A Perfect Peace

¶ … Perfect Peace & the Lover

What can one citizen, or two citizens, or even a community of citizens does to stop wars when both sides - Israelis and Palestinians - are locked in a fierce, historical culture of loathing for one another? There is little if anything a community and its individuals can do about the big picture of war, albeit people in homes and neighborhoods theoretically could create a peaceful existence removed from suffering. But in the two novels reviewed in this paper, even at the family and married couple level, there is no way to remove suffering from caring lives.

Meanwhile, the human suffering in Amos Oz's novel, A Perfect Peace, comes through to the reader in a number of important and dramatic forms. The protagonist, Yonatan Lif*****z, would seem to have a lot of things going for him. After all, he is the son of a former member of the Israeli parliament who now serves an important post in the Israeli labor movement and is secretary of a kibbutz. But he is tormented. The above-mentioned facts put some pressure on the son Yonatan, who is himself a decorated war hero, a no-nonsense type of character, and hard worker in the kibbutz.

Near the kibbutz is the ruins of an Arab village (Shikh Dahr), which was destroyed during Israel's 1948 War for Independence, and the specter of a destroyed village paints a kind of moral pall of gloom and a foreshadowing for more war and more suffering over the story.

And on page 6 of A Perfect Peace, the reasons for Yonatan's desire to escape the kibbutz include images of suffering, to wit: "...the long lines of hitchhiking soldiers at road junctions blasted by hot dry winds and the stench of thistles, sweat, dust, and dried urine."

Yonatan's mental suffering results from several issues and problems; one, the rumors swirl around the kibbutz that his "real" biological father is someone named "Trotsky" who ran away from the kibbutz six months before Yonatan was born. Another problem for Yonatan is a condition known as psychological asphyxiation, which is apparently the result of the many demands on him, and the myriad pressure-packed things that members of the kibbutz expect of him.

A sadness rose and fell like the wail of a siren" (A Perfect Peace 10), Oz writes, "though even when it fell, as it sometimes did at work or during a chess game, he could feel it pierce him like a foreign body in his heart, in his throat, in his gut..."

Yonatan suffers from a lack of sexual interaction too, as his wife Rimona, although she is sweet, and pretty, is not very responsive. But it is fair to mention that Rimona, too, has suffered. She lost a baby two years ago and "when she became pregnant again, she was delivered at the end of the summer of a stillborn girl" (A Perfect Peace 12). A great deal of suffering is endured by any woman who has a miscarriage, then a stillborn daughter, and a husband who is leaving (although later in the story Rimona gives birth to a healthy baby).

But that pain his wife had to go through notwithstanding, Yonatan could not hide the frustration he felt at her indifference to sensual pleasure; "I might as well be living with some expensive painting, he thought angrily, or with a governess training me to be forever content" (A Perfect Peace 26).

And it is clear that Yonatan himself suffered from the stillborn daughter he will never enjoy; on page 27, the pain of a dad mourning the loss of his unborn daughter is presented in very grim narrative: "No one had ever told them what had been done with her. Yet somewhere out there in that darkness, in the thick mud, lay the little body whose curious stirrings deep in her mother's womb had felt with the flat of his palm only five months before" (A Perfect Peace 27). The image of one's deceased infant rotting in "thick mud" is suffering personified.

And later in the book, as he entered Jordan, out of Israel, all alone he is still haunted by his unborn daughter's death. "I was born dead" (A Perfect Peace 338), he thought to himself. "Like Rimona's baby last year." And there he is, out there far away from the immediate pain of his kibbutz surroundings but his suffering leads him to wonder what the Syrian gynecologist in Haifa did with the body of his daughter, a rather gloomy and hideous thought. "Mysteriously, Yonatan had the sensation of the baby moving in his own belly." He wonders, "How come I never cried over her? How come, whenever Rimona wanted to talk about her, I told her to cut it out?" By suffering through all that silence back then Yonatan now has to pay the price, and is seemingly quasi-insane as he remembers the doctor telling he and his wife after the miscarriage not to have another baby for awhile; and he now blames himself: "I killed my own two children."

What could have been done about the suffering in A Perfect Peace? Probably nothing could have been done to save Yonatan and Rimona's two lost babies, nothing could have been done to stop the wars between the Israelis and Arabs, and nothing could have been done to erase the emotional baggage that Yonatan carries with him regarding the uncertainty of his paternity.

In Abraham Yehoshua's The Lover, war is again an ongoing theme - which is predictable and understandable coming from Israeli authors - and along with war are numerous kinds of suffering. On page 3, there are "so many missing, so many mysteries" as to what happened to soldiers who cannot be accounted for. And compounding the fact of soldiers missing in battle, is the sense of deep suffering the loved ones endure as they gather the "last remnants - scraps of clothing, bits of charred documents, twisted pens," and, brutally painful is certainly would be for any family member to discover "bullet-ridden wallets" and "melted wedding rings."

Sad, indeed, it is when family and loved ones are left with shards and scraps and not even an ounce of flesh to bury; but another kind of sadness awaits families when their warrior soldier simply deserts the battle lines, and disappears. "...They simply decided not to return home, to abandon their old ties and go elsewhere" (The Lover 3).

Moreover, it is a brutal brand of suffering for the parents of a soldier, parents who of course are desperate to learn the fate of their son. This is the human being whom they have raised with such meticulous hands-on passion ("...walked him to the nursery, ran with him to the doctor, made sandwiches for him in the morning when he went away to youth camp, waited for him at the railway station when he returned from a school trip...washed and ironed and worried the whole time...") are facing his disappearance, the suffering is an enormous burden (The Lover 4).

And the suffering - which is caused by war, which in turn is caused by a lack of grace and forgiveness on both sides of the Israeli - Arab battle lines - grows more intense when an officer takes the parents to see the place where their son was (allegedly) last seen. And adding to the misery, the parents and the officer are traveling "on roads that are not roads, through the dust and the desolation" to a lonesome desert site where "...even the dry rocks are broken in mourning..."

When a war is going on, there is suffering created by the uncertainty, there is suffering resulting from stress and the noise of war. Adam searches for the latest information because "the war" was "breaking out with such force...every plan flying overhead sent him rushing out to the balcony...was it one of ours or one of theirs, he had to know..." (The Lover 17).

And when the "lover" disappears, it's a different kind of suffering for the young woman who searches for him, even going to the hospitals "...to check the lists of casualties...the lists were long and confusing, there was no distinction between wounded and sick" (The Lover 21). Her anxiety - knowing anyone involved in war can have his life snuffed out in a second - is heightened as she saw a wounded man being carried on a stretcher, "his whole body burned...like an ancient wrapped mummy" (The Lover 22). She sat near the door and stared at "the shape of the body blurred beneath the sheets, watching the bandaged face" - and "suddenly there was a groan from the injured man" (The Lover 22).

A stood up, went close to him: 'Gabriel?' He turned his bandaged face toward me, trying to locate the voice...but his groans grew louder. It seemed that he was dying in this lonely place, writing, trying to tear the bandages from his chest...the injured man continued to die... [and after they removed the bandages from his face] I saw a fearful sight...It wasn't him. I knew it. A few minutes later his breathing stopped" (The Lover 23). She still had not searched the upper floor, but the emotion of her search, the suffering of the men on those awful wards, was too much, and so she "left the building."

Dafi describes that when a math teacher is killed in the war, students were suffering over the loss, but, "it's impossible to be only sorry, but we really were stunned and shocked because we remembered him living and standing beside the blackboard not so long ago, writing out the exercises with endless patience...[and though many students went to sleep because of how boring he was] in the middle of all this drowsiness, in the cloud of chalk dust flying around the blackboard, the formulas used to penetrate. And now he was himself a flying cloud..." (The Lover 24). Soon, not only the math teacher was forgotten, "we forgot the math as well, because for two months we studied the Bible instead of math."

So the irony in this circle of violence-related suffering, is that the math teacher is taken away through the draft and is killed by war's ugliness, and what he taught the students is then replaced in student's minds by rigorous religious instruction, which, if religion were really truly a powerful force in society, would have prevented the war that took the math teacher in the first place.