Chapter 1

Most of the Time 

I Am a Child

I am little Danny, aged nine, slim and introverted, most of the time I look at the floor, ashamed of everything, avoiding people and their looks. I prefer that they not address me, I see that people do not really address me, and yet nevertheless I have a feeling that everybody is looking at me. I am busy with my issues and I don’t look people in the eye and yet some people ask me ‘what are you looking at?.

And I am not looking at all. I am rather confused. I have no idea what is really happening to me. Everybody tells me that I am already a man and must take responsibility for my life, but I am a little boy, no? I would say that I am a very little boy.

I remember myself from age five with these strange feelings. I see things, I dream of things, sometimes I know what is about to happen before it happens and this scares me. Even now I feel that a large change is about to happen in my life. I live in a stone house on a small road in Casablanca; I love the good feeling at home, the songs of the Sabbath and the holidays, the stories of my father, and the conversations at home.

My father is a simple man, diligent and honest, a philosopher of life. He knows much about what happens in the political and cosmological world. My father lives Judaism and the Bible, is well versed in the theories of the Sofis, the Shamans, the Chinese, and the Hindus. He quotes from the sutras and the Vedas. He is an intelligent man who works hard to earn his livelihood.

I am afraid of the fights between my brothers, since sometimes they really go too far. Once they even broke chairs on one another, when father and mother were not home.

When they fight between them, I suddenly draw strength that is generally hidden in me and I become the defender of my small brother against the brothers who are older than he and I are. Sometimes I even bend my older brother’s hand and then I see that he is shocked, since he is very big and I am small and thin. How do I overcome him and not allow him to hit my little brother?

I don’t have to worry about myself since nobody hits me. All this is very confusing for me, I don’t understand why the big ones hit the little ones and why one brother hits another brother, and then I find myself closed in myself for days at a time trying to understand, to find an answer to the question, something that I can understand and accept.

On the days that I close up in myself, I feel that I am sixty years old. I think like an old person, I think that I need to take care of everybody, just like an adult does, and I am only a child, and then I am confused between my desire to be a child and even a child who does not really care what happens to others, or perhaps to grow quickly and take all my fears and the fears of others and find an answer for them.

Most of the time I want to be a child and even an infant, since I am a child who barely gets a hug once every few months. I am loved at home, but this is how it is in our home, it is custom that we don’t hug and only kiss. You go cheek to cheek and make a kissing sound and that’s it, this is what is done even when guests come. And I need more than that, I need really long and large hugs, I saw also that there are mothers who caress their children before they go to sleep, long caresses, but I was not born to these mothers and therefore I all the time want to be an infant so as to receive more and more, so that it is similar to at least one hug.

When I would want to get a hug from my mother I would go under her dress and then I would get attention and a passing caress. My mother raised by herself eleven children and care for one grandmother; she was the commander of the family ship, she navigates and determines and organizes, she was a woman of valor in the fullest meaning.

To receive a hug and attention from my father, the best method is to make myself ill. Sometimes I forget this need to be an infant or a child and then I feel that I am far older than my father, as if I am his father. Let there be no mistake: my father is really a serious person, even very serious, and yet sometimes I feel like a big person.