Two Princes and a Queen

by Shmuel David

  “You’ve no idea how important this is to me. You couldn’t possibly understand.”

  No one was happier than his father as he sat among the guests during the graduation ceremony at University Stadium at Givat Ram. He listened attentively to each and every speaker, wiping away a tear when Alan was declared an honors student. He constantly snapped photos with his ancient Minolta camera. He photographed Alan on stage shaking hands with the dignitaries, then leaving the stage with his diploma. Finally, he made sure he himself was photographed while proudly holding his son’s diploma.

  When Alan accompanied his parents to the bus, his father mentioned the Minister of Education’s speech during the ceremony.

  “We must listen to the nine o’clock news tonight. They’ll probably broadcast part of the speech,” his father declared solemnly, pulling out the transistor radio that served as his constant companion. “Just in case the driver doesn’t put on the nine o’clock news for us,” he said triumphantly.

  The laughing neighbor had fallen asleep, his head tipped back, a contented expression on his face. The stewardess came by with the duty-free cart. Perhaps he’d buy a carton of cigarettes for his sister, Bracha. He couldn’t remember what brand she smoked and finally bought a carton of Kent cigarettes.

  He returned his wallet to his pocket; his mother had given it to him years ago for his birthday, together with her blessing that his wallet would always be full. Years later, when she came to visit him in New York and witnessed the opulence and grandeur of his life, she said it wasn’t quite what she’d intended. She hadn’t meant for money to blind him so much he’d forget where he came from and choose to live in a foreign country.

  “This isn’t the Zionist dream your father and I cultivated,” she said reproachfully.

  His father, on the other hand, simply admired everything he saw on glittering Fifth Avenue, and Seventh Avenue, with its illuminated restaurants and dimly lit clubs.

  “Here I am in a big city again, a real metropolis,” he said enthusiastically as they slowly explored the avenue and side streets, Alan recalling his father’s stories about his childhood in the large city of Belgrade.

  His father wasn’t bothered by Alan’s luxurious lifestyle. But he didn’t like the career change Alan had made a few years earlier. His father had come all the way to Jerusalem to see him, a four-hour journey on three buses and a train, to try to dissuade him from abandoning his PhD studies in physiology. How surprised he was to see his father suddenly appearing at the door to his laboratory, right in the middle of his physiology session for sophomore students.

  “And for what?” his father demanded. “This modern computer stuff? Another passing fad like my transistor radio? Is this what you’re throwing away an academic career for…?”

  Alan tried to explain he’d been offered better conditions and a much higher salary.

  “You don’t realize how important this is,” his father continued angrily. “I never had the opportunity you’ve had to study and advance at university. You’re throwing away the chance of a lifetime!”

  That sentence echoed in his mind for a long time. Just like the story his father had told him about the beautiful villa on the hill in Dedinje, Belgrade. He’d seen the large house with its spacious garden in an 8-mm film Grandfather Emil had shot; an avid photographer, he was up-to-date with all the innovations in the field during the 1920s and early 1930s. The photographs of the large house in Belgrade ran through his mind as he thought of his father’s missed career when he left everything behind to go to Israel. A distinguished student and literary man, fluent in several languages, he was a man who appreciated literature and poetry. All his teachers predicted a bright future for him. But then, in 1939, he’d found himself on a boat, on his way to Israel to fulfill the Zionist agricultural dream of cultivating the land of Zion.

  Half the flight was behind him. Alan thought about his missed work opportunity, but realized his father had missed far more opportunities than he had.

  As a child, he saw his father’s inadequacy, witnessed how people took advantage of his innocence and honesty. Dishonest merchants would try to swindle him, divert his attention while he was weighing poultry or vegetables. His mother was the vigilant one, discovering deceptions right under his father’s nose and trying to correct them at the last moment. All the moshav officials and heads of committees with their promises of help failed to do so. They all spoke of assisting the hard-working farmers but ended up making the situation much worse.

  Alan found it hard to see his father’s weakness. He wanted to help but was powerless to do so, deciding instead to try his luck out in the wide world, embark on an independent career, and leave everything behind. He visited rarely, only coming when something happened. Like now.

  Were these his father’s final hours? Would he get there too late? But surely his condition might also improve, stabilize for months, even years. So why had he been in such a hurry, then? Why had he been so eager to sacrifice his career?

  The pressure in his ears indicated the plane was dropping in altitude. The saccharine voice of the stewardess requesting them to “please fasten your seatbelts” brought him back to reality. The captain announced that the temperature in Tel Aviv was ninety-one degrees, the skies were clear, and a light easterly breeze was blowing.

  * * *

  1Ruth Klüger Eliav was a Jewish Zionist activist who helped with Aliyah Bet and did much to assist in the saving of European Jews between 1938 and 1941. Her autobiography, The Last Escape, is the turbulent story of her life, which includes many details about the period, as well as details related to the Kladovo-Sabac Affair.

  2Mossad – here throughout the whole book, the word Mossad stands for The Mossad le-Aliya Bet which was an arm of the Haganah organization to organize for the Yishuv leadership all the illegal immigration to Palestine (which was illegal under British Mandate laws).

  Haifa, November 1998

  Bracha was waiting for him at the airport, her face flushed with heat and tears in her eyes. She gave him a big hug.

  “I’m so happy you came,” she said, starting up the old Volvo that was as neglected as it had been five years ago, on his previous visit.

  “Father is recovering nicely from the operation, but the situation is still complicated,” she said as they exited the parking lot.

  Once again, he wondered if he hadn’t been rash to come so quickly. He looked into his sister’s tired face and saw the additional wrinkles around her eyes.

  The same avenue of eucalyptus trees still lined the road leading to Petah Tikva, as if nothing had changed since he left.

  “Well, how was your flight? Did you get any sleep?”

  “Too many thoughts to sleep.”

  “I can imagine,” she answered. “How are Rachel and the girls? I heard Nina got another award for excellence at school.”

  “Yes, she’s a good student. Not like me at all,” he said and immediately changed the subject. “Has he asked about me?”

  “He was very confused at first. Spoke in a language I didn’t recognize. Who knew he still remembered Serbo-Croatian?” she said, adding after a brief pause, “I only knew he spoke German, French, and Hungarian. Lately, he’s been studying Arabic.”.

  “Why Arabic?” asked Alan.

  “He said something about ‘a citizen of a Middle Eastern country needing to learn the most commonly spoken language in the region.’ He’s always had a remarkable gift for languages.”

  A bus shot past them, dangerously close to their vehicle.

  “Bracha, has he asked about me?” he urged again.

  “Since the stroke, he hasn’t asked about anybody. It’s impossible to understand him. He just mumbles half-sentences, some in Hebrew, and some in Serbo-Croatian. He did ask about you before the stroke, though.”

  “I thought he was mad at me for drifting away from the family.”


  “Just so you know, he really enjoyed the letters you sent him. It’s a shame you stopped writing.”

  “I stopped writing him letters because my life there is a race against the clock. I need to keep up the pace, get things done, and move on. Work, career, I don’t have a moment to myself.”

  A silence followed. Alan looked up at the sky and saw a flock of birds flying south in V formation.

  “So, what does the doctor say?”

  “Dr. Paritzker sounded optimistic after the operation. He gave me a real fright at first, said that many patients never fully recover, and if they do, it’s only for a limited time.”

  “Well, we happen to live for a limited amount of time,” Alan answered and scratched the back of his head. “So he isn’t really telling us anything new.”

  “You know, you’re starting to sound and act just like Father,” she said. “The way you moved your hand to the back of your head, he does the exact same thing when he’s bothered about something.”

  “What do you mean? We couldn’t be more different,” he answered. “I’ve always regarded him as the symbol of everything I don’t want to become…”

  “You just don’t get it, Alan.” She smiled at him. “The fact that you keep running away says it all.” She quoted the psychology textbooks from her university days. “Deep down, you’re very much like him, but you don’t want to be. So you intentionally go on doing the exact opposite of everything he’s done. He came to Israel to become a farmer because of his Zionist ideology. So what did you do? You refused to hear anything about farming, left the country, and ran away to the biggest metropolis in the world. Right?”

  “It’s got nothing to do with him. It’s just who I am,” he said.

  The first houses of the Bat Galim neighborhood could now be seen up ahead.

  “It’s subconscious, Alan. You can convince yourself all you want, but bottom line, you’re very much like him. You’re fulfilling all the dreams he had to put behind him when he decided to come here.”

  They took the elevator up to the seventh floor. The Bay of Haifa in all its splendor was visible through the windows. The sight of green banana plantations, the red-tiled roofs of moshav houses along the beach wrapped in the blue of the sea, stirred up childhood memories for Alan.

  “Prepare yourself, Alan. Don’t expect to meet the father you remember. They shaved his head, and he’s hooked up to tubes. He may not even recognize you.”

  They walked down the hospital corridors between grim-faced nurses, inhaling the odors of medication and disinfectant.

  “Trauma room,” said Bracha. “Everyone here has suffered severe car accidents or heart trauma. They don’t let everyone in.”

  She turned to one of the nurses, “My brother just arrived from New York to see our father.”

  The nurse admitted them, adding, “Only for a minute. You can’t stay there too long.”

  In the room, people were lying in a blur of personal identity and form. A plastered leg suspended in the air, tubes attached to chests or heads and ventilators. The nurse led them past the beds, through groans and cries of pain, bandages and towels soaked with blood. Alan looked at each patient, seeking his father.

  He lay at the far corner of the room and looked exactly as Bracha said he would. The gleaming surface of his shaven scalp exposed fresh sutures on the left side of the skull. Transparent tubes drained liquids into a drainage bag hanging beside him. His deep-green eyes were open, yet expressionless. He lay quietly, eyes vacant, but his face was tranquil and his skin looked youthful.

  Suddenly, he focused his eyes and tried to pull himself up in bed.

  “Pauli. So you finally remembered to come?” A stream of words sounding like curses in an unfamiliar language erupted from his mouth.

  He reached out with his hand and tried to touch his son. Alan briefly recoiled, then quickly regained his composure and bent toward him in a clumsy embrace.

  “It’s me, Father, Alan. Your son,” he tried to break through the veil clouding his father’s mind.

  “What about Inge? Where is she?” his father asked in an outburst of fluent Hebrew.

  “Who?” asked Alan, thinking perhaps he might have misheard, or his father had merely mixed up a familiar name. “Who are you talking about, Father?”

  “Inge, Inge,” he said in a weak voice, sinking back on his pillows.

  On the way to the car, Bracha said she hadn’t seen him so agitated or trying so hard to say something since the operation.

  “Who is this Inge? And Pauli, why talk about him now?”

  “It’s true. He hasn’t mentioned him since he passed away. How long has it been?”

  “Seventeen years,” Bracha prompted.

  “But who is Inge? I’ve never heard that name before.”

  “Me neither,” she said. “He’s never mentioned her. I don’t think she’s family. Perhaps someone from his distant past,” she hazarded a guess. “Lately, he’s started talking about the group.”

  “What group?”

  “The group on the transport boats on the Danube. He’s started mentioning names of people there.”

  They got into the car and began to drive.

  “You look tired, Alan. Your eyes are closing. You could do with a rest after twelve hours of flying,” she said. “Come, I’ll take you home.”

  “What home?” he asked, half-jokingly. “I didn’t know I had one here.”

  “I’ve made up a bed for you in Father’s house,” she said.

  ***

  Alan made himself some tea in the kitchen where every tile and cupboard handle was familiar to him. It was the house he’d grown up in. He opened the kitchen window and heard the rustling of eucalyptus trees swaying in the wind. They didn’t seem so threatening now. When he was a child, he was certain it was the trees themselves that produced the strong winter winds, and he dreamed of living in a place without trees. By the time he was a teenager, he loved them, and later, in America, the avenue took on the image of his native landscape, revisited in many of his dreams.

  The whistling of the kettle broke into his thoughts.

  The kitchen was almost the same. The only addition was a tiny microwave, a token of the times. He sat in the old armchair with its wide wooden handrests. His father used to sit there with a book or a newspaper. His eyes flickered over the headlines of the newspaper lying on the table. It appeared that his father had been reading when he had the stroke.

  Again, he recalled the name Inge, a name he’d never heard before. Now he couldn’t get it out of his mind.

  He got up, opened the cabinet, and took out the envelopes of old photographs from his father’s house in Belgrade. He hadn’t looked at them in years. His grandfather had taken them with his fine Kodak camera. In one of the photos were two children with shorn heads; they were tanned and smiling, about eleven or twelve years old. On the back, written in German: “Pauli and Hanne, Belgrade 1934.” Hanne was the nickname his grandmother Louisa had given his father in tribute to Goethe, her favorite poet.

  In the photo, they were standing next to a swimming pool, dressed in bathing suits. They were so thin that the hollow between shoulder and collarbone seemed too deep, although it may have been the light and camera angle.

  A large, plain-looking envelope from Migdal Insurance containing many documents. He took out a folder bound with a blue ribbon. On the first, slightly stained page appeared a charcoal portrait of his grandmother Louisa. Above it was the title:

  Diary Entries, Belgrade 1931–1939 (Hebrew Translation, 1962)

  He opened it, and began to read:

  Today, when I came home from school, Mother gave me this smart notebook as a present, my first diary. It was packed in a cardboard box and wrapped with scented paper. The pages have gold margins and that nice smell of paper. Mother said I can write interesting things that happen
to me in this diary and anything else I think about. She says I should think of this diary as a new friend. I’m already in second grade, but I’ve known how to read since I was four. Mother always tells everyone her son has a gift for writing. She probably wants me to grow up to be like one of the writers that sometimes come to lecture to her and her friends on literary evenings she holds in our house.

  Alan turned the page and went on reading, captivated by the images of life that emerged from the pages.

  Belgrade, July 1931

  Today, Father brought me lots of new stamps for my collection. Klarie helped me sort them out by subject and country. But in the afternoon, Klarie’s friend Frenzie came to visit again. I don’t like it when she comes, because Klarie tells me to go to my room, even if we’re in the middle of something important. Klarie told me to go to my room this time, too, and sort out my stamps on my own.

  Klarie is a good sister, maybe because she’s ten years older than me, not like Pauli, who’s always picking on me and taking my stuff. Klarie showed Frenzie photos Father took on Saturday at our swimming pool. They laughed, then Klarie closed her door and I went down to my room to sort out my new stamps.

  Klarie helps me with my German lessons, because she knows German almost as well as Mother. Mother is always busy, and Father isn’t home all day. In the evenings, when he comes back, Lord and I stand next to the gate and wait for him to drive his car through the gateposts. Lord always begins to bark with joy, even before we see or hear Father’s car. Almost right after that, we see Father’s broad shoulders inside the car, his head almost reaching the roof of the car, and his elbow sticking out the window. Father promised he’ll open the car top again next week, just like he did last summer. We took a trip in the Žirovnica forest and saw the Danube winding through the trees. Mother kept humming “The Blue Danube,” then she suddenly stopped and cried enthusiastically, “Look, look children. See how blue it is? Just like Strauss’s music.”