7

The days passed without our noticing. Physical training and language instruction kneaded us. Ephraim was vigilant. At night he warned us against the refugees, their talk and their business dealings. We had to grow up without their influence, and only when we were immunized would we be allowed to help them. For the present, we had to invest all our might into shaping our new lives.

Ephraim was a man of many faces: When he ran with us, exercised, and taught us self-defense, he was cheerful and jocular and seemed like a man of thirty. But at night his face would change. He looked like a person with a heavy responsibility weighing on his shoulders. He stopped saying “I” and spoke as “we.”

Some distance from our tent area the refugees lived in gloom. On our morning run or upon returning from field training, we passed by their sheds and heard our mother tongue being mumbled in their mouths. They were still living in the ghettos and the camps, trading goods for other goods, coins for coins. The smell of their food wafted over from their sheds, reminding us, as though in spite, of home.

Whenever I had a little time, I would sneak over to the refugees and sit by the kiosk. I had the feeling that before too long they would pick me up and carry me off. Sometimes a refugee noticed me and called out, “Here’s the sleepy guy,” as though I was about to run away. Anyway, they hadn’t forgotten me.

It’s amazing what the exercise and daily runs did for us. We grew taller. Our skin became tanned, and some of us were already looking at the refugees with arrogance, calling them rootless, as if they were inferior beings, stubborn people who refused to change, who burrowed into their prolonged misery and spoke in a language all of whose words were sorrow, depression, pain that could not be healed, or the unpleasant laughter of someone who was glad to have survived.

Ephraim told us that in the Land of Israel we would be far from them, in the heart of fields, orange groves, and orchards. We would have other names, and our bodies would move in a quiet and measured way, like tillers of the soil, without haste or panic.

The refugees sprawling in their sheds were not indifferent to us. They observed our changes, and not without pride. From time to time we would notice, in the distance, a bald head looking at us in amazement, a woman’s look of desire, a skeptical old man who had seen efforts at change in his lifetime and no longer believed in them.

One evening a refugee approached me, a man of average height, wearing a secondhand suede jacket and a cap. He was a merchant or a money changer, and he asked me for my name and my family’s name.

I told him.

He didn’t ask anything else. He just looked gloomier and gloomier. I knew that for a moment he had taken me for one of his relatives, but disappointment hadn’t been slow in coming.

“Where are you from, sir?” I addressed him, trying to bring him closer.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t like talking about myself,” he said, and turned away.

He shuffled away, and his whole body said, I was wrong this time, too. There’s no hope. I was sorry to have been the cause of his disappointment.

I returned to our area feeling somber. I ran into Mark, who shared my tent, and I told him what had happened to me. He looked at me and then astonished me by saying, “I guess we bear other people inside us, too.”

My friend Mark was handsome, quiet, and introverted, doing all his duties seriously and precisely. He neither questioned nor complained, and he didn’t like it when people asked him anything. We had been living in the same tent for more than two months, and I didn’t know a thing about him. His mother tongue was the same as mine, but we obeyed instructions and spoke only Hebrew. Our conversations were brief and about current matters. Sometimes it seemed to me that Mark did things only because he had to. He had a world of his own, his fortress. No one knew where its entrances where, and there he lived his real life. Once, one of the boys challenged him.

“You aren’t here,” the boy said. “Where are you?”

Mark didn’t reply. He just hit him. The boy fell to the ground and shouted, “He’s crazy! What did I do to him?” Mark kept hitting the boy until he was pulled away. That night Ephraim asked Mark why he had hit his comrade. Mark made a strange gesture with his right shoulder and said, “He annoyed me.” He responded to the rest of Ephraim’s questions with only movements of his body.

Ephraim concluded by saying, “Promise all of us that from now on you won’t hit your comrades. If you have a complaint, bring it before this assembly.” Mark responded with silence to this comment as well, but Ephraim insisted that he say “I promise.” After a short delay, Mark did utter those two words.

—

That night I was once again enveloped in a deep slumber. Every time I was in distress, it came to my assistance and swaddled me. Its contours changed over time, but its power was undiminished. Sometimes it isolated me, and I felt completely alone.

I saw Father again. This time he wasn’t writing but engraving. His back was bent, and his hand held a chisel firmly.

“Father,” I said, “you’re exerting yourself more than I do in my fitness training.”

“It’s a chisel stylus. I have to get used to it.”

“It would be better for you to exercise than to subdue the paper with a chisel.”

“That’s my fate, my dear. My fate led me to attempt the impossible and told me to persevere. You’re right. It would be better to exercise. A person who exercises knows how to breathe properly. His body is sturdy and flexible. Eventually, he will reach old age in good health.”

“The exercise is changing me, and it hurts.”

“Let it change you.” Father’s voice was full of despair.