Life got back on track. Documenting, talking with Attorney Perl, reading his books. Everything attested to routine. Grandpa Lolek broke an appliance and asked that my friend “who fixes things cheap” repair it. Effi found a new boyfriend. Anat said she’d be busy on Purim. Grandpa Yosef asked if I could bring back the Vauxhall, which Grandpa Lolek couldn’t use anyway, because Hans might want to use it (for some time, his entire life had been dedicated to paving roads for Hans). I told him I had finished documenting most of the family stories, everything was ready, and he asked me to come over. He served me a dish of okra and banana. (Did I think Hans would like these sorts of exotic flavors?) I put down a neatly bound copy of everything I had documented. My documentary, on Grandpa Yosef’s brown wooden table.
Grandpa Yosef left the bound pages where they were and did not even reach out a curious hand. He talked about how things were going in the neighborhood. Everything was the same as usual. Gershon Klima had decided he needed a rest and had found himself a suitable place near Tel Aviv. They were thinking of renting out his house here, but weren’t sure they’d be able to. Not long ago, the Meretz party had rented the late Orgenstern’s house and set up a local branch, but they had to leave after visiting dignitaries were bitten by dogs on two separate occasions, for no apparent reason. (Grandpa Yosef and I knew it was Brandy, who had become an extreme right-winger after her death.) Mr. Pepperman had stopped getting his mail, which alarmed him. They had to have a search. At the post office they said everything was in order. In the end they found all his mail lying in a puddle and no one knew who had done it. There was also a strange affair with the poet, Asher Schwimmer. He no longer lived with his brother; the brother had passed away. They took him to a place near Nazareth, a quiet place, so he’d be happy. But he suddenly started slapping people for no reason — the staff, the doctors, the caregivers. He yelled and made accusations and hit. Here in the neighborhood, Uncle Antek was losing his hearing, he couldn’t hear at all in his right ear. The doctors were looking into it, and so was Effi. In the meantime she suggested he turn up the volume on his radio. Uncle Mendel was also losing his hearing, but he never listened to anyone anyway so it didn’t matter.
“And how’s Mr. Levertov?”
Mr. Levertov was absolutely fine. Ever since Effi had become his primary physician, he’d been truly exceptional. Like a young boy. People were envious; they wanted Effi to be their doctor too. Even Mrs. Tsanz. (And we both knew, because Effi had told us confidentially, that she was probably going to leave the clinic soon. A position had opened up for her at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem.)
The conversation naturally shifted to Grandpa Lolek. We agreed that he had to have the surgery — what was he waiting for? Grandpa Yosef asked about Yariv and how Anat was. We didn’t talk about Hermann Dunevitz. As long as we didn’t talk and didn’t ask, everything would be fine. If-we-shut-our-eyes-the-monster-would-leave. Everything was fine. Simply fine. And really, I thought, it’s no fault of hers. Everything is fine, I thought. Simply fine.
But at nights, our glaciers floated on as we slept.
Around the time Grandpa Lolek decided to leave me the lands in Gedera, I started feeling that I couldn’t, I just couldn’t. Not because of Anat, but because of Hermann Dunevitz. He had cunningly found a way to live on through me. To give himself a great-grandson, an eighth of himself, through me. Not only Hermann Dunevitz, but all the traitors, the murderers, the sadists. The people who made Hirsch wander the streets and gave Rachela Kempler that look. And Gershon Klima and Mr. Pepperman and Itcha Dinitz and Mr. Bergman and Linow Community and everyone.
In Effi’s kangaroo court, I declared, “It won’t leave me alone. You see, he’s her grandfather, and Yariv is one eighth of him. One eighth. His blood is living on through her, through Yariv, through everyone who will come in the future. Precisely what shouldn’t happen. Do you see?”
Effi bristled. “Are you listening to yourself? That’s exactly what the Nazis said. They also looked for people with one eighth Jewish blood in them. They also said it coursed through one’s blood and could not be helped. You’ve really lost your mind.”
Attorney Perl said, “You have a wife, you mustn’t do anything. Give it time. Trust me, don’t do anything.” He caressed the cover of a book, The Protocols of the Nazi Trials, Volume IV, printed in 1950. These were the protocols that should have explained, should have told us what the grandfathers did in Germany. They all kept telling me, “So what?” They told me to forget. But something stronger than “so what” had to come, it had to. I would give anything to be told how to go on, what to do. They told me, “So what?” and “Forget it,” as if they were selling shiny objects to savages. As if I were incapable of understanding on my own that Anat was not to blame and neither were the German grandchildren who come here every summer to plant forests. Every summer, so I heard, they came to plant trees. Where were all these forests? Maybe you couldn’t see them from the roads, but after a few more years of apologies, their trees would suddenly shoot up over the bald, white shoulders of the highways, and the roads would have to be paved through wooded fields. It wasn’t her fault. I wished it was, so I could grasp at something. There wasn’t even the edge of a thread, nothing to point to, to imagine, to locate the pain, to know what to heal. There was nothing to do, no way to go on. Still they disembarked on my island to sell me shiny objects. (My suffering could not be traded for simple glass beads.)
“You have a major problem,” Effi said. “Everywhere you go, you take your hatred with you, like a dung beetle rolling a ball along. You need to stop. Get it in your head that there isn’t as much black and white in the world as we would like. Just stop it.”
“I don’t want to stop it.”
“I understand why it’s bothering you, but enough, stop it. You’re a grown man, you need to resolve this.”
“How?”
“Well, think of a bridge, for example.”
“A bridge?”
“Yes. When there’s a river you can’t cross, you build a bridge over it. It doesn’t mean the river is gone, it just means now you can cross it. See?”