Dangerous?
No.
They explained that the location of the tumor made Grandpa Lolek’s surgery a fairly easy case. Very easy. They had to operate so there wouldn’t be any more unpleasant surprises. Still, during evening phone calls, little drops of concern were voiced, fears for his well-being. We spoke our fears out loud so our hearts could make it through them. Here and there an explicit question was posed: Was there a chance he wouldn’t make it?
Effi did not allow anyone to go too far. “Don’t worry, he won’t die. Before he goes under, we’ll tell him the price of gravestones has gone up, and that will be that. No danger.”
She greeted us in a white coat when we got to Hadassah, not yet a staff member, and in any case brain surgery was not her field. But for Grandpa Lolek, Effi in a white cloak was a good sign, evidence that someone was looking out for him. He agreed to be hospitalized without protest, saving us several hours we had planned to waste on a sudden refusal in the parking lot. Grandpa Lolek dismissed us, asked Dad to stay, and agreed to send me back to Haifa. (Behind the glass window in the door, far away, he turned back to me and twirled his finger around fast, to remind me about the blender. I nodded.)
Two days later, with his head bandaged, everything was behind him. As promised, it had been very simple. Grandpa Lolek was convinced we had come to release him from the doctors, he was sick-of-doctors, there-is-life-outside, there-is-business-outside, and he believed we would devise an impressive rescue operation, a kidnapping, something that would conclude at his home with a cup of tea and news from the neighbor’s radio. His question for me was, “What about the blender?” He had been anesthetized for brain surgery, knives had sliced open his skull, blood infusions had been pumped into his veins, a tumor that had been pressing on a primary blood vessel had been cut out of him, and yet when he awoke, his desire to fix the blender on the cheap was still intact, having survived the procedure like a tightrope walker who tiptoes from one end to the other without losing his balance.
I looked at him and knew he would never die. He was the strength, the power. He had never come down from the peaks of Monte Cassino, and so he had no need for memories. He was the tree of life, and not only did he have no memories, he also had no hatred. No ball of loathing to roll around, only a large world full of profits and cups of tea, cigarettes to be smoked, and debts to accumulate. From him, from him I should be learning. Not bridges and not punishments. All I needed to do was ask, how do you get rid of the thoughts?
I did not forget his wish, and the next morning I turned up at his apartment to pick up the blender. (I was also there to move the Vauxhall back to Grandpa Yosef’s parking lot. Twice he had called. “Hans is coming. Where’s the Vauxhall?”) I opened the darkened house and instead of going to the kitchen, where the blender was, I walked into the living room. Just to sit for a while on the couch, above the rug that covered the opening to the cellar and the box of letters to Joyce the dancer, and the letter from Finkelstein who knew everything back in 1939. The house of wonders was at my disposal. I could have opened the cellar door and found, with adult eyes, what we had not found as children, when Grandpa Lolek had walked in with the Leica camera. But the magic of the cellar had been dampened. We had grown up. On the couch at Grandpa Lolek’s I could only rest and think, Yariv is an eighth of him. Who knew how many eighths like Yariv were running around in some kindergarten? Those eighths also had parents who, like me, had sat through Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremonies at school and recited words from black placards, and had learned to understand that we were the victims and that was it. Easy. We were the victims. We were. And that was that. Now life. Once a year our hearts would be sad, once a year we would remember what happened, and we would never look around us and realize that everything existed now too, here too. They did not see Mr. Pepperman checking his bills, they did not see Rachela Kempler. Itcha Dinitz, between the blinds, in the dark, living there; they did not see him either. They say I should build bridges, forget. But before the bridge-erectors came the abyss-builders. I am not willing to forget the abyss-builders. On Holocaust Day everyone stands for a moment of silence when the siren goes off, and everyone feels moved, and they all raise their children and do not know, and are sure of themselves, and do not understand. 1939, every year anew. 1939, and they do not know.
I went to check the blender. The only thing wrong with it was that it was unplugged. The power chord was lying cunningly on the counter, disconnected from the socket. When I plugged it in the blender started whirring loudly, ready to blend and mix. I took it with me anyway, for some reason, and placed it on the back seat of the Vauxhall. (There was a reddish-brown stain on the upholstery, as if right there was where the battle of Monte Cassino had ended, when Grandpa Lolek had spun around and stabbed a German on the back seat with his bayonet).
At Grandpa Yosef’s house I opened the door to find him wearing an apron, holding a steaming pie fresh from the oven.
“I brought the Vauxhall.”
“Nu, welcome, welcome. Come in please.” He put the pie down and wiped his hands on the apron. On the brown wooden table was my documentation, bound and neat. Grandpa Yosef hadn’t touched it.
“Haven’t you read what I wrote?” I ask. Eighty well-written pages.
Grandpa Yosef squirmed. “Nu, no time. I didn’t get to it. Hans is coming tomorrow morning, and the house…no time….” He sliced a piece of pie and served it to me, then continued to cut more slices for an invisible guest.
“All right. When you have time, read it.”
“Nu, taste it, taste it. I’m a little…I’ll read it, I’ll read it all. I just haven’t had time.” He wouldn’t leave the pie alone. He sliced and sliced, sinking the knife into the dough, attacking it nervously. He got up and asked, “Would you like some sugar for the pie?” Without waiting for an answer, he reached out and leafed through the pages. Then suddenly he said, “Nu, documentation. Naked in the snow for ten hours, can you know what that is? Hunger like there was in Buchenwald, can you know what that is? No, no. You cannot know what that is…” He darted into the kitchen.
I cautiously tasted the pie, another of Grandpa Yosef’s strange concoctions. The sparks of his soul. He came back with sugar and scattered some on my pie without asking. I tasted it — cardamom and sugar.
“So, how are things?” I asked.
“Good, good. Just that there’s no time for anything. Hans is coming and look, look at the state of the house.”
“The house looks fine.”
“Effi volunteered to pick him up at the airport. It’s a good thing it worked out for her, and she’s coming from Jerusalem. You’re busy, I know, with Grandpa Lolek’s operation. You can’t do it, nu. It’s a good thing Effi volunteered.”
(“Wherever Hans Oderman is concerned, I’m the first to volunteer,” Effi said.)
I looked at Grandpa Yosef. In a white undershirt, his shoulders looked soft. His tiredness suddenly seemed very pronounced. A whole life of charity, of nerve-wracking righteousness, and one visit from Hans Oderman of Germany, of all things, was wearing him out to the point of exhaustion. (I suddenly understood and was seized by panic: He was not like Grandpa Lolek; he would die one day. There was a day waiting for us, a funeral, rain, umbrellas, a rabbi praying.)
“Aren’t you a little tired?”
“Tired? Gracious no. I enjoy the work.”
“Isn’t it difficult for you like this here? Alone?”
“Difficult? No, not difficult. I get along fine, thank God.”
Something strange in our conversation. Like forcing a puzzle piece that doesn’t fit. Something wrong, but you ignore it.