The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 51
Israel led me and Lazarus into the gangway. He stopped abruptly, turned to me, defensive, tense. I sensed he was competing for me, and I felt sad for it. He told me that he had made a bad mistake, out of rashness, when he invited Grandfather over here, that only the shock of what they had found could explain his stupidity. He said Grandfather was a savage man, capable of any crime. He felt responsible for protecting these pathetic people from him. Israel was in a killing mood himself. I had watched him deteriorate since Stockholm. I am ashamed now that I had become more trusting of Grandfather’s patriarchal brutality than Israel’s enlightened humanity. To be fair to Israel, Molly’s pregnancy was a disabling fact. Israel seemed to suffer more than she with each new peril. Several times I came upon him belowdecks sitting with Peregrine and Charity; he was pale, weepy, withdrawn, seemingly inconsolable. I had tried to conceal that I was increasingly suspicious of his opinions. I was not the only one to waver before Israel’s weaknesses. Guy and Lazarus openly challenged him at our councils, even Earle—whose broken health undermined Guy’s confidence in the same way Molly’s listlessness did Israel’s—spoke against Israel’s pronouncements.
Israel told me before Port Praia that he thought what was happening to us—what I have described as falling from the inside to the outside—made no sense, was neither a judgment of us nor inevitable. He said he did not hate Grandfather, nor did he blame him for our condition; he said that he was certain the opposition he had encountered all his life was not organized, nor of a piece, nor did it have a face. He also denied my talk of luck. He said, “I keep going, we keep on, because we believe we’re decent and right and honest. There is no protection for us if we lose that conviction. That will be the end.”
I wonder now about that man, Israel Elfers, who loved me from that first moment I lay in Earle’s arms in the mickey mouse club, who helped to raise me happily, who taught me what he believed in above all else—decency—who played the gentle uncle for me so effortlessly that it was not until my five years of exile in Vexbeggar that I appreciated what a gift it is to have such parenting: ever patient, ever earnest, never ponderous or heavyhanded. Israel talked to me continually as I grew up. He drenched me with wit, wisdom, and plain fun. When I think of him now, I think of a man in motion, hands waving, eyes darting, a flood of talk—an endless monologue. Israel talked most easily when musing about himself. And before any other kind of portraiture, he described himself as a Jew. A man’s idea of himself has weight. Israel’s idea was that he was first, always, lastly, a Jew. He also said he was both profoundly comforted and profoundly worried by his birthright. He toyed with the word chosen, as in the Jews being God’s chosen people. For a quirk that I never penetrated, Israel laughed every time he said that God had chosen the Jews. I can guess that it suggested an irony to him that he preferred to illustrate with those romantic, melodramatic, sometime operatic stories he told about the struggles of the Jews since, as he said, God exiled them from Eden, abandoned Adam and Eve to homelessness and temptations. Indeed, so many of the best stories I remember from childhood were Israel’s parables about fantastic Jewish reversals, epic Jewish displacements, beastly Jewish persecutions, that I suspect that much of my ability to confront the sorrow in my story derives not from my Norse learning, rather from my borrowings and innovations of what Israel told me of Jewish history.
Yet there is more to say of him, and there was more mystery to him, than whatever he finally meant to communicate with the idea of Jewishness. He was smart, cagey, kindhearted, political, secretive, motherly, childlike, all things to all he loved, and he loved everyone whom he could tease and who appreciated, even acknowledged, his jokes. There were always those jokes—ridiculous word-games, absurd puns, excited displays of farce involving costumes, props, masquerade masks. That was Israel most of the time I knew him, the jester, the man who could always make me laugh. Beyond that, it did not come to me until after he was gone from me, forever, that his pranks and cracks and gamesmanship were his way of struggling with the despair that threatened him as an exile and that had dragged Peregrine down to his crime. Israel once told me that he thought tragedy was too easy to be deep wisdom, all one had to do was pull up a chair and moan about betrayal, hatred, slaughter, and get the audience to weep at the meaninglessness of murdered innocence. It was comedy, Israel declared, that was the sublime endeavor; for one to get that same audience to laugh in the face of defeat or at their own fears, that was a worthy challenge. Israel told me, “Make laughter, Grim, and you make reason.”
Israel stopped laughing at Port Praia. What undid him were his tears for Molly’s helplessness and his inability to love her and himself back to strength. He had passed his life laughing and making laughter. His weakness was that he had not learned how to cry and at the same time remain balanced and resolute. I understand why; I rush to excuse. His life had been endless adversity. He had been obliged to reach for laughter again and again, straining to smile, wearing out his humor. He had emptied of smiles. His cup filled with tears. He would not drink it. He thought it poison. He was right. Still, I have learned that one must