Uncles

Abstract

Uncles Avital Gad-Cykman (bio) Until I learned to read and write my mother read to me the letters that Uncle Davy sent, and I sent back drawings of suns and flowers and smiling faces. My father would hand us the envelopes, saying, “It’s for you, Elise,” or, “Look, it’s from David Bettencourt, Uncle Davy.” The sender wrote that he loved me very much, which explained why he wrote to me in the first place. During the following years, his letters said he was living in the shambles of a city destroyed by war. I imagined Vienna, then Prague, then, after the Internet had entered my home, Sarajevo. He wrote in bright blue ink that he couldn’t join us in Israel because he was busy composing music. The lines, usually carved into the thin paper, became lighter in his snippets about his meetings with ministers whose names I knew from watching tv. For a girl who read almost compulsively, everything he described sounded just right. In fact, I was certain he was an undercover agent. My own life seemed to me like a waiting room, while everything exciting took place regularly in the next room. He’d tell me to turn on the radio and listen to channel Aleph on a certain Saturday. “They would only announce Arthur Rubinstein’s name, but you can hear me playing the violin.” It felt reassuring. All I had to do was go on living, and marvelous things would happen to me as well. Then, one day, everything became too dull, and I became less compliant. It was my adolescence. I even neglected to open his letters, which remained unopened, as my parents said they would never violate my privacy, unless they thought Uncle Davy might harm me. I stopped studying altogether, rolled under an eiderdown with a book in my hand, or escaped to the beach with the occasional boy. One day, however, driven by sudden curiosity, I hunted down the unopened letters in the overflowing drawers of my parents and read everything I found. I guess that respect [End Page 61] for privacy wasn’t mutual. I discovered that my father had served time in prison. Whatever wasn’t about love in his letters was crossed and blurred with censoring red lines. During my raid, I discovered that Uncle Davy wrote only to me, never to my parents. I suddenly wondered whose brother he was, Mother’s or Father’s. “What do you mean?” my mother asked. I couldn’t formulate the question any clearer, yet she and my father did not understand it. I gave up. I was drowning in the soft plumage of nothingness, waiting for life to begin. “If you don’t study or do anything productive, go to the family in Birmingham to learn a profession,” my mother said. My father blocked my door, as solid as a brick wall, and said I must study or work, either this or that. So I went to England and learned to be a hairdresser. The letters kept coming. Uncle Davy was playing the saxophone too now, and meeting the prime minister of India. I wrote to him that I had learned English and could finally give a splendid haircut. No answer. “I met someone. Please join us for coffee or tell us where to find you,” I wrote. His next letter, from Budapest, said he was on the road, so a meeting would be impossible. But would I tell him about the workings of the British police? His priorities lay with solid careers, I gathered, and I took his advice. I graduated, joined the British police, and learned the function of each department to satisfy Uncle Davy’s endless curiosity and his in-depth questions. “Excellent. Are you getting married?” he wrote. I had. “I hope he’s Jewish.” My husband said he’d be willing to convert before we have children. “Could you find out about the ugly propaganda coming from the university?” I left the police, enrolled in International Relations studies, and went back to hairdressing for a living, which was a relief. “How are your parents?” I visited them. “You’d make an excellent...