Waiting at the Gate

An unexpected gift.

By the river of Babylon

I was coming home from a three week trip to Europe, where I attended training courses at several companies in Germany, Denmark, England and Holland. Overseas travel for Israelis at the time being rare, I was expected to bring presents from Duty Free for my wife and her family. I thought that this meant bringing perfume for the women. Easy enough. For myself, I chose a one-hundred-dollar shortwave radio with digital tuning. It would allow me to listen to Voice of America, to get my fix of Americana now and then. This was long before the internet.

It was a short ride from the airport to my in-laws in Petach Tikva and as soon as I was settled in, I opened the bags and handed out the perfume. If I had known how much it would be appreciated I would have bought them two bottles each.

My father-in-law was standing off to the side. There was a moment of suspense when I reached in to pull out my radio to show to them. I was thinking that my father-in-law, especially, would appreciate my choice. There was a full-size picture of the radio on the box that held it. As soon as he saw that he rushed over to me saying “Thank You! Thank You! and took the radio from my hands. Overwhelmed by his gratitude, I was speechless. I was thinking why would he, Baghdad born and raised, want to listen to The Voice of America? He retired to his room and I was left standing there with a stupid grin on my face. My wife knew what was happening as I had told her I would be looking for a shortwave radio, and she gave me with a look that said “I know you are disappointed, but look at my father. He is so happy!”

As soon as I could I went outside and found myself leaning on the entrance gate to the property, looking out on Salant Road. This was his spot. This is where he would stand when we were coming for Shabbat, waiting to great us and help with the luggage and, later, to hug his grandchildren as they jumped out of the car. As I stood there, I tried to understand his thoughts. Watching the cars pass, I did a summing-up of our relationship. There were very few points of contact beyond that most important one, that we loved the same woman, he as a father and I as a husband. We both loved his Turkish coffee. I knew I was getting the real thing when he would hand me the small porcelain cup. The first time I held that small cup in my hand I was thinking thanks for the sip. That was before I had taken my first sip. Afterwards, I looked at him and he just smiled. He was my father’s age, and like a father, he knew what I didn’t know. The taste of excellent Turkish coffee was one of those things.

I also didn’t know backgammon. I thought I did, but seeing that I considered it little more than grown-up checkers, I had no idea. My father-in-law took it upon himself to set me straight. I had been raised by a man, my father, who worshipped chess. Chess is a game of mental power, concentration, and ruthlessness. Players are mini-fascist aggressors. Backgammon is a constricted maze of fluid probabilities changing with each roll of the dice and move taken. It is a simulation of real life. The most you can know before rolling the dice is a matrix of probabilities, and that is what you have after you have rolled the dice and made your move, and it continues like that until one player reaches the finish line. There are no dice in chess and a game can end in a draw, without a winner. It seems to us that there are dice in real life, as it seems that there is always a winner and loser after the last roll, just like in backgammon.

Thoughts like these were in my mind when I turned back towards the house, reconciled with the fact that I would not be taking Voice of America home with me, and that I would not be having a daily dose of Americana. It should have been jazz hour on the station when I entered the house, so I sat down on the sofa in the entrance room to listen, as my father-in-law was resting in his bedroom, adjacent to where I was sitting. It is telling that I was still expecting to hear VOA. For me, that was all the radio was good for. My first reaction was to be incredulous that VOA jazz hour was broadcasting avant-garde jazz. That was not their style. Then I was thinking that the music sounded like a cat fight. I finally understood that I was not listening to VOA. More like VOB, or Voice of Baghdad. It was a sacrilege. I had come to terms with losing the radio, but this was too much. This was transistor abuse. I went back out to stand by the gate, far away from those alien sounds. To me, the sound of the cars in the street sounded better.

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A few months passed. My father-in-law and I found ourselves alone in the house. I settled in with a book in the living room. A cup of Turkish coffee appeared at my side, along with another one for himself. He went into his room and returned with the radio. He sat down and fiddled with it, found the station he was searching for, and placed it on the table between us, a smile on his face. We were now listening to the World Service of the BBC. It was a heart-warming gesture. We sat back and listened. Little did he know that for me, American born and bred, listening to the BBC was, while not quite a cat-fight, not much preferable than listening to the Baghdad National Orchestra. I played along, suffering in silence, and then thought to make a gesture of my own. I asked him to tune-in to his favorite station. He was surprised. When he saw that I was serious, he tuned-in to the cat fight. That’s when it happened.

I closed my eyes with absolutely no expectations. He lit a cigarette which he rarely did in the house, and that told me that he had entered his comfort zone. With the smell and taste of the coffee, and the smell of his cigarette, I listened. I let my senses do the thinking. I isolated in my mind the different instruments that I was hearing, and their relationship to the whole, the rhythms, the scales and chords, yes, the point and counterpoint, or what seemed to me as such. It was so different from a Western musical composition, but still, there were enough points of contact that I began to understand the pleasure that an Eastern ear might derive from this music. In its own way, this music approached its harmonic resolutions with subtlety or with high drama, as Western music does. It was still discordant to me, but at the same time it made sense. Like learning a new language, I felt as if I had been given an entry into understanding part of a foreign culture. It was an unexpected gift, an extraordinary one.

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For most of my life since we first met, I viewed my father-in-law, Zion “Aziz” Zemach, from my side of the gate where he stood. I was safely delivering his daughter and grandchildren for a visit. As I was unloading the car there was a feeling of “mission accomplished.” I was looking ahead in my life; he was approaching retirement. He gave me the feeling that he had no qualms about passing the baton to the next generation. Looking back, at least in my case, he probably should have had a few, and maybe he did, but if he did, he never let on to me, and I received from him only strength and trust. I was smart enough to appreciate this attitude, and over the years I let him know it, receiving a slight nod of confirmation in return.

Now I am at the age of the man I see only in my mind’s eye, as he passed away years ago. I see him standing at the gate, alone, looking out away from the home he built with his own two hands after a full day’s work. In front of him, I learned late in our relationship, where the two-laned Salant Street now passed, was a large parcel of his original plot taken from him by eminent domain in order to pave that same road. A city needs its streets. My father-in-law needed his small plot of fruit trees where he would take his leisure after a day’s work. That was gone, though he had a few trees left that grew next to the house. He could stand at the gate and remember, and I am certain that he stood there and gave thanks that in lieu of that orchard he received grandchildren, jumping out of the finally arrived cars, running to hug him.

Still, though, in my memory he stands there looking east, towards a Baghdad of his youth and young adulthood, where he had been well on his way to a successful career, one of the many upwardly rising Jews in Baghdad, where the Jews had made up forty percent of the population of the city. He had re-established himself in Israel after much effort, but I see him thinking of what might have been. He had soft memories of Iraq and I could almost see him at the gate, cocking his head towards the east, hoping to hear a sweet Arab tune short-waving directly to his ear.

What he eventually received was a tune of a different key, an air raid siren, during the Gulf War. It turned out that the journey of the scud missiles from their launch site in the western Iraqi desert towards the target of the general staff headquarters in Tel Aviv passed over Ramat Gan, where by some counts at that time eighty percent of Jewish Iraqis had settled. Most of the missiles fell short, into the heart of Ramat Gan. One fell shorter still, on Petach Tikva, damaging my in-laws’ house. We arrived soon after, and while looking at the damage I was thinking, if I were in my father-in-law’s place, I would be taking this personally. As if he could hear me he said: “What does he (Saddam) want from me?” I understood him completely. This meeting happened in the middle of the “First Intifada,” and normally our Shabbat visits to Petach Tikva were for us a release of the stress of living in the Gaza Strip during that time. Now, with Saddam seemingly looking for his escaped Jews, our roles had been reversed. We got my in-laws packed up and took them back with us to Gush Katif, far out of range of the scuds.

The relief was palpable on the face of my father-in-law while he was with us in Gan Or. I felt elevated in providing refuge from the rockets. I was able to provide him a warm home, where he could relax. We do not always get a chance to return favors. He had a nice little corner in the shade where he could smoke. My fondest memory of this time was when I saw him walk to the spot on our lot that corresponded to his place by the gate at his home, and stand there and look around, sizing up our little gateless village, pleased with what he saw. When he looked east from where he stood at the entrance to our yard, he was not seeing anymore a dreamed-of Baghdad in the sky. No, he was seeing our greenhouses full of produce on the vines, soon to be shipped out to Europe for premium prices. That breathing product of Jewish labor renewed in the Jewish homeland, the land of Israel, the labor of Jews no longer squatting in terror of the next blow coming their way.

Another striking memory I had was years later, arriving at Petach Tikva, and not seeing him at the gate. He had not been feeling well of late—indeed, he would leave us not long after this visit—so as soon as I parked, my wife jumped out of the car and ran to the house. I took it slow with the kids and luggage, to give some time for things to develop. I shuffled the children into the kitchen to be with their grandmother, and took a few steps towards the door to my father-in-law’s room. I heard my wife trying to comfort him. I took a quick peek and saw red-eyed and sobbing. I backed out before he could see me. All I heard over my wife’s entreaties was the single word, “Why?”

That turned out to be the final cry of an honorable man, aside from the Shema Israel he said with his last breath on his deathbed. Only later, when the children were sleeping, did my wife and I walk out to the gate. She told me that it had been a difficult encounter. He hadn’t been able to talk at first. He just kept repeating “Why?” Then, after her persistent enquiries, he changed the word. “Dad,” he repeated.

That explained everything. He knew that he was on the way out, and a few weeks later he did pass. What he was doing was attaching a coda to the song of his life. This was not a man who complained about his life as he was living it. But here, near what he knew was the end, he allowed himself to cry.

By the rivers of Babylon,
there we sat,
sat and wept,
as we thought of Zion. (Psalms 137)

Now Zion was weeping as he thought of Babylon, or of the Zion in Babylon, his father Zion whom he never knew, who died before he was born, and whose name he bore. The Turks had forcibly conscripted his father into the Turkish army during World War I while his mother was pregnant with him. Before long, word came back that Zion the elder had been killed. There were conflicting accounts about how he was killed, but killed he was. Zion “Aziz” Zemach finally allowed himself to mourn fully the father he had never met. His cry was a short-wave message bouncing amongst the layers of the heavens, a resounding cry, demanding attention.