194
PARTISAN REVIEW
In the night , while he slept, I lay awake, thinking of the rhesus
monkey which was your own childhood friend inside the fences of
the empty estate, and which you and your father dressed as a waiter,
with a bow tie , and trained to serve a tray of pomegranate juice. Un–
til one day it bit you in the neck, and you still carry the scar. The
Armenian servant was ordered to shoot it , and you dug its grave and
wrote an epitaph. And since then you have been alone.
And I thought about the fact that you never asked to hear about
my childhood, in Poland and here, and that I was too ashamed to
tell you about it. My father, like my husband, was a schoolteacher.
We lived in a cramped apartment , whose gloominess even on sum–
mer days is engraved on my memory as the gloom of a cavern .
There was a brown clock on the wall. I had a brown
coat ~
From the
ground floor rose the smell of the bakery . The narrow street was
paved with stone , and streetcars ran along it every now and again.
At night there was my father's asthmatic coughing fits . When I was
five we received a permit to go to Palestine. For seven years we lived
in a wooden hut by Nes Ziona. Father got a job as a plasterer in a
building cooperative , but he never lost his short-tempered teacherly
manner until he was killed falling from a scaffold. My mother died
less than a year later. She died of a children's disease, measles, on
the festival of the trees. Tu Bishevat. Rahei was sent away to be
educated in the kibbutz where she still lives, '"'(hile I was enrolled in
an institution of the Working Women's Council. After that I was a
platoon clerk in the army. Five months before I was discharged you
were put in charge of the platoon. What was it about you that caught
l
my heart? To try to answer the question I'll write down here for you
J
our son's ten commandments , in random order but in his own
words: I. Pity them all. II. Take more notice of the stars. III.
Against being bitter. IV. Against making fun. V . Against hating.
VI. Bastards are still human beings , not shit. VII . Against beating
up . VIII. Against killing. IX. Not to eat each other. X. Cool it.
These halting words are the exact opposite of you. As far as the
stars are from a mole . The icy malice that radiated from you like a
bluish arctic glow and made the other girls in the battalion hate you
to the point of hysteria was what caught my heart. Your air of indif–
ferent mastery. The cruelty that you exuded like a scent. The grey–
ness of your eyes, like the smoke from your pipe. The murderous
sharpness of your tongue at any hint of opposition . Your wolfish glee
at the sight of the terror you spread . The codtempt you could emit
like a flamethrower, and shoot like a searing jet at your friends, your
