Michel Laub - Diary of the Fall

26.

João’s father listened to me with the TV still on, and it was as if he wasn’t interested in anything I was saying, because he kept looking straight ahead, even occasionally changing channels. At one point, he commented on a game show in which the audience begged for money, the toothless, the blind, the deaf, people covered in sores and burns, and João’s father said how absurd to allow those people to appear on TV, how absurd to treat them like that, how absurd that the government did nothing about it. I’m sick of living in this shithole of a country. Don’t you agree that this is a shithole of a country? That everything we do turns to shit? That the people in it are nothing but shit? And then he got up, turned off the TV and started talking about himself and his son and about life, and then, with the same anger in his voice, fixing me with his eyes as if he had been waiting for this moment for a very long time, he asked if I didn’t feel ashamed about what had happened at João’s birthday party.

27.

In a school like mine, the few non-Jewish students even enjoyed certain privileges. For example, they didn’t have to attend Hebrew classes. Or the classes about Hebrew culture. In the weeks preceding religious holidays, they were excused from learning the traditional songs, saying the prayers, doing the dances, taking part in the Shabbat, visiting the synagogue and the Old People’s Home, and decorating Moses’s cradle to the sound of the Israeli national anthem, not to mention the so-called Youth Movement camps.

28.

At camp we were divided into groups, each with an older boy as a monitor, and part of the day was taken up with the usual activities one would expect at such a gathering: lunch, football, group hugs, treasure hunts and messy games involving talcum powder and eggs. We took a tent, insect repellent, a cooking pot and a canteen, and I remember carefully hiding anything that might be stolen in my absence, stowing a bar of chocolate at the bottom of my dirty laundry bag, a battery charger in the middle of a clump of nettles.

29.

At night we were divided into two groups, in an exercise known as “camp attack,” with one group hidden in the vegetation and the other in charge of defending the camp. Then, in a clearing in the early hours, we would form into platoons that basically did what patrols are supposed to do, armed with compasses and in columns, crawling through undergrowth and scaling hills, an imitation of what we had heard about in talks the monitors gave about the Six-Day War, the War of Independence, the Yom Kippur War, the Lebanese War.

30.

There were other non-Jews at the school, but none like João. Once, one of them got hold of a Jewish classmate, dragged him along for about forty meters, pinned his victim’s right arm to the wall next to an iron door and repeatedly slammed the door on the boy’s fingers, and when the boy was screaming and writhing in pain, he grabbed the boy’s left arm and did the same again. João was different: if a classmate ordered him to stand, he would stand. If a classmate flung João’s sandwich across the playground, João would go and fetch it. If the same classmate then grabbed João and made him eat the sandwich, bite by bite, João’s face would remain utterly impassive — no pain, no pleading, no expression at all.

31.

When João’s father asked me if I didn’t feel ashamed about what had happened at the party, I could have described that scene to him. I could have told him more than he was expecting to hear, rather than about how I had apologized to João when he returned to school. Instead of telling him how relieved I felt when I found out that João would make a full recovery, walking normally and leading a normal life, and how knowing this had made our conversation easier, as if my apology had instantly erased everything he had been through after the fall, João lying on the floor in front of his relatives, the breath knocked out of him, João in the ambulance and in the emergency room and in hospital, where not a single one of his classmates visited him, and then another two months spent at home, where, again, none of us went to see him, and then back at school where, again, none of us spoke to him until I plucked up enough courage to do so — instead of that I could have told him what it was like to see João eating that sandwich watched by his attacker. And how, when he had finished the last mouthful, his attacker had hit him again, hidden behind a tree in one corner of the playground, surrounded by a small group of boys who chanted the same refrain every day.

32.

The refrain went like this: eat sand, eat sand . It was a sort of ritual, intended to drive them on while João turned his head to try and avoid the blows, until he could resist no longer and opened his mouth, the hot, rough taste, the sole of someone’s sneaker in his face, and only then did his attacker grow weary and the shouting diminish and then João would be left to get up on his own, red-faced and straightening his rumpled clothes, picking up his backpack and going up the stairs like a public admission of how dirty and weak and despicable he was.

33.

None of this prevented him from coming to school with the invitations to his party. For bar mitzvah ceremonies, the invitations were always professionally printed on a folded piece of card, with a ribbon and gilt lettering, the name of the boy’s parents, a telephone number to confirm that you would be coming and an address where presents could be sent. João’s invitations were homemade on a sheet of foolscap paper placed in a cardboard envelope and written in felt-tip pen. Two weeks beforehand, he silently gave them out, going from desk to desk, inviting the whole year group.

34.

That Saturday I woke up early. I got dressed, went to the fridge and spent the morning in my room. I liked watching TV like that, with the blinds down, the bed still unmade and breadcrumbs among the sheets, until someone knocked on the door to tell me it was a quarter to one, and the rest of the day was: lunch at my grandmother’s house, a visit to the shopping mall with my mother, her asking me if the classmate whose birthday it was would prefer a pair of shorts or a backpack, a wallet or a T-shirt, or if he liked music and would be happy with a record voucher, and me answering and waiting for her to pay and for the assistant to wrap the present up and then still having time to visit the arcade where I played at circuit racing and electronic snooker.

35.

I wished João a happy birthday when I arrived at the party. I gave him his present. I may have said hello to his father too, or to some relative of his standing nearby, and I may even have enjoyed the party along with all the other guests, I may even have had a good time without for a moment appearing nervous, along with the four other classmates chosen to form the safety net, and who I had also greeted when I arrived, and with whom I chatted normally, all of us dressed and ready and united as we waited for the moment for the birthday cake to be cut and for everyone to sing “Happy Birthday.”

36.

I don’t know if I took part because of those other classmates, and it would be easy at this stage to blame them for everything, or if at some point I played an active role in the story: if during the previous days I had an idea, made a suggestion, and was in some way indispensable if everything was to work out as planned, with us singing the last line together, happy birthday to you , before we gathered round him, one at each leg, one at each arm, with me supporting his neck because that’s the most vulnerable part of the body.