18
Bliss
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Translated by: Jeremy Forman
My father believed in Marxist karma as a thrilling destiny that was tailored to the measurements of his short, solid body. He viewed the world through defiant, eroding eyes, as if endowed with the ability to discern an elusive spark of truth in the darkness. When he would focus his gaze on me, I felt as if my organs were part of a puzzle of a picture that only he could see, and that I needed to train for its completion. But I was a sickly child, with a body that did not befit this theory.
He hated illness and recoiled from it like a personal fault, a case of individual rebellion against the orderly ideology of history. I wanted to be strong like him, to have arms and legs that were thick with muscles, but I grew to be thin and bony. He had trained to be a boxer, toughening his body to absorb the blows of life. I ran from one place to another, dodging the blows instead of taking them.
He ultimately came to terms with the fact that I would not grow up to be a boxer like him. On my fifth birthday, as a symbolic gesture, he removed the picture of Cassius Clay’s gold medal victory at the Rome Olympics from the cover of my photo album, and he replaced it with a photo of Zátopek, the “Czech Locomotive.” When he switched the photos, he remarked to my mother that whereas “sentiments are lies,” a “Czech locomotive” is a force that not only runs, but that also carries and hauls the load until it reaches its destination.
Where to? To this question he either had no clear answer or preferred not to say. Every evening at six forty-five he would stand at the front door of their room. “Come! We’re going!” he would command, grabbing me with a meaty, calloused hand. And every evening at seven I would stop in front of the door of the children’s house and try to not be released from him. He would thrust me into the arms of the caretaker and explain to the open space that “he who lacks ideals lacks love.” I would shriek and try to escape her arms, clutching his shirt. “You are the craziest kid I have ever seen,” he would mutter. Apparently, I was a disappointing child, a source of bewilderment and no small measure of embarrassment.
My father had three sacred holidays on which he did not work: the First of May, October Revolution Day, and Independence Day. These were parade days. I liked to run; he liked to march. On the evening before the First of May, he would take the red cloth sheet out of the closet, mount it on a broom handle, and lean it beside the door. At six in the morning, I could already hear the clicking of hard shoes through the open space of the children’s house, followed by the smell of work clothes. I would pretend to be asleep just to hear him say, in his soft voice, “Iftachik, wake up. We’re going.” And we would go to the First of May parade in Beer-Sheva, which, according to my memory and his faith, will last forever. Invigorated by the waving of the flag, his face extending sharply forward, he did not care about the declining number of marchers from year to year.
Today, on the First of May, at four in the morning, his face again awakens me. A soft, dark oval line. A white mane. Dark eyes. “Iftachik, wake up,” the creaking tree branches whisper, echoing in the trash collectors’ shouts of “forward!” and “stop!” “Iftachik, wake up! We’re leaving.” And I awaken to my karma, the run, a purpose intertwined with destiny. “Red,” his hovering voice whispers, and without turning on a light, hands feel around in the sock drawer, pull out the red ones, and dress me in red running shorts. My pre-run protocol operates on its own, without me. All I need to do is to be committed to what is necessary and to obey the force controlling me, which arises out of memory and leads me. I run slowly and then pick up the pace. I am already at the promenade when the purple light rises over the sea.
Running is sometimes a strange and mysterious consolation. Unintentionally, the monotonous horizontal movement sculls backward in memory. My consciousness that always runs forward tarries and goes silent for long moments at a time. However, instead of emptying out, it is filled with messages broadcast over a frequency whose rhythmic movements march in formation, invading my movements. I make room for it, internalize it, run with it, and mourn. The longing rolls its soul into mine until the details accumulate at such a high compression that there is no room between them, and I almost suffocate. The wound was – is – and will be, and when I run around it, I comprehend how deep its perimeter is.
Occasionally, the pain is concentrated in my hip joints, and whenever I try to increase my speed, my legs tear, and the pain of the tearing befits the other pain. The run does not heal, but it lets the wound bleed, and the wound fills me with the power of the locomotive, the one my father talked about…
The sound of the lifeguard’s announcement to swimmers to not venture in deep sounds to me like a cry from the megaphone he would carry with him during the parade: “Power to the workers! Down with the Bourgeoisie!” – Marxist slogans that don’t rhyme. I run along the promenade and reality plays in my imagination. People walking to the beach with towels over their shoulders become marchers waving red flags and calling out: “Happy workers’ day!” And I become increasingly extracted from the course of time.
“Now listen here!” I hear the angry voice of an adult leaning over a child. “Don’t you leave my side. Don’t go getting lost on me.”
Only rarely did anger ignite within him – only when he felt helpless with me, or that the ideological home he had built was being invaded and he was backed into a corner. Nevertheless, the fury pulsed within him – a murky, sweeping vortex of a believer who knows the fragility of his own faith. I run, and, through my eyes, he sees that not a single red flag is waving – neither from a rooftop or a balcony, nor along the promenade, nor from a broom handle borne proudly by an everyday worker. At the southern end of the promenade I stop and turn to take another look, but not a single flag is in sight. All I can feel and hear is him: “Iftachik, wave it strongly!”
How naïve of me to still allow him to direct my movements today. But when I begin running again, just after the Jaffa Port, his shoulders and his back reveal themselves. To my surprise, he runs fast and I have trouble catching up to him. I push my legs hard, hauling the load like a locomotive to reach him, hoping that running can change the course of time and make it cyclical, so that we are like runners in a stadium, finishing at the starting line over and over again, at the door to the children’s room, his large hand holding mine.
My energy is depleted, and, despondent, I step down onto the sand and move slowly along the water line that winds like the outline of a body in a hospice bed, with a thin blanket covering it – like a parochet, separating the living and the dead. But when I leave the beach and cut into an alleyway at Ajami, a red flag suddenly appears from the railing of a balcony. “Look!” escapes my lips, and the woman sitting idly on the balcony turns to me with the face of an elderly woman in the light of a fading fire.
“I thought that love for me was non-binding,” he panted as I sat by his bedside in the hospice. “If I had the strength, I would not put myself to the test with such fervor.” A milky cloud blocks the sun and the red color of the flag turns pink. The old woman waves me away with her hand, as if banishing to run onward. I am overcome by thirst, but I have already passed the city’s new construction sites to the south, and there is neither a city kiosk nor a local convenience store in sight – only the foundations of buildings full of the sounds of foreign workers, and a tin fence bearing an elegant sign posted by a contractor hiding them from sight.
And I continue on, running to the same place that he never discovered but rather only promised existed.
Bliss
Wants
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