1.
The light broke above her and poured into her head. A few solitary animal cries drifted through the valley and a loud chorus of barks immediately rose to join them. She sat and listened. The distant sounds cradled her. Without thinking she fell asleep.
After reading The Story of a Life, I wanted to be in the fields and the forests again. Not the real ones, though it is a beautiful day, but the ones in Appelfeld’s books. In the silent fields and forests. I open a book with the same subtitle (in translation at least) as Appelfeld’s memoirs, only this is a fiction, Tzili (Hebrew title: Kutonet veha-pasim – what would this be in English?).
Appelfeld tells an interviewer that Tzili was written at a time when he had become fascinated by what he calls naivete:
When I wrote Tzili, I was about forty. At that time I was interested in the possibilities of naiveness in art. Can there be a naive modern art? It seemed to me without naivete still found among children and old people, and, to some extend, in ourselves, the work of art would be flawed. [In Tzili] I tried to correct that flaw.
Then I wonder whether Tzili will give me the answer to a question I asked myself at the end of my last post. What was the meaning of silence in Appelfeld’s The Story of A Life? Why did the young man he was want to retreat back into the silence of the years he spent in the fields of the forests? Why was that silence – born out of his aloneness, his missing parents, and the savagery of the peasants for whom he worked – linked to writing?
Perhaps because it was also that silence that came forward in him when he heard the ideologues of the new Israel. The refusal of grandiloquence and pomp. He is on the side of the stutterers, says Appelfeld, remembering, perhaps, how Moses was said to stutter. And he is on the side of silence, or rather, it is from that silence that writing comes. That it would come. Out of silence, and writing itself according to a melody that was deep within him. That flowed through him just as it flowed, he said, through all true writing. A melody that was, in the end, religious.
Is that how one is to understand naivete? Let’s see.
2.
Tzili is in the forest. She is alone, a Jew, and these are the years of the Nazis.
She is the youngest of a large family. She grew up neglected, quiet, charmless and mute. Small and skinny, she was ignored by the others. She goes to school, but she is ineducable. The non-religious family employ a tutor to visit her to teach her her prayers.
Tzili feels an intimacy with the abandoned things in the old shed. It is also her hiding place; she spends most of her time out of doors. Then the Nazis come; her family flees; Tzili is left to look after the house. A feeble-minded girl to look after the whole house.
She runs away from the house and into the fields and the forests. She has not slept out of doors before. Now she sees the night sky and washes her face in the river.
She meets a blind man; he tries to rape her, she who knows nothing of sex. After that, she menstruates, she who knows nothing of menstruation. She thinks she might be dying.
3.
It is summer. She lives in the fields and the forest. Her memories of home are disappearing. She learns which berries can be eaten and which cannot.
Autumn comes. She finds shelter in deserted barns. She looks repulsive. She claims to be one of the daughters of Maria, a well-known local prostitute. This will be her alibi.
Winter through Spring she works for Katerina, a prostitute. She tells Katernia, too, she is Maria’s daughter. Katerina knew Maria back in the city. Perhaps she guesses Tzili is a Jew. No matter; she, like Maria, likes Jews. But Katerina, who is drink and given to violent rages, turns on Tzili. The girl flees.
In autumn, she shelters with an old couple. Again, she is Maria’s daughter. The old man lusts after her; the old woman sees this and beats Tzili.
4.
Amidst all this, there are times of contentedness . With the cows, in their warmth presence. In the meadows.
Her imagination did not soar but the little she possessed warmed her like soft, pure wool.
She thinks of Katerina. She learnt a great deal from her. How to carry out household chores. About men, and what men want. Tzili is fearful of men; Katerina had tried to prostitute her, but she resisted.
Winter passes at the house of the old couple. She is beaten, but the snows have melted and she can leave.
5.
One morning soon after, she wakes in a field. Then she sees him: Mark.
Mark asks Tzili, where are your parents? When she says she doesn’t know, he says, ‘So you’re one of us.
Mark had left behind his wife and children in the concentration camps when he fled. They were too fearful to flee; now he hides in a mountain forest.
Mark wears a suit and a hat. He tells her everyone can tell he’s a Jew; he can’t hide it. Tzili, he says, does not look like a Jew. He asks her how this is possible. She doesn’t know.
He has clothes – children’s clothes, his wife’s clothes. Tzili takes each item of clothing down to the villages and trades them for bread and sausage and vodka. A long time passes on the mountain. It is quiet there. Mark digs a bunker. For a time, he drinks too much, then, as the clothes begin to run out, he drinks less.
Then he tells her he loves her. She has never had anyone tell her that. In the darkness of the bunker, they lie together. She knows happiness in this intimacy.
6.
Then Mark decides to go down to the villages to look around. He needs to find out what is happening in the world. No doubt this educated man, who left his family behind, is too obviously a Jew; he disappears from the story. Now Tzili is alone again. She is alone and pregnant, and without many more clothes to trade. She must leave the forest.
Everything drew near and the last rays of the sun fell golden on the hillside. "I lived here and now I’m leaving", said Tzili, and she felt a slight twinge in her chest. The embryo throbbed gently in her belly. Her vision narrowed even further. Now she could picture to herself the paths lying underneath the blanket of snow. There was no resentment in her heart, only longing, longing for the earth on which she stood. Everything beyond this little corner if the world seemed alien and remote to her.
From now on, she will have visions of Mark. I find these very beautiful. We know Tzili through her actions, through her simple desire to survive and her fear when she hears the Jews cursed. Now we know her as the one who is addressed by Mark, her lover, the one who said he loved her. Now Mark is gone from the story, but another Mark speaks to her several times in the remaining third of the book.
For days she had not tasted food. She would sit for hours sucking the snow. The melted snow assuaged her hunger. The liquids refreshed her. Now she felt a faint anxiety.
And while she was standing transfixed by what she saw, Mark rose up before her.
"Mark", the word burst from her throat.
Mark seemed surprised. He stood still. And then he asked: "Why are you going to the refugees? Don’t you know how bad they are?"
"I was looking for you".
"You won’t find me there. I keep as far away as possible from them."
"Where are you?"
"Setting sail."
"Where to?"
But he has gone. She sees a flock of birds rise into the sky.
Tzili understood that he had only called her in order to take his leave.
He will call her several more times.
7.
When she learns she is pregnant, she thinks to herself, Mark is inside me. As though Mark was enfolded the embryo that was growing there.
Tzili thinks often of Katernia, of Maria, and more often still of Mark. These are the ones who have addressed her. They are her witnesses, the ones who knew her when she was on her own.
Eventually, she will meet up with the refugees. Close to giving birth, she is carried by them on a stretcher. She loses the baby. Does she lose Mark, too? He does not speak to her again. She has lost the baby, she has lost Mark. Perhaps she no longer needs him as a witness.
For a while, just before she met the refugees, she worked again for the peasants. When they beat her, she said, ‘I am not an animal, I am a woman’. This reminds us of some of the things Mark says – ‘after all, men are not insects’ – which Tzili repeats to herself. Only now she no longer needs to repeat them. She speaks in her own name, as a woman.
We might ask ourselves whether the whole story one of a rite of passage? After all, she first menstruates at the beginning of the book. Then there is her meeting with the old man. She wanders and then finds her way to the mountain where she hides with Mark. It is as though Mark has initiated her into something. True, she learnt something of adulthood and sex from Katerina. But Katerina tried to prostitute her. Mark said he loved her; they coupled; she was pregnant, and this pregnancy allowed Mark to live even though in all probability, he was dead. Then the child died and Mark disappeared. Is she now an initiate? But of what?
She finds herself among others; there are men and women; she is one of the women, no longer a child. She is fifteen; it is summer again. There are happy times by the shore with the other refugees. Then she sails off at the end with the others to Palestine. A new life.
8.
A new life. Tzili is not imaginative or intelligent; perhaps she is still devoid of charm. She is quiet. What does she carry with her to the new state of Israel? The silence of the fields and forests? The silence of the cows she used to tend? But also the ‘Hear, O Israel’ she recited when she was a child, covering her face.
I don’t know if what calls Appelfeld calls melody flows through her, but flows through the telling of the book called Tzili. A quiet book, yes, but with a strength in that quietness. A story is told; this is not a fairy story; Tzili is real and no archetype. She is real; what happens does so in a present like our own.
But it happens such that a simplicity makes itself present; an intimacy with the earth and the animals; a closeness with Mark, and then Tzili’s certainty that she is a woman. Tzili survives, and does not fear the future. She lives in the moment; she trusts it. So does the story. The trust that is her life, her naivete, is also that of the story.
9.
In an interview in the Observer, Appelfeld says we have, each of us, an elderly man, a child, a woman within us. ‘Everything. We have it in ourselves’. Everything: but what do we have? Naivete – which calls in turn for a telling of naivete. What does this mean? A kind of regression into fairy tale? Pastiche of outmoded forms?
Perhaps it is significant that Tzili is a novella, genre which lends itself to the simplicity of telling. No panorama of character or landscape here, only the forward drive of a narrative at once familiar (the passage into adulthood; expulsion and return) and new, since it is told in our present.
And by choosing an unprepossessing girl as his heroine? What happens because of that? Appelfeld writes of the one who survives, of a girl, a woman, who is weak and strong; who will draw on resources which awaken inside her and eventually fold them back until they stay with her.
This is no allegory. Tzili does not stand in for the children of Israel. She is barely observant. If she is close to the fields and forests, she is not secure there; her milieu is not the natural world. Sometimes, it is true, she remembers the little yard at home, and hearing her mother call ‘Tzili’. She would reply ‘here I am’. But only this is left of her childhood; only ‘the misty edge of the garden of Eden’.
And of the future? The child is dead; Mark does not return to speak to her in dreams. The future is the state of Israel, where she will go bearing her silence, her naivete and the strength of that naivete. Does the novella called Tzili not let speak that same silence Appelfeld wanted to discover? Not, now, that of the frightened child he was in the forests and the fields, but in the moments of safety and repose which gave themselves there, where the observer he was looked around him.
It is this same look that would allow him, later, judge the good from the wicked, to know that the army officer bellowing him was bellowing at his father or mother and not him. The same power of observation which set itself back in him, looking out with equanimity and calmness, eternal witness to the world.
Bringing that power to expression, writing in small and quiet words that would allow him to speak of what is small and quiet, Appelfeld finds his way to the witness that lives in each of us. But one must be careful. What sees, what witnesses, does not reside at our heart. Not unless we understand that same heart to be turned inside out and the inner – our inner life, our strength – reveals itself only against the streaming of the outside.
That streaming also bears Appelfeld’s prose. It is the silence that recedes in order to allow melody and religion to sing. It withdraws to allow the novella to come forward even as it streams in this same novella. Modern naivete is that art which allows what comes forward thus to resonate with that streaming. Tzili is the drama of the folding of the outside that allows a self to step forward.
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