We would come on rainy Saturdays to visit Grandpa Yosef, careful not to track mud into the house — he had enough trouble as it was. We sat with the family and the neighbors, watching the rain, talking. Winter, the mire and the rain, for some reason did not bring back memories from the camps. On the contrary, winter was good. Their heavy faces were flushed from the heaters. The couches bore their weight. They flew. Childhood memories hovered. They themselves, their childhoods in snow and mud — they did not need us there. In their pictures they were fair-eyed toddlers sledding down the snow with a screech and walking with Father, holding his big hand. Always with them it was prayer shawls and Shabbat, narrow alleyways and, in the distance, the forest. The forests had long names. Niepolomice, Naliboki, Zielona. Sometimes there were weekdays too — haberdasheries, markets and synagogues. Tall goyim. Tomorrow it will snow.
And we were outside.
Sometimes other life forms tried to infiltrate the neighborhood. Young couples grew excited by the cheap real estate, and suddenly there were baby clothes hanging from the laundry lines. Crying at night, a soft, continuous sound. For some reason the young people did not last long. They moved away, leaving only the regular crying, lights on all night, the smell of old fabric on the lines. And sometimes kids were sent to the neighborhood to do fundraising.
On one side the children wait, sometimes giggling at the funny names on the doorbells. On the other side, life comes to a standstill. Quiet! Someone’s at the door! The children of Israel wait with their vouchers in denominations of five, ten and twenty. Beyond the door the Gestapo is knocking — someone has turned us in.
Black clouds of starlings also invaded in season, finding the neighborhood a wonderful place for their needs, chattering on the trees, increasing the value of every branch. Footballs suddenly appeared in the air, kicked over from a nearby practice field. A young boy soon emerges and looks around for the ball, somewhat surprised at this neighborhood, this quiet. Sometimes he spots a resident in a window. Impudently, the boy asks Uncle Antek if perhaps he’s seen the ball, not knowing that sundown is approaching and in Auschwitz the prisoners are being counted. The inmates stand for roll-call, the shadows of their tortured bodies hidden in the earth, and when the roll-call drags on and on it seems as if only a small step separates the natural state from its opposite: the shadow straightening up while the body falls to the ground to rest.
We invade too. Our neighborhood vacation. Halfway through summer, before we arrive, a sudden blossoming in the yards. Gloomy trees light up with color. Pink, red and purple glimmer trivially in the yards. Then we show up, Effi and I. Tanned, unkempt, full of ideas. After a whole session at camp, bursting with our little disputes, bitter grudges erupting every hour. How could Effi have made us lose the indoor-soccer match? How could I have forgotten the right answer in the group quiz? Effi still resentful over the gray horse I got to ride on horse-riding day. Carried on its back, I felt afraid, with a foolish smile on my lips, hesitant but victorious. Effi got a skinny horse without a mane.
Effi was older than me. She was always a year ahead of me and always beat me at everything. A poem she wrote was published in Ha’aretz Shelanu; mine wasn’t. She got work as a photographer for Maariv LaNoar magazine; I didn’t even get a response to my application. She managed to get herself a cast on her arm at least once every two years; I never even had one. She had braces and she was sent to have her eyes tested. Every other summer when she got her cast, everyone wrote lines and poems and signed their names with colorful markers. Every year I plucked up the courage to rebel, to reverse the order of things and try to lead. Effi would rise to the challenge. For that reason we set up a summer camp, an arena in which everything would be decided. Moshe attended our camp, and very quickly he also became the janitor and the judge. When Moshe wasn’t quick enough and the fights were too great, Effi would declare — to the woods! That was where I lost.
Above us the Carmel mountains towered, and behind them the woods of Minsk. We were partisans and we were American-Indians and we were ghetto-fighters, day in day out. Time was thrown into disarray. German trucks were attacked and taken down whenever a path met a road. The rivers flowed with opportunities to wade through the water and join the partisans. Uprisings broke out in the ghettos every day. We escaped to the woods and hid. We poked around all the houses of Katznelson, climbing through windows, invading closets. We opened sealed boxes and read impenetrable certificates in foreign Polish on paper that smelled like dead countries. We picked up the rules from the grownups’ conversations: if you get caught, better to be caught by the Germans. Worse to be caught by the Poles. Worst of all — Ukrainians or Lithuanians. We were afraid of Mrs. Dopochek, who was Lithuanian. We tried to find evidence to ascertain who was Ukrainian. We carved oaths of silence-if-taken-hostage on all the trees except Gershon Klima’s Indian bombax, which we regarded as slightly holy. And we celebrated our childhood, our wildness. Apart from Menachem, the only child in the neighborhood, we had no competitors there, and we sucked everything we could out of it. Every year, the same things. Momentous events tried, unsuccessfully, to distinguish the years from one another, but one year skipped into the next and they all turned into one huge, borderless year. A year in which everything happened, then, now, forever. A tremendous year, its details bursting forth, every memory picking out arbitrary details from many places; contradictions and amazements jostle, huddle, one thuggish version wins for a moment then disappears into the pile, kicking and screaming. The Great Year plays innocent: I am not one year, I am all of childhood. But we think only of the summers with Grandpa Yosef and the Great Year quickly stands at attention, buttons itself up into the measurements of a single year, barely standing, rocking on its heels.
Genia Mintz, the teacher, who kept a little parrot on her windowsill, comes to complain that we threw chewing gum and toffees into the bird-cage. (She dies on a Saturday; they wheel her out of the house and take her away in a black car.) In the middle of summer, she pets Effi’s head and asks math questions, questions for tanned skin and sandals. “Tell us about Ravensbrück, Mrs. Mintz.” Little Genia Mintz walks down Katznelson, alone.
Mr. Bergman is hospitalized for a whole year, allowing us to investigate the contents of his home. Grandpa Yosef goes over to return a book in Polish about Herod and we agree to just stand at the window. Mr. Bergman’s plants need to be watered, he’s been in “convalescence” near Jerusalem for two weeks, and Grandpa Yosef goes inside with us and a watering can.
During that Great Year we were American Indians and soldiers and illegal immigrants and astronauts. But mostly we were partisans, of the vengeful type. We sought out victims. Once, on the side of the road that ran between the two forests, we found an abandoned car whose driver had gone into the woods for a pit-stop. Bleary-eyed, we crawled into the car. We stole candy from the glove compartment, let the air out of one tire and spat on the seats.
The road at the edge of the first forest was, for me, the final frontier, never to be crossed. Something about the way it popped up after a long run among the trees was inexplicably frightening. Nature, nature, nature, then suddenly a break, a road — human presence. Effi used to mock me. Complacently crossing the road, she would disappear into the other forest, then come back and tell me how she’d gone “to the edge.” I didn’t know that just beyond “the edge,” behind another forest, was the Kiryat Haim soccer stadium where I went on Saturdays with Dad and yelled cheers that reached the heights of the treetops in the woods.