Foiglman

By AHARON MEGGED

 

This is the first chapter from the Koret Book Award-Winning novel, FOIGLMAN. Aharon Megged tells the story of an Israeli historian and his complicated friendship with a Yiddish poet.

 

CHAPTER ONE
I am not a young man. I shall be sixty-one in August. Nine months have passed since the death of my wife Nora, and five since the death of the poet Shmuel Foiglman. It’s as if I’m being corroded by sorrow. It is a kind of slow, incessant burning. I’m neglecting my work: three weekly lectures on Thursdays, and my research on the Petliura pogroms, which I carry out without any enthusiasm. I am not sure I will complete this research. I even have doubts if any good will come of it. Foiglman’s funeral haunts me like a bad dream.

When I was notified about his death, I told myself: I’m not going to his funeral. No way. I can’t.

Yet half an hour before the appointed time, I left home and went there.

About thirty or forty people had gathered in front of the funeral home.

His son, his daughter, his brother and his family, a large group of Yiddish writers, several men and women apparently from his hometown. Many of them came to shake my hand, as if I were related to him or was his closest friend. As if it were my personal bereavement. Meanwhile, all the time, I felt a kind of heartburn, an inner burning, and could not utter a word.

Nora’s suicide is crying out inside of me, and time cannot silence that cry.

I turned aside and leaned against the wall of the yard fearing that I might collapse. A kind of hushed commotion stirred up the little crowd of Yiddish writers, as if they were engaged in some clandestine affair, as if there were some last-minute arrangements to be made before a trip in some pre-war railway station in Poland. Then a certain poet, whose name escapes me, mounted the podium before the coffin. He had sunken cheeks, a pointed thin-skinned nose, and protruding blue veins on his temples. He delivered a eulogy in Yiddish about the departing member of this united yet quarrelsome family whose ranks are gradually shrinking. He spoke heatedly, with an enthusiasm that sounded like anger. Then a loud cry suddenly burst out of his heart, half in Yiddish, half in Hebrew, “Geshtorben? Neyn! Geharget!* Yea, for Thy sake are we killed all the day long!”—a sort of protest, an accusation, which he hurled to the four winds of the town, the whole country; it hovered above like a wounded bird in the hot afternoon air. And it seemed to me that this man, who only a few minutes earlier, silently, with a bowed head, had shaken my hand as a brother-mourner, was now aiming his outcry at me! At me!

Then the son, Irving, who had come from England for the funeral, said Kaddish, the mourner’s prayer. Kaddish. He read from the prayer book slowly, stumbling over the words, bringing the pocket-sized book closer to his glasses, then away from them to decipher the small print; he pronounced the verses in an estranged tone while his sister, who had come from France, stood at his side with a handkerchief clutched to her nose. They stood next to each other—he, tall, skinny, in impeccable suit and tie, and she, chubby, broad-faced, with unkempt yellowish hair that made her look frightened. In her stature and blue eyes, she resembled her father.

When the mourners got on the bus to go to the cemetery, I could have slipped away unnoticed in the street. Many did just that. But my legs would not obey my impulse. When I stood on the step, most seats on the bus had already been taken, and again I felt the urge to turn back and leave. It was like finding myself in some East European Jewish quarter whose breaths, smells and whispers would be repulsive to me. Yes, I know, it’s a despicable feeling. And the embarrassment: standing like that on the doorstep with your eyes roaming around trying to decide where to sit, next to whom, who will be your neighbor for the next half hour; while all you want, if indeed you are destined to be cooped up in this fold, is to be by yourself, away from the others, not to be bothered.

I shouldn’t have gone to that funeral. It was like a desecration of Nora’s memory. Morris Goldman, who was sitting in one of the back seats, motioned to me to come and sit with him. He patted the seat next to him, and when the bus started on its way, he said to me softly, “How do you explain this, Professor?”—he always addressed me as “Professor” the few times we had met, and I seemed to discern a note of irony there, as if he were saying: You, who study the history of our people, who are so versed in our heritage, who can fathom the mysteries of various phenomena—“How do you explain this, Professor, that not even one representative of the Hebrew Writers’ Union, or the Journalists’ Association, or the Municipality’s Department of Culture, or even the publishing house that put out his book, has showed up at his funeral?”

I said nothing. I looked around at the passengers trying to find Zelniker, the translator, but he, too, was not there. To avoid an argument, I said dryly, “I have no explanation.” Morris Goldman—in a light suit, powdery face and thin white hair meticulously brushed back, that made him look like a respectable businessman, had been the owner of a Jewish publishing house in Uruguay before coming to Israel in the sixties. Here he had a travel agency, but out of a smoldering love for Yiddish literature, he financed various publications of its writers’ union and, it was rumored, he also secretly supported some impecunious individuals.

“You have no explanation,” he looked at me with a bitter smile on his thin, pale lips. For a moment I was seized with indignation; was I responsible for the whole “Hebrew” state, for all its institutions and organizations?! Am I to be held accountable for all the accusations brought against it! I restrained myself and said, “People don’t come to other funerals, either.”

Goldman continued to look at me. “Yes, you’re right. The dead increase and the mourners decrease.”

A fog clouded my eyes, and again I felt a pressure on my heart. I was reminded of Nora’s funeral. Many, many people attended her funeral. More than a hundred. Perhaps two hundred. The old settlers of Rehovot, who knew our families, employees of the Biological Institute, my colleagues from the University, who came from Tel Aviv, her girlfriends who had studied with her in Jerusalem. They dispersed like a flock of sheep around the tombstones of the Old Cemetery. Many cried bitterly when the grave was sealed over her, and Yoav—in his officer’s uniform—who has been to so many funerals of his friends and subordinates, and whose harsh combat experience should have hardened and steeled him, covered his face with his hands as the sobs gushed out of him, like coughing. It infected the others who wiped the tears from their faces, as if the sorrow of seeing such a robust man break down and weep like a child was greater than the sorrow of death itself.

“To be buried next to my father and mother,” those were the only words she wrote on a note before taking her life. For months afterward, days and nights, these words haunted me and lacerated my heart; again and again I turned them over in my mind, puzzling over what she wanted to convey to me: was it a message telling me that she wished to be separated from me in the next world, too, to be gathered only to her fathers, as it were? I was tormented by the question. Why only these few words, and not one word addressed to me, or to our son? Why shroud everything in mystery?

We got off the bus and mingled in the big Jewish crowd gathered in the forecourt in front of the gate. Family by family, group by group, they made their way to the mortuary, from which they emerged and parted along seven paths. Something weird hung in the air. Perhaps it was the desperate wails of a woman in a red shawl that trailed from her head to her arms, who was supported on both sides by two strong young men, apparently her sons. Perhaps it was shreds of howling that the wind wafted from afar, from the vast desert of tombstones stretching as far as the eye could see. A busy, nervous, traffic of coming and going, gathering and dispersing, filled the square, as if it were a marketplace of the dead. And in that motley crowd—a medley of faces, clothes, and headgears probably unseen at funerals anywhere in the world, where a respectful, somber, somewhat ceremonial silence invests the mourners with a uniform aspect. Our outlandish group was moving to and fro, trying not to lose sight of each other, waiting, not sure for what. Like a railway terminal in a big city, where a loudspeaker announces the arrival and departure of trains, the announcer now called out the names of the departed being carried on their last journey.

Then something embarrassing, disgraceful, grotesque happened: a name ending in “man” reverberated in the air, and someone from our group pulled my sleeve and said, “Now! Let’s go!” We whispered to each other and hastened to gather behind the coffin, which was being carried from the mortuary by the people from the burial society. We had barely made a few steps toward the cemetery when we found ourselves surrounded by people we didn’t know, dressed in overalls, in rustic clothes, two or three in army uniform, some of whom were hastily approaching the coffin; and among us, right in front of me, some dressed in black, including one woman who keened loudly in a language that sounded like Rumanian to me. Even before reaching the first tombstones, we realized our mistake and, ashamed and embarrassed, we returned to our starting point.

When Shmuel Foiglman’s name was called out loud and clear, my heart leaped. I saw him, alive, before me, as I had seen him the last time at his apartment door when he told me, his face all flushed with confidential optimism, “There is an alternative, indeed there is! We’ll talk about it some other time. But there is!”

It was a long trek to the plot, along rows of barren tombstones. The six men who took turns carrying the coffin looked as if they were seizing the horns of the altar. Behind them walked the daughter, Rachel, her arms joined with her aunts’ and cousins,’ followed by Shmuel’s brother, Katriel, and his two daughters, then Irving, walking with measured steps, his head held high, and behind him and around him, the rest of the mourners. About half way, when I realized the distance between myself and the others had widened, I quickened my steps and caught up with him, to walk along with him. When he noticed me, his face lit up in surprise, and he whispered in English, “Thank you for coming.”

“What about your mother?” I asked.

“She’s in Australia. Couldn’t make it in time.” His faint smile seemed to say: just as well. Then he added that she had been giving performances there for two months. After many attempts to reach her by phone, his sister finally tracked her down in Melbourne, but then it turned out that the earliest flight would get her here in three days. The funeral could not be delayed. “She has been distant from him for years,” he said with half a smile. I felt a sense of affinity, of brotherhood toward him, welling up inside me, as if the two of us, marching side by side, were the only outsiders in this group of mourners. The plot was at the edge of the cemetery, and beyond it stretched the yellow sands.

It was hot. People wiped the sweat from their faces and necks with large handkerchiefs. Irving stood still, his head bowed, his hands clasped, watching the skillful work of the lowering of the body into the grave and the removal of the boards. The other mourners tossed earth in, passing the spades to each other, eager to perform the sacred duty; they shoveled the earth diligently, like expert sextons, with sweat dripping from their faces. The cantor chanted the prayer for the dead, and then, just as one of the mourners—Foiglman’s neighbor—was about to deliver a eulogy on behalf of the tenants in his house, someone grabbed my arm—a short, thin man with a long nose—and took me aside, among the tombstones. From a tattered leather briefcase, he took out a thin volume and handed it to me.

“I was going to mail this to you, but seeing that you’re here….” he said, one leg poised on a tombstone. On the cover of the book, which had a dark human shadow cutting across it diagonally, was written: “Lang is di Veg—Lider—I.I. Segalovich.”

I thanked him faintly, stifling a sigh, and he—with an embittered look in his narrow eyes, whose pupils seemed to pierce his interlocutor—stretched his hand toward the book and said, “If you have any comments after reading, I shall be delighted to hear them.”

But this is exactly how the whole affair with Foiglman started, I said to myself, standing among the tombstones, five paces from Shmuel Foiglman’s freshly dug grave, the affair that brought calamity on my life! It all started with a book, with one book of poetry! And as soon as the ceremony was over, when the wooden marker had been posted on the grave, I fled from there. I hastened my steps toward the main gate, leaving the group far behind me. When I reached the road, I hailed a cab and returned to the city.

But in spite of all this, in spite of all this, I say. As if there is some kind of determinism that governs the behavior of man—that ‘biological creature,’ as Nora used to say with a dash of irony—so that he cannot break away from predetermined patterns dictated by his dna. Because, for all my determination to stay away, not to get sucked in, to flee—the next evening I went to pay my condolences.

There were about a dozen people seated on the sofa and chairs around the room, which was quite familiar to me. Rachel and Foiglman’s sister-in-law were serving tea and cakes. While still on the threshold, I asked Rachel about Irving, and she said, “He’s in the next room, keeping to himself. I’ll tell him you’re here.”

“No, leave him alone, he must be tired of seeing people,” I stopped her. “We’ll have a chance to talk before he leaves.” I entered the room and sat down on an empty chair next to Katriel, Shmuel’s twin brother. “He asked about you. Quite often,” he put his hand on my shoulder. “I didn’t want to bother you. I knew you were very busy, and besides … you have troubles of your own…”

I apologized and said that I did not know that his brother was sick until he, Katriel, called me, and I had no idea it was so serious. Since I had such a heavy workload at the end of the semester, I’d kept putting off visiting him at the hospital. “Yes, it all happened very fast. The end came very fast,” he said, and added that at first the doctors thought it was a common intestinal problem, and he himself made light of it. Then, when he started losing weight, and within one month lost twenty-six pounds, they discovered the malignant tumor in his intestines. It was operated on, and he felt better and seemed to regain his health. He wrote, made several trips to Jerusalem, had great plans which he “kept under his hat,” was full of optimism, as was his nature. Only three weeks before the end did the doctors discover that the cancer had spread to the liver and the gall bladder, and that it was hopeless.

“I didn’t know about it, I had no idea…” I said, “In the last few months we somehow lost contact…”

“Yes, I know,” he said ruefully, and added in Yiddish, “Er hot aykh shtark lib gehat!”*

I shuddered from head to toe. I seemed to hear Shmuel’s own voice, his turn of phrase. “Lib gehat.”* Yes, this is how he used to express himself, with such embarrassing frankness, and to use the verb “love”—always in Yiddish—when talking to me.

The twins were not alike in all things. Although both had stocky, peasant-like bodies, wide faces and bluish eyes, Shmuel’s hair was all white while his brother’s had only begun to turn gray. The expression in their eyes was different, too: Shmuel’s was a bright, open, almost childlike expression, while this one’s was humble, submissive, reserved. But now there was the voice! It was the same voice: thick, warm, a little moist, coming from deep down in the chest. The kind of voice that seemed to achieve its full spiritual quality only when speaking Yiddish.

“You know…” Katriel started saying in Hebrew, but at that moment Rachel sat on his other side and he put his hand on her shoulder and continued in Yiddish, “It reminds me of that well-known story about Death coming upon a man in the marketplace and telling him: I’ll see you in Samarkand. This is how it was with my brother. He lurked and stayed in wait for him, for both of us, all the time we were there, sickle in hand, but he didn’t raise it, he only whispered, ‘I’ll see you in Samarkand. It’s been almost forty years—and it’s here, in Israel of all places…”

We were silent. The other people in the room chatted with one other, walked around, helped themselves to fruit and pastries from the bowls on the table. Snatches of conversation reached my ears, something about a recently published book, a television interview. Rachel said, her face flushed, “When I sat by his bed at the hospital, and he could barely talk, he said to me, ‘I’m telling you, it all started there! It’s them!’ And he told me that when the Americans were approaching Kungskirchen and the German guards fled, all the survivors broke into the camp kitchen and grabbed everything they could find there. They gorged themselves on raw potatoes, beets and canned meat. Dozens died on the spot as a result of this overindulgence. He was seized by terrible cramps and was taken to hospital. It was dysentery, and he recovered. But all those years he knew the disease had not left him; the snake was lodged in his belly and would one day rear its head. And then he said: ‘I mustn’t complain. I received a gift of forty years. I don’t deserve it.’” And she dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief.

Rachel, the faithful daughter. She had been born in Paris, but had no trace of Parisian chic in her. She neglected her appearance, her clothes; she used no make-up, made no attempt to refine the peach-like face and the puffed lips, or to pluck the thick, blond eyebrows. Whenever Foiglman spoke about her, tears would come to his eyes. “A disaster!” he would say, “A disaster!” and he would relate her tale of woe; she married a Jewish boy from Algeria, a shiftless good-for-nothing, who deceived and bamboozled her, extracted money from them, her parents, under false pretences, and finally deserted her and disappeared. She was left alone, with a little daughter and a small boutique in Orleans.

Rachel got up, and I followed her. When I reached the door, I said I’d pop into the next room to say hello to Irving.

Irving was seated deeply in an armchair, his limbs crumpled, an open book in his hand. When I came in he raised his eyes to me, as if he did not recognize me, or as if he were still wrapped in his reading reverie. “I see I’m disturbing you,” I said, and he got up, displaying his customary civility—even here, inside the house, he wore a tie, and a white striped shirt over his narrow chest—and apologized: “I…I saw no point in sitting there…I can speak only a broken Yiddish, and they don’t speak any English, or French…” and he asked me to sit down. I turned the cover of the book he was holding toward me to see its title, and he grinned: “I didn’t know my dad was interested in electronics…interesting…”

I myself was surprised. It was a French book by one Bourjon about the invention and development of laser beams. I glanced at the books Foiglman had brought with him from Paris. Most of them were in Yiddish, a few were in Hebrew; in French he had Verlaine, Baudelaire, Apollinaire, St. John Perse, as well as Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu and Sartre’s Les mots. I had been in that room several times—in Foiglman’s study—but that book had escaped my notice.

“I suppose there were a lot of things you didn’t know about your father,” I said, “you lived apart…for how long?”

“Eight years, maybe more. Yes, that’s true. I was sure he was absorbed in Jewish affairs… Look here, he even made notes to himself,” and he opened the book to show me. In the margins, next to the French text inlaid with diagrams and scientific formulas, some Yiddish words were scribbled in pencil. A wave of warmth, affection, and pity came over me when I saw the tiny Hebrew letters—like a miniature reflection of their author—next to the Greek and Latin characters of the formulas. “Perhaps he was thinking of the medical use of those beams,” I speculated aloud. “Don’t you think? But he had brought the book with him from France, before he took ill…that’s strange…”

Facing me, on the wall, behind the armchair to which he now returned, hung a picture of his mother—Hinda, as she was called by her husband, Henrietta Fogel, which sounded “less Jewish” for her stage name, in the role of Berenice in Racine’s play; she was clad in a Roman toga, with long black hair cascading to her shoulders. I was struck by the resemblance between her and her son: the same oval face, the thin nose, the delicate sensuality in the nostrils, in the lips, a sort of “spiritual” sensuality. From whom did he inherit his talents, this young man who at the age of 24 had already received a doctorate in the philosophy of science at Oxford?

“A prodigy!” his father used to brag about him. And yet, whenever he spoke about him he would sigh: “He will never get married, not this one.”

“What was he looking for in this country father, that is? What made him come here in the first place?” A sad smile flickered in his eyes.

“He was looking for family,” I said.

“And did he find it?”

“No, he didn’t.” He looked at me silently, then bent down, his head bowed to his knees, and when he straightened up again, he said: “What’s going to happen here, in your land? Wars, wars… And your generals, when they crossed the Litani River, probably saw themselves as Caesar crossing the Rubicon. The die is cast!”

I told him that in my opinion the invasion into Lebanon was indeed a sin, but since the army was already crossing the Litani on its way back, it was a kind of repentance. The look he darted at me showed he expected another response. “Your original sin…is perhaps the State itself…whatever followed from there…” He paused for a moment and smiled, “It seems to me that you are living by nineteenth-century concepts…all this business of incursions beyond your borders…interfering in the affairs of your neighboring states…it’s anachronistic, don’t you think?”

Like many Oxford graduates, he, too, had the habit of stammering and truncating his speech in a manner that indicates not hesitancy but overconfidence. His views on Israel were familiar to me from our first meeting, two years earlier, and I had no desire to engage in an argument with him. His long fingers, twitching nervously, were interlaced over his stomach. A slight tic traversed his face from time to time. “Hubris…” he said, “Don’t you think you are guilty of hubris?”

Suddenly I felt a sharp stab in my heart as I thought of my son, Yoav, who had left with his family two months earlier to live on the other side of the globe.

As if he were fleeing from me. And not yet written a word. Only “Regards” on the margins of Shula’s letters. And again, as every time I’m reminded of it, I was devastated by the things he had said to me on the eighth day after the tragedy, when we were left alone in the house—

“There is one thing I don’t understand, Dad…why, when you found her in the morning…you didn’t right away call…it sometimes happens that…”

It utterly blows the mind! As if he were accusing me of murder!

Irving continued talking. He mentioned Sparta. Beads of perspiration glistened on his forehead, and he whipped out an immaculate and neatly folded handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face and neck. Sparta conquered the whole Peloponnesus, Laconia and Messina, reached all the way to Persia…they fostered ideals of frugality and abnegation, subservience of private will to public benefit, courage, heroism, sacrifice… What was left of Sparta at the end of the fourth century? A small, unimportant village…

His words smacked of cold “scientific objectivity.” As if these were not matters of life and death for people to whom he, too, perhaps against his will, was related by blood. There was something feeble, slightly unwholesome in his appearance: the thin body, the round face with the large glasses, his soft hands and arms. “You…are building a fortress here. Closed and confined.”

Suddenly a smile lit his face, he bent forward, his arms hanging between his knees, grinned and said, “But you haven’t got public toilets. I was walking around the town…couldn’t find even one… A fortress without a toilet…” A thin, effeminate laughter trickled from his mouth.

I wondered about him. I wondered how such a shoot came forth out of his father’s stock.

“Your father,” I said after a short silence, “in one of our last meetings, told me that he had started compiling a “Lexicon of the Holocaust,” from A to Z, from Auschwitz to Zyklon B, as he phrased it. I have no idea which letter he managed to reach.”

He straightened up, and a glimmer of memory or of surprise lit his eye. “Yes?” he said, and then immediately—as if curbing his excitement—commented derisively, “That’s his nostalgia.”

I was flabbergasted. “Nostalgia? For the Holocaust?”

*

“It…sounds paradoxical, I know…” he stammered, “but there is such a thing… No, not longing for those days, of course…but rather for the sense of uniqueness, for having been chosen…for being singled out in the world, in human history, for being the select…”

I was overcome by sadness. A curtain of despondency suddenly enveloped everything: the room, full of his orphaned books, the figure of this dainty young man, so restive, so inwardly perturbed, the nocturnal world that stretched beyond the window. I took off my glasses and wiped them with my handkerchief. “Absurd,” I muttered.

“Otherwise…otherwise I can’t explain this…constant and continuous digging and poking.” His face became flushed with excitement, “Thirty, forty years…such pleasure in burrowing and rummaging in a pile of ashes…and what for? At any event, it’s nothing but ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’”

I got up, and he saw me to the door, but when I put my hand on the doorknob, he said, “One more minute…I wanted to ask you something…” He went to the table, picked up the book about laser beams, leafed through quickly and brought it to me open, pointing to four words in his father’s handwriting, at the edge of one of the formulas. “Could you tell me what this means? You know I don’t understand Hebrew…”

The four words, so heavily underlined they almost tore the paper, were: “So perish all thine enemies!!”

I translated it into English for him.

His eyes opened wide with amazement.

I looked back at the four words, my heart sinking, and I closed the book.

Standing on the threshold, he said, with a thin, contrite smile, like an excellent student who has erred, and now stands repentant before his master, “I’m sorry. I’m afraid I said a lot of rubbish…”

Rachel, with an imploring look, said, “I’ll see you again, won’t I? I have something to give you.”

I came once more, at the end of the shiva—the seven-day period of mourning—in the afternoon. Irving had already left for England. Tranquility pervaded the room. The square table that stood in the middle was covered with the yellow lace tablecloth with the tassels, and on it an empty, crystal vase. On the wall hung a three-tier bookcase: on its top shelf his own books, about five or six, on the middle shelf some of his colleagues’ books, and on the bottom shelf—just like the days when I used to visit him, nothing had changed—three bottles of drinks: one Napoleon cognac, one Israeli red wine, and one cherry liqueur. As soon as I had walked in, he would take down the bottle of cognac from the shelf, put it on the table with a thud, produce two glasses, pour, and importune me—actually force me!—to drink a glezele, a small glass. To decline would have been perceived as an unforgivable, major insult. Against the walls stood a couple of two-seater sofas with orange upholstery. The furniture was spare, as in a temporary lodging.

Rachel brought two glasses of tea, and cakes she had baked herself. “The world has emptied,” she said, and laid her corpulent, albino arms on the table. I asked if she had spoken with her mother, and she said, yes, her mother had been calling every day. She was broken hearted, but she was not going to return just yet. “The show must go on,” she had said. Her father would often say those words too, in times of trouble. ‘The show must go on.’ When she was a child, she said, they had often been hungry. They subsisted on the pittance her father received for articles he published here and there, and from what her mother earned in the occasional roles she performed with an itinerant theatrical company in the provinces. “But father was an optimist. The show must go on, he used to say.”

“Yes,” I agreed, “I always found him in high spirits.”

She lowered her eyes to her glass, which she rolled back and forth with both hands—she hadn’t touched her tea—and when she raised them again to me, she said, “He was not happy here. No. From his letters I sensed that something had snapped in him.” She spoke a beautiful, natural Yiddish, which she had learned from her parents. Yes, that was true. He had not been happy here, and I was well aware that the “high spirits” he displayed were a mere pretense, or a desperate attempt to cheer himself up.

“Recently we didn’t see too much of each other,” I said. “We haven’t met for several weeks.”

“Yes, I know.” And after a moment’s pause, she gave me a look full of ‘Jewish sorrow’ and said, “He wrote me about your tragedy.”

The tragedy. A small tongue of fire leapt from the ashes in my chest. The ashes that have not cooled, that will never cool. But how could she have known about the connection between the two tragedies?

I swallowed hard, and to distract us both from that unfortunate affair, I told her what her father had once told me—something that demonstrated his optimistic humor: he said that Hebrew had a severe and stern face, while Yiddish had a smiling, happy face. And he cited an example. It says in the Passover Haggadah, “With a mighty hand did God bring us forth from Egypt,” a sentence which bespeaks seriousness and gravity. However, Yiddish took this Hebrew expression ‘Hozek,’ meaning, “might,” and changed it into ‘Khoyzek,’ meaning to mock, to deride, to travesty. What is harsh in Hebrew becomes soft in Yiddish. Troubles that Hebrew tackles with pathos, Yiddish treats with humor. And there was something else he had said to me. “You speakers of Hebrew are as hard as cypress trees, whereas we are as pliable as a reed. Strong gales will break the cypress, but they only bend us. Don’t marvel then when you see Yiddish speakers walking around bent and bowed down—bent they may be, but they endure better than you!”

Tears of laughter sparkled in her eyes. She told me that when she was a child, her father—even though he was a Bundist*—insisted that she learn Hebrew, and sent her to a Hebrew day school in the afternoons. After two weeks she ran away and never returned. “I had such internal resistance!” She put her hand on her chest. “I felt like a traitor! As if I were really committing an act of treason!”

I asked her how long she intended to stay in the country, and she replied that she had to go back to France right away. She had left her five-year-old with friends, and she had already been here for three weeks. But she did not know what to do with the apartment. Should she sell it? Should she rent it out? And what about all the things in it, the books? Her mother was not going to come here from Australia. She was going straight back to their apartment in Paris. “An empty house is like a heart that has stopped beating.”

And saying that, she got up, went to the other room, and returned with a parcel. It was wrapped in crumpled brown paper and tied several times over with a frayed string. “Father asked me to give this to you.” She put the parcel on the table. “I think there are notebooks inside.”

When I came home, I opened the parcel. Yes, it contained five notebooks, gray, Israeli school-type notebooks; next to “Student’s name” he had written his name, and next to “Grade” he had written his address in Tel Aviv. I peeked inside. A journal? Philosophical ruminations? There were little asterisks between the passages. I rewrapped the notebooks in the same crumpled paper, tied the string around them, fetched a ladder, and put the parcel on the top shelf of my library, on a pile of other brown envelopes which also contained old notebooks.

On the last day of Nora’s life, in the morning, I saw her watering the geraniums in the flowerpots that hang from our front porch. She was wearing a light, bright suit, and she went from plant to plant with a little sprayer in her hand. I called to her from a distance: “Why are you watering them? Everything’s still wet from the rain?”

She did not answer and went on watering. Then, when she was done, she came closer and asked me softly, almost imploringly: “Shall I give you a lift?”

I said it was not necessary; I could take the bus to the university. “Good bye, then,” she said, and there was tremendous sorrow in her eyes. I left the house and did not return until eleven that night. In the afternoon we had a staff meeting, and in the evening I had dinner at the “Sheraton” with a Jewish-American donor from whom I solicited a donation for a research grant for one of our brightest students. When I came home, I saw that there was light in her room, but the door was closed. For several months now we had been sleeping apart—she in the bedroom and I in my study. One night, at the end of a short argument, I picked up my bedding and told her, “I need my rest, Nora.” I had hoped she would stop me, but she said nothing. I moved my bedding to the couch in the study; I felt a heaviness in my legs, my arms, and my chest. We spoke very little. The “soul-searching talks” I tried to initiate, mostly during meals, would sink very fast, like water in sand. “How will it all end?” I finally asked, when all words failed me.

“There will be an end,” she said with a rueful smile on her lips, and her eyes radiated a kind of affection, perhaps even love, toward me. I wondered where she got the strength to maintain such long silences, not to succumb to the temptation to “thrash things out.” In the mornings she would go to the institute, return in the afternoon, do her chores around the house—obligations she fulfilled meticulously—and in the evenings, when I worked at my desk, she would watch a little television; but in the middle of a program, she would get out of the armchair, turn it off and retire to her room. I seemed to hear her sighing behind the wall. So strong!—I would say to myself when I heard her vigorous steps going to her room—So strong!

Once in a while she would go out in the evening. I did not ask her where she was going.

When I woke up the following morning—earlier than usual, it was five thirty—the light was still on in her room. I walked in and found her dead. Her face serene, pure, as if she had finally found peace.

*

Last night, at one am, I called Bogota. Shula answered the phone, warmly, cheerily. How are you? How are things in Israel, how is the weather? They are fine, terrific. Sarit is okay. She misses me. Why isn’t Grandpa coming, she keeps asking. “You probably want to speak to Yoav. Just a minute.” I waited for a long moment. As if a negotiation is being conducted behind the scene. “How are you”—he sounds very restrained. And then with forced jocularity:

“How is Petliura?” And then—with Shula whispering in the background—suggesting that I come visit them over my winter vacation—which is summer there—for two or three weeks. “What for?”

“To rest. If you want, you can work here.” They would allocate me a whole floor in their villa. It’s quiet there, you only hear the birds. “I’ll send you a ticket. Don’t worry about the money.” “I’m not worried about money,” I said, and he did not insist. “What’s new apart from this?”

Apart from what?!—I wanted to shout—apart from what? What do you want me to do, Yoav? You want me to disappear, to vanish from the face of the earth?

Why do you bear me a grudge? What could I have done that I did not do?

The news of their departure had hit me like a blow. It was Shula who broke the news to me, barely two weeks before their trip, two and a half months after Nora’s death. She came with the child. They already had the tickets. They had already rented out the house in Ramat-Efal. She tried to soften the blow; they were going for only two years. In any event, if Yoav had accepted the job offer he had been given here—after thirteen years’ service in the army—they would anyhow have moved to Beer-Sheba and I wouldn’t have seen them that often. Sarit sat on my lap, hugging me, demonstrating her reluctance to be separated from me. To Colombia?—I said stunned—What is he going to do in Colombia?

The letters I received—once every few weeks—were all written by Shula. Long letters full of descriptions of the Colombian landscapes they see on the long car-trips they take. Detailed descriptions of the local customs and beliefs. They have three servants in the house—a villa situated away from the center of town, surrounded by a large garden. And Shula, who from early childhood was accustomed to doing the household chores by herself, finds it hard to adjust to this luxury. Six-year-old Sarit is driven every morning by a chauffeur to the Jewish school in town. Luckily, her teacher is an Israeli. “Warm regards from Yoav.” Not a word in his own handwriting.

I have no idea what he is doing there. It’s confidential.

He knew from the start about my falling out with his mother. It was in the air. And perhaps he overheard a few exchanges during his short visits. In the beginning, he tried to dispel the tension by cracking a joke every once in a while. Then, when the crisis intensified, he made a point of never coming by himself, but always accompanied by Shula and Sarit. We would busy ourselves with our granddaughter, chasing her around the house, playing with her. He would shun me, ostracize me. Once, before leaving, he stood at the door with Sarit in his arms and said to me, with suppressed hostility in his eyes: “I don’t understand you, Dad, I just don’t understand!”—and left.

What did you want me to do, Yoav?

The love between him and his mother! From his childhood! Gently she used to guide him with his studies, never raising her voice to him, never losing her patience when he encountered a difficulty in solving problems. She treated him like a little gentleman. On holidays she used to take him with her to the Institute, show him the marvels of biological experiments, and he came back exhilarated.

When he was twelve or thirteen, she used to put her arm around his shoulder and the two of them would walk in the street like pals, proud to be seen together. When he grew taller than she—first in a soldier’s uniform, then in an officer’s—he would put his arm around her shoulder protectively. He was proud of her good looks, of her youthful appearance, of her vitality. He would introduce her to his friends saying, “Meet my beautiful mother.”

And the ‘telepathy’ that existed between them when he was in the army! A radar on which she traced his moves. On the night of October 16, when he was injured during the crossing of the Suez Canal—he was then squadron commander in the Armored Corps—she had a nightmare. In the morning she told me, quietly but with complete certainty, “Yoav was hit.” And she stretched her spread fingers as though releasing their tension. She kept spreading and clenching them. I grabbed her forcefully by the hand and said, “We don’t know anything, calm down!” But that same evening she was by his bed at Tel-Ha’shomer Hospital. His injury was slight: some shrapnel in the shoulder and chest. She did not try to detain him when, ten days later, he returned to his unit.

What a perversion of nature that it is Shula who is now acting as mediator between us, that only through her can I now talk to him! Shula, whom Nora—unlike me—intensely disliked before they got married.

When the two of them left our house after the first introduction, Nora put her hands on her head in a desperate gesture and said with a bitter grin, “I don’t understand anything!” Shula looked so pitiable to her: a face like a bird, huge glasses with a dangling chain, swarthy complexion, skinny, tongue-tied. She sat on the couch, huddled as if cold, her answers to our questions barely audible, looking at us with suspicious eyes. She was born in Be’er Tuvia, she told us, graduated from a seminary for kindergarten teachers. No, she did not think she would teach kindergarten. Her answers were laconic, dry. Yoav put his hand on her shoulder, to protect her. “What does he see in her?”—Nora wondered. She thought he deserved someone prettier, better educated. She said she always marveled at this strange yet common phenomenon that handsome boys, beloved and desired by the prettiest of girls—a wink and they would tumble in their arms—end up marrying the dullest, most unglamorous girls.

Only after they were married did Nora start to see some merit in her: ‘practical wisdom,’ common sense, manual skill, love of nature—Shula surprised her with her familiarity with the Latin names not only of wild flowers but also of the common garden varieties—and her greatest virtue: whole-hearted love for and devotion to Yoav. After Sarit was born, she acted like an older sister toward her. Quite often, when I arrived home, I found the two of them having an animated conversation, like two contemporary friends. Once I caught snatches of their conversation about polygamous tendencies in humans and in animals…

Then, after the tragedy… There were maddening things he said to me the first day after the shiva.

The doubt! As if it were I—

Since then he almost never came by himself. The two of them would sit down, he would let Shula do the talking. He himself kept still, was impatient. Soon he would get up, rattle the car keys in his hand, “Well, we have to go.”

Or he would pop in for a few minutes—as if impelled by a sense of duty to his widowed father or, perhaps, his conscience bothered him a little—between one errand and the next, to ask if he “could do something.” He would wander from room to room, check here and there, as if the house needed supervision. He would go out into the stairway, open the electricity box to make sure the fuses were okay, turn on the television for a few seconds to see if there was ‘snow’ on the screen, walk into the bathroom and declare that the faucet was leaking and that he would replace it the next time he came. “Well, I’m in a hurry now. Take care.”

Then, without any notice he upped and left the country. To Colombia! And Yoav, how could I have anticipated this fatal entanglement?

Excerpted from FOIGLMAN by Aharon Megged. Copyright 2003. Published by the Toby Press. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.