Mai sunt câteva ore, şi nu cred că găsesc moment mai bun decât sărbătoarea asta pentru a vă aduce un text tulburător cum e cel de mai jos. Ştiu. Învierea e un moment al bucuriei, dar nu al bucuriei de a putea îndesa o felie de cozonac şi o bucată de drob în gură în acelaşi timp. Textul de mai jos nu este despre un Creştin, dar spune multe despre umanitate, despre suferinţă şi despre lumea în care trăim. Dacă nu aţi ţinut post, opriţi-vă câteva minute asupra cuvintelor de mai jos, şi dacă vă ating cumva, dacă citindu-le veţi realiza că o bucată de friptură nu înseamnă bucurie decât pentru că sărbătorim SPERANŢA umană, atunci vă urez Paşte Fericit.
Textul este despre un scriitor israelian care militează, în ciuda ofensivei armate a Israelului, pentru un compromis în zonă.
Grossman closed the press conference without mentioning his personal interest in the war: his 20-year-old son, Uri, was a tank commander then fighting in Lebanon. To do so would have been unseemly, and un-Israeli, he told me later. “The cause was to stop the war for the sake of the entire country.”
Grossman is 54, but he is trim and his face is unlined. He is reflective and self-contained, somewhat owlish, but not without humor. We met on a cold day in Jerusalem, at Mishkenot Sha’ananim, an artists’ colony situated across the Valley of Hinnom from Mount Zion.
Grossman told me that after the press conference, he went home to work on his latest novel, which he had begun in May of 2003, when Uri, the second of his three children, was about to be called up for army service. Grossman’s oldest boy, Yonatan, had already completed three years in the army.
“I thought about writing a novel about an Israeli soldier, a tank commander, who goes to a big military operation,” he said. “His mother has a kind of premonition that he’s going to be killed, and she will do everything she can in order to prevent that from happening. So she escapes. She will not be at home when the army comes to announce the death of her son. She understands that bad news takes two people, one to deliver and one to receive, and she will not be there to receive. She starts a walk across Israel, a 500-kilometer walk, and she tells the story of her son’s life, from the smallest details to the largest things, to someone who is very significant to her. She believes that this will protect her son.”
Grossman himself took a similar journey while writing the book, spending weeks crossing Israel on foot, and he visited with army officers whose duty it is to inform families of the deaths of their children.
At 2:40 a.m. on Sunday, August 13, three days after the press conference, Grossman’s doorbell rang. There were officers at the door. Uri had been killed in action in Lebanon, in the village of Hirbat Kasif, when a Hezbollah missile struck his tank. He was one of 24 soldiers to die on the first day of the ground offensive. Five hours later, David and his wife, Michal, woke up Uri’s sister, Ruti, who was then 13. As she cried, she asked, “But we will still go on living, right?”
Yehoshua, who is close to the family, told me that the Grossmans had taken to turning off their outside light at night, to make it more difficult for a messenger to find the house. But on that particular night, Michal had turned their outside light on. She later worried, she said, that in so doing she had “invited the terrible news.”
Among the mourners to visit the next day were Oz and Yehoshua. “Maybe he was trying to prevent Uri’s death by writing down his most terrible fears,” Yehoshua told me. “It’s a terrible tragedy that it didn’t work.”
Grossman recalled the visit of Oz and Yehoshua the day after Uri’s death.
“When Uri fell, the morning after, they came to the shivah”—the period of visitation and mourning that follows a Jewish burial—“and I told them I won’t be able to save this novel. I think it was Amos who said, ‘The novel will save you.’ The day after the shivah, I went back and started to work again.” I asked Grossman whether the novel has changed. “The writer changed, not the story. I knew how the story was going to end. I don’t want to say it.” There is more sadness in the book now, he said, “sadness for the fate of the young man, for the future of Israel, but I must say that the small number of people who have read it say they find it comforting.”
The novel is being published this spring. It could have a seismic effect on Israelis, who have, in their 60th year of independence, grown tired of losing their sons to war.
Articolul este din (de departe) cea mai bună revistă pe care o citesc în ultimul timp, The Atlantic, şi îl găsiţi în întregime aici
