Amos Oz - A Tale Of Love And Darkness, Part 1

 A Tale of Love and Darkness


 Amos Oz


     Translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange

     A Harvest Book • Harcourt, Inc.
 ORLANDO AUSTIN NEW YORK SAN DIEGO TORONTO LONDON

     Copyright © 2003 by Amos Oz and Keter Publishing House Ltd.
 Translation copyright © 2004 by Nicholas de Lange

     All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
 transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
 photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without
 permission in writing from the publisher.

     Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be
 mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc.,
 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

     www.HarcourtBooks.com

     This is a translation of Sipour Al Ahava Vehoshekh.

     First published in the UK by Chatto & Windus.

     The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
 Oz, Amos.
 [Sipur 'al ahavah ve-hoshekh. English]
 A tale of love and darkness/Amos Oz;
 translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange.
 p. cm.

     1. Oz, Amos—Childhood and youth. 2. Authors, Israeli—Biography. I. Title.
 PJ5054.O9Z47313 2004
 892.4'36—dc22 2004007302
 ISBN-13: 978-0151-00878-0 ISBN-10: 0-15-100878-7
 ISBN-13: 978-0156-03252-0 (pbk.) ISBN-10: 0-15-603252-x (pbk.)

     Text set in Minion
 Designed by Cathy Riggs

     Printed in the United States of America

     First Harvest edition 2005

     A C E G I K J H F D B


 1


     I WAS BORN and bred in a tiny, low-ceilinged ground-floor apartment. My parents slept on a sofa bed that filled their room almost from wall to wall when it was opened up each evening. Early every morning they used to shut away this bed deep into itself, hide the bedclothes in the chest underneath, turn the mattress over, press it all tight shut, and conceal the whole under a light gray cover, then scatter a few embroidered oriental cushions on top, so that all evidence of their night's sleep disappeared. in this way their bedroom also served as study, library, dining room, and living room.

     Opposite this room was my little green room, half taken up with a big-bellied wardrobe. A narrow, low passage, dark and slightly curved, like an escape tunnel from a prison, linked the little kitchenette and toilet to these two small rooms. A lightbulb imprisoned in an iron cage cast a gloomy half-light on this passage even during the daytime. At the front both rooms had just a single window, guarded by metal blinds, squinting to catch a glimpse of the view to the east but seeing only a dusty cypress tree and a low wall of roughly dressed stones. Through a tiny opening high up in their back walls the kitchenette and toilet peered out into a little prison yard surrounded by high walls and paved with concrete, where a pale geranium planted in a rusty olive can was gradually dying for want of a single ray of sunlight. On the sills of these tiny openings we always kept jars of pickles and a stubborn cactus in a cracked vase that served as a flowerpot.
     It was actually a basement apartment, as the ground floor of the building had been hollowed out of the rocky hillside. This hill was our next-door neighbor, a heavy, introverted, silent neighbor, an old, sad hill with the regular habits of a bachelor, a drowsy, still wintry hill, which never scraped the furniture or entertained guests, never made a noise or disturbed us, but through the walls there seeped constantly toward us, like a faint yet persistent musty smell, the cold, dark silence and dampness of this melancholy neighbor.
     Consequently through the summer there was always a hint of winter in our home.
     Visitors would say: it's always so pleasant here in a heat wave, so cool and fresh, really chilly, but how do you manage in the winter? Don't the walls let in the damp? Don't you find it depressing?
    


     Books filled our home. My father could read sixteen or seventeen languages and could speak eleven (all with a Russian accent). My mother spoke four or five languages and read seven or eight. They conversed in Russian or Polish when they did not want me to understand. (Which was most of the time. When my mother referred to a stallion in Hebrew in my hearing, my father rebuked her furiously in Russian: Shto s toboi?! Vidish malchik random s nami!—What's the matter with you? You can see the boy's right here!) Out of cultural considerations they mostly read books in German or English, and presumably they dreamed in Yiddish. But the only language they taught me was Hebrew. Maybe they feared that a knowledge of languages would expose me too to the blandishments of Europe, that wonderful, murderous continent.

     On my parents' scale of values, the more Western something was, the more cultured it was considered. For all that Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were dear to their Russian souls, I suspect that Germany—despite Hitler—seemed to them more cultured than Russia or Poland, and France more so than Germany. England stood even higher on their scale than France. As for America, there they were not so sure: after all, it was a country where people shot at Indians, held up mail trains, chased gold, and hunted girls.
     Europe for them was a forbidden promised land, a yearned-for landscape of belfries and squares paved with ancient flagstones, of trams and bridges and church spires, remote villages, spa towns, forests, and snow-covered meadows.
     Words like "cottage," "meadow," or "goose girl" excited and seduced me all through my childhood. They had the sensual aroma of a genuine, cozy world, far from the dusty tin roofs, the urban wasteland of scrap iron and thistles, the parched hillsides of our Jerusalem suffocating under the weight of white-hot summer. It was enough for me to whisper to myself "meadow," and at once I could hear the lowing of cows with little bells tied around their necks, and the burbling of brooks. Closing my eyes, I could see the barefoot goose girl, whose sexiness brought me to tears before I knew about anything.
    


     As the years passed I became aware that Jerusalem, under British rule in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, must be a fascinatingly cultured city. It had big businessmen, musicians, scholars, and writers: Martin Buber, Greshom Scholem, S. Y. Agnon, and a host of other eminent academics and artists. Sometimes as we walked down Ben Yehuda Street or Ben Mai-mon Avenue, my father would whisper to me: "Look, there is a scholar with a worldwide reputation." I did not know what he meant. I thought that having a worldwide reputation was somehow connected with having weak legs, because the person in question was often an elderly man who felt his way with a stick and stumbled as he walked along, and wore a heavy woolen suit even in summer.

     The Jerusalem my parents looked up to lay far from the area where we lived: it was in leafy Rehavia with its gardens and its strains of piano music, it was in three or four cafés with gilded chandeliers on the Jaffa Road or Ben Yehuda Street, in the halls of the YMCA or the King David Hotel, where culture-seeking Jews and Arabs mixed with cultivated Englishmen with perfect manners, where dreamy, long-necked ladies floated in evening dresses, on the arms of gentlemen in dark suits, where broad-minded Britons dined with cultured Jews or educated Arabs, where there were recitals, balls, literary evenings, thés dansants, and exquisite, artistic conversations. Or perhaps such a Jerusalem, with its chandeliers and thés dansants, existed only in the dreams of the librarians, schoolteachers, clerks, and bookbinders who lived in Kerem Avra-ham. At any rate, it didn't exist where we were. Kerem Avraham, the area where we lived, belonged to Chekhov.
     Years later, when I read Chekhov (in Hebrew translation), I was convinced he was one of us: Uncle Vanya lived right upstairs from us, Doctor samoylenko bent over me and examined me with his broad, strong hands when I had a fever and once diphtheria, Laevsky with his perpetual migraine was my mother's second cousin, and we used to go and listen to Trigorin at Saturday matinees in the Beit Ha'am Auditorium.
     We were surrounded by Russians of every sort. There were many Tolstoyans. Some of them even looked like Tolstoy. When I came across a brown photograph of Tolstoy on the back of a book, I was certain that i had seen him often in our neighborhood, strolling along Malachi Street or down Obadiah Street, bareheaded, his white beard ruffled by the breeze, as awesome as the Patriarch Abraham, his eyes flashing, using a branch as a walking stick, a Russian shirt worn outside the baggy trousers tied around his waist with a length of string.
     Our neighborhood Tolstoyans (whom my parents referred to as Tolstoyshchiks) were without exception devout vegetarians, world reformers with strong feelings for nature, seekers after the moral life, lovers of humankind, lovers of every single living creature, with a perpetual yearning for the rural life, for simple agricultural labor among fields and orchards. But they were not successful even in cultivating their own potted plants: perhaps they killed them by overwatering, or perhaps they forgot to water them, or else it was the fault of the nasty British administration that put chlorine in our water.
     Some of them were Tolstoyans who might have stepped straight out of the pages of a novel by Dostoevsky: tormented, talkative, suppressing their desires, consumed by ideas. But all of them, Tolstoyans and Dostoevskians alike, in our neighborhood of Kerem Avraham, worked for Chekhov.
     The rest of the world was generally known as "the worldatlarge," but it had other epithets too: enlightened, outside, free, hypocritical. I knew it almost exclusively from my stamp collection: Danzig, Bohemia, and Moravia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Ubangi-Shari, Trinidad and Tobago, Kenya, Uganda, and Tanganyika. That worldatlarge was far away, attractive, marvelous, but to us it was dangerous and threatening. It didn't like the Jews because they were clever, quick-witted, successful, but also because they were noisy and pushy. It didn't like what we were doing here in the Land of Israel either, because it begrudged us even this meager strip of marshland, boulders, and desert. Out there, in the world, all the walls were covered with graffiti: "Yids, go back to Palestine," so we came back to Palestine, and now the worldatlarge shouts at us: "Yids, get out of Palestine."
     It was not only the worldatlarge that was a long way away: even the Land of Israel was pretty far off. Somewhere, over the hills and far away, a new breed of heroic Jews was springing up, a tanned, tough, silent, practical breed of men, totally unlike the Jews of the Diaspora, totally unlike the residents of Kerem Avraham. Courageous, rugged pioneers, who had succeeded in making friends with the darkness of night, and had overstepped every limit, too, as regards relations between a boy and a girl and vice versa. They were not ashamed of anything. Grandpa Alexander once said: "They think in the future it's going to be so simple, a boy will be able to go up to a girl and just ask for it, or maybe the girls won't even wait to be approached, but will go and ask the boys for it, like asking for a glass of water." Shortsighted Uncle Betsalel said with polite anger: "Isn't this sheer Bolshevism, to trample on every secret, every mystery?! To abolish all emotions?! To turn our whole life into a glass of lukewarm water?!" Uncle Nehemia, from his corner, let fly a couple of lines of a song that sounded to me like the growling of a cornered beast: "Oh, long is the journey and winding the road, I travel o'er mountain and plain, Oh Mamma, I seek you through heat and through snow, I miss you but you're far away!..." Then Aunt Zippora said, in Russian: "That'll do, now. Have you all gone out of your minds? The boy can hear you!" And so they all changed to Russian.
    


     The pioneers lived beyond our horizon, in Galilee, Sharon, and the Valleys. Tough, warmhearted, though of course silent and thoughtful, young men, and strapping, straightforward, self-disciplined young women, who seemed to know and understand everything; they knew you and your shy confusion, yet they would treat you with affection, seriousness, and respect, treat you not like a child but like a man, albeit an undersized one.

     I pictured these pioneers as strong, serious, self-contained people, capable of sitting around in a circle and singing songs of heartrending longing, or songs of mockery, or outrageous songs of lust; or of dancing so wildly that they seemed to transcend the physical. They were capable of loneliness and introspection, of living outdoors, sleeping in tents, doing hard labor, singing, "We are always at the ready," "Your boys brought you peace with a plowshare, today they bring peace with a gun," "Wherever we're sent to, we go-o-o"; they could ride wild horses or wide-tracked tractors; they spoke Arabic, knew every cave and wadi, had a way with pistols and hand grenades, yet read poetry and philosophy; they were large men with inquiring minds and hidden feelings, who could converse in a near whisper by candlelight in their tents in the small hours of the morning about the meaning of our lives and the grim choices between love and duty, between patriotism and universal justice.
     Sometimes my friends and I went to the Tnuva delivery yard to watch them arriving from over the hills and far away on a truck laden with agricultural produce, "clad in dust, burdened with arms, and with such heavy boots," and I used to go up to them to inhale the smell of hay, the intoxicating odors of faraway places: it's where they come from, I thought, that great things are happening. That's where the land is being built and the world is being reformed, where a new society is being forged. They are stamping their mark on the landscape and on history, they are plowing fields and planting vineyards, they are writing a new song, they pick up their guns, mount their horses, and shoot back at the Arab marauders: they take our miserable human clay and mold it into a fighting nation.
     I secretly dreamed that one day they would take me with them. And make me into a fighting nation too. That my life too would become a new song, a life as pure and straightforward and simple as a glass of water on a hot day.
    


     Over the hills and far away, the city of Tel Aviv was also an exciting place, from which came the newspapers, rumors of theater, opera, ballet, and cabaret, as well as modern art, party politics, echoes of stormy debates, and indistinct snatches of gossip. There were great sportsmen in Tel Aviv. And there was the sea, full of bronzed Jews who could swim. Who in Jerusalem could swim? Who had ever heard of swimming Jews? These were different genes. A mutation. "Like the wondrous birth of a butterfly out of a worm."

     There was a special magic in the very name of Tel Aviv. As soon as I heard the word "Telaviv," I conjured up in my mind's eye a picture of a tough guy in a dark blue T-shirt, bronzed and broad-shouldered, a poet-worker-revolutionary, a man made without fear, the type they called a Hevreman, with a cap worn at a careless yet provocative angle on his curly hair, smoking Matusians, someone who was at home in the world: all day long he worked hard on the land, or with sand and mortar, in the evening he played the violin, at night he danced with girls or sang them soulful songs amid the sand dunes by the light of the full moon, and in the early hours he took a handgun or a sten out of its hiding place and stole away into the darkness to guard the houses and fields.
     How far away Tel Aviv was! In the whole of my childhood I visited it five or six times at most: we used to go occasionally to spend festivals with the aunts, my mother's sisters. It's not just that the light in Tel Aviv was different from the light in Jerusalem, more than it is today, even the laws of gravity were different. People didn't walk in Tel Aviv: they leaped and floated, like Neil Armstrong on the moon.
     In Jerusalem people always walked rather like mourners at a funeral, or latecomers at a concert. First they put down the tip of their shoe and tested the ground. Then, once they had lowered their foot, they were in no hurry to move it: we had waited two thousand years to gain a foothold in Jerusalem and were unwilling to give it up. If we picked up our foot, someone else might come along and snatch our little strip of land. On the other hand, once you have lifted your foot, do not be in a hurry to put it down again: who can tell what coil of vipers you might step on. For thousands of years we have paid with our blood for our impetuousness, time and time again we have fallen into the hands of our enemies because we put our feet down without looking where we were putting them. That, more or less, was the way people walked in Jerusalem. But Tel Aviv! The whole city was one big grasshopper. The people leaped by, and so did the houses, the streets, the squares, the sea breeze, the sand, the avenues, and even the clouds in the sky.
     Once we went to Tel Aviv for Passover, and the morning after we arrived I got up early, while everyone was still asleep, got dressed, went out, and played on my own in a little square with a bench or two, a swing, a sandpit, and three or four young trees where the birds were already singing. A few months later, at New Year, we went back to Tel Aviv, and the square wasn't there anymore. It had been moved, complete with its little trees, benches, sandpit, birds, and swing, to the other end of the road. I was astonished: I couldn't understand how Ben Gurion and the duly constituted authorities could allow such a thing. How could somebody suddenly pick up a square and move it? What next—would they move the Mount of Olives, or the Tower of David? Would they shift the Wailing Wall?
     People in Jerusalem talked about Tel Aviv with envy and pride, with admiration, but almost confidentially: as though the city were some kind of crucial secret project of the Jewish people that it was best not to discuss too much—after all, walls have ears, and spies and enemy agents could be lurking around every corner.
     Telaviv. Sea. Light. Sand, scaffolding, kiosks on the avenues, a brand-new white Hebrew city, with simple lines, growing up among the citrus groves and the dunes. Not just a place that you buy a ticket for and travel to on an Egged bus, but a different continent altogether.
    


     For years we had a regular arrangement for a telephone link with the family in Tel Aviv. We used to phone them every three or four months, even though we didn't have a phone and neither did they. First we would write to Auntie Hayya and Uncle Tsvi to let them know that on, say, the nineteenth of the month—which was a Wednesday, and on Wednesdays Tsvi left his work at the Health Clinic at three—we would phone from our pharmacy to their pharmacy at five. The letter was sent well in advance, and then we waited for a reply. In their letter, Auntie Hayya and Uncle Tsvi assured us that Wednesday the nineteenth suited them perfectly, and they would be waiting at the pharmacy a little before five, and not to worry if we didn't manage to phone at five on the dot, they wouldn't run away.

     I don't remember whether we put on our best clothes for the expedition to the pharmacy, for the phone call to Tel Aviv, but it wouldn't surprise me if we did. It was a solemn undertaking. As early as the Sunday before, my father would say to my mother, Fania, you haven't forgotten that this is the week that we're phoning Tel Aviv? On Monday my mother would say, Arieh, don't be late home the day after tomorrow, don't mess things up. And on Tuesday they would both say to me, Amos, just don't make any surprises for us, you hear, just don't be ill, you hear, don't catch cold or fall over until after tomorrow afternoon. And that evening they would say to me, Go to sleep early, so you'll be in good shape for the phone call, we don't want you to sound as though you haven't been eating properly.
     So they would build up the excitement. We lived in Amos Street, and the pharmacy was a five-minute walk away, in Zephaniah Street, but by three o'clock my father would say to my mother:
     "Don't start anything new now, so you won't be in a rush."
     "I'm perfectly OK, but what about you with your books, you might forget all about it."
     "Me? Forget? I'm looking at the clock every few minutes. And Amos will remind me."
     Here I am, just five or six years old, and already I have to assume a historic responsibility. I didn't have a watch—how could I?—and so every few moments I ran to the kitchen to see what the clock said, and then I would announce, like the countdown to a spaceship launch: twenty-five minutes to go, twenty minutes to go, fifteen to go, ten and a half to go—and at that point we would get up, lock the front door carefully, and set off, the three of us, turn left as far as Mr. Auster's grocery shop, then right into Zechariah Street, left into Malachi Street, right into Zephaniah Street, and straight into the pharmacy to announce:
     "Good afternoon to you, Mr. Heinemann, how are you? We've come to phone."
     He knew perfectly well, of course, that on Wednesday we would be coming to phone our relatives in Tel Aviv, and he knew that Tsvi worked at the Health Clinic, and that Hayya had an important job in the Working Women's League, and that Yigal was going to grow up to be a sportsman, and that they were good friends of Golda Meyerson (who later became Golda Meir) and of Misha Kolodny, who was known as Moshe Kol over here, but still we reminded him: "We've come to phone our relatives in Tel Aviv." Mr. Heinemann would say: "Yes, of course, please take a seat." Then he would tell us his usual telephone joke. "Once, at the Zionist Congress in Zurich, terrible roaring sounds were suddenly heard from a side room. Berl Locker asked Harzfeld what was going on, and Harzfeld explained that it was Comrade Rubashov speaking to Ben Gurion in Jerusalem. 'Speaking to Jerusalem,' exclaimed Berl Locker, 'so why doesn't he use the telephone?' "
     Father would say: "I'll dial now." And Mother said: "It's too soon, Arieh. There's still a few minutes to go." He would reply: "Yes, but they have to be put through" (there was no direct dialing at that time). Mother: "Yes, but what if for once we are put through right away, and they're not there yet?" Father replied: "In that case we shall simply try again later." Mother: "No, they'll worry, they'll think they've missed us."
     While they were still arguing, suddenly it was almost five o'clock. Father picked up the receiver, standing up to do so, and said to the operator: "Good afternoon, Madam. Would you please give me Tel Aviv 648." (Or something like that: we were still living in a three-digit world). Sometimes the operator would answer: "Would you please wait a few minutes, Sir, the Postmaster is on the line." Or Mr. Sitton. Or Mr. Nashashibi. And we felt quite nervous: whatever would they think of us?
     I could visualize this single line that connected Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and via Tel Aviv the rest of the world. If this one line was engaged, we were cut off from the world. The line wound its way over wastelands and rocks, over hills and valleys, and I thought it was a great miracle. I trembled: what if wild animals came in the night and bit through the line? Or if wicked Arabs cut it? Or if the rain got into it? Or if there was a fire? Who could tell? There was this line winding along, so vulnerable, unguarded, baking in the sun, who could tell? I felt full of gratitude to the men who had put up this line, so brave-hearted, so dexterous, it's not easy to put up a line from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. I knew from experience: once we ran a wire from my room to Eliyahu Friedmann's room, only two houses and a garden away, and what a business it was, with the trees in the way, the neighbors, the shed, the wall, the steps, the bushes.
     After waiting a while, Father decided that the Postmaster or Mr. Nashashibi must have finished talking, and so he picked up the receiver again and said to the operator: "Excuse me, Madam, I believe I asked to be put through to Tel Aviv 648" She would say: "I've got it written down, Sir. Please wait" (or "Please be patient"). Father would say: "I am waiting, Madam, naturally I am waiting, but there are people waiting at the other end too" This was his way of hinting to her politely that although we were indeed cultured people, there was a limit to our endurance. We were well brought up, but we weren't suckers. We were not to be led like sheep to the slaughter. That idea—that you could treat Jews any way you felt like—was over, once and for all.
     Then all of a sudden the phone would ring in the pharmacy, and it was always such an exciting sound, such a magical moment, and the conversation went something like this:
     "Hallo, Tsvi?"
     "Speaking."
     "It's Arieh here, in Jerusalem."
     "Yes, Arieh, hallo, it's Tsvi here, how are you?"
     "Everything is fine here. We're speaking from the pharmacy."
     "So are we. What's new?"
     "Nothing new here. How about at your end, Tsvi? Tell us how it's going."
     "Everything is OK. Nothing special to report. We're all well."
     "No news is good news. There's no news here either. We're all fine. How about you?"
     "We're fine too."
     "That's good. Now Fania wants to speak to you."
     And then the same thing all over again. How are you? What's new? And then: "Now Amos wants to say a few words."
     And that was the whole conversation. What's new? Good. Well, so let's speak again soon. It's good to hear from you. It's good to hear from you too. We'll write and set a time for the next call. We'll talk. Yes. Definitely. Soon. See you soon. Look after yourselves. All the best. You too.
    


     But it was no joke: our lives hung by a thread. I realize now that they were not at all sure they would really talk again, this might be the last time, who knew what would happen, there could be riots, a pogrom, a blood bath, the Arabs might rise up and slaughter the lot of us, there might be a war, a terrible disaster, after all Hitler's tanks had almost reached our doorstep from two directions, North Africa and the Caucasus, who knew what else awaited us? This empty conversation was not really empty, it was just awkward.

     What those telephone conversations reveal to me now is how hard it was for them—for everyone, not just my parents—to express private feelings. They had no difficulty at all expressing communal feelings—they were emotional people, and they knew how to talk. Oh, how they could talk! They were capable of conversing for hours on end in excited tones about Nietzsche, Stalin, Freud, Jabotinsky, giving it everything they had, shedding tears of pathos, arguing in a singsong, about colonialism, anti-Semitism, justice, the "agrarian question," the "woman question," "art versus life," but the moment they tried to give voice to a private feeling, what came out was something tense, dry, even frightened, the result of generation upon generation of repression and negation. A double negation in fact, two sets of brakes, as bourgeois European manners reinforced the constraints of the religious Jewish community. Virtually everything was "forbidden" or "not done" or "not very nice."
     Apart from which, there was a great lack of words: Hebrew was still not a natural enough language, it was certainly not an intimate language, and it was hard to know what would actually come out when you spoke it. They could never be certain that they would not utter something ridiculous, and ridicule was something they lived in fear of. They were scared to death of it. Even people like my parents who knew Hebrew well were not entirely its masters. They spoke it with a kind of obsession for accuracy. They frequently changed their minds, and reformulated something they had just said. Perhaps that is how a shortsighted driver feels, trying to find his way at night through a warren of side streets in a strange city in an unfamiliar car.
     One Saturday a friend of my mother's came to visit us, a teacher by the name of Lilia Bar-Samkha. Whenever the visitor said in the course of the conversation that she had had a fright or that someone was in a frightful state, I burst out laughing. In everyday slang her word for "fright" meant "fart" No one else seemed to find it funny, or perhaps they were pretending not to. It was the same when my father spoke about the arms race, or raged against the decision of the NATO countries to rearm Germany as a deterrent to Stalin. He had no idea that his bookish word for "arm" meant "fuck" in current Hebrew slang.
     As for my father, he glowered whenever I used the word "fix": an innocent enough word, I could never understand why it got on his nerves. He never explained of course, and it was impossible for me to ask. Years later I learned that before I was born, in the 1930s, if a woman got herself in a fix, it meant she was pregnant. "That night in the packing room he got her in a fix, and in the morning the so-and-so made out he didn't know her" So if I said that "Uri's sister was in a fix" about something, Father used to purse his lips and clench the base of his nose. Naturally he never explained—how could he?
     In their private moments they never spoke Hebrew to each other. Perhaps in their most private moments they did not speak at all. They said nothing. Everything was overshadowed by the fear of appearing or sounding ridiculous.

 2


     OSTENSIBLY, IN those days it was the pioneers who occupied the highest rung on the ladder of prestige. But the pioneers lived far from Jerusalem, in the Valleys, in Galilee, and in the wilderness on the shores of the Dead Sea. We admired their rugged, pensive silhouettes, poised between tractor and plowed earth, that were displayed on the posters of the Jewish National Fund.

     On the next rung below the pioneers stood the "affiliated community," reading the socialist newspaper Davar in their T-shirts on summer verandas, members of the Histadrut, the Hagganah, and the Health Fund, men of khaki and contributors to the voluntary Community Chest fund, eaters of salad with an omelette and yogurt, devotees of self-restraint, responsibility, a solid way of life, homegrown produce, the working class, party discipline, and mild olives from the distinctive Tnuva jar, Blue beneath and blue above, we'll build our land with love, with love!
     Over against this established community stood the "unaffiliated," aka the terrorists, as well as the pious Jews of Meah Shearim, and the "Zion-hating," ultra-orthodox communists, together with a mixed rabble of eccentric intellectuals, careerists, and egocentric artists of the decadent-cosmopolitan type, along with all sorts of outcasts and individualists and dubious nihilists, German Jews who had not managed to recover from their Germanic ways, Anglophile snobs, wealthy Frenchified Levantines with what we considered the exaggerated manners of uppity butlers, and then the Yemenites, Georgians, North Africans, Kurds, and Salonicans, all of them definitely our brothers, all of them undoubtedly promising human material, but what could you do, they would need a huge amount of patience and effort.
     Apart from all these, there were the refugees, the survivors, whom we generally treated with compassion and a certain revulsion: miserable wretches, was it our fault that they chose to sit and wait for Hitler instead of coming here while there was still time? Why did they allow themselves to be led like sheep to the slaughter instead of organizing and fighting back? And if only they'd stop nattering on in Yiddish, and stop telling us about all the things that were done to them over there, because that didn't reflect too well on them, or on us for that matter. Anyway, our faces here are turned toward the future, not the past, and if we do have to rake up the past, surely we have more than enough uplifting Hebrew history, from biblical times, and the Hasmoneans, there's no need to foul it up with this depressing Jewish history that's nothing but a bundle of troubles (they always used the Yiddish word tsores, with an expression of disgust on their faces, so the boy realizes that these tsores are a kind of sickness that belonged to them, not to us). Survivors like Mr. Licht, whom the local kids called Million Kinder. He rented a little hole-in-the-wall in Malachi Street where he slept on a mattress at night, and during the day he rolled up his bedding and ran a small business called Dry Cleaning and Steam Pressing. The corners of his mouth were always turned down in an expression of scorn or disgust. He used to sit in the doorway of his shop waiting for a customer, and whenever one of the neighborhood children went past, he would always spit to one side and hiss through his pursed lips: "A million Kinder they killed! Kiddies like you! Slaughtered them!" He did not say this sadly, but with hatred, with loathing, as though he were cursing us.
    


     My parents did not have a clearly defined place on this scale between the pioneers and the tsores-mongers. They had one foot in the affiliated community (they belonged to the Health Fund and paid their dues to the Community Chest) and the other in the air. My father was close in his heart to the ideology of the unaffiliated, the breakaway New Zionist of Jabotinsky, although he was very far from their bombs and rifles. The most he did was put his knowledge of English at the service of the underground and contribute an occasional illegal and inflammatory leaflet about "perfidious Albion." My parents were attracted to the intelligentsia of Rehavia, but the pacifist ideals of Martin Buber's Brit Shalom—sentimental kinship between Jews and Arabs, total abandonment of the dream of a Hebrew state so that the Arabs would take pity on us and kindly allow us to live here at their feet—such ideals appeared to my parents as spineless appeasement, craven defeatism of the type that had characterized the centuries of Jewish Diaspora life.

     My mother, who had studied at Prague University and graduated from the university in Jerusalem, gave private lessons to students who were preparing for the examinations in history or occasionally in literature. My father had a degree in literature from the University of Vilna (now Vilnius), and a second degree from the university at Mount Scopus, but he had no prospect of securing a teaching position in the Hebrew University at a time when the number of qualified experts in literature in Jerusalem far exceeded that of the students. To make matters worse, many of the lecturers had real degrees, gleaming diplomas from famous German universities, not like my father's shabby Polish-Jerusalemite qualification. He therefore settled for the post of librarian in the National Library on Mount Scopus, and sat up late at night writing his books about the Hebrew novella or the concise history of world literature. My father was a cultivated, well-mannered librarian, severe yet also rather shy, who wore a tie, round glasses, and a somewhat threadbare jacket. He bowed before his superiors, leaped to open doors for ladies, insisted firmly on his few rights, enthusiastically cited lines of poetry in ten languages, endeavored always to be pleasant and amusing, and endlessly repeated the same repertoire of jokes (which he referred to as "anecdotes" or "pleasantries"). These jokes generally came out rather labored: they were not so much specimens of living humor as a positive declaration of intent as regards our obligation to be entertaining in times of adversity.
     Whenever my father found himself facing a pioneer in khaki, a revolutionary, an intellectual turned worker, he was thoroughly confused. Out in the world, in Vilna or Warsaw, it was perfectly clear how you addressed a proletarian. Everyone knew his place, although it was up to you to demonstrate clearly to this worker how democratic and uncon-descending you were. But here, in Jerusalem, everything was ambiguous. Not topsy-turvy, as in communist Russia, but simply ambiguous. On the one hand, my father definitely belonged to the middle class, albeit the slightly lower middle class; he was an educated man, the author of articles and books, the holder of a modest position in the National Library, while his interlocutor was a sweaty construction worker in overalls and heavy boots. On the other hand, this same worker was said to have some sort of degree in chemistry, and he was also a committed pioneer, the salt of the earth, a hero of the Hebrew Revolution, a manual laborer, while Father considered himself—at least in his heart of hearts—to be a sort of rootless, shortsighted intellectual with two left hands. Something of a deserter from the battlefront where the homeland was being built.
    


     Most of our neighbors were petty clerks, small retailers, bank tellers, cinema ticket sellers, schoolteachers, dispensers of private lessons, or dentists. They were not religious Jews; they went to synagogue only for Yom Kippur and occasionally for the procession at Simhat Torah, yet they lit candles on Friday night, to maintain some vestige of Jewishness and perhaps also as a precaution, to be on the safe side, you never know. They were all more or less well educated, but they were not entirely comfortable about it. They all had very definite views about the British Mandate, the future of Zionism, the working class, the cultural life of the land, Dühring's attack on Marx, the novels of Knut Hamsun, the Arab question, and women's rights. There were all sorts of thinkers and preachers, who called for the Orthodox Jewish ban on Spinoza to be lifted, for instance, or for a campaign to explain to the Palestinian Arabs that they were not really Arabs but the descendants of the ancient Hebrews, or for a conclusive synthesis between the ideas of Kant and Hegel, the teachings of Tolstoy and Zionism, a synthesis that would give birth here in the Land of Israel to a wonderfully pure and healthy way of life, or for the promotion of goat's milk, or for an alliance with America and even with Stalin with the object of driving out the British, or for everyone to do some simple exercises every morning that would keep gloom at bay and purify the soul.

     These neighbors, who would congregate in our little yard on Saturday afternoons to sip Russian tea, were almost all dislocated people. Whenever anyone needed to mend a fuse or change a washer or drill a hole in the wall, they would send for Baruch, the only man in the neighborhood who could work such magic, which was why he was dubbed Baruch Goldfingers. All the rest knew how to analyze, with fierce rhetoric, the importance for the Jewish people to return to a life of agriculture and manual labor: we have more intellectuals here than we need, they declared, but what we are short of is plain manual laborers. But in our neighborhood, apart from Baruch Goldfingers, there was hardly a laborer to be seen. We didn't have any heavyweight intellectuals either. Everyone read a lot of newspapers, and everyone loved talking. Some may have been proficient at all sorts of things, others may have been sharp-witted, but most of them simply declaimed more or less what they had read in the papers or in myriad pamphlets and party manifestos.
     As a child I could only dimly sense the gulf between their enthusiastic desire to reform the world and the way they fidgeted with the brims of their hats when they were offered a glass of tea, or the terrible embarrassment that reddened their cheeks when my mother bent over (just a little) to sugar their tea and her decorous neckline revealed a tiny bit more flesh than usual: the confusion of their fingers, which tried to curl into themselves and stop being fingers.
     All this was straight out of Chekhov—and also gave me a feeling of provinciality: that there are places in the world where real life is still happening, far away from here, in a pre-Hitler Europe, where hundreds of lights are lit every evening, ladies and gentlemen gather to drink coffee with cream in oak-paneled rooms, or sit comfortably in splendid coffeehouses under gilt chandeliers, stroll arm in arm to the opera or the ballet, observe from close up the lives of great artists, passionate love affairs, broken hearts, the painter's girlfriend falling in love with his best friend the composer, and going out at midnight bareheaded in the rain to stand alone on the ancient bridge whose reflection trembles in the river.
    


     Nothing like this ever happened in our neighborhood. Things like this happened only over the hills and far away, in places where people live recklessly. In America, for instance, where people dig for gold, hold up mail trains, stampede herds of cattle across endless plains, and whoever kills the most Indians ends up getting the girl. That was the America we saw at the Edison Cinema: the pretty girl was the prize for the best shooter. What one did with such a prize I had not the faintest idea. If they had shown us in those films an America where the man who shot the most girls was rewarded with a good-looking Indian, I would simply have believed that that was the way it was. At any rate—in those far-off worlds. In America, and in other wonderful places in my stamp album, in Paris, Alexandria, Rotterdam, Lugano, Biarritz, St. Moritz, places where G-dlike men fell in love, fought each other politely, lost, gave up the struggle, wandered off, sat drinking alone late at night at dimly lit bars in hotels on boulevards in rain-swept cities. And lived recklessly.

     Even in those novels by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky that they were always arguing over, the heroes lived recklessly and died for love. Or for some exalted ideal. Or of consumption and a broken heart. Those suntanned pioneers too, on some hilltop in Galilee, lived recklessly. Nobody in our neighborhood ever died from consumption or unrequited love or idealism. They were anything but reckless. Not just my parents. Everyone.
    


     We had an iron rule that one should never buy anything imported, anything foreign, if it was possible to buy a locally made equivalent. Still, when we went to Mr. Auster's grocery shop on the corner of Obadiah and Amos streets, we had to choose between kibbutz cheese, made by the Jewish cooperative Tnuva, and Arab cheese: did Arab cheese from the nearby village, Lifta, count as homemade or imported produce? Tricky. True, the Arab cheese was just a little cheaper. But if you bought Arab cheese, weren't you being a traitor to Zionism? Somewhere, in some kibbutz or moshav, in the Jezreel Valley or the hills of Galilee, an overworked pioneer girl was sitting, with tears in her eyes perhaps, packing this Hebrew cheese for us—how could we turn our backs on her and buy alien cheese? Did we have the heart? On the other hand, if we boycotted the produce of our Arab neighbors, we would be deepening and perpetuating the hatred between our two peoples. And we would be partly responsible for any blood that was shed, heaven forbid. Surely the humble Arab fellah, a simple, honest tiller of the soil, whose soul was still undefiled by the miasma of town life, was nothing more or less than the dusky brother of the simple, noble-hearted muzhik in the stories of Tolstoy! Could we be so heartless as to turn our backs on his rustic cheese? Could we be so cruel as to punish him? What for? Because the deceitful British and the corrupt effendis had set him against us? No. this time we would definitely buy the cheese from the Arab village, which incidentally really did taste better than the Tnuva cheese, and cost a little less in the bargain. But still, on the third hand, what if the Arab cheese wasn't clean? Who knew what the dairies were like there? What if it turned out, too late, that their cheese was full of germs?

     Germs were one of our worst nightmares. They were like anti-Semitism: you never actually managed to set eyes on an anti-Semite or a germ, but you knew very well that they were lying in wait for you on every side, out of sight. Actually, it was not true that none of us had ever set eyes on a germ: I had. I used to stare for a long time very intently at a piece of old cheese, until I suddenly began to see thousands of tiny squirming things. Like gravity in Jerusalem, which was much stronger then than now, the germs too were much bigger and stronger. I saw them.
     A little argument used to break out among the customers in Mr. Auster's grocery shop: to buy or not to buy Arab cheese? On the one hand, "charity begins at home," so it was our duty to buy Tnuva cheese only; on the other hand, "one law shall there be for you and for the stranger in your midst," so we should sometimes buy the cheese of our Arab neighbors, "for you were strangers in the land of Egypt." And anyway, imagine the contempt with which Tolstoy would regard anyone who would buy one kind of cheese and not another simply because of a difference of religion, nationality, or race! What of universal values? Humanism? The brotherhood of man? And yet, how pathetic, how weak, how petty-minded, to buy Arab cheese simply because it cost a couple of mils less, instead of cheese made by the pioneers, who worked their backs off for our benefit!
     Shame! Shame and disgrace! Either way, shame and disgrace!
     The whole of life was full of such shame and disgrace.
    


     Here was another typical dilemma: should one or should one not send flowers for a birthday? And if so, what flowers? Gladioli were very expensive, but they were cultured, aristocratic, sensitive flowers, not some sort of half-wild Asiatic weed. We could pick as many anemones and cyclamen as we liked, but they were not considered suitable for sending to someone for a birthday, or for the publication of a book. Gladioli conjured up recitals, grand parties, the theater, the ballet, culture—deep, fine feelings.

     So we'd send gladioli. And hang the expense. But then the question was, wasn't seven overdoing it? And wasn't five too few? Perhaps six then? Or should we send seven after all? Hang the expense. We could surround the gladioli with a forest of asparagus fern, and get by with six. On the other hand, wasn't the whole thing outdated? Gladioli? Who on earth sends gladioli nowadays? In Galilee, do the pioneers send one another gladioli? In Tel Aviv, do people still bother with gladioli? And what are they good for anyway? They cost a fortune, and four or five days later they end up in the trash. So what shall we give instead? How about a box of chocolates? A box of chocolates? That's even more ridiculous than gladioli. Maybe the best idea would be simply to take some serviettes, or one of those sets of glass holders, curly ones made of silvery metal, with cute handles, for serving hot tea, an unostentatious gift that is both aesthetic and very practical and that won't get thrown away but will be used for many years, and each time they use them, they'll think, just for an instant, of us.

 3


     EVERYWHERE YOU could discern all kinds of little emissaries of Europe, the promised land. For example, the manikins, I mean the little men who held the shutters open during the day, those little metal figures: when you wanted to close the shutters, you swiveled them around so that all night long they hung head down. The way they hung Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci at the end of the World War. It was terrible, it was scary, not the fact that they were hanged, they deserved that, but that they were hanged head down. I felt almost sorry for them, although I shouldn't: are you crazy or something? Feeling sorry for Mussolini? It's almost like feeling sorry for Hitler! But I tried an experiment, I hung upside down by my legs from a pipe attached to the wall, and after a couple of minutes all the blood rushed to my head and I felt I was going to faint. And Mussolini and his mistress were hung like that not for a couple of minutes but for three days and nights, and that was after they were killed! I thought that was an excessively cruel punishment. Even for a murderer. Even for a mistress.

     Not that I had the faintest idea what a mistress was. In those days there wasn't a single mistress in all of Jerusalem. There were "companions," "partners," "lady friends, in both senses of the word," there may even have been the odd affair. It was said, very cautiously, for instance, that Mr. Tchernianski had something going on with Mr. Lupatin's girlfriend, and I sensed with a pounding in my heart that "something going on with" was a mysterious, fateful expression that concealed something sweet and terrible and shameful. But a mistress?! That was something altogether biblical. Something larger than life. It was unimaginable. Maybe in Tel Aviv things like that existed, I thought, they always have all sorts of things that don't exist or aren't allowed here.
    


     I started to read almost on my own, when I was very young. What else did we have to do? The evenings were much longer then, because the earth revolved more slowly, because the galaxy was much more relaxed than it is today. The electric light was a pale yellow, and it was interrupted by the many power cuts. To this day the smell of smoky candles or a sooty paraffin lamp makes me want to read a book. By seven o'clock we were confined to our homes because of the curfew that the British imposed on Jerusalem. And even if there wasn't a curfew, who wanted to be out of doors in the dark at that time in Jerusalem? Everything was shut and shuttered, the cobblestone streets were deserted, every passing shadow in those narrow streets was trailed by three or four other shadows.

     Even when there was no power cut, we always lived in dim light because it was important to economize: my parents replaced the forty-watt bulbs with twenty-five-watt ones, not just for economy but on principle, because a bright light is wasteful, and waste is immoral. Our tiny apartment was always crammed full with the sufferings of the whole human race. The starving children in India, for whose sake I had to finish everything that was put on my plate. The survivors of Hitler's hell whom the British had deported to detention camps in Cyprus. The ragged orphan children still wandering around the snowbound forests of devastated Europe. My father used to sit working at his desk till two in the morning by the light of an anemic twenty-five-watt bulb, straining his eyes because he didn't think it was right to use a stronger light: the pioneers in the kibbutzim in Galilee sit up in their tents night after night writing books of verse or philosophical treatises by the light of guttering candles, and how can you forget about them and sit there like Rothschild with a blazing forty-watt bulb? And what will the neighbors say if they see us suddenly lit up like a ballroom? He preferred to ruin his eyesight rather than draw the glances of others.
     We were not among the poorest. Father's job at the National Library brought him a modest but regular salary. My mother gave some private lessons. I watered Mr. Cohen's garden in Tel Arza every Friday for a shilling, and on Wednesdays I earned another four piasters by putting empty bottles in crates behind Mr. Auster's grocery, and I also taught Mrs. Finster's son to read a map for two piasters a lesson (but this was on credit and to this day the Finsters have not paid me).
     Despite all these sources of income, we never stopped economizing. Life in our little apartment resembled life in a submarine, as they showed it in a film I saw once at the Edison Cinema, where the sailors had to close a hatch behind them every time they went from one compartment to another. At the very moment I switched on the light in the toilet with one hand I switched off the light in the passage with the other, so as not to waste electricity. I pulled the chain gently, because it was wrong to empty the whole Niagara cistern for a pee. There were other functions (that we never named) that could occasionally justify a full flush. But for a pee? A whole Niagara? While pioneers in the Negev were saving the water they had brushed their teeth with to water the plants? While in the detention camps in Cyprus a whole family had to make a single bucket of water last for three days? When I left the toilet, I switched off the light with my left hand and simultaneously switched on the light in the passage with my right hand, because the Shoah was only yesterday, because there were still homeless Jews roaming the Carpathians and the Dolomites, languishing in the deportation camps and on board unseaworthy hulks, as thin as skeletons, dressed in rags, and because there was hardship and deprivation in other parts of the world too, the coolies in China, the cotton pickers in Mississippi, children in Africa, fishermen in Sicily. It was our duty not to be wasteful.
     Apart from which, who could say what each day would bring? Our troubles were not yet over, and it was as good as certain that the worst was still to come. The Nazis might have been vanquished, but there were more pogroms in Poland, Hebrew speakers were being persecuted in Russia, and here the British had not yet said their last word, the Grand Mufti was talking about butchering the Jews, and who knew what the Arab states were planning for us, while the cynical world supported the Arabs from considerations of oil, markets, and other interests. It was not going to be easy for us, even I could see that.
    


     The one thing we had plenty of was books. They were everywhere: from wall to laden wall, in the passage and the kitchen and the entrance and on every windowsill. Thousands of books, in every corner of the apartment. I had the feeling that people might come and go, be born and die, but books went on for ever. When I was little, my ambition was to grow up to be a book. Not a writer. People can be killed like ants. Writers are not hard to kill either. But not books: however systematically you try to destroy them, there is always a chance that a copy will survive and continue to enjoy a shelf life in some corner of an out-of-the-way library somewhere, in Reykjavik, Valladolid, or Vancouver.

     If once or twice it happened that there was not enough money to buy food for Shabbat, my mother would look at Father, and Father would understand that the moment had come to make a sacrifice, and turn to the bookcase. He was an ethical man, and he knew that bread takes precedence over books and that the good of the child takes precedence over everything. I remember his hunched back as he walked through the doorway, on his way to Mr. Meyer's secondhand bookshop with two or three beloved tomes under his arm, looking as though it cut him to the quick. So must Abraham's back have been bowed as he set off early in the morning from his tent with Isaac on his shoulder, on their way to Mount Moriah.
     I could imagine his sorrow. My father had a sensual relationship with his books. He loved feeling them, stroking them, sniffing them. He took a physical pleasure in books: he could not stop himself, he had to reach out and touch them, even other people's books. And books then really were sexier than books today: they were good to sniff and stroke and fondle. There were books with gold writing on fragrant, slightly rough leather bindings, that gave you gooseflesh when you touched them, as though you were groping something private and inaccessible, something that seemed to tremble at your touch. And there were other books that were bound in cloth-covered cardboard, stuck with a glue that had a wonderful smell. Every book had its own private, provocative scent. Sometimes the cloth came away from the cardboard, like a saucy skirt, and it was hard to resist the temptation to peep into the dark space between body and clothing and sniff those dizzying smells.
     Father would generally return an hour or two later, without the books, laden with brown paper bags containing bread, eggs, cheese, occasionally even a can of corned beef. But sometimes he would come back from the sacrifice with a broad smile on his face, without his beloved books but also without anything to eat: he had indeed sold his books, but had immediately bought other books to take their place, because he had found such wonderful treasures in the secondhand bookshop, the kind of opportunity you encounter only once in a lifetime, and he had been unable to control himself. My mother forgave him, and so did I, because I hardly ever felt like eating anything except sweet corn and ice cream. I loathed omelettes and corned beef. To be honest, I was sometimes even jealous of those starving children in India, because nobody ever told them to finish up everything on their plate.
    


     When I was about six, there was a great day in my life: Father cleared a small space for me in one of his bookcases and let me put my own books there. To be precise, he granted me about a quarter of the length of the bottom shelf. I hugged all my books, which up till then had lain on a stool by the side of my bed, carried them in my arms to Father's bookcase, and stood them up in the proper way, with their backs turned to the world outside and their faces to the wall.

     It was an initiation rite, a coming of age: anyone whose books are standing upright is no longer a child, he is a man. I was like my father now. My books were standing to attention.
     I had made one terrible mistake. When Father went off to work, I was free to do whatever I wanted with my corner of the bookcase, but I had a wholly childish view about how these things were done. So it was that I arranged my books in order of height. The tallest books were the ones that by now were beneath my dignity, children's books, in rhyme, with pictures, the books that had been read to me when I was a toddler. I did it because I wanted to fill the whole length of shelf that had been allotted to me. I wanted my section to be packed full, crowded, overflowing, like my father's shelves. I was still in a state of euphoria when Father came home from work, cast a shocked glance toward my bookshelf, and then, in total silence, gave me a long hard look that I shall never forget: it was a look of contempt, of bitter disappointment beyond anything that could be expressed in words, almost a look of utter genetic despair. Finally he hissed at me with pursed lips: "Have you gone completely crazy? Arranging them by height? Have you mistaken your books for soldiers? Do you think they are some kind of honor guard? The firemen's band on parade?"
     Then he stopped talking. There came a long, awesome silence from my father, a sort of Gregor Samsa silence, as though I had turned into a cockroach before his eyes. From my side too there was a guilty silence, as though I really had been some kind of wretched insect all along, and now my secret was out and everything was lost.
     At the end of the silence Father began talking, and in the space of twenty minutes he revealed to me the facts of life. He held nothing back. He initiated me into the deepest secrets of the librarian's lore: he laid bare the main highway as well as the forest tracks, dizzying prospects of variations, nuances, fantasies, exotic avenues, daring schemes, and even eccentric whims. Books can be arranged by subject, by alphabetical order of authors' names, by series or publishers, in chronological order, by languages, by topics, by areas and fields, or even by place of publication. There are so many different ways.
     And so I learned the secret of diversity. Life is made up of different avenues. Everything can happen in one of several ways, according to different musical scores and parallel logics. Each of these parallel logics is consistent and coherent on its own terms, perfect in itself, indifferent to all the others.
     In the days that followed I spent hours on end arranging my little library, twenty or thirty books that I dealt and shuffled like a pack of cards, rearranging them in all sorts of different ways.
     So I learned from books the art of composition, not from what was in them but from the books themselves, from their physical being. They taught me about that dizzying no-man's-land or twilight zone between the permitted and the forbidden, between the legitimate and the eccentric, between the normative and the bizarre. This lesson has remained with me ever since. By the time I discovered love, I was no greenhorn. I knew that there were different menus. I knew that there was a motorway and a scenic route, and also unfrequented byways where the foot of man had barely trodden. There were permitted things that were almost forbidden and forbidden things that were almost permitted. There were so many different ways.
     Occasionally my parents allowed me to take books from my father's shelves outside into the yard to shake off the dust. No more than three books at a time, so as not to get them out of order, so that each one would get back to its proper place. It was a heavy but delicious responsibility, because I found the smell of book dust so intoxicating that I sometimes forgot my task, my duty, my responsibilities, and stayed outside until my mother became anxious and dispatched my father on a rescue mission to make sure I was not suffering from heatstroke, that I had not been bitten by a dog, and he always discovered me curled up in a corner of the yard, deep in a book, with my knees tucked under me, my head on one side, my mouth half open. When Father asked me, half angrily, half affectionately, what was the matter with me this time, it took a while for me to come back to this world, like someone who has drowned or fainted, and returns slowly, reluctantly, from unimaginable distant parts to this vale of tears of everyday chores.
     All through my childhood I loved to arrange and rearrange things, each time slightly differently. Three or four empty egg cups could become a series of fortifications, or a group of submarines, or a meeting of the leaders of the great powers at Yalta. I made occasional brief sorties into the realm of unbridled disorder. There was something very bold and exciting about this: I loved emptying a box of matches on the floor and trying to find all the infinite possible combinations.
     Throughout the years of the World War there hung on the wall in the passage a large map of the theaters of war in Europe, with pins and different-colored flags. Every day or two Father moved them in accordance with the news on the wireless. And I constructed a private, parallel reality: I spread out on the rush mat my own theater of war, my virtual reality, and I moved armies around, executed pincer movements and distractions, captured bridgeheads, outflanked the enemy, resigned myself to tactical withdrawals that I later turned into strategic breakthroughs.
     I was a child fascinated by history. I attempted to rectify the errors of the commanders of the past. I refought the great Jewish revolt against the Romans, rescued Jerusalem from destruction at the hands of Titus's army, pushed the campaign onto the enemy's ground, brought Bar Kochba's troops to the walls of Rome, took the Coliseum by storm, and planted the Hebrew flag on top of the Capitol. To this end I transported the British army's Jewish Brigade to the first century ad and the days of the Second Temple, and reveled in the devastation that a couple of machine guns could inflict on the splendid legions of the accursed Hadrian and Titus. A light aircraft, a single Piper, brought the proud Roman Empire to its knees. I turned the doomed struggle of the defenders of Masada into a decisive Jewish victory with the aid of a single mortar and a few hand grenades.
     And in fact that selfsame strange urge I had when I was small—the desire to grant a second chance to something that could never have one—is still one of the urges that set me going today whenever I sit down to write a story.
    


     Many things have happened in Jerusalem. The city has been destroyed, rebuilt, destroyed, and rebuilt again. Conqueror after conqueror has come, ruled for a while, left behind a few walls and towers, some cracks in the stone, a handful of potsherds and documents, and disappeared. Vanished like the morning mist down the hilly slopes. Jerusalem is an old nymphomaniac who squeezes lover after lover to death before shrugging him off her with a yawn, a black widow who devours her mates while they are still in her.

     Meanwhile, far away on the other side of the world, new continents and islands were being discovered. My mother used to say, You're too late, child, forget it, Magellan and Columbus have already discovered even the most far-flung islands. I argued with her. I said, How can you be so sure? After all, before Columbus came along, people thought all the world was known and there was nothing left to discover.
     Between the rush mat, the legs of the furniture, and the space under my bed I sometimes discovered not only unknown islands but new stars, solar systems, entire galaxies. If I'm ever put in prison, no doubt I'll miss my freedom and one or two other things, but I'll never suffer from boredom so long as I'm allowed to have a box of dominoes, a pack of cards, a couple of boxes of matches or a handful of buttons. I'll spend my days arranging and rearranging them, moving them apart and together, forming little compositions. It may be because I was an only child: I had no brothers and sisters, and very few friends, who soon tired of me because they wanted action and couldn't adjust to the epic pace of my games.
     Sometimes I would start a new game on Monday, then spend the whole of Tuesday morning at school thinking out the next move, make one or two moves that afternoon, and leave the rest for Wednesday or Thursday. My friends hated it, they went outside and played at chasing one another around the backyards, while I went on pursuing my own game of history on the floor day after day, moving troops, besieging a castle or a city, routing, taking by storm, starting a resistance movement in the mountains, attacking fortresses and defense works, liberating and then reconquering, extending or contracting frontiers marked out by matchsticks. If a grown-up accidentally trod on my little world, I would declare a hunger strike or a moratorium on teeth brushing. But eventually doomsday would come, and my mother, unable to stand the accumulation of dust, would sweep everything away, ships, armies, cities, mountains, coasts, entire continents, like a nuclear holocaust.
     Once, when I was about nine, an elderly uncle by the name of Nehemia taught me a French proverb: "In love as in war." I knew nothing at that time about love, except for the obscure connection in the Edison Cinema between love and dead Indians. But from what Uncle Nehemia had said I drew the inference that it was best not to hurry. In later years I realized that I had been totally mistaken, at least so far as warfare was concerned: on the battlefield, speed is of the essence. Perhaps my mistake came from the fact that Uncle Nehemiah himself was a slow-moving man who hated change. When he was standing up, it was almost impossible to make him sit down, and once he was seated, he could not be induced to stand up. Get up, Nehemiah, they would say to him, for goodness sake, make a move, what's the matter with you, it's very late, how long are you going to go on sitting there, till tomorrow morning, till next year, till kingdom come?
     And he would answer: At least.
     Then he would reflect, scratch himself, smile slyly to himself as though he had fathomed our ruse, and add: Where's the fire?
     His body, like all bodies, had a natural disposition to remain where it was.
     I am not like him. I'm very fond of change, encounters, travel. But I was fond of Uncle Nehemiah too. Not long ago I looked for him, without success, in Givat Shaul Cemetery. The cemetery has grown; soon it'll reach the edge of Lake Beit Neqofa or the outskirts of Motsa. I sat on a bench for half an hour or so; in the cypress trees a stubborn wasp hummed and a bird repeated the same phrase five or six times, but all I could see were gravestones, trees, hills, and clouds.
     A thin woman dressed in black with a black headscarf walked past me, with a five- or six-year-old child holding on to her. The child's little fingers were gripping the side of her dress, and both of them were crying.

 4


     ALONE AT home one late winter afternoon. It was five or half past, and outside it was cold and dark, windswept rain lashed the closed iron shutters, my parents had gone to have tea with Mala and Staszek Rudnicki in Chancellor Street, on the corner of the Street of the Prophets, and would be back, they had promised me, just before eight, or at a quarter past or twenty past eight at the latest. And even if they were late, there was nothing to worry about, after all they were only at the Rudnickis', it wasn't more than a quarter of an hour away.

     Instead of children Mala and Staszek Rudnicki had two Persian cats, Chopin and Schopenhauer. There was also a cage in a corner of the salon containing an old, half-blind bird. So the bird wouldn't feel lonely they had put another bird into its cage, made by Mala Rudnicki from a painted pinecone on stick legs, with multicolored paper wings embellished with a few real feathers. Loneliness, Mother said, is like a hammer blow that shatters glass but hardens steel. Father treated us to a learned discourse on the etymology of the word "hammer," with all its ramifications in various languages.
     My father was fond of explaining to me all sorts of connections between words. Origins, relationships, as though words were yet another complicated family from Eastern Europe, with a multitude of second and third cousins, aunts by marriage, great-nieces, in-laws, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Even words like "aunt" or "cousin" had their own family history, their own network of relationships. Did we know, for example, that "aunt" came from the Latin amita, which properly denotes a father's sister, while "uncle" came from the Latin avunculus, which means specifically a mother's brother? The Hebrew word for uncle, dod, also means a lover, although I am not convinced that it was really the same word originally. You must remind me some time, Father said, to have a look in the big dictionary and check precisely where these words came from and how their use has changed over the generations. Or rather, don't remind me, go and fetch the dictionary right away and let's educate ourselves here and now, you and I, and while you're at it, take your dirty cup to the kitchen.
    


     In the yards and in the street the silence is so black and wide that you can hear the sound of the clouds flying low among the roofs, stroking the tops of the cypresses. A dripping faucet in the bath and a rustling or scratching sound so faint that it is barely audible, you sense it at the tips of the hairs on the back of your neck, coming from the space between the wardrobe and the wall.

     I switch on the light in my parents' room, and from my father's desk I take eight or nine paper clips, a pencil sharpener, a couple of small notebooks, a long-necked inkwell full of black ink, an eraser, and a packet of thumbtacks, and use all these to construct a new frontier kibbutz. A wall and a tower in the depth of the desert on the rug; arrange the paper clips in a semicircle, stand the pencil sharpener and eraser on either side of the tall inkwell that is my water tower, and surround the whole with a fence made of pencils and pens and fortified with thumbtacks.
     Soon there will be a raid: a gang of bloodthirsty marauders (a couple of dozen buttons) will attack the settlement from the east and south, but we will play a trick on them. We'll open the gate, let them advance into the farmyard where the blood bath will take place, the gate will be barred behind them so that they cannot escape, then I shall give the order to fire, and at that instant, from every rooftop and the top of the inkwell that serves as the water tower, the pioneers, represented by my white chessmen, will open fire, and with a few furious salvos they will wipe out the trapped enemy force, "chanting hymns of glory, singing loud the story of the slaughter gory, then I'll raise a song of praise" and promote the rush mat to serve as the Mediterranean Sea, with the bookcase standing for the coast of Europe, the sofa as Africa, the Straits of Gibraltar passing between the legs of the chair, a scattering of playing cards representing Cyprus, Sicily, and Malta, the notebooks can be aircraft carriers, the eraser and pencil sharpeners destroyers, the thumbtacks mines, and the paper clips will be submarines.
    


     It was cold in the apartment. Instead of putting on another pullover, as I was told to do, to save electricity, I would put on the electric heater, just for ten minutes or so. The heater had two elements, but there was an economy switch that was always set to light only one of them. The lower one. I stared at it and watched the coil begin to glow. It lit up gradually: at first you couldn't see anything, you just heard a series of crackling sounds, as when you walk on grains of sugar, and after that a pale purplish gleam appeared at either end of the element and a hint of pink began to spread toward the center, like a faint blush on a shy cheek, which turned into a deep blush, which soon ran riot in a shameless display of naked yellow and lecherous lime green, until the glow reached the middle of the coil and glowed unstoppably, a red-hot fire like a savage sun in the shiny metal dish of the reflector that you couldn't look at without squinting, and the element now was incandescent, dazzling, unable to contain itself; any moment now it would melt and pour down on my Mediterranean Sea like an erupting volcano raining cascades of molten lava to destroy my flotilla of destroyers and submarines.

     All this time its partner, the upper element, slumbered cold and indifferent. The brighter the other one glowed, the more indifferent this one appeared. Shrugging its shoulders, watching everything from a ringside seat but totally unmoved. I suddenly shuddered, as though I could sense on my skin all the pent-up tension between the two coils, and realized that I had a simple, quick way to ensure that the indifferent coil too would have no choice but to glow, so that it too would quiver fit to burst with overflowing fire—but that was forbidden. It was forbidden not only because of the crying waste but also because of the danger of overloading the circuit, of blowing a fuse and plunging the house in darkness, and who would go out in the middle of the night to fetch Baruch Goldfingers for me?
     The second coil was only if I was crazy, completely crazy, and to hell with the consequences. But what if my parents came back before I had managed to switch it off? Or if I managed to switch it off in time but the coil didn't have time to cool down and play possum, then what could I say in my defense? So I must resist the temptation. Hold myself back. And I might as well start clearing up the mess I made and put everything away in its place.

 5


     SOMETIMES THE facts threaten the truth. I once wrote about the real reason for my grandmother's death. My grandmother Shlomit arrived in Jerusalem straight from Vilna one hot summer's day in 1933, took one startled look at the sweaty markets, the colorful stalls, the swarming side streets full of the cries of hawkers, the braying of donkeys, the bleating of goats, the squawks of pullets hung up with their legs tied together, and blood dripping from the necks of slaughtered chickens, she saw the shoulders and arms of Middle Eastern men and the strident colors of the fruit and vegetables, she saw the hills all around and the rocky slopes, and immediately pronounced her final verdict: "The Levant is full of germs."

     My grandmother lived in Jerusalem for some twenty-five years, she knew hard times and a few good ones, but to her last day she found no reason to modify her verdict. They say that the day after they arrived, she ordered my grandfather, as she would every single day they lived in Jerusalem, winter and summer alike, to get up at six or six thirty every morning and to spray Flit in every corner of the apartment to drive away the germs, to spray under the bed, behind the wardrobe, and even into the storage space and between the legs of the sideboard, and then to beat all the mattresses and the bedclothes and eiderdowns. From my childhood I remember Grandpa Alexander standing on the balcony in the early morning in his vest and bedroom slippers, beating the pillows like Don Quixote attacking the wineskins, bringing the carpet beater down on them repeatedly with all the force of his wretchedness or despair. Grandma Shlomit would stand a few steps behind him, taller than he, dressed in a flowery silk dressing gown buttoned all the way up, her hair tied with a green butterfly-like bow, as stiff and upright as the headmistress of a boarding school for young ladies, commanding the field of battle until the daily victory was won.
     In the context of her constant war against germs Grandma used to boil fruit and vegetables uncompromisingly. She would wipe the bread twice over with a cloth soaked in a pinkish disinfectant solution called Cali. After each meal she did not wash the dishes but gave them the treatment normally reserved for Passover Eve, boiling them for a long time. Grandma Shlomit boiled her own person, too, three times a day: summer and winter alike she took three baths in nearly boiling water, to eradicate the germs. She lived to a ripe old age, the bugs and viruses crossing to the other side of the street when they saw her approaching in the distance, and when she was over eighty, after a couple of heart attacks, Dr. Kromholtz warned her: Dear lady, unless you desist from these fervid ablutions of yours, I am unable to take responsibility for any possible untoward and regrettable consequences.
     But Grandma could not give up her baths. Her fear of germs was too strong for her. She died in the bath.
     Her heart attack is a fact, but the truth is that she died from an excess of hygiene. Facts have a tendency to obscure the truth. It was cleanliness that killed her. Although the motto of her life in Jerusalem, "The Levant is full of germs," may testify to an earlier, deeper truth than the demon of hygiene, a truth that was repressed and invisible. After all, Grandma Shlomit came from northeastern Europe, where there were just as many germs as there were in Jerusalem, not to mention all sorts of other noxious things.
     Here then is a peephole that may afford us a glimpse of the effect of the sights of the orient, its colors and smells, on my grandmother and perhaps on other immigrants and refugees who like her came from gloomy shtetls in Eastern Europe and were so disturbed by the pervasive sensuality of the Levant that they resolved to defend themselves from its menace by constructing their own ghetto.
     Menace? Or perhaps the truth is that it was not the menace of the Levant that made my grandmother mortify and purify her body with those boiling-hot ablutions morning, noon, and night every day that she lived in Jerusalem but rather its seductive sensual charms, and her own body, and the powerful attraction of those teeming markets that made her breathing tight and her knees weak with that abundance of un-familiar vegetables, fruit, spicy cheeses, pungent odors, and guttural foods that so tormented and excited her, and those lustful hands that groped and burrowed into the most intimate recesses of fruit and vegetables, the chilis and spicy olives and the nudity of all that ripe, bare red meat, dripping blood, hanging shamelessly naked from the butchers' hooks, and the dizzying array of spices, herbs, and powders, all the multicolored lascivious lures of that pungent, highly seasoned world, not to mention the penetrating aromas of freshly roasted, cardamom-flavored coffee, and the glass containers full of colorful drinks with lumps of ice or slices of lemon in them, and those powerfully built, deeply tanned, hirsute market porters, naked to the waist, the muscles of their backs rippling with effort under their hot skin that gleamed as rivulets of perspiration ran down it in the sun. Perhaps Grandma's cult of cleanliness was nothing more or less than a hermetic, sterile spacesuit. An antiseptic chastity belt that she had voluntarily buckled on, since her first day here, and secured with seven locks, destroying all the keys?
     Or maybe it was neither the hygiene nor her desires nor the fear of her desires that killed her but her constant secret anger at this fear, a suppressed, malignant anger, like an unlanced boil, anger at her own body, at her own longings, and also a deeper anger, at the very revulsion these longings gave rise to, a murky, poisonous anger directed both at the prisoner and at her jailer, years and years of secret mourning for the ceaseless passage of desolate time and the shriveling of her body and the desires of that body, the desires, laundered and cleansed and scraped and disinfected and boiled a thousand times, for that Levant, filthy, sweaty, bestial, exciting to the point of swooning, but swarming with germs.

 6


     ALMOST SIXTY years have gone by, yet I can still remember his smell. I summon it, and it returns to me, a slightly coarse, dusty, but strong and pleasant smell, reminiscent of touching rough sackcloth, and it borders on the memory of the feel of his skin, his flowing locks, his thick mustache that rubbed against the skin of my cheek and gave me a pleasant feeling, like being in a warm, dark old kitchen on a winter day. The poet Saul Tchernikhowsky died in the autumn of 1943, when I was little more than four years old, so that this sensual recollection can only have survived by passing through several stages of transmission and amplification. My mother and father often reminded me of those moments, because they enjoyed boasting to acquaintances that their child sat on Tchernikhowsky's lap and played with his mustache. They always turned to me for confirmation of their story: "Isn't it true that you can still remember that Saturday afternoon when Uncle Saul sat you on his lap and called you 'little devil'? It's true, isn't it?"

     My task was to recite for them the refrain: "Yes, it's true. I remember it very well."
     I never told them that the picture I remembered was a little different from their version. I did not want to spoil it for them.
     My parents' habit of repeating this story and turning to me for confirmation did indeed strengthen and preserve the memory of those moments for me, which had it not been for their pride might well have faded and vanished. But the difference between their story and the picture in my memory, the fact that the memory I retained was not merely a reflection of my parents' story but had a life of its own, that the image of the great poet and the little child according to my parents' staging was somewhat different from my own, is proof that my story is not merely inherited from theirs. In my parents' version the curtain opens on a blond child in shorts sitting on the lap of the giant of Hebrew poetry, stroking and tugging at his mustache, while the poet bestows on the youngster the accolade of "little devil" and the child—oh, sweet innocence!—repays him with his own coin by saying, "No, you're a devil!" to which, in my father's version, the author of "Facing the Statue of Apollo" replied with the words "Maybe we're both right" and even kissed me on my head, which my parents interpreted as a sign of things to come, a sort of anointing, as if, let us say, it had been Pushkin bending over and kissing the head of the little Tolstoy.
     But in the picture in my mind, which my parents' recurrent searchlight beams may have helped me preserve but definitely did not imprint in me, in my scenario, which is less sweet than theirs, I never sat on the poet's lap, nor did I tug at his famous mustache, but I tripped and fell over at Uncle Joseph's home, and as I fell, I bit my tongue, and it bled a little, and I cried, and the poet, being also a doctor, a pediatrician, reached me before my parents, helped me up with his big hands, I even remember now that he picked me up with my back to him and my shouting face to the room, then he swung me around in his arms and said something, and then something else, certainly not about handing on the crown of Pushkin to Tolstoy, and while I was still struggling in his arms, he forced my mouth open and called for someone to fetch some ice, then inspected my injury and declared:
     "It's nothing, just a scratch, and as we are now weeping, so we shall soon be laughing."
     Whether because the poet's words included both of us, or because of the rough touch of his cheek on mine, like the roughness of a thick warm towel, or whether indeed because of his strong, homely smell, which to this day I can conjure up (not a smell of shaving lotion or soap, nor a smell of tobacco, but a full, dense body smell, like the taste of chicken soup on a winter day), I soon calmed down, and it transpired that, as so often happens, I was more in shock than in pain. And the bushy Nietzsche mustache scratched and tickled me a little, and then, as far as I can remember, Dr. Saul Tchernikhowsky laid me down carefully but without any fuss on my back on Uncle Joseph's couch (that is Professor Joseph Klausner), and the poet-doctor or my mother put on my tongue some ice that Auntie Zippora had hurriedly brought.
     So far as I can remember, no witty aphorism worthy of immortalization was exchanged on that occasion between the giant among the poets of the formative Generation of National Revival and the sobbing little representative of the later so-called Generation of the State of Israel.
     It was only two or three years after this incident that I managed to pronounce the name Tchernikhowsky. I was not surprised when I was told that he was a poet: almost everyone in Jerusalem in those days was either a poet or a writer or a researcher or a thinker or a scholar or a world reformer. Nor was I impressed by the title Doctor: in Uncle Joseph and Auntie Zippora's home, all the male guests were called Professor or Doctor.
     But he was not just any old doctor or poet. He was a pediatrician, a man with a disheveled mop of hair, with laughing eyes, big warm hands, a thicket of a mustache, a felt cheek, and a unique, strong, soft smell.
     To this day, whenever I see a photograph or drawing of the poet Saul or his carved head that stands in the entrance of the Tchernikhowsky Writers' House, I am immediately enveloped, like the embrace of a winter blanket, by his comforting smell.
    


     Like so many Zionist Jews of our time, my father was a bit of a closet Canaanite. He was embarrassed by the shtetl and everything in it, and by its representatives in modern writing, Bialik and Agnon. He wanted us all to be born anew, as blond-haired, muscular, suntanned Hebrew Europeans instead of Jewish Eastern Europeans. He always loathed the Yiddish language, which he termed "jargon." He saw Bialik as the poet of victimhood, of "eternal death pangs," while Tchernikhowsky was the harbinger of the new dawn that was about to break, the dawn of "The Conquerors of Canaan by Storm." He would reel off "Facing the Statue of Apollo" by heart, with tremendous gusto, without even noticing that the poet, while still bowing down to Apollo, unwittingly bursts into a hymn to Dionysus.

     He knew more of Tchernikhowsky's poems by heart than anyone else I have met, probably more than Tchernikhowsky himself did, and he recited them with pathos and gusto, such a muse-inspired, and therefore musical, poet, without the complexes and complexities so typical of the shtetl, writing shamelessly about love and even about sensual pleasures. Father said: Tchernikhowsky never wallows in all sorts of tsores or krechtzen.
     At such moments my mother would look at him skeptically, as though surprised by the crude nature of his pleasures but refraining from comment.
     He had a distinctly "Lithuanian" temperament, my father, and he was very fond of using the word "distinctly" (the Klausners came from odessa, but before that they came from Lithuania, and before that apparently from Mattersdorf, now Mattersburg in eastern Austria, near the Hungarian border). He was a sentimental, enthusiastic man, but for most of his life he loathed all forms of mysticism and magic. He considered the supernatural to be the domain of charlatans and tricksters. He thought the tales of the Hasidim to be mere folklore, a word that he always pronounced with the same grimace of loathing that accompanied his use of such words as "jargon," "ecstasy," "hashish," and "intuition."
     My mother used to listen to him speak, and instead of replying she would offer us her sad smile, and sometimes she said to me: "Your father is a wise and rational man; he is even rational in his sleep."
     Years later, after her death, when his optimistic cheerfulness had faded somewhat, along with his volubility, his taste also changed and may have moved closer to that of my mother. In a basement in the National Library he discovered a previously unknown manuscript of I. L. Peretz, an exercise book from the writer's youth, which contained, in addition to all sorts of sketches and scribbles and attempts at poetry, an unknown story titled "Revenge." My father went off for several years to London, where he wrote a doctoral dissertation on this discovery, and with this encounter with the mystically inclined Peretz he moved away from his earlier penchant for the Sturm und Drang of early Tchernikhowsky. He began to study the myths and sagas of faraway peoples, glanced at Yiddish literature, and gradually succumbed, like someone finally relaxing his grip on a handrail, to the mysterious charm of Peretz's stories in particular and Hasidic tales in general.
    


     However, in the years when we used to walk to his Uncle Joseph's in Talpiot on Saturday afternoons, my father was still trying to educate us all to be as enlightened as he was. My parents often used to argue about literature. My father liked Shakespeare, Balzac, Tolstoy, Ibsen, and Tchernikhowsky. My mother preferred Schiller, Turgenev, Chekhov, Strindberg, Gnessin, Bialik, and also Mr. Agnon, who lived across the road from Uncle Joseph in Talpiot, although I have the impression there was not much love lost between the two men.

     A polite but arctic chill fell momentarily on the little road if the two of them ever happened to meet, Professor Joseph Klausner and Mr. S. Y. Agnon; they would raise their hats an inch or so, give a slight bow, and probably each wished the other from the depth of his heart to be consigned for all eternity to the deepest hell of oblivion.
     Uncle Joseph did not think much of Agnon, whose writing he considered prolix, provincial, and adorned with all sorts of over-clever cantorial grace notes. As for Mr. Agnon, he nursed his grudge and had his revenge eventually when he speared Uncle Joseph on one of his spits of irony, in the ludicrous figure of Professor Bachlam in his novel Shirah. Fortunately for Uncle Joseph, he died before Shirah was published, thus sparing himself considerable distress. Mr. Agnon, on the other hand, lived on for many a year, won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and earned a worldwide reputation for himself, although he was condemned to the bitter tribulation of seeing the little cul-de-sac in Talpiot in which they had both lived renamed Klausner Street. From that day until the day he died, he had to suffer the indignity of being the famous writer S. Y. Agnon of Klausner Street.
     And so to this day a perverse fate has willed that Agnon's house should stand in Klausner Street, while a no less perverse fate has willed that Klausner's house should be demolished and replaced by a very ordinary square building that houses very average apartments, overlooking the hordes of visitors who pass through Agnon's house.

 7


     EVERY SECOND or third Saturday we would make the pilgrimage to Talpiot, to Uncle Joseph and Auntie Zippora's little villa. Our house in Kerem Avraham was some six or seven kilometers distant from Talpiot, a remote and somewhat dangerous Hebrew suburb. South of Rehavia and Kiriat Shmuel, south of Montefiore's Windmill, stretched an expanse of alien Jerusalem: the suburbs of Talbiyeh, Abu Tor, and Kata-mon, the German Colony, the Greek Colony, and Bakaa. (Abu Tor, our teacher Mr. Avisar once explained to us, was named after an old warrior whose name meant "father of the bull," Talbiyeh was once the estate of a man named Taleb, Bakaa means a "plain or valley, the biblical valley of the Giants," while the name Katamon is an Arabic corruption of the Greek kata monēs, meaning "beside the monastery.") Farther still to the south, beyond all these foreign worlds, over the hills and far away, at the end of the world, glimmered isolated Jewish dots, Mekor Hayyim, Talpiot, Arnona, and Kibbutz Ramat Rahel, which almost abutted on the extremities of Bethlehem. From our Jerusalem, Talpiot could be seen only as a tiny gray mass of dusty trees on a distant hilltop. From the roof of our house one night our neighbor Mr. Friedmann, an engineer, pointed out a cluster of shimmering pale lights on the far horizon, suspended between heaven and earth, and said: "That's Allenby Barracks, and over there you may be able to see the lights of Talpiot or Arnona. If there is more violence," he said, "I wouldn't like to be them. Not to mention if there's all-out war."

    


     We would set out after lunch, when the city had shut itself off behind barred shutters and sunk into a Sabbath afternoon slumber. Total silence ruled in the streets and yards among the stone-built houses with their corrugated iron lean-tos. As though the whole of Jerusalem had been enclosed in a transparent glass ball.

     We crossed Geulah Street, entered the warren-like alleys of the shabby ultra-Orthodox quarter at the top of Ahva, passed underneath washing lines heavy with black, yellow, and white clothes, among rusty iron railings of neglected verandas and outside staircases, climbed up through Zikhron Moshe, which was always swathed in poor Ashkenazi cooking smells, of chollent, borscht, garlic and onion and sauerkraut, and continued across the Street of the Prophets. There was not a living soul to be seen in the streets of Jerusalem at two o'clock on a Saturday afternoon. From the Street of the Prophets we walked down Strauss Street, which was perpetually bathed in shadow from the ancient pine trees in the shade of two walls, on the one side the moss-grown gray wall of the Protestant Hospital run by the Deaconesses, and on the other the grim wall of the Jewish hospital, Bikkur Holim, with the symbols of the twelve tribes of Israel embossed on its splendid bronze gates. A pungent odor of medicines, old age, and Lysol escaped from these two hospitals. Then we crossed Jaffa Road by the famous clothes shop, Maayan Shtub, and lingered for a moment in front of Ahiasaf Brothers bookshop, to allow my father to feast his hungry eyes on the abundance of new Hebrew books in the window. From there we walked the whole length of King George V Avenue, past splendid shops, cafés with high chandeliers, and rich stores, all empty and locked for the Sabbath, but with their windows beckoning to us through barred iron grilles, winking with the seductive charm of other worlds, whiffs of wealth from distant continents, scents of brightly lit, bustling cities dwelling securely on the banks of wide rivers, where there were elegant ladies and prosperous gentlemen who did not live their lives between one attack or government decree and the next, knowing no hardship, relieved of the need to count every penny, free from the oppressive rules of pioneering and self-sacrifice, exempt from the burdens of Community Chest and Medical Fund contributions and rationing coupons, comfortably installed in beautiful houses with chimney stacks rising from their roofs or in spacious apartments in modern blocks, with carpets on the floor, with a doorman in a blue uniform guarding the entrance and a boy in a red uniform manning the elevator, and servants and cooks and butlers and factotums at their beck and call. Ladies and gentlemen who enjoyed a comfortable life, unlike ours.
     Here, in King George V Avenue, as well as in German-Jewish Rehavia and rich Greek and Arab Talbieh, another stillness reigned now, unlike the devout stillness of those indigent, neglected Eastern European alleys: a different, exciting, secretive stillness held sway in King George V Avenue, empty now at half past two on a Saturday afternoon, a foreign, in fact specifically British, stillness, since King George V Avenue (not only because of its name) always seemed to me as a child to be an extension of that wonderful London Town I knew from films: King George V Avenue with its rows of grand, official-looking buildings extending on both sides of the road in a continuous, uniform facade, without those gaps of sad, neglected yards defaced by rubbish and rusting metal that separated the houses in our own areas. Here on King George V Avenue there were no dilapidated verandas, no broken shutters at windows that gaped like a toothless old mouth, paupers' windows revealing to passersby the wretched innards of the home, patched cushions, gaudy rags, cramped piles of furniture, blackened frying pans, moldy pots, misshapen enamel saucepans, and a motley array of rusty tin cans. Here on either side of the street was an uninterrupted, proud facade whose doors and lace-curtained windows all spoke discreetly of wealth, respectability, soft voices, choice fabrics, soft carpets, cut glass, and fine manners. Here the doorways of the buildings were adorned with the black glass plates of lawyers, brokers, doctors, notaries, and accredited agents of well-known foreign firms.
     As we walked past Talitha Kumi Buildings, my father would explain the origin of the name, as though he had not done so a fortnight before and a month before that, and my mother protested that he would put us all to sleep with his explanations. We passed Schiber's Pit, the gaping foundations of a building that was never built, and the Frumin Building, where the Knesset would later have its temporary home, and the semicircular Bauhaus facade of Beit Hama'alot, which promised all who entered the severe delights of pedantic German-Jewish aesthetics, and we paused for a moment to look out over the walls of the Old City across the Mamillah Muslim Cemetery, hurrying each other along (It's a quarter to three already, and there's still a long way to go!), walking on past the Yeshurun Synagogue and the bulky semicircle of the Jewish Agency building. (Father would half-whisper, as though disclosing state secrets: "That's where our cabinet sits, Doctor Weizmann, Kaplan, Shertok, sometimes even David Ben-Gurion himself. This is the throbbing heart of the Hebrew government. What a pity it's not a more impressive national cabinet!" And he would go on to explain to me what a "shadow cabinet" was and what would happen in the country when the British finally left, as one way or another they surely would.)
     From there we walked downhill toward the Terra Sancta College (where my father was to work for ten years, after the War of Independence and the siege of Jerusalem, when the university buildings on Mount Scopus were cut off and the Periodicals Department of the National Library, among others, found a temporary refuge here, in a corner of the third floor).
     From Terra Sancta a twenty-minute walk brought us to the curved David Building, where the city suddenly stopped and you were confronted by open fields on your way to the railway station in Emek Refaim. To our left we could see the sails of the windmill at Yemin Moshe, and up the slope to our right the last houses in Talbiyeh. We felt a wordless tension as we left the confines of the Hebrew city, as though we were crossing an invisible border and entering a foreign country.
     Soon after three o'clock we would walk along the road that divided the ruins of the Ottoman pilgrims' hostel, above which stood the Scottish church, and the locked railway station. There was a different light here, a cloudier, old, mossy light. This place reminded my mother of a little Muslim street on the outskirts of her hometown in western Ukraine. At this point Father would inevitably start to talk about Jerusalem in the days of the Turks, about the decrees of Jemal Pasha, about decapitations and floggings that took place before a crowd gathered right here on the paved square in front of this very railway station, which was, as we knew, built at the end of the nineteenth century by a Jerusalem Jew named Joseph Bey Navon, who had obtained a concession from the Ottomans.
    


     From the square in front of the railway station we walked down Hebron Road, passing in front of the fortified British military installations and a fenced-off cluster of massive fuel containers over which a sign in three languages proclaimed vacuum oil. There was something strange and comical about the Hebrew sign, lacking as it did any vowels. Father laughed and said this was yet more proof that it was high time to modernize Hebrew writing by introducing separate letters for vowels, which, he said, are the traffic police of reading.

     To our left a series of roads led downhill toward the Arab quarter of Abu Tor, while to our right were the charming lanes of the German Colony, a tranquil Bavarian village full of singing birds, barking dogs, and crowing cocks, with dovecotes and red-tiled roofs dotted here and there among cypresses and pine trees, and little stone-walled gardens shaded by leafy trees. Every house here was built with a cellar and an attic, words the very sound of which afforded sentimental pangs to a child like me, born in a place where no one had a dark cellar under his feet or a dimly lit attic above his head, or a larder or a hamper or a chest of drawers or a grandfather clock or a well in his garden fitted with a hoist.
     As we continued down Hebron Road, we passed the pink stone mansions of wealthy effendis and Christian Arab professionals and senior civil servants in the British mandatory administration and members of the Arab Higher Committee, Mardam Bey al-Matnawi, Haj Rashed al-Afifi, Dr. Emile Adwan al-Boustani, the lawyer Henry Tawil Tutakh, and the other wealthy residents of the suburb of Bakaa. All the shops here were open, and sounds of laughter and music came from the coffeehouses, as if we had left the Sabbath itself behind us, held back behind an imaginary wall that blocked its way somewhere between Yemin Moshe and the Scottish Hospice.
     On the wide pavement, in the shade of two ancient pine trees in front of a coffeehouse, three or four gentlemen of mature years sat on wicker stools around a low wooden table, all wearing brown suits and each sporting a gold chain that emerged from his buttonhole, looped across his belly, and disappeared into a pocket. They drank tea from glasses or sipped coffee from little decorated cups, and rolled dice onto the backgammon boards in front of them. Father greeted them cheerily in Arabic that came out of his mouth sounding more like Russian. The gentlemen stopped talking for a moment, eyed him with mild surprise, and one of them muttered something indistinct, perhaps a single word, or perhaps a reply to our greeting.
     At half past three we passed the barbed wire fence around Allenby Barracks, the British military base in south Jerusalem. I had often stormed into this camp, conquered, subdued, and purged it, and raised the Hebrew flag over it in my games on the rush mat. From here I would press on toward the heart of the foreign occupier, sending groups of commandos to the walls of the High Commissioner's residence on the Hill of Evil Counsel, which was captured again and again by my Hebrew troops in a spectacular pincer movement, one armored column breaking into the residence from the west from the barracks, while the other arm of the pincers closed in with complete surprise from the east, from the barren eastern slopes that descended toward the Judaean desert.
     When I was a little more than eight, in the last year of the British Mandate, a couple of fellow conspirators and I built an awesome rocket in the backyard of our house. Our plan was to aim it at Buckingham Palace (I had discovered a large-scale map of central London in my father's collection).
     I typed out on my father's typewriter a polite letter of ultimatum addressed to His Majesty King George VI of England of the House of Windsor (I wrote in Hebrew—he must have someone there who can translate for him): If you do not get out of our country in six months at the latest, our Day of Atonement will be Great Britain's Day of Reckoning. But our project never came to fruition, because we were unable to develop the sophisticated guiding device (we planned to hit Buckingham Palace but not innocent English passersby) and because we had some problems devising a fuel that would take our rocket from the corner of Amos and Obadiah Streets in Kerem Avraham to a target in the middle of London. While we were still tied up in technological research and development, the English changed their minds and hurriedly left the country, and that is how London survived my national zeal and my deadly rocket, which was made up of bits of an abandoned refrigerator and the remains of an old bicycle.
    


     Shortly before four we would finally turn left off Hebron Road and enter the suburb of Talpiot, along an avenue of dark cypresses on which a westerly breeze played a rustling tune that aroused in me wonder, humility, and respect in equal measure. Talpiot in those days was a tranquil garden suburb on the edge of the desert, far removed from the city center and its commercial bustle. It was planned on the model of well-cared-for Central European housing schemes constructed for the peace and quiet of scholars, doctors, writers, and thinkers. On either side of the road stood pleasant little single-story houses set in pretty gardens, in each of which, as we imagined, dwelt some prominent scholar or well-known professor like our Uncle Joseph, who although he was childless was famous throughout the land and even in faraway countries through the translations of his books.

     We turned right into Kore Hadorot Street as far as the pine wood, then left, and there we were outside Uncle's house. Mother would say: It's only ten to four, they may still be resting. Why don't we sit down quietly on the bench in the garden and wait for a few minutes? Or else: We're a little late today, it's a quarter past four, the samovar must be bubbling away and Aunt Zippora will have put the fruit out.
     Two Washingtonias stood like sentries on either side of the gate, and beyond them was a paved path flanked on either side by a thuja hedge that led from the gate to the wide steps, up which we went to the front porch and the door, above which was engraved on a fine brass plate Uncle Joseph's motto:
     JUDAISM AND HUMANISM

     On the door itself was a smaller, shinier copper plate on which was engraved both in Hebrew and Roman letters:

     PROFESSOR DR. JOSEPH KLAUSNER

     And underneath, in Aunt Zippora's rounded handwriting, on a small card fixed with a thumbtack, was written:

     Please refrain from calling between two and four o'clock. Thank you.


 8


     ALREADY IN the entrance hall I was seized by respectful awe, as though even my heart had been asked to remove its shoes and walk in stockinged feet, on tiptoe, breathing politely with mouth closed, as was fitting.

     In this entrance hall, apart from a brown wooden hat tree with curling branches that stood near the front door, a small wall mirror, and a dark woven rug, there was not an inch of space that was not covered with rows of books: shelves upon shelves rose from the floor to the high ceiling, full of books in languages whose alphabets I could not identify, books standing up and other books lying down on top of them; plump, resplendent foreign books stretching themselves comfortably, and other wretched books that peered at you from cramped and crowded conditions, lying like illegal immigrants crowded on bunks aboard ship. Heavy, respectable books in gold-tooled leather bindings, and thin books bound in flimsy paper, splendid portly gentlemen and ragged, shabby beggars, and all around and among and behind them was a sweaty mass of booklets, leaflets, pamphlets, offprints, periodicals, journals, and magazines, that noisy crowd that always congregates around any public square or marketplace.
     A single window in this entrance hall looked out, through iron bars reminiscent of a hermit's cell, at the melancholy foliage of the garden. Aunt Zippora received us here, as she received all her guests. She was a pleasant elderly woman, bright of face and broad of beam, in a gray dress with a black shawl around her shoulders, very Russian, with her white hair pulled back and arranged in a small, neat bun, her two cheeks proffered in turn for a kiss, her kindly round face smiling at you in welcome. She was always the first to ask how you were, and usually didn't wait for your answer but launched straight into news of our dear Joseph, who hadn't slept a wink again all night, or whose stomach was back to normal again after protracted problems, or who had just had a wonderful letter from a very famous professor in Pennsylvania, or whose gallstones were tormenting him again, or who had to finish an important long article by tomorrow for Ravidovitch's Metsuda, or who had decided to ignore yet another insult from Eisig Silberschlag, or who had finally decided to deliver a crushing response to the abuse issuing from one of those leaders of the Brit Shalom gang.
     After this news bulletin Aunt Zippora would smile sweetly and lead us into the presence of the uncle himself.
     "Joseph is waiting for you in his drawing room," she would announce with a peal of laughter, or "Joseph is in the living room already, with Mr. Krupnik and the Netanyahus and Mr. Jonitchman and the Schochtmans, and there are some more honored guests on their way." And sometimes she said: "He's been cooped up in his study since six o'clock this morning, I've even had to take him his meals there, but no matter, no matter, just you come straight through, do come along, he'll be glad, he's always so glad to see you, and I'll be glad too, it's better for him to stop working for a while, to take a little break, he is ruining his health! He doesn't spare himself at all!"
    


     Two doors opened off the entrance hall: one, a glass door whose panes were decorated with flowers and festoons, led to the living room, which also served as a dining room; the other, a heavy, somber door, led us into the professor's study, sometimes known as the "library."

     Uncle Joseph's study seemed to me the antechamber to some palace of wisdom. There are more than twenty-five thousand volumes, Father once whispered to me, in your uncle's private library, among them priceless old tomes, manuscripts of our greatest writers and poets, first editions inscribed to him personally, volumes that were smuggled out of Soviet Odessa by all sorts of devious subterfuges, valuable collectors' items, sacred and secular works, virtually the whole of Jewish literature and a good deal of world literature as well, books that Uncle bought in Odessa or acquired in Heidelberg, books that he discovered in Lausanne or found in Berlin or Warsaw, books he ordered from America and books the like of which exist nowhere but in the Vatican Library, in Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, classical and modern Greek, Sanskrit, Latin, medieval Arabic, Russian, English, German, Spanish, Polish, French, Italian, and languages and dialects I had never even heard of, like Ugaritic and Slovene, Maltese and Old Church Slavonic.
     There was something severe and ascetic about the library, about the straight black lines of the dozens of bookshelves extending from the floor to the high ceiling and even over the doorways and windows, a sort of silent, stern grandeur that brooked no levity or frivolity and compelled all of us, even Uncle Joseph himself, always to speak in a whisper here.
     The smell of my uncle's enormous library would accompany me all the days of my life: the dusty, enticing odor of seven hidden wisdoms, the smell of a silent, secluded life devoted to scholarship, the life of a secretive hermit, the severe silence of ghosts billowing up from the deepest wells of knowledge, the whisper of dead sages, outpourings of secret thoughts of long-buried authors, the cold caress of the desires of preceding generations.
     From the study too, through three tall, narrow windows, could be seen the gloomy, rather overgrown garden, immediately beyond whose wall began the desolation of the Judaean desert and the rocky slopes that cascaded down toward the Dead Sea. The garden was hemmed in by tall cypresses and whispering pines, among which stood occasional oleanders, weeds, unpruned rose bushes, dusty thujas, darkened gravel paths, a wooden garden table that had rotted under the rain of many winters, and an old, stooped, and half-withered pride of India. Even on the hottest days of summer there was something wintry, Russian, and downcast about this garden, whose cats were fed by Uncle Joseph and Aunt Zip-pora, childless as they were, on kitchen scraps, but where I never saw either of them stroll or sit in the evening breeze on one of the two discolored benches.
     I was the only one who wandered in this garden, always alone, on those Sabbath afternoons, escaping from the tedious conversation of the scholars in the sitting room, hunting leopards in its undergrowth, digging under its stones for a hoard of ancient parchments, dreaming of conquering the arid hills beyond its wall with a wild charge of my troops.
    


     All four high, wide walls of the library were covered with crowded but well-ordered books, rank upon rank of precious blue-, green-, and black-bound volumes embossed in gold or silver. In places they were so cramped that two rows of books were forced to stand one behind the other on a single shelf. There were sections with florid Gothic lettering that made me think of spires and turrets, and zones of Jewish holy books, Talmuds and prayer books and law codes and Midrashic compilations, a shelf of Hebrew works from Spain and another with books from Italy, and a section with the writings of the Hebrew Enlightenment, from Berlin and elsewhere, and an endless expanse of Jewish thought and Jewish history and early Near Eastern history, Greek and Roman history, Church history both ancient and modern, and the various pagan cultures, Islamic thought, eastern religions, medieval history, and there were wide Slavic regions that left me mystified, Greek territories, and gray-brown areas of ring binders and cardboard folders stuffed with offprints and manuscripts. Even the floor was covered with dozens of piledup books, some of them laid open facedown, some full of little markers, while others huddled like frightened sheep on the high-backed chairs that were intended for visitors, or even on the windowsills; while a black ladder that could be moved all around the library on a metal track gave access to the upper shelves that clung on under the high ceiling. Occasionally, I was permitted to move it from bookcase to bookcase very carefully on its rubber wheels. There were no pictures, plants, or ornaments. Only books, more books, and silence filled the room, and a wonderful rich smell of leather bindings, yellowing paper, mold, a strange hint of seaweed and old glue, of wisdom, secrets, and dust.

     In the center of his library, like a large dark destroyer that had dropped anchor in the waters of a mountain-girt bay, stood Professor Klausner's desk, entirely covered with piles and piles of reference works, notebooks, an assortment of different pens, blue, black, green, and red, pencils, erasers, inkwells, containers full of paper clips, rubber bands, and staples, manila envelopes, white envelopes, and envelopes with attractive colorful stamps on them, sheets of paper, leaflets, notes, and index cards, foreign volumes piled open on top of open Hebrew volumes, interleaved here and there with sheets torn from a spiral-bound pad, inscribed with the cobwebs of my uncle's spidery handwriting, full of crossings out and corrections, like corpses of bloated flies, full of little slips of paper, and Uncle Joseph's gold-rimmed spectacles lay on top of the pile as though hovering over the void, while a second, black-framed, pair lay on top of another pile of books, on a little trolley beside his chair, and a third pair peered out from among the pages of an open booklet on a small chest that stood beside the dark sofa.
     On this sofa, curled up in the fetal position, covered to his shoulders in a green and red tartan rug, like a Scottish soldier's kilt, his face bare and childlike without his glasses, lay Uncle Joseph himself, thin and small, his elongated brown eyes looking both happy and a little lost. He gave us a feeble wave of his translucent white hand, smiled a pink smile between his white mustache and his goatee, and said something like this:
     "Come in, my dears, come in, come in" (even though we were already in the room, standing right in front of him, though still close to the door, huddled together—my mother, my father, and myself—like a tiny flock that had strayed into a strange pasture) "and please forgive me for not standing up to greet you, do not judge me too harshly, for two nights and three days now I have not stirred from my desk or closed my eyes, ask Mrs. Klausner and she will testify on my behalf, I am neither eating nor sleeping, I do not even glance at the newspaper while I finish this article, which, when it is published, will cause a great stir in this land of ours, and not only here, the whole cultural world is following this debate with bated breath, and this time I believe I have succeeded in silencing the obscurantists once and for all! This time they will be forced to concur and say Amen, or at least to admit that they have nothing more to say, they have lost their case, their game is up. And how about you? Fania my dear? My dear Lonia? And dear little Amos? How are you? What is new in your world? Have you read a few pages from my When a Nation Fights for Its Freedom to dear little Amos yet? I believe, my dears, that of all that I have written there is nothing that is more suitable than When a Nation Fights for Its Freedom to serve as spiritual sustenance to dear Amos in particular and the whole of our wonderful Hebrew youth in general, apart perhaps from the descriptions of heroism and rebellion that are scattered through the pages of my History of the Second Temple.
     "And how about you, my dears? You must have walked here. And such a long way. From your home in Kerem Avraham? I recall how, when we were still young, thirty years ago, when we still lived in the picturesque and so authentic Bukharian Quarter, we used to set out on Saturdays and walk from Jerusalem to Bethel or Anatot and sometimes as far as the tomb of the Prophet Samuel. Dear Mrs. Klausner will give you something to eat and drink now if you will kindly follow her to her realm, and I shall join you as soon as I have finished this difficult paragraph. We are expecting the Voyslavskys today, and the poet Uri Zvi, and Even-Zahav. And dear Netanyahu and his charming wife visit us almost every Sabbath. Now come closer, my dears, come closer and see with your own eyes, you too my dear little Amos, take a look at the draft on my desk: after my death they should bring groups of students here, generation after generation, so that they may see with their own eyes the torments that writers endure in the service of their art, the struggles I have had and the lengths I have gone to to ensure that my style is simple and fluent and crystal clear, see how many words I have crossed out in each line, how many drafts I have torn up, sometimes more than half a dozen different drafts, before I was happy with what I had written. Success flows from perspiration, and inspiration from diligence and effort. As the good book saith, blessings of heaven up above, and blessings of the deep on the bottom. Only my little joke, naturally, please forgive me, ladies. Now, my dears, follow in Mrs. Klausner's footsteps and slake your thirst, and I shall not tarry."
    


     From the far side of the library you could go out into a long narrow corridor that was the bowels of the house, and from this corridor the bathroom and a storeroom led off to the right, while straight ahead was the kitchen and pantry and the maid's room, which opened off the kitchen (although there was never any maid), or you could turn left right away into the living room or keep going toward the end of the corridor to the door of my uncle and aunt's white, flowery bedroom, which contained a large mirror in a bronze frame on either side of which was an ornamental candle sconce.

     So you could reach the living room by any one of three routes: you could turn left from the entrance hall as you came into the house, or go straight ahead into the study, leave it by the corridor, turn left at once, as Uncle Joseph used to do on Sabbaths, and find yourself directly at the seat of honor at the head of the long black dining table that extended for almost the entire length of the living room. In addition, there was a low, arched doorway in a corner of the living room that led into a drawing room that was rounded on one side like a turret, with windows that looked out on the front garden, the Washingtonias, the quiet little street, and Mr. Agnon's house, which stood directly opposite, on the other side of the road.
     This drawing room was also known as the smoking room. (Smoking was forbidden in Professor Klausner's house during the Sabbath, although the Sabbath did not always prevent Uncle Joseph from working at his articles.) There were several heavy, soft armchairs, sofas covered with cushions embroidered in oriental style, a wide, soft rug and a big oil painting (by Maurycy Gottlieb?) of an old Jew wearing phylacteries and a prayer shawl, holding a prayer book, which he was not reading because his eyes were closed, his mouth open, and his face expressed tortured religiosity and spiritual exaltation. I always had the feeling that this pious Jew knew all my shameful secrets, but instead of reproving me, he silently pleaded with me to mend my ways.
     At that time, when the whole of Jerusalem was cramped into one-and-a-half- or two-bedroom apartments partitioned between two rival families, Professor Klausner's mansion seemed to me like a model for a sultan's palace or that of the Roman emperors, and often before I went to sleep, I would lie in bed imagining the restoration of the Davidic kingdom, with Hebrew troops standing guard over the palace in Talpiot. In 1949, when Menahem Begin, the leader of the opposition in the Knesset, put Uncle Joseph's name forward in the name of the Herut movement as a rival candidate to Chaim Weizmann for the presidency of Israel, I conjured up an image of my uncle's presidential residence in Talpiot surrounded on every side by Hebrew troops with two gleaming sentries standing on either side of the entrance under the brass plate promising all those who approached that Jewish and humanist values would be united and never come into conflict with each other.
     "That crazy child is running around the house again," they said; "just look at him, running to and fro, all out of breath, flushed and perspiring, as though he's swallowed quicksilver." And they scolded me: "What's the matter? Have you been eating hot peppers? Or are you simply chasing your own tail? Do you think you are a dreidel? Or a moth? Or a fan? Have you lost your beautiful bride? Have your ships sunk at sea? You're giving us all a headache. And you're getting in Aunt Zippora's way. Why don't you sit down calmly for a change? Why don't you find a nice book and read it? Or shall we find you some pencils and paper so you can sit quietly and draw us a pretty picture? Well?"
     But I was already on my way, galloping excitedly from the hall to the corridor and the maid's room, out into the garden, and back, full of fantasies, feeling the walls and knocking on them to discover hidden chambers, invisible spaces, secret passages, catacombs, tunnels, burrows, secret compartments, or camouflaged doors. I haven't given up to this day.

 9


     IN THE DARK glass-fronted sideboard in the living room were displayed a floral dinner service, long-necked glass jugs, prized items of china and crystal, a collection of old Hanukkah menorahs, and special dishes for Passover. On top of a display cabinet stood two bronze busts: a sullen Beethoven facing a calm, pinch-lipped Vladimir Jabotinsky, who stood carefully polished, resplendent in uniform, with an officer's peaked cap and an authoritative leather strap across his chest.

     Uncle Joseph sat at the head of the table talking in his reedy, feminine voice, pleading, wheedling, at times almost sobbing. He would speak about the state of the nation, the status of writers and scholars, the responsibilities of cultural figures, or about his colleagues and their lack of respect for his research, his discoveries, his international standing, while he himself was none too impressed with them, in fact he despised their provincial pettiness and their pedestrian, self-serving ideas.
     Sometimes he would turn to the wider world of international politics, expressing anxiety at the subversiveness of Stalin's agents everywhere, contempt for the hypocrisy of the sanctimonious British, fear of the intrigues of the Vatican, who had never accepted, and never would accept, Jewish control of Jerusalem in particular and the Land of Israel in general, cautious optimism about the scruples of the enlightened democracies, and admiration, not without reservations, for America, which stood in our times at the head of all democracies even though it was infected by vulgarity and materialism and lacked cultural and spiritual depth. In general, the heroic figures of the nineteenth century, men like Giuseppe Garibaldi, Abraham Lincoln, William Gladstone, were great national liberators and outstanding exponents of civilized and enlightened values, whereas this new century was under the jackboot of those two butchers, the Georgian shoemaker's son in the Kremlin and the crazed ragamuffin who had seized control of the land of Goethe, Schiller, and Kant...
     His guests listened in respectful silence or expressed agreement in a few quiet words so as not to interrupt the flow of his lecture. Uncle Joseph's table talk consisted of emotive monologues: from his seat at the head of the table, Professor Klausner would censure and denounce, reminisce or share his opinions, ideas, and feelings about such matters as the plebeian wretchedness of the leadership of the Jewish Agency, forever fawning on the Gentiles, the status of the Hebrew language, under constant threat from the Scylla and Charybdis of Yiddish on the one hand and the European languages on the other, the petty jealousy of some of his professorial colleagues, the shallowness of the younger writers and poets, particularly those born in the land, who not only failed to master a single language of European culture but limped even in Hebrew, or the Jews of Europe who had failed to understand Jabotinsky's prophetic warnings, and the American Jews, who even now, after Hitler, still clung to their fleshpots instead of settling in the Homeland.
     Occasionally one of the male guests would venture a question or comment, like someone throwing a twig on a bonfire. But very rarely would one of them dare to take issue with some detail or other in their host's discourse; most of the time they all sat respectfully, uttering polite cries of agreement and contentment, or laughed when Uncle Joseph adopted a sarcastic or humorous tone, in which case he invariably explained: I was only joking when I said what I said a moment ago.
     As for the ladies, their role in the conversation was limited to that of nodding listeners, who were expected to smile in the appropriate places and convey by their facial expressions delight at the pearls of wisdom that Uncle Joseph scattered before them so generously. I do not recall Aunt Zippora herself ever sitting at the table: she was forever scurrying back and forth between the kitchen or the larder and the living room, topping up the biscuit dish or the fruit bowl, adding hot water to the tea from the large silver-plated samovar, always hurrying, with a little apron around her waist, and when she had no tea to pour and there was no need for fresh supplies of cakes, biscuits, fruit, or the sweet concoction known as varinye, she would stand near the door between the living room and the corridor, to Uncle Joseph's right and a couple of paces behind him, with her hands joined on her stomach, waiting to see if anything was needed or if any of the guests wanted something, from a damp napkin to a toothpick, or if Uncle Joseph indicated to her politely that she should fetch from the far right-hand corner of the desk in his library the latest number of the periodical Leshonenu or the new volume of poems by Yitzhak Lamdan from which he wanted to quote a passage to support his argument.
     Such was the invariable order of things in those days: Uncle Joseph sitting at the head of the table, pouring forth words of wisdom, polemic, and wit, and Aunt Zippora standing in her white apron, serving or waiting till she was needed. And yet, my uncle and aunt were utterly devoted to each other and lavished signs of affection on each other, an elderly, chronically ill, childless couple, he treating his wife like a baby and behaving toward her with extreme sweetness and affection, she treating her husband like a pampered only child, swaddling him in scarves and coats in case he caught cold and beating an egg in milk and honey to soothe his throat.
     Once I happened to catch sight of them sitting side by side on their bed, his translucent hand in hers, while she carefully trimmed his fingernails, whispering all sorts of endearments to him in Russian.
    


     Uncle Joseph had a penchant for putting emotional inscriptions in books: each year, from the time I was nine or ten, he gave me a volume of the Children's Encyclopedia, in one of which he wrote, in letters that slanted slightly backward, as though recoiling:

     To my clever and hard-working little Amos
 with heartfelt hopes
 that he will grow up to be a credit to his people from
 Uncle Joseph
 Jerusalem-Talpiot, Lag Ba-Omer, 5710
     As I stare at this inscription now, more than fifty years later, I wonder what he really knew about me, my Uncle Joseph, who used to lay his cold little hand on my cheek and question me, with a gentle smile beneath his white mustache, about what I had been reading lately, and which of his books I had read, and what Jewish children were being taught at school these days, which poems by Bialik and Tchernikhowsky I had learned by heart, and who was my favorite biblical hero, and without listening to my answers he told me that I ought to familiarize myself with what he had written about the Maccabees in his History of the Second Temple, while on the future of the state I should read his strongly worded article in yesterday's Hamashkif, or in the interview he gave to Haboker this week. In the inscription itself he had taken care to add the vowel points where there was any risk of ambiguity, while the last letter of his name fluttered like a flag in the wind.
     In another inscription, on the title page of a volume of David Frischmann's translations, he wished me, in the third person:
     May he succeed in the path of life
 and learn from the words of the great translated in this book
 that one must follow one's conscience
 and not the human herd—the mass that rule at this time,
 from his affectionate
 Uncle Joseph
 Jerusalem-Talpiot, Lag Ba-Omer, 5714
     On one of those occasions Uncle Joseph said something like this:

     "I am a childless man, after all, ladies and gentlemen, and my books are my children, I have invested the blood of my soul in them, and after my death it is they and they alone that will carry my spirit and my dreams to future generations."
     To which Aunt Zippora responded:
     "Nu, Osia, that's enough now. Sha. Osinka. That's quite enough of that. You know the doctors have told you not to get excited. And now you've let your tea get cold. It's stone cold. No, no, my dear, don't drink it, I'll go and get you a fresh glass."
     Uncle Joseph's anger at the hypocrisy and baseness of his rivals sometimes led him to raise his voice, but his voice was never a roar, rather a high-pitched bleat, more like a sobbing woman than a scoffing, denouncing prophet. Sometimes he struck the top of the table with his frail hand, but when he did so, it seemed less like a blow than a caress. Once, while he was in the midst of a tirade against Bolschewismus or the Bund or the proponents of Judeo-German "jargon" (as he termed Yiddish), he knocked over a jug of lemonade, which spilled into his lap, and Aunt Zippora, who was standing in her apron by the door just behind him, hurried over and mopped at his trousers with her apron, apologized, helped him to his feet, and led him off to the bedroom. Ten minutes later she brought him back, changed and dry and gleaming, to his friends who had been waiting politely around the table, talking quietly about their hosts, who lived just like a pair of doves: he treated her like a daughter of his old age, and he was her darling baby and the apple of her eye. Sometimes she would lace her plump fingers in his translucent ones and for a moment the two of them would exchange a look, and then lower their eyes and smile at each other coyly.
     And sometimes she gently undid his tie, helped him to take off his shoes, laid him down to rest for a while, his sad head resting on her bosom and his slight form clinging to the fullness of her body. Or else she would be standing in the kitchen washing up and weeping soundlessly, and he would come up behind her, place his pink hands on her shoulders, and utter a string of chirrups, chuckles, and twitters, as though he were trying to soothe a baby, or perhaps volunteering to be her baby.

 10


     AS A CHILD the thing I most admired Uncle Joseph for was that, as I had been told, he had invented and given us several simple, everyday Hebrew words, words that seemed to have been known and used forever, including "pencil," "iceberg," "shirt," "greenhouse," "toast," "cargo," "monotonous," "multicolored," "sensual," "crane," and "rhinoceros." (Come to think of it, what would I have put on each morning if Uncle Joseph had not given us the word "shirt"? A "coat of many colors"? And what would I have written with without his pencil? A "lead stylus"? Not to mention "sensual," a rather surprising gift from this puritanical uncle.)

     Joseph Klausner was born in 1874 in Olkieniki, Lithuania, and died in Jerusalem in 1958. When he was ten, the Klausners moved from Lithuania to Odessa, where he progressed through the traditional Jewish educational system from the cheder to the modern-style yeshiva, and thence to the Hibbat Zion movement and the circles of Ahad Ha'am. At the age of nineteen he published his first article, titled "New Words and Fine Writing," in which he argued for the bounds of the Hebrew language to be extended, even by the incorporation of foreign words, so as to enable it to function as a living language. In the summer of 1897 he went to study in Heidelberg in south Germany, because in Tsarist Russia the universities were closed to Jews. During his five years in Heidelberg he studied philosophy with Professor Kuno Fischer, became deeply attracted to Eastern history a la Renan, and was profoundly influenced by Carlyle. His studies led from philosophy and history to literature, Semitic languages, and oriental studies (he mastered some fifteen languages, including Greek and Latin, Sanskrit and Arabic, Aramaic, Persian, and Amharic).
     Tchernikhowsky, his friend from the Odessa days, was studying medicine at Heidelberg at the same time, and their friendship deepened into a warm, fruitful affinity. "A passionate poet!" Uncle Joseph would say about him, "an eagle of a Hebrew poet, with one wing touching the Bible and the landscape of Canaan while the other spreads over the whole of modern Europe!" And he sometimes said of Tchernikhowsky: "The soul of a simple, pure child in the sturdy body of a Cossack!"
     Uncle Joseph was selected to be a delegate representing Jewish students at the First Zionist Congress in Basel, and at the following one, and he once even exchanged a few words with the father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl himself. ("He was a handsome man! Like an angel of G-d! His face had an inner glow! He looked to us like an Assyrian king with his black beard and his inspired, dreamy expression! And his eyes, I'll remember his eyes to my dying day, Herzl had the eyes of a young poet in love, blazing, lugubrious eyes that bewitched everyone who looked into them. And his high forehead also endowed him with majestic splendor!")
     On his return to Odessa, Klausner wrote, taught, and engaged in Zionist activity until, at the tender age of twenty-nine, he inherited from Ahad Ha'am the editorship of Hashiloah, the main monthly of modern Hebrew culture. To be more precise, Uncle Joseph inherited from Ahad Ha'am a "periodical letter," and he turned it into a monthly immediately by inventing the Hebrew word for "monthly."
     A man who has the ability to generate a new word and to inject it into the bloodstream of the language seems to me only a little lower than the Creator of light and darkness. If you write a book, you may be fortunate enough to be read for a while, until other, better books come along and take its place; but to produce a new word is to approach immortality. To this day I sometimes close my eyes and visualize this frail old man, with his pointed white goatee, his soft mustache, his delicate hands, his Russian glasses, shuffling along absentmindedly with his eggshell footsteps like a tiny Gulliver in a Brobdingnag peopled by a multicolored throng of mighty icebergs, tall cranes, and massive rhinoceroses, all bowing politely to him in gratitude.
     ***

     He and his wife, Fanni Wernick (who from the day of their marriage was invariably known as "my dear Zippora," or, in the presence of guests, "Mrs. Klausner"), made their home in Rimislinaya Street, Odessa, into a kind of social club and meeting place for Zionists and literary figures.

     Uncle Joseph always radiated an almost childlike cheerfulness. Even when he spoke of his sadness, his deep loneliness, his enemies, his aches and illnesses, the tragic destiny of the nonconformist, the injustices and humiliations he had had to suffer all through his life, there was always a restrained joy lurking behind his round spectacles. His movements, his bright eyes, his pink baby cheeks projected a cheery, optimistic vivaciousness that was life-affirming and almost hedonistic: "I didn't sleep a wink again all night," he would always say to his visitors, "the anxieties of our nation, fears for our future, the narrow vision of our dwarf-like leaders, weighed more heavily on me in the dark than my own considerable problems, not to mention my pain, my shortness of breath, and the terrible migraines I suffer night and day." (If you could believe what he said, he never closed his eyes for a moment between at least the early 1920s and his death in 1958.)
     Between 1917 and 1919 Klausner was a lecturer, and eventually professor, at the University of Odessa, which was already changing hands with bloody fighting between Whites and Reds in the civil war that followed Lenin's revolution. In 1919 Uncle Joseph and Aunt Zippora and my uncle's elderly mother, my great-grandmother Rasha-Keila née Braz, set sail from Odessa to Jaffa on board the Ruslan, which was the Zionist Mayflower of the Third Aliyah, the postwar wave of immigration. By Hanukkah of that year they were living in the Bukharian Quarter of Jerusalem.
     My grandfather Alexander and my grandmother Shlomit, with my father and his elder brother David, on the other hand, did not go to Palestine even though they were also ardent Zionists: the conditions of life there seemed too Asiatic to them, so they went to Vilna, the capital of Lithuania, and arrived there only in 1933, by which time, as it turned out, anti-Semitism in Vilna had grown to the point of violence against Jewish students. My Uncle David especially was a confirmed European, at a time when, it seems, no one else in Europe was, apart from the members of my family and other Jews like them. Everyone else turns out to have been Pan-Slavic, Pan-Germanic, or simply Latvian, Bulgarian, Irish, or Slovak patriots. The only Europeans in the whole of Europe in the 1920s and 1930s were the Jews. My father always used to say: In Czechoslovakia there are three nations, the Czechs, the Slovaks, and the Czecho-Slovaks, i.e., the Jews; in Yugoslavia there are Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and Montenegrines, but, even there, there lives a group of unmistakable Yugoslavs; and even in Stalin's empire there are Russians, there are Ukrainians, and there are Uzbeks and Chukchis and Tatars, and among them are our brethren, the only real members of a Soviet nation.
     Europe has now changed completely, and is full of Europeans from wall to wall. Incidentally, the graffiti in Europe have also changed from wall to wall. When my father was a young man in Vilna, every wall in Europe said, "Jews go home to Palestine." Fifty years later, when he went back to Europe on a visit, the walls all screamed, "Jews get out of Palestine."
    


     Uncle Joseph spent many years writing his magnum opus on Jesus of Nazareth, in which he maintained—to the amazement of Christians and Jews alike—that Jesus was born and died a Jew and never intended to found a new religion. Moreover, he considered him to be "the Jewish moralist par excellence." Ahad Ha'am pleaded with Klausner to delete this and other sentences, to avoid unleashing a colossal scandal in the Jewish world, as indeed happened both among Jews and among Christians when the book was published in Jerusalem in 1921: the ultras accused him of having "accepted bribes from the missionaries to sing the praises of That Man," while the Anglican missionaries in Jerusalem demanded that the archbishop dismiss Dr. Danby, the missionary who had translated Jesus of Nazareth into English, as it was a book that was "tainted with heresy, in that it portrays our Saviour as a kind of Reform rabbi, as a mortal, and as a Jew who has nothing at all to do with the Church." Uncle Joseph's international reputation was acquired mainly from this book and from the sequel that followed some years later, From Jesus to Paul.

     Once Uncle Joseph said to me: "At your school, my dear, I imagine they teach you to loathe that tragic and wonderful Jew, and I only hope that they do not teach you to spit every time you go past his image or his cross. When you are older, my dear, read the New Testament, despite your teachers, and you will discover that this man was flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, he was a kind of wonder-working Jewish pietist, and although he was indeed a dreamer, lacking any political understanding whatever, yet he has his place in the pantheon of great Jews, beside Baruch Spinoza, who was also excommunicated. Know this: those who condemn me are yesterday's Jews, narrow-minded, ineffectual worms. And you, my dear, to avoid ending up like them, must read good books—read, reread, and read again! And now, would you be kind enough to ask Mrs. Klausner, dear Aunt Zippora, where the skin cream is? The cream for my face? Please tell her, the old cream, because the new cream is not fit to feed to a dog. Do you know, my dear, the huge difference between the 'redeemer' in Gentile languages and our messiah? The messiah is simply someone who has been anointed with oil: every priest or king in the Bible is a messiah, and the Hebrew word 'messiah' is a thoroughly prosaic and everyday word, closely related to the word for face cream—unlike in the Gentile languages, where the messiah is called Redeemer and Savior. Or are you still too young to understand this lesson? If so, run along now and ask your aunt what I asked you to ask her. What was it? I've forgotten. Can you remember? If so, ask her to be kind enough to make me a glass of tea, for, as Rav Huna says in Tractate Pesahim of the Babylonian Talmud, 'Whatever the master of the house tells you to do, do, except leave,' which I interpret as referring to tea leaves. I am only joking, of course. Now run along, my dear, and do not steal any more of my time, as all the world does, having no thought for the minutes and hours that are my only treasure, and that are seeping away."
    


     When he arrived in Jerusalem, Uncle Joseph served as secretary to the Hebrew Language Committee, before he was nominated to a chair of Hebrew literature in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which was opened in 1925. He had hoped and expected to be put in charge of the department of Jewish history, or at least of the teaching of the Second Temple period, but, as he said, "the grandees of the university, from the exalted heights of their Germanness, looked down on me." In the department of Hebrew literature Uncle Joseph felt, in his own words, like Napoleon on Elba: since he was prevented from moving the whole European continent forward, he shouldered the task of imposing some progressive and well-organized order on his little island of exile. Only after some twenty years was the chair of history for the Second Temple era (536 bce to 70 ad) established, and Uncle Joseph was finally put in charge of this subject, without relinquishing his position as the head of the Hebrew literature department. "To absorb alien culture and to turn it into our own national and human flesh and blood," he wrote, "that is the ideal I have fought for most of my life, and I shall not abandon it to my dying day."

     And elsewhere he wrote, with Napoleonic fervor, "If we aspire to be a people ruling over our own land, then our children must be made of iron!" He used to point to the two bronze busts on the sideboard in his living room, the raging, passionate Beethoven and Jabotinsky in his splendid uniform and his resolutely pursed lips, and say to his guests: "The spirit of the individual is just like that of the nation—both reach upward and both become unruly in the absence of a vision." He was fond of Churchillian expressions like "our flesh and blood," "human and national," "ideals," "I have battled for the best part of my life," "we shall not budge," "the few against the many," "alien to his contemporaries," "generations yet to come," and "to my dying breath."
     In 1929 he was forced to flee when Talpiot was attacked by Arabs. His house, like Agnon's, was looted and burned, and his library, like Agnon's again, was badly damaged. "We must re-educate the younger generation," he had written in his book When a Nation Fights for Its Freedom, "we must clothe it in a spirit of heroism, a spirit of steadfast opposition....Most of our teachers have still not overcome the submissive defeatist Diaspora spirit, whether of the European or the Arab Diaspora, that lurks within them."
    


     Under Uncle Joseph's influence my grandfather and grandmother also became New Zionist Jabotinskyites, and my father actually grew close to the ideas of the Irgun—the paramilitary underground—and its political wing, and Menahem Begin's Herut Party, even though Begin actually aroused in such broad-minded, secular Odessan Jabotinskyites rather mixed feelings, mingled with a certain restrained condescension: his Polish shtetl origins and his excessive emotionalism may have made him appear somewhat plebeian or provincial, and however indisputably dedicated and stalwart a nationalist, he may have appeared not quite enough of a man of the world, not quite charmant enough, too lacking in poetry, in the ability to radiate the charisma, the grandeur of spirit, that touch of tragic loneliness, that they felt became a leader possessed of the qualities of a lion or an eagle. What was it Jabotinsky wrote about the relationship between Israel and the nations after the national revival: "Like a lion confronting other lions." Begin did not look much like a lion. Even my father, despite his name, was not a lion. He was a shortsighted, clumsy Jerusalem academic. He was not capable of becoming an underground fighter, but made his contribution to the struggle by composing occasional manifestos in English for the underground in which he denounced the hypocrisy of "perfidious Albion." These manifestos were printed on a clandestine printing press, and lithe young men used to go around the neighborhood at night posting them on every wall and even on the telegraph poles.

     I, too, was a child of the underground; more than once I drove out the British with a flanking movement of my troops, sank His Majesty's fleet after a daring ambush at sea, kidnapped and court-martialed the High Commissioner and even the King of England himself, and with my own hands I raised the Hebrew flag (like those soldiers raising the Stars and Stripes at Iwo Jima on an American stamp) on the flagpole at Government House on the Hill of Evil Counsel. After driving them out, I would sign an agreement with the conquered, perfidious British to set up a front of the so-called civilized, enlightened nations against the waves of savage orientals with their ancient curly writing and their curved scimitars that threatened to burst out of the desert to kill, loot, and burn us with bloodcurdling guttural shrieks. I wanted to grow up to be like the good-looking, curly-haired, tight-lipped statue of David by Bernini, reproduced on the title page of Uncle Joseph's When a Nation Fights for Its Freedom. I wanted to be a strong, silent man with a slow, deep voice. Not like Uncle Joseph's reedy, slightly querulous voice. I didn't want my hands to be like his soft, old lady's hands.
    


     He was a wonderfully frank man, my great-uncle Joseph, full of self-love and self-pity, vulnerable and craving recognition, brimming with childlike merriment, a happy man who always pretended to be miserable. With a kind of cheery contentment he loved to talk endlessly about his achievements, his discoveries, his insomnia, his detractors, his experiences, his books, articles, and lectures, all of which without exception had caused a "great stir in the world," his encounters, his work plans, his greatness, his importance, and his magnanimity.

     He was at once a kind man and a selfish, spoiled one, with the sweetness of a baby and the arrogance of a wunderkind.
     There, in Talpiot, which was intended to be a Jerusalemite replica of a Berlin suburb, a peaceful wooded hill where, in the fullness of time, red-tiled roofs would gleam among the foliage and villas would each provide a calm and comfortable home for a famous writer or renowned scholar, Uncle Joseph would go for a stroll sometimes in the evening breeze along the little street that was later to become Klausner Street, his thin arm entwined with the plump arm of Aunt Zippora, his mother, his wife, the child of his old age, and his right-hand person. They walked with tiny, delicate steps just past the house of the architect Kornberg, who occasionally took in paying guests of a polite and cultured kind, at the end of the cul-de-sac that was also the end of Talpiot, the end of Jerusalem, and the end of the settled land: beyond stretched the grim, barren hills of the Judaean desert. The Dead Sea sparkled in the distance like a platter of molten steel.
     I can see them standing there, at the end of the world, on the edge of the wilderness, both very tender, like a pair of teddy bears, arm in arm, with the evening breeze of Jerusalem blowing above their heads, the rustle of pine trees, and a bitter smell of geraniums floating on the clear dry air, Uncle Joseph in a jacket (which he suggested should be called in Hebrew "jacobite") and tie, wearing slippers on his feet, his white hair bare to the breeze, and Auntie in a flowery, dark silk dress with a gray woolen wrap around her shoulders. The whole width of the horizon is occupied by the blue bulk of the hills of Moab beyond the Dead Sea; beneath them passes the old Roman Road that continues to the walls of the Old City, where before their eyes the domes of the mosques are turning gold, the crosses on the church towers and the crescents atop the minarets gleam in the glow of the setting sun. The walls themselves are turning gray and heavy, and beyond the Old City one can see Mount Scopus, crowned by the buildings of the university that is so dear to Uncle Joseph, and the Mount of Olives, on whose slopes Aunt Zippora will be buried, though his own wish to be buried there will not be granted because at the time of his death East Jerusalem will be under Jordanian rule.
     The evening light intensifies the pink color of his babylike cheeks and his high brow. On his lips floats a distracted, slightly bewildered smile, as when a man knocks on the door of a house where he is a regular visitor and where he is used to being very warmly received, but when the door opens, a stranger suddenly looks out at him and recoils in surprise, as though asking, Who are you, sir, and why exactly are you here?
    


     My father, my mother, and I would leave him and Aunt Zippora to stand there for a while longer; we quietly took our leave and made for the stop of the No. 7 bus, which would surely arrive in a few minutes from Ramat Rahel and Arnona, because the Sabbath was over. The No. 7 took us to the Jaffa Road, where we caught the 3B to Zephaniah Street, a five-minute walk from our home. Mother would say:

     "He doesn't change. Always the same sermons, the same stories and anecdotes. He has repeated himself every Sabbath as long as I've known him."
     Father would reply:
     "Sometimes you are a little too critical. He's not a young man, and we all repeat ourselves sometimes. Even you."
     Mischievously, I would add my parody of a line from Jabotinsky's "Beitar Hymn":
     "With blood and zhelezo we'll raise a gezho." (Uncle Joseph could hold forth at length about how Jabotinsky chose his words. Apparently, Jabotinsky could not find a suitable rhyme in Hebrew for the word geza, "race," so he provisionally wrote the Russian word zhelezo, "iron." And so it came out: "With blood and zhelezo / We'll raise a race / Proud, generous, and tough," until his friend Baruch Krupnik came along and changed zhelezo to the Hebrew word yeza, "sweat": "With blood and sweat / We'll raise a race / Proud, generous, and tough."
     My father would say:
     "Really. There are some things one doesn't joke about."
     And Mother said:
     "Actually, I don't think there are. There shouldn't be."
     At this Father would interpose:
     "That's quite enough for one day. As for you, Amos, remember you're having a bath tonight. And washing your hair. No, I'm certainly not letting you off. Why should I? Can you give me one good reason to put off washing your hair? No? In that case you should never even try to start an argument, if you haven't got the slightest shadow of a reason. Remember this well from now on: 'I want' and 'I don't want' aren't reasons, they can only be defined as self-indulgence. And, incidentally, the word 'define' comes from a Latin word meaning 'end' or 'limit,' and every act of definition denotes tracing a limit or border dividing what is inside it from what is outside, in fact it may well be related to the word 'defense,' and the same image is mirrored in the Hebrew word from definition, derived as it is from the word for 'fence.' Now, cut your fingernails, please, and throw all the dirty clothes in the laundry basket. Your underwear, your shirt, your socks, the lot. Then into your pajamas, a cup of cocoa, and bed. And that's enough of you for today."

 11


     AND SOMETIMES, after we had taken our leave of Uncle Joseph and Aunt Zippora, if it wasn't too late, we would linger for twenty minutes or half an hour to call on the neighbors across the road. We would sneak, as it were, to the Agnons' house, without telling Uncle and Auntie where we were going, so as not to upset them. Sometimes we bumped into Mr. Agnon as he came out of the synagogue while we were on our way to the No. 7 bus stop, and he tugged at my father's arm and warned him that if he, that is to say my father, declined to visit the Agnon home and treat it to the radiance of the lady's face, it, that is to say the Agnon home, would be deprived of her radiance. In this way Agnon brought a smile to my mother's lips, and my father would accede to his invitation, saying: "Very well, but only for a few minutes, if Mr. Agnon will forgive us, we shall not stay long, we have to get back to Kerem Avraham, as the child is tired and has to get up for school in the morning."

     "The child is not tired at all," I said.
     And Mr. Agnon said:
     "Hearken, pray, good Doctor: out of the mouths of babes and sucklings thou hast established strength."
     The Agnons' house was set in a garden surrounded by cypresses, but to be on the safe side it was built with its back to the street, as though hiding its face in the garden. All you could see from the street were four or five slit windows. You entered through a gate concealed among the cypresses, walked along a paved path by the side of the house, climbed four or five steps, rang the bell at the white door, and waited for the door to be opened and for you to be invited to turn to your right and to climb the half-dark steps to Mr. Agnon's study, from which you reached a large paved rooftop terrace that looked out onto the Judaean desert and the hills of Moab, or else to turn left, to the small, rather cramped living room whose windows looked into the empty garden.
     There was never full daylight in the Agnons' house, it was always in a kind of twilight with a faint smell of coffee and pastries, perhaps because we visited just before the end of the Sabbath, toward evening, and they would not switch on the electric light until three stars at least had appeared at the window. Or perhaps the electric light was on, but it was that yellow, miserly Jerusalem electricity, or Mr. Agnon was trying to economize, or there was a power failure and the only light came from a paraffin lamp. I can still remember the half darkness, in fact I can almost touch it; the grilles on the windows seemed to imprison and accentuate it. The reason for it is hard to tell now, and it may have been hard to tell even then. Whatever the reason, whenever Mr. Agnon stood up to pull out a book from the shelves that looked like a crowded congregation of worshippers dressed in shabby dark clothes, his form did not cast one shadow but two or three or even more. That is the way his image was engraved on my childhood memory and that is the way I remember him today: a man swaying in the half-light, with three or four separate shadows around him as he walked, in front of him, to his right, behind him, above him, or beneath his feet.
     Occasionally Mrs. Agnon would make some remark in a sharp, commanding voice, and once Mr. Agnon said to her, with his head a little to one side and with a hint of a sarcastic smile: "Kindly permit me to be master in my own house so long as our guests are with us. Once they have left, you shall be the mistress." I remember this sentence clearly, not only because of the unexpected mischievousness it contained (which nowadays we would term subversive), but principally because of his use of the word "mistress," which is rare in Hebrew. I came across it again many years later when I read his story "The Mistress and the Pedlar." I have never come across anyone else apart from Mr. Agnon who used the word "mistress" to mean the lady of the house. Although perhaps in saying "mistress" he meant something slightly different.
     It is hard to tell: after all, he was a man with three or more shadows.
    


     My mother behaved toward Mr. Agnon, how should I say, as though she were on tiptoe all the time. Even when she was sitting down, she seemed to be sitting on tiptoe. Mr. Agnon himself hardly spoke to her, he spoke almost exclusively to my father, but as he spoke to my father, his glance seemed to rest for a moment on my mother's face. Strangely, on the rare occasions when he addressed a remark to my mother, his eyes seemed to avoid her and turn to me. Or to the window. Or maybe this is not how it was, but simply the way it is etched in my imagination: living memory, like ripples in water or the nervous quivering of a gazelle's skin in the moment before it takes flight, comes suddenly and trembles in a single instant in several rhythms or various focuses, before being frozen and immobilized into the memory of a memory.

     In the spring of 1965, when my first book, Where the Jackals Howl, was published, I sent a copy with some trepidation to Agnon, with an inscription on the flyleaf. Agnon sent me a nice letter in reply, said some things about my book, and concluded as follows:
     "What you wrote to me about your book conjured up the image of your late mother. I recall her once some fifteen or sixteen years ago bringing me a book from your father. You may have been with her. She stood upon the doorstep, and her words were few. But her face remained with me in all its grace and innocence/honesty for many days. Yours sincerely, S.Y. Agnon."
     My father, who at Agnon's request translated the article "Buczacz" for him from a Polish encyclopedia when Agnon was writing A City and the Fullness Thereof, would twist his lips as he defined him as a "Diaspora writer": his stories lack wings, he said, they have no tragic depth, there is not even any healthy laughter but only wisecracks and sarcasm. And if he does have some beautiful descriptions here and there, he does not rest or put down his pen until he has drowned them in pools of verbose buffoonery and Galician cleverness. I have the impression my father saw Agnon's stories as an extension of Yiddish literature, and he was not fond of Yiddish literature. In keeping with his temperament of a rationalistic Lithuanian Misnaged, he loathed magic, the supernatural, and excessive emotionalism, anything clad in foggy romanticism or mystery, anything intended to make the senses whirl or to blinker reason—until the last years of his life, when his taste changed. Admittedly, just as on the death certificate of my grandmother Shlomit, the one who died of an excess of cleanliness, it is recorded simply that she died of a heart attack, so my father's curriculum vitae states merely that his last research was on an unknown manuscript of Y. L. Peretz. These are the facts. What the truth is I do not know, because I hardly ever spoke to my father about the truth. He hardly ever talked to me about his childhood, his loves, love in general, his parents, his brother's death, his own illness, his suffering, or suffering in general. We never even talked about my mother's death. Not a word. I did not make it easy for him either, and I never wanted to start a conversation that might lead to who knew what revelations. If I started to write down here all the things we did not talk about, my father and I, I could fill two books. My father left me a great deal of work to do, and I'm still working.
    


     My mother used to say about Agnon:

     "That man sees and understands a lot."
     And once she said:
     "He may not be such a good man, but at least he knows bad from good, and he also knows we don't have much choice."
     She used to read and reread the stories in the collection At the Handles of the Lock almost every winter. Perhaps she found an echo there of her own sadness and loneliness. I too sometimes reread the words of Tirzah Mazal, née Minz, at the beginning of "In the Prime of Her Life":
     In the prime of her life my mother died. Some one and thirty years of age my mother was at her death. Few and evil were the days of the years of her life. All the day she sat at home, and she never went out of the house....Silent stood our house in its sorrow; its doors opened not to a stranger. Upon her bed my mother lay, and her words were few.

     The words are almost the same as those that Agnon wrote to me about my mother: "She stood upon the doorstep, and her words were few."

     As for me, when many years later I wrote an essay called "Who Has Come?" about the opening of Agnon's "In the Prime of Her Life," I dwelled on the apparently tautological sentence "All the day she sat at home, and she never went out of the house."
     My mother did not sit at home all the day. She went out of the house a fair amount. But the days of the years of her life, too, were few and evil.
     "The years of her life?" Sometimes I hear in these words the duality of my mother's life, and that of Lea, the mother of Tirzah, and that of Tirzah Mazal, née Minz. As if they too cast more than one shadow on the wall.
    


     Some years later, when the General Assembly of Kibbutz Hulda sent me to the university to study literature, because the kibbutz school needed a literature teacher, I summoned up my courage and rang Mr. Agnon's doorbell one day (or in Agnon's language: "I took my heart and went to him").

     "But Agnon is not at home," Mrs. Agnon said politely but angrily, the way she answered the throngs of brigands and highwaymen who came to rob her husband of his precious time. Mistress Agnon was not exactly lying to me: Mr. Agnon was indeed not at home, he was out at the back of the house, in the garden, whence he suddenly emerged, wearing slippers and a sleeveless pullover, greeted me, and then asked suspiciously, But who are you, sir? I gave my name and those of my parents, at which, as we stood in the doorway of his house (Mrs. Agnon having disappeared indoors without a word), Mr. Agnon remembered what wagging tongues had said in Jerusalem some years before, and placing his hand on my shoulder he said to me, "Aren't you the child who, having been left an orphan by his poor mother and distanced himself from his father, went off to live the life of the kibbutz? Are you not he who in his youth was reprimanded by his parents in this very house, because he used to pick the raisins off the cake?" (I did not remember this, nor did I believe him about the raisin picking, but I chose not to contradict him.) Mr. Agnon invited me in and questioned me for a while about my doings in the kibbutz, my studies (And what are they reading of mine in the university these days? And which of my books do you prefer?), and also inquired whom I had married and where my wife's family came from, and when I told him that on her father's side she was descended from the seventeenth-century Talmudist and kabbalist Isaiah Horowitz, his eyes lit up and he told me two or three tales, by which time his patience was exhausted and it was evident that he was looking for a way of getting rid of me, but I summoned up my courage, even though I was sitting there on tiptoe, precisely as my mother had done before me, and told him what my problem was.
     I had come because Professor Gershom Shaked had given his first-year students in Hebrew literature the task of comparing the stories set in Jaffa by Brenner and by Agnon, and I had read the stories and also everything I could find in the library about their friendship in Jaffa in the days of the Second Aliyah, and I was amazed that two such different men could have become friends. Yosef Hayyim Brenner was a bitter, moody, thickset, sloppy, irascible Russian Jew, a Dostoevskian soul constantly oscillating between enthusiasm and depression, between compassion and rage, a figure who at that time was already installed at the center of modern Hebrew literature and at the heart of the pioneering movement, while Agnon was then (only) a shy young Galician, several years Brenner's junior and still almost a literary virgin, a pioneer turned clerk, a refined, discriminating Talmud student, a natty dresser and a careful, precise writer, a thin, dreamy, yet sarcastic young man: what on earth could have drawn them so close to each other in the Jaffa of the days of the Second Aliyah, before the outbreak of the First World War, that they were almost like a pair of lovers? Today I think that I can guess something of the answer, but that day in Agnon's house, innocent as I was, I explained to my host the task I had been set, and innocently inquired if he would tell me the secret of his closeness to Brenner.
     Mr. Agnon screwed up his eyes and looked at me, or rather scrutinized me, for a while with a sidelong glance, with pleasure, and a slight smile, the sort of smile—I later understood—that a butterfly catcher might smile on spotting a cute little butterfly. When he had finished eyeing me, he said:
     "Between Yosef Hayyim, may G-d avenge his death, and me in those days there was a closeness founded on a shared love."
     I pricked up my ears, in the belief that I was about to be told a secret to end all secrets, that I was about to learn of some spicy, concealed love story on which I could publish a sensational article and make myself a household name overnight in the world of Hebrew literary research.
     "And who was that shared love?" I asked with youthful innocence and a pounding heart.
     "That is a strict secret," Mr. Agnon smiled, not to me but to himself, and almost winked to himself as he smiled, "yes, a strict secret, that I shall reveal to you only if you give me your word never to tell another living soul."
     I was so excited that I lost my voice, fool that I was, and could only mouth a promise.
     "Well then, strictly between ourselves I can tell you that when we were living in Jaffa in those days, Yosef Hayyim and I were both madly in love with Samuel Yosef Agnon."
    


     Yes, indeed: Agnonic irony, a self-mocking irony that bit its owner at the same time as it bit his simple visitor, who had come to tug at his host's sleeve. And yet there was also a grain of truth hidden here, a vague hint of the secret of the attraction of a very physical, passionate man to a thin, spoiled youth, and also of the refined Galician youth to the venerated, fiery man who might take him under his fatherly wing, or offer him an elder brother's shoulder.

     Yet it was actually not a shared love but a shared hatred that unites Agnon's stories to Brenner's. Everything that was false, rhetorical, or swollen by self-importance in the world of the Second Aliyah (the wave of immigration that ended with World War I), everything mendacious or self-glorifying in the Zionist reality, all the cozy, sanctimonious, bourgeois self-indulgence in Jewish life at that time, was loathed in equal measure by Agnon as by Brenner. Brenner in his writing smashed them with the hammer of his wrath, while Agnon pricked the lies and pretenses with his sharp irony and released the fetid hot air that inflated them.
     Nonetheless, in Brenner's Jaffa as in Agnon's, among the throngs of shams and prattlers there shine dimly the occasional figures of a few simple men of truth.
     Agnon himself was an observant Jew who kept the Sabbath and wore a skullcap; he was, literally, a G-d-fearing man: in Hebrew, "fear" and "faith" are synonyms. There are corners in Agnon's stories where, in an indirect, cleverly camouflaged way, the fear of G-d is portrayed as a terrible dread of G-d: Agnon believes in G-d and fears him, but he does not love him. "I am an easygoing sort of a man," says Daniel Bach in A Guest for the Night, "and I do not believe that the Almighty desires the good of his creatures." This is a paradoxical, tragic, and even desperate theological position that Agnon never expressed discursively but allowed to be voiced by secondary characters in his works and to be implied by what befalls his heroes. When I wrote a book on Agnon, The Silence of Heaven: Agnons Fear of G-d, exploring this theme, dozens of religious Jews, most of them from the ultra-Orthodox sector, including youngsters and women and even religious teachers and functionaries, wrote personal letters to me. Some of these letters were veritable confessions. They told me, in their various ways, that they could see in their own souls what I had seen in Agnon. But what I had seen in Agnon's writings I had also glimpsed, for a moment or two, in Mr. Agnon himself, in that sardonic cynicism of his that verged almost on desperate, jesting nihilism. "The L-rd will no doubt have mercy on me," he said once, with reference to one of his constant complaints about the bus service, "and if the L-rd does not have mercy on me, maybe the Neighborhood Council will, but I fear that the bus cooperative is stronger than both."
    


     I made the pilgrimage to Talpiot two or three more times during the two years I studied at the university in Jerusalem. My first stories were being published then in the weekend supplement of Davar and in the quarterly Keshet, and I planned to leave them with Mr. Agnon to hear what he thought of them; but Mr. Agnon apologized, saying "I regret that I do not feel up to reading these days," and asked me to bring them back another day. Another day, then, I returned, empty-handed but carrying on my belly, like an embarrassing pregnancy, the number of Keshet containing my story. In the end I lacked the courage to give birth there, I was afraid of making a nuisance of myself, and I left his house as I had arrived, with a big belly. Or a bulging sweater. It was only some years later, when the stories were collected in a book (Where the Jackals Howl in 1965), that I summoned up the courage to send it to him. For three days and three nights I danced around the kibbutz, drunk with joy, silently singing and roaring aloud with happiness, inwardly roaring and weeping, after receiving Mr. Agnon's nice letter, in which he wrote, inter alia, "...and when we meet, I shall tell you viva voce more than I have written here. During Passover I shall read the rest of the stories, G-d willing, because I enjoy stories like yours where the heroes appear in the full reality of their being."

     Once, when I was at the university, an article appeared in a foreign journal by one of the leading lights in comparative literature (perhaps it was by the Swiss Emil Steiger?), who gave it as his opinion that the three most important Central European writers of the first half of the twentieth century were Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, and S. Y. Agnon. The article was written several years before Agnon won the Nobel Prize, and I was so excited that I stole the journal from the reading room (there were no photocopiers at the university in those days) and hurried with it to Talpiot to give Agnon the pleasure of reading it. And he was indeed pleased, so much so that he wolfed down the whole article as he stood on the doorstep of his house, in a single breath, before so much as asking me in; after reading it, rereading it, and perhaps even licking his lips, he gave me that look he sometimes gave me and asked innocently: "Do you also think Thomas Mann is such an important writer?"
     One night, years later, I missed the last bus back from Rehovot to the kibbutz at Hulda and had to take a taxi. All day long the radio had been talking about the Nobel Prize that had been shared between Agnon and the poet Nellie Sachs, and the taxi driver asked me if I'd ever heard of a writer called, what was it, Egnon. "Think about it," he said in amazement. "We've never heard of him before, and suddenly he gets us into the world finals. Problem is, he ends up tying with some woman."
    


     For several years I endeavored to free myself from Agnon's shadow. I struggled to distance my writing from his influence, his dense, ornamented, sometimes Philistine language, his measured rhythms, a certain midrashic self-satisfaction, a beat of Yiddish tunes, juicy ripples of Hasidic tales. I had to liberate myself from the influence of his sarcasm and wit, his baroque symbolism, his enigmatic labyrinthine games, his double meanings, and his complicated, erudite literary games.

     Despite all my efforts to free myself from him, what I have learned from Agnon no doubt still resonates in my writing.
     What is it, in fact, that I learned from him?
     Perhaps this. To cast more than one shadow. Not to pick the raisins from the cake. To rein in and polish pain. And one other thing, that my grandmother used to say in a sharper way than I have found it expressed by Agnon: "If you have no more tears left to weep, then don't weep. Laugh."

 12


     SOMETIMES I was left with my grandparents for the night. My grandmother used to point suddenly at a piece of furniture or an item of clothing or a person and say to me:

     "It's so ugly, it's almost beautiful."
     Sometimes she said:
     "He's become so clever, he can't understand anything anymore."
     Or:
     "It hurts so much, it almost makes me laugh."
     All day long she hummed tunes to herself that she had brought with her from places where she lived apparently without fear of germs and without the rudeness that she complained also infected everything here.
     "Like animals," she would suddenly hiss disgustedly, for no visible reason, with no provocation or connection, without bothering to explain whom she was comparing to animals. Even when I sat next to her on a park bench in the evening, and there was no one in the park, and a slight breeze gently touched the tips of the leaves or perhaps made them tremble without really touching them with its invisible fingertips, Grandma could suddenly erupt, quivering with shocked loathing:
     "Really! How could they! Worse than animals!"
     A moment later she was humming to herself gentle tunes that were unfamiliar to me.
     She was always humming, in the kitchen, in front of the mirror, on her deck chair on the veranda, even in the night.
     Sometimes, after I had had my bath and brushed my teeth and cleaned out my ears with an orange stick with its tip wrapped in cotton wool, I was put to bed next to her, in her wide bed (the double bed that Grandpa had abandoned, or been evicted from, before I was born). Grandma read me a story or two, stroked my cheek, kissed my forehead, and immediately rubbed it with a little handkerchief moistened with perfume, which she always kept in her left sleeve and which she used to wipe away or squash germs, and then she turned out the light. Even then she went on humming in the dark, or rather she expelled from inside her a distant, dreamy voice, a chestnut-colored voice, a pleasant, dark voice that was gradually refined into an echo, a color, a scent, a gentle roughness, a brown warmth, lukewarm amniotic fluid. All night long.
     But all these nocturnal delights she made you scrub off furiously first thing in the morning, even before your cup of cocoa without the skin. I would wake up in her bed to the sound of Grandpa's carpet beater as he fought his regular dawn battle with the bedding.
     Before you even opened your eyes, there was a steaming hot bath waiting for you, smelling like a medical clinic because of the antiseptic solution that had been added to the water. On the edge of the bath a toothbrush was laid out, with a curly white worm of Ivory toothpaste already lying along the bristles. Your duty was to immerse yourself, soap yourself all over and rub yourself with the loofah, and rinse yourself, and then Grandma came, got you up on your knees in the bathtub, held you firmly by the arm, and scrubbed you all over, from head to toe and back again, with the dreaded brush, reminiscent of the iron combs that the wicked Romans used to tear the flesh of Rabbi Akiva and the other martyrs of the Bar Kochba Revolt, until your skin was pink like raw flesh, and then Grandma told you to close your eyes tight as tight, while she shampooed and pummeled your head and scratched your scalp with her sharp nails like Job scraping himself with a potsherd, and all the while she explained to you in her brown, pleasant voice about the filth and mire that the body's glands secrete while you sleep, such as sticky sweat and all sorts of fatty discharges and flakes of skin and fallen hairs and millions of dead cells and various kinds of slimy secretions you'd better not know about, and while you were fast asleep all this refuse and effluent smeared itself all over your body and mixed itself up together and invited, yes, positively invited, bacteria and bacilli and viruses too to come and swarm all over you, not to mention all the things that science has not yet discovered, things that cannot be seen even with the most powerful microscope, but even if they can't be seen, they crawl all over your body all night with trillions of horrible hairy little legs, just like a cockroach's but so tiny you can't see them, even scientists can't see them yet, and on these legs that are covered with disgusting bristles they creep back inside our bodies through the nose and the mouth and through I don't need to tell you where else they crawl in through, especially when people never wash themselves there in those not nice places they just wipe, but wiping isn't cleaning, on the contrary, it just spreads the filthy secretions into the millions of tiny holes we have all over our skin, and it all gets more and more filthy and disgusting, especially when the internal filth that the body is constantly excreting, day and night, gets mixed up with the external filth that comes from touching unhygienic things that have been handled by who knows whom before you, like coins or newspapers or handrails or doorknobs or even bought food, after all who can tell who has sneezed over what you're touching, or even, excuse me, wiped their nose or even dripped from their nose precisely on those sweet wrappers that you pick up in the street and put straight on the bed where people sleep, not to mention those corks you pick straight out of the garbage cans, and that corn on the cob your mother, G-d preserve her, buys straight from the hand of that man who may not even have washed and dried his hands after he has excuse me, and how can we be so sure that he's a healthy man? That he hasn't got TB or cholera, or typhus or jaundice or dysentery? Or an abscess or enteritis or eczema or psoriasis or impetigo or a boil? He might not even be Jewish. Have you any idea how many diseases there are here? How many Levantine plagues? And I'm only talking about known diseases, not the ones that are not known yet and that medical science doesn't recognize yet, not a day goes by after all here in the Levant that people don't die like flies from some parasite or bacillus or microbe, or from all kinds of microscopic worms that the doctors can't even identify especially here in this country where it's so hot and full of flies, mosquitoes, moths, ants, cockroaches, midges, and who knows what else, and people here perspire all the time and they are always touching and rubbing each other's inflammations and discharges and sweat and all their bodily fluids, better at your age you shouldn't know from all these foul fluids, and anyone can easily wet someone else so the other one doesn't even feel what's stuck to him in all the crush there is here, a handshake is enough to transmit all sorts of plagues, and even without touching, just by breathing the air that someone else has breathed into his lungs before you with all the germs and bacilli of ringworm and trachoma and bilharzia. And the sanitation here is not at all European, and, as for hygiene, half the people here have never even heard of it, and the air is full of all kinds of Asiatic insects and revolting winged reptiles that come here straight from the Arab villages or even from Africa, and who knows what strange diseases and inflammations and discharges they bring with them all the time, the Levant here is full of germs. Now you dry yourself very well all on your own like a big boy, don't leave anywhere damp, and then put some talcum powder all by yourself in your you-know-where, and in your other you-know-where, and all around about, and I want you to rub some Velveta cream from this tube all over your neck, and then get dressed in the clothes I'm putting out for you here, which are the clothes that your mother, G-d preserve her, has prepared for you only I've gone over them with a hot iron that disinfects and kills anything that might be breeding there better than the laundering does, and then come to me in the kitchen, with your hair nicely combed, and you'll get a nice cup of cocoa from me and then you'll have your breakfast.
     As she left the bathroom, she would mutter to herself, not angrily but with a kind of deep sadness:
     "Like animals. Or worse."
    


     A door with a pane of frosted glass decorated with geometrical flower shapes separated Grandma's bedroom from the little cubicle that was known as "Grandpa Alexander's study." From here Grandpa had his own private way out into the veranda and from there into the garden and finally outside, to the city, to freedom.

     In one corner of this tiny room stood the sofa from Odessa, as narrow and hard as a plank, on which Grandpa slept at night. Underneath this sofa, like recruits on parade, seven or eight pairs of shoes stood in a neat row, all black and shiny; just like Grandma Shlomit's collection of hats, in green and brown and maroon, that she guarded as her prize possession in a round hatbox, so Grandpa Alexander liked to be in command of a whole fleet of shoes that he polished until they shone like crystal, some hard and thick-soled, some round-toed or pointed, some brogued, some fastened with laces, some with straps, and others with buckles.
     Opposite the sofa stood his small desk, always neat and tidy, with an inkwell and an olivewood blotter. The blotter always looked to me like a tank or a thick-funneled boat sailing toward a jetty formed by a trio of bright silvery containers, one full of paper clips, the next of thumbtacks, while in the third, like a nest of vipers, the rubber bands coiled and swarmed. There was a rectangular metal nest of trays on the desk, one for incoming mail, one for outgoing mail, a third for newspaper cuttings, another for documents from the municipality and the bank, and yet another for correspondence with the Herut Movement, Jerusalem Branch. There was also an olivewood box full of stamps of different values, with separate compartments for express, registered, and airmail stickers. And there was a container for envelopes and another for postcards, and behind them a revolving silvery stand in the form of the Eiffel Tower that contained an assortment of pens and pencils in different colors, including a wonderful pencil with a point at either end, one red and the other blue.
     In one corner of Grandpa's desk, next to the files of documents, there stood a tall dark bottle of foreign liqueur and three or four green goblets that looked like narrow-waisted women. Grandpa loved beauty and hated everything ugly, and he liked to fortify his passionate, lonely heart occasionally with a little sip of cherry brandy, on his own. The world did not understand him. His wife did not understand him. Nobody really understood him. His heart always longed for what was noble, but everyone conspired to clip his wings: his wife, his friends, his business partners, they were all part of a plot to force him to plunge into two score and nine different kinds of breadwinning, hygiene, tidying up, business dealings, and a thousand petty nuisances and obligations. He was an even-tempered man, irascible but easily calmed. Whenever he saw some duty on the ground, whether a family or public or moral duty, he always bent down, picked it up, and shouldered it. But then he would sigh and complain about the weight of his burden and say that everyone, especially Grandma, took advantage of his good nature and loaded him with a thousand and one tasks that stifled his poetic spark and used him like an errand boy.
     During the day, Grandpa Alexander worked as a commercial representative and salesman of garments, being the Jerusalem agent of the Lodzia textile factory and a number of other well-respected firms. In a large number of cases piled up on shelves that ran the full height of the wall of his study, he kept a colorful collection of samples of cloths, shirts, and trousers in tricot and gabardine, socks, and all kinds of towels, napkins, and curtains. I was allowed to use these sample cases, provided I did not open them, to construct towers, forts, and defensive walls. Grandpa sat on his chair with his back to the desk, his legs stuck out in front of him, and his pink face, generally beaming with kindness and contentment, smiling happily at me as though the tower of cases and boxes that was growing under my hands would soon put the pyramids, the hanging gardens of Babylon, and the great wall of China in the shade. It was Grandpa Alexander who told me about the great wall, the pyramids, the hanging gardens, and the other wonders of the human spirit, such as the Parthenon and the Coliseum, the Suez and Panama Canals, the Empire State Building, the churches of the Kremlin, the Venetian canals, the Arc de Triomphe, and the Eiffel Tower.
     At night, in the solitude of his study, at his desk, over a goblet of cherry brandy, Grandpa Alexander was a sentimental poet who cast over an alien world poems of love, delight, enthusiasm, and longing, all in Russian. His good friend Joseph Kohen-Tsedek translated them into Hebrew. Here is an example:
     After many years of slumber
 Gracious L-rd my corpse upraise;
 Lovingly my eyelids open,
 Let me live for three more days.
 From northern Dan down to Beersheva
 Let me tour my fatherland,
 Let me roam each hill and valley
 And in beauty see it stand:
 Every man shall dwell in safety
 Each beneath his fig and vine,
 As the earth bestows its bounty,
 Full of joy this land of mine...

     He wrote poems of praise, celebrating such figures as Vladimir Jabotinsky, Menachem Begin, and his famous brother, my great-uncle Joseph, and also poems of wrath against the Germans, the Arabs, the British, and all the other Jew haters. Among all these I also found three or four poems of loneliness and sorrow with lines like: "Such gloomy thoughts surround me / In the evening of my days: / Farewell to youthful vigor / And to sunshine's hopeful rays—/ Now icy winter stays..."
     But usually it was not icy winter that beset him: he was a nationalist, a patriot, a lover of armies, victories, and conquests, a passionate, innocent-minded hawk who believed that if only we Jews girded ourselves with courage, boldness, iron resolve, etc., if only we finally rose up and stopped worrying about the Gentiles, we could defeat all our foes and establish the Kingdom of David from the Nile to the great river, the Euphrates, and the whole cruel, wicked Gentile world would come and bow down before us. He had a weakness for everything grand, powerful, and gleaming—military uniforms, brass bugles, banners and lances glinting in the sun, royal palaces and coats of arms. He was a child of the nineteenth century, even if he did live long enough to see three-quarters of the twentieth.
     I remember him dressed in a light-cream flannel suit, or a sharply creased pinstripe suit under which he sometimes sported a piqué vest with a fine silver chain that hugged him and led into a pocket of the said vest. On his head he wore a loosely woven straw hat in summer, and in winter a Borsalino with a dark silk band. He was terribly irascible, liable to erupt suddenly in billows of resounding thunder, but he would very quickly brighten up, forgive, apologize, be contrite, as though his anger was just a sort of bad coughing fit. You could always tell the state of his temper from a distance, because his face changed color like a traffic light: pink-white-red and back to pink. Most of the time his cheeks were a contented pink, but when he was offended they would turn white, and when he was angry they went red, but after a short time they resumed their pink hue that informed the whole world that the thunderstorm had ended, the winter was over, the flowers had appeared on the earth, and Grandpa's habitual cheeriness was beaming and radiating from him again after a short interruption; and in an instant he would have forgotten who or what it was that had angered him, and what all the commotion had been about, like a child who cries for a moment and at once calms down, smiles, and goes back to playing happily.

 13


     RAV ALEXANDER ZISKIND of Horodno (at that time in Russia, but later Poland, Belarus...), who died in 1794, is known in rabbinic tradition as YVShH, after the initials of his best-known work, Yesod Ve-Shoresh Ha-'Avodah ("The Foundation and Root of Worship"). He was a mystic, kabbalist, ascetic, the author of several influential ethical writings. It was said of him that "He spent his life shut away in a small room studying Torah; he never kissed or held his children and never had any conversation with them that was not directed to heavenly things." His wife ran the household and brought up the children on her own. Nevertheless, this outstanding ascetic taught that one should "worship the Creator with great joy and fervor." (Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav said of him that he was a hasid avant la lettre.") But neither joy nor fervor prevented Rabbi Alexander Ziskind from leaving instructions in his will that after his death "the Burial Society shall perform on my corpse the four death penalties entrusted to the Sanhedrin," until all his limbs were crushed. For example: "Let them raise me to the height of the ceiling and throw me violently to the ground with no intervening sheet or straw, and let them repeat this seven times, and I solemnly admonish the Burial Society under pain of excommunication to afflict me with these seven deaths, and not to spare my humiliation, for my humiliation is my honor, that I may be released somewhat from the great Judgment on high." All this in atonement for sins or for purification, "for the spirit or soul of Alexander Ziskind who was born of the woman Rebecca." It is also known about him that he wandered through the German towns collecting money to settle Jews in the Holy Land, and he was even imprisoned for this. His descendants bear the family name Braz, which is an abbreviation for "Born of Rabbi Alexander Ziskind."

     His son, Rav Yossele Braz, one of those whom their father never kissed or held, was considered a consummate Righteous Man who studied the Torah all his days and never left the house of study on a weekday even to sleep: he would permit himself to doze off as he sat, with his head on his arms and his arms on the desk, for four hours each night, with a lighted candle held between his fingers so that when it burned down, the flame would wake him. Even his snatched meals were brought to him in the house of study, which he left only at the onset of Sabbath and to which he returned as soon as the Sabbath was over. He was an ascetic like his father. His wife kept a draper's shop, and she kept him and his offspring until the day he died and beyond, as his mother too had done in her day, because Rav Yossele's humility did not allow him to assume the position of a rabbi, but he taught Torah for nothing to the children of the poor. Nor did he leave any books behind him, because he considered himself inadequate to say anything new that his predecessors had not said before him.
     Rav Yossele's son, Rav Alexander Ziskind Braz (my grandfather Alexander's grandfather), was a successful businessman who dealt in grain, linen, and even hogs' bristles; he traded as far afield as Königsberg and Leipzig. He was a scrupulously observant Jew, but so far as is known he distanced himself from his father's and grandfather's zealotry: he did not turn his back on the world, did not live by the sweat of his wife's brow, and did not hate the Zeitgeist and the Enlightenment. He allowed his children to learn Russian and German and a little "alien wisdom," and even encouraged his daughter, Rasha-Keile Braz, to study, to read, and to be an educated woman. He certainly did not admonish the burial society with dire threats to crush his body after his death.
    


     Menahem Mendel Braz, son of Alexander Ziskind, grandson of Rav Yossele, great-grandson of Rabbi Alexander Ziskind the author of the Yesod Ve-Shoresh Ha-'Avodah, settled in the early 1880s in Odessa where, together with his wife Perla, he owned and ran a small glass factory. Previously, in his youth, he had worked as a government clerk back in Königsberg. Menahem Braz was a well-to-do, good-looking bon vivant, and a strong-willed nonconformist even by the very tolerant standards of late-nineteenth-century Jewish Odessa. An undisguised atheist and well-known hedonist, he abhorred both religion and religious fanatics with the same whole-hearted devotion with which his grandfather and great-grandfather had insisted on observing every jot and tittle of the Law. Menahem Braz was a freethinker to the point of exhibitionism: he smoked publicly on the Sabbath, consumed forbidden foods with gay abandon, and pursued pleasure out of a gloomy vision of the brevity of human life and a passionate denial of the afterlife and divine judgment. This admirer of Epicurus and Voltaire believed that a man should reach out and help himself to whatever life put in his way and give himself over to the unrestrained enjoyment of whatever his heart desired, provided that in doing so he inflicted neither injury, injustice, nor suffering on others. His sister, Rasha-Keila, that educated daughter of Rav Alexander Ziskind Braz, was, on the other hand, affianced to a simple Jew back in the village of Olkieniki in Lithuania (not far from Vilna), whose name was Yehuda Leib Klausner, the son of Ezekiel Klausner, a tenant farmer.*

     The Klausners of Olkieniki, unlike their learned cousins from the nearby town of Trakai, were mostly simple village Jews, stubborn and naive. Ezekiel Klausner had raised cattle and sheep and grown fruit and vegetables, first in a village named Popishuk (or Papishki), and later in another village called Rudnik, and finally in Olkieniki itself. All three villages were near Vilna. Yehuda Leib, like his father Ezekiel before him, had learned a little Torah and Talmud from a village teacher, and observed the commandments, although he loathed exegetical subtleties. He loved the outdoor life and hated being cooped up indoors.
     After trying his hand at dealing in agricultural produce and failing because other traders soon discovered and took advantage of his naïveté and edged him out of the market, Yehuda Leib used the rest of his money to buy a horse and cart and cheerfully carried passengers and goods from village to village. He was an easygoing, gentle-natured carter, who was contented with his lot and enjoyed good food, singing table songs on Sabbaths and festivals, and a drop of schnapps on winter nights; he never beat his horse or recoiled from danger. He liked traveling alone, at a slow, relaxed pace, his cart weighed down with timber or sacks of grain through the dark forests, over empty plains, through snowstorms, and across the thin layer of ice that covered the river in winter. Once (so Grandpa Alexander loved to relate over and over again on winter evenings) the ice broke under the weight of his cart, and Yehuda Leib jumped into the icy water, grabbed the horse's bridle with his strong hands, and pulled his horse and cart to safety.
     Rasha-Keila Braz bore three sons and three daughters to her husband the carter. But in 1884 she fell seriously ill, and the Klausners decided to leave their out-of-the-way village in Lithuania and move hundreds of miles to Odessa, where Rasha-Keila came from and where her affluent brother lived: Menahem Mendel Braz would surely take care of them and see that his sick sister was treated by the best physicians.
     *Names run in families. My elder daughter is named Fania after my mother, Fania. My son is Daniel Yehuda Arie, after Daniel Klausner, my first cousin, who was born the year before me and was murdered together with his parents, David and Malka, by Germans in Vilna when he was three, and also after my father Yehuda Arieh Klausner, who in turn was named after his grandfather Yehuda Leib Klausner from the village of Olkieniki in Lithuania, the son of Rav Ezekiel, the son of Rav Kadish, the son of Rav Gedaliah Klausner-Olkienicki, a descendant of Rabbi Abraham Klausner the author of the Sefer Haminhagim ("Book of Customs"), who lived in Vienna in the late fourteenth century. My brother David was named after Uncle David, my father's brother, the one who was murdered by Germans in Vilna. Three of my grandchildren bear the name of one of their grandparents (Maccabi Salzberger, Lote Salzberger, Riva Zucker-man). And so it goes.

     At the time the Klausners settled in Odessa, in 1885, their eldest son, my great-uncle Joseph, was an infant prodigy of eleven, compulsively hard-working, a lover of Hebrew and thirsty for knowledge. He seemed to take after his cousins, the sharp-minded Klausners of Trakai, rather than his ancestors the farmers and carters from Olkieniki. His uncle, the Epicurean, Voltairian Menahem Braz, declared that little Joseph was destined for great things and supported his studies. His brother Alexander Ziskind, on the other hand, who was only four years old or so when they moved to Odessa, was a somewhat unruly and emotional child, who soon displayed an affinity with his father and grandfather, the rustic Klausners. He was not drawn to studying, and from an early age displayed a fondness for staying out of doors for extended periods, observing people's behavior, sniffing and feeling the world, being alone in the meadows and woods, and dreaming dreams. His liveliness, generosity, and kindness endeared him to all whom he met. He was universally known as Zusia or Zissel. And that was Grandpa Alexander.
     There was also their younger brother, my great-uncle Bezalel, and three sisters, Sofia, Anna, and Daria, none of whom ever made it to Israel. So far as I have been able to ascertain, after the Russian Revolution Sofia was a literature teacher and later the headmistress of a school in Leningrad. Anna died before World War II, while Daria, or Dvora, and her husband Misha attempted to escape to Palestine after the Revolution but "got stuck" in Kiev because Daria was pregnant.*
     Despite the help of their prosperous uncle Menahem and of other Odessa relations on the Braz side of the family, the Klausners fell on hard times soon after arriving in the city. The carter, Yehuda Leib, a strong, patient man who enjoyed life and loved joking, faded away after having to invest what was left of his savings in the purchase of a small, airless grocery shop from which he and his family eked out a precarious living. He longed for the open plains, the forests, the snowfields, his horse and cart, the inns and the river that he had left behind in Lithuania. After a few years he fell ill and soon died in his mean little shop when he was only fifty-seven. His widow, Rasha-Keila, for whose sake they had come all that way, lived on for twenty-five years after his death. She eventually died in the Bukharian Quarter of Jerusalem in 1928.
     *Daria's daughter, Yvetta Radovskaya, a woman in her eighties, still corresponds with me. Aunt Yvetta, my father's cousin, left St. Petersburg after the collapse of the Soviet Union and settled in Cleveland, Ohio. Her only child, Marina, who was about my age, died in St. Petersburg in the prime of life. Nikita, Marina's only son, who is my children's generation, went to America with his grandmother but changed his mind after a short while and returned to Russia or Ukraine, where he married and now works as a country vet. His daughters are the same generation as my grandchildren.

    


     While great-uncle Joseph was pursuing his brilliant student career in Odessa and later in Heidelberg, Grandpa Alexander left school at fifteen and turned his hand to a variety of petty trading ventures, buying something here and selling something there, scribbling passionate poems in Russian by night, casting covetous eyes into shop windows and at the mountains of melons, grapes, and watermelons, as well as the sensual southern women, dashing home to compose yet another emotional poem, then cycling around the streets of Odessa once more, carefully dressed in the latest flashy style, smoking cigarettes like a grown-up, with his carefully waxed black mustache; he sometimes went down to the port to feast his eyes on the ships, stevedores, and cheap whores, or he watched excitedly as a troop of soldiers marched past to the accompaniment of a military band, and sometimes he would spend an hour or two in the library, eagerly reading whatever came to hand, resolving not to try to compete with the bookishness of his elder brother, the prodigy. Meanwhile he learned how to dance with well-bred young ladies, how to drink several glasses of brandy without losing his wits, how to cultivate acquaintances in coffeehouses, and how to pay court to the little dog so as to woo the lady.

     As he made his way around the sun-washed streets of Odessa, a harbor town with a heady atmosphere colored by the presence of several different nationalities, he made friends of various kinds, courted girls, bought and sold and sometimes made a profit, sat down in a corner of a café or on a park bench, took out his notebook, wrote a poem (four stanzas, eight rhymes), then cycled around again as the unpaid errand boy of the leaders of the Lovers of Zion Society in pre-telephone Odessa: carrying a hasty note from Ahad Ha'am to Mendele Mokher Seforim, or from Mendele Mokher Seforim to Mr. Bialik, who was fond of saucy jokes, or to Mr. Menahem Ussishkin, from Mr. Ussishkin to Mr. Lilienblum, and while he waited in the drawing room or the hall for the reply, poems in Russian in the spirit of the Love of Zion movement played in his heart: Jerusalem whose streets are paved with onyx and jasper, an angel standing at every street corner, the sky above shining with the radiant light of the Seven Heavens.
     He even wrote love poems to the Hebrew language, praising its beauty and its musicality, pledging his undying faithfulness—all in Russian. (Even after he had been living in Jerusalem for more than forty years, Grandpa was unable fully to master Hebrew: to his dying day he spoke a personal Hebrew that broke every rule, and he made horrific mistakes when he wrote it. In the last postcard he sent us to Kibbutz Hulda shortly before his death, he wrote, more or less: "My very dear grandchildrens and greatgrandchildrens, I mist you lots and lots. I want to sea you all lots and lots!")
    


     When he finally arrived in Jerusalem in 1933 with a fear-ridden Grandma Shlomit, he stopped writing poems and devoted himself to commerce. For a few years he successfully sold dresses imported from Vienna in the fashion of the previous year to Jerusalemite women who longed for the delights of Europe. But eventually another Jew appeared who was cleverer than Grandpa, and began to import dresses from Paris in the fashion of the previous year, and Grandpa with his Viennese dresses had to admit defeat: he was forced to abandon the business and his love of dresses, and found himself supplying Jerusalem with hosiery by Lodzia in Holon and towels from a small firm called Szczupak and Sons in Ramat Gan.

     Failure and want brought back the muse, who had abandoned him during his years of commercial success. Once more he shut himself away in his "study" at night and penned passionate verses in Russian about the splendors of the Hebrew language, the enchantments of Jerusalem, not the poverty-stricken, dusty, heat-stifled city of zealots but a Jerusalem whose streets are fragrant with myrrh and frankincense, where an angel of G-d floats over every one of its squares. At this point I entered the picture, in the role of the brave little boy in the story of the emperor's new clothes, and attacked Grandpa with exasperated realism for these poems of his: "You've been living in Jerusalem for years now, and you know perfectly well what the streets are paved with, and what really floats over Zion Square, so why do you keep writing about something that simply doesn't exist? Why don't you write about the real Jerusalem?"
     Grandpa Alexander, furious at my impertinent words, turned in an instant from a pleasant pink hue to a blazing red, thumped the table with his fist, and roared: "The real Jerusalem? What on earth does a little bed-wetter like you know about the real Jerusalem?! The real Jerusalem is the one in my poems!!"
     "And how long will you go on writing in Russian, Grandpa?"
     "What do you mean, ty durak, you fool, you little bed-wetter? I do sums in Russian! I curse myself in Russian! I dream in Russian! I even—" (but here Grandma Shlomit, who knew exactly what was coming next, interrupted him: "Shto's toboi? Ty ni normalni?! Vidish malchik ryadom's nami!!"—What's the matter with you? Are you crazy? You can see the boy is right here!!)
     "Would you like to go back to Russia, Grandpa? For a visit?"
     "It doesn't exist anymore. Propali!"
     "What doesn't exist anymore?"
     "What doesn't exist anymore, what doesn't exist anymore—Russia doesn't exist anymore! Russia is dead. There is Stalin. There is Dzherzhinsky. There is Yezhov. There is Beria. There is one great big prison. Gulag! Yevsektsia! Apparatchiks! Murderers!"
     "But surely you still love Odessa a little?"
     "Nu. Love, don't love—what difference does it make. Chort ego znayet. The Devil knows"
     "Don't you want to see it again?"
     "Nu, sha, little bed-wetter, that's enough now. Sha. Chtob ty propal. Sha."
     One day, in his study, over a glass of tea and kichelakh, after the discovery of one of those scandals of embezzlement and corruption that shook the country, Grandpa told me how, when he was fifteen, in Odessa, "on my bike, very fast, I once carried a dispatch, a message, to Mr. Lilienblum, a committee member of the Lovers of Zion." (Besides being a well-known Hebrew writer, Lilienblum served in an honorary capacity as treasurer of the Lovers of Zion in Odessa.) "He, Lilienblum, was really our first finance minister," Grandpa explained to me.
     While he was waiting for Lilienblum to write the reply, the fifteen-year-old man-about-town took out his cigarettes and reached for the ashtray and matchbox on the drawing room table. Mr. Lilienblum quickly put his hand on Grandpa's to stop him, then went out of the room and returned a moment later with another matchbox that he had brought from the kitchen, explaining that the matches on the drawing room table had been bought out of the budget of the Lovers of Zion, and were to be used only at committee meetings, and then only by members of the committee. "So, you see. In those days public property was public property, not a free-for-all. Not the way it is in the country at the moment, when after two thousand years we've established a state so as to have someone to steal from. In those days every child knew what was permitted and what was not, what was ownerless property and what was not, what was mine and what was not."
     Not always, however. Once, it may have been in the late 1950s, a fine new ten-lira note came into circulation bearing a picture of the poet Bialik.* When I got hold of my first Bialik note, I hurried straight to Grandpa's to show him how the state had honored the man he had known in his youth. Grandpa was indeed excited, his cheeks flushed with pleasure, he turned the note this way and that, held it up to the lightbulb, scrutinized the picture of Bialik (who seemed to me suddenly to be winking mischievously at Grandpa, as if to say "Nu?!"). A tiny tear sparkled in Grandpa's eye, but while he reveled in his pride his fingers folded up the new note and tucked it away in the inside pocket of his jacket.
     Ten liras was a tidy sum at that time, particularly for a kibbutznik like me. I was startled:
     "Grandpa, what are you doing? I only brought it to show you and to make you happy. You'll get one of your own in a day or two, for sure."
     "Nu," Grandpa shrugged, "Bialik owed me twenty-two rubles."

 14


     BACK IN ODESSA, as a mustachioed seventeen-year-old, Grandpa had fallen in love with a well-respected young woman by the name of Shlomit Levin, who loved nice things and was drawn to high society. She longed to entertain famous people, to be friendly with artists and "live a cultured life."

     *Hayyim Nahuran Bialok (1873-1934), the Russian-born Hebrew poet, recognized as Israel's national poet, though he did not live to see the birth of the State of Israel.

     It was a terrible love: she was eight or nine years older than her pocket Casanova, and moreover she also happened to be his first cousin.
     At first the startled family did not want to hear about a marriage between the maiden and the boy. As if the difference in their ages and their blood tie were not enough, the young man had no education worthy of the name, no fixed employment, and no regular income beyond what he could earn from buying and selling here and there. Over and above all these catastrophes, Tsarist Russian law forbade the marriage of first cousins.
     According to the photos, Shlomit Levin—the daughter of a sister of Rasha-Keila Klausner, née Braz—was a solidly built, broad-shouldered young woman, not particularly good-looking but elegant, haughty, tailored with severity and restraint. She wears a felt trilby, which cuts a fine slanting line across her brow, its brim coming down on the right over her neat hair and her left ear and sweeping upward on the left like the stern of a boat, while in front a bunch of fruit is held in place by a shiny hat pin, and to the left a feather waves proudly over the fruit, the hat, everything, like an arrogant peacock's tail. The lady's left arm, clad in a stylish kid glove, holds an oblong leather handbag, the other arm being firmly crossed with that of the young Grandpa Alexander, while her fingers, also gloved, hover lightly above the sleeve of his black overcoat, barely touching him.
     He is standing to her right, nattily dressed, stiff, well turned out, his height enhanced by thick soles, yet he looks slighter and shorter than she is, despite the tall black homburg on his head. His young face is serious, resolute, almost lugubrious. His lovingly tended mustache tries in vain to dispel the boyish freshness that still marks his face. His eyes are elongated and dreamy. He is wearing an elegant, wide-lapeled overcoat with padded shoulders, a starched white shirt, and a narrow silk tie, and on his right arm hangs or perhaps even swings a stylish cane with a carved handle and shiny ferrule. In the old photograph it glints like the blade of a sword.
    


     A shocked Odessa turned its back on this Romeo and Juliet. Their two mothers, who were sisters, engaged in a war of the worlds that began with mutual accusations of culpability and ended in everlasting silence. So Grandpa withdrew his meager savings, sold something here and something there, added one ruble to another, both families may have contributed something, if only to drive the scandal out of sight and out of mind, and my grandparents, the love-struck cousins, set sail for New York, as hundreds of thousands of other Jews from Russia and other Eastern European countries were doing at that time. Their intention was to marry in New York and take American citizenship, in which case I might have been born in Brooklyn or in Newark, New Jersey, and written clever novels in English about the passions and inhibitions of top-hatted immigrants and the neurotic ordeals of their agonized progeny.

     But on board the ship, somewhere between Odessa and New York, on the Black Sea or off the coast of Sicily, or as they glided through the night toward the twinkling lights of the Straits of Gibraltar, or maybe as their love boat was passing over the lost continent of Atlantis, there was a further drama, a sudden twist to the plot: love raised its awesome dragon's head once more.
     To cut a long story short, my grandfather, the bridegroom-to-be who had not yet reached his eighteenth birthday, fell in love again, passionately, heart-breakingly, desperately, up on deck or somewhere in the bowels of the ship, with another woman, a fellow passenger, who was also, as far as we know, a full decade older than he, give or take a year.
     But Grandma Shlomit, so the family tradition has it, never entertained for a moment the thought of giving him up. She immediately took hold of him by the earlobe and held fast, she did not relax her grip day or night until they emerged from the premises of the New York rabbi who had married them to each other according to the laws of Moses and of Israel. ("By the ear," my family would say in a hilarious whisper, "she pulled him by the ear all the way, and she didn't let go till they were well and truly hitched." And sometimes they said: "Till they were hitched? Naah. She never let go of him. Ever. Not till her dying day, and maybe even a little bit longer than that, she held fast to his ear, and sometimes gave him a little tug.")
     And then, a great puzzle followed. Within a year or two this odd couple had paid for another passage—or perhaps their parents helped them again—and embarked on another steamship, and without a backward glance they returned to Odessa.
     It was utterly unheard of: some two million Jews migrated from east to west and settled in America in fewer than two score years between 1880 and 1917, and for all of them it was a one-way trip, except for my grandparents, who made the return journey. It must be supposed that they were the only passengers, so that there was no one for my passionate grandfather to fall in love with, and his ear was safe all the way back to Odessa.
     Why did they return?
     I was never able to extract a clear answer from them.
     "Grandma, what was wrong with America?"
     "There was nothing wrong. Only it was so crowded."
     "Crowded? In America?"
     "Too many people in such a small country."
     "Who decided to go back, Grandpa? You or Grandma?"
     "Nu, shto, what do you mean? What sort of a question is that?"
     "And why did you decide to leave? What didn't you like about it?"
     "What didn't we like? What didn't we like? We didn't like anything about it. Nu, well. It was full of horses and Red Indians."
     "Red Indians?"
     "Red Indians."
     More than this I was never able to get out of him.
    


     Here is a translation of a poem called "Winter" that Grandpa wrote in Russian, as usual:

     Springtime has fled, now it's winter instead,
 The storm winds do rage and the skies have turned black.
 Joy and gladness depart from my gloom-laden heart,
 I wanted to weep but my tears are held back.
     My soul feels weak and my spirit is bleak,
 My heart is as dark as the heavens above.
 My days have grown old, I'll no longer behold
 The joys of the spring and the pleasures of love.
     In 1972, when I first went to New York, I looked for and found a woman who looked like a Native American; she was standing, as I recall, on the corner of Lexington and Fifty-third Street handing out leaflets. She was neither young nor old, had wide cheekbones, and she wore an old man's overcoat and a kind of shawl against the biting cold wind. She held out a leaflet and smiled; I took it and said thank you. "Love awaits you," it promised, under the address of a singles bar. "Don't waste another minute. Come now."
    


     In a picture taken back in Odessa in 1913 or 1914 my grandfather is wearing a bowtie, a gray hat with a shiny silk band, and a three-piece suit whose open jacket reveals, running across the buttoned-up vest, a fine line of silver apparently connected to a pocket watch. The dark silk bow stands out against his brilliant white shirt, there is a high shine on his black shoes, his smart cane hangs, as usual, from his arm, just below the elbow; he is holding hands with a six-year-old boy on his right and a pretty four-year-old girl on his left. The boy has a round face, and a carefully combed lock of hair peeps endearingly from under his cap and cuts a straight line across his forehead. He is wearing a magnificent double-breasted coat with two rows of huge white buttons. From the bottom of the coat sprouts a pair of short trousers beneath which peeps a narrow band of white knee that is immediately swallowed up in long white socks presumably held up by garters.

     The little girl is smiling at the photographer. She looks as though she is well aware of her charms, which she is projecting very deliberately at the lens of the camera. Her soft, long hair, which comes down over her shoulders and rests on her coat, is neatly parted on the right. Her round face is plump and happy, her eyes are elongated and slanted, almost Chinese-looking, and there is a half smile on her full lips. She has been dressed in a tiny double-breasted coat over her dress, identical to her brother's in every respect, only smaller, and wonderfully sweet. She too is wearing little socks that go up to her knees. On her feet she has shoes whose buckles sport cute little bows.
     The boy in the picture is my uncle David, who was always called Ziuzya or Ziuzinka. And the girl, that enchanting, coquettish little woman, the little girl is my father.
     From his infancy until the age of seven or eight—though sometimes he told us that it went on until he was nine—Grandma Shlomit used to dress him exclusively in dresses with collars, or in little pleated and starched skirts that she ran up for him herself, and girls' shoes, often in red. His magnificent long hair cascaded down onto his shoulders and was tied with a red, yellow, pale blue, or pink bow. Every evening his mother washed his hair in fragrant solutions, and sometimes she washed it again in the morning, because night grease is well known to harm hair and rob it of its freshness and sheen and serve as a hothouse for dandruff. She made him wear pretty rings on his fingers and bracelets on his pudgy arms. When they went to bathe in the sea, Ziuzinka—Uncle David—went to the men's changing rooms with Grandpa Alexander, while Grandma Shlomit and little Lionichka—my father—headed for the women's showers, where they soaped themselves thoroughly, yes, there, and there too, and especially there please, and wash twice down there.
     After she gave birth to Ziuzinka, Grandma Shlomit had set her heart on having a daughter. When she gave birth to what was apparently not a daughter, she decided on the spot that it was her natural and indisputable right to bring this child, flesh of her flesh and bone of her bones, up as her heart desired, according to her own choice and taste, and no power in the world had the right to interfere and dictate her Lonia or Lionichka's education, dress, sex, or manners.
    


     Grandpa Alexander apparently saw no cause for rebellion: behind the closed door of his little den, inside his own nutshell, he enjoyed a relative autonomy and was even permitted to pursue some of his own interests. Like some Monaco or Liechtenstein, he never would have thought to make a fool of himself and jeopardize his frail sovereignty by poking his nose into the internal affairs of a more extensive neighboring power, whose territory enclosed that of his own Lilliputian duchy on all sides.

     As for my father, he never protested. He rarely shared his memories of the women's showers and his other feminine experiences, except when he took it into his head to try to joke with us.
     But his jokes always seemed more like a declaration of intent: look, watch how a serious man like me can step outside himself for you and volunteer to make you laugh.
     My mother and I used to smile at him, as though to thank him for his efforts, but he, excitedly, almost touchingly, interpreted our smiles as an invitation to go on amusing us, and he would offer us two or three jokes that we had already heard from him a thousand times, about the Jew and the Gentile on the train, or about Stalin meeting the Empress Catherine, and we had already laughed ourselves to tears when Father, bursting with pride at having managed to make us laugh, charged on to the story of Stalin sitting on a bus opposite Ben Gurion and Churchill, and about Bialik meeting Shlonsky in paradise, and about Shlonsky meeting a girl. Until Mother said to him gently:
     "Didn't you want to do some more work this evening?"
     Or:
     "Don't forget you promised to stick some stamps in the album with the child before he goes to bed."
     Once he said to his guests:
     "The female heart! In vain have the great poets attempted to reveal its mysteries. Look, Schiller wrote somewhere that in the whole of creation there is no secret as deep as a woman's heart, and that no woman has ever revealed or will ever reveal to a man the full extent of the female mystique. He could simply have asked me: after all, I've been there."
     Sometimes he joked in his unfunny way: "Of course I chase skirts sometimes, like most men, if not more so, because I used to have plenty of skirts of my own, and suddenly they were all taken away from me."
     Once he said something like this: "If we had a daughter, she would almost certainly be a beauty." And he added: "In the future, in generations to come, the gap between the sexes may well narrow. This gap is generally considered to be a tragedy, but one day it may transpire that it is nothing but a comedy of errors."

 15


     IT WAS Grandma Shlomit, the distinguished lady who loved books and understood writers, who turned their home in Odessa into a literary salon—perhaps the first Hebrew literary salon ever. With her sensitivity she grasped that the sour blend of loneliness and lust for recognition, shyness and extravagance, deep insecurity and self-intoxicated egomania that drives poets and writers out of their rooms to seek one another out, to rub shoulders with one another, bully, joke, condescend, feel one another, lay a hand on a shoulder or put an arm around a waist, to chat and argue with little nudges, to spy a little, sniff out what is cooking in other pots, flatter, disagree, collide, be right, take offense, apologize, make amends, avoid one another, and seek one another's company again.

     She was the perfect hostess, and she received her guests unpretentiously but graciously. She offered everyone an attentive ear, a supportive shoulder, curious, admiring eyes, a sympathetic heart, homemade fish delicacies or bowls of thick, steaming stew on winter evenings, poppy-seed cakes that melted in the mouth, and rivers of scalding tea from the samovar.
     Grandpa's job was to pour out liqueurs expertly, and keep the ladies supplied with chocolates and sweet cakes, and the men with papirosi, those pungent Russian cigarettes. Uncle Joseph, who at the tender age of twenty-nine had inherited from Ahad Ha'am the editorship of Hashiloach, the leading periodical of modern Hebrew culture (the poet Bialik himself was the literary editor), ruled Hebrew literature from Odessa and promoted or demoted writers by his word. Aunt Zippora accompanied him to his brother and sister-in-law's "soirees," careful to wrap him well in woolen scarves, warm overcoats, and earmuffs. Menahem Ussishkin, the leader of those forerunners of Zionism, the Lovers of Zion, smartly turned out, his chest puffed out like a buffalo's, his voice as coarse as a Russian governor's, as effervescent as a boiling samovar, reduced the room to silence with his entrance: everyone stopped talking out of respect, someone or other would leap up to offer him a seat, Ussishkin would stride across the room with the gait of a general, seat himself expansively with his large legs spread wide, and tap the floor twice with his cane to indicate his consent that the conversations in the salon should continue. Even Rabbi Czernowitz (whose nom de plume was Rav Tsair) was a regular visitor. There was also a plump young historian who had once paid court to my grandmother ("But it was hard for a decent woman to be close to him—he was extremely intelligent and interesting, but he always had all sorts of disgusting stains on his collar, and his cuffs were grimy, and sometimes you could see bits of food caught in the folds of his trousers. He was a total shlump, shmutsik, fui!").
     Occasionally Bialik would drop in for an evening, pale with grief or shivering with cold and anger—or quite the contrary: he could also be the life and soul of the party. "And how!" said my grandmother. "Like a kid, he was! A real scalawag! No holds barred! So risqué! Sometimes he would joke with us in Yiddish till he made the ladies blush, and Chone Rawnitski would shout at him: 'Nu, sha! Bialik! What's up with you! Fui! That's enough, now!'" Bialik loved food and drink, he loved having a good time, he stuffed himself with bread and cheese, followed by a handful of cakes, a glass of scalding tea, and a little glass of liqueur, and then he would launch into entire serenades in Yiddish about the wonders of the Hebrew language and his deep love for it.
     The poet Tchernikhowsky, too, might burst into the salon, flamboyant but shy, passionate yet prickly, conquering hearts, touching in his childlike innocence, as fragile as a butterfly but also hurtful, wounding people left, right, and center without even noticing. The truth? "He never meant to give offense—he was so innocent! A kind soul! The soul of a baby who has never known sin! Not like a sad Jewish baby, no! Like a goyish baby! Full of joie de vivre, naughtiness, and energy! Sometimes he was just like a calf! Such a happy calf! Leaping around! Playing the fool in front of everybody! But only sometimes. Other times he would arrive so miserable it immediately made every woman want to make a fuss over him! Every single one! Young and old, free or married, plain or pretty, they all felt some kind of hidden desire to make a fuss over him. It was a power he had. He didn't even know he had it—if he had, it simply would never have worked on us the way it did!"
     Tchernikhowsky stoked his spirits with a glazele or two of vodka, and sometimes he would start to read those poems of his that overflowed with hilarity or sorrow and made everybody in the room melt with him and for him: his liberal ways, his flowing locks, his anarchic mustache, the girls he brought with him, who were not always too bright, and not even necessarily Jewish, but were always beauties who gladdened every eye and caused not a few tongues to wag and whetted the writers' envy—"I'm telling you as a woman (Grandma again), women are never wrong about such things, Bialik used to sit and stare at him like this ... and at the goyish girls he brought along ... Bialik would have given an entire year of his life if only he could have lived for a month as Tchernikhowsky!"
     Arguments raged about the revival of the Hebrew language and literature, the limits of innovation, the connection between the Jewish cultural heritage and that of the nations, the Bundists, the Yiddishists (Uncle Joseph, in polemical vein, called Yiddish jargon, and when he was calm he called it "Judeo-German"), the new agricultural settlements in Judaea and Galilee, and the old troubles of the Jewish farmers in Kherson or Kharkov, Knut Hamsun and Maupassant, the great powers and Sozialismus, women's rights and the agrarian question.
    


     In 1921, four years after the October Revolution, after Odessa had changed hands several times in the bloody fighting between Whites and Reds, two or three years after my father finally changed from a girl to a boy, Grandma and Grandpa and their two sons fled the city for Vilna, which at that time was part of Poland (long before it became Vilnius in Lithuania).

     Grandpa loathed the Communists. "Don't talk to me about the Bolsheviks," he used to grumble. "Nu, what, I knew them very well, even before they seized power, before they moved into the houses they stole from other people, before they dreamed of becoming apparatchiks, yevseks, politruks, and commissars. I can remember them when they were still hooligans, the Unterwelt of the harbor district in Odessa, hoodlums, bullies, pickpockets, drunkards, and pimps. Nu, what, they were nearly all Jews, Jews of a sort, what can you do. Only they were Jews from the simplest families—nu, what, families of fishmongers from the market, straight from the dredgings that clung to the bottom of the pot, that's what we used to say. Lenin and Trotsky—what Trotsky, which Trotsky, Leibele Bronstein, the crazy son of some gonef called Dovidl from Janowka—this riffraff they dressed up as revolutionaries, nu, what, with leather boots and revolvers in their belts, like a filthy sow in a silk dress. And that's how they went around the streets, arresting people, confiscating property, and anyone whose apartment or girlfriend they fancied, pif-paf, they murdered him. Nu, what, this whole filthy khaliastra (gang), Kameneff was really Rosenfeld, Maxim Litvinoff was Meir Wallich, Grigory Zinoviev was originally Apfelbaum, Karl Radek was Sobelsohn, Leiser Kaganovich was a cobbler, the son of a butcher. Nu, what, I suppose there were one or two goyim who went along with them, also from the bottom of the pot, from the harbor, from the dredgings, they were riffraff, nu, what, riffraff with smelly socks."
    


     He had not budged from this view of Communism and the Communists even fifty years after the Bolshevik Revolution. A few days after the Israeli army conquered the Old City of Jerusalem in the Six Days' War, Grandpa suggested that the international community should now assist Israel in returning all the Arabs of the Levant "very respectfully, without harming a hair of their heads, without robbing them of a single chicken," to their historic homeland, which he called "Arabia Souadia": "Just the way we Jews are returning to our homeland, so they ought to go back honorably to their own home, to Arabia Souadia, where they came here from."

     To cut the argument short, I inquired what he proposed doing if Russia attacked us, in a desire to spare their Arab allies the hardships of the journey back to Arabia.
     His pink cheeks turned red with rage, he puffed himself up and roared:
     "Russia?! What Russia do you mean?! There is no more Russia, bed-wetter! Russia doesn't exist! Are you talking about the Bolsheviks, maybe? Nu, what. I've known the Bolsheviks since they were pimping in the harbor district in Odessa. They're nothing but a gang of thieves and hooligans! Riffraff from the bottom of the pot! The whole of Bolshevism is just one gigantic bluff! Now that we've seen what wonderful Hebrew airplanes we have, and guns, nu, what, we ought to send these young lads and planes of ours across to Petersburg, two weeks there, two weeks back, then one decent bombing—what they've deserved from us a long time now—one big phoosh—and the whole of Bolshevism will fly away to hell there just like dirty cotton wool!"
     "Are you suggesting Israel should bomb Leningrad, Grandpa? And for a world war to break out? Haven't you ever heard of atom bombs? Hydrogen bombs?"
     "It's all in Jewish hands, nu, what, the Americans, the Bolsheviks, all these newfangled bombs of theirs are all in the hands of Jewish scientists, and they're bound to know what to do and what not to do."
     "What about peace? Is there any way to bring peace?"
     "Yes there is: we have to defeat all our enemies. We have to beat them up so they'll come and beg us for peace—and then, nu, what, of course we'll give it to them. Why should we deny it to them? After all, we are a peace-loving people. We even have such a commandment, to pursue peace—nu, what, so we'll pursue it as far as Baghdad if we have to, as far as Cairo even. Shouldn't we? How so?"
    


     Bewildered, impoverished, censored, and terrified after the October Revolution, the Civil War, and the Red victory, the Hebrew writers and Zionist activists of Odessa scattered in every direction. Uncle Joseph and Aunt Zippora, together with many of their friends, left for Palestine at the end of 1919 on board the Ruslan, whose arrival in the port of Jaffa announced the beginning of the Third Aliyah. Others fled from Odessa to Berlin, Lausanne, and America.

     Grandpa Alexander and Grandma Shlomit with their two sons did not emigrate to Palestine—despite the Zionist passion that throbbed in Grandpa's Russian poems, the country still seemed to them too Asiatic, too primitive and backward, lacking in minimal standards of hygiene and elementary culture. So they went to Lithuania, which the Klausners, the parents of Grandpa, Uncle Joseph, and Uncle Betsalel, had left more than twenty-five years earlier. Vilna was still under Polish rule, and the violent anti-Semitism that had always existed there was growing by the year. Poland and Lithuania were in the grip of nationalism and xenophobia. To the conquered and subdued Lithuanians the large Jewish minority appeared as the agent of the oppressive regimes. Across the border, Germany was in the grip of the new, cold-blooded, murderous Nazi brand of Jew hatred.
     In Vilna, too, Grandpa was a businessman. He did not set his sights high; he bought a little here and sold a little there, and in between he sometimes made some money, and he sent his two sons first to Hebrew school and then to the classical gymnasium. The brothers David and Arieh, otherwise known as Zyuzia and Lonia, had brought three languages with them from Odessa: at home they had spoken Russian and Yiddish, in the street Russian, and at the Zionist kindergarten they had learned to speak Hebrew. Here, in the classical gymnasium in Vilna, they added Greek and Latin, Polish, German, and French. Later, in the European literature department at the university, English and Italian were added to the list, and in the Semitic philology department my father also learned Arabic, Aramaic, and cuneiform writing. Uncle David soon got a teaching job in literature, and my father, Yehuda Arieh, who took his first degree at Vilna University in 1932, was hoping to follow in his footsteps, but the anti-Semitism by now had become unbearable. Jewish students had to endure humiliation, blows, discrimination, and sadistic abuse.
     "But what exactly did they do to you?" I asked my father. "What sort of sadistic abuse? Did they hit you? Tear up your exercise books? And why didn't you complain about them?"
     "There's no way," Father said, "that you can understand this. And it's better that way. I'm glad, even though you can't understand this either, that is to say, why I'm glad that you can't understand what it was like: I definitely don't want you to understand. Because there's no need, there's simply no need anymore. Because it's all over. It's all over once and for all. That is to say, it won't happen here. Now let's talk about something else: shall we talk about your album of planets? Of course we still have enemies. And there are wars. There is a siege and no small losses. Definitely. I'm not denying it. But not persecution. That—no. Neither persecution nor humiliation nor pogroms. Not the sadism we had to endure there. That will never come back, for sure. Not here. If they attack us, we'll give as good as we get. It seems to me you've stuck Mars between Saturn and Jupiter. That's wrong. No, I'm not telling you. You can look it up yourself and see where you went wrong, and you can put it right all by yourself."
    


     A battered photo album survives from Vilna days. Here is Father, with his brother David, both still at school, both looking very serious, pale, with their big ears sticking out from under peaked caps, both in suits, ties, shirts with stiff collars. Here is Grandpa Alexander, starting to go a little bald, still mustached, nattily turned out, looking a little like a minor Tsarist diplomat. And here are some group photographs, perhaps a graduation class. Is it Father's year or his brother David's? It's hard to tell: the faces are rather blurred. The boys are wearing caps and the girls round berets. Most of the girls have dark hair, and some are smiling a Mona Lisa smile that knows something that you're dying to know but that you won't discover because it's not meant for you.

     Who for, then? It is almost certain that virtually all the young people in these group photographs were stripped naked and made to run, whipped and chased by dogs, starved and frozen, into the large pits in the Ponar Forest. Which of them survived, apart from my father? I study the group photograph under a bright light and try to discern something in their faces: some hint of cunning or determination, of inner toughness that might have made this boy in the second row on the left guess what was in store for him, mistrust all the reassuring words, climb down into the drains under the ghetto while there was still time, and join the partisans in the forests. Or how about that pretty girl in the middle, with the clever, cynical look, no, my dear, they can't deceive me, I may still be a youngster but I know it all, I know things that you don't even dream I know. Perhaps she survived? Did she escape to join the partisans in the Rudnik Forest? Did she manage to go into hiding in a district outside the ghetto, thanks to her "Aryan" appearance? Was she sheltered in a convent? Or did she escape while there was time, manage to elude the Germans and their Lithuanian henchmen, and slip across the border into Russia? Or did she emigrate to the Land of Israel while there was still time, and live the life of a tight-lipped pioneer till the age of seventy-six, introducing beehives or running the chicken farm in a kibbutz in Jezreel Valley?
     And here is my young father, looking very much like my son Daniel (whose middle names are Yehuda Arieh, after him), a spine-chilling resemblance, seventeen years old, long and thin as a cornstalk, wearing a bowtie, with his innocent eyes looking at me through his round spectacles, partly embarrassed and partly proud, a great talker and yet, with no contradiction, terribly shy, with his dark hair combed neatly back over his head and a cheerful optimism on his face, Don't worry, pals, everything's going to be fine, we shall overcome, somehow we'll put everything behind us, what more can happen, it's not so bad, it'll all be OK.
     My father in this picture is younger than my son. If only it were possible, I would get into the photo and warn him and his cheerful chums. I would try to tell them what's in store. It's almost certain they wouldn't believe me if I told them: would just make fun of me.
     Here is my father again, dressed for a party, wearing a shapka, a Russian hat, rowing a boat, with two girls who are smiling at him coquettishly. Here he is wearing slightly ridiculous knickers, showing his socks, embracing from behind a smiling girl with a neat center parting. The girl is about to post a letter in a box marked "Skrzynka Pocztowa" (the words are clearly legible in the picture). Who is the letter to? What happened to the addressee? What was the fate of the other girl in the picture, the pretty girl in a striped dress, with a little black handbag tucked under her arm and white socks and shoes? For how long after the picture was taken did this pretty girl go on smiling?
     And here is my father, smiling too, suddenly reminiscent of the sweet little girl his mother made him into when he was a child, in a group of five girls and three boys. They are in a forest, but are dressed in their best town clothes. The boys, however, have removed their jackets and are standing in their shirts and ties, in a bold, laddish posture, daring fate—or the girls. And here they are constructing a human pyramid, with two boys carrying a rather plump girl on their shoulders and the third holding her thigh rather daringly, and two other girls looking on and laughing. The bright sky too looks merry, and so does the railing of the bridge over the river. Only the surrounding forest is dense, serious, dark: it extends from one side of the picture to the other and presumably a good deal farther. A forest near Vilna: the Rudnik Forest? Or the Ponar Forest? Or is it perhaps the Popishok or Olkieniki Forest, which my father's grandfather, Yehuda Leib Klausner, loved to cross on his cart, trusting to his horse, his strong arms, and his good luck in the dense darkness, even on rainy, stormy winter nights?
    


     Grandpa yearned for the Land of Israel that was being rebuilt after its two thousand years of desolation; he yearned for Galilee and the valleys, Sharon, Gilead, Gilboa, the hills of Samaria and the mountains of Edom, "Flow, Jordan flow on, with your roaring billows"; he contributed to the Jewish National Fund, paid the Zionist shekel, eagerly devoured every scrap of information from the Land of Israel, got drunk on the speeches of Jabotinsky, who occasionally passed through Jewish Vilna and attracted an enthusiastic following. Grandpa was always a wholehearted supporter of Jabotinsky's proud, uncompromising nationalist politics and considered himself a militant Zionist. However, even as the ground of Vilna burned underneath his and his family's feet he was still inclined—or perhaps Grandma Shlomit inclined him—to seek a new homeland somewhere a little less Asiatic than Palestine and a little more European than ever-darkening Vilna. During 1930-32 the Klausners attempted to obtain immigration papers for France, Switzerland, America (Red Indians notwithstanding), a Scandinavian country, and England. None of these countries wanted them: they all had enough Jews already. ("None is too many," ministers in Canada and Switzerland said at the time, and other countries felt the same without advertising the fact.)

     Some eighteen months before the Nazis came to power in Germany, my Zionist grandfather was so blinded by despair at the anti-Semitism in Vilna that he even applied for German citizenship. Fortunately for us, he was turned down by Germany too. So there they were, these over-enthusiastic Europhiles, who could speak so many of Europe's languages and recite its poetry, who believed in its moral superiority, appreciated its ballet and opera, cultivated its heritage, dreamed of its postnational unity, and adored its manners, clothes, and fashions, who had loved it unconditionally and uninhibitedly for decades, since the beginning of the Jewish Enlightenment, and who had done everything humanly possible to please it, to contribute to it in every way and in every domain, to become part of it, to break through its cool hostility with frantic courtship, to make friends, to ingratiate themselves, to be accepted, to belong, to be loved...
    


     And so in 1933 Shlomit and Alexander Klausner, those disappointed lovers of Europe, together with their younger son Yehuda Arieh, who had just completed his first degree in Polish and world literature, emigrated halfheartedly, almost against their will, to Asiatic Asia, to the Jerusalem that Grandpa's sentimental poems had longed for ever since his youth.

     They sailed from Trieste to Haifa on the Italia, and on the way they were photographed with the captain, whose name, recorded on the edge of the picture, was Beniamino Umberto Steindler. Nothing less.
     And in the port of Haifa, so runs the family story, a British Mandatory doctor or sanitary officer in a white coat was waiting for them, to spray all the passengers with disinfectant. When it was Grandpa Alexander's turn, so the story goes, he was so furious that he grabbed the spray from the doctor and gave him a good dousing, as if to say: Thus shall it be done unto the man who dares to treat us here in our own homeland as though we were still in the Diaspora; for two thousand years we have borne everything in silence, but here, in our own land, we shall not put up with a new exile, our honor shall not be trampled underfoot—or disinfected.
    


     Their elder son, David, a committed and conscientious Europhile, stayed behind in Vilna. There, at a very early age, and despite being Jewish, he was appointed to a teaching position in literature at the university. He had no doubt set his heart on the glorious career of Uncle Joseph, just as my father did all his life. There in Vilna he would marry a young woman called Malka, and there, in 1938, his son Daniel would be born. I never saw this son, born a year and a half before me, nor have I ever managed to find a photograph of him. There are only some postcards and a few letters left, written in Polish by Aunt Malka (Macia), Uncle David's wife. 10.2.39: The first night Danush slept from nine in the evening to six in the morning. He has no trouble sleeping at night. During the day he lies with his eyes open with his arms and legs in constant motion. Sometimes he screams...

     Little Daniel Klausner would live for less than three years. Soon they would come and kill him to protect "Europe" from him, to prevent in advance Hitler's "nightmare vision of the seduction of hundreds and thousands of girls by repulsive, bandy-legged Jew bastards ... With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood ... The final Jewish goal is denationalization ... by the bastardization of other nations, lowering the racial level of the highest ... with the secret ... aim of ruining the ... white race ... If 5,000 Jews were transported to Sweden, within a short time they would occupy all the leading positions ... the universal poisoner of all races, international Jewry."*
     But Uncle David thought otherwise: he despised and dismissed such hateful views as these, refused to consider solemn Catholic anti-Semitism echoing among the stone vaults of high cathedrals, or coldly lethal Protestant anti-Semitism, German racism, Austrian murderousness, Polish Jew-hatred, Lithuanian, Hungarian, and French cruelty, Ukrainian, Rumanian, Russian, and Croatian love of pogroms, Belgian, Dutch, British, Irish, and Scandinavian fear of Jews. All these seemed to him an obscure relic of savage, ignorant eons, remains of yesteryear, whose time was up.
     *Hitler, quoted in Joachim C. Fest, Hitler, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Har-court, 2002), pp. 40,204,533, and 746 (Hitler's testament); see also Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks: A Series of Political Conversations with Adolf Hitler on his Real Aims (London: Thornton Butterworth Ltd., 1939).

     A specialist in comparative literature, he found in the literatures of Europe his spiritual homeland. He did not see why he should leave where he was and emigrate to western Asia, a place that was strange and alien to him, just to please ignorant anti-Semites and narrow-minded nationalist thugs. So he stayed at his post, flying the flag of progress, culture, art, and spirit without frontiers, until the Nazis came to Vilna: culture-loving Jews, intellectuals, and cosmopolitans were not to their taste, and so they murdered David, Malka, and my little cousin Daniel, who was nicknamed Danush or Danushek. In their penultimate letter, dated 15.12.40, his parents wrote that "he has recently started walking ... and he has an excellent memory."
     Uncle David saw himself as a child of his time: a distinguished, multicultural, multilingual, fluent, enlightened European and a decidedly modern man. He despised prejudices and ethnic hatreds, and he was resolved never to give in to lowbrow racists, chauvinists, demagogues, and benighted, prejudice-ridden anti-Semites, whose raucous voices promised "death to the Jews" and barked at him from the walls: "Yids, go to Palestine!"
     To Palestine? Definitely not: a man of his stamp would not take his young bride and infant son, defect from the front line and run away to hide from the violence of a noisy rabble in some drought-stricken Levantine province, where a few desperate Jews tried their hand at establishing a segregationist armed nationhood that, ironically, they had apparently learned from the worst of their foes.
     No, he would definitely stay here in Vilna, at his post, in one of the most vital forward trenches of that rational, broad-minded, tolerant, and liberal European enlightenment that was now fighting for its existence against the waves of barbarism that were threatening to engulf it. Here he would stand, for he could do no other.
     To the end.

 16


     GRANDMA CAST a single startled look around her and pronounced the famous sentence that was to become her motto for the twenty-five years she lived in Jerusalem: The Levant is full of germs.

     Henceforth Grandpa had to get up at six or six thirty every morning, attack the mattresses and bedding violently for her with a carpet beater, air the bedspreads and pillows, spray the whole house with DDT, help her in her ruthless boiling of vegetables, fruit, linen, towels, and kitchen utensils. Every two or three hours he had to disinfect the toilet and washbasins with chlorine. These basins, whose drains were normally kept stoppered, had a little chlorine or Lysol solution at the bottom, like the moat of a medieval castle, to block any invasion by the cockroaches and evil spirits that were always trying to penetrate the apartment through the plumbing. Even the nostrils of the basins, the overflow holes, were kept blocked with improvised plugs made of squashed soap, in case the enemy attempted to infiltrate that way. The mosquito nets on the windows always smelled of DDT, and an odor of disinfectant pervaded the whole apartment. A thick cloud of disinfecting spirit, soap, creams, sprays, baits, insecticides, and talcum powder always hung in the air, and something of it may also have wafted from Grandma's skin.
     Yet here too occasionally in the early evening some minor writers, two or three intellectually inclined businessmen, or some promising young scholars were invited over. Admittedly there was no more Bialik or Tchernikhowsky, there were no more large, jolly dinner parties. Their limited budget, cramped conditions, and daily hardships forced Grandma to lower her sights: Hannah and Chaim Toren, Esther and Israel Zarchi, Zerta and Jacob-David Abramski, and occasionally one or two of their friends from Odessa or Vilna, Mr. Scheindelevitch from Isaiah Street, Mr. Katchalsky the shopkeeper from David Yellin Street, whose two sons were already considered to be famous scientists with some enigmatic position in the Hagganah, or the Bar-Yitzhars (Itzeleviches) from Mekor Baruch, he a lugubrious haberdasher and she a maker of women's wigs and corsets to order, both of them devout right-wing Zionist Revisionists who loathed the Labor Party heart and soul.
     Grandma would lay out the food in military fashion in the kitchen, dispatching Grandpa into the fray over and over again, laden with trays, to serve cold borscht with a hefty iceberg of sour cream floating on it, peeled fresh clementines, seasonal fruit, walnuts, almonds, raisins, dried figs, candied fruits, candied orange peel, various jams and preserves, poppy-seed cakes, jam sponges, apple strudel, and an exquisite tart that she made from puff pastry.
     Here too they discussed current affairs and the future of the Jewish people and the world, and reviled the corrupt Labor Party and its defeatist, collaborationist leaders who ingratiated themselves obsequiously with the Gentile oppressor. As for the kibbutzim, from here they looked like dangerous Bolshevik cells that were anarcho-nihilist to boot, permissive, spreading licentiousness and debasing everything the nation held sacred, parasites who fattened themselves at the public expense and spongers who robbed the nation's land. Not a little of what was later to be said against the kibbutzim by their enemies from among radical Middle Eastern Jews was already "known for a fact," in those years, to visitors to my grandparents' home in Jerusalem. Apparently the discussions did not bring much joy to the participants; otherwise why did they often fall silent the moment they caught sight of me, or change to Russian, or shut the door between the sitting room and the castle of sample cases I was building in Grandpa's study?
    


     Here is what their little apartment in Prague Lane was like. There was a single, very Russian sitting room, crammed with heavy furniture and with various objects and glass cases, thick smells of boiled fish, boiled carrot and pasties mingled with the odors of DDT and Lysol; around the walls were huddled chests, stools, a dark masculine wardrobe, a thick-legged table, a sideboard covered with ornaments and souvenirs. The whole room was full of white muslin mats, lace curtains, embroidered cushions, souvenirs, and on every available surface, on the windowsill were crowds of little knickknacks, such as a silver crocodile that opened its jaws to crack a nut when you raised its tail, or the life-size white poodle, a gentle, silent creature with a black nose and round glass eyes that always lay at the foot of Grandma Shlomit's bed and never barked or asked to be let out into the Levant, from which it might have brought in who knew what, insects, bedbugs, fleas, ticks, worms, lice, eczema, bacilli, and other plagues.

     This amiable creature, whose name was Stakh or Stashek or Stashinka, was the mildest and most obedient dog ever, because he was made of wool and stuffed with rags. He had followed the Klausners faithfully in all their migrations from Odessa to Vilna and from Vilna to Jerusalem. For the sake of his health this poor dog was made to swallow several mothballs every few weeks. Every morning he had to put up with being sprayed by Grandpa. Now and again, in the summer, he was placed in front of the open window to get some air and sunlight.
     For a few hours Stakh would sit motionless on the windowsill, raking the street below with unfathomable longing in his melancholy black eyes, his black nose raised in vain to sniff at the bitches in the little street, his woolen ears pricked up, straining to catch the myriad sounds of the neighborhood, the wail of a lovesick cat, the cheerful chirruping of the birds, noisy shouting in Yiddish, the rag-and-bone man's bloodcurdling cry, the barking of free dogs whose lot was better by far than his own. His head was cocked thoughtfully to one side, his short tail tucked sadly between his hind legs, his eyes had a tragic look. He never barked at passersby, never cried for help to dogs in the street, never burst out howling, but his face as he sat there expressed a silent despair that tugged at my heartstrings, a dumb resignation that was more piercing than the most dreadful howl.
     One morning Grandma, without a second thought, wrapped her Stashinka up in newspaper and threw him in the trash, because all of a sudden she was smitten with suspicions of dust or mold. Grandpa was no doubt upset but didn't dare utter a peep. And I never forgave her.
    


     This overcrowded living room, whose smell, like its color, was dark brown, doubled as Grandma's bedroom, and from it opened Grandpa's monastic cell of a study, with its hard couch, its office shelves, the piles of sample cases, the bookcase, and the little desk that was always as neat and tidy as the morning parade of a bright and shiny troop of Austro-Hungarian hussars.

     Here in Jerusalem, too, they eked out an existence on Grandpa's precarious earnings. Once again he bought here and sold there, storing up in the summer to bring out and sell in the autumn, going around the clothes shops on Jaffa Road, King George V Avenue, Agrippa Street, Luncz Street, and Ben-Yehuda Street with his cases of samples. Once a month or so he went off to Holon, Ramat Gan, Netanya, Petah Tikva, sometimes as far as Haifa, to talk to towel manufacturers, or haggle with underwear makers or suppliers of ready-made clothing.
     Every morning, before he went out on his rounds, Grandpa made up parcels of clothes or cloth for the mail. Sometimes he was awarded, lost, or regained the position of local sales representative for some wholesaler or factory. He did not enjoy trading and was not successful at it—he barely made enough to keep himself and Grandma alive—but what he did enjoy was walking the streets of Jerusalem, always elegant in his Tsarist diplomat's suit, with a triangle of white handkerchief protruding from his top pocket, with his silver cufflinks, and he loved to spend hours sitting in cafés, ostensibly for business purposes but in reality for the conversations and arguments and steaming tea and leafing through the newspapers and magazines. He also liked eating in restaurants. He always treated waiters like a very particular yet magnanimous gentleman.
     "Excuse me. This tea is cold. I ask you bring me right away hot tea: hot tea, that means the essence also must be very very hot. Not just the water. Thank you very much."
     What Grandpa loved best were the long trips out of town and the business meetings in the offices of the firms in the coastal towns. He had an impressive business card, with a gold border and an emblem in the form of intertwined rhombuses, like a little heap of diamonds. The legend on the card read: "Alexander Z. Klausner, Importer, Authorized Representative, General Agent and Accredited Wholesaler, Jerusalem and District." He would hold out his card with an apologetic, childlike little laugh:
     "Nu, what. A man has to live somehow."
     His heart was not in his business but in innocent, illicit love affairs, romantic yearnings, like a seventy-year-old schoolboy, vague longings and dreams. If he had only been allowed to live his life again, according to his choice and the real inclination of his heart, he would certainly have chosen to love women, to be loved, to understand their hearts, to enjoy their company in summer retreats in the bosom of nature, to row with them on lakes beneath snow-capped mountains, to write passionate poetry, to be good-looking, curly-haired, and soulful yet masculine, to be loved by the masses, to be Tchernikhowsky. Or Byron. Or, better still, Vladimir Jabotinsky, sublime poet and prominent political leader combined in a single wonderful figure.
     All his life he longed for worlds of love and emotional generosity. (He never seems to have made the distinction between love and admiration, thirsting for an abundance of both.)
     Sometimes in desperation he rattled his chains, champed at the bit, drank a couple of glasses of brandy in the solitude of his study, or on bitter, sleepless nights particularly, he drank a glass of vodka and smoked sadly. Sometimes he went out alone after dark and roamed the empty streets. It was not easy for him to go out. Grandma had a highly developed, supersensitive radar screen on which she kept track of us all: at any given moment she could check the inventory, to know precisely where each of us was, Lonya at his desk in the National Library on the fourth floor of the Terra Sancta Building, Zussya at Café Atara, Fania sitting in the B'nai B'rith Library, Amos playing with his best friend Eliyahu next door at Mr. Friedmann the engineer's, in the first building on the right. Only at the edge of her screen, behind the extinguished galaxy, in the corner from which her son Zyuzya, Zyuzinka, with Malka and little Daniel, whom she had never seen or washed, were supposed to flicker back at her, all she could see by day or night was a terrifying black hole.
     Grandpa would stroll down the Street of the Abyssinians with his hat on, listening to the echo of his footsteps, breathing in the dry night air, saturated with pine trees and stone. Back at home, he would sit down at his desk, have a little drink, smoke a cigarette or two, and write a soulful Russian poem. Ever since that shameful lapse when he had fallen for someone else on the boat to New York, and Grandma had had to drag him off by force to the rabbi, it had never crossed his mind to rebel again: he stood before his wife like a serf before a lady, and he served her with boundless humility, admiration, awe, devotion, and patience.
     She, for her part, called him Zussya, and on rare occasions of profound gentleness and compassion she called him Zissel. Then his face would suddenly light up as though the seven heavens had opened before him.

 17


     HE LIVED for another twenty years after Grandma Shlomit died in her bath.

     For several weeks or months he continued to get up at daybreak and drag the mattresses and bedclothes to the balcony railing, where he beat them mercilessly to crush any germs or goblins that might have insinuated themselves into the bedding overnight. Perhaps he found it hard to break the habit; perhaps it was his way of paying his respects to the departed; perhaps he was expressing his longing for his queen; or perhaps he was afraid of provoking her avenging spirit if he stopped.
     He did not immediately stop disinfecting the toilet and washbasins, either.
     But slowly, with the passage of time, Grandpa's smily cheeks grew pink as they had never done before. They always had a cheerful look. Although he remained very particular to his last day about cleanliness and tidiness, being by nature a dapper man, the violence had gone out of him: there were no more furious beatings or frantic sprays of Lysol or chlorine. A few months after Grandma's death his love life began to blossom in a tempestuous and wonderful way. At about the same time, I have the impression that my seventy-seven-year-old grandfather discovered the joy of sex.
     Before he had managed to wipe the dust of Grandma's burial off his shoes, Grandpa's home was full of women offering condolences, encouragement, freedom from loneliness, sympathy. They never left him alone, nourishing him with hot meals, comforting him with apple cake, and he apparently enjoyed not letting them leave him alone. He was always attracted to women—all women, both the beautiful ones and those whose beauty other men were incapable of seeing. "Women," my grandfather once declared, "are all very beautiful. All of them without exception. Only men," he smiled, "are blind! Completely blind! Nu, what. They only see themselves, and not even themselves. Blind!"
    


     After my grandmother's death Grandpa spent less time on his business. He would still sometimes announce, his face beaming with pride and joy, "a very important business trip to Tel Aviv, to Grusenberg Street," or "an extremely important meeting in Ramat Gan, with all the heads of the company" He still liked to proffer to anyone he met one of his many impressive business cards. But now he was busy most days with his tempestuous affairs of the heart: issuing or receiving invitations to tea, dining by candlelight in some select but not too expensive restaurant ("with Mrs. Tsitrine, ty durak, not Mrs. Shaposhnik!").

     He sat for hours at his table on the discreet upstairs floor of Café Atara in Ben Yehuda street, dressed in a navy blue suit, with a polka-dot tie, looking pink, smiling, gleaming, well groomed, smelling of shampoo, talcum powder, and aftershave. A striking sight in his starched white shirt, his gleaming white handkerchief in his breast pocket, his silver cufflinks, always surrounded by a bevy of well-preserved women in their fifties or sixties: widows in tight corsets and nylons with seams running down the back, well made up divorcees, adorned with an abundance of rings, earrings, and bracelets, finished off with a manicure, a pedicure, and a perm, matrons who spoke massacred Hebrew with a Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, or Bulgarian accent. Grandpa loved their company, and they were melted by his charms: he was a fascinating, entertaining conversationalist, a gentleman in the nineteenth-century mold, who kissed ladies' hands, hurried forward to open doors for them, offered his arm at every stairway or slope, never forgot a birthday, sent bouquets of flowers and boxes of sweets, noticed and made a subtle compliment on the cut of a dress, a change of hair style, elegant shoes, or a new handbag, joked tastefully, quoted a poem at the appropriate moment, chatted with warmth and humor. Once I opened a door and caught sight of my ninety-year-old grandfather kneeling before the jolly, dumpy brunette widow of a certain notary. The lady winked at me over my enamored grandfather's head, and smiled gaily, revealing two rows of teeth too perfect to be her own. I left, closing the door gently, before Grandpa was aware of my presence.
     What was the secret of Grandpa's charm? I began to understand only years later. He possessed a quality that is hardly ever found among men, a marvelous quality that for many women is the sexiest in a man:
     He listened.
     He did not just politely pretend to listen, while impatiently waiting for her to finish what she was saying and shut up.
     He did not break into his partner's sentence and finish it for her.
     He did not cut in to sum up what she was saying so as to move on to another subject.
     He did not let his interlocutress talk into thin air while he prepared in his head the reply he would make when she finally finished.
     He did not pretend to be interested or entertained, he really was. Nu, what: he had an inexhaustible curiosity.
     He was not impatient. He did not attempt to deflect the conversation from her petty concerns to his own important ones.
     On the contrary: he loved her concerns. He always enjoyed waiting for her, and if she needed to take her time, he took pleasure in all her contortions.
     He was in no hurry, and he never rushed her. He would wait for her to finish, and even when she had finished, he did not pounce or grab but enjoyed waiting in case there was something more, in case she was carried along on another wave.
     He loved to let her take him by the hand and lead him to her own places, at her own pace. He loved to be her accompanist.
     He loved getting to know her. He loved to understand, to get to the bottom of her. And beyond.
     He loved to give himself. He enjoyed giving himself up to her more than he enjoyed it when she gave herself up to him.
     Nu, what: they talked and talked to him to their heart's content, even about the most private, secret, vulnerable things, while he sat and listened, wisely, gently, with empathy and patience.
     Or rather with pleasure and feeling.
     There are many men around who love sex but hate women.
     My grandfather, I believe, loved both.
     And with gentleness. He never calculated, never grabbed. He never rushed. He loved setting sail, he was never in a hurry to cast anchor.
    


     He had many romances in his twenty-year Indian summer after my grandmother's death, from when he was seventy-seven to the end of his life. He would sometimes go away with one or another of his lady friends for a few days to a hotel in Tiberias, a guesthouse in Gedera, or a "holiday resort" by the seaside in Netanya. (His expression "holiday resort" was apparently his translation of some Russian phrase with Chekhovian overtones of dachas on the Crimean coast.) Once or twice I saw him walking down Agrippa Street or Bezalel Street arm in arm with some woman, and I did not approach them. He did not take any particular pains to conceal his love affairs from us, but he did not boast about them either. He never brought his lady friends to our house or introduced them to us, and he rarely mentioned them. But sometimes he seemed as giddy with love as a teenager, with veiled eyes, humming to himself, an absentminded smile playing on his lips. And sometimes his face fell, the baby pink left his cheeks like an overcast autumn day, and he would stand in his room furiously ironing shirts one after the other, he even ironed his underwear and sprayed it with scent from a little flask. and occasionally he would speak harshly but softly to himself in Russian, or hum some mournful Ukrainian melody, from which we deduced that some door had shut in his face, or, on the contrary, he had become embroiled again, as on his amazing trip to New York when he was engaged, in the anguish of two simultaneous loves.

     Once, when he was already eighty-nine, he announced to us that he was thinking of taking an "important trip" for two or three days, and that we were on no account to worry. But when he had not returned after a week, we were beset with worries. Where was he? Why didn't he phone? What if something had happened to him, heaven forbid? After all, a man of his age...
     We agonized: should we involve the police? If he was lying sick in some hospital, heaven forbid, or had got into some sort of trouble, we would never forgive ourselves if we hadn't looked for him. On the other hand, if we rang the police and he turned up safe and sound, how could we face his volcanic fury? If Grandpa didn't appear by noon on Friday, we decided after a day and a night of dithering, we would have to call the police. There was no alternative.
     He turned up on Friday, about half an hour before the deadline, pink with contentment, brimming with good humor, amusement, and enthusiasm, like a little child.
     "Where did you disappear to, Grandpa?"
     "Nu, what. I was traveling."
     "But you said you'd only be away for two or three days."
     "So what if I did? Nu, I was traveling with Mrs. Hershkovich, and we were having such a wonderful time we didn't notice how the time was flying."
     "But where did you go?"
     "I've told you, we went away to enjoy ourselves for a little. We discovered a quiet guesthouse. A very cultured guesthouse. A guesthouse like in Switzerland."
     "A guesthouse? Where?"
     "On a high mountain in Ramat Gan."
     "Couldn't you at least have phoned us? So we wouldn't be so worried about you?"
     "We didn't find a phone in the room. Nu, what. It was such a wonderfully cultured guesthouse!"
     "But couldn't you have phoned us from a public telephone? I gave you the tokens myself."
     "Tokens. Tokens. Nu, shto takoye, what are tokens?"
     "Tokens for the public phone."
     "Oh, those jetons of yours. Here they are. Nu, take them, little bed-wetter, take your jetons along with the holes in the middle of them, take them, only be sure to count them. Never accept anything from anyone without counting properly first."
     "But why didn't you use them?"
     "The jetons7. Nu, what. I don't believe in jetons."
    


     And when he was ninety-three, three years after my father died, Grandpa decided that the time had come and that I was old enough for a man-to-man conversation. He summoned me into his den, closed the windows, locked the door, sat down solemnly and formally at his desk, motioned to me to sit facing him on the other side of the desk. He didn't call me "little bed-wetter," he crossed his legs, rested his chin in his hands, mused for a while, and said:

     "The time has come we should talk about women."
     And at once he explained:
     "Nu. About woman in general."
     (I was thirty-six at the time, I had been married fifteen years and had two teenage daughters.)
     Grandpa sighed, coughed into his palm, straightened his tie, cleared his throat a couple of times, and said:
     "Nu, what. Women have always interested me. That is to say, always. Don't you go understanding something not nice! What I am saying is something completely different, nu, I am just saying that woman has always interested me. No, not the 'woman question'! Woman as a person."
     He chuckled and corrected himself:
     "—interested me in every way. All my life I am all the time looking at women, even when I was no more than a little chudak, nu, no, no, I never looked at a woman like some kind of paskudniak, no, only looking at her with all respect. Looking and learning. Nu, and what I learned, I want to teach you now also. So you will know. So now you, listen carefully please: it is like this."
     He paused and looked around, as though to make certain that we were really alone, with no one to overhear us.
     "Woman," Grandpa said, "nu, in some ways she is just like us. Exactly the same. But in some other ways," he said, "a woman is entirely different. Very very different."
     He paused here and pondered it for a while, maybe conjuring up images in his mind, his childlike smile lit his face, and he concluded his lesson:
     "But you know what? In which ways a woman is just like us and in which ways she is very very different—nu, on this," he concluded, rising from his chair, "I am still working."
     He was ninety-three, and he may well have continued to "work" on the question to the end of his days. I am still working on it myself.
    


     He had his own unique brand of Hebrew, Grandpa Alexander, and he refused to be corrected. He always insisted on calling a barber (sapar) a sailor (sapan), and a barber's shop (mispara) a shipyard (mispana). Once a month, precisely, this bold seafarer strode off to the Ben Yakar Brothers' shipyard, sat down on the captain's seat, and delivered a string of de-tailed, stern orders, instructions for the voyage ahead. He used to tell me off sometimes: "Nu, it's time you went to the sailor, what do you look like! A pirate!" He always called shelves shlevs, even though he could manage the singular, shelf, perfectly well. He never called Cairo by its Hebrew name, Kahir, but always Cairo; I was called, in Russian, either khoroshi malchik (good boy) or ty durak (you fool); Hamburg was Gamburg; a habit was always a habitat: sleep was spat, and when he was asked how he had slept, he invariably replied "excellently!" and because he did not entirely trust the Hebrew language, he would add cheerfully in Russian "Khorosho! Ochen khorosho!!" He called a library biblioteka, a teapot chainik, the government partats, the people oilem goilem, and the ruling Labor Party, Mapai, he sometimes called geshtankt (stink) or iblaikt (decay).

     And once, a couple of years before he passed away, he spoke to me about his death: "If, heaven forbid, some young soldier dies in battle, nineteen-years-old, maybe twenty-years-old boy, nu, it is a terrible disaster but it's not a tragedy. To die at my age though—that's a tragedy! A man like me, ninety-five years old, nearly a hundred, so many years getting up every morning at five o'clock, taking a cold douche every morning every morning since nearly hundred years, even in Russia cold douche in the morning, even in Vilna, hundred years now eating every morning every morning slice of bread with salty herring, drinking glass of chai and going out every morning every morning always to stroll half an hour in the street, summer or winter, morning stroll, this is for the motion, it gets the circulation going so well! And right away after that coming home every day every day and reading a bit newspaper and meanwhile drinking another glass chai, nu, in short, it's like this, dear boy, this bakhurchik of nineteen, if he is killed, Heaven forbid, he still hasn't had time to have all sorts of regular habitats. When would he have them? But at my age it is very difficult to stop, very very difficult. To stroll in the street every morning—this is for me old habitat. And cold douche—also habitat. Even to live—it's a habitat for me, nu, what, after hundred years who can all at once suddenly change all his habitats? Not to get up anymore at five in the morning? No douche, no salt herring with bread? No newspaper no stroll no glass hot chai? Now, that's tragedy!'

 18


     IN THE YEAR 1845 the new British Consul James Finn together with his wife Elizabeth Anne arrived in Ottoman-ruled Jerusalem. They both knew Hebrew, and the consul even wrote books about the Jews, for whom he always harbored a sympathy. He belonged to the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews, although so far as is known he was not directly involved in missionary work in Jerusalem. Consul Finn and his wife believed fervently that the return of the Jewish people to their homeland would hasten the salvation of the world. More than once he protected Jews in Jerusalem from harassment by the Ottoman authorities. James Finn also believed in the need to make the Jews lead "productive" lives—he even helped Jews gain a proficiency in building work and adapt themselves to agriculture. To this end he purchased in 1853, at a cost of £250 sterling, a desolate rocky hill a few miles from Jerusalem intra muros, to the northwest of the Old City, an uninhabited and untilled piece of land that the Arabs called Karm al-Khalil, which translated means "Abraham's Vineyard." Here James Finn built his home and set up an "Industrial Plantation" that was intended to provide poor Jews with work and train them for "useful" lives. The farm extended over some ten acres, James and Elizabeth Anne Finn erected their house on the summit of the hill, and around it extended the agricultural colony, the farm buildings, and the workshops. The thick walls of the two-story house were built of dressed stone, and the ceilings were constructed in oriental style, with crossed vaults. Behind the house, around the edge of the walled garden, wells were sunk, and stables, a sheep pen, a granary, storehouses, a wine press and cellar, and an olive oil press were constructed.

     Some two hundred Jews were employed on the Industrial Plantation in Finn's farm in work such as removing stones, building walls, fencing, planting an orchard, and growing fruit and vegetables, as well as developing a small stone quarry and engaging in various building trades. In the course of time, after the consul's death, his widow set up a soap factory in which she also employed Jewish workers. Not far from Abraham's Vineyard, almost at the same time, the German Protestant missionary Johann Ludwig Schneller founded an educational institute for Christian Arab orphans fleeing from the fighting between Druse and Christians in the Lebanon mountains. It was a large property surrounded by a stone wall. The Schneller Syrian Orphanage, like Mr. and Mrs. Finn's Industrial Plantation, was based on a desire to train its inmates for a productive life in handicrafts and agriculture. Finn and Schneller, in their different ways, were both pious Christians who were moved by the poverty, suffering, and backwardness of Jews and Arabs in the Holy Land. Both believed that training the inhabitants for a productive life of work, building, and agriculture would wrest the "Orient" from the clutches of degeneration, despair, indigence, and indifference. They may indeed have believed, in their different ways, that their generosity would light the way of Jews and Muslims into the bosom of the Church.*
     In 1920 the suburb of Kerem Avraham, Abraham's Vineyard, was founded below Finn's farm: its huddled little houses were built among the plantations and orchards of the farm and progressively ate into them. The consul's house itself underwent various transformations after the death of his widow Elizabeth Anne Finn: first it was turned into a British institute for young offenders, then it became a property of the British administration, and finally an army HQ.
     Toward the end of World War II the garden of Finn's house was surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence, and captured Italian officers were imprisoned in the house and the garden. We used to creep out at nightfall to tease the POWs. The Italians greeted us with cries of Bambino! Bambino! Buon giorno bambino! and we responded by shrieking Bambino! Bambino! Il Duce morte! Finito il Duce! Sometimes we shouted Viva Pinocchio! and from beyond the fences and the barriers of language, war, and Fascism there always echoed like the second half of some ancient slogan the cry: Gepetto! Gepetto! Viva Gepetto!
     In exchange for the sweets, peanuts, oranges, and biscuits that we threw to them over the barbed-wire fence, as though to monkeys in the zoo, some of them passed us Italian stamps or displayed to us from a distance family photographs with smiling women and tiny children stuffed into suits, children with ties, children with jackets, children of our age with perfectly combed dark hair and a forelock shining with brilliantine.
     One of the POWs once showed me, from behind the wire, in return for an Alma chewing gum in a yellow wrapper, a photo of a plump woman wearing nothing but stockings and a suspender belt. I stood staring, for a moment, wide-eyed and struck dumb with horror, as though someone in the middle of the synagogue on the Day of Atonement had suddenly stood up and shouted out the Ineffable Name. Then I spun around and fled, terrified, sobbing, hardly seeing where I was running. I was six or seven at the time, and I ran as though there were wolves on my tail, I ran and ran and did not stop fleeing from that picture until I was eleven and a half or so.
     *Based on the Hebrew book Architecture in Jerusalem: European Christian Building outside the Walls, 1855-1918, by David Kroyanker (Keter: Jerusalem, 1987), pp. 419-21.

     After the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 the Finns' house was used successively by the Home Guard, the Border Patrol, the Civil Defense, and the paramilitary youth movement, before becoming a religious Jewish girls' school by the name of Beit Bracha. I occasionally stroll around Kerem Avraham, turning from Geula Street, which has been renamed Malkei Israel Street, into Malachi Street, then left into Zechariah Street, walk up and down Amos Street a few times, then up to the top end of Obadiah Street, where I stand at the entrance to Consul Finn's house for a few minutes and gaze at the house. The old house has shrunk over the years, as though its head has been pushed down into its shoulders with an ax blow. It has been Judaized. The trees and shrubs have been dug up, and the whole area of the garden has been asphalted over. Pinocchio and Gepetto have vanished. The paramilitary youth movement has also disappeared without a trace. The old frame of a broken sukkah left over from the last Sukkot festival stands in the front yard. There are sometimes a few women wearing snoods and dark dresses standing at the gate; they stop talking when I look at them. They do not look back at me. They start whispering as I move away.
    


     When he arrived in Jerusalem in 1933, my father registered for an MA at the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus. At first he lived with his parents in the dark little apartment in Kerem Avraham, in Amos Street, about two hundred yards east of Consul Finn's house. Then his parents moved to another apartment. A couple named Zarchi moved into the Amos Street apartment, but that young student, whose parents pinned such high hopes on him, paid rent to go on living in his room, which had its own entrance through the veranda.

     Kerem Avraham was still a new district: most of the streets were un-paved, and the vestiges of the vineyard that gave it its name were still visible in the gardens of the new houses, in the form of vines and pomegranate bushes, fig and mulberry trees, that whispered to each other whenever there was a breeze. At the beginning of summer, when the windows were opened, the smell of greenery flooded the tiny rooms. From the rooftops and at the ends of the dusty streets you could catch sight of the hills that surrounded Jerusalem.
     One after the other, simple square stone houses sprang up, two- or three-story buildings that were divided up into large numbers of cramped apartments each with two tiny rooms. The gardens and verandas had iron railings that soon rusted. The wrought-iron gates incorporated a six-pointed star or the word ZION. Gradually dark cypresses and pines supplanted the pomegranates and vines. Here and there, pomegranates grew wild, but the children snuffed them out before the fruit had a chance to ripen. Among the untended trees and the bright outcrops of rock in the gardens some people planted oleander or geranium bushes, but the garden beds were soon forgotten, as washing lines were strung out over them and they were trampled underfoot or filled with thistles and broken glass. If they did not die of thirst, the oleanders and geraniums grew wild, like scrub. All sorts of storehouses were erected in the gardens, sheds, corrugated-iron shacks, improvised huts made from the planks of the packing cases in which the residents brought their belongings here, as though they were trying to create a replica of the shtetl in Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, or Lithuania.
     Some fixed an empty olive can to a pole, set it up as a dovecote, and waited for the doves to come—until they gave up hope. Here and there somebody tried to keep a few hens, someone else tended a little vegetable patch, with radishes, onions, cauliflower, parsley. Most of them longed to get out of here and move somewhere more cultured, like Re-havia, Kiryat Shmuel, Talpiot, or Beit Hakerem. All of them tried hard to believe that the bad days would soon be over, the Hebrew state would be established, and everything would change for the better: surely their cup of sorrow was full to overflowing? Shneour Zalman Rubashov, who later changed his name to Zalman Shazar and was elected President of Israel, wrote something like this in a newspaper at that time: "When the free Hebrew state finally arises, nothing will be the same as it was! Even love will not be what it was before!"
     Meanwhile the first children were born in Kerem Avraham, and it was almost impossible to explain to them where their parents had come from, or why they had come, or what it was that they were all waiting for. The people who lived in Kerem Avraham were minor bureaucrats in the Jewish Agency, or teachers, nurses, writers, drivers, shorthand typists, world reformers, translators, shop assistants, theorists, librarians, bank tellers or cinema ticket sellers, ideologues, small shopkeepers, lonely old bachelors who lived on their meager savings. By eight o'clock in the evening the grilles on the balconies were closed, the apartments were locked, shutters were barred, and only the streetlamp cast a gloomy yellow puddle on the corner of the empty street. At night you could hear the piercing shrieks of night birds, the barking of distant dogs, stray shots, the wind in the trees of the orchard: for at nightfall Kerem Avra-ham went back to being a vineyard. Fig trees, mulberries and olives, apple trees, vines and pomegranates rustled their leaves in every garden. The stone walls reflected the moonlight back up into the branches in a pale, skeletal glow.
    


     Amos Street, in one or two pictures in my father's photograph album, looks like an unfinished sketch for a street. Square stone buildings with iron shutters and iron grilles on the verandas. Here and there on the windowsills pale geraniums bloom in pots between the sealed jars of cu-cumbers or peppers pickling in garlic and dill. In the center between the buildings there is no road yet but only a temporary building site, a dusty track scattered with building materials, gravel, piles of half-finished stones, sacks of cement, metal drums, floor tiles, heaps of sand, coils of wire for fencing, a mound of wooden scaffolding. Some spiny prosopis still sprout among the mess of building materials, covered with whitish dust. Stonemasons sit on the ground in the middle of the track, barefoot, naked from the waist up, with cloths draped around their heads, in baggy trousers, the sound of their hammers striking the chisels and cutting grooves in the stones filling the air with the drumbeats of some strange, stubborn atonal music. Hoarse shouts ring out from time to time from the end of the street, "Ba-rud! Ba-rud" (explosion), followed by the thunderous haul of shattered stones.

     In another, formal picture, as though taken before a party, there stands right in the center of Amos Street, in the midst of all this commotion, a rectangular black hearse-like automobile. A taxi or a hired car? Impossible to tell from the photo. It is a gleaming, polished car of the 1920s, with thin tires like a motorcycle, and metal spokes, and a strip of chrome running along the edge of the hood. The hood has louvers on the side to let in the air, and on the tip of its nose the shiny chrome radiator cap protrudes like a pimple. In front, two round headlights hang from a sort of silvery bar, and the headlights too are silvery and gleam in the sun.
     By the side of this magnificent automobile the camera has caught Alexander Klausner, General Agent, resplendent in a cream-colored tropical suit and a tie, with a panama hat on his head, looking rather like Errol Flynn in a film about European aristocrats in equatorial Africa or in Burma. At his side, stronger, taller, and wider than he, stands the imposing figure of his elegant wife Shlomit, his cousin and mistress, a grande dame, stately as a battleship, in a short-sleeved summer frock, wearing a necklace and a splendid fedora hat with muslin veil set at a precise angle on her perfectly coiffed hairdo, and clutching a parasol. Their son Lonia, Lionichka, is standing at their side like a nervous bridegroom on his wedding day. He looks faintly comical, with his mouth slightly open, his round spectacles slipping down his nose, his shoulders drooping, confined, and almost mummified in a tight suit, and a stiff black hat that looks as though it has been forced onto his head: it comes halfway down his forehead like an upturned pudding basin, and gives the impression that only his overlarge ears prevent it from slipping down to his chin and swallowing up the rest of his head.
     What was the solemn event for which the three of them had dressed up in their finery and ordered a special limousine? There is no way of knowing. The date, to judge by other photographs on the same page of the album, is 1934, the year after they arrived in the country, when they all still lived in the Zarchis' apartment on Amos Street. I can make out the number of the automobile without difficulty, M 1651. My father would have been twenty-four, but in the picture he looks like a fifteen-year-old disguised as a respectable middle-aged gentleman.
    


     When they first arrived from Vilna, all three Klausners lived for a year or so in the two-and-a-half-room apartment in Amos Street. Then Grandma and Grandpa found themselves a little place to rent, with a single room plus a tiny room that served as Grandpa's "den," his safe haven from his wife's fits of rage and from the hygienic scourge of her war on germs. The new apartment was the one in Prague Lane, between Isaiah Street and Chancellor Street, now renamed Strauss Street.

     The front room in the old apartment on Amos Street now became my father's student sitting room. Here he installed his first bookcase, containing the books he had brought with him from his student days in Vilna; here stood the old, spindly-legged plywood table that served as his desk, here he hung his clothes behind a curtain that concealed the packing case that did duty as his wardrobe. Here he invited his friends for intellectual conversations about the meaning of life, literature, the world, and local politics.
     In one photograph, my father sits comfortably behind his desk, thin, young, and stern, his hair combed back, wearing those serious, black-framed spectacles and a long-sleeved white shirt. He is sitting in a relaxed pose, at an angle to the desk, with his legs crossed. Behind him is a double window, one half of which is open inward, but the shutters are still closed so that only thin fingers of light penetrate between the slats. In the picture my father is deeply engrossed in a big book that he is holding up in front of him. On the desk in front of him another book lies open, and there is something else that looks like an alarm clock with its back to the camera, a round tin clock with little slanting legs. To Father's left stands a small bookcase laden with books, one shelf bowing under the weight of the thick tomes it is carrying, foreign books apparently that have come from Vilna and are clearly feeling rather cramped, warm, and uncomfortable here.
     On the wall above the bookcase hangs a framed photograph of Uncle Joseph, looking authoritative and magnificent, almost prophetic with his white goatee and thinning hair, as though he were peering down from a great height on my father and fixing him with a watchful eye, to make sure he does not neglect his studies, or let himself be distracted by the dubious delights of student life, or that he doesn't forget the historic condition of the Jewish nation or the hopes of generations, or—heaven forbid!—underestimate those little details out of which, after all, the big picture is made up.
     Hanging on a nail underneath Uncle Joseph is the collecting box of the Jewish National Fund, painted with a thick Star of David. My father looks relaxed and pleased with himself, but as serious and resolute as a monk: he is taking the weight of the open book on his left hand, while his right hand rests on the pages to the right, the pages he has already read, from which we may deduce that it is a Hebrew book, read from right to left. At the place where his hand emerges from the sleeve of his white shirt I can see the thick black hair that covered his arms from elbow to knuckles.
     My father looks like a young man who knows what his duty is and intends to do it come what may. He is determined to follow in the footsteps of his famous uncle and his elder brother. Out there, beyond the closed shutters, workmen are digging a trench under the dusty roadway to lay pipes. Somewhere in the cellar of some old Jewish building in the winding alleyways of Sha'arei Hesed or Nahalat Shiv'a the youths of the Jerusalem Hagganah are training in secret, dismantling and reassembling an ancient illicit Parabellum pistol. On the hilly roads that wind among menacing Arab villages, Egged bus drivers and Tnuva van drivers are steering their vehicles, their hands strong and suntanned on the wheel. In the wadis that go down to the Judaean desert, young Hebrew scouts in khaki shorts and khaki socks, with military belts and white kaffiyehs, learn to recognize with their feet the secret pathways of the Fatherland. In Galilee and the Plains, in the Beth Shean Valley and the Valley of Jezreel, in the Sharon and the Hefer Valley, in the Judaean lowlands, the Negev and the wilderness around the Dead Sea, pioneers are tilling the land, muscular, silent, brave, and bronzed. And meanwhile he, the earnest student from Vilna, plows his own furrow here.
     One fine day he too would be a professor on Mount Scopus, he would help push back the frontiers of knowledge and drain the swamps of exile in the people's hearts. Just as the pioneers in Galilee and the Valleys made the desert places bloom, so he too would labor with all his strength, with enthusiasm and dedication, to plow the furrows of the national spirit and make the new Hebrew culture bloom. The picture says it all.

 19


     EVERY MORNING Yehuda Arieh Klausner took the No. 9 bus from the stop in Geula Street via the Bukharian Quarter, Prophet Samuel Street, Simeon the Righteous Street, the American Colony, and the Sheikh Jarrah district to the university buildings on Mount Scopus, where he diligently pursued his MA studies. He attended lectures on history by Professor Richard Michael Kobner, who never succeeded in learning Hebrew; Semitic linguistics by Professor Hans Jacob Polotsky; Biblical studies from Professor Umberto Moshe David Cassuto; and Hebrew literature from Uncle Joseph, alias Professor Dr. Joseph Klausner, the author of Judaism and Humanism.

     While Uncle Joseph definitely encouraged my father, who was one of his star pupils, he never chose him, when the time came, as a teaching assistant, so as not give malicious tongues anything to wag about. So important was it for Professor Klausner to avoid aspersions on his good name that he may have behaved unfairly to his brother's son, his own flesh and blood.
     On the front page of one of his books the childless uncle inscribed the following words: "To my beloved Yehuda Arieh, my nephew who is as dear to me as a son, from his uncle Joseph who loves him like his own soul." Father once quipped bitterly: "If only we had not been related, if only he loved me a little less, who knows, I might have been a lecturer in the literature department by now instead of a librarian."
     All those years it was like a running sore in my father's soul, because he really deserved to be a professor like his uncle and his brother David, the one who had taught literature in Vilna and died of it. My father was amazingly knowledgeable, an excellent student with a prodigious memory, an expert in world literature as well as Hebrew literature, who was at home in many languages, utterly familiar with the Tosefta, the Midrashic literature, the religious poetry of the Jews of Spain, as well as Homer, Ovid, Babylonian poetry, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Adam Mickiewicz, as hard-working as a honey bee, as straight as a die, a gifted teacher who could give a simple and accurate explanation of the barbarian invasions, Crime and Punishment, the workings of a submarine, or the solar system. Yet he never earned the chance to stand up before a class or to have pupils of his own, but ended his days as a librarian and bibliographer who wrote three or four scholarly books and contributed a few entries to the Hebrew Encyclopedia, mainly on comparative and Polish literature.
     In 1936 he was found a modest post in the newspaper department of the National Library, where he worked for twenty years or so, first on Mount Scopus and after 1948 in the Terra Sancta Building, beginning as a simple librarian and eventually rising to deputy to the head of the department, Dr. Pfeffermann. In a Jerusalem that was full of immigrants from Poland and Russia and refugees from Hitler, among them distinguished luminaries from famous universities, there were more lecturers and scholars than students.
     In the late 1950s, after receiving his doctorate from London University, my father tried unsuccessfully to secure a foothold in the literature department in Jerusalem as an outside lecturer. Professor Klausner, in his day, had been afraid of what people would say if he employed his own nephew. Klausner was succeeded as professor by the poet Shimon Halkin, who attempted to make a fresh start by eliminating the heritage, the methods, and the very smell of Klausner and certainly did not want to take on Klausner's nephew. In the early 1960s Father tried his luck at the newly opened Tel Aviv University, but he was not welcome there either.
    


     In the last year of his life he negotiated for a literature post in the academic institute that was being set up in Beer Sheva and was eventually to become Ben Gurion University. Sixteen years after my father's death I myself became an adjunct professor of literature at Ben Gurion University; a year or two later I was made a full professor, and eventually I was appointed to the Agnon Chair. In time I received generous invitations from both Jerusalem and Tel Aviv Universities to be a full professor of literature, I, who am neither an expert nor a scholar nor a mover of mountains, who have never had any talent for research and whose mind always turns cloudy at the sight of a footnote.* My father's little finger was more professorial than a dozen "parachuted in" professors like me.

    


     The Zarchis' apartment had two and a half small rooms, and was on the ground floor of a three-story building. The rear part of the apartment was occupied by Israel Zarchi, his wife Esther, and his two aged parents. The front room, where my father lived, first with his parents, then on his own, and eventually with my mother, had its own door, leading onto the veranda, then down a few steps into the narrow front garden, and out into Amos Street, which was still no more than a dusty track, with no roadway or pavements, still scattered with heaps of building materials and dismantled scaffolding among which hunger-weary cats roamed and a few doves pecked. Three or four times a day a cart drawn by a donkey or mule came down the road, a cart bearing long iron rods for building, or the paraffin seller's cart, the iceman's cart, the milkman's cart, the cart of the rag-and-bone man, whose hoarse cry "alte sachen"always made my blood freeze: all the years of my childhood I imagined that I was being warned against illness, old age, and death, which though still distant from me were gradually and inexorably approaching, creeping secretly like a viper through the tangle of dark vegetation, ready to strike me from behind. The Yiddish cry alte sachen sounded to me just like the Hebrew words al-tezaken, "do not age." To this day, the cry sends a cold shiver up my spine.

     *My father's books are rich in footnotes. As for me, I have only used them freely in one book, The Silence of Heaven: Agnons Tear of G-d (Jerusalem: Keter, 1993; Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 2000). I introduced my father into note 92 on page 192 of the Hebrew edtion of that book. That is to say, I referred the reader to his book The Novella in Hebrew Literature. In writing that note, some twenty years after his death, I hoped to afford him a small pleasure yet at the same time feared that instead of being pleased he might be waving an admonishing finger at me.

     Swallows nested in the fruit trees in the gardens, while lizards, geckos, and scorpions crept in and out of the clefts of the rocks. Occasionally we even saw a tortoise. The children burrowed under the fences, creating a network of shortcuts that spread through the backyards of the neighborhood, or climbed up on the flat rooftops to watch the British soldiers in the Schneller Barracks or to look out at the distant Arab villages on the surrounding hillsides: Isawiya, Shuafat, Beit Iksa, Lifta, Nebi Samwil.
    


     Today the name of Israel Zarchi is almost forgotten, but in those days he was a prolific young writer whose books sold many copies. He was about my father's age, but by 1937, when he was twenty-eight, he had published no fewer than three books. I revered him because I was told that he was not like other writers: the whole of Jerusalem wrote scholarly books, put together from notes, from other books, from booklists, dictionaries, weighty foreign tomes, and ink-stained index cards, but Mr. Zarchi wrote books "out of his own head." (My father used to say: "If you steal from one book, you are condemned as a plagiarist, but if you steal from ten books, you are considered a scholar, and if you steal from thirty or forty books, a distinguished scholar.")

     On winter evenings a few members of my parents' circle used to get together sometimes at our place or at the Zarchis' in the building across the road: Hayim and Hannah Toren, Shmuel Werses, the Breimans, flamboyant Mr. Sharon-Shvadron, who was a great talker, Mr. Haim Schwarzbaum the red-headed folklorist, Israel Hanani, who worked at the Jewish Agency, and his wife Esther Hananit. They arrived after supper, at seven or half past, and left at half past nine, which was considered a late hour. In between, they drank scalding tea, nibbled honey cake or fresh fruit, discussed with well-bred anger all kinds of topics that I could not understand; but I knew that when the time came, I would understand them, I would participate in the discussions and would produce decisive arguments that they had not thought of. I might even manage to surprise them, I might end up writing books out of my own head like Mr. Zarchi, or collections of poems like Bialik and Grandpa Alexander and Levin Kipnis and Dr. Saul Tchernikhowsky, the doctor whose smell I shall never forget.
     The Zarchis were not only Father's former landL-rds but also dear friends, despite the regular arguments between my Revisionist father and Zarchi the "Red": my father loved to talk and explain, and Zarchi liked to listen. My mother would interpose a quiet sentence or two from time to time. Esther Zarchi, for her part, tended to ask questions, and my father enjoyed giving her extensively detailed replies. Israel Zarchi would turn to my mother sometimes, with downcast eyes, and ask her opinion as though begging her in coded language to take his side in the argument: my mother knew how to cast a new light on everything. She did this with a few brief words, after which the conversation sometimes took on a pleasant, relaxed tone, a new calm, a cautious or hesitant note entered the argument, until after a while tempers became inflamed again and voices were once more raised in a civilized fury, which simmered with exclamation marks.
    


     In 1947 the Tel Aviv publisher Joshua Chachik brought out my father's first book, The Novella in Hebrew Literature, from Its Origins to the End ofthe Haskalah. This book was based on my father's MA dissertation. The title page declared that the book had been awarded the Klausner Prize of Tel Aviv Municipality and was published with the assistance of the Municipality and that of the Zippora Klausner Memorial Fund. Professor Dr. Joseph Klausner in person contributed a foreword:

     It is a twofold pleasure for me to see the publication of a Hebrew book on the novella that was submitted to me in my capacity as Professor of Literature in our one and only Hebrew University as a final dissertation in Modern Hebrew Literature by my long-standing pupil, my nephew Yehuda Arieh Klausner. This is no ordinary work ... It is a comprehensive and all-embracing study ... Even the style of the book is both rich and lucid, and is in keeping with the important subject matter ... I am unable therefore to forbear from rejoicing ... The Talmud says "Pupils are like sons"...

     and on a separate page, after the title page, my father dedicated his book to the memory of his brother David:

     To my first teacher of literary history—
 my only brother
 David
 whom I lost in the darkness of exile.
 Where art thou?

     For ten days or a fortnight, as soon as my father got home from work at the library on Mount Scopus, he hurried to the local post office at the eastern end of Geula Street, opposite the entrance to Mea Shearim, eagerly awaiting copies of his first book, which he had been informed had been published and which someone or other had seen in a bookshop in Tel Aviv. So every day he rushed to the post office, and every day he returned empty-handed, and every day he promised himself that if the parcel from Mr. Gruber at Sinai Printers had not arrived by the next day, he would definitely go to the pharmacy and telephone forcefully to Mr. Chachik in Tel Aviv: This is simply unacceptable! If the books did not arrive by Sunday, by the middle of the week, by Friday at the latest—but the parcel did arrive, not by mail but by personal delivery, brought to our home by a smiling Yemenite girl, not from Tel Aviv but straight from Sinai Printers (Jerusalem, tel. no. 2892).
     The parcel contained five copies of The Novella in Hebrew Literature, hot from the press, virginal, wrapped in several layers of good-quality white paper (on which the proofs of some picture book had been printed) and tied up with string. Father thanked the girl, and despite his excitement did not forget to give her a shilling (a handsome sum in those days, sufficient for a vegetarian meal at the Tnuva Restaurant). Then he asked me and my mother to step into his study to be with him while he opened the packet.
     I remember how my father mastered his trembling enthusiasm, and did not forcibly snap the string holding the parcel together or even cut it with scissors but—I shall never forget this—undid the strong knots, one after another, with infinite patience, making alternate use of his strong fingernails, the tip of his paper knife, and the point of a bent paper clip. When he had finished, he did not pounce on his new book but slowly wound up the string, removed the wrapping of glossy paper, touched the jacket of the uppermost copy lightly with his fingertips, like a shy lover, raised it gently to his face, ruffled the pages a little, closed his eyes and sniffed them, inhaling deeply the fresh printing smells, the pleasure of new paper, the delightful, intoxicating odor of glue. Only then did he start to leaf through his book, peering first at the index, scrutinizing the list of addenda and corrigenda, reading and rereading Uncle Joseph's foreword and his own preface, lingering on the title page, caressing the cover again, then, alarmed that my mother might be secretly making fun of him, he said apologetically:
     "A new book fresh from the press, a first book, it's as though I've just had another baby."
     "When it's time to change its nappy," my mother replied, "I expect you'll call me."
     So saying, she turned and left the room, but she returned a few moments later carrying a bottle of sweet, sacramental Tokay and three tiny liqueur glasses, saying that we must drink the health of Father's first book. She poured some wine for the two of them and a little drop for me, she may even have kissed him on the forehead, while he stroked her hair.
     That evening my mother spread a white cloth on the kitchen table, as though it were Sabbath or a festival, and served up Father's favorite dish, hot borscht with an iceberg of pure white cream floating in it. She congratulated him. Grandpa and Grandma joined us to share our modest celebration, and Grandma remarked to my mother that the borscht was really very nice and almost tasty, but that—G-d preserve her from giving advice, but it was well known, every little girl knew, even Gentile women who cooked in Jewish homes knew, that borscht should be sour and just slightly sweet, certainly not sweet and just slightly sour, the way the Poles make it, because they sweeten everything, without rhyme or reason, and if you didn't watch them, they would drown salt herring in sugar, or even put jam on chreyn (horseradish sauce).
     Mother, for her part, thanked Grandma for sharing her expertise with us and promised that in the future she would serve her only bitter and sour food, as that would be sure to suit her. As for Father, he was too pleased to notice such pinpricks. He presented one inscribed copy to his parents, another he gave to Uncle Joseph, a third to his dear friends Esther and Israel Zarchi, another to I cannot remember whom, and the last copy he kept in his library, on a prominent shelf, snuggled up close to the works of his uncle Professor Joseph Klausner.
     Father's happiness lasted for three or four days, and then his face fell. Just as he had rushed to the post office every day before the packet arrived, so he now rushed every day to Achiasaph's bookshop in King George V Avenue, where three copies of The Novella were displayed for sale. The next day the same three copies were there, not one of them had been purchased. And the same the next day, and the day after that.
     "You," Father said with a sad smile to his friend Israel Zarchi, "write a new novel every six months, and instantly all the pretty girls snatch you off the shelves and take you straight to bed with them, while we scholars, we wear ourselves out for years on end checking every detail, verifying every quotation, spending a week on a single footnote, and who bothers to read us? If we're lucky, two or three fellow prisoners in our own discipline read our books before they tear us to shreds. Sometimes not even that. We are simply ignored."
     A week passed, and none of the three copies at Achiasaph's was sold. Father no longer spoke of his sorrow, but it filled the apartment like a smell. He no longer hummed popular songs out of tune while he shaved or washed the dishes. He no longer told me by heart of the doings of Gilgamesh or the adventures of Captain Nemo or Engineer Cyrus Smith in The Mysterious Island, but immersed himself furiously in the papers and reference books scattered on his desk, from which his next learned book would be born.
     And then suddenly, a couple of days later, on Friday evening, he came home beaming happily and all atremble like a boy who has just been kissed in front of everyone by the prettiest girl in the class. "They're sold! They've all been sold! All in one day! Not one copy sold! Not two copies sold! All three sold! The whole lot! My book is sold out—Shakhna Achiasaph is going to order more copies from Chachik in Tel Aviv! He's ordered them already! This morning! By telephone! Not three copies, another five! And he thinks that's not going to be the end of the story!"
     My mother left the room again and came back with the sickly sweet Tokay and the three tiny liqueur glasses. This time, though, she did not bother with the borscht or the white tablecloth. Instead she suggested the two of them go out to the Edison Cinema the next evening to the early showing of a famous film starring Greta Garbo, whom they both admired.
     I was left with the novelist Zarchi and his wife, to have my supper there and behave myself until they got back, at nine or half past. Behave yourself, you hear?! Don't let us hear the tiniest complaint about you! When they set the table, don't forget to offer to help. After supper, but only once everyone has got up from the table, clear away your dishes and put them carefully on the draining board. Carefully, you hear?! Don't you break anything there. And take a dishcloth as at home and wipe the oilcloth nicely when the table's cleared. And only speak when you're spoken to. If Mr. Zarchi is working, just find yourself a toy or a book and sit as quietly as a mouse! And if heaven forbid Mrs. Zarchi complains of a headache again, don't bother her with anything. Anything, you hear?!
     And so they went off. Mrs. Zarchi may have shut herself up in the other room, or gone to visit a neighbor, and Mr. Zarchi suggested I go into his study, which, as in our apartment, was also the bedroom and the sitting room and everything. That was the room that had once been my father's room when he was a student, that was also my parents' room and where apparently I was conceived, since they lived there from their wedding up to a month before I was born.
     Mr. Zarchi sat me down on the sofa and talked to me for a bit, I don't remember what about, but I shall never forget how I suddenly noticed on the little coffee table by the sofa no fewer than four identical copies of The Novella in Hebrew Literature, one on top of the other, as in a shop, one copy that I knew Father had given to Mr. Zarchi with an inscription, and three more whose existence I just couldn't understand, and it was on the tip of my tongue to ask Mr. Zarchi, but at the last moment I remembered the three copies that had just been bought today, at long last, in Achiasaph's bookshop, and I felt a rush of gratitude inside me that almost brought tears to my eyes. Mr. Zarchi saw that I had noticed them and he did not smile, but shot me a sidelong glance through half-closed eyes, as though he were silently accepting me into his band of conspirators, and without saying a word he leaned over, picked up three of the four copies on the coffee table, and secreted them in a drawer of his desk. I too held my peace, and said nothing either to him or to my parents. I did not tell a soul until after Zarchi died in his prime and after my father's death, I did not tell anyone except, many years later, his daughter Nurit Zarchi, who did not seem overly impressed by what I had told her.
     I count two or three writers among my best friends, friends who have been close to me and dear to me for decades, yet I am not certain that I could do for one of them what Israel Zarchi did for my father. Who can say if such a generous ruse would have even occurred to me. After all, he, like everyone else in those days, lived a hand-to-mouth existence, and the three copies of The Novella in Hebrew Literature must have cost him at least the price of some much-needed clothes.
     Mr. Zarchi left the room and came back with a cup of warm cocoa without skin on it, because he remembered from his visits to our apartment that that was what I drank in the evening. I thanked him as I had been told to, politely, and I really wanted to say something else, but I could not, and so I just sat there on the sofa in his room not uttering a peep, so as not to distract him from his work, even though in fact he did not work that evening but just skimmed backward and forward through the newspaper until my parents returned from the cinema, thanked the Zarchis, and hurriedly said good-night and took me home, because it was very late and I had to brush my teeth and go straight to bed.
    


     That must have been the same room where, one evening some years earlier, in 1936, my father had first brought home a certain reserved, very pretty student, with olive skin and black eyes, who spoke little but whose very presence caused men to talk and talk.

     She had left Prague University a few months previously and come to Jerusalem to study history and philosophy at the university on Mount Scopus. I do not know how or when or where Arieh Klausner met Fania Mussman, who was registered here by her Hebrew name, Rivka, although on some documents she is called Zippora and in one place she is registered as Feiga, but her family and her girlfriends always called her Fania.
     He loved talking, explaining, analyzing, and she knew how to listen and hear even between the lines. He was very erudite, and she was sharp-eyed and something of a mind reader. He was a straightforward, decent, hard-working perfectionist, while she always understood why someone who clung firmly to a particular view did so, and why someone else who furiously opposed him felt such a powerful need to argue. Clothes interested her only as a peephole into their wearers' inner selves. When she was sitting in a friend's home, she always cast an appraising glance at the upholstery, the curtains, the sofas, the souvenirs on the window ledge, and the knicknacks on the bookshelf, while everyone else was busy talking: as though she were on a spying mission. People's secrets always fascinated her, but when there was gossip going on, she mostly listened with her faint smile, that hesitant smile that looked as though it was about to snuff itself out, and said nothing. She was often silent. But whenever she broke her silence and spoke a few sentences, the conversation was never the same as it had been before.
     When Father spoke to her, there was sometimes something in his voice that suggested a mixture of timidity, distance, affection, respect, and fear. As though he had a fortune-teller living in his home under an assumed identity. Or a clairvoyant.

 20


     THERE WERE three wicker stools around our kitchen table with its flower-patterned oilcloth. The kitchen itself was small, low-ceilinged, and dark; its floor had sunk a little, its walls were sooty from the paraffin cooker and the Primus stove, and its one little window looked out on the basement yard surrounded by gray concrete walls. Sometimes, when my father had gone off to work, I used to sit on his stool so as to be opposite my mother, and she told me stories while she peeled and sliced vegetables or sorted lentils, picking out the black ones and putting them in a saucer. Later I would feed these to the birds.

     My mother's stories were strange: they were nothing like the stories that were told in other homes at that time, or the stories I told my own children, but were veiled in a kind of mist, as though they did not begin at the beginning or end at the end but emerged from the undergrowth, appeared for a while, arousing alienation or pangs of fear, moved in front of me for a few moments like distorted shadows on the wall, amazed me, sometimes sent shivers up my spine, and slunk back to the forest they had come from before I knew what had happened. I can remember some of my mother's stories almost word for word to this day. For instance, there's the one about the very old man, Alleluyev:
     Once upon a time, beyond the high mountains, beyond deep rivers and desolate steppes, there was a tiny, out-of-the-way village, with tumbledown huts. At the edge of this village, in a dark fir forest, lived a poor, dumb, blind man. He lived all on his own, without any family or friends, and his name was Alleluyev. Old Alleluyev was older than the oldest men in the village, older than the oldest men in the valley or the steppe. He was not just old, he was ancient. So old was he that moss had begun to grow on his bent back. Instead of hair, black mushrooms grew on his head, and instead of cheeks he had hollows where lichens spread. Brown roots had begun to sprout from his feet, and glowing fireflies had settled in his sunken eyesockets. This old Alleluyev was older than the forest, older than the snow, older than Time himself. One day a rumor spread that in the depths of his hut, whose shutters had never been opened, lodged another old man, Cherni-chortyn, who was much, much older than old Alleluyev, and even blinder and poorer and more silent, more bent, deafer, more motionless, and worn as smooth as a Tartar coin. They said in the village, on the long winter nights, that old Alleluyev looked after the ancient Chernichortyn, washing his wounds, setting the table for him, and making his bed, feeding him on berries from the forest washed down with well water or melted snow, and sometimes at night he sang to him, as one sings to a baby: Lula, lula, lula, don't be scared my treasure, lula, lula, lula, don't tremble my darling. And so they slept, the two of them, snuggled up together, the old man and the even older man, while outside there was nothing but wind and snow. Ifthey have not been eaten by wolves, they are still living there, the two of them, to this day, in their miserable hut, while the wolf howls in the forest and the wind roars in the chimney.

     Alone in bed before I fell asleep, trembling with fear and excitement, I whispered to myself over and over again the words "old," "ancient," "older then Time himself." I closed my eyes and saw in my mind's eye, with delicious dread, the moss slowly spreading over the old man's back, the black mushrooms and lichens, and those greedy brown wormlike roots growing in the darkness. I tried to visualize behind my closed eyes the meaning of"worn as smooth as a Tartar coin." And so I swathed myself in sleep to the sound of the wind shrieking in the chimney, a wind that could never come near our home, sounds I had never heard, the chimney I had never seen except in the pictures in children's books where every house had a tiled roof and a chimney.
    


     I had no brothers or sisters, my parents could hardly afford to buy me any toys or games, and television and computers had not yet been born. I spent my whole childhood in Kerem Avraham in Jerusalem, but where I really lived was on the edge of the forest, by the huts, the steppes, the meadows, the snow in my mother's stories, and in the illustrated books that piled up on my low bedside table: I was in the east, but my heart was in the farthermost west. Or the "farthermost north," as it said in those books. I wandered dizzily through virtual forests, forests of words, huts of words, meadows of words. The reality of the words thrust aside the suffocating backyards, the corrugated iron spread on top of stone houses, balconies laden with washtubs and washing lines. What surrounded me did not count. All that counted was made of words.

     We had elderly neighbors in Amos Street, but their appearance as they walked slowly, painfully past our house was only a pale, sad, clumsy imitation of the spine-chilling reality of old, ancient Alleluyev, just as the Tel Arza woods were a miserable, amateurish sketch of the impenetrable, primeval forest. My mother's lentils were a disappointing reminder of the mushrooms and forest fruits, the blackberries and blueberries, in the stories she told me. The whole of reality was just a vain attempt to imitate the world of words. Here is the story my mother told me about the woman and the blacksmiths, not choosing her words but laying bare before my eyes with no thought for my tender age the full extent of the faraway many-colored provinces of language, where few children's feet had trodden before, the haunt of linguistic birds of paradise:
     Many years ago, in a peaceful little town in the Land of Enularia, in the region of the innermost valleys, there lived three brothers who were blacksmiths, Misha, Alyosha, and Antosha. They were all thickset, hairy, bearlike men. All the winter long they slept, and only when summer came did they forge plows, shoe horses, whet knives, sharpen blades, and hammer out metal tools. One day Misha, the eldest brother, arose and went to the region of Troshiban. He was gone for many a day, and when he returned he was not alone, but with him he brought a laughing girlish woman named Tatiana, Tanya, or Tanichka. She was a beautiful woman, no one more beautiful than she was to be found in all the width and breadth of Enularia. Misha's two younger brothers ground their teeth and kept silent all day long. If ever one of them looked at her, this Tanichka would laugh her rippling laugh until the man was forced to lower his gaze. Or if she looked at one of them, then the brother she had chosen to look at trembled and lowered his eyes. There was only a single big room in the brothers' hut, and in this room dwelt Misha and Tanichka and the furnace and the bellows and the anvil and the wild brother Alyosha and the silent brother Antosha surrounded by heavy iron hammers and axes and chisels and poles and chains and coils of metal. So it befell that one day Misha was pushed into the furnace and Alyosha took Tanichka to himself. For seven weeks the beautiful Tanichka was the bride of the wild brother Alyosha until the heavy hammer fell on him and flattened his skull, and Antosha the silent brother buried his brother and took his place. When seven weeks had passed as the two ofthem were eating a mushroom pie, Antosha suddenly turned pale and went blue in the face, and he choked and died. And from that day on, young wandering blacksmiths from all the length and breadth ofEnularia come and stay in that hut, but not one of them has dared to stay there for seven whole weeks. One might stay for a week, another for a couple of nights. And what of Tanya? Well, every blacksmith throughout the length and breadth of Enularia knew that Tanichka loved smiths who came for a week, smiths who came for a few days, smiths who stayed for a night and a day, half-naked they labored for her, farrowing, hammering, and forging, but she could never abide a smith who forgot to get up and leave. A week or two would do, but seven weeks? How could they?

     Herz and Sarah Mussman, who lived in the early nineteenth century in the small village of Trope or Tripe near the town of Rovno in Ukraine, had a fine son named Ephraim. From his childhood on, so the family story ran,* this Ephraim loved playing with wheels and running water. When Ephraim Mussman was thirteen years old, twenty days after his bar mitzvah, some more guests were invited and entertained, and this time Ephraim was betrothed to a twelve-year-old girl named Haya-Duba: in those days boys were married to girls on paper to prevent their being carried off to serve in the Tsar's army and never being seen again.

     My aunt Haya Shapiro (who was named after her grandmother, the child bride) told me many years ago about what happened at this wedding. After the ceremony and the festive meal, which took place in the late afternoon opposite the rabbi's house in the village of Trope, the little bride's parents stood up to take her home to bed. It was getting late, and the child, who was tired after the excitement of the wedding and a little tipsy from the sips of wine she had been given, had fallen asleep with her head in her mother's lap. The bridegroom was running around, hot and sweaty, among the guests, playing catch and hide-and-seek with his little school friends. So the guests started to take their leave, the two families began to say their farewells, and the groom's parents told their son to hurry up and get on the cart to go home.
     *I heard this and other tales, which I tell on the following pages, from my mother when I was young and partly also from my grandparents and my mother's cousins Shimshon and Michael Mussman. In 1979 I wrote down some of my Aunt Haya's childhood memories, and between 1997 and 20011 occasionally noted down some of the many things that Aunt Sonia told me. I have also been helped by my mother's cousin Shimshon Mussman's book Escape from Horror, published in Hebrew in Tel Aviv, 1996.

     But the young bridegroom had other ideas: the child Ephraim stood in the middle of the courtyard, all puffed up suddenly like a young cockerel, stamped his foot, and obstinately demanded his wife. Not in three years' time, not even in three months' time, but right here and now. This very evening.
     When the remaining guests burst out laughing, he turned his back on them angrily and strode across the road, thumped on the rabbi's door, stood in the doorway face to face with the grinning rabbi, and started quoting texts from the Bible, the Mishnah, the law codes, and the commentators. The boy had clearly prepared his ammunition and done his homework well. He demanded that the rabbi judge immediately between him and the whole world, and give a ruling one way or the other. What was written in the Torah? What did the Talmud and the jurists say? Was it or was it not his right? Was she or was she not his wife? Had he or had he not married her according to the law? And so, which was it to be: either let him take his bride or he must have his ketubba, his marriage contract, back, and let the marriage be null and void.
     The rabbi, so the story goes, hemmed and hawed and cleared his throat, fingered his mustache and scratched his head a few times, tugged his sidelocks and pulled at his beard, and eventually he heaved a sigh and ruled that there was nothing for it, the boy was not only skillful at marshaling his texts and his arguments, he was also perfectly right: the youthful bride had no alternative but to follow him and no other course but to obey him.
     And so the little bride was woken and, at midnight, when all the deliberations were concluded, they had to accompany the bridal pair to his parents' home. The bride wept for fear all the way. Her mother held her tight and wept with her. The bridegroom, too, wept all the way, because of the guests' jeers and sneers. As for his mother and the rest of his family, they too wept all the way, from shame.
     The nocturnal procession lasted an hour and a half. It was a cross between a tearful funeral procession and a raucous party, because some of the participants, delighted by the scandal, insisted on recounting at the tops of their voices the well-known joke about the male chick and the female chick, or the one about how to thread a needle, treating themselves to schnapps to the accompaniment of obscene snorts and neighs and shouts.
     Meanwhile the youthful bridegroom's courage abandoned him, and he began to regret his victory. And so the young couple were led, bewildered, tearful, and deprived of sleep, like sheep to the slaughter, to the improvised bridal chamber, into which, in the early hours of the morning, they had to be pushed almost by force. The door, it is said, was locked from the outside. Then the wedding party retreated on tiptoe and spent the rest of the night sitting up in another room, drinking tea and finishing up the remains of the feast, while endeavoring to console one another.
     In the morning, who knows, the mothers may have burst into the room, armed with towels and washbasins, anxious to discover whether or how their children had survived their wrestling bout, and what damage they had inflicted on each other.
     But a few days later the husband and wife were to be seen happily running around the yard and playing together barefoot and noisily. The husband even built a little treehouse for his wife's dolls, while he himself went back to playing with wheels and watercourses that he channeled across the yard into streams, lakes, and waterfalls.
     His parents, Herz and Sarah Mussman, supported the young couple until they reached the age of sixteen. Kest-Kinder was the Yiddish name given in those days to young couples who relied on their parents' support. When he came of age, Ephraim Mussman combined his love of wheels with his love of running water and set up a flour mill in the village of Trope. The mill wheel was turned by running water power. His business never prospered: he was dreamy and childishly naive, an idler and a spendthrift, argumentative and yet never stuck to his guns. He was inclined to engage in idle conversations that lasted from morning till evening. Haya-Duba and Ephraim lived a life of poverty. His little bride bore Ephraim three sons and two daughters. She trained to be a midwife and domestic nurse. She was in the habit of treating poor patients for nothing, secretly. She died in the prime of her life, of consumption. My great-grandmother was twenty-six at her death.
     The handsome Ephraim swiftly married another child bride, a sixteen-year-old who was named Haya like her predecessor. The new Haya Mussman lost no time in banishing her stepchildren from her home. Her weak husband made no attempt to stop her: he seemed to have expended his entire modest share of boldness and resolution all at one go, the evening when he knocked heroically on the rabbi's door and demanded in the name of the Torah and all the jurists the right to consummate his marriage. From that night of bloodshed until the end of his days he always behaved unassertively: he was meek and mild, always yielding to his wives, happy to defer to anyone who resisted his will, yet with strangers he acquired over the years the enigmatic manner of a man of hidden depths of mystery and sanctity. His bearing suggested a certain self-importance wrapped in humility, like a rustic wonder worker or a Russian Orthodox holy man.
    


     And so his firstborn, my grandfather, Naphtali Hertz, at the age of twelve, became an apprentice on the Vilkhov estate, near Rovno, which belonged to an eccentric unmarried noblewoman named Princess Rav-zova. Within three or four years the princess had discovered that the young Jew whom she had acquired virtually for nothing was agile, sharp-witted, charming, and amusing, and in addition to all these qualities he had also learned a thing or two about flour milling as a result of growing up in his father's mill. There was possibly something else about him, too, that aroused maternal feelings in the shriveled, childless princess.

     And so she decided to buy a plot of land on the outskirts of Rovno, opposite the cemetery at the end of Dubinska Street, and build a flour mill. She placed in charge of this mill one of her nephews and heirs, Konstantin Semyonovich Steletsky, an engineer, and appointed the sixteen-year-old Hertz Mussman as his assistant. My grandfather very soon revealed the organizing abilities, tact, and empathy that endeared him to all who met him, and that sensitivity to others that enabled him to divine what people were thinking or what they wanted.
     By the age of seventeen my grandfather was the real manager of the mill. ("So very quick he rose in the favor of that princess! Just like in that story about the righteous Joseph in Egypt and that what's her name? Lady Potiphar, wasn't it? That Engineer Steletsky, everything he fixed he smashed up again himself when he was drunk. He was a terrible alcoholic! I can still remember him beating his horse furiously and crying at the same time out of pity for dumb animals, he was weeping tears big like grapes, but still he went on beating his horse. All day long he was inventing new machines, systems, gear wheels, just like Stephenson. He had a sort of spark of genius. But as soon as he invented anything, he would get angry, that Steletsky, and destroy it all!")
     And so the young Jew got in the habit of maintaining and repairing the machinery, haggling with the peasants who brought in their wheat and barley, paying the workers their wages, bargaining with dealers and customers. Thus he became a miller like his father, Ephraim. Unlike his idle, childlike father, however, he was clever, hardworking, and ambitious. And he was successful.
     Meanwhile, Princess Ravzova in the evening of her life became increasingly pious: she wore nothing but black, multiplied vows and fasts, was in perpetual mourning, conversed in whispers with Jesus, traveled from monastery to monastery in search of illumination, squandered her wealth on gifts to churches and shrines. ("And one day she picked up a great hammer and hammered a nail into her own hand, because she wanted to feel exactly what Jesus had felt. And then they came and tied her up, took care of her hand, shaved her hair off, and shut her up for the rest of her days in a convent near Tula.")
     The wretched engineer, Konstantin Steletsky, the Princess's nephew, subsided into drunkenness after his aunt's demise. His wife, Irina Matveyevna, ran off with Anton, the son of Philip the coachman. ("She was a great pianitsa—drunkard—too. But it was he, Steletsky, who made her a pianitsa. He used to lose her at cards sometimes. That is, he would lose her for one night, get her back in the morning, and the next night he would lose her again.")
     And so Steletsky drowned his sorrows in vodka and cards. ("But he also wrote beautiful poetry, such wonderful poetry full of feeling, full of repentance and compassion! He even wrote a philosophical treatise, in Latin. He knew all the works of the great philosophers by heart, Aristotle, Kant, Soloviev, and he used to go off on his own in the forest. To abase himself he used to dress up as a beggar sometimes, and wander the streets in the early hours of the morning rooting around in the rubbish heaps like a starving beggar.")
     Gradually Steletsky made Hertz Mussman his right-hand man at the mill, and then his deputy, and eventually his partner. When my grandfather was twenty-three, some ten years after he was "sold into slavery" to Princess Ravzova, he bought up Steletsky's share of the mill.
     His business soon expanded, and among other acquisitions he swallowed up his father's little mill.
     The young mill owner did not bear a grudge on account of his eviction from his parents' house. On the contrary: he forgave his father, who in the meantime had managed to become a widower for the second time, and installed him in the office, the so-called kontora, and even paid him a decent monthly salary to the end of his days. The handsome Ephraim sat there for many years, sporting an impressive long white beard, doing nothing: he passed his days slowly, drinking tea, and conversing pleasantly and at great length with the dealers and agents who came to the mill. He loved to lecture them, calmly and expansively, on the secret of longevity, the nature of the Russian soul as compared to the Polish or Ukrainian soul, the secret mysteries of Judaism, the creation of the world, or his own original ideas for improving the forests, for sleeping better, for preserving folk tales, or for strengthening the eyesight by natural means.
    


     My mother remembered her Grandpa Ephraim Mussman as an impressive patriarchal figure. His face seemed sublime to her on account of the long snowy beard that flowed down majestically like that of a prophet and the thick white eyebrows that gave him a biblical splendor. His blue eyes sparkled like pools in this snowy landscape, with a happy, childlike smile. "Grandpa Ephraim looked just like G-d. I mean the way every child imagines G-d. He gradually came to appear before the whole world like a Slavic saint, a rustic wonder worker, something between the image of the old Tolstoy and that of Santa Claus."

     Ephraim Mussman was in his fifties when he became an impressive if somewhat vague old sage. He was less and less capable of distinguishing between a man of G-d and G-d himself. He started to mind-read, tell fortunes, spout morality, interpret dreams, grant absolution, perform pious acts, and take pity. From morning to evening he sat over a glass of tea at the desk in the mill office and simply took pity. Apart from taking pity, he did virtually nothing all day.
     He always had a smell of expensive scent about him, and his hands were soft and warm. ("But I," my Aunt Sonia said at eighty-five with ill-disguised jubilation, "I was the one he loved best of all his grandchildren! I was his favorite! That's because I was such a little krasavitsa, such a little coquette, like a little Frenchwoman, and I knew how to twist him around my little finger, though actually any girl could twist his handsome head around her little finger, he was so sweet and absentminded, so childish, and so emotional, the slightest thing brought tears to his eyes. And as a little girl I used to sit on his lap for hours on end, combing his magnificent white beard over and over, and I always had enough patience to listen to all the rubbish he used to spout. And on top of everything else I was given his mother's name. That's why Grandpa Ephraim loved me the best of all, and sometimes he used to call me Little Mother.")
     He was quiet and good-tempered, a gentle, amiable man, rather a chatterbox, but people liked to look at him because of an amused, childlike, captivating smile that constantly flicked across his wrinkled face. ("Grandpa Ephraim was like this: the moment you looked at him, you started to smile yourself! Everybody started smiling, willy nilly, the moment he came into the room. Even the portraits on the walls started smiling the moment he came into the room!") Fortunately for him, his son Naphtali Hertz loved him unconditionally, and always forgave him or pretended not to notice whenever he got the accounts mixed up or opened the cash box in the office without permission and took out a couple of notes to hand out, like G-d in Hasidic folk tales, to grateful peasants after telling their fortunes and treating them to a moralizing sermon.
     For days on end the old man used to sit in the office staring out the window, contentedly watching his son's mill at work. Perhaps because he looked "just like G-d," he actually saw himself in his later years as a kind of deity. He was humble yet arrogant, perhaps a little feebleminded in his old age. He sometimes offered his son all kinds of advice and suggestions for improving and expanding the business, but most of the time he forgot what he had said after an hour or so and proffered new advice instead. He drank one glass of tea after another, glanced absentmindedly at the accounts, and if strangers mistook him for the boss, he did not correct them but chatted to them pleasantly about the wealth of the Rothschilds or the terrible hardships of the coolies in China (which he called Kitai). His conversations normally lasted for seven or eight hours.
     His son indulged him. Wisely, cautiously, and patiently Naphtali Hertz expanded the business, opening branches here and there, making a little money. He married off one sister, Sarah, took in another sister, Jenny, and finally managed to marry her off too. ("To a carpenter, Yasha! A nice boy, even if he was very simple! But what other choice was there for Jenny? After all, she was nearly forty!") He employed his nephew Shimshon at a decent wage, and Jenny's Yasha the carpenter too, he spread his largesse over all his brothers and sisters and kinsfolk; his business prospered, and his Ukrainian and Russian customers bowed to him respectfully, with their hats pressed to their chests, and addressed him as Gertz Yefremovich (Hertz son of Ephraim). He even had a Russian assistant, an impoverished young aristocrat who suffered from ulcers. With his help my grandfather extended his business even further, and opened branches as far away as Kiev, Moscow, and St. Petersburg.
    


     In 1909 or 1910, at the age of twenty-one, Naphtali Hertz Mussman married Itta Gedalyevna Schuster, the capricious daughter of Gedaliah Schuster and his wife Pearl (née Gibor). Of my great-grandmother Pearl, I was informed by Aunt Haya that she was a tough woman, "as shrewd as seven traders," with a sixth sense for village intrigues, sharp-tongued, fond of money and power, and desperately mean. ("The story goes that she always collected every lock of hair that was cut off at the hairdresser's for stuffing cushions. She cut every lump of sugar into four precise little cubes with a knife.") As for great-grandfather Gedaliah, his granddaughter Sonia remembered him as a grumpy, thickset man, overflowing with appetites. His beard was black and unkempt, and his manner was noisy and domineering. It was said of him that he could belch loud enough to rattle the windowpanes, and that his roar was like the sound of rolling barrels. (But he was scared to death of animals, including dogs, cats, and even kids and calves.)

     Their daughter Itta, my grandmother, always behaved like a woman whom life had not treated as gently as she deserved. She was pretty when she was young, and had many suitors, and it seems she was pampered. She ruled her own three daughters with an iron hand, and yet behaved as though she wanted them to treat her like a younger sister or a sweet little child. Even in her old age she continued to treat her grandchildren to all sorts of little bribes and coquettish gestures, as though begging us to make a fuss of her, to be captivated by her charms, to pay court to her. At the same time, she was capable of behaving with polite ruthlessness.
    


     The marriage of Itta and Hertz Mussman endured, with gritted teeth, through sixty-five years of insults, wrongs, humiliations, truces, shame, restraint, and pursed-lipped mutual politeness. My maternal grandparents were desperately different and remote from each other, yet this desperation was always kept under lock and key. Nobody in my family talked about it, and if I ever managed to sense it in my childhood, it was like a faint whiff of flesh being singed on the other side of a wall.

     Their three daughters, Haya, Fania, and Sonia, sought ways to relieve the misery of their parents' married life. All three unhesitatingly took their father's side against their mother. All three loathed and feared their mother; they were ashamed of her and considered her a depress-ingly vulgar and domineering mischief maker. When they quarreled, they would say to each other accusingly: "Just look at yourself! You're becoming exactly like Maman!"
     Only when her parents were old and when she was getting old herself did Aunt Haya manage finally to separate her parents, putting her father in a home for the elderly in Givatayim and her mother in a nursing home near Nes Tsiyona. She did this despite the protests of Aunt Sonia, who thought such enforced separation was totally wrong. But by then the schism between my two aunts was at its height. They did not speak a single word to each other for nearly thirty years, from the late 1950s until Aunt Haya's death in 1989. Aunt Sonia did attend her sister's funeral, where she remarked to us sadly: "I forgive her for everything. And I pray in my heart that G-d too will forgive her—and it won't be easy for Him, because he will have an awful lot to forgive her for." Aunt Haya, a year before her death, had said the very same thing to me about her sister Sonia.
     The fact is that all three Mussman sisters, in their different ways, were in love with their father. My grandfather, Naphtali Hertz (whom we all, his daughters, sons-in-law, and grandchildren, called Papa), was a warmhearted, paternal, kindly, fascinating man. He had a swarthy complexion and a warm voice, and he had inherited his father's clear blue eyes, those piercing sharp eyes that concealed a smile. Whenever he spoke to you, you had the impression that he could plumb the depth of your feelings, guessing between the lines, grasping instantly what you had said and why you had said it, and at the same time discerning whatever it was you were trying unsuccessfully to conceal from him. He would sometimes shoot you an unexpected, mischievous smile, almost accompanied by a wink, as though to embarrass you slightly while being embarrassed on your behalf, but forgiving you because after all, when it comes down to it, a human being is only human.
     He considered all human beings to be reckless children who brought great disappointment and suffering upon themselves and each other, all of us trapped in an unending, unsubtle comedy that would generally end badly. All roads led to suffering. Consequently virtually everyone, in Papa's view, deserved compassion, and most of their deeds were worthy of forgiveness, including all sorts of machinations, pranks, deceptions, pretensions, manipulations, false claims, and pretenses. From all these he would absolve you with his faint, mischievous smile, as though saying (in Yiddish): Nu, what.
     The only thing that tested Papa's amused tolerance were acts of cruelty. These he abhorred. His merry blue eyes clouded over at the news of wicked deeds. "An evil beast? What does the expression mean?" he would reflect in Yiddish. "No beast is evil. No beast is capable of evil. The beasts have yet to invent evil. That is our monopoly, the L-rds of creation. So maybe we ate the wrong apple in the Garden of Eden after all? Maybe between the tree of life and the tree of knowledge there was another tree growing there in the Garden of Eden, a poisonous tree that is not mentioned in scripture, the tree of evil" (the tree of rishes, he called it in Yiddish) "and that was the one we accidentally ate from? That scoundrel of a serpent deceived Eve, he promised her that this was definitely the tree of knowledge, but it was really the tree of rishes he led her to. Perhaps if we had stuck to the trees of life and knowledge, we would never have been thrown out of the garden?"
     And then, with his eyes restored to their merry sparkling blue, he went on to explain clearly, in his slow, warm voice and his picturesque, orotund Yiddish, what Jean-Paul Sartre was to discover only years later: "But what is hell? What is paradise? Surely it is all inside. In our homes. You can find hell and paradise in every room. Behind every door. Under every double blanket. It's like this. A little wickedness, and people are hell to each other. A little compassion, a little generosity, and people find paradise in each other.
     "I said a little compassion and generosity, but I didn't say love: I'm not such a believer in universal love. Love of everybody for everybody—we should maybe leave that to Jesus. Love is another thing altogether. It is nothing whatever like generosity and nothing whatever like compassion. On the contrary. Love is a curious mixture of opposites, a blend of extreme selfishness and total devotion. A paradox! Besides which, love, everybody is always talking about love, love, but love isn't something you choose, you catch it, like a disease, you get trapped in it, like a disaster. So what is it that we do choose? What do human beings have to choose between every minute of the day? Generosity or meanness. Every little child knows that, and yet wickedness still doesn't come to an end. How can you explain that? It seems we got it all from the apple that we ate back then: we ate a poisoned apple."

 21


     THE CITY of Rovno (Polish Rowne, German Rowno), an important railway junction, grew up around the palaces and moated parks of the princely family of Lubomirsky. The River Uste crossed the city from south to north. Between the river and the marsh stood the citadel, and in the days of the Russians there was still a beautiful lake with swans. The skyline of Rovno was formed by the citadel, the Lubomirsky palace, and a number of Catholic and Orthodox churches, one adorned with twin towers. The city boasted some sixty thousand inhabitants before the Second World War, of whom Jews constituted the majority, and the rest were Ukrainians, Poles, Russians, and a handful of Czechs and Germans. Several thousand more Jews lived in the nearby towns and villages. The villages were surrounded by orchards and vegetable gardens, pastures and fields of wheat and rye that sometimes shuddered or rippled in the breeze. The silence of the fields was broken from time to time by the howl of a locomotive. Occasionally you could hear Ukrainian peasant girls singing in the gardens. From a distance it sounded like wailing.

     Wide, flat plains extended as far as the eye could see, here and there arching up in gentle hills, crisscrossed by rivers and pools, dappled with marshes and forests. In the city itself there were three or four "European" streets with a handful of official buildings in neoclassical style and an almost unbroken facade of two-story apartment buildings with wrought-iron balconies, where the middle class lived. A row of small shops occupied the ground floor of these merchants' homes. But most of the side roads were unpaved tracks; they were muddy in winter and dusty in summer. Here and there they were edged with rickety wooden walkways. No sooner had you turned into one of these side roads than you were surrounded by low, broad-shouldered Slavic houses, with thick walls and deep eaves, surrounded by allotments and innumerable ramshackle wooden huts, some of which had sunk up to their windows in the earth and had grass growing on their roofs.
     In 1919 a Hebrew secondary school was opened in Rovno by Tar-buth, a Jewish educational organization, together with a primary school and several kindergartens. My mother and her sisters were educated in Tarbuth schools. Hebrew and Yiddish newspapers were published in Rovno in the 1920s and 1930s, ten or twelve Jewish political parties contended frantically with each other, and Hebrew clubs for literature, Judaism, science, and adult education flourished. The more anti-Semitism increased in Poland in the 1920s and 1930s, the stronger Zionism and Hebrew education grew, and at the same time (with no contradiction) the stronger became the pull of secularism and of non-Jewish culture.*
     Every evening, at ten o'clock precisely, the night express pulled out of Rovno Station, bound for Zdolbunowo, Lvov, Lublin, and Warsaw. On Sundays and Christian holidays all the church bells rang out. The winters were dark and snowy, and in summer warm rain fell. The cinema in Rovno was owned by a German named Brandt. One of the pharmacists was a Czech by the name of Mahacek. The chief surgeon at the hospital was a Jew called Dr. Segal, whose rivals nicknamed him Mad Segal. A colleague of his at the hospital was the orthopedic surgeon Dr. Joseph Kopejka, who was a keen Revisionist Zionist. Moshe Rotenberg and Simcha-Hertz Majafit were the town's rabbis. Jews dealt in timber and grain, milled flour, worked in textiles and household goods, gold and silver work, hides, printing, clothing, grocery, haberdashery, trade, and banking. Some young Jews were driven by their social conscience to join the proletariat as print workers, apprentices, and day laborers. The Pisiuk family had a brewery. The Twischor family were well-known craftsmen. The Strauch family made soap. The Gendelberg family leased forests. The Steinberg family owned a match factory. In June 1941 the Germans captured Rovno from the Soviet Army, which had taken over the city two years earlier. In two days, November 7 and 8,1941, Germans and their collaborators murdered more than twenty-three thousand of the city's Jews. Five thousand of those who survived were murdered later, on July 13, 1942.
     *Menahem Gelehrter, The Tarbuth Hebrew Gymnasium in Rovno (in Hebrew) (Jerusalem, 1973). The Tarbuth schools were Zionist and secular.

     My mother sometimes talked to me nostalgically, in her quiet voice that lingered on the ends of the words, about the Rovno she had left behind. In six or seven sentences she could paint me a picture. I repeatedly put off going to Rovno, so that the pictures my mother gave me do not have to make way for others.
    


     The eccentric mayor of Rovno in the second decade of the twentieth century, Lebedevski, never had any children; he lived in a large house surrounded by more than an acre of land, with a garden, a kitchen garden, and an orchard, at 14 Dubinska Street. He lived there with a single servant and her little daughter, who was rumored to be his own daughter. There was also a distant relation of his, Lyubov Nikitichna, a penniless Russian aristocrat who claimed also to be somehow distantly related to the ruling Romanov family. She lived in Lebedevski's house with her two daughters by two different husbands, Anastasia Sergeyevna, or Tasia, and Antonina Boleslavovna, or Nina. The three of them lived crowded into a tiny room that was actually the end of a corridor, curtained off. The three noblewomen shared this tiny space with a huge, magnificent eighteenth-century piece of furniture made of mahogany and carved with flowers and ornaments. Inside it and behind its glazed doors were crammed masses of antiques, silver, porcelain, and crystal. They also had a wide bed adorned with colorful embroidered cushions, where apparently the three of them slept together.

     The house had a single, spacious story, but underneath it there was a vast cellar that served as workshop, larder, storage room, wine cellar, and repository of thick smells: a strange, slightly scary but also fascinating mixture of smells of dried fruit, butter, sausages, beer, cereals, honey, different kinds of jams, varinnye, povidlo, barrels of pickled cabbage and cucumbers and all sorts of spices, and strings of dried fruits hung across the cellar, and there were several kinds of dried pulses in sacks and wooden tubs, and smells of tar, paraffin, pitch, coal, and firewood, and also faint odors of mold and decay. A small opening close to the ceiling let in a slanting, dusty ray of light, which seemed to intensify rather than dispel the darkness. I came to know this cellar so well from my mother's stories that even now as I write this, when I close my eyes, I can go down there and inhale its dizzying blend of smells.
     In 1920, shortly before Marshal Pilsudski's Polish troops captured Rovno and all of western Ukraine from the Russians, Mayor Lebedevski fell from grace and was expelled from office. His successor was a crass hoodlum and drunkard named Bojarski, who on top of everything else was a ferocious anti-Semite. Lebedevski's house in Dubinska Street was bought at a bargain price by my grandfather, the mill owner Naphtali Hertz Mussman. He moved in with his wife Itta and his three daughters, Haya, or Nyusya, the eldest, who had been born in 1911, Rivka-Feiga, or Fania, who was born two years later, and the daughter of his old age, Sarah, or Sonia, who was born in 1916. The house, I was told recently, is still standing.
     On one side of Dubinska Street, whose name was changed by the Poles to Kazarmowa (Barracks) Street, stood the mansions of the wealthier inhabitants of the city, while the other side was occupied by the army barracks (the kazarmy). The fragrance of gardens and orchards filled the street in springtime, mingled sometimes with smells of washing or of baking, of fresh bread, cakes, biscuits, and pies, and scents of strongly seasoned dishes that wafted from the kitchens of the houses.
     In that spacious house with its many rooms various lodgers whom the Mussmans had "inherited" from Lebedevski continued to dwell. Papa did not have the heart to turn them out. So the old servant, Xenia Demitrievna, Xenietchka, continued to live behind the kitchen, with her daughter Dora, who may or may not have been sired by Lebedevski himself; everyone called her simply Dora, with no patronymic. At the end of the corridor, behind the heavy curtain, the impoverished aristocrat Lyubov Nikitichna, Lyuba, still claiming to be somehow related to the imperial family, remained in undisturbed possession of her tiny space, together with her daughters Tasia and Nina; all three were very thin, erect, and proud, and always elaborately got up, "like a muster of peacocks."
     In a light, spacious room at the front of the house that he rented on a monthly basis and that was known as the Kabinett lived a Polish colonel (polkovnik) by the name of Jan Zakrzewski. He was a boastful, lazy, and sentimental man in his fifties, solidly built, manly, broad-shouldered, and not bad looking. The girls addressed him as "Panie Polkovnik." Every Friday, Itta Mussman would send one of her daughters with a tray of fragrant poppy cakes straight from the oven; she had to tap politely on Panie Polkovnik's door, curtsey, and wish him a good Sabbath on behalf of all the family. The colonel would lean forward and stroke the little girl's hair or sometimes her back or shoulder; he called them all cyganka (Gypsy) and promised each of them that he would wait for her faithfully, and marry no one but her when she was old enough.
     Bojarski, the anti-Semitic mayor who had replaced Lebedevski, would sometimes come to play cards with Retired Colonel Zakrzewski. They drank together and smoked "until the air was black." As the hours passed, their voices became thick and hoarse, and their loud laughter filled with grunts and wheezes. Whenever the mayor came to the house, the girls were sent to the back or out into the garden, to prevent their ears picking up remarks that were unsuitable for well-brought-up girls to hear. From time to time the servant would bring the men hot tea, sausages, herring, or a tray of fruit compote, biscuits, and nuts. Each time she would respectfully convey the request of the lady of the house that they should lower their voices as she had a "blinding headache." What the gentlemen replied to the old servant we shall never know, as the servant was "as deaf as ten walls" (or sometimes they said "as deaf as G-d Almighty"). She would cross herself piously, curtsey, and leave the room dragging her tired, painful feet.
     And once, in the early hours of a Sunday morning, before first light, when everyone else in the house was still in bed fast asleep, Colonel Zakrzewski decided to try out his pistol. First he fired into the garden through the closed window. By chance, or in some mysterious way, he managed in the dark to hit a pigeon, which was found wounded but still alive in the morning. Then, for some reason, he took a pot shot at the wine bottle on his table, shot himself in the thigh, fired twice at the chandelier but missed, and with his last bullet shattered his own forehead and died. He was a sentimental, garrulous man, who wore his heart on his sleeve; often he would suddenly burst out singing or weeping, sad as he was about the historic tragedy of his people, sad about the pretty piglet that the neighbor bludgeoned to death with a pole, sad about the bitter fate of songbirds when winter came, about the suffering of Jesus nailed to the cross, he was even sad about the Jews, who had been persecuted for fifty generations and had still not managed to see the light, he was sad about his own life, which was flowing on without rhyme or reason, and desperately sad about some girl, Vassilisa, whom he had once allowed to leave him, many years before, for which he would never cease to curse his stupidity and his empty, useless life. "My G-d, my G-d," he used to declaim in his Polish Latin, "why hast Thou forsaken me? And why hast Thou forsaken us all?"
     That morning they took the three girls out of the house by the back door, through the orchard, and past the stable gate, and when the girls returned, the front room was empty, clean and tidy and aired, and all the colonel's belongings had been bundled into sacks and taken away. Only the smell of wine, from the bottle that had been smashed, Aunt Haya remembered, lingered for a few days.
     And once the girl who was to be my mother found a note there tucked into a crack in the wardrobe, written in rather simple Polish, in a female hand, in which somebody wrote to her very precious little wolf cub to say that in all the days of her life she had never ever met a better or more generous man than he, and that she was not worthy to kiss the soles of his feet. Little Fania noticed two spelling mistakes in the Polish. The note was signed with the letter N, beneath which the writer had drawn a pair of full lips extended for a kiss. "Nobody," my mother said, "knows anything about anyone else. Not even about a close neighbor. Not even about the person you are married to. Or about your parent or your child. Nothing at all. Or even about ourselves. We know nothing. And if we sometimes imagine for an instant that we do know something after all, that's even worse, because it's better to live without knowing anything than to live in error. Although in fact, who knows? Maybe on second thought it's much easier to live in error than to live in the dark?"
    


     From her stuffy, gloomy, clean and tidy, overfurnished, always shuttered two-room apartment on Wessely Street in Tel Aviv (while a damp, oppressive September day gradually gathers outside), Aunt Sonia takes me to visit the mansion in the Wolja quarter in northwest Rovno. Kazarmowa Street, formerly Dubinska, crossed the main street of Rovno, which used to be called Shossejna, but after the arrival of the Poles was renamed Trzecziego Maya, Third of May Street, in honor of the Polish national day.

     When you approach the house from the road, Aunt Sonia describes to me, precisely and in detail, you first cross the small front garden, which is called a palisadnik, with its neat jasmine bushes ("and I can still remember a little shrub on the left that had a very strong and particularly pungent smell, which is why we called it 'love-struck'..."). And there were flowers called margaritki, that now you call daisies. And there were rose bushes, rozochki, we used to make a sort of konfitura from their petals, a jam that was so sweet and fragrant that you imagined it must lick itself when no one was looking. The roses grew in two circular beds surrounded by little stones or bricks that were laid diagonally and whitewashed, so that they looked like a row of snow white swans leaning on one another.
     Behind these bushes, she says, we had a small green bench, and next to it you turned left to the main entrance: there were four or five wide steps, and a big brown door with all kinds of ornaments and carvings, left over from Mayor Lebedevski's baroque taste. The main entrance led to a hall with mahogany furniture and a large window with curtains that reached the floor. The first door on the right was the door of the Kabinett where Polkovnik Pan Jan Zakrzewski lived. His manservant or denshchik, a peasant boy with a broad red face like a beet, covered with the kind of acne you get from thinking not nice thoughts, slept in front of his door at night on a mattress that was folded away in the daytime. When this denshchik looked at us girls, his eyes popped out as though he were going to die of hunger. I'm not talking about hunger for bread, actually bread we used to bring him all the time from the kitchen, as much as he wanted. The polovnik used to beat his denshchik mercilessly, and then he used to regret it and give him pocket money.
     You could enter the house through the wing on the right—there was a path paved with reddish stones that was very slippery in winter. Six trees grew along this path, in Russian they are called siren, I don't know what you call them, maybe they don't even exist here. These trees sometimes had little clusters of purple flowers with such an intoxicating scent, we used to stop there on purpose and breathe it in deeply until we sometimes felt light-headed, and we could see all kinds of bright dots in front of our eyes, in all kinds of colors that don't have names. In general, I think there are far more colors and smells than there are words. The path on this side of the house takes you to six steps that led up to a little open porch where there was a bench—the love bench, we all called it, because of something not very nice that they didn't want to tell us about but we knew it had to do with the servants. The servants' entrance opened off this porch; we called it chyorny khod, which means the black door.
     If you didn't come into the house through the front door or the chyorny khod, you could follow the path around the side of the house and reach the garden. Which was gigantic: at least as big as from here, from Wessely Street, to Dizengoff Street. Or even as far as Ben Yehudah Street. In the middle of the garden there was an avenue with a lot of fruit trees on either side, all sorts of plum trees and two cherry trees whose blossoms looked like a wedding dress, and they used to make vishniak and piroshki from the fruit. Reinette apples, popirovki, and grushi—huge juicy pears, pontovki pears, that the boys called by names that are not very nice to repeat. On the other side there were more fruit trees, succulent peaches, apples that resemble the ones we call Peerless, and little green pears that again the boys said something about that made us girls press our hands hard against our ears so we wouldn't hear. And long plums for making jam, and among the fruit trees there were raspberry canes and blackberries and black currant bushes. And we had special apples for winter, which we used to put under straw in the cherdak—the loft—to ripen slowly for the winter. They put pears there too, also wrapped in straw, to sleep for a few more weeks and only wake up in the winter, and that way we had good fruit right through the winter, when other people only had potatoes to eat, and not always potatoes even. Papa used to say that wealth is a sin and poverty is a punishment but that G-d apparently wants there to be no connection between the sin and the punishment. One man sins and another is punished. That's how the world is made.
    


     He was almost a Communist, Papa, your grandfather. He always used to leave his father, Grandpa Ephraim, eating with a knife and fork and a white napkin at the desk in the mill office, while he sat with his workers down by the wood-burning stove and ate with them, using his hands, rye bread and pickled herring, a slice of onion with some salt, and a potato in its jacket. On a piece of newspaper on the floor they used to eat, and they washed their food down with a swig of vodka. Every festival, the day before every festival, Papa used to give each worker a sack of flour, a bottle of wine, and a few rubles. He would point to the mill and say—Nu, all this isn't mine, it's ours! He was like Schiller's Wilhelm Tell, your grandfather, that socialist president who drank wine from the same goblet as the simplest soldiers.

     That must surely be the reason that in 1919, when the Communists came into the town and immediately lined up all the capitalists and Fabrikanten—factory owners—against the wall, Papa's workers opened up the cover of the big engine, I can't remember what it was called, the main motor that gave power to the Walzen—the wheels—to grind the corn, and they hid him inside and locked him in, and they sent a delegation to the Red povodir and said to him, Listen to us real good, please, Comrade Governor, our Gerz Yefremovich Mussman, you're not to touch him, not even a hair on his head, right! Herz Mussman—on nash bachka (which is Ukrainian for "he's our father").
     And the Soviet authorities in Rovno really did make your grandfather the upravlayushi—the boss—of the mill, they didn't interfere with his authority, on the contrary, they came and said to him something like this: Dear Comrade Mussman, listen please, from now on, if you have any trouble with a lazy worker or a sabotazhnik—just point him out to us and we'll put him up against the wall. To be sure, your grandfather did just the opposite: he was very crafty at protecting his workers from this workers' government. And at the same time he supplied flour to the entire Red Army in our district.
     One time it so happened that the Soviet governor apparently took delivery of a huge consignment of totally moldy corn, and he was in a panic because for this they could put him up against the wall right away, What's this, why did you accept it without checking? So what did he do, the governor, to save his skin? Late at night he ordered the whole consignment to be unloaded near Papa's mill, and gave him an order to grind it into flour urgently by five in the morning.
     In the dark Papa and the workers didn't even notice that the corn was moldy, they set to work and ground the lot, they worked all through the night, and in the morning they had foul-smelling flour full of maggots. Papa understood at once that this flour was his responsibility now, and it was his choice whether to accept the responsibility or to blame without any proof the Soviet governor who sent him the moldy corn: either way it was the firing squad.
     What choice did he have? To put all the blame on his workers? So he simply threw away all the moldy flour with the maggots, and in its place he brought out from his stores a hundred and fifty sacks of best quality flour, not army flour but white flour, for baking cakes and cholla, and in the morning without saying a word he presented this flour to the governor. The governor didn't say a word either, even though in his heart he was maybe a bit ashamed that he tried to shift the blame onto your grandfather. But what could he do now? After all, Lenin and Stalin never accepted explanations or apologies from anyone: they just put them up against the wall and shot them.
     Of course the governor understood that what Papa was giving him was definitely not his filthy corn, and therefore that Papa had saved both their skins at his own expense. And his workers' too.
     This story has a sequel. Papa had a brother, Mikhail, Michael, who had the good fortune to be as deaf as G-d. I say good fortune, because Uncle Michael had a terrible wife, Rakhil, who was so nasty, she used to shout and curse at him all day and all night with her rough, hoarse voice, but he heard nothing: he lived in silent calm, like the moon in the sky.
     All those years Mikhail hung around Papa's mill and did nothing, drinking tea with Grandpa Ephraim in the office and scratching himself, and for this Papa paid him a fairly handsome monthly salary. One day, a few weeks after the moldy flour incident, the Soviets suddenly took Mikhail away and conscripted him into the Red Army. But the same night Mikhail saw his mother Haya in a dream, and she was saying to him in the dream, Hurry, my son, hurry and flee, because tomorrow they plan to kill you. So he got up early in the morning and ran away from the barracks as if they were on fire: a deserter, rastralki. But the Reds caught him at once and court-martialed him and sentenced him to be put up against the wall. Just the way his mother had warned him in the dream! Only in the dream she forgot to say that it was the opposite, that he should on no account run away and desert!
     Papa went to the square to take leave of his brother, there was nothing to be done, when all of a sudden, in the middle of the square, where the soldiers had already loaded their rifles for Mikhail—all of a sudden this governor of the moldy flour turns to the condemned man and shouts: Tell me please, ty brat of Gertz Yefremovich? Are you by any chance the brother of Hertz son of Ephraim? And Mikhail answers him: Da, Comrade General! And the governor turns to Papa and asks: Is he your brother? And Papa also answers, Yes, yes, Comrade General! He's my brother! Definitely my brother! So the general simply turns and says to Uncle Mikhail: Nu, idi domoy! Poshol! Go home! Off with you! And he leans toward Papa, so they can't hear, and this is what he says to him, quietly: "Nu, what, Gertz Yefremovich? Did you think you were the only one who knows how to turn shit into pure gold?"
    


     Your grandfather was a Communist in his heart, but he was not a red Bolshevik. He always considered Stalin to be another Ivan the Terrible. He himself was, how should I say, a kind of pacifist Communist, a nar-odnik, a Tolstoyshchik Communist who was opposed to bloodshed. He was very frightened of the evil that lurks in the soul, in men of all stations: he always used to say to us that there ought someday to be a popular regime common to all decent people in the world. But that first of all it will be necessary to eliminate gradually all the states and armies and secret polices, and only after that will it be possible to start gradually creating equality between rich and poor. To take tax from one lot and give to the other, only not all at once, because that makes bloodshed, but slowly and gradually. He used to say: Mit aroapfalendiker. Downhill. Even if it takes seven or eight generations, so the rich almost don't notice how slowly they're not so rich anymore. The main thing in his opinion was that we had to start to convince the world at last that injustice and exploitation are a disease of mankind and that justice is the only medicine: true, a bitter medicine, that's what he always used to say to us, a dangerous medicine, a strong medicine that you have to take drop by drop until the body becomes accustomed to it. Anyone who tries to swallow it all at one go only causes disaster, sheds rivers of blood. Just look what Lenin and Stalin did to Russia and to the whole world! It's true that Wall Street really is a vampire that sucks the world's blood, but you can never get rid of the vampire by shedding blood, on the contrary, you only strengthen it, you only feed it more and more fresh blood!

     The trouble with Trotsky and Lenin and Stalin and their friends, your grandfather thought, is that they tried to reorganize the whole of life, at a stroke, out of books, books by Marx and Engels and other great thinkers like them; they may have known the libraries very well, but they didn't have any idea about life, about malice or about jealousy, envy, rishes, or gloating at others' misfortunes. Never, never will it be possible to organize life according to a book! Not our Shulhan Arukh, not Jesus of Nazareth, and not Marx's Manifesto! Never! In general, Papa always used to say to us, better a little less to organize and reorganize and a little more to help one another and maybe to forgive, too. He believed in two things, your grandpa: compassion and justice, derbaremen un gerechtigkeit. But he was of the opinion that you always have to make the connection between them: justice without compassion isn't justice, it's an abattoir. On the other hand, compassion without justice may be all right for Jesus but not for simple mortals who have eaten the apple of evil. That was his view: a little less organizing, a little more pity.
    


     Opposite the chyorny khod there grew a beautiful kashtan, a magnificent old chestnut tree that looked a bit like King Lear, and underneath it Papa had a bench put up for the three of us—we called it the "sisters' bench" On fine days we used to sit there and dream aloud about what would happen to us when we grew up. Which of us would be an engineer, a poet, or a famous inventor like Marie Curie? That was the kind of thing we dreamed about. We didn't dream, like most girls of our age, about marrying a rich or famous husband, because we came from a rich family and we weren't at all attracted by the idea of marrying someone even richer than we were.

     If we ever talked about falling in love, it wasn't with some nobleman or famous actor but only with someone with elevated feelings, like a great artist for example, even if he didn't have a kopek. Never mind. What did we know then? How could we possibly know what scoundrels, what beasts great artists are? (Not all of them—definitely not all of them!) Only today I really don't think that elevated feelings and suchlike are the main thing in life. Definitely not. Feelings are just a fire in a field of stubble: it burns for a moment, and then all that's left is soot and ashes. Do you know what the main thing is—the thing a woman should look for in her man? She should look for a quality that's not at all exciting but that's rarer than gold: decency. And maybe kindness too. Today, you should know this, I rate decency more highly than kindness. Decency is the bread, kindness is the butter. Or the honey.
     In the orchard, halfway down the avenue, there were two benches facing each other, and that was a good place to go when you felt like being alone with your thoughts in the silence between the birdsong and the whispering of the breeze in the branches.
     Beyond that, at the edge of the field, was a little building we called the ofitsina, where, in the first room, there was a black boiler for the laundry. We played at being prisoners of the wicked witch Baba Yaga who puts little girls in the boiler. Then there was a little back room where the gardener lived. Behind the ofitsina were the stables, where Papa's phaeton was kept, and a big chestnut horse lived there too. Next to the stable stood a sleigh with iron runners in which Philip, the coachman, or his son Anton, drove us to the hairdresser on icy or snowy days. Sometimes Hemi came with us—he was the son of Rucha and Arie Leib Pisiuk, who were very rich. The Pisiuks owned a brewery and supplied the whole district with beer and yeast. The brewery was enormous, and it was managed by Hertz Meir Pisiuk, Hemi's grandfather. The famous men who visited Rovno always stayed with the Pisiuks: Bialik, Jabotinsky, Tchernikhowsky. I think that boy, Hemi Pisiuk, was your mother's first love. Fania must have been about thirteen or fifteen, and she always wanted to ride in the carriage or the sleigh with Hemi but without me, and I always deliberately came between them; I was nine or ten, I didn't let them be alone, I was a silly little girl. That's what I was called at that time. When I wanted to irritate Fania, I called her, in front of everybody, Hemuchka, which comes from Hemi. Nehemiah. Hemi Pisiuk went to study in Paris, and that's where they killed him. The Germans.
     Papa, your grandfather, was fond of Philip, the coachman, and he was very fond of the horses, he even liked the smith who used to come and grease the carriage, but the one thing he really hated was to ride in the carriage, wearing a fur coat with a fox-fur collar, like a squire, behind his Ukrainian coachman. He preferred to walk. Somehow he didn't enjoy being a wealthy man. In his carriage, or in his fauteuil, surrounded by buffets and crystal chandeliers, he felt a bit like a komediant.
     Many years later, when he had lost all his possessions, when he came to Israel almost empty-handed, he actually didn't think it was too terrible. He didn't miss his possessions at all. On the contrary: he felt lightened. He didn't mind sweating in the sun, with a gray vest on, with a thirty-kilo sack of flour on his back. Only Mama suffered terribly, she cursed, she shouted at him and insulted him, why had he come down in the world? Where were the fauteuils, the crystal and the chandeliers? Did she deserve at her age to live like a mujik, like a hoholka, without a cook or a hairdresser or a seamstress? When would he finally pull himself together and build a new flour mill in Haifa, so that we could recover our lost position? Like the fisherman's wife in the story, that's what Mama was like. But I forgave her for everything. May G-d forgive her too. And he will have plenty to forgive! May G-d forgive me too for talking about her like this, may she rest in peace. May she rest in peace the way she never gave Papa a moment's peace in his life. For forty years they lived in this country, and every day, morning to night, she did nothing but poison his life. They found themselves a sort of tumbledown hut in a field of thistles behind Kiriat Motskin, a one-room hut with no water and no toilet, roofed with tar paper—do you remember Papa and Mama's hut? Yes? The only faucet was outside among the thistles, the water was full of rust, and the toilet was a hole in the ground in a makeshift shelter at the back that Papa built himself out of bits of wood.
     Maybe it's not entirely Mama's fault that she poisoned his life so. After all, she was very unhappy there. Desperately! She was an unhappy woman altogether. She was born unhappy. Even the chandeliers and the crystal did not make her happy. But she was the kind of unhappy person who has to make other people miserable too; that was your grandfather's bad luck.
     As soon as he came to Israel, Papa found work in Haifa, in a bakery. He used to go around Haifa Bay with a horse and cart: they saw that he knew something about corn, flour, and bread, so instead of giving him a job milling or baking they made him carry sacks of flour and deliver bread with his horse and cart. After that he worked for many years with the Vulcan iron foundry, transporting all sorts of round and long bits of iron for building.
     Sometimes he used to take you with him in his cart around Haifa Bay. Do you still remember? Yes? When he was old, your grandpa made a living carrying around wide planks for scaffolding or sand from the seashore for new buildings.
     I can remember you sitting next to him, a skinny little kid, as taut as a rubber band; Papa used to give you the reins to hold. I can still see the picture clearly in front of my eyes: you were a white child, as pale as a piece of paper, and your grandpa was always very suntanned, a strong man, even when he was seventy he was strong, as dark as an Indian, some kind of Indian prince, a maharajah with blue eyes that sparkled with laughter. And you sat on the plank that served as the driver's seat in a little white vest, and he sat next to you in a sweaty gray workman's vest. He was actually happy, content with his lot, he loved the sunshine and the physical labor. He rather enjoyed being a carter, he had always had proletarian leanings, and in Haifa he felt good being a proletarian again, as at the beginning of his journey, when he was just an apprentice on the Vilkhov estate. Perhaps he enjoyed life much more as a carter than he had as a rich mill owner and man of property in Rovno. And you were such a serious little boy, a boy who couldn't stand the sunshine, too serious, seven or eight years old, all stiff on the driver's seat next to him, anxious about the reins, suffering from the flies and heat, afraid of being lashed by the horse's tail. But you behaved bravely and didn't complain. I remember it as if it were today. The big gray vest and the little white one. I thought then that you would surely be much more of a Klausner than a Mussman. Today I'm not so sure...

 22


     I REMEMBER we used to argue a lot, Aunt Sonia says with our girlfriends, with the boys, with teachers at school, and at home too, among ourselves, about questions like what is justice, what is fate, what is beauty, what is G-d? Of course we also argued about Palestine, assimilation, political parties, literature, socialism, or the ills of the Jewish people. Haya and Fania and their friends were especially argumentative. I argued less, because I was the little sister, and they would always say to me: You just listen. Haya was big in the Zionist youth movement. Your mother was in Hashomer Hatsair, and I joined Hashomer Hatsair too, three years later. In your family, the Klausners, it was best not to mention Hashomer Hatsair. It was too far left for them. The Klausners didn't even want the name mentioned because they were scared stiff you might get a sprinkling of red just from hearing it.

     Once, it may have been in the winter, at Hannukah, we had a huge argument that lasted off and on for several weeks, about heredity versus free will. I remember as if it were yesterday how your mother suddenly came out with this strange sentence, that if you open up someone's head and take out the brains, you see at once that our brains are nothing but cauliflower. Even Chopin or Shakespeare: their brains were nothing but cauliflower.
     I don't even remember in what connection Fania said this, but I remember that we couldn't stop laughing, I laughed so much I cried, but she didn't even smile. Fania had this habit of saying in deadly earnest things that would make everyone laugh, and she knew they would, but she didn't join in the laughter. Fania would laugh only when it suited her, not together with everyone else, just when nobody thought there was anything funny in what we were talking about—that's when your mother would suddenly burst out laughing.
     Nothing but cauliflower, she said, and she showed us the size of the cauliflower with her hands, and what a miracle it is, she said—into this cauliflower you can get heaven and earth, the sun and all the stars, the ideas of Plato, the music of Beethoven, the French Revolution, Tolstoy's novels, Dante's Inferno, all the deserts and oceans, there's room in there for the dinosaurs and the whales, everything can get into that cauliflower, and all the hopes, desires, and errors and fantasies of mankind, there's room for everything there, even that puffy wart with the black hairs in it that grows on Bashka Durashka's chin. The moment Fania introduced Bashka's revolting wart right in the middle of Plato and Beethoven, we all burst out laughing again, except for your mother, who just stared at us all in amazement, as though it wasn't the cauliflower that was so funny, but us.
     Later Fania wrote me a philosophical letter from Prague. I was about sixteen and she was a nineteen-year-old student, her letters to me were perhaps a bit too much de haut en bas, because I was always considered a silly little girl, but I can still remember that it was a long, detailed letter about heredity versus environment and free will.
     I'll try to tell you what she said, but of course it will be in my own words, not Fania's: I don't know many people who are capable of expressing what Fania could express. So this is more or less what Fania wrote to me: that heredity and the environment that nurtures us and our social class—these are all like cards that are dealt out at random before the game begins. There is no freedom about this: the world gives, and you just take what you're given, with no opportunity to choose. But, she wrote to me from Prague, the question is what each person does with the cards that are dealt out to him. Some people play brilliantly with poor cards, and others do the opposite: they squander and lose everything even with excellent cards. And that is what our freedom amounts to: how to play with the hand we have been dealt. But even the freedom to play well or badly, she wrote, depends ironically on each person's luck, on patience, intelligence, intuition, or adventurousness. And in the last resort surely these too are simply cards that are or are not dealt to us before the game begins. And if so, then what is left of our freedom of choice?
     Not much, your mother wrote, in the last resort maybe all we are left with is the freedom to laugh at our condition or to lament it, to play the game or to throw in our hand, to try more or less to understand what is and isn't the case, or to give up and not try to understand—in a nutshell, the choice is between going through this life awake or in a kind of stupor. That is, roughly, what Fania, your mother, said, but in my words. Not in her words. I can't say it in her words.
    


     Now that we're talking about fate versus freedom of choice, now that we're talking about cards, I have another story for you ... Philip, the Mussman family's Ukrainian coachman, had a dark, good-looking son called Anton: black eyes that sparkled like black diamonds, a mouth that turned down slightly at the corners, as if from contempt, and strength, broad shoulders, a bass voice like a bull's, the glasses in the kommoda tinkled when Anton roared. Every time he passed a girl in the street, this Anton deliberately walked more slowly, and the girl unconsciously walked a little faster, and her breath came a little faster too. I remember that we used to make fun of one another, we sisters and our girlfriends: who had arranged her blouse just so for Anton? Who had put a flower in her hair for Anton? And who had gone out walking in the street for Anton with a starched pleated skirt and snow-white short socks?

     Next door to us on Dubinska Street lived Engineer Steletsky, the nephew of Princess Ravzova whom your grandfather was sent to work for when he was twelve. It was the same poor engineer who founded the flour mill that Papa started out working for and finally bought him out. Steletsky's wife simply ran off clutching a little blue suitcase straight to the little hut opposite, which Anton had built for himself beyond our front garden, at the edge of the built-up area. Actually it was a field where cows grazed. It's true she had reasons to run away from her husband: he may have been a bit of a genius, but he was a drunken genius, and sometimes he lost her at cards, that is, he handed her over for a night in lieu of payment, if you see what I mean.
     I remember asking my mother about it, and she turned pale and said to me, Soniechka! Oy vey! You should be ashamed of yourself! Just you stop, do you hear me?! Just you stop even thinking about nasty things like that this minute and start thinking about beautiful things instead! Because it's well known, Soniechka, that a girl who thinks nasty thoughts in her heart starts growing hair in all sorts of parts of her body, and she develops an ugly deep voice like a man, and after that no one will ever want to marry her!
     That was the way we were brought up in those days. And the truth? I myself didn't want to think thoughts like that at all, about a woman who had to go off with some drunken wretch to some filthy hut at night as his prize. Thoughts about the fate of many women whose husbands lose us. Because there are other ways of losing a woman. Not just at cards! But thoughts are not like television, where if you see unpleasant things you simply press the button and run away to another program. Nasty thoughts are more like worms in the cauliflower!
    


     Aunt Sonia remembers Ira Steletskaya as a frail, miniature woman with a sweet, slightly surprised expression. "She always looked as though she'd just been told that Lenin was waiting for her outside in the courtyard."

     She lived in Anton's hut for several months, maybe half a year, and her husband forbade the children to go to her or even to answer her if she addressed them, but they could see her every day in the distance and she could see them. Her husband could also see her all the time, in the distance, in Anton's hut. Anton liked to pick Ira up off the ground—after giving birth to two children she still had the slim, beautiful body of a sixteen-year-old—and he liked to lift her in his hands like a puppy, swing her in circles, throw her up and catch her, hop hop hop, and Ira used to scream with fear and pummel him with her tiny fists that must hardly have tickled him. Anton was as strong as an ox: he could straighten out the shaft of our carriage with his bare hands if it got bent. It was simply a tragedy without words: every day Ira Steletskaya could see her home and her children and her husband opposite, and every day they could see her in the distance.
     Once this unfortunate woman, who already drank more than was good for her—she started drinking in the morning too—well, once she simply hid by the gate of their house and waited for her younger daughter, Kira, to come home from school.
     I happened to be passing and I saw from close up how Kiruchka wouldn't let her mother pick her up in her arms, because her father forbade any contact. The child was afraid of her father, she was afraid even to say a few words to her mother, she pushed her away, kicked her, called for help, until Kasimir, Engineer Steletsky's manservant, heard her cries and came out on the steps. At once he started waving his hands at her, like that, and making noises as if shooing a chicken away. I shall never forget how Ira Steletskaya went away and cried, not quietly, like a lady, no, she cried like a servant, like a muzhik she cried, with terrifying, inhuman howls, like a bitch whose whelp is taken away and killed in front of her eyes.
     There's something like it in Tolstoy, you surely remember, in Anna Karenina, when one day Anna slips into her house while Karenin is away at his office, she manages to slip inside the house that was once hers, and even manages to see her son for a moment, but the servants drive her away. Except in Tolstoy it is much less cruel than what I saw when Irina Matveyevna ran away from Kasimir the servant, she passed me, as close as I am to where you are sitting—after all, we were neighbors—but she didn't greet me, and I heard her broken howls and I smelled her breath and I saw from her face that she was no longer entirely sane. In her look, the way she cried, her walk, I could see clearly the signs of her death.
     And after a few weeks or months Anton threw her out, or rather he went off to another village, and Irina went home, she went down on her knees to her husband, and apparently Engineer Steletsky took pity on her and took her back, but not for long: they kept taking her off to the hospital, and in the end male nurses came and bound her eyes and arms and took her away by force to a lunatic asylum in Kovel. I can remember her eyes, even now as I am talking to you I can see her eyes, and it's so strange, eighty years have passed, and there was the Holocaust, and there were all the wars here and our own tragedy, and illnesses, everyone apart from me is dead, and even so her eyes still pierce my heart like a pair of sharp knitting needles.
     Ira came home to Steletsky a few times, calmed; she looked after the children, she even planted new rosebushes in the garden, fed the birds, fed the cats, but one day she ran away again, to the forest, and when they caught her, she took a can of petrol and went to the little hut that Anton had built himself in the pasture. The hut was roofed with tar paper—Anton hadn't lived there for a long time—and she lit a match and burned down the hut with all his rags and herself too. In the winter, when everything was covered with white snow, the blackened beams of the burned hut rose out of the snow, pointing to the clouds and the forest like sooty fingers.
     Some time later Engineer Steletsky went off the rails and made a complete fool of himself; he remarried, lost all his money, and finally sold Papa his share of the mill. Your grandfather had managed to buy Princess Ravzova's share even before that. And to think that he started out as her apprentice, just a serf, a poor twelve-and-a-half-year-old boy who had lost his mother and been thrown out of the house by his stepmother.
     Now see for yourself what strange circles fate draws for us: weren't you exactly twelve and a half when you lost your mother? Just like your grandfather. Although they didn't farm you out to some half-crazed landowner. You were sent to a kibbutz instead. Don't imagine I don't know what it means to come to a kibbutz as a child who wasn't born there: it was no paradise. By the age of fifteen your grandfather was virtually managing Princess Ravzova's mill for her, and at the same age you were writing poems. A few years later the whole mill belonged to Papa, who in his heart always despised property. He didn't just despise it, it choked him. My father, your grandfather, had persistence and vision, generosity, and even a special worldly wisdom. The one thing he didn't have was luck...

 23


     AROUND THE garden, Aunt Sonia says, we had a picket fence that was painted white every spring. Every year too the trunks of the trees were whitewashed to keep off the insects. The fence had a little kalitka, a wicket gate, through which you could go out into the ploshchadka, a sort of square or open space. Every Monday the tsiganki, the Gypsy women, came. They used to park their painted caravan there, with its large wheels, and erect a big tent of tarpaulin on the side of the square. Beautiful Gypsy women went barefoot from door to door: they came to the kitchens to read the cards, to clean the toilets, to sing songs for a few kopeks, and if you weren't watchful, to pilfer. They came into our house by the servants' entrance, the chyorny khod I told you about, which was to one side, in the wing.

     That back door opened straight into our kitchen, which was enormous, bigger than this whole apartment, with a table in the middle and chairs for sixteen people. There was a kitchen range with twelve hobs of different sizes, and cupboards with yellow doors, and quantities of porcelain and crystal. I remember that we had a huge long dish on which you could serve a whole fish wrapped in leaves on a bed of rice and carrots. What happened to that dish? Who knows? It may still be adorning the sideboard of some fat hohol. And there was a kind of podium in one corner with an upholstered rocking chair and a little table next to it where there was always a glass of sweet fruit tea. This was Mama's—your grandmother's—throne, where she would sit, or sometimes stand with her hands on the back of the chair, like a captain on the bridge, giving orders to the cook and the maid and anyone who came into the kitchen. And not only the kitchen: her podium was arranged in such a way that she had a clear view to the left, through the door into the corridor, so that she could survey the doors to all the rooms, and to the right she could see through the hatch into the wing, to the dining room and the maid's room, where Xenia lived with her pretty daughter Dora. From this vantage point, which we all called Napoleon's Hill, she could command all her battlefields.
     Sometimes Mama stood there breaking eggs into a basin, and she made Haya, Fania, and me swallow the raw yolks, in such quantities that we loathed them, because there was a theory at that time that egg yolks made you resistant to all illnesses. It may even be true. Who knows? It's a fact that we were rarely ill. Nobody had heard of cholesterol in those days. Fania, your mother, was made to swallow the most egg yolks, because she was always the weakest, palest child.
     Of the three of us, your mother was the one who suffered most from our mother, who was a strident, rather military woman, like a Feldwebel, a sergeant. From morning to evening she kept sipping her fruit tea and giving instructions and orders. She had some mean habits that exasperated Papa, she was obsessively mean, but mostly he was wary of her and gave way to her, and this irritated us: we were on his side because he had right on his side. Mama used to cover the fauteuils and the fine furniture with dustcovers, so that our drawing room always looked as though it were full of ghosts. Mama was terrified of the tiniest speck of dust. Her nightmare was that children would come and walk on her beautiful chairs with dirty shoes.
     Mama hid the porcelain and crystal, and only when we had important guests or at New Year or Passover did she bring it all out and remove the dustcovers in the drawing room. We hated it so. Your mother especially detested the hypocrisy: that sometimes we kept kosher and sometimes we didn't, sometimes we went to synagogue and sometimes we didn't, sometimes we vaunted our wealth and sometimes we kept it hidden under white shrouds. Fania took Papa's side even more than we did, and resisted Mama's rule. I think that he, Papa, was also especially fond of Fania. I can't prove it, though—there was never any favoritism—he was a man with a very strong sense of fairness. I've never known another man like your grandpa, who so hated hurting people's feelings. Even with scoundrels he always tried very hard not to hurt their feelings. In Judaism, upsetting someone is considered worse than shedding their blood, and he was a man who would never hurt a soul. Never.
     Mama quarreled with Papa in Yiddish. Most of the time they conversed in a mixture of Russian and Yiddish, but when they fought, it was only in Yiddish. To us daughters, to Papa's business partner, to the lodgers, the maid, the cook, and the coachman they spoke only Russian. With the Polish officials they spoke Polish. (After Rovno was annexed by Poland, the new authorities insisted that everyone speak Polish.)
     In our Tarbuth school all the pupils and teachers spoke almost exclusively Hebrew. Among the three of us sisters, at home, we spoke Hebrew and Russian. Mostly we spoke Hebrew, so that our parents wouldn't understand. We never spoke Yiddish to each other. We didn't want to be like Mama: we associated Yiddish with her complaints and bossiness and arguments. All the profits that Papa made by the sweat of his brow from his mill she extorted from him and spent on expensive dressmakers who made her luxurious dresses. But she was too mean to wear them: she saved them up at the back of her closet, and most of the time she wore an old mouse-colored housecoat. Only a couple of times a year she got herself up like the Tsar's carriage to go to synagogue or to some charity ball, so the whole town could see her and burst with envy. Yet she shouted at us that we were ruining Papa.
     Fania, your mother, wanted to be talked to quietly and reasonably, not shouted at. She liked to explain, and she wanted to be explained to. She couldn't stand commands. Even in her bedroom she had her own special way of ordering things—she was a very tidy girl—and if someone disturbed the order, she was very upset. Yet she held her peace. Too much: I don't recall her ever raising her voice. Or telling someone off. She responded with silence even to things that she shouldn't have.
    


     In one corner of the kitchen there was a big baking oven, and sometimes we were allowed as a treat to take the lopata, the paddle, and put the Sabbath chollas in the oven. We pretended we were putting the wicked witch Baba Yaga and the black devil, chyorny chyort, in the fire. There were smaller cookers too, with four cooktops and two dukhovki, for baking biscuits and roasting meat. The kitchen had three huge windows looking out on the garden and the orchard, and they were nearly always steamed up. The bathroom opened off the kitchen. Hardly anybody in Rovno had a bathroom inside their house at that time. The rich families had a little shed in the yard, behind the house, with a wood-burning boiler that served for baths and also for the laundry. We were the only ones who had a proper bathroom, and all our little friends were green with envy. They used to call it the "sultan's delight."

     When we wanted to take a bath, we would put some logs and sawdust in the opening under the big boiler, then light the fire and wait an hour or an hour and a half for the water to heat up. There was enough hot water for six or seven baths. Where did the water come from? There was a kolodets, a well, in the neighbor's yard, and when we wanted to fill our boiler, they shut off their water and Philip or Anton or Vassia pumped the water up with the squeaky hand pump.
     I remember how once, on the eve of the Day of Atonement, after the meal, two minutes before the fast began, Papa said to me: Sureleh, mein Tochterl, please bring me a glass of water straight from the well. When I brought him the water, he dropped three or four sugar lumps in it and stirred it with his finger, and when he had drunk it, he said: Now thanks to you, Sureleh, the fast will be lighter for me. (Mama called me Sonichka, my teachers called me Sarah, but to Papa I was always Sureleh.)
     Papa liked to stir with his finger and eat with his hands. I was a little girl then, maybe five or six. And I can't explain to you—I can't even explain to myself—what joy, what happiness his words brought me, and the thought that thanks to me the fast would be lighter for him. Even now, eighty years later, I feel happy, just as I did then, whenever I remember it.
     But there's also an upside-down sort of happiness, a black happiness, that comes from doing evil to others. Papa used to say that we were driven out of paradise not because we ate from the tree of knowledge but because we ate from the tree of evil. Otherwise, how can you explain black happiness? The happiness we feel not because of what we have but because of what we have and others haven't got? That others will be jealous of? And feel bad? Papa used to say, every tragedy is something of a comedy and in every disaster there is a grain of enjoyment for the bystander. Tell me, is it true there's no word for Schadenfreude in English?
    


     Opposite the bathroom, on the other side of the kitchen, was the door that led to the room that Xenia shared with her daughter Dora, whose father was rumored to be the previous owner of the house, Mayor Lebe-devski. Dora was a real beauty, she had a face like the Madonna, a full body but a very thin wasplike waist, and big brown doe's eyes, but she was already a little weak in the head. When she was fourteen or sixteen, she fell in love with an older Gentile called Krynicki, who was also said to be her mother's lover.

     Xenia made her Dora only one meal a day, in the evening, and then she would tell her a story in installments, and the three of us would run there to listen, because Xenia knew how to tell such strange stories, they sometimes made your hair stand on end, I've never met anyone who could tell stories like her. I still remember one story she told. Once upon a time there was a village idiot, Ivanuchka, Ivanuchka Durachok, whose mother sent him every day across the bridge to take a meal to his elder brothers working in the fields. Ivanuchka himself, who was foolish and slow, was given only a single piece of bread for the whole day. One day a hole suddenly appeared in the bridge, or the dam, and the water started to come through and threatened to flood the whole valley. Ivanuchka took the single piece of bread that his mother had given him and stopped the hole in the dam with it, so the valley would not be flooded. The old king happened to be passing and was amazed, and he asked Ivanuchka why he had done such a thing. Ivanuchka replied, What do you mean, Your Majesty? I did it so there wouldn't be a flood, otherwise the people would all be drowned, heaven forbid! And was that your only piece of bread? asked the old king. So what will you eat all day? Nu, so if I don't eat today, Your Majesty, so what? Others will eat, and I shall eat tomorrow! The old king had no children, and he was so impressed by what Ivanuchka had done and by his answer that he decided there and then to make him his Crown Prince. He became King Durak (which means King Fool), and even when Ivanuchka was king, all his subjects still laughed at him, and he even laughed at himself, he sat on his throne all day making faces. But gradually it transpired that under the rule of King Ivanuchka the Fool there were never any wars, because he did not know what it was to take offense or to seek revenge. Of course eventually the generals killed him and seized power, and of course at once they took offense at the smell of the cattle pens that the wind carried across the border from the next-door kingdom, and they declared war, and they were all killed, and the dam that King Ivanuchka Durak had once stopped with his bread was blown up, and they all drowned happily in the flood, both kingdoms submerged.
     ***

     Dates. My grandfather, Naphtali Hertz Mussman, was born in i889.My grandmother Itta was born in 1891. Aunt Haya was born in 1911. Fania, my mother, was born in 1913. Aunt Sonia was born in 1916. The three Mussman girls went to the Tarbuth school in Rovno. Then Haya and Fania, each in turn, were sent for a year to a private Polish school that issued matriculation certificates. These enabled Haya and Fania to attend the university in Prague, because in anti-Semitic Poland in the 1920s hardly any Jews gained admittance to the universities. Aunt Haya came to Palestine in 1933 and obtained a public position in the Zionist Workers' Party and in the Tel Aviv branch of the Working Mothers' Organization. Through this activity she met some of the leading Zionist figures. She had a number of keen suitors, including rising stars in the Workers' Council, but she married a cheerful, warm-hearted worker from Poland, Tsvi Shapiro, who later became an administrator in the Health Fund and eventually ended up as executive director of the Donnolo-Tsahalon Hospital in Jaffa. One of the two rooms in Haya and Tsvi Shapiro's ground-floor apartment at 175 Ben Yehuda Street in Tel Aviv was sublet to various senior commanders of the Haganah. In 1948, during the War of Independence, Major General Yigael Yadin, who was head of operations and deputy chief of staff of the newly established Israeli army, lived there. Conferences were held there at night, with Israel Galili, Yitzhak Sadeh, Yaakov Dori, leaders of the Haganah, advisers and officers. Three years later, in the same room, my mother took her own life.

    


     Even after little Dora fell in love with her mother's lover, Pan Krynicki, Xenia did not stop cooking the evening meal and telling her stories, but the food she made was drenched with tears and so were the stories. The two of them would sit there in the evening, one weeping and eating, the other weeping and not eating; they never quarreled, on the contrary, they embraced each other and wept together, as if they had both caught the same incurable disease. Or as if the mother had unintentionally infected the daughter, and now she was nursing her lovingly, compassionately, with endless devotion. At night we would hear the creaking of the wicket gate, that little kalitka in the garden fence, and we knew that Dora had returned and that soon her mother would slip away to the same house. Papa always said that every tragedy is something of a comedy.

     Xenia watched over her daughter assiduously, to make sure she did not fall pregnant. She explained to her endlessly, do this, don't do that, and if he says this, you say that, and if he insists on this, you do that. In this way we also heard something and learned, because no one had ever explained such not-nice things to us. But it was all to no avail: little Dora became pregnant, and it was said that Xenia had gone to Pan Krynicki to ask for money, and he had refused to give her anything and pretended he didn't know either of them. That's how G-d created us: wealth is a crime and poverty is a punishment, though the punishment is given not to the one who sinned but to the one who hasn't got the money to escape the punishment. The woman, naturally, cannot deny that she is pregnant. The man denies it as much as he likes, and what can you do? G-d gave men the pleasure and us the punishment. To the man He said, in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, which is a reward not a punishment, anyway, take away a man's work and he goes out of his mind—and to us women He gave the privilege of smelling their sweat of thy face close up, which is not such a big pleasure, and also the added promise of "in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children." I know that it is possible to see it differently.
    


     Poor Dora, when she was nine months pregnant, they came and took her away to a village, to some cousin of Xenia's. I think that Papa gave them some money. Xenia went with Dora to the village, and a few days later she came back sick and pale. Xenia, not Dora. Dora came back after a month, neither sick nor pale but red-faced and plump, like a juicy apple, she came back without a baby and she did not seem in the least sad, only, as it were, even more childish than she had been before. And she had been very childish before. After she came back from the village, Dora spoke to us only in baby talk, and she played with dolls, and when she cried, it sounded just like the crying of a three-year-old. She started sleeping the hours a baby sleeps too: that girl slept for twenty hours a day.

     And what happened to the baby? Who knows. We were told not to ask and we were very obedient daughters: we did not ask questions and nobody told us anything. Only once, in the night, Haya woke me and Fania saying that she could hear very clearly from the garden, in the dark—it was a rainy, windy night—the sound of a baby crying. We wanted to dress and go out but we were frightened. By the time Haya went and woke Papa, there was no baby to be heard, but still Papa took a big lantern and went out in the garden and checked every corner, and he came back and said sadly, Hayunia, you must have been dreaming. We did not argue with our father, what good would it do to argue? But each of us knew very well that she had not been dreaming, but that there really had been a baby crying in the garden: such a thin high-pitched cry so piercing, so frightening, not like a baby that is hungry and wants to suck, or a baby that's cold, but like a baby in terrible pain.
     After that pretty Dora fell ill with a rare blood disease, and Papa paid again for her to go and be examined by a great professor in Warsaw, a professor as famous as Louis Pasteur, and she never came back. Xenia Dimitrovna went on telling stories in the evening, but her stories ended up wild, that is to say not very proper, and occasionally words crept into her stories that were not so nice and that we didn't want to hear. Or if we did want to, we denied ourselves, because we were well-brought-up young ladies.
     And little Dora? We never spoke about her again. Even Xenia Dim-itrovna never pronounced her name, as though she forgave her for taking her lover but not for disappearing to Warsaw. Instead Xenia raised two dear little birds in a cage on the porch and they thrived until the winter, and in the winter they froze to death. Both of them.

 24


     MENAHEM GELEHRTER, who wrote the book about the Tarbuth gymnasium (secondary school) in Rovno, was a teacher there himself. He taught Bible, literature, and Jewish history. Among other things in his book I found something of what my mother and her sisters and friends studied as part of their Hebrew curriculum in the 1920s. It included stories from the rabbis, selected poems from the Jewish Golden Age in Spain, medieval Jewish philosophy, collected works of Bialik and Tchernikhowsky and selections from other modern Hebrew writers, and also translations from world literature, including such authors as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Turgenev, Chekhov, Mickiewicz, Schiller, Goethe, Heine, Shakespeare, Byron, Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Jack London, Tagore, Hamsun, the Epic of Gilgamesh in Tchernikhowsky's translation, and so on. The books on Jewish history included Joseph Klausner's History of the Second Temple.

    


     Every day (Aunt Sonia continues), before the day begins, at six or even earlier, I go slowly down the stairs to empty the liner in the garbage can outside. Before I climb up again, I have to rest there for a moment, I have to sit on the low wall by the garbage cans because the stairs leave me breathless. Sometimes I bump into a new immigrant from Russia, Varia, who sweeps the pavement in Wessely Street each morning. Over there, in Russia, she was a big boss. Here—she sweeps the pavements. She has hardly learned any Hebrew. Sometimes the two of us stay for a few minutes by the garbage cans and talk a little in Russian.

     Why is she a street sweeper? To keep two talented daughters at the university, one in chemistry, one in dentistry. Husband—she has none. Family in Israel—she has none either. Food—they save on that too. Clothes—they save on. Accommodation—they share a single room. All so that for tuition and textbooks they won't be short. It was always like that with Jewish families: they believed that education was an investment in the future, the only thing that no one can ever take away from your children, even if, heaven forbid, there's another war, another revolution, another migration, more discriminatory laws—your diploma you can always fold up quickly, hide it in the seams of your clothes, and run away to wherever Jews are allowed to live.
     The Gentiles used to say about us: the diploma—that's the Jews' religion. Not money, not gold. The diploma. But behind this faith in the diploma there was something else, something more complicated, more secret, and that is that girls in those days, even modern girls, like us, girls who went to school and then to university, were always taught that women are entitled to an education and a place outside the home—but only until the children are born. Your life is your own only for a short time: from when you leave your parents' home to your first pregnancy. From that moment, from the first pregnancy, we had to begin to live our lives only around the children. Just like our mothers. Even to sweep pavements for our children, because your child is the chick and you are—what? When it comes down to it, you are just the yolk of the egg, you are what the chick eats so as to grow big and strong. And when your child grows up—even then you can't go back to being yourself, you simply change from being a mother to being a grandmother, whose task is simply to help her children bring up their children.
     True, even then there were quite a few women who made careers for themselves and went out into the world. But everybody talked about them behind their backs: look at that selfish woman, she sits in meetings while her poor children grow up in the street and pay the price.
     Now it's a new world. Now at last women are given more opportunity to live lives of their own. Or is it just an illusion? Maybe in the younger generations too women still cry into their pillows at night, while their husbands are asleep, because they feel they have to make impossible choices? I don't want to be judgmental: it's not my world anymore. To make a comparison I'd have to go from door to door checking how many mothers' tears are wept every night into the pillow when husbands are asleep, and to compare the tears then with the tears now.
     Sometimes I see on television, sometimes I see even here, from my balcony, how young couples after a day's work do everything together—wash the clothes, hang them out, change diapers, cook, once I even heard in the grocer's a young man saying that the next day he and his wife were going—that's what he said, tomorrow we're going—for an amniocentesis. When I heard him say that, I felt a lump in my throat: maybe the world is changing a little after all?
     It's certain that malice, rishes, hasn't lost ground in politics, between religions, nations, or classes, but maybe it's receding a little in couples? In young families? Or maybe I'm just deceiving myself. Maybe it's all just play-acting, and in fact the world carries on as before—the mother cat suckles her kittens, while Mr. Puss-in-Boots licks himself all over, twitches his whiskers, and goes off in search of pleasures in the yard?
     Do you still remember what is written in the book of Proverbs? A wise son maketh a glad father, but a foolish son is the heaviness of his mother! If the son turns out wise, then the father rejoices, boasts of his son, and scores full marks. But if, heaven forbid, the son turns out unsuccessful, or stupid, or problematic, or deformed, or a criminal—nu, then it's bound to be the mother's fault, and all the care and suffering falls on her. Once your mother said to me: Sonia, there are just two things—no, I've got a lump in my throat again. We'll talk about this another time. Let's talk about something else.
     Sometimes I'm not quite sure that I remember correctly whether that princess, Lyubov Nikitichna, who lived behind the curtain in our house with her two girls, Tasia and Nina, and slept with them in the same antique bed, I'm not quite sure: was she really their mother? Or was she just the gouvernantka, the governess, of the two girls? Who apparently had two different fathers? Because Tasia was Anastasia Ser-geyevna, while Nina was Antonina Boleslavovna. There was something a bit foggy. Something we didn't talk about much, and when we did, it was an awkward subject. I remember that the two girls both called the Princess "Mama" or "Maman," but it might have been because they couldn't remember their real mother. I can't tell you for certain, either way, because the cover-up already existed. There were many cover-ups in life two or three generations ago. Today perhaps there are fewer. Or have they just changed? Have new ones been invented?
     Whether the cover-up is a good thing or a bad thing I really don't know. I am not qualified to judge today's habits because I may well have been brainwashed, like all the girls of my generation. Still, I sometimes think that "between him and her," as they say, perhaps in these times it has all become simpler. When I was a girl, when I was what they called a young lady from a good home, it was full of knives, poison, terrifying darkness. Like walking in the dark in a cellar full of scorpions with no shoes on. We were completely in the dark. It simply wasn't talked about.
     But they did talk all the time—chatter, jealousy, and rishes, malicious gossip—they talked about money, about diseases, they talked about success, about a good family versus who knows what sort of family, this was an endless topic, and about character they talked endlessly too, this one has such and such a character and that one has such and such a character. And how much they talked about ideas! It's unimaginable today! They talked about Judaism, Zionism, the Bund, Communism, they talked about anarchism and nihilism, they talked about America, they talked about Lenin, they even talked about the "woman question," women's emancipation. Your aunt Haya was the most daring of the three of us about women's emancipation—but only when it came to talking and arguing, naturally—Fania was a bit of a suffragette too, but she had some doubts. And I was the silly little girl who is always being told, Sonia don't talk, Sonia don't interrupt, you wait till you grow up, then you'll understand. So I closed my mouth and listened.
     All young people in those days bandied notions of freedom about: this kind of freedom, that kind of freedom, another kind of freedom. But when it came to "between him and her" there was no freedom: there was just walking in the dark in a cellar full of scorpions with no shoes on. Not a week went by without our hearing horrifying rumors about a young girl who experienced what happens to girls who aren't careful; or a respectable woman who fell in love and went out of her mind; or a maid who was seduced; or a cook who ran off with her employer's son and came back alone with a baby; or a respectable woman who fell in love and threw herself at her beloved's feet only to be cast out and scoffed at. Do you say scoffed? No? When we were girls, chastity was both a cage and the only railing between you and the abyss. It lay on a girl's chest like a thirty-kilo stone. Even in the dreams she dreamed at night, chastity stayed awake and stood beside the bed and watched over her, so she could be very ashamed when she woke up in the morning, even if nobody knew.
     All that business "between him and her" may be a bit less in the dark nowadays. A bit simpler. In the darkness that covered things then, it was much easier for men to abuse women. On the other hand, the fact that it's so much simpler and less mysterioius now—is that a good thing? Doesn't it turn out too ugly?
     I'm surprised at myself that I'm talking to you about this at all. When I was still a girl, we would sometimes whisper to one another. But with a boy? Never in my life have I talked about such things with a boy. Not even with Buma, and we've been married now for nearly sixty years. How did we end up here? We were talking about Lyubov Nikitichna and her Tasia and Nina. If you go to Rovno someday, you can have a detective adventure. Maybe you could try to check if they still have in the town hall any documents that can shed light on that cover-up. Discover whether that countess, or princess, was or wasn't the mother of her two daughters. And whether she really was a princess or a countess. Or maybe whether Lebedevski, the mayor, was also the father of Tasia and Nina, just as he was said to be the father of poor Dora.
     But on second thought, any documents there must have been burned by now ten times over, when we were conquered by the Poles, by the Red Army, and then by the Nazis, when they simply took us all and shot us in ditches and covered us with earth. Then there was Stalin again, with the NKVD, Rovno was thrown from hand to hand like a puppy being teased by Russia-Poland-Russia-Germany-Russia. And now it doesn't belong to Poland or to Russia but to Ukraine, or is it Belarus? Or some local gangs? I don't know myself who it belongs to now. And I don't even really care: what there was doesn't exist anymore, and what there is now will in a few more years also turn to nothing.
     The whole world, if you just look at it from a distance, will not go on forever. They say one day the sun will go out and everything will return to darkness. So why do men slaughter one another throughout history? What does it matter so much, who rules Kashmir or the Tombs of the Patriarchs in Hebron? Instead of eating the apple from the tree of life or the tree of knowledge, it seems we ate the apple from the tree of rishes, and we ate it with pleasure. That's how paradise came to an end and this hell began.
    


     There's so much either-or: you know so little even about people who live under the same roof as you do. You think you know a lot—and it turns out you know nothing at all. Your mother, for example—no, I'm sorry, I simply can't talk about her directly. Only in a roundabout way. Otherwise the wound starts to hurt. I won't talk about Fania. Only about what there was around her. What there was around Fania is also maybe a little bit Fania. We used to have a kind of proverb, that when you really love someone, then you love even their handkerchief. It loses something in translation. But you can see what I'm getting at.

     Take a look at this, please: I've got something here that I can show you and you can feel it with your fingers, so you'll know that everything I've told you isn't just stories. Look at this please—no, it's not a tablecloth, it's a pillowcase, embroidered the way young ladies from good homes learned to embroider in the old days. It was embroidered for me as a present by the Princess—or Countess?—Lyubov Nikitichna. The head that's embroidered here, she told me herself, is the silhouette of the head of Cardinal Richelieu. Who he was, that Cardinal Richelieu, I don't remember anymore. Perhaps I never knew, I'm not clever like Haya and Fania: they were sent off to get their matriculation, and then to Prague, to study at the university. I was a bit thick. People always said about me: that Sonichka, she is so cute but she's a bit thick. I was sent to the Polish military hospital to learn how to be a qualified nurse. But still I remember very well, before I left home, that the princess told me it was the head of Cardinal Richelieu.
     Perhaps you know who Cardinal Richelieu was? Never mind. Tell me another time, or don't bother. At my age, it's not so important to me if I end my days without the honor of knowing who Cardinal Richelieu was. There are plenty of cardinals, and most of them are none too fond of our people.
     Deep down in my heart I'm a bit of an anarchist. Like Papa. Your mother was also an anarchist at heart. Of course, among the Klausners she could never express it: they thought her pretty strange as it was, although they always behaved politely toward her. In general with the Klausners manners were always the most important thing. Your other grandfather, Grandpa Alexander, if I didn't snatch my hand away quickly, would have kissed it. There's a children's story about Puss-in-Boots. In the Klausner family your mother was like a captive bird in a cage hanging in Puss-in-Boots's drawing room.
     I'm an anarchist for the very simple reason that nothing good ever came from any Cardinal Richelieu. Only Ivanuchka Durachok, do you remember, the village idiot in our maid Xenyuchka's story who took pity on the ordinary people and didn't begrudge the little bread he had to eat, but used it to stop the hole in the bridge and because of that he was made king—only someone like him might take pity on us, too, occasionally. All the rest, the kings and rulers, have no pity on anyone. In fact, we ordinary people don't have much pity for each other either: we didn't exactly have pity for the little Arab girl who died at the road block on the way to the hospital because apparently there was some Cardinal Richelieu of a soldier there, without a heart. A Jewish soldier—but still a Cardinal Richelieu! All he wanted was to lock up and go home, and so that little girl died, whose eyes should be piercing our souls so none of us can sleep at night, though I didn't even see her eyes because in the papers they only show pictures of our victims, never theirs.
     Do you think ordinary people are so wonderful? Far from it! They are just as stupid and cruel as their rulers. That's the real moral of Hans Christian Andersen's story about the emperor's new clothes, that ordinary people are just as stupid as the king and the courtiers and Cardinal Richelieu. But Ivanuchka Durachok didn't care if they laughed at him; all that mattered to him was that they should stay alive. He had compassion for people, all of whom without exception need some compassion. Even Cardinal Richelieu. Even the Pope, and you must have seen on television how sick and feeble he is, and here we were so lacking in compassion, we made him stand for hours in the sun on those sick legs of his. They had no pity on an old, very sick man, who you could see even on TV could stand upright only with terrible pain, but he made a supreme effort and stood in front of us saying nothing at Yad Vashem (the Holocaust memorial) for half an hour without a break, in a heat wave, just so as not to bring us dishonor. It was quite hard for me to watch. I felt sorry for him.
    


     Nina was a very good friend of your mother Fania, they were exactly the same age, and I made friends with the little one, Tasia. For many years they lived in our house with the princess, Maman they called her. Maman is the French for Mama, but who knows if she was really their Mama? Or just their nanny? They were very poor, I don't think they paid us even a kopek in rent. They were allowed to come into the house not through the servants' entrance, the chyorny khod, but through the main entrance, which was called paradny khod. They were so poor that the princess, the Maman, used to sit at night by the lamp sewing paper skirts for rich girls who were learning ballet. It was a kind of corrugated paper, and she glued lots of glittering stars on, made from golden paper.

     Until one fine day that princess, or countess, Lyubov Nikitichna, left her two girls and suddenly went off to Tunis, of all places, to look for some long-lost relative called Yelizaveta Franzovna. And now just look how my memory is making an idiot of me! Where have I put my watch? I can't remember. But the name of some Yelizaveta Franzovna that I've never seen in my life, some Yelizaveta Franzovna that maybe eighty years ago our Princess Lyubov Nikitichna went off to Tunis, of all places, to look for, that I can remember as clear as the sun in the sky! Perhaps I lost my watch in Tunis, too?
     In our dining room hung a picture in a gilded frame by some very expensive khudozhnik (artist): I remember that in the picture you could see a good-looking boy with fair hair, all disheveled, looking more like a spoiled girl than a boy, like something between a boy and a girl. I can't remember his face but I do remember very well that he was wearing a kind of embroidered shirt with puffy sleeves, a big yellow hat hanging by a string on her shoulder—perhaps it was a little girl after all—and you could see her three skirts, one under the other, because one side was raised a little and the lace peeped out from underneath, first a yellow underskirt, a very strong yellow like in a Van Gogh, then under that a white lace underskirt, and the bottom one—her legs were covered apparently by a third underskirt in sky blue. A picture like that, it seemed modest but it wasn't really. It was a life-size picture. And that girl who looked so much like a boy was standing there in the middle of the field, surrounded by pasture and white sheep, there were some light clouds in the sky, and in the distance you could see a strip of forest.
     I remember once Haya said that a beauty like that shouldn't go out herding sheep but should stay inside the walls of the palace, and I said that the bottommost skirt was painted the same color as the sky, as though the skirt had been cut straight from the sky. And suddenly Fania burst out in fury against us and said, Be quiet, both of you, why are you talking such nonsense, it's a lying painting that is covering a very great moral decay. She used more or less these words, but not exactly, I can't repeat your mother's way of speaking, nobody could—can you still remember a little how Fania spoke?
     I can't forget that outburst of hers, or her face at that moment. She was maybe fifteen or sixteen at the time. I remember it all precisely because it was so unlike her: Fania never raised her voice, ever, even when she was hurt, she would just withdraw inward. And anyway, with her you always had to guess what she was feeling, what she didn't like. And here suddenly—I remember it was Saturday night or the end of some festival, maybe Sukkot? or Shavuot?—she suddenly burst out and shouted at us. Never mind me, all my life I've been just the silly little one, but to shout at Haya! Our big sister! The leader of the youth group! With her charisma! Haya, who was admired by the whole school!
     But your mother, as though suddenly rebelling, started to pour scorn on that artistic painting that had been hanging there in our dining room all those years. She ridiculed it for sweetening reality! For lying! She said that in real life, shepherdesses are dressed in rags, not in silk, and they have faces scarred by cold and hunger, not angelic faces, and dirty hair with lice and fleas, not golden locks. And that to ignore suffering is almost as bad as inflicting it, and that the picture turned real life into some kind of Swiss chocolate box scene.
     Maybe the reason your mother was in such a rage about the picture in the dining room was that the khudozhnik who painted it had made it seem as if there were no more disasters in the world. I think that's what made her angry. At the time of this outburst she must have been more miserable than anyone could have imagined. Forgive me for crying. She was my sister and she loved me a lot and she's been ravaged by scorpions. That's enough: I've finished crying now. Sorry. Every time I remember that prettified picture, every time I see a picture with three underskirts and a feathery sky, I see scorpions ravaging my sister and I start to cry.

 25


     SO THE eighteen-year-old Fania, following in the footsteps of her elder sister Haya, was sent in 1931 to study at the university in Prague, because in Poland the universities were virtually closed to Jews. Mother studied history and philosophy. Her parents, Hertz and Itta, like all the Jews of Rovno, were witnesses and victims of the anti-Semitism that was growing among their Polish neighbors and among the Ukrainians and Germans, Catholic and Orthodox Christians—acts of violence by Ukrainian hooligans and increasingly discriminatory measures by the Polish authorities. And, like the rumble of distant thunder, echoes reached Rovno of deadly incitement to violence and the persecution of Jews in Hitler's Germany.

     My grandfather's business affairs were also in crisis: the inflation of the early 1930s wiped out all his savings overnight. Aunt Sonia told me about "loads of Polish banknotes for millions and trillions that Papa gave me, that I wallpapered my room with. All the dowries that he had been saving for ten years for the three of us went down the drain in two months." Haya and Fania soon had to abandon their studies in Prague because the money, their father's money, had almost run out.
     And so the flour mill, the house and orchard in Dubinska Street, the carriage, horses, and sleigh were all sold in a hasty, unfavorable deal. Itta and Hertz Mussman reached Palestine in 1933 almost penniless. They rented a miserable little hut covered with tar paper. Papa, who had always enjoyed being near flour, managed to find work in the Pat bakery. Later, when he was about fifty, as Aunt Sonia recalled, he bought a horse and cart and made his living first delivering bread, then transporting building materials around Haifa Bay. I can see him clearly, a darkly suntanned, thoughtful man, in his work clothes and sweaty gray vest, his smile rather shy but his blue eyes shooting sparks of laughter, the reins slack in his hands, as though from his seat on a board set across the cart he found some charming and amusing side to the views of Haifa Bay, the Carmel range, the oil refineries, the derricks of the port in the distance, and the factory chimneys.
     Now that he had stopped being a wealthy man and returned to the proletariat, he seemed rejuvenated. A sort of perpetual suppressed joy seemed to have descended on him, a joie de vivre in which an anarchistic spark flickered. Just like Yehuda Leib Klausner of Ulkieniki in Lithuania, the father of my other grandfather, Alexander, my grandfather Naphtali Hertz Mussman enjoyed the life of a carter, the lonely, peaceful rhythm of the long slow journeys, the feel of the horse and its pungent smells, the stable, the straw, the harness, the shafts, the oat bag, the reins, and the bit.
     Sonia, who was a girl of sixteen when her parents emigrated and her sisters were studying in Prague, stayed on in Rovno for five years, until she had qualified as a nurse at the nursing college attached to the Polish military hospital. She reached the port of Tel Aviv, where her parents, her sisters, and Tsvi Shapiro, Haya's "fresh" husband, were waiting for her, two days before the end of 1938. After a few years she married in Tel Aviv the man who had been her leader in the youth movement in Rovno, a strict, pedantic, opinionated man named Avraham Gendel-berg. Buma.
     And in 1934, a year or so after her parents and her elder sister Haya and four years before her younger sister Sonia, Fania too reached the Land of Israel. People who knew her said that she had had a painful love affair in Prague; they couldn't give me any details. When I visited Prague and on several successive evenings walked in the warren of ancient cobblestone streets around the university, I conjured up images and composed stories in my head.
     A year or so after she arrived in Jerusalem, my mother registered to continue her history and philosophy studies at the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus. Forty-eight years later, apparently with no notion of what her grandmother had studied in her youth, my daughter Fania decided to study history and philosophy at Tel Aviv University.
     I do not know if my mother broke off her studies at Charles University only because her parents' money had run out. How far was she pushed to emigrate to Palestine by the violent hatred of Jews that filled the streets of Europe in the mid-1930s and spread to the universities, or to what extent did she come here as the result of her education in a Tar-buth school and her membership in a Zionist youth movement? What did she hope to find here, what did she find, what did she not find? What did Tel Aviv and Jerusalem look like to someone who had grown up in a mansion in Rovno and arrived straight from the Gothic beauty of Prague? What did spoken Hebrew sound like to the sensitive ears of a young lady coming with the refined, book-learned Hebrew of the Tar-buth school and possessing a finely tuned linguistic sensibility? How did my young mother respond to the sand dunes, the motor pumps in the citrus groves, the rocky hillsides, the archaeology field trips, the biblical ruins and remains of the Second Temple period, the headlines in the newspapers and the cooperative dairy produce, the wadis, the hamsins, the domes of the walled convents, the ice-cold water from the jarra, the cultural evenings with accordion and harmonica music, the cooperative bus drivers in their khaki shorts, the sounds of English (the language of the rulers of the country), the dark orchards, the minarets, strings of camels carrying building sand, Hebrew watchmen, suntanned pioneers from the kibbutz, construction workers in shabby caps? How much was she repelled, or attracted, by tempestuous nights of arguments, ideological conflicts, and courtships, Saturday afternoon outings, the fire of party politics, the secret intrigues of the various underground groups and their sympathizers, the enlisting of volunteers for agricultural tasks, the dark blue nights punctuated by howls of jackals and echoes of distant gunfire?
     By the time I reached the age when my mother could have told me about her childhood and her early days in the Land, her mind was elsewhere and set on other matters. The bedtime stories she told me were peopled by giants, fairies, witches, the farmer's wife and the miller's daughter, remote huts deep in the forest. If she ever spoke about the past, about her parents' house or the flour mill or the bitch Prima, something bitter and desperate would creep into her voice, something ambivalent or vaguely sarcastic, a kind of suppressed mockery, something too complicated or veiled for me to catch, something provocative and disconcerting.
     Maybe that is why I did not like her to talk about these things and begged her to tell me simple stories I could relate to instead, like that of Matvey the Water Drawer and his six bewitched wives, or the dead horseman who went on crossing continents and cities in the form of a skeleton wearing armor and blazing spurs.
     I have hardly any idea about my mother's arrival in Haifa, her first days in Tel Aviv, or her first years in Jerusalem. Instead, I can hand you back to Aunt Sonia to tell her story of how and why she came here, what she hoped to find and what she really found.
    


     At the Tarbuth school we not only learned to read and write and speak very good Hebrew, which my subsequent life has corrupted. We also learned Bible and Mishnah and medieval Hebrew poetry, as well as biology, Polish literature and history, Renaissance art and European history. And above all we learned that beyond the horizon, beyond the rivers and forests, there was a land that we would all soon have to go to because the days of the Jews in Europe, at least those of us who lived in Eastern Europe, were numbered.

     Our parents' generation were much more aware than we were that time was running out. Even those who had made money, like our father, or those who had built modern factories in Rovno or turned to medicine, law, or engineering, those who enjoyed good social relations with the local authorities and intelligentsia, felt that we were living on a volcano. We were right on the borderline between Stalin and Grajewski and Pilsudski. We already knew that Stalin wanted to put an end to Jewish existence by force; he wanted all the Jews to become good Komsomolniks who would inform on one another. On the other hand, the Polish attitude toward the Jews was one of disgust, like someone who has bitten into a piece of bad fish and can neither swallow it nor spit it out. They didn't feel like spewing us forth in the presence of the Versailles nations, in the atmosphere of minority rights, in front of Woodrow Wilson, the League of Nations: in the 1920s the Poles still had some shame, they were keen to look good. Like a drunk trying to walk straight, so that no one can see he's weaving. They still hoped to appear outwardly more or less like other countries. But under the table they oppressed and humiliated us, so that we would gradually all go off to Palestine and they wouldn't have to see us anymore. That's why they even encouraged Zionist education and Hebrew schools: by all means let us become a nation, why not, the main thing was that we should scram to Palestine, and good riddance.
     The fear in every Jewish home, the fear that we never talked about but that we were unintentionally injected with, like a poison, drop by drop, was the chilling fear that perhaps we really were not clean enough, that we really were too noisy and pushy, too clever and money-grubbing. Perhaps we didn't have proper manners. There was a terror that we might, heaven forbid, make a bad impression on the Gentiles, and then they would be angry and do things to us too dreadful to think about.
     A thousand times it was hammered into the head of every Jewish child that we must behave nicely and politely with the Gentiles even when they were rude or drunk, that whatever else we did, we must not provoke them or argue with them or haggle with them, we must not irritate them, or hold our heads up, and we must speak to them quietly, with a smile, so they shouldn't say we were noisy, and we must always speak to them in good, correct Polish, so they couldn't say we were defiling their language, but we mustn't speak in Polish that was too high, so they couldn't say we had ambitions above our station, we must not give them any excuse to accuse us of being too greedy, and heaven forbid that they should say we had stains on our skirts. In short, we had to try very hard to make a good impression, an impression that no child must mar, because even a single child with dirty hair who spread lice could damage the reputation of the entire Jewish people. They could not stand us as it was, so heaven forbid we should give them more reasons not to stand us.
     You who were born here in Israel can never understand how this constant drip-drip distorts all your feelings, how it corrodes your human dignity like rust. Gradually it makes you as fawning and dishonest and full of tricks as a cat. I dislike cats intensely. I don't like dogs much either, but if I had to choose, I prefer a dog. A dog is like a Gentile, you can see at once what it's thinking or feeling. Diaspora Jews became cats, in the bad sense, if you know what I mean.
     But most of all they dreaded the mobs. They were terrified of what might happen in the gap between governments, for instance if the Poles were thrown out and the Communists came in, they were afraid that in the interval gangs of Ukrainians or Belarussians or the inflamed Polish masses or, farther north, the Lithuanians, would raise their heads once more. It was a volcano that kept dribbling lava all the time and smelling of smoke. "They're sharpening their knives for us in the dark," people said, and they never said who, because it could be any of them. The mobs. Even here in Israel, it turns out, Jewish mobs can be a bit of a monster.
     The only people we were not too afraid of were the Germans. I can remember in 1934 or 1935—I'd stayed behind in Rovno to finish my nursing training when the rest of the family had left—there were quite a few Jews who said if only Hitler would come, at least in Germany there's law and order and everyone knows his place, it doesn't matter so much what Hitler says, what matters is that over there in Germany he imposes German order and the mob is terrified of him. What matters is that in Hitler's Germany there is no rioting in the streets and they don't have anarchy—we still thought then that anarchy was the worst state. Our nightmare was that one day the priests would start preaching that the blood of Jesus was flowing again, because of the Jews, and they would start to ring those scary bells of theirs and the peasants would hear and fill their bellies with schnapps and pick up their axes and pitchforks, that's the way it always began.
     Nobody imagined what was really in store, but already in the 1920s almost everyone knew deep down that there was no future for the Jews either with Stalin or in Poland or anywhere in Eastern Europe, and so the pull of Palestine became stronger and stronger. Not with everyone, naturally. The religious Jews were very much against it, and so were the Bundists, the Yiddishists, the Communists, and the assimilated Jews who thought they were already more Polish than Paderewski or Wojciechowski. But many ordinary Jews in Rovno in the 1920s were keen that their children should learn Hebrew and go to Tarbuth. Those who had enough money sent their children to study in Haifa, at the Technion, or at the Tel Aviv gymnasium, or the agricultural colleges in Palestine, and the echoes that came back to us from the Land were simply wonderful—the young people were just waiting, when would your turn come? Meanwhile everyone read newspapers in Hebrew, argued, sang songs from the Land of Israel, recited Bialik and Tchernikhowsky, split up into rival factions and parties, ran up uniforms and banners, there was a kind of tremendous excitement about everything national. It was very similar to what you see here today with the Palestinians, only without their penchant for bloodshed. Among us Jews you hardly see such nationalism nowadays.
     Naturally we knew how hard it was in the Land: we knew it was very hot, a wilderness, and we knew there was unemployment, and we knew there were poor Arabs in the villages, but we could see on the big wall map in our classroom that there weren't many Arabs, there may have been half a million altogether then, certainly less than one million, and there was total certainty that there would be enough room for another few million Jews, and that maybe the Arabs were just being stirred up to hate us, like the simple people in Poland, but surely we'd be able to explain to them and persuade them that our return to the Land represented only a blessing for them, economically, medically, culturally, in every way. We thought that soon, in a few years, the Jews would be the majority here, and as soon as that happened, we'd show the whole world how to treat a minority—our own minority, the Arabs. We, who had always been an oppressed minority, would treat our Arab minority justly, fairly, generously, we would share our homeland with them, share everything with them, we would certainly never turn them into cats. It was a pretty dream.
    


     In every classroom in the Tarbuth kindergarten, the Tarbuth primary school, and the Tarbuth secondary school there hung a large picture of Theodor Herzl, a large map of the Land from Dan to Beer Sheba with the pioneering villages highlighted, a Jewish National Fund collecting box, pictures of pioneers at work, and all sorts of slogans with snatches of verse. Bialik visited Rovno twice and Tchernikhowsky came twice too, and Asher Barash as well, I think, or it may have been some other writer. Prominent Zionists from Palestine came too, almost every month, Zalman Rubashov, Tabenkin, Yaakov Zerubavel, Vladimir Jabotinsky.

     We used to put on big processions for them, with drums and banners, decorations, paper lanterns, passion, slogans, armbands, and songs. The Polish mayor himself went out to meet them in the square, and in that way we could sometimes begin to feel that we were also a nation, not just some kind of scum. It may be a little hard for you to understand, but in those days all the Poles were drunk on Polishness, the Ukrainians were drunk on Ukrainianness, not to mention the Germans, the Czechs, all of them, even the Slovaks, the Lithuanians, and the Latvians, and there was no place for us in that carnival, we didn't belong and we weren't wanted. Small wonder that we too wanted to be a nation, like the rest of them. What alternative had they left us?
     But our education was not chauvinistic. Actually the education at Tarbuth was humanistic, progressive, democratic, and also artistic and scientific. They tried to give boys and girls equal rights. They taught us always to respect other peoples: every man is made in the image of G-d, even if he has a tendency to forget it.
     From a very early age our thoughts were with the Land of Israel. We knew by heart the situation in every new village, what was grown in Beer Tuvia and how many inhabitants there were in Zichron Yaakov, who built the metaled road from Tiberias to Tsemach, and when the pioneers climbed Mount Gilboa. We even knew what people ate and wore there.
     That is, we thought we knew. In fact our teachers did not know the whole truth, so even if they had wanted to tell us about the bad aspects, they couldn't have. They didn't have the faintest idea. Everybody who came from the Land—emissaries, youth leaders, politicians—and everyone who went and came back painted a rosy picture. And if anyone came back and told us less pleasant things, we didn't want to hear. We simply silenced them. We treated them with contempt.
     Our headmaster was a delightful man. Charmant. He was a firstrate teacher with a sharp mind and the heart of a poet. His name was Reiss, Dr. Issachar Reiss. He came from Galicia and soon became the idol of the young people. The girls secretly adored him, including my sister Haya, who was involved in communal activities and was a natural leader, and Fania, your mother, on whom Dr. Reiss had a mysterious influence, gently steering her in the direction of literature and art. He was so handsome and manly, a bit like Rudolph Valentino or Ramon Navarro, full of warmth and natural empathy, he hardly ever lost his temper, and when he did, he never hesitated to send for the student afterward to apologize.
     The whole town was under his spell. I think the mothers dreamed of him at night and the daughters swooned at the sight ofhim by day. And the boys, no less than the girls, tried to imitate him, to speak like him, to cough like him, to stop in the middle of a sentence like him and go and stand by the window for a few moments, deep in thought. He could have been a successful seducer. But no, so far as I know he was married—not particularly happily, to a woman who barely came up to his ankles—and behaved like an exemplary family man. He could also have been a great leader: he had a quality that made people long to follow him through fire and water, to do anything that would make him smile appreciatively and praise them afterward. His thoughts were our thoughts. His humor became our style. And he believed that the Land of Israel was the only place where the Jews could be cured of their mental illnesses and prove to themselves and to the world that they had some good qualities too.
     We had some other wonderful teachers too. There was Menahem Gelehrter, who taught Bible studies as though he had been personally present at the Valley of Elah or Anathoth or the Philistine temple in Gaza. Every week he took us on a trip "in the Land," one day in Galilee, another in the new villages in Judaea, another day in the plain of Jericho, another through the streets of Tel Aviv. He would bring maps and photographs, newspaper cuttings and bits of poetry and prose, examples from the Bible, geography, history, and archaeology, until you ended up feeling pleasantly tired, as if you had really been there, not just in your thoughts but as if you'd really walked in the sun and the dust, among the citrus trees and the lodge in the vineyard and the cactus hedges and the pioneers' tents in the valleys. And so I came to the Land long before I actually arrived here.

 26


     IN ROVNO, your mother had a boyfriend, a deep, sensitive student whose name was Tarla or Tarlo. They had a sort of little union of Zionist students that included your mother, Tarlo, my sister Haya, Esterka Ben Meir, Fania Weissmann, possibly also Fania Sonder, Lilia Kalisch, who was later called Lea Bar-Samkha, and a few others. Haya was the natural leader until she went off to Prague. They would sit around concocting all sorts of plans, how they would live in the Land of Israel, how they would work there to reinvigorate the artistic and cultural life, how they would keep the Rovno connection alive. After the other girls left Rovno, either to study in Prague or to emigrate to the Land, Tarlo started courting me. He would wait for me every evening at the entrance to the Polish Military Hospital. I would come out in my green dress and white headband, and we would stroll together down Trzecziego Maya and Topolyova Streets, which had been renamed Pilsudski Street, in the Palace Gardens, in Gravni Park, sometimes we walked toward the River Ostia and the old quarter, the Citadel District, where the Great Synagogue and the Catholic cathedral stood. There was never anything more between us than words. We may have held hands two or three times at most. Why? That's hard for me to explain to you because your generation would never understand anyway. You might even make fun of us. We had a terrible sense of modesty. We were buried under a mountain of shame and fear.

     That Tarlo, he was a great revolutionary by conviction, but he used to blush at everything: if ever he happened to utter a word like "women" or "suckle" or "skirt," or even "legs," he would flush red to his ears, like a hemorrhage, and he'd start apologizing and stuttering. He would talk to me endlessly about science and technology, whether they were a blessing or a curse for mankind. Or both. He would talk enthusiastically about a future where there would soon be no more poverty or crime or illness or even death. He was a bit of a Communist, but it didn't help him much: when Stalin came in '41, Tarlo was simply taken away, and he disappeared.
     Of the whole of Jewish Rovno there's barely a soul left alive—only those who came to the Land while there was still time, and the few who fled to America, and those who somehow managed to survive the knives of the Bolshevik regime. All the rest were butchered by the Germans, apart from those who were butchered by Stalin. No, I have no desire to go back for a visit: what for? To start longing again from there for a Land of Israel that no longer exists and may never have existed outside our youthful dreams? To grieve? If I want to grieve, I don't have to leave Wessely Street or even set foot outside my own apartment. I sit here in my armchair and grieve several hours a day. Or I look out the window and grieve. Not for what once was and is no more, but for what never was. I have no reason now to grieve for Tarlo, it was nearly seventy years ago, he wouldn't be alive now anyway: if Stalin hadn't killed him, he'd be dead from this place, from a war or a terrorist bomb, or else from cancer or diabetes. I only grieve for what never was. Only for those pretty pictures we made for ourselves, and now they've faded.
    


     I embarked from Trieste on a Romanian cargo boat, the ConstanŢa it was called, and I remember that, even though I didn't believe in any religion, I didn't want to eat pork—not because of G-d, after all G-d created pigs, they don't disgust him, and when a piglet is killed and it squeals and pleads with the voice of a tortured child, G-d sees and hears every grunt and has about as much pity for the tortured piglet as He does for human beings. He has neither more nor less pity for the piglet than He does for all His rabbis and Hasidim who keep all the commandments and worship Him all their lives.

     So it wasn't because of G-d but merely because it didn't seem appropriate, on my way to the Land of Israel, to gobble smoked pork and salt pork and pork sausages on board that boat. So I ate wonderful white bread instead, bread that was so fine and rich. At night I slept belowdecks, in third class, in a dormitory, next to a Greek girl with a baby who must have been no more than three weeks old. Every evening the two of us used to rock the baby in a sheet so that she'd stop crying and go to sleep. We didn't speak to each other because we had no common language, and maybe that's the reason we parted from each other with great affection.
     I even remember that at one moment I had a fleeting thought, why did I have to go to the Land of Israel at all? Just to be among Jews? Yet this Greek girl, who probably didn't even know what a Jew was, was closer to me than the entire Jewish people. The entire Jewish people seemed to me at that moment like a great sweaty mass whose belly I was being tempted to enter, so it could consume me entirely with its digestive juices, and I said to myself, Sonia, is that what you really want? It's curious that in Rovno I'd never experienced this fear, that I was going to be consumed by the digestive juices of the Jewish people. It never came back once I was here, either. It was just then, for a moment, on that boat, on the way, when the Greek baby fell asleep in my lap and I could feel it through my dress as though at that moment she really was flesh of my flesh, even though she wasn't Jewish, and despite the wicked Jew-hating Antiochus Epiphanes.
    


     Early one morning, I can even tell you the precise date and time—it was exactly three days before the end of 1938, Wednesday, December 28,1938, just after Hanukkah—it happened to be a very clear, almost cloudless day, by six in the morning I'd already dressed warmly, a sweater and light coat, and I went up on deck and looked at the gray line of clouds ahead. I watched for maybe an hour and all I saw was a few seagulls. And suddenly, almost in an instant, above the line of the clouds the winter sun appeared and below the clouds there was the city of Tel Aviv: row after row of square, white-painted houses, quite unlike houses in a town or a village in Poland or Ukraine, quite unlike Rovno or Warsaw or Trieste, but very like the pictures on the wall in every classroom at Tarbuth, and the drawings and photographs that our teacher Menahem Gelehrter used to show us. So I was both surprised and not surprised.

     I can't describe how all at once the joy rose up in my throat; suddenly all I wanted to do was shout and sing, This is mine! All mine! It really is all mine! It's a funny thing, I'd never experienced such a strong feeling before in my life, of belonging, of ownership, if you know what I mean, not in our house, our orchard, the flour mill, never. Never in my life, either before that morning or after it, have I known that kind of joy: at long last this would be my home, at long last here I'd be able to draw my curtains and forget about the neighbors and do exactly as I pleased. Here I didn't need to be on my best behavior the whole time, I didn't have to be shy because of anyone, I didn't have to worry about what the peasants would think of us or what the priests would say or what the intelligentsia would feel, I didn't have to try to make a good impression on the Gentiles. Even when we bought our first apartment, in Holon, or this one in Wessely Street, I didn't feel so strongly how good it felt to own your own home. And that was the feeling that filled me at maybe seven in the morning, looking out at a city I'd never even been to, and a land where I'd never set foot, and funny little houses the like of which I'd never seen before in my life! I don't suppose you can understand this. It must seem rather ludicrous to you, doesn't it? Or foolish?
     At eleven o'clock we climbed down with our luggage into a little motorboat, and the sailor who was there, a big hairy Ukrainian, all sweaty and slightly scary, the moment I thanked him nicely in Ukrainian and wanted to give him a coin, he laughed and suddenly said in pure Hebrew, Darling, what's the matter with you, there's no need for that, why don't you give me a little kiss instead?
     It was a pleasant, slightly cool day, and what I remember most is an intoxicating, strong smell of boiling tar, and out of the thick smoke coming from the tar barrels—they must have just asphalted some square or pavement—there suddenly burst my mother's face, laughing, and then Papa's, in tears, and my sister Haya with her husband, Tsvi, whom I hadn't met yet, but right from the first glance I had a flash of a thought like this: what a boy she's found herself here! He's quite good-looking, good-hearted, and jolly too! And it was only after I'd hugged and kissed everyone that I saw that my sister Fania, your mother, was there too. She was standing slightly to one side, away from the burning barrels, in a long skirt and a blue hand-knitted sweater, standing quietly there, waiting to hug and kiss me after all the others.
     Just as I saw at once that my sister Haya was blooming here, she was so animated, pink-cheeked, confident, assertive—I also saw that Fania was not feeling so good: she seemed very pale and was even more silent than usual. She had come from Jerusalem especially to greet me, she apologized for Arieh, your father, but he hadn't been able to get a day off, and she invited me to come to Jerusalem.
     It was only after a quarter of an hour or so that I saw that she was uncomfortable standing up for so long. Before she or some other member of the family told me, I realized suddenly for myself that she was finding it hard to bear her pregnancy—that is to say, you. She must only have been in her third month, but her cheeks seemed slightly sunken, her lips pale, and her forehead clouded. Her beauty had not vanished, on the contrary, it just seemed to have been covered with a gray veil, which she never removed right to the end.
     Haya was always the most glamorous and impressive of the three of us, she was interesting, brilliant, a heartbreaker, but to any sharp-eyed observer who looked carefully it was clear that the most beautiful of us was Fania. Me? I didn't count for anything: I was just the silly little sister. I think our mother admired Haya most and was proudest of her, while Papa almost managed to hide the truth, that he was fondest of Fania. I was not the pet of either my father or my mother, maybe only Grandpa Ephraim, yet I loved them all: I wasn't jealous and I wasn't resentful. Maybe it's the people who are the least loved, provided they're not envious or bitter, who find the most love in themselves to give to others. Don't you think? I'm not too sure about what I've just said. It may just be one of those stories I tell myself before I go to sleep. Maybe everybody tells themselves stories before they go to sleep, so it'll be a bit less frightening. Your mother hugged me and said, Sonia, it's so good you're here, so good we're all together again, we're going to have to help one another a lot here, we'll especially have to help our parents.
     Haya and Tsvi's apartment was maybe a quarter of an hour's walk from the port, and Tsvi was a hero and carried most of my luggage himself. On the way we saw some workmen building a great big building, it was the teachers' training college that still stands in Ben Yehuda Street just before the corner of Nordau Avenue. At first sight I took the builders for Gypsies or Turks, but Haya said they were just suntanned Jews. I'd never seen Jews like that before, except in pictures. Then I started crying—not just because the builders were so strong and happy, but also because among them there were some small children, twelve years old at most, and each one was carrying a sort of wooden ladder on his back laden with heavy building blocks. I wept a little when I saw that, from joy but also from sorrow. It's hard for me to explain.
     In Haya and Tsvi's tiny apartment, Yigal was waiting with a neighbor who was looking after him until we got there. He must have been about six months, a lively, smily little boy, just like his father, and I washed my hands, picked up Yigal, and hugged him to me, ever so gently, and this time I didn't feel any desire to cry, and I didn't feel a wild joy as on the boat, I only felt a sort of reassurance, from inside, from the innermost depth of my being, as though from the bottom of the well, that it was very good that we were all here and not in the house in Dubinska Street. And I also felt that it was a great pity after all that the cheeky, sweaty sailor had not got the little kiss from me that he'd asked for. What was the connection? I don't know to this day. But that's how I felt there at that moment.
     That evening Tsvi and Fania took me out to see Tel Aviv. We walked to Allenby Street and Rothschild Boulevard, because Ben Yehuda Street was not considered really part of Tel Aviv then. I remember how clean and nice everything looked at first glance, in the evening, with the benches and street lights and all the signs in Hebrew: as if the whole of Tel Aviv was just a very nice display in the playground of the Tarbuth school.
     It was late December 1938, and since then I have never been abroad, except maybe in my thoughts. And I shall never go. It's not because the Land of Israel is so wonderful, it's because I now believe that all journeys are ridiculous: the only journey from which you don't always come back empty-handed is the journey inside yourself. Inside me there are no frontiers or customs, and I can travel as far as the farthest stars. Or walk in places that no longer exist, visit people who no longer exist. Inside, I can even go to places that never existed, that could never have existed, but where I like being. Or at least, don't dislike being. Now can I make you a fried egg before you go, with some tomato and cheese and a slice of bread? Or some avocado? No? You're in a hurry again? Won't you have another glass of tea, at least?
    


     It was at the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus, or perhaps in one of those cramped rooms in Kerem Avraham, Geula, or Ahva, where poor students crowded in those days two or three to a room, that Fania Muss-man met Yehuda Arieh Klausner. It was in 1935 or 1936. I know that my mother was living at the time in a room at 42 Zephaniah Street that she shared with two friends from Rovno who were also students, Esterka Weiner and Fania Weissmann. I know she was much courted. But, so I heard from Esterka Weiner, she had also had one or two passing affairs.

     As for my father, I've been told that he was very keen on the company of women, he spoke a lot, brilliantly, wittily, he attracted attention and perhaps some mockery. "A walking dictionary," the other students called him. If anyone needed to know, or even if they didn't, he always liked to impress on them all that he knew—the name of the president of Finland, the Sanskrit word for "tower," or where oil is mentioned in the Mishnah.
     If he fancied any student, he would take a fussy pleasure in helping her with her work, he would take her out walking at night in Mea Shearim or the lanes of Sanhedriya, buy her a fizzy drink, join trips to holy sites or archaeological digs, he enjoyed taking part in intellectual discussions, and he would read aloud, with pathos, from the poems of Mickiewicz or Tchernikhowsky. But apparently most of his relationships with girls only got as far as serious discussions and evening strolls: it seemed that girls were attracted only to his brains. Probably his luck was no different from that of most boys in those days.
     I do not know how or when my parents became close, and I do not know whether there was still any love between them before I knew them. They were married at the beginning of 1938 on the roof of the Rabbinate building on Jaffa Road, he in a black pinstripe suit and a tie, with a triangle of white handkerchief peeping from his top pocket, she in a long white dress that accentuated the pallor of her skin and the beauty of her black hair. Fania moved with her few belongings from her shared room in Zephaniah Street to Arieh's room in the Zarchi family's apartment in Amos Street.
     A few months later, when my mother was pregnant, they moved to a building across the road, to the two-room semibasement apartment. Here their only child was born. Sometimes my father joked in his rather anemic way that in those days the world was decidedly not a fit place to bring babies into (he was fond of the word "decidedly," as well as "nevertheless," "indeed," "in a certain sense," "unmistakably," "promptly," "on the other hand," and "utter disgrace"). In saying that the world was not a fit place to bring babies into, he may have been uttering an implied reproach to me, for being born so recklessly and irresponsibly, contrary to his plans and expectations, decidedly before he had achieved what he had hoped to achieve in his life, and hinting that because of my birth he had missed the boat. Or he may not have been hinting anything, just being clever in his usual way: quite often my father made some joke or other just to break the silence. He always imagined that silence was somehow directed against him. Or that it was his fault.

 27


     WHAT DID poor Ashkenazim eat in Jerusalem in the 1940s? We ate black bread with slices of onion and olives cut in half, and sometimes also with anchovy paste; we ate smoked fish and salt fish that came from the depths of the fragrant barrels in the corner of Mr. Auster's grocery; on special occasions we ate sardines, which were considered a delicacy.

     We ate squash and eggplant, boiled or fried or made into an oily salad with slivers of garlic and chopped onion.
     In the morning there was brown bread with jam, or occasionally with cheese. (The first time I went to Paris, straight from Kibbutz Hulda, in 1969, my hosts were amused to discover that in Israel there were only two kinds of cheese: white cheese and yellow cheese.) In the morning I was given Quaker Oats that tasted of glue, and when I went on strike, they replaced it with semolina and a sprinkling of cinnamon. My mother drank lemon tea in the morning, and sometimes she dunked a dark biscuit in it. My father's breakfast consisted of a slice of brown bread with thick yellow jam, half a hard-boiled egg with olives, slices of tomato, green pepper, and cucumber, and some Tnuva sour cream that came in a thick glass jar.
     My father always got up early, an hour or an hour and a half before my mother and me. By five-thirty he was already standing at the bathroom mirror, brushing the snow on his cheeks into a thick lather, and while he shaved he softly sang a folk song that was hair-raisingly offkey. Afterward he would drink a glass of tea alone in the kitchen while he read the paper. In the citrus season he would squeeze some oranges with a little hand squeezer and bring my mother and me a glass of orange juice in bed. And because the citrus season was in the winter, and because in those days it was thought that you could catch a chill from drinking cold drinks on a cold day, my diligent father used to light the Primus stove before he squeezed the oranges and put a pan of water on, and when the water was almost boiling he carefully lowered the two glasses of juice into the pan and stirred them well with a spoon so that the juice close to the edge was not warmer than the juice in the middle of the glass. Then, shaved and dressed, with my mother's checked kitchen apron tied around his waist over his cheap suit, he would wake my mother (in the book room) and me (in the little room at the end of the corridor) and hand each of us a glass of warmed orange juice. I used to drink this lukewarm juice as though it were poison, while Father stood next to me in his checked apron and his quiet tie and his threadbare suit, waiting for me to give him back the empty glass. While I drank the juice, he would look for something to say: he always felt guilty about silence. He would rhyme in his unfunny way:
     "Drink the juice my boy, I don't wish to annoy."
     Or:
     "If you drink your juice each day, you'll end up feeling merry and gay."
     Or even:
     "Every sip, so I've been tol', builds the body and the soul."
     Or sometimes, on mornings when he was feeling more discursive than lyrical:
     "Citrus fruit is the pride of our land! Jaffa oranges are appreciated all over the world. By the way, the name Jaffa, like the biblical name Japheth, apparently derives from the word for beauty, yofi, a very ancient word that may come from the Akkadian faya, and in Arabic has the form wafi, while in Amharic, I believe, it is tawafa. And now, my young beauty"—by now he would be smiling modestly, taking quiet satisfaction in his play on words—"finish your boo-tiful Jaffa juice and permit me to take the glass back to the kitchen as my booty."
     Such puns and witticisms, that he called calembours or paronomasia, always aroused in my father a kind of well-intentioned good-humor. He felt that they had the power to dispel gloom or anxiety and spread a pleasant mood. If my mother said, for instance, that our neighbor Mr. Lemberg had come back from the hospital looking more emaciated than when he went in and they said he was in dire straits, Father would launch into a little lecture on the origin and meaning of the words "dire" and "straits," replete with biblical quotations. Mother expressed amazement that everything, even Mr. Lemberg's serious illness, sparked off his childish pleasantries. Did he really imagine that life was just some kind of school picnic or stag party, with jokes and clever remarks? Father would weigh her reproach, apologize, but he had meant well, and what good would it do Mr. Lemberg if we started mourning for him while he was still alive? Mother said, Even when you mean well, you somehow manage to do it with poor taste: either you're condescending or you're obsequious, and either way you always have to crack jokes. At which they would switch to Russian and talk in subdued tones.
    


     When I came home from Mrs. Pnina's kindergarten at midday, my mother fought with me, using bribery, entreaties, and stories about princesses and ghosts, to distract my attention until I had swallowed some runny-nose squash and mucous squash (which we called by its Arabic name, kusa), and rissoles made from bread mixed with a little mince (they tried to disguise their breadiness with bits of garlic).

     Sometimes I was forced to eat, with tears, disgust, and fury, all sorts of spinach rissoles, leaf spinach, beetroot, beetroot soup, sauerkraut, pickled cabbage, or carrots, raw or cooked. At other times I was condemned to cross wastelands of grits and bran, to chew my way through tasteless mountains of boiled cauliflower and all kinds of depressing pulses such as dried beans and peas and lentils. In summer Father chopped a fine salad of tomatoes, cucumbers, green peppers, spring onions, and parsley, gleaming with olive oil.
     Every now and then a piece of chicken made a guest appearance, sunk in rice or run aground on a sandbank of potato purée, its mast and sails adorned with parsley and with a tight guard of boiled carrots with rickets-smitten squash standing around its deck. A pair of pickled cucumbers served as the flanks of this destroyer, and if you finished it all up, you were rewarded with a pink milk pudding made from powder, or a yellow jelly made from powder, which we called by its French name gelée, which was only a step away from Jules Verne and the mysterious submarine Nautilus, under the command of Captain Nemo, who despaired of the whole human race and set off for the depths of his mysterious realm under the oceans and where, so I had decided, I should be joining him soon.
     In honor of Sabbaths and festivals my mother would get a carp, which she bought early, in the middle of the week. All day long the fish would swim relentlessly back and forth in the bathtub, from side to side to side, searching tirelessly for some secret underwater passage from the bath to the open sea. I fed it on breadcrumbs. Father taught me that in our own secret language a fish was called Noon. I quickly made friends with Noonie: he could distinguish my footsteps from a distance and hurried to the side of the bath to greet me, raising out of the water a mouth that reminded me of things it's best not to think about.
     Once or twice I got up and crept along in the dark to check whether my friend really slept in the cold water all night, which seemed to me strange and even contrary to the laws of nature, or whether maybe after lights out Noonie's working day was over and he wriggled out and crawled slowly on his belly into the laundry basket and curled up and slept in the warm embrace of the towels and underwear, till in the morning he secretly slipped back into the bath to serve his time in the navy.
     Once, when I was left at home on my own, I decided to enrich this poor bored carp's life with islands, straits, headlands, and sandbanks made from various kitchen utensils that I dropped in the bath. As patient and persistent as Captain Ahab I hunted my Moby Dick with a ladle for a long time, but time and again he wriggled away and escaped to the submarine lairs that I had scattered for him myself on the seabed. At one point I touched his cold, sharp scales, and I shuddered with disgust and fear at this new, spine-chilling discovery: until that morning, every living thing, whether chick, child, or cat, was always soft and warm; only what was dead turned cold and hard. And now this paradox of the carp, cold and hard but alive, all damp, slippery, and oily, scaly, with gills, wriggling and struggling strongly, stiffening and chill between my fingers, stabbed me with such a sudden panic that I hurriedly released my catch and shook my fingers, then washed, soaped, and scrubbed them three times. So I gave up the chase. Instead of hunting Noonie, I spent a long time trying to look at the world through the round, still eyes of a fish, without eyelids, without eyelashes, without moving.
     And that's how Father, Mother, and retribution found me, because they came home and crept into the bathroom without my hearing them, and they caught me sitting motionless like a Buddha on the toilet lid, my mouth slightly open, my face frozen, my glazed eyes staring unblinkingly like a pair of glass beads. At once the kitchen utensils that the crazy child had sunk to the bottom of the carp water to serve as an archipelago or the underwater defenses of Pearl Harbor came to light. "His Highness," Father said sadly, "will once again be compelled to suffer the consequences of his deeds. I am sorry."
     On Friday night, Grandpa and Grandma came, and so did Mother's friend Lilenka with her rotund husband Mr. Bar-Samkha, whose face was covered with a thick curly beard like steel wool. His ears were different sizes, like an Alsatian that has pricked up one ear and let the other flop.
     After the chicken soup with kneidlach, Mother suddenly placed on the table the corpse of my Noonie, complete with head and tail but bearing a series of seven knife gashes along its side, as splendid as the body of a king being borne on a gun carriage to the Pantheon. The regal corpse reposed in a rich cream-colored sauce upon a couch of gleaming rice, embellished with stewed prunes and slices of carrot, scattered with decorative green flakes. But Noonie's alert, accusing, gaze was fixed unyieldingly on all his murderers in motionless reproach, in silent torment.
     When my eyes met his terrifying gaze, his piercing eye cried Nazi betrayer and murderer, and I began to cry silently, dropping my head on my chest, trying not to let them see. But Lilenka, my mother's best friend and confidante, the soul of a kindergarten teacher in a china doll body, was alarmed and hastened to comfort me. First she felt my forehead and declared, No, he hasn't got a temperature. Then she kept stroking my arm and said, But yes, he is shivering a little. Then she bent over me until her breath almost took my breath away, and said: It looks as though it's something psychological, not physical. With that she turned to my parents and concluded, with self-righteous pleasure, that as she had already told them a long time ago, this child, like all vulnerable, complicated, sensitive future artists, was apparently entering puberty very early, and the best thing was simply to let him be.
     Father mulled this over, weighed it, and pronounced judgment: "Very well. But first of all you will please eat your fish like everyone else."
     "No."
     "No? And why not? Is His Highness by any chance contemplating sacking his team of cooks?"
     "I can't."
     At this point Mr. Bar-Samkha, overflowing with sweetness and the urge to mediate, started to wheedle in his reedy, placatory voice:
     "Well, why don't you just have a tiny bit? Just one symbolic piece, eh? For the sake of your parents and the Sabbath day?"
     But Lilka, his wife, a soulful, emotional person, cut in on my behalf:
     "There's no point in forcing the child! He has a psychological block!"
    


     Lea Bar-Samkha, also known as Lilenka, formerly Lilia Kalisch,* was a frequent visitor to our apartment during most of my childhood in Jerusalem. She was a small, sad, pale, frail woman with drooping shoulders. She had worked for many years as a schoolmistress and had even written two books about the mentality of the child. From behind she looked like a slim twelve-year-old girl. She and my mother spent hours whispering together, sitting on the wicker stools in the kitchen or on chairs that they had taken out into the garden, chatting or poring over some open book or a picture book of artistic gems, head to head and hand to hand.

     *I have changed some of the names, for various reasons.

     Mostly Lilka came when my father was out at work. I have a feeling that she and my father maintained that polite mutual loathing that is commonly found between husbands and their wives' best friends. If I approached my mother when she was chatting to Lilenka, they both shut up at once and only resumed their conversation when I was out of earshot. Lilia Bar-Samkha looked at me with her wistful, I-understand-and-forgive-everything-on-emotional-grounds smile, but my mother asked me to buck up and say what I needed and leave them alone. They had a lot of shared secrets.
     Once Lilenka came when my parents were out. She eyed me for a while with understanding and sorrow, nodded her head as though she was definitely agreeing with herself, and began a conversation. She had truly, but truly, been so fond of me since I was so small, and interested in me. Not interested like those boring grown-ups who always asked if I was good at school, if I liked soccer, or if I still collected stamps, and what did I want to be when I grew up, and silly things like that. No! She was interested in my thoughts! My dreams! My mental life! She considered me such a unique, original child! The soul of an artist in the making! She would like to try one day—not necessarily right now—to make contact with the inner, vulnerable side of my young personality (I was about ten at the time). For example, what did I think about when I was completely alone? What happened in the secret life of my imagination? What really made me happy and sad? What excited me? What frightened me? What repelled me? What kinds of scenery did I find attractive? Had I ever heard of Janusz Korczak? Had I ever read his book Yotam the Magician? Did I have any secret thoughts yet about the fair sex? She would love to be my, how to put it, my listening ear. My confidante. Despite the difference in our ages, etc.
     I was a compulsively polite child. To her first question, what did I think about, I therefore replied politely: All sorts of things. To the volley of questions What-excited-me-What-frightened-me I answered: Nothing in particular. While to her offer of friendship I responded tactfully: "Thank you, Auntie Lilia, that's very kind of you."
     "If ever you feel a need to talk about something that you don't find it easy to talk to your parents about, you won't hesitate? You'll come to me? And tell me? And of course I'll keep the secret. We can discuss it together."
     "Thank you."
     "The things you have nobody to talk to about? Thoughts that make you feel a bit lonely?"
     "Thank you. Thank you truly. Would you like me to fetch you a glass of water? My mother will be home soon. She's just around the corner at Heinemann the pharmacist's. Or would you like to read the paper while you're waiting, Auntie Lilia? Shall I put the fan on for you?"

 28


     TWENTY YEARS later, on July 28,1971, a few weeks after my book Unto Death was published, I received a letter from this friend of my mother's, who was then in her sixties:

     I feel I haven't behaved properly to you since your late father's death. I have been very depressed and am unable to do anything. I have shut myself up at home (our apartment is frightening ... but I have no energy to change anything) and I am afraid to go out—that's the simple truth. In the man in your story "Late Love" I recognized some common traits—he seemed so familiar and so close. "Crusade" I heard dramatized on the radio once, and you read some excerpts in a television interview. It was wonderful to see you so unexpectedly on the television in the corner of my room. I am curious to know what the sources of the story are—it is unique. It's hard for me to imagine what was going on inside you when you wrote those descriptions of horror and dread. It's chilling. The descriptions of the Jews—strong figures, definitely not victims ... impressed me. And also the description of water eating away iron ... and the picture of a Jerusalem that is not a reality nor is it the journey's end, it is just longing and yearning for something that is not a place in the world. Death appears to me from the pages of your book as something I had never imagined—and yet I craved it not so long ago ... I am reminded now more than usually of your mother's words—she foresaw my failure in life. And I prided myself that my weakness was only superficial, that I was resilient. Now I feel disintegration—strange, for so many years I dreamed of returning to the Land, and now that it has become a reality—I am living here as in a nightmare. Don't pay any attention to what I'm saying. It just slipped out. Don't react. The last time I saw you, in your heated exchange with your father, I didn't sense in you the gloomy man ... All my family send regards to yours. I'm going to be a grandma soon! With friendship and affection, Lilia (Lea).

     And in another letter, from August 5, 1979, Lilka wrote to me:
     ...but enough of that for the time being, maybe some day we'll meet after all and then we'll chat about lots of questions that your words have raised for me. What are you hinting at now, in the "Autobiographical Note" in your book ... when you talk of your mother dying "out of disappointment or longing. Something had gone wrong"? Please forgive me, I'm touching a wound. Your late father's wound, your wound especially, and even—my own. You can't know how much I miss Fania, especially lately. I am left so much on my own in my narrow little world. I long for her. And for another friend of ours, Stefa she was called, who departed this world from grief and suffering in 1963 ... She was a pediatrician, and her life consisted of one disappointment after another, maybe because she trusted men. Stefa simply refused to grasp what some men are capable of. The three of us were very close in the 1930s. I am one of the last of the Mohicans—of friends who no longer exist. Twice I tried, in '71 and '73, to take my own life, and I didn't succeed. I won't try again ... The time has not yet come for me to talk to you about things to do with your parents ... Years have gone by since ... No, I'm not ready yet to express in writing everything I'd like to say. To think that once I could only express myself in writing. Maybe we'll meet again—and many things may change before then ... And by the way, you ought to know that your mother and I and some other members of our group in Hashomer Hatsair in Rovno considered the petite bourgeoisie to be the worst of all things. We all came from similar backgrounds. Your mother was never a "rightist"...Although when she married into the Klausner family, she may have pretended she was like them.
     And again, in a letter dated September 28,1980:
     Your mother came from an unhappy family, and she damaged your family. But she is not to blame ... I recall that once, in 1963, you sat in our apartment ... and I promised you that I would write to you about your mother someday ... But it's very hard for me to carry it out.Even to write a letter is hard for me ... Ifyou only knew how much your mother wanted to be an artist, to be a creative person—from her childhood! If only she could see you now! And why didn't she manage it? Maybe in a personal conversation I could be more daring and tell you things that I don't dare put in writing. Yours affectionately, Lilia.
    


     My father, before he died (in 1970), was able to read my first three books, which he did not entirely enjoy. My mother was able to see only some stories I wrote at school and a few childish verses that I penned in the hope of touching the Muses, whose existence she liked to tell me about. (My father did not believe in the Muses, just as he always despised fairies, witches, wonder-working rabbis, elves, any kind of saint, intuition, miracles, and ghosts. He saw himself as a man with a secular worldview; he believed in rational thought and hard intellectual work.)

     If my mother had read the two stories in Unto Death, would she, too, have responded to them with words similar to those written by her friend Lilenka Kalisch, "longing and yearning for something that is not a place in the world"? It is hard to know. A misty veil of dreamy sadness, unexpressed emotions, and romantic suffering enfolded those well-to-do Rovno young ladies, as though their lives there were painted forever within the walls of their secondary school with a palette that contained only two colors: either melancholy or festive. Although my mother sometimes rebelled against this upbringing.
     Something in the curriculum of that school in the 1920s, or maybe some deep romantic mustiness that seeped into the hearts of my mother and her friends in their youth, some dense Polish-Russian emotionalism, something between Chopin and Mickiewicz, between the Sorrows of Young Werther and L-rd Byron, something in the twilight zone between the sublime, the tormented, the dreamy, and the solitary, all kinds of will-o'-the-wisps of "longing and yearning" deluded my mother most of her life and seduced her until she succumbed and committed suicide in 1952. She was thirty-eight when she died. I was twelve and a half.
    


     In the weeks and months that followed my mother's death I did not think for a moment of her agony. I made myself deaf to the unheard cry for help that remained behind her and that may have always hung in the air of our apartment. There was not a drop of compassion in me. Nor did I miss her. I did not grieve at my mother's death: I was too hurt and angry for any other emotion to remain. When, for example, I noticed her checked apron, which still hung on a hook on the back of the kitchen door several weeks after her death, I was as angry as though it were pouring salt on my wounds. My mother's toilet things, her powder box, her hairbrush on her green shelf in the bathroom hurt me as though they had remained there deliberately to mock me. Her books. Her empty shoes. The echo of her smell that continued for some time to waft in my face every time I opened "Mother's side" of the closet. Everything moved me to impotent rage. As though one of her sweaters, which had somehow crept into my pile of sweaters, was gloating at me with a vile grin.

     I was angry with her for leaving without saying good-bye, without a hug, without a word of explanation: after all, my mother had been incapable of parting even from a total stranger, a delivery man or a pedlar at the door, without offering him a glass of water, without a smile, without a little apology and two or three pleasant words. All through my childhood, she had never left me alone at the grocer's or in a strange courtyard or in a public garden. How could she have done it? I was angry with her on Father's behalf too, whose wife had shamed him thus, had shown him up, had suddenly vanished like a woman running away with a stranger in a comic film. Throughout my childhood, if I ever disappeared even for an hour or two, I was shouted at and punished: it was a fixed rule that anyone who went out always had to say where they were going and for how long and what time they would be back. At least they had to leave a note in the usual place, under the vase.
     All of us.
     Is that the way to leave, rudely, in the middle of a sentence? She herself had always insisted on tact, politeness, considerate behavior, a constant effort not to hurt others, attentiveness, sensitivity! How could she?
     I hated her.
    


     After a few weeks the anger subsided. And with the anger I seemed to lose a protective layer, a kind of lead casing that had protected me in the early days against the shock and pain. From now on I was exposed.

     As I stopped hating my mother, I began to hate myself.
     I still had no free corner in my heart for my mother's pain, her loneliness, the suffocation that had closed in around her, the terrible despair of the last nights of her life. I was still living out my own crisis rather than hers. Yet I was no longer angry with her, but rather the opposite, I blamed myself: if only I had been a better, more devoted, son, if I had not scattered my clothes all over the floor, if I had not pestered and nagged her, if I had done my homework on time, if I had taken the rubbish out every evening willingly, without being shouted at to do it, if I had not made a nuisance of myself, made a noise, forgotten to turn out the light, come home with a torn shirt, left muddy footprints all around the kitchen. If I had been more considerate of her migraines. Or if at least I had tried to do what she wanted, and been a bit less weak and pale, eaten everything she cooked for me and put on my plate and not been so difficult, if for her sake I had been a more sociable child and a bit less of a loner, a bit less skinny and more suntanned and athletic, as she had wanted me to be!
     Or perhaps the opposite? If I had been much weaker, chronically ill, confined to a wheelchair, consumptive, or even blind from birth? Surely her kindliness and her generous nature would never have allowed her to abandon such a disadvantaged child, leave him to his misery and just disappear? If only I had been a handicapped child with no legs, if only while there was still time I had run under a passing car and been run over and had both my legs amputated, perhaps my mother would have been filled with compassion? Would not have left me? Would have stayed to go on looking after me?
     If my mother had abandoned me like that, without a backward glance, surely it was a sign that she had never loved me: if you love someone, she herself had taught me, you forgive them for everything, except betrayal. You even forgive them for nagging, for losing their cap, for leaving the squash on their plate.
     To forsake is to betray. And she had forsaken both of us, Father and me. I would never have left her like that, despite her migraines, even though I now knew that she had never loved us, I would never have left her, despite all her long silences, her shutting herself up in a darkened room, and all her moods. I'd have lost my temper sometimes, maybe even not talked to her for a day or two, but not abandoned her forever. Never.
     All mothers love their children: that's a law of nature. Even a cat or a goat. Even mothers of criminals and murderers. Even mothers of Nazis. Or of drooling retards. Even mothers of monsters. The fact that only I couldn't be loved, that my mother had run away from me, only proved that there was nothing in me to love, that I didn't deserve love. There was something wrong with me, something very terrible, something repulsive and truly horrifying, more loathsome than a physical or mental defect, or even madness. There was something so irreparably detestable about me, something so terrible, that even a sensitive woman like my mother, who could lavish love on a bird or a beggar or a stray puppy, couldn't stand me anymore and had to run away from me as far as she could go. There is an Arabic saying, Kullu qirdin bi-'ayni ummihi ghazalun—"Every monkey is a gazelle to its mother." Except for me.
     If only I were also sweet, just a little, as all children in the world are to their mothers, even the ugliest and naughtiest children, even those violent, disturbed children who are always being thrown out of school, even Bianca Schor who stabbed her grandfather with a kitchen knife, even Yanni the pervert, who has elephantiasis and unzips his fly in the street and takes out his thing and shows it to the girls—if only I were good, if only I had behaved the way she asked me to a thousand times, and like an idiot I didn't listen to her—if only after Seder night I hadn't broken her blue bowl that had come down to her from her great-grandmother—if only I'd brushed my teeth properly every morning, top and bottom and all around and in the corners, without cheating—if only I hadn't pinched that half-pound note from her handbag and then lied and denied I'd taken it—if only I'd stopped thinking those wicked thoughts and never let my hand stray inside my pajama bottoms at night—if only I'd been like everyone else, deserving a mother, too—
    


     After a year or two, when I'd left home and gone to live in Kibbutz Hulda, I slowly started to think about her, too. At the end of the day, after school and work and a shower, when all the kibbutz kids had showered and dressed for the evening and gone to spend time with their parents, leaving me all alone and odd among the empty children's houses, I would go and sit on my own on the wooden bench inside the reading room.

     I would sit there in the dark for half an hour or an hour, conjuring up, picture by picture, the end of her life. In those days I was already trying to imagine a little of what had never been spoken about, either between my mother and me, or between me and my father, or apparently even between the two of them.
     My mother was thirty-eight when she died: younger than my elder daughter and a little older than my younger daughter on the day these lines were written. Ten or twenty years after they completed their studies at the Tarbuth secondary school, when my mother, Lilenka Kalisch, and their group of friends experienced the buffeting of reality in a Jerusalem of heat waves, poverty, and malicious gossip, when those emotional Rovno schoolgirls suddenly found themselves in the rough terrain of everyday life, diapers, husbands, migraines, queues, smells of mothballs and kitchen sinks, it transpired apparently that the curriculum of the school in Rovno in the 1920s was of no help to them. It only made things worse.
     Or it may have been something else, something neither Byronic nor Chopinic but closer to that haze of melancholy loneliness that surrounds introverted, well-born young ladies in the plays of Chekhov and in the stories of Gnessin, a sort of childhood promise that is inevitably frustrated, trampled underfoot, and even ridiculed by the monotony of life itself. My mother grew up surrounded by an angelic cultural vision of misty beauty whose wings were finally dashed on a hot dusty pavement of Jerusalem stone. She had grown up as the pretty, refined miller's daughter, she had come of age in the mansion in Dubinska Street, with an orchard, a cook, and maids, where she was probably brought up just like the shepherdess in that picture that she hated, that prettified pink-cheeked shepherdess with three petticoats.
     The outburst that Aunt Sonia recalled seventy years later, when the sixteen-year-old Fania with an uncharacteristic access of rage suddenly poured scorn and almost spat on the picture of the gentle shepherdess with the dreamy expression and the profusion of silk petticoats, may have been the spark of my mother's life-force vainly trying to free itself from the darkness that was already beginning to enfold it.
     Behind the curtained windows that protected Fania Mussman's childhood so well, Pan Zakrzewski one night shot a bullet into his thigh and another into his brain. Princess Ravzova hammered a rusty nail into her hand to receive some of the Savior's pain and bear it in His stead. Dora the housekeeper's daughter was pregnant by her mother's lover, drunk Steletsky lost his wife at cards, and she, Ira, his wife, was eventually burned to death when she set fire to the handsome Anton's empty hut. But all these things happened on the other side of the double glazing, outside the pleasant, illuminated circle of the Tarbuth school. None of them could break in and seriously harm the pleasantness of my mother's childhood, which was apparently tinged with a hint of melancholy that did not mar but merely colored and sweetened it.
     A few years later, in Kerem Avraham, in Amos Street, in the cramped, damp basement apartment, downstairs from the Rosendorffs and next door to the Lembergs, surrounded by zinc tubs and pickled gherkins and the oleander that was dying in a rusty olive drum, assailed all day by smells of cabbage, laundry, boiled fish, and dried urine, my mother began to fade away. She might have been able to grit her teeth and endure hardship and loss, poverty, or the cruelty of married life. But what she couldn't stand, it seems to me, was the tawdriness.
    


     By 1943 or 1944, if not earlier, she knew that everybody had been murdered there, just outside Rovno. Somebody must have come and reported how Germans, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians, armed with submachine guns, had marched the whole city, young and old alike, to Sosenki Forest, where they had all loved to go for walks on fine days, for scout games, for sing-songs around campfires, to sleep in sleeping bags on the banks of a stream under starry skies. There, among boughs, birds, mushrooms, currants, and berries, the Germans opened fire and slaughtered on the edge of pits, in two days, some twenty-five thousand souls.* Almost all my mother's classmates perished. Together with their parents, and all of their neighbors, acquaintances, business rivals, and enemies; well-to-do and proletarian, pious, assimilated, and baptized, communal leaders, synagogue functionaries, pedlars and drawers of water, Communists and Zionists, intellectuals, artists, and village idiots, and some four thousand babies. My mother's schoolteachers also died there, the headmaster, Issachar Reiss, with his charismatic presence and hypnotic eyes, whose look had pierced the dreams of so many adolescent schoolgirls, sleepy, absentminded Isaac Berkowski, hot-tempered Eliezer Buslik, who had taught Jewish culture, Fanka Zeidmann, who had taught geography and biology and also PE, and her brother Shmuel the painter, and pedantic, embittered Dr. Moshe Bergmann, who through almost clenched teeth had taught general and Polish history. All of them.

     Not long afterward, in 1948, when the Arab Legion was shelling Jerusalem, another friend of my mother's, Piroshka, Piri Yannai, was also killed, by a direct hit from a shell. She had only gone outside to fetch a bucket and floorcloth.
    


     Perhaps something of the childhood promise was already infected by a kind of poisonous, romantic crust that associated the Muses with death? Something in the overrefined curriculum of the Tarbuth school? Or perhaps it was a melancholy Slavic bourgeois trait that I encountered a few years after my mother's death in the pages of Chekhov, Turgenev, Gnessin, and even some of the poetry of Rahel. Something that made my mother, when life failed to fulfill any of the promises of her youth, envisage death as an exciting but also protective, soothing lover, a last, artistic lover, who would finally heal the wounds of her lonely heart.

     For many years now I have been trailing this old murderer, this cunning ancient seducer, this revolting old rake, deformed by old age yet disguising himself time and again as a youthful prince charming. This crafty hunter of the broken-hearted, this vampire wooer with a voice as bittersweet as that of a cello on a lonely night, a subtle, velvety charlatan, a master of stratagems, a magic piper who draws the desperate and lonely into the folds of his silken cloak. The ancient serial killer of disappointed souls.
     *Roughly the population of Arad, where I now live, and more than the total number killed on the Jewish side in a hundred years of war against the Arabs.


 29


     WHAT DOES my memory begin with? The very first memory is a shoe, a little brown fragrant new shoe, with a soft warm tongue. It must have been one of a pair, but memory has only salvaged the one. A new, still slightly stiff shoe. I was so entranced by its delightful smell of new, shiny, almost living leather, and of pungent, dizzying glue that apparently I first tried to put my new shoe on my face, on my nose, like a sort of snout. So I could get drunk on the smell.

     My mother came into the room, followed by my father with various uncles and aunts or mere acquaintances. I must have looked cute but funny, with my little face stuck inside the shoe, because they all burst out laughing and pointed at me, and somebody roared and slapped his knees with both hands, and somebody else grunted and called hoarsely, Quick, quick, somebody fetch a camera!
     There was no camera in our apartment, but I can still see that baby: all of two or two and a quarter, his hair flaxen and his eyes big, round, and surprised. But immediately under the eyes, instead of the nose, mouth, and chin, sprouted the heel of a shoe, and a shiny new virgin sole that had never been walked on. From the eyes up it was a pale-faced infant, and from the cheeks down what looked like a hammerfish or some kind of primeval, heavy-cropped bird.
     What was the baby feeling? I can answer that question quite precisely, because I have inherited from that baby what he felt at that moment: a piercing joy, a wild, dizzying joooy, springing from the fact that the whole crowd of people was focused on him alone, surprised at him, enjoying him, pointing at him. At the same time, without any contradiction, the infant was also frightened and alarmed by the abundance of their attention, which he was too small to contain, because his parents and strangers and all of them were bellowing-laughing-pointing at him and his snout, and laughing again as they shouted to one another, a camera, quick, fetch a camera.
     And also disappointed because they cut off right in the middle the intoxicating sensual pleasure of inhaling the fresh smell of leather and the dizzying fragrance of glue that made his insides tremble.
    


     In the next picture there is no audience. Just my mother putting a soft warm sock on me (because it was cold in the room), and then encouraging me, push, push hard, harder, as if she were a midwife helping the fetus of my tiny foot travel down the virginal birth canal of my fragrant new shoe.

     To this day, whenever I strain to push my foot into a boot or shoe, and even now as I sit and write this, my skin reexperiences the pleasure of my foot tentatively entering the inner walls of that first shoe, the trembling of the flesh as it entered for the first time in its life this treasure cave whose stiff yet soft walls enfolded it caressingly as it thrust deeper and deeper while my mother's voice, soft and patient, encouraged me, push, push just a bit more.
     One hand gently pushed my foot deeper inside while the other, holding the sole lightly, thrust against me, apparently opposing my movement but really helping me get right inside, until that delicious moment when, as if overcoming a final obstacle, my heel made one last effort and slid in so that the foot entirely filled the space, and from now on you were all there, inside, enfolded, held, secure, and already Mother was pulling the laces, tying them, and finally, like a last delicious lick, the warm tongue stretched under the laces and the knot, that stretching that always gives me a kind of tickling sensation along the instep. And here I was. Inside. Clasped, held in the tight, pleasurable embrace of my very first shoe.
     That night I begged to be allowed to sleep in my shoes: I didn't want it to end. Or begged at least to be allowed to have my new shoes next to my head, on the pillow, so that I could fall asleep with that scent of leather and glue. Only after protracted and tearful negotiations did they finally agree to put the shoes on a chair by the head of my bed—on condition you didn't so much as touch them till morning, because you've washed your hands, you can just look, you can peep every minute into their dark jaws that are smiling at you and inhale their smell until you drop off facing them, smiling to yourself in your sleep with a sensual pleasure, as if you are being stroked.
    


     In my third memory I am locked in, alone, in a dark kennel.

     When I was three and a half, nearly four, I was entrusted several times a week for a few hours to a middle-aged widowed neighbor who had no children of her own, a woman who smelled of damp wool and, less strongly, of washing soap and frying. Her name was Mrs. Gat, but we always called her Auntie Greta, except for my father, who occasionally put his arm around her shoulder and called her Gretchen, or Gret, and he would make up joky rhymes, as was his custom, in the manner of an old-world schoolboy: "Never let us forget that dear Gret is a pet!" (This was apparently his way of paying court to women.) Auntie Greta would blush, and because she was ashamed of blushing, she would immediately blush a deeper blood red, verging on purple.
     Auntie Greta's blond hair was arranged in a thick plait that she coiled like a rope around her round head. The hair at her temples was turning gray, like thistles growing at the edge of a field of yellow. Her plump, soft arms were dotted with masses of pale brown freckles. Under the rustic cotton dresses she liked to wear she had heavy, very wide thighs that suggested a carthorse. An embarrassed, apologetic smile sometimes hung around her lips as though she had been caught doing something very naughty, or telling a fib, and she was frankly shocked at herself. She always had two of her fingers bandaged, or at least one, and occasionally three, either because she had cut herself while chopping vegetables or slammed her hand in the kitchen drawer or brought the lid of the piano down on her fingers; despite her constant misadventures with her fingers, she gave private piano lessons. She was also a private child sitter.
     After breakfast my mother would stand me on a wooden stool in front of the basin in the bathroom, wipe the traces of porridge off my cheeks and chin with a damp towel, moisten my hair, and comb a sharp, straight side parting, then hand me a brown paper bag containing a banana, an apple, a piece of cheese, and some biscuits. And so, scrubbed, combed, and miserable, I was taken to the backyard of the fourth building to the right of ours. On the way there I had to promise to be good, to do whatever Auntie Greta said, not to make a nuisance of myself, and above all on no account to scratch the brown crust that had grown on the wound on my knee, because the crust, which is called a scab, is part of the healing process and it will soon fall off by itself, but if you touch it, heaven forbid, it might get infected and then there will be nothing for it, they'll have to give you another injection.
     At her door my mother wished me and Auntie Greta a good time together and left. At once Auntie Greta took off my shoes and put me down in my socks to play nicely and quietly on a mat, in one corner of which I was awaited every morning by bricks, teaspoons, cushions, napkins, an agile felt tiger, and some dominoes, as well as a threadbare princess doll that smelled a little musty.
     This inventory sufficed me for several hours of battles and of heroic deeds. The princess had been captured by a wicked wizard (the tiger), who had imprisoned her in a cave (under the piano). The teaspoons were a fleet of airplanes that were all flying in search of the princess over the sea (the mat) and beyond the mountains (cushions). The dominoes were the dreaded wolves that the wizard had scattered around the cave of the imprisoned princess.
     Or the other way around: the dominoes were tanks, the napkins Arab tents, the soft doll was transformed into the English High Commissioner, the cushions were built into the walls of Jerusalem, while the teaspoons, under the command of the tiger, were promoted by me to become Hasmonean fighters or the guerrilla troops of Bar Kochba.
     Halfway through the morning Auntie Greta would bring me thick, slimy raspberry juice in a heavy cup that was unlike any we had at home. Sometimes she carefully lifted the hem of her dress and sat down next to me on the mat. She made all sorts of chirruping sounds and other signs of affection that always ended in sticky, jammy kisses. Sometimes she allowed me to dabble—gently!—on the piano. If I finished up all the food Mummy had put in my paper bag, Auntie Greta would treat me to a couple of squares of chocolate or cubes of marzipan. The shutters in her apartment were always closed because of the sunlight. The windows were shut because of the flies. As for the flowery curtains, they were always kept drawn and firmly joined together, like a pair of chaste knees, for greater privacy.
     Sometimes Auntie Greta would put on my shoes, put on my head a little khaki cap with a stiff peak like an English policeman's or a Hamekasher bus driver's. Then she would scrutinize me with a quizzical look, rebutton my shirt, lick her finger and scrape off the encrusted remains of chocolate or marzipan around my mouth, and put on her round straw hat, which hid half her face but accentuated the roundness of her body. When all these preparations were concluded, the two of us would go out together for a couple of hours, "to see what's going on in the wide world."

 30


     FROM OUR suburb of Kerem Avraham you could reach the wide world by taking either the No. 3A bus, which stopped in Zephaniah Street, next to Mrs. Hasia's kindergarten, or the No. 3B bus, which stopped at the other end of Amos Street, on the corner of Geula Street at Malachi Street. The wide world itself extended along Jaffa Road, down King George V Avenue toward the Ratisbonne Convent and the Jewish Agency Buildings, in and around Ben Yehuda Street, in Hillel Street and Shammai Street, around the Studio Cinema and the Rex Cinema, which were down Princess Mary's Way, and also up Julian's Way, which led to the King David Hotel.

     At the junction of Julian's Way, Mamilla Road, and Princess Mary's Way there was always a busy policeman in shorts and white armbands. He ruled firmly over a little concrete island sheltered by a round tin umbrella. From atop his island he directed the traffic, an all-powerful divinity armed with a piercing whistle; his left hand stopped the traffic and his right moved it on. From this junction the wide world branched out and continued toward the Jewish commercial center beneath the walls of the Old City, and sometimes its extensions reached as far as the Arab parts around the Damascus Gate, in Sultan Suleiman Road, and even into the bazaar inside the walls.
     On every one of these expeditions Auntie Greta would drag me to three or four clothes shops, where she liked to try on, take off, and try on again, in the privacy of a changing cubicle, a number of beautiful dresses and a range of magnificent skirts, blouses, and nightgowns, and a mass of colorful housecoats that she termed "negligees." Once she even tried on a fur: the look in the tortured eyes of the slain fox terrified me. The fox's face stirred my soul because it looked both cunning and heartrendingly wretched.
     Time and again Auntie Greta would plunge into the little cubicle, from which she emerged after what seemed like years. Time and again this broad-beamed Aphrodite was reborn from the foam, bursting from behind the curtain in a new and ever more glamorous incarnation. For my benefit and for that of the salesperson and the other shoppers she would turn on her heel a couple of times in front of the mirror. Despite her heavy thighs she enjoyed executing a coquettish pirouette, and inquired of us each in turn whether it suited her, whether it flattered her, whether it clashed with the color of her eyes, whether it hung well, didn't it make her look fat, wasn't it rather common, a bit brash? As she did so, her face reddened, and because she was embarrassed at blushing, she blushed again, that blood red verging on purple. Finally she promised the salesperson earnestly that she would almost certainly be back the same day, in fact very shortly, after lunch, by the end of the afternoon, when she'd had time just to look around some other shops, tomorrow at the very latest.
     So far as I can recall, she never went back. On the contrary, she was always very careful not to visit the same shop twice until several months had elapsed.
     And she never bought anything. At any rate, from all the excursions on which I accompanied her in the role of escort, arbiter elegantiarum, and confidant she returned empty-handed. Perhaps she did not have enough money. Perhaps the curtained changing cubicles in all the women's clothes shops in Jerusalem were for Auntie Greta what the wizard's castle I built from bricks at the edge of the mat was for the shabby princess doll.
    


     Until one day, one windy winter's day when throngs of rustling leaves eddied in the gray light, Auntie Greta and I, hand in hand, arrived at a splendid large clothes store, perhaps in one of the Christian Arab streets. As usual, Auntie Greta, laden with dressing gowns, nightgowns, and colorful dresses, disappeared into the fitting rooms, though not before giving me a sticky kiss and sitting me down to wait for her on a wooden stool in front of her solitary confinement cell, which was protected by a thick curtain. Promise me now you won't go anywhere, on any account, heaven forbid, just sit here and wait for me, and above all don't talk to any stranger until Auntie Greta comes out again even prettier than ever, and if you're a good boy, you'll get a little surprise from Auntie Greta, guess what it is!

     While I was sitting waiting for her, sadly but obediently, all of a sudden a little girl tripped by, dressed up as though for a carnival, or else just dolled up. She was very young but older than me. For an instant I had the impression she was wearing lipstick, but how could she be? And they'd made her a sort of chest like a woman's with a cleft down the middle. The shape of her waist and hips was not like a child's, but violinlike. On her little legs I managed to see nylons with a seam at the back, ending in a pair of pointy red high-heeled shoes. I had never seen such a child-woman: too little to be a woman and too dressed up to be a child. So I stood up, fascinated and bewildered, and started to follow her to see what I had seen, or rather what I had almost not seen, because the girl had darted out from the rail of skirts behind me and walked past very fast. I wanted to see her close up. I wanted her to see me. I wanted to do or say something that would make her notice me: I already had a little repertoire that could draw cries of admiration from grown-ups, and one or two that worked quite well with children too, especially little girls.
     The dressed-up little girl floated lightly between rows of shelves weighed down with bales of cloth and disappeared down a tunnel-like passage lined on either side with tall tree trunks festooned with dresses, branches almost broken under the weight of their colorful cloth foliage. Despite their weight, these trunks could be turned around with a light push.
     It was a women's world, a dark, fragrant maze of warm paths, a deep, seductive silky, velvety labyrinth that ramified into ever more dress-lined paths. Smells of wool, mothballs, and flannel mingled with a vague hint of elusive scents that wafted through a dense thicket of frocks, sweaters, blouses, skirts, scarves, shawls, lingerie, dressing gowns, and all kinds of corsets and garter belts, petticoats and nightgowns, and assorted jackets and tops, coats and furs, while rustling silk stirred like a gentle sea breeze.
     Here and there little dark cubicles draped in dark curtains gaped at me on my way. Here and there at the end of a winding tunnel a shadowy lightbulb winked faintly. Here and there mysterious secondary alleys opened up, alcoves, narrow winding jungle tracks, little niches, sealed fitting rooms, and all kinds of cupboards, shelves, and counters. And there were many corners hidden by thick screens or curtains.
     The footsteps of the high-heeled infant were rapid and confident, ti-ta-tak ti-ta-tak (in my fever I heard "come to chat, come to chat," or, mockingly, "tiny tot, tiny tot!"), not at all those of a little girl, and yet I could see for myself that she was shorter than I was. My heart went out to her. I yearned with all my being, whatever the cost, to make her eyes open wide in admiration.
     I quickened my pace. I was almost running after her. With a soul steeped in fairy tales about princesses that knights like me galloped to rescue from the teeth of dragons or the spells of wicked wizards, I just had to overtake her, to get a good look at the face of this wood nymph, perhaps rescue her a little, slay a dragon or two for her, earn her undying gratitude. I was afraid of losing her forever in the darkness of the labyrinth.
     But I had no way of knowing whether the girl who was winding her way with such agility through the forest of clothes had noticed that a valiant knight was close on her heels, lengthening his little strides so as not to fall behind. If she had, why had she not given any sign: not once had she turned toward me or looked around.
     All of a sudden the little fairy dived under a many-branched raincoat tree, stirred it this way and that, and in an instant vanished from my sight, swallowed up in its thick foliage.
     Flooded by an uncharacteristic bravery, electrified by knightly daring, I plunged fearlessly into the thicket of cloth after her, and swimming against the tide, I fought my way through the mass of rustling garments. And so, finally, panting with excitement, I emerged—almost stumbled—into a sort of poorly lit clearing in the forest. Here I resolved to wait as long as I had to for the little wood nymph, whose sound and indeed whose scent I imagined I could perceive among the nearest branches. I would risk my life to take on bare-handed the wizard who had imprisoned her in his cellar. I would defeat the monster, smash the iron chains from her hands and feet, set her free, then stand at a distance, my head bowed in mute modesty, and wait for my reward, which would not be long in coming, and her tears of gratitude, after which I did not know what would follow, but I did know that it would surely come and that it would overwhelm me.
    


     She was tiny, chicklike, her frame fragile as a matchstick, almost a baby, and she had cascading brown curls. And red high-heeled shoes. And a woman's dress with a low neckline that revealed a woman's breast with a real woman's cleavage. And she had wide, slightly parted lips, painted a garish red.

     When I finally found the courage to look up at her face, a wicked, mocking crack suddenly opened between her lips, a kind of twisted, poisonous smile that disclosed sharp little teeth among which a single gold incisor glinted. A thick layer of powder mottled with islands of rouge covered her forehead and whitened her terrifying cheeks, which were slightly hollow, sunken like those of a wicked witch, as though she had suddenly put on the face of the killed fox fur, that face that had seemed both malicious and heartrendingly sad.
     That elusive infant, the fleet-footed fairy, the enchanted nymph that I had pursued as though bewitched through the length and breadth of the forest, was not a child at all. She was neither fairy nor wood nymph but a sardonic-looking, almost elderly woman. A midget. A little hunchbacked. From close up her face had something of the look of a crooked-beaked, beady-eyed raven. To me she was frightening, dwarfish, shrunken, with a wrinkled old neck and hands that she suddenly opened wide and extended toward me, with a terrifying low laugh, like a witch who must be trying to touch me so as to trap me, with bony, wrinkled fingers like the claws of a bird of prey.
     Instantly I turned and fled, breathless, terrified, sobbing, I ran, too petrified to shout aloud, I ran, screaming a choked scream inside me, help, help me, I ran crazily among the rustling tunnels in the dark, losing my way, becoming more and more lost in that labyrinth. Never before or since have I experienced such terror. I had discovered the terrible secret that she was not a child, that she was a witch disguised as a child, and now she would never let me escape alive from her dark forest.
     As I ran I suddenly fell into a small entrance, with a wooden door that was neither open nor shut; in fact it was not a full-sized door but just a low opening like that of a dog kennel. I dragged myself inside with my last breath and there I hid from the witch, cursing myself, why hadn't I closed the door of my hiding place behind me? But I was paralyzed by horror, too frightened to emerge even for a moment from my shelter, too petrified even to reach out and close the door behind me.
     And so I curled up in a corner of this kennel, which may have been no more than a storeroom, a kind of enclosed triangular space under a staircase. There, among some vague twisting metal pipes and crumbling cases and piles of moldy cloth, shrunk and curled up fetus-like, my hand covering my head, my head burrowing between my knees, trying to blot out my very existence, to withdraw inside my own womb, I lay trembling, perspiring, afraid to breathe, careful not to let out so much as a squeak, frozen with panic because of the bellows-like breathing that would soon give me away since it must surely be audible out there.
     Over and over again I fancied I heard the tapping of her heels, "traitor die, traitor die, traitor die," getting closer, she was chasing me with her killed fox's face, here she was now right on top of me, any moment now she would catch me, drag me out, touch me with fingers that felt like a frog's, groping at me, hurting me, and suddenly she would stoop over me laughing with her sharp teeth and inject some terrifying magic spell into my blood to make me too turn suddenly into a killed fox. Or into stone.
     After seven years somebody went past. Someone who worked in the shop? I stopped breathing and clenched my trembling fists. But the man did not hear my pounding heart. He hurried past my kennel and on the way he closed the door and inadvertently shut me in. Now I was locked in. Forever. In total darkness. At the bottom of a quiet ocean.
     I have never been in such darkness and quiet either before or since. It was not the darkness of night, which is usually a dark blue darkness where you can generally make out various glimmers of light, with stars and glow-worms, lanterns of distant wayfarers, the window of a house here and there, and everything that punctuates night darkness, where you can always navigate from one block of darkness to the next by means of the various glimmers and shimmers and flickers, and you can always try to grope in the darkness at some shadows that are a little darker than the night itself.
     Not here: I was at the bottom of a sea of ink.
     Nor was the silence that of the night, where there is always some faraway pump pounding away, and you can hear the crickets and a chorus of frogs, dogs barking, dimly rumbling motors, the whine of a mosquito, and from time to time the wail of a jackal goes right through you.
     But here I was not in a living, shivering dark purple night, I was locked into the darkest darkness. And silent silence enfolded me there, the silence you can find only at the bottom of a sea of ink.
    


     How long was I there?

     There is no one left to ask now. Greta Gat was killed in the siege of Jewish Jerusalem in 1948. An Arab Legion sniper with a diagonal black belt and a red kaffieh fired an accurate shot at her from the direction of the Police Academy that was on the cease-fire line. The bullet, so locals related, went in through Auntie Greta's left ear and came out of her eye. To this day, when I try to imagine what her face was like, I have nightmares about one spilled eye.
     Nor have I any means to establish where in Jerusalem that clothes shop was, with its abundance of warrens, caves, and forest tracks, some sixty years ago. Was it an Arab shop? An Armenian one? And what stands on the site now? What happened to those forests and winding tunnels? And the alcoves behind the curtains, the counters, and all the changing cubicles? And the kennel where I was buried alive? Or the witch disguised as a wood nymph, whom I pursued and then fled in terror? What happened to my very first temptress, who drew me into her forest hideaway until I found myself inside her secret lair where suddenly she deigned to show me her face, which with nothing more than a look I managed to transform into a horror, the face of a slain fox, both vicious and desperately sad.
    


     It is possible that Auntie Greta, when she finally deigned to reemerge glittering anew from her limbo, clad in a shiny dress, was alarmed not to find me waiting for her in the place where she had fixed me, on the wicker stool opposite the fitting room. No doubt she was startled and her face blushed so deeply that it turned almost purple. What has happened to the child? He is usually such a responsible and obedient child, a very cautious child, not at all adventurous, not even particularly brave.

     We must imagine that at first Auntie Greta tried to find me on her own: perhaps she imagined that the child had waited and waited until he got bored and now was playing hide-and-seek with her to punish her for being away so long. Maybe the little scamp was hiding here behind the shelves? No? Or here among the coats? Perhaps he was standing and staring at waxwork models of half-dressed girls? Perhaps he was looking out at the people in the street from the inside of the shopwindow? Or had he simply found the toilet all by himself? Or a faucet to drink some water? A clever boy, quite a responsible boy, no question of that, only a bit absentminded, muddled, lost in all sorts of daydreams, always getting lost in the stories I tell him or he tells himself. Perhaps he's gone out in the street, after all? Frightened I might have forgotten him, trying to find his own way home? What if a strange man appeared and held out his hand and promised him all sorts of wonderful things? And what if the child let himself be tempted? And went off? With a stranger?
     As Auntie Greta's apprehension intensified, she stopped blushing and turned white instead, and she started to shiver as though she had caught a cold. Eventually no doubt she raised her voice, she burst out crying, and everyone in the shop, assistants and shoppers alike, came to help and set to work looking for me. They may have called my name, combed the maze-like alleys of the shop, searched all the forest tracks in vain. And because apparently it was an Arab shop, one may imagine that crowds of children a little older than me were summoned and sent out to search for me in the neighborhood, in the narrow streets, in pits, in the nearby olive grove, in the courtyard of the mosque, in the goat pasture on the hillside, in the passages leading to the bazaar.
     Was there a telephone? Did Auntie Greta phone Mr. Heinemann's pharmacy on the corner of Zephaniah Street? Did she or did she not manage to apprise my parents of the terrible news? Apparently not, otherwise my parents would have reminded me of it over and over again, for years to come, at any sign of disobedience they would have brandished a reenactment of that terrible experience of loss and mourning, however short-lived, that the crazy child had inflicted on them, and how in an hour or two their hair had almost turned white.
     I remember that I did not shout there in the total darkness. I did not make a sound. I did not try to shake the locked door or hammer on it with my little fists, maybe because I was still trembling with fear that the witch with the killed fox's face was still sniffing around after me. I remember that the fear was replaced there, at the bottom of that silent sea of ink, by a strange sweetness: being there was a little like snuggling up warmly to my mother under a winter blanket while gusts of cold and darkness touched the windowpanes from the outside. And a bit like playing at being a deaf and blind child. And a bit like being free of all of them. Completely.
     I hoped they would soon find me and get me out of there. But only soon. Not right away.
     I even had a small, solid object there, a sort of round metal snail, smooth and pleasant to touch. Its dimensions exactly matched my hand, and my fingers thrilled as they closed around it, felt it, stroked it, clenched a little and relaxed a little, and sometimes pulled and drew out—only a little—the tip of the thin, lithe lodger within, like the head of a snail that peeps out for a moment, curiously, curls this way and that, and instantly retreats inside its shell.
     It was a retractable measuring tape, a thin, lithe strip of steel, coiled within a steel case. I amused myself with this snail for a long while in the dark, unsheathing it, stretching it, extending it, letting go suddenly and causing the steel snake to dart back into the shelter of its lair with the speed of lightning until the case had drawn it all back into its belly, received its entire length, and responded with a final slight shudder, a quivering click that was very pleasant to my enfolding hand.
     And again unsheathing, releasing, stretching, and this time I extended the steel snake to its full length, sending it far away into the depth of the dark space, feeling with it for the end of the darkness, listening to the popping of its delicate joints as it stretched and its head moved farther and farther away from its shell. Eventually I allowed it to come home gradually, releasing just a tiny bit and stopping, another tiny bit and stopping again, trying to guess—because I'd seen nothing, literally nothing—how many soft puk-puk pulses there would be before I heard the decisive tluk of the final locking that indicated that the snake had vanished from head to tail back into the womb from which I had allowed it to emerge.
     How had this good snail suddenly come into my possession? I can't remember whether I had snatched it as I went past, in my knight-errant journey, in one of the twists and turns of the maze, or if my fingers had come across it inside that kennel, after the stone was rolled back to seal the mouth of my tomb.
    


     One may reasonably imagine that, on reflection, Auntie Greta decided that from every angle it would be best not to tell my parents. She certainly saw no reason to alarm them after the event, when everything had ended well and safely. She may have feared that they would judge her to be an insufficiently responsible child sitter, and that she would thereby lose a modest but regular and much-needed source of income.

     Between me and Auntie Greta the story of my death and resurrection in the Arab clothes shop was never mentioned or even hinted at. There was not so much as a conspiratorial wink. She may have hoped that in time the memory of that morning would fade and we would both come to think that it had never happened, that it had been only a bad dream. She may even have been a little ashamed of her extravagant excursions to clothes shops: after that winter's morning she never again made me her partner in crime. She may even have managed, thanks to me, to recover somewhat from her addiction to dresses. A few weeks or months later I was taken away from Auntie Greta and sent to Mrs. Pnina Shapiro's kindergarten in Zephaniah Street. We continued, however, for a few years to hear the sound of Auntie Greta's piano dimly in the distance, at dusk, a persistent, lonely sound beyond the other noises of the street.
     It had not been a dream. Dreams dissolve with time and make way for other dreams, while that dwarf witch, that elderly child, the face of the killed fox, still sniggers at me with sharp teeth, among which is a single gold incisor.
     And there was not only the witch: there was also the snail I had brought back from the forest, the snail I hid from my father and mother, and that sometimes, when I was alone, I dared to take out and play with under the bedclothes, causing it long erections and lightning retreats back into the depth of its lair.
     A brown man with big bags under his kind eyes, neither young nor old, with a green-and-white tailor's tape measure around his neck and both ends dangling down onto his chest. He moved in a weary sort of way. His brown face was wide and sleepy, and a shy smile flickered for a moment and died under his soft gray mustache. The man leaned over me and said something to me in Arabic, something I could not understand but that I nevertheless translated into words in my heart, Don't be frightened, child, don't be frightened anymore now.
     I remember that my rescuer had square, brown-framed reading glasses, which suited not an assistant in a women's clothes shop but rather, perhaps, a heavily built carpenter getting on in years, who hums to himself as he walks along dragging his feet, with a dead cigarette butt between his lips and a worn folding ruler peeping out of his shirt pocket.
     The man eyed me for a moment, not through the lenses of his glasses, which had slipped down his nose, but over the top of them, and after scrutinizing me closely and hiding another smile or shadow of a smile behind his neat mustache, he nodded to himself two or three times and then reached out and took my hand, which was cold with fear, into his warm hand, as though he were warming a freezing chick, and drew me out of that dark recess, raised me high in the air, and squeezed me quite hard to his chest, and at that I began to cry.
     When the man saw my tears, he pressed my cheek against his slack cheek, and said, in his low, dusty voice, pleasantly reminiscent of a shaded dirt road in the country at dusk, in Arabs' Hebrew, question, answer, and summing up:
     "Everything all right? Everything all right. OK."
     And he carried me in his arms to the office, which was located in the bowels of the shop, and there the air was full of smells of coffee and cigarettes and woolen cloth and the aftershave lotion of the man who had found me, different from my father's, much sharper and fuller, a smell that I wanted my father to have too. And the man who had found me said a few more words to the assembled company in Arabic, because there were people in the office standing and sitting between me and Auntie Greta, who was weeping in a corner, and he said one sentence to Auntie Greta too, and she blushed very deeply, and with that, with a long, slow, responsible movement, like a doctor feeling to find out where exactly it hurts, the man passed me over into Auntie Greta's arms.
     But I was not so keen to be in her arms. Not quite yet. I wanted to stay a little longer pressed to the chest of the man who had rescued me.
     After that they talked for a while, the others, not my man, he did not talk but just stroked my cheek and patted me twice on the shoulder and left. Who knows what he was called? Or if he's still alive? Is he living in his home? Or in dirt and poverty, in some refugee camp?
    


     Then we went home on the No. 3A bus. Auntie Greta washed her face and mine too, so that it wouldn't show that we'd been crying. She gave me some bread and honey, a bowl of boiled rice, and a glass of lukewarm milk, and for dessert she gave me two pieces of marzipan. Then she undressed me and put me to bed in her bed, and she gave me lots of cuddles and mewing sounds that ended in sticky kisses, and as she tucked me in, she said, Sleep, sleep a little, my darling child. Perhaps she was hoping to wipe away the evidence. Perhaps she was hoping that when I woke from my siesta, I would think that it had all happened in a dream and wouldn't tell my parents, or if I did, she could smile and say that I always had such dreams in the afternoon, someone really ought to write them down and publish them in a book, with pretty color pictures, so that all the other children could enjoy them too.

     But I didn't go to sleep, I lay quietly under the blanket playing with my metal snail.
     I never told my parents about the witch, the bottom of the inky sea, or the man who rescued me: I didn't want them to confiscate my snail. And I didn't know how I would explain to them where I'd found it. I could hardly say I'd brought it back as a souvenir from my dream. And if I told them the truth, they would be furious with Auntie Greta and me. What's that?! His Highness?! A thief?! Has His Highness gone out of his mind?
     And they would take me straight back there and force me to give my snail back and say I was sorry.
     And then the punishment.
    


     Later in the afternoon Father came to pick me up from Auntie Greta's. As usual, he said, "His Highness looks a little pale today. Has he had a hard day? Have his ships been shipwrecked, heaven forbid? Or have his castles been captured by foes?"

     I did not reply, even though I could definitely have made him unhappy. For instance, I could have told him that since that morning I had another father apart from him. An Arab father.
     While he was putting on my shoes, he joked with Auntie Greta. He always courted women with witticisms. And he always chatted on endlessly so as not to allow any room for a moment's silence. All his life my father was afraid of silence. He always felt himself to be responsible for the life of the conversation and saw it as a sign of failure and guilt on his part if it flagged for an instant. So he made up a rhyme in honor of Auntie Greta, something like this:
     "It's not illegal yet, I bet, to flirt and pet with Gret."
     Perhaps he went even further and said:
     "Greta dear, Greta dear, you have really touched me here," pointing at his heart.
     Auntie Greta blushed immediately, and because she was embarrassed at blushing, she blushed even more deeply, and her neck and chest turned purple like an eggplant, despite which she managed to mutter:
     "Nu, but really, Herr Doktor Klausner," but her thighs nodded to him slightly, as though they longed to execute a little pirouette for him.
     That same evening Father took me on a long, detailed tour of the remains of Inca civilization: eager for knowledge, we crossed oceans and mountains, rivers and plains together in the big German atlas. With our own eyes we saw the mysterious cities and the remains of palaces and temples in the encyclopedia and in the pages of a Polish book with pictures. All evening Mother sat in an armchair reading, with her legs tucked under her. The paraffin heater burned with a quiet, deep blue flame.
     And every few minutes the silence of the room was emphasized by three or four soft mutters as air bubbled through the veins of the heater.