A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [267]
After the calamity the children emerged from the cave, saw the destruction, and instead of despairing they decided, in a discussion that resembled a general assembly in a kibbutz, that life must go on and that they must rebuild the ruined village. So they set up committees, which girls sat on too, because these children were not only brave and industrious but also amazingly progressive and enlightened. Gradually, working like ants, they managed to recover the remaining livestock, repair the pens and cow sheds, restore the burned houses, start working the fields again, and set up a model community of children, a sort of idyllic kibbutz: a commune of Robinson Crusoes without a single Man Friday.
Not a cloud darkened the life of sharing and equality enjoyed by these children of the dream: neither power struggles nor rivalries and jealousies, neither filthy sex nor the ghosts of their dead parents. It was exactly the opposite of what happened to the children in Lord of the Flies. Tsvi Livne certainly intended to give the children of Israel an inspiring Zionist allegory: the generation of the wilderness had all died, and in its place there arose the generation of the Land, bold and brave, raising itself up by its own efforts from catastrophe to heroism and from darkness to great light. In my own, Jerusalem version, in the sequel that I composed in my head, the children were not content with milking the cows and harvesting the olives and grapes; they discovered an arms cache, or better still they managed to devise and construct machine guns, mortars, and armored vehicles. Or else it was the Palmach that managed to smuggle these weapons a hundred generations backward in time to the outstretched hands of the children of Over the Ruins. Armed with all these weapons, Tsvi Livne's (and my) children hurried to Masada and arrived at the very last minute. With a devastating barrage of fire, from the rear, with long, accurate salvos and deadly mortar fire they took the Roman legionnaires by surprise—the very same legionnaires who had killed their parents and were now engaged in building a ramp to storm the rocky citadel of Masada. And so, at the very moment when Eleazar Ben Yair was about to conclude his unforgettable farewell speech and the last defenders of Masada were on the point of falling on their swords so as not to be taken captive by the Romans, my young men and I burst onto the mountain and saved them from death, and our nation from the ignominy of defeat.
Then we carried the war to enemy territory: we positioned our mortars on the seven hills of Rome, smashed the Arch of Titus to smithereens, and brought the emperor to his knees.
There may well be another sick illicit pleasure concealed here, one that no doubt never occurred to Tsvi Livne when he was writing the book, a dark, oedipal pleasure. Because the children here buried their own parents. All of them. Not a single grown-up was left in the entire village. No parent, no teacher, no neighbor, no uncle, no grandpa, no grandma, no Mr. Krochmal, no Uncle Joseph, no Mala and Staszek Rudnicki, no Abramskis, no Bar-Yizhars, no Aunt Lilia, no Begin, and no Ben-Gurion. And so a well-repressed desire of the Zionist ethos, and of the child that I was then, was miraculously fulfilled: that the grown-ups should be dead. Because they were so alien, so burdensome. They belonged to the Diaspora. They were the generation of the wilderness. They were always full of demands and commands, they never let you breathe. Only when they are dead will we be able to show them at last how we can do everything ourselves. Whatever they want us to do, whatever they expect from us, we'll do the lot, magnificently: we'll plow