Loud and Clear

picture of Zvi. It was a copy of a copy, a very grainy photograph. I hid the photograph under the folded clothes in my compartment of the common cupboard, the second one from the top. At nights, when my three roommates in the children’s houses of Givat-Brenner were asleep, I would take a light under the blanket and study it for a long time. I saw the head and shoulders of a young man, very good-looking, somewhat similar to his brother Aronchik. The young man’s head was tilted to one side. His hair was blowing in the wind and a slight smile, really just a hint of smile, played on his lips. Sometimes I talked to him, but his face was turned away from me. He seemed listening to something else in the distance. I knew he was smiling at the songs of Sirens of unknown seas.

This picture is still on my table.

Chapter 4 By Myself

IMAGINE ODYSSEUS DECIDING to write his story in the first person. Would that be possible?

Not a simple question.

And that’s not just because Odysseus was too busy between Scylla and Charybdis to take up pen and paper. After all, he might have taken to writing later in calmer times, say, when he returned to his always-waiting Penelope from his second voyage, the more magical voyage of the two—to remote lands where the inhabitants didn’t know what the sea was and couldn’t recognize an oar. Well, then?

No, that’s still not it. Because there is another difficulty, arising from the limitation of Odysseus’s own viewpoint. While blind Homer sat with the gods and saw everything, Odysseus was struggling against the wine-dark sea and saw very little.

And there is another problem, small but irritating, the writing in the first person: me, and again me, me. I know well that behind every word I write are many friends who were there with me, fought, laughed, acted, lived, and died near me, but can I tell all their stories?

AND INDEED IN ANOTHER BOOK that I wrote—its title was A Dream in Black and Azure—I wanted to tell about a small odyssey of mine (forgive me, dear reader, for the immodest metaphor), which occurred in 1973, in a very difficult and terrible war. But at the time I wrote it I was still young and afraid to expose myself. And so it came to pass that eventually I wrote the entire book in the third person.

And this is what happened as a result of my reservations about using “me”: I invented a person and sent him out to replace me. I gave him a name: Toledano. Just like that, without much thought.

Toledano was the name my father, Zvi, adopted in his youth, the name of his deceased mother. Zvi Toledano is the name written on the few documents he left behind, papers from school and such. Somehow the name Toledano didn’t pass to me.

And so I wrote a book, and in page after page about that war in 1973, I kicked this guy, Toledano, around in the same way all of us were kicked around. Toledano kicked back, and he developed his own point of view, and he was stressed, sometimes to the breaking point. And I watched him from above through the microscope, and saw him struggling down there, the same way I waged my own Yom Kippur War. I controlled him and his actions, and he was dependent on me. I could pull the strings and operate him at will.

But then something strange happened: This guy Toledano, whom I invented to serve my needs, developed a will of his own. From the moment he received his name from me, Toledano grew more powerful and drew from me things I had no intention of giving to anybody, ever, and he reacted spontaneously in ways that nobody could have instilled in him, definitely not me. You see, I never knew my father. I invented him.

And so, throughout the year when I wrote that book, I felt as if my clothes and then my skin were gradually peeled away. And in the end I found myself running around naked in the small, empty flat I was working in, looking for clothes to cover myself. This process extracted from me things that people don’t talk about, even things I never knew I ever knew. There were days when I fled my writing desk and ran into the street, being driven half crazy by the devil pushing my pencil across the page.

Time and again I decided to retake control of my book and to return it to the path I had chosen for it—just a simple war story—but Toledano wouldn’t submit. He was there, he had a forceful personality, and he wanted to speak. So whenever I returned to that small flat and the piles of scribbled pages, I found that my control of the situation was at best partial, and I couldn’t do with my hero what I initially planned. There came a moment when I considered killing him off, but I failed. It was Toledano’s fault that the entire book charged off in another direction, and other characters began their own revolution, and also tried to rewrite their stories through me.

And I cannot blame anybody, because A Dream in Black and Azure came out okay in the end. At least that’s what people told me, and to this day occasionally people grab me on the street, call me up, or send letters telling me things about it and about themselves from its pages. That book even won me a literary prize. I was invited to share the stage where none other than the prime minister, Mr. Yitzhak Rabin, was waiting for me. So Yitzhak shook my hand again and again, and then he turned from me to the microphone and said in his deep bass voice, “Iftach Spector surprises us again.”

And, all in all, it was really nice, although I couldn’t remember any previous surprises I had given Mr. Rabin. And in truth, it should have been Toledano standing there on the podium before that big audience and getting an award, not me. Because it was Toledano who had surprised the prime minister no less than he surprised me.

Days and years later, I have decided that there is still something special in the first person: it is mandatory. And over it, together with it, comes the special flavor of authenticity. Now I realize that it was with good reason that for the hardest of Odysseus’s tribulations, Homer gave him the mike, telling him to speak for himself. The dilemma is clear: How does the poet get inside the head of the man who tied himself to the mast and listened to the singing of the Sirens until he went mad? And who, except the one who dared to descend to the underworld, could imagine the emotions and the thoughts that flooded him when he met his dead mother there?

SO NOW, HAVING STARTED another session with blank pages, I recall Toledano and think that though the word “me” irritates, it still has one exclusive quality: this word is at least clear and binding. Surely it’s much easier to blur things; obscurity would have made the telling much easier on me, but I fear that compromises may damage the final product. Take A Dream in Black and Azure. With all the praise and the award, who remembers it now?

Well, for sure, one man—a high-ranking officer in the IDF does. He swore, after I declared I would refuse to take part in war crimes, that he was going to destroy and annihilate my book. Erase it from under the sun.

When I heard about him and his threat, I was astounded. Initially I thought there might have been some mistake in the last edition that somehow insulted him personally. So I checked in my copy, and the text was okay. On reflection, I decided that the book had nothing to do with him, and the important thing to this person was just the proclamation of its annihilation. I thought that probably his reward would be an invitation by his superiors for a macho pissing with the wind, a hell of a promotion. If this was really the case, I salute him. This officer must be practical, a man of action, and surely he has the “right stuff,” a man with a great future. I am glad my book helped him to get there.

SO THIS IS MY CONCLUSION after all these deliberations: I have decided that my small odyssey will be told by myself, under my own name. I shall not compromise anything intentionally.

NOW HERE WE ARE BACK IN THE EARLY 1960s, at the Scorpions.

Two months have passed since our arrival; I haven’t yet passed my flight test. Yak himself was invited from headquarters and came down to the Scorpions to check out the trainees on the Super Mystere in aerial combat, one on one, against him.

Now it was my turn.

“Turn out,” he ordered. We separated, turning away and preparing for battle. Then he reversed direction and turned back toward me. He came nearer and nearer, the master battle tactician, and—wham!

We passed each other head on, at supersonic speed.