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Soon the family moved again, from the large Arab house in mid-city to a suburban block where Mrs Saporta-Yecchs and Gaga the Bulgarian Bloodhound and the Rebetsen Twilliger-Syphilis-Face were already in evidence. Papa Blok's war with what he termed "the plague bacilli of 43 Yehezkel Hacohen Street" began almost immediately. Soon he also commenced his philatelic retreat, sealing off the study, subscribing to foreign journals, launching himself on to permanent safari at home. Mama Blok, finding refuge in scripture, particularly in Psalms, kept one eye on her growing stranger. Blok, whenever he could, would traipse westward over the hills rolling from Kiryat Moshe, searching for buried treasure, Arab spies, aliens from outer space. In this phase, like most of his male contemporaries, he became highly misogynous and maintained strict self-discipline in the field of rubber erasers and pigtails.
Before one knew it, it was Bar Mitsvah time! And Blok, in the breathless expectation of gifts such as money orders, cheques or envelopes full of cash, turned to study the portion of the Torah he would have to recite at the synagogue when the great day dawned. He learned text and le'amim fairly easily and, when the moment came, stood up to the congregation and belted out the following passage:"Thus ye shall separate the children of Israel from their uncleanness; that they shall not die in their uncleanness, when they defile thy tabernacle which is among them. This is the law of him that hath an issue, and of him whose seed goeth from him, and is defiled therewith. And of her that is sick of her flowers, and of him that hath an issue, of the man, and of the woman, and of him that lieth with her that is unclean."
With this, Blok officially became a man. In the same year, he finally mastered the art of full-scale masturbation.
On his first day at Klander, Blok was assigned a room with two other occupants. One was short, thick-set and tanned, with the look of a beach-loving clerk. The other was tall and wispy and swayed like a willow in the wind.
The thick-set man offered his hand cheerfully. "Davidov," he said, "hypomaniac. Our friend here is Schwartsbart, hebephrenic first class. You can depend on me, despite my cyclothymic temperament."
" I am Avram Blok," said Blok. "Pleased to meet you," said Davidov. "Kiss my arse," said Schwartsbart, turning to face the wall.
" Don't worry about him," said Davidov. "A small libation?" He rummaged and produced from behind his bed a flask of wood-coloured liquid which Blok nervously declined.
" Whisky, Glenfiddich," Davidov explained, "all the way from the Highlands. The best. Don't worry about anything," he added, noticing Blok's despondency. "You've fallen on your feet here, I can tell you. This is the best room they could have put you. Schwartsi and I have got everything under control. Nothing goes on in this dump that we don't know. We have all the secret passages mapped, not to speak of those no one has been able to find yet. Our network extends into the highest echelons of this Institutiod. Those who think they have us under their thumb should laugh on the other side of their face. You want a peek at your file? Give me twenty-four hours and it's sitting right in your lap. Captain Davidov, late Ordnance Corps, delivers. In the Sinai Campaign I kept two battalions on roast turkey throughout, and white steak on the Sabbath when they gave the chaplain home leave. Yes sir! When Davidov's around, no one wants for anything. Foreign cigarettes? Pipe tobacco? Liqueurs? Pink gin? J & B? Brandy Napoleon? Vat sixty-nine, eh, sixty-nine, know what I mean ... ? Vodka? Slivovitz? Ouzo? Lletaxas? Arak? Formosan rice wine? Champagne? Veuve Clicquot, name the year, give me forty-eight hours - a la table! On the table, my friend! On the table! Everything the discerning mental patient needs. Why moan with despair at being cast out by the `normas'? What's wrong with life here, on the crazy side of the fence? Look at Them on the outside - wars, pestilences, blood, lice, plagues of the first born ... what do we care? We're snug as Pharaohs in here, thank you very much. You have to laugh, I tell you. What else can you do? Say yes, and the world is yours. Give up, and you might as well take a trip down the tunnel, to Dr Nachtnebel's basement."Indeed. Blok found his fellow inmates, on the whole, no more frightful or repulsive than any other random group of people he had known. In fact the asylum had a distinct advantage over the army - there were no criminal psychopaths. A small number of the patients were obviously quite mad, mumbling nonsense to themselves in the corridors, drooling into their food or masturbating at the top of the stairs. Others were lucid most of the time, but tended to sink into reverie at odd moments, for example, when one asked them a simple question such as "which way, please, to the toilet?" Still others seemed to him perfectly normal, though generally depressed. (Does one expect joie de vivre here? Anyway, many were slowed down by medication.) As in the army, there were the usual identifiable types: the Fixer, the Scrounger, the Wailer, the Whiner, the Joker, the Liar, the Pervert, the 'thief, the Con-Artist, the Arse-Licker, the Stoolie, the Saint, the Philosopher, the Religious Maniac. "A society like any other," Davidov said, in a moment of relative calmness, "madmen and doctors with one common aim - to keep the outside world at bay." (In this he inadvertently expressed the hidden principle of Klander himself.)
The staff, too, appeared to Blok no more, no less than the average. Often dressed informally, they mingled with the patients and were generally known by their nicknames: Ursus - Male Nurse Elkayam, Maciste - his assistant, Marciano. El Bzaz - Nurse Nitsa, of the giant breasts, Nurse Nili-Honey - of whom, more later. Yama Pasta - Mrs Patchouli, Chief Cook. Big Golem and Little Golem, laundry boys. Then there were the occasionals: Dr Feifinkoklootz-Ear- Nose-andThroat, Dr Blinder-Eye-Surgeon, Kretshmar-Schuldorff, physiotherapist. Patata, from the social services. And the less famous - clerks, secretaries, temporary nurses, psychologists and the sephardi charwomen cackling gleefully about family business as they scoured the asylum floors with Kleen. At the top of the pyramid, the Director, Flusser, known alternatively as Herr Doktor, Commander, Papa Fluss, and, on good days, Flussie. His Vice, an American immigrant, Dr Veltsch, had no affectionate nickname. He was usually referred to as "that fucking bastard", and was inclined to the Behaviourist creed. His aim, it was said, was to turn the Institute into a greenhouse of reward and punishment. Awaiting, in Flusser's shadow, the hallowed day when all this would be his ...And beyond this hierarchy, the inescapable legend of the invisible patron: Dr Nachtnebel, said to be ensconced in his laboratory, hidden in the locked Annexe B. There were few actual sightings, three reported by Old Leib, who was a Treblinka survivor. He was convinced Nachtnebel was the escaped Commandant of the death camp's Block 2'7. He had a hold over Flusser, declared Old Leib, a dark secret from the past. Others said, no, he was Flusser's twin brother, struck down in childhood by a disfiguring disease. Paranoids vied with depressives for the best Nachtnebel theory. He was a Christian diabolist, imprisoned in the Annexe by his own occult spells. A Man from the Ministry, working on the Final Solution to the Mental Health Problem. But Old Leib did not budge from his certitude and spent hours, as he had done for several years, writing aerogrammes exposing the outrage to the leaders of the world's nations. He had a signed photograph in his room of President Eisenhower, who had sent it to him with a mimeograph stating: "I am with you in your struggle for Justice."
In short - Jerusalem routine. Blok's month at Klander was undramatic except for the event, at the end of his stay, to which we shall turn later ... He filled in questionnaires, performed the TAT, the DPI and the Minnesota Multiphasic Inventory. He blew up balloons and made up silly stories to fit non-descript illustrations. He poured out his troubles to Flusser in three pleasant sessions in the director's office. He had a less pleasant scrape with Veltsch, who pressed him to confess further acts of voyeurism and/or acts of nameless perversion. And Davidov, who was no idle boaster, kept him in Swiss chocolates, imported beer and pornographic "stalag" paperbacks. Like everyone else, he fell in love with Nurse Nili-Honey and even secured her phone number. He made unusual friends, of whom more later. In fact, he enjoyed the asylum: the tall cypresses swaying softly in the hilltop breeze, the odiferous bougainvillaeas, the green lawns, the paved pathways which curved into nooks where one could hide to put one's thoughts in order, the magnificent view of the walled Old City from the north-eastern terrace, scudding winter clouds alternately lighting and greying the silver dome of the mosque. His short sojourn with the mad, the obsessive and the temporarily round the bend seemed to provide a long-sought haven. This may well be why, in the years to come, he returned there, again and again. Or was it perhaps ... ?Flusser used to say: "I don't know about God, but I rather believe in Man."
Klander said: "Neither God nor Man can be trusted."
Klander was assassinated in Zion Square in Jerusalem on 10th May 1960, by a "wild-eyed man" who materialized out of the Friday morning crowd and shot him three times in the chest and face, crying, "Sic semper tyrannis!" as the great psychotherapist fell. The killer was found to be one Pesach Zilberschvantz, a well-known Jerusalem vagrant, who used to perambulate the streets with a small battered attache case tied with string round his neck, filled with plastic combs, razor blades, shaving cream and brushes, matchboxes, balls of string, shirt studs and further knick knacks. He was commonly named Groise-Metsiyes, after the loud nasal cry of "Groise metsiyes, alles fur gurnischt!" (Great bargains, all for nothing!) which he uttered wherever he went. Where he had got the Luger pistol, his murder weapon, no one ever found out. Nor was his motive discovered. He claimed that Klander had "stolen his soul", but, curiously, there was no evidence that he had ever been the victim's patient, nor met him in any capacity. He was yet another of the poor flotsam of Europe washed up on Palestinian shores. His papers dated from 1947, but no relative or acquaintance ever turned up to claim him as their own. The Zilberschvantzes of Bnei-Brak, reputable dealers in dry goods, denied him vehemently. They produced a family tree, going back two centuries, absolute proof of their disavowal. The assassin, apart from repeating ad nauseam his strange accusation, provided no further clue, and he was tried, found guilty but insane and committed for life to the State Mental Hospital, T-t. Moses Klander was buried with full civic honours in the National Cemetery at Mount Herzl. Thousands followed the coffin to its final resting place. The Institute he headed was named after him. Five years later, a stamp was issued in his memory. It was for IL8.50, and was very handy for overseas parcels.
Peter Flusser mourned his mentor deeply, but firmly took up the burden of the great work that Groise-Metsiyes's bullets had bequeathed him.Meanwhile, as Blok's adolescence progressed, Mama Blok's anxieties and Papa's withdrawal deepened. She suffered from recurring migraines and would take to bed with a cold schmutter pressed at her forehead and the Bible, open at Psalms, or, at times of crisis, Ecclesiastes: "What profit hath a man of all his labour which he maketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth for ever." Papa Blok became even more virulent in his atheistic responses and would shut himself up with his new set of Monaco Grace Kellys. "For all his days are sorrows, and his travail grief, yea, his heart taketh not rest in the night ... This is also vanity and vexation of the spirit."
And Blok pursued his own mysteries. The sun rose, the sun fell, autumn followed summer, then came winter, et cetera. He did reasonably well in school at some subjects, not so well in others. He was hated by his gym teacher and treated with suspicion by several other teachers. He made a name for himself committing practical jokes, of a sneakily cerebral kind: lampooning hostile teachers by making wall posters out of newspaper headlines carefully revised with scissors and glue. For example: "Varkin (the tyrannical physics master) Found Bound and Gagged in the Suitcase Discovered at Athens Airport." "Varkin, Notorious Rumanian Spy, Jailed for Life. A Menace to Society, Says Judge." Feeble threats of expulsion followed. Years passed. He grew a straggly moustache which failed to make him look like Clark Gable. Masturbation continued throughout. But yearnings waxed ever stronger ... In 1963 Mama Blok had a hernia operation and Papa Blok triumphantly unveiled a complete set of French Melanesia (1869-). In 1964 Blok graduated from Secondary School with unexpectedly high matriculation marks. He received a Bible signed by Headmaster Aricha who shook his hand on the conveyor belt.
Five months later he was drafted into the army. Mama Blok was prostrate for three weeks with the worst migraine in living memory. Papa Blok abandoned his stamps for the duration, to sit loyally by her side. (A time to rend, a time to sew, a time to keep silence and a time to speak.) While this touching process was occurring, Blok was crawling through the winter mud of the coastal plain, ripping his kneecaps and being yelled at incessantly by a loutish Corporal Simha: "You arsehole! You piece of dried shit! You'd bring shame on the Egyptian army! Take your leg out of your arse and move on there, dungface, or you'll soon know what sucking cock means!"
Just as he was about to end his army service, war broke out with three Arab states.
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