598
PARTISAN REVIEW
planted in the soft tar. Genka, with the black light that hovered around
his gaunt, uniformed frame, his narrow jaw seeming to quiver with
stored invective. The one doing the talking was Uri, who looked not at
Avram's scowling face but to his side, where a new star pricked the sun–
set.
"The mine is a going concern," Avram growled, interrupting.
"It
ought to be round," Uri repeated, absorbed in the sight of an ideal
invisible mine slightly to Avram's left, in the vicinity of Venus, "and the
multiswitch ought to fit inside the lid."
"When a thing works," Avram boomed, "you don't have to make a
Platonic symposium out of it!"
Of course, he admitted to me, Uri was right. The mine needed to be
round, yet Avram always remembered being angry that the boy-whom
no one dreamed would become famous-had dared to criticize. I sensed
that it wronged Avram's sense of natural order. The veteran of a winter
siege shouldn't have to kowtow to a stripling in love with the sky.
Among Inventors
"Now I
CAN TELL
you about your father's arrival," Avram continued. I
bore down on my notepad with another heading, the real one this time.
"One morning between ten and eleven, I was working in the Studio
when the door opened. I looked up, and there was a tall, strangely
happy man with a jute sack over his shoulder. He untied the sack and
took out a small-caliber recoilless rifle, which consisted of a piece of
pipe, a stopper in one end, and a revolving ammunition chamber.
It
was
like a homemade toy. Genka looked it over and said, 'We'll develop
this.' As for your father," Avram finished, "he was always-I must use
the English
word-exuberant."
That was the end of the story about my father.
It
was no more than a verbal snapshot of a young man beaming in a
doorway. To give the picture depth, I had to imagine the history behind
him: the taste of the last Turkish coffee he'd sipped in the circle of his
own kibbutz; his first wife watching from the armored truck as he
waved goodbye; the potato sack slung on his turned-away shoulder. I
saw that I would have to forgive his exuberance. When he'd handed the
homemade rifle to Genka Ratner, it stopped being the thingamajig that
had nearly killed poor Comrade Tzipi in the tractor shed, and became
his passport to the world he was born for-the world of invention . No
more wasting his gifts as the mechanic of a small farm tucked between
