That morning, while waiting for the bus, I’d read this passage in the Gospel of St Matthew: ‘The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.’
Was there light in those bodies, brightness in those eyes? Or rather conformism, sentimentalism, superstition? I’m doing this because it’s what the others are doing, because I want to be admired for my virtue, because, no matter what, I want to be protected from the powerful forces of evil that dominate the universe, and therefore, instead of a coral horn, I wear a cross around my neck; in fact, just to be sure, I wear two of them, along with a hand of Fatima.
Was this faith, or was it exactly the form of belief that should be rejected? And what relationship was there between faith and religion? Could you practise a religion without having any faith, and vice versa? What was a heavenly gift, and what was human weakness? Where was the line between the truth and the desire for approval?
All the while I sat there, I searched for other eyes that would respond to mine, but it was like slipping on ice or Plexiglas; probably I was the lightless one, but no one in that whole crowd emitted even the tiniest reverberation.
I was on the verge of giving up when a flash met my gaze, shining from the radiant face of a tiny, elderly Korean lady. Her countrymen were already climbing back on their tour bus, but she – who knows why – came up to me with a smile and took my hand between both of hers, squeezing it hard, as if she were trying to tell me, Keep going, don’t stop, and then, after the hint of a bow, she scurried away to the coach with small, quick steps.
Many hours later, I arrived in Capernaum. There, too, I found the usual mass of tourist buses. Guides and travel assistants, speaking various languages, filled the air with explanations, which I grasped in pieces as I moved through the brightly-coloured crowd heading in the direction of the archaeological area.
All that remained of the ancient synagogue were four white limestone columns and, on the ground, some bas-relief fragments covered with carvings of pomegranates and bunches of grapes.
‘The Via Maris passed through Capernaum,’ a man holding a signal paddle was saying. ‘The Via Maris was the ancient road that linked Syria and Mesopotamia to Egypt and Palestine. It was a road travellers were obliged to take, especially the drivers of the long merchant caravans. And it was to this very synagogue that Jesus came to preach after he left Nazareth. Anyone have any idea why?’
‘Because it was like a lorry parking area.’
‘Or a shopping centre.’
‘Exactly! Jesus must have chosen it because it was such a busy place. Later, in 665, the synagogue was destroyed, probably by an earthquake . . .’
The sun was at its zenith, and the temperature was quite hot. Following the stream of people trudging ahead in disorder, some eating sandwiches, some quenching their thirst from small bottles of mineral water, I reached a shady spot in the southernmost part of the excavations and sat down to have a snack myself.
Of the town that had been Simon Peter’s birthplace, nothing was left but the foundations of the houses. I could hear the guides droning on: ‘This is where St Matthew had his tax-collector’s table. This is where Simon lived with his mother-in-law.‘
I was wondering why, when people talk about Simon Peter, they mention only this one relative, and why his wife and children never appear, when my sight was afflicted by a kind of monstrous spaceship, a construction of glass and cement perched on six large iron feet, totally obscuring the view of the lake.
What was it?
At first glance, a low-end dance hall right out of the sixties or some bizarre temple for UFO worshippers.
‘This is the site of Peter’s house,’ the guides kept repeating emphatically, indicating the modest remnants of a wall hidden by the dreary spaceship.
Peter’s mother-in-law would have had good reason to loathe him, I thought, if she’d known he’d cause her family’s memory to be crushed under tons of cement and glass. But maybe it wasn’t Peter’s fault, but rather the obtuse conceit of human beings, who must exhibit the signs of their power everywhere.
Dozens and dozens of coins tossed by tourists glinted on the house’s ancient floor. I couldn’t understand what the sense of this ritual might be. Was the gesture supposed to be propitiatory? Auspicious? Or was it perhaps the far-sighted beginning of a collection taken up to tear down that monster and return Capernaum to its enchantment some happy day not too long from now?
By then, it was late. I’d wanted to go up to the top of the Mount of Beatitudes, but I wasn’t sure I’d have time to get back to the kibbutz, as I’d promised my uncle I would, so I walked back to the bus stop.
Throughout the ride, while the landscape was being gobbled up by the darkness, I reflected on the day I’d just spent. The multitude of the wise is the salvation of the world – I’d read that line in the Bible a short while before. Had I met any of the wise that day, or in years past?
The only priests I’d ever encountered along my way were the ones I saw on television. I don’t remember anything about their sermons, except that they emanated an aura suffused with moralistic sentimentality that failed to open any door in my mind and quite possibly sealed the one to my heart.
What was Wisdom, really? Was it the shooting spinal pains I’d had forever?
So on the shores of this lake, the Sea of Galilee, the Rabbi of Nazareth fed thousands of people. Were there any loaves or fishes left to hand out? And what hunger were they supposed to satisfy? What did modern man hunger for, when he possessed everything except himself? What did the soul hunger for? For glory, triumphs, verdicts, separations? Or simply for the discovery of a threshold it could kneel before?
16
IN THE FOLLOWING months, my life took on a regular rhythm. I worked in the laundry with a group of old ladies who spoke Yiddish. While they folded the washing, I operated the sheet-ironing machine. My knowledge of German helped me to understand some of what they said and to engage in a minimum of conversation.
For the most part, I spent my free time with Uncle Jonathan; he, too, seemed happy to have recovered a missing branch of the family. In the evenings, we sat talking for hours in his little living room or went for walks along the rows of citrus trees he himself had planted.
‘In the beginning,’ he said, ‘this work had merely been assigned to me. For a while, as far as I was concerned, planting a tree was the same as building a wall; I didn’t see the difference. But as the years passed and I looked after the trees and watched them grow, I developed a real passion for them. My wife often used to tease me: “You think more about those trees than you do about your children,” and maybe she was right.
‘After all, a certain inevitability hovered over the children’s destinies. However hard I might try to bring them up in the best possible way, I knew that at a certain point they could – in total autonomy – make a bad choice, or one simply different from mine.
‘With my trees, however, things were different. They depended on my care. They required water when the soil got too dry, mineral oil to protect them from scale insects, and the right amount of fertiliser at the end of the winter, because if you got the proportions of the various composts wrong, the trees would produce too many leaves or the fruit would start falling prematurely or you could even cause dangerous burns. That’s a mistake I made a lot in the beginning: I gave the soil too many nutrients. I overfed it like a nervous mother and wound up making it sick. Fertiliser has to be applied in the correct proportions and at the right time, and sometimes the right move is to apply none at all. A reasonable amount of deprivation is as good for plants as it is for children; in order to feel the desire to have something, you must first give it up.
‘These days, there’s a rather obtuse but widespread notion that children, if they’re to be happy, must have everything right away, everything from foreign languages to computer games. I often discuss this topic with young couples, and they tell me I’m old-fashioned and maybe even a bit sadist
ic. They don’t understand that you have to feel nostalgia for something before you can go on a journey. If I deprive my plants of light, they’ll concentrate all their strength on finding it again. Their apical cells will strain spasmodically to discover a chink, and once the goal has been reached, the plant will be stronger because it’s had to encounter adversity and overcome it.
‘Spoiled plants, like spoiled children, have only one path ahead of them: the path of their ego.
‘I make these assertions, but I know I’m alone. The modern world’s evolving, but in a different way from before, and I certainly can’t do anything about that. But I would like it if people would think more about trees, if they’d learn to care for them and be grateful to them, because (even though no one seems to remember this) without trees, our lives could not exist; it’s their breath that allows us to breathe.
‘Do you know what aspect of the modern world I’m most afraid of? The spreading sense of omnipotence. Man is convinced he can do anything because he lives in an artificial world, built with his own hands, and he believes he has total dominion over it. But whoever does what I do, whoever grows plants and trees, knows that’s not the case.
‘Of course, if I want to guarantee regular deliveries of water to my trees, I can construct a sophisticated irrigation system – we’ve cultivated practically the whole country like that – but if it doesn’t rain for days, for months, for years, at some point the earth will grow so dry it’ll crack, plants will die, and animals will die with them. We can’t manufacture water, you see. And we can’t manufacture oxygen, either. We’re dependent on something that’s out of our hands. If the sea rises, we’ll be overwhelmed; if locusts arrive, they’ll devour the harvest and the seedlings exactly the way they did in the days of the pharaohs. But those are the kinds of things we don’t know any more, enclosed as we are by our artificial lights.
‘The only sure horizon is that of our dominion over the material world. We’re curing more and more diseases and using more and more sophisticated methods to do so. This, obviously, is an extraordinary accomplishment. But then again, we freeze pigs alive to see if it might be possible for us to fall asleep and wake up again, at several reprises, over an extended period – in short, to see whether we can counterfeit death and come back to life. We dismember the bodies of the dead and keep the pieces on ice for use as spare parts.
‘See here? My kneecap hardly moves any more because of arthritis – it’s always swollen, and I have a hard time walking. Do you know what a physician at the hospital said to me one day? He said, “If you want, we can replace it with another kneecap.” I said, “And where are you going to get another kneecap?” And he calmly replied, “At the bank.”
‘In other words, somewhere in the world, there’s a giant freezer that contains all possible spare parts; instead of courgettes and peas, it holds kneecaps and hands, tendons and eyes, waiting there to be used as replacements like car doors in a body shop.
‘I saw the expression that came over the doctor’s face when I gave him my reply, which was, “I’d rather be a cripple than profane another person’s body.” He looked at me in a way that let me know he thought I was just an old fanatic. But I’ve never been fanatical about anything. Doubt and perplexity have accompanied my every step. I would have liked to go back and tell him so, but then I realised it wasn’t worth the trouble. Enclosed spaces cause incredible obtuseness in people. You have to stand out in the open in order to admit that there’s something you can’t understand. That new awareness isn’t a defeat; it makes it possible for you to grow.
‘From that point, you can go on some extraordinary journeys, as my son always says, and if you don’t, whatever road you undertake to travel on will only lead you in a circle, around and around.
‘When you’re holding your newborn child in your arms, how can you think he’s an assembly of spare parts? You feel his tender flesh, entrusted to your care; you see his eyes – if you could read what’s in them, you’d be able to understand everything – and you realise that those few pounds of matter incorporate the greatest of mysteries. It’s not your intelligence that tells you this, but your guts, which have produced that mystery. Do you know this psalm? “My frame was not hidden from thee, when I was being made in secret, intricately wrought in the depths of the earth.”
‘And then I’m supposed to saw up those bones and put them in a freezer? No thanks, I’d rather let them go back to the depths of the earth. I’d rather think that “in thy book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them,” to continue the psalm. I’d rather bow my head and accept my fate.
‘I often discuss these things with my son when he and his little girls come to visit me. He and I stay up late and talk when everyone else has gone to bed. Sometimes he laughs and says I’ve become more religious than he is, but I tell him he’s wrong, because I’m like a shopkeeper who has an account with someone, an account he hasn’t settled yet – my mother’s death, my father’s, the extermination of millions of innocents throughout history – and since I’ve got that account, I can’t give myself heart and soul to a faith, but by the same token, I can’t pretend there’s nothing there, either. I can’t say that all’s well under the sun or that the heavens are filled with anything other than masses of matter in motion. Anyone who makes declarations like that either can’t see or pretends not to see what’s under his nose.
‘Like every city boy, when I first started planting trees, I was convinced they weren’t much different from posts, except they could put out leaves. As time passed and I listened to them, observed their growth, watched them get sick and die or bear fruit, I realised that they weren’t much different from children, that they needed care and love but also a firm hand. I realised that every one of them, incredibly, had its own individuality – some were stronger and others were weaker, some were generous and others were stingy, and some were even capricious.
‘I tended all of them with the same dedication and intensity, but they all responded differently. This made me see that they weren’t posts, but creatures with a destiny unto themselves. And if there’s a mystery about them, how much greater must be the mystery that envelops human beings?
‘If I had reached my present age convinced I’d spent my life planting mere posts that happened to be capable of generating fruit, what would I be by this point? Foolish? Wicked? What do you think? In any case, I’d be a person who’d lived from day to day without knowing how to listen, without knowing how to look. Instead of thoughts and questions, my head would be filled with something like wet, burning leaves. The smoke from their poor combustion would have prevented me from seeing how similar the tree’s destiny is to man’s.’
I told Uncle Jonathan about my own passion for trees; I described the walnut tree you’d so casually had removed and the devastation that followed. It was as if a tree had been chopped down inside of me, too. The wound was always open, and my anxieties gushed forth from it continuously.
We also talked about your illness, and about how I still hadn’t been able to come to terms with our relationship: too close and over-protective in my childhood, too full of conflict afterwards. The fact that you had loved me but hadn’t been able to love your daughter left me hanging, suspended in utter ambivalence as far as you were concerned.
Then I told him about my father as well, and about his affair with my mother and their years in Padua. After I was finished, and perhaps by way of turning down the drama a little, we started playing the plant game.
‘What kind of plant was Ilaria?’ I asked Uncle Jonathan.
‘Surely, some sort of aquatic plant,’ he replied. ‘Her floating roots didn’t let her form a stalk or live a long life, but as often happens with plants of that kind, she produced a most beautiful flower.’
‘How about my father?’
Taking his cues from the stories I’d told him, Uncle Jonathan compared my father to one of those plants that one sees rolling about in desert
country. They don’t resemble bushes so much as crowns of thorns, he said; pushed along by the wind, they dance on the sand, clamber up dunes, and roll back down, without ever stopping. Since they have neither roots nor the possibility of growing them, they can’t even offer nourishment to the bees, and their destiny is an eternal and solitary drift into nothingness.
When I was a little girl, I told my uncle, I’d wanted to have the solid strength of an oak or the fragrance of a lime tree, but recently I’d changed my mind. I was as much troubled by the lime trees’ imprisonment along avenues and in gardens as I was saddened by the fate of the oaks, condemned to solitude. Therefore, I now wanted to be a willow and grow my long tresses beside a river, dip my roots in the stream, listen to the sound of the current, offer the hospitality of my boughs to the nightingales and the reed warblers, and watch the kingfishers appear and disappear in the water, like little rainbows.
Then I asked him, ‘How about you? What kind of tree would you like to be?’
Uncle Jonathan concentrated for a little while before answering. ‘As a young man, I would have liked to be some kind of bush – a wild rose, say, or a hawthorn, or a prunus of some kind – and blend into the middle of a hedge. After I came to Israel, I would have liked to be one of those majestic cedars that grow on the slopes of Mount Hermon. But in recent years, the tree I always think about, the one I’m most nostalgic for, is one that grows back in our part of the world, the beech. I remember beeches from my excursions in the mountains: the silvery-grey trunks, covered with moss, and the leaves lighting up the air like little flames . . . So yes, there you are, now I’d like to be a beech.
‘Or better yet, I feel like a beech, I am a beech, because when life’s about to go out, it burns high with emotions, with memories, with feelings, just as the foliage of those trees turns to flame in the autumn.’