The Seven Good Years (4 page)

T
he pleasant-voiced captain apologizes again over the loudspeaker. The plane was scheduled to take off two hours earlier and we still haven't left. “Our crew still hasn't been able to determine the problem with the plane, so we need to ask our passengers to disembark. We will update you as soon as we can.”

The skinny young guy sitting next to me says, “It's me. I did it. When we got on the plane, I talked to my wife on my cell, remember? She told me she was on the way to the beach with our daughter and the baby. I'm sitting here with my safety belt buckled, and all I can think is, Why the hell am I going to Italy? Instead of spending Saturday with my wife and daughter, why am I flying six hours, including a connecting flight, for some hourlong meeting my boss said was important? I hope the plane breaks down. I swear, that's what I thought, I hope the plane breaks down, and look what happened.”

As we reenter the terminal, a big woman wearing a flowered dress and dragging a suitcase the size of a coffin goes up to the skinny guy and asks him where we're coming from. “Who cares where we're coming from”—he winks at me—“the main thing is where we're headed.”

A few hours later, when I get on the small, crowded replacement plane that will take me to Rome on my way to Sicily, I'll walk down the aisle and notice that the skinny guy isn't there. Throughout the flight, I'll picture him on the beach in Tel Aviv building sand castles with his wife and kid, and I'll be jealous.

I also have a wife, and a little boy, waiting for me in Tel Aviv. From the start, this trip was really inconvenient for me, too, and with every minute of delay it's becoming less desirable. On Saturday evening I'm supposed to take part in an event at a small book festival in the town of Taormina. When the organizers invited me, I agreed to go because I thought I could take my family along, but a few weeks ago my wife realized that she had a prior work commitment, and I was stuck with my own promise to attend the festival. The trip, originally planned for a week, was shortened to two days, and now it turns out that, as a result of the supernatural powers of a skinny young guy who wanted to play with his kid, half of those two days will be wasted in airports.

Because of the delay, I miss my connecting flight from Rome to Catania, in Sicily. When I finally make it to the island, it's another long ride to Taormina, and by the time I arrive at the hotel, it's already dark. A mustached reception clerk gives me the key to my room. Lying asleep on a small couch in the lobby is a cute little boy, about seven, who looks just like the reception clerk, minus the mustache. I climb into bed with all my clothes on and fall asleep.

The night goes by in a long, dark, dreamless instant, but the morning makes up for it. I open the window to find that I'm in a dream: Stretched out before me is a gorgeous landscape of beach and stone houses. A long walk and a few conversations in broken English punctuated with a lot of enthusiastic arm waving reinforce the unreal feel of the place. After all, I know this sea very well; it's the same Mediterranean that's only a five-minute walk from my house in Tel Aviv, but the peace and tranquillity projected by the locals here are something I have never encountered before. The same sea, but without the frightening, black, existential cloud I'm used to seeing hanging over it. Maybe this is what Shimon Peres meant back in those innocent days when he talked about “a new Middle East.”

This is Taormina's first book festival. The people on the organizing team are extremely nice, and the atmosphere is relaxed; this festival seems to have everything except an audience at the events. Not that I'm passing judgment on the city's residents: When you're in the heart of a paradise like this, in the middle of a hot July, would you rather spend the day at one of the most beautiful beaches in the world or in a mosquito-riddled public garden having your mind numbed by a wild-haired writer speaking strangely accented English?

But in the harmonious atmosphere of Taormina, even a small audience isn't considered a failure. I think that these pleasant people, who speak such a lovely, melodious Italian and live in such gorgeous surroundings, would accept even boils and plagues with an understanding smile. After the event, the mild-mannered English translator points to the dark sea and tells me that during the day you can see the Italian mainland from here. “You see those lights there?” he asks, pointing toward a few flickering pinpoints. “That's Reggio Calabria, the southernmost city in Italy.”

When I was a kid, my parents used to tell me bedtime stories. During World War II, the stories their parents told them were never read from books because there were no books to be had, so they made up their own. As parents themselves, they continued that tradition, and from a very young age, I felt a special pride, because the bedtime stories I heard every night couldn't be bought in any store; they were mine alone. My mother's stories were always about dwarves and fairies, while my father's were about the time he lived in southern Italy, from 1946 to 1948.

His fellow members of the Irgun wanted him to try to buy weapons for them, and after asking around and pulling a few strings, my father found himself at the southernmost tip of Italy, from which you can see the Sicilian coast—Reggio Calabria. There he rubbed shoulders with the local Mafia and, in the end, persuaded them to sell him rifles for the Irgun to use to fight the British. Since he had no money to rent an apartment, the local Mafia offered him free lodgings in a whorehouse they owned there, and that, it seems, was the best time of his life.

The heroes of my father's bedtime stories were always drunks and prostitutes, and as a child, I loved them very much. I didn't know yet what a drunk and a prostitute were, but I did recognize magic, and my father's bedtime stories were filled with magic and compassion. Now, forty years later, here I am, not far from the world of my childhood stories. I try to imagine my father coming here after the war, nineteen years old at the time, to this place that, despite its many troubles and dark alleys, projects such a sense of peace and tranquillity. Compared with the horrors and cruelty he witnessed during the war, it's easy to imagine how his new acquaintances from the underworld must have appeared to him: happy, even compassionate. He walks down the street, smiling faces wish him a good day in mellifluous Italian, and for the first time in his adult life, he doesn't have to be afraid or hide the fact that he's a Jew.

When I try to reconstruct those bedtime stories my father told me years ago, I realize that beyond their fascinating plots, they were meant to teach me something. Something about the almost desperate human need to find good in the least likely places. Something about the desire not to beautify reality but to persist in searching for an angle that would put ugliness in a better light and create affection and empathy for every wart and wrinkle on its scarred face. And here, in Sicily, sixty-three years after my father left it, as I face a few dozen pairs of riveted eyes and a lot of empty plastic chairs, that mission suddenly seems more possible than ever.

I
don't want to brag, but I've managed to earn myself a unique, somewhat mythic status among the parents who take their children to Ezekiel Park, my son's favorite spot in Tel Aviv. I attribute that special achievement not to any overwhelming charisma I may possess, but rather to two common, lackluster qualities: I'm a man, and I'm hardly ever working. In Ezekiel Park, I have been dubbed
ha-abba
, or “the father,” an almost religious and slightly gentile nickname intoned with great respect by all the park's regulars. Most of the fathers in my neighborhood go off to work every morning, so the inherent laziness that has plagued me for so many years is finally being construed as exceptional sensitivity and affection, a genuine understanding for children's tender young souls.

As “the father,” I can take an active part in conversations on a wide variety of subjects that until recently were alien to me, and I can expand my knowledge of topics such as nursing, breast pumps, and the relative merits of cloth diapers versus their disposable counterparts. There is something almost perversely soothing about discussing such things. As a stressed-out Jew who considers his momentary survival to be exceptional and not the least bit trivial, and whose daily Google Alerts are confined to the narrow territory between “iranian nuclear development” and “jews+genocide,” there is nothing more enjoyable than a few tranquil hours spent discussing sterilizing bottles with organic soap and the red-pink rashes on a baby's bottom. But this week, the magic ended and political reality stealthily crept its way into my private paradise.

“Tell me something,” Orit, the mother of three-year-old Ron, asked innocently. “Will Lev go to the army when he grows up?” The question caught me totally off guard. Over the last three years, I have had to deal with quite a few speculative questions about my son's future, but most were of the annoying but non-threatening would-you-advise-him-to-be-an-artist-even-though-from-the-way-you're-dressed-there-can't-be-much-money-in-it kind. But that question about the army thrust me into a different, surreal world in which I saw dozens of sturdy babies swathed in environmentally friendly cloth diapers sweeping down from the mountains on miniature ponies, weapons brandished in their pink hands, shouting murderous battle cries. And facing them, alone, stands chubby little Lev, wearing scruffy fatigues and an army vest. A green steel helmet, slightly too large, slides over his eyes, as he clutches a bayoneted rifle in his tiny hands. The first wave of diapered riders has almost reached him. He presses the rifle against his shoulder and closes one eye to aim. . . .

“So what do you say?” Orit awakened me from my unpleasant reverie. “Are you going to let him serve in the army or not? Don't tell me you haven't talked about it yet.” There was something accusing in her tone, as if the fact that my wife and I haven't discussed our baby's military future is on the same scale as skipping his measles vaccination. I refused to give in to the guilt feelings that come so naturally to me and replied unhesitatingly, “No, we haven't talked about it. We still have time. He's three years old.”

“If you feel that you still have time, then take it,” Orit snapped back sarcastically. “Assaf and I have already made up our minds about Ron. He's not going into the army.”

That night, sitting in front of the TV news, I told my wife about the strange incident in Ezekiel Park. “Isn't that weird,” I said, “talking about recruiting a kid who still can't put on his underpants by himself?”

“It's not weird at all,” my wife replied. “It's natural. All the mothers in the park talk to me about it.”

“So how come they haven't said anything to me about it till now?”

“Because you're a man.”

“So what if I'm a man,” I argue. “They have no problem talking to me about nursing.”

“Because they know you'll be understanding and empathetic about nursing, but you'll just be snide when it comes to serving in the army.”

“I wasn't snide,” I defended myself. “I just said that it's a strange subject to be dealing with when the kid's so young.”

“I've been dealing with it from the day Lev was born,” my wife confessed. “And if we're already discussing it now, I don't want him to go into the army.”

I was silent. Experience has taught me that there are some situations in which it's better to keep quiet. That is, I tried to keep quiet. Life gives me good advice, but sometimes I refuse to take it. “I think it's very controlling to say something like that,” I finally said. “After all, in the end, he'll have to decide those things by himself.”

“I'd rather be controlling,” my wife answered, “than have to take part in a military funeral on the Mount of Olives fifteen years from now. If it's controlling to keep your son from putting his life at risk, then that's exactly what I am.”

At that point, the argument heated up and I turned off the TV. “Listen to yourself,” I said. “You're talking as if serving in the army is an extreme sport. But what can we do? We live in a part of the world where our lives depend on it. So what you're actually saying is that you'd rather have other people's children go into the army and sacrifice their lives, while Lev enjoys his life here without taking any risks or shouldering the obligations the situation calls for.”

“No,” my wife responded. “I'm saying that we could have reached a peaceful solution a long time ago, and we still can. And that our leaders allow themselves not to do that because they know that most people are like you: they won't hesitate to put their children's lives into the government's irresponsible hands.”

I was about to answer her when I sensed another pair of huge eyes watching me. Lev was standing at the entrance to the living room. “Daddy,” he asked, “why are you and Mommy fighting?”

“We are not really fighting.” I tried to come up with something. “This isn't a real fight, it is just a drill.”

Since that conversation with Orit, none of the mothers in the park have spoken to me again about Lev's military service. But I still can't get that image of him in uniform, armed with a rifle, out of my mind. Just yesterday, in the sandbox, I saw him push Orit's peacenik son Ron, and later, on the way home, he chased a cat with a stick. “Start saving, Daddy,” I tell myself. “Start saving for a defense attorney. You're not raising just a soldier here, but a potential war criminal.” I'd be happy to share those thoughts with my wife, but after we barely survived that last clash, I don't want to start a new one.

We managed to end our argument with an agreement of sorts. First, I suggested what sounded like a fair settlement: when the kid is eighteen, we'll let him decide for himself. But my wife rejected that out of hand, claiming he would never be able to make a really free choice with all the social pressure around him. In the end, out of exhaustion, and in the absence of any other solution, we decided to compromise on the only principle we both truly agreed on: to spend the next fifteen years working toward family and regional peace.