiet.
I end the day of my first furrow, a solitary groove that scars the landscape of a meagre thought.
Day Three
Even here, much of my time goes on the little things of life that make life bearable. I make my coffee while the stove struggles with the morning chill. All I do is immediately undone. I restrict any cleaning and washing to the bare minimum required for personal comfort. But the unravelling goes on.
My wife with the wily face (was she the only one?) would make me feel an unraveller. Some people are subversive just by being – “I am here” I cried by standing in my narrow space of time. I and others. Other odd-shaped men and women whose ancestral lands were fenced in by the machinery of state, and all required the little things of life that largely drain into the swelling coffers of well-stuffed men.
The stuff of life is this, I fear. They were right, my colleagues and my wife – their simple rule has worked, and turned them into comfortable things that grow in the sheltered pasture of the hemmed-in land. Not even the lily-of-the-field has raiment so designered as they. Nor does the scythe cut deep in those parts.
Day Four
Again it rang. It rang the presence of a past that now returns.
“Who is it?” I cried.
“It’s me, Dad. My brother and I are worried about you, Dad.” She insisted on the “Dad”, claiming ties of kin like a God-given right. “We have forgiven for the past!”
I had a daughter and a son! What had I done that demanded to be forgiven, and was now recalled by that demand? I had given them the finitude of life, and left them in the well-protected pen – the well-machined and metal pen where our children are reared.
Forgive. Forgive the intensity of thought, and the carelessness with which I cast it aside. Forgive for not improving while denouncing all. Forgive the petty banter that blurs the hard reality of things that die. Forgive my sagging muscles that no longer hew.
Forgive me for not having the solidity of well-stuffed men to bear you up on the tide of life.
“What was there to forgive?” I asked.
“The desertion of our normality,” I think she said, or did she say:
“Come on Dad! What do you think? Piking off like that to your mountain without a thought for others. You didn’t come to my graduation. You didn’t come to my wedding. You’re a grandfather now, you know! But what do you care! You’ve always been so wrapped up in yourself! It’s really sick. We should just leave you to die up there. You’re a stubborn old man who never did anything for anyone, least of all for your own family!”
Close relations are always the most incomprehensible because of the simplicity of their demands – and their pervasiveness. I cannot remember why I would have ever wanted children, but certainly it was not for this. Was it the arrogance of continuing my genes? – mixed with those of the wily woman, so that with wily smiles they haunt my dreams? Was it to love and nurture them, to give a meaning to the expanse of life? Could I not love? Was that why they closed me out, and set those stakes into the ground? For what original sin did wire enclose the Eden of my early dreams, those banal ambitions of family and career?
Tiredness has pulled me early to my bed. I fell with such a force that dust has filled the room like fog. My smarting eyes can no longer focus on the cracks that randomly run patterns on the wall.
Day Five
I cannot move. A fragile stillness like settled dust settles in my soul. The light cuts the air and falls in hard-edged shadows. Outside the bright day is heralded by an activity of birds framed by the stillness of the stones, which now I can only imagine. The fiefdom of my solitude is taken from me by the paralysis of sagging sinews – and the hierarchy of the past stands outside my room and makes way for death.
All that was either forgotten or remembered will shrivel, and the desert of my life will be submerged beneath the waters of oblivion, and become a more fertile land for future growth and more rooted existences.
I cannot move, I cannot eat. All things I cared for have no hold and lose their shape, like the pages of a book exposed to sun and rain.
Day Six
The phone rings persistent and full of things to say, but I cannot reach it. Controlled from beyond the walls and confining forms, an extension of the cultivated world, it calls on my imagination and what might be said.
“Who are you?”
“I am God, the creator of all the universe, in whom you have seldom believed.”
“It was not from want of trying.”
“You tried all – and believed nothing.”
“I had my creed.”
“We organise things quite strictly here, and can make no exceptions. We have drawn a line, divided off, and sent our charges to their appointed place.”
“Then I was right not to believe in your nightmare reflection of this loveless world. But I would believe in your utopia where the excluded enter in…”
“Prepare
…”
“And who are you?”
“Your father, upon whose grave you could not weep. Your father who raised you with loving care, and lacking nothing sent you forth into the wooded world – to adventure, vigour and a strong hold on the future. Instead you wimpishly let me down – and cried on the shoulder of fate. You joined the weak – and then deserted all for this deserted place.”
“I remember the hardness of your caring hand that pushed me forward to the empty plain.”
“You remember nothing, not even how to die.”
“And who are you?”
“Your fatherland, the most betrayed of all your relations, and the one that gave you most. I gave you your language, the landscape of your thoughts; I gave you the smells and colours of your youth – and in return you have ridiculed my heroic and masterly past, the design of my machine and the hardness of my walls. Your feminine sensitivity for those beyond the firm boundaries of our brotherhood has sapped the virile juices for generations to come.”
Day Seven
God made the world in seven days, say the clerics, and others, more precise, produce a figure of prosaic enormity that belittles our short scratching on this earth. But we have ordered almost every inch, and set it around with markers of propriety – the narrow etiquette of ownership. This little world of discarded thoughts and deserted memories had seven days to die, and still insists on gasping at the dusty air, wanting to live but wanting to die before the past with satanic ritual erupts into this sacred privacy.
There is no beauty in an old man’s death; it hangs in the air, uncertain about the certainty. There is no sorrow in an old man’s death, and little tragic in the misuse of such a wealth of years.
Can the Gods Cry? Page 11