The Seven Good Years (7 page)

I
f not for my mother, there's a good chance we might have gone on thinking everything was fine.

It was an ordinary Saturday morning when she told us that her grandson had asked her to play a special game with him, a game you can only play on Mom's phone. It's really easy: all you have to do is shoot birds out of a slingshot so they can destroy buildings where green pigs live.

“Ah, Angry Birds,” my wife and I said together, “our favorite game.”

“I've never heard of it,” my mother said.

“You are probably the only one,” my wife said. “I think there are more Japanese soldiers hiding in the forests, not knowing that World War Two is over, than people on this planet who don't know this game. It is probably the most popular iPhone game ever.”

“And I thought your favorite game was Go Fish with the cards of flowers of Israel,” my mother said, offended.

“Not anymore,” my wife said. “How many times can you ask someone without yawning whether they have a squill?”

“But that game,” my mother said, “even though I watched it without my glasses, it looked like when those birds hit their targets, they die.”

“They sacrifice themselves to achieve a greater goal,” I said quickly. “It's a game that teaches values.”

“Yes,” my mother said. “But that goal is just to collapse buildings on the heads of those sweet little piglets that never did them any harm.”

“They stole our eggs,” my wife insisted.

“Yes,” I said. “It's actually an educational game that teaches you not to steal.”

“Or, more accurately,” my mother said, “it teaches you to kill anyone who steals from you and to sacrifice your life doing it.”

“They shouldn't have stolen those eggs,” my wife said in the tear-choked voice that emerges when she knows she's about to lose an argument.

“I don't understand,” my mother said. “Did those infant piglets themselves steal your eggs, or are we talking about collective punishment here?”

“Coffee, anyone?” I asked.

After coffee, our family broke its Angry Birds record when the teamwork between my son, an expert in shooting cluster birds that hit multiple targets, and my wife, an expert in launching birds with square-shaped iron heads that can penetrate anything, succeeded in collapsing an especially well fortified, beehive-shaped structure on the swollen green head of the mustached prince of pigs who said his last “Ho-la” and was then silenced forever.

While we ate cookies to celebrate our moral victory over the evil pigs, my mother started hassling us again. “What is it about that game that makes you love it so much?” she asked.

“I love the weird sounds the birds make when they crash into things,” Lev said with a giggle.

“I love the physical-geometrical aspect of it,” I said, shrugging. “That whole business of calculating angles.”

“I love killing things,” my wife whispered in a shaky voice. “Destroying buildings and killing things. It's so much fun.”

“And it really improves coordination,” I said, still trying to soften the effect. “Seeing those pigs exploding into pieces and their houses collapsing,” my wife continued, her green eyes staring into infinity.

“More coffee, anyone?” I asked.

My wife was the only one in the family who really hit the nail on the head. Angry Birds is so popular in our home and in others because we truly love to kill and break things. So, it's true that the pigs stole our eggs in the short opener of the game, but between you and me, that's only an excuse for us to channel some good old rage in their direction. The more time I spend thinking about that game, the more clearly I understand something:

Under the adorable surface of the funny animals and their sweet voices, Angry Birds is actually a game that is consistent with the spirit of religious fundamentalist terrorists.

I know it isn't really politically correct. But how else to explain a game in which you are prepared to sacrifice your life just so you can destroy the houses of unarmed enemies and vaporize their wives and children inside, causing their deaths? And that's before you get into the business of the pigs: a filthy animal that, in fanatic Muslim rhetoric, is often used to symbolize heretical races whose fate is death. After all, cows and sheep could just as easily have stolen our eggs, but the game planners still deliberately chose fat, dollar-green capitalist pigs.

By the way, I'm not saying that this is necessarily bad. I guess launching square-headed birds into stone walls is as close as I'll ever get to a suicide mission in this incarnation. So, this might be a fun, controlled way of learning that not only birds or terrorists get angry, but so do I, and all I need is the right and relatively harmless context in which to recognize that anger and let it run wild for a while.

A few days after that odd conversation with my mother, she and my father appeared at our door holding a rectangular gift wrapped in flowered paper. Lev opened it excitedly and found a board game inside, on which pictures of dollar bills were prominently featured.

“You said you were bored by Go Fish,” my mother said, “so we decided to buy you Monopoly.”

“What do you have to do in this game?” Lev asked suspiciously.

“Make money,” my father said. “Lots of money! You take all your parents' money till you're filthy rich and they're left with nothing.”

“Great!” Lev said happily. “How do you play?”

And from that day on, the green pigs have been living in peace and quiet. True, we haven't been to their neighborhoods on Mom's iPhone, but I'm sure that if we dropped in for a quick visit, we'd find them squealing contentedly after closing off a balcony or digging a burrow for their little ones. My wife and I, on the other hand, find our situation deteriorating. Every evening, after Lev goes to sleep, we sit in the kitchen and calculate our new debts to our greedy little scion, who holds more than ninety percent of the Monopoly real estate, including cross-ownership of construction and infrastructure companies. After we finish calculating our multidigit debts, we go to bed. I close my eyes, trying not to think about the chubby, coldhearted issue of our loins who, in the near future, is going to strip my wife and me of the torn carton we're presently living in on the game board, till blessed sleep finally arrives, and with it, dreams. Once again I'm a bird, flying across the blue skies, cutting through the clouds in a breathtaking blissful arc, only to crush my square head in a delirium of vengeance on the heads of green, mustached, egg-eating pigs. Ho-la!

W
hen I was a kid, I used to try to imagine Poland. My mother, who grew up in Warsaw, told me quite a few stories about the city, about Jerusalem Boulevard (Aleje Jerozolimskie), where she was born and played as a little girl, and about the ghetto where she spent her childhood years trying to survive and where she lost her entire family. Apart from one blurred photograph in my older brother's history book that showed a tall, mustached man and a horse-drawn carriage in the background, I had no reality-based images of that distant country, but my need to imagine the place where my mother grew up and where my grandparents and uncle are buried was strong enough to keep me trying to create it in my mind. I pictured streets like the ones I saw in illustrations in Dickens novels. In my mind, the churches my mother told me about were right out of a musty old copy of
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
. I could imagine her walking down those cobblestone streets, careful not to bump into tall, mustached men, and all the images I invented were always in black-and-white.

My first encounter with the real Poland took place a decade ago, when I was invited to the Warsaw Book Fair. I remember feeling surprise when I walked out of the airport, a reaction I couldn't account for at the moment. Later, I realized that I had been surprised that the Warsaw spread before me was alive in Technicolor, that the roads were full of cheap Japanese cars, not horse-drawn carriages, and yes, also that most of the people I saw were utterly clean-shaven.

Over the past decade, I traveled to Poland almost every year. I kept getting invitations to visit, and although I had generally been cutting down on flying, I found it hard to refuse the Poles. Although most of my family had perished under horrendous circumstances there, Poland was also the place where they had lived and thrived for generations, and my attraction to that land and its people was almost mystic. I went looking for the house my mother was born in, and found a bank there. I went to another house where she had spent a year of her life and found that it was now a grassy field. Strangely enough, I didn't feel frustrated or sad, and even took pictures of both sites. True, I would rather have found a house instead of a bank or a field. But a bank, I thought, was better than nothing.

During my last visit to Poland a few weeks ago, for a book festival in another part of the country, a charming photographer named Elzbieta Lempp asked if she could take my picture. I agreed happily. She photographed me in a café, where I was waiting for my reading to take place, and on returning to Israel, I found that she had e-mailed me a copy of the picture. It was a black-and-white shot of me talking to a tall, mustached man. Behind us, out of focus, was an old building. Everything in the photograph seemed to be taken not from reality, but from my childhood imaginings of Poland. Even the expression on my face looked Polish and frighteningly serious. I stared at the image. If I could have unfrozen my photographed self from his pose, he could have walked right out of the frame and actually found the house where my mother was born. If he were brave enough, he might even have knocked on the door. And who knows who would have opened it for him: the grandmother or grandfather I never knew, maybe even a smiling little girl who had no idea what the cruel future had in store for her. I stared at the picture for quite a while, until Lev came into the room and saw me sitting there, eyes glued to the computer screen. “How come that picture has no colors?” he asked. “It's magic,” I said, and smiled and ruffled his hair.

I
n preparation for the meeting with Lev's preschool teacher, I shaved and took my good suit out of the closet.

“It's a ten-in-the-morning meeting,” my wife said, laughing. “The teacher will probably be wearing sweatpants. And with that white shirt and jacket, you'll look like a groom.”

“Like a lawyer,” I corrected her. “And when the meeting's over, you'll thank me for dressing up.”

“Why are you acting like she wants to talk to us because Lev did something bad?” my wife protested. “Maybe she just wants to tell us that Lev is a good kid who helps the other kids in his group?”

I tried to picture our Lev in the preschool yard generously sharing his sandwich with a scrawny, grateful classmate who forgot to bring a snack that day. The incredible strain from trying to conjure up that image almost gave me a stroke. “Do you really think they asked us to come in to hear about something nice Lev did?” I argued. “No,” she admitted sadly. “I just like arguing with you.”

The teacher was actually wearing sweatpants, but she really liked my suit and enjoyed hearing that it was the same suit I wore to my wedding.

“But back then he could still wear it without having to hold in his stomach,” my wife said, and she and the teacher exchanged the empathetic smiles of women stuck with men who have three pizzerias on speed dial but have never seen the inside of a gym.

“Actually,” the teacher said, “the reason I asked you to come in does have something to do with food.”

The teacher told us that little Lev had forged a secret pact with the preschool cook, that she was bringing him chocolate on a regular basis, even though the board of education had strictly prohibited children from eating sweets on school grounds. “He goes to the bathroom and comes back with five chocolate bars,” the teacher explained. “Yesterday, he sat in a corner and kept eating until streams of chocolate started running out of his nose.”

“But why don't you talk to the cook about it?” my wife asked.

“I've already done that,” the teacher sighed. “But she says Lev is so manipulative that she just can't help it.”

“And you think it's possible,” my wife continued, “that a five-year-old can control an adult and force her to—”

“Don't pay attention to her,” I whispered to the teacher. “She knows it's possible. She just likes to argue.”

In the afternoon, I took advantage of a friendly soccer game with Lev to have a heart-to-heart. “You know what Ricki the teacher told me today?” I asked.

“That even though I water her computer every morning, it doesn't help, and the screen will always stay a midget?” Lev asked.

“No,” I said. “She told me that Mari the cook brings you chocolate every morning.”

“Yes,” Lev said happily. “Lots and lots and lots of chocolate.”

“Ricki also said that you eat all the chocolate yourself and won't share it with the other kids,” I added.

“Yes,” Lev agreed quickly. “But I can't give them any because kids aren't allowed to eat sweets in school.”

“Very good,” I said. “But if kids aren't allowed to eat sweets in school, why do you think you can?”

“Because I'm not a kid.” Lev smiled a pudgy, sneaky smile. “I'm a cat.”

“You're what?”

“Meow,”
Lev answered in a soft, purry voice.
“Meow, meow, meow.”

The next morning, I was drinking coffee in the kitchen and reading the papers. The coach of the Israeli national soccer team was caught by customs smuggling more than $25,000 worth of cigars into the country. A Knesset member from the Shas Party bought a restaurant and forced his parliamentary aide, paid out of the Knesset budget, to work there. Basketball coaches for Maccabi Tel Aviv, the country's star team, are facing charges of income tax evasion. Then, while I ate breakfast, I read a little about the trial of former prime minister Ehud Olmert, accused of graft, and topped it all off with a short item stating that former finance minister Avraham Hirschson, currently incarcerated for embezzlement, has been called “a model prisoner” by his fellow inmates.

For years I've struggled in vain to understand why such well-heeled, successful people choose to break the law, risking punishment and scorn, when they already have everything. Olmert, after all, was not living in abject poverty when he forged flight expenses so he could squeeze another thousand dollars out of Yad Vashem. And Hirschson wasn't exactly starving when he embezzled money from the organization for which he was working. But then, after that heart-to-heart with Lev, it all became clear. Those men, just like my son, cheat and steal and lie only because they are sure they are cats. And as adorable, furry, cream-loving creatures, they don't have to abide by the same rules and laws all those sweaty two-legged creatures around them have to obey. With that in mind, it's easy to predict the former prime minister's line of defense:

Prosecutor:
Mr. Olmert, are you aware of the fact that forgery and fraud are against the law?

Olmert:
Of course. As a moral, law-abiding former prime minister, I am completely aware that they are against the law for all the citizens of the country. But if you read the country's laws carefully, you will see that they don't apply to cats! And I, sir, have been well known throughout the world as a lazy fat cat.

Prosecutor
(flabbergasted): Mr. Olmert, certainly you do not expect the court to take your last remark seriously.

Olmert
(licking the cuffs of his Armani suit):
Meow, meow, meow.