We wanted to know why he was known as ‘his own brother.’ But no one would tell us. You could peek into his home from 17-B Katznelson, or boldly climb the huge bombax that rose from his modest yard halfway up the sky. He had an empty apartment. Utterly empty. No furniture, no tables, no boxes. Nothing. Walls and whitewash.
“I’ve always lived this way, this is how I like it,” he explained. He didn’t ask how we knew what the inside of his apartment looked like, just smiled sheepishly and promised to take us down the sewage tunnels one day.
“How far?” we wanted to know.
“Caesarea. Or Tiberias.”
He debated pros and cons to which we were not privy, then secretly settled them in his mind. “I lived like this on the kibbutz too.” A late-blooming thought to explain his empty apartment.
A few years after immigrating to Israel and bouncing around various places until the age of twenty-five, Gershon Klima had joined one of the most severe of the Shomer HaTzair movement’s kibbutzim. There, his request to live in a room without objects was reviewed and they allowed him to live between bare walls in a drafty room. They were impressed. His name was even mentioned at one of the national conferences as a model of ascetic extremism. Gains were reaped. Gershon Klima was briefly upheld as a paragon but was soon forgotten, to the relief of the kibbutz representatives. Better to suffice with brief symbolism and not expose the embarrassing flaw in his character, his insistent tendency to collect expensive fabrics as bedding. In the center of his room, on the bare floor, he scattered lengths of utterly non-socialist fabrics: satin, velvet, brocade and silk. A princely bed was formed from these broad sheets of fabric with cascading folds which, if not for the sour odor of perspiration and hay that clung to it, might have engendered thoughts of a harem. When he was kicked off the kibbutz because of something that happened, he gathered up his fabrics and came to the neighborhood. Peering through his window from the bombax branches, one could just make out his luxurious bedding in the corner of the room. We once stole a few silk shirts from Grandpa Lolek and gave them to Gershon Klima for his pile. He was touched.
“It’s a gift,” he explained our deed to us. He promised to get a permit and take us on a tour of the sewage tunnels.
“How far?” we pressed.
“Caesarea.” This time he was determined. “Too hot in Tiberias.”
His voice heralded a prediction about to come true. Caesarea! We could not immediately digest all the fun of anticipating this walk. For weeks and months we sat daydreaming, breaking the walk down into smaller units. We imagined a dark passage, numerous dangers and enemies, a treasure trunk. Arguments broke out — would there be bats? Would they bite? How many candles should we take? Were flashlights allowed? Would we ever return to our worried families? A sewage-full Caesarea was about to cleave our souls before we could even see it. Every few days we had to unload a dose of excitement upon Gershon Klima:
“Will you really take us to Caesarea?”
“All the way to Caesarea, not just half-way?”
The promise was ratified and a bag of toffee candies placed in our hands, to fortify mind with matter.
Sometimes, usually at summer’s end, Gershon Klima surprised the neighborhood residents by appearing in an IDF uniform, thanks to the reserve duty for which he continued to volunteer even at the age of fifty-three. As soon as Gershon Klima turned up at his army base somewhere in the south of Israel, his fellow unit members showered him with respect and praise. They walked him inside and danced around him. Senior officers came up to shake his hand, quickly asking, “Gershon, where are the mains?” Because, as it turned out, Gershon Klima was the only person who knew how to find the water mains that united the water and sewage systems of the entire base, and he had been jealously guarding the secret since 1963. The visible mains, the straightforward ones, which any hand could touch, were nothing but an empty vessel — a superfluous component that had been maliciously circumvented and left completely without function. The real mains were hidden somewhere, probably in the thick of the earth, lording over the supply of water to the base with demonic whims. Only Gershon Klima could work his magic on them to make them keep working. A certain deviousness snuck into Gershon Klima when he put his IDF uniform on, a-completely-different-Gershon-Klima, and in order to keep the scandal to a minimum he was willing at any moment to turn up at the base and repair the mains, even if it meant leaving in mid-hospitalization. He had already been summoned by two base commanders to offices with brigade maps hanging on their walls, where, with grave expressions, they pressed, “Gershon, where are the mains?” The maintenance commanders, who were replaced every few years, hated him. One of them once spent thirteen thousand shekels on sophisticated equipment to locate the real mains. He reasoned, how difficult could it be? It was simply a matter of following the pipes. But the operation failed and the pipes lay still, never betraying Gershon Klima. As Grandpa Yosef served him a slice of watermelon, Gershon Klima recounted gleefully, “They almost struck oil with their thirteen grand, but they didn’t find the mains.” He chuckled, treating the thirteen thousand shekels as if he had donated them to an important cause.
Gershon Klima was unaware of the role his apartment played during his reserve duty days. In his absence, we reconstructed the terrorist takeover of the Savoy Hotel in Tel Aviv (we were both the late Colonel Uzi Yairi, the first of the forces to be killed), and we freed the Sabena airliner hostages at Ben-Gurion Airport (united against the terrorists but resentful of one another, since we were both the commanding officer of the Sayeret Matkal special forces unit, neither of us wanting to be a hostage). In ’76 we would have freed the Entebbe hostages seven days before a government meeting authorized a similar operation, were it not for Gershon Klima’s early return.
We needed Gershon Klima. His hands alone could uncover manholes to reveal the thrilling, multifaceted belly of the underworld. Ever since we had been given a Tarbut encyclopedia set, we had become acquainted with the properties of Planet Earth, and knew that it was made up of layer inside layer inside layer. We envisioned us humans as tiny people who stood on the outer layer, not knowing that down below it was burning — not even knowing that there was a below, that below was the source of everything that occasionally burst forth up here, volcanic eruptions and streams of lava, and steaming geysers and earthquakes, and a horrible smell of sulfur in ordinary-looking places. Our minds wrestled with the structure of the Earth’s layers, the thin layer we lived on, only its outer skin viable. Underneath was the cloak layer, in moderate burning colors, and finally the core, storing iron in a fluid state. Effi claimed Gershon Klima had never gone down deeper than the Earth’s layer. I believed the core of the Earth was within his reach, as evidenced by the fact that his clothes were covered with grey and brown stains, which must have come from the iron and manganese so plentiful in the Earth’s core. In any event, Gershon Klima had the key to the heart of Planet Earth.
He also held another key: if he was born in 1939, the time of the Big Bang, well then he must have known what had happened, and he was obliged to tell us.
We never walked up to him and asked questions just like that. We were conscious of the magnitude of caution required, of the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity we would be given one day in the future to ask the true questions, and of our obligation to wait, to ambush, to sense the right moment. We circled Gershon Klima, giving each other meaningful looks before each question and conducting silent consultations to avoid asking the wrong question, the kind that might destroy our chance to one day be able to ask: What happened to you in the war? How were you saved as a baby? How far down into the earth have you reached? Why do the people who come to take you away to the hospital call you ‘your own brother’? And above all, when will you finally take us on a tour inside Earth? We proceeded with caution. Edged around the nerve centers with a subtlety beyond our age, a concentration beyond our abilities.