46

The new patients wouldn’t leave me alone. They were impressed by my spoken Hebrew. I of course didn’t tell them about the three to four hours every day that I spent copying from the book of Genesis. That activity bound me not only to the words but also to their form.

The patients didn’t ask me where I was from or what my mother tongue was. Instead, they were worried about my future. The past wasn’t important to them. In their youth they had been pioneers, and since then they thought only about the future.

—

“What are you going to do?” one of the patients startled me one day by asking.

“I’m training myself to be an author.” I tried to emerge from my misery for a moment.

He pierced through me with his gaze. “How are you training yourself?”

“I’m studying the Bible,” I said, without emphasizing any of the words.

He looked at me in surprise, and then his eyes narrowed.

“We all studied Bible,” he said with derision.

“I pray in my heart that the Bible will help me write.”

The word “pray” actually got this patient mad, and he confronted me like someone who had been insulted to the depths of his soul.

“You pray?” he said. “What are you praying for, and who to?”

“I pray in my heart,” I repeated.

He didn’t let up. “You’re a young man. You shouldn’t give yourself over to false visions. We came to the Land to live in reality, in this reality. Remove the word ‘pray’ from your head. The Jews have prayed more than enough.”

I didn’t know how to answer, so I just said, “So be it.” But that one wasn’t satisfied with this retreat.

“We came to this country to work the soil. To bring forth bread from the earth and not to give ourselves over to imaginary things. You’re allowed to study the Bible—to learn botany from it, geography, history—but not to sink into worthless beliefs that we had been given for generations.”

Only later, on my bed in my room, did I feel those angry words seeping into me.

Words spoken with conviction work upon you in secret and uproot the tender sprouts that come up in your secret garden without your being aware of it. I have to keep away from those patients, I said to myself, though I knew that in this shared space, I couldn’t escape their prying eyes.

—

The sharp pains reappeared. I didn’t give up on my copying. The more I copied, the more I felt the power of the exposed sentences. I didn’t deceive myself into believing that I could make use of them. They were carved out of a whole world, and I had only fragments. In my sleep I saw the vocalized words in their entirety and in their full splendor, and fear made my body tremble.

—

Ephraim came to visit me. His entire right arm was bandaged, and he was sitting in a wheelchair. To my surprise, he hadn’t changed. A few lines crisscrossed his face, but except for that, he was the same Ephraim: bashful in an unfamiliar place. He was a master of carrying burdens and smashing rocks, an excellent exercise coach by day and by night. But hospitals and convalescent homes unsettled him.

I told him I was copying from the book of Genesis into my notebook.

“Copying?” he wondered. “Why copy?”

I tried to string together a few words to tell him about my struggles to connect with the Hebrew letters, but some of his inarticulateness had rubbed off on me. I observed his simplicity, his direct engagement with life, his willingness to help, even in his present situation, and I was ashamed of my authorial pretensions. In my embarrassment, I said, “I haven’t lost hope.”

“Who planted that good feeling in you?”

“It’s hard for me to say. I feel that one day I’ll stand on my own.”

“What do the doctors say?”

“Doctors aren’t usually optimistic.”

My words seemed exaggerated—or who knows what—to Ephraim. He groped for something to say to me.

“Medicine in our time is advanced.”

The cliché pained me.

I asked him about his wound.

He didn’t hide the truth from me. “I won’t be able to go back to my work,” he said. “I’ll return to my kibbutz.”

I remembered Ephraim’s modest way of standing on the pristine coast of Naples, the long runs with him, the big meals after hours of exhausting training. His poetry recitations while we were running made him appear like a spiritual adviser who believed in the power of human speech. He planted within us many poems by Natan Alterman, Avraham Shlonsky, and Leah Goldberg, quite a few verses from the Bible, and even some sayings from Ethics of the Fathers.

I was afraid Ephraim would be angry at me for giving myself over simply to copying from the book of Genesis. As I said, he was the same Ephraim, only more attentive. But some of the beliefs that had guided his life must have slackened within him after he was wounded, or they had been silenced.

“Tomorrow is the fateful operation,” he said as he was leaving. “I’ve already gotten used to the thought that they’re going to amputate some of my arm.”

“No!” The word leaped from my mouth.

“Being without an arm isn’t shameful. You can do a lot even without an arm.” The voice from the old days returned to him.

For a moment it seemed that Ephraim wasn’t talking about himself but had come to tell me that even on shaky legs a person can do what’s required.