Feathers

Chapter Ten

Chapter Ten 1. Already that morning my mother feared the worst. “You’re not leaving the house today,” she stated categorically the minute I opened my eyes. The world wouldn’t come to an end, she insisted, if I missed a day of school. My school was near the Knesset building, and my mother, who did not believe in looking for trouble, especially if trouble was already looking for you, feared the morning of Reparations Day. The debate over the reparations negotiations conducted by the Israeli and German governments had naturally reached my parents’ grocery, which became a miniature parliament in those days, the shouts of whose delegates often brought curious bypassers in from the street. That morning, however, when my father opened the store at five a.m. for his early-bird customers, the arguments soon turned into fisticuffs. Mr. Kipper, the night watchman who lived alone and stopped off each morning on his way home from the cold storage plant in Tel Arza where he worked for a pack of cigarettes and a glance at the headlines of the newspapers stacked in the corner, emptied a milk can over Ada Kaleko, a prominent figure in the nurses’ union, and declared that never in his darkest dreams in Buchenwald had he imagined that one day the rulers of a Jewish state would sit down to make a deal with Hitler’s heirs. In the ensuing fracas BenAvram , who worked in the warehouse of the co-op dairy, broke an egg on the head of Rabbi Shisha, whose son had been killed while fighting in the ranks of the Irgun. Only fascist hooligans, he shouted, supported Mr. Begin, who had organized the antigovernment demonstrations and deserved to be exiled to Kenya as his terrorist comrades had been by the British, where he could rot in the jungle with the blacks. My father stood by helplessly as his store began to resemble our house after the Rationing Bureau raid. My mother, however, had the presence of mind quickly to turn out the lights, plunging the skirmishers into the darkness of the foggy, rainy winter morning. Soon they trooped embarrassedly outside, where Kipper continued to conduct a rear-guard action on the sidewalk. All morning long, her mouth grim with worry, my mother watched the trucks and command cars full of helmeted policemen armed with billy clubs, and the fire engines with their menacing hoses, racing past the store. “The Tenth of Tevet is only tomorrow,” several customers tried to humor her, referring to the fast day that commemorates the start of Nebuchadnezzar’s siege of Jerusalem. “But the siege of Jerusalem has already begun,” my mother smiled back. It was because of such jests, she observed, that King Solomon had said in his book of proverbs, “Even in laughter the heart is sad.” At noon the quickly thinning streets were blasted by the loudspeakers of a billboarded pickup truck calling the masses to a rally in Zion Square at four o’clock at which Menachem Begin and Professor Klausner would speak out against the satanic alliance with Evil. My mother hurried to close the store and stopped by Rachlevski ’s on her way home to tell him that civil war was imminent and that by evening we would be able to boast that Jews too could make a pogrom. If he was smart, she advised him, he would stay home like her and not re-open after the noonday break. “Blessed are they who dwell in thy house,” she announced in the words of the Psalmist when she got home. From now until tomorrow morning, she proclaimed, none of us would set foot out-of-doors. She had already bolted the door behind her when she discovered to her dismay that Riklin was in the house with my father, and that she had just condemned herself to an indefinite stay in his presence, from which he alone could release her. The two men sat at the table, which was littered as usual with rolled up maps, registers of the Burial Society, and issues of “The Lawgiver’s Plot” in their crumbling paper bindings. Father’s attention was riveted on Riklin, who had been bringing him news of the world and was now telling him about the scandal that took place at 171 } the funeral of Reb Itchele Glazer, the stout little tutor from the Etz Haim Yeshiva who...