Grandpa Yosef put Grandpa Lolek in Feiga’s room. He laid his clothes and suits on the closet shelves (where he found a forgotten tie belonging to Hans Oderman). He scattered towels and toiletries in the bathroom. Cleared space on the kitchen shelves. Then he began sending us to Grandpa Lolek’s house on the Carmel to bring whatever he thought necessary for the recovering patient. He made us bring fine bed linen and fancy teacups, and the Leica camera. Each item we brought found its place, but did not satisfy Grandpa Yosef. He scanned the newly arranged room and found fault. Off he sent us for another item.
There seemed to be something overwrought about Grandpa Yosef’s conduct, but we did not bother to question him. We assumed he was simply being accommodating, trying to introduce a certain amount of grandeur to his modest home. We thought he was trying to fill the house up for his patient’s sake. We smiled and obeyed — it was unwise to refuse Grandpa Yosef’s requests at a time when the Caribbeanism seemed to be rearing its head again.
Out in the world, the rain finally began to fall. December took its revenge in the form of storms, and we drove back and forth between Kiryat Haim and the Carmel, on the seat beside us a transistor radio, sometimes a scarf, sometimes a vase.
“He’s emptying out my home!” Effi complained, already well entrenched in Grandpa Lolek’s empty house. (“Just for a while,” she explained, insinuating herself like a cuckoo.)
Grandpa Yosef would not rest. He declared his intent to vacate another shelf, the top one, which housed various useless antiques (an ivory elephant from Uncle Tulek, a backup menorah in case the regular one broke, a bag of Bonzo he hadn’t had the fortitude to throw out). He climbed up a ladder and passed the little treasures down to us. He grinned awkwardly when he found a bottle of rum he had brought back on a Caribbean whim. “Well, now you know…” he mumbled. “The doctorate. I went there because of Adler, to research the Jewish pirates.”
He seemed to feel the need to tie up loose ends and lift the veil off whatever still remained mysterious. We were struck by an odd sensation — a slight aversion to Grandpa Yosef. His life was suddenly deciphered, suddenly clear, all the way down to his most recent secret, the journey to the Caribbean, a dream dreamt by another. That, and Moshe’s name, and the doctorate, were all spread out before us. It was hard to look at Grandpa Yosef without feeling uncomfortable. This Grandpa Yosef was too open, too broken down into factors. The bare facts of his life story had become just that — bare. Something had been exposed which should have remained hidden. A bright light had come and flooded with clarity what had thus far squirmed inside towers of clues, fractures of truth that had come together into the form we loved: mysterious Grandpa Yosef, who goes to university despite his age, who writes a doctoral thesis, who rises from sitting shiva and sets off for the Caribbean. Everything was exposed — everything. Even the fog tormenting his soul, his son Moshe and the names he was not given — demons which, according to his belief, had taken their revenge.
We had to fight to reconstruct a Grandpa Yosef free of this aversion. There commenced an era of clearing away shards. We fought. But the feelings grew more complicated, emerging in an opposite form to the one we had envisioned. We were unable to look lucidly at this man into whose house once again flowed the needy and the troubled, demanding that Grandpa Yosef give them solutions, assistance, shelter. His good deeds were depicted in a new light. Against our will we saw Grandpa Yosef having to persist, to do only good, without ceasing. If he stopped even for a moment, his old deeds would catch up with him and crush him under their wheels.
The world filled with rain and we fought inside it, against the mist, the dragons, the aversion. One day Grandpa Yosef sent me for Grandpa Lolek’s files that contained his bills and the certificates for the land in Gedera and his other property. He thought the recovering patient needed the files to be present beside him on the bedside table. When I returned I found Green the Mechanic in the little parking lot, bringing the Vauxhall at Grandpa Yosef’s demand. Then suddenly Hirsch emerged, the almost-deciphered Hirsch, but a chasm still stretched between the end of his story in Grandpa Yosef’s voyage and the filthy old man now standing on Katznelson and enquiring theologically,
“Only saints were gassed?”
The root of evil had been revealed: Grandpa Yosef’s unfinished voyage. From within the voyage, from one end to the other, questions erupted, movements stirred. What had happened to Hirsch after he left the Lodz ghetto? What happened to Farkelstein? What happened to Ahasuerus? Fragments had been born so that we could contemplate them and think of everything we had not had time to ponder during his hurtling voyage. And Grandpa Yosef’s voyage began to roam inside me. All the days he had casually mentioned (“Sometimes I ate nothing but a turnip leaf for a whole day”) sprawled out before me. Whole days depicting the events and suffering that had surrounded Grandpa Yosef. A tiny dot with a world around it. I had to fight. If not the dragon, at least its wings.
I came to Grandpa Yosef. “I want you to tell me your whole story again.”
“What for?”
“So I can document it.”
“What do you want to do that for?” Anat asked.
“What’s the point of that?” Effi asked. She was sitting in Grandpa Lolek’s house on a new couch she had bought “to make him happy when he comes home.” She had placed it exactly above the opening of his secret cellar, opposite her newly purchased television; she had even paid for cable TV (“it’s instead of men”). She would leave everything for Grandpa Lolek, to make him happy when he came home.
“We have to document, to understand,” I reply.
Grandpa Yosef’s voyage kept rambling, great bright landscapes around every small section of his story.
Grandpa Yosef acquiesced. “All right, if you think it’s important.”
We sat together night after night, him talking and me writing. Every so often he got up, leafed through what I had written, reviewed his own story on the pages, pleased with what he saw. As if every letter wore a little tie, and his duty was to walk among the rows and inspect them, correcting little imperfections in their appearance.
Night after night, I acquired Grandpa Yosef’s memories.
Dad was also willing to talk. I was Old Enough.
This time, I was the emotional one. His style was short and simple, with no inexpedient words. His life, his memories. The lost world in which he had been left to wander among ruins, people-who-would-no-longer-be, places-that-were-gone, a culture that had left only pointy headstones in little cemeteries and monuments at the edges of train tracks, and now the whole world that had once convened at the edge of the tracks was gathering its memories into the monuments, enlarging them, and so my father turned the years back, slowly retelling.
His words were clear. Simple. He had the talent to remember, a talent I inherited. Sometimes he struggled, “Nu…what was the name of Einhorn’s son from the furniture store?” But he did not give in to the fifty years. I tried to comprehend how deeply he was casting these moments of concentration as I sat beside him, unable to help. In the evenings I transcribed his story, documenting, without changing a single word. I left it just as Dad said.
I was born in Bochnia, Poland, in 1930. My father was a barber, my mother a housewife. Before the war I completed the third grade in a regular Polish school, the Jachowicza School. My family was middle class. My father was a Zionist. My mother had a Jewish National Fund collection box like all good Jewish women did. Father was very active in the Jewish community. He was involved in building a large synagogue in Bochnia. Until then there were many small synagogues, known as stiebelech. The Jews in Bochnia were divided. Some were very Orthodox, some traditional, and some were not religious. My grandfather on my father’s side was traditional. On Mother’s side I only knew Grandmother, and she was very religious. My mother was also very religious.