• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1038 0

I was little more than four years old, so that this sensual recollection can only have survived by passing through several stages of transmission and amplification. My mother and father often reminded me of those moments, because they enjoyed boasting to acquaintances that their child sat on Tchernikhowsky's lap and played with his mustache. They always turned to me for confirmation of their story: "Isn't it true that you can still remember that Saturday afternoon when Uncle Saul sat you on his lap and called you 'little devil'? It's true, isn't it?"

My task was to recite for them the refrain: "Yes, it's true. I remember it very well."

I never told them that the picture I remembered was a little different from their version. I did not want to spoil it for them.

My parents' habit of repeating this story and turning to me for confirmation did indeed strengthen and preserve the memory of those moments for me, which had it not been for their pride might well have faded and vanished. But the difference between their story and the picture in my memory, the fact that the memory I retained was not merely a reflection of my parents' story but had a life of its own, that the image of the great poet and the little child according to my parents' staging was somewhat different from my own, is proof that my story is not merely inherited from theirs. In my parents' version the curtain opens on a blond child in shorts sitting on the lap of the giant of Hebrew poetry, stroking and tugging at his mustache, while the poet bestows on the youngster the accolade of "little devil" and the child—oh, sweet innocence!—repays him with his own coin by saying, "No, you're a devil!" to which, in my father's version, the author of "Facing the Statue of Apollo" replied with the words "Maybe we're both right" and even kissed me on my head, which my parents interpreted as a sign of things to come, a sort of anointing, as if, let us say, it had been Pushkin bending over and kissing the head of the little Tolstoy.

But in the picture in my mind, which my parents' recurrent searchlight beams may have helped me preserve but definitely did not imprint in me, in my scenario, which is less sweet than theirs, I never sat on the poet's lap, nor did I tug at his famous mustache, but I tripped and fell over at Uncle Joseph's home, and as I fell, I bit my tongue, and it bled a little, and I cried, and the poet, being also a doctor, a pediatrician, reached me before my parents, helped me up with his big hands, I even remember now that he picked me up with my back to him and my shouting face to the room, then he swung me around in his arms and said something, and then something else, certainly not about handing on the crown of Pushkin to Tolstoy, and while I was still struggling in his arms, he forced my mouth open and called for someone to fetch some ice, then inspected my injury and declared:

"It's nothing, just a scratch, and as we are now weeping, so we shall soon be laughing."

Whether because the poet's words included both of us, or because of the rough touch of his cheek on mine, like the roughness of a thick warm towel, or whether indeed because of his strong, homely smell, which to this day I can conjure up (not a smell of shaving lotion or soap, nor a smell of tobacco, but a full, dense body smell, like the taste of chicken soup on a winter day), I soon calmed down, and it transpired that, as so often happens, I was more in shock than in pain. And the bushy Nietzsche mustache scratched and tickled me a little, and then, as far as I can remember, Dr. Saul Tchernikhowsky laid me down carefully but without any fuss on my back on Uncle Joseph's couch (that is Professor Joseph Klausner), and the poet-doctor or my mother put on my tongue some ice that Auntie Zippora had hurriedly brought.

So far as I can remember, no witty aphorism worthy of immortalization was exchanged on that occasion between the giant among the poets of the formative Generation of National Revival and the sobbing little representative of the later so-called Generation of the State of Israel.