Diary of the Fall Read Free Page B

charger in the middle of a clump of nettles.
29.
    At night we were divided into two groups, in an exercise known as “camp attack,” with one group hidden in the vegetation and the other in charge of defending the camp. Then, in a clearing in the early hours, we would form into platoons that basically did what patrols are supposed to do, armed with compasses and in columns, crawling through undergrowth and scaling hills, an imitation of what we had heard about in talks the monitors gave about the Six-Day War, the War of Independence, the Yom Kippur War, the Lebanese War.
30.
    There were other non-Jews at the school, but none like João. Once, one of them got hold of a Jewish classmate, dragged him along for about forty meters, pinned his victim’s right arm to the wall next to an iron door and repeatedly slammed the door on the boy’s fingers, and when the boy was screaming and writhingin pain, he grabbed the boy’s left arm and did the same again. João was different: if a classmate ordered him to stand, he would stand. If a classmate flung João’s sandwich across the playground, João would go and fetch it. If the same classmate then grabbed João and made him eat the sandwich, bite by bite, João’s face would remain utterly impassive — no pain, no pleading, no expression at all.
31.
    When João’s father asked me if I didn’t feel ashamed about what had happened at the party, I could have described that scene to him. I could have told him more than he was expecting to hear, rather than about how I had apologized to João when he returned to school. Instead of telling him how relieved I felt when I found out that João would make a full recovery, walking normally and leading a normal life, and how knowing this had made our conversation easier, as if my apology had instantly erased everything he had been through after the fall, João lying on the floor in front of his relatives, the breath knocked out of him, João in the ambulance and in the emergency room and in hospital, where not a single one of hisclassmates visited him, and then another two months spent at home, where, again, none of us went to see him, and then back at school where, again, none of us spoke to him until I plucked up enough courage to do so — instead of that I could have told him what it was like to see João eating that sandwich watched by his attacker. And how, when he had finished the last mouthful, his attacker had hit him again, hidden behind a tree in one corner of the playground, surrounded by a small group of boys who chanted the same refrain every day.
32.
    The refrain went like this:
eat sand, eat sand
. It was a sort of ritual, intended to drive them on while João turned his head to try and avoid the blows, until he could resist no longer and opened his mouth, the hot, rough taste, the sole of someone’s sneaker in his face, and only then did his attacker grow weary and the shouting diminish and then João would be left to get up on his own, red-faced and straightening his rumpled clothes, picking up his backpack and going up the stairs like a public admission of how dirty and weak and despicable he was.

33.
    None of this prevented him from coming to school with the invitations to his party. For bar mitzvah ceremonies, the invitations were always professionally printed on a folded piece of card, with a ribbon and gilt lettering, the name of the boy’s parents, a telephone number to confirm that you would be coming and an address where presents could be sent. João’s invitations were homemade on a sheet of foolscap paper placed in a cardboard envelope and written in felt-tip pen. Two weeks beforehand, he silently gave them out, going from desk to desk, inviting the whole year group.
34.
    That Saturday I woke up early. I got dressed, went to the fridge and spent the morning in my room. I liked watching TV like that, with the blinds down, the bed still unmade and breadcrumbs among the sheets, until someone knocked on the door