8

Toward evening, I went to the refugee camp to look for the man who had seen his relative in me. The men were short and broad. The years in the camps made them all look the same. Now they beheld the world with indifference and a touch of irony, as if to say, Nothing can surprise us anymore. Man is a lowly creature.

But then one of them raised his head and spoke directly to me.

“A little exercise and running don’t change a person,” he called out. “Don’t get so arrogant. Your parents were with us in the camps, and they were no different from us. A little courtesy, a little modesty.” He didn’t expect me to answer him and went on his way.

I walked in the alleys of the camp. A stubborn feeling had been with me for days. If I returned here, I would easily mingle with these men. But, I kept repeating to myself, in a few months I’ll change, the war years will be erased, and I’ll be a new creature. The more I repeated those words, the more I saw their foolishness, and anguish mixed with sorrow consumed me.

I stopped and waited for the man who tried to find his relative in me. It seemed he was on his way to me. Meanwhile, another man approached and asked me what I was doing there. I didn’t conceal that I was in the training group.

He looked at me sternly. “You ran away from us.”

“I didn’t run away. I’m close by. Just a few meters.”

“And yet you ran away. Everyone who trains himself to travel to a faraway land—what is it called?—abandons us. Youth won’t save you forever.”

“I don’t intend to abandon you.”

“You have already abandoned us.” He came closer, and I thought he was going to slap my face. But he just went away.

At this hour the comrades were already gathering at the campfire. I overcame my embarrassment at having abandoned the refugees and ran back to our area.

This time Ephraim spoke about manual labor, about the need to make our hands used to working. To demonstrate this, he brought us a hoe and showed us every side of it.

“A tool with many uses,” he said, “one that every farmer is glad to have. In the next few days we’ll bring you other tools and teach you how to use them,” he promised. “By means of the tools, we are linked to the earth. The earth is the mother of all living things. It isn’t love at first sight. You have to learn to love the earth; over time you become devoted to it and seek to be nearer to it.”

It occurred to me that this was the way monks trained novices before they joined monasteries. But that thought also seemed preposterous to me because most of our training was physical. We weren’t taught how to meditate or pray, only how to speak and argue.

With words they had acquired over the past few months and a few they had brought from home, some of the fellows among us already began to express their own opinions. It was hard for me to combine words into sentences. Every time I was asked, I became deeply embarrassed.

When I went for a shower, I looked at myself in the mirror: I saw that my body had filled out, and my muscles were thicker. But would my thinking change as well? Would I no longer think like my parents? Get excited by what excited them? Sit in an armchair in the afternoon and drink in the evening light? Would I become instead a man of the soil who was forbidden to contemplate? Who just worked and brought forth bread from the earth?

Ephraim was sure that bodily changes would also bring changes to the soul. A man who worked in an orchard—who harrowed, pulled out weeds, watered, plowed, pruned, propped up a fallen trunk, ate his meal in the shadow of a tree—he was the new Jew.

At first Ephraim sounded like an army man, but the more you listened to him, the more you grasped that he wanted to plant us into the soil of the Land even now. He was a member of the Haganah and served as a scout for them; the roads and footpaths of the country were familiar to him. But more than anything, he loved the orchards.

I asked Mark for his impressions of Ephraim’s words. Mark made a dismissive gesture, as if to say, What is there to say? In any event, I have nothing to say. I felt that he was well enclosed in his fortress and that no one dared to approach the gate. I was sad for this handsome, talented fellow who could have been a faithful friend, but who shut himself off and didn’t allow anyone to get close to him.

One of the boys asked Ephraim where he had been born.

“In the Land,” he answered immediately.

Amazing, I said to myself. He didn’t say in a ghetto or in the camps or in the forests. Every one of us had been in one of those places, but not Ephraim.