Hezi was an utterly unexpected fountain of information, and an incautious one. He was apparently reprimanded by Grandpa Yosef because the next year he was completely silent, as if the Hezi who had snuck into the previous year’s amusement park day had been an impostor. We failed to see how he could be Littman’s son, and how he could suddenly have talked. The year after that, Hezi was abolished altogether.
Hezi was abolished, but not the impressions of Buchenwald. We had finally found a magic key to the Shoah: hunger was something we too could experience. Hunger. That, we could do ourselves.
But it was hard to stop eating just like that. Mom’s radar eyes would have picked up on it immediately, and things were no different in Effi’s household. We waited for our chance, knowing that we had to taste Buchenwald. The opportunity did not come quickly, but it came. We were sent to the kibbutz.
The original plan was to spend summer with Grandpa Yosef as usual, but a severe deterioration in Feiga’s health necessitated a change of plans. We oscillated between the threat of a session at camp (after already having announced that we were through with camp — thirteen years old, enough is enough), lounging around at my place, lounging around at Effi’s place, or going to the kibbutz. We wanted to stay with Grandpa Yosef, even prayed for Feiga’s health, but this time her decline was so severe that all the pale bones at the foundation of her illnesses were exposed, revealing a ruined network of body-soul connections. The die was cast: kibbutz.
The kibbutz was where Grandpa Hainek’s eldest sons lived. Ze’ev had already been killed. It was the year in which Dov was to be killed, in November, but that summer he still welcomed us warmly. His task was to host us for a month, and he did just that, with the help of Eitan, Grandpa Hainek’s third son, who was well-suited to the mission. He had just finished his army service and he liked to talk once in a while, which, by family standards, made him garrulous.
Most of the time we were left to our own devices, and we made the most of it: this was what we had been waiting for. Buchenwald. The rules of the game were simple: no eating. Then we replaced the absolute rule with less severe derivatives: eating was allowed, but only scraps from the kibbutz trash-cans, fruit peel, waste, bones. We were willing to be disgusted, to get ill. We toughened our spirits. It was not a game played for immediate victory, but in the service of the senses, to acquire skill, depth, and the possibility of touching the truth. Then we added another rule: we could eat whatever we stole.
It was not an easy time between Effi and me. She was fourteen, I was at bar mitzvah age (“Comfort, comfort my people,” began the haftorah I was learning to recite), and all sorts of things were erupting in my body. Strange discoveries emerged constantly, everything seemed peculiar, in constant flux. Effi had begun to hide things from me and was often busy. She had recruited a staff of girlfriends. When I wanted to go to the library, she would say she was busy, and eventually she confessed: “I’m kind of sick of the Shoah.” I felt betrayed. With great anger, I would go alone to read in the library, more diligent than ever, now representing the righteous, the neglected, the abandoned. I traded horrible thoughts and self-pity for studious reading. What I found out, I kept to myself, a little treasure for the treasureless.
On the kibbutz, the rift was somewhat healed. We knew it was Buchenwald time. Effi put her new interests (which, to my horror, had begun to take on the corporeal form of Yaron from the ninth grade) on hold. We played Buchenwald. We fasted and did not drink. We licked water from leaking taps, slipped behind the dining hall, stole old hunks of cheese and ate with trembling hands. We even sucked on straw, like Littman had done when he had escaped. We shared a sour, blackened banana peel in a tender moment of mutual destiny. Then, one day, there was an event of a different kind.
At the burning hour of midday we went to the distant fields near the entrance to the cowshed and the dairy. The heat was relentless. Our breath was lethargic from the Buchenwald hunger and the oppressive heat, colorful circles of sunlight hovered in front of our eyes. No one dared go outside in the heat wave. Only a few stunned pigeons wandered on the lawns and in the shade of the oleander shrubs, and the cows mooed plaintively in the distance. We walked slowly. I felt as if my legs were acting of their own accord. A strange sensation. Hunger had weakened my thoughts. For four days it had been nothing but sour banana peels, straw, cheese from a discarded container, and some apple rinds Effi had got hold of — the most nutritious thing I had consumed.
Effi dragged me into the oleander shade. She did not speak. She was breathing heavily and I saw a strange look in her eyes, beneath fluttering eyelids. Without warning, she lay down on her back on the slightly putrid bed of leaves, and slowly took off her blouse, crushing the leaves as she squirmed. Her nipples were presented to me with the hem of her blouse still draped over her forearms. Curiously, I surveyed the revelation, the fair mounds which bore her nipples on their peaks, and my heart did not demand a thing. Effi ordered me to come closer, laid down the law. She let me touch her with my tongue, but only on her belly-button, her earlobes, and the tip of her nose. She warned me against deviating from this crucifix of flesh. I knelt, examining my options, looking for interest in them. Effi breathed heavily. Nerve endings bustled just beneath the surface of her skin, invisible channels of sweetness perceptible only in her rosy blush. I kissed her earlobes undesiringly, cautiously touched the edge of her nose, then licked her navel. I sat up straight.
Effi sighed with her eyes closed. “Again.”
I was scared. “Again?”
Effi felt for my hand. She dragged it over her skin, letting me find the tracks on my own. “Use your tongue too,” she ordered.
I chose the safest looking path, the four points that had already proven themselves. I flitted over her navel, her ears, her nose. I sniffed. Effi exuded a new scent of budding perspiration. I gained courage and touched a nipple. I put my lips to it and tried to drink. I placed my hand on her abdomen and attempted to draw out a single drop, the way we had once both sucked on the udders of Lassie, the barn dog. She had not put up much resistance as we removed her puppies and tasted her udders, only a look that said, “Kids, it’s not pasteurized,” and slight amazement, perhaps also resentment at the temporary suspension of her puppies. (We didn’t drink much. It was a little bitter and unpleasantly warm. Unlike Romulus and Remus, we preferred grape juice.) I could not find a drop in Effi’s nipples. And she too, fairly soon, grew bored. But a new idea glistened.
At my cousin Zevik’s wedding, Grandpa Hainek’s son Eitan had been kind enough to explain to me about the schlong. He pulled me aside at one of the tables and went into great detail regarding whom he had given his schlong to, whom he was planning to give his schlong to, and how one gives one’s schlong. Later, in the restroom, he pulled down his pants and showed me this mysterious creature, the schlong, which had-been and was-being and would-be given according to a carefully implemented plan. I discovered with Columbus-like excitement that I too had a fragile schlong in my pants, and that its thus-far monotonous functions (sometimes, to my chagrin, at night in bed) were merely a spiritual weakening whose time was up. Now I looked at Effi and was guided by an unspoken sensation — her fluttering eyelids, her trembling lips, her expectant look. I put my worlds together and enquired, “Do you want to get my schlong?”
The days were days of Buchenwald, and I was dizzy from barely eating, and Effi’s slap sent me reeling into deep darkness. I could not believe how much Jewish strength still remained in the hand of this girl who had been testing her limits by starving herself for a week. Years later, she told me I was the only one who had been in the throes of Buchenwald starvation. She was secretly gobbling down double meals, fattening herself up in the dining room and at Dov’s. “I thought about it,” she generously explained, “about whether both of us really needed to do it, to understand.” And she had a complaint too. “Do you have any idea how many apples I had to eat, to make you those scraps?”