by W. E. Gutman
Only those willing to question the validity of entrenched convention ever get closer to the truth. Fallacious reasoning and arrogant convictions, licit as they might be, are more dangerous enemies of truth than outright lies. They are the prisons in which we lock ourselves to feign a clear conscience. As someone once remarked, a clear conscience is usually the sign of a very bad memory. It is this willful myopia that helps defile the truth.
Troublesome facts, computed by rational minds, are more useful than myths peddled by uninformed crusaders. When flock mentality is at play, it is the latter, alas, that captures the imagination of the majority. Inflexible convictions render men blind, arrogant and, carried to the extreme, insane.
*
Many years later, I would ask in a published commentary:
“…What if history was drawn not from verifiable facts and scrupulously recorded events, but from the opinion pages of newspapers? What if the sum total of human knowledge was distilled from unsigned editorials, bylined manifestos, letters to the editor and the blogosphere -- that soap box legions of bottom-feeders so impetuously ascend to orate, often with shameless fatuity?”
To my great disappointment, the questions, provocative as they were meant to be, elicited no response. In time, it dawned on me that this rhetorical decoy contained within it the seeds of its own definition. I had asked the obvious.
Silence is often a form of self-incrimination.
*
The good Sisters must have known that I would be a handful when they accepted me in their school. Endless pranks, habitual insubordination and a barrage of firebrand compositions, I’m sure, propelled them toward early sainthood. What they did not anticipate is that raging hormones and the premature onset of puberty will transform a brat into an enfant terrible and that harmless antics are apt to mutate into socially unacceptable mischief.
One day during recess, as a sudden downpour forced students under the convent’s vaulted ambulatory, I took a seat on one of the stone benches and invited a girl, whose budding curves I had eyed with lustful interest, to join me for a chat. As she was about to roost, I slipped a hand under her, an inquisitive middle finger poised for the occasion. Buttocks made contact with covetous hand. Startled, the girl sprang up like a jack-in-the-box, giggling. Sister Louis, who’d witnessed the scene from afar, was not amused. Red-faced and fuming, she flew toward me like some stygian specter, buoyed it seemed by the fullness of her black robes and veil. Before I had a chance to react, I felt the searing impact of her open hand upon my cheek.
She’d slapped me with such force that I nearly fell backward. The sting subsided soon enough but I was mortified. The girl glanced at me sheepishly before returning to class. She would later console me by letting herself be fingered in one of the school’s utility closets. Such encounters, during which I harvested an array of strangely enticing aromas, were followed by furious mutual masturbation. I would then carry her scent back home on my fingers, lock myself in the bathroom and masturbate some more, often to exhaustion.
Not long after that incident, my parents received a letter from Mother Superior, Marie Jeanne-d’Arc, informing them that I was now too old to continue my studies in an all-girls school and that I’d have to transfer to the all-boys Collège des Frères in Jaffa. Tucked away, memories of boarding school life, drafty dormitories and rank, institutional food came back to haunt me. I spent the last few sleepless nights in a state of emotional disarray that vanished soon after I boarded the bus for the two-hour dizzying descent from the hills of Judea to the coastal plains of Sharon. Every unexpected turn in the road, every counterpoint in a life otherwise marked by inconstancy and turmoil, I’d reasoned, teaches lessons begging to be learned: A lesson about the cunning savagery of life, about the absurdity of the best-laid plans, about the frivolity of presumption. A lesson about the duty to resist, to fight back. Such concepts, I also learned, are easy to intellectualize, hard to implement.
*
On the eve of my departure, I spent the better part of the afternoon perched in my sylvan “lookout,” the highest branch of a towering, densely foliated eucalyptus tree. This is where I often retreated when I felt dispirited or in need of solitude. There was something about climbing up that tree that set my mind at ease. I was far from prying eyes, wagging tongues, inquisitive ears. I could survey things from a loftier perspective, much as I did in a recurring dream that allowed me to leap up high in the air and levitate over the rooftops without the slightest exertion. I felt enveloped, no, embraced by nature, swaying in the wind, intoxicated by the peppery odor the leaves exuded. I could gaze at the purple afternoon sky or take in, alone and unmolested, the night spectacle of an imponderable, cosmos. I was a solitary mariner aboard a ghostly Flying Dutchman and the tree was my crow’s nest. As I smoked dried eucalyptus leaves rolled in newsprint, I imagined the ground undulating beneath me like a vast and bottomless sea. Oblivious to my mother’s insistent calls to dinner, hearing nothing but the whisper of the trade winds and the lament of the albatross, I set sail for distant lands glimpsed only in my dreams.
THE FEAR OF ALL SUMS
History may be a long march but life is a short stroll on a very narrow footpath. The road from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv was littered with the mementos of war: A charred, overturned bus; a mutilated armored troop carrier resting on its side atop a desolate bluff; a tank, its turret gaping like an open wound, its tracks severed and caked with mud, its formidable cannon truncated, its flanks now etched with graffiti -- anonymous initials, cryptic verses, arrowed hearts, words of love and sorrow and peace and hope for fallen heroes and an infant nation bleeding as it took its first breath. I would travel this road many times as I went home to Jerusalem on precious few weekends and holidays. The spectacle would bring back memories of wartime Paris and Bucharest. It would also inspire lasting views on the folly of war, the fragility of life and the lunatic ambivalence of the human spirit.
*
I arrived at the Collège des Frères late in the afternoon. It had rained but the clouds had dispersed and the setting sun cast a golden glow on the old minarets. The Mediterranean spread before me, flanked on one side by the ancient port city of Jaffa, its fortress-like stone visage seemingly untouched by time, and Tel Aviv’s airy perspective of seaside hotels and modern apartment buildings on the other. Behind me, facing the sea, stood the high-walled cloister-like mission school where I would spend the next two years.
I rang the bell. The groundskeeper, a surly old man with huge hairy arms, opened the massive wooden door and let me in. I told him my name. He pointed to the main building across the courtyard and clambered back to his lodgings without uttering a word. The Brother Procurator (I would never learn his name) a tall, gaunt cleric with an angular face and a weasel-like expression, peered over his glasses, sized me up and extended a long, bony arm. We shook hands.
“Alors, Gutman, c’est vous? So, you’re Gutman?” There was more smirk than smile in his greeting. His teeth were small, pointy -- all canines -- blackened by years of chain-smoking.
“Sisters Louis and Clémence told us about you. They called you a ‘rough, stubborn diamond encrusted in granite.’ That’s a mighty daring assessment, wouldn’t you say?”
I said nothing.
“Well, never mind. Let’s see what we can do to extract and polish this precious stone,” he said with palpable sarcasm.
“Let’s hope you don’t break your pickax in the process,” I replied, looking him straight in the eyes. The shark smile faded from his lips. He stood up from behind his desk and bid me to follow. I complied, carrying the small valise in which lay, neatly folded, an assortment of clothes that my mother had monogrammed, as instructed by the school, with my initials. We climbed the stairs to the second floor. He showed me my classroom and the back row desk, near a window, to which I’d been assigned. He then took me across the hall and into the dormitory. He pointed to a bed, a sagging metal cot on which lay a lumpy mattress and a thin, coarse blanket that reeked of insec
ticide. In place of a closet, five rusty nails protruded from the wall over the bed.
“All yours,” he declared, probing the depths of my discomfiture.
“You’re too kind.”
“The others are having supper in the refectory. Might as well join them.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Suit yourself.” He spun around on his heels and exited the dorm.
We would never speak again. In due time, Brother Procurator, who also taught algebra, geometry, trigonometry and calculus -- subjects that put me in a cataleptic trance -- would conclude that whatever buried gift I possessed was too deeply embedded and not worth mining. Having sized me up in math class, he was quite willing to let me spend the next two years looking out the window, daydreaming, doodling and writing poetry as he droned on about algorithms, quadratic equations and vertical asymptotes. It would take me thirty years to discover the poetry and magic of mathematics. By then, my reputation as a mathematically challenged individual had become legend. I would make no attempt to alter this perception. I can still be seen using my fingers to make simple computations, but I’m also exploring the hypnotic realm of quantum physics and discovering mind-boggling treasures along the way. I could not possibly have imagined that such transformation was possible as I plodded through the school’s barren math curriculum. Intimidated by its cold, cryptic character, stumped by its glacial logic, I would be slowly drowning in a viscous sea of incomprehension and self-doubt that very nearly caused me to drop out of school.
*
Tired, confused, annoyed, I lay down. I’d been consigned, yet again, to involuntary captivity in a boarding school, this most alien, most hostile setting for a child. In the process, I’d lost the little privacy my former life afforded. Worse, as a social-animal-in-training, wary of hasty friendships, indifferent to my dorm-mates, I now had to learn to adjust to the practicalities of mutual forbearance.
Cruising on the ceiling was an enormous cockroach. I flung a shoe at it but missed. I closed my eyes and let the thoughts submerge me. I was 15, gushing with energy, brimming with mythical visions of life on the loose. But here I was, confined against my will, forced to labor for snippets of knowledge that would open up a near-lifetime of low-paying jobs.
*
My two years at the Collège des Frères in Jaffa are a near blur, broken here and there by vivid if disjointed still images that have somehow survived the depredations of time. What emerges from the fog is a medley of memories. Among them are the haunting reminders of inner turmoil, wretched grades and relations with teachers and students marked by dissonance and rancor.
Agitation best describes my state of being at the time, a restlessness augmented by resentment and feelings of uncertainty about the future. I stood at the edge of a chasm looking down, aware that the distance between equilibrium and the dizzying void was less than a breath’s length away and mindful that every step taken retreating from the brink only brought it closer. I fought back angst and foreboding the only way I knew, by weaving fantastical scenarios involving journeys to faraway places. I made sketches of schooners and brigantines aboard which these expeditions would take place. I also drew maps, plotted convoluted itineraries across the oceans and kept a detailed log of distances covered and ports-of-call yet to be espied from the safety of an anchorage at the center of a shallow blue lagoon. Everywhere, graceful, doe-eyed maidens with long black tresses and easy virtue awaited my return. And we would feast late into the night, under a full moon, to the beat of the tom-tom. And when morning came, I would weigh anchor, unfurl the mainsail and the mizzenmast jib, catch the wind and point the bowsprit straight at the open sea.
I’d seen too many Errol Flynn and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. epics at the Semadar Cinema. Emboldened by Brother Procurator’s utter lack of interest in my person, an attitude further evidenced by his contemptuous demeanor, I embarked on these imaginary peregrinations during math classes. I owe them my sanity.
Determined to rescue whatever small nugget of genius Sisters Louis and Clémence might have seen in me, I had the good sense or the prudence to apply myself in Frère Jean’s French and social studies classes. Frère Jean was a good-natured man with a broad, projecting lower jaw, a huge aquiline nose, splayed ears, an easy smile and a weakness for metaphors. He enjoyed teaching and, as school librarian, he encouraged his students to read a book a month. Book reports and surprise written quizzes were his stock-in-trade. I did generally well, an achievement I owed as much to his amiability as to my natural skills, and which prevented abysmal math and science grades from scuttling my scholastic average.
While Brother Procurator’s disdain was non-verbal -- an occasional glance in my direction sufficed to telegraph it -- the scorn evinced by two boys, both excellent in math, mediocre in everything else, was blunt and relentless.
“X plus five equals ten. What’s the value of X? I dare you,” Kabile would grimace.
“Don’t rush him,” Chapat would intervene. “He hasn’t yet learned to count to ten. How many fingers do you have, Gutman?” We were encouraged to call each other by our patronymics.
“Enough to shove one up your smelly ass, you cocksucker.”
“Brother Procurator, Brother Procurator, Gutman spoke dirty.”
Indifferent to the origins of this confrontation, more so to justice, Brother Procurator would show me the door and I’d spend the rest of the period in the hallway, plotting my revenge or sailing the South Seas.
Kabile, a Greek Jew from Salonika had pink cheeks, hairless legs and an effeminate stride that drew conspicuous glances from the priests and the older boys. Chapat, a Bulgarian Jew from Plovdiv, was short, stocky and hirsute. He had beady eyes that peered from behind thick round glasses and conveyed a look of mocking suspicion. They would take turns, conspiring to cause embarrassment or bring discredit upon me from teacher and class alike.
I may have been a dunce in math but my tormentors’ compositions were badly written and prosaic. They spoke fractured and heavily accented French, and their knowledge of world geography -- my best subject -- was rudimentary at best. Though I would have gladly throttled them, I got even instead by writing a caustic parody that mimicked Theophrastus’ style of social satire. Much of it is untranslatable in English: full of double entendres and lewd puns that only make sense in French; something about “the Pasha taking pleasure entering Kabul from the city’s rear gate….” Frère Jean never caught on, or pretended not to, and Kabile and Chapat, loath to draw attention by claiming to be the butt of my unsparing lampoons, kept their mouths shut from then on.
The only other schoolmate I remember, this time with lingering remorse, was a shy, gentle, obese boy everyone called Mammouth. Tactlessness and stupidity, rather than malice -- I addressed him that way too -- blinded me to the pain and humiliation this despicable sobriquet must have caused him. It was when some boys got physical with him one day, pushing and shoving and pinching and tripping him as he wept softly pleading for mercy that I intervened. I sent an older boy to the hospital with a broken jaw and fractured my right fist in the process. Many years later I learned from a girl I began dating while in school, that Mammouth, now in his early twenties and in a final parry against the insensitivity of man, had shoved the barrel of a rifle in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
*
As I pored over Frère Jean’s history assignments, trying to decipher the past and filtering from it not even a telltale hint of tomorrow, my father was decanting the bitter dregs of a present that seemed without future. His clientele had dwindled to a handful of loyal but destitute patients. Most were North African immigrants who seemed in greater need of kind-hearted counsel in French than medical care. At the dinner table, talk focused on the gravity of our circumstance. Money was running out. But penury was not the only bondage my parents feared. They were also suffocating with boredom in a vacuum of social and cultural alienation. Governed by tyrannical theocrats, administered by pseudo-religious sycophants, Jerusalem was a den of intolera
nce in which religion regulated life’s every cadence and breath. Sabbath rules were rigorously enforced. Stores, cafés and movie houses were closed, vehicular traffic prohibited. Even innocent activities such as picking flowers from one’s own garden, riding a bicycle or washing windows came under hostile scrutiny. Everyone in the neighborhood took a dim view of our impious, worldly ways. In a newborn nation whose very existence hinged on uncritical compliance with elemental canons of solidarity, we were perceived as meddlesome outsiders ill-tuned to the prevailing ethos. It was time to leave the holy city and exhale its vitiated air. Hoping to revive his practice, my father moved us to Ramat-Gan, on the outskirts of modern, secular Tel Aviv. I could now sleep in my own bed and ride my bike to school every day. But the winds of change were blowing once again. Summoned by the Israeli government, my father accepted a number of delicate missions that would set the stage for yet another detour in our lives. One such mission, masterminded by Israeli intelligence and coordinated at first by a network of Freemasons, took him to Tunisia. His efforts would help kick off and hasten the massive emigration -- via France -- of most North African Jews to Israel.
*
Colette Avital (née Abramovich) was my age, a Romanian dark-eyed honey blonde with ripening curves and the gait of a girl eager to reach womanhood. The mischief in her smile and the coquetry of her body language concealed a subtle mind overshadowed only by an all-consuming ego. These traits, undergirded by the knowledge that men with a hard-on can be useful, would serve her well in the pursuit of a brilliant political career. They would prove worthless in bed where she laid bare a disconcerting lack of enthusiasm for sex. I would not be surprised to learn that her dalliances with a bevy of newsmen, high-ranking military officers, parliamentarians and diplomats were short-lived.