y

Me'ir, however, neither forgot nor let things slide. Several days later, he accosted me in the dorm cafeteria on the first floor one mealtime. I realized then that he was well known, perhaps even famous, for the kibbutz classes on Judaism he taught up north. The students, who seemed to know him well, behaved respectfully towards him. What sort of dilettante pensioner was this? I wondered. My short fuse again had led me into error. The kitchen staff pampered him, serving him double portions of whatever he liked. What had become of that discerning eye on which I prided myself? I thought of him as a visitor, and I a student on scholarship, for he was only a guest while I in my dorm room was no stranger here. I was angry with myself over my impatience, the new man, and the chronic shell shock. A sense of inferiority still not easily overcome. There was, indeed, no basis for my vanity, which more than once had led me astray. I felt perplexed, sensing that things weren't working out as anticipated. I was annoyed with myself for missing something again. As usual, I had overlooked both the real truth and the most interesting people.

"Say," said Me'ir, "let's continue what we started. What's a middle-aged Jew like you doing here? Don't tell me you're a full-time student."

I told him how difficult it had been for me coming home from the war. Although I said nothing of chronic shell shock, I think he knew exactly what I meant. I also told him about my meeting with the literary editor in Tel Aviv, the retrospective on my father the newspaper had published and, of a sudden, my feeling that I was now in the crisis of my life. If I returned to the fields and crops, I'd sink into them forever. I'd realized during the war that I had to do something else with the rest of my life.

"Don't talk like that," Me'ir interjected. "You're still a young man."

Writing gives me no satisfaction, I said. In fact, everything I'd published thus far had been merely a beginner's experiments, the scribbling of a novice. But if I didn't make time for writing now, I'd be lost. I told him about my late father; although he'd honed his short articles to a keen edge, the cognoscenti knew that these were only fine pearls rolling off the desk of someone who had given up on writing. Me'ir listened to me, I recall, as no one had listened to me for years. His wise eyes fixed on me, he said nothing as I sat there at the table in the dormitory dining hall. Under his encouraging gaze, I rambled quite a bit that dinner.

"Your soup's getting cold, gentlemen," I suddenly heard the cook's good-natured voice. "Let me get you fresh bowls." I abruptly came out of my unexpected reverie. Oh yes, I'd spoken far more than I should have. I went back to my warm dinner. Me'ir still sat there looking pensive.

"Yes, that was a terrible war," he said, sighing deeply. Over his face darted a shadow so gloomy that I stabbed myself with the soup spoon. Turning from me at last, Me'ir resumed his dinner. We ate in silence. The racket raised by the young students around us bounced off the bubble enveloping us. From time to time, students would approach Me'ir to ask his advice which, to their thanks, he expertly gave in a few, short words. As I began to listen to his comments, I realized that this old fellow interested me. When he again turned to the table, I saw from the corner of my eye that his face was shrouded in some dark veil while his eyes conveyed an expression that I can describe only as "unhinged."

We met the next day on the grounds outside the building. It was a brisk, early winter morning. Me'ir asked where I was going. "To the library, as usual," I replied. "The Jewish studies reading room." As if I had anyplace else to go. With Me'ir at my side, I took the short cut, a steep eastern path. When we arrived at the copse of large pines, breathing hard, we stopped to catch our breath. Me'ir leaned against the trunk of a broad pine. He had something to tell me, he said, and wanted to say it now. Actually, he'd meant to tell me after dinner the night before but, too distracted by the clamor of the students, hadn't found the words and the moment had passed. He'd considered knocking on my door but had dropped the idea because the hour was late and he hadn't felt he could bother me. It simply wasn't right, he'd thought, to enter a room and start a personal conversation with someone he'd just met. He inhaled, steadying his breathing. I also was recovering from the unforeseen effort of climbing the steep path.

"I lost," he started, then stopped. After a pause he went on, "We lost our son three years ago at the end of the Yom Kippur War." I was too startled to know what to do. After all, he was nearly old enough to be my father.

"It was important to me to tell you that," Me'ir added. "And I wanted it said straight out."

I said nothing. I felt uneasy. Should I console him? Put my arm around him? Perhaps mutter something and clasp his hand? I froze, mutely rooted to my spot. It was such a surprise.

"He was a top helicopter pilot," Me'ir continued. "He went down in the Great Bitter Lake, you know, at the Suez Canal."

I was still too flabbergasted to say anything. Unconsciously, I picked up some pine needles and started kneading them.

"This month makes exactly three years," he went on. I took a good look at him. I couldn't tear my gaze from his eyes. That great shadow, a pall of profound grief whose source I couldn't guess the night before, crossed his face again. "He was a terrific boy," Me'ir said. "I still remember the last time he visited us before the fighting started. I doubt I'll ever forget it." He breathed deeply in the pause that followed. Glancing up at the sunlight glinting through the heavy canopy of pine boughs, he said, "all right, let's go on. I have several appointments today. They're waiting for me at the library."

Now I was ashamed that I'd burdened him with my own troubles in the dormitory dining hall the night before. What a dolt I'd been not to understand the man facing me. How dull must my wits have been, how imperceptive had my chronic battle fatigue made me, that I was unable to discern a grieving father? What had become of my famous sensitivity, where had it suddenly fled?

"Please forgive me, Me'ir," I said as we resumed walking. "I was a real idiot last night." Why had I babbled away at him about my meeting with the editor in Tel Aviv? And what about all those ridiculous things I'd said to him about the "short article genre?" What gall of me to confound him with my waffling after the war over returning to the kibbutz. Who the hell would be interested in all that mindless trivia? This man sitting next to me, who for three years had counted the hours and minutes his son had been gone? Why, during a department social at the restored home of one of my colleagues just a few weeks ago, I'd boasted that I can't be fooled, no one can put anything past me. Instantly, in seconds, I spot the bereaved who lost loved ones during the recent war.

We went the rest of the way in silence. He kept switching his big, heavy book bag from shoulder to shoulder. "Can I help?" I asked. But he silently refused. When the dirt path ended and merged into a narrow concrete lane, we stopped again for a short rest. From here, we now could see the library's roof and large glass windows. We entered the coatroom together but he no longer had time for talk. Keeping only a handful of books, he deposited the large bag and his jacket in the cloakroom. "We'll meet in the dorm," he said before leaving. "Maybe tonight, maybe next week."

I, on the other hand, was upset. What awaited me at my table in the reading room? A discourse by the Rambam, which I'd begun to study with one of the teachers, or an anthology of prayer and poetics I was studying on my own? Or dozens of dark volumes from the defunct journal Gilyonot, which I'd inexplicably remembered during my first leave after the war? That had been about three years ago, and still I'll never forget the pain that jolted me when I saw the bare legs of the Scandinavian girls who had volunteered to pick early ripening grapefruit. The agonizing realization that life went on here on the ground; that life must go on; that the world, the little of it visible to me riding back on that first pass and the portion I might never see, keeps on moving, keeps on living, keeps on flowing, continues to exist, cut through me like a sharp knife. What shell shock victim's false pride did I harbor to think even for a moment that the world would stop and fall silent? Why should it? Simply because of my damned war?

I went down to the cafeteria and ordered a light breakfast with coffee. The tables around me hummed with the congenial, soothing drone of quiet conversation. Real life sometimes broke in, as when a young, lost soldier, who had wrested time off for an arduous day of registration, appeared at the door. I thought of Me'ir taking courses so late in life. I thought of his dead son and the tangible life abruptly torn from him and the proxy life in memory that he was just beginning. I thought of the comrades I'd left on the smoking basalt hills of the Golan Heights. I thought of the young, wounded men I'd evacuated from the battalion aid stations. I thought of the war's cruel arbitrariness and the torture it still inflicts on those who, like me, cannot forget. Particularly at such times, as in the cafeteria that morning, I promised myself I'd never forget. I'll never madly rush back into my previous life. I'll never shut out the memories. Quite the contrary, I'll find some way never to surrender to forgetting. To anyone who agrees to listen until he's so bored and exasperated he plugs his ears, I'll tell again and again what happened one night three years ago at the Great Bitter Lake or on the basalt hills. But I was too overwrought to go on. I finished my coffee and left.

I started writing several memorial poems that winter in Jerusalem. They were crude beginner's works, suffused with sentiment. Me'ir asked me several times what I intended to do after my courses. I didn't know what to say. I was afraid I wouldn't know what to do. I feared confusion and silence and the need to go back to my earlier life. Here, in Jerusalem, in my dormitory and at the library, I could submerge my sorrow in a host of words, books, illuminating exchanges and dazzling lecturers. But when all this ended, what then? I didn't know what to say to him. He tried to convince me to be more practical. I'd given enough of myself to my chronic shell shock. Now I needed to plunge back into ordinary life, absorb the blows, heal my wounds, bury the gruesome memories. He strove to draw me into teaching Jewish studies for only in this, he felt sure, would we find balm for our battle scars.

"What a queer bird you are," he said to me one time on our way back to the dorm from the library. "A mixed-up boy from a Hashomer Hatza'ir kibbutz, pushing 40, finally comes to Jerusalem to study Judaism. And what interests him the most? Sitting down at night to write memorial poems. For what? Isn't it time to grow up?"

But I wasn't convinced. True, my studies were fascinating and exerted a seductive, powerful attraction. More than once, I felt this was my last opportunity not only to change careers but to start a new life, if one can put it that way, to recognize that all my life until then had been squandered. Perhaps my severe case of shell shock had been to my benefit, for now I could no longer go on hiding. I had to decide. I had to reveal what I was, if not to the world then at least to myself. But the obligation to teach others, to hold their interest and follow their progress, that wasn't for me. It scared me, actually. Was I to give myself entirely to others again? When was I look after myself? No, I wasn't born to be a teacher, no matter how much I enjoyed leading hikes and giving talks on "the heritage of combat" and touring remote sites with young enthusiasts. No, teaching as a profession for the rest of my life, I couldn't take that.

Me'ir, however, wouldn't give in. "It's people like you, who have grown stronger from their crises in war, who must step up to teach Jewish studies," he badgered me.

A heavy snow fell that winter in Jerusalem. All the roads were impassable and it was hard going even on foot. Shut up in our dorm, we waited for the weather to improve. Our building, with the heat at full blast, was warm and cozy. We felt nothing of the bitter cold outside and could even shed our heavy coats to walk the hallways in open shirts. I invited Me'ir to join me in my room for a cup of the fine tea I'd brought from home. As usual, he showed me the latest book on Judaism. "Anything you can imagine is in these books," he said. We sat at the little table, drinking tea and gorging on the small cookies my wife had baked before I returned to Jerusalem. Despite the frigid draft blowing through the window seams, I opened the shutter and pulled aside the curtains. The view of the city blanketed in snow was spellbinding.

"We had a snow like this that winter during the war," I said to Me'ir. "Some mornings, we couldn't find our huts in the snow." A friend in my platoon, an artist, had been stirred by the melting snow. "Take a look," he'd said. "The snow is exposing the fox holes and the old gear, even the corpses. It's like a bandage has been removed." On the slopes of the basalt hills, and in the trenches of the Syrian fortifications, we saw terrible things, like open wounds from which the healing dressings had been stripped.

From his seat, Me'ir stared entranced at the coat of snow deposited on Jerusalem. "For you, the snow brings back memories of the basalt on the Golan Heights. It reminds me of the best days of my life." Some years earlier, he told me, a heavy snow had fallen on the city while he served full-time on a Jewish education committee. By chance, all his family had been in his small apartment - his wife, his older daughter and his young son, the lost son. He'd been only a lad then, a promising pilot trainee there with his girlfriend. While the city was at a standstill for two days, the entire family was stuck in the apartment. They had felt themselves back in their modest home on the kibbutz, warm, pleasant days unlike any they'd ever enjoyed together. Tearing his gaze from the window, Me'ir pressed his palms to his face. So he sat several seconds, his head bent into his hands. Only the howling of the wind seeping through the cracks broke the silence in my apartment. "We were happy then," he said, raising his head. "We were so happy, maybe we made someone angry."

My courses in Jerusalem lasted only a short time. I went home and rarely saw Me'ir after that. From friends I heard that he had done well in finishing the degree he'd begun more than 30 years earlier at the outbreak of the War of Independence. Later I saw newspaper announcements of books he'd published through a reputable house. Occasionally, I also saw short interviews with him and once even heard his familiar voice on a television broadcast. I didn't transform my life the way I'd dreamed. I went back to hard farming on the kibbutz while my chronic shell shock continued to plague me at night. When the haunting memories threatened to overwhelm me, I would imagine the copse of broad pines and the steep path we climbed to the library. "Don't feel sorry for yourself," I chided myself. "Others paid a far greater price." I heard Me'ir catching his breath and saying, "I lost...," then stopping, peering above the pine tree and going on, "We lost our son three years ago at the end of the Yom Kippur War."

Then, when I could no longer restrain myself, my memorial poems burst from me with a will of their own. Sights that had assailed me for years leapt from my eyes. Sounds that long had tormented me poured from my ears. The groans and cries I couldn't forget, and that threatened to crush my spirit, surged to the paper on my desk. As much as I sought to be unlike my father, I failed. I found myself doing almost the same things he had done. Like him, secretly fuming, I would shove my papers, of no use to anyone, into the wooden trunk to molder and yellow. Just as he had, I too developed a rare talent for the superfluous and transitory. I rebuked myself for choosing this life. I was angry with my father for letting his life take this path. And I was angry with Me'ir, who correctly had pushed me to "change lives" at the right moment, when my postwar crisis came to a head. But even Me'ir failed to make a Jewish studies teacher of me. Even he couldn't persuade me to join the small, select band that gathered around him at the institute where he taught.