Amos Oz - A Tale Of Love And Darkness, Part 2

31


     THE GARDEN wasn't a real garden, just a smallish rectangle of trampled earth as hard as concrete, where even thistles could scarcely grow. It was always in the shade of the concrete wall, like a prison yard. And in the shade of the tall cypress trees on the other side of the wall, in the Lembergs' garden next door. In one corner a stunted pepper tree struggled to survive, with gritted teeth; I loved to rub its leaves between my fingers and inhale its exciting smell. Opposite, near the other wall, was a single pomegranate tree or bush, a disillusioned survivor of the days when Kerem Avraham was still an orchard, which obstinately flowered year after year. We children did not wait for the fruit but ruthlessly cut off the vase-shaped unripe buds, into which we would insert a stick that was a finger's length or so, and thus make them into pipes like those the British smoked, and a few better-off people in our neighborhood who wanted to imitate the British. Once a year we opened a pipe shop in a corner of the yard. Because of the color of the buds it sometimes looked as though there was a reddish glow at the tip of each of our pipes.

     Some agriculturally minded visitors, Mala and Staszek Rudnicki from Chancellor Street, once brought me a gift of three little paper bags containing radish, tomato, and cucumber seeds. So Father suggested we should make a vegetable patch. "We'll both be farmers," he said enthusiastically. "We'll make a little kibbutz in the space by the pomegranate tree, and bring forth bread from the earth by our own efforts!"
     No family in our street had a spade, fork, or hoe. Such things belonged to the new, suntanned Jews, who lived over the hills and far away—in the villages and kibbutzim in Galilee, the Sharon, and the Valleys. So Father and I set out to conquer the wilderness and make a vegetable garden almost with our bare hands.
     Early on Saturday morning, when Mother was still asleep and the whole neighborhood too, the two of us crept outside, wearing white vests and khaki shorts and hats, skinny, narrow-chested, townies to our slim fingertips, as pale as two sheets of paper but well protected by the thick coating of cream that we had rubbed into each other's shoulders. (The cream, called Velveta, was calculated to frustrate all the wiles of the spring sun.)
     Father led the parade, wearing boots and armed with a hammer, a screwdriver, a kitchen fork, a ball of string, an empty sack, and the letter opener from his desk. I marched behind, all excited, full of the fierce joys of agriculture, carrying a bottle of water, two glasses, and a small box containing a plaster, a little bottle of iodine, a little stick to apply the iodine with, a strip of gauze, and a bandage, first aid in case of mishaps.
     First Father brandished the letter opener ceremoniously, bent down, and drew four lines on the ground. In this way he marked out once and for all the boundaries of our plot, which was about two meters square, or just a little larger than the world map that hung on the wall of our corridor between the doors of the two rooms. Then he instructed me to get down on my knees and hold tightly, with both hands, a sharpened stick that he called a peg. His plan was to hammer a peg into each corner of the plot and surround it all with a border of taut string. The trodden earth, however, was as hard as cement and resisted all Father's efforts to hammer in the pegs. So he put down the hammer, with a martyred expression removed his glasses, deposited them carefully on the kitchen windowsill, returned to the battlefield, and redoubled his efforts. He sweated profusely as he battled, and without his glasses he once or twice narrowly missed my fingers, which were holding the peg for him. The peg, meanwhile, was fast becoming flattened.
     By dint of hard work we finally managed to pierce the top crust and make a shallow depression. The pegs were embedded to the depth of half a finger's length and refused to go any farther. We were obliged to support each peg with two or three large stones and to compromise on the tautness of the string, because every time we tightened the string, the pegs threatened to come out of the ground. So the plot was marked out with four lines of slack string. Despite everything we had managed to create something out of nothing: from here to here was inside, in fact our vegetable garden, and everything beyond was outside, in other words the rest of the world.
     "That's it," said Father modestly, and nodded his head several times, as though to agree with himself and confirm the validity of what he had done.
     And I repeated after him, unconsciously imitating his nods:
     "That's it."
     This was Father's way of announcing a short break. He instructed me to wipe off my sweat, drink some water, sit down on the step, and take a rest. He himself did not sit down next to me but put his glasses back on, stood beside our square of string, inspected the progress of our project so far, mulled it over, considered the next stage of the campaign, analyzed our mistakes, drew the conclusions, and instructed me to remove the pegs and string provisionally and lay them neatly next to the wall: it would be better, in fact, to dig the plot first and mark it out afterward, otherwise the string would get in our way. It was also decided to pour four or five buckets of water on the soil and wait for twenty minutes or so for it to work its way in and soften the iron plating, and only then to renew our onslaught.
     Father struggled on until midday, heroically, against the compacted earth. Bent double, with an aching back, pouring with sweat, gasping for breath like a drowning man, his eyes looking bare and helpless without the glasses, time after time he brought his hammer down on the stubborn ground. But the hammer was too light: it was a domestic hammer, meant not for storming fortifications but for cracking nuts or hammering a nail into the back of the kitchen door. Time after time Father brandished his pathetic hammer, like David with his sling against the mighty armor of Goliath, or as though he were assailing the battlements of Troy with a frying pan. The forked part of the hammer, intended for pulling nails out, served as spade, fork, and hoe rolled into one.
     Large blisters soon rose on the soft cushions of his hands, but Father gritted his teeth and ignored them, even when they burst and released their fluid and became open wounds. Nor did he take any notice of the blisters that appeared on the sides of his scholar's fingers. Time and again he raised his hammer, brought it down, pounded and smote and raised it again, and as he wrestled with the elements of nature and the primeval wilderness, his lips muttered fevered imprecations to the unyielding soil in Greek and Latin and for all I know in Amharic, Old Slavonic, and Sanskrit.
     At one point he brought the hammer down with all his force on the toe of his shoe and groaned with pain; he bit his lip, took a rest, used the word "decidedly" or "definitely" to reproach himself for his carelessness, wiped his brow, sipped some water, wiped the mouth of the bottle with his handkerchief, and insisted that I take a swig, returned to the field of combat limping but determined, and heroically renewed his unrelenting efforts.
     Eventually the compacted earth took pity on him, or perhaps it was just astonished at his dedication, and began to crack. Father lost no time in inserting the tip of his screwdriver into the cracks, as though he was afraid the soil might change its mind and turn to concrete once again. He worked at the cracks, deepened and widened them, and with his bare fingers turning white with effort he detached thick clods that he piled up one by one at his feet, like slain dragons belly up. Severed roots protruded from these clods of earth, twisting and turning like sinews torn from living flesh.
     My task was to advance in the rear of the assault echelon, open up the clods of earth with the letter opener, detach the roots and put them in the sack, remove any stones or bits of gravel, break up and crumble each clod, and finally, using the kitchen fork as a rake or harrow, comb the hair of the loosened soil.
     Now came the time to fertilize. We had no animal or poultry manure, and the pigeon droppings on the roof were out of the question because of the risk of infection, so Father had prepared in advance a saucepanful of leftover food. It was a murky swill of grit water, fruit and vegetable peelings, rotten pumpkins, muddy coffee grounds with tea leaves floating on them, remains of porridge and borscht and boiled vegetables, fish trimmings and burnt frying oil, sour milk and various other viscous liquids and murky slops full of dubious lumps and particles in a sort of thick soup that had turned rancid.
     "This will enrich our poor soil," Father explained to me as we rested side by side on the step in our sweat-soaked vests, feeling like a pair of real working men, and fanned our faces with the khaki hats. "We absolutely must feed the soil with anything that may turn from kitchen waste into a humus rich in organic substances, to give our plants the nourishment without which they will grow stunted and sickly."
     He must have guessed correctly at a horrible idea that had come into my mind, because he hastened to add reassuringly: "And don't make the mistake of worrying that we might end up eating through the vegetables that we grow what may now appear to be disgusting rubbish. No, and no again! On no account! Manure is not filth, it is a hidden treasure—generations upon generations of peasants and farmers have sensed this mysterious truth instinctively. Tolstoy himself speaks somewhere about the mystical alchemy that is constantly taking place within the womb of the earth, that wonderful metamorphosis that translates rot and decay into compost, compost into rich soil and thence into cereals, vegetables, fruit, and all the rich produce of field, garden, and orchard."
     While we fixed the pegs back in the four corners of our plot and stretched the string carefully between them, Father explained the words to me simply, precisely, and in order: rot and decay, compost, organic, alchemy, metamorphosis, produce, Tolstoy, mystery.
    


     By the time Mother came out to warn us that lunch would be ready in half an hour, the project of conquering the wilderness was complete. Our new garden extended from peg to peg and from string to string, surrounded on all sides by the barren earth of the backyard, but distinguished from it by its dark, brown color and its crumbly, tilled soil. Our vegetable plot was beautifully hoed and raked, manured and sown, divided into three equal, elongated waves or hillocks, one for the tomatoes, one for the cucumbers, and one for the radishes. And as temporary labels, like those that are put up at the head of graves that have not yet been covered with a tombstone, we placed a stick at the end of each row with an empty seed packet on each stick. Thus we had, for the time being, at least until the vegetables themselves grew, a colorful garden of pictures: a vivid image of a fiery red tomato with two or three transparent dewdrops trickling down its cheeks; a picture of some cucumbers in an attractive shade of green; and an appetizing illustration of a bunch of radishes, washed and bursting with health, gleaming in red, white, and green.

     After spreading the fertilizer and sowing the seeds, we watered and rewatered each of the pregnant hillocks gently with an improvised watering can made from a water bottle and the little strainer from the kitchen that in civilian life hung on the kettle and caught the tea leaves when we made tea.
     Father said:
     "So from now on every morning and every evening we'll water our vegetable beds, we mustn't overwater or underwater them, and you will no doubt run and check every morning, as soon as you get up, for the first signs of germination, because in a few days' time tiny shoots will start to raise their heads and shake the grains of soil aside, like a naughty boy shaking his cap off his head. Every plant, the Rabbis say, has its own private angel that stands over it, taps it on the head, and says, 'Grow!'"
     Father also said:
     "Now Your sweaty, grubby Honor will kindly take out clean underwear, shirt, and trousers and jump in the bath. Your Highness will remember to use plenty of soap, especially you-know-where. And don't fall asleep in the bath as usual, because your humble servant is waiting patiently for his turn."
     In the bathroom I stripped down to my underpants and then climbed on the toilet seat and peeped out through the little window. Was there anything to see yet? A first shoot? A green sprout? Even if it was just the size of a pinhead?
     As I peeped out, I saw my father lingering for a few minutes beside his new garden, modest and humble, as happy as an artist posing beside his latest creation, tired, still limping from when he hit his toe with the hammer, but as happy as a conquering hero.
     My father was a tireless talker, always overflowing with quotations and proverbs, always happy to explain and to quote, eager to treat you on the spot to the benefit of his extensive knowledge. Had you ever reflected on the way the Hebrew language links certain roots together by their sounds, for instance, to uproot and to rend, to stone and to drive away, to till and to be lacking, to plant and to dig up, or the etymological link between earth-red-man-blood-silence? A regular torrent of allusions, associations, connotations, and wordplays poured out of him, whole forests of facts and analogies, piles upon piles of explanations, rebuttals, and arguments, desperately straining to entertain or amuse those present, to spread happiness, even to play the fool, not sparing his own dignity, so long as silence had no dominion, even for a moment.
     A lean, tense figure, in a sweat-drenched T-shirt and khaki shorts that were too wide and reached almost down to his nobby knees. His thin arms and legs were very pale and covered with thick black hair. He looked like a dazed Talmud student who had suddenly been dragged out of the darkness of the house of study, dressed up in the khaki garb of the pioneer, and ruthlessly led out into the dazzling blue of midday. His hesitant smile fixed you for a moment as though begging, as though plucking your sleeve and beseeching you to show him some affection. His brown eyes stared at you absentmindedly or even in a panic through his round-framed glasses, as though he had just remembered that he had forgotten something, who knows what, but it was the most important and urgent thing of all, something that he must not at any cost forget. But what it was that he had forgotten he completely failed to recall. Excuse me, perhaps you happen to know what I've forgotten? Something important. Something that can't be delayed. Would you be kind enough to remind me what it was? If I may make so bold.
    


     The following days I ran to our vegetable garden every two or three hours, impatient to discover signs of germination, if only some tiny movement in the loosened soil. Again and again I watered the plot, until the soil turned to mud. Every morning I leaped out of bed and ran barefoot in my pajamas to check whether the longed-for miracle had occurred during the night. And after a few days, early one morning, I found that the radishes had taken the lead and put up their tiny, closely packed periscopes.

     I was so happy that I watered them again and again.
     And I erected a scarecrow dressed in an old slip of my mother's, with an empty tin can for a head, on which I drew a mouth and a mustache and a forehead with black hair falling across it like Hitler, and eyes one of which came out slightly crooked, as though he was winking or mocking.
     A couple of days later the cucumbers came up too. But whatever it was the radishes and cucumbers saw must have saddened or terrified them, because they changed their minds, turned pale, their bodies bent double overnight as though in deep dejection, their tiny heads touched the ground, and they became shriveled, thin, gray, until they were no more than miserable threads of straw. As for the tomatoes, they never even sprouted: they examined the prevailing conditions, discussed what to do, and decided to give us up. Maybe our yard was incapable of growing anything, since it was so low-lying, surrounded by high walls and shaded by tall cypress trees, so that not a ray of sunlight reached it. Or perhaps we had overdone the watering. Or the fertilizer. It is possible that my Hitler scarecrow, which left the birds completely unimpressed, terrified the tiny shoots to death. So that was the end of our attempt to create a kind of little kibbutz in Jerusalem and someday to eat the fruit of the labor of our own hands.
     "From this," my father said sadly, "follows the grave but inescapable conclusion that we must decidedly have gone wrong somewhere along the line. So now we are definitely under an obligation to labor tirelessly and uncompromisingly to determine the root and cause of our failure. Did we put on too much fertilizer? Did we water excessively? Or, on the contrary, did we omit some essential step? When all is said and done, we are not peasants and sons of peasants but mere amateurs, inexperienced suitors paying court to the earth but unfamiliar as yet with the golden mean."
     That very day, when he came back from his work in the National Library on Mount Scopus, he brought with him two thick tomes he had borrowed about gardening and vegetable growing (one of them was in German) and studied them carefully. His attention soon turned to other matters, and to totally different books, the decline of certain minority languages in the Balkans, the influence of medieval courtly poetry on the origins of the novella, Greek words in the Mishnah, the interpretation of Ugaritic texts.
     But one morning, as he was setting off to work with his rather battered briefcase, Father saw me bent over the dying shoots with tears in my eyes, absorbed in a last desperate effort to rescue them by means of some nose or ear drops that I had taken without permission from the medicine chest in the bathroom and was now administering to the withered shoots, one drop each. At that moment Father's pity was stirred toward me. He picked me up and hugged me, but lost no time in putting me down again. He was perplexed, embarrassed, at a loss. Before he left, as though fleeing the field of combat, he nodded his head three or four times and muttered thoughtfully, to himself rather than to me, the words: "We'll see what else can be done."
    


     On Ibn Gabirol Street in Rehavia there used to stand a building called Pioneering Women's House, or it may have been Working Women's Farm, or something of the sort. Behind it there was a small agricultural reserve, a kind of commune, a women's farm, just a quarter of an acre or so of fruit trees, vegetables, poultry, and beehives. On this site in the early 1950s President Ben-Zvi's famous official prefab would be erected.

     Father went to this experimental farm after work. He must have explained to Rachel Yannait or one of her assistants the whole story of our agricultural defeat, sought advice and guidance, and finally left and came home by bus bearing a small wooden box in whose soil there were some twenty or thirty healthy seedlings. He smuggled his booty into the apartment and hid it from me behind the laundry basket or under the kitchen cupboard, waited till I was asleep, and then crept outside, armed with his flashlight, his screwdriver, his heroic hammer, and his letter opener.
     When I got up in the morning, Father addressed me in a matter-of-fact voice, as though reminding me to tie my shoelaces or button up my shirt. Without taking his eyes off his paper he said:
     "Right. I have the impression your medicine from yesterday has done some good to our ailing plants. Why don't you go and have a look for yourself, Your Highness, and see if there's any sign of recovery? Or was it just my impression? Please go and check, and come back to let me know what you think, and we'll see if we both share the same opinion, more or less, shall we?"
     My tiny shoots, which the day before had been so withered and yellowed that they were no more than sad threads of straw, had suddenly overnight, as though by magic, into sturdy, vigorous plants, bursting with health, full of sap and a deep green color. I stood there stunned, overwhelmed by the magical power of ten or twenty nose or ear drops.
     As I went on staring, I realized that the miracle was even greater than it had appeared at first glance. The radish seedlings had jumped over into the cucumber bed in the night. While in the radishes' bed some plants I didn't recognize at all had settled, perhaps eggplants or carrots. And the most wondrous thing of all: all along the left-hand row, where we had put the tomato seeds that had not germinated, the row where I had not seen any point in using my magic drops at all, there were now three or four bushy young plants, with yellow buds among their upper shoots.
    


     A week later disease struck our garden again, the death throes began all over again, the saplings bowed their heads and once more started looking as sickly and weak as persecuted Diaspora Jews, their leaves dropped, the shoots withered, and this time neither nose drops nor cough syrup did any good: our vegetable patch was drying out and dying. For two or three weeks the four pegs continued to grow there, joined by the grubby strings, and then they too died. Only my Hitler scarecrow flourished for a little longer. Father sought consolation in the exploration of the sources of the Lithuanian romance or the birth of the novel from troubadour poetry. As for me, I scattered the yard with galaxies crammed with strange stars, moons, suns, comets, and planets, and set out on a perilous journey from star to star, in search of other signs of life.


 32


     LATE ONE summer afternoon. It is the end of the first grade, or maybe the beginning of the second grade, or the summer between the two. I am alone in the yard. The others have all gone off without me, Danush, Alik, Uri, Lulik, Eitan, and Ammi, they've gone to look for those things among the trees on the slope of the Tel Arza woods, but they wouldn't have me in the Black Hand gang because I wouldn't blow. Danush found one among the trees, full of smelly sticky stuff that had dried up, and he washed it out under the tap, and anyone who didn't have the guts to blow it up wasn't fit to belong to the Black Hand, and anyone who didn't have the guts to put it on and pee into it a bit, like an English soldier, there was no question of his being admitted to the Black Hand. Danush explained how it worked. Every night English soldiers take girls to the Tel Arza woods and there, in the dark, it goes like this. First they kiss a long time, on the mouth. Then he touches her body in all sorts of places, even under her clothes. Then he pulls both their pants down and puts one of those things on and he lies on top of her and so on and in the end he wets. And this thing was invented so that she wouldn't get wet from him at all. And that's the way it goes every night in Tel Arza woods, and that's the way it goes every night with everyone. Even Mrs. Sussmann, the teacher, her husband does it to her at night. Even your parents. Yes, yours too. And yours. All of them. And it gives you all sorts of nice feelings in your body and it builds up your muscles and it's also good for cleansing the blood.

     They've all gone off without me and my parents are out too. I'm lying on my back on the concrete at the end of the yard behind the washing lines and watching the remains of the day. The concrete is cold and hard under your body in a vest. Thinking, but not right to the end, that everything that's hard and everything that's cold will stay hard and cold forever and everything that's soft and everything that's warm is only soft and warm for the time being. In the end everything has to pass over to the cold, hard side. Over there you don't move, you don't think, you don't feel, you don't warm anything. Forever.
     You're lying on your back, and your fingers find a small stone and put it inside your mouth, which can taste dust and plaster and something else that's kind of salty but not exactly salty. The tongue explores all sorts of little projections and depressions as though the stone is a world like ours and it has mountains and valleys. And what if it turns out that our earth, or even our whole universe, is just a little stone on the concrete in the yard of some giants? What will happen if, in the next moment, some huge child, it's impossible to imagine how big he is, and his friends have made fun of him and gone off without him and that child simply picks up our whole universe between two of his fingers and puts it all in his mouth and also starts exploring us with his tongue? And he also thinks that maybe this stone that's inside his mouth is really a whole universe with Milky Ways and suns and comets and children and cats and washing hanging on the line? And who knows, maybe that huge boy's universe, the boy in whose mouth we are just a tiny stone, is actually nothing more than a little stone on the ground in the yard of an even bigger boy, and he and his universe, and so on and so forth, like Russian dolls, a whole universe inside a tiny stone inside a universe inside a stone, and it's just the same when it gets smaller as when it gets bigger? Every universe is a stone, and every stone is a universe. Until it begins to make your head spin, and meanwhile your tongue explores the stone as though it were a sweet, and now your tongue itself has a chalky taste. Danush, Alik, Uri, Lulik, Eitan, and Ammi and the rest of the Black Hand, in another sixty years they'll be dead and then everyone who remembers them will die and then everyone who remembers everyone who remembers everyone who remembers them. Their bones will turn to stone like this stone that's in my mouth. Maybe the stone in my mouth was children who died trillions of years ago? Maybe they went to look for those things in the woods too and there was someone they made fun of because he didn't have the guts to blow it up and put it on? And they left him alone in his yard too, and he also lay on his back and put a stone in his mouth, and the stone was also a boy once and the boy was once a stone. Dizzy. And meanwhile this stone is getting a bit of life and it's not quite so cold and hard anymore, it's become wet and warm, it's even beginning to stir in your mouth and gently return the tickles it's getting from the tip of your tongue.
    


     Behind the cypress trees behind the fence at the Lembergs' someone's put the electric light on, but lying here you can't see who's there, Mrs. Lemberg or Shula or Eva, who put the light on, but you can see the yellow electricity pouring out like glue that's so thick it's hard to spill, it can hardly move, it can barely make its heavy way, the way viscous liquids do; dull and yellow and slow, it advances like heavy motor oil across the evening, which is a little gray-blue now, and the breeze stirs and licks it for a moment. And fifty-five years later, as I sit and write that evening in an exercise book at the garden table in Arad, that very same evening breeze stirs and from the neighbors' window again this evening too there flows a thick, slow, yellow electric light like heavy motor oil—we know each other, we've known each other for a long time, it's as if there are no more surprises. But there are. That evening of the stone in the mouth in the yard in Jerusalem didn't come here to Arad to remind you of what you've forgotten or to revive old longings, but the opposite: it's come to assault this evening. It's like a woman you've known for a long time, you no longer find her attractive or unattractive, whenever you bump into each other, she always says more or less the same few worn-out words, always offers you a smile, always taps you on the chest in a familiar way, only now, only this time, she doesn't, she suddenly reaches out and grabs your shirt, not casually but with her all, her claws, lustfully, desperately, eyes tight shut, her face twisted as though in pain, determined to have her way, determined not to let go, she doesn't care anymore about you, about what you are feeling, whether or not you want to, what does she care, now she's got to, she can't help herself, she reaches out now and strikes you like a harpoon and starts pulling and tearing you, but actually she's not the one who's pulling, she just digs her claws in and you're the one who's pulling and writing, pulling and writing, like a dolphin with the barb of the harpoon caught in his flesh, and he pulls as hard as he can, pulls the harpoon and the line attached to it and the harpoon gun that's attached to the line and the hunters' boat that the harpoon gun is fixed to, he pulls and struggles, pulls to escape, pulls and turns over and over in the sea, pulls and dives down into the dark depths, pulls and writes and pulls more; if he pulls one more time with all his desperate strength, he may manage to free himself from the thing that is stuck in his flesh, the thing that is biting and digging into you and not letting go, you pull and you pull and it just bites into your flesh, the more you pull, the deeper it digs in, and you can never inflict a pain in return for this loss that is digging deeper and deeper, wounding you more and more because it is the catcher and you are the prey, it is the hunter and you are the harpooned dolphin, it gives and you have taken, it is that evening in Jerusalem and you are in this evening here in Arad, it is your dead parents, and you just pull and go on writing.

     ***

     The others have all gone to the Tel Arza woods without me, and because I didn't have the guts to blow, I'm lying here on my back on the concrete at the end of the yard behind the washing lines. Watching the light of day gradually surrendering. Soon it will be night.

     Once I watched from the Ali Baba's cave I had in the space between the wardrobe and the wall when Grandma, my mother's mother, who had come to Jerusalem from the tar-papered shack on the edge of Kiriat Motskin, lost her temper with my mother, gesticulating at her with the iron, her eyes flashing, and spat terrible words at her in Russian or Polish mixed with Yiddish. Neither of them imagined that I was squeezed into that space holding my breath, peering out, seeing and hearing everything. My mother didn't reply to her mother's thunderous curses but just sat on the hard chair that had lost its back, which stood in the corner, she sat up straight with her knees pressed together and her hands motionless on her knees and her eyes also fixed on her knees, as though everything depended on her knees. My mother sat there like a scolded child, and as her mother shot one venomous question at her after another, all of them soaked and sizzling with sibilants, she said nothing in reply, but her eyes focused even more fixedly on her knees. Her continued silence only redoubled Grandma's fury, she seemed to have gone right out of her mind: her eyes flashing, her face wolflike with rage, flecks of foam whitening the corners of her open lips, and her sharp teeth showing, she hurled the hot iron she was holding, as though to smash it against the wall, then kicked the ironing board over and stormed out of the room, slamming the door so hard that the windowpanes, the vase, and the cups all rattled.
     My mother, unaware that I was watching, suddenly stood up and began punishing herself, she slapped her cheeks and tore her hair, she grabbed a clothes hanger and hit her head and back with it until she wept, and I too in my space between the wardrobe and the wall began to cry silently and to bite both my hands so hard that painful marks appeared. That evening we all ate sweetened gefilte fish that Grandma had brought with her from the tar-papered shack on the edge of Kiriat Mot-skin, in a sweet sauce with sweet boiled carrot, and they all talked to each other about speculators and the black market, about the state construction company and free enterprise and the Ata textile factory near Haifa, and they finished the meal with a cooked fruit salad that we called compote, which was also made by my mother's mother and which had also turned out sweet and sticky like a syrup. My other grandma, the one from Odessa, Grandma Shlomit, politely finished her compote, wiped her lips on a white paper napkin, took a lipstick and pocket mirror out of her leather handbag, and redrew the line of her lips, and then, while she carefully retracted her red dog's erection of a lipstick into its sheath, she observed:
     "What can I say to you? I have never tasted sweeter food in my whole life. The Almighty must be very fond of Vohlynia, to have soaked it so in honey. Even your sugar is much sweeter than ours, and your salt is sweet, and your pepper, and even the mustard in Vohlynia has a taste of jam, and your horseradish, your vinegar, your garlic, they're all so sweet you could sweeten the Angelofdeath himself with them."
     As soon as she had spoken these words, she fell silent, as though in fear of the wrath of the angel whose name she had dared to take so lightly.
     At which my other grandma, my mother's mother, adopted a pleasant smile, not at all vindictive or gloating, but a well-meaning smile as pure and innocent as the singing of the cherubs, and to the charge that her cooking was sweet enough to sweeten vinegar or horseradish and even the angel of death Grandma Ita replied to Grandma Shlomit with a sing-song lilt:
     "But not you, dear mother-in-law of my daughter!"
     The others are not back yet from the Tel Arza woods and I am still on my back on the concrete, which seems to have become a little less cold and hard. The evening light is growing cooler and grayer above the points of the cypresses. As though someone is surrendering there, on the awesome heights above the treetops, the rooftops, and everything that is stirring here in the street, the backyards and kitchens, high above the smells of dust, cabbage, and rubbish, high above the twittering of the birds, as high as the sky is above the earth, above the wailing sounds of prayer coming in ragged tatters from the synagogue down the road.
     Lofty, clear, and indifferent it is unfolding now above the water heaters and the washing hung out on every roof here and above the abandoned junk and the alley cats and above all sorts of longings and above all the corrugated iron lean-tos in the yards and above the schemes, the omelettes, the lies, the washtubs, the slogans pasted up by the Underground, the borscht, the desolation of ruined gardens and remains of fruit trees from the times when there was an orchard here, and now, right now, it is spreading and creating the calm of a clear, even evening, making peace in the high heavens above the garbage cans and above the hesitant, heartrending piano notes repeatedly attempted by a plain girl, Menuchele Schtich, whom we nicknamed Nemucheleh, Shortie, trying over and over again to play a simple ascending scale, stumbling over and over again, always in the same place, and each time trying again. While a bird replies to her, over and over again, with the first five notes of Beethoven's Für Elise. A wide, empty sky from horizon to horizon at the end of a hot summer day. There are three cirrus clouds and two dark birds. The sun has set beyond the walls of the Schneller Barracks, though the firmament has not let go of the sun but has seized it in its claws and managed to tear the train of its many-colored cloak and now is trying on its booty, using the cirrus clouds as a dressmaker's dummy, putting on light like a garment, removing it, checking how well necklaces of greenish radiance suit it, or the coat of many colors with its golden glow and its halo of bluish purple, or how some fragile strips of silver curl along their length, shivering like the broken lines sketched underwater by a fast-moving school of fish. And there are some flashes of purple-tinged pink and lime green, and now it strips quickly and dresses in a reddish mantle from which trail rivers of dull crimson light and after a moment or two puts on a different robe, the color of bare flesh that is suddenly stabbed and stained by several strong hemorrhages while its dark train is being gathered up beneath folds of black velvet, and all at once it is no longer height upon height but depth upon depth upon depth, like the valley of death opening up and expanding in the firmament, as if it were not overhead and the one lying on his back underneath, but the opposite, all the firmament an abyss and the one lying on his back no longer lying but floating, being sucked, plunging rapidly, falling like a stone toward the velvety depth. You will never forget this evening: you are only six or at most six and a half, but for the first time in your little life something enormous and very terrible has opened up for you, something serious and grave, something that extends from infinity to infinity, and it takes you, and like a mute giant it enters you and opens you, so that you too for a moment seem wider and deeper than yourself, and in a voice that is not your voice but may be your voice in thirty or forty years' time, in a voice that allows no laughter or levity, it commands you never to forget a single detail of this evening: remember and keep its smells, remember its body and light, remember its birds, the notes of the piano, the cries of the crows and all the strangeness of the sky running riot from one horizon to the other before your eyes, and all of this is for you, all strictly for the attention of the addressee alone. Never forget Danush, Ammi, and Lulik, or the girls with the soldiers in the woods, or what your grandma said to your other grandma, or the sweet fish floating, dead and seasoned, in a sauce of carrots. Never forget the roughness of the wet stone that was in your mouth more than half a century ago, an echo of whose grayish taste of chalk, plaster, and salt still seduces the tip of your tongue. And all the thoughts that stone conjured up you are never to forget, a universe inside a universe inside a universe. Remember the vertiginous sense of time within time within time, and the whole host of heaven trying on, blending, and hurting the innumerable hues of light just after the sun has set, purple lilac lime orange gold mauve crimson scarlet blue and dull red with gushing blood, and slowly there descends over all a deep dim blue-gray color like the color of silence with a smell like that of the repeated notes on the piano, climbing and stumbling over and over again up a broken scale, while a single bird answers with the five opening notes of Für Elise: Ti-da-di-da-di.

 33


     MY FATHER had a weakness for the momentous, whereas my mother was fascinated by yearning and surrender. My father was an enthusiastic admirer of Abraham Lincoln, Louis Pasteur, and the speeches of Churchill, "blood, sweat, and tears," "never have so many owed so much," "we shall fight them on the beaches." My mother, with a gentle smile, identified with the poetry of Rahel, "I have not sung to you, my land, or praised your name with deeds of heroism, only a path have my feet trodden down..." My father, at the kitchen sink, would suddenly erupt into a spirited recital, with no prior warning, of Tchernikhowsky: "...and in this Land will rise a brood / that breaks its iron chains / looking the light straight in the eye!" Or sometimes Jabotinsky: "...Jotapata, Masada / and captured Beitar / shall rise again in might and splendor! O Hebrew—whether pauper, / slave, or wanderer / you were born a prince / crowned with David's royal diadem."When the spirit descended upon him, Father would roar out, with a tunelessness that would startle the dead, Tchernikhowsky's "My country, oh my land, bare rock-covered highland!" Until Mother had to remind him that the Lembergs next door and probably the other neighbors, the Buchovskis and the Rosendorffs, must be listening to his recital and laughing, whereupon father would stop sheepishly, with an embarrassed smile, as though he had been caught stealing sweets.

     As for my mother, she liked to spend the evening sitting on the bed that was disguised as a sofa, with her bare feet folded underneath her, bent over a book on her knees, wandering for hours on end along the paths of autumnal gardens in the stories of Turgenev, Chekhov, Iwaszkewicz, André Maurois, and U. N. Gnessin.
     Both my parents had come to Jerusalem straight from the nineteenth century. My father had grown up on a concentrated diet of operatic, nationalistic, battle-thirsty romanticism (the Springtime of Nations, Sturm und Drang), whose marzipan peaks were sprinkled, like a splash of champagne, with the virile frenzy of Nietzsche. My mother, on the other hand, lived by the other Romantic canon, the introspective, melancholy menu of loneliness in a minor key, soaked in the suffering of broken-hearted, soulful outcasts, infused with vague autumnal scents of fin de siècle decadence.
     Kerem Avraham, our suburb, with its street hawkers, shopkeepers and little middlemen, its fancy-goods sellers and Yiddishists, its pietists with their wailing chants, its displaced petite bourgeoisie and its eccentric world reformers, suited neither of them. There was always a hesitant dream hovering over our home of moving to a more cultured neighborhood, such as Beit Hakerem or Kiryat Shemuel, if not to Tal-piot or Rehavia, not right away but someday, in the future, when it was a possibility, when we'd put something by, when the child was a bit older, when Father had managed to get his foot on the academic ladder, when Mother had a regular teaching position, when the situation improved, when the country was more developed, when the English left, when the Hebrew State came into being, when it was clearer what was going to happen here, when things finally got a little easier for us.
    


     "There, in the land our fathers loved," my parents used to sing when they were young, she in Rovno and he in Odessa and Vilna, like thousands of other young Zionists in Eastern Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century, "all our hopes will be fulfilled. There to live in liberty, there to flourish, pure and free."

     But what were all the hopes? What sort of "pure and free" life did my parents expect to find here?
     Perhaps they vaguely thought they would find in the renewed Land of Israel something less petit-bourgeois and Jewish and more European and modern; something less crudely materialistic and more idealistic; something less feverish and voluble and more settled and reserved.
     My mother may have dreamed of living the life of a bookish, creative teacher in a village school in the Land of Israel, writing lyric poetry in her spare time, or perhaps sensitive, allusive stories. I think that she hoped to forge gentle relationships with subtle artists, relationships marked by baring one's breast and revealing one's true feelings, and so to break free at last of her mother's noisy, domineering hold on her, and to escape from the stifling puritanism, poor taste, and base materialism that were apparently rampant where she came from.
     My father, on the other hand, saw himself as destined to become an original scholar in Jerusalem, a bold pioneer of the renewal of the Hebrew spirit, a worthy heir to Professor Joseph Klausner, a gallant officer in the cultured army of the Sons of Light battling against the forces of darkness, a fitting successor to a long and glorious dynasty of scholars that began with the childless Uncle Joseph and continued with his devoted nephew who was as dear to him as a son. Like his famous uncle, and no doubt under his inspiration, my father could read scholarly works in sixteen or seventeen languages. He had studied in the universities of Vilna and Jerusalem (and even wrote a doctoral thesis later, in London). For years, neighbors and strangers had addressed him as "Herr Doktor," and then, at the age of fifty, he finally had a real doctorate. He had also studied, mostly on his own, ancient and modern history, the history of literature, Hebrew linguistics and general philology, biblical studies, Jewish thought, archaeology, medieval literature, philosophy, Slavonic studies, Renaissance history, and Romance studies: he was equipped and ready to become an assistant lecturer and to advance through the ranks to senior lecturer and eventually professor, to be a path-breaking scholar, and indeed to end up sitting at the head of the table every Saturday afternoon and delivering one monologue after another to his awestruck tea-time audience of admirers and devotees, just like his esteemed uncle.
     But nobody wanted him, or his learned accomplishments. So this Treplev had to eke out a wretched existence as a librarian in the newspaper department of the National Library, writing his books about the history of the novella and other subjects of literary history at night, with what remained of his strength, while his Seagull spent her days in a basement apartment, cooking, laundering, cleaning, baking, looking after a sickly child, and when she wasn't reading novels, she stood staring out of the window while her glass of tea grew cold in her hand. Whenever she could, she gave private lessons.
    


     I was an only child, and they both placed the full weight of their disappointments on my little shoulders. First of all, I had to eat well and sleep a lot and wash properly, so as to improve my chances of growing up to fulfill something of the promise of my parents when they were young. They expected me to learn to read and write even before I reached school age. They vied with each other to offer me blandishments and bribes to make me learn the letters (which was unnecessary, as letters fascinated me anyway and came to me of their own accord). And once I learned to read, at the age of five, they were both anxious to provide me with a tasty but also nutritious diet of reading, rich in cultural vitamins.

     They frequently conversed with me about topics that were certainly not considered suitable for young children in other homes. My mother liked telling me stories about wizards, elves, ghouls, enchanted cottages in the depths of the forest, but she also talked to me seriously about crimes, emotions, the lives and sufferings of brilliant artists, mental illness, and the inner lives of animals. ("If you just look carefully, you'll see that every person has some dominant characteristic that makes him resemble a particular animal, a cat or a bear or a fox or a pig. A person's physical features also point to the animal he most closely resembles") Father, meanwhile, introduced me to the mysteries of the solar system, the circulation of the blood, the British White Paper, evolution, Theodor Herzl and his astonishing life story, the adventures of Don Quixote, the history of writing and printing, and the principles of Zionism. ("In the Diaspora the Jews had a very hard life; here in the Land of Israel it's still not easy for us, but soon the Hebrew State will be established, and then everything will be made just and rejuvenated. The whole world will come and marvel at what the Jewish people is creating here.")
     My parents and grandparents, sentimental family friends, well-meaning neighbors, all sorts of gaudy aunties, with their bear hugs and greasy kisses, were constantly amazed at every word that came out of my mouth: the child is so marvelously intelligent, so original, so sensitive, so special, so precocious, he's so thoughtful, he understands everything, he has the vision of an artist.
     For my part, I was so amazed at their amazement that I inevitably ended up amazing myself. After all, they were grown-ups, in other words creatures who knew everything and were permanently right, and if they were always saying that I was so clever, then, of course, I must be. If they found me interesting, I was not unnaturally inclined to agree with them. And if they thought I was a sensitive, creative child and rather something and quite something else (both in some foreign language), and also so original, so advanced, so intelligent, so logical, so cute, etc., well...
     Being conformist and respectful as I was of the grown-up world and its prevailing values, and having no brothers or sisters or friends to counterbalance the personality cult that surrounded me, I had no alternative but to concur, humbly but thoroughly, with the grown-ups' opinion of me.
     And so, unconsciously, by the age of four or five I had become a little show-off whose parents together with the rest of the adult world had invested a considerable fortune in me and offered generous fuel to my arrogance.
    


     Sometimes on winter evenings the three of us would sit and chat around the kitchen table after supper. We spoke softly because the kitchen was so small and cramped, and we never interrupted each other. (Father considered this a precondition of any conversation.) We would talk, for instance, about what a blind man or a creature from another planet would make of our world. Perhaps fundamentally we were all rather like some blind alien? We talked about children in China and India, children of Bedouin and Arab peasants, children of the ghetto, children of the illegal immigrants, and children in the kibbutzim who did not belong to their parents but by my age were already living independent communal lives that they were themselves responsible for, cleaning their own rooms by rotation and deciding by vote what time they would turn the lights out and go to sleep.

     The pale-yellow electric light lit the shabby little kitchen even in the daytime. Outside in the street, which was already empty by eight in the evening, whether because of the British curfew or simply out of habit, a hungry wind whistled on winter nights. It rattled the garbage can lids outside the houses, terrified the cypresses and the stray dogs, and with its dark fingers tested the washtubs suspended on balcony railings. Sometimes a distant echo of gunfire or a muffled explosion reached us from the heart of darkness.
     After supper the three of us stood in line, as though on parade, first Father then Mother then me, facing the wall that was stained black from the Primus stove and the paraffin cooker, with our backs to the room. Father bent over the sink, washed and rinsed each plate and glass in turn, and placed each one on the draining board, from where mother picked them up and dried them and put them away. I was responsible for drying the forks and spoons, and I also sorted them out and put them away in the drawer. From the time I was six, I was allowed to dry the table knives, but I was absolutely forbidden to handle the bread knife or the kitchen knives.
    


     For them it was not enough for me to be intelligent, rational, good, sensitive, creative, and thoughtful with the dreamy vision of an artist. In addition, I also had to be a seer and a fortune-teller, a kind of family oracle. After all, everyone knew that children were closer to nature, to the magical bosom of creation, not having been corrupted yet by lies or poisoned by selfish considerations.

     And so I had to play the role of the Delphic oracle or the holy fool. As I climbed the consumptive pomegranate tree in the yard, or ran from wall to wall without treading on the lines between the paving stones, they called out to me to give them and their guests some spontaneous sign from heaven to help them to settle a dispute, whether or not to go and visit their friends in Kibbutz Kiriat Anavim, whether or not to buy (in installments) a round brown table with four chairs, whether or not to endanger the lives of the survivors by smuggling them into the country on decrepit boats, or whether or not to invite the Rudnickis to supper on Friday night.
     My task was to utter some vague, ambiguous thought, beyond my years, some obscure sentence based on fragments of ideas that I had heard from the grown-ups and shaken up and stirred well, something that could be taken either way, something that was open to all sorts of interpretations. If possible, it should include some vague simile, or feature the phrase "in life." For example: "Every journey is like opening a drawer." "In life there is morning and evening, summer and winter." "Making small concessions is like avoiding treading on little creatures."
     Such enigmatic sentences, "out of the mouths of babes and sucklings," made my parents overflow with emotion; their eyes sparkled, they turned my words this way and that, discovering in them an oracular expression of the pure, unconscious wisdom of nature itself.
     Mother would clasp me warmly to her breast on hearing such beautiful sayings, which I always had to repeat or reproduce in the presence of astonished relatives or friends. I soon learned how to mass-produce such utterances to order, at the request of my excited public. I succeeded in extracting not one but three separate pleasures from each prophecy. First, the sight of my audience fixing their hungry eyes on my lips, waiting excitedly for what would come out, and then plunging into a mass of contradictory interpretations. Second, the dizzying experience of sitting in judgment like Solomon between these grown-ups ("Didn't you hear what he said to us about small concessions? So why do you keep insisting we shouldn't go to Kiriat Anavim tomorrow?"). The third pleasure was the most secret and delicious of all: my generosity. There was nothing I enjoyed more in the world than the delight of giving. They were thirsty, they needed me, and I gave them what they wanted. How fortunate that they had me! What would they do without me?

 34


     I WAS ACTUALLY a very easy child, obedient, hard-working, unknowingly supporting the established social order (Mother and I were subject to Father, who sat at the feet of Uncle Joseph, who in turn—despite his critical opposition—obeyed Ben-Gurion and the "authorized institutions"). Apart from which I was tireless in my quest for words of praise from grown-ups, my parents and their visitors, aunts, neighbors, and acquaintances.

     Nevertheless, one of the most popular performances in the family repertoire, a favorite comedy with a set plot, revolved around a transgression followed by a session of soul-searching and then a fitting punishment. After the punishment came remorse, repentance, pardon, remission of part or most of the punishment, and, finally, a tearful scene of forgiveness and reconciliation, accompanied by hugs and mutual affection.
     One day, for example, driven by love of science, I sprinkle black pepper into my mother's coffee.
     Mother takes one sip, chokes, and spits the coffee out into her napkin. Her eyes are full of tears. Already full of regret, I say nothing, I know very well that the next scene belongs to Mother.
     Father, in his role of unbiased investigator, cautiously tastes Mother's coffee. He may just wet his lips with it. At once he gives his diagnosis:
     "Somebody has decided to season your coffee. It is my suspicion that this is the work of some high-ranking personage."
     Silence. Like a supremely well-behaved child I shovel spoonful after spoonful of porridge from my plate into my mouth, wipe my lips with my napkin, pause for a moment, and then eat another two or three spoonfuls. composed. Sitting up straight. As though acting out an etiquette book. Today I shall finish all my porridge. Like a model child. Until the plate is sparkling clean.
     Father continues, as though deep in thought, as though sharing with us the general outlines of the mysteries of chemistry, without looking at me, talking only to Mother, or to himself:
     "There might have been a disaster, though. As is well known, there are a number of compounds made up of substances that in themselves are completely harmless and fit for human consumption, but that when combined are liable to pose a threat to the life of anyone who tastes them. Whoever it was who put whatever it is in your coffee might well have mixed in some other ingredient. And then? Poisoning. Hospital. Life-threatening, even."
     A deathly silence fills the kitchen. As though the worst has already happened.
     Mother, unconsciously, pushes the poisoned chalice away from her with the back of her hand.
     "And then what?" Father continues, thoughtfully, nodding his head a few times as though he knows very well what almost happened but is too tactful to name the horror.
     Silence.
     "I therefore suggest that whoever performed this prank—no doubt inadvertently, as a misplaced joke—should have the courage to stand up at once. So that we should all know that if there is such a frivolous miscreant in our midst, at least we're not harboring a coward. A person bereft of all honesty and self-respect."
     Silence.
     It is my turn.
     I get to my feet and say in a grown-up tone just like my father's:
     "It was me. I'm sorry. It was a really stupid thing to do. It won't ever happen again."
     "Are you sure?"
     "Definitely."
     "On your word of honor as a self-respecting man?"
     "On my word of honor as a self-respecting man."
     "Confession, regret, and promise all point to a reduction of the penalty. We shall content ourselves on this occasion with your kindly drinking it. Yes, now. Please."
     "What, this coffee? With the black pepper in it?"
     "Yes, indeed."
     "What, me, drink it?"
     "Yes, please."
     But after a first hesitant sip Mother intervenes. She suggests that will be enough. There is no need to exaggerate. The child has such a sensitive stomach. And he has surely learned his lesson by now.
     Father does not hear the plea for compromise. Or pretends not to. He asks:
     "And how does Your Highness find his beverage? Does it taste like manna from heaven?"
     I screw up my face in utter revulsion. Expressing suffering, remorse, and heart-wrenching sadness. So Father declares:
     "Very well, then. that's enough. We shall make do with that on this occasion. Your Highness has expressed his contrition. So let us draw a line under what has been done. And let us underline it with the help of a piece of chocolate, to take away the bad taste. Then, if you like, we can sit at my desk and sort some more stamps. Right?"
    


     Each of us enjoyed his fixed part in this comedy. Father was fond of acting the part of a vengeful deity, all-seeing and punishing wrongdoing, a sort of domestic Jehovah flashing sparks of rage and rumbling terrible thunder, but also compassionate and merciful, long-suffering and abundantly loving.

     But occasionally he was overcome with a blind wave of real fury, not just theatrical anger, especially if I did something that might have been dangerous for me, and then, without any foreplay, he would hit me across the face two or three times.
     Sometimes, after I had been playing with electricity or climbing onto a high branch, he even ordered me to pull my trousers down and get my bottom ready (he called it "The seat, if you please!"), then he beat me ruthlessly six or seven times with his belt.
     But generally Father's anger was expressed not through pogroms but through courtly politeness and icy sarcasm:
     "Your Highness has deigned to tread mud from the street all down the corridor again: apparently it is beneath Your Honor's dignity to wipe his feet on the doormat as we poor mortals take the trouble to do on rainy days. On this occasion I fear Your Excellency will have to condescend to wipe away his royal footprints with his own fair hands. And then Your Supreme Highness will kindly submit to being locked in the bathroom for an hour in the dark so as to have an opportunity to reflect on the error of his ways and resolve to make amends for the future."
     Mother immediately protested at the severity of the sentence:
     "Half an hour will do. And not in the dark. What's the matter with you? You'll be forbidding him to breathe next."
     "How very fortunate for His Excellency that he always has such an enthusiastic counsel to leap to his defense."
     Mother said:
     "If only there was a punishment for having a warped sense of humor—" but she never finished the sentence.
     A quarter of an hour later it was time for the final scene. Father himself would come to fetch me from the bathroom. Reaching out to give me a quick, embarrassed hug, he would mutter a sort of apology:
     "Of course I realize you didn't leave the mud on purpose, it's just that you're absentminded. But of course you also realize that we only punished you for your own good, so that you don't grow up to be another absentminded professor."
     I looked straight into his innocent, sheepish brown eyes and promised him that from now on I would always be careful to wipe my shoes when I came in. Moreover, my fixed part in the drama was to say at this point, with an intelligent, grown-up expression on my face and words borrowed from my father's arsenal, that naturally I understood full well that I was only punished for my own good. My set part even included an address to Mother, in which I begged her not to be so quick to forgive me, because I accepted the consequences of my actions and was perfectly capable of taking the punishment I deserved. Even two hours in the bathroom. Even in the dark. I didn't care.
    


     And I really didn't care, because there was hardly any difference between being locked in the bathroom and my usual solitude, in my room or the yard or the kindergarten: for most of my childhood I was a solitary child, with no brother or sister and with hardly any friends.

     A handful of toothpicks, a couple of bars of soap, three toothbrushes and a half-squeezed tube of Shenhav toothpaste, plus a hairbrush, five of Mother's hairpins, Father's toilet bag, the bathroom stool, an aspirin packet, some sticky plasters, and a roll of toilet paper were enough to last me for a whole day of wars, travels, mammoth construction projects, and grand adventures in the course of which I was, by turns, His Highness, His Highness's slave, a hunter, the hunted, the accused, a fortune-teller, a judge, a seafarer, and an engineer digging the Panama and Suez canals through difficult hilly terrain to join up all the seas and lakes in the tiny bathroom and to launch on voyages from one end of the world to the other merchant ships, submarines, warships, pirate corsairs, whalers, and boatloads of explorers who would discover continents and islands where no man had ever set foot.
     Even if I was condemned to solitary confinement in the dark, I was not alarmed. I would lower the cover of the toilet, sit myself on it, and conduct all my wars and journeys with empty hands. Without any soap or combs or hairpins, without stirring from my place. I sat there with my eyes closed and switched on all the light I wanted inside my head, leaving all the darkness outside.
     You might even say I loved my punishment of solitary confinement. "Whoever doesn't need other human beings," Father quoted Aristotle, "must be a G-d or an animal." For hours on end, I enjoyed being both. I didn't mind.
     When Father mockingly called me Your Highness or Your Excellency, I didn't take offense. On the contrary: I inwardly agreed with him. I adopted these titles and made them my own. But I said nothing. I gave him no hint of my enjoyment. Like an exiled king who has managed to slip back across the border and walks around his city disguised as an ordinary person. Every now and again one of his startled subjects recognizes him and bows down before him and calls him Your Majesty, in the line for the bus or in the crowd in the main square, but I simply ignore the bow and the title. I give no sign. Maybe the reason I decided to behave in this way was that Mother had taught me that you can tell real kings and nobles by the fact that they despise their titles and know full well that true nobility consists in behaving toward the simplest people with humility, like an ordinary human being.
    


     And not just like any ordinary human being, but like a good-natured, benevolent ruler, who always tries to do whatever his subjects want. They seem to enjoy dressing me and putting my shoes on: so let them. I gladly extend all four limbs. After some time they suddenly change their mind and prefer me to dress myself and put on my own shoes: I am only too pleased to slip into my clothes all by myself, enjoying the sight of their beaming delight, occasionally getting the buttons wrong, or sweetly asking them to help me tie my shoelaces.

     They almost fall over each other as they claim the privilege of kneeling down in front of the little prince and tying his shoelaces, as he is in the habit of rewarding his subjects with a hug. No other child is as good at thanking them regally and politely for their services. Once he even promises his parents (who look at each other with eyes misting over with pride and joy, patting him as they inwardly melt with pleasure) that when they are very old, like Mr. Lemberg next door, he will do up their buttons and shoelaces. For all the goodnesses they're always doing for him.
     Do they enjoy brushing my hair? Explaining to me how the moon moves? Teaching me to count to a hundred? Putting one sweater on me on top of another? Even making me swallow a teaspoon of revolting cod liver oil every day. I happily let them do whatever they want to me, I enjoy the constant pleasure that my tiny existence affords them. So even if the cod liver oil makes me want to throw up, I gladly overcome my disgust and swallow the whole spoonful at one go, and even thank them for making me grow up healthy and strong. At the same time I also enjoy their amazement: it's clear this is no ordinary child—this child is so special!
     And so for me the expression "ordinary child" became a term of utter contempt. It was better to grow up to be a stray dog, better to be a cripple or a mental retard, better to be a girl even, provided I didn't become an "ordinary child" like the rest of them, provided I could go on being "so very special!" or "really out of the ordinary!"
    


     So there I was, from the age of three or four, if not earlier, already a one-child show. A nonstop performance. A lonely stage star, constantly compelled to improvise, and to fascinate, excite, amaze, and entertain his public. I had to steal the show from morning to evening. For example, we go to visit Mala and Staszek Rudnicki one Saturday morning in their home on chancellor Street, at the corner of the Street of the Prophets. As we walk along, my parents impress on me that I am on no account to forget that Uncle Staszek and Auntie Mala have no children, so I am not even to think of asking them, for instance, when they are going to have a baby. And in general I must be on my best behavior. Uncle and Auntie have such a high opinion of me already, so I mustn't do anything, anything at all, that might damage their good opinion.

     Auntie Mala and Uncle Staszek may not have any children, but they do of course have their pair of plump, lazy, blue-eyed Persian cats, Chopin and Schopenhauer (and as we make our way up Chancellor Street, I am treated to two thumbnail sketches, of chopin from my mother and of Schopenhauer from my father). Most of the time the cats doze curled up together on the sofa or on a pouffe, like a pair of hibernating polar bears. And in the corner, above the black piano, hangs the cage containing the ancient, bald bird, not in the best of health and blind in one eye. Its beak always hangs half open, as though it is thirsty. Sometimes Mala and Staszek call it Alma, and sometimes they call it Mirabelle. In its cage, too, is the other bird that Auntie Mala put there to relieve its solitude, made from a painted pinecone, with matchsticks for legs and a dark red sliver of wood for a beak. This new bird has wings made from real feathers that have fallen or been plucked from Alma-Mirabelle's wings. The feathers are turquoise and mauve.
    


     Uncle Staszek is sitting smoking. One of his eyebrows, the left one, is always raised, as though expressing a doubt: is that really so, aren't you exaggerating a little? And one of his incisors is missing, giving him the look of a rough street kid. My mother hardly speaks. Auntie Mala, a blond woman who wears her hair in two plaits that sometimes fall elegantly over her shoulders and at other times are wrapped tightly around her head like a wreath, offers my parents a glass of tea and some apple cake. She can peel apples in a single spiral that winds around itself like a telephone cord. Both Staszek and Mala once dreamed of being farmers. They lived on a kibbutz for a couple of years, and then tried living on a cooperative farm for another couple of years, until it became clear that Auntie Mala was allergic to most wild plants, while Uncle Staszek was allergic to the sun (or, as he put it, the sun itself was allergic to him). So now Uncle Staszek works as a clerk in the Head Post Office, while Auntie Mala works as an assistant to a well-known dentist on Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. When she serves us the apple cake, Father cannot resist complimenting her in his usual jocular fashion:

     "Dear Mala, you bake the most heavenly cake, and I always adore the tea that you pour."
     Mother says:
     "That's enough, Arieh."
     And for me, on condition I eat up a thick slice of cake like a big boy, Auntie Mala has a special treat: homemade cherryade. Her homemade cherryade compensates for being short on bubbles (evidently the soda bottle has suffered the consequences of standing around for too long with its hat off) by being so rich in red syrup that it is almost unbearably sweet.
     So I politely eat all my cake (not bad at all), careful not to chew with my mouth open, to eat properly with a fork and not dirty my fingers, fully aware of the various dangers of stains, crumbs, and an overfull mouth, spearing each piece of cake on the fork and moving it through the air with extreme care, as though taking into account enemy aircraft that might intercept my cargo flight on the way from plate to mouth. I chew nicely, with my mouth closed, and swallow discreetly and without licking my lips. On the way I pluck the Rudnickis' admiring glances and my parents' pride and pin them to my air-force uniform. And I finally earn the promised prize: a glass of homemade cherryade, short on bubbles but very rich in syrup.
     So rich in syrup, indeed, that it is completely, utterly, and totally un-drinkable. I can't take a single gulp. Not even a sip. It tastes even worse than Mother's pepper-flavored coffee. It is revoltingly thick and sticky, like cough medicine.
     I put the cup of sorrows to my lips, pretending to drink, and when Auntie Mala looks at me—with the rest of my audience, eager to hear what I shall say—I hastily promise (in Father's words and Father's tone of voice) that both her creations, the apple cake and the syrupy drink, are "truly very excellent."
     Auntie Mala's face lights up:
     "There's more! There's plenty more! Let me pour you another glass! I've made a whole jugful!"
     As for my parents, they look at me with mute adoration. In my mind's ears I can hear their applause, and from my mind's waist I bow to my appreciative audience.
     But what to do next? First of all, to gain some time, I must distract their attention. I must pronounce some utterance, something deep beyond my years, something they will like:
     "Something as tasty as this in life needs to be drunk in tiny sips."
     The use of the phrase "in life" particularly helps me: the Pythian has spoken again. The pure, clear voice of nature itself has sounded from my mouth. Taste your life in little sips. Slowly, thoughtfully.
     Thus, with a single dithyrambic sentence, I manage to distract their attention. So they won't notice I still haven't drunk any of their wood glue. Meanwhile, while they are still in a trance, the cup of horrors stays on the floor beside me, because life must be drunk in little sips.
     As for me, I am deep in thought, my elbows resting on my knees and my hands under my chin, in a pose that precisely represents a statue of the Thinker's little son. I was shown a picture of the original once in the encyclopedia. After a moment or two their attention leaves me, either because it is not fitting to stare at me when my soul is floating up to higher spheres, or because more visitors have arrived and a heated discussion gets going about the refugee ships, the policy of self-restraint, and the High Commissioner.
     I seize the opportunity with both hands, slip out into the hallway with my poisoned chalice, and hold it up to the nose of one of the Persian cats, the composer or the philosopher, I'm not sure which. This plump little polar bear takes a sniff, recoils, lets out an offended mew, twitches its whiskers, No thank you very much, and retreats with a bored air to the kitchen. As for its partner, the portly creature does not even bother to open its eyes when I hold out the glass but merely wrinkles its nose, as if to say No, really, and flicks a pink ear toward me. As though to chase away a fly.
     Could I empty the lethal potion into the water container in the birdcage, which blind, bald Alma-Mirabelle shares with her winged pinecone? I weigh the pros and cons: the pinecone might tell on me, whereas the philodendron will not give me away even if it is interrogated under torture. My choice therefore falls on the plant rather than the pair of birds (who, like Auntie Mala and Uncle Staszek, are childless, and whom one must therefore not ask when they are planning to lay an egg).
     After a while Auntie Mala notices my empty glass. It immediately becomes apparent that I have made her really and truly happy by appreciating her drink. I smile at her and say, just like a grown-up, "Thank you, Auntie Mala, it was just lovely." Without asking or waiting for confirmation she refills my glass and reminds me to remember that that isn't all, she's made a whole jug. Her cherryade might not be as fizzy as it could be, but it is as sweet as chocolate, isn't it?
     I concur and thank her once again and settle down to wait for another opportunity; then I slink out again unobserved, like an underground fighter on his way to the British fortified radar installations, and poison their other plant, a cactus.
     But at that moment I sense a powerful urge, like a sneeze you can't hold back, like an irresistible laugh in class, to confess, to stand up and announce in public that their drink is so foul that even their cats and their birds find it disgusting, that I have poured the whole lot into their flowerpots, and now their plants are going to die.
     And be punished, and take my punishment like a man. With no regrets.
     Of course I won't do it: my desire to charm them is much stronger than my urge to shock them. I am a saintly rabbi, not a Genghis Khan.
    


     On the way home Mother looks me straight in the eye and says with a conspiratorial smile:

     "Don't think I didn't see you. I saw it all."
     All innocence and purity, my sinful heart thumping in my chest like a startled rabbit, I say:
     "What did you see?"
     "I saw that you were terribly bored. But you managed not to show it, and that made me happy."
     Father says:
     "The boy really did behave well today, but after all he got his reward, he got a piece of cake and two glasses of cherryade, which we never buy him although he's always asking us to, because who knows if the glasses in the kiosk are really clean?"
     Mother:
     "I'm not so sure you really liked that drink, but I noticed that you drank it all, so as not to offend Auntie Mala, and I'm really proud of you for that."
     "Your mother," Father says, "can see right into your heart. In other words she knows at once not only what you've said and done but also the things you think no one else knows. It's not necessarily easy to live with someone who can see right into your heart."
     "And when Auntie Mala offered you a second glass," Mother continues, "I noticed that you thanked her and you drank it all up, just to make her happy. I want you to know that there are not many children of your age, in fact there aren't that many people of any age, who are capable of such consideration."
     At that moment I almost admit that it was the Rudnickis' plants, not I, that deserve the compliment, since it was they who drank the syrupy mess.
     But how can I tear off the medals that she has just pinned to my chest and fling them at her feet? How can I cause my parents such undeserved hurt? I have just learned from Mother that if you have to choose between telling a lie and hurting someone's feelings, you should choose sensitivity over truthfulness. Faced with a choice between making someone happy and telling the truth, between not causing pain and not lying, you should always prefer generosity over honesty. In so doing you raise yourself above the common herd and earn a bouquet from all of them: a very special child.
     Father then patiently explains to us that in Hebrew the word for childlessness is not unrelated to the word for darkness, because both imply a lack, a lack of children or a lack of light. There is another related word that means to spare or to save. "'He who spares the rod hates his child,' it says in the book of Proverbs, and I fully agree with that statement." By way of digression into Arabic, he goes on to suggest that the word for darkness is related to the word for forgetting. "As for the pine-cone, its Hebrew name, itstrubal, derives from a Greek word, strobilos, which denotes anything that spins or whirls, from strobos, the act of revolving. And that word comes from the same root as words like 'strophe' and 'catastrophe.' A couple of days ago I saw a truck that had overturned on the way up to Mount Scopus: the people inside were hurt and the wheels were still going around—so there was strobos and also catastrophe. As soon as we get home, would Your Honor kindly pick up all the toys you left scattered on the floor and put them back where they belong?"

 35


     MY PARENTS put on my shoulders everything that they had not managed to achieve themselves. In 1950, on the evening of the day they first met by chance on the steps of Terra Sancta College, Hannah and Michael (in the novel My Michael) meet again in Café Atara in Ben Yehuda Street in Jerusalem. Hannah encourages shy Michael to talk about himself, but he tells her instead about his widowed father:

     His father cherished high hopes for him. He refused to recognize that his son was an ordinary young man.... His father's greatest wish was for Michael to become a professor in Jerusalem, because his paternal grandfather had taught natural sciences in the Hebrew teachers' seminary in Grodno.... It would be nice, Michael's father thought, if the chain could pass on from one generation to another.

     "A family isn't a relay race, with a profession as the torch," [Hannah] said.*
     For many years my father did not abandon the hope that eventually the mantle of Uncle Joseph would alight on him, and that he might pass it on to me when the time came, if I followed the family tradition and became a scholar. And if, because of his dreary job that left him only the night hours for his research, the mantle passed over him, perhaps his only son would inherit it.
     I have the feeling that my mother wanted me to grow up to express the things that she had been unable to express.
    


     In later years they repeatedly reminded me, with a chuckle combined with pride they reminded me, in the presence of all their guests they reminded me, in front of the Zarchis and the Rudnickis and the Hananis and the Bar Yitzhars and the Abramskis they always reminded me how, when I was only five years old, a couple of weeks after I learned the letters of the alphabet, I printed in capital letters on the back of one of Father's cards the legend amos klausner writer, and pinned it up on the door of my little room.

     *My Michael, trans. Nicholas de Lange (New York: Random House, 1972), p. 6.
     I knew how books were made even before I knew how to read. I would sneak in and stand on tiptoe behind my father's back as he bent over his desk, his weary head floating in the pool of yellow light from his desk lamp, as he slowly, laboriously made his way up the winding valley between the two piles of books on the desk, picking all sorts of details from the tomes that lay open in front of him, plucking them out, holding them up to the light, examining them, sorting them, copying them onto little cards, and then fitted each one in its proper place in the puzzle, like stringing a necklace.
     In fact, I work rather like him myself. I work like a watchmaker or an old-fashioned silversmith: one eye screwed up, the other fitted with a watchmaker's magnifying glass, with fine tweezers between my fingers, with bits of paper rather than cards in front of me on my desk on which I have written various words, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, and bits of dismantled sentences, fragments of expressions and descriptions and all kinds of tentative combinations. Every now and again I pick up one of these particles, these molecules of text, carefully with my tweezers, hold it up to the light and examine it carefully, turn it in various directions, lean forward and rub or polish it, hold it up to the light again, rub it again slightly, then lean forward and fit it into the texture of the cloth I am weaving. Then I stare at it from different angles, still not entirely satisfied, and I take it out again and replace it with another word, or try to fit it into another niche in the same sentence, then remove it, file it down a tiny bit more, and try to fit it in again, perhaps at a slightly different angle. Or deploy it differently. Perhaps farther down the sentence. Or at the beginning of the next one. Or should I cut it off and make it into a one-word sentence on its own?
     I stand up. Walk around the room. Return to the desk. Stare at it for a few moments, or longer, cross out the whole sentence or tear up the whole page. I give up in despair. I curse myself aloud and curse writing in general and the language as a whole, despite which I sit down and start putting the whole thing together all over again.
     Writing a novel, I said once, is like trying to make the Mountains of Edom out of Lego blocks. Or to build the whole of Paris, buildings, squares, and boulevards, down to the last street bench, out of matchsticks.
     If you write an eighty-thousand-word novel, you have to make about a quarter of a million decisions, not just decisions about the outline of the plot, who will live or die, who will fall in love or be unfaithful, who will make a fortune or make a fool of himself, the names and faces of the characters, their habits and occupations, the chapter divisions, the title of the book (these are the simplest, broadest decisions); not just what to narrate and what to gloss over, what comes first and what comes last, what to spell out and what to allude to indirectly (these are also fairly broad decisions); but you also have to make thousands of finer decisions, such as whether to write, in the third sentence from the end of that paragraph, "blue" or "bluish." Or should it be "pale blue"? Or "sky blue"? Or "royal blue"? Or should it really be "blue-gray"? And should this "grayish blue" be at the beginning of the sentence, or should it only shine out at the end? Or in the middle? Or should it simply be caught up in the flow of a complex sentence, full of subordinate clauses? Or would it be best just to write the three words "the evening light," without trying to color it in, either "gray-blue" or "dusty blue" or whatever?
    


     From my early childhood on I was the victim of a thorough, protracted brainwashing: Uncle Joseph's temple of books in Talpiot, Father's strait-jacket of books in our apartment in Kerem Avraham, my mother's refuge of books, Grandpa Alexander's poems, our neighbor Mr. Zarchi's novels, my father's index cards and word play, and even Saul Tcherni-khowsky's pungent hug, and Mr. Agnon, who cast several shadows at once, with his currants.

     But the truth is that secretly I turned my back on the card I had pinned to the door of my room. For several years I dreamed only of growing up and escaping from these warrens of books and becoming a fireman. The fire and water, the uniform, the heroism, the shiny silver helmet, the wail of the siren, and the stares of the girls and the flashing lights, the panic in the street, the thunderous charge of the red engine, leaving a trail of terror in its wake.
     And then the ladders, the hose uncoiling endlessly, the glow of the flames reflected like gushing blood in the red of the engine, and finally, the climax, the girl or woman carried unconscious on the shoulder of her gallant rescuer, the self-sacrificing devotion to duty, the scorched skin, eyelashes, and hair, the infernal suffocating smoke. And then immediately afterward—the praise, the rivers of tearful love from dizzy women swooning toward you in admiration and gratitude, and above all the fairest of them all, the one you bravely rescued from the flames with the tender strength of your own arms.
    


     But who was it that through most of my childhood I rescued in my fantasies over and over again from the fiery furnace and whose love I earned in return? Perhaps that is not the right way to ask the question, but rather: What terrible, incredible premonition came to the arrogant heart of that foolish, dreamy child and hinted to him, without revealing the outcome, signaled to him without giving him any chance to interpret, while there was still time, the veiled hint of what would happen to his mother one winter's evening?

     Because already at the age of five I imagined myself, over and over again, as a bold, calm fireman, resplendent in uniform and helmet, bravely darting on his own into the fierce flames, risking his life, and rescuing her, unconscious, from the fire (while his feeble, verbal father merely stood there stunned, helplessly staring at the conflagration).
     And so, while embodying in his own eyes the fire-hardened heroism of the new Hebrew man (precisely as prescribed for him by his father), he dashes in and saves her life, and in doing so he snatches his mother forever from his father's grasp and spreads his own wings over her.
     But from what dark threads could I have embroidered this oedipal fantasy, which did not leave me for several years? Is it possible that somehow, like a smell of faraway smoke, that woman, Irina, Ira, infiltrated my fantasy of the fireman and the rescued woman? Ira Stelet-skaya, the wife of the engineer from Rovno whose husband used to lose her every night at cards. Poor Ira Steletskaya, who fell in love with Anton the coachman's son and lost her children, until one day she emptied a can of paraffin and burned herself to death in his tar-papered shack. But all that happened fifteen years before I was born, in a country I had never seen. And surely my mother would never have been so crazy as to tell a terrible story like that to a four- or five-year-old child?
    


     When my father was not at home, as I sat at the kitchen table sorting lentils while my mother stood with her back to me, peeling vegetables or squeezing oranges or shaping meatballs on the work surface, she would tell me all sorts of strange and, yes, frightening stories. Little Peer, the orphan son of Jon, the grandson of Rasmus Gynt, must have been just like me, as he and his poor widowed mother sat alone in their mountain cabin on those long, windy, snowy nights, and he absorbed and stored in his heart her mystical, half-crazed stories, about Soria-Moria Castle beyond the fjord, the snatching of the bride, the trolls in the hall of the mountain king, and the green ghouls, the button-molder, and the imps and pixies and also about the terrible Boyg.

     The kitchen itself, with its smoke-blackened walls and sunken floor, was as narrow and low as a solitary confinement cell. Next to the stove we had two matchboxes, one for new matches and one for used matches, which, for reasons of economy, we used to light a burner or the Primus from a burner that was already lit.
     My mother's stories may have been strange, frightening, but they were captivating, full of caves and towers, abandoned villages and broken bridges suspended above the void. Her stories did not begin at the beginning or conclude with a happy ending but flickered in the half light, wound around themselves, emerged from the mists for a moment, amazed you, sent shivers up your spine, then disappeared back into the darkness before you had time to see what was in front of your eyes. That is how her story about the old man Alleluyev was, and the one about Tanitchka and her three husbands, the blacksmith brothers who killed one another, the one about the bear who adopted a dead child, the ghost in the cave that fell in love with the woodman's wife, or the ghost of Nikita the waggoner that came back from the dead to charm and seduce the murderer's daughter.
     Her stories were full of blackberries, blueberries, wild strawberries, truffles, and mushrooms. With no thought for my tender years my mother took me to places where few children had ever trodden before, and as she did so, she opened up before me an exciting fan of words, as though she were picking me up in her arms and raising me higher and higher to reveal vertiginous heights of language: her fields were sun-dappled or dew-drenched, her forests were dense or impenetrable, the trees towered, the meadows were verdant, the mountain, a primeval mountain, loomed up, the castles dominated, the turrets towered, the plains slumbered and sprawled, and in the valleys, which she called vales, springs, streams, and rivulets were constantly gushing, babbling, and purling.
    


     My mother lived a solitary life, shut up at home for most of the time. Apart from her friends Lilenka, Esterka, and Fania Weissmann, who had also been at the Tarbuth gymnasium in Rovno, my mother found no sense or interest in Jerusalem; she did not like the holy places and the many ancient sites. The synagogues and rabbinic academies, churches, convents, and mosques all seemed much of a muchness to her, dreary and smelling of religious men who did not wash often enough. Her sensitive nostrils recoiled from the odor of unwashed flesh, even under a thick cloud of incense.

     My father did not have much time for religion either. He considered the priests of every faith as rather suspect, ignorant men who fostered antique hatreds, promoted fears, devised lying doctrines, shed crocodile tears, and traded in fake holy objects and false relics and all kinds of vain beliefs and prejudices. He suspected everyone who made a living from religion of some kind of sugared charlatanism. He enjoyed quoting Heine's remark that the priest and the rabbi both smell (or in Father's toned-down version, "Neither of them has a rosy smell! And nor has the Muslim Mufti, Haj Amin the Nazi-lover!"). On the other hand, he did believe at times in a vague providence, a "presiding spirit of the people" or "Rock of Israel," or in the wonders of the "creative Jewish genius," and he also pinned his hopes on the redeeming and reviving powers of art: "The priests of beauty and the artists' brush," he used to recite dramatically from Tchernikhowsky's sonnet cycle, "and those who master verse's mystic charm / redeem the world by melody and song." He believed that artists were superior to other human beings, more perceptive, more honest, unbesmirched by ugliness. The question of how some artists, despite all this, could have followed Stalin, or even Hitler, troubled and saddened him. He often argued with himself about this: artists who were captivated by the charms of tyrants and placed themselves at the service of repression and wickedness did not deserve the title "priests of beauty." Sometimes he tried to explain to himself that they had sold their souls to the devil, like Goethe's Faust.
     The Zionist fervor of those who built new suburbs, who purchased and cultivated virgin land and paved roads, while it intoxicated my father to some extent, passed my mother by. She would usually put the newspaper down after a glance at the headlines. Politics she considered a disaster. Chitchat and gossip bored her. When we had visitors, or when we went to call on Uncle Joseph and Aunt Zippora in Talpiot, or the Zarchis, the Abramskis, the Rudnickis, Mr. Agnon, the Hananis, or Hannah and Hayim Toren, my mother rarely joined in the conversation. Yet sometimes her mere presence made men talk and talk with all their might while she just sat silent, smiling faintly, as though she was trying to decipher from their argument why Mr. Zarchi maintained that particular view and Mr. Hanani the opposite one: would the argument be any different if they suddenly changed around, and each defended the other's position while attacking the one he had argued for previously?
     Clothes, objects, hairdos, and furniture interested my mother only as peepholes through which she could peer into people's inner lives. Whenever we went into someone's home, or even a waiting room, my mother would always sit up straight in a corner, with her hands folded across her chest like a model pupil in a boarding school for young ladies, and stare carefully, unhurriedly, at the curtains, the upholstery, the pictures on the walls, the books, the china, the objects displayed on the shelves, like a detective amassing details, some of which might eventually combine to yield a clue.
     Other people's secrets fascinated her, but not on the level of gossip—who fancied whom, who was going out with whom, who had bought what. She was like someone studying the placing of tiles in a mosaic or of the pieces in a huge jigsaw puzzle. She listened attentively to conversations, and with that faint smile hovering unawares on her lips she would observe the speaker carefully, watching the mouth, the wrinkles on the face, what the hands were doing, what the body was saying or trying to hide, where the eyes were looking, any change of position, and whether the feet were restless or still inside the shoes. She rarely contributed to the conversation, but if she came out of her silence and spoke a sentence or two, the conversation usually did not go back to being as it was before she intervened.
     Maybe it was that in those days women were allotted the role of the audience in conversations. If a woman suddenly opened her mouth and said a sentence or two, it caused some surprise.
     Now and then my mother gave private lessons. Occasionally she went to a lecture or a literary reading. Most of the time, though, she stayed at home. She did not sit around, but worked hard. She worked silently and efficiently. I never heard her humming or grumbling while she was doing the housework. She cooked, baked, did the washing, put the shopping away, ironed, cleaned, tidied, washed the dishes, sliced vegetables, kneaded dough. But when the apartment was perfectly tidy, the washing up was done, and the laundry had been folded and put away neatly, then my mother curled up in her corner and read. At ease with her body, breathing slowly and gently, she sat on the sofa and read. With her bare feet tucked under her legs, she read. Bent over the book that was propped on her knees, she read. Her back curved, her neck bent forward, her shoulders drooping, her whole body shaped like a crescent moon, she read. With her face, half hidden by her dark hair, leaning over the page, she read.
     She read every evening, while I played outside in the yard and my father sat at his desk writing his research on cramped index cards, and she also read after the supper things were washed up, she read while my father and I sat together at his desk, my head slanting, lightly resting on his shoulder, while we sorted stamps, checked them in the catalogue, and stuck them in the album, she read after I had gone to bed and Father had gone back to his little cards, she read after the shutters had been shut and the sofa had been turned over to reveal the double bed that was hidden inside it, and she went on reading even after the ceiling light had been switched off and my father had taken off his glasses, turned his back to her, and fallen into the sleep of well-meaning people who firmly believe that everything will turn out well, and she went on reading: she suffered from insomnia that grew worse with time, until in the last year of her life various doctors saw fit to prescribe strong pills and all sorts of sleeping potions and solutions and recommended a fortnight's real rest in a family hotel in Safed or the Health Fund sanatorium in Arza.
     Consequently my father borrowed a few pounds from his parents and volunteered to look after the child and the house, and my mother really did go off alone to the sanatorium in Arza. But even there she did not stop reading; on the contrary, she read almost day and night. From morning to evening she sat in a deck chair in the pine woods on the flank of the hill and read, and in the evening she read on the lit veranda while the other guests danced or played cards or took part in all sorts of other activities. And at night she would go down to the little sitting room next to the reception desk and read for most of the night, so as not to disturb the woman who shared her room. She read Maupassant, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Gnessin, Balzac, Flaubert, Dickens, Chamisso, Thomas Mann, Iwaszkiewicz, Knut Hamsun, Kleist, Moravia, Hermann Hesse, Mauriac, Agnon, Turgenev, as well as Somerset Maugham, Stefan Zweig, and André Maurois—she hardly took her eyes off a book for the whole of her break. When she came back to Jerusalem, she looked tired and pale, with dark shadows under her eyes, as if she had been living it up every night. When Daddy and I asked her how she had enjoyed her holiday, she smiled and said: "I haven't really thought about it."
    


     Once, when I was seven or eight, my mother said to me, as we sat on the last seat but one on the bus to the clinic or the shoe shop, that while it was true that books could change with the years just as much as people could, the difference was that whereas people would always drop you when they could no longer get any advantage or pleasure or interest or at least a good feeling from you, a book would never abandon you. Naturally you sometimes dropped them, maybe for several years, or even forever. But they, even if you betrayed them, would never turn their backs on you: they would go on waiting for you silently and humbly on their shelf. They would wait for ten years. They wouldn't complain. One night, when you suddenly needed a book, even at three in the morning, even if it was a book you had abandoned and erased from your heart for years and years, it would never disappoint you, it would come down from its shelf and keep you company in your moment of need. It would not try to get its own back or make excuses or ask itself if it was worth its while or if you deserved it or if you still suited each other, it would come at once as soon as you asked. A book would never let you down.

    


     What was the title of the very first book I read on my own? That is, Father read me the book in bed so often that I must have ended up knowing it by heart, word for word, and once when Father could not read to me, I took the book to bed with me and recited the whole of it to myself, from beginning to end, pretending to read, pretending to be Father, turning the page at the precise gap between two words where Father used to turn it every night.

     Next day I asked Father to follow with his finger as he read, and I followed his finger, and by the time we had done this five or six times, I could identify each word by its shape and its place in the line.
     Then the moment came to surprise them both. One Saturday morning I appeared in the kitchen, still in my pajamas, and without saying a word I opened the book on the table between them, my finger pointed to each word in turn and I said the word aloud just as my finger touched it. My parents, dizzy with pride, fell into the trap, unable to imagine the enormity of the deception, both convinced that the special child had taught himself to read.
     But in the end I really did teach myself. I discovered that each word had its own special shape. As though you could say, for instance, that "dog" looks like a round face, with a nose drawn in profile on one side and a pair of glasses on the other; while "eye" actually looks like a pair of eyes with the bridge of a nose between them. In this way I managed to read lines and even whole pages.
     After another couple of weeks I started making friends with the letters themselves. The F of Flag looks like a flag waving at the beginning of the flag. The S of Snake looks just like a snake. Daddy and Mummy are the same at the end, but the rest is quite different: Daddy has a pair of boots in the middle with legs sticking up from them, while Mummy has a row of teeth that look like a smile.
    


     The very first book I can remember was a picture book about a big, fat bear who was very pleased with himself, a lazy, sleepy bear that looked a bit like our Mr. Abramski, and this bear loved to lick honey even when he wasn't supposed to. He didn't just lick honey, he stuffed himself with it. The book had an unhappy ending followed by a very unhappy ending, and only after that did it come to the happy ending. The lazy bear was horribly stung by a swarm of bees, and in case that was not enough, he was punished for being so greedy by suffering from toothache, and there was a picture of him with his face all swollen, and a white cloth tied right around his head and ending with a big knot on top, just between his ears. And the moral was written in big red letters:

     IT'S NOT GOOD TO EAT TOO MUCH HONEY!

     In my father's world there was no suffering that did not lead to redemption. Were the Jews miserable in the Diaspora? Well, soon the Hebrew State would be established and then everything would change for the better. Had the pencil sharpener got lost? Well, tomorrow we'd buy a new and better one. Did we have a bit of a tummy ache today? It would get better before your wedding. And as for the poor, stung bear, whose eyes looked so miserable that my own eyes filled with tears looking at him? Well, here he was on the next page healthy and happy, and he was no longer lazy because he had learned his lesson: he had made a peace treaty with the bees, to the benefit of both sides, and there was even a clause in it granting him a regular supply of honey, admittedly a reasonable, moderate amount, but forever and ever.
     And so on the last page the bear looked jolly and smiling, and he was building himself a house, as though after all his exciting adventures he had decided to join the ranks of the middle class. He looked a bit like my father in a good mood: he looked as though he was about to make up a rhyme or pun, or call me Your Honorable Highness ("only in fun!").
     All this more or less was written there, in a single line on the last page, and this may actually have been the first line in my life that I read not by the shapes of the words but letter by letter, the proper way, and from now on every letter would be not a picture but a different sound:
     TEDDY BEAR IS VERY HAPPY!
 TEDDY BEAR IS FULL OF JOY!

     Except that within a week or two my hunger had turned into a feeding frenzy. My parents were unable to separate me from books, from morning till evening and beyond.
     They were the ones who had pushed me to read, and now they were the sorcerer's apprentice: I was the water that couldn't be stopped. Just come and look, your son is sitting half naked on the floor in the middle of the corridor, if you please, reading. The child is hiding under the table, reading. That crazy child has locked himself in the bathroom again and he's sitting on the toilet reading, if he hasn't fallen in, book and all, and drowned himself. The child was only pretending to fall asleep, he was actually waiting for me to leave, and after I left the room, he waited a few moments, then switched the light on without permission, and now he seems to be sitting with his back against the door so that you and I can't get in, and guess what he's doing. The child can read fluently without vowels. Do you really want to know what he's doing? Well, now the child says he'll just wait for me to finish part of the newspaper. Now we've got another newspaper addict in the house. That child didn't get out of bed the whole weekend, except to go to the toilet. And even then he took his book with him. He reads all day long, indiscriminately, stories by Asher Barash or Shoffmann, one of Pearl Buck's Chinese novels, The Book of Jewish Traditions, The Travels of Marco Polo, The Adventures of Magellan and Vasco da Gama, Advice for the Elderly in Case of Influenza, the Newsletter of the Beit Hakerem District Council, The Kings of Israel and Judah, Notable Events of 1929, pamphlets about agricultural settlement, back issues of Working Women's Weekly, if it goes on like this, he'll soon be eating bindings and drinking compositor's ink. We're going to have to step in and do something. We must put a stop to this: it's already becoming odd and in fact rather worrying.

 36


     THE BUILDING down Zechariah Street had four apartments. The Nahlielis' apartment was on the first floor, at the back. Its windows overlooked a neglected backyard, partly paved and the other part overgrown with weeds in winter and thistles in summer. The yard also housed washing lines, garbage cans, traces of a bonfire, an old suitcase, a corrugated iron lean-to, and the wooden remains of a ruined sukkah. Pale blue passionflowers bloomed on the wall.

     The apartment contained a kitchen, a bathroom, an entrance passage, two rooms, and eight or nine cats. After lunch Isabella, who was a teacher, and her husband Nahlieli the cashier used the first room as their living room, and at night they and their army of cats slept in the tiny second room. They got up early every morning and pushed all the furniture out into the passage and set out three or four school desks in each of the rooms, with three or four benches, each of which could seat two children.
     Thus between eight a.m. and noon their home became the Children's Realm Private Elementary School.
     There were two classes and two teachers at Children's Realm, which was all the small apartment could hold, with eight pupils in the first grade and another six in the second grade. Isabella Nahlieli was the proprietor of the school and served as headmistress, storekeeper, treasurer, syllabus organizer, sergeant major of discipline, school nurse, maintenance woman, cleaner, class teacher of the first grade, and responsible for all practical activities. We always called her Teacher Isabella.
     She was a loud, jolly, broad woman in her forties, with a hairy mole that looked like a stray cockroach above her upper lip. She was irascible, temperamental, strict, yet overflowing with a rough warmheartedness. In her plain loose cotton-print frocks with their many pockets she looked like a thickset, sharp-eyed matchmaker from the shtetl, who could weigh your character, inside and out, with a single look of her experienced eye and a couple of well-aimed questions. In a moment she had got to the bottom of who you were, with all your secrets. While she interrogated you, her raw red hands would be fidgeting restlessly in her innumerable pockets, as though she was just about to pull out the perfect bride for you, or a hairbrush, or some nose drops, or at least a clean hankie to wipe away that embarrassing green booger on the end of your nose.
     Teacher Isabella was also a cat herder. Wherever she went, she was surrounded by a flock of admiring cats that got under her feet, clung to the hem of her dress, impeded her progress, and almost tripped her up, so devoted were they to her. They were of every possible color, and they would claw their way up her dress and lie down on her broad shoulders, curl up in the book basket, settle like broody hens on her shoes, and fight among themselves with desperate wails for the privilege of snuggling in her bosom. In her classroom there were more cats than pupils, and they kept perfectly quiet so as not to disturb the students; as tame as dogs, as well brought up as young ladies from good families, they sat on her desk, on her lap, on our little laps, on our satchels, on the windowsill and the box that held equipment for PE, art, and crafts.
     Sometimes Teacher Isabella reprimanded the cats or issued orders. She would wave her finger at one or another of them and threaten to tweak its ears or pull its tail out if it did not improve its behavior instantly. The cats, for their part, always obeyed her promptly, unconditionally, and without a murmur. "Zerubbabel, you should be ashamed of yourself!" she would suddenly shout. Immediately some poor wretch would detach himself from the huddled mass on the rug beside her desk and creep away in disgrace, his belly almost touching the floor, his tail between his legs and his ears pressed back, making his way to the corner of the room. All eyes—children's and cats' alike—were fixed on him, witnessing his disgrace. So the accused would crawl into the corner, miserable, humiliated, ashamed of himself, repenting his sins, and perhaps hoping humbly up to the last minute for some miraculous reprieve.
     From the corner the poor thing sent us a heartrending look of guilt and supplication.
     "You child of the muck heap!" Teacher Isabella snarled at him contemptuously, and then she would pardon him with a wave of her hand:
     "All right. That's enough. You can come back now. But just remember that if I catch you once more—"
     She had no need to finish her sentence, because the pardoned criminal was already dancing toward her like a suitor, determined to make her head spin with his charms, barely mastering his joy, tail erect, ears pricked forward, with a spring in the pads of his dainty paws, aware of the secret power of his charm and using it to heartbreaking effect, his whiskers gleaming, his coat shiny and bristling slightly, and with a flicker of sanctimonious feline slyness in his glowing eyes, as though he were winking at us while swearing that from now on there would be no more pious or upright cat than he.
     Teacher Isabella's cats were schooled to lead productive lives, and indeed they were useful cats. She had trained them to bring her a pencil, some chalk, or a pair of socks from the closet, or to retrieve a stray teaspoon that was lurking under some piece of furniture; to stand at the window and give a wail of recognition if an acquaintance approached, but to issue a cry of alarm at the approach of a stranger. (Most of these wonders we did not witness with our own eyes, but we believed her. We would have believed her if she had told us that her cats could solve crossword puzzles.)
     As for Mr. Nahlieli, Teacher Isabella's little husband, we hardly ever saw him. He had usually gone to work before we arrived, and if for any reason he was at home, he had to stay in the kitchen and do his duty there quietly during school hours. If it had not been for the fact that both we and he occasionally had permission to go to the toilet, we would never have discovered that Mr. Nahlieli was actually only Getzel, the pale boy who took the money at the cooperative store. He was nearly twenty years younger than his wife, and if they had wanted to, they could have passed for mother and son.
     Occasionally when he had to (or dared to) call out to her during a class, because he had either burned the beef patties or scalded himself, he did not call her Isabella but Mum, which is presumably what her herd of cats also called her. As for her, she called her youthful husband some name taken from the world of birds: Sparrow or Finchy or Thrush or Warbler. Anything except Wagtail, which was the literal meaning of the name Nahlieli.
    


     There were two primary schools within half an hour's walk for a child from our home. One was too socialist, and the other was too religious. The Berl Katznelson House of Education for Workers' Children, at the north end of Haturim Street, flew the red flag of the working class on its roof side by side with the national flag. They celebrated May Day there with processions and ceremonies. The headmaster was called Comrade by teachers and pupils alike. In summer the teachers wore khaki shorts and biblical sandals. In the vegetable garden in the yard pupils were prepared for farming life and personal pioneering in the new villages. In the workshops they learned productive skills such as woodwork, metalwork, building, mending engines and locks, and something vague but fascinating called fine mechanics.

     In class the pupils could sit anywhere they liked; boys and girls could even sit together. Most of them wore blue shirts fastened at the chest with the white or red laces of the two youth movements. The boys wore shorts with the legs rolled up as far as the crotch, while the girls' shorts, which were also shamelessly short, were secured to their thighs with elastic. The pupils called the teachers by their first names. They were taught arithmetic, homeland studies, Hebrew and history, but also subjects like the history of Jewish settlement in the Land, history of the workers' movement, principles of collective villages, or key phases in the evolution of the class war. And they sang all kinds of working class anthems, starting with the Internationale and ending with "We are all pioneers" and "The blue shirt is the finest jewel."
     The Bible was taught at the House of Education for Workers' Children as a collection of pamphlets on current affairs. The prophets fought for progress and social justice and the welfare of the poor, whereas the kings and priests represented all the iniquities of the existing social order. Young David, the shepherd, was a daring guerrilla fighter in the ranks of a national movement to liberate the Israelites from the Philistine yoke, but in his old age he turned into a colonialist-imperialist king who conquered other countries, subjugated peoples, stole the poor man's ewe-lamb, and ruthlessly exploited the sweat of the working people.
     Some four hundred yards away from this red House of Education, in the parallel street, stood the Tachkemoni national-traditional school, founded by the Mizrahi religious Zionist movement, where the pupils were all boys who kept their heads covered during class. Most of the pupils came from poor families, apart from a few who came from the old Sephardi aristocracy, which had been thrust aside by the more assertive Ashkenazi newcomers. The pupils here were addressed only by their surnames, while the teachers were called Mr. Neimann, Mr. Alkalai, and so forth. The headmaster was addressed as Mr. Headmaster. The first lesson every day began with morning prayers, followed by study of the Torah with Rashi's commentary, classes where the skullcapped pupils read the Ethics of the Fathers and other works of rabbinic wisdom, the Talmud, the history of the prayers and hymns, all sorts of commandments and good deeds, extracts from the code of Jewish law, the Shulhan Arukh, the cycle of the Jewish high days and holidays, the history of the Jewish communities around the world, lives of the great Jewish teachers down the ages, some legends and ethics, some legal discussions, a little poetry by Judah Hallevi or Bialik, and among all this they also taught some Hebrew grammar, mathematics, English, music, history, and elementary geography. The teachers wore jackets even in summer, and the headmaster, Mr. Ilan, always appeared in a three-piece suit.
    


     My mother wanted me to go to the House of Education for Workers' Children from the first grade on, either because she did not approve of the rigorous religious separation of boys and girls or because Tachke-moni, with its heavy old stone buildings, which were built under Turkish rule, seemed antiquated and gloomy compared to the House of Education for Workers' Children, which had big windows, light, airy classrooms, cheerful beds of vegetables, and a sort of infectious youthful joy. Perhaps it reminded her in some way of the Tarbuth gymnasium in Rovno.

     As for my father, he worried himself about the choice. He would have preferred me to go to school with the professors' children in Rehavia or at least with the children of the doctors, teachers, and civil servants who lived in Beit Hakerem, but we were living in times of riots and shooting, and both Rehavia and Beit Hakerem were two bus rides away from our home in Kerem Avraham. Tachkemoni was alien to my father's secular outlook and to his skeptical, enlightened mind. The House of Education, on the other hand, he considered a murky source of leftist indoctrination and proletarian brainwashing. He had no alternative but to weigh the black peril against the red peril and choose the lesser of two evils.
     After a difficult period of indecision Father decided, against my mother's choice, to send me to Tachkemoni. He believed that there was no fear that they would turn me into a religious child, because in any case the end of religion was nigh, progress was driving it out fast, and even if they did succeed in turning me into a little cleric there, I would soon go out into the wide world and shake off that archaic dust, I would give up any religious observance just as the religious Jews themselves with their synagogues would disappear off the face of the earth in a few years, leaving nothing behind but a vague folk memory.
     The House of Education, on the other hand, presented in Father's view a serious danger. The red tide was on the upsurge in our land, it was sweeping through the whole world, and socialist indoctrination was a one-way road to disaster. If we sent the child there, they would instantly brainwash him and stuff his head full of all sorts of Marxist straw and turn him into a Bolshevik, one of Stalin's little soldiers, they would pack him off to one of their kibbutzim and he would never come back ("None that go into her return again," as Father put it).
     But the way to Tachkemoni, which was also the way to the House of Education for Workers' Children, ran along the side of the Schneller Barracks. From sandbagged positions on top of the walls, nervous, Jew-hating, or simply drunken British soldiers sometimes fired on passersby in the street below. Once they opened fire with a machine gun and killed the milkman's donkey because they were afraid that the milk churns were full of explosives, as had happened in the bombing of the King David Hotel. Once or twice British drivers even ran pedestrians over with their jeeps, because they had not got out of the way fast enough.
     These were the days after the World War, the days of the underground and terrorism, the blowing up of the British headquarters, infernal devices planted by the Irgun in the basement of the King David Hotel, attacks on CID HQ in Mamilla Road and on army and police installations.
     Consequently my parents decided to postpone the frustrating choice between the darkness of the Middle Ages and the Stalinist trap for another two years and send me for the time being to Mrs. Isabella Nahlieli's Children's Realm. The great advantage of her cat-ridden school was that it was literally within hailing distance of our home. You went out of our yard and turned left, passed the entrance to the Lembergs' and Mr. Auster's grocery shop, carefully crossed Amos Street opposite the Zahavis' balcony, went down Zechariah Street for thirty yards, crossed it carefully, and there you were: a wall covered with passionflowers, and a gray-white cat, the sentry cat, announcing your arrival from the window. up twenty-two steps, and you were hanging up your water bottle on the hook in the entrance to the smallest school in Jerusalem: two classes, two teachers, a dozen pupils, and nine cats.

 37


     WHEN I FINISHED my year in the first grade, I passed from the volcanic realm of Teacher Isabella the cat herder into the cool, calm hands of Teacher Zelda in the second grade. She had no cats, but a sort of blue-gray aura surrounded her and at once beguiled and fascinated me.

     Teacher Zelda talked so softly that if we wanted to hear what she was saying, we not only had to stop talking, we had to lean forward on our desks. Consequently we spent the whole morning leaning forward, because we did not want to miss a word. Everything that Teacher Zelda said was enchanting and rather unexpected. It was as if we were learning another language from her, not very different from Hebrew and yet distinctive and touching. She would call stars the "stars of heaven," the abyss was "the mighty abyss," and she spoke of "turbid rivers" and "nocturnal deserts." If you said something in class that she liked, Teacher Zelda would point to you and say softly: "Look, all of you, there's a child who's flooded with light" If one of the girls was daydreaming, Teacher Zelda explained to us that just as nobody can be blamed for being unable to sleep, so you couldn't hold Noa responsible for being unable to stay awake at times.
     Any kind of mockery Teacher Zelda called "poison." A lie she called "a Fall." Laziness was "leaden," and gossip "the eyes of the flesh." She called arrogance "wing-scorching," and giving anything up, even little things like an eraser or your turn to hand out the drawing paper, she called "making sparks." A couple of weeks before the festival of Purim, which was our favorite festival in the whole year, she suddenly announced: There may not be a Purim this year. It may be put out before it gets here.
     Put out? A festival? We were all in a panic: we were not only afraid of missing Purim, but we felt a dark dread of these powerful, hidden forces, whose very existence we had not been told about before, that were capable, if they so wished, of lighting or putting out festivals as though they were so many matches.
     Teacher Zelda did not bother to go into details but just hinted to us that the decision of whether to extinguish the festival depended mainly on her: she herself was somehow connected to the invisible forces that distinguished between festival and nonfestival, between sacred and profane. So if we didn't want the festival to be put out, we said to each other, it would be best for us to make a special effort to do at least the little we could to make sure Teacher Zelda was in a good mood with us. There is no such thing as a little, Teacher Zelda used to say, to someone who has nothing.
     I remember her eyes: alert and brown, secretive, but not happy. Jewish eyes that had a slightly Tatar set to them.
     Sometimes she would cut the lesson short and send everyone out into the yard to play, but keep back a couple of us who were found worthy to continue. The exiles in the yard were not so much pleased at the free time as jealous of the elect.
     And sometimes when time was up, when Teacher Isabella's class had long been sent home, when the cats, set free, had spread all over the apartment, the staircase, and the yard, and only we seemed forgotten under the wings of Teacher Zelda's stories, leaning forward on our desks so as not to miss a word, an anxious mother, still wearing her apron, would come and stand in the doorway, hands on her hips, and wait at first impatiently, then with surprise that turned into curiosity, as though she too had become a little girl full of wonderment, reaching out, with the rest of us, to hear and not miss what would happen at the end of the story to the lost cloud, the unloved cloud whose cloak had got caught on the rays of the golden star.
     If you said in class that you had something to say to everyone, even in the middle of a lesson, Teacher Zelda would immediately seat you on her own desk, while she sat down on your little bench. So she would promote you in a single wonderful bound to the role of teacher, on condition that the story you told made sense, or that you had an interesting argument to put forward. So long as you managed to hold her interest, or the class's, you could go on sitting in the saddle. If, on the other hand, you said something stupid or were just trying to attract attention, if you did not really have anything to say, then Teacher Zelda would cut in, in her coldest, quietest voice, a voice that brooked no levity:
     "But that's very silly."
     Or:
     "That's enough of playing the fool."
     Or even:
     "Stop it: you're just lowering yourself in our estimation."
     So you went back to your place covered with shame and confusion.
     We quickly learned to be careful. Silence is golden. Best not to steal the show if you have nothing sensible to say. True, it was pleasant and could even go to your head, to be raised up above the others and sit on the teacher's desk, but the fall could be swift and painful. Poor taste or overcleverness could lead to humiliation. It was important to prepare before any public utterance. You should always think twice, and ask yourself if you would not be better off keeping quiet.
    


     She was my first love. An unmarried woman in her thirties, Teacher Zelda, Miss Schneersohn. I was not quite eight, and she swept me away, she set in motion some kind of inner metronome that had not stirred before and has not stopped since.

     When I woke up in the morning, I conjured up her image even before my eyes were open. I dressed and ate my breakfast in a flash, eager to finish, zip up, shut, pick up, run straight to her. My head melted with the effort to prepare something new and interesting for her every day so that I would get the light of her look and so that she would point to me and say, "Look, there's a boy among us this morning who's flooded with light."
     I sat in her class each morning dizzy with love. Or sooty with jealousy. I was constantly trying to discover what charms of mine would draw her favors to me. I was always plotting how to frustrate the charms of the others and get between them and her.
     At noon I would come home from school, lie down on my bed, and imagine how just she and I—
     I loved the color of her voice and the smell of her smile and the rustle of her dresses (long-sleeved and usually brown or navy or gray, with a simple string of ivory-colored beads or occasionally a discreet silk scarf). At the end of the day I would close my eyes, pull the blanket up over my head, and take her with me. In my dreams I hugged her, and she kissed me on my forehead. An aura of light surrounded her and illuminated me too, to make me a boy who's flooded with light.
     Of course, I already knew what love was. I had devoured so many books, books for children, books for teenagers, and even books that were considered unsuitable for me. Just as every child loves his mother and father, so everyone falls in love, when he is a little older, with someone from outside the family. Someone who was a stranger before, but suddenly, like finding a treasure in a cave in the Tel Arza woods, the lover's life is different. And I knew from the books that in love, as in sickness, you neither eat nor sleep. And I really did not eat much, although I slept very well at night, and during the day I waited for it to get dark so I could go to sleep. This sleep did not match the symptoms of love as described in the books, and I was not quite sure if I was in love the way grown-ups are, in which case I should have suffered from insomnia, or if my love was still a childish love.
     And I knew from the books and from the films I had seen at the Edison Cinema and simply out of the air that beyond falling in love, like beyond the Mountains of Moab, which we could see from Mount Scopus, there was another, rather terrifying, landscape, not visible from here, and it was probably just as well that it wasn't. There was something lurking there, something furry, shameful, something that belonged in the darkness. Something that belonged to that picture I had tried so hard to forget (and yet also to remember some detail of it that I had not managed to get a good look at), the photo that the Italian prisoner showed me that time through the barbed-wire fence, and I ran away almost before I'd seen it. It also belonged to items of women's clothing that we boys didn't have and neither did the girls in our class yet. In the darkness there was something else living and moving, stirring, and it was moist and full of hair, something that on the one hand it was much better for me not to know anything about but on the other hand if I didn't know anything about it, it followed that my love was nothing more than that of a child.
     A child's love is something different, it doesn't hurt and it's not embarrassing, like Yoavi with Noa or Ben-Ammi with Noa or even like Noa with Avner's brother. But in my case it wasn't a girl in my class or someone from the neighborhood, a girl of my own age or just a little older, like Yoezer's big sister: I had fallen in love with a woman. And it was much worse, because she was a teacher. My class teacher. And there was no one in the whole world I could approach and ask about it without being made fun of. She called mockery poison. Lying she regarded as falling. She called disappointment sorrow, or dreamers' sorrow. And arrogance was certainly wing-scorching. And she actually called being ashamed the image of G-d.
     And what about me, whom she sometimes used to point to in class and call a boy flooded with light, and who now, because of her, was flooded with darkness?
    


     All of a sudden I didn't want to go to Children's Realm school anymore. I wanted to go to a real school, with classrooms and a bell and a playground, not in the Nahlielis' apartment with its swarms of cats everywhere, even in the toilet, that clung to your body under your clothes, and without the perpetual smell of old cats' pee that had dried under some piece of furniture. A real school, where the head teacher didn't suddenly come up and pull a booger out of your nose and wasn't married to a cashier in a cooperative store, and where I wouldn't be called flooded with light. A school without falling in love and that sort of thing.

     And indeed, after a row between my parents, a whispered row in Russian, a tichtikhchavoyniy kind of row, which Father apparently won, it was decided that at the end of the second grade, when I finished at Children's Realm, after the summer holiday, I would start in the third grade at Tachkemoni, and not at the House of Education for Workers' Children: of the two evils, the red was worse than the black.
     But between me and Tachkemoni there still stretched a whole summer of love.
     "What are you off to Teacher Zelda's house again for? At half past seven in the morning? Don't you have any friends of your own age?"
     "But she invited me. She said I could come whenever I liked. Even every morning."
     "That's very nice. But just you tell me, please, don't you think it's a little unnatural for an eight-year-old child to be tied to his teacher's apron strings? His ex-teacher, in fact? Every day? At seven o'clock in the morning? In the summer holidays? Don't you think that's overdoing it a bit? Isn't it a bit impolite? Think about it please. Rationally!"
     I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, impatiently, waiting for the sermon to be finished, and I blurted out: "Fine, all right! I'll think about it! Rationally!"
     I was already running as I spoke, borne on eagles' wings to the yard of her ground-floor apartment on Zephaniah Street, across the road from the No. 3 bus stop, opposite Mrs. Hassia's kindergarten, behind the milkman Mr. Langermann, with his big iron milk churns, which came to our gloomy little streets straight from the highlands of Galilee "from the sun-drenched plains, with the dew beneath us and the moon overhead." But the moon was here: Teacher Zelda was the moon. Up there in the Valleys and Sharon and Galilee there stretched the lands of the sun, the realm of those tough, tanned pioneers. Not here. Here in Zephaniah Street even on a summer morning there was still the shadow of a moonlit night.
     I was standing outside her window before eight every morning, with my hair plastered down with some water and my clean shirt tucked neatly into the top of my shorts. I had willingly volunteered to help her with her morning chores. I ran off to the shops for her, swept the yard, watered her geraniums, hung her little washing out on the line and brought in the clothes that had dried, fished a letter for her out of the letter box, whose lock was rusted up. She offered me a glass of water, which she called not simply water but limpid water. The gentle west wind she called the "westerly," and when it stirred the pine needles, it dabbled among them.
     When I had finished the few household chores, we would take two rush stools out into the backyard and sit under Teacher Zelda's window facing north toward the Police Training School and the Arab village of Shuafat. We traveled without moving. Being a map child, I knew that beyond the mosque of Nebi Samwil, which was on top of the farthest and highest hills on the horizon, was the valley of Beit Horon, and I knew that beyond it were the territories of Benjamin and Ephraim, Samaria, and then the Mountains of Gilboa, and after them the Valleys, Mount Tabor and Galilee. I had never been to those places: once or twice a year we went to Tel Aviv for one of the festivals; twice I had been to Grandma-Mama and Grandpa-Papa's tar-papered shack on the edge of Kiryat Motskin behind Haifa, once I went to Bat Yam, and apart from that I had not seen anything. Certainly not the wonderful places that Teacher Zelda described to me in words, the stream of Harod, the mountains of Safed, the shores of Kinneret.
     The summer after our summer, Jerusalem would be shelled from the tops of the hills facing which we sat all through the morning. Next to the village of Beit Iksa and by the hill of Nebi Samwil the guns of the British artillery battery, which was at the service of the Transjordanian Arab Legion, would be dug in and would rain thousands of shells on the besieged and starving city. And many years later all the hilltops we could see would be covered with densely packed housing, Ramot Eshkol, Ramot Alon, Ma'alot Dafna, Ammunition Hill, Giv'at Hamivtar, French Hill, "and all the hills shall melt." But in the summer of 1947 they were all still abandoned rocky hills, slopes dappled with patches of light rock and dark bushes. Here and there the eye lingered over a solitary, stubborn old pine tree, bent by the powerful winter winds that had bowed its back forever.
    


     She would read to me what she might have been intending to read anyway that morning: Hasidic tales, rabbinic legends, obscure stories about holy kabbalists who succeeded in combining the letters of the alphabet and working wonders and miracles. Sometimes, if they did not take all the necessary precautions, while these mystics were endeavoring to save their own souls or those of the poor and oppressed or even those of the entire Jewish people, they caused terrible disasters that always resulted from an error in the combinations or a single grain of impurity that got into the sacred formulae of mental direction.

     She replied to my questions with strange, unexpected answers. Sometimes they seemed quite wild, threatening to undermine in a terrifying way my father's firm rules of logic.
     Sometimes, however, she surprised me by giving me an answer that was predictable, simple yet as nutritious as black bread. Even the most expected things came out of her mouth in an unexpected way, though. And I loved her and was fascinated by her, because there was something strange and disturbing, almost frightening, in virtually everything she said and did. Like the "poor in spirit," of whom she said that they belong to Jesus of Nazareth but that there is a lot of poverty of spirit among us Jews here in Jerusalem too, and not necessarily in the sense that "That Man" intended. Or the "dumb of spirit" who appear in Bialik's poem "May My Lot Be with You," who are actually the thirty-six hidden just men who keep the universe in existence. Another time she read me Bialik's poem about his pure-spirited father whose life was mired in the squalor of the taverns but who was himself untouched by squalor and impurity. It was only his son the poet who was touched by them, and how, as Bialik himself writes in the first two lines of "My Father," in which he talks only about himself and his impurity, even before he moves on to tell us about his father. She found it strange that scholars had not noticed that the poem about the pure life of the father actually opens with such a bitter confession about the impurity of the son's life.
     Or maybe she did not say all this; after all, I didn't sit there with a pencil and notebook writing down everything she said to me. And more than fifty years have passed since then. Much of what I heard from Zelda that summer was beyond my comprehension. But day by day she raised the crossbar of my comprehension. I remember, for example, that she told me about Bialik, about his childhood, his disappointments, and his unfulfilled yearnings. Even things that were beyond my years. Among other poems she certainly read "My Father" to me, and talked to me about cycles of purity and impurity.
     ***

     But what precisely did she say?

     Now in my study in Arad on a summer day at the end of June 2001 I am trying to reconstruct, or rather to guess, to conjure up, almost to create out of nothing: like those paleontologists in the natural history museum who can reconstruct a whole dinosaur on the basis of two or three bones.
     I loved the way Teacher Zelda placed one word next to another. Sometimes she would put an ordinary, everyday word next to another word that was also quite ordinary, and all of a sudden, simply because they were next to each other, two ordinary words that did not normally stand next to each other, a sort of electric spark jumped between them and took my breath away.
     For the first time I am thinking
 about a night when the constellations are only a rumor...

     That summer Zelda was still unmarried, but sometimes a man appeared in the yard; he did not look young to me, and his appearance marked him out as a religious Jew. As he passed between us, he tore unawares the mass of invisible morning webs that had spun themselves between the two of us. Sometimes he shot me a nod with the fag end of a smile, and standing with his back to me, he had a conversation with Teacher Zelda that lasted seven years, if not seventy-seven. And in Yiddish, so that I should not understand a single word. Once or twice he even managed to draw out of her a peal of girlish laughter such as I had never managed to extract from her. Not even in my dreams. In my despair I conjured up a detailed image of the noisy cement mixer that had been stirring away at the bottom of Malachi Street for several days: I would hurl the body of this jester into the belly of that mixer at dawn, after murdering him at midnight.
     I was a word child. A ceaseless, tireless talker. Even before my eyes opened in the morning, I had embarked on an oration that continued almost without interruption until lights out in the evening, and beyond, into my sleep.
     But I had no one to listen to me. To the other children of my age everything I said sounded like Swahili or Double Dutch, while as for the grown-ups, they were all delivering lectures too, just like me, from morning till night, none of them listening to the others. Nobody listened to anybody else in Jerusalem in those days. And perhaps they did not even really listen to themselves (apart from good old Grandpa Alexander, who could listen attentively, and even derived a lot of pleasure from what he heard, but he listened only to ladies, not to me).
     Consequently there was not a single ear in the whole world open to listen to me, except very rarely. And even if anyone did deign to listen to me, they got tired of me after two or three minutes, although they politely pretended to go on listening and even feigned enjoyment.
     Only Zelda, my teacher, listened to me. Not like a kindly aunt wearily lending an experienced ear out of pity to a frantic youngster who had suddenly boiled over on her. No, she listened to me slowly and seriously, as if she was learning things from me that pleased her or aroused her curiosity.
     Furthermore, Zelda, my teacher, did me the honor of gently fanning my flames when she wanted me to speak, putting twigs on my bonfire, but when she had had enough, she did not hesitate to say:
     "That's enough for now. Please stop talking."
     Other people stopped listening after three minutes but let me go prattling on to my heart's content for an hour or more, all the time pretending to listen while they thought their own thoughts.
     All this was after the end of the second grade, after I'd finished at Children's Realm School and before I started at Tachkemoni. I was only eight, but I had already got into the habit of reading newspapers, newsletters, and all sorts of magazines, on top of the hundred or two hundred books I had devoured by then (almost anything that fell into my hands, quite indiscriminately: I scoured my father's library and whenever I found a book written in modern Hebrew, I dug my teeth into it and took it off to gnaw on it in my corner).
     I wrote poetry too: about Hebrew battalions, about the underground fighters, about Joshua the conqueror, even about a squashed beetle or the sadness of autumn. I presented these poems to Zelda, my teacher, in the morning, and she handled them carefully, as though conscious of her responsibility. What she said about each poem I don't remember. In fact, I have forgotten the poems.
     But I do remember what she said to me about poems and sounds: not the sound of voices from above speaking to the poet's soul, but about the different sounds that various words make: "rustling," for example, is a whispering word, "strident" is a screeching word, "growl" has a deep, thick sound, while "tone" has a delicate sound and the word "noise" is itself noisy. And so forth. She had a whole repertoire of words and their sounds, and I am asking more of my memory now than it is capable of yielding.
     I may also have heard this from Zelda, my teacher, that summer when we were close: if you want to draw a tree, just draw a few leaves. You don't need to draw them all. If you draw a man, you don't have to draw every hair. But in this she was not consistent: one time she would say that at such and such a place I had written a bit too much, while another time she would say that actually I should have written a little more. But how do you tell? I am still looking for an answer to this day.
    


     Teacher Zelda also revealed a Hebrew language to me that I had never encountered before, not in Professor Klausner's house or at home or in the street or in any of the books I had read so far, a strange, anarchic Hebrew, the Hebrew of stories of saints, Hasidic tales, folk sayings, Hebrew leavened with Yiddish, breaking all the rules, confusing masculine and feminine, past and present, pronouns and adjectives, a sloppy, even disjointed Hebrew. But what vitality those tales had! In a story about snow, the writing itself seemed to be formed of icy words. In a story about fires, the words themselves blazed. And what a strange, hypnotic sweetness there was in her tales about all sorts of miraculous deeds! As though the writer had dipped his pen in wine: the words reeled and staggered in your mouth.

     Teacher Zelda also opened up books of poetry to me that summer, books that were really, but really, unsuitable for someone of my age: poems by Leah Goldberg, Uri Tzvi Greenberg, Yocheved Bat-Miriam, Esther Raab, and Y. Z. Rimon.
     It was from her that I learned that there are some words that need to have total silence all around them, to give them enough space, just as when you hang pictures there are some that cannot abide having neighbors.
     I learned a great deal from her, in class and also in her courtyard. Apparently she did not mind sharing some of her secrets with me.
     Only some of them, though. For instance, I had not the slightest idea, and she never gave me the faintest hint, that besides being my teacher, my beloved, she was also Zelda the poet, some of whose poems had been published in literary supplements and in one or two obscure magazines. I did not know that, like me, she was an only child. Nor did I know that she was related to a famous dynasty of Hasidic rabbis, that she was a first cousin of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneersohn (their fathers were brothers). And I did not know that she had also studied drawing, or that she belonged to a drama group, or that even then she enjoyed a modest reputation among small circles of poetry lovers. I did not imagine that my rival, her other suitor, was Rabbi Chayim Mishkowsky, or that two years after our summer, hers and mine, he would marry her. I knew almost nothing about her.
     At the beginning of the autumn in 1947 I entered the third grade of the Tachkemoni Religious Boys' School. New thrills filled my life. And anyway, it wasn't appropriate for me to go on being tied like a baby to the skirts of a teacher from the elementary classes: neighbors were raising their eyebrows, their children had begun to make fun of me, and I even made fun of myself. What's wrong with you that you keep running to her every morning? What will you look like when the whole neighborhood starts talking about the crazy little boy who takes down her washing and sweeps her yard and probably even dreams of marrying her in the middle of the night when the stars are shining?
    


     A few weeks after that, violent clashes broke out in Jerusalem, then came the war, the shelling, the siege and starvation. I drifted away from Teacher Zelda. I no longer ran around at seven o'clock in the morning, washed and scrubbed with my hair plastered down, to sit with her in her yard. I no longer took her poems I had written the night before. If we met in the street, I would mumble hurriedly, "Good morning, how are you, Teacher Zelda," without a question mark, and run away without waiting for an answer. I was ashamed of everything that had happened. And I was also ashamed of the way I had ditched her so suddenly, without even bothering to tell her I had ditched her and without even offering an explanation. And I was ashamed of her thoughts, because she must surely know that in my thoughts I had not ditched her yet.

     After that we were finally freed from Kerem Avraham. We moved to Rehavia, the area my father had dreamed of. Then my mother died and I went to live and work in the kibbutz. I wanted to leave Jerusalem behind me once and for all. All the links were severed. Now and then I would come across a poem by Zelda in a magazine and so I knew that she was still alive and that she was still a person with feelings. But after my mother's death I had recoiled from all feelings, and I especially wanted to put a distance between myself and women with feelings. In general.
     The year my third book, My Michael, the action of which takes place more or less in our neighborhood, was published, Zelda's first collection, Leisure, also appeared. I thought of writing her a few words to congratulate her, but I didn't. I thought of sending her my book, but I didn't. How could I know if she still lived in Zephaniah Street or if she had moved somewhere else? In any case, I had written My Michael to draw a line between myself and Jerusalem, not to reconnect with her. Among the poems in Leisure I discovered Teacher Zelda's family and I also met some of our neighbors. Then two more books of poems appeared, The Invisible Carmel and Neither Mountain nor Fire, which aroused the love of thousands of readers and earned her eminent literary prizes and salvos of acclaim, which Teacher Zelda, a solitary woman, seems to have dodged, and to which she appeared indifferent.
    


     All Jerusalem in my childhood, in the last years of British rule, sat at home and wrote. Hardly anyone had a radio in those days, and there was no television nor video nor CD player nor Internet nor e-mail, not even the telephone. But everyone had a pencil and a notebook.

     The whole town was locked indoors at eight o'clock in the evening because of the British curfew, and on evenings when there was no curfew, Jerusalem locked itself in of its own accord, and nothing stirred outside except the wind, the alley cats, and the puddles of light from the street lamps. And even these hid themselves in the shadows whenever an English jeep went past, patrolling the streets with its searchlight and its gun. The evenings were longer because the sun and the moon moved more slowly, and the electric light was dim because everyone was poor: they saved on bulbs and they saved on lighting. And sometimes the power was cut off for several hours or several days, and life continued by the light of sooty paraffin lamps or candles. The winter rains were also much stronger than they are now, and with them the fists of the wind and the echoes of the thunder and lightning also beat on the barred shutters.
     We had a nightly ritual of locking up. Father would go outside to close the shutters (they could be closed only from the outside); bravely he went out into the jaws of the rain and the dark and the unknown perils of the night, like those shaggy Stone Age men who used to emerge boldly from their warm caves to look for food or to defend their women and children, or like the fisherman in The Old Man and the Sea, so Father went out on his own to brave the ferocious elements, covering his head with an empty bag as he confronted the unknown.
     Each evening, when he returned from Operation Shutters, he locked the front door from the inside and put the bar in place: iron brackets were set into both doorposts, and into those Father fixed the flat iron bar that guarded the door against marauders or invaders. The thick stone walls defended us from evil, along with the iron shutters, and the dark mountain that stood heavily just on the other side of our back wall, guarding us like a gigantic, taciturn wrestler. The whole outside world was locked out, and inside our armored cabin there were just the three of us, the stove, and the walls covered with books upon books from floor to ceiling. So the whole apartment was sealed off every evening and slowly sank, like a submarine, beneath the surface of the winter. Because right next to us the world suddenly ended: you turned left outside the front yard, two hundred yards farther on at the end of Amos Street you turned left again, you walked three hundred yards as far as the last house on Zephaniah Street, and that was also the end of the road and the end of the city and the end of the world. Beyond that there were just empty rocky slopes in the thick darkness, ravines, caves, bare mountains, valleys, dark rain-swept stone villages: Lifta, Shuafat, Beit Iksa, Beit Hanina, Nebi Samwil.
     And so each evening all the residents of Jerusalem locked themselves away in their homes like us, and wrote. The professors and scholars in Rehavia, Talpiot, Beit Hakerem, and Kiriat Shemuel, the poets and writers, the ideologues, the rabbis, the revolutionaries, the apocalypticists, and the intellectuals. If they did not write books, they wrote articles. If they did not write articles, they wrote verses or composed all sorts of pamphlets and leaflets. If they did not write illegal wall posters against the British, they wrote letters to the newspaper. Or letters to each other. The whole of Jerusalem sat each evening bent over a sheet of paper, correcting, erasing, writing, and polishing. Uncle Joseph and Mr. Agnon, on either side of their little street in Talpiot. Grandpa Alexander and Teacher Zelda. Mr. Zarchi, Mr. Abramski, Professor Buber, Professor Scholem, Professor Bergman, Mr. Toren, Mr. Netanyahu, Mr. Wislawski, and perhaps even my mother. My father researched and laid bare Sanskrit motifs that had crept into the Lithuanian national epic, or Homeric influences on White Russian poetry. As though he were raising a periscope from our little submarine at night and looking toward Danzig or Slovakia. Our neighbor to the right, Mr. Lemberg, sat and wrote his memoirs in Yiddish, while our neighbors to the left, the Bukhovskis, probably also wrote each evening, and the Rosendorffs upstairs and the Stichs across the road. Only the mountain, the neighbor beyond our back wall, always kept silent and did not write a single line.
     Books were the slender lifeline that attached our submarine to the outside world. We were surrounded on all sides by mountains, caves, and deserts, the British, the Arabs, and the underground fighters, salvos of machine-gun fire in the night, explosions, ambushes, arrests, house-to-house searches, stifled dread of what awaited us in the days to come. Among all these the slender lifeline still wound its way to the real world. In the real world there were the lake and the forest, the cottage, the field and the meadow, and also the palace with its turrets, cornices, and gables. There the foyer, embellished with gold, velvet, and crystal, was lit by chandeliers with a mass of lights like the seven heavens.
    


     In those years, as I said, I hoped I would grow up to be a book.

     Not a writer but a book. And that was from fear.
     Because it was slowly dawning on those whose families had not arrived in Israel that the Germans had killed them all. There was fear in Jerusalem, but people tried as hard as they could to bury it deep inside their chests. Rommel's tanks had reached almost to the gateway of the Land of Israel. Italian planes had bombed Tel Aviv and Haifa during the war. And who knew what the British might do to us before they left? And after they had left, hordes of bloodthirsty Arabs, millions of fanatical Muslims, would be bound to butcher the whole lot of us in a few days. They would not leave a single child alive.
     Naturally the grown-ups tried hard not to talk about these horrors in the presence of children. At any rate, not in Hebrew. But sometimes a word slipped through, or somebody cried out in his sleep. All our apartments were as tiny and cramped as cages. In the evening after lights out I could hear them whispering in the kitchen, over tea and biscuits, and I caught Chelmno, Nazis, Vilna, partisans, Aktionen, death camps, death trains, Uncle David and Aunt Malka and little cousin David who was the same age as me.
     Somehow the fear got into me. Children of your age don't always grow up. Sometimes bad people come and kill them in the cradle, or in kindergarten. In Nehemiah Street once there was a bookbinder who had a nervous breakdown, and he went out on his balcony and screamed, Jews, help, hurry, soon they'll burn us all. The air was heavy with dread. And I may have already gathered how easy it is to kill people.
     Books are not difficult to burn either, it's true, but if I grew up to be a book, there was a good chance that at least one copy might manage to survive, if not here then in some other country, in some city, in some remote library, in a corner of some G-dforsaken bookcase. After all, I had seen with my own eyes how books manage to hide in the dusty darkness between the crowded rows, underneath heaps of offprints and journals, or find a hiding place behind other books—

 38


     SOME THIRTY years later, in 1976, I was invited to spend a couple of months in Jerusalem and give some guest lectures at the Hebrew University. I was offered a studio room in the campus on Mount Scopus, and every morning I sat and wrote the story "Mr. Levi" in The Hill of Evil Counsel. The story takes place on Zephaniah Street at the end of the British Mandate, and so I went for a walk on Zephaniah Street and the adjoining streets, to see what had changed since then. The Children's Realm Private School had long since closed. The yards were full of junk. The fruit trees had died. The teachers, clerks, translators, and cashiers, bookbinders, domestic intellectuals, and writers of letters to the newspaper had mostly disappeared, and the district had filled up over the years with poor ultra-Orthodox Jews. Almost all our neighbors' names had disappeared from the letter boxes. The only familiar person I saw was Mrs. Stich, the invalid mother of Menuchele Stich, the girl with the stoop that we called Nemuchele, "Shortie"; I caught sight of her in the distance, sitting dozing on a stool in an out-of-the-way yard, not far from the garbage cans. Every wall was festooned with strident handbills that waved puny fists in the air and threatened sinners with various forms of unnatural death: "The bounds of modesty have been breached," "We have suffered a great loss," "Touch not mine anointed," "Stones cry out from the wall for the evil decree," "Heavens behold the dreadful abomination the like of which has never been seen in Israel," and so forth.

     For thirty years I had not set eyes on my teacher from the second grade in Children's Realm Private School, and now here I was suddenly standing on her doorstep. Instead of the dairy that belonged to Mr. Langermann, who used to sell us milk out of heavy round metal milk churns, the front of the building was occupied now by an ultra-Orthodox shop selling all kinds of haberdashery, cloth, buttons, fasteners, zippers, and curtain hooks. Surely Teacher Zelda didn't live here anymore?
     But there was her letter box, the one out of which I used to fish her mail when I was little, because the lock had rusted up and it was impossible to open it. Now the door hung open: somebody, certainly a man, must have been more impatient than Teacher Zelda and me, and had smashed the lock once and for all. The wording had changed too: instead of "Zelda Schneersohn" it now said "Schneersohn Mishkowsky." No more Zelda, but no hyphen or "and" either. And what would I do if it was her husband who opened the door to me? What could I say to him? Or to her?
     I almost turned tail and fled, like a startled suitor in a comedy film. (I hadn't known she was married, or that she had been widowed, I had not worked it out that I was eight when I left her apartment and now I was thirty-seven, older than she had been when I left her.)
    


     This time, as then, it was quite early in the morning.

     I really should have phoned her before coming to see her. Or written her a note. Perhaps she was angry with me? Perhaps she had not forgiven me for walking out on her? For this long silence? For not congratulating her on either the publication of her books or the literary prizes she had won? Perhaps, like some other Jerusalemites, she resented my spitting in the well from which I had drunk, in My Michael. Suppose she had changed beyond recognition? What if she was an entirely different woman now, twenty-nine years later?
     I stood in front of the door for some ten minutes, I went out into the yard, I smoked a cigarette or two, I touched the washing lines from which I once used to pluck her modest brown or gray skirts. I identified the cracked paving stone that I cracked myself once when I tried to break almonds open with a stone. And I looked out beyond the red roofs of the Bukharian Quarter, toward the desolate hills there used be to the north. Now, though, the hills were no longer desolate but smothered in housing developments: Ramot Eshkol, Ma'alot Dafna, Givat Hamivtar, French Hill, and Ammunition Hill.
     But what should I say to her? Hello, Dear Teacher Zelda? I hope I'm not disturbing you. My name is, ahem, such and such? Good morning Mrs. Schneersohn-Mishkowsky? I was a pupil of yours once, I don't know if you remember? Excuse me, may I take just a few minutes of your time? I like your poetry? You still look marvelous? No, I haven't come to interview you?
    


     I must have forgotten how dark little ground-floor apartments in Jerusalem could be, even on a summer morning. Darkness opened the door to me: darkness full of brown smells. And out of the darkness the fresh voice that I remembered, the voice of a confident girl who loved words, said to me:

     "Come on in, Amos."
     And immediately afterward:
     "You probably want us to sit outside in the yard?"
     And then:
     "You like your iced lemonade weak."
     And then:
     "I have to correct myself: you used to like your lemonade weak. But maybe there has been a change since then?"
     Naturally I am reconstructing that morning and our conversation from memory—like trying to restore an ancient ruined building on the basis of seven or eight stones that are still left standing. But among the few stones left standing exactly as they were, neither reconstructed nor invented, are these words: "I have to correct myself:...But maybe there has been a change since then?" That is exactly what Zelda said to me on that summer morning in late June 1976. Twenty-nine years after our honey summer. And twenty-five years before the summer morning that I am writing this page (in my study in Arad, in an exercise book full of crossings out, on July 30, 2001: this is therefore a recollection of a visit that was also meant, in its day, to conjure up a recollection or to scratch at old wounds. In all these recollections, my task is a bit like that of someone trying to build something out of old stones that he is digging out of the ruins of something that was also, in its day, built out of stones from a ruin).
     "I have to correct myself," Teacher Zelda said. "Maybe there has been a change since then?"
     She could have said it in so many different ways. For instance, she might have said: Maybe you don't like lemonade anymore? Or: Maybe you like it very strong now? Or she might have asked, quite simply: What would you like to drink?
     She was a person of precision. Her intention was to allude at once, happily, without a hint of bitterness, to our private past, hers and mine (lemonade, not too strong), but to do so without subordinating the present to the past ("Maybe there has been a change since then?"—with a question mark—thus offering me the choice, and also shouldering me with the responsibility for the continuation, for the rest of the visit. Which I had initiated).
     I said (certainly not without a smile):
     "Thank you. I'd love to have some lemonade like before."
     She said:
     "That's what I thought, but I felt I ought to ask."
     Then we both drank iced lemonade (instead of the icebox there was now a little refrigerator, an obsolete model that was showing signs of its age). We reminisced. She had indeed read my books, and I had read hers, but we passed over all that in five or six sentences, as though hurrying past an unsafe stretch of road.
     We talked about what had happened to the Nahlielis, Isabella and Getzel. About other common acquaintances. About the changes that had taken place in Kerem Avraham. My parents and her late husband, who had passed away some five years before my visit, we also mentioned at a run, then went back to walking pace to talk about Agnon and perhaps also about Thomas Wolfe (Look Homeward, Angel was translated into Hebrew around that time, although it is possible that we had both read it in English). As my eyes became accustomed to the darkness, I was amazed to see how little the apartment had changed. The dreary brown dresser with its thick coat of varnish was still crouching in its usual corner like an old dog. The china tea set still dozed behind its glass panes. On the dresser there were photographs of Zelda's parents, who looked younger than she did, and a picture of a man who I imagined must be her husband, but I still asked who he was. Her eyes suddenly lit up and sparkled mischievously; she grinned at me as though we had just done something naughty together, then she pulled herself together and said simply:
     "That's Chayim."
     The round brown table seemed to have shrunk over the years. In the bookcase there were old prayer books in battered dark covers, and a few big new religious books in splendid leather bindings with gold tooling, as well as Schirmann's history of Hebrew poetry in Spain, a lot of books of poetry and modern Hebrew novels, and a row of paperbacks. When I was a child, this bookcase had loomed very, very large; now it only loomed shoulder-height. On the dresser and various shelves there were silver Sabbath candlesticks, a number of Hanukkah lamps, little ornaments made of olive wood or copper, and a sad potted plant on the chest of drawers and a couple more on the windowsill. The whole scene was dominated by a dim light saturated with brown smells: it was unmistakably the room of a religious woman. Not an ascetic place, but one that was withdrawn and reserved, and also somehow depressing. There had indeed been, as she had put it, a change. Not because she had aged, or because she had become loved and famous, but perhaps because she had become earnest.
     Yet she had always been a person of precision, earnestness, and inner seriousness. It's hard to explain.
    


     I never saw her again after that morning. I heard that she finally moved to a new area. I heard that over the years she had a number of close women friends who were younger than herself and younger than me. I heard that she had cancer, and that one Friday night in 1984 she died in terrible pain. But I never went back to see her, I never wrote to her, I never sent her any of my books, and I never set eyes on her again except a couple of times in literary supplements and once more, on the day of her death, for less than half a minute, toward the end of the TV news (and I wrote about her, and her room, in The Same Sea).

     When I stood up to go, it turned out that the ceiling had become lower over the years. It almost touched my head.
     The years had not changed her much. She had not become ugly, or fat, or shriveled, the lightning of her eyes still flashed out occasionally while we talked, like a beam sent to search all my hidden recesses. Yet even so, something had changed. As though over the decades that I had not seen her, Teacher Zelda had grown to resemble her old-fashioned apartment.
     She was like a silver candlestick, like a candlestick glowing dimly in a dark void. And I should like to be as precise here as it is possible to be: in that last meeting Zelda seemed to me like the candle, the candlestick, and the dark void.

 39


     EVERY MORNING, a little before or a little after sunrise, I am in the habit of going out to discover what is new in the desert. The desert begins here in Arad at the end of our road. An easterly morning breeze comes from the direction of the Mountains of Edom, stirring little eddies of sand here and there that try unsuccessfully to rise up from the ground. Each of them struggles, loses its whirlwind shape, and dies down. The hills themselves are still hidden by the mist that comes up from the Dead Sea and covers the rising sun and the highlands with a gray veil, as though it were autumn already instead of summer. But it is a false autumn: in another couple of hours it will be dry and hot again here. Like yesterday. Like the day before yesterday, like a week ago, like a month ago.

     In the meantime the cool of the night is still holding its own. There is a pleasant smell of dust that has soaked up a lot of dew, blended with a faint smell of sulfur, goat droppings, thistles, and dead campfires. This is the smell of the Land of Israel from time immemorial. I go down into the wadi and advance along a winding path to the edge of the cliff from which I have a view of the Dead Sea, nearly three thousand feet below, fifteen and a half miles away. The shadow of the hills to the east falls on the water and gives it the color of old copper. Here and there a sharp needle of light manages to pierce the cloud for a moment and touch the sea. The sea responds with a dazzling shimmer, as though there is an electric storm raging under the surface.
     From here to there stretch empty slopes of limestone dappled with black rocks. Among these rocks, exactly on the horizon at the top of the hill facing me, suddenly there are three black goats and with them a human figure standing motionlessly draped in black from head to foot. A Bedouin woman? And is that a dog next to her? And suddenly they've all disappeared beyond the line of the hills, the woman, the goats, and the dog. The gray light casts doubt on every movement. Meanwhile other dogs give voice in the distance. A little farther on, among the rocks by the side of the path, lies a rusty shell casing. How did it end up here? Maybe one night a camel caravan of smugglers passed here on their way from Sinai to the southern part of Mount Hebron, and one of the smugglers lost the shell casing, or threw it away after wondering what he would do with it.
     Now you can hear the full depths of the desert silence. It isn't the quiet before the storm, or the silence of the end of the world, but a silence that only covers another, even deeper, silence. I stand there for three or four minutes inhaling silence like a smell. Then I turn back. I walk back up from the wadi to the end of my road, arguing with an angry chorus of dogs that start barking at me from every garden. Perhaps they imagine that I'm threatening to help the desert invade the town.
     In the branches of the first tree in the garden of the first house a whole parliament of sparrows are deep in a noisy argument, all interrupting each other with deafening shrieks: they seem to be roaring rather than chirping. As though the departure of the night and the breaking of the day are unprecedented developments that justify an emergency meeting.
     Along the road an old car is starting up with a hoarse coughing fit, like a heavy smoker. The newspaper boy vainly tries to make friends with an uncompromising dog. A thickset, tanned neighbor, with a thicket of gray hair on his bare chest, a retired colonel, whose foursquare body reminds me of a tin trunk, is standing half naked in blue running shorts, watering the bed of roses in front of his house.
     "Your roses are looking wonderful. Good morning, Mr. Shmuelevich."
     "What's so good about it?" he assails me. "Has Shimon Peres finally stopped selling out the whole country to Arafat?"
     And when I remark that some people see it differently, he adds bitterly:
     "It seems one holocaust wasn't enough to teach us a lesson. Do you really call this disaster peace? Have you ever heard of the Sudetenland? Or Munich? Or Chamberlain? Well?"
     I do indeed have a detailed, reasoned reply to this, but thanks to the reserves of calm I have built up earlier, in the wadi, I bring up the words:
     "Somebody was playing the Moonlight Sonata in your house about eight o'clock last night. I was walking past and I even stopped to listen for a few minutes. Was it your daughter? She played beautifully. Tell her."
     He moved the hose to the next bed and smiled at me like a shy schoolboy who has suddenly been chosen as class monitor by secret ballot. "That wasn't my daughter," he says, "she's gone off to Prague. That was her daughter. My granddaughter, Daniella. She came third out of the whole Southern Region in the Young Talent Competition. Though everyone without exception says she should have been second. She writes beautiful poems too. So sensitive. Would you have time to take a look at them? Maybe you could give her some encouragement. Or even send them to a newspaper, for publication. They'd be bound to publish them if you sent them."
     I promise Mr. Shmuelevich that I'll read Daniella's poems when I have a chance. Gladly. Certainly. Why not. Don't mention it.
     In my heart I enter this promise as my contribution to the advancement of peace. Back in my study, with a mug of coffee in my hand and the morning paper spread out on the sofa, I stand at the window for another ten minutes. I hear on the news about a seventeen-year-old Arab girl who has been seriously injured by a round of bullets after she tried to stab an Israeli soldier with a knife at a roadblock outside Bethlehem. The early morning light, which was blended with a gray mist, has begun to glow and turned to a harsh, uncompromising blue.
     ***

     At my window there is a little garden, a few shrubs, a vine, and a sickly lemon tree: I don't know yet if it will live or die, its foliage is pale, its trunk is bent like an arm that someone is forcing backward. The Hebrew word for "bent," which happens to begin with the letters AK, reminds me of what my father used to say, that every word that begins with AK signifies something bad. "And you must have noticed yourself, Your Highness, that your own initials, whether by chance or not, are also AK."

     Maybe I should write an article today for Yediot Aharonot, to try to explain to Mr. Shmuelevich that getting out of the conquered territories will not weaken Israel but actually strengthen us. And that it's a mistake to see the Holocaust and Hitler and Munich everywhere.
     Mr. Shmuelevich told me once, on one of those long summer evenings when you think the evening light will never fade, when the two of us were sitting in vests and sandals on his garden wall, how he was taken to the Maidanek death camp when he was about twelve with his parents, his three sisters, and their grandmother, and he was the only one who survived. He didn't want to tell me how he survived. He promised he'd tell me some other time. But every other time he chose instead to open my eyes, so I shouldn't believe in peace, so I should stop being naive, so I should get it firmly in my head that their only aim is to butcher us all and all their talk of peace is a trap, or a sleeping draught that the whole world has helped them brew and given us to lull us to sleep. Just as then.
     I decide to put off writing the article. An unfinished chapter of this book is waiting for me on my desk in a heap of scribbled drafts, crumpled notes, and half pages full of crossings out. It's the chapter about Teacher Isabella Nahlieli from Children's Realm School and her army of cats. I'm going to have to make some concessions there and delete some incidents about cats and about Getzel Nahlieli, the cashier. They were quite amusing incidents, but they do not contribute anything to the progress of the story. Contribute? Progress? I don't know what can contribute to the progress of the story, because as yet I have no idea where this story wants to go, and in fact why it needs contributions. Or progress.
     Meanwhile the eleven o'clock news has finished and I've had a second mug of coffee and I'm still staring out the window. A pretty little turquoise-colored bird peers at me for a moment out of the lemon tree: it moves to and fro, leaps from a branch to a twig, and shows off the lightning of its feathers in the dappled light and shade. Its head is nearly violet, its neck is a dark metallic blue, and it is wearing a delicate yellow waistcoat. Welcome back. What have you come to remind me about this morning? The Nahlielis? Bialik's poem "A twig fell on a wall and dozed"? My mother, who used to spend hours standing at the window, with a glass of tea getting cold in her hand, with her face to the pomegranate bush and her back to the room? That's enough. I must get down to work. Now I have to use the rest of the calm I stored up in the wadi this morning before the sun rose.
     Just before noon I drive into town to sort out one or two things at the post office, the bank, the clinic, and the stationer's. A tropical sun is scorching the streets and their dusty, thin-looking trees. The desert light is white-hot now and so cruel to your eyes that they turn of their own accord into two narrow slits.
     There is a short line at the cash dispenser and another one at Ouak-nine's newspaper stand. In Tel Aviv, in the summer holiday of 1950 or 1951, not far from Auntie Haya and Uncle Tsvi's apartment at the north end of Ben Yehuda Street, my cousin Yigal pointed out to me a newspaper kiosk that was kept by David Ben-Gurion's brother and told me that anyone who wanted to could simply go up and talk to him, to this brother of Ben-Gurion's, who really looked a lot like him. You could even ask him questions. Like, How are you, Mr. Gruen? How much is a chocolate wafer, Mr. Gruen? Is there going to be another war soon, Mr. Gruen? The only thing you mustn't do is ask him about his brother. That's the way it is. He really doesn't like being asked questions about his brother.
     I was very jealous of the people in Tel Aviv. In Kerem Avraham we didn't have any celebrities or even brothers of celebrities. All we had were the Minor Prophets in our street names: Amos Street, Obadiah Street, Zephaniah Street, Haggai, Zechariah, Nahum, Malachi, Joel, Habakkuk, Hosea, Micah, and Jonah. The lot.
     A Russian immigrant is standing on the corner of the square in the center of Arad. His violin case lies open on the pavement in front of him, for coins. The tune is quiet, poignant, reminiscent of fir forests with cottages, streams, and meadows, which bring back to me my mother's stories when she and I used to sit together sorting lentils or shelling peas in our soot-blackened little kitchen.
     But here in the square at the center of Arad the desert light banishes ghosts and dispels any memory of fir forests and misty autumns. The musician, with his shock of gray hair and his thick white mustache, reminds me a little of Albert Einstein, and a little too of Professor Samuel Hugo Bergman, who taught my mother philosophy on Mount Scopus; in fact I attended some unforgettable lectures of his myself at the Givat Ram Campus in 1961, on the history of dialogical philosophy from Kierkegaard to Martin Buber.
     There are two young women, possibly of North African extraction, one of them very thin and wearing a semitransparent top and a red skirt, the other in a trouser suit replete with belts and buckles. They stop in front of the musician and listen to his playing for a minute or two. He is playing with his eyes closed and doesn't open them. The women exchange whispers, open their handbags, and each puts a shekel in the case.
     The thin woman, whose upper lip is slightly drawn up toward her nose, says:
     "But how can you tell they're real Jews? Half the Russians who come here, I've heard they're simply goyim who just take advantage of us to get the hell out of Russia and come here for the free handouts."
     Her friend says:
     "What do we care, let them all come, let him play in the street, Jew, Russian, Druze, Georgian, what difference is it to you? Their children will be Israelis, they'll go in the army, eat meatballs in pita with pickles, take out a mortgage, and moan all day long."
     The red skirt remarks:
     "What's the matter with you, Sarit? If they let in anyone who wants to come for free, including foreign workers and Arabs from Gaza and the territories, who's going to—"
     But the rest of the discussion drifts away from me toward the parking lot of the shopping mall. I remind myself that I have not made any progress yet today and the morning is no longer young. Back in my study. The heat is beginning to be too much, and a dusty wind brings the desert indoors. I close the windows and shutters and draw the curtain, block every crack, just as Greta Gat, my child sitter, who was also a piano teacher, always used to seal her apartment and turn it into a submarine.
     This study was built by Arab workers not many years ago. They laid the floor and checked it with a spirit level. They erected the door and window frames. They concealed the plumbing and electrical wiring in the walls and put in an outlet for the telephone. A large-bodied carpenter, an opera lover, made the cupboards and put up the bookshelves. A contractor who emigrated from Romania in the late 1950s sent for a truckload of rich topsoil from somewhere for the garden and laid it over the lime, chalk, flint, and salt that have always lain on these hills, like putting a plaster on a wound. In this good topsoil the previous occupant planted shrubs and trees and a lawn, which I do my best to look after but without overdoing the love, so that this garden doesn't suffer the same fate as the one my father and I planted with such good intentions.
     A few dozen pioneers, including loners who loved the desert or were searching for solitude and also a few young couples, came and settled here in the early 1960s: miners, quarry workers, regular army officers, and industrial workers. Lova Eliav, with a handful of other town planners seized by Zionist enthusiasm, planned, sketched out, and immediately constructed this town, with its streets, squares, avenues, and gardens, not far from the Dead Sea, in an out-of-the-way place that at that time, in the early 1960s, was not served by any main road, water pipeline, or power supply, where there were no trees, no paths, no buildings, no tents, no signs of life. Even the local Bedouin settlements mostly came into being after the town was built. The pioneers who founded Arad were passionate, impatient, talkative, and busy. Without a second thought, they vowed to "conquer the wilderness and tame the desert."
    


     Somebody is passing the house now in a little red van; he stops at the mailbox on the corner and extracts the letters I posted yesterday. Somebody else has come to replace the broken curbstone of the pavement opposite. I must find some way to thank them all, the way a bar mitzvah boy publicly thanks everyone who has helped him come this far: Aunt Sonia, Grandpa Alexander, Greta Gat, Teacher Zelda, the Arab man with bags under his eyes who rescued me from the dark cell where I was trapped in that clothes shop, my parents, Mr. Zarchi, the Lembergs next door, the Italian prisoners of war, Grandma Shlomit with her war on germs, Teacher Isabella and her cats, Mr. Agnon, the Rudnickis, Grandpa Papa the carter from Kiriat Motskin, Saul Tchernikhowsky, Auntie Lilenka Bar Samkha, my wife, my children, my grandchildren, the builders and electricians who made this house, the carpenter, the newspaper boy, the man in the red mail van, the musician playing his violin on the corner of the square who reminded me of Einstein and Bergman, the Bedouin woman and the three goats I saw this morning before dawn, or did I just imagine them, Uncle Joseph who wrote Judaism and Humanity, my neighbor Shmuelevich who is afraid of another Holocaust, his granddaughter Daniella who played the Moonlight Sonata yesterday, Minister Shimon Peres who went to talk to Arafat again yesterday in the hope of finding some compromise formula despite everything, and the turquoise bird that sometimes visits my lemon tree. And the lemon tree itself. And especially the silence of the desert just before sunrise, that has more and more silences wrapped up inside it. That was my third coffee this morning. That's enough. I put the empty mug down at the edge of the table, taking particular care not to make the slightest noise that would injure the silence that has not vanished yet. Now I will sit down and write.


 40


     I HAD NEVER seen a house like it in my life before that morning.

     It was surrounded by a thick stone wall that concealed an orchard shady with vines and fruit trees. My astonished eyes looked instinctively for the tree of life and the tree of knowledge. There was a well in front of the house set in a wide terrace paved with blocks of smooth pinkish stone with delicate pale-blue veins. An arbor of thick vines shaded a corner of this terrace. Some stone seats and a low, wide stone table tempted you to linger in this arbor, to take your ease, to rest in the shade of the vines and listen to the buzzing of the summer bees, the singing of the birds in the orchard, and the trickle of the fountain—because at one end of the arbor there was a little pool in the form of a five-pointed star made of stone and lined with blue tiles decorated with Arabic writing. In the middle of the pool a fountain bubbled quietly. Groups of goldfish swam slowly to and fro among the clumps of water lilies.
     From the terrace the three of us, excited, polite, and humble, walked up the stone steps to a wide veranda with a view of the northern walls of the Old City with the minarets and domes beyond. Wooden chairs with cushions and footstools and some mosaic-covered tables were scattered around the veranda. Here too, as in the arbor, one felt an urge to sprawl facing the view of the city walls, to doze in the shade of the foliage or calmly drink in the silence of the hills and the stone.
     We did not linger in the orchard or in the arbor or on the veranda but pulled the bell pull next to the double iron doors, which were painted the color of mahogany and skillfully carved in relief with all sorts of pomegranates, grapes, winding tendrils, and symmetrical flowers. While we waited for the door to open, Uncle Staszek turned his head to us again and put his finger to his lips one more time, as though to signal a final warning to Auntie Mala and me: manners! composure! diplomacy!
    


     Along all four walls of the spacious reception room stood soft sofas, their carved wooden backs adjacent and touching one another. The furniture was carved with leaves, buds, and flowers, as though to represent inside the house the garden and orchard that surrounded it on the outside. The sofas were upholstered in a variety of striped fabrics in shades of red and sky blue. On each sofa there was a mass of colorful embroidered cushions. There were rich carpets on the floor, one of them woven with a scene of birds of paradise. In front of each sofa there was a low table, the top of which was formed by a wide round metal tray, and each tray was richly engraved with abstract designs of interwoven forms that recalled Arabic writing; in fact, they may well have been stylized Arabic inscriptions.

     On each side of the room six or eight doors opened. The walls were draped with rugs, and between the rugs the plaster was visible; it too was patterned with flowers, and colored pink, lilac, and pale green. Here and there, beneath the high ceiling, ancient weapons were hung as decorations: Damascus swords, a scimitar, daggers and spears, pistols, longbarreled muskets and double-barreled rifles. Facing the entrance, and flanked by a burgundy-covered sofa on one side and a lemon-colored one on the other, stood a huge, heavily ornamented brown sideboard in baroque style looking like a small palace, with many glass-fronted compartments containing porcelain cups, crystal goblets, silver and brass goblets, and numerous ornaments of Hebron or Sidon glass.
     In a deep recess in the wall between two windows nestled a green vase inlaid with mother-of-pearl from which rose several peacocks' feathers. Other recesses housed large brass pitchers and glass or earthenware beakers. Four fans hung from the ceiling, constantly making a wasplike buzz and stirring the smoke-laden air. In between the fans a huge, splendid brass chandelier sprouted from the ceiling, resembling a great tree with a profusion of branches, boughs, twigs, and tendrils all blooming with shining stalactites of crystal and quantities of pear-shaped lightbulbs that were all lit despite the summer morning light streaming through the open windows. The arches of the windows were fitted with stained glass representing wreaths of trefoils, each of which colored the daylight a different color: red, green, gold, and purple.
     Two cages hung from brackets on facing walls, each containing a pair of solemn parrots whose feathers were a riot of orange, turquoise, yellow, green, and blue. Every now and again one of them would exclaim in a hoarse voice like that of a heavy smoker: " Tfaddal! S'il vous plaît! Enjoy!" And from the other cage, at the other end of the room, a wheedling soprano voice replied at once in English: "Oh, how very, very sweet! How lovely!"
     Above the lintels of the doors and windows and on the flowery plaster Quranic verses or lines of poetry were inscribed in curling green Arabic writing, and between the rugs on the wall there were family portraits. Some were of portly, plump-faced, clean-shaven effendis, wearing red fezzes with black tassels, and squeezed into heavy blue suits, with gold chains suspended across their bellies and disappearing into their vest pockets. Their predecessors were mustachioed men with an authoritative air and a sullen mien, robed in responsibility, awe-inspiring, with a commanding presence, wearing embroidered robes and gleaming white keffiyehs held in place by black rings. There were also two or three mounted figures, ferocious-looking bearded men riding on magnificent horses, galloping at such speed that their keffiyehs trailed behind and their horses' manes streamed; they had long daggers thrust through their belts and curved scimitars tied at the side or brandished aloft.
     The deep-set windows of this reception hall faced north and east toward Mount Scopus and the Mount of Olives, a pine copse, rocky slopes, the Ophel, and the Augusta victoria hospice, its tower crowned like an imperial helmet with a sloping gray Prussian roof. A little to the left of Augusta Victoria stood a fortified building with narrow loopholes topped with a dome: this was the National Library, where my father worked, and around it were ranged the other buildings of Hebrew University and Hadassah Hospital. Below the skyline could be seen some small stone houses scattered over the hillside, small flocks among the boulders and fields of thorns, and the occasional old olive tree that seemed to have long since abandoned the living world and joined the realm of the inanimate.
    


     In the summer of 1947 my parents went to stay with some acquaintances in Netanya, leaving me with Uncle Staszek, Auntie Mala, and Chopin and Schopenhauer Rudnicki for the weekend. ("Just you behave yourself there! Impeccably, do you hear! And give Auntie Mala a hand in the kitchen and don't disturb Uncle Staszek, and keep yourself occupied, take a book to read and keep out of their way, and let them sleep late on Saturday morning! Be as good as gold! You can do it when you really want to!")

     The writer Hayyim Hazaz once decreed that Uncle Staszek should get rid of his Polish name, "that smelt of the pogroms," and persuaded him to take the first name of Stav, meaning "autumn" in Hebrew, because it sounded a little like Staszek but had a certain flavor of the Song of Songs. And that is how they appeared in Auntie Mala's handwriting on the card that was attached to the door of their apartment:
     Malka and Stav Rudnicki
 Please do not knock
 during the usual rest times.

     Uncle Staszek was a thickset, compact man with powerful shoulders, dark, hairy nostrils like caverns, and bushy eyebrows, one of which was always raised quizzically. He had lost one of his incisors, which sometimes gave him a villainous look, particularly when he smiled. He worked for a living in the registered mail department of the main post office in Jerusalem, and in his spare time he was collecting material on little cards for an original piece of research on the medieval Hebrew poet Immanuel of Rome.
     Ustaz Najib Mamduh al-Silwani, a resident of Sheikh Jarrah in the northeast of the city, was a wealthy businessman and the local agent of a number of large French firms whose business extended as far as Alexandria and Beirut and from there branched off to Haifa, Nablus, and Jerusalem. It so happened that at the beginning of the summer a considerable money order or bank draft, or it may have been some share certificates, went missing. Suspicion fell on Edward Silwani, Ustaz Najib's eldest son and his partner in the firm of Silwani and Sons. The young man was questioned, so we were told, by the assistant head of the CID in person, and he was subsequently taken to the remand center in Haifa for further questioning. Ustaz Najib, after attempting to rescue his son in various ways, eventually turned in desperation to Mr. Kenneth Orwell Knox-Guildford, the postmaster general, and begged him to renew the search for a lost envelope that he had, he swore, sent in person, the previous winter, by registered post.
     Unfortunately he had mislaid the receipt. It had vanished as though the Devil himself had swallowed it.
     Mr. Kenneth Orwell Knox-Guildford, for his part, after assuring Ustaz Najib of his sympathy but informing him candidly and sadly that there was not much hope of the search resulting in a positive outcome, nevertheless entrusted Staszek Rudnicki with the task of investigating the matter and discovering whatever there was to learn about the possible fate of a registered letter sent several months previously, a letter that might or might not have existed, that might or might not have been mislaid, a letter of which there was no trace either in the possession of the sender or in the post office ledger.
     Uncle Staszek lost no time in investigating, and discovered that not only was there no entry for the letter in question, but that the whole page had been carefully torn out of the ledger. There was no sign of it. Staszek's suspicions were immediately aroused. He made inquiries, found out which clerk was on duty at the registered counter at the time, and questioned the other clerks too until he discovered when the page had last been seen in the ledger. Once he had done this, it was not long before he identified the culprit (the youngster had held the envelope up to the light and seen the draft, and the temptation had been too much for him).
     So the lost property was restored to its owner, young Edward al-Silwani was released from custody, the honor of the respectable firm of Silwani and Sons once more shone forth from the company's letterhead without blot or stain, while dear Mr. Stav was invited together with his wife to partake of coffee at Silwani Villa in Sheikh Jarrah on Saturday morning. As for the dear child, their friends' son who would be staying with them, whom they had no one to leave with on Saturday morning, of course, what a question, he must come with them, the whole Silwani family was impatient to express their gratitude to Mr. Stav for his efficiency and integrity.
    


     After breakfast on Saturday therefore, just before we set out, I put on my best clothes, which my parents had left with Auntie Mala especially for the visit ("The Arab attaches great importance to outward appearances!" Father insisted): a gleaming white shirt, freshly ironed, its sleeves rolled up with splendid precision; navy blue trousers with cuffs and a neat crease down the front; and a serious-looking black leather belt with a shiny metal buckle that, for some reason, bore the image of the two-headed imperial Russian eagle. On my feet I wore a pair of sandals that Uncle Staszek had polished for me with the same brush and black polish that he had used for his own best shoes and Auntie Mala's.

     Despite the heat of the August day, Uncle Staszek insisted on wearing his dark woolen suit (it was his only one), his snow-white silk shirt, which had made the journey with him fifteen years ago from his parents' home in Lodz, and the unobtrusive blue silk tie he had worn on his wedding day. As for Auntie Mala, she agonized for three quarters of an hour in front of the mirror, tried out her evening dress, changed her mind, tried a dark pleated skirt with a light cotton blouse, changed her mind again, and looked at herself in the girlish summer frock she had bought recently, with a brooch and a silk scarf, or with a necklace and without the brooch and the scarf, or with the necklace and a different brooch but without the scarf, with or without drop earrings?
     Suddenly she decided that the airy summer frock with the embroidery around the neck was too frivolous, too folksy for the occasion, and she went back to the evening dress she had started with. In her predicament Auntie Mala turned to Uncle Staszek and even to me, and made us swear to tell the truth and nothing but the truth, however painful: wasn't this outfit too dressy, too theatrical for an informal visit on a hot day? Wasn't it wrong for her hairdo? And while we were looking at her hair, what did we think, really and truly, should she tie her plaits up around her head, or should she undo them and let her hair fall loose over her shoulder, and if so which one?
     Finally, reluctantly, she opted for a plain brown skirt, a long-sleeved blouse set off with a pretty turquoise brooch, and a pair of pale blue drop earrings to match her beautiful eyes. And she unplaited her hair and let it fall freely over both shoulders.
     On the way, Uncle Stav, his thickset body crammed uncomfortably into his heavy suit, explained to me some of the facts of life resulting from the historical difference between cultures. The Silwani family, he said, was a highly respected Europeanized family whose menfolk had been educated in excellent schools in Beirut and Liverpool and could all speak Western languages well. We ourselves, for our part, were definitely Europeans, although perhaps in rather a different sense of the word. We, for example, attached no importance to outward appearances but only to inner cultural and moral values. Even a universal genius like Tolstoy had not hesitated to walk around dressed as a peasant, and a great revolutionary like Lenin had mostly despised bourgeois dress and preferred to wear a leather jacket and a worker's cap.
     Our visit to Silwani Villa was not like Lenin visiting the workers or like Tolstoy among the simple folk: it was a special occasion. In the eyes of our more respectable and enlightened Arab neighbors, who adopted a more Western European culture most of the time, Uncle Staszek explained, we modern Jews were mistakenly portrayed as a sort of rowdy rabble of rough paupers, lacking manners and not yet fit to stand on the lowest rung of cultural refinement. Even some of our leaders were apparently portrayed in a negative light among our Arab neighbors, because they dressed in a very simple way and their manners were crude and informal. Several times in his work at the post office, both at the public counters and behind the scenes, he had had the opportunity to observe that the new Hebraic style, sandals and khaki, rolled-up sleeves and open neck, which we considered pioneer-like and democratic and egalitarian, was viewed by the British and particularly by the Arabs as uncouth, or as a vulgar kind of display, showing a lack of respect for others and contempt for the public services. Of course this impression was fundamentally mistaken, and there was no need to repeat that we believed in the simple life, in making do with little and in renouncing all outward show. But in the present circumstances, a visit to the mansion of a well-known and highly respected family, and on other similar occasions, it was proper for us to behave as though we had been entrusted with a diplomatic mission. Consequently we had to take great care about our appearance, our manners, and our way of talking.
     For instance, Uncle Staszek insisted, in such gatherings children and even teenagers were not expected on any account to join in the grownups' conversation. If, and only if, they were spoken to, they should reply politely and as briefly as possible. If refreshments were being served, the child should choose only things that would not spill or make crumbs. If he was offered a second helping, he should refuse very politely, even if he was dying to help himself. And throughout the visit the child should kindly sit up straight and not stare, and above all he must on no account make faces. Any inappropriate behavior, particularly in Arab society, which was, he assured us, well known to be extremely sensitive, easily hurt, and inclined to take offense (and even, he was inclined to believe, vengeance), would not only be impolite and a breach of trust but might also impair future mutual understanding between the two neighboring peoples; thus—he warmed to his theme—exacerbating hostility during a period of anxiety about the danger of bloody warfare between the two nations.
     In brief, Uncle Staszek said, a great deal, maybe far more than an eight-year-old child can carry on his shoulders, depends on you too this morning, on your intelligence and good behavior. By the way, you too, Malenka my dear, had better not say anything there, just say nothing beyond the necessary courtesies: as is well known, in the tradition of our Arab neighbors, as it was for our forefathers too, it is not considered acceptable for a woman suddenly to open her mouth in male company. Consequently you would do well, my darling, to let your innate good breeding and feminine charm speak for you on this occasion.
     And so this little diplomatic mission set forth at ten o'clock in the morning, resplendent and fully briefed, from the Rudnickis' one-and-a-half-room apartment on the corner of the Street of the Prophets and Chancellor Street, just above Blooms Galore, the florist, leaving Chopin and Schopenhauer, the lame bird Alma-Mirabelle and the painted pine-cone bird behind, and began to wend its way eastward toward Silwani Villa on the northern side of Sheikh Jarrah, up the road that leads to Mount Scopus.
     The first thing we passed on our way was the wall of the house named Thabor, which was once the home of an eccentric German architect named Conrad Schick, a devout Christian who was in love with Jerusalem. Above his gate Schick had built a small turret around which I used to weave all sorts of tales peopled by knights and princesses. From there we walked down the Street of the Prophets to the Italian Hospital, which, to judge by its castellated tower and its tiled domes, was modeled on a Florentine palace.
     At the Italian Hospital, without saying a word, we turned north toward St. George's Street, skirting the ultra-Orthodox Jewish quarter of Mea Shearim, pressing on into the world of cypresses, grilles, cornices, and stone walls. This was the opposite Jerusalem, the Jerusalem I hardly knew, the Abyssinian, Arab, pilgrim, Ottoman, missionary, German, Greek, brooding, Armenian, American, monastic, Italian, Russian Jerusalem, thick with pine trees, menacing yet fascinating, with its bells and winged enchantments that were forbidden to you because they were alien and hostile, a veiled city, concealing dangerous secrets, heavy with crosses, turrets, mosques, and mysteries, a dignified and silent city, through whose streets ministers of alien cults shrouded in black cloaks and priestly garb flitted like dark shadows, monks and nuns, kadis and muezzins, notables, worshippers, pilgrims, veiled women, and cowled priests.
     It was a Saturday morning in the summer of 1947, a few months before the bloody clashes broke out in Jerusalem, less than a year before the British left, before the siege, the shelling, the water stoppage, and the partition of the city. The Saturday that we walked to the Silwani family's house in Sheikh Jarrah a pregnant calm still lay on all these northeastern suburbs. But already within the calm you could sense a faint hint of impatience, a whiff of suppressed hostility. What were three Jews, a man, a woman, and a child, doing here, where had they suddenly sprung from? And now that you're here, on this side of the city, you'd better not linger longer than necessary. Slip swiftly through these streets. While there is still—
     ***

     There were already some fifteen or twenty guests and members of the family in the hall when we arrived, as though hovering on a cloud of cigarette smoke, most of them seated on the rows of sofas along the four walls, a few standing in little clusters in the corners. Among them was Mr. Cardigan, and also Mr. Kenneth Orwell Knox-Guildford, the postmaster general and Uncle Staszek's boss, who was standing with some other gentlemen and greeted Uncle Staszek by raising his glass slightly. Most of the doors leading into inner rooms were closed, but through one that was ajar I could see three girls of my own age, wearing long dresses, huddled together on a little bench, eyeing the guests and whispering among themselves.

     Ustaz Najib Mamduh al-Silwani, our host, introduced a few members of the family and some of the other guests, men and women, including a pair of middle-aged English ladies in gray suits, an elderly French scholar, and a Greek priest in a robe and a curly square beard. To all alike our host praised his guest, in English and sometimes in French, and explained in a couple of sentences how dear Mr. Stav had dispelled the great trouble that had hung over the heads of the Silwani family for several dark weeks.
     We, in turn, shook hands, chatted, smiled, made little bows, and murmured "How nice!," "Enchanté," and "Good to meet you." We even presented a modest symbolic gift to the al-Silwani family: a book of photographs of life in the kibbutz, with pictures of everyday scenes in the communal dining room, pioneers in the fields and the dairy, naked children happily splashing around under the sprinklers, and an old Arab peasant, holding fast to his donkey's halter as he stared at a gigantic tractor on tracks going past in a cloud of dust. Each photograph was accompanied by a few words of explanation in Hebrew and English.
     Ustaz al-Silwani leafed through the book of photographs, smiling pleasantly, and nodding a few times as though he had finally understood what the photographers had meant to say in the pictures. He thanked his guests for the present and put it down in one of the recesses in the wall, or was it a windowsill. The parrot with the high voice suddenly chanted in English from its cage: "Who will be my destiny? Who will be my prince?" and from the other end of the room the hoarse parrot replied: "Kalamat, ya sheikh! Kalamat, ya sheikh! Kalamat!"
     Two crossed swords hung on the wall above our heads in the corner where we sat. I tried unsuccessfully to guess who were the guests and who were family. Most of the men were in their fifties or sixties, and one was a very old man in a threadbare brown suit that was a little frayed at the cuffs. He was a wrinkled old man, his cheeks were hollow, his silvery mustache was yellowed from tobacco smoke, as were his lined plasterer's hands. He closely resembled some of the portraits hanging on the wall in their gilt frames. Was he the grandfather? Or even the greatgrandfather? Because to the left of Ustaz al-Silwani there appeared another old man, veined, tall, and stooped, looking like a broken tree trunk, his brown head covered with prickly bristles. He was sloppily dressed, in a striped shirt that was buttoned up only halfway and trousers that seemed too big for him. I was reminded of the old man Alleluyev in my mother's story, who looked after an even older man in his cottage.
     There were a few young people in white tennis clothes, and a pair of pot-bellied men in their mid-forties who looked like twins; they sat sleepily side by side, with their eyes half closed, and one of them fingered a string of amber worry beads while his brother chain-smoked, making his contribution to the gray pall of smoke that hung in the air. Apart from the two English ladies there were some other women sitting on the sofas, or circulating around the room, taking care not to collide with the servants in bow ties carrying trays laden with cold drinks, sweetmeats, glasses of tea, and tiny cups of coffee. Which of the women was the mistress of the house was hard to say: several of them seemed to be at home here. A large woman in a flowery silk dress the same color as the vase containing the peacock feathers, whose fleshy arms were so festooned with silver bracelets and bangles that they jangled with every movement, stood talking eagerly to some young men in tennis shorts. Another lady, in a cotton dress printed with a profusion of fruit that seemed to accentuate the roundness of her bust and thighs, extended her hand for her host to kiss and immediately repaid him with three kisses on the cheek, right, left, and right again. There was also an older matron with a gray mustache and flared hairy nostrils, as well as some charming young girls, slim-hipped, red-nailed, ceaselessly whispering-pspispering, with elegant hairdos and sporty skirts. Staszek Rudnicki in his ministerial dark suit that had emigrated with him from Lodz some fifteen years previously and his wife Mala in her brown skirt, long-sleeved blouse, and drop earrings seemed to be the most formally dressed people in the room (apart from the waiters). Even the postmaster general, Mr. Knox-Guildford, was wearing a plain blue shirt with no jacket or tie. Suddenly the parrot who sounded like an inveterate smoker called out from his cage at one end of the hall: "Mais oui, mais oui, chere mademoiselle, mais oui, absolument, naturellement." From the other end of the room the pampered soprano immediately answered: "Bas! Bas, ya 'eini! Bas min fadlak! Usqut! Bas wahalas!"
     Every now and then the servants in their black, white, and red materialized out of the cloud of smoke and tried to tempt us with bowl after bowl of almonds, walnuts, peanuts, pumpkin and melon seeds, and trays laden with warm pastries, fruit, slices of watermelon, more little cups of coffee, glasses of tea and tall frost-ringed glasses containing fruit juices and pomegranate juice with lumps of ice, and little bowls of blancmange smelling deliciously of cinnamon and decorated with chopped almonds. But I made do with two biscuits and a single glass of fruit juice, and politely but firmly refused all subsequent delicacies, mindful of the obligations that stemmed from my status as a junior diplomat accepting the hospitality of an important power that was scrutinizing my behavior with suspicion.
     Mr. Silwani stopped next to us and chatted in English for a few minutes with Auntie Mala and Uncle Staszek, joking, smiling, perhaps complimenting Auntie on her drop earrings. Then, as he was excusing himself and about to move on to his other guests, he hesitated, suddenly turned to me, and said with a pleasant smile in stumbling Hebrew:
     "If the young sir would like to go out in the garden. There are some children in the garden."
     Apart from Father, who liked to call me Your Highness, nobody had ever called me sir before. For one glorious moment I really did see myself as a young Hebrew gentleman whose status was not one whit less exalted than that of the young foreign gentlemen who were outside in the garden. When the free Hebrew state was finally established, Father used to quote enthusiastically from Vladimir Jabotinsky, our nation would be able to join the comity of nations, "like a lion confronting other lions."
     Like a lion confronting other lions I therefore left the smoke-filled room. From the spacious veranda I took in the view of the walls of the Old City, the towers and domes. Then slowly, imperiously, with a strong sense of national awareness, I descended the flight of stone steps and walked toward the arbor of vines and beyond, into the orchard.

 41


     OUT IN THE arbor there was a group of five or six girls in their mid-teens. I gave them a wide berth. Then some rowdy boys sauntered past me. A young couple were strolling under the trees, deep in whispered conversation but not touching each other. At the other end of the orchard, near the corner of the wall, around the rough trunk of a leafy mulberry tree, someone had erected a kind of bench without legs, and here a pale-faced girl was sitting with her knees together. Her hair and eyelashes were black, her neck was slim, her shoulders were frail, and her bobbed hair fell over a brow that seemed to me to be illuminated from within by a light of curiosity and joy. She was dressed in a cream blouse under a long navy blue dress with broad straps. on the lapel of her blouse she wore an ivory brooch that reminded me of one that belonged to my Grandma Shlomit.

     At first sight this girl seemed to be my age, but from the slight curve of her blouse and the unchildlike look of curiosity and also of warning in her eyes as they met mine (for an instant, before my eyes looked away), she must have been two or three years older, perhaps eleven or twelve. Still, I managed to see that her eyebrows were rather thick and joined in the middle, in contrast with the delicacy of her other features. There was a little child at her feet, a curly-haired boy of about three who may have been her brother; he was kneeling on the ground and was absorbed in picking up fallen leaves and arranging them in a circle.
     Boldly and all in one breath I offered the girl a quarter of my entire vocabulary of foreign words, perhaps less like a lion confronting other lions and more like the parrots in the room upstairs. Unconsciously I even bowed a little bow, eager to make contact and thus to dispel any prejudices and to advance the reconciliation between our two peoples:
     "Sabah al-heir, Miss. Ana ismi Amos. Wa-inti, ya bint? Votre nom's'il vous plait, Mademoiselle? Please your name kindly?"
     She eyed me without smiling. Her joined eyebrows gave her a severe look beyond her years. She nodded a few times, as though making a decision, agreeing with herself, ending the deliberation, and confirming the findings. Her navy blue dress came down below her knees, but in the gap between the dress and her shoes with the butterfly buckles I caught sight of the skin of her calves, brown and smooth, feminine, already grown up; my face reddened, and my eyes fled again, to her little brother, who looked back at me quietly, unsuspectingly, but also un-smilingly. Suddenly he looked very much like her with his dark, calm face.
    


     Everything I had heard from my parents, from neighbors, from Uncle Joseph, from my teachers, from my uncles and aunts, and from rumors came back to me at that moment. Everything they said over glasses of tea in our backyard on Saturdays and on summer evenings about mounting tensions between Arab and Jew, distrust and hostility, the rotten fruit of British intrigues and the incitement of Muslim fanatics who painted us in a frightening light to inflame the Arabs to hate us. Our task, Mr. Rosendorff once said, was to dispel suspicions and to explain to them that we were in fact a positive and even kindly people. In brief, it was a sense of mission that gave me the courage to address this strange girl and try to start a conversation with her: I meant to explain to her in a few convincing words how pure our intentions were, how abhorrent was the plot to stir up conflict between our two peoples, and how good it would be for the Arab public—in the form of this graceful-lipped girl—to spend a little time in the company of the polite, pleasant Hebrew people, in the person of me, the articulate envoy aged eight and a half. Almost.

     But I had not thought out in advance what I would do after I had used up most of my supply of foreign words in my opening sentence. How could I enlighten this oblivious girl and get her to understand once and for all the rightness of the Jewish return to Zion? By charades? By dance gestures? And how could I get her to recognize our right to the Land without using words? How, without any words, could I translate for her Tchernikhowsky's "O, my land, my homeland"? Or Jabotinsky's "There Arabs, Nazarenes and we / shall drink our fill in happy manner, / when both the banks of Jordan's stream / are purged by our unsullied banner"? In a word, I was like that fool who had learned how to advance the king's pawn two squares, and did so without any hesitation, but after that had no idea at all about the game of chess, not even the names of the pieces, or how they moved, or where, or why.
     Lost.
     But the girl answered me, and actually in Hebrew, without looking at me, her hands resting open on the bench on either side of her dress, her eyes fixed on her brother, who was laying a little stone in the center of each leaf in his circle:
     "My name is Aisha. That little one is my brother. Awwad."
     She also said:
     "You're the son of the guests from the post office?"
     And so I explained to her that I was definitely not the son of the guests from the post office, but of their friends. And that my father was a rather important scholar, an ustaz, and that my father's uncle was an even more important scholar, who was even world famous, and that it was her honored father, Mr. Silwani, who had personally suggested that I should come out in the garden and talk to the children of the house.
     Aisha corrected me and said that Ustaz Najib was not her father but her mother's uncle: she and her family did not live here in Sheikh Jar-rah but in Talbieh, and she herself had been going to lessons from a piano teacher in Rehavia for the past three years, and she had learned a little Hebrew from the teacher and the other pupils. It was a beautiful language, Hebrew, and Rehavia was a beautiful area. Well kept. Quiet.
     Talbieh was well kept and quiet, too, I hastened to reply, repaying one compliment with another. Would she be willing for us to talk a little?
     Aren't we talking already? (A little smile flickered for an instant around her lips. She straightened the hem of her dress with both her hands, and uncrossed and recrossed her legs. And for an instant her knees appeared, the knees of a grown-up woman already, then her dress straightened again. She looked slightly to my left now, where the garden wall peered at us among the trees.)
     I therefore adopted a representative position, and expressed the view that there was enough room in this country for both peoples, if only they had the sense to live together in peace and mutual respect. Somehow, out of embarrassment or arrogance, I was talking to her not in my own Hebrew but in that of Father and his visitors: formal, polished. Like a donkey dressed up in a ballgown and high-heeled shoes: convinced for some reason that this was the only proper way to speak to Arabs and girls. (I had hardly ever had an occasion to talk to a girl or an Arab, but I imagined that in both cases a special delicacy was required: you had to talk on tiptoe, as it were.)
     It transpired that her knowledge of Hebrew was not extensive, or perhaps her views were not the same as mine. Instead of responding to my challenge, she chose to sidestep it: her elder brother, she told me, was in London, studying to be a "solicitor and a barrister."
     Puffed up with representativity, I asked her what she was thinking of studying when she was older.
     She looked straight into my eyes, and at that moment, instead of blushing, I turned pale. Instantly I averted my eyes, and looked down at her serious little brother Awwad, who had already laid out four precise circles of leaves at the foot of the mulberry tree.
     How about you?
     Well, you see, I said, still standing, facing her, rubbing my clammy palms against the sides of my shorts, well, you see, it's like this—
     You'll be a lawyer too. From the way you speak.
     What makes you think that exactly?
     Instead of replying, she said: I'm going to write a book.
     You? What kind of a book will you write?
     Poetry.
     Poetry?
     In French and English.
     You write poetry?
     She also wrote poetry in Arabic, but she never showed it to anyone. Hebrew was a beautiful language, too. Had anyone written any poetry in Hebrew?
     Shocked by her question, swollen with indignation and a sense of mission, I began there and then to give her an impassioned recital of snatches of poetry. Tchernikhowsky. Levin Kipnes. Rahel. Vladimir Jabotinsky. And one poem of my own. Whatever came to mind. Furiously, describing circles in the air with my hands, raising my voice, with feeling and gestures and facial expressions and occasionally even closing my eyes. Even her little brother Awwad raised his curly head and fixed me with brown, innocent lamblike eyes, full of curiosity and slight apprehension, and suddenly he recited in clear Hebrew: Jest a minute! Rest a minute! Aisha, meanwhile, said nothing. Suddenly she asked me if I could climb trees.
     All excited and perhaps a little in love with her and yet trembling with the thrill of national representativity, eager to do anything she wanted, I instantly transformed myself from Jabotinsky into Tarzan. Taking off the sandals that Uncle Staszek had polished for me that morning till the leather gleamed like jet, oblivious of my neatly pressed best clothes, I took a jump and swung myself up onto a low branch, scrabbled with my bare feet against the gnarled trunk, and without a moment's hesitation climbed up into the tree, from one fork to the next and upward, toward the topmost branches, not caring about scratches, ignoring bruises, grazes, and mulberry stains, up beyond the line of the wall, beyond the tops of the other trees, out of the shade, up to the topmost part of the tree, until my tummy was clinging to a sloping branch that bent under my weight like a spring, and I groped and suddenly discovered a rusty iron chain with a heavy iron ball, also rusty, attached to the end of it, the devil only knew what it was for and how it had got to the top of the mulberry tree. Little Awwad looked at me thoughtfully, doubtfully, and called again: Jest a minute! Rest a minute!
     These were apparently the only Hebrew words he knew.
     I held on to my sighing branch with one hand, and with the other, uttering wild war cries, I waved the chain and whirled the iron ball in quick circles, as though brandishing some rare fruit for the young woman underneath. For sixty generations, so we had learned, they had considered us a miserable nation of huddled yeshiva students, flimsy moths who start in a panic at every shadow, awlad al-mawt, children of death, and now at last here was muscular Judaism taking the stage, the resplendent new Hebrew youth at the height of his powers, making everyone who sees him tremble at his roar: like a lion among lions.
     But this awesome tree lion that I was exultantly acting the part of in front of Aisha and her brother was unaware of approaching doom. He was a blind, deaf, foolish lion. Eyes had he but he saw not, ears neither did he hear. He just whirled the chain, straddling his swaying branch, piercing the air with stronger and stronger revolutions of his iron apple, like those heroic cowboys he had seen in the cinema, describing loops in the air with their lassos as they rode along.
     He did not see or hear or imagine or beware, this eager brother's keeper, this flying lion, even though nemesis was well on the way, and everything was ready for the horror to come. The rusty iron ball at the end of the rusty chain was whirling in the air, threatening to wrench his arm out of his shoulder socket. His arrogance. His folly. The poison of his rising virility. The intoxication of vainglorious chauvinism. The branch he was lying on to perform his demonstration was already groaning under his weight. And the delicate, thoughtful girl with the thick black eyebrows, the poetess, was looking up at him with a pitying smile, not a smile of admiration or awe for the new Hebrew man but a faintly contemptuous expression, an amused, indulgent smile, as if to say, that's nothing, all those efforts of yours, it's nothing at all, we've seen much more than that already, you can't impress us with that, if you really want to surprise me someday, you'll have to try seven times as hard.
     (And from the depth of some dark well there may have flashed before him for a brief instant a faint memory of a thick forest in a women's clothes shop, a primeval jungle through which he had once pursued a little girl, and when he finally caught up with her, she turned out to be a horror.)
     And her brother was still there, at the foot of the mulberry tree, he had finished making his precise, mysterious circles out of fallen leaves and now, tousled, serious, responsible-looking, and sweet, he was toddling after a white butterfly in his shorts and red shoes when suddenly from the top of the mulberry tree someone called his name in a terrified roar, Awwad Awwad run, and he may just have had time to look up into the tree with his round eyes, he may just have had time to see the rusty iron apple that had broken free from the end of the chain and was rushing toward him like a shell straight toward him getting darker and bigger and flying straight at the child's eyes, and it would surely have smashed his skull in if it had not missed his head by an inch and whizzed right down past the child's nose to land with a heavy dull thud crushing his little foot through his tiny red shoe, the doll-like shoe that was suddenly covered with blood and started to fountain blood through the lace holes and to gush out through the seams and over the top of the shoe. Then a single long, piercing, heartrending shriek of pain rose above the tops of the trees and then your whole body was seized with trembling like frosty needles and everything was silent all around you in an instant as though you had been shut up inside an iceberg.
     ***

     I don't remember the unconscious child's face when his sister carried him away in her arms, I don't remember if she screamed too, if she called for help, if she spoke to me, and I don't remember when or how I got down from the tree or if I fell down with the branch that collapsed beneath me, I don't remember who dressed the cut on my chin that trickled blood down onto my best shirt (I still have a mark on my chin), and I can hardly remember anything that happened between the injured boy's only shriek and the white sheets that evening, as I lay still shivering all over curled up fetus-like with several stitches in my chin in Uncle Staszek and Auntie Mala's double bed.

     But I do remember to this day, like two sharp burning coals, her eyes beneath the mourning border of her black eyebrows that joined in the middle: loathing, despair, horror, and flashing hatred came from her eyes, and beneath the loathing and the hatred there was also a sort of gloomy nod of the head, as though she were agreeing with herself, as if to say I could tell right away, even before you opened your mouth I should have noticed, I should have been on my guard, you could sniff it from a long way away. Like a bad smell.
     And I can remember, vaguely, somebody, a hairy, short man, with a bushy mustache, wearing a gold watch on a very wide bracelet, maybe he was one of the guests, or one of the host's sons, dragging me roughly out of there, pulling me by my torn shirt, almost at a run. And on the way I could see a furious man, standing by the well in the middle of the paved terrace, hitting Aisha, not punching her with his fists, not slapping her cheeks, but hitting her hard, repeatedly, with the flat of his hand, slowly, thoroughly, on her head, her back, her shoulder, across her face, not the way you punish a child but the way you vent your rage on a horse. Or an obstinate camel.
    


     Of course my parents intended, and so did Staszek and Mala, to get in touch and ask how the child Awwad was and how serious his injuries were. Of course they intended to find some way to express their sorrow and shame. They might have considered offering suitable compensation. It might have been important to them to make our hosts see with their own eyes that our side had not come off unscathed either, but he had cut his chin and needed two or three stitches. It is possible that my parents and the Rudnickis even planned a return visit to Silwani Villa, in which they would bring presents for the injured youngster, while my task would be to express my humble remorse by prostrating myself on the threshold or putting on sackcloth and ashes, to demonstrate to the al-Silwani family in particular and to the Arab people in general how sorry and ashamed and embarrassed we were, but at the same time too high-minded to seek excuses or extenuating circumstances, and sufficiently responsible to shoulder the full burden of embarrassment, remorse, and guilt.

     But while they were still conferring, arguing with each other about the timing and the manner, possibly suggesting that Uncle Staszek should go and ask his boss Mr. Knox-Guildford to put out some informal feelers on our behalf and find out how the land lay with the Silwani family, how angry they still were and how they could be mollified, how helpful a personal apology would be and in what spirit they would receive our offer to put matters right, while they were still laying plans and exploratory measures, the Jewish high holidays arrived. And even before that, on the first day of September 1947, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine presented its recommendations to the General Assembly.
     And in Jerusalem, even though no violence had broken out as yet, it felt as though all of a sudden an invisible muscle was suddenly flexed. It was not sensible to go to those areas anymore.
     So Father bravely telephoned the offices of Silwani and Sons Ltd in Princess Mary Street, introduced himself in English and in French, and asked, in both languages, to be put through to Mr. al-Silwani senior. A young male secretary answered him with cold politeness, asked him in fluent English and in French to be kind enough to hold the line for a few moments, and came on again to say that he had been authorized to take a message for Mr. Silwani. So Father dictated a brief message about our feelings, our regrets, our anxiety for the health of the dear child, our readiness to meet any medical expenses in full, and our sincere wish to effect a meeting at an early date to clarify and to try to right the wrong. (Father had a pronounced Russian accent in English and in French. When he said "the," it sounded like "dzee," while "locomotive" came out as "locomotsif.")
     We received no answer from the Silwani family, either directly or via Mr. Knox-Guildford, Staszek Rudnicki's boss. Did Father endeavor to discover by other means how serious little Awwad's injuries were? What Aisha had or hadn't said about me? If he did indeed manage to find anything out, they didn't say a word to me. To the day my mother died and afterward, to the day of his own death, my father and I never talked about that Saturday. Not even incidentally. And even many years later, some five years after the Six Day War, at Mala Rudnicki's memorial service, when poor Staszek talked half the night in his wheelchair and reminisced about all sorts of good and terrible times, he did not mention that Saturday at Silwani Villa.
     And once, in 1967, after we conquered East Jerusalem, I went there on my own, quite early one Saturday morning in the summer, along the same route that we had taken that earlier Saturday. There were new iron gates, and a shiny black German car was parked in front of the house, fitted with gray curtains. On top of the wall that surrounded the garden there was broken glass that I did not remember. The green treetops showed above the wall. The flag of a certain important consulate fluttered above the roof, and beside the new iron gates there was a gleaming brass plate bearing the name of the state in question, in Arabic and in Latin characters, and its coat of arms. A guard in plain clothes came and stared at me curiously; I mumbled something and walked on toward Mount Scopus.
    


     The cut on my chin healed in a few days. Dr. Hollander, the pediatrician at the clinic on Amos Street, removed the stitches put in at the first-aid station that Saturday morning.

     From the day the stitches came out, a veil descended over the entire episode. Auntie Mala and Uncle Staszek were also enlisted in the cover-up. Not a word. Neither about Sheikh Jarrah nor about little Arab children nor about iron chains nor about orchards and mulberry trees, nor about scars on the chin. Taboo. It never happened. Only Mother, in her usual way, challenged the walls of censorship. Once, in our own special place, at the kitchen table, at our own special time, when Father was out of the house, she told me an Indian fable:
     Once upon a time there were two monks who imposed all sorts of disciplines and afflictions on themselves. Among other things, they resolved to cross the whole Indian subcontinent on foot. They also determined to make the journey in complete silence: they were not to utter a single word, even in their sleep. Once, however, when they were walking on the bank of a river, they heard a drowning woman crying for help. Without a word the younger monk leaped into the water, carried the woman to the bank on his back, and laid her down wordlessly on the sand. The two ascetics continued their journey in silence. Six months or a year passed, and suddenly the younger monk asked his companion: Tell me, do you think I sinned in carrying that woman on my back? His friend answered with a question: What, are you still carrying her?

     Father, for his part, went back to his research. At that time he was deep in the literatures of the ancient Near East, Akkadia and Sumeria, Babylonia and Assyria, the discoveries of early archives in Tel el-Amarna and Hatushash, the legendary library of King Assurbanipal, whom the Greeks called Sardanapalus, the stories of Gilgamesh, and the short myth of Adapa. Monographs and reference works piled up on his desk, surrounded by a regular army of notes and index cards. He tried to amuse Mother and me with one of his usual wisecracks: If you steal from one book, you're a plagiarist; if you steal from five books, you're a scholar; if you steal from fifty books, you're a great scholar.
     Day by day that invisible muscle under Jerusalem's skin was tensing. Wild rumors circulated in our neighborhood; some of them were bloodcurdling. Some said that the British government in London was about to withdraw the army, so as to enable the regular forces of the member states of the Arab League, which was nothing but an arm of the British dressed up in desert robes, to defeat the Jews, conquer the land and then, once the Jews had gone, let the British in by the back door. Jerusalem, some of the strategists in Mr. Auster's grocery maintained, would soon be King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan's capital, and we Jewish residents would be put on board ships and taken to refugee camps in Cyprus. Or we might be dispersed to DP camps in Mauritius and the Seychelles.
     Others did not hesitate to claim that the Hebrew underground movements, the Irgun, the Stern Gang, and the Haganah, by their bloody actions against the English, particularly by blowing up the British HQ in the King David Hotel, had brought disaster upon us. No empire in history had turned a blind eye to such humiliating provocations, and the British had already decided to punish us with a savage bloodbath. The overhasty outrages of our fanatical Zionist leaders had made us so hated by the British public that London had decided simply to allow the Arabs to slaughter the lot of us: so far the British armed forces had stood between us and a general massacre by the Arab nations, but now they would step aside, and our blood would be on our own heads.
     Some people reported that various well-connected Jews, rich people from Rehavia, contractors and wholesalers with connections to the British, high-ranking civil servants in the Mandatory administration, had been tipped that they would be better off going abroad as soon as possible, or at least sending their families to some safe haven. They mentioned such and such a family that had pushed off to America, and various well-to-do business people who had quit Jerusalem overnight and settled in Tel Aviv with their families. They must know for certain something that the rest of us could only imagine. Or they could imagine what was just a nightmare for us.
     Others told of groups of young Arabs who combed our streets at night, armed with pots of paint and brushes, marking the Jewish houses and allocating them in advance. They claimed that armed Arab gangs, under the orders of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, already controlled all the hills around the city, and the British turned a blind eye to them. They said that the forces of the Trans-Jordanian Arab Legion, under the command of the British Brigadier Sir John Glubb, Glubb Pasha, were already deployed in various key positions across the country so that they could crush the Jews before they could even try to raise their heads. And that the fighters of the Muslim Brotherhood, whom the British had allowed to come in from Egypt with their arms and set up fortified positions in the hills around Jerusalem, were digging themselves in just across from Kibbutz Ramat Rahel. Some expressed the hope that when the British left, the American president, Truman, would step in despite everything. He would send his army in quickly, two gigantic American aircraft carriers had already been spotted off Sicily heading east; President Truman surely wouldn't allow a second Holocaust to happen here less than three years after the Holocaust of the Six Million. Surely the rich and influential American Jews would put pressure on him. They couldn't just stand idly by.
     Some believed that the conscience of the civilized world, or progressive public opinion, or the international working class, or widespread guilt feelings over the sorry fate of the Jewish survivors, would all act to thwart the "Anglo-Arab plot to destroy us." At the very least, some of our friends and neighbors encouraged themselves at the onset of that strange, threatening autumn with the comforting thought that even if the Arabs didn't want us here, the last thing the peoples of Europe wanted was for us to go back and flood Europe again. And since the Europeans were far more powerful than the Arabs, it followed that there was a chance that we might be left here after all. They would force the Arabs to swallow what Europe was trying to spew forth.
     One way or another, virtually everyone prophesied war. The underground broadcast passionate songs on the short waves. Grits, oil, candles, sugar, powdered milk, and flour almost vanished from the shelves in Mr. Auster's grocery shop: people were beginning to stock up in readiness for what was to come. Mother filled the kitchen cupboard with bags of flour and matzo meal, packets of rusks, Quaker oats, oil, preserves, canned food, olives, and sugar. Father bought two sealed canisters of paraffin and stored them under the basin in the bathroom.
     Father still went off every day, as usual, at half past seven in the morning, to work in the National Library on Mount Scopus, on the No. 9 bus that went from Geula Street along Mea Shearim and crossed Sheikh Jarrah not far from Silwani Villa. He came home a little before five, with books and offprints in his battered briefcase and more tucked under his arm. But Mother asked him several times not to sit by the window in the bus. And she added some words in Russian. We suspended our regular Saturday afternoon walks to Uncle Joseph and Aunt Zippora's house for the time being.
    


     I was barely nine, and already I was a devout newspaper reader. An avid consumer of the latest news. A keen expositor and debater. A political and military expert whose views were valued by the neighbors' children. A strategist with matchsticks, buttons, and dominoes on the matting. I would dispatch troops, execute tactical outflanking movements, forge alliances with one foreign power or another, store up trenchant arguments that were capable of winning over the stoniest British heart, and compose speeches that would not only bring the Arabs to understanding and reconciliation and make them ask for our forgiveness, but could even bring tears of sympathy for our sufferings to their eyes, mixed with profound admiration for our noble hearts and moral grandeur.

     I conducted proud yet pragmatic talks at that time with Downing Street, the White House, the Vatican, the Kremlin, and the Arab rulers. "Hebrew state! Free immigration!" demonstrators from the affiliated community shouted in marches and public gatherings, one or two of which Mother let Father take me along to. While every Friday, Arab crowds, marching angrily after they came out of the mosques, roared "Idbah al-Yahud!" (Butcher the Jews!) and "Falastin hi arduna wa al-Yahud kilbuna!" (Palestine is our land, and the Jews are our dogs!). If I had the chance, I could easily convince them rationally that while our slogans contained nothing that could hurt them, their slogans, shouted by inflamed mobs, were not very nice or civilized, and in fact they showed up the people who were shouting them in rather a shameful light. In those days I was not so much a child as a bundle of self-righteous arguments, a little chauvinist dressed up as a peace lover, a sanctimonious, honey-tongued nationalist, a nine-year-old Zionist propagandist. We were the goodies, we were in the right, we were innocent victims, we were David against Goliath, a lamb among wolves, the sacrificial lamb, whereas they—the British, the Arabs, and the whole Gentile world—they were the wolves, the evil, hypocritical world that was always thirsting for our blood, more shame on them.
     When the British government announced the intention of ending its rule in Palestine and returning the mandate to the United Nations Organization, the UN set up a Special Committee on Palestine (UN-SCOP) to examine conditions in Palestine and also among the hundreds of thousands of displaced Jews, survivors of the Nazi genocide, who had been living for two years and more in DP camps in Europe.
     At the beginning of September 1947, UNSCOP published its majority report, recommending that the British mandate should end at the earliest opportunity. Instead, Palestine should be partitioned into two independent states, one for the Arabs and one for the Jews. The area allocated to the two states was almost equal in size. The complicated, winding border that separated them was drawn roughly in accordance with the demographic distribution of the respective populations. The two states would be linked by a common economy, currency, etc. Jerusalem, the committee recommended, should be a neutral corpus separatum, under international trusteeship with a governor appointed by the UN.
     These recommendations were submitted to the General Assembly for its approval, which required a two-thirds majority. The Jews gritted their teeth and agreed to accept the partition proposal: the territory allocated to them did not include Jerusalem or Upper and Western Galilee, and three quarters of the proposed Jewish state was uncultivated desert land. Meanwhile the Palestinian Arab leadership and all the nations of the Arab League declared at once that they would not accept any compromise, and that they intended "to resist by force the implementation of these proposals, and to drown in blood any attempt to create a Zionist entity on a single inch of Palestinian soil." They argued that the whole of Palestine had been Arab land for hundreds of years, until the British came and encouraged hordes of foreigners to spread all over it, flattening hills, uprooting ancient olive groves, purchasing land, plot by plot, by subterfuges from corrupt landL-rds, and driving out the peasants who had farmed it for generations. If they were not stopped, these crafty Jewish colonists would swallow up the whole of the land, eradicating every trace of Arab life, covering it with their red-roofed European colonies, corrupting it with their arrogant and licentious ways, and very soon they would take control of the holy places of Islam and then they would overflow into the neighboring Arab countries. In no time at all, thanks to their deviousness and technical superiority, and with the support of British imperialism, they would do here exactly what the whites had done to the indigenous populations in America, Australia, and elsewhere. If they were allowed to set up a state here, even a little one, they would undoubtedly use it as a bridgehead, they would flood in, millions of them, like locusts, settle on every hill and valley, rob these ancient landscapes of their Arab character, and swallow everything up before the Arabs had time to shake themselves out of their slumber.
     In the middle of October the British High Commissioner, General Sir Alan Cunningham, uttered a veiled threat to David Ben-Gurion, who was the executive head of the Jewish Agency: "If troubles begin," he remarked sadly, "I fear that we will not be able to help you; we will not be able to defend you."*
    


     Father said:

     "Herzl was a prophet and he knew it. At the time of the First Zionist congress in 1897 he said that in five years, or at the latest in fifty years, there would be a Jewish State in the Land of Israel. And now fifty years have passed, and the state is literally standing at the gate."
     Mother said:
     *Dov Joseph, The Faithful City: The Siege of Jerusalem, 1948 (London, 1962), p. 31.

     "It's not standing. There is no gate. There's an abyss."
     Father's reprimand sounded like the crack of a whip. He spoke in Russian, so that I would not understand.
     And I said, with a joy I could not conceal:
     "There's going to be a war soon in Jerusalem! And we'll beat them all!"
     But sometimes, when I was all alone in the yard toward sunset or early on Saturday morning when my parents and the whole neighborhood were still asleep, I would freeze with a stab of terror, because the picture of the girl Aisha picking up the unconscious child and silently carrying him in her arms suddenly seemed to me like a chilling Christian picture that Father showed me and explained to me in a whisper when we visited a church once.
     I remembered the olive trees I saw from the windows of that house, which had left the world of the living ages before and become part of the realm of the inanimate.
     Jest a minute rest a minute jest a rest a jesta resta.
    


     By November a sort of curtain had begun to divide Jerusalem. The buses still ran there and back, and fruit sellers from the nearby Arab villages still did their rounds in our street, carrying trays of figs, almonds, and prickly pears, but some Jewish families had already moved out of the Arab neighborhoods, and Arabs families had begun to leave the west of the city for the southern and eastern parts.

     Only in my thoughts could I sometimes go to the extension of St. George's Street northeastward, and stare wide-eyed at the other Jerusalem: a city of old cypress trees that were more black than green, streets of stone walls, interlaced grilles, cornices, and dark walls, the alien, silent, aloof, shrouded Jerusalem, the Abyssinian, Muslim, pilgrim, Ottoman city, the strange, missionary city of crusaders and Templars, the Greek, Armenian, Italian, brooding, Anglican, Greek Orthodox city, the monastic, Coptic, Catholic, Lutheran, Scottish, Sunni, Shi'ite, Sufi, Alawite city, swept by the sound of bells and the wail of the muezzin, thick with pine trees, frightening yet alluring, with all its concealed enchantments, its warrens of narrow streets that were forbidden to us and threatened us from the darkness, a secretive, malign city pregnant with disaster.
    


     The whole Silwani family, I was told after the Six Day War, left Jordanian Jerusalem in the 1950s and early 1960s. Some went to Switzerland and Canada, others settled in the Gulf emirates, a few moved to London, and some others to Latin America.

     And what about their parrots? "Who will be my destiny? Who will be my prince?"
     And what about Aisha? And her lame brother? Where on earth is she playing her piano, assuming she still has one, assuming she has not grown old and worn out among the dusty, heat-blasted hovels in some refugee camp where the sewage runs down the unpaved streets.
     And who are the fortunate Jews who now live in what was once her family home in Talbieh, a neighborhood built of pale blue and pinkish stone with stone vaults and arches?
    


     It was not because of the approaching war but for some other, deeper reason that I would be suddenly seized with dread in those autumn days of 1947 and feel aching pangs of yearning mixed with shame and the certainty of impending punishment and also some ill-defined pain: a sort of forbidden longing, blended with guilt and sorrow. For that orchard. For that well that was covered with a sheet of green metal, and the blue-tiled pool where golden fish sparkled for an instant in the sunlight before disappearing into the forest of water lilies. For the soft cushions trimmed with fine lace. For the richly textured rugs, one of which showed birds of paradise among trees of paradise. For the stained-glass trefoils, each of which colored the daylight a different shade: red leaf, green leaf, gold leaf, purple leaf.

     And for the parrot who sounded like an inveterate smoker: "Mais oui, mais oui, chere mademoiselle," and its soprano counterpart that answered in a voice like a silver bell: "Tfaddal! S'il vous plaît! Enjoy!"
     I was there once, in that orchard, before I was banished from it in disgrace, I did touch it once, with my fingertips—
     "Bas! Bas, ya 'eini! Bas min fadlak! Usqut!"
     Early in the morning I would wake to the smell of first light and see through the iron slats of the closed shutters the pomegranate tree that stood in our yard. Hidden in this tree every morning an invisible bird would repeat joyfully and precisely the first five notes of Fur Elise.
     Such an articulate fool, such a noisy little fool.
     Instead of approaching her like the New Hebrew Youth approaching the Noble Arab People, or like a lion approaching lions, perhaps I could simply have approached her like a boy approaching a girl. Or couldn't I?

 42


     "JUST LOOK how that strategist of a child has occupied the whole apartment again. You can't move in the corridor, it's so full of fortifications and towers made out of building blocks, castles made out of dominoes, mines made out of corks, and borders made out of spillikins. In his room there are battlefields of buttons from wall to wall. We're not allowed in there, it's out of bounds. That's an order. And even in our room he's scattered knives and forks all over the floor, presumably to mark out some Maginot Line or navy or armored corps. If it goes on like this, you and I will have to move out into the yard. Or into the street. But the moment the paper arrived, your child dropped everything, he must have declared a general cease-fire, and he lay back on the sofa and read it from cover to cover, including the small ads. Now he's running a line from his HQ behind his wardrobe right through the apartment to Tel Aviv, which is apparently on the edge of the bathtub. If I'm not mistaken, he's about to use it to speak to Ben-Gurion. Like yesterday. To explain to him what we ought to be doing at this point and what we ought to watch out for. He might already have started giving Ben-Gurion orders."

    


     In one of the bottom drawers here in my study in Arad I found a battered cardboard box last night, containing various notes that I made when I was writing the novellas that make up The Hill of Evil Counsel, more than twenty-five years ago. Among other things there are some messy notes that I made in a library in Tel Aviv in 1974 or 1975 from newspapers from September 1947. And so, in Arad, on a summer morning in 2001, like an image reflected in a mirror reflected in another mirror, my notes from twenty-seven years ago remind me of what the "strategist of a child" read in the paper of September 9, 1947:

     Hebrew traffic police have started to operate in Tel Aviv with the consent of the British governor. They have eight policemen working in two shifts. A thirteen-year-old Arab girl is to stand trial before a military court, accused of possessing a rifle in the village of Hawara, Nablus District. The "illegal" immigrants from the Exodus are being deported to Hamburg, and they say they will fight to the last to resist disembarkation. Fourteen Gestapo men have been sentenced to death in Lübeck. Mr. Solomon Chmelnik of Rehovot has been kidnapped and badly beaten up by an extremist organization but has been returned safe and sound. The Voice of Jerusalem orchestra is going to be conducted by Hanan Schlesinger. Mahatma Gandhi's fast is in its second day. The singer Edis de Philippe will be unable to perform this week in Jerusalem, and the Chamber Theatre has been obliged to postpone its performance of You Can't Take It with You. On the other hand, two days ago the new Colonnade Building on the Jaffa Road was opened, containing, among other shops, Mikolinski, Freidmann & Bein, and the chiropodist Dr. Scholl. According to the Arab leader Musa Alami, the Arabs will never accept the partition of the country; after all, King Solomon ruled that the mother who was opposed to partition was the true mother, and the Jews ought to recognize the significance of the parable. And then again, Comrade Golda Myerson [later Meir] of the Jewish Agency Executive has declared that the Jews will fight for the inclusion of Jerusalem in the Hebrew State, because the Land of Israel and Jerusalem are synonymous in our hearts.

     A few days later the paper reported:

     Late last night, an Arab set upon two Jewish girls in the vicinity of the Bernardiya Café, between Beit Hakerem and Bayit Vagan. One of the girls escaped, and the other screamed for help, and some of the local residents heard and succeeded in preventing the suspect from escaping. In the course of investigations by Constable O'Connor, it emerged that the man is an employee of the Broadcasting Service and is distantly related to the influential Nashashibi family. Despite this, bail was refused, on account of the gravity of the alleged offense. In his defense the prisoner stated that he had come out of the café drunk and had been under the impression that the two girls were prancing around naked in the dark.

     And another day in September 1947:

     Lieutenant-Colonel Adderley has presided over a military court hearing the case of Shlomo Mansoor Shalom, a distributor of illegal leaflets who was found to be of unsound mind. The probation officer, Mr. Gardewicz, requested that the prisoner should not be committed to a lunatic asylum, for fear of a deterioration in his condition, and pleaded with the judges that he should be isolated in a private institution instead, lest his weak intellect be exploited by fanatics for their own criminal ends. Lt.-Col. Adderley regretted that he was unable to accede to Mr. Gardewicz's request, since it was beyond his powers; he was obliged to commit the unfortunate man to custody pending a ruling by the High Commissioner, representing the Crown, on the possible exercise of special leniency or clemency. On the radio, Cilla Leibowitz is giving a piano recital, and after the news we are promised a commentary by Mr. Gordus; to round off the evening Miss Bracha Tsefira will give a rendition of a selection of folk songs.

     One evening Father explained to his friends who had come over for a glass of tea that ever since the middle of the eighteenth century, long before the appearance of modern Zionism and unconnected with it, the Jews constituted a clear majority of the population of Jerusalem. At the beginning of the twentieth century, still before the beginning of the Zionist immigrations, Jerusalem, under Ottoman Turkish rule, was already the most populous city in the country: it had fifty-five thousand inhabitants, of whom some thirty-five thousand were Jews. And now, in the autumn of 1947, there were about a hundred thousand Jews living in Jerusalem and some sixty-five thousand non-Jews, made up of Muslim and Christian Arabs, Armenians, Greeks, British, and many other nationalities.

     But in the north, east, and south of the city there were extensive Arab neighborhoods, including Sheikh Jarrah, the American colony, the Muslim and Christian Quarters in the Old City, the German Colony, the Greek Colony, Katamon, Bakaa, and Abu Tor. There were Arab towns, too, in the hills around Jerusalem, Ramallah and el-Bireh, Beit Jalla and Bethlehem, and many Arab villages: el-Azariya, Silwan, Abu-Dis, et-Tur, Isawiya, Qalandaria, Bir Naballah, Nebi Samwil, Biddu, Shuafat, Lifta, Beit Hanina, Beit Iksa, Qoloniya, Sheikh Badr, Deir Yassin, where more than a hundred inhabitants would be butchered by members of the Irgun and the Stern Gang in April 1948, Suba, Ein Karim, Beit Mazmil, el-Maliha, Beit Safafa, Umm Tuba, and Sur Bahir.
     To the north, south, east, and west of Jerusalem were Arab areas, and only a few Hebrew settlements were scattered here and there around the city: Atarot and Neve Yaakov to the north, Kalya and Beit ha-Arava on the shore of the Dead Sea to the east, Ramat Rahel and Gush Etsion to the south, and Motsa, Kiriat Anavim and Maale ha-Hamisha to the west. In the war of 1948 most of these Hebrew settlements, together with the Jewish Quarter inside the walls of the Old City, fell into the hands of the Arab Legion. All the Jewish settlements that were captured by the Arabs in the War of Independence, without exception, were razed to the ground, and their Jewish inhabitants were murdered or taken captive or escaped, but the Arab armies did not allow any of the survivors to return after the war. The Arabs implemented a more complete "ethnic cleansing" in the territories they conquered than the Jews did: hundreds of thousands of Arabs fled or were driven out from the territory of the State of Israel in that war, but a hundred thousand remained, whereas there were no Jews at all in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip under Jordanian and Egyptian rule. Not one. The settlements were obliterated, and the synagogues and cemeteries were razed to the ground.
    


     In the lives of individuals and of peoples, too, the worst conflicts are often those that break out between those who are persecuted. It is mere wishful thinking to imagine that the persecuted and the oppressed will unite out of solidarity and man the barricades together against a ruthless oppressor. In reality, two children of the same abusive father will not necessarily make common cause, brought close together by their shared fate. Often each sees in the other not a partner in misfortune but in fact the image of their common oppressor.

     That may well be the case with the hundred-year-old conflict between Arabs and Jews.
     The Europe that abused, humiliated, and oppressed the Arabs by means of imperialism, colonialism, exploitation, and repression is the same Europe that oppressed and persecuted the Jews, and eventually allowed or even helped the Germans to root them out of every corner of the continent and murder almost all of them. But when the Arabs look at us, they see not a bunch of half-hysterical survivors but a new offshoot of Europe, with its colonialism, technical sophistication, and exploitation, that has cleverly returned to the Middle East—in Zionist guise this time—to exploit, evict, and oppress all over again. And when we look at them, we do not see fellow victims either; we see not brothers in adversity but pogrom-making Cossacks, bloodthirsty anti-Semites, Nazis in disguise, as though our European persecutors have reappeared here in the Land of Israel, put keffiyehs on their heads, and grown mustaches, but they are still our old murderers, interested only in slitting Jews' throats for fun.
    


     In September, October, and November 1947 nobody in Kerem Avraham knew whether to pray that the UN General Assembly would approve the UNSCOP majority report or to hope instead that the British would not abandon us to our fate, "alone and defenseless in a sea of Arabs." Many hoped that a free Hebrew state would be established at last, that the restrictions on immigration imposed by the British would be lifted, and the hundreds of thousands of Jewish survivors who had been languishing in displaced persons camps and detention camps in Cyprus since the downfall of Hitler would finally be allowed into the land that most of them considered their only home. Yet behind the back of these hopes, as it were, they feared (in whispers) that the million local Arabs, with the help of the regular armies of the countries of the Arab League, might rise up and slaughter the six hundred thousand Jews the moment the British pulled out.

     At the grocer's, in the street, at the pharmacist's, people talked openly about an imminent redemption, they talked about Moshe Shertok and Eliezer Kaplan becoming ministers in the Hebrew government to be set up by Ben-Gurion in Haifa or Tel Aviv, and they talked (in whispers) about famous Jewish generals from abroad, from the Red Army, the American Air Force, and even the Royal Navy, being invited to come and command the Hebrew armed forces to be created when the British left.
     But secretly, at home, under the blankets, after lights out, they whispered to each that who knew—perhaps the British would still cancel their evacuation, perhaps they had no intention of leaving, and the whole thing was nothing but a cunning ploy on the part of Perfidious Albion, with the aim of getting the Jews themselves to turn to the British in the face of impending annihilation and beg them not to abandon them to their fate. Then London could demand, in exchange for continued British protection, that the Jews cease all terrorist activities, decommission some of their stockpiles of illegal weapons, and hand over the leaders of the underground armies to the CID. Perhaps the British would change their minds at the last minute and not surrender us all to the mercy of the Arabs' knives. Perhaps at least here in Jerusalem they might leave a regular force behind to protect us from an Arab pogrom. Or perhaps Ben-Gurion and his friends down there in comfortable Tel Aviv, which was not surrounded by Arabs on every side, might come to their senses at the last minute and give up this adventure of a Hebrew state in favor of some modest compromise with the Arab world and the Muslim masses. Or perhaps the United Nations would send some troops from neutral countries while there was still time to take over from the British and protect the Holy City at least, if not the whole Holy Land, from the threat of a bloodbath.
    


     Azzam Pasha, the secretary general of the Arab League, warned the Jews that "if they dared to attempt to create a Zionist entity on a single inch of Arab land, the Arabs would drown them in their own blood," and the Middle East would witness horrors "compared to which the atrocities of the Mongol conquests would pale into insignificance." The Iraqi Prime Minister, Muzahim al-Bajaji, called on the Jews of Palestine to "pack their bags and leave while there was still time," because the Arabs had vowed that after their victory they would spare the lives only of those few Jews who had lived in Palestine before 1917, and even they "would be allowed to take refuge under the wings of Islam and be tolerated under its banner only on condition that they woke up once and for all from the poison of Zionism and became once more a religious community that knew its place under the protection of Islam and lived according to the laws and customs of Islam." The Jews, added a preacher at the great mosque in Jaffa, were not a people and not really a religion either: everyone knew that Allah, the compassionate, the merciful, himself detested them, and had therefore condemned them to be accursed and despised forever in all the lands of their dispersion. The Jews were the most stubborn of the stubborn: the Prophet had extended his hand to them, and they had spat at him; Issa (Jesus) had extended his hand to them, and they had murdered him; they had even regularly stoned to death the prophets of their own contemptible faith. Not in vain had all the nations of Europe resolved to be rid of them once and for all, and now Europe was planning to inflict them all upon us, but we Arabs would not permit the Europeans to dump their rubbish on us. We Arabs would frustrate with our swords this devilish plan to turn the holy land of Palestine into a midden for all the refuse of the world.

     And what about the man from Aunt Greta's clothes shop? The compassionate Arab man who rescued me from the dark pit and carried me in his arms when I was only four or five? The man with big bags under his kind eyes, and a brown, soporific smell, with the green-and-white tailor's tape-measure around his neck, both ends dangling down onto his chest, with his warm cheek and pleasant gray stubble, that sleepy, kindly man with a shy smile that flickered for a moment and died under his soft gray mustache? With his square, brown-framed reading glasses, which he wore halfway down his nose, like a kindhearted, elderly carpenter, a sort of Gepetto, that man who walked so slowly, dragging his feet in a weary sort of way, through the thicket of women's clothes, and when he pulled me out of my solitary confinement, said to me in his husky voice, a voice that I will always remember with longing: "Enough child every thing all right child everything all right." What, him too? Was he "sharpening his curved dagger, whetting the blade and preparing to slaughter us all"? Would he too sneak into Amos Street in the middle of the night with a long curved knife between his teeth, to slit my throat and my parents' throats and "drown us all in blood"?
     Balmy are the nights in Canaan
 as the breeze blows over all.
 From the Nile hyenas answer
 the Syrian jackals' call.
 Abd el-Qadr, Spears, and Khoury
 stir their poison brew of gall.
 ...
 Stormy March winds puffand bluster
 sending clouds across the sky.
 Youthful, fully armed, and bristling
 Tel Aviv tonight lets fly,
 Manara keeps a lofty vigil,
 watchful is the Huleh's eye.*

     But Jewish Jerusalem was neither youthful nor fully armed and bristling, it was a Chekhovian town, confused, terrified, swept by gossip and false rumors, at its wits' end, paralyzed by muddle and terror. On April 20, 1948, David Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary, following a conversation with David Shealtiel, the commander of the Haganah militia in Jerusalem, his impression of Jewish Jerusalem:

     The element in Jerusalem: 20% normal people, 20% privileged (university etc.), 60% weird (provincial, medieval, etc.).**

     (It is hard to say whether Ben-Gurion smiled when he wrote this entry in his diary; either way, Kerem Avraham was not included in the first category, nor in the second either.)
     At the greengrocer's, our neighbor Mrs. Lemberg said:
     "But I don't trust them anymore already. I don't trust anybody. It's just one big intrigue."
     Mrs. Rosendorff said:
     "You absolutely mustn't speak like this. I'm sorry. You must please forgive me if I say this to you: speaking like this simply wrecks the morale of the entire nation. What are you thinking? That our boys will agree to go and fight for you, risk their young lives, if you are saying that it is all an intrigue?"
     *Natan Alterman, "Nights in Canaan," from The Seventh Column, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv, 1950), p. 364.

     **David Ben-Gurion, Diary of the War, 1948, ed. G. Rivlin and Dr. E. Oren, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv, 1983), p. 359.

     The greengrocer, Mr. Babaiof, said:
     "I don't envy those Arabs. There are some Jews in America, they will soon send us here some atom bombs."
     My mother said:
     "These onions don't look too good. Neither do the cucumbers."
     And Mrs. Lemberg (who always smelled faintly of hard-boiled eggs, perspiration, and stale soap) said:
     "It's all just one big intrigue, I'm telling you! They're making theater! Comedy! Ben-Gurion has already agreed in secret to sell all of Jerusalem to the Mufti and the Arab gangs and King Abdullah, and for this the English and the Arabs have agreed maybe to leave him his kibbutzim and the Nahalal and Tel Aviv. And that's all they care about! And what will happen to us, if they will murder us or burn us all, they don't care about that at all. Jerusalem, the best thing they should all go faifen, so afterward in the state they want to make for themselves they should be left with a few less revisionists, a few less ultra-Orthodox, a few less intelligentsia."
     The other women hurriedly silenced her: What's the matter with you! Mrs. Lemberg! Sha! Bist du meshigge? Es shteit da a kind! A farsh-tandiker kind! (Hush! Are you crazy? There is a child here! A child who understands!)
     The farshtandiker kind, the child strategist, recited what he had heard from his father or his grandfather:
     "When the British go home, the Haganah, the Irgun, and the Stern Gang will certainly unite and defeat the enemy."
     Meanwhile, the unseen bird in the pomegranate tree held fast to its own line: it did not budge. "Ti-da-di-da-di." And over and over again: "Ti-da-di-da-di." And after a pause for reflection: "Ti-da-di-da-di!!"

 43


     IN SEPTEMBER and October 1947 the papers were full of guesses, analyses, assessments, and suppositions. Would there be a vote on partition at the General Assembly? Would the Arabs succeed in getting the recommendations changed or the vote canceled? And if it did go to the vote, where would we get a two-thirds majority?

     Every evening Father would sit between Mother and me at the kitchen table, and after drying the oilcloth he would spread out some cards and start calculating, in pencil, in the sickly yellow light, the chances of winning the vote. Evening by evening his spirits fell. All his calculations indicated a certain and crushing defeat.
     "All twelve Arab and Muslim states will naturally vote against us. And the Catholic Church is definitely putting pressure on the Catholic countries to vote against, because a Jewish state contradicts the fundamental belief of the Church, and there's no one like the Vatican when it comes to pulling strings behind the scenes. So we'll probably lose all twenty votes of the Latin American countries. And Stalin will undoubtedly instruct all his satellites in the Communist bloc to vote in accordance with his rigid anti-Zionist approach, so that makes another twelve votes against us. Not to mention England, which is always stirring up feeling against us everywhere and especially in her dominions, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, and they'll all be roped in to thwart any chance of a Hebrew state. What about France, and the countries that follow her? France will never dare to risk incurring the anger of the millions of Muslims in Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. Greece has close trade links with the whole Arab world, and there are big Greek communities in all the Arab countries. And what about America itself? Is America's support for the partition plan final? What happens if the intrigues of the giant oil companies and our enemies in the State Department tip the balance and outweigh President Truman's conscience?"
     Over and over again Father calculated the balance of votes in the Assembly. Evening after evening he tried to soften the blow, to devise some coalition of countries that usually followed the United States, countries that might have reasons of their own to oppose the Arabs, and small, respectable countries like Denmark or Holland, countries that had witnessed the horrors of the genocide of the Jewish people and might now gird their loins and act according to the dictates of their conscience rather than considerations of self-interest and oil.
    


     Was the Silwani family, in their villa in Sheikh Jarrah (a mere forty minutes' walk from here), also sitting around a piece of paper at their kitchen table this very minute, making the same calculations in reverse? Were they worrying, just like us, which way Greece would vote, and chewing the tip of a pencil over the final decision of the Scandinavian countries? Did they also have their optimists and pessimists, their cynics and their prophets of doom? Were they also trembling every night, imagining that we were scheming, stirring things up, cunningly pulling strings? Were they also all asking what would happen here, what would come to pass? Were they just as frightened of us as we were of them?

     And how about Aisha, and her parents in Talbieh? Was her whole family sitting in a room full of men with mustaches and jeweled women with angry faces and eyebrows that met above their noses, gathered in a circle around bowls of sugared orange peel, whispering among themselves and planning to "drown us in blood"? Did Aisha still sometimes play tunes she had learned from her Jewish piano teacher? Or was she forbidden to?
     Or perhaps they were standing in a silent circle around their little boy's bed? Awwad. His leg had been amputated. Because of me. Or he was dying from blood poisoning. Because of me. His curious, innocent puppy-dog eyes were closed. Pressed tight with suffering. His face drawn and pale as ice. His forehead racked with pain. His pretty curls lying on the white pillow. Jest a moment rest a moment. Groaning and shaking with pain. Or quietly crying in a high-pitched baby voice. And his sister sitting by his bedside hating me because it was my fault, everything was my fault, it was my fault she was beaten so cruelly, so thoroughly, over and over again, on her back, her head, her frail shoulders, not the way a girl who has done something wrong is sometimes beaten, but like a stubborn horse. It was my fault.
    


     Grandpa Alexander and Grandma Shlomit used to come around sometimes on those September evenings in 1947 to sit with us and take part in Father's vote-counting stock exchange. Also Hannah and Hayim Toren, or the Rudnickis, Auntie Mala and Uncle Staszek, or the Abramskis, or our neighbors the Rosendorffs and Tosia and Gustav Krochmal. Mr. Krochmal had a tiny lock-up shop down Geula Street where he sat all day wearing a leather apron and horn-rimmed glasses, repairing dolls:

     Reliable healer from Danzig, toy doctor

     Once, when I was about five, Uncle Gustav mended my red-haired ballerina doll, Tsilly, for me for nothing, in his miniature workshop. Her freckled nose had broken off. Skillfully, with a special glue, Mr. Krochmal repaired her so well that you could hardly see the scar.

     Mr. Krochmal believed in dialogue with our Arab neighbors. In his view, the residents of Kerem Avraham ought to get together a small, select deputation and go and hold talks with the mukhtars, sheikhs, and other dignitaries of the nearest Arab villages. After all, we had always enjoyed good neighborly relations, and even if the rest of the country was going out of its mind, there was no logical reason why here, in northwest Jerusalem, where there had never been any conflict or hostility between the two sides—
     If he could only speak a little Arabic or English, he himself, Gustav Krochmal, who had applied his healing skills for many years to Arab and Jewish dolls alike, without distinction, would pick up his walking stick, cross the empty field that divided us from them, knock on their doors, and explain to them, in simple terms, from house to house—
     Sergeant Wilk, Uncle Dudek, a handsome man who looked like an English colonel in a film and actually did serve the British at that time as a policeman, came around one evening and stayed for a while, bringing a box of langues de chat from a special chocolate factory. He drank a cup of coffee and chicory mixture, ate a couple of biscuits, and dazzled me with his smart black uniform with its row of silvery buttons, the leather belt that ran diagonally across his chest, and his black pistol that reposed in a gleaming holster on his hip, like a sleeping lion (only the butt protruded, giving me the shivers every time I looked at it). Uncle Dudek stayed a quarter of an hour or so, and it was only after my parents and their guests had begged him that he finally let out one or two veiled hints about what he had gathered from the veiled hints of some high-ranking British police officers who knew what they were talking about:
     "It's a pity about all your calculations and guesses. There's not going to be any partition. There aren't going to be two states, seeing as what the whole of the Negev is going to remain in British hands so they can protect their bases in Suez, and the British will also hang on to Haifa, the town as well as the port, and the main airfields at Lydda, Ekron, and Ramat David, and their clump of army camps at Sarafand. All the rest, including Jerusalem, the Arabs will get, seeing as what America wants them to agree in return to let the Jews have a kind of pocket between Tel Aviv and Hadera. The Jews will be permitted to establish an autonomous canton in this pocket, a sort of Jewish Vatican City, and we'll gradually be allowed to bring into this pocket up to a hundred thousand or at most a hundred and fifty thousand survivors from the DP camps. If necessary, this Jewish pocket will be defended by a few thousand US marines from the Sixth Fleet, from their giant aircraft carriers, seeing as that they don't believe the Jews will be able to defend themselves under these conditions."
     "But that's a ghetto!" Mr. Abramski shouted in a terrible voice. "A prison! Solitary confinement!"
     Gustav Krochmal, for his part, smiled and suggested pleasantly:
     "It would be much better if the Americans took this Lilliput they want to give us, and simply gave us their two aircraft carriers instead: we'd be more comfortable there, and safer too. And a bit less crowded."
     Mala Rudnicki begged the policeman, implored him, as though she were pleading with him for our lives:
     "What about Galilee? Galilee, dear Dudek? And the Valleys? Won't we even get the Valleys? Why can't they leave us that at least? Why must they take the poor man's last ewe-lamb?"
     Father remarked sadly:
     "There's no such thing as the poor man's last ewe-lamb, Mala: the poor man had only one ewe-lamb, and they came and took that away from him."
     After a short silence Grandpa Alexander exploded furiously, going red in the face, puffing up as if he was about to boil over:
     "He was quite right, that villain from the mosque in Jaffa! He was quite right! We really are just dung! Nu, what: this is the end! Vsyo! Khvatit! That's enough! All the anti-Semites in the world are very right. Khmelnicki was right. Petliura was right. Hitler was right also: nu, what. There really is a curse on us! G-d really does hate us! As for me," Grandpa groaned, flaming red, shooting flecks of saliva in every direction, thumping on the table till he made the teaspoons rattle in the glasses, "nu, what, ty skazal, the same way as G-d hates us so I hate him back! I hate G-d! Let him die already! The anti-Semite from Berlin is burnt, but up there is sitting another Hitler! Much worse! Nu, what! He's sitting there laughing at us, the rascal!"
     Grandma Shlomit took hold of his arm and commanded:
     "Zisya! that's enough! Shto ty govorish! Genug! Iber genug!"
     They somehow calmed him down. They poured him a little brandy and put some biscuits in front of him.
     But Uncle Dudek, Sergeant Wilk, apparently considered that words such as those that Grandpa had roared so desperately should not be uttered in the presence of the police, so he stood up, donned his splendid policeman's peaked cap, adjusted his holster on his left hip, and from the doorway offered us a chance of a reprieve, a ray of light, as though taking pity on us and condescending to respond positively to our appeal, at least up to a point:
     "But there's another officer, an Irishman, a real character, who keeps repeating the same thing, that the Jews have more brains than the rest of the world put together, and they always end up landing on their feet. That's what he says. The question is, whose feet exactly do they land on? Good night, all. I must just ask you not to repeat anything I've told you, seeing as what it's inside information." (All his life, even as an old man, after living in Jerusalem for sixty years, Uncle Dudek always insisted on saying "seeing as what," and three generations of devoted sticklers for the language failed to teach him otherwise. Even his years of service as a senior police officer and eventually as chief of the Jerusalem police, and later as deputy director-general of the Ministry of Tourism, did not help. He always stayed just as he was—"seeing as what I'm just a stubborn Jew!").

 44


     FATHER EXPLAINED over supper one evening that at the General Assembly of the United Nations, which would meet on November 29, at Lake Success, near New York, a majority of at least two-thirds would be required if the UNSCOP report recommending the creation of two states on the territory of the British Mandate, one Jewish and one Arab, was to be adopted. The Muslim bloc, together with Britain, would do everything in their power to prevent such a majority. They wanted the whole territory to become an Arab state under British protection, just as some other Arab countries, including Egypt, Trans-Jordan, and Iraq, were de facto under British protection. On the other side, President Truman was working, contrary to his own State Department, for the partition proposal to be accepted.

     Stalin's Soviet Union had surprisingly joined with the United States and also supported the establishment of a Jewish state side by side with an Arab one: he may have foreseen that a vote in favor of partition would lead to many years of bloody conflict in the region, which would enable the USSR to acquire a foothold in the area of British influence in the Middle East, close to the oil fields and the Suez Canal. Contorted calculations on the part of the superpowers coincided with one another, and apparently intersected with religious ambitions: the Vatican hoped to gain decisive influence in Jerusalem, which under the partition plan was to be under international control, i.e., neither Muslim nor Jewish. Considerations of conscience and sympathy intertwined with selfish, cynical ones: several European governments were seeking a way of somehow compensating the Jewish people for losing a third of its numbers at the hands of the German murderers and for generations of persecution. The same governments, however, were not averse to channeling the tide of hundreds of thousands of indigent displaced Eastern European Jews who had been languishing in camps since the defeat of Germany as far away as possible from their own territories and indeed from Europe.
     Right up to the moment of the actual vote it was hard to foresee the outcome. Pressures and temptations, threats and intrigues and even bribes managed to sway the crucial votes of three or four little republics in Latin America and the Far East back and forth. The government of Chile, which had been in favor of partition, yielded to Arab pressure and instructed its representative at the UN to vote against. Haiti announced its intention of voting against. The Greek delegation was of a mind to abstain, but also decided at the last minute to support the Arab position. The Philippine representative refused to commit himself. Paraguay hesitated; its delegate to the UN, Dr. César Acosta, complained that he had not received clear instructions from his government. In Siam there had been a coup d'état, and the new government had recalled its delegation and not yet dispatched a new one. Liberia promised to support the proposal. Haiti changed its mind, under American pressure, and decided to vote in favor.* Meanwhile, in Amos Street, in Mr. Auster's grocery shop or at Mr. Caleko's, the news agent and stationer, they told of a good-looking Arab diplomat who had exerted his charms on the female representative of a small state and managed to get her to vote against the partition plan, even though her government had promised the Jews their support. "But at once," Mr. Kolodny, the proprietor of Kolodny's Printing Press, chuckled, "they sent a clever Jew to spill the beans to the infatuated diplomat's husband, and a clever Jewess to spill the beans to the diplomatic Don Juan's wife, and in case that doesn't do the trick, they've also arranged..." (here the conversation switched to Yiddish, so I wouldn't understand).
     *See Jorge García Granados, The Birth of Israel: The Drama As I Saw It (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948).

     On Saturday morning, they said, the General Assembly would convene at a place called Lake Success and there they would determine our fate. "Who is for life and who for destruction," said Mr. Abramski. And Mrs. Tosia Krochmal fetched the extension cord from the sewing machine in her husband's dolls' hospital to enable the Lembergs to bring their heavy black radio receiver outside and set it up on the table on the balcony. (It was the only radio in Amos Street, if not in the whole of Kerem Avraham.) They would put it on at full volume, and we would all assemble in the Lembergs' apartment, in the yard, in the street, on the balcony of the apartment upstairs and on the balcony opposite, and so the whole street would be able to hear the live broadcast, and learn the verdict and what the future held for us ("if indeed there is a future after this Saturday").
     "The name Lake Success," Father remarked, "is the opposite of the Sea of Tears that symbolizes the fate of our people in Bialik. Your Highness," he continued, "will be allowed to take part on this occasion, as befits his new role as devout newspaper reader and as our political and military commentator."
     Mother said:
     "Yes, but with a sweater on: it's chilly out."
     But on Saturday morning it turned out that the fateful meeting due to take place that afternoon at Lake Success would start here only in the evening, because of the time difference between New York and Jerusalem, or perhaps because Jerusalem was such an out-of-the-way place, so far from the great world, over the hills and far away, that everything that happened out there only reached us faintly, and always after a delay. The vote, they worked out, would be taken when it was very late in Jerusalem, close to midnight, an hour when this child ought to be long since tucked in bed, because we have to get up for school in the morning.
     Some rapid sentences were exchanged between Mother and Father, a short exchange in shchphzhenic Polish and yanikhatchuic Russian, at the end of which Mother said:
     "It might be best after all if you go to bed as usual tonight, but we'll sit outside by the fence and listen to the broadcast from the Lembergs' balcony, and if the result is positive, we'll wake you up even if it's midnight and tell you. We promise."
    


     After midnight, toward the end of the vote, I woke up. My bed was underneath the window that looked out on the street, so all I had to do was kneel and peer through the slats of the shutters. I shivered.

     Like a frightening dream, crowds of shadows stood massed together silently by the yellow light of the street lamp, in our yard, in the neighboring yards, on balconies, in the roadway, like a vast assembly of ghosts. Hundreds of people not uttering a sound, neighbors, acquaintances, and strangers, some in their nightclothes and others in jacket and tie, occasional men in hats or caps, some women bareheaded, others in dressing gowns with scarves around their heads, some of them carrying sleepy children on their shoulders, and on the edge of the crowd I noticed here and there an elderly woman sitting on a stool or a very old man who had been brought out into the street with his chair.
     The whole crowd seemed to have been turned to stone in that frightening night silence, as if they were not real people but hundreds of dark silhouettes painted onto the canvas of the flickering darkness. As though they had died on their feet. Not a word was heard, not a cough or a footstep. No mosquito hummed. Only the deep, rough voice of the American presenter blaring from the radio, which was set at full volume and made the night air tremble, or it may have been the voice of the president of the Assembly, the Brazilian Oswaldo Aranha. One after another he read out the names of the last countries on the list, in English alphabetical order, followed immediately by the reply of their representative. United Kingdom: abstains. Union of Soviet Socialist Republics: yes. United States: yes. Uruguay: yes. Venezuela: yes. Yemen: no. Yugoslavia: abstains.
     At that the voice suddenly stopped, and an otherworldly silence descended and froze the scene, a terrified, panic-stricken silence, a silence of hundreds of people holding their breath, such as I have never heard in my life either before or after that night.
     Then the thick, slightly hoarse voice came back, shaking the air as it summed up with a rough dryness brimming with excitement: Thirty-three for. Thirteen against. Ten abstentions and one country absent from the vote. The resolution is approved.
     His voice was swallowed up in a roar that burst from the radio, overflowing from the galleries in the hall at Lake Success, and after a couple more seconds of shock and disbelief, of lips parted as though in thirst and eyes wide open, our faraway street on the edge of Kerem Avraham in northern Jerusalem also roared all at once in a first terrifying shout that tore through the darkness and the buildings and trees, piercing itself, not a shout of joy, nothing like the shouts of spectators in sports grounds or excited rioting crowds, perhaps more like a scream of horror and bewilderment, a cataclysmic shout, a shout that could shift rocks, that could freeze your blood, as though all the dead who had ever died here and all those still to die had received a brief window to shout, and the next moment the scream of horror was replaced by roars of joy and a medley of hoarse cries and "The Jewish People Lives" and somebody trying to sing Hatikvah and women shrieking and clapping and "Here in the Land Our Fathers Loved," and the whole crowd started to revolve slowly around itself as though it were being stirred in a huge cement mixer, and there were no more restraints, and I jumped into my trousers but didn't bother with a shirt or sweater and shot out our door, and some neighbor or stranger picked me up so I wouldn't be trampled underfoot, and I was passed from hand to hand until I landed on my father's shoulders near our front gate. My father and mother were standing there hugging one another like two children lost in the woods, as I had never seen them before or since, and for a moment I was between them inside their hug and a moment later I was back on Father's shoulders and my very cultured, polite father was standing there shouting at the top of his voice, not words or wordplay or Zionist slogans, not even cries of joy, but one long naked shout like before words were invented.
     Others were singing now, everyone was singing, but my father, who couldn't sing and didn't know the words of the popular songs, did not stop but went on with his long shout to the end of his lungs aaaahhh, and when he ran out of breath, he inhaled like a drowning man and went on shouting, this man who wanted to be a famous professor and deserved to become one, but now he was all just aaahhhh. And I was surprised to see my mother's hand stroking his wet head and the back of his neck, and then I felt her hand on my head and my back too because I might unawares have been helping my father shout, and my mother's hand stroked the two of us over and over again, perhaps to soothe us or perhaps not, perhaps out of the depths she was also trying to share with him and me in our shout and with the whole street, the whole neighborhood, the whole city, and the whole country, my sad mother was trying to participate this time—no, definitely not the whole city but only the Jewish areas, because Sheikh Jarrah, Katamon, Bakaa, and Talbieh must have heard us that night wrapped in a silence that might have resembled the terrified silence that lay upon the Jewish neighborhoods before the result of the vote was announced. In the Silwanis' house in Sheikh Jarrah and in Aisha's home in Talbieh and the home of the man in the clothes shop, the beloved man Gepetto with the bags under his compassionate eyes, there were no celebrations tonight. They must have heard the sounds of rejoicing from the Jewish streets, they may have stood at their windows to watch the few joyful fireworks that injured the dark sky, pursing their lips in silence. Even the parrots were silent. And the fountain in the pool in the garden. Even though neither Katamon, Talbieh, nor Bakaa knew or could know yet that in another five months they would fall empty, intact, into the hands of the Jews and that new people would come and live in those vaulted houses of pink stone and those villas with their many cornices and arches.
    


     Then there was dancing and weeping on Amos Street, in the whole of Kerem Avraham and in all the Jewish neighborhoods; flags appeared, and slogans written on strips of cloth, car horns blared, and "Raise the Banner High to Zion" and "Here in the Land Our Fathers Loved," sho-far blasts sounded from all the synagogues, and Torah scrolls were taken out of the holy arks and were caught up in the dancing, and "G-d Will Rebuild Galilee" and "Come and Behold How Great Is This Day," and later, in the small hours of the morning, Mr. Auster suddenly opened his shop, and all the kiosks in Zephaniah Street and Geula Street and Chancellor Street and Jaffa Road and King George opened, and the bars opened up all over the city and handed out soft drinks and snacks and even alcoholic drinks until the first light of dawn, bottles of fruit drink, beer, and wine passed from hand to hand and from mouth to mouth, strangers hugged each other in the streets and kissed each other with tears, and startled English policemen were also dragged into the circles of dancers and softened up with cans of beer and sweet liqueurs, and frenzied revelers climbed up on British armored cars and waved the flag of the state that had not been established yet, but tonight, over there in Lake Success, it had been decided that it had the right to be established. And it would be established 167 days and nights later, on Friday, May 14, 1948, but one in every hundred men, women, old folk, children, and babies in those crowds of Jews who were dancing, reveling, drinking, and weeping for joy, fully one percent of the excited people who spilled out onto the streets that night, would die in the war that the Arabs started within seven hours of the General Assembly's decision at Lake Success—to be helped, when the British left, by the regular armed forces of the Arab League, columns of infantry, armor, artillery, fighter planes, and bombers, from the south, the east, and the north, the regular armies of five Arab states invading with the intention of putting an end to the new state within one or two days of its proclamation.

     But my father said to me as we wandered there, on the night of November 29,1947, me riding on his shoulders, among the rings of dancers and merrymakers, not as though he was asking me but as though he knew and was hammering in what he knew with nails: Just you look, my boy, take a very good look, son, take it all in, because you won't forget this night to your dying day and you'll tell your children, your grandchildren, and your great-grandchildren about this night when we're long gone.
    


     And very late, at a time when this child had never been allowed not to be fast asleep in bed, maybe at three or four o'clock, I crawled under my blanket in the dark fully dressed. And after a while Father's hand lifted my blanket in the dark, not to be angry with me because I'd got into bed with my clothes on but to get in and lie down next to me, and he was in his clothes too, which were drenched in sweat from the crush of the crowds, just like mine (and we had an iron rule: you must never, for any reason, get between the sheets in your outdoor clothes). My father lay beside me for a few minutes and said nothing, although normally he detested silence and hurried to banish it. But this time he did not touch the silence that was there between us but shared it, with just his hand lightly stroking my head. As though in this darkness my father had turned into my mother.

     Then he told me in a whisper, without once calling me Your Highness or Your Honor, what some hooligans did to him and his brother David in Odessa and what some Gentile boys did to him at his Polish school in Vilna, and the girls joined in too, and the next day, when his father, Grandpa Alexander, came to the school to register a complaint, the bullies refused to return the torn trousers but attacked his father, Grandpa, in front of his eyes, forced him down onto the paving stones in the middle of the playground and removed his trousers too, and the girls laughed and made dirty jokes, saying that the Jews were all so-and-sos, while the teachers watched and said nothing, or maybe they were laughing too.
     And still in a voice of darkness with his hand still losing its way in my hair (because he was not used to stroking me), my father told me under my blanket in the early hours of November 30,1947, "Bullies may well bother you in the street or at school someday. They may do it precisely because you are a bit like me. But from now on, from the moment we have our own state, you will never be bullied just because you are a Jew and because Jews are so-and-sos. Not that. Never again. From tonight that's finished here. Forever."
     I reached out sleepily to touch his face, just below his high forehead, and all of a sudden instead of his glasses my fingers met tears. Never in my life, before or after that night, not even when my mother died, did I see my father cry. And in fact I didn't see him cry that night either: it was too dark. Only my left hand saw.
    


     A few hours later, at seven o'clock, while we and probably all our neighbors were asleep, shots were fired in Sheikh Jarrah at a Jewish ambulance that was on its way from the city center to Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus. All over the country Arabs attacked Jewish buses on the highways, killed and wounded passengers, and fired with light arms and machine guns into outlying suburbs and isolated settlements. The Arab Higher Committee headed by Jamal Husseini declared a general strike and sent the crowds into the streets and mosques, where religious leaders called for a jihad against the Jews. A couple of days later, hundreds of armed Arabs came out of the Old City, singing bloodthirsty songs, roaring verses from the Qur'an, howling "idbah al-Yahud" (butcher the Jews), and firing volleys in the air. The English police accompanied them, and British armored cars, it was reported, led the crowd that burst into the Jewish shopping center at the eastern end of Mamilla Road and looted and set fire to the whole area. Forty shops were burned down. British soldiers and policemen formed barriers across Princess Mary Street and prevented the defense forces of the Haganah from coming to the help of the Jews who were caught in the shopping center, and even confiscated their arms and arrested sixteen of them. The following day, in retaliation, the paramilitary Irgun burned down the Rex Cinema, which was apparently under Arab ownership.

     In the first week of the troubles some twenty Jews were killed. By the end of the second week about two hundred Jews and Arabs had died throughout the country. From the beginning of December 1947 until March 1948 the initiative was in the hands of the Arab forces; the Jews in Jerusalem and elsewhere had to content themselves with static defense, because the British thwarted the Haganah's attempts to launch counterattacks, arrested its men, and confiscated their weapons. Local semiregular Arab forces, together with hundreds of armed volunteers from the neighboring Arab countries and some two hundred British soldiers who had defected to the Arabs and fought beside them, blocked the highways and reduced the Jewish presence to a fragmented mosaic of beleaguered settlements and blocks of settlements that could be kept supplied with food, fuel, and ammunition only by means of convoys.
     While the British still continued to govern and used their power mainly to help the Arabs in their war and to tie the Jews' hands, Jewish Jerusalem was gradually cut off from the rest of the country. The only road linking it with Tel Aviv was blocked by Arab forces, and convoys carrying food and supplies were able to make their way up from the coast only at irregular intervals and at the cost of heavy losses. By the end of December 1947, the Jewish parts of Jerusalem were de facto under siege. Regular Iraqi forces, whom the British administration had allowed to take control of the waterworks at Rosh ha-Ayin, blew up the pumping installations and Jewish Jerusalem was left without water, apart from wells and reservoirs. Isolated Jewish areas like the Jewish Quarter within the walls of the Old City, Yemin Moshe, Mekor Hayim, and Ramat Rahel underwent a siege within a siege as they were cut off from the other Jewish parts of the city. An "emergency committee" set up by the Jewish Agency supervised the rationing of food and the tankers that traveled the streets between bouts of shelling distributing a bucket of water per person every two or three days. Bread, vegetables, sugar, milk, eggs, and other foodstuffs were strictly rationed and were distributed to families under a system of food coupons, until supplies ran out and instead we received occasional meager rations of powdered milk, dry rusks, and strange-smelling egg powder. Drugs and medical supplies had almost run out. The wounded were sometimes operated on without anesthetic. The electricity supply collapsed, and since it was virtually impossible to obtain paraffin, we lived for several months in the dark, or by candlelight.
    


     Our cramped basement-like apartment was turned into a kind of bomb shelter for the residents of the apartments above us, being safer from shelling and shooting. All the windowpanes were taken out, and we barricaded the windows with sandbags. We lived in uninterrupted cavelike darkness, night and day, from March 1948 until the following August or September. In this thick darkness, breathing fetid air that had no escape, we were joined at intervals by some twenty or twenty-five persons, neighbors, strangers, acquaintances, refugees from front-line neighborhoods, who slept on mattresses and mats. They included two very elderly women who sat all day on the floor in the corridor staring into space, a half-crazed old man who called himself the Prophet Jeremiah and constantly lamented the destruction of Jerusalem and foretold for all of us Arab gas chambers near Ramallah "where they've already started gassing 2,100 Jews per day," as well as Grandpa Alexander and Grandma Shlomit, and Grandpa Alexander's widowed elder brother (Aunt Tsipora had died in 1946), Uncle Joseph himself—Professor Klausner—with his sister-in-law Haya Elitsedek: the two of them had managed, virtually at the last minute, to escape from Talpiot, which was cut off and encircled, and taken refuge with us. Now the two lay fully dressed, with their shoes on, alternately dozing and waking—because on account of the darkness it was hard to tell night from day—on the floor in our tiny kitchen, which was considered the least noisy place in the apartment. (Mr. Agnon, too, we were told, had left Talpiot with his wife and was staying with friends in Rehavia.)

     Uncle Joseph was constantly lamenting, in his reedy, rather tearful voice, the fate of his library and his precious manuscripts, which he had had to leave behind in Talpiot and who knew if he would ever see them again. As for Haya Elitsedek, her only son, Ariel, had joined up and was fighting to defend Talpiot, and for a long time we did not know if he was alive or killed, wounded or taken prisoner.*
     The Miudovniks, whose son Grisha was serving somewhere with the Palmach, had fled from their home on the front line in Beit Yisrael, and they too had landed up in our apartment, along with various other families who crowded together in the little room that had been my room before the war. I regarded Mr. Miudovnik with awe, because it emerged that he was the man who had written the greenish book that we all used at Tachkemoni School: Arithmetic for Third-Graders by Matityahu Miudovnik.
     Mr. Miudovnik went out one morning and did not return by evening. He did not come back the next day either. So his wife went to the municipal mortuary, had a good look around, and came back happy and reassured because her husband was not among the dead.
     When Mr. Miudovnik did not return the next day either, my father began to joke, as he usually did when he wanted to banish silence or dispel gloom. Our dear Matya, he declared, has obviously found himself some fighting beauty in a khaki skirt and now he's her comrade in arms (this was his feeble attempt at a pun).
     But after a quarter of an hour of this labored jollity Father suddenly turned serious and went off to the morgue himself, where, thanks to a pair of his own socks that he had lent to Matityahu Miudovnik, he managed to identify the body that had been smashed by an artillery shell; Mrs. Miudovnik had failed to recognize it because the face was missing.
     *My father's cousin Ariel Elitsedek wrote about his experiences in the War of Liberation in his book The Thirsty Sword (Jerusalem: Ahiasaf, 1950).

    


     During the months of the siege, my mother, my father, and I slept on a mattress at the end of the corridor, and all night long processions of people clambered over us on their way to the toilet, which stank to high heaven because there was no water to flush it and because the window was blocked with sandbags. Every few minutes, when a shell landed, the whole hill shook, and the stone-built houses shuddered too. I was sometimes woken by the sound of bloodcurdling cries whenever one of the other sleepers in the apartment had a nightmare.

     On February 1 a car bomb exploded outside the building of the English-language Jewish newspaper, the Palestine Post. The building was completely destroyed and suspicion fell on British policemen who had deserted to the Arab cause. On February 10 the defenders of Yemin Moshe managed to repel a heavy attack by semiregular Arab troops. On Sunday, February 22, at ten past six in the morning, an organization calling itself the "British Fascist Army" blew up three trucks loaded with dynamite in Ben Yehuda Street, in the heart of Jewish Jerusalem. Six-story buildings were reduced to rubble and a large part of the street was left in ruins. Fifty-two Jewish residents were killed in their homes, and some hundred and fifty were injured.
     That day my shortsighted father went to the National Guard HQ that had been set up in a narrow lane off Zephaniah Street and offered to enlist. He had to admit that his previous military experience was limited to composing some illegal posters in English for the Irgun ("Shame on Perfidious Albion!," "Down with Nazi British repression!," and such).
     On March 11 the American consul general's familiar car, with the consul general's Arab driver at the wheel, drove into the courtyard of the Jewish Agency building, the site of the offices of the Jewish organizations in Jerusalem and the country as a whole. Part of the building was destroyed and dozens of people were killed or injured. In the third week of March attempts to bring convoys of food and supplies up from the coast failed: the siege grew worse, and the city was on the brink of starvation, short of water, and at risk of epidemic.
    


     The schools in our area had been closed since mid-December 1947.We children from the third and fourth grades at Tachkemoni and the House of Education were assembled one morning in an empty apartment in Malachi Street. A suntanned youth casually dressed in khaki and smoking a cigarette, who was introduced to us only by his code name, Garibaldi, addressed us in very serious tones for some twenty minutes, with a kind of wry matter-of-factness that we had previously encountered only in grown-ups. Garibaldi gave us the task of searching all the yards and storage sheds for empty sacks ("We'll fill them with sand") and bottles ("Someone knows how to fill them with a cocktail that the enemy will find very tasty").

     We were also taught to collect wild mallow, which we all called by its Arabic name, khubeizeh, on plots of wasteland or in neglected backyards. This khubeizeh helped relieve the horrors of starvation somewhat. Mothers boiled or fried it and then used it to make rissoles or puree, which was green like spinach but tasted much worse. We also had a lookout round: every hour during daylight two of us kids had to keep watch from a suitable rooftop in Obadiah Street on the British army camp in Schneller Barracks, and every now and then one of us ran to the operations room in the apartment on Malachi Street to tell Garibaldi or one of his adjutants what the Tommies were up to and whether there were any signs of preparations for departure.
     The bigger boys, from the fourth and fifth grades, were taught by Garibaldi to carry messages between the various Haganah posts at the end of Zephaniah Street and around the Bukharian Quarter. My mother begged me to "show real maturity and give up these childish games," but I couldn't do as she wanted. I was particularly good at collecting bottles: in a single week I managed to collect 146 empty bottles and take them in boxes and sacks to HQ. Garibaldi himself gave me a slap on the back and shot me a sidelong glance. I record here exactly the words he spoke to me as he scratched the hair on his chest through his open shirt: "Very nice. We may hear more of you one day." Word for word. Fifty-three years have gone by, and I have not forgotten to this day.

 45


     MANY YEARS later I discovered that a woman I knew as a child, Mrs. Abramski, Zerta, the wife of Yakov-David Abramski (both of them were frequent visitors to our home), kept a diary during those days. I vaguely remember that my mother sometimes sat on the floor in a corner of the corridor during bombardments, with an exercise book supported on a closed book on her knees, writing, ignoring the exploding shells and mortars and the bursts of machine-gun fire, deaf to the noise of a score of inmates who bickered all day long in our dark, smelly submarine, writing in her exercise book, indifferent to the Prophet Jeremiah's doom-laden mutterings and Uncle Joseph's lamentations, and the penetrating, babylike crying of an old woman whose mute daughter changed her wet diapers in front of all of us. I will never know what my mother was writing: no exercise book of hers has reached me. Maybe she burned them all before she killed herself. I do not have a single complete page in her handwriting.

     In Zerta Abramski's diary I find written, among other things:
     February 24,1948

     I am weary ... so weary ... the storeroom full of belongings of the killed and injured ... Hardly anyone comes to claim these objects: there is no one to claim them, their owners are killed or lying wounded in the hospital. A man came in who had been wounded in the head and arm, but was able to walk. His wife had been killed. He found her clothes, her pictures, and some linen ... And these things that were bought with such love and joie de vivre are piled up in this basement ... And a young man, G., came in search of his belongings. He had lost his father and mother, his two brothers, and his sister in the Ben Yehuda Street car bombing. He himself escaped only because he did not sleep at home that night, he was on duty ... Incidentally: he was not interested in objects so much as in photographs. Among the hundreds of photographs ... that survived he was trying to find a few family photographs.

     April 14, 1948

     This morning they announced ... that for a coupon from the paraffin book (the head of the household's book) you can receive a quarter of a chicken per family at certain designated butchers. Some ofmy neighbors asked me to collect their ration, ifI was in line anyway, as they had to work and could not wait in line. Yoni, my son, offered to keep me a place in line before he went to school, but I told him I would do it myself. I sent Yair off to kindergarten and went to "Geula," where the butcher was. I arrived at a quarter to eight and found a line of about six hundred people.

     They said some people had arrived at three or four in the morning, because the rumor ofthe distribution ofchicken started to spread before it was dark. I had no desire to stand in line, but I had promised my neighbors to bring them their ration, and I didn't like to go home without it. I decided to "stand" like the rest.
     While I was in line, it turned out that the "rumor" that had been circulating since yesterday had been confirmed: yes, a hundred Jews were burned alive yesterday near Sheikh Jarrah; they were in a convoy going up to Hadassah and the university. A hundred people. They included distinguished scientists and scholars, doctors and nurses, workers and students, clerks and patients.
     It is hard to believe it. There are so many Jews in Jerusalem, and they were unable to save these hundred people who were facing death only a kilometer away ... They said the English would not let them. What is the point of a quarter of a chicken, if horrors like this happen in front of your very eyes? Yet people stood in line patiently. And all the time all you hear is: "The children are getting thin ... they haven't tasted meat for months ... there is no milk, there are no vegetables..."It is hard to stand in a line for six hours, yet it is worth it: there will be soup for the children ... What happened in Sheikh Jar-rah is terrible, but who knows what is awaiting us all here in Jerusalem ... The dead are dead, and the living go on living ... The line advances slowly. The "lucky ones" go home hugging their quarter of a chicken per family ... Eventually a funeral went past ... At two o'clock in the afternoon I received my ration and my neighbors' and I went home.*
     ***

     *Zerta Abramski, "Excerpts from the Diary of a Woman from the Siege of Jerusalem, 1948," in The Correspondence of Yakov-David Abramski, edited and annotated by Shula Abramski (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim, 5751/1991), pp. 288-89.

     My father was supposed to go up to Mount Scopus in that very convoy, on April 13,1948, in which seventy-seven doctors and nurses, professors and students were murdered and burned alive. He had been instructed by the National Guard, or perhaps by his superiors in the National Library, to go and lock up certain sections of the basement stores of the library, since Mount Scopus was cut off from the rest of the city. But the evening before he was due to go, he had a temperature, and the doctor absolutely forbade him to leave his bed. (He was shortsighted, and frail, and every time his temperature went up, his eyes clouded over until he was almost blind and he also lost his sense of balance.)

     Four days after Irgun and Stern Gang forces captured the Arab village of Deir Yassin to the west of Jerusalem and butchered many of its inhabitants, armed Arabs attacked the convoy, which, at half past nine in the morning, was crossing Sheikh Jarrah on its way to Mount Scopus. The British secretary of state for the colonies, Arthur Creech-Jones, had personally promised the representatives of the Jewish Agency that as long as the British army was in Jerusalem, it would guarantee the regular arrangement of convoys to relieve the skeleton presence guarding the hospital and the university. (Hadassah Hospital served not just the Jewish population but all the inhabitants of Jerusalem.)
     There were two ambulances in the convoy, three buses whose windows had been reinforced with metal plates for fear of snipers, several trucks carrying supplies, including medical supplies, and two small cars. At the approach to Sheikh Jarrah stood a British police officer who signaled to the convoy, as usual, that the road was open and safe. In the heart of the Arab neighborhood, almost at the feet of the villa of the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, the exiled pro-Nazi leader of the Palestinian Arabs, at a distance of 150 yards or so from Silwani Villa, the leading vehicle went over a land mine. Immediately a hail of fire assailed the convoy from both sides of the road, including hand grenades and Molotov cocktails. The firing continued right through the morning.
     The attack took place less than two hundred yards away from the British military post whose task was to safeguard the road to the hospital. For several hours the British soldiers stood and watched the attack without lifting a finger. At 9:45 General Gordon H. A. MacMillan, the supreme commander of the British forces in Palestine, drove past without stopping. (He later claimed, without batting an eye, that he had the impression the attack had ended.)
     At one o'clock, and again an hour later, some British vehicles drove past without stopping. When the Jewish Agency liaison officer contacted British military headquarters and requested permission to send in the Haganah to evacuate the injured and the dying, he was informed that "the army is in control of the situation" and that HQ forbade the Haganah to intervene. Haganah rescue forces nevertheless attempted to assist the trapped convoy, both from the city and from Mount Scopus. They were prevented from approaching. At 1:45 p.m. the president of the Hebrew University, Professor Judah Leon Magnes, telephoned General MacMillan and asked for help. The answer was that "the army is trying to reach the scene, but a large battle has developed."
     There was no fighting. By three o'clock two of the buses had caught fire and almost all the passengers, most of whom were already wounded or dying, were burned alive.
     The seventy-seven dead included the director of the Hadassah Medical Organization, Professor Chaim Yassky, Professors Leonid Doljansky and Moshe Ben-David, who were among the founders of the Faculty of Medicine at the university, the physicist Dr. Guenther Wolfsohn, Professor Enzo Bonaventura, head of the Department of Psychology, Dr. Abraham Chaim Freimann, an expert on Jewish law, and Dr. Binyamin Klar, a linguist.
     The Arab Higher Committee later issued an official statement in which the slaughter was described as a heroic exploit carried out "under the command of an Iraqi officer." The statement censured the British for their last-minute intervention and declared: "Had it not been for Army interference, not a single Jewish passenger would have remained alive."* It was only through a coincidence, because of his high temperature, and perhaps also because my mother knew how to curb his patriotic fervor, that my father was not among those who were burned to death in that convoy.
    


     Not long after this massacre, the Haganah launched major offensives for the first time all over the country and threatened to take up arms against the British army if it dared to intervene. The main road from the coastal plain to Jerusalem was unblocked by means of a major offensive, then blocked again, then unblocked again, but the siege of Hebrew Jerusalem was renewed with the invasion by regular Arab armies. Through April and up to the middle of May, large Arab and mixed towns—Haifa, Jaffa, Tiberias, and Safed—as well as dozens of Arab villages in the north and the south were captured by the Haganah. Hundreds of thousands of Arabs lost their homes in those weeks and became refugees. Some of them have remained refugees to this day. Many fled, but many were driven out by force. Several thousand were killed.

     *Based on various sources, including Dov Joseph, The Faithful City: The Siege of Jerusalem, 1948 (London, 1962), p. 78.

     There may not have been anyone at the time in besieged Jewish Jerusalem who mourned the fate of the Palestinian refugees. The Jewish Quarter in the Old City, which had been inhabited continuously by Jews for thousands of years (with the exception of a single interruption after they were all massacred or expelled by the Crusaders in 1099), fell to the Trans-Jordanian Arab Legion, all its buildings were looted and razed and the residents were killed, expelled, or taken prisoner. The settlements in the Etzion bloc were also taken and destroyed, and their residents were killed or taken prisoner. Atarot, Neve Yaakov, Kaliya, and Beit Ha-Arava were evacuated and destroyed. The hundred thousand Jewish inhabitants of Jerusalem feared that a similar fate awaited them. When the Voice of the Defender radio station announced the flight of the Arab residents from Talbieh and Katamon, I do not remember feeling sorry for Aisha and her brother. I merely extended, with my father, our matchstick frontier on the map of Jerusalem: the months of bombardment, hunger, and fear had hardened my heart. Where did Aisha go, with her little brother? To Nablus? Damascus? London? Or to the refugee camp at Deheisha? Today, if she is still alive, Aisha is a woman of sixty-five. And her little brother, whose foot I may have smashed, would be nearly sixty now. Perhaps I could set out to find them? To discover what happened to all the branches of the Silwani family, in London, South America, and Australia?
     But suppose I found Aisha, somewhere in the world, or the person who was once that sweet little boy: how would I introduce myself? What could I say? What could I really explain? What could I offer?
     Do they still remember? And if so, what do they remember? Or have the horrors they must have undergone since made them both forget the silly show-off in the tree?
     It wasn't all my fault. Not all of it. All I did was talk, and talk, and talk. Aisha is to blame, too. It was Aisha who said to me, Come on, let's see you climb a tree. If she hadn't urged me on, it would never have occurred to me to climb the tree, and her brother—
     It's gone forever. It can't be undone.
    


     At the National Guard post in Zephaniah Street my father was given a very old rifle and put on night-watch duty in the streets of Kerem Avraham. It was a heavy, black rifle, with all sorts of foreign words and initials engraved on its worn butt. Father eagerly attempted to decipher the writing even before turning to study the rifle itself. It may have been an Italian rifle from the First World War, or an ancient American carbine. Father felt it all over, scrabbled around, pushed and pulled without success, and eventually put it down on the floor and turned to check the magazine. Here he scored an immediate and dazzling success: he managed to extract the bullets. He brandished a handful of bullets in one hand and the empty magazine in the other, and waved them exultantly at my tiny form as I stood in the doorway, while he made some sort of joke about the narrow-mindedness of those who had tried to discourage Napoleon Bonaparte.

     But when he tried to press the bullets back into the magazine, his triumph turned to utter defeat: the bullets had got a whiff of freedom and obdurately refused to be reimprisoned. None of his stratagems and blandishments had the slightest effect. He tried to insert them the right way around and he tried them back to front, he tried doing it gently and he tried with all the force of his delicate scholar's fingers, he even tried putting them in alternately, one facing upward and the next downward and so on, but all in vain.
     Undeterred, my father tried to charm the bullets into the magazine by reciting poetry at them in a voice laden with pathos: he gave them selections from Polish patriotic poetry, as well as Ovid, Pushkin, and Lermontov, entire Hebrew love poems from medieval Spain—all in the original languages with a Russian accent, and all without success. In a final paroxysm of rage he declaimed from memory extracts from Homer in ancient Greek, the Nibelungenlied in German, Chaucer in Middle English, and, for I know, from the Kalevala in Saul Tchernikhowsky's Hebrew translation, from the epic of Gilgamesh, in every possible language and dialect. All in vain.
     Dejectedly, therefore, he wended his way back to the National Guard post in Zephaniah Street, with the heavy rifle in one hand, in the other the precious bullets in an embroidered bag originally intended for sandwiches, and in his pocket (pray G-d he did not forget it there) the empty magazine.
     At the National Guard post they took pity on him and quickly showed him how easy it was to load the bullets into the magazine, but they did not give him the weapon or the ammunition back. Not that day, or in the days that followed. Or ever. Instead he was given an electric lamp, a whistle, and an impressive armband bearing the motto "National Guard." Father came back home beside himself with joy. He explained to me the meaning of "National Guard," flashed his lamp on and off, blew and blew on his whistle, till Mother touched his shoulder lightly and said, That's enough now, Arieh? Please?
    


     At midnight between Friday, May 14, 1948, and Saturday, May 15, at the end of thirty years of the British Mandate, the state whose birth David Ben-Gurion had announced in Tel Aviv a few hours earlier came into being. After a gap of some nineteen hundred years, Uncle Joseph declared, Jewish rule was once more established here.

     But at one minute past midnight, without war being declared, the infantry columns, artillery, and armor of the regular Arab armies poured into the country, from Egypt to the south, Trans-Jordan and Iraq to the east, and Lebanon and Syria to the north. On Saturday morning Tel Aviv was bombed by Egyptian planes. The Arab Legion, the half-British army of the Kingdom of Trans-Jordan, and regular Iraqi troops, as well as armed Muslim volunteers from several other countries, had all been invited in by the British to seize key points around the country before the formal ending of the Mandate.
     The noose was tightening around us. The Trans-Jordanian Legion captured the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, cut off the highway to Tel Aviv and the coastal plain with massive forces, took control of the Arab districts of the city, stationed artillery on the hills around Jerusalem, and began a massive bombardment whose aim was to cause losses among the civilian population, break their spirit, and bring them to submission. King Abdullah, London's protégé, already saw himself as King of Jerusalem. The legion's gun batteries were commanded by British artillery officers.
     At the same time the Egyptian army was reaching the southern outskirts of Jerusalem and attacked the kibbutz of Ramat Rahel, which changed hands twice. Egyptian planes dropped fire bombs on Jerusalem and, among other things, destroyed the old people's home in Romema, not far from us. Egyptian mortars joined the Trans-Jordanian artillery in bombarding the civilian population. From a hill close to the Mar Elias Monastery the Egyptians pounded Jerusalem with 4.2 inch shells. Shells fell on the Jewish areas at a rate of one every two minutes, and the streets were raked by continuous rifle fire. Greta Gat, my piano-playing child sitter who always smelled of wet wool and washing soap, Aunt Greta, who used to drag me off to clothes shops with her, for whom my father used to compose his silly rhymes, went out on her veranda one morning to hang out her washing. A Jordanian sniper's bullet, they said, went in her ear and came out her eye. Zippora Yannai, Piri, my mother's shy friend who lived in Zephaniah Street, went out in the yard for a moment to fetch a floor cloth and a bucket and was killed on the spot by a direct hit from a shell.
    


     And I had a little tortoise. During the Passover holiday in 1947, some six months before the outbreak of war, Father joined some people from the Hebrew University for a day trip to Jerash in Trans-Jordan. He set off early in the morning, with a bag of sandwiches and a genuine army water bottle, which he wore proudly on his belt. He came back that evening, full of happy stories of the trip and the wonders of the large Roman theater, and he brought me a present of a little tortoise he found there "at the foot of an amazing Roman stone arch."

     Although he had no sense of humor and possibly had no clear idea of what a sense of humor was, my father always loved jokes, witticisms, and wordplay, and whenever he made anyone smile with his remarks, his face would light up with modest pride. Thus he decided to call the tortoise by the comical name of Abdullah-Gershon, in honor of the king of Trans-Jordan and the city of Jerash (Gerash in Hebrew). Whenever we had visitors, he would call the tortoise solemnly by his full name, like a master of ceremonies announcing the arrival of some duke or ambassador, and he was always amazed that everyone present did not double up with laughter. Consequently he felt it necessary to enlighten them as to the reasons for the two names. Perhaps he hoped that, not having found the joke funny before the explanation, they would find it hilarious afterward. Sometimes he was so enthusiastic or absentminded that he told the whole story to guests who had already heard it at least twice before and knew it backward.
     I loved that little tortoise, who used to crawl to my hideaway under the pomegranate bush every morning and eat lettuce leaves and juicy cucumber peel right out of my hand. He was not afraid of me and did not retract his head inside his shell, and while he was gobbling up his food, he would make funny movements with his head, as though he were nodding in agreement at what you were saying. He was like a certain bald professor from Rehavia, who also used to nod enthusiastically until you had finished talking, but then his approval turned to mockery, as he continued to nod at you while he tore your views to shreds.
     I used to stroke my tortoise's head with my finger while he ate, amazed at the similarity between his nose holes and his ear holes. In my heart of hearts, and behind Father's back, I secretly called him Mimi instead of Abdullah-Gershon.
     During the bombardment there were no cucumbers or lettuce leaves and I wasn't allowed out into the yard, but I still used to open the door sometimes and throw scraps of food out for Mimi. Sometimes I could see him in the distance, and sometimes he disappeared for several days on end.
    


     The day that Greta Gat and my mother's friend Piri Yannai were killed, my tortoise Mimi was killed too. He was sliced in half by a piece of shrapnel. When I tearfully asked Father if I could at least bury him under the pomegranate and put up a tombstone to remember him by, Father explained to me that I could not, mainly for reasons of hygiene. He told me he had already gotten rid of the remains. He refused to tell me where he had gotten rid of them, but he took the opportunity to give me a little lecture on the meaning of irony: our Abdullah-Gershon was an immigrant from the Kingdom of Trans-Jordan, so it was ironic that the piece of shrapnel that killed him came from a shell fired from one of King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan's guns.

     That night I could not get to sleep. I lay on my back on our mattress in the far corner of the corridor, surrounded by the snores, mutterings, and intermittent moans of old people. I was dripping with sweat as I lay between my parents, and by the faint trembling light of the single candle in the bathroom, in the fetid air, I suddenly thought I saw the form of a tortoise, not Mimi, the little tortoise I loved to stroke with my finger (there was no possibility of a cat or a puppy: forget it!), but a terrifying gigantic monster-tortoise, dripping blood and mashed bones, floating through the air, digging with its sharp-clawed paws and chuckling mockingly at me from above all the people sleeping in the corridor. Its face was horrible, crushed and torn by a bullet that had entered its eye and come out in the place where even a tortoise has a sort of ear hole, although it has no actual ear.
     I may have tried to wake Father. He did not wake up: he was lying motionless on his back breathing deeply, like a contented baby. But Mother took my head and pressed it to her bosom. Like the rest of us, she was sleeping in her clothes, and the buttons of her blouse hurt my cheek a little. She hugged me hard but didn't try to comfort me; instead she sobbed with me, smothering her crying so that no one would hear, and her lips whispered over and over again: Piri, Piroshka, Piriii. All I could do was stroke her hair and her cheeks, and kiss her, and it was as though I was the grown-up and she was my child, and I whispered, There there, Mummy, it's all right, I'm here.
     Then we whispered a little more, she and I. Tearfully. And later on, after the faint flickering candle at the end of the corridor went out and only the wails of the shells broke the silence and the hill on the other side of our wall shuddered with every shell that fell, instead of my head on her chest Mother put her wet head on my chest. That night I understood for the first time that I would die too. That everyone would die. And that nothing in the world, not even my mother, could save me. And I could not save her. Mimi had an armored shell, and at any sign of danger he would withdraw, hands, feet, and head, inside his shell. And that hadn't saved him.
     ***

     In September, during a cease-fire that interrupted the fighting in Jerusalem, we had visitors on Saturday morning: Grandpa and Grandma, the Abramskis, and maybe some others. They drank tea in the yard and discussed the successes of the Israeli army, and the terrible dangers of the peace plan put forward by the UN mediator, the Swede Count Bernadotte, a scheme behind which the British were undoubtedly lurking and whose aim was to crush our young state to death. Somebody had brought a rather large, ugly new coin from Tel Aviv: it was the first Hebrew coin to be minted, and it was passed excitedly from hand to hand. It was a twenty-five prutot coin, and it had a picture of a bunch of grapes, a motif that Father said was taken straight from a Jewish coin of the Second Temple period, and above the bunch of grapes was a clear Hebrew legend: ISRAEL. To be on the safe side, it was written not just in Hebrew but in English and Arabic as well.

     Mrs. Zerta Abramski said:
     "If only our dear late parents, and their parents, and all the generations, had been privileged to see and hold this coin. Jewish money—" Her voice choked. Mr. Abramski said:
     "It is fitting to give thanks with the appropriate benediction. Blessed art thou, O L-rd our G-d, King of the Universe, who hast given us life, preserved us, and permitted us to reach this time!"
     Grandpa Alexander, my elegant, hedonistic grandfather, so beloved of the fair sex, said nothing, but simply touched the overlarge nickel coin to his lips and kissed it twice, gently, and his eyes brimmed. Then he passed it on. At that moment the street was startled by the wail ofan ambulance on its way to Zephaniah Street, and ten minutes later the siren howled again on its way back, and Father may have seen in this a pretext to make some pallid joke about the last trump or something of the sort. They sat and chatted and may even have had another glass of tea, and after half an hour or so the Abramskis took their leave, wishing us all the best, and Mr. Abramski, who loved rhetorical flourishes, probably uttered a few high-flown phrases. While they were still standing in the doorway, a neighbor arrived and gently called them over to a corner of the yard, and they were in such a hurry to follow him that Aunt Zerta forgot her handbag. A quarter of an hour later the Lembergs came, looking bewildered, to tell us that while his parents were visiting us, Yonatan Abramski, twelve-year-old Yoni, had been playing in Nehemiah Street, when a Jordanian sniper firing from the Police Training School had hit him with a single shot in the middle of his forehead, and the boy had lain there dying for five minutes, vomited, and expired before the ambulance reached him.
     I found this in Zerta Abramski's diary:

     September 23,1948

     On the eighteenth of September, at a quarter past ten on Saturday morning, my Yoni,Yoni my child, my whole life, was killed ... He was hit by an Arab sniper, my angel, he only managed to say "Mummy," to run a few yards (my wonderful, pure boy was standing near the house) before he fell ... I did not hear his last word, neither did I answer him when he called out to me. When I returned, my sweet, beloved child was no longer alive. I saw him at the mortuary. He looked so wonderfully beautiful, he seemed to be asleep. I embraced him and kissed him. They had put a stone under his head. The stone moved, and his head, his cherubic head, moved a little. My heart said, He is not dead, my son, look, he's moving ... His eyes were half shut. Then "they" came—the mortuary workers—came and insulted me and reprimanded me rudely and disturbed me: I had no right to embrace and kiss him ... I left.

     But a few hours later I returned. There was a "curfew" (they were searching for the killers of Bernadotte). On every street corner policemen stopped me ... They asked for my permit to be out during the curfew. He, my slain son, was my only permit. The policemen let me into the mortuary. I had brought a cushion with me. I removed the stone and put it to one side: I could not bear to see his dear, wonderful head resting on a stone. Then "they" came back and tried to make me leave. They said that I ought not to touch him. I did not heed them. I continued to embrace and kiss him, my treasure. They threatened to lock the door and leave me with him, with the essence of my whole life. This was all that I wanted. Then they reconsidered and threatened to call the soldiers. I was not afraid of them ... I left the mortuary a second time. Before I left, I embraced and kissed him. The next morning I came to him again, to my child ... Once more I embraced and kissed him. Once again I prayed to G-d for vengeance, vengeance for my baby, and once again they drove me out ... And when I came back again, my wonderful child, my angel, was in a closed coffin, yet I remember his face, all of him, everything about him I remember.*

 46


     TWO FINNISH missionary ladies lived in a little apartment at the end of Ha-Turim Street in Mekor Baruch, Aili Havas and Rauha Moisio. Aunt Aili and Aunt Rauha. Even when the conversation turned to the shortage of vegetables, they both spoke high-flown, biblical Hebrew, because that was the only Hebrew they knew. If I knocked at their door to ask for some wood that we could use for the Lag Baomer bonfire, Aunt Aili would say with a gentle smile, as she handed me an old orange crate: "And the shining of a flaming fire by night!" If they came around to our apartment for a glass of tea and a bookish conversation while I was fighting against my cod-liver oil, Aunt Rauha might say: "The fishes of the sea shall shake at His presence!"

     Sometimes the three of us paid them a visit in their Spartan one-room apartment, which resembled an austere nineteenth-century girls' boarding school: two plain iron bedsteads stood facing each other on either side of a rectangular wooden table covered with a dark blue tablecloth, with three plain wooden chairs. Beside each of the matching beds was a small bedside table with a reading lamp, a glass of water, and some sacred books in black covers. Two identical pairs of bedroom slippers peered out from under the beds. In the middle of the table there was always a vase containing a bunch of everlasting flowers from the nearby fields. A carved olive-wood crucifix hung in the middle of the wall between the two beds. And at the foot of each bed stood a chest of drawers made from a thick shiny wood of a sort we did not have in Jerusalem, and Mother said it was called oak, and she encouraged me to touch it with my fingertips and run my hand over it. My mother always insisted that it was not enough to know the various names of objects but you should get to know them by sniffing them, touching them with the tip of your tongue, feeling them with your fingertips, to know their warmth and smoothness, their smell, their roughness and hardness, the sound they made when you tapped them, all those things that she called their "response" or "resistance." Every material, she said, every piece of clothing or furniture, every utensil, every object had different characteristics of response and resistance, which were not fixed but could change according to the season or the time of day or night, the person who was touching or smelling, the light and shade, and even vague propensities that we have no means of understanding. It was no accident, she said, that Hebrew uses the same word for an inanimate object and a desire. It was not only we who had or did not have a desire for one thing or another, inanimate objects and plants also had an inner desire of their own, and only someone who knew how to feel, listen, taste, and smell in an ungreedy way could sometimes discern it.
     Father observed jokingly:
     *Zerta Abramski, "Excerpts from the Diary of a Woman from the Siege of Jerusalem, 1948," in The Correspondence of Yakov-David Abramski, edited and annotated by Shula Abramski (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim, 5751/1991), pp. 288-89.

     "Our Mummy goes one further than King Solomon. Legend says that he understood the language of every animal and bird, but our Mummy has even mastered the languages of towels, saucepans, and brushes."
     And he went on, beaming mischievously:
     "She can make trees and stones speak by touching them: Touch the mountains, and they shall smoke, as it says in the Psalms."
     Aunt Rauha said:
     "Or as the prophet Joel put it, The mountains shall drop down new wine, and the hills shall flow with milk. And it is written in the twenty-ninth Psalm: The voice of the L-rd maketh the hinds to calve."
     Father said:
     "But coming from someone who is not a poet, such things are always liable to sound somewhat, how shall I put it, prettified. As if they are trying to sound very deep. Very mystical. Very hylozoical. Trying to make the hinds to calve. Let me explain the meaning of these difficult words, mystical and hylozoical. Behind them both is a clear, rather unhealthy, desire to blur realities, to dim the light of reason, to blunt definitions, and to muddle distinct domains."
     Mother said:
     "Arieh?"
     And Father, in a conciliatory tone (because although he enjoyed teasing her, goading her, and even occasionally gloating, he enjoyed even more repenting, apologizing, and beaming with goodwill, just like his own father, Grandpa Alexander), said:
     "Nu, that's enough, Fanitchka. I've finished. I was only having a bit of fun."
    


     The two missionaries did not leave Jerusalem during the siege: they had a strong sense of mission. The Savior himself seemed to have charged them with the task of boosting the spirits of the besieged and helping as volunteers to treat the wounded at the Shaarei Tsedek Hospital. They believed that every Christian had a duty to try to atone, in deeds rather than words, for what Hitler had done to the Jews. They considered the establishment of the State of Israel as the finger of G-d. As Aunt Rauha put it, in her biblical language and gravely pronunciation: It is like the appearance of the rainbow in the cloud, after the flood. And Aunt Aili, with a tiny smile, no more than a twitch of the corner of her mouth: "For it repented the L-rd of all that great evil, and He would no longer destroy them."

     Between bombardments they used to walk around our neighborhood, in their ankle boots and headscarves, carrying a deep bag of grayish hessian, distributing a jar of pickled cucumbers, half an onion, a piece of soap, a pair of woolen socks, a radish, or a small quantity of black pepper to anyone prepared to receive it from them. Who knows how they got hold of all these treasures. Some of the ultra-Orthodox rejected these gifts in disgust, some drove the two ladies away from their doors contemptuously, others accepted the gifts but spat on the ground the missionaries' feet had trodden on the moment their backs were turned.
     They did not take offense. They were constantly quoting verses of consolation from the Prophets, which seemed strange to us in their Finnish accent, which sounded like their heavy boots tramping on gravel. "For I will defend this city, to save it." "No enemy or foe shall come into the gates of this city." "How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace ... for the wicked shall no more pass through thee..." "Fear not, O Jacob my servant, saith the L-rd: for I am with thee; for I will make a full end of all the nations whither I have driven thee."
     Sometimes one of them would volunteer to take our place in the long line for water that was distributed from a tanker, half a bucket per family on Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays only, assuming the tanker had not been pierced by shrapnel before it reached our street. Or else one of them would go around our tiny barricaded apartment handing out half a "mixed vitamin" tablet to each of the many inmates. Children received a whole tablet. Where did the two missionaries get hold of these wonderful gifts? Where did they replenish their gray hessian bag? Some said one thing and some another, and some warned me not to accept anything from them because their only objective was "to take advantage of our distress and make converts for that Jesus of theirs."
     Once I plucked up my courage and asked Aunt Aili—even though I knew what the answer would be: "Who was Jesus?" Her lips quivered slightly as she replied hesitantly that he was still alive, and that he loved us all, particularly those who mocked or despised him, and if I filled my heart with love, he would come and dwell within my heart and bring me suffering but also great happiness, and the happiness would shine forth out of the suffering.
     These words seemed so strange and full of contradictions that I felt a need to ask Father too. He took me by the hand and led me to the mattress in the kitchen, which was Uncle Joseph's refuge, and asked the famous author of Jesus of Nazareth to explain to me who and what Jesus was.
     Uncle Joseph was lying on his mattress, looking exhausted, gloomy, and pale, his back resting on the blackened wall and his glasses raised onto his forehead. His answer was very different from Aunt Aili's: Jesus of Nazareth was, in his view, "one of the greatest Jews of all time, a wonderful moralist who loathed the uncircumcised of heart and fought to restore to Judaism its original simplicity and wrest it from the power of hair-splitting rabbis."
     I did not know who the uncircumcised of heart or the hair-splitting rabbis were. Nor did I know how to reconcile Uncle Joseph's Jesus, who loathed and fought to wrest, with Aunt Aili's Jesus who neither loathed nor fought nor wrested but did the exact opposite, he especially loved sinners and those who despised him.
    


     In an old folder I came across a letter that Aunt Rauha wrote to me from Helsinki in 1979, on behalf of both of them. She wrote in Hebrew, and among other things she said:

     ...We too were pleased that you won the Euro-Viseo Song Contest. And how about the song?

     The faithful here were very glad that they from Israel sang: Hallelujah! There is no more fitting song ... I was able also to see the film Shoah, which caused tears and pains of conscience from the countries that persecuted to such an extent, without any end, without any sense. The Christian countries must ask much pardon from the Jews. Your father said once that he cannot understand why the L-rd allows such terrible things ... I always said to him that the L-rd's secret is on high. Jesus suffers with the people of Israel in all its sufferings. The faithful also have to bear their share of the sufferings of Jesus that he let them suffer ... Nevertheless the atonement of Christ on the cross covers all the sins of the world, of all mankind. But this you can never understand with your brain ... There were Nazis who received pains of conscience and repented before their death. But their repentance did not make the Jews who died come back to life. We all need atonement and grace each day. Jesus says: Do not fear those who kill the body, because they are not able to kill the soul. This letter is from me and from Aunt Aili. I received a heavy blow to my back six weeks ago when I fell inside the bus, and Aunt Aili does not see so well.
     With love,
     Rauha Moisio
     And once when I went to Helsinki, because one of my books had been translated into Finnish, the two of them suddenly turned up in the cafeteria of my hotel, both wearing dark shawls that covered their heads and shoulders, like a pair of old peasant women. Aunt Rauha was leaning on a stick and was gently holding Aunt Aili's hand, as she was now almost blind. Aunt Aili helped her to a corner table. They both demanded the right to kiss me and bless me. It was not easy to get them to allow me to order them each a cup of tea, "but nothing else please!"
     Aunt Aili smiled slightly: it was not so much a smile as a faint quivering of her lips; she was on the verge of saying something, changed her mind, placed her right fist inside her left hand, as though putting a diaper on a baby, moved her head once or twice as though in lament, and finally she said:
     "Praise be to G-d for permitting us to see you here in our land, though I do not understand why your dear parents were not vouchsafed to be among the living. But who am I to understand? The L-rd has the answers. We can merely wonder. Please, I'm sorry, will you allow me to feel your dear face? It is only because my eyes have failed."
     Aunt Rauha said of my father: "Blessed be his memory, he was the dearest of men! He had such a noble spirit! Such a humane spirit!" And of my mother she said: "Such a suffering soul, peace be upon her! She had many sufferings, because she saw into the heart of people, and what she saw was not so easy for her to bear. As the prophet Jeremiah says, 'The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?'"
     Outside, in Helsinki, sleet was falling. The daylight was low and murky, and the snowflakes were gray and did not settle. The two old women were wearing almost identical dark dresses and thick brown socks, like girls from a respectable boarding school. When I kissed them, they both smelled of plain washing soap, brown bread, and bedding. A small maintenance man hurried past us, with a battery of pencils and pens in the pocket of his overalls. Aunt Rauha took a brown paper packet out of a big bag that was under the table and handed it to me. I recognized the bag: it was the same gray hessian bag from which they used to hand out small bars of soap, woolen socks, rusks, matches, candles, radishes, or a precious packet of powdered milk during the siege of Jerusalem, thirty years previously.
     I opened the packet, and there was a Bible printed in Jerusalem, in Hebrew and Finnish on facing pages, a tiny music box made of painted wood with a brass lid, and an assortment of dried flowers, unfamiliar Finnish flowers that were beautiful even in their death, flowers that I could not name and that I had never seen before that morning.
     "We were very fond," Aunt Aili said, her unseeing eyes seeking mine, "of your dear parents. Their life on this earth was not easy, and they did not always dispense grace to each other. There was sometimes much shadow between them. But now that finally they dwell in the secret of Almighty in the shelter of the wings of the L-rd, now there is certainly only grace and truth between your parents, like two innocent children who have known no thought of iniquity, only light, love, and compassion between them forever, his left hand under her head and her right hand embraces him, and every shadow has long since departed from them."
     For my part, I had intended to present two copies of the Finnish translation of my book to the two aunts, but Aunt Rauha refused: A Hebrew book, she said, a book about Jerusalem written in the city of Jerusalem, we must please read it in Hebrew and not in any other language! And besides, she said with an apologetic smile, truly Aunt Aili can no longer read anything because the L-rd has taken to himself the last of the light of her eyes. I read to her, morning and evening, only from the Old and New Testament, from our prayer book, and the books of the saints, although my eyes are also growing dim, and soon we shall both be blind.
     And when I am not reading to her and Aunt Aili is not listening to me, then we both sit at the window and look out at trees and birds, snow and wind, morning and evening, daylight and night lights, and we both give thanks in all humility to the good L-rd for all his mercies and all his wonders: His will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Do you not also see sometimes, only when you are at rest, how the sky and the earth, the trees and the stones, the fields and the woods, are all full of great wonders? They are all bright and shining and they all together like a thousand witnesses testify to the greatness of the miracle of grace.

 47


     IN THE winter between 1948 and 1949 the war ended. Israel signed an armistice agreement with the neighboring countries, first with Egypt, then with Trans-Jordan, and finally with Syria and Lebanon. Iraq withdrew its expeditionary force without signing any document. Despite all these agreements, all the Arab countries continued to proclaim that one day they would embark on a "second round" of the war so as to put an end to a state that they refused to recognize; they declared that its very existence was an act of continuing aggression, and they called it the "artificial state," "ad-dawla al-maz'uma."

     In Jerusalem the Trans-Jordanian commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Abdullah al-Tall, and the Israeli commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Moshe Dayan, met several times to draw a demarcation line between the two parts of the city and to reach an agreement about the passage of convoys to the university campus on Mount Scopus, which remained as an isolated Israeli enclave within the area under the control of the Trans-Jordanian army. High concrete walls were erected along the line, to block streets that were half in Israeli Jerusalem and half in Arab Jerusalem. Here and there corrugated iron barriers were put up to conceal passersby in West Jerusalem from the view of the snipers on the rooftops of the eastern part of the city. A fortified strip of barbed wire, minefields, firing positions, and observation posts crossed the whole city, enclosing the Israeli section to the north, east, and south. Only the west was left open, and a single winding road linked Jerusalem to Tel Aviv and the rest of the new state. But as part of this road was still in the hands of the Arab Legion, it was necessary to build a bypass road and to lay a new water pipeline along it, in place of the pipeline laid by the British, parts of which had been destroyed, and to replace the pumping stations that remained under Arab control. The new road was called the Burma Road. A year or two later a new bypass road was laid and asphalted; it was named the Road of Heroism.
     Nearly everything in the young state in those days was named for those who had died in battle, or for heroism, or for the struggle, the illegal immigration and the realization of the Zionist dream. The Israelis were very proud of their victory and entrenched in the justice of their cause and their feelings of moral superiority. People did not think much about the fate of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees and displaced persons, many of whom had fled and many others of whom had been driven out of the towns and villages conquered by the Israeli army.
     War was a terrible thing, of course, and full of suffering, people said, but who asked the Arabs to start it? After all, we had accepted the partition compromise that was agreed by the United Nations, and it was the Arabs who had rejected any compromise and tried to butcher us all. In any case, it was well known that that every war claims its victims, millions of refugees from World War II were still wandering around Europe, entire populations had been uprooted and others had been settled in their place, the newly created states of Pakistan and India had exchanged millions of people, and so had Greece and Turkey. And after all, we had lost the Jewish Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem, we had lost the Etzion bloc, Kfar Darom, Atarot, Kaliya, and Neve Yaakov, just as they had lost Jaffa, Ramla, Lifta, el-Maliha, and Ein Karim. Instead of the hundreds of thousands of displaced Arabs, hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees who had been driven out of the Arab countries had arrived here. People were careful to avoid the word "expulsion." The massacre at Deir Yassin was laid at the door of "irresponsible extremists."
     A concrete curtain came down and divided us from Sheikh Jarrah and the other Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem.
     From our roof I could see the minarets of Shuafat, Biddu, and Ramallah, the solitary tower atop Nebi Samwil, the Police Training School (from which a Jordanian marksman had shot and killed Yoni Abramski when he was playing in the yard outside his house), beleaguered Mount Scopus and the Mount of Olives, now held by the Arab Legion, and the roofs of Sheikh Jarrah and the American Colony.
     Sometimes I imagined I could identify, among the thick treetops, a corner of the roof of Silwani Villa. I believed that they were much better off than we were: they had not been shelled for long months, they had not been subjected to hunger and thirst, they had not been made to sleep on mattresses in foul-smelling basements. And yet I often talked to them in my heart. Just like Mr. Gustav Krochmal, the doll repairer from Geula Street, I longed to put on my best clothes and go to them at the head of a deputation for peace and reconciliation, to prove to them that we were in the right, to apologize and receive their apology, to be treated to biscuits and sugared orange peel, to demonstrate our forgiveness and magnanimity, to sign an agreement of peace, friendship, and mutual respect with them, and maybe also to convince Aisha and her brother and all the Silwani family that the accident had not been entirely my fault, or not only my fault.
     Sometimes we were woken in the early hours by machine-gun salvos from the direction of the armistice line, a mile or so from where we lived, or the wailing of the muezzin on the other side of the new border: like a hair-raising lament, the howl of his prayer penetrated our sleep.
    


     Our apartment was emptied of all the visitors who had sought refuge in it. The Rosendorffs went back to their apartment on the next floor up; the vacant old lady and her daughter folded their bedding away into a sack and disappeared; Gita Miudovnik, the widow of the man who wrote the arithmetic textbook, whose mangled body had been identified by my father because of the socks he had lent him, also left. And Uncle Joseph with his sister-in-law Haya Elitsedek returned to the Klausner house in Talpiot, with the brass plate bearing the motto Judaism and humanity over the front door. They had to do some work on the house because it had been damaged in the fighting. For several weeks the old professor mourned the thousands of books that had been swept off the shelves and thrown on the floor or used to make barricades and shelters against bullets fired through the windows of the house, which had become firing positions. Ariel Elitsedek, the prodigal son, was found safe and sound after the war, but he kept arguing and cursing the wretched Ben-Gurion, who could have liberated the Old City and the Temple Mount and had not done so, who could have driven all the Arabs out to the Arab countries and had not done so, all because he and his fellow reds who had seized the leadership of our beloved state had been perverted by socialistic pacifism and Tolstoyan vegetarianism. Soon, he believed, a new, proud national leadership would arise, and our forces would be unleashed to liberate every part of the fatherland at last from the yoke of the Arab conqueror.

     Most Jerusalemites, however, did not yearn for more war, and were not concerned about the fate of the Wailing Wall and Rachel's tomb, which had vanished behind the concrete curtain and the minefields. The shattered city licked its wounds. All through that winter and throughout the following spring and summer, long gray lines formed in front of the grocers, greengrocers, and butchers. The austerity regime had arrived. Lines formed behind the ice man's cart, lines formed behind the paraffin seller's cart. Food was distributed in exchange for coupons from ration books. The sale of eggs and a little bit of chicken was restricted to children and invalids with medical certificates. Milk was measured out in limited quantities. Fruit and vegetables were rarely seen in Jerusalem. Oil, sugar, grits, and flour appeared intermittently, monthly or fortnightly. If you wanted to buy simple clothes, shoes, or furniture you had to use up precious coupons from your dwindling ration books. Shoes were made from reused leather, and their soles were as thin as cardboard. The furniture was shoddy. Instead of coffee people drank ersatz coffee or chicory, and powdered eggs and milk replaced the real thing. And we all came to hate the frozen cod fillets we had to eat every day, surplus stock from Norway that the new government bought at a cut-rate price.
     In the early months after the war you even needed a special permit to leave Jerusalem to go to Tel Aviv and the rest of the country. But all sorts of clever or pushy people, anyone with a bit of money who knew the way to the black market, anyone with connections to the new administration, hardly felt the shortages. And some people managed to grab themselves apartments and houses in the prosperous Arab neighborhoods whose residents had fled or been expelled, or in the closed zones where British army and civil service families had lived before the war: Katamon, Talbieh, Bakaa, Abu Tor, and the German Colony. The poorer Arabs from Musrara, Lifta, and el-Maliha were replaced by thousands and thousands of poor Jewish families who had fled or been thrown out of the Arab countries. Huge transit camps were set up in Talpiot, the Allenby Barracks, and Beit Mazmil, rows of corrugated iron shacks with no electricity, drains, or running water. In winter the paths between the huts became a gooey porridge, and the cold pierced the bone. Accountants from Iraq, goldsmiths from Yemen, tradesmen and shopkeepers from Morocco, and watchmakers from Bucharest were crowded into these huts and employed for a pittance on government schemes of rock clearing and reforesting in the Jerusalem hills.
     Gone were the "heroic years" of World War II, the genocide of European Jewry, the partisans, mass enlistment in the British army and the Jewish Brigade, which the British set up for the war against Nazism, the years of the struggle against the British, the underground, the illegal immigration, the new "tower and stockade" villages settlements, the war to the death against the Palestinians and the regular armies of five Arab states.
     Now that the years of euphoria were over, we were suddenly living in the "morning after": gray, gloomy, damp, mean, and petty. These were the years of blunt Okava razor blades, tasteless Shenhav toothpaste, smelly Knesset cigarettes, the roaring sports commentators Nehemia Ben-Avraham and Alexander Alexandroni on the Voice of Israel, cod-liver oil, ration books, Shmulik Rozen and his quiz shows, the political commentator Moshe Medzini, the Hebraization of surnames, food rationing, government work schemes, lines at the grocer's, larders built into kitchen walls, cheap sardines, Inkoda canned meat, the Mixed Israeli-Jordanian Armistice Committee, Arab infiltrators from the other side of the armistice line, the theater companies—Ohel, Habima, Doh-Re-Mi, Chisbatron—Djigan and Schumacher the comedians, the Mandelbaum Gate crossing, retaliatory raids, washing children's hair with paraffin to get rid of the lice, "Help for the Transit Camps," "abandoned property," the Defense Fund, no-man's-land, and "Our blood will no longer be shed with impunity."
    


     And once more I went to school each morning at the Tachkemoni Religious Boys' School on Tachkemoni Street. The pupils were poor children, schooled to beatings, whose parents were artisans, manual workers, and small traders; they came from families of eight or ten, some of them were always hungry for my sandwiches; some had shaved heads, and we all wore black berets at an angle. They would gang up on me at the water fountains in the playground and splash me, because they quickly discovered that I was the only only child, the weakest among them, and that I was easily offended or upset. When they went out of their way to devise new humiliations for me, I sometimes stood panting in the middle of a circle of my sneering tormentors, beaten up, covered with dust, a lamb among wolves, and suddenly to the astonishment of my enemies I would start to beat myself, scratch myself hysterically, and bite my arm so hard that a bleeding watch shape appeared. Just as my mother did in my presence two or three times when she was overwhelmed.

     But sometimes I made up stories of suspense for them in installments, breathtaking tales in the spirit of the action films we used to watch at the Edison Cinema. In these stories I never hesitated to introduce Tarzan to Flash Gordon or Nick Carter to Sherlock Holmes, or to mix the cowboys-and-Indians world of Karl May and Mayne Reid with Ben Hur or the mysteries of outer space or gangs of thugs in the suburbs of New York. I used to give them an installment each break, like Scheherazade postponing her fate with her tales, always stopping at the moment of greatest tension, just when it seemed as though the hero was doomed and beyond hope, leaving the sequel (which I had not invented yet) ruthlessly to the following day.
     So I used to walk around in the playground during breaks like Rabbi Nahman with his flocks of students eager to drink in his teachings; I would turn this way and that surrounded by a tight crush of listeners afraid of missing a single word, and among them would sometimes be my leading persecutors, whom I would make a point of magnanimously inviting into the innermost circle and favoring with a precious clue to a possible twist in the plot or some hair-raising event that would figure in the next installment, thus promoting the recipient into an influential figure who had the power to reveal or withhold invaluable information at will.
     My first stories were full of caves, labyrinths, catacombs, forests, ocean depths, dungeons, battlefields, galaxies inhabited by monsters, brave policemen and fearless warriors, conspiracies, terrible betrayals accompanied by wonderful acts of chivalry and generosity, baroque twists, unbelievable self-sacrifice, and highly emotional gestures of self-denial and forgiveness. As far as I recall, the characters in my early works included both heroes and villains. And there were a number of villains who repented and atoned for their sins by acts of self-sacrifice or by a heroic death. There were also bloodthirsty sadists, and all sorts of scoundrels and mean cheats, as well as unassuming characters who sacrificed their lives with a smile. The female characters, on the other hand, were all, without exception, noble: loving despite being exploited, suffering yet compassionate, tormented and even humiliated, yet always proud and pure, paying the price for male insanities yet generous and forgiving.
     But if I tightened the string too much, or not enough, then after a few episodes, or at the end of the story, at the moment when wrongdoing was confounded and magnanimity finally received its reward, that was when this poor Scheherazade was thrown into the lions' den and showered with blows and insults to his ancestry. Why could he never keep his mouth shut?
    


     Tachkemoni was a boys' school. Even the teachers were all male. Apart from the school nurse no woman ever appeared there. The bolder boys sometimes climbed onto the wall of the Laemel Girls' School to get a glimpse of life on the other side of the iron curtain. Girls in long blue skirts and blouses with short puffy sleeves, so the rumor went, walked around the playground in pairs during break, played hopscotch, braided each other's hair, and occasionally splashed each other with water from the fountains just like us.

     Apart from me, almost all the boys at Tachkemoni had older sisters, sisters-in-law, and female cousins, and so I was the last of the last to hear the whispers about what it was that girls had and we didn't, and vice versa, and what the older brothers did to their girls in the dark.
     At home not a word was spoken on the subject. Ever. Except, perhaps, if some visitor got carried away and joked about bohemian life, or about the Bar-Yizhar-Itselevitches who were so meticulous about observing the commandment to be fruitful and multiply, but he would immediately be silenced by the others with the rebuke: Shto's toboi?! Vidish malchik ryadom's nami!! (Can't you see the boy is here!)
     The boy may have been there, but he understood nothing. If his classmates hurled the Arabic word for what girls have at him, if they huddled together and passed a picture of a scantily dressed woman from hand to hand, or if someone brought along a ballpoint pen inside which was a girl dressed for tennis, and when you turned it upside down, the clothes disappeared, they would all chortle hoarsely, elbowing each other in the ribs, trying hard to sound like their older brothers, and only I felt a terrible dread, as though some vague disaster was taking shape far away on the horizon. It was not here yet, it did not touch me yet, but it was already blood-curdlingly frightening, like a forest fire on the faraway hilltops. Nobody would escape from it unscathed. Nothing would be the same as it was before.
     When they whispered breathlessly in recess about some "halfwitted Tali who lives down the alley," who hangs around in the Tel Arza woods and gives it to anyone who hands her half a pound, or the fat widow from the kitchen goods shop who takes a few boys from class 8 to the storeroom behind her shop and shows what she's got in exchange for watching them jerk off, I felt a pang of sorrow nibbling at my heart, as though some great horror was lying in wait for everybody, men and women alike, a cruel, patient horror, a creeping horror that was slowly spinning a slimy invisible web, and maybe I was already infected without knowing it.
     When we got to class 6 or 7, the school nurse, a gruff, military woman, suddenly came into our classroom, and stood there for a whole double lesson, alone in front of thirty-eight dazed boys, revealing to us all the facts of life. Fearlessly she described organs and functions, drew diagrams of the plumbing in colored chalks on the blackboard, she spared us nothing: seeds and eggs, glands, sheaths and tubes. Then she moved on to the horror show and treated us to terrifying descriptions of the two monsters lurking at the gateway, the Frankenstein's monster and the werewolf of the world of sex: the twin calamities of pregnancy and infection.
     Dazed and shamefaced, we left the lecture and went out into the world, which now appeared to me as a gigantic minefield or a plague-ridden planet. The child I was then grasped, more or less, what was supposed to be pushed into what, what was supposed to receive what, but for the life of me I could not understand why a sane man or woman would want to get caught in those labyrinthine dragon's lairs. The bold nurse who had not hesitated to lay everything bare for us, from hormones to rules of hygiene, had forgotten to mention, even obliquely, that there might be some pleasure involved in all those complicated, dangerous procedures, either because she wanted to protect our innocence or because she simply did not know.
    


     Our teachers at Tachkemoni mostly wore threadbare dark-gray or brown suits or ancient jackets and constantly demanded our respect and fear: Mr. Monzon, Mr. Avisar, Mr. Neimann Senior and Mr. Neimann Junior, Mr. Alkalai, Mr. Duvshani, Mr. Ophir, Mr. Michaeli, the imperious Mr. Ilan the headmaster, who always appeared in a three-piece suit, and his brother, also Mr. Ilan but only in a two-piece suit.

     We had to get to our feet when each of these men entered the classroom, and we could not sit down until he had graciously indicated that we were worthy to do so. We addressed the teachers as "my teacher," and always in the third person. "My teacher asked me to bring a note from my parents, but my parents have gone to Haifa. Would he please let me bring the note on Sunday instead?" Or: "Please, my teacher, doesn't he think he's laying it on a bit thick here?" (The second "he" in this sentence does not, of course, refer to the teacher—whom none of us would ever have dared accuse of laying it on a bit thick—but merely the prophet Jeremiah, or the poet Bialik, whose blazing anger we were studying at the time.)
     As for us, the pupils, we lost our first names completely from the moment we crossed the threshold of the school. Our teachers called us only Bozo, Saragosti, Valero, Ribatski, Alfasi, Klausner, Hajaj, Schleifer, De La Mar, Danon, Ben-Naim, Cordovero, and Axelrod.
     They had a plethora of punishments, those teachers at Tachkemoni School. A slap on the face, a ruler blow across an outstretched hand, shaking us by the scruff of the neck and banishing us to the playground, summoning our parents, a black mark in the class register, copying out a chapter from the Bible twenty times, writing out five hundred lines: "I must not chatter during class" or "Homework must be done on time." Anyone whose handwriting was not neat enough was made to write pages upon pages at home in calligraphic writing "as pure as a mountain stream" Anyone whose fingernails were untrimmed, whose ears were not immaculate, or whose shirt collar was a bit grimy was sent home in disgrace, but not before being made to stand in front of the class and recite loud and clear: "I'm a dirty boy, being dirty is a sin; if I don't have a wash, I'll end up in the bin!"
     The first lesson every morning at Tachkemoni began with the singing of "Modeh ani":
     I give thanks unto thee, O living and eternal King,
 who hast restored my soul unto me in mercy: great is thy faithfulness.

     After which we all trilled shrilly but with gusto:

     O universal L-rd, who reigned ere any creature yet was formed ...
 And after all things pass away, alone the dreaded one shall reign...

     Only when all the songs and the (abbreviated) morning prayers were complete did our teachers order us to open our textbooks and exercise books and prepare our pencils, and generally they launched straight into a long, boring dictation that went on until the bell for recess rang, or sometimes even longer. At home we had to learn by heart: chunks of the Bible, entire poems, and sayings of the rabbis. To this day you can wake me up in the middle of the night and get me to recite the prophet's reply to Rab-shakeh, the envoy of the king of Assyria: "The virgin, the daughter of Zion / hath despised thee, and laughed thee to scorn; / the daughter of Jerusalem / hath shaken her head at thee. / Whom hast thou reproached and blasphemed? / and against whom has thou exalted thy voice?... I will put my hook in thy nose, / and my bridle in thy lips, / and I will turn thee back by the way by which thou camest." Or the Ethics of the Fathers: "On three things the world stands ... Say little and do much ... I have found nothing better for a body than silence ... Know what is above thee ... Separate thyself not from the congregation, neither trust in thyself until the day of thy death, and do not judge thine associate until thou comest to his place ... and in a place where there are no men endeavor to be a man."
    


     At Tachkemoni School, I studied Hebrew. It was as if the drill had struck a rich vein of minerals, which I had touched for the first time in Teacher Zelda's class and in her yard. I was powerfully drawn to the solemn idioms, the almost forgotten words, the exotic syntax, and the linguistic byways where barely a human foot had trodden for centuries, and the poignant beauty of the Hebrew language: "And it came to pass, that in the morning, behold, it was Leah"; "ere any creature yet was formed"; "uncircumcised of heart"; "a seah of suffering"; or "Warm thyself by the fire of the wise; but beware of their glowing coals, lest thou be burnt, for their bite is the bite of a fox, and their sting is the scorpion's sting ... and all their words are like coals of fire."

     Here, at Tachkemoni, I studied the Pentateuch with Rashi's witty, light-winged commentary, here I soaked up the wisdom of the sages, lore and law, prayers, hymns, commentaries, supercommentaries, Sabbath and festival prayer books and the laws of the Prepared Table. I also encountered familiar friends from home, like the wars of the Maccabees, the Bar Kochba Revolt, the history of Jewish communities of the Diaspora, lives of the great rabbis, and Hasidic tales with the moral attached. Something too of the rabbinic jurists, and of the Hebrew poetry of Spain and Bialik, and occasionally, in Mr. Ophir's music lessons, some song of the pioneers in Galilee and the Valley, which was as out of place in Tachkemoni as a camel in the snows of Siberia.
     Mr. Avisar, the geography teacher, would take us with him on adventure-laden trips to Galilee, the Negev, Trans-Jordan, Mesopotamia, the pyramids, and the hanging gardens of Babylon, with the aid of wall maps and occasionally a battered magic lantern. Mr. Neimann Junior declaimed the fury of the prophets at us in thunderous cascades, followed at once by gentle rivulets of comfort and consolation. Mr. Monzon, the English teacher, hammered into us the eternal difference between "I do," "I did," "I have done," "I have been doing," "I would have done," "I should have done," and "I should have been doing": "Even the King of England in person!" he would thunder like the L-rd from Mount Sinai, "even Churchill! Shakespeare! Gary Cooper!—all obey these rules of language with no excuses, and only you, honorable sir, Mister Abulafia, are apparently above the law! What, are you above Churchill?! are you above Shakespeare?! are you above the King of England?! Shame on you! Disgrace! Now please note this, pay attention all the class, write it down, get it right: It is a shame, but you, the Right Honorable Master Abulafia, you are a disgrace!!!"
     But my favorite teacher of all was Mr. Michaeli, Mordechai Michaeli, whose soft hands were always perfumed like a dancer's and whose face was sheepish, as though he was forever ashamed of something; he used to sit down, take off his hat, put it on the desk in front of him, adjust his little skullcap, and, instead of bombarding us with knowledge, he would spend hours telling us stories. From the Talmud he would move on to Ukrainian folk tales, and then he would plunge suddenly into Greek mythology, Bedouin stories, and Yiddish slapstick, and he would go on until he came to the tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen and his own stories, which he composed, just like me, by telling them.
     Most of the boys in my class took advantage of sweet Mr. Michaeli's good nature and absentmindedness, and they dozed through his lessons with their heads resting on their arms on the desk. Or sometimes they passed notes around or even tossed a paper ball between the desks: Mr. Michaeli did not notice, or perhaps he did not care.
     I did not care either. He fixed me with his weary, kindly eyes and told his stories to me alone. Or just to two or three of us, who did not take our eyes off his lips, which seemed to be creating entire worlds in front of us.

 48


     FRIENDS AND neighbors started appearing in our little yard again on summer evenings, to talk about politics or cultural affairs over a glass of tea and a piece of cake. Mala and Staszek Rudnicki, Hayim and Hannah Toren, the Krochmals, who had reopened their tiny shop in Geula Street and were once more repairing dolls and making hair grow on balding teddy bears. Yakov-David and Zerta Abramski were also regular visitors. (They had both gone very gray in the months since their son Yoni was killed. Mr. Abramski had become even more talkative than before, while Zerta had turned very quiet.) My father's parents, Grandpa Alexander and Grandma Shlomit, also came sometimes, very elegant and robed in Odessan self-importance. Grandpa Alexander would briskly dismiss everything his son said with a "Nu, what" and a scornful wave of his hand, but he never found the courage to disagree with Grandma Shlomit about anything. Grandma would plant two wet kisses on my cheeks, and immediately wipe her lips with a paper napkin and my cheeks with another one, wrinkle her nose at the refreshments Mother had prepared, or the napkins that weren't folded the right way, or her son's jacket, which seemed to her too loud and verging on Oriental bad taste:

     "But really, Lonya, it's so cheapl Where did you find that rag? In some Arab shop in Jaffa?" And without favoring my mother with so much as a glance she added sadly: "Only in the tiniest shtetls, where culture was barely more than a rumor, might you have seen somebody dressing like that!"
     They would sit in a circle around the black tea cart that had been taken outside to serve as a garden table, unanimously bless the cool evening breeze, and over tea and cakes analyze Stalin's latest devious move or President Truman's determination, discuss the decline of the British Empire or the partition of India, and from there the conversation moved on to the politics of the young state and became more animated. Staszek Rudnicki raised his voice while Mr. Abramski ridiculed him with expansive movements of his hand and in high-flown, biblical Hebrew. Staszek believed firmly in the kibbutzim and the new collective farms and maintained that the government ought to send all the new immigrants there en masse, straight off the ships, whether they wanted to go or not, to be cured once and for all of their Diaspora mentality and their persecution complexes; it was there, through hard work in the fields, that the New Hebrew Man would be molded.
     My father expressed his resentment of the Bolshevik despotism of the Histadrut leadership who withheld work from those not in possession of their red card. Mr. Gustav Krochmal timidly advanced the view that Ben-Gurion, despite his faults, was the hero of the age: he had been sent to us providentially at a time when petty-minded party hacks might have been put off by the enormity of the undertaking and missed the opportune moment to establish a state. "It was our youth!" Grandpa Alexander shouted loudly, "It was our wonderful youth that gave us the victory and the miracle! Without no Ben-Gurion! The youth!" At which Grandpa leaned toward me and patted me absentmindedly a couple of times, as though to reward the younger generation for winning the war.
     Women hardly ever joined in the conversation. In those days it was customary to compliment women on being "such marvelous listeners," on the cakes and biscuits, on the pleasant atmosphere, but not on their contribution to the conversation. Mala Rudnicki, for instance, would nod happily whenever Staszek spoke and shake her head if anyone interrupted him. Zerta Abramski clasped her shoulders with her hands as though she felt cold. Ever since Yoni's death she would sit, even on warm evenings, with her head inclined as though she was looking at the tops of the cypresses in the next-door garden, hugging her shoulders with her hands. Grandma Shlomit, who was a strong-minded, opinionated woman, would sometimes interpose in that deep alto voice of hers: "How very true!" or "It's much worse than you said, Staszek, much, much worse!" Or else: "N-o! What do you mean, Mr. Abramski! That is simply not possible!"
    


     Only my mother sometimes subverted this rule. When there was a moment's silence, she would say something that at first might seem irrelevant but then could be seen to have gently shifted the center of gravity completely, without changing the subject or contradicting those who had spoken before, but rather as though she were opening a door in some back wall of the conversation that up to then had not seemed to have a doorway in it.

     Once she had made her remark, she shut up, smiling agreeably and looking triumphantly not at the visitors or at my father but at me. After my mother had spoken, the whole conversation seemed to shift its weight from one foot to another. Soon afterward, still smiling her delicate smile that seemed to be doubting something while deciphering something else, she would get up and offer her guests another glass of tea: Please? How strong? And another slice of cake?
     To the child I was then my mother's brief intervention in the men's conversation was rather distressing, perhaps because I sensed an invisible ripple of embarrassment among the speakers, an almost imperceptible search for a way out, as though there were a vague momentary fear that they might inadvertently have said or done something that had caused my mother to snigger at them, but none of them knew what it was. Maybe it was her withdrawn, radiant beauty that always embarrassed those inhibited men and made them fear she might not like them, or find them just a little repulsive.
     As for the women, my mother's interventions stirred in them a strange mixture of anxiety and hope that one day she would finally lose her footing, and perhaps a mite of pleasure at the men's discomfiture.
     Hayim Toren, the writer and writers' union hack, might say, for example:
     "Surely everyone must realize that you cannot run a state the way you might run a grocer's shop. Or like the town council in some G-dforsaken shtetl."
     My father says:
     "It may be too early to judge, my dear Hayim, but everyone with eyes in his head occasionally discerns cause for profound disappointment in our young state."
     Mr. Krochmal, the dolls' doctor, adds shyly:
     "Apart from which, they don't even mend the pavement. Two letters I've written to the mayor, and I haven't had a single reply. I'm not saying that to disagree with what Mr. Klausner was saying, but in the self-same spirit."
     My father ventures one of his puns:
     "The only things that work in this country of ours are the road works."
     Mr. Abramski quotes:
     "'And blood toucheth blood,' saith the prophet Hosea, 'therefore shall the land mourn.' The remnant of the Jewish nation has come here to rebuild the kingdom of David and Solomon, to lay the foundation of the Third Temple, and we have all fallen into the sweaty hands of assorted bloated kibbutz treasurers of little faith, and other red-faced hacks of uncircumcised heart, 'whose world is as narrow as that of an ant.' Rebellious princes and companions of thieves the lot of them, who are sharing among themselves plot by plot the paltry strip of the Fatherland that the nations have left in our hands. It was to them and no one else that the prophet Ezekiel was referring when he said: 'The suburbs shall shake at the sound of the cry of thy pilots.' "
     And Mother, with her smile hovering on her lips and barely touching them:
     "Perhaps when they've finished sharing out the plots, they'll start mending the pavements? And then they'll mend the pavement in front of Mr. Krochmal's shop."
    


     Now, fifty years after her death, I imagine I can hear in her voice as she says these words, or something like them, a tense mixture of sobriety, skepticism, sharp, fine sarcasm, and ever-present sadness.

     In those years something gnawed at her. A slowness started to make itself felt in her movements, or something resembling a slight absence of mind. She had stopped giving private history and literature lessons. Sometimes, for a paltry payment, she would correct the grammar and style of articles written in limping Germanic Hebrew by professors from Rehavia and edit them for publication. She still did all the housework herself, ably and nimbly: she spent each morning cooking, frying, baking, shopping, slicing, mixing, drying, cleaning, scraping, washing, hanging out, ironing, folding, until the whole place was gleaming, and after lunch she sat in an armchair reading.
     She had a strange way of sitting when she read: the book always rested on her knees, and her back and neck were bent over it. She looked like a young girl shyly lowering her eyes to her knees when she sat reading like that. Often she stood at the window looking out for a long time at our quiet street. Or she took her shoes off and lay on her back on the bedspread, fully dressed, with her open eyes fixed on a particular spot on the ceiling. Sometimes she would suddenly stand up, feverishly put on her outdoor clothes, promise to be back in a quarter of an hour, straighten her skirt, smooth down her hair without looking in the mirror, hang her plain straw handbag on her shoulder, and go out briskly, as though she was afraid of missing something. If I asked to go with her, or if I asked her where she was going, my mother would say:
     "I need to be on my own for a bit. Why don't you be on your own too?" And again: "I'll be back in a quarter of an hour."
     She always kept her word: she'd be back very soon, with a sparkle in her eyes and color in her cheeks, as though she had been in very cold air. As though she'd run all the way. Or as though something exciting had happened to her on the way. She was prettier when she returned than when she left.
     Once I followed her out of the house without her noticing me. I trailed her at a distance, clinging to walls and bushes, as I'd learned to do from Sherlock Holmes and from films. The air was not very cold and my mother did not run, she walked briskly, as though afraid she'd be late. At the end of Zephaniah Street she turned right and stepped out jauntily in her white shoes until she reached the bottom of Malachi Street. There she stopped beside the mailbox and hesitated. The young detective who was trailing her came to the conclusion that she went out to mail letters secretly, and I was bristling with curiosity and vague apprehension. But my mother did not mail any letter. She stood for a moment beside the mailbox, lost in thought, and then she suddenly put a hand to her forehead and turned to go home. (Years later that red mailbox still stood there, set into a concrete wall, and inscribed with the letters GR, for King George V.) So I cut through a yard that led me to a shortcut through a second yard, and I got home a minute or two before she arrived, a little out of breath, her cheeks colored as though she'd been in snow, with a mischievous, affectionate sparkle in her piercing brown eyes. At that moment my mother looked very much like her father, Grandpa-Papa. She took my head and pressed it lightly to her tummy and said something like this to me:
     "Of all my children, you're the one I love best. Can you tell me once and for all what it is about you that makes me love you the most?"
     And also:
     "It's especially your innocence. I've never encountered innocence like yours in all my life. Even when you've lived for many long years and had all sorts of experiences, your innocence will never leave you. Ever. You'll always stay innocent."
     And also:
     "There are some women who just devour the innocent, and there are others, and I'm one of them, who love innocent men and feel an inner urge to spread a protective wing over them."
     And also:
     "I think you will grow up to be a sort of prattling puppydog like your father, and you'll also be a man who is quiet and full and closed like a well in a village that has been abandoned by all its inhabitants. Like me. You can be both, yes. I do believe you can. Would you like us to play at making up a story now? We'll take it in turns to make up a chapter. Shall I start? Once upon a time there was a village that had been abandoned by all its inhabitants. Even the cats and dogs. Even the birds had abandoned it. So the village stood silent and abandoned for years upon years. The thatched roofs were lashed by the rain and the wind, the walls of the cottages were cracked by hail and snow, the vegetable gardens were overgrown, and only the trees and bushes went on growing, and with no one to prune them, they grew thicker and thicker. One evening, in the autumn, a traveler who had lost his way arrived in the abandoned village. Hesitantly he knocked at the door of the first cottage, and ... would you like to carry on?"
    


     Around that time, in the winter between 1949 and 1950, two years before her death, she began to have frequent headaches. She often had the flu and sore throats, and even when she recovered, the migraines did not go away. She put her chair near the window and sat for hours in a blue flannel dressing gown staring at the rain, with her book open upside-down on her lap, but instead of reading she drummed on its cover with her fingers. She sat stiffly staring at the rain or at some sodden bird for an hour or two hours and never stopped drumming on the book with all ten fingers. As though she were repeating the same piece over and over again on the piano.

     Gradually she had to cut down on the housework. She still managed to put away the dishes, tidy up, and throw out every scrap of paper and crumb. She still swept the apartment every day and washed the floor once every two or three days. But she did not cook complicated meals anymore. She made do with simple food: boiled potatoes, fried eggs, raw vegetables. Occasionally bits of chicken floating in chicken soup. Or boiled rice with canned tuna. She hardly ever complained about her piercing headaches, which sometimes continued for days. It was my father who told me about them. He told me quietly, not in her presence, in a kind of man-to-man conversation. He put his arm around my shoulder and asked me to promise to keep my voice down from now on when Mother was at home. Not to shout or make a racket. And I must especially promise not to slam doors, windows, or shutters. I must be careful not to drop pots or cans or saucepan lids. And not to clap my hands indoors.
     I promised, and I kept my word. He called me a bright boy, and once or twice he even called me "young man."
     My mother smiled at me affectionately, but it was a smile without a smile. That winter she got more wrinkles at the corners of her eyes.
     We had few visitors. Lilenka—Lilia Kalish, Lea Bar-Samkha, the teacher who wrote two popular books about child psychology—came over some days; she sat facing my mother, and the two of them chatted in Russian or Polish. I had the feeling they were talking about their hometown, Rovno, and about their friends and teachers who were shot by Germans in the Susenki Forest. Because occasionally they mentioned the name of Issachar Reiss, the charismatic headmaster whom all the girls in Tarbuth were in love with, and the names of some other teachers too—Buslik, Berkowski, Fanka Seidman—and of some of the streets and parks from their childhood.
     Grandma Shlomit came around occasionally, inspected the icebox and the larder, screwed up her face, had a brief whispered conversation with Father at the end of the corridor, outside the door of the little bathroom that was also the toilet, then peeped into the room where Mother was resting and asked her in a sweetened voice:
     "Do you need anything, my dear?"
     "No, thank you."
     "Then why don't you lie down?"
     "I'm fine like this. Thank you."
     "Aren't you cold? Shall I light the heater for you?"
     "No thanks, I'm not cold. Thank you."
     "What about the doctor? When did he call?"
     "I don't need the doctor."
     "Really? Nu, and how exactly do you know you don't need the doctor?"
     Father said something to his mother in Russian, sheepishly, then immediately apologized to both of them. Grandma told him off:
     "Be quiet, Lonya. Don't interfere. I'm talking to her, not to you. What an example, excuse me, you're setting for the child."
     The child hurriedly got out of the way, although once he did manage to hear Grandma whispering to Father when he saw her to the door:
     "Yes. Play-acting. As though she deserves the moon. Just stop arguing with me. You'd think she was the only one who has a hard time here. You'd think the rest of us are living in the lap of luxury. You should open her window a bit. A person could literally suffocate to death in there."
     Nevertheless, the doctor was called. He was called again not long afterward. Mother was sent to the clinic for thorough tests and even had to spend a couple of nights at Hadassah Hospital, in its temporary premises at Davidka Square. The tests were inconclusive. A fortnight after she came back from the hospital, pale and drooping, our doctor was called again. Once he was even called out in the middle of the night, and I was woken by his kind voice, thick and rough like wood glue, joking with Father in the corridor. By the side of the sofa that opened out at night into a narrow double bed, on Mother's side, all sorts of packets and jars appeared, vitamin pills, migraine pills, something called APC, and bottles of medicine. She refused to lie in bed. She sat quietly on her chair by the window for hours on end, and sometimes she seemed in a very good mood. She spoke gently and kindly to Father that winter, as though he were the patient, as though he were the one who shuddered if anyone raised their voice. She got into the habit of speaking to him as though to a child, sweetly, affectionately, sometimes she even spoke to him in baby talk. Whereas to me she spoke as one might speak to a confidant.
     "Please don't be angry with me, Amos," she would say, piercing my soul with her eyes. "I'm not having an easy time of it right now. You can see for yourself how hard I'm trying to make everything all right."
     I got up early and swept the floor before I went to school, and twice a week I washed it with soapy water and wiped it dry. I learned how to chop up a salad, butter bread, fry an egg for my supper, because Mother generally suffered from slight evening sickness.
     As for Father, he suddenly showed signs of cheerfulness at this time, for no apparent reason, which he made every effort to disguise. He hummed to himself, chuckled for no reason, and once, when he didn't notice me, I caught sight of him leaping and jumping in the yard as though he had been stung. He often went out in the evening and came back only after I was asleep. He had to go out, he said, because my light went out at nine and in their room Mother couldn't stand the electric light. Every evening she would sit in the dark in her chair by the window. He tried sitting with her, next to her, in silence, as though he were sharing her suffering, but his cheery, impatient nature didn't let him sit motionless like that for more than three or four minutes.

 49


     AT FIRST Father withdrew to the kitchen in the evenings. He tried to read, or to spread out his books and note cards on the worn oilcloth and work a little. But the kitchen was too small and cramped, and he felt confined there. He was a man who thrived on company, he loved arguing and joking, he loved light, and if he was made to sit on his own night after night in that depressing kitchen, with no clever wordplay, no historical or political debate, his eyes misted over with a sort of childish sulkiness.

     Mother suddenly laughed and said to him:
     "Go and play outside for a bit."
     She added:
     "Only take care. There are all sorts of people out there. They're not all as kindhearted and straightforward as you are."
     "Shto ty ponimayesh?" Father exploded. "Ty ne normalnaya? Vidish malchik!"
     Mother said:
     "Sorry."
     He always asked her permission before he went out. He never went out before he had finished all the chores: putting the shopping away, washing up, hanging out the wash, bringing in the wash. Then he would polish his shoes, take a shower, splash on some of the new aftershave he had bought for himself, put on a clean shirt, carefully choose a suitable tie, and, still holding his jacket, he would bend over my mother and say:
     "Are you really sure you don't mind if I go out to see some friends? Have a chat about the political situation? Talk about work? Tell me the truth."
     Mother never objected. But she adamantly refused to listen when he tried to tell her where he was going.
     "Just try not to make too much noise when you come in, Arieh."
     "I will."
     "Good night. Off you go."
     "You really don't mind if I go out? I won't stay out late."
     "I really don't mind. And you can come home when you like."
     "Do you need anything else?"
     "Thank you. No, I don't need anything. Amos is here to look after me."
     "I won't be late."
     And after another little hesitant silence:
     "All right then. So is that OK? I'm off? See you soon. Hope you feel better. Try to get into bed, don't fall asleep in the chair."
     "I'll try."
     "Good night then? See you? I promise I won't make a noise when I come in, it won't be late."
     "Go."
     He straightened his jacket, adjusted his tie, and left, humming as he walked past my window in a warm voice but hair-raisingly out of tune: "So long is the road and so winding the way, you're farther away than the moon..." Or "What are they saying, your eyes, your eyes, without ever saying a word..."
    


     Her insomnia came from her migraine. The doctor prescribed all kinds of sleeping pills and tranquilizers, but none of them helped. She was afraid of going to bed, and spent every night in her chair, draped in a blanket, with a cushion under her head and another one hiding her face; perhaps she tried to sleep like that. The slightest disturbance made her start: the wailing of lovesick cats, distant gunfire in Sheikh Jarrah or Isawiya, the muezzin's call at dawn from a minaret in Arab Jerusalem, across the border. If Father turned out all the lights, she was afraid of the dark; if he left a light on in the corridor, it made her migraine worse. Apparently he would get back shortly before midnight, in high spirits but full of shame, to find her sitting awake in her chair, staring dry-eyed at the darkened window. He would ask if she wanted some tea or hot milk, beg her to get into bed and try to go to sleep, and offer to sit up on the chair instead, if that would help her to get some sleep at last. Sometimes he felt so guilty that he got down on his knees to put some woolen socks on her, in case her feet were cold.

     When he came home in the middle of the night, he probably showered thoroughly, singing to himself cheerfully, shamelessly out of tune, "I have a garden, and I have a well," catching himself in the middle and silencing himself at once, covered with shame and confusion, getting undressed in a guilty silence, putting on his striped pajamas, gently repeating his offer of tea or milk or a cold drink, and perhaps trying once more to induce her to lie down in bed, next to him or instead of him. And begging her to banish her bad thoughts and think pleasant thoughts instead. While he got into bed and curled up under the blanket, he suggested all sorts of pleasant thoughts that she might think, and ended up falling asleep like a baby with all those pleasant thoughts. But I imagine that he would wake up, responsibly, two or three times in the night to check on the patient in her chair, bring her her medicine and a glass of water, straighten her blanket, and go back to sleep.
    


     By the end of the winter she had almost stopped eating. Sometimes she dunked a dry rusk in a glass of tea and said that was enough for her, she was feeling a little queasy and had no appetite. Don't worry about me, Arieh, I hardly ever go out. If I did eat, I'd get fat like my mother. Don't worry.

     Father said sadly to me:
     "Mother isn't well, and the doctors can't discover what's wrong with her. I wanted to call in some other doctors, but she wouldn't let me." And once he said to me:
     "Your mother is punishing herself. Just to punish me."
     Grandpa Alexander said:
     "Nu, what. Mental state. Melancholia. Whims. It's a sign that the heart is still young."
     Auntie Lilenka said to me:
     "It can't be easy for you either. You're such a bright, sensitive child. You'll be a writer one day. And your mother says you're a ray of sunshine in her life. You really are a ray of sunshine. Not like someone whose childish selfishness allows him to go out and gather rosebuds at such a time, without realizing that he's only making matters worse. Never mind. I was talking to myself there, not to you. You're a rather lonely child, and you may be even more lonely than usual right now, so whenever you need to have a heart to heart with me, don't hesitate, please remember that Lilia is not just a friend of Mother's but, if only you let me, a good friend of yours too. A friend who doesn't just see you the way grown-ups see children, but is a real kindred spirit."
     I may have understood that when Aunt Lilia said "go out and gather rosebuds" she was referring to Father's habit of going to see friends in the evening, although I couldn't see what rosebuds she thought grew in the Rudnickis' cramped apartment, with the bald bird and the pine-cone bird and the herd of raffia animals behind the glass doors of the sideboard, or in the miserable, run-down apartment that was all the Abramskis could afford, and that they had almost stopped cleaning and keeping tidy since they went into mourning for their son. Or perhaps in those rosebuds of Aunt Lilia's I guessed at something that was impossible. And that may be why I refused to understand it or to make a connection with Father's meticulous polishing of his shoes or his new aftershave.
    


     Memory deludes me. I have just remembered something that I completely forgot after it happened. I remembered it again when I was about sixteen, and then I forgot it again. And this morning I remembered not the event itself but the previous recollection, which itself was more than forty years ago, as though an old moon were reflected in a windowpane from which it was reflected in a lake, from where memory draws not the reflection itself, which no longer exists, but only its whitened bones.

     So here it is. Here and now, in Arad on an autumn day at half past six in the morning, I can suddenly see perfectly sharply the image of me and my friend Lolik walking down Jaffa Road near Zion Square, one cloudy lunchtime in the winter of 1950 or 1951, and Lolik punches me lightly in the ribs and whispers, Hey, take a look at that, isn't that your Dad sitting in there? Let's scamper before he spots us and realizes we've cut Avisar's class. So we made off, but as we went, I saw my father through the glass front of Sichel's Café, sitting just inside, laughing, with a young woman who had her back to the window, and holding her hand—she was wearing a bracelet—to his lips; and I ran away from there, I ran away from Lolik, and I haven't quite stopped running since.
     Grandpa Alexander kissed every lady's hand. Father did it sometimes, but otherwise he just took her hand and bent over it to look at her wristwatch and compare it with his own, he was always doing that, to almost everybody, watches were his hobby. That was the only time I ever skipped a class, and I did it this time especially to go and see the burned-out Egyptian tank they put on display in the Russian Compound. I would never cut a class again. Ever.
    


     I hated him. For a couple of days. Out of shame. And after a couple of days I started hating my mother, with her migraines and her play-acting and her sit-in in her chair by the window, she was the one who was to blame because she had pushed him to look for signs of life. Then I hated myself because I had let Lolik tempt me like the fox and the cat in Pinocchio to skip Mr. Avisar's class. Why didn't I have a single ounce of strength of character? Why was I so easily influenced? And a week later it had completely slipped my mind, and I recalled what I had seen through the window of Sichel's Café only one bad night at Kibbutz Hulda when I was about sixteen. I forgot, just as I forgot all about the morning I came home early from school and found my mother sitting quietly in her blue flannel dressing gown, not in her chair by the window but outside in the yard, in a deck chair, under the bare pomegranate tree, sitting there calmly with an expression on her face that looked like a smile but wasn't; her book was lying as usual upside down open on her lap and torrential rain was pouring down on her and must have been doing so for an hour or two because when I stood her up and dragged her indoors, she was soaked and frozen like a drenched bird that would never fly again. I got her to the bathroom and fetched her some dry clothes from her closet and I told her off like a grown-up and I gave her instructions, through the bathroom door, and she didn't answer but she did everything I told her to do, only she didn't stop smiling that smile that wasn't a smile. I didn't say a word to Father, because Mother's eyes asked me to keep it a secret. And to Aunt Lilia all I said was something like this:

     "But you're completely wrong, Auntie Lilia. I'll never be a writer or a poet, or a scholar either, there's no way I will, because I haven't got any feelings. Feelings disgust me. I'm going to be a farmer. I'm going to live in a kibbutz. Or maybe someday I'll be a dog poisoner. With a syringe full of arsenic."
    


     In the spring she felt better. On the morning of the spring festival of Tu Bishvat, the day that Chaim Weizmann, as president of the Provisional Council of State, opened the meeting of the Constituent Assembly that became the First Knesset, my mother put on her blue dress and asked Father and me to join her in a little outing to the Tel Arza woods. I thought she carried herself well and looked pretty in this dress, and when we finally left our book-laden basement and went out into the spring sunlight, there was a warm sparkle of affection in her eyes. Father put his arm in hers and I ran a little way ahead of them, like a puppy, to give them a chance to talk to each other, or maybe just because I was so happy.

     Mother had made some cheese sandwiches with slices of tomato, hard-boiled egg, red pepper, and anchovy, and Father had made a flask of lukewarm orange juice that he had squeezed himself. When we got to the woods, we spread out a small tarpaulin and sprawled on it, inhaling the smell of the pines that had drunk their fill of the winter rains. Rocky slopes that had grown a deep fuzz of green peeped at us through the trees. We could see the houses of the Arab village of Shuafat across the border, and the minaret of Nebi Samwil rose slim and tall on the horizon. Father observed that the word for "woods" in Hebrew was similar to the words for "deaf," "silent," "industry," and "plowing," which led into a short lecture about the charms of language. Since Mother was in such a good mood, she gave him a list of other similar words.
     Then she told us about a Ukrainian neighbor, an agile, good-looking boy who could predict exactly which morning the rye would start sprouting and the first shoots of beetroot would appear. All the Gentile girls were crazy about this boy, Stephan, Stepasha they called him, or Stiopa, but he was madly in love with a Jewish teacher at the Tarbuth school, so much so that he once tried to drown himself in a whirlpool in the river, but he was such a wonderful swimmer that he could not drown, he was carried along to an estate on the bank of the river, and the woman who owned the estate seduced him, and a few months later she bought an inn for him, and he's probably still there, ugly and gross from too much drinking and womanizing.
     For once Father forgot to silence her when she used the word "womanizing," and didn't even shout, "Vidish Malchik!" He laid his head on her knee, stretched out on the tarpaulin, and chewed a blade of grass. I did the same: I lay down on the tarpaulin, put my head on Mother's other knee, chewed a blade of grass, and filled my lungs with the intoxicating warm air, full of fresh scents and the hum of insects drunk with the spring, and washed clean by the winter wind and rain. How good it would be to stop time, and to stop writing this too, a couple of years before her death, with the picture of the three of us in the Tel Arza woods on that spring festival: my mother in her blue dress, with a red silk scarf tied gracefully around her neck, sitting upright and looking pretty, then leaning back against the trunk of a tree, with my father's head on one knee and mine on the other, stroking our faces and hair with her cool hand, as throngs of birds shrilled overhead in the spring-cleaned pine trees.
    


     She was really much better that spring. No longer did she sit day and night in her chair facing the window; she didn't recoil from the electric light or start at every noise. She no longer neglected the housework and the hours of reading that she loved. She had fewer migraines, and she almost recovered her appetite. And once again it was enough for her to spend five minutes in front of the mirror, a dab of powder, a touch of lipstick and eyeshadow, a brush of the hair, another couple of minutes carefully making her choice in front of the open closet door, to appear to all of us mysterious, pretty, and radiant. The usual visitors reappeared at our apartment, the Bar-Yitzhar-Itselevitches, the Abramskis, devout Revisionists who loathed the Labor government, Hannah and Hayim Toren, the Rudnickis, and Tosia and Gustav Krochmal from Danzig, who had the dolls' hospital in Geula Street. The men sometimes shot a hasty, embarrassed look at my mother and hurriedly looked away again.

     And we resumed going on Friday evenings to light candles and eat gefilte fish or stuffed chicken neck sewn up with a needle and thread at Grandma Shlomit and Grandpa Alexander's round table. On Saturday mornings we sometimes went to visit the Rudnickis, and after lunch, almost every Sabbath, we crossed the whole of Jerusalem, from north to south, on the pilgrimage to Uncle Joseph in Talpiot.
     Once, over supper, Mother suddenly told us about a standard lamp that had stood beside her armchair in her rented room in Prague when she was a student there. Father stopped on his way home from work the next day at two furniture shops in King George Street and an electrical goods shop in Ben Yehuda Street: he compared, went back to the first shop, and came home with the most beautiful standard lamp. It had cost him nearly a quarter of his monthly salary. Mother kissed us both on our foreheads and promised us with her strange smile that the lamp would give us light long after she had gone. Father, drunk on victory, did not hear these words of hers because he was never a good listener and because his torrent of verbal energy had already swept him on, to the proto-Semitic root meaning light, NWR, the Aramaic form menarta and the Arabic equivalent manar.
     I heard but I didn't understand. Or I understood but I didn't grasp the significance.
     Then the rain started again. Once again Father asked permission, after I had been sent to bed, to "go out and see some people." He promised to come back not too late, and not to make a noise, he brought her a cup of warm milk, and went out with his super-shiny shoes, with a triangle of white handkerchief peering out of his jacket pocket, like his father, trailing a scent of aftershave. As he went past my window, I heard him open his umbrella with a click, humming out of tune, "What delicate hands she had, no man dared to tou-ou-ouch her," or "Her eyes were like the northern star, but her heart was as hot as the de-e-e-sert."
    


     But Mother and I deceived him while his back was turned. Although he was so strict about lights-out for me, "nine on the dot and not a second later," as soon as the sound of his footsteps faded down the wet street I leaped out of bed and ran to her, to hear more and more stories. She sat in her chair in a room whose walls were lined with row upon row of books, with more piled up on the floor, and I knelt on the rug at her feet in my pajamas, with my head resting on her warm thigh, listening with my eyes closed. There were no lights on in the apartment apart from the new standard lamp by her chair. The wind and rain pounded at the shutters. Occasional volleys of low thunder rolled across Jerusalem. Father had gone off and left me and Mother with her stories. Once, she told me about the empty apartment above her rented room in Prague when she was a student. No one had lived there for two years except, so the neighbors said, in a whisper, the ghosts of two little dead girls. There had been a big fire in the apartment, and it had been impossible to save the girls, Emilia and Jana. After the tragedy, the girls' parents had emigrated. The soot-blackened apartment was locked and shuttered. It was not renovated or rented. Sometimes, the neighbors whispered, muffled sounds of laughter and mischief were heard, or crying in the middle of the night. I never heard sounds like that, Mother said, but sometimes I was almost certain that faucets were turned on, furniture was moved, bare feet pattered from room to room. Perhaps somebody was using the empty apartment for secret love-making or for some other shady purpose. When you grow up, you'll discover that almost everything your ears hear at night can be interpreted in more than one way. In fact, not only at night and not only your ears. What your eyes see, too, even in broad daylight, can almost always be understood in various ways.

     On other nights she told me about Eurydice and Orpheus. She told me about the eight-year-old daughter of a well-known Nazi, a brutal killer who was hanged by the Allies at Nuremberg after the war: his little daughter was sent to an institution for juvenile delinquents just because she was caught decorating his photograph with flowers. She told me about a young timber merchant from one of the villages near Rovno who got lost in the forest one stormy night in winter and disappeared, but six years later somebody secretly deposited his worn-out boots at the foot of his widow's bed in the middle of the night. She told me about old Tolstoy, who left his home at the end of his life and expired in a station master's cottage at a remote railway junction called Astapovo.
     My mother and I were like Peer Gynt and his mother Ase on those winter nights:
     My young lad and I were companions in grief ...
 As we sat in our home there, my young Peer and I—
 seeking solace from sorrow and blessed relief ...
 So all sorts of adventures we started to spin

     of princes and trolls and all manner of beasts;
 and of bride-rapes as well. Oh, but who would have thought
 that those devilish tales would have stuck in his head?*

     Often we played a game on those nights, making up a story alternately: Mother would start a story, I would continue it, then the thread passed back to her, and then to me again, and so on. My father would get home just before or after midnight, and at the sound of his footsteps outside, we instantly switched off the lamp, jumped into bed like a pair of naughty children, and pretended to be sleeping the sleep of the just. Half asleep, I heard him moving about the little apartment, undressing, drinking some milk from the icebox, going to the bathroom, turning on the faucet, turning it off, flushing the toilet, turning the faucet on and off again, humming an old love song under his breath, drinking some more milk, and padding barefoot to the book room and the sofa, which had been opened into a double bed, presumably lying down next to Mother, who was feigning sleep, internalizing his humming, humming inside himself for another minute or two, then dropping off to sleep, and sleeping like a babe until six in the morning. At six he woke first, shaved, dressed, and put on Mother's apron to squeeze us both some oranges, warming the juice, as always, over a pan of boiling water, because cold juice is well known to give you a chill, then bringing each of us a glass of juice in bed.

    


     One of those nights my mother couldn't sleep again. She didn't like lying on the sofa bed next to Father, who was sleeping soundly while his glasses slept quietly on the shelf next to him, so she got up and instead of going to sit in her chair facing the window or to the gloomy kitchen, she got into bed with me, cuddled me, and kissed me till I woke up. Then she asked me in a whisper, right into my ear, if I minded if we whispered together tonight. Just the two of us. I'm sorry I woke you up but I really need to talk to you tonight. And this time in the dark I heard in her voice a smile that was a real smile, not a shadow of one.

     When Zeus discovered that Prometheus had managed to steal a spark from the fire that he had withheld from the mortals as a punishment, he almost exploded with rage. Rarely had the other G-ds seen their king so sullen and angry. Day after day he let his thunder roll, and no one dared approach him. In his rage the furious father ofthe G-ds decided to bring a great disaster upon the race ofmortals in the guise of a wonderful present. So he commanded Hephaestus, the blacksmith G-d, to form a beautiful woman out ofclay. The G-ddess Athena taught her to spin and sew and clothed her in fine garments. The G-ddess Aphrodite endowed her with graceful charms that beguiled all men and enflamed their desires. Hermes, the G-d of merchants and thieves, taught her to lie without batting an eyelid, to captivate and to deceive. The beautiful temptress was named Pandora, meaning "She who possesses all gifts." And then Zeus, thirsty for vengeance, ordered her to be given as a bride to Prometheus's foolish brother. In vain did Prometheus warn his brother to beware of the gifts of the G-ds. When the brother saw this beauty queen, he leaped with joy upon Pandora, who had brought with her as a dowry a casket filled with gifts from all the G-ds of Olympus, which she was instructed never to open. One day Pandora lifted the lid of the casket of gifts, and out flew illness, loneliness, injustice, cruelty, and death. That is how all the troubles that we see around us came into this world. If you haven't fallen asleep, I wanted to tell you that in my opinion the troubles existed already. There were the troubles of Prometheus and Zeus, and the troubles of Pandora herself, not to mention simple people like us. The troubles did not come out of Pandora's box, Pandora's box was invented because of troubles. It was opened because of troubles, too. Will you go and have your hair cut after school tomorrow? Just look how long it's grown.

     *Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt, act II, scene 2.


 50


     SOMETIMES MY parents took me with them when they went "into town," that is to say to King George Street or Ben Yehuda Street, to one of the three or four main cafés that may have been reminiscent of cafés in the cities of Central Europe in the interwar years. In these cafés Hebrew and foreign-language newspapers were at the disposal of customers, fixed into long sticks, as well as a selection of weeklies and monthlies in various languages. Beneath the brass and crystal chandeliers a subdued foreign murmur mingled with blue-gray cigarette smoke and a whiff ofother worlds, in which tranquil lives of study and companionship proceeded at a peaceful pace.

     Well-groomed ladies and distinguished-looking gentlemen sat at the tables, conversing quietly. Waiters and waitresses in white jackets with white tea towels folded neatly over their arms floated among the tables serving piping-hot coffee on top of which floated pure, curly angels of whipped cream, Ceylon tea with the essence served separately in little china pots, liqueur-filled pastries, croissants, apple strudel with cream, chocolate cake with vanilla icing, mulled wine on winter evenings, and little glasses of brandy and cherry brandy. (In 1949 and 1950 there still was only ersatz coffee, and the chocolate and cream were probably ersatz too.)
     In these cafés my parents sometimes met a different group of acquaintances, far removed from their usual circle of doll menders or the post office. Here we conferred with such valuable acquaintances as Mr. Pfeffermann, who was Father's boss in the newspaper department at the library, Joshua Czaczik the publisher, who came to Jerusalem occasionally from Tel Aviv on business, promising young philologists and historians of my parents' age who were embarking on a university career, and other young scholars, including professors' assistants, whose future seemed assured. Sometimes my parents met a small group of Jerusalem writers whom Father felt honored to know: Dov Kimche, Shraga Kadari, Yitzhak Shenhar, Yehuda Yaari. Today they are almost forgotten, and even most of their readers have gone the way of all flesh, but in their time they were very well known, and their books were widely read.
     Father would prepare for these meetings by washing his hair, polishing and buffing his shoes till they shone like jet, securing his favorite tie, the gray-and-white striped one, with a silver tie clip, and explaining to me not once but several times the rules of polite behavior and my duty to reply to any question with brevity and good taste. Sometimes he shaved before we left home, even though he had already shaved in the morning. My mother would mark the occasion by putting on her coral necklace, which set off her olive complexion perfectly and added an exotic touch to her rather withdrawn beauty, making her look Italian or possibly Greek.
     The well-known scholars and writers were impressed by Father's acuity and erudition. They knew they could always rely on his extensive knowledge whenever their dictionaries and reference works let them down. But even more than they made use of my father and took advantage of his expertise, they were openly pleased by my mother's company. Her profound, inspirational attentiveness urged them on to tireless verbal feats. Something in her thoughtful presence, her unexpected questions, her look, her remarks, would shed a new, surprising light on the subject under discussion, and made them talk on and on as though they were slightly intoxicated, about their work, their creative struggles, their plans and their achievements. Sometimes my mother would produce an apposite quotation from the speaker's own writings, remarking on a certain similarity to the ideas of Tolstoy, or she would identify a stoic quality in what was being said, or observe with a slight inclination of the head—at such moments her voice would take on a dark, winelike quality—that here her ear seemed to catch an almost Scandinavian note in the work of a writer who was present, an echo of Hamsun or Strindberg, or even of the mystical writings of Emmanuel Swedenborg. Thereupon my mother would resume her previous silence and alert attentiveness, like a finely tuned instrument, while they enchantedly lavished on her whatever they did or did not have on their minds as they competed for her attention.
     Years later, when I happened to bump into one or two of them, they informed me that my mother had been a very charming woman and a truly inspired reader, the sort of reader every writer dreamed of when hard at work in the solitude of his study. What a pity she left no writings of her own: it was possible that her premature death had deprived us of a highly talented writer, at a time when women writing in Hebrew could be counted on the fingers of one hand.
     If these notables met my father at the library or in the street, they would chat with him briefly about Education Minister Dinur's letter to the heads of the university, or Zalman Shneour's attempt to become Walt Whitman in his old age, or who would get Professor Klausner's chair when he retired, and then they would pat him on the back and say, with a gleam in their eyes and a beaming expression, please greet your lady wife warmly from me, what a truly wonderful woman, such a cultivated, discerning woman! So artistic!
     As they patted him affectionately on the shoulder, in their heart of hearts they may have envied him his wife and wondered what she had seen in him, that pedant, even if he was extraordinarily knowledgeable, industrious, and even, relatively speaking, a not insignificant scholar, but, between ourselves, a rather scholastic, totally uncreative person.
    


     I had a specific role in these conversations at the café. First of all I had to give polite, intelligent answers, just like a grown-up, to such difficult questions as how old I was, what class I was in at school, did I collect stamps or have a scrapbook, what did they teach us these days in geography, what did they teach us in Hebrew, was I a good boy, what had I read by Dov Kimche (or Yaari, or Kadari, or Even-Zahav, or Shenhar), did I like all my teachers? And occasionally: had I started to take an interest in young ladies yet? And what would I be when I grew up—a professor too? Or a pioneer? Or a field marshal in the armies of Israel? (I came to the conclusion at that time that writers were phony and even somewhat ridiculous.)

     Secondly, my task was not to get in the way.
     I had to be nonexistent, invisible.
     Their café talk lasted at least seventy hours at a time, and for the whole of this eternity I had to embody an even more silent presence than the softly humming fan on the ceiling.
     The penalty for breach of trust in the presence of strangers might be complete house arrest, from the moment I got home from school, every day for a fortnight, or the loss of the privilege of playing with friends, or cancellation of the right to read in bed for the next twenty days.
     The big prize for a hundred hours of solitude was an ice cream. Or even corn on the cob.
     I was hardly ever allowed ice cream because it was bad for the throat and gave one a chill. As for corn on the cob, that was sold on street corners from a container of boiling water set on top of a Primus stove, the hot, fragrant corn on the cob that the unshaven man wrapped in a green leaf for you and sprinkled with cooking salt. I was hardly ever allowed it because the unshaven man looked distinctly unwashed, and his water was probably teeming with germs. "But if Your Highness behaves impeccably at Café Atara today, you will be allowed a free choice on our way home: ice cream or corn on the cob, whichever you prefer."
     So it was in cafés, against a background of endless conversations between my parents and their friends about politics, history, philosophy, and literature, about power struggles among professors and intrigues of editors and publishers, conversations whose content I was unable to understand, that I gradually became a little spy.
     I developed a secret little game that I could play for hours on end without moving, without speaking, with no accessories, not even a pencil and paper. I would look at the strangers in the café and try to guess, from their clothes and gestures, from the paper they were reading or the drinks they had ordered, who they all were, where they came from, what they did, what they had done just before they came here, and where they were going afterward. That woman over there who had just smiled to herself twice—I tried to deduce from her expression what she was thinking. That thin young man in a cap who had not taken his eyes off the door and was disappointed every time anyone came in: what was he thinking about? What did the person he was waiting for look like? I sharpened my ears and stole snatches of conversation out of the air. I leaned over and peeped to see what everyone was reading, I observed who was in a hurry to leave and who was just settling down.
     On the basis of a few uncertain outward signs, I made up complicated but exciting life stories for them. That woman with the embittered lips and the low-cut dress, for example, sitting at a corner table in a thick cloud of cigarette smoke: three times in the space of an hour by the big clock on the wall behind the counter she has stood up, disappeared into the ladies', then returned to sit in front of her empty cup, chain smoking with her brown cigarette holder, casting an occasional glance at the tanned figure in the vest sitting at a table near the hat stand. Once she stood up and went over to the man in the vest, bent over, said a few words to which he replied only with a nod, and now she's sitting smoking again. How many possibilities there are! How dizzyingly rich the kaleidoscope of plots and stories I can weave from these fragments! Or maybe she just asked him if she could have the newspaper he was reading when he was finished with it.
     My eyes attempt in vain to escape the profile of the woman's ample bosom, but when I close them, it comes closer, I can feel its warmth, it almost enfolds my face. My knees begin to shake. The woman is waiting for her lover, who has promised to come but forgotten, and that's why she's sitting there chain smoking so desperately, drinking one black coffee after another, to soothe the lump in her throat. She disappears to the ladies' from time to time to powder her face and hide the signs of her tears. The waitress has brought the man in the vest a goblet of liqueur, to drown his sorrow because his wife has left him for a younger man. Perhaps at this very moment the pair are sailing away on some love boat, dancing cheek to cheek by the light of the moon, which is reflected in the ocean, at a ball given by the captain, dreamy music from the Edison Cinema wafting around them as they dance, on their way to some outrageous resort: St. Moritz, San Marino, San Francisco, Sao Paulo, Sans Souci.
     I go on weaving my web. The young lover, whom I visualize in the form of the proud, manly sailor depicted on the packet of Nelson Navy Cut, is actually the man who promised the chain-smoking woman to meet her here this evening, and now he's a thousand miles away. She is waiting in vain. "Have you, too, sir, been abandoned to your fate? Have you, like me, been left all alone?" That, in the language of old romantic stories, is how she addressed the man in the vest when she went over to his table a moment ago and bent over him, and he answered with a nod. Soon the forsaken couple will walk out of the café together, and outside in the street they will link arms without another word needing to be spoken.
     Where will they go together?
     My imagination paints avenues and parks, a moonlit bench, a lane leading to a little house behind a stone wall, candlelight, closed shutters, music, and here the story becomes too sweet and terrible for me to tell it to myself or to bear, and I hasten to take my leave of it. Instead I fix my eyes on two middle-aged men at a table close to ours, playing chess and talking Germanic Hebrew. One of them is sucking and stroking a cold pipe made of reddish wood, the other occasionally wipes invisible perspiration from his high brow with a checkered handkerchief. A waitress comes over and whispers something to the man with the pipe, and he begs the other's pardon in his Germanic Hebrew, apologizes to the waitress too, and goes across to the telephone next to the serving hatch. When he has finished talking, he hangs up, stands for a moment looking forlorn and lost, then stumbles back to his table and apparently asks his chess partner again to excuse him, then he explains something to him, in German this time, hurriedly puts some coins down on the table and turns to leave; his friend is angry and tries almost by force to put the coins back in his pocket, but the other resists, and suddenly the coins are rolling on the floor under several tables, and the two gentlemen have stopped parrying and have gone down on their knees to pick them up.
     Too late: I have already decided for them that they are cousins, the only survivors of a family that was murdered by Germans. I have already enriched their story with an enormous legacy and an eccentric will under the terms of which the winner of the game of chess will receive two-thirds of the inheritance while the loser will have to make do with one-third. Then I introduce to the story an orphan girl of my own age, who has been sent from Europe with Youth Aliya to some kibbutz or educational institution, and she, not the chess players, is the real heir. At this point I step into the story myself, in the role of the knight in shining armor, the protector of orphans, who will wrest the legendary inheritance from those who are not entitled to it and restore it to its rightful owner, not for nothing but in exchange for love. But when I get to the love, my eyes close again and I have an urgent need to cut the story short and start spying on another table. Or on the lame waitress with her deep black eyes. This, it seems, was the beginning of my life as a writer: in cafés, waiting for ice cream or corn on the cob.
    


     To this day I pickpocket in this way. Especially from strangers. Especially in busy public places. In line at the clinic, for instance, or in some bureaucratic waiting room, at the railway station or the airport. Even sometimes when I am driving, in a traffic jam, peeping into the car next to me. Peeping and making up stories. Peeping again, and making up more stories. Where does she come from, by her clothes, her expression, her gestures as she touches up her makeup? What is her home like? What is her man like? Or take that boy over there with the unfashion-ably long sideburns, holding his mobile phone in his left hand while his other hand describes slicing movements, exclamation marks, distress signals: why exactly is he getting ready to fly to London tomorrow? What is his failing business? Who is waiting for him there? What do his parents look like? Where do they come from? What was he like as a child? And how is he planning to spend the evening, and the night, after he lands in London? (Nowadays I no longer stop in terror at the bedroom door: I float invisibly in.)

     If strangers intercept my inquisitive look, I smile absently at them by way of apology and look away. I have no desire to embarrass. I live in fear of being caught in the act and asked to explain myself. But, anyway, after a minute or two I have no need to keep peeping at the heroes of my casual stories: I've seen enough. Half a minute, and they're caught in my invisible paparazzi camera.
     Waiting at the supermarket check-out, for instance: the woman in front of me is short and plump, in her mid-forties, very attractive because something in her pose or expression suggests that she's tried everything and is unshockable now, even the most bizarre experience will do no more than arouse her amused curiosity. The wistful-looking young soldier behind me, who is only about twenty, is staring at this knowing woman with a starved look in his eyes. I take half a step sideways, not to block his view, and prepare a room with a deep-pile carpet for them, I shut the shutters, stand leaning back against the door, and now the vision is in full flow, in all its details, including the comic touch of his coy feverishness, and the moving touch of her compassionate generosity. Until the woman at the till has to raise her voice: Next, please! In an accent that is not exactly Russian, but perhaps comes from one of the Central Asian republics? And already I'm in Samarkand, in beautiful Bukhara: Bactrian camels, pink stone mosques, round prayer halls with sensual domes, and soft, deep carpets accompany me out into the street with my shopping.
    


     After my military service, in 1961, the Committee of Kibbutz Hulda sent me to Jerusalem to study for two years at the Hebrew University. I studied literature because the kibbutz needed a literature teacher urgently, and I studied philosophy because I insisted on it. Every Sunday, from four to six p.m., a hundred students gathered in the large hall in the Meiser Building to hear Professor Samuel Hugo Bergman lecture on "dialectical philosophy from Kierkegaard to Martin Buber." My mother Fania also studied philosophy with Professor Bergman, in the 1930s, when the university was still on Mount Scopus, before she married my father, and she had fond memories of him. By 1961 Bergman was already retired, he was an emeritus professor, but we were fascinated by his lucid, fierce wisdom. I was thrilled to think that the man standing in front of us had been at school with Kafka in Prague, and, as he once told us, had actually shared a bench with him for two years, until Max Brod turned up and took his place next to Kafka.

     That winter Bergman invited five or six of his favorite or most interesting pupils to come to his house for a couple of hours after the lectures. Every Sunday, at eight o'clock, I took the No. 5 bus from the new campus on Givat Ram to Professor Bergman's modest apartment in Re-havia. A pleasant faint smell of old books, fresh bread, and geraniums always filled the room. We sat down on the sofa or on the floor at the feet of our great master, the childhood friend of Kafka and Martin Buber and the author of the books from which we learned the history of epistemology and the principles of logic. We waited in silence for him to pronounce. Samuel Hugo Bergman was a stout man even in old age. With his shock of white hair, the ironic, amused lines around his eyes, a piercing glance that looked skeptical yet as innocent as that of a curious child, Bergman bore a striking resemblance to pictures of Albert Einstein as an old man. With his Central European accent he walked in the Hebrew language not with a natural stride, as though he were at home in it, but with a sort of elation, like a suitor happy that his beloved has finally accepted him and determined to rise above himself and prove to her that she has not made a mistake.
     Almost the only subject that concerned our teacher at these meetings was the survival of the soul, or the chances, if there were any, of existence after death. That is what he talked to us about on Sunday evenings through that winter, with the rain lashing at the windows and the wind howling in the garden. Sometimes he asked for our opinions, and he listened attentively, not at all like a patient teacher guiding his pupils' footsteps but more like a man listening for a particular note in a complicated piece of music, so as to decide if it was right or wrong.
     "Nothing," he said to us on one of the Sunday evenings, and I have not forgotten, so much so that I believe I can repeat what he said almost word for word, "ever disappears. The very word 'disappears' implies that the universe is, so to speak, finite, and that it is possible to leave it. But no-o-othing" (he deliberately drew the word out) "can ever leave the universe. And nothing can enter it. Not a single speck of dust can appear or disappear. Matter is transformed into energy, and energy into matter, atoms assemble and disperse, everything changes and is transformed, but no-o-othing can ever change from being to not-being. Not even the tiniest hair growing on the tail of some virus. The concept of infinity is indeed open, infinitely open, but at the same time it is also closed and hermetically sealed. Nothing leaves and nothing enters."
     Pause. A crafty, innocent smile spread like a sunrise across the wrinkled landscape of his rich, fascinating face: "In which case why, maybe someone can explain to me, why do they insist on telling me that the one and only exception to the rule, the one and only thing that is doomed to perdition, that can become nothing, the one and only thing that is destined for cessation in the whole wide universe in which not so much as an atom can be destroyed, is my poor soul? Will everything, every speck of dust, every drop of water continue to exist eternally, albeit in different forms, except for my soul?"
     "Nobody," murmured a clever young genius from a corner of the room, "has ever seen the soul."
     "No," Bergman agreed at once. "You don't meet the laws of physics or mathematics in a café either. Or wisdom, or foolishness, or desire or fear. No one has yet taken a little sample of joy or longing and put it in a test tube. But who is it, my young friend, who is talking to you right now? Is it Bergman's humors? His spleen? Is it perhaps Bergman's large intestine speaking? Who was it, if you will excuse my saying so, who spread that none-too-pleasant smile on your face? Was it not your soul? Was it your cartilages? Your gastric juices?"
     On another occasion he said:
     "What is in store for us after we die? No-o-obody knows. At any rate not with a knowledge that is susceptible of proof or demonstration. If I tell you this evening that I sometimes hear the voice of the dead and that it is much clearer and more intelligible to me than most of the voices of the living, you are entitled to say that this old man is in his dotage. He has gone out of his mind with terror at his impending death. Therefore I will not talk to you this evening about voices, this evening I will talk mathematics: since no-o-obody knows if there is anything on the other side of our death or if there is nothing there, we can deduce from this complete ignorance that the chances that there is something there are exactly the same as the chances that there is nothing there. Fifty percent for cessation and fifty percent for survival. For a Jew like me, a Central European Jew from the generation of the Nazi Holocaust, such odds in favor of survival are not at all bad."
     Gershom Scholem, Bergman's friend and rival, was also fascinated and possibly even tormented by the question of life after death. The morning the news of his death was broadcast, I wrote:
     Gershom Scholem died in the night. And now he knows.
     Bergman too knows now. So does Kafka. So do my mother and father. And their friends and acquaintances and most of the men and women in those cafés, both those I used to tell myself stories about and those who are forgotten. They all know now. Someday we will know too. And in the meantime we will continue to gather little details. Just in case.

 51


     I WAS A fiercely nationalistic child when I was in the fourth and fifth grades at Tachkemoni School. I wrote a historical novel in installments called The End of the Kingdom ofJudah, and several poems about conquest, and about national greatness, which resembled Grandpa Alexander's patriotic verses and aimed to imitate Vladimir Jabotinsky's nationalistic marching songs such as the Beitar Anthem: "...Spill your blood and offer up your soul! / Raise high the fire: / Repose is like mire; / We fight for a glorious goal!" I was also influenced by the song of the Jewish partisans in Poland and the ghetto rebels: "...What if our blood we spill? / Surely our spirit with heroic deeds shall thrive!" And poems by Saul Tchernikhowsky that Father used to read to me with wavering pathos in his voice: "...a tune of blood and fire! / So climb the hill and crush the vale, whate'er you see—acquire!" The poem that excited me most of all was "Nameless Soldiers," by Avraham Stern, alias Yair, the leader of the Stern Gang. I used to recite it with pathos but in a whisper in bed after lights out: "Nameless soldiers are we, we must fight to be free; / all around is the shadow of death. / We have signed up for life to do battle and strife—/ we must fight till we breathe our last breath.../ In the day that is red with our blood that is shed, / in the blackest despair of the night, / over village and town our flag shall be flown / for we fight to defend what is right!"

     Torrents of blood, soil, fire, and iron intoxicated me. Over and over again I imagined myself falling heroically on the battlefield, I imagined my parents' sorrow and pride, and at the same time, with no contradiction, after my heroic death, after tearfully enjoying the rousing funeral orations pronounced by Ben-Gurion, Begin, and Uri Zvi, after grieving over myself and seeing with emotion and a lump in my throat the marble statues and songs of praise in my memory, I always arose healthy and sound from my temporary death, soaked in self-admiration, appointed myself commander-in-chief of Israel's armed forces, and led my legions to liberate in blood and fire everything that the effeminate, Diaspora-bred worm of Jacob had not dared to wrest from the hand of the foe.
    


     Menachem Begin, the legendary underground commander, was my chief childhood idol at that time. Even earlier, in the last year of the British Mandate, the nameless commander of the underground had fired my imagination. In my mind I saw his form swathed in clouds of biblical glory. I imagined him in his secret headquarters in the wild ravines of the Judaean Desert, barefoot, with a leather girdle, flashing sparks like the prophet Elijah among the rocks of Mount Carmel, sending out orders from his remote cave with innocent-looking youths. Night after night his long arm reaches the heart of the British occupation force, dynamiting HQs and military installations, breaking through walls, blowing up ammunition dumps, pouring out its wrath on the strongholds of the enemy who was called, in the posters composed by my father, the "Anglo-Nazi foe," "Amalek," "Perfidious Albion." (My mother once said of the British: "Amalek or not, who knows if we won't miss them soon.")

     Once the state of Israel was established, the supreme commander of the Hebrew underground forces finally emerged from hiding, and his picture appeared one day in the paper above his name: not something heroic like Ari Ben-Shimshon or Ivriahu Ben-Kedumim, but Menachem Begin. I was shocked: the name Menachem Begin might have suited a Yiddish-speaking haberdasher from Zephaniah Street or a gold-toothed sheitel and corset maker from Geula Street. Moreover, to my disappointment, my childhood hero was revealed in the photograph in the paper as a frail, skinny man with large glasses perched on his pale face. Only his mustache attested to his secret powers; but after a few months the mustache disappeared. Mr. Begin's figure, voice, accent, and diction did not remind me of the biblical conquerors of Canaan or of Judah Mac-cabee, but of my feeble teachers at Tachkemoni, who were also men flowing with nationalist fervor and righteous wrath, but from behind their heroism a nervous self-righteousness and latent sourness occasionally burst through.
    


     And one day, thanks to Menachem Begin, I suddenly lost my desire to "spill my blood and offer up my son" and to "fight for a glorious goal." I abandoned the view that "repose is like mire"; after a while I came around to the opposite view.

     Every few weeks half of Jerusalem assembled at eleven o'clock on a Saturday morning to hear fiery speeches by Menachem Begin at gatherings of the Herut movement in the Edison Auditorium, which was the largest hall in the city. Its facade bore posters announcing the imminent appearance of the Israel Opera under the baton of Fordhaus Ben-Zisi. Grandpa used to dress himself up for the occasion in his magnificent black suit and a light blue satin tie. A triangle of white handkerchief protruded from his breast pocket like a snowflake in a heat wave. When we entered the auditorium, half an hour before the meeting was due to start, he raised his hat in all directions in greeting and even bowed to his friends. I marched beside my grandfather, solemn and well combed, in a white shirt and polished shoes, straight to the second or third row, where seats of honor were reserved for people like Grandpa Alexander, members of the Jerusalem committee of the "Herut Movement—founded by the Irgun, the National Military Organization." We would sit between Professor Yosef Yoel Rivlin and Mr. Eliahu Meridor, or between Dr. Israel Sheib-Eldad and Mr. Hanoch Kalai, or next to Mr. Isak Remba, the editor of the newspaper Herut.
     The hall was always packed with supporters of the Irgun and admirers of the legendary Menachem Begin, almost all of them men, among them the fathers of many of my classmates at Tachkemoni. But there was a fine invisible dividing line between the front three or four rows, which were reserved for prominent members of the intelligentsia, veterans of the National Front campaigns, activists in the Revisionist movement, former commanders of the Irgun, who mostly came from Poland, Lithuania, White Russia, and Ukraine, and the throngs of Sephardim, Bukharians, Yemenites, Kurds, and Aleppo Jews who filled the rest of the hall. This excitable throng packed the galleries and aisles, pressed against the walls, and spilled out into the foyer and the square in front of the auditorium. In the front rows they talked nationalist, revolutionary talk with a taste for glorious victories and quoted Nietzsche and Mazzini, but there was a dominant petit-bourgeois air of good manners: hats, suits, and ties, etiquette and a certain flowery salon formality that even then, in the early 1950s, had a whiff of mold and mothballs.
     Behind this inner circle extended an ocean of fervent true believers, a loyal, devoted throng of tradesmen, shopkeepers, workmen, many of them sporting skullcaps, having come straight from synagogue to hear their hero, their leader Mr. Begin, shabbily dressed, hard-working Jews trembling with idealism, warmhearted, hot-tempered, excitable, and vocal.
     At the beginning of the meeting they sang Beitar songs and at the end they sang the anthem of the Movement and the National Anthem, Hatikva. The dais was decorated with masses of Israeli flags, a gigantic photograph of Vladimir Jabotinsky, two razor-sharp rows of Beitar Youth resplendent in their uniforms and black ties—how I longed to join them when I was older—and stirring slogans such as "Jotapata, Masada, Beitar!," "If I forget thee O Jerusalem may my right hand lose its cunning!," and "In blood and fire Judaea fell, in blood and fire Judaea will rise again!"
     After a couple of warm-up speeches by committee members of the Jerusalem branch, everyone suddenly left the stage. Even the Beitar Youth marched off. A deep, religious silence fell upon the Edison Auditorium like a quiet whirring of wings. All eyes were fixed on the empty stage, and all hearts were primed. This expectant silence lasted for a long moment, then something stirred at the back of the stage, the velvet curtains parted a crack, and a solitary small, thin man stepped daintily to the microphone and stood before the audience with his head humbly bowed, as though he was overwhelmed by his own shyness. Only after a few seconds of awestruck silence did a few hesitant claps rise from the audience, as if the crowd could hardly believe its eyes, as if they were stunned, every time, to discover that Begin was not a fire-breathing giant but a slightly built, almost frail-looking man. But at once they burst into applause, and at the back the applause quickly turned to roars of affection that accompanied Begin's speech almost from beginning to end.
     For a couple of seconds the man stood motionless, with head bowed, shoulders drooping, as if to say: "I do not deserve this accolade," or "My soul is bowed down to the dust under the burden of your love" Then he stretched out his arms as if to bless the crowds, smiled shyly, silenced them, and began hesitantly, like a novice actor with stage fright:
     "Good Sabbath to you all, brothers and sisters. Fellow Jews. People of Jerusalem, our eternal holy city."
     And he stopped. Suddenly he said quietly, sadly, almost mournfully:
     "Brothers and sisters. These are difficult days for our beloved young state. Exceptionally difficult days. Awesome days for all of us."
     Gradually he overcame his sadness, gathered his strength, and continued, still quietly but with a controlled power, as though behind that veil of quietness there lurked a subdued but very serious warning:
     "Once again our enemies are grinding their teeth in the dark and plotting vengeance for the shameful defeat we inflicted on them on the battlefield. The Great Powers are devising evil once again. There is nothing new. In every generation men rise up against us to annihilate us. But we, my brothers and sisters, we shall stand up to them again. As we have stood up to them not once or twice but many times in the past. We shall stand up to them with courage and devotion. Holding our heads up high. Never, never shall they see this nation on its knees. Never! To the last generation!"
     At the words "Never, never" he raised his voice to a resounding cry from the heart, full of pained vibrations. This time the audience did not shout, it roared with rage and anguish.
     "The Eternal One of Israel," he said in a quiet, authoritative voice, as though he had just come from an operational meeting at the Eternal One of Israel's headquarters, "the Rock of Israel shall rise up again and frustrate and dash to pi-eces all the schemes of our enemies!"
     Now the crowd was flushed with gratitude and affection, which they expressed by a rhythmic chant of "Begin! Begin!" I too leaped to my feet and roared his name with all the power I could muster in my voice, which was breaking at the time.
     "On one condition," the speaker said solemnly, sternly, raising his hand, and then he paused as though pondering the nature of this condition and wondering whether it was proper for him to share it with the audience. A deathly hush spread through the hall. "One sole, crucial, vital, fateful condition." He paused again. His head drooped. As though bent under the terrible weight of the condition. The audience listened so intently that I could hear the hum of the fans on the high ceiling of the hall.
     "On condition that our leadership, brothers and sisters, is a national leadership and not a bunch of panic-stricken ghetto Jews who are scared of their own shadows! On condition that the feeble, enfeebling, defeated, defeatist, despicable Ben-Gurion government makes way at once for a proud, daring Hebrew government, an emergency government that knows how to make our foes quake with terror, just as the very name of our glorious army, the army of Israel, puts fear and trembling into the hearts of all the enemies of Israel wherever they may be!"
     At this the whole audience boiled over and seemed to burst its banks. The mention of the "despicable Ben-Gurion government" roused snorts of hatred and contempt on every side. From one of the galleries someone shouted hoarsely "Death to the traitors!," and from another corner of the hall came a wild chant of "Begin for PM, Ben-Gurion go home!"
     But the speaker silenced them and declared slowly, calmly, like a strict teacher rebuking his pupils:
     "No, brothers and sisters. That is not the way. Shouting and violence are not the right way, but peaceful, respectful, democratic elections. Not with the methods of those Reds, not with deception and hooliganism, but with the upright and dignified way that we have learned from our great mentor Vladimir Jabotinsky. We shall soon send them packing, not with hatred among brothers, not with violent upheaval, but with cold contempt. Yes, we shall send them all packing. Those who sell the soil of our Fatherland and those who have sold their souls to Stalin. Those bloated kibbutz hacks, and the arrogant, condescending tyrants of the Bolshevik Histadrut, all the petty Zhdanovs together with all the big thieves. Off with them! Aren't they always spouting to us smugly about manual labor and draining the swamps? Very well then. We shall send them off, ve-ery respectfully, to do some manual labor. They've long since forgotten what the word labor means. It'll be interesting to see if any of them can still hold a shovel! We, my brothers and sisters, shall do a great job of draining swamps—very soon, brothers and sisters, very soon, just be patient—we shall drain the swamp of this Labor government once and for all! Once and for all, my brothers and sisters! We shall drain it irreversibly, with no return! Now repeat after me, my people, as one man, loud and clear, this solemn vow: Once and for all! Once and for all!! Once and for all!!! No return! No return!! No return!!!"*
     The crowd went mad. So did I. As though we had all become cells in a single giant body, blazing with rage, boiling with indignation.
    


     And it was at this point that it happened. The fall. The expulsion from Paradise. Mr. Begin went on to speak about the imminent war and the arms race that was in progress all over the Middle East. However, Mr. Begin spoke the Hebrew of his generation, and was evidently not aware that usage had changed. A dividing line separated those under the age of twenty-five or so, who were brought up in Israel, from those above that age or who had learned their Hebrew from books. The word that for Mr. Begin, as for others of his generation, of all parties, meant "weapon" or "arm," for the rest of us signified the male sexual organ and nothing else. And his verb "to arm" for us signified the corresponding action.

     Mr. Begin took a couple of sips of water, scrutinized the audience, nodded his head a few times, as though agreeing with himself, or lamenting, and in a harsh, accusing voice, like a prosecutor sternly enumerating a series of unanswerable charges, launched into his tirade:
     "President Eisenhower is arming the Nasser regime!
     "Bulganin is arming Nasser!
     "Guy Mollet and Anthony Eden are arming Nasser!!
     "The whole world is arming our Arab enemies day and night!!!"
     Pause. His voice filled with loathing and contempt:
     "But who will arm the government of Ben-Gurion?"
     A stunned silence fell on the hall. But Mr. Begin did not notice. He raised his voice and crowed triumphantly:
     *Begin's speech is reconstructed from memory and experience.

     "If only I were the prime minister today—everyone, everyone would be arming us!! Ev-ery-one!!!"
     A few faint claps rose from the elderly Ashkenazim in the front rows. But the rest of the vast crowd hesitated, apparently unable to believe their ears, or perhaps they were shocked. In that moment of embarrassed silence there was just one nationalistic child, one twelve-year-old child who was politically committed to the roots of his hair, a devoted Beginite in a white shirt and highly polished shoes, who could not contain himself and burst out laughing.
     This child tried with all his might and main to restrain his laughter, he wanted to die of shame on the spot, but his contorted, hysterical laughter was irrepressible: it was a choked, almost tearful laugh, a hoarse laugh with strident hoots, a laugh that resembled sobbing and also suffocation.
     Looks of horror and alarm fixed on the child from every direction. On every side hundreds of fingers were laid on hundreds of lips, as he was hushed and shushed. Shame! Disgrace! All around important persons fumed reproachfully at a horror-smitten Grandpa Alexander. The child had the impression that far away at the back of the hall an unruly laugh echoed his, followed by another. But those laughs, if they occurred, had broken out in the outer suburbs of the nation, while his own outburst had struck in the middle of the third row, which was full of veterans of Beitar and dignitaries of Herut, all well-known and respectable figures.
     And now the speaker had noticed him and interrupted his speech; he waited patiently, with an indulgent, tactful smile, while Grandpa Alexander, blushing, shocked, and seething like someone whose world had collapsed around him, seized the child's ear, lifted him furiously to his feet, and dragged him out by his ear, in front of the whole third row, in front of the massed lovers of the Fatherland in Jerusalem, bellowing desperately as he tugged and pulled. (It must have been rather like this that Grandpa himself was dragged by the ear to the rabbi in New York by the formidable Grandma Shlomit when, having been engaged to her, he suddenly fell in love with another lady on the boat to America.)
     And once the three of them were outside the Edison Auditorium, the one who was doing the dragging, seething with rage, the one who was being dragged, choking and weeping with laughter, and the poor ear that was by now as red as a beet, Grandpa raised his right hand and administered the grandfather of a slap on my right cheek, then he raised his left hand and slapped my other cheek with all the force of his hatred for the Left, and because he was such a Rightist, he did not want to let the left have the last word, so he gave me another slap on the right, not a feeble, obsequious Diaspora slap in the spirit of the worm of Jacob, but a bold, hawkish, patriotic slap, proud, magnificent, and furious.
     Jotapata, Masada, and besieged Beitar had lost: they might indeed rise again in glory and might, but without me. As for the Herut movement and the Likkud Party, they lost someone that morning who might have become in time a little heir, a fiery orator, perhaps an articulate member of the Knesset, or even a deputy minister without portfolio.
     I have never again blended happily into an ecstatic crowd, or been a blind molecule in a gigantic superhuman body. On the contrary, I have developed a morbid fear of crowds. The line "Repose is like mire" seems to me now to attest to a widespread, dangerous illness. In the phrase "blood and fire" I can taste blood and smell burning human flesh. As on the plains of northern Sinai during the Six Day War and among the blazing tanks on the Golan Heights in the Yom Kippur War.
     The autobiography of Professor Klausner, Uncle Joseph, which I have drawn on for much of what I have written here about the history of the Klausner family, is entitled My Road to Resurrection and Redemption. On that Saturday, while kindhearted Grandpa Alexander, Uncle Joseph's brother, was dragging me outside by my ear and making furious noises that sounded like sobs of horror and madness, I seem to have begun to run away from resurrection and redemption. I am still running.
     But that was not the only thing I ran away from. The suffocation of life in that basement, between my father and mother and between the two of them and all those books, the ambitions, the repressed, denied nostalgia for Rovno and Vilna, for a Europe that was embodied by a black tea cart and gleaming white napkins, the burden of his failure in life, the wound of hers, failures that I was tacitly charged with the responsibility of converting into victories in the fullness of time, all this oppressed me so much that I wanted to run away from it. At other times young people left their parents' homes and went off to find them-selves—or to lose themselves—in Eilat or the Sinai Desert, later on in New York or Paris, and later still in ashrams in India or jungles in South America, or in the Himalayas (where the only child Rico went in my book The Same Sea following the death of his mother). But in the early 1950s the opposite pole to the oppressiveness of the parental home was the kibbutz. There, far from Jerusalem, "over the hills and far away," in Galilee, Sharon, the Negev, or the Valleys—so we imagined in Jerusalem in those days—a new, rugged race of pioneers was taking shape, strong, serious but not complicated, laconic, able to keep a secret, able to be swept away in a riot of heady dancing, yet also able to be lonely and thoughtful, fitted for life in the fields and under canvas: tough young men and women, ready for any kind of hard work yet with a rich cultural and intellectual life and sensitive, contained feelings. I wanted to be like them so as not to be like my father or my mother or any of those gloomy refugee scholars of whom Jewish Jerusalem was full. After a while I signed up for the scout movement, whose members in those days intended to enlist in the Nahal, the military formation that specialized in creating new kibbutzim along the border, when they had finished at school, and to go on to "labor, defense, and the kibbutz." My father was not pleased, but because he yearned to be a true liberal, he contented himself with remarking sadly: "The scout movement. Very well. So be it. Why not. But the kibbutz? The kibbutz is for simple, strong people, and you are neither. You are a talented child. An individualist. Surely it would be better for you to grow up to serve our beloved state with your talents, not with your muscles. Which are not all that developed."
     My mother was far away by then. She had turned her back on us.
     And I agreed with my father. That is why I forced myself to eat twice as much and to strengthen my feeble muscles with running and exercises.
    


     Three or four years later, after my mother's death and my father's remarriage, in Kibbutz Hulda, at half past four one Saturday morning, I told Ephraim Avneri about Begin and the arms. We had gotten up early because we had been detailed for apple picking. I was fifteen or sixteen. Ephraim Avneri, like the other founder-members of Hulda, was in his mid-forties, but he and his friends were called—by us and even among themselves—the oldies.

     Ephraim listened to the story and smiled, but for a minute it seemed he had trouble understanding what the point of it was, because he too belonged to the generation for whom "arming" was a matter of tanks and guns. After a moment he said: "Ah yes, I see, Begin was talking about 'arming' with weapons and you took it in the slang sense. It does come out rather funny. But listen here my young friend," (we were standing on ladders on opposite sides of the same tree, talking while we picked, but the foliage was in the way so we could not see each other) "it seems to me you missed the main point. The thing that's so funny about them, Begin and all his noisy crew, is not their use of the word 'arm' but their use of words in general. They divide everything up into 'obsequious Diaspora-Jewish' on the one hand and 'manly Hebrew' on the other. They don't notice how Diaspora-Jewish the division itself is. Their whole childish obsession with military parades and hollow machismo and weapons comes straight from the ghetto."
     Then he added, to my great surprise:
     "Basically he's a good man, that Begin. He's a demagogue, it's true, but he's not a fascist or a warmonger. Absolutely not. On the contrary, he's a rather soft man. A thousand times softer than Ben-Gurion. Ben-Gurion's as hard as granite, but Menachem Begin is made of cardboard. And he's so old-fashioned, Begin. So anachronistic. A sort of lapsed yeshiva bocher, who believes that if we Jews start shouting at the top of our voices that we're not the way Jews used to be, we're not sheep for the slaughter, we're not pale weaklings but the opposite, we're dangerous now, we're terrifying wolves now, then all the real beasts of prey will be scared of us and give us everything we want, they'll let us have the whole land, they'll let us take all the holy places, swallow up Trans-Jordan, and be treated with respect and admiration by the whole civilized world as well. They, Begin and his chums, talk from morning to evening about power, but they haven't the first idea what power is, what it's made of, what the weaknesses of power are. After all, power also has an element of terrible danger for those that wield it. Didn't that bastard Stalin once say that religion is the opium of the masses? Vell, just listen to little old me: I tell you, power is the opium of the ruling classes. And not only the ruling classes. Power is the opium of the whole of humanity. Power is the temptation of the Devil, I would say, if I believed in the Devil. As a matter of fact, I do believe in him a bit. Vell, where were we?" (Ephraim and some of his fellow Galicians always pronounced "well" as "vell.") "We were talking about Begin and your big laugh. You laughed at him for the wrong reason that day, my young friend. You laughed at him because the word 'arm' can be taken in different ways. Vell, so be it. You know what you should really have laughed at? Laughed till the floor collapsed? I'll tell you what. You shouldn't have laughed at the 'arming' but because Menachem Begin truly believes that if he were prime minister, everybody, the whole world, would immediately leave the side of the Arabs and come over to his side. Why? Why would they do that? For what? For his beautiful eyes? For his polished language? In memory of Jabotinsky, perhaps? You should have laughed your head off at him, because that's exactly the politics that all those layabouts in the shtetl used to like. All day long they would sit behind the stove in the house of study and talk that kind of politics. They used to wave their thumbs around like Talmud teachers: 'Foist of all, we send a delegation to Tsar Nikolai, an important delegation, that will speak to him very nicely and promise the Tsar to fix for him what Russia wants most of all, a way out to the Mediterranean. Then, we ask the Tsar that in exchange for this he should put in a kind word for us with his friend Kaiser Wilhelm, so our Tsar should get this Kaiser to tell his good friend the Sultan of Turkey to give the Jews, right away, no arguments, the whole of Palestine from the Euphrates to the Nile. Only after that, when we've sorted out the whole redemption once for all, then we can decide according to how we feel if Ponya (that's what we called Tsar Nikolai) deserves that we should keep our promise and let him have a way out to the Mediterranean or not.' If you've finished there by any chance, vell, let's both go and empty our baskets into the bin and move on to the next tree. On the way we can check with Alec or Alyoshka if they remembered to bring a pitcher of water with them or if we'll have to go and complain to Tsar Nikolai."
    


     A year or two later my class was already sharing night-watch duties in Hulda; we had learned to use a gun in our paramilitary training. These were the nights of the fedayeen and the reprisal raids before the Sinai campaign of 1956. Almost every night the fedayeen attacked a moshav or a kibbutz or a suburb of a town, blowing up houses with people inside them, shooting or throwing hand grenades through people's windows, and laying land mines behind them.

     Every ten days it was my turn to keep watch along the perimeter fence of the kibbutz, which was only some three miles from the Israel-Jordan armistice line at Latrun. Every hour I would sneak into the empty clubhouse, against regulations, to listen to the news on the radio. The self-righteous, heroic rhetoric of a beleaguered society dominated those broadcasts as it dominated our kibbutz education. Nobody used the word "Palestinians" in those days: they were called "terrorists," "fe-dayeen," "the enemy," or "Arab refugees hungry for revenge."
     One winter evening I happened to be on night duty with Ephraim Avneri. We were wearing boots, tattered army fatigues, and prickly woolly hats. We were tramping through the mud along the fence behind the storehouses and cowsheds. A stench of fermenting orange peels that were used for making silage mingled with other agricultural smells: compost, rotting straw, warm steam from the sheep sheds, feather dust from the chicken coops. I asked Ephraim if he had ever, in the War of Independence or during the troubles in the 1930s, shot and killed one of those murderers.
     I could not see Ephraim's face in the dark, but there was a certain subversive irony, a strange sarcastic sadness in his voice as he replied, after a short pensive silence:
     "Murderers? What d'you expect from them? From their point of view, we are aliens from outer space who have landed and trespassed on their land, gradually taken over parts of it, and while we promise them that we've come here to lavish all sorts of goodies on them—cure them of ringworm and trachoma, free them from backwardness, ignorance, and feudal oppression—we've craftily grabbed more and more of their land. Vell, what did you think? That they should thank us? That they should come out to greet us with drums and cymbals? That they should respectfully hand over the keys to the whole land just because our ancestors lived here once? Is it any wonder they've taken up arms against us? And now that we've inflicted a crushing defeat on them and hundreds of thousands of them are living in refugee camps—what, d'you expect them to celebrate with us and wish us luck?"
     I was shocked. Even though I had come a long way from the rhetoric of Herut and the Klausner family, I was still a conformist product of a Zionist upbringing. Ephraim's nocturnal words startled and even enraged me. In those days this kind of thinking was seen as treachery. I was so stunned that I asked him sarcastically:
     "In that case, what are you doing here with your gun? Why don't you emigrate? Or take your gun and go and fight on their side?"
     I could hear his sad smile in the dark:
     "Their side? But their side doesn't want me. Nowhere in the world wants me. Nobody in the world wants me. That's the whole point. It seems there are too many of my kind in every country. That's the only reason I'm here. That's the only reason I'm carrying a gun, so they won't kick me out of here the way they kicked me out of everywhere else. But you won't find me using the word 'murderers' about Arabs who've lost their villages. At least, not easily. About Nazis, yes. About Stalin, also. And about whoever steals other people's land."
     "Doesn't it follow from what you're saying that we have also stolen other people's land? But didn't we live here two thousand years ago? Weren't we driven out of here by force?"
     "It's like this," said Ephraim. "It's really very simple. Where is the Jewish people's land if not here? Under the sea? On the moon? Or is the Jewish people the only people in the world that doesn't deserve to have a little homeland of its own?"
     "And what about what we've taken from them?"
     "Vell, maybe you happen to have forgotten that in '48 they had a go at killing all of us? Then, in '48, there was a terrible war, and they themselves made it a simple question of either them or us, and we won and took it from them. It's nothing to boast about! But if they'd beaten us in '48, there would have been even less to boast about: they wouldn't have left a single Jew alive. And it's true that there isn't a single Jew living in the whole of their sector today. But that's the whole point: it's because we took what we did from them in '48 that we have what we have now. And because we have something now, we mustn't take anything else from them. That's it. And that's the whole difference between me and your Mr. Begin: if we take even more from them someday, now that we already have something, that will be a very big sin."
     "And what if the fedayeen turn up here now?"
     "If they do," Ephraim sighed, "vell, we'll just have to lie down in the mud and shoot. And we'll try our damnedest to shoot better and faster than them. But we won't shoot at them because they're a nation of murderers, but for the simple reason that we also have a right to live and for the simple reason that we also have a right to a land of our own. Not just them. And now thanks to you I'm going on like Ben-Gurion. Now if you'll just excuse me, I'm going into the cowshed to have a quiet smoke, and you keep a good lookout here while I'm gone. Keep a lookout for both of us."

 52


     A FEW YEARS after this nocturnal conversation, eight or nine years after the morning when Menachem Begin and his camp lost me at the Edison Auditorium, I met David Ben-Gurion. In those years he was prime minister and minister of defense but was thought of by many as the "great man of his day," the founder of the state, the great victor in the War of Independence and the Sinai Campaign. His enemies loathed him and ridiculed the cult of personality that surrounded him, while his admirers already saw him as the Father of the Nation, a sort of miraculous blend of King David, Judah Maccabee, George Washington, Garibaldi, a Jewish Churchill, and even the Messiah of G-d Almighty.

     Ben-Gurion saw himself not only as a statesman but also—maybe primarily—as an original thinker and intellectual mentor. He had taught himself classical Greek so as to read Plato in the original, had dipped into Hegel and Marx, had taken an interest in Buddhism and Far Eastern thought, and had studied Spinoza so thoroughly that he considered himself a Spinozist. (The philosopher Isaiah Berlin, a man with a razor-sharp mind, whom Ben-Gurion used to enlist as his companion whenever he raided the great bookshops of Oxford for philosophy books, when he was already prime minister, once said to me: "Ben-Gurion went out of his way to depict himself as an intellectual. This was based on two mistakes. The first, he believed, wrongly, that Chaim Weizmann was an intellectual. The second, he also believed, wrongly, that Jabotinsky was an intellectual" In this way Isaiah Berlin ruthlessly killed three prominent birds with one clever stone.)
     Every now and again Prime Minister Ben-Gurion filled the weekend supplement of Davar with lengthy theoretical reflections on philosophical questions. Once, in January 1961, he published an essay in which he claimed that equality between human beings was impossible, although they could achieve a measure of fraternity.
     Considering myself a defender of kibbutz values, I penned a short response in which I asserted, with due humility and respect, that Comrade Ben-Gurion was mistaken.* When my article appeared, it provoked a great deal of anger in Kibbutz Hulda. The members were furious at my impertinence: "How dare you disagree with Ben-Gurion?"
     Only four days later, however, the gates of Heaven opened for me: the Father of the Nation descended from his great heights and deigned to publish a long, courteous reply to my piece; extending over several prominent columns, it defended the views of the "great man of his day" against the criticisms of the lowest of the low.**
     The same members of the kibbutz who only a couple of days earlier had wanted to send me away to some reeducation institution because of my impertinence now beamed delightedly and hurried over to shake my hand or pat me on the back: Vell, you've made it! You're immortal! Your name will be in the index of Ben-Gurion's collected writings someday! And the name of Kibbutz Hulda will be there too, thanks to you!"
    


     But the Age of Miracles had only just begun.

     A couple of days later came the phone call.
     It didn't come to me—we didn't have telephones in our little rooms yet—it came to the kibbutz office. Bella P., a veteran member who happened to be in the office at the time, ran to find me, pale and trembling like a sheet of paper, as shaken as though she had just seen the chariots of the G-ds wreathed in flames of fire, and told me as though they were her dying words that the Prime-Minister-and-Minister-of-Defense's secretary had summoned me to appear early the next morning, at six-thirty precisely, at the minister of defense's office in Tel Aviv, for a personal meeting with the Prime-Minister-and-Minister-of-Defense, at David Ben-Gurion's personal invitation. She pronounced the words "Prime-Minister-and-Minister-of-Defense" as though she had said "The Holy One Blessed Be He."
     Now it was my turn to go pale. Firstly, I was still in uniform, I was a regular soldier, a staff sergeant in the army, and I was half afraid that I had broken some rule or regulation in embarking on an ideological dispute in the columns of the newspaper with my commander-in-chief. Secondly, I didn't possess a single pair of shoes apart from my heavy, studded army boots. How could I appear before the Prime-Minister-and-Minister-of-Defense? In sandals? Thirdly, there was no way in the world I could get to Tel Aviv by half past six in the morning: the first bus from Kibbutz Hulda didn't leave till seven and it didn't get to the Central Bus Station till half past eight, with luck.
     *David Ben-Gurion, "Reflections," Davar, 27 Jan. 1961; Amos Oz, "Fraternity Is No Substitute for Equality," Davar, 20 Feb. 1961.

     **David Ben-Gurion, "Further Reflections," Davar, 24 Feb. 1961.

     So I spent the whole of the night praying silently for a disaster: a war, an earthquake, a heart attack—his or mine, either would do.
     And at four-thirty I polished my studded army boots for the third time, put them on and laced them up tight. I wore well-pressed civilian khaki trousers, a white shirt, a sweater, and a windbreaker. I walked out onto the main road, and by some miracle I managed to get a lift and made it, half fainting, to the minister of defense's office. This was located not in the monstrous Ministry of Defense building, bristling with antennas, but in a courtyard at the back, in a charming, idyllic little Bavarian-style cottage on two floors, with a red-tiled roof, covered with a green vine, which had been built in the nineteenth century by German Templars, who created a tranquil agricultural colony in the sands north of Jaffa and ended up being thrown out of the country by the British at the outbreak of World War II.
     The gentle-mannered secretary ignored my shaking body and strangled throat; he briefed me, with an almost intimate warmth, as though plotting with me behind the back of the divinity in the next room:
     "The Old Man," he began, using the affectionate nickname that had been in common use since Ben-Gurion was in his fifties, "has, you understand, how shall we say, a tendency these days to get carried away by long philosophical conversations. But his time, I'm sure you can imagine, is like gold dust. He still deals with virtually all affairs of state himself, from preparations for war and relations with the Great Powers to the postal workers' strike. You will, of course, beat a tactful retreat after twenty minutes, so that we can somehow rescue his diary for the rest of the day."
     There was nothing in the whole wide world that I wanted better than to "beat a tactful retreat," not after twenty minutes but right away. At once. The very thought that the Almighty himself was here, in person, just behind that gray door, and that in another minute I would be in his power, almost made me faint from awe and dread.
     So much so that the secretary had no alternative but to push me gently from behind into the Holy of Holies.
     The door was closed behind me, and I stood there, silently, with my back against the door I had just come in by, and my knees were shaking. King David's office was an ordinary, sparsely furnished room, hardly bigger than one of our modest kibbutz living rooms. Facing me was a window, covered with a rustic curtain, that added a little daylight to the electric light. On either side of the window stood a metal filing cabinet. A large glass-topped desk stood in the middle of the room, taking up about a quarter of its area; on it there were three or four piles of books, magazines, and newspapers, and various papers and folders, some open and some closed. On either side of the desk there was a bureaucratic gray metal chair, of the sort you could see in those days in every administrative or military office, and they were always inscribed, on the underside, with the words "Property of the State of Israel." There were no other chairs in the room. An entire wall, from ceiling to floor and from corner to corner, was taken up by a huge map of the whole Mediterranean basin and the Middle East, from the Straits of Gibraltar to the Persian Gulf. Israel, the size of a postage stamp, had been marked out with a thick line. Another wall had three shelves loaded and piled with books, as if someone might suddenly be seized here with an urgent reading frenzy that brooked no delay.
     In this Spartan room there was a man pacing to and fro with rapid little steps, his hands clasped behind his back, his eyes on the floor, his big head thrust forward as though to butt. The man looked exactly like Ben-Gurion, but there was no way he could actually be Ben-Gurion. Every child in Israel, even in kindergarten, in those days knew in his sleep what Ben-Gurion looked like. But since there was no television yet, it was obvious to me that the Father of the Nation was a giant whose head reached the clouds, whereas this impostor was a short, tubby man whose height was less than five foot three.
     I was alarmed. Almost offended.
     Nevertheless, during the two or three minutes of uninterrupted silence that felt like an eternity, with my back still pressed against the door in terror, I feasted my eyes on the strange, hypnotic form of this compact, powerfully built little man, something between a tough, patriarchal highlander and an ancient, energetic dwarf, who was restlessly pacing to and fro with his hands behind his back, his head thrust forward like a battering ram, sunk in thought, remote, not bothering to give the slightest indication that he was aware that somebody, something, a speck of floating dust, had suddenly landed in his office. David Ben-Gurion was about seventy-five at the time, and I was barely twenty.
     He had a prophetic shock of silvery hair that surrounded his bald patch like an amphitheater. At the lower margin of his massive brow were two thick, bushy gray eyebrows, beneath which a pair of sharp gray-blue eyes pierced the air. He had a wide, coarse nose, a shamelessly ugly nose, a pornographic nose, like an anti-Semitic caricature. His lips, on the other hand, were thin and indrawn, but his jaw looked to me like the prominent, defiant jaw of an ancient mariner. His skin was rough and red like raw meat. Under a short neck his shoulders were broad and powerful. His chest was massive. His open-necked shirt revealed a hand's-breadth of hairy chest. His shamelessly protruding belly, like a whale's hump, looked as solid as if it were made of concrete. But all this magnificence terminated, to my bewilderment, in a dwarf-like pair of legs that, if it were not blasphemous, one would be tempted to call almost ridiculous.
     I tried to breathe as little as possible. I may have envied Gregor Samsa in Kafka's Metamorphosis, who managed to shrink himself into a cockroach. The blood fled from my extremities and collected in my liver.
     The first words that broke the silence came in the piercing, metallic voice that we all heard virtually every day on the radio, and even in our dreams. The Almighty shot me an angry look, and said:
     "Nu! So why aren't you sitting! Sit!"
     I sat down in a flash on the chair facing the desk. I sat bolt upright, but only on the edge of the chair. There was no question of leaning back.
     Silence. The Father of the Nation continued to pace to and fro, with hasty little steps, like a caged lion or someone who was determined not to be late. After half an eternity he suddenly said:
     "Spinoza!"
     And he stopped. When he had walked away as far as the window, he whirled around and said:
     "Have you read Spinoza? You have. But maybe you didn't understand? Few people understand Spinoza. Very few."
     And then, still pacing to and fro, to and fro, between the window and the door, he burst into a protracted dawn lecture on Spinoza's thought.
     In the middle of the lecture, the door hesitantly opened a crack and the secretary poked his head in meekly, smiled, and tried to mumble something, but the roar of a wounded lion was unleashed on him:
     "Get out of here! Go! Do not disturb! Can't you see that I'm having one of the most interesting conversations I've had in a long time? So be off with you!"
     The poor man vanished in a flash.
     So far I had not uttered a single word. Not a sound.
     But Ben-Gurion, it turned out, was enjoying lecturing on Spinoza before seven o'clock in the morning. And he did indeed continue for a few minutes without interruption.
     Suddenly he stopped in the middle of a sentence. I could almost feel his breath on the back of my petrified neck, but I dared not turn around. I sat rigid, my tightly pressed knees forming a right angle and my thighs at a right angle to my tense back. Without a hint of a question mark in his voice Ben-Gurion hurled at me:
     "You haven't had any breakfast!"
     He did not wait for an answer. I did not utter a sound.
     All of a sudden Ben-Gurion sank out of sight behind his desk like a large stone in water; even his silvery mane vanished from view.
     After a moment he resurfaced, holding two glasses in one hand and a bottle of cheap fruit drink in the other. Energetically he poured a glass for himself, then he poured one for me and declared:
     "Drink it!"
     I drank it all, in a single gulp. Down to the last drop.
     David Ben-Gurion, meanwhile, took three noisy swallows, like a thirsty peasant, and resumed his lecture on Spinoza.
     "As a Spinozist I say to you without a shadow of doubt that the whole essence of Spinoza's thought can be summed up as follows. A man should always stay composed! He should never lose his calm! All the rest is hair-splitting and paraphrase. Composure! Calm in any situation! And the rest—frippery!" (Ben-Gurion's peculiar intonation stressed the last syllable of each word with something like a little roar.)
     By now I could not take the slur on Spinoza's honor any longer. I could not remain silent without betraying my favorite philosopher. So I summoned up all my courage, blinked, and by some miracle I dared to open my mouth in the presence of the L-rd of All Creation, and even to squeak in a small voice:
     "It's true that there is calm and composure in Spinoza, but surely it's not right to say that that's the whole essence of Spinoza's thought? Surely there's also—"
     Then fire and brimstone and streams of molten lava erupted over me from the mouth of the volcano:
     "I've been a Spinozist all my life! I've been a Spinozist since I was a young man! Composure! Calm! That is the essence of the whole of Spinoza's thought! That's the heart of it! Tranquility! In good or in evil, in victory or in defeat, a man must never lose his peace of mind!
     Never!"
     His two powerful, woodcutter's fists landed furiously on the glass top of the desk, making our two glasses jump and rattle with fear.
     "A man must never lose his temper!" The worlds were hurled at me like the thunder of judgment day. "Never! And if you can't see that, you don't deserve to be called a Spinozist!"
     At this he calmed down. He brightened up.
     He sat down opposite me and spread his arms out wide on his desk as though he was about to clasp everything on it to his breast. A pleasant, heart-melting light radiated from him when he suddenly smiled a simple, happy smile, and it seemed not only as though it was his face and his eyes that smiled but as though his whole fistlike body relaxed and smiled with him, and the whole room smiled too, and even Spinoza himself. Ben-Gurion's eyes, which had turned from a cloudy gray to bright blue, scrutinized me all over, with no thought for good manners, as though he were feeling me with his fingers. There was something mercurial about him, something restless and ferocious. His arguments were like punches. And yet when he suddenly brightened without warning, he was transformed from a vengeful deity to a delightful old grandfather, radiating good health and satisfaction. A seductive warmth gushed from him, and for a moment he displayed the charming quality of a cheeky child with an insatiable curiosity.
     "And what about you? You write poetry? Yes?"
     He winked mischievously. As though he had laid a playful little trap for me. And had won the game.
     I was startled again. All I had authored at that time were two or three worthless poems in out-of-the-way quarterlies published by the kibbutz movement (which I hope have crumbled to dust by now together with my miserable attempts at poetry). But Ben-Gurion must have seen them. He was reportedly in the habit of poring over everything that was published: gardening monthlies, magazines for lovers of nature or chess, studies in agricultural engineering, statistical journals. His curiosity knew no bounds.
     He also apparently had a photographic memory: once he had seen something, he never forgot it.
     I mumbled something.
     But the prime minister and minister of defense was no longer with me. His restless spirit had moved on. Now that he had explained once and for all, in one crushing blow, everything that had been left unexplained in the thought of Spinoza, he started to lecture me with passion about other matters: the loss of Zionistic fervor in our youth, or modern Hebrew poetry, which was dabbling in all kinds of weird experiments instead of opening its eyes and celebrating the miracle that was happening here daily in front of our eyes: the rebirth of the nation, the rebirth of the Hebrew language, the rebirth of the Negev Desert!
    


     And suddenly, again without any warning, in the full flow of his monologue, almost in the middle of a sentence, he had had enough.

     He leaped up from his chair as though shot from a gun, made me stand up too, and as he pushed me toward the door—pushed me physically, just as his secretary had pushed me in some three-quarters of an hour previously—he said warmly:
     "It's good to chat! Very good! And what have you been reading lately? What is the youth reading? Please come and see me any time you're in town. Just drop in, don't be afraid!"
     And while he pushed me, with my studded army boots and my white Sabbath-best shirt, through the door, he went on shouting cheerily:
     "Drop in! Any time! My door is always open!"
    


     More than forty years have passed since that Spinoza morning in Ben-Gurion's Spartan office. I have met famous people since then, including political leaders, fascinating personalities, some of whom exuded great personal charm, but nobody has left such a sharp impression of their physical presence on me, or of their electrifying willpower. Ben-Gurion had, at least on that morning, a hypnotic energy.

     Isaiah Berlin was right in his cruel observation: Ben-Gurion was no intellectual, Plato and Spinoza notwithstanding. Far from it. As I see it, he was a visionary peasant. There was something primeval about him, something not of this day and age. His simplicity of mind was almost biblical; his willpower resembled a laser beam. As a young man in the shtetl of Plonsk in eastern Poland he had two simple ideas: that the Jews must reestablish their homeland in the Land of Israel, and that he was the right man to lead them. Throughout his life he never budged from these two decisions of his youth; everything else was subordinated to them.
     He was an honest, cruel man; like most visionaries he did not stop to count the cost. Or perhaps he did stop for a moment and decided: let it cost whatever it costs.
     As a child growing up among the Klausners and all their fellow anti-leftists in Kerem Avraham, I was always taught that Ben-Gurion was responsible for all the troubles of the Jewish people. Where I grew up he was the baddie, the embodiment of all the plagues of the leftist regime.
     As I grew up, however, I opposed Ben-Gurion from the opposite angle, from the Left. Like many of the Israeli intelligentsia of my time, I saw him as an almost despotic personality, and I recoiled from the tough way he treated the Arabs in the War of Independence and the reprisal raids. It is only in recent years that I have begun to read about him and wonder whether I was right.
     There is no simple way of summing him up.
     And suddenly, as I write the words "the tough way," I can see again with perfect clarity the way Ben-Gurion held his glass of cheap fruit drink, which he had poured for himself first. The glass was cheap too, it was made of thick glass, and his tough fingers were thick and short as they clasped it like a hand grenade. I was alarmed: if I put a foot wrong and said something that would trigger his rage, Ben-Gurion might well dash the contents of the glass into my face, or hurl the glass at the wall. Or he might tighten his grip on the glass and crush it. That was the awesome way he held that glass. Until he suddenly brightened and showed me that he knew all about my attempts at writing poetry, and smiled with pleasure at the sight of my discomfiture, and for a brief moment he looked almost like a merry joker who had pulled off a little trick and was now asking himself: What next?

 53


     IN THE autumn, toward the end of 1951, my mother's condition took another turn for the worse. Her migraines came back, and so did her insomnia. Once again she sat all day at the window counting the birds or the clouds. She sat there at night too, with her eyes wide open.

     My father and I shared the household chores. I peeled vegetables, and he chopped them up to make a fine salad. He sliced bread, and I spread it with margarine and cheese or margarine and jam. I swept and washed the floors and dusted all the surfaces, and my father emptied the garbage cans and bought a third of a block of ice for the icebox every two or three days. I went shopping at the grocer's and the greengrocer's, while Father took care of the butcher and the pharmacist. Both of us added items as necessary to the shopping list that we wrote on one of Father's index cards and pinned up on the kitchen door. As we bought items, we crossed them off the list. Every Saturday evening we started a new list:
     Tomatoes. Cucumber. Onion. Potatoes. Radishes.
 Bread. Eggs. Cheese. Jam. Sugar.
 Find out if any clementines yet and when oranges start.
 Matches. Oil. Candles for power failures.
 Washing-up liquid. Washing soap. Shenhav toothpaste.
 Paraffin.

     A 40-watt lightbulb. Get iron mended. Batteries.
 New washer for faucet in bathroom basin. Fix the faucet because it doesn't turn off completely.
 Yogurt. Margarine. Olives.
 Buy woolen socks for Mother.

     At that time my handwriting grew more and more like my father's, so that it was almost impossible to say which of us had written "paraffin" or who had added, "We need a new floorcloth." To this day my writing looks like my father's: vigorous, not always legible, but always energetic, sharp, and revealing strong pressure on the pen, unlike my mother's calm, rounded, pearl-like letters, leaning slightly backward, precise and pleasant to look at, written with a light, disciplined hand, letters as perfect and well-spaced as her teeth.
     We were very close to one another at that time, Father and I: like a pair of stretcher bearers carrying an injured person up a steep slope. We took her a glass of water and made her take the tranquilizers that were prescribed by two different doctors. We had one of Father's little cards for that too: we wrote down the name of each medicine and the times she had to take it, and we put a tick by each one that she took and a cross by the ones she refused to swallow or that she brought up. Mostly she was obedient and took her medicine even when she was feeling queasy. Sometimes she forced herself to give us a little smile, which was even more painful than her pallor or the dark half moons that appeared under her eyes, because it was such a hollow smile, as if it had nothing to do with her. And sometimes she motioned to us to lean over and she stroked both our heads with a uniform circular movement. She stroked us both for a long time, until Father gently removed her hand and laid it on her bosom. And I did the same.
     Every evening, at supper time, Father and I held a kind of daily staff meeting in the kitchen. I filled him in on my day at school, and he told me something about his day at work, at the National Library, or described an article he was trying to finish in time for the next issue of Tarbiz or Metsuda.
     We talked about politics, about the assassination of King Abdullah, or about Begin and Ben-Gurion. We talked like equals. My heart filled with love for this tired man when he concluded gravely:
     "It seems there remain considerable areas of disagreement between us. So for the time being we shall have to agree to differ."
     Then we would talk about household matters. We would jot down on one of Father's little cards what we still had to do, and cross out what we'd already seen to. Father even discussed money matters with me sometimes: still a fortnight to go till pay day, and we had already spent such and such a sum. Every evening he would ask me about my homework, and I would hand him my list of assignments from school and the exercise books in which I had completed the allotted tasks, for comparison. Sometimes he took a look at what I had done and made appropriate comments; he knew more about virtually every subject than my teachers and even than the authors of the textbooks. Mostly he would say:
     "There's no need to check up on you. I know I can rely on you and trust you absolutely."
     Secret pride and gratitude flooded through me when I heard these words. Sometimes I also felt a rush of pity.
     For him, not for Mother. I had no pity for her at that time: she was just a long series of daily duties and demands. And a source of embarrassment and shame, because I had to explain somehow to friends why they could never come over to my place, and I had to answer neighbors who quizzed me sweetly at the grocer's about why they never saw her. What had happened to her? Even to uncles and aunts, even to Grandpa and Grandma, Father and I did not tell the whole truth. We played it down. We said she had the flu even when she didn't. We said: Migraine. We said: A particular sensitivity to daylight. Sometimes we said: She's very tired, too. We tried to tell the truth but not the whole truth.
     We didn't know the whole truth. But we did know, even without exchanging notes, that neither of us told anyone everything we both knew; we only shared a few facts with the outside world. The two of us never discussed her condition. All we ever talked about was the work to do tomorrow, sharing the daily chores, and the needs of the household. Not once did we talk about what was wrong with her, apart from Father's repeated refrain: "Those doctors, they don't know anything. Not a thing." We didn't talk after her death, either. From the day of my mother's death to the day of my father's death, twenty years later, we did not talk about her once. Not a word. As if she had never lived. As if her life was just a censured page torn from a Soviet encyclopedia. Or as if, like Athena, I had been born straight from the head of Zeus. I was a sort of upside-down Jesus: born of a virgin man by an invisible spirit. And every morning, at dawn, I was awoken by the sound of a bird in the branches of the pomegranate tree in the yard, which greeted the day with the first five notes of Beethoven's Für Elise: "Ti-da-di-da-di!" And again, more excitedly: "Ti-da-di-da-di!" And under my blanket I completed it with feeling: "Da-di-da-da!" In my heart I called the bird Elise.
    


     I was sorry for my father at that time. As though he had fallen victim, through no fault of his own, to some protracted act of abuse. As though my mother were maltreating him on purpose. He was very tired, and sad, even though as usual he tried to be cheery and chatty the whole time. He always hated silences and blamed himself for any silence that occurred. His eyes, like Mother's, had dark half moons beneath them.

     Sometimes he left work during the day to take her for tests. What didn't they test in those months: her heart, lungs, and brain waves, digestion, hormones, nerves, women's problems, and circulation. To no effect. He spared no expense, he called various doctors and took her to see private specialists; he may even have had to borrow sums of money from his parents, although he hated having debts and loathed the way his mother, Grandma Shlomit, enjoyed being "put in the picture" and sorting out his marriage for him.
     My father got up before dawn every morning to tidy the kitchen, sort the laundry, squeeze fruit, and bring Mother and me the juice at room temperature, to make us stronger, and he also managed to write hasty replies to a few letters from editors and scholars before he left for work. Then he rushed to the bus stop, with a string shopping bag folded up in his battered briefcase, to get to work on time at Terra Sancta Building, where the Newspaper Department of the National Library was transferred when the Mount Scopus campus of the university was cut off from the rest of the town in the War of Independence.
     He would come home at five o'clock, having stopped on the way at the grocer's, the electrician's, or the pharmacist's, and would hurry straight in to Mother to see if she was feeling better, hoping that she might have dozed off for a bit while he was out. He would try to spoonfeed her some potato purée or boiled rice that he and I had somehow learned to cook. Then he locked the door on the inside, helped her to change, and tried to talk to her. He may even have attempted to entertain her with jokes that he had read in the paper or brought back from the library. Before it got dark, he would hurry out to the shops again, take care of various things, not resting, peering at the instructions that accompanied some new medicine, without even sitting down, trying to draw Mother into a conversation about the future of the Balkans.
     Then he would come to my room to help me change my sheets or to put mothballs in my closet for the winter, while singing some sentimental ballad to himself, criminally out of tune, or try to draw me into an argument about the future of the Balkans.
    


     After nightfall we sometimes had a visit from Auntie Lilenka—Aunt Lilia, Aunt Leah Kalish-Bar-Samkha—Mother's best friend, who came from the same town, Rovno, and had been in the same class at the Tar-buth gymnasium, the one who had written two books about child psychology.

     Aunt Lilia brought some fruit and a plum cake. Father served tea and biscuits and her plum cake, while I washed and put out the fruit, with plates and knives, and then we left the two of them alone together. Aunt Lilia sat shut up with my mother for an hour or two, and when she emerged, her eyes were red. Whereas my mother was as calm and serene as always. Father overcame the dislike he felt toward this lady sufficiently to invite her politely to stay for supper. Why don't you give us a chance to spoil you a little? And it would make Fania happy too. But she always apologized embarrassedly, as though she had been asked to take part in an indecent act. She didn't want to be in the way, G-d forbid, and anyway she was expected at home, and they'd start worrying about her soon.
     Sometimes Grandpa and Grandma came, dressed up as though for a ball. Grandma, in high heels and a black velvet dress with her white necklace, made a tour of the kitchen before she sat down next to Mother. Then she examined the packets of pills and the little bottles, pulled Father toward her and looked inside his collar, and screwed up her face in disgust as she inspected the state of my fingernails. She saw fit to remark sadly that medical science was now aware that most if not all illnesses had their origin in the mind rather than the body. Meanwhile, Grandpa Alexander, always charming and restless like a playful puppy, kissed my mother's hand and praised her beauty, "even in sickness, and all the more so when you are restored to full health, tomorrow, if not this very evening. Nu, what! You're already blossoming! Perfectly enchanting! Krasavitsa!"
    


     My father still insisted adamantly that my light had to be out by nine o'clock precisely every evening. He tiptoed into the other room, the book room, the living-room-study-and-bedroom, wrapped a shawl around my mother's shoulders because autumn was on the way and the nights were getting cooler, sat down beside her, took her cold hand into his hand, which was always warm, and tried to rouse her into a simple conversation. Like the prince in the story, he tried to wake Sleeping Beauty. But even if he kissed her, he was unable to wake her: the apple's spell could not be broken. Perhaps he did not kiss her right, or else she was not waiting in her dreams for a bespectacled chatterbox who was an expert in every branch of knowledge, never stopped cracking jokes, and worried about the future of the Balkans, but some other kind of prince entirely.

     He sat next to her in the dark, because she could not stand the light at that time. Every morning before he went off to work or before I went to school, we had to close all the shutters and draw the curtains as though my mother had become the terrifying mad woman in the attic in Jane Eyre. He sat in the dark, silently holding my mother's hand, without moving. Or he may have held both her hands in his.
     But he was unable to sit without moving for more than three or four minutes, either beside my sick mother or anywhere else apart from at his desk with his little cards. He was an active, busy man, always bustling, arranging things, talking nonstop.
     When he could not take any more of the darkness and the silence, he took his books and his innumerable cards out to the kitchen, cleared himself a space on the oilcloth, sat down on a stool, and worked for a bit. But he was soon dispirited by this solitary confinement in the soot-blackened kitchen. So once or twice a week he would get up, sigh, change into his suit, comb his hair, brush his teeth well, splash on some of his aftershave, and peep quietly into my room to see if I was fast asleep (for his sake I always pretended I was). Then he went in to Mother, said whatever he said, promised her whatever he promised, and she certainly did not stop him, on the contrary, she used to stroke his head and say, Go, Arieh, go and play, they're not all as dozy as I am.
     When he went out, with a Humphrey Bogart hat on his head and a just-in-case umbrella swinging on his arm, my father walked past my window singing to himself, terribly out of tune, and with a distinct Ashkenazi accent: "...my head found rest upon your breast, and my distant prayers found a nest," or "like a pair of doves your lovely eyes, and your voice like the's-ou-ou-nd of a be-e-ll!"
     I did not know where he was going and yet I did know without knowing and yet I did not want to know and yet I forgave him. I hoped he enjoyed himself there a bit. I had absolutely no desire to picture to myself what went on there, in that "there" of his, but what I didn't want to picture to myself came to me in the night and threw me in a whirl and would not let me sleep. I was a twelve-year-old boy. My body had begun to be a pitiless foe.
    


     Sometimes I had the feeling that when the house emptied every morning, Mother actually did get into bed and slept during the daylight hours. And sometimes she got up and walked around the house, always barefoot, despite my father's entreaties and the slippers he brought to her: to and fro, to and fro my mother sailed along the corridor that had been our shelter during the war and was now piled with books and with its wall maps served as the operations room from which my father and I supervised the security of Israel and the defense of the Free World.

     Even during the day the corridor was pitch black, unless you switched the light on. In the black my mother floated to and fro, unvaryingly, for half an hour or an hour, as prisoners walk around their prison yard. And sometimes she began to sing, as though to compete with my father, but with far fewer wrong notes. Her singing voice was dark and warm, like the taste of mulled wine on a winter evening. She did not sing in Hebrew, but in sweet-sounding Russian, in dreamy Polish, or occasionally in Yiddish, with a sound like choked tears.
     On the nights when he went out, my father always kept his promise and came back before midnight. I could hear him undressing down to his underwear, then making himself a glass of tea, sitting on a stool in the kitchen and humming quietly to himself as he dunked a biscuit in his sweet tea. Then he would take a cold shower (to get hot water, you had to heat the boiler three-quarters of an hour beforehand with wood that you had to sprinkle with paraffin first). Then he would come into my room on tiptoe to make sure I was asleep and to straighten my bedclothes. Only then did he tiptoe to their room. Sometimes I could hear the two of them talking in low voices until I fell asleep at last. And sometimes there was total silence as though there was no living being there.
     Father began to fear that he himself was responsible for my mother's insomnia, because he was in the big bed. Sometimes he insisted on putting her to bed in the sofa bed every night (when I was little, we called it the "barking sofa" because when you opened it up, it looked like the jaws of an angry dog), and he himself slept on her chair. He said it would really be better for everyone if he slept on the chair and she in the bed, because he slept like a log wherever he was put, "even on a hot griddle." In fact, he would sleep much better on the chair knowing that she was sleeping in the bed, than he would in the bed knowing that she was awake for hours on end on the chair.
    


     One night, toward midnight, the door of my room opened silently and Father's silhouette bent over me in the dark. As usual, I hastily feigned sleep. Instead of straightening my bedclothes, he lifted them and got into bed with me. Like that time. Like on November 29, after the vote for the creation of the state, when my hand saw his tears. I was terrified and hastily drew my knees up and pressed them hard against my stomach, hoping and praying that he would not notice what it was that had stopped me getting to sleep: if he did, I would die on the spot. My blood froze when Father got into bed with me, and I was in such a panic not to be caught out being filthy, that it was quite a while before I realized, as though in a nightmare, that the silhouette that had slipped into bed with me was not my father's.

     She pulled the covers up over both our heads and cuddled me, and whispered, Don't wake up.
     And in the morning she was not there. The next night she came to my room again, but this time she brought one of the two mattresses from the "barking sofa" with her and slept on the floor at the foot of my bed. The following night I firmly insisted, doing my best to imitate my father's authoritative manner, that she should sleep in my bed and I would sleep on the mattress at her feet.
     It was as if we were all playing an improved version of musical chairs called musical beds. First round: normal—both my parents in their double bed and me in my bed. Then in the next round Mother slept in her chair, Father on the sofa, and I was still in my bed. In the third round Mother and I were in my single bed while Father was alone in the double bed. In the fourth round my father was unchanged and I was alone again in my bed and my mother on the mattress at my feet. Then she and I swapped over, she went up, I went down, and Father stayed where he was.
     But we weren't finished yet.
     Because after a few nights when I slept on the mattress in my room at my mother's feet, she frightened me in the middle of the night with broken sounds that were almost but not quite like coughing. Then she calmed down, and I went back to sleep. But a night or two later I was woken again by her coughs that weren't coughs. I got up, with my eyes stuck together, went down the corridor in a daze with my blanket wrapped around me, and climbed in with my father into the double bed. I fell asleep again at once. And I slept there the following nights, too.
     Almost to her last days my mother slept in my room, in my bed, and I slept with my father. After a couple of days all her tablets and bottles of medicine and tranquilizers and migraine pills moved to her new place.
     We did not exchange a word about the new sleeping arrangements. None of us mentioned them. It was as if it had happened all by itself.
     And it really had. Without any family decision. Without a word.
     But the week before the last one Mother did not spend the night in my bed but returned to her chair by the window, except that the chair was moved from our room—mine and Father's—to my room, which had become her room.
     Even when it was all over, I did not want to go back to that room. I wanted to stay with my father. And when I did eventually return to my old room, I couldn't get to sleep: it was as if she were still there. Smiling at me without a smile. Coughing without a cough. Or as if she had bequeathed me the insomnia that had pursued her to the end and was now pursuing me. The night I went back to my own bed was so terrifying that the following nights my father had to drag one of the mattresses from the "barking sofa" to my room and sleep there with me. For a week or maybe two he slept at the foot of my bed. After that he went back to his place, and she, or her insomnia, followed him.
     It was as though a great whirlpool had swept us up, thrown us together and apart, hurled us around and around and jumbled us up, until each of us was thrown up on a shore that was not our own. And we were all so tired that we silently accepted the move. Because we were very tired. It was not only my mother and father who had dark half moons under their eyes: in those weeks I saw them under my eyes, too, in the mirror.
     We were bound and stuck together that autumn like three prisoners sharing the same cell. Yet each of us was on his or her own. For what could my parents know about the sordidness of my nights? The filthi-ness of my cruel body? How could my parents know that I warned myself over and over again, with my teeth clenched in shame, If you don't give that up, if you don't stop it tonight, then I swear by my life that I'll swallow all Mother's pills and that'll be the end of it.
     My parents suspected nothing. A thousand light-years divided us. Not light-years: dark years.
     But what did I know about what they were going through?
     And how about the two of them? What did my father know about her ordeal? What did my mother understand about his suffering?
     A thousand dark years separated everyone. Even three prisoners in a cell. Even that day in Tel Arza, that Saturday morning when Mother sat with her back against the tree and my father and I laid our heads on her knees, one head on each knee, and Mother stroked us both, even at that moment, which is the most precious moment of my childhood, a thousand lightless years separated us.

 54


     IN THE COLLECTED poems of Jabotinsky, after "With blood and sweat we'll raise a race," "Two banks has the Jordan," and "From the day I was called to the wonder / of Beitar, Zion, and Sinai," came his melodic translations from world poetry, including Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" and "Annabel Lee," Edmond Rostand's "The Princess Faraway," and Paul Verlaine's heartrending "Autumn Song."

     Very soon I knew all these poems by heart and walked around all day drunk on the romantic anguish and macabre torments that enveloped them.
     Side by side with the militaristic patriotic verses that I composed in the splendid black notebook that was a present from Uncle Joseph, I started to write poems of Weltschmerz as well, full of storm, forest, and sea. And some love poems too, before I even knew what was what. Or didn't know but vainly tried to find some accommodation between the westerns in which whoever slew the most Indians won the pretty girl as the prize and the tearful vows of Annabel Lee and her partner and their love beyond the grave. It was not easy to reconcile them. And much harder still to make some sort of peace between all of this and the school nurse's labyrinth of sheaths-eggs-and-Fallopian-tubes. And the nocturnal filth that tormented me so mercilessly that I wanted to die. Or to go back to being as I had been before I fell into the clutches of those jeering night hags: night after night I resolved to kill them off once and for all, and night after night those Scheherazades revealed to my startled gaze such uninhibited plots that all day long I waited impatiently to be in bed at night. Sometimes I could not wait and locked myself in the smelly toilets in the playground at Tachkemoni or our bathroom at home and emerged a few minutes later with my tail between my legs and as wretched as a rag.
     The love of girls and everything associated with it seemed to me to be a catastrophe, a terrible trap from which there was no way out: you start out floating dreamily into an enchanted crystal palace, and you wake up immersed up to here in a cesspool.
     I ran away and sought refuge in the fortress of sanity of books of mystery, adventure, and battle: Jules Verne, Karl May, James Fenimore Cooper, Mayne Reid, Sherlock Holmes, The Three Musketeers, Captain Hatteras, Montezuma's Daughter, The Prisoner of Zenda, With Fire and Sword, De Amicis's The Heart of a Boy, Treasure Island, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, Through the Desert and Jungle, The Gold ofCaxa-malca, The Mysterious Island, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Last of the Mohicans, The Children of Captain Grant, the darkest recesses of Africa, grenadiers and Indians, wrongdoers, cavalrymen, cattle thieves, robbers, cowboys, pirates, archipelagos, hordes of bloodthirsty natives in feathered headdresses and war paint, blood-chilling battle cries, magical spells, knights of the dragon and Saracen horsemen with curved scimitars, monsters, wizards, emperors, bad guys, hauntings, and especially stories about pale little adolescents who are destined for great things when they have managed to overcome their own wretchedness. I wanted to be like them and I wanted to be able to write like the people who wrote them. Perhaps I did not make a distinction yet between writing and winning.
    


     Jules Verne's Michael Strogoff imprinted something on me that is with me to this day. The Russian tsar has sent Strogoff on a secret mission to take a fateful message to the beleaguered Russian forces in remotest Siberia. On the way he has to cross regions that are under Tartar control. Michael Strogoff is captured by Tartar guards and taken to their leader, the Great Khan, who orders his eyes to be put out by being touched with a white-hot sword, so that he will be unable to continue with his mission to Siberia. Strogoff has memorized the fateful message, but how can he slip through the Tartar ranks and reach Siberia if he cannot see? Even after the glowing iron touches his eyes, the faithful messenger continues to grope his way blindly eastward, until at a crucial moment in the plot it is revealed to the reader that he has not lost his sight after all: the white-hot sword as it approached his eyes was cooled by his tears! Because at the crucial moment Michael Strogoff thought of his beloved family whom he would never see again, and the thought filled his eyes with tears, which cooled the blade and saved his sight as well as his fateful mission, which is crowned with success and leads to the victory of his country over all its foes.

     So it was Strogoff's tears that saved him and the whole of Russia. But where I lived, men were not allowed to shed tears! Tears were shameful! Only women and children were permitted to weep. Even when I was five, I was ashamed of crying, and at the age of eight or nine I learned to suppress it so as to be admitted to the ranks of men. That is why I was so astonished on the night of November 29 when my left hand in the dark encountered my father's wet cheek. That is why I never talked about it, either to Father himself or to any other living soul. And now here was Michael Strogoff, a flawless hero, a man of iron who could endure any hardship or torture, and yet when he suddenly thinks of love, he shows no restraint: he weeps. Michael Strogoff does not weep from fear, or from pain, but because of the intensity of his feelings.
     Moreover, Michael Strogoff's crying does not demote him to the rank of a miserable wretch or a woman or a wreck of a man; it is acceptable both to the author, Jules Verne, and to the reader. And as if it were not enough that it is suddenly acceptable for a man to weep, both he and the whole of Russia are saved by his tears. And so this manliest of men defeats all his foes thanks to his "feminine side," which rose up from the depths of his soul at the crucial moment, without impairing or weakening his "masculine side" (as they brainwashed us to say in those days): on the contrary, it complemented it and made peace with it. So perhaps there was an honorable way out of the choice that tormented me in those days, the choice between emotion and manliness? (A dozen years later, Hannah in My Michael would also be fascinated by the character of Michael Strogoff.)
     And then there was Captain Nemo in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, who detested exploitative regimes and the oppression of nations and individuals by heartless bullies and selfish powers. He had a hatred for the arrogant condescension of the northwestern countries that is reminiscent of Edward Said, if not Franz Fanon, so he decided to dissociate himself from all of it and to create a little utopia under the ocean.
     This apparently aroused in me, among other things, a throb of Zionist responsiveness. The world always persecuted us and treated us unjustly: that was why we had retreated sideways, to create our own little independent bubble where we could live "a life of purity and freedom," far from the cruelty of our persecutors. But, like Captain Nemo, we would not go on being helpless victims but by the power of our creative genius we would arm our own Nautilus with sophisticated death rays. No one would ever dare to plot against us again. Our long arm would reach to the end of the world if necessary.
    


     In Verne's The Mysterious Island a group of survivors from a shipwreck manage to create a tiny patch of civilization on a barren desert island. The survivors are all Europeans, all men, all rational, generous-hearted men of goodwill, they are all technologically minded, bold and resourceful: they are the very image of the way the nineteenth century wanted to see the future: sane, enlightened, virile, capable of solving any problem by the power of reason and in accordance with the tenets of the new religion of progress. (Cruelty, baser instincts, and evil were apparently banished to another, later island: the one in William Golding's L-rd of the Flies.)

     By their hard work, common sense, and pioneering enthusiasm the group manages to survive and to build up from scratch, with their bare hands, a prosperous homestead on the desert island. This delighted me, imbued as I was with the pioneering ethos of Zionism that I had received from my father: secular, enlightened, rationalistic, idealistic, mil-itantly optimistic and progressive.
     And yet, there were moments when the pioneers of The Mysterious Island were threatened by catastrophe from the forces of nature, moments when they had their backs to the wall and their brains were of no further use to them, and at such fateful moments a mysterious hand always intervened in the plot, a miraculous, all-powerful providence that time and again delivered them from certain destruction. "If there be justice, let it shine forth at once," Bialik wrote: in The Mysterious Island there was justice and it did shine forth at once, as quick as lightning, whenever all hope was lost.
     But that was precisely the other ethos, the one diametrically opposed to my father's rationalism. It was the logic of the stories my mother used to tell me at night, tales of demons, of miracles, the tale of the ancient man who sheltered an even more ancient man under his roof, tales of evil, mystery, and grace, Pandora's box where at the end hope still remained beyond all despair. It was also the miracle-laden logic of the Hasidic tales that Teacher Zelda first exposed me to and that my storytelling teacher at Tachkemoni, Mordechai Michaeli, took up from the place where she had left off.
     It was as if here, in The Mysterious Island, there was at last some kind of reconciliation between the two opposing windows through which the world had first been revealed to me, at the beginning of my life: my father's commonsensical, optimistic window, over against my mother's window, which opened onto grim landscapes and strange supernatural forces, of evil but also of pity and compassion.
     At the end of The Mysterious Island it turns out that the providential force that intervened over and over again to rescue the "Zionist enterprise" of the survivors of the shipwreck whenever they were threatened with destruction was actually the discreet intervention of Captain Nemo, the angry-eyed captain from Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. But that in no way diminished the pleasure of reconciliation that I got from the book, the elimination of the contradiction between my childish fascination with Zionism and my no less childish fascination with the Gothic.
     It was as though my father and mother had finally made peace and were living together in perfect harmony. Admittedly not here in Jerusalem but on some desert island. But still, they could make peace.
    


     Kindhearted Mr. Marcus, who sold new and secondhand books on Jonah Street, almost at the corner of Geula Street, also ran a lending library, and eventually he allowed me to change my book every day. Sometimes twice on the same day. At first he would not believe that I had really read the whole book, and when I brought a book back only a few hours after I had borrowed it, he used to test me on it with all sorts of crafty trick questions. Gradually his suspicion turned to astonishment and finally to devotion. He was convinced that with such an amazing memory and the ability to read so fast, particularly if I also learned the major languages, someday I could become the ideal private secretary for one of our great leaders. Who knew, I might end up as Ben-Gurion's secretary, or Moshe Sharet's. Consequently he decided that I was worth a long-term investment, that he should cast his bread upon the water: who knew, he might need some permit one day, he might need to jump a line or oil the wheels of the publishing business he was planning to join, and then surely his ties of friendship with the private secretary of one of the greatest of the great would be worth its weight in gold.

     Mr. Marcus sometimes used to show my crowded reader's ticket proudly to selected customers, as though gloating over the fruits of his investment. Just look what we have here! A bookworm! A phenomenon! A child who devours not just books but whole shelves every month!
     So I got special permission from Mr. Marcus to make myself at home in his library. I could borrow four books at a time so as not to go hungry over the holidays, when the shop was closed. I could leaf— carefully!—through books hot from the press that were intended for sale, not for lending. I could even look at books that were not meant for someone of my age, like the stories of Somerset Maugham, O. Henry, Stefan Zweig, and even spicy Maupassant.
     In the winter I ran in the dark, through showers of piercing rain and driving wind, to get to Mr. Marcus's bookshop before it closed, at six o'clock. It was very cold in Jerusalem in those days, a sharp biting cold, and hungry polar bears came down from Siberia to roam the streets of Kerem Avraham on those late December nights. I ran without a coat, and so my sweater got drenched and gave off a depressing, itchy smell of wet wool all evening.
     Occasionally it happened that I was left without a scrap to read, on those long empty Saturdays when by ten in the morning I had finished all the ammunition I had brought from the library. Frantically I grabbed whatever came to hand in my father's bookcases: Till Eulenspiegel in Shlonsky's translation, the Arabian Nights translated by Rivlin, the books of Israel Zarchi, Mendele Mocher Sforim, Sholem Aleichem, Kafka, Berdyczewski, Rahel's poetry, Balzac, Hamsun, Yigal Mossensohn, Feierberg, Natan Shaham, Gnessin, Brenner, Hazaz, even Mr. Agnon's books. I understood almost nothing, except perhaps for what I could see through my father's spectacles, namely that life in the shtetl was despicable, repulsive, and even ridiculous. In my foolish heart, I was not entirely surprised by its terrible end.
     Father had most of the key works of world literature in the original languages, so I could hardly even read their titles. But whatever was there in Hebrew, if I didn't actually read it, at least I sniffed at it. I left no stone unturned.
    


     Of course, I also read the weekly children's section of Davar, and those children's books that were on everyone's dessert menu: poems by Leah Goldberg and Fania Bergstein, The Children's Island by Mira Lobeh, and all the books by Nahum Guttmann. Lobengula's Africa, Beatrice's Paris, Tel Aviv surrounded by sand dunes, orchards, and sea, all these were destinations of my first hedonistic world cruises. The difference between Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv-that-was-joined-to-the-rest-of-the-big-wide-world seemed to me like the difference between our wintry, black-and-white life and a life of color, summer, and light. One book that particularly captured my imagination was Over the Ruins by Tsvi Liebermann-Livne, which I read and reread. Once upon a time, in the days of the Second Temple, there was a remote Jewish village, tucked away peacefully among hills, valleys, and vineyards. One day the Roman legionnaires arrived, slaughtered all the inhabitants, men, women, and old folk, looted their property, set fire to the buildings, and went on their way. But the villagers had managed before the massacre to hide their little children, the ones who were not yet twelve and could not take part in the defense of the village, in a cave in the hills.

     After the calamity the children emerged from the cave, saw the destruction, and instead of despairing they decided, in a discussion that resembled a general assembly in a kibbutz, that life must go on and that they must rebuild the ruined village. So they set up committees, which girls sat on too, because these children were not only brave and industrious but also amazingly progressive and enlightened. Gradually, working like ants, they managed to recover the remaining livestock, repair the pens and cow sheds, restore the burned houses, start working the fields again, and set up a model community of children, a sort of idyllic kibbutz: a commune of Robinson Crusoes without a single Man Friday.
     Not a cloud darkened the life of sharing and equality enjoyed by these children of the dream: neither power struggles nor rivalries and jealousies, neither filthy sex nor the ghosts of their dead parents. It was exactly the opposite of what happened to the children in L-rd of the Flies. Tsvi Livne certainly intended to give the children of Israel an inspiring Zionist allegory: the generation of the wilderness had all died, and in its place there arose the generation of the Land, bold and brave, raising itself up by its own efforts from catastrophe to heroism and from darkness to great light. In my own, Jerusalem version, in the sequel that I composed in my head, the children were not content with milking the cows and harvesting the olives and grapes; they discovered an arms cache, or better still they managed to devise and construct machine guns, mortars, and armored vehicles. Or else it was the Palmach that managed to smuggle these weapons a hundred generations backward in time to the outstretched hands of the children of Over the Ruins. Armed with all these weapons, Tsvi Livne's (and my) children hurried to Masada and arrived at the very last minute. With a devastating barrage of fire, from the rear, with long, accurate salvos and deadly mortar fire they took the Roman legionnaires by surprise—the very same legionnaires who had killed their parents and were now engaged in building a ramp to storm the rocky citadel of Masada. And so, at the very moment when Eleazar Ben Yair was about to conclude his unforgettable farewell speech and the last defenders of Masada were on the point of falling on their swords so as not to be taken captive by the Romans, my young men and I burst onto the mountain and saved them from death, and our nation from the ignominy of defeat.
     Then we carried the war to enemy territory: we positioned our mortars on the seven hills of Rome, smashed the Arch of Titus to smithereens, and brought the emperor to his knees.
    


     There may well be another sick illicit pleasure concealed here, one that no doubt never occurred to Tsvi Livne when he was writing the book, a dark, oedipal pleasure. Because the children here buried their own parents. All of them. Not a single grown-up was left in the entire village. No parent, no teacher, no neighbor, no uncle, no grandpa, no grandma, no Mr. Krochmal, no Uncle Joseph, no Mala and Staszek Rudnicki, no Abramskis, no Bar-Yizhars, no Aunt Lilia, no Begin, and no Ben-Gurion. And so a well-repressed desire of the Zionist ethos, and of the child that I was then, was miraculously fulfilled: that the grown-ups should be dead. Because they were so alien, so burdensome. They belonged to the Diaspora. They were the generation of the wilderness. They were always full of demands and commands, they never let you breathe. Only when they are dead will we be able to show them at last how we can do everything ourselves. Whatever they want us to do, whatever they expect from us, we'll do the lot, magnificently: we'll plow and reap and build and fight and win, only without them, because the new Hebrew nation needs to break free from them. Because everything here was made to be young, healthy, and tough, while they are old and shattered and complicated and a bit repulsive, and more than a bit ridiculous.

     So in Over the Ruins the whole generation of the wilderness has evaporated, leaving behind happy, light-footed orphans, as free as a flock of birds in the clear blue sky. There is no one left to nag them in a Diaspora accent, to speechify, to enforce musty manners, to spoil life with all kinds of depressions, traumas, imperatives, and ambitions. Not one of them has survived to moralize all day long—this is permitted, that is forbidden, that is disgusting. Just us. Alone in the world.
     The death of all the grown-ups concealed a mysterious, powerful spell. And so at the age of fourteen and a half, a couple of years after my mother's death, I killed my father and the whole of Jerusalem, changed my name, and went on my own to Kibbutz Hulda to live there over the ruins.

 55


     I KILLED HIM particularly by changing my name. For many years my father had lived under the wide shadow of his learned uncle with his "worldwide reputation" (a concept that my father would voice in piously hushed tones). For many years Yehuda Arieh Klausner had dreamed of following in the footsteps of Professor Joseph Gedalyahu Klausner, the author of Jesus of Nazareth, From Jesus to Paul, A History of the Second Temple, A History of Hebrew Literature, and When a Nation Fights for Its Freedom. In his heart of hearts my father even dreamed of succeeding the childless professor when the time came. That is why he learned no fewer foreign languages than his uncle had mastered. That is why he sat huddled over his desk at night while the little cards piled up around him. And when he began to despair of being a famous professor someday, he may have begun to pray in his heart of hearts that the torch would pass to me, and that he would be there to see it.

     My father sometimes jokingly compared himself to the insignificant Mendelssohn, the banker Abraham Mendelssohn, whose fate it was to be the son of the famous philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and the father of the great composer Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. ("First I was my father's son, then I became my son's father," Abraham Mendelssohn once said jokingly.)
     As though in jest, as though he was making fun of me out of stunted feelings of affection, my father insisted on addressing me, from an early age, as "Your Honor," "Your Highness." It was only many years later, the night of the day he died, that it suddenly occurred to me that behind this fixed, irritating joke there may have lurked his own disappointed ambitions, and the sad necessity to reconcile himself to his own mediocrity, as well as the concealed wish to entrust me with the mission to achieve in his name, when the time came, the goals that had eluded him.
     My mother, in her loneliness and depression, told me stories ofwon-ders, horrors, and ghosts that were possibly not much different from those that the widow Ase told the young Peer Gynt on winter nights. My father, in his own way, was Jon Gynt, Peer's father, to my mother's Ase, hoping for "great things."
     "The kibbutz," Father remarked sadly, "may be a not insignificant phenomenon, but it requires tough manual workers of average intelligence. You know by now that you are decidedly not average. I do not wish to cast aspersions on the kibbutz as such, kibbutzim have distinct merits in the life of the state, but you will not be able to develop there. Consequently I am afraid I cannot agree to this. In any way. And that's that. End of discussion."
    


     After my mother's death, and his remarriage a year or so later, he and I talked almost only about the necessities of everyday life, politics, new scientific discoveries, or values and moral theories. (By now we were living in the new apartment, at 28 Ben Maimon Avenue, in Rehavia, the area of Jerusalem where he had longed to live for years.) The anxieties of my adolescent years, his remarriage, his feelings, my feelings, the last days of my mother's life, her death, her absence, these were topics about which we never spoke. We sometimes clashed, with a polite but very tense mutual hostility, about Bialik, Napoleon, and socialism, which had begun to fascinate me and which my father saw as the "red epidemic," and once we had a terrible row about Kafka. Most of the time, though, we behaved like two lodgers sharing a small apartment. The bathroom's free. We need margarine and toilet paper. Don't you think it's getting rather cold: shall I light the heater?

     When I started to go away on weekends and during festivals to visit my mother's sisters, Haya and Sonia, in Tel Aviv, or to Grandpa Papa's house in Kiriat Motskin, my father gave me money for the fare and added a few pounds "So you won't have to ask anybody there for money." "And don't forget to tell somebody there that you mustn't eat anything fried." Or "Please remember to ask somebody there if they'd like me to put the things from her drawer in an envelope for the next time you go."
     The word "her" covered my mother's memory like a slab of stone with no inscription. The words "anybody there" or "somebody there" signified the breaking of all ties between him and my mother's family, which had never been renewed. They blamed him. His relationships with other women, my mother's sisters in Tel Aviv believed, had cast a cloud over their sister's life. Plus all those nights when he had sat at his desk with his back to her and his mind on his research and his little cards. My father was shocked by this accusation and wounded to the quick. He viewed my trips to Tel Aviv and Haifa more or less the way the Arab states, in that time of boycott and denial, viewed visits to Israel by neutral individuals: we can't stop you going, go where you like, but please don't call that place by its name in our presence, and don't tell us anything about it when you get back. Anything good or bad. And don't tell them about us. We don't want to hear and we don't care to know. And make sure they don't put any unwanted stamps in your passport.
     Some three months after my mother's suicide came the day of my bar mitzvah. There was no party. They made do with my being called up to the Torah on Saturday morning at Tachkemoni Synagogue and mumbling my way through the weekly reading. The whole Mussman family came, from Tel Aviv and Kiriat Motskin, but they found their own corner in the synagogue, as far as possible from the Klausners. Not a word was exchanged between the two camps. Zvi and Buma, my aunts' husbands, may have given a little, almost imperceptible nod. And I ran back and forth between the two cantons like a dizzy puppy dog, trying my best to look like a happy little boy, talking endlessly, in imitation of my father.
     Only Grandpa Alexander unhesitatingly crossed the iron curtain, kissed my grandmother from Haifa and my mother's two sisters on both cheeks, three times, left right left, in the Russian manner, and pressed me to his side as he exclaimed delightedly: "Nu, what? A charming young man, is he not? A molodyets young man! And very talented, too! Very very talented! Very!"
    


     Some time after my father's remarriage, my schoolwork went downhill so badly that there was a threat of expulsion from school (the year after my mother's death I had been moved from Tachkemoni to Rehavia High School). My father took it as a personal affront, and was outraged; he punished me in various ways. Gradually he came to suspect that this was my form of guerrilla warfare, which would not stop until I had forced him to let me go to the kibbutz. He fought back: every time I entered the kitchen, he would get up and leave without saying a word. But one Friday he went out of his way to accompany me to the old Egged bus station halfway down Jaffa Road. Before I boarded the bus to Tel Aviv, he suddenly said:

     "If you wish, please ask them there what they think about this kibbutz idea of yours. Needless to say their opinion is not binding on us and does not interest us that much, but for once I do not object to hearing what they think of this possibility over there."
     Long before my mother's death, from the beginning of her illness and perhaps even earlier, my aunts from Tel Aviv saw my father as a selfish and maybe slightly domineering man; they were convinced that since her death I had been groaning under the yoke of his oppression and that since his marriage my stepmother, too, was mistreating me. Over and over again I annoyed my aunts by saying nice things about my father and his wife, how devotedly they looked after me and tried their very best to make sure I didn't lack for anything. My aunts refused to listen: they were surprised at me, they were angry, they were offended, as though I were singing the praises of Abdel Nasser and his regime, or defending the fedayeen. Both of them silenced me whenever I began to sing my father's praises. Aunt Haya said:
     "That's enough. Please stop. You're hurting me. They seem to be brainwashing you properly."
     Aunt Sonia did not reproach me at such moments: she simply burst into tears.
     To their inquisitive eyes, the truth spoke for itself: I looked as thin as a rake, pale, nervous, and not properly washed. They must be neglecting me over there. If not something worse. And what's that wound on your cheek? Don't they send you to the doctor there? And that rag of a sweater—is that the only one you've got? And when was the last time they bought you any underwear? And how about money for the return fare? Did they forget to give you any? No? Why are you so obstinate? Why don't you let us put a few pounds in your pocket, to be on the safe side?
     As soon as I arrived in Tel Aviv, my aunts pounced on the bag I'd packed for the weekend and took out the shirt, the pajamas, the socks, the underwear, and even the spare hankie, tut-tutting to themselves wordlessly and condemning the whole lot to be laundered, boiled, thoroughly aired for a couple of hours on the balcony, then there was violent ironing, and occasionally uncompromising destruction, as though they were eliminating the risk of plague or sending all my personal effects off for a course of reeducation. I was always sent off to the shower first thing, and secondly it was, Sit in the sun on the balcony for half an hour, you're as white as that wall, and won't you have a bunch ofgrapes? an apple? some raw carrot? Then we'll go and buy you some new underwear. Or a decent shirt. Or some socks. They both tried to feed me chicken liver, cod-liver oil, fruit juices, and masses of raw vegetables. As if I'd come straight from the ghetto.
     On the question of my going to the kibbutz Aunt Haya immediately declared:
     "Yes, definitely. You ought to get away from them for a bit. In a kibbutz you'll get bigger and stronger, and gradually you'll lead a healthier life."
     Aunt Sonia suggested sadly, with her arm around my shoulder:
     "Try the kibbutz, yes. And if, G-d forbid, you feel just as miserable there, simply move in with us here."
    


     Towards the end of year nine (the fifth grade at Rehavia School) I suddenly gave up the scouts and almost stopped going to school. I lay on my back in my room all day in my underwear, devouring one book after another and piles of sweets, which were almost the only thing I ate at the time. I was already in love up to here, with stifled tears and without the ghost of a chance, with one of the princesses of my class: not bittersweet youthful love as in the books I was reading, where they described how the soul aches with love but is still uplifted and thrives, but as if I had been hit over the head with an iron rod. And to make matters worse, my body, at that time, didn't stop tormenting me at night and even during the day with its insatiable filth. I wanted to go free, to be liberated once and for all from these two enemies, the body and the soul. I wanted to be a cloud. To be a stone on the surface of the moon.

     Every evening I got up, went out, and wandered the streets for two or three hours or walked to the empty fields outside the city. Sometimes I felt attracted to the barbed-wire fence and the minefields that divided the city, and once, in the dark, straying perhaps into one of the areas of no-man's-land, I accidentally trod on an empty can, which made a noise that sounded as loud as a landslide, and immediately two shots rang out from quite nearby in the dark and I ran away. Still, I went back the next evening and the following ones to the edge of no-man's-land as though I had had enough of it all. I even went down into the secluded wadis, till I couldn't see any lights, only the outline of the hills and a sprinkling of stars, the smell of fig and olive trees and thirsty summer earth. I got home at ten, eleven, or midnight, refusing to say where I'd been, ignoring my bedtime even though Father had extended it from nine o'clock to ten, ignoring all his complaints, not responding to his hesitant efforts to bridge the silence between us with his well-worn jokes:
     "And where, if we may be permitted to ask, has Your Excellency spent the evening, until almost midnight? Did you have a rendezvous? With some beautiful young lady? Was Your Highness invited to an orgy in the Queen of Sheba's palace?"
     My silence scared him even more than the burrs that clung to my clothes or the fact that I had stopped studying. When he realized that his anger and his punishments were having no effect, he replaced them with petty sarcasm. He muttered with a nod of the head: "If that's the way Your Highness wants it, that's the way it will be." Or: "When I was your age I had almost finished the gymnasium. Not the light entertainment of a school like yours! The classical gymnasium! With iron military discipline! With classical Greek and Latin lessons! I read Euripides, Ovid, and Seneca in the original! And what are you doing? Lying flat on your back for twelve hours on end reading rubbish! Comics! Dirty magazines! Dwarf and Stalag! Disgusting rags intended for the dregs of humanity! To think of the great-nephew of Professor Klausner ending up as a good-for-nothing! A hooligan!"
     Eventually his sarcasm gave way to sorrow. At the breakfast table he would look at me for a moment with sad, warm, doglike eyes, and at once his gaze fled before mine and buried itself behind his paper. As though he were the one who had gone astray and should be ashamed of himself.
     Finally, with a heavy heart, my feather suggested a compromise. Some friends in Kibbutz Sde Nehemia would be willing to have me stay for the summer months: I could try my hand at agricultural work and find out whether life with youngsters of my age sleeping in communal dormitories suited me. If it turned out that the experience of the summer was enough for me, I had to commit myself to coming back to school and tackle my studies with the seriousness they deserved. But if I still hadn't come to my senses by the end of the summer holidays, then the two of us would sit down together again and have a truly grown-up conversation and try to come up with a solution that was agreeable to both of us.
     Uncle Joseph himself, the old professor whom the Herut Party put forward at that time as its candidate for the presidency of the State against Professor Chaim Weizmann, the candidate of the Center and the Left, heard about my distressing intention to join a kibbutz and was alarmed. He considered kibbutzim to be a threat to the national ethos, if not an extension of Stalinism. So he invited me to his house for a serious private conversation, a tête-à-tête, not on one of our Sabbath pilgrimages but, for the first time in my life, on a weekday. I prepared for this meeting with a pounding heart and even jotted down three or four notes. I would remind Uncle Joseph of what he himself always proclaimed: the need to swim against the tide. The determined individual must always stand up boldly for what he conscientiously believes in, even against strong resistance from those dearest to him. But Uncle Joseph was forced to withdraw his invitation at the last minute because of some urgent matter that had attracted his outrage.
     And so it was without his blessing, and without this David and Goliath confrontation, that I got up at five o'clock on the first morning of the summer holidays to go to the Central Bus Station on Jaffa Road. My father had gotten up half an hour before me: by the time my alarm went off, he had already made me two thick cheese and tomato sandwiches, two egg and tomato sandwiches, some peeled cucumber, an apple, and a slice of sausage, and wrapped them in greaseproof paper, with a bottle of water with the top screwed on very tight so it wouldn't leak on the journey. He had cut his finger slicing the bread and was bleeding, so before I left, I bandaged it for him. At the door he gave me a hesitant hug, then a second, harder one, put his head to one side and said:
     "If I have hurt you in any way lately, I apologize. I haven't had an easy time of it either."
     Suddenly he changed his mind, hastily put on a jacket and tie, and walked me to the bus station. The two of us carried the bag that held all my worldly belongings through the streets of Jerusalem, which were deserted before dawn. All the way my father spouted old jokes and puns. He talked about the Hasidic origins of the term "kibbutz," which means "ingathering," and the interesting parallel between the kibbutz ideology and the Greek idea of koinonia, community, from koinos, meaning "common" He pointed out that koinonia was the origin of the Hebrew word kenounia, "collusion," and perhaps also of the musical term "canon." He got on the Haifa bus with me and argued about where I should sit, then he said good-bye again, and he must have forgotten that this was not one of my Saturday visits to the aunts in Tel Aviv because he wished me a good Sabbath, even though it was Monday. Before he got off the bus, he joked with the driver and asked him to drive with special care because he was carrying a great treasure. Then he ran off to buy a paper, stood on the platform, looked for me, and waved good-bye to the wrong bus.

 56


     AT THE END of that summer I changed my name and moved with my bag from Sde Nehemia to Hulda. To start with I was an external boarder at the local secondary school (which modestly called itself "continuation classes"). When I finished school, just before I started my military service, I became a member of the kibbutz. Kibbutz Hulda was to be my home from 1954 to 1985.

     My father had remarried about a year after my mother's death, and then a year later, after I went to live in the kibbutz, he and his wife moved to London. He lived there for about five years. It was in London that my sister Marganita and brother David were born, that he finally—with immense difficulty—learned to drive, and that he gained a Ph.D. from London University for a dissertation on "an unknown manuscript by I. L. Peretz." Periodically we sent each other postcards. Occasionally he sent me copies of his articles. He sometimes sent me books and little objects intended as gentle reminders of my true destiny, such as pens and pen holders, handsome notebooks, and a decorative letter opener.
     Every summer he used to come home on a visit, to see how I really was and if kibbutz life really suited me, and at the same time to check on the state of his apartment and how his library was feeling. In a detailed letter my father announced to me at the start of the summer of 1956:
     On Wednesday of next week, provided it is not too much trouble for you, I plan to come and visit you in Hulda. I have made inquiries and ascertained that there is a local bus that leaves the Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv daily at 12 noon and arrives at Hulda at approximately 1:20. Now here are my questions: 1. Would you be able to come and meet me at the bus stop? (But if it is a problem for you, if you are busy for example, I can easily ask where you are and find you by myself.) 2. Should I eat something before I board the bus in Tel Aviv, or would it be possible for us to eat together when I reach the kibbutz? Only on condition that it is no trouble for you, naturally. 3. My inquiries show that in the afternoon there is only one bus from Hulda to Rehovot, from where I can take a second bus to Tel Aviv and then a third bus back to Jerusalem. But in that case we would only have some two and a half hours at our disposal. Would that be enough for us? 4.Or, alternatively, perhaps I could stay the night and leave Hulda on the 7 o'clock bus in the morning? That is, if three conditions are met: A. that you would have no difficulty finding me somewhere to stay (a very simple bed or even a mattress would suffice); B. that this would not be viewed askance in the kibbutz; and C. that you yourself feel comfortable with such a relatively long visit. Please let me know at once, either way. 5. What should I bring with me, apart from personal effects? (Towel? Sheets? I have never stayed on a kibbutz before!) Naturally I will give you all the news (there is not much) when we see each other. And I will tell you about my plans, if you are interested. And if you like you can tell me something of your plans. I hope you are in good health and spirits (there is a definite connection between the two!). As for the rest, we'll talk very soon. With love, yours, Dad.

     ***

     That Wednesday I finished school at one, and I asked to be let off the two hours' work we had to do after lunch (I was working in the chicken coop at the time). Nevertheless, after my last class I dashed back to change into dusty blue work clothes and heavy work boots, then I ran to the tractor shed, found the keys of the Massey-Ferguson hidden under the seat cushion, started the engine, and roared up to the bus stop in a cloud of dust a couple of minutes after the Tel Aviv bus got in. My father, whom I had not seen for more than a year, was already there, sheltering his eyes from the sun with his hand and waiting nervously to see where his help would come from. He was dressed—to my utter amazement—in khaki trousers, a light-blue short-sleeved shirt and a kibbutz-type hat, without a trace of a jacket and tie. From a distance he almost looked like one of our "oldies." I imagine he had thought hard before dressing in this way, as a gesture of respect to a culture that he felt some esteem for, even if it did not conform to his own ethos and principles. In one hand he was carrying his battered briefcase, and in the other he held a handkerchief with which he was mopping his brow. I roared up to him, braked almost in front of his nose, and, leaning toward him with one hand on the wheel and the other posed proprietorially on the wing, I said: Shalom. He looked up at me with eyes magnified by his glasses so that he looked like a frightened child and hurriedly returned my greeting, although he was not entirely sure who I was. When he did identify me, he looked startled.

     After a moment he said:
     "Is that you?"
     And after another moment:
     "You've grown so much. You're looking healthier."
     And finally, when he had recovered himself:
     "Permit me to remark that it wasn't very safe, that stampede of yours. You might have run me over."
     I asked him to wait there, out of the sun, and returned the Massey-Ferguson to the shed: its role in the drama was over. Then I took my father to the dining hall, where we suddenly both became aware that we were the same height now; we were embarrassed, and my father made a joke about it. He felt my muscles curiously, as though he was wondering whether to buy me, and he made another joke about the dark color of my skin, compared to his pale skin: "Little Black Sambo! You're as dark as a Yemenite!"
     In the dining hall most of the tables had been cleared; there was only one that was laid, and I served my father some boiled chicken with carrots and potatoes and a bowl of chicken soup with croutons. He ate very carefully, with meticulous table manners, ignoring my own deliberately noisy, peasantlike way of eating. While we drank sweet tea from plastic cups, he struck up a polite conversation with Tsvi Butnik, one ofthe old-timers, who was sitting at our table. Father was very careful not to touch on any topic that might degenerate into an ideological argument. He inquired which country Tsvi had come from, and when he said he was from Romania, my father's face lit up and he started speaking Romanian, which for some reason Tsvi had trouble understanding from the way my father spoke it. Then he moved on to the beauty of the landscape of the coastal plain, the biblical prophetess Hulda and the Hulda Gates in the Temple, topics that must have seemed to him beyond any risk of disagreement. But before we parted from Tsvi, Father could not resist asking him how they were enjoying having his son here. Was he managing to acclimatize? Tsvi Butnik, who had not the faintest idea whether or how I was acclimatizing in Hulda, said:
     "What a question! Very well!"
     And Father replied:
     "Well, for that I am most grateful to you all."
     As we were leaving the dining hall, he remarked to Tsvi without sparing my feelings, like someone collecting a dog from a boarding kennels:
     "He was rather out of condition in some ways when he came, and now he seems to be in tip-top form."
     I dragged him off for a comprehensive tour of the length and breadth of Hulda. I did not bother to ask if he would rather rest. I did not bother to offer him a cold shower, or show him the toilets. Like a sergeant-major on a base for new recruits I rushed my poor father along, red-faced, panting, mopping his face all the time, from the sheep pens to the chicken coops and the barns, and then on to the carpentry shop and the locksmith's shop and the olive-oil plant at the top of the hill, and all the time I lectured him about the principles of the kibbutz, agricultural economy, the advantages of socialism, the contribution of the kibbutz to Israel's military victories. I didn't spare him a single detail. I was possessed by a kind of vindictive didactic zeal that was too strong to contain. I did not let him utter a word. I rebuffed his attempts to ask questions. I talked and I talked and I talked.
     From the children's block I dragged him, with his last remaining strength, to see the veterans' quarters, the clinic, and the schoolrooms, until finally we reached the culture hall and the library, where we found the librarian Sheftel, the father of Nily, who was to become my wife a few years later. Kindhearted, smily Sheftel was sitting in blue work clothes, humming a Hasidic melody under his breath and typing something with two fingers on a wax stencil sheet. Like a dying fish that by some miracle has been thrown back into the water at the last minute, my father, who was gasping from the heat and dust and stifled by the smell of manure, revived: the sight of books and a librarian suddenly brought him back to life, and at once he started pouring forth opinions.
     They chatted for ten minutes or so, the two future in-laws, about whatever librarians talk about. Then Sheftel's shyness got the better of him, and Father left him and turned to inspect the layout of the library and all its nooks and crannies, like an alert military attaché observing with a professional eye the maneuvers of a foreign army.
     Then we walked around a bit longer, Father and I. We had coffee and cakes in the home of Hanka and Oizer Huldai, who had volunteered to be my adoptive family. Here Father displayed the full extent of his knowledge of Polish literature, and after studying their bookcase for a moment, he even had a lively conversation with them in Polish: he quoted from Julian Tuwim, and Hanka replied by quoting Slowacki; he mentioned Mickiewicz, and they responded with Iwaszkiewicz, he mentioned the name of Rejmont, and they answered with Wyspianski. Father seemed to be treading on tiptoe as he talked to the people in the kibbutz, as though being very careful not to let slip something terrible whose consequences might be irretrievable. He spoke to them with great delicacy, as though he saw their socialism as an incurable disease whose unfortunate carriers did not realize how grave their condition was, and he, the visitor from outside who saw and knew, had to be careful not to say something accidentally that might alert them to the seriousness of their plight.
     So he took care to express admiration for what he had seen, he showed polite interest, asked a few questions ("Are your crops doing well?" "How is the livestock doing?"), and reiterated his admiration. He did not drown them in a display of his erudition, nor did he attempt any puns. He kept himself under control. Perhaps he was afraid he might harm me.
    


     But toward evening a sort of melancholy descended upon him, as though his witticisms had run out and his fountain of anecdotes had dried up. He asked if we could sit down together on a shady bench behind the culture hall and wait for the sunset. When the sun was setting, he stopped talking and we sat together side by side in silence. My brown forearm, which already boasted a blond fuzz, rested on the back of the bench not far from his pale arm with its black hair. This time my father did not address me as Your Highness or Your Honor, he did not even behave as though he were responsible for banishing any silence. He looked so awkward and sad that I almost touched his shoulder. But I didn't. I thought he was trying to say something to me, something important and even urgent, and that he was unable to get started. For the first time in my life, my father seemed afraid of me. I would have liked to help him, even to start the conversation instead of him, but I was as inhibited as he was. Eventually he suddenly said:

     "Well then."
     And I repeated after him:
     "Well."
     And we fell silent again. I suddenly remembered the vegetable garden we had tried to create together in the concrete-hard ground of our backyard in Kerem Avraham. I remembered the letter opener and the household hammer that were his agricultural equipment. The seedlings he brought from the Pioneering Women's House or the Working Women's Farm and planted in the night behind my back to make up for the failure of the seeds we had sown.
    


     My father brought me a present of two of his own books. On the title page of The Novella in Hebrew Literature he had written this dedication: "To my chicken-breeding son, from your (ex-)librarian father," while the inscription he wrote in his History of Literature may have contained a veiled reproach expressing his own disappointment: "To my son Amos, in the hope that he will carve out a place for himself in our literature."

     We slept in an empty dormitory with two children's beds and a packing chest fitted with a curtain for hanging clothes. We undressed in the dark, and in the dark we talked for ten minutes or so. About the NATO alliance and the Cold War. Then we said good-night and turned our backs to each other. Perhaps, like me, my father found it hard to get to sleep. His breath sounded labored, as if he did not have enough air, or as if he were breathing through his mouth with his teeth clenched. We had not slept in the same room for several years, not since my mother's death, since her last days when she moved into my room and I ran away and slept next to him in the double bed, and the first nights after her death, when he had to come and sleep on a mattress on the floor in my room because I was so terrified.
     This time, too, there was a moment of terror. I woke up in a panic in the early hours, imagining in the moonlight that my father's bed was empty and that he had silently pulled up a chair and was sitting by the window, quiet, motionless, his eyes open, staring all night at the moon or counting the passing clouds. My blood froze.
     But in fact he was sleeping deeply and peacefully in the bed I had made up for him, and what had looked like someone sitting quietly on the chair with open eyes staring at the moon was not my father or a ghost but his clothes, the khaki trousers and plain blue shirt that he had chosen so thoughtfully so as not to seem superior to the kibbutz members. So as not to hurt their feelings, heaven forbid.
    


     In the early 1960s my father returned to Jerusalem from London with his wife and children. They settled in a suburb called Beit Hakerem. Once more he went to work every day in the National Library, not in the newspaper department but in the bibliographical section, which was started at that time. Now that he finally had a doctorate from London University and a handsome yet modest visiting card attesting to the fact, he made another attempt to obtain a teaching post, if not in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, his late uncle's fiefdom, then perhaps at least in one of the new universities: Tel Aviv, Haifa, Beersheba. He even tried his luck on one occasion at the religious university, Bar Ilan, though he saw himself as an avowed anticlericalist.

     In vain.
     In his fifties now, he was too old to become a teaching assistant or a junior lecturer, and not sufficiently well thought of to be in the running for a senior academic position. He was not wanted anywhere. (This was also a time when Professor Joseph Klausner's reputation suffered a dramatic decline. All Uncle Joseph's work on Hebrew literature had by the 1960s begun to seem antiquated and rather naive.) As Agnon writes about one of his characters, in the story "Forever":
     For twenty years Adiel Amzeh conducted research into the secrets of Gumlidatha, which was a great city and the pride of mighty nations until the Gothic hordes descended upon it and made it into a heap of dust and its inhabitants into eternal slaves, and all the years during which he labored he did not show his face to the sages of the universities or to their womenfolk and children; now that he came to ask them for a favor, their eyes radiated such cold anger that their spectacles glinted as they addressed him in these terms: Who are you, sir, we do not know you. His shoulders sagged and he departed from them a disappointed man. Nevertheless, the matter was not without benefit, for he had learned the lesson that if one wishes to be recognized by people, one must be close to them. He was not, however, a man who knew how to be close to people...*

     *S. Y. Agnon, "Forever," in Complete Works of S. Y. Agnon, vol. 8 (Jerusalem/Tel Aviv, 1962), pp. 315-14.

     My father never learned "how to be close to people," even though he always tried his hardest to do so, by means of jokes and wisecracks, displays of erudition and plays on words, a constant willingness to shoulder any task without counting the cost. He never knew how to flatter, and he did not master the art of attaching oneself to academic power groups and cabals; he was nobody's lackey, and he wrote in praise of people only after their death.
     Eventually he seems to have accepted his fate. For another ten years or so he spent his days sitting meekly in a windowless cell in the bibliographical section in the new National Library building in Givat Ram, accumulating footnotes. When he came home from work, he sat down at his desk and compiled entries for the Hebrew Encyclopedia, which was taking shape at the time. He mainly wrote about Polish and Lithuanian literature. Slowly he converted some chapters of his doctoral dissertation about I. L. Peretz into articles that he published in Hebrew journals, and once or twice he even managed to publish in French. Among the copies that I have here in my home in Arad I have found articles on Saul Tchernikhowsky ("The Poet in His Homeland"), Immanuel of Rome, Longus's Daphnis and Chloe, and one entitled "Mendele Studies," which my father dedicated
     To the memory of my wife, a woman of discrimination and good taste, who left me on 8 Tebeth 5712*

     In 1960, just a few days before Nily and I were married, my father had his first heart attack. It prevented him from attending the ceremony, which took place in Hulda under a canopy held up on the points of four pitchforks. (It was a fixed tradition in Hulda to support the bridal canopy on two rifles and two pitchforks, symbolizing the union of work, defense, and the kibbutz. Nily and I caused quite a scandal by refusing to marry in the shadow of rifles. In the kibbutz assembly Zalman P. called me a "bleeding heart," while Tzvi K. inquired mockingly whether the army unit I was serving in allowed me to go on patrol armed with a pitchfork or a broom.)

     My father recovered two or three weeks after the wedding, but his face did not look the same: he was gray and tired. From the mid-1960s on, his liveliness gradually left him. He still got up early in the morning enthusiastic and eager for work, but after lunch his head would start drooping wearily onto his chest, and he would lie down and rest at the end of the afternoon. Then his stamina began to ebb at midday. In the end he only had the first two or three hours of the morning, after which he became gray and faded.
     He still liked jokes and wordplay, and he still got pleasure from explaining to me, for example, that the Hebrew word for a faucet, berez, was derived from the Modern Greek vrisi, a spring, and that Hebrew mahsan, a store, like the English word "magazine," came from Arabic mahzan, a storeroom, which may be derived from a Semitic root HSN meaning strong. As for the word balagan, mess or confusion, he said, which was wrongly considered by many to be a Russian word, it actually came from Persian balakan, denoting an unobtrusive veranda where unwanted rags were thrown, from which the English word "balcony" was derived.
     *January 6,1952, in the Roman calendar.
     He repeated himself more and more. Despite his once-sharp memory, he would now repeat a joke or explanation twice in the same conversation. He was tired and withdrawn and sometimes found it hard to concentrate. In 1968, when my third book, My Michael, came out, he read it in a few days and then phoned me in Hulda to say that "there were some quite convincing descriptions, but in the end the book lacks a certain spark of inspiring vision, it lacks a central idea." And when I sent him my story "Late Love," he wrote me a letter in which he expressed his joy that
     your daughters are so splendid, and the main thing is that we shall see each other soon ... As for the story, it is not bad. Apart from the main character, however, the rest are mere caricatures in my humble opinion. But the main character, unappealing and ridiculous as he is, is alive. A few observations: 1.p. 3, "the mighty river of the galaxies": "Galaxy" comes from Greek gala, milk, and means "the milky way." The singular is preferable. To the best of my knowledge there is no basis for the plural. 2.p. 3 (and elsewhere), "Liuba Kaganovska": This is the Polish form; in Russian it should be "Kaganovskaya." 3. On p. 7 you have written viazhma: it should be viazma (z, not zh!).

     And so on and so forth, up to observation no. 23, by which time he only had a tiny space left at the end of the page to write "Regards from all of us, Dad."
     But a few years later Hayim Toren said to me: "Your father used to run from room to room in the National Library, beaming, and showing us what Gershom Shaked had written about your book Where the Jackals Howl and how Avraham Shaanan had praised Elsewhere, Perhaps. Once he explained to me angrily how blind Professor Kurzweil had been to cast aspersions on My Michael. I believe he even called Agnon especially to complain to him about Kurzweil's review. Your father was proud of you in his own way, even though of course he was too shy to tell you, and he may also have been afraid of making you big-headed."
    


     In the last year of his life his shoulders slumped. He had grim fits of rage, when he would hurl rebukes and accusations at anyone around, and shut himself away in his study, slamming the door behind him. But after five or ten minutes he would come out and apologize for his outburst, blaming it on his poor health, his tiredness, his nerves, and sheepishly asking us to forgive him for saying things that were so unjust and unfair.

     He often used the words "just and fair," just as he often said "definitely," "indeed," "undoubtedly," "decidedly," and "from several points of view."
     At this time, when my father was unwell, Grandpa Alexander, in his nineties now, was still at the height of his physical blossoming and in full romantic bloom. As pink-faced as a baby, as full of sap as a young bridegroom, he would come and go all day erupting and exclaiming, "Nu, shto!" or "Such paskudniaks! Such scoundrels! Zhuliks! Crooks!" or "Nu, davai, forward march! Khorosho! Enough, already!" Women flocked to him. Frequently, even in the morning, he would sip a "teeny-weeny brandy," and at once his pink face turned as red as the dawn. If my father and grandfather stood in the garden talking, or paced up and down on the pavement in front of the house, arguing, at least by their body language Grandpa Alexander seemed much younger than his younger son. He was to outlive his older son David and his first grandson Daniel Klausner, who were killed by Germans in Vilna, by four decades, his wife by two, and his remaining son by seven years.
    


     One day, on October 11,1970, some four months after his sixtieth birthday, my father got up early as usual, long before the rest of the household, shaved, splashed on some toilet water, wetted his hair before brushing it back, ate a roll and butter, drank two glasses of tea, read the newspaper, sighed a few times, glanced at the diary that always lay open on his desk so that he could cross things out when he had done them, put on a jacket and tie, made himself a little shopping list, and drove down the street to Denmark Square, where Beit Hakerem Road meets Herzl Avenue, to buy some items of stationery from the little basement shop where he used to purchase whatever he needed for his desk. He parked and locked the car, went down the half-dozen steps, got in line and even gave up his place politely to an elderly woman, bought everything on his list, joked with the woman who owned the shop about the fact that the word "clip" can be both a noun and a verb, said something to her about the negligence of the city council, paid, counted his change, picked up his bag of shopping, thanked the shopkeeper with a smile, asked her not to forget to pass on his greetings to her dear husband, wished her a good and successful day, greeted two strangers who were in line behind him, turned and walked to the door, and dropped dead of a heart attack. He left his body to science, and I inherited his desk. These pages are being written on it, not tearfully, because my father was fundamentally opposed to tears, particularly in men.

     This is what I found written in his desk diary: "Stationery: l. Writing pad. 2. Spiral-bound notebook. 3. Envelopes. 4. Paper clips. 5. Ask about cardboard folders." All these items, including the folders, were in the shopping bag that his fingers were still clutching. So when I reached my father's home in Jerusalem, after an hour or an hour and a half, I picked up my father's pencil and crossed off the list, just as Father always used to cross things off as soon as he had done them.

 57


     WHEN I LEFT home and went to live in the kibbutz, at the age of fifteen, I wrote down some resolutions that I set for myself as a test that I absolutely must not fail. If I was really to start a brand-new life, I must start by getting a tan within a fortnight so that I looked just like one of them; I must stop daydreaming once and for all; I must change my last name; I must take two or three cold showers every day; I must absolutely force myself to give up doing that filthy stuff at nights; I must not write any more poems; I must stop chattering; and I must not tell stories: I must appear in my new home as a silent man.

     Then I tore up the list. For the first four or five days I actually managed not to do the filthy stuff and not to chatter. When I was asked a question like, Will one blanket be enough? or Do you mind sitting in the corner of the classroom near the window?, I replied with a movement of the head, without any sound. To the questions Was I interested in politics? and Would I consider joining a newspaper-reading circle? I answered Ahem. If I was asked about my previous life in Jerusalem, I answered in fewer than ten words, which I held back for a few seconds on purpose, as though I was deep in thought: let them know that I'm a reserved, secretive kind of man, with an inner life. I even succeeded in the matter of the cold showers, although it took an act of heroism to force myself to strip naked in the boys' showers. It even looked as though for the first weeks I could manage to stop writing.
     But not reading.
     Every day after work and school the kibbutz children went to their parents' homes, while the outside boarders relaxed in the clubroom or played basketball. In the evenings there were various activities—dancing, for instance, or sing-alongs—which I avoided so as not to appear ridiculous. When everyone else had disappeared, I would lie down half naked on the grass in front of our dormitory sunbathing and reading till it was dark. (I was very careful to avoid lying on my bed in the empty room, because there my filthy mind lay in wait for me, swarming with Scheherazade-like fantasies.)
    


     Once or twice a week toward evening I would check the progress of my tan in the mirror before putting on my shirt, then pluck up my courage and go to the veterans' block to drink a glass of fruit juice and eat a slice of cake with my kibbutz "parents" Hanka and Oizer Huldai. This pair of teachers, both originally from Lodz, in Poland, presided year after year over the cultural and educational life of the kibbutz. Hanka, who taught in the primary school, was a buxom, energetic woman, always as taut as a spring, and surrounded by a powerful aura of dedication and cigarette smoke. She shouldered the whole burden of organizing the Jewish festivals, weddings, anniversaries, putting on productions and shaping the local tradition of rustic proletarian life. This tradition, as Hanka envisaged it, was supposed to blend the flavor of the Song of Songs with the olives-and-carobs Hebraic taste of the new biblical tillers of the soil, Ha-sidic melodies from Eastern Europe with the rough and ready ways of Polish peasants and other children of nature who drew their purity of mind and mystical joie de vivre straight from the Knut Hamsun-like Growth of the Soil under their bare feet.

     As for Oizer Huldai, the director of the "continuation classes" or secondary school, he was a hard, wiry man whose Jewish wrinkles were plowed with suffering and ironic sagacity. Occasionally a mischievous sparkle of anarchic playfulness flickered for an instant among these tortured lines. He was lean and angular, short of stature but with devastating steely eyes and a hypnotic presence. He had the gift of the gab and a radioactive sarcasm. He could emanate a warmth of affection that melted anyone who was exposed to it to the point of total submission, but he was also capable of volcanic fits of rage that could put the fear of doomsday into those around him.
     Oizer combined the intellectual acumen of a Lithuanian Talmud scholar with a dithyrambic Hasidic ecstasy that could make him suddenly screw up his eyes and burst forth in a rapturous song straining to break free from the trammels of the corporeal world. In a different time or place he might have become a revered Hasidic rebbe, a charismatic wonder-worker surrounded by a packed court of entranced admirers. He could have gone a long way if he had chosen to be a politician, a Tribune of the Plebs, leaving behind him a foaming wake of visceral admiration in some and no less visceral hatred in others. But Oizer Huldai had chosen to live as a kibbutz schoolmaster. He was a hard man of uncompromising principles who enjoyed a fight and could be domineering and even tyrannical. He taught, with an equal degree of detailed proficiency and almost erotic zeal, like a wandering preacher of the shtetl, Bible, biology, Baroque music, Renaissance art, rabbinic thought, principles of socialist ideology, ornithology, taxonomy, the recorder, and subjects like "the historic Napoleon and his representation in nineteenth-century European literature and art."
    


     My heart pounded as I entered the one-and-a-half-room bungalow with a little front porch in the northern block at the edge of the veterans' quarters, opposite the alley of cypresses. The walls were adorned with reproductions of pictures by Modigliani and Paul Klee and a precise, almost Japanese, drawing of almond blossoms. Between two plain armchairs a small coffee table bore a tall vase that almost always contained not flowers but a tasteful arrangement of sprigs. The bright, rustic-style curtains were hand-embroidered in a faintly orientalizing pattern, reminiscent of the modified and adapted orientalism of the Hebraic folk songs written by German-Jewish composers seeking to incorporate the captivating Arab or biblical spirit of the Middle East.

     Oizer, if he was not pacing briskly up and down the path in front of his house with his hands behind his back and his jutting chin slicing the air in front of him, would be sitting in his corner, smoking, humming to himself, and reading. Or inspecting some flowering plant through his magnifying glass while leafing through his botanical handbook. Hanka, meanwhile, would be striding vigorously around the room with a military gait, straightening a mat, emptying and rinsing an ashtray, her lips pursed, adjusting the bedspread, or cutting ornamental shapes out of colored paper. Dolly would welcome me with a couple of barks before Oizer startled her with a thunderous rebuke: "Shame on you, Dolly! Look who you're barking at! Look who you're daring to raise your voice at!" Or sometimes: "Really! Dolly! I'm shocked! I'm truly shocked at you! How could you?! How come your voice didn't tremble?! You're only letting yourself down with this shameful performance!"
     The dog, at the sound of these torrents of prophetic rage, shrank like a deflated balloon, looked around desperately for somewhere to hide her shame, and ended up crawling under the bed.
     Hanka Huldai beamed at me and addressed an invisible audience: "Look! Just look who's here! Cup of coffee? Cake? Or some fruit?" No sooner had these options left her lips than, as if a magic wand had been waved, the coffee, cake, and fruit landed on the table. Meekly but with a warm glow inside I politely drank the coffee, ate some fruit, in moderation, and chatted with Hanka and Oizer for a quarter of an hour about such pressing matters as the death penalty, whether human nature was truly good from birth and only corrupted by society, or whether our instincts were innately wicked and only education could improve them to some degree and in certain conditions. The words "decadence," "refinement," "character," "values," and "improvement" often filled that refined room with its white bookshelves, so different from the shelves in my parents' home in Jerusalem, because here the books were divided up by pictures, figurines, a collection of fossils, collages of pressed wildflowers, well-tended potted plants, and in one corner a gramophone with masses of records.
     Sometimes the conversation about refinement, corruption, values, liberation, and oppression was accompanied by the mournful sound of a violin or the quiet bleating of a recorder: curly-headed Shai would be standing there playing, his back to us. Or Ron would be whispering to his violin, skinny Ronny who was always called "the little one" by his mother, and whom it was better not to try to talk to, even how-are-you-what's-new, because he was always entrenched in his smiling shyness and only rarely treated you to a short sentence like "Fine" or a longer sentence like "No problem." Almost like the dog Dolly who hid under the bed until her master's rage had subsided.*
     Sometimes I found all three Huldai boys, Oizer, Shai, and Ronny, sitting on the grass or on the steps of the front porch, like a klezmer group from the shtetl, stirring the evening air with long-drawn-out, haunting notes on the recorder that gave me a pleasant sense of longing tinged with a pang of sadness for my worthlessness, my otherness, for the fact that no suntan in the world could make me really one of them, I would always be just a beggar at their table, an outsider, a restless little runt from Jerusalem, if not simply a wretched impostor. (I endowed Azaria Gitlin in my book A Perfect Peace with some of this feeling.)
    


     At sunset I took my book to Herzl House, the cultural center at the edge of the kibbutz. There was a newspaper room here where on any evening you could find a few of the older bachelors of the kibbutz, gnawing their way through the daily papers and the weeklies, engaging each other in fierce political debates that reminded me a little of the arguments in Kerem Avraham, with Staszek Rudnicki, Mr. Abramski, Mr. Krochmal, Mr. Bar-Yizhar, and Mr. Lemberg. (The "older bachelors of the kibbutz" when I arrived were in their early to mid-forties.)

     Behind the newspaper room there was another, almost deserted, room called the study room, which was sometimes used for committee meetings or for various group activities but was mostly unoccupied. In a glass-fronted cabinet stood row upon dreary row of tired, dusty copies of Young Worker, Working Woman's Monthly, Field, The Clock, and Davar Yearbook.
     *Ron Huldai has been mayor of Tel Aviv since 1998.

     This is where I went every evening to read my book until nearly midnight, until my eyelids were stuck together. And this is also where I took up writing again, when no one was looking, feeling ashamed of myself, feeling base and worthless, full of self-loathing: surely I hadn't left Jerusalem for the kibbutz to write poems and stories but to be reborn, to turn my back on the piles of words, to be suntanned to the bone and become an agricultural worker, a tiller of the soil.
    


     But it soon dawned on me in Hulda that even the most agricultural of agricultural workers here read books at night and discussed them all day long. While they picked olives, they debated furiously about Tolstoy, Plekhanov, and Bakunin, about permanent revolution versus revolution in one country, about Gustav Landauer's social democracy and the eternal tension between the values of equality and freedom and between both these and the quest for the brotherhood of man. While they sorted eggs in the hen house, they argued about how to revive the old Jewish holidays for celebration in a rural setting. While they pruned the rows of vines, they disagreed about modern art.

     Some of them even wrote modest articles, notwithstanding their dedication to agriculture and their total devotion to manual labor. They wrote mostly about the same topics they debated with each other all day long, but in the pieces they published every fortnight in the local newsletter they occasionally allowed themselves to wax lyrical between one crushing argument and an even more crushing counterargument.
     Just as at home.
     I had tried to turn my back once and for all on the world of scholarship and debate from which I had come, and I had jumped out of the frying pan into the fire, or "as when a man flees from a lion and meets a bear." Admittedly, here the debaters were more suntanned than those who sat around Uncle Joseph and Aunt Zippora's table, they wore cloth caps, workaday garb, and heavy boots, and instead of bombastic Hebrew with a Russian accent they spoke humorous Hebrew with a juicy flavor of Galician or Bessarabian Yiddish.
     Sheftel the librarian, just like Mr. Marcus, the proprietor of the bookshop and lending library on Jonah Street, took pity on my unquenchable thirst for books. He allowed me to borrow as many books as I wanted, far in excess of the library rules that he himself had compiled and typed in eye-catching letters on the kibbutz typewriter and pinned up at various prominent points in his fiefdom, whose vague dusty smell of old glue and seaweed attracted me to it like a wasp to jam.
     What did I not read in Hulda in those days? I devoured Kafka, Yigal Mossensohn, Camus, Tolstoy, Moshe Shamir, Chekhov, Natan Shaham, Brenner, Faulkner, Pablo Neruda, Hayyim Guri, Alterman, Amir Gilboa, Leah Goldberg, Shlonsky, O. Hillel, Yizhar, Turgenev, Thomas Mann, Jakob Wassermann, Hemingway, I, Claudius, all the volumes of Winston Churchill's The Second World War, Bernard Lewis on the Arabs and Islam, Isaac Deutscher on the Soviet Union, Pearl Buck, The Nuremberg Trials, The Life of Trotsky, Stefan Zweig, the history of Zionist settlement in the Land of Israel, the origins of the Norse saga, Mark Twain, Knut Hamsun, Greek mythology, Memoirs of Hadrian, and Uri Avneri. Everything. Apart from those books that Sheftel did not allow me to read, despite all my entreaties, The Naked and the Dead, for example (I think that even after I was married, Sheftel hesitated to let me read Norman Mailer and Henry Miller).
     Arch of Triumph, a pacifist novel by Erich Maria Remarque set in the 1930s, opens with a description of a lonely woman leaning on the parapet of a bridge at nighttime, about to end her life by jumping into the river. At the last minute a strange man stops and speaks to her, seizes her arm, saves her life, and spends a torrid night with her. That was my fantasy: that was how I, too, would encounter love. She would be standing alone on a deserted bridge one stormy night, and I would turn up at the last moment to save her from herself, and slay the dragon—not a dragon of flesh and blood like the ones I used to slay by the dozen when I was little, but the inner dragon of despair.
     I would slay this inner dragon for the woman I loved and receive my reward from her, and so the fantasy developed in directions that were too sweet and awesome for me to contemplate. It did not occur to me at the time that the desperate woman on the bridge was, again and again, my dead mother. With her despair. Her own dragon.
     Or take Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, a book I read four or five times in those years, populated by femmes fatales and tough-looking men who concealed a poetic soul behind their rough exterior. I dreamed that one day I would be like them: a gruff, virile man with the body of a bullfighter and a face full of contempt and sorrow, perhaps a little like the photograph of Hemingway himself. And if I did not manage to be like them someday, at least I would learn to write about such men: courageous men who knew how to scoff and to loathe, or how to punch some bully on the chin if the need arose, who knew precisely the right thing to order in a bar, and what to say to a woman, a rival or a comrade in arms, how to use a gun and how to make love superbly. And also about noble women, vulnerable yet unattainable temptresses, enigmatic, mysterious women, who lavished their favors generously but only on selected men who knew how to mock and despise, drink whisky, punch hard, etc.
     The films that were shown every Wednesday in the hall at Herzl House or on a white cloth set up on the lawn outside the dining hall gave firm evidence that the big wide world was peopled mainly by men and women out of the pages of Hemingway or Knut Hamsun. The same picture emerged from the stories told by the red-bereted soldiers of the kibbutz who came home on weekend leave straight from reprisal raids by the famed Unit 101, strong, silent men resplendent in their paratroopers' uniforms, armed with Uzis, "clad in workaday garb, shod in heavy boots, and wet with the dew of Hebrew youth."
     I almost gave up in despair: surely to write like Remarque or Hemingway you had to get out of here into the real world, go to places where men were as virile as a fist and women as tender as the night, where bridges spanned wide rivers and the evenings sparkled with the lights of bars where real life really happened. No one who lacked experience of that world could get even half a temporary permit to write stories or novels. The place of a real writer was not here but out there, in the big wide world. Until I got out and lived in a real place, there was not a hope that I could find anything to write about.
     A real place: Paris, Madrid, New York, Monte Carlo, the African deserts, or the Scandinavian forests. In a pinch one could write about a country town in Russia or even a Jewish shtetl in Galicia. But here, in the kibbutz, what was there? A hen house, a barn, children's houses, committees, duty rosters, the small supplies store. Tired men and women who got up early every morning for work, argued, showered, drank tea, read a little in bed, and fell asleep exhausted before ten o'clock. Even in Kerem Avraham where I came from there did not seem to be anything worth writing about. What was there there, apart from dull people leading gray, tawdry lives? Rather like here in Hulda. I had even missed the War of Independence: I was born too late to get more than a few miserable crumbs, filling sandbags, collecting empty bottles, running with messages from the local Civil Defense post to the lookout post on the Slonimskys' roof and back.
     True, in the kibbutz library I did discover two or three virile novelists who managed to write almost Hemingway-like stories about kibbutz life: Natan Shaham, Yigal Mossensohn, Moshe Shamir. But they belonged to the generation that had smuggled in immigrants and arms, blown up British headquarters, and repelled the Arab armies; their stories seemed to me swathed in mists of brandy and cigarettes and the smell of gunpowder. And they all lived in Tel Aviv, which was more or less connected to the real world, a city with cafés where young artists sat over a glass of liquor, a city with cabarets, scandals, theaters, and a bohemian life full of forbidden love and helpless passion. Not like Jerusalem or Hulda.
     Who had ever seen brandy in Hulda? Who had ever heard of daring women or sublime love here?
     If I wanted to write like those writers, I first had to get to London or Milan. But how? Simple farmers from kibbutzim did not suddenly go off to London or Milan to draw inspiration for creative writing. If I wanted to have a chance to get to Paris or Rome, I first had to be famous, I had to write a successful book like one of those writers. But before I could write the successful book, I first had to live in London or New York. A vicious circle.
    


     It was Sherwood Anderson who got me out of the vicious circle and "freed my writing hand." I shall always be grateful to him.

     In September 1959 the Popular Library of Am Oved Publishing House brought out a Hebrew translation of Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio by Aharon Amir. Before I read this book, I did not know that Winesburg existed and I had never heard of Ohio. Or I may have remembered it vaguely from Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Then this modest book appeared and excited me to the bone: for nearly a whole summer night until half past three in the morning I walked the paths of the kibbutz like a drunken man, talking to myself, trembling like a lovesick swain, singing and skipping, sobbing with awestruck joy and ecstasy: eureka!
     At half past three in the morning I put on my work clothes and boots, ran to the tractor shed from which we set out for a field called Mansura to weed the cotton, snatched a hoe from the pile, and till noon I charged along the rows of cotton plants, racing ahead of the others as though I had sprouted wings, dizzy with happiness, running and hoeing and bellowing, running and hoeing and lecturing myself and the hills and the breeze, hoeing and making vows, running, excited and tearful.
     The whole of Winesburg, Ohio was a string of stories and episodes that grew out of each other and were connected to each other, particularly because they all took place in a single, poor, G-dforsaken provincial town. It was filled with small-time people: an old carpenter, an absent-minded young man, some hotel owner, and a servant girl. The stories were also connected to each other because the characters slipped from story to story: what had been central characters in one story reappeared as secondary, background characters in another.
     The stories in Winesburg, Ohio all revolved around trivial, everyday happenings, based on snatches of local gossip or on unfulfilled dreams. An old carpenter and an old writer discuss the raising of some bed, while a dreamy young man by the name of George Willard who works as a cub reporter on the local rag overhears their conversation and thinks his own thoughts. And there is an eccentric old man named Bid-dlebaum, nicknamed Wing Biddlebaum. And a tall dark-haired woman who for some reason marries a man called Doctor Reefy, but dies a year later. Then there is Abner Groff, the town baker, and Doctor Parcival, a large man with a drooping mouth covered by a yellow mustache, who always wears a dirty white vest out of the pockets of which protrudes a number of black cigars known as stogies, and other similar characters, types who until that night I had supposed had no place in literature, unless it was as background characters who afforded readers at most half a minute of mockery mixed with pity. And here, in Winesburg, Ohio, events and people that I was certain were far beneath the dignity of literature, below its acceptability threshold, occupied center stage. There was nothing daring about Sherwood Anderson's women, they were not mysterious temptresses. And his men were not strong, silent types swathed in cigarette smoke and manly grief.
    


     So Sherwood Anderson's stories brought back what I had put behind me when I left Jerusalem, or rather the ground that my feet had trodden all through my childhood and that I had never bothered to bend down and touch. The tawdriness of my parents' life. The faint smell of flour-and-water paste and pickled herring that always wafted around the Krochmals, the couple who mended broken toys and dolls. Teacher Zelda's dingy brown apartment with its peeling veneer cabinet. Mr. Zarchi the writer with a heart complaint, and his wife, who suffered from perpetual migraines. Zerta Abramski's sooty kitchen, and the two birds that Staszek and Mala Rudnicki kept in a cage, the old bald one and the other one made out of a pinecone. And Teacher Isabella Nahlieli's houseful of cats, and her husband Getsel, the open-mouthed cashier in the cooperative shop. And Stakh, Grandma Shlomit's mournful old dog with the melancholy button eyes that they used to stuff full of mothballs and beat cruelly to get rid of the dust, until one day they didn't want him anymore and they wrapped him in old newspaper and threw him in the garbage.

     I understood where I had come from: from a dreary tangle of sadness and pretense, of longing, absurdity, inferiority and provincial pomposity, sentimental education and anachronistic ideals, repressed traumas, resignation, and helplessness. Helplessness of the acerbic, domestic variety, where small-time liars pretended to be dangerous terrorists and heroic freedom fighters, where unhappy bookbinders invented formulas for universal salvation, where dentists whispered confidentially to all their neighbors about their protracted personal correspondence with Stalin, where piano teachers, kindergarten teachers, and housewives tossed and turned tearfully at night from stifled yearning for an emotion-laden artistic life, where compulsive writers wrote endless disgruntled letters to the editor of Davar, where elderly bakers saw Mai-monides and the Baal Shem Tov in their dreams, where nervy, self-righteous trade-union hacks kept an apparatchik's eye on the rest of the local residents, where cashiers at the cinema or the cooperative shop composed poems and pamphlets at night.
     Here too, in Kibbutz Hulda, there lived a cowman who was an expert on the anarchist movement in Russia, a teacher who was once put in eighty-fourth place on the list of Labor candidates for the elections to the Second Knesset, and a good-looking needlewoman who was fond of classical music and spent her evenings drawing the landscape of her native village in Bessarabia as she remembered it from before the village was destroyed. There was also an aging bachelor who enjoyed sitting on a bench on his own in the cool of the evening staring at little girls, a truck driver with a pleasant baritone voice who secretly dreamed of being an opera singer, a pair of fiery ideologues who had heaped scorn and contempt on each other, verbally and in print, for the past twenty-five years, a woman who had been the prettiest girl in her class back in Poland and had even appeared once in a silent film, but now sat on a rough stool behind the food store every day in a stained apron, fat, red-faced, and uncared-for, peeling huge piles of vegetables and occasionally wiping her face with her apron—a tear, perspiration, or both.
     Winesburg, Ohio taught me what the world according to Chekhov was like even before I encountered Chekhov himself: no longer the world of Dostoevsky, Kafka, or Knut Hamsun, or that of Hemingway or Yigal Mossensohn. No more mysterious women on bridges or men with their collars turned up in smoky bars.
     This modest book hit me like a Copernican revolution in reverse. Whereas Copernicus showed that our world is not the center of the universe but just one planet among others in the solar system, Sherwood Anderson opened my eyes to write about what was around me. Thanks to him I suddenly realized that the written world does not depend on Milan or London but always revolves around the hand that is writing, wherever it happens to be writing: where you are is the center of the universe.*
     And so I chose myself a corner table in the deserted study room, and here every evening I opened my brown school exercise book on which was printed "utility" and also "forty pages." Next to it I laid out a ballpoint pen called Globus, a pencil with a rubber tip, printed with the name of the trade-union retail outlets, and a beige plastic cup of tap water.
     And this was the center of the universe.
     *Years later I managed to repay a few pence of my debt. In America the wonderful Sherwood Anderson, friend and contemporary of William Faulkner, was almost forgotten; only in a handful of English departments were his stories still twitching with life. Then one day I received a letter from his publishers (Norton), who were reissuing a collection of his stories, titled Death in the Woods and Other Stories, and had heard that I was an admirer: would I kindly write a couple of lines of praise for the back cover of the book? I felt like a humble fiddle player in a restaurant who is suddenly asked if he would let his name be used to promote the music of Bach.

    


     In the newspaper room, on the other side of the thin wall, Moishe Kalker, Alyoshka, and Alec are having a furious argument about Moshe Dayan's speech, which has "thrown a stone through the window of the fifth floor" in the Trade Union Building, where the Central Committee meets. Three men, none of them good-looking or young anymore, arguing among themselves in the singsong tones of yeshiva students. Alec, a vigorous, energetic man, always tries to play the part of the good sport who likes plain talking. His wife, Zushka, is not well, but he mostly spends his evenings with the single men. He is vainly attempting to interpose a sentence between Alyoshka and Moishe Kalker: "Just a moment, you've both got it wrong," or: "Give me just a minute to tell you something that will resolve your dispute."

     Alyoshka and Moishe Kalker are both bachelors, and they have opposing views about almost everything, despite which they are hardly ever apart in the evening: they always eat together in the dining hall, take a stroll together afterward, and go to the newspaper room together. Alyoshka, who is as shy as a little boy, is a modest, good-natured man with a smiling round face, but his puzzled eyes are always downcast as though his life itself is something shameful. But when he is arguing, he sometimes heats up and starts flashing sparks, and his eyes almost start out of their sockets. Then his gentle childlike face looks not so much angry as panicky and offended, as though it is his own views that humiliate him.
     Moishe Kalker, the electrician, on the other hand, is a thin, wry, sardonic man, and when he is arguing, he screws up his face and gives you an almost salacious wink, he smiles at you with a mischievous, self-satisfied air and winks again with Mephistophelian glee, as if he finally discovered what he has been searching for all these years, the whereabouts of some quagmire that you have managed to hide from the world but that you cannot conceal from those eyes of his, which pierce your disguises and take pleasure in the very swamp they have uncovered inside you: everyone thinks of you as such a reasonable, respectable man, such a positive figure, but both of us know the unsavory truth, even though most of the time you manage to hide it under seventy-seven veils. I can see through everything, chum, including your vile nature, everything is exposed to my gaze and I take nothing but pleasure in it.
     Alec gently tries to quell the argument between Alyoshka and Moishe Kalker, but the two opponents gang up on him and both shout at him, because in their view he has not even begun to grasp what the argument is about.
     Alyoshka says:
     "Excuse me, Alec, but you're simply not praying from the same prayer book as us."
     Moishe Kalker says:
     "Alec, when everyone else is eating borscht, you're singing the national anthem; when everyone else is fasting for Tisha Be-Av, you're celebrating Purim."
     Alec, offended, gets up to go, but the two bachelors, as usual, insist on accompanying him to his door while continuing to debate, and he, as usual, invites them in. Why not, Zushka will be delighted, and we'll drink some tea, but they refuse politely. They always refuse. For years now he has been inviting them both to tea in his home after the newspaper room, Come inside, come in for a while, we'll drink a glass of tea, why not, Zushka will be delighted, but year after year they always refuse his invitation politely. Until one day—
     Here, that is how I will write stories.
     And because it is night outside and jackals are howling hungrily very close to the perimeter fence, I will put them in the story too. Why not. Let them weep under the windows. And the night watchman who lost his son on a reprisal raid, too. And the gossipy widow who is called the Black Widow behind her back. And the barking dogs and the movement of the cypress trees that are trembling slightly in the breeze in the dark, which makes me think of them as a row of people praying in an undertone.

 58


     AND THERE was a kindergarten or primary school teacher in Hulda, whom I shall call Orna, a hired teacher in her mid-thirties who lived in the end room in one ofthe old blocks. Every Thursday she left to be with her husband, returning early on Sunday morning. One evening she invited me and a couple of girls in my class to her room, to talk about a book of poems by Natan Alterman, Stars Outside, and to listen to Mendelssohn's violin concerto and the Schubert octet. The gramophone stood on a wicker stool in a corner of her room, which also contained a bed, a table, two chairs, an electric coffeepot, a clothes cupboard covered by a flowery curtain, and a shell case that served as a vase and sprouted an arrangement of purple thistles.

     Orna had decorated the walls of her room with two reproductions of Gauguin paintings, of plump, sleepy, half-naked Tahitian women, and some pencil drawings of her own that she had framed herself. Perhaps under the influence of Gauguin she had also drawn full-bodied nude women, in lying or reclining positions. All the women, Gauguin's and Orna's, looked sated and slack, as though they had just been pleasured. Yet their inviting poses suggested that they were willing to give plenty more pleasure to anyone who had not had enough yet.
     On the bookshelf at the head of Orna's bed I found the Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayyam, Camus's The Plague, Peer Gynt, Hemingway, Kafka, poems by Alterman, Rahel, Shlonsky, Leah Goldberg, Hayyim Guri, Natan Yonatan and Zerubbabel Gilead, S. Yizhar's short stories, Yigal Mossensohn's The Way of a Man, Amir Gilboa's Early Morning Poems, O. Hillel's Noonday Land, and two books by Rabindranath Tagore. (A few weeks later I bought her his Fireflies out of my pocket money, and on the flyleaf I inscribed a soulful dedication that included the word "moved.")
     Orna had green eyes, a slender neck, a caressing, melodic voice, small hands and delicate fingers, but her breasts were full and firm and her thighs were strong. Her normally serious, calm face changed the moment she smiled: she had a captivating, almost suggestive smile, as though she could see into the secret recesses of your mind but forgave you. Her armpits were shaved, but unevenly, as though she had shaded one of them with her drawing pencil. When she was standing, she generally placed most of her weight on her left leg, so that she unconsciously arched her right thigh. She liked to air her views about art and inspiration, and she found me a devoted listener.
    


     A few days later I summoned up the courage to arm myself with Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass in Halkin's translation (which I had told her about on the first evening) and knocked on her door in the evening— alone this time. It was just the way I had run around to Teacher Zelda's flat in Zephaniah Street ten years earlier. Orna was wearing a long dress buttoned down the front with a row of big buttons. The dress was cream-colored, but the electric light, filtered through an orange raffia shade, gave it a reddish hue. When she stood between me and the lamp, the outline of her thighs and her underpants showed through the cloth of her dress. This time she had Grieg's Peer Gynt on the gramophone. She sat down next to me on the bed with its Middle Eastern bedspread and explained to me the feelings evoked by each of the movements. As for me, I read to her from Leaves of Grass and launched into a conjecture about the influence of Walt Whitman on the poetry of O. Hillel. Orna peeled me tangerines, poured me cold water from an earthenware jug with a muslin cover, placed her hand on my knee to indicate that I should stop talking for a moment, and read me a morbid poem by Uri Zvi Greenberg, not from the collection Streets of the River, which my father liked to recite from, but from a slim volume that was unfamiliar to me, with the strange title Anacreon at the Pole of Sadness. Then she asked me to tell her a little about myself, and I didn't know what, so I said all sorts of muddled things about the idea of beauty, until Orna placed her hand on the back of my neck and said, That's enough now, shall we sit in silence for a bit? At half past ten I got up, said good-night, and went for a walk under the starlight among the sheds and chicken batteries, full of happiness because Orna had invited me to come back, some evening, the day after tomorrow, even tomorrow.

     Within a week or two, word had gone around the kibbutz and I was becoming known as "Orna's new bull calf." She had a number of suitors, or conversational partners, in the kibbutz, but not one of them was barely sixteen and not one of them could recite poems by Natan Alter-man and Leah Goldberg by heart like me. Occasionally one of them would be lurking in the dark among the eucalyptus trees in front of her house, waiting for me to leave. Jealously I would hang around by the hedge, and I managed to see him go into the room where she had just made thick Arab coffee for me and called me "unusual," and let me smoke a cigarette with her even though I was still only a little chatterbox from class eleven. I stood there for a quarter of an hour or so, a shadowy figure in the shadows, until they turned the light out.
     ***

     Once, that autumn, I went to Orna's room at eight o'clock, but she was not there. Because the dim orange light of her lamp poured out through the drawn curtains, and because her door was not locked, I went in and lay down on the rug to wait for her. I waited for a long time, until the voices of men and women on the porches died down to be replaced by night sounds, the howling of jackals, the barking of dogs, the lowing of cows in the distance, the chuk-chuk sound of the sprinklers and choruses of frogs and crickets. Two moths were struggling between the bulb and the orange-red lampshade. The thistles in the shell-case vase cast a kind of crushed shadow on the floor tiles and the rug. The Gauguin women on the walls and Orna's own nude pencil sketches suddenly gave me a vague idea of what her body would look like naked in the shower or on this bed at night after I left, not alone, maybe with Yoav or Mendi, even though she had a husband somewhere who was a regular army officer.

     Without getting up from the rug, I raised the curtain in front ofher clothes cupboard and I saw white and colored underwear and an almost transparent peach nightgown. As I lay on my back on the rug, my fingers groped to touch this peach of hers and my other hand had to reach out for the mound in my trousers, and my eyes closed and I knew I ought to stop I must stop but not right away just a little more. Finally, right on the edge, I did stop and without taking my fingers off the peach or my hand off the mound in my trousers I opened my eyes and saw that Orna had come back without my noticing and was standing watching me at the edge of the rug, with most of her weight on her left leg so that her right hip was slightly raised and one hand rested on this hip while the other lightly stroked her shoulder under her untied hair. So she stood and looked at me with a warm, mischievous smile on her lips and a laugh in her green eyes as if to say, I know, I know that you'd like to drop dead on the spot, I know that you would be less startled if there was a burglar standing here pointing a submachine gun at you, I know that because of me you're as miserable as can be, but why should you be miserable? Look at me, I'm not at all shocked, so you should stop being miserable.
     I was so terrified and helpless that I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep, so that Orna might imagine that nothing had happened, or that, if it had, it was just in a dream, in which case I was indeed guilty and disgusting, but much less than if I'd done it while I was awake.
     Orna said: I've interrupted you. She wasn't laughing when she said it, but she went on to say, I'm sorry, and then she did a complicated kind of dance with her hips and said cheerfully that no, actually she was not exactly sorry, she'd enjoyed watching me, because my face had looked pained and lit up at the same time. Then she did not say anything else, she started to unbutton her dress, from the top button to the waist, and she stood in front of me so I could watch and carry on. But how could I? I closed my eyes hard and then I blinked and then I peeped at her and her happy smile begged me not to be afraid, what's wrong, it's all right, and her firm breasts also seemed to beg me. And then she got down on her knees on the rug to my right and lifted my hand off the mound in my trousers and put her own hand there instead, and then she opened and released and a trail of hard sparks like a thick rain of meteorites ran the whole length of my body, and I closed my eyes again but not before I saw her lift up and stoop, and then she lay on top of me and bent over and took my hands and guided them, there and there, and her lips touched my forehead and they touched my closed eyes, and then she reached down and inserted all of me, and instantly several soft rolls of thunder passed through me followed at once by piercing lightning, and because the hardboard partition was so thin she had to press her hand over my mouth hard and when she thought it was over and took her fingers away to let me breathe, she had to put them back again quickly because it wasn't. And after that she laughed and stroked me like a little boy and she kissed me again on my forehead and wrapped my head in her hair and I with tears in my eyes started to give her shy kisses of gratitude on her face her hair the back of her hand, and I wanted to say something but she didn't let me and covered my mouth again with her hand until I gave up.
     After an hour or two she woke me and my body asked her for more, and I was full of shame and embarrassment, but she did not spare me, she whispered to me as though she was smiling, Come, take, and she whispered, Look what a little savage, and her legs were yellowy brown and there was a faint almost invisible golden down on her thighs, and after stifling my spurting cries again with her hand she pulled me to my feet and helped me button up my clothes and poured me some cold water from her earthenware jug with its white muslin cover, and stroked my head and pressed it to her breast and kissed me one last time on the tip of my nose and sent me out into the chill of the thick silence of three o'clock on an autumn morning. But when I came back the next day to say I was sorry, or to pray for a repetition of the miracle, she said: Look at him, he's as white as chalk. What's come over you, here, have a glass of water. And she sat me down on a chair and said something like: Look, there's no harm done, but from now on I want everything to be the way it was before yesterday, OK?
     It was hard for me to do what she wanted, and Orna must have felt it too, and so our poetry reading evenings accompanied by strains of Schubert, Grieg, or Brahms on the gramophone faded, and after a couple more times they stopped, and her smile settled on me only from a distance when we passed each other, a smile radiating joy, pride, and affection, not like a benefactor smiling at someone she has given something to, but more like an artist looking at a painting she has made, and even though she has moved on to other paintings, she is still satisfied with her work, proud to be reminded of it and happy to look at it again, from a distance.
    


     And since then I have felt good in the company of women. Like my Grandpa Alexander. And even though over the years I have learned one or two things and I have occasionally gotten my fingers burned, I still have the feeling—just as that evening in Orna's room—that women possess the keys of delight. The expression "she granted him her favors" seems right, seems to hit the mark better than others. Women's favors arouse in me not only desire and wonderment but also a childlike gratitude and a wish to bow down in reverence: I am not worthy of all these marvels; I would be grateful for a single drop, let alone this wide ocean. And always I feel like a beggar at the gate: only a woman has the power to choose whether or not to bestow.

     There may also be a vague jealousy of female sexuality: a woman is infinitely richer, gentler, more subtle, like the difference between a fiddle and a drum. Or there may be an echo of a memory from the very beginning of my life: a breast as against a knife. As soon as I came into the world, there was a woman waiting for me, and although I had caused her terrible pain, she repaid me with gentleness, and gave me her breast. The male sex, on the other hand, was already lying in wait clutching the circumcision knife.
    


     Orna was in her mid-thirties, more than twice my age that night. She scattered a whole river of purple, crimson, and blue and a mass of pearls before a little swine who did not know what to do with them except grab and swallow without chewing, so much I almost choked. A few months later she left her job in the kibbutz. I did not know where she went. Years later I heard that she had divorced and remarried, and for some time she had a regular column in some women's magazine. Not long ago, in America, after a lecture and before the reception, out of a crush of people asking questions and arguing, Orna suddenly shone out at me, green-eyed, lit up, just a little bit older than she was when I was a teenager, in a light-colored dress with buttons, her eyes sparkling with her knowing, seductive, compassionate smile, the smile from that night, and as though under a magic spell I stopped in the middle of a sentence, forced my way toward her through the throng, pushing everyone out of my way, even the blank-faced old woman that Orna was pushing in a wheelchair, and I seized her, hugged her, said her name twice, and kissed her warmly on the lips. She gently disengaged herself, and without switching off that smile, which spoke of favors and which made me blush like a teenager, she pointed to the wheelchair and said in English: That's Orna. I'm her daughter. Sadly, my mother can no longer speak. She hardly recognizes people.


 59


     A WEEK OR SO before her death my mother suddenly got much better. A new sleeping pill prescribed by a new doctor worked miracles overnight. She took two pills in the evening, fell asleep fully dressed at halfpast seven on my bed, which had become her bed, and slept for almost twenty-four hours, until five o'clock the following afternoon, when she got up, took a shower, drank some tea, and must have taken another pill or two, because she fell asleep again at half past seven and slept through till the morning, and when my father got up, shaved, and squeezed two glasses of orange juice and warmed them to room temperature, Mother also got up, put on a housecoat and apron, combed her hair, and made us both a real breakfast, as she used to before she was ill, fried eggs done on both sides, salad, pots of yogurt, and slices of bread that she could cut much finer than Father's "planks of wood," as she affectionately called them.

     So there we sat once more at seven o'clock in the morning on the three wicker stools at the kitchen table with its flower-patterned oilcloth, and Mother told us a story, about a rich furrier who had lived in her hometown, Rovno, an urbane Jew who was visited by buyers from as far away as Paris and Rome because of the rare silver fox furs he had that sparkled like frost on a moonlit night.
     One fine day this furrier forswore meat and became a vegetarian. He put the whole business, with all its branches, into the hands of his father-in-law and partner. Some time later he built himself a little hut in the forest and went to live there, because he was sorry for all the thousands of foxes that his trappers had killed on his behalf. Eventually the man vanished and was never seen again. And, she said, when my sisters and I wanted to frighten each other, we used to lie on the floor in the dark and take turns telling how the formerly rich furrier now roamed naked through the forest, possibly ill with rabies, uttering bloodcurdling fox howls in the undergrowth, and if anyone was unfortunate enough to encounter the fox-man in the forest, his hair turned instantly white with terror.
     My father, who intensely disliked this kind of story, made a face and said:
     "I'm sorry, what is that supposed to be? An allegory? A superstition? Some kind of bubbe-meiseh?" But he was so pleased to see Mother looking so much better that he added with a dismissive wave of his hand:
     "Never mind."
     Mother hurried us along so my father would not be late for work and I would not be late for school. At the door, as my father was putting his galoshes on over his shoes and I was getting into my boots, I suddenly let out a long, bloodcurdling howl, which made him jump and shiver with fear, and when he recovered himself, he was just about to hit me when Mother interposed herself between us, pressed me to her breast, and calmed us both down, saying, "That was all because of me. I'm sorry." That was the last time she hugged me.
     We left home at about half past seven, Father and I, not saying a word because he was still angry with me over the rabid fox howl. At the front gate he turned left toward Terra Sancta Building and I turned right toward Tachkemoni School.
    


     When I got home from school, I found Mother dressed up in her light skirt with two rows of buttons and her navy jumper. She looked pretty and girlish. Her face looked well, as though all the months of illness had vanished overnight. She told me to put my school satchel down and keep my coat on, she put her coat on too, she had a surprise for me:

     "We're not going to have lunch at home today. I've decided to take the two men in my life out to a restaurant for lunch. But your father doesn't know anything about it yet. Shall we surprise him? Let's go for a walk in town, and then we'll go to Terra Sancta Building and drag him out of there by force, like a blinking moth out of a heap of book dust, and then we'll all go and eat somewhere that I'm not even going to tell you, so that you'll have some suspense too."
     I didn't recognize my mother. Her voice was not her usual voice, it was solemn and loud, as though she were speaking a part in a school play; it was full of light and warmth when she said, "Let's go for a walk," but it shook a little at the words "blinking moth" and "book dust"; for an instant it made me feel a vague fear, which gave way at once to happiness at the surprise, at Mother's cheerfulness, at the joy of her return to us.
    


     My parents hardly ever ate out, although we often met up with their friends in cafés on Jaffa Road or King George Street.

     Once, in 1950 or 1951, when the three of us were staying with the aunts in Tel Aviv, on the last day, literally just before we left for Jerusalem, Father uncharacteristically declared himself to be "Baron Rothschild for the day" and invited everybody, my mother's two sisters with their respective husbands and only sons, out to lunch at Hamozeg Restaurant on Ben Yehuda Street, at the corner of Sholem Aleichem Street. A table was laid for the nine of us. Father sat at the head, between his two sisters-in-law, and seated us in such a way that neither sister sat next to her husband and none of us children sat between his parents: as though he had made up his mind to shuffle all the cards. Uncle Tzvi and Uncle Buma were slightly suspicious, as they could not understand what he was up to, and firmly refused to join him in a glass of beer, as they were not used to drinking. They chose not to speak, and left the floor to my father, who apparently felt that the most urgent and exciting topic must be the Dead Sea Scrolls that had been found in the Judaean desert. So he embarked on a detailed lecture that lasted right through the soup and the main course about the significance of the scrolls that had been found in some caves near Qumran and the possibility that more and more priceless hidden treasures were waiting to be discovered among the ravines in the desert. Eventually Mother, who was sitting between Uncle Tzvi and Uncle Buma, remarked softly:
     "Perhaps that's enough for now, Arieh?"
     Father understood and left off, and for the rest of the meal the conversation broke up into separate conversations. My older cousin Yigal asked if he could take my younger cousin Ephraim to the nearby beach. After a few more minutes I also decided I had had enough of the company of the grown-ups and left Hamozeg Restaurant to look for the beach.
    


     But who could have imagined that Mother would suddenly decide to take us out for lunch? We had become so accustomed to seeing her sitting day and night staring at the window and not moving. Only a few days earlier I had given up my bedroom for her and run away from her silence to sleep with Father in the double sofa bed. She looked so beautiful and elegant in her navy jersey and light skirt, in her nylon stockings with a seam at the back and her high-heeled shoes, that strange men turned around to look at her. She carried her raincoat over one arm, and linked the other arm in mine as we walked along:

     "You'll be my cavalier today."
     And as though she had adopted Father's normal role as well, she added:
     "A cavalier is a knight: cheval is a horse in French, and chevalier is a horseman or knight."
     Then she said:
     "There are lots of women who are attracted to tyrannical men. Like moths to a flame. And there are some women who do not need a hero or even a stormy lover but a friend. Just remember that when you grow up. Steer clear of the tyrant lovers, and try to locate the ones who are looking for a man as a friend, not because they are feeling empty themselves but because they enjoy making you full too. And remember that friendship between a woman and a man is something much more precious and rare than love: love is actually something quite gross and even clumsy compared to friendship. Friendship includes a measure of sensitivity, attentiveness, generosity, and a finely tuned sense of moderation."
     "Good," I said, because I wanted her to stop talking about things that had nothing to do with me and talk about something else instead. We hadn't talked for weeks, and it was a pity to waste this walking time that was just hers and mine. As we approached the city center, she slipped her arm through mine again, gave a little laugh, and asked suddenly:
     "What would you say to a little brother? Or sister?"
     And without waiting for a reply, she added with a sort of jocular sadness, or rather a sadness wrapped in a smile that I could not see but that I heard in her voice as she spoke:
     "One day when you get married and have a family of your own, I very much hope you won't take me and your father as an example of what married life ought to be."
     I am not just re-creating these words from memory, as I did a dozen lines earlier with her words about love and friendship, because I remember this plea not to take my parents' marriage as an example exactly as it was said to me, word for word. And I remember her smiling voice precisely, too. We were on King George Street, my mother and I, walking arm in arm past the building called Talitha Kumi on our way to Terra Sancta Building to take Father away from his work. The time was one-thirty p.m. A cold wind mixed with sharp drops of rain was blowing from the west. It was strong enough to make passersby close their umbrellas so they would not blow inside out. We did not even attempt to open ours. Arm in arm, Mother and I walked in the rain, past Talitha Kumi and the Frumin Building, which was the temporary home of the Knesset, and then we passed the Hamaalot Building. It was at the beginning of the first week of January 1952. Five or four days before her death.
    


     And as the rain grew heavier, Mother said, with an amused tone to her voice:

     "Shall we go to a café for a bit? Our Father won't run away."
     We sat for half an hour or so in a German Jewish café at the entrance to Rehavia, in JNF Street, opposite the Jewish Agency Building, where the prime minister's office was also located at the time. Till the rain stopped. Meanwhile, Mother took a little powder compact and a comb from her handbag and repaired the damage to her hair and face. I felt a mixture of emotions: pride at her looks, joy that she was better, responsibility to guard and protect her from some shadow whose existence I could only guess at. In fact I did not guess, I only half sensed a slight strange uneasiness in my skin. The way a child sometimes grasps without really grasping things that are beyond his understanding, senses them and is alarmed without knowing why:
     "Are you all right, Mother?"
     She ordered a strong black coffee for herself and for me a milky coffee, even though I was never allowed coffee-is-not-for-children, and a chocolate ice cream, even though we all knew perfectly well that ice cream gives you a sore throat, especially on a cold winter day. And before lunch to boot. My sense of responsibility forced me to eat only two or three spoonfuls and to ask my mother if she didn't feel cold sitting here. If she didn't feel tired. Or dizzy. After all she'd only just recovered from an illness. And be careful, Mummy, when you go to the toilet, it's dark and there are two steps. Pride, earnestness, and apprehension filled my heart. As though as long as the two of us were sitting here in Café Rosh-Rehavia, her role was to be a helpless girl who needed a generous friend, and I was her cavalier. Or perhaps her father:
     "Are you all right, Mother?"
    


     When we got to Terra Sancta Building, where several departments of the Hebrew University were relocated after the road to the campus on Mount Scopus was blocked in the War of Independence, we asked for the newspaper department and went up the stairs to the second floor. (It was on a winter's day like this that Hannah in My Michael slipped on these very stairs, and might have twisted her ankle, and the student Michael Gonen caught her by the elbow and said he liked the word "ankle." Mother and I may well have walked past Michael and Hannah without noticing them. Thirteen years separated the winter's day when I was in Terra Sancta Building with my mother from the winter's day when I began to write My Michael.)

     When we entered the newspaper department, we saw facing us the director, gentle, kindly Dr. Pfeffermann, who looked up from the pile of papers on his desk, smiled, and beckoned us with both his hands to come in. We saw Father too, from behind. For a long moment we did not recognize him, because he was wearing a gray librarian's coat to protect his clothes from the dust. He was standing on a small stepladder, with his back to us and all his attention concentrated on the big box files he was taking down from a high shelf, leafing through and returning to the shelf, before taking down another and another file, because apparently he could not find what he was looking for.
     All this time, kind Dr. Pfeffermann did not make a sound, but sat comfortably in the chair behind his big desk, his smile growing broader and broader in an amused sort of way, and two or three other people who worked in the department stopped working and smirked as they looked at us and at Father's back without saying anything, as though they were sharing in Dr. Pfeffermann's little game and watching with amused curiosity to see when the man would finally notice his visitors, who were standing in the doorway patiently watching his back, the pretty woman's hand resting on the little boy's shoulder.
     From where he was standing on the top step of the ladder Father turned to his head of department and said, "Excuse me, Dr. Pfeffermann, I believe there is something—," and suddenly he noticed the director's broad smile—and he may have been alarmed because he could not understand what was making him smile—and Dr. Pfeffermann's eyes guided Father's bespectacled gaze from the desk to the doorway. When he caught sight of us, I believe his face went white. He returned the large box file he was holding with both hands to its place on the top shelf and carefully climbed down the ladder, looked around, and saw that all the other members of staff were smiling, and as though he had no choice, he remembered to smile too, and said to us, "What a surprise! What a great surprise!" and in a quieter voice he asked if everything was all right, if anything had happened, heaven forbid.
     His face was as strained and anxious as that of a child who in the middle of a kissing game at a party with his classmates looks up and notices his parents standing sternly in the doorway, and who knows how long they have been standing there quietly watching or what they have seen.
     First of all he tried to shoo us outside very gently, with both hands, into the corridor, and looking back he said to the whole department and particularly to Dr. Pfeffermann: "Excuse me for a few minutes?"
     But a minute later he changed his mind, stopped edging us out, and pulled us back inside, into the director's office, and started to introduce us, then he remembered and said: "Dr. Pfeffermann, you already know my wife and son." And then he turned us around and formally introduced us to the rest of the staff of the newspaper department with the words: "I'd like you to meet my wife, Fania, and my son Amos. A schoolboy. Twelve and a half years old."
     When we were all outside in the corridor, Father asked anxiously, and a little reproachfully:
     "What has happened? Are my parents all right? And your parents? Is everyone all right?"
     Mother calmed him down. But the issue of the restaurant made him apprehensive: after all, it was not anyone's birthday today. He hesitated, started to say something, changed his mind, and after a moment he said:
     "Certainly. Certainly. Why not. We'll go and celebrate your recovery, Fania, or at any rate the distinct and sudden amelioration in your condition. Yes. We must definitely celebrate."
     His face as he spoke, however, was anxious rather than festive.
     But then my father suddenly cheered up, and fired with enthusiasm he put his arms around both our shoulders, got permission from Dr. Pfeffermann to leave work a little early, said good-bye to his colleagues, took off his gray dust coat, and treated us to a thorough tour of several departments of the library, the basement, the rare manuscripts section, he even showed us the new photocopying machine and explained how it worked, and he introduced us proudly to everyone we met, as excited as a teenager introducing his famous parents to the staff of his school.
      

    


     The restaurant was a pleasant, almost empty place tucked away in a narrow side street between Ben Yehuda Street and Shammai or Hillel Street. The rain started again the moment we arrived, which Father took as a good sign, as though it had been waiting for us to get to the restaurant. As though heaven were smiling on us today.

     He corrected himself immediately:
     "I mean, that is what I would say if I believed in signs, or if I believed that heaven cares at all about us. But heaven is indifferent. Apart from homo sapiens, the whole universe is indifferent. Most people are indifferent too, if it comes to that. I believe indifference is the most salient feature of all reality."
     He corrected himself again:
     "And anyway, how could I say that heaven was smiling on us when the sky is so dark and lowering and it's raining cats and dogs?"
     Mother said:
     "No, you two order first because it's my treat today. And I'll be very pleased if you choose the most expensive dishes on the menu."
     But the menu was a modest one, in keeping with those years of shortages and austerity. Father and I ordered vegetable soup and chicken rissoles with mashed potato. I conspiratorially refrained from telling Father that on the way to Terra Sancta I'd been allowed to taste coffee for the very first time. And to have a chocolate ice cream before my lunch, even though it was winter.
     Mother stared at the menu for a long time, then placed it face down on the table, and it was only after Father reminded her again that she finally ordered a bowl of plain boiled rice. Father apologized amiably to the waitress and explained vaguely that Mother was not entirely recovered. While Father and I tucked into our food with gusto, Mother pecked at her rice for a little as though she were forcing herself, then stopped and ordered a cup of strong black coffee.
     "Are you all right, Mother?"
     The waitress returned with a cup of coffee for my mother and a glass of tea for my father, and she placed in front of me a bowl of quivering yellow jelly. At once Father impatiently took his wallet out of his inside jacket pocket. But Mother insisted on her rights: Put it right back, please. Today you are both my guests. And Father obeyed, not before cracking some forced joke about her inheriting an oil well apparently, which explained her newfound wealth and her extravagance. We waited for the rain to let up. My father and I were sitting facing the kitchen, and Mother's face opposite us was looking between our shoulders at the stubborn rain through the window that gave onto the street. What we spoke about I can't remember, but presumably Father chased away any silence. He may have talked to us about the Christian Church's relations with the Jewish people, or treated us to a survey of the history of the fierce dispute that broke out in the middle of the eighteenth century between Rabbi Jacob Emden and the adherents of Shabbetai Zvi, particularly Rabbi Jonathan Eybeschutz, who was suspected of Sabbataean leanings.
     The only other customers in the restaurant that rainy lunchtime were two elderly ladies who were talking in very refined German in low, well-mannered voices. They looked alike, with steely gray hair and birdlike features accentuated by prominent Adam's apples. The elder of the two looked over eighty, and at second glance I supposed that she must be the other one's mother. And I decided that the mother and daughter were both widows, and that they lived together because they had no one else left in the whole wide world. In my mind I dubbed them Mrs. Gertrude and Mrs. Magda, and I tried to imagine their tiny, scrupulously clean apartment, perhaps somewhere in this part of town, roughly opposite the Eden Hotel.
     Suddenly one of them, Mrs. Magda, the younger of the two, raised her voice and hurled a single German word at the old woman opposite. She pronounced it with venomous, piercing rage, like a vulture pouncing on its prey, and then she threw her cup against the wall.
     In the deeply etched lines on the cheeks of the older woman, whom I had named Gertrude, tears began to run. She wept soundlessly and without screwing up her face. She wept with a straight face. The waitress bent down and silently picked up the pieces of the cup. When she had finished, she disappeared. Not a word was spoken after the shout. The two women went on sitting opposite each other without uttering a sound. They were both very thin, and they both had curly gray hair that started a long way up their foreheads, like a man's receding hairline. The older widow was still weeping silent tears, with no contortion of her face; they drained down to her pointed chin, where they dripped onto her breast like stalactites in a cave. She made no attempt to control her weeping or to dry her tears. Even though her daughter, with a cruel expression on her face, silently held out a neatly ironed white handkerchief. If indeed it was her daughter. She did not withdraw her hand, which lay extended on the table in front of her with the neatly ironed handkerchief on top of it. The whole image was frozen for a long time, as though mother and daughter were just an old, fading sepia photograph in some dusty album. Suddenly I asked:
     "Are you all right, Mother?"
     That was because my mother, ignoring the rules of etiquette, had turned her chair slightly and was staring fixedly at the two women. At that moment it struck me that my mother's face had turned very pale again, the way it was all the time she was ill. After a little while she said she was very sorry, she was feeling a little tired and wanted to go home and lie down a little. Father nodded, got up, asked the waitress where the nearest phone booth was, and went off to call a taxi. As we left the restaurant, Mother had to lean on Father's arm and shoulder; I held the door open for them, warned them about the step, and opened the door of the taxi for them. When we had got Mother into the backseat, Father went back into the restaurant to settle the bill. She sat up very straight in the taxi, and her brown eyes were wide open. Too wide.
    


     That evening the new doctor was sent for, and when he had left, Father sent for the old one as well. There was no disagreement between them: both doctors prescribed complete rest. Consequently Father put Mother to bed in my bed, which had become her bed, took her a glass of warm milk and honey, and begged her to take a few sips with her new sleeping pills. He asked how many lights she wanted him to leave on. A quarter of an hour later I was sent to peep through the crack in the door, and I saw that she was asleep. She slept till next morning, when she woke up early again and got up to help Father and me with the various morning chores. She made us fried eggs again while I set the table and Father chopped various vegetables very fine for a salad. When it was time for us to go, Father to Terra Sancta Building and me to Tachkemoni School, Mother suddenly decided to go out too, and to walk me to school, because her good friend Lilenka, Lilia Bar-Samkha, lived near Tachkemoni.

     Later we discovered that Lilenka had not been at home, so she had gone to see another friend, Fania Weissmann, who had also been a fellow pupil at the Tarbuth gymnasium in Rovno. From Fania Weiss-mann's she had walked just before midday to the Egged Central Bus Station halfway down Jaffa Road and boarded a bus bound for Tel Aviv, to see her sisters, or perhaps she intended to change buses in Tel Aviv and go on to Haifa and Kiriat Motskin, to her parents' hut. But when my mother got to the Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv, she apparently changed her mind: she had a black coffee in a café and returned to Jerusalem late in the afternoon.
     When she got home, she complained of feeling very tired. She took another two or three of the new sleeping pills. Or perhaps she tried going back to the old ones. But that night she could not get to sleep, the migraine came back, and she sat up fully dressed by the window. At two o'clock in the morning my mother decided to do some ironing. She put the light on in my room, which had become her room, set up the ironing board, filled a bottle with water to sprinkle on the clothes, and ironed for several hours, until dawn broke. When she ran out of clothes, she took the bed linen out of the cupboard and ironed it all over again. When she had finished that, she even ironed the bedspread from my bed, but she was so tired or weak that she burned it: the smell of burning woke Father, who woke me too, and the two of us were astonished to see that my mother had ironed every sock, handkerchief, napkin, and tablecloth in the place. We rushed to put out the burning bedspread in the bathroom, and then we sat Mother down in her chair and got down on our knees to remove her shoes: my father took off one, and I took off the other. Then Father asked me to leave the room for a few minutes and kindly close the door behind me. I closed the door, but this time I pressed myself against the door because I wanted to hear. They spoke to each other for half an hour in Russian. Then Father asked me to look after my mother for a few minutes, and he went to the pharmacist's and bought some medicine or syrup, and while he was there, he phoned Uncle Tsvi in his office at Tsahalon Hospital in Jaffa and he also phoned Uncle Buma at work at the Zamenhof clinic in Tel Aviv. After these calls Father and Mother agreed that she should go to Tel Aviv that very morning, Thursday, to stay with one of her sisters, to get some rest and a change of air and atmosphere. She could stay as long as she liked, till Sunday or even till Monday morning, because on Monday afternoon Lilia Bar-Samkha had managed to get her an appointment for a test at Hadassah Hospital in Heneviim Street, an appointment that without Aunt Lilenka's good connections we would have had to wait several months for.
     And because Mother was feeling weak and complained of dizziness, Father insisted that this time she should not travel to Tel Aviv alone, but that he would go with her and take her all the way to Auntie Haya and Uncle Tsvi's, and he might even stay the night: if he took the first bus back to Jerusalem the next morning, Friday, he could manage to get to work for a few hours at least. He took no notice of Mother's protests, that there was no need for him to travel with her and miss a day's work, she was perfectly capable of taking the bus to Tel Aviv on her own and finding her sister's house. She wouldn't get lost.
     But Father would not hear of it. He was gray and stubborn this time, and he absolutely insisted. I promised him that after school I would go straight to Grandma Shlomit and Grandpa Alexander's in Prague Lane, explain what had happened, and stay overnight with them till Father got back. Only don't be a nuisance to Grandma and Grandpa, help them nicely, clear the table after supper, and offer to take the rubbish out. And do all your homework: don't leave any of it for the weekend. He called me a clever son. He may even have called me young man. And from outside we were joined at that moment by the bird Elise, who trilled her morning snatch of Beethoven for us three or four times with clear, limpid joy: "Ti-da-di-da-di..." The bird sang with wonderment, awe, gratitude, exaltation, as though no night had ever ended before, as if this morning was the very first morning in the universe and its light was a wondrous light the like of which had never before burst forth and traversed the wide expanse of darkness.

 60


     I WAS ABOUT fifteen when I went to Hulda, two and a half years after my mother's death: a paleface among the suntanned, a skinny youth among well-built giants, a tireless chatterbox among the taciturn, a versifier among agricultural laborers. All my new classmates had a healthy mind in a healthy body, only I had a dreamy mind in an almost transparent body. Worse still: I was caught a couple of times sitting in out-of-the-way corners of the kibbutz trying to paint watercolors. Or hiding in the study room behind the newspaper room on the ground floor of Herzl House, scribbling away. A McCarthyite rumor soon went around that I was somehow connected to the Herut party, that I had grown up in a Revisionist family, and I was suspected of having obscure links with the hated demagogue Menachem Begin, the archenemy of the Labor Movement. In short: a twisted upbringing and irreparably screwed-up genes.

     The fact that I had come to Hulda because I had rebelled against my father and his family did not help me. I was not given credit for being a renegade from Herut, or for my helpless laughter during Begin's speech at the Edison auditorium: the brave little boy from "The Emperor's New Clothes," of all people, was suspected here in Hulda of being in the pay of the crooked tailors.
     In vain did I endeavor to excel in farm work and fail at school. In vain did I grill myself like a steak in my efforts to be as brown as the rest of them. In vain did I show myself in the Current Affairs Discussion Group to be the most socialist socialist in Hulda, if not in the entire working class. Nothing helped me: to them I was some kind of alien, and so my classmates harassed me pitilessly to make me give up my strange ways and become a normal person like them. Once they sent me off on the double to the barn without a flashlight in the middle of the night, to check and report back if any of the cows was in heat and required the urgent attention of the bull. Another time they put me down for toilet-polishing duty. And yet another time I was sent to the children's farm to sex the ducklings. Heaven forbid that I should ever forget where I had come from or have any misapprehensions about where I had landed.
     As for me, I took it all with humility, because I knew that the process of getting Jerusalem out of my system rightly entailed suffering, the pangs of rebirth. I considered the practical jokes and the humiliation justified not because I was suffering from some inferiority complex but because I really was inferior. They, those solidly built boys scorched by dust and sun and those proud-walking girls, were the salt of the earth, the L-rds of creation. As handsome as demiG-ds, as beautiful as the nights in Canaan.
     All except for me.
     No one was taken in by my suntan: they all knew perfectly well—I knew it myself—that even when my skin was finally tanned a deep brown, I would still be pale on the inside. Though I forced myself to learn how to lay irrigation hoses in the hayfields, drive a tractor, hit the target in the rifle range with the old Czech rifle, I had still not managed to change my spots: through all the camouflage nets I covered myself with you could still see that weak, soft-hearted, loquacious town boy, who fantasized and made up all sorts of strange stories that could never have happened and didn't interest anyone here.
     Whereas they seemed to me glorious: those big boys who could score a goal from twenty yards with their left foot, wring a chicken's neck without batting an eyelid, break into the stores at night to pilfer provisions for a midnight feast, and those bold girls who could do a twenty-mile hike carrying a sixty-five-pound pack on their backs and still have enough energy left afterward to dance late into the night with their blue skirts whirling as though the force of gravity had been suspended in their honor, then sit in a circle with us till dawn and sing to us under the starry sky, sing heartrending songs in rounds and canons, sing leaning back to back, sing while radiating an innocent glow that swept you off your feet precisely because it was so innocent, so heavenly, as pure as the angelic choirs.
    


     Yes, indeed: I knew my place. Don't get too big for your boots. Don't get ideas above your station. Don't stick your nose into what's meant for your betters. True, all people are born equal, that is the fundamental principle of kibbutz life, but the field of love belongs to the realm of nature, not to the Egalitarianism Committee. And the field of love belongs to mighty cedars, not to little weeds.

     Still, even a cat may look at a king, as the proverb says. So I looked at them all day long, and in bed at night too, when my eyes were closed, I never stopped looking at them, those tousled beauties. And I especially looked at the girls. How I looked. I fixed my feverish eyes on them. Even in my sleep I turned my wistful calf's eyes on them helplessly. Not that I nursed any false hopes: I knew they were not meant for me. Those boys were magnificent stags, and I was a miserable worm. The girls were graceful gazelles, and I was a stray jackal howling behind the fence. And among them—the clapper in the bell—was Nily.
     Every one of those girls was as radiant as the sun. Every single one. But Nily—she was always surrounded by a trembling circle of joy. Nily always sang as she walked, on the path, on the lawn, in the wood, between the flower beds, she sang to herself as she walked. And even when she walked without singing, she looked as though she were singing. What's the matter with her, I would ask myself sometimes from the depths of my tormented sixteen years, why is she always singing? What is so good about this world? How, "from such a cruel fate / from poverty and sorrow / from unknown yesterday / and visionless tomorrow," could one draw such joy? Hadn't she heard that "The mountains of Ephraim / have received a new young victim /...and just like you we'll offer / for the nation's sake our lives..."?
     It was a wonder. It exasperated me but fascinated me: like a firefly.
    


     Kibbutz Hulda was surrounded by deep darkness. Every night a black abyss started a couple of yards beyond the yellow circles of light from the lamps along the perimeter fence and continued to the ends of the night, to the distant stars in the sky. Beyond the barbed-wire fence lurked empty fields, deserted orchards, hills without a living soul, plantations abandoned to the night wind, ruins of Arab villages—not like today, when you can see closely packed blocks of lights all around. In the 1950s the night outside Hulda was still totally empty. And in this great emptiness infiltrators, fedayeen, crept through the heart of the night. And in this great emptiness there was the wood on the hill, the olive grove, fields of crops, among which drooling jackals roamed, whose lunatic, blood-curdling howls penetrated our sleep and froze our blood toward dawn.

     Even inside the fenced and guarded compound of the kibbutz there was not much light at night. Here and there a weary lamp cast a faint puddle of light, and then thick darkness reigned until the next lamp. Muffled night watchmen did their rounds among the chicken houses and barns, and every half hour or hour the woman on watch duty in the babies' quarters put down her knitting and went on a round from the nursery to the children's houses and back.
     We had to make a noise every evening so as not to fall prey to the emptiness and sadness. Every evening we got together and did something noisy, almost wild, until midnight or later, to prevent the darkness from creeping into our rooms and into our bones and snuffing out our souls. We sang, we shouted, we stuffed ourselves, we argued, we swore, we gossiped, we joked, all to drive away the darkness, the silence, and the howling of the jackals. In those days there was no television, no video, no stereo, no Internet or computer games, there weren't even discos and pubs, and there was no disco music; there was only a film at Herzl House or on the main lawn once a week, on Wednesdays.
     Every evening we had to get together and try to create some light and fun for ourselves.
     Among the older members of the kibbutz, whom we called the oldies even though most of them were barely forty, there were quite a few whose inner light had faded from too many duties, commitments, disappointments, meetings, committees, fruit-picking details, discussions, duty rosters, study days, and party activities, too much culturalism and the friction of daily routines. Quite a few of them were already extinguished. By half past nine or a quarter to ten the faint lights went out one after another in the windows of the little apartments in the veterans' quarters: tomorrow they had to get up at half past four again, to pick fruit, milk the cows, work in the fields or the communal kitchens. On those nights, light was a rare and precious commodity in Hulda.
     And Nily was a firefly. More than a firefly: a generator, a whole powerhouse.
    


     She exuded abundant joie de vivre. Her joy was unconfined and unrestrained, it had no rhyme or reason, no grounds or motive, nothing had to happen to make her overflow with jollity. Of course, I sometimes saw her momentarily sad, weeping openly when she thought rightly or wrongly that someone had insulted her, or shamelessly sobbing in a sad film, or crying over a poignant page in a novel. But her sadness was always firmly enclosed within brackets of powerful joy, like hot spring water that no snow or ice could cool because its heat flowed straight from the core of the earth.

     It may well have come from her parents. Her mother Riva could hear music in her head even when there was no music around. And Sheftel, the librarian, would sing as he walked around the kibbutz in his gray T-shirt, he would sing as he worked in the garden, sing as he carried heavy sacks on his back, and when he said to you, "It'll be OK," he always believed it was true, without a shadow of a doubt or reservation: Don't worry, it'll be OK, soon.
     As a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old boarder at the kibbutz, I viewed the joy that radiated from Nily the way one looks at a full moon: distant, unattainable, but fascinating and delightful.
     Of course, only from a distance. I was unworthy. Such radiant lights as these the likes of me were permitted only to look at. For the last two years of school and during my military service I had a girlfriend outside Hulda, while Nily had a shining string of princely suitors, and around this string she had a second circle of dizzy, bewitched followers, and then a third circle of meek, humble votaries, and a fourth circle of distant admirers, and the fifth and sixth circles included me, a little weed that was occasionally touched unawares by a single extravagant ray, which could not imagine what its passing touch had done.
    


     When I was caught scribbling poems in the shabby back room of the culture building in Hulda, it was finally clear to everyone that no good would ever come of me. Nevertheless, to make the best of a bad job they decided to give me the task of composing appropriate verses for various occasions: festivities, family celebrations, weddings, and festivals, and when necessary, also funeral eulogies and lines for memorial booklets. As for my soulful poems, I managed to hide them (deep in the straw of an old mattress), but sometimes I could not restrain myself and I showed them to Nily.

     Why Nily, of all people?
     Perhaps I had a need to check which of my poems of darkness would crumble to nothing the moment they were exposed to the rays of the sun, and which if any would survive. To this day Nily is my first reader. When she finds something in a draft that is wrong she says: That just doesn't work. Cross it out. Sit down and write it again. Or: We've heard that before. You've already written it somewhere. No need to repeat yourself. But when she likes something, she looks up from the page and gives me a certain look, and the room gets bigger. And when something sad comes off, she says, that passage makes me cry. Or if it's something funny, she bursts into peals of laughter. After her, my daughters and my son read it: they all have sharp eyes and a good ear. After a while, a few friends will read what I have written, and then the readers, and after them come the literary experts, the scholars, the critics, and the firing squads. But by then I'm not there anymore.
    


     In those years Nily went out with the L-rds of creation, and I did not set my sights high: if the princess, surrounded by a swarm of suitors, walked past a serf's cottage, at most he might look up at her for a moment, be dazzled, and bless his fortune. Hence the sensation in Hulda, and even in the surrounding villages, when it emerged one day that the sunlight had suddenly lit up the dark side of the moon. That day, in Hulda, the cows laid eggs, wine came out of the ewes' udders, and the eucalyptus trees flowed with milk and honey. Polar bears appeared from behind the sheep shed, the emperor of Japan was seen wandering beside the laundry reciting from the works of A. D. Gordon, the mountains dripped wine, and all the hills melted. The sun stood still for seventy-seven hours above the cypress trees and refused to set. And I went to the empty boys' showers, locked myself in, stood in front of the mirror and asked aloud, Mirror mirror on the wall, tell me, how did this happen? What have I done to deserve it?


 61


     MY MOTHER was thirty-eight when she died. At the age I am today, I could be her father.

     After her funeral, my father and I stayed at home for several days. He did not go to work, and I did not go to school. The door ofthe apartment was open all day long. We received a constant flow of neighbors, acquaintances, and relations. Kind neighbors volunteered to make sure there were soft drinks for all the visitors, and coffee, cakes, and tea. From time to time I was invited to their homes for a while, for a hot meal. I politely sipped a spoonful of soup and downed half a rissole, then hurried back to Father. I did not want him to be there alone. Not that he was alone. From morning until ten or ten-thirty in the evening our apartment was packed with comforters. The neighbors rustled up some chairs and arranged them in a circle around the walls of the book room. Strange coats were piled on my parents' bed all day long.
     Grandpa and Grandma were banished to the other room for most of the day, at Father's request, because he found their presence too much. Grandpa Alexander would suddenly burst into noisy Russian weeping, punctuated by hiccups, while Grandma Shlomit never stopped running back and forth between the visitors and the kitchen, wresting their cups and cake plates from them almost by force, washing them carefully with dish-washing liquid, rinsing them well, drying them, and putting them away in the cupboard. Any teaspoon that was not washed immediately after use seemed to my Grandma Shlomit to be a dangerous agent of the forces that had brought about the disaster.
     So my grandfather and grandmother sat in the other room with those of the visitors who had finished sitting with Father and me and yet felt it proper to stay a little longer. Grandpa Alexander, who had loved his daughter-in-law and always dreaded her sadness, walked up and down the room nodding his head with a kind of furious irony and occasionally bursting into loud wails:
     "Why? Oh why? So beautiful! So young! And so talented! So gifted! Why? Explain to me why?"
     And he stood in a corner with his back to the room, sobbing aloud as though he were hiccuping, his shoulders trembling violently.
     Grandma rebuked him:
     "Zussia, stop that please. That's enough. Lonya and the child can't stand it when you behave like this. Stop it! Control yourself! Really! Learn a lesson from Lonya and the child, how to behave! Really!"
     Grandpa obeyed her instantly, sat down, and buried his face in his hands. But a quarter of an hour later another helpless bellow would burst from his heart:
     "So young! So beautiful! Like an angel! So young! So talented! Why?! Explain to me why?!"
    


     My mother's friends came: Lilia Bar-Samkha, Ruchele Engel, Esterka Weiner, Fania Weissmann, and another woman or two, childhood friends from the Tarbuth gymnasium. They sipped tea and talked about their schooldays. They reminisced about my mother as a girl, about their charismatic headmaster, Issachar Reiss, whom all the girls had secretly been in love with, and his rather unsuccessful marriage. They talked about other teachers, too. Then Aunt Lilenka had second thoughts, and asked Father delicately if he minded them talking in this way, reminiscing, telling stories. Would he rather they talked about something else?

     But my father, who sat all day long wearily, unshaven, in the chair where my mother had spent her sleepless nights, only nodded apathetically and motioned for them to continue.
     Aunt Lilia, Dr. Lilia Bar-Samkha, insisted that she and I must have a heart-to-heart chat, although I tried to get out of it politely. Since the other room was occupied by Grandpa and Grandma and some other members of my father's family, and the kitchen was full of kind neighbors, and Grandma Shlomit was constantly coming and going to scrub every bowl and teaspoon, Aunt Lilia took me by the hand and led me to the bathroom, where she locked the door behind us. It felt strange and rather repellent to be in a locked bathroom with this woman. But Aunt Lilia beamed at me, sat down on the covered toilet seat, and sat me down facing her on the edge of the bath. She eyed me in silence for a minute or two, compassionately, with tears welling in her eyes, and then she started talking, not about my mother or the school in Rovno but about the great power of art and the connection between art and the inner life of the soul. What she was saying made me cringe.
     Then, in a different voice, she talked to me about my new grownup responsibility, to look after my father from now on, to bring some light into his dark life and give him a little satisfaction, for example, by doing especially well at school. Then she went on to talk about my feelings: she had to know what I had thought when I heard what had happened. What were my feelings at that moment? What were my feelings now? To help me, she started to enumerate various names of feelings, as though inviting me to make my choice, or cross out the ones that did not apply. Sadness? Fear? Anxiety? Longing? A little anger perhaps? Surprise? Guilt? Because you have probably heard or read that guilt feelings can sometimes arise in such cases? No? And what about a feeling of disbelief? Pain? Or a refusal to accept the new reality?
     I said sorry nicely and got up to go. I was terrified for a moment that when she locked the door, she might have hidden the key in her pocket and I wouldn't be allowed to leave until I had answered all her questions one by one. But the key was still in the keyhole. As I left, I could still hear her concerned voice behind me:
     "Perhaps it is still a little too soon for you to have this conversation. Just remember that the moment you decide you are ready for it, don't hesitate for a moment, come and see me, and we'll talk. I believe that Fania, your poor mother, very much wanted a deep bond to continue between you and me."
     I fled.
    


     Three or four well-known figures of the Herut party in Jerusalem were sitting with my father; they and their wives had met in a café beforehand and come together, like a small deputation, to offer us their condolences. They had previously decided to try to distract my father with political talk: at that time the Knesset was about to debate the reparations agreement that Prime Minister Ben-Gurion had signed with Chancellor Adenauer of West Germany, an agreement that the Herut party saw as a disgrace and an abomination, a slur on the memory of the victims of Nazism and an ineradicable blot on the conscience of the young state. Some of our comforters maintained the view that it was our duty to thwart this agreement at any cost, even if it meant bloodshed.

     My father hardly participated in the conversation, he merely nodded a couple of times, but I was fired with the courage to say a few sentences to these Jerusalem grandees, as a way of washing away some of the distress I felt after the conversation in the bathroom: Aunt Lilia's words grated on me like chalk on a blackboard. For several years afterward my face used to twitch involuntarily whenever I remembered that conversation in the bathroom. To this day when I recall it, it feels like biting into rotten fruit.
     Then the Herut leaders went to the other room to bring comfort to Grandpa Alexander with their indignation over the reparations agreement. I went with them because I wanted to go on taking part in the discussion of plans for the coup aimed at foiling the abominable agreement with our murderers and finally toppling Ben-Gurion's red regime. And there was another reason that I accompanied them: Aunt Lilia had arrived from the bathroom and was advising my father to take some excellent sedative pill that she had brought with her, it would make him feel much better. Father made a face and refused. For once he even forgot to thank her.
    


     The Torens came, and the Lembergs and the Rosendorffs and the Bar-Yizhars, Getsel and Isabella Nahlieli from Children's Realm came, and other acquaintances and neighbors from Kerem Avraham, Uncle Dudek, the chief of police, came with his pleasant wife Tosia, Dr. Pfeffermann came with the staff of the newspaper department, and other librarians came from all the departments of the National Library. Staszek and Mala Rudnicki came, and various scholars and booksellers, and Mr. Joshua Czeczik, Father's publisher from Tel Aviv. Even Uncle Joseph, Professor Klausner, appeared one evening, very upset and emotional; he silently shed an old man's tear on Father's shoulder and murmured some formal words of condolence. Our acquaintances from the cafés came, and the Jerusalem writers, Yehuda Yaari, Shraga Kadari, Dov Kimche and Yitzhak Shenhar, and Professor and Mrs. Halkin, and Professor Bennet, the expert on Islamic history, and Professor Yitzhak (Fritz) Baer, the expert on the history of the Jews in Christian Spain. Three or four younger lecturers, rising stars in the firmament of the university, also came. Two of my teachers from Tachkemoni School came, and some of my classmates, and the Krochmals, Tosia and Gustav Krochmal, the broken toy and doll repairers, whose little shop had been renamed the Dolls' Hospital. Zerta and Yakov-David Abramski came: the one whose eldest son Yonatan had been killed at the end of the War of Independence by a Jordanian sniper. The sniper's bullet hit twelve-year-old Yoni in the forehead when he was playing in his yard that Saturday morning years ago, at the very moment his parents were sitting with us, sipping tea and eating cake. And the ambulance went down our street hooting on its way to pick him up and again a few minutes later as it drove past with its siren wailing on its way to the hospital, and when my mother heard the siren she said, We spend all our time making plans, yet there's someone out there in the dark laughing at us and all our plans. And Zerta Abramski said, That's right, life is like that, and yet people will always go on making plans because otherwise despair would take over. It was ten minutes later that a neighbor came and gently called the Abram skis over and told them less than the truth, and they were in such a hurry to run after him that Aunt Zerta left her handbag behind with her wallet and her papers inside. When we went to see them the next day to offer condolences, Father silently handed her the handbag after embracing her and Mr. Abramski. Now they tearfully embraced my father and me but they didn't bring us a handbag.

     My father suppressed his tears. In any case, he never wept in my presence. He firmly believed that tears were fitting for women but not for men. He sat all day long in Mother's old chair, his face growing darker day by day since as a mark of mourning he did not shave, greeting his visitors with a nod and nodding to them again when they left. He barely spoke during those days, as though my mother's death had cured him of his habit of breaking any silence. Now he sat silently for days on end, letting others do the talking, about my mother, about books and book reviews, about the twists and turns of politics. I tried to sit opposite him: I hardly took my eyes off him all day long. And whenever I passed close to his chair, he patted me wearily once or twice on the arm or back. But we did not speak to each other.
    


     My mother's parents and her sisters did not come to Jerusalem during the mourning period and the days that followed: they sat and mourned separately, in Auntie Haya's apartment in Tel Aviv, because they blamed my father for what had happened and couldn't bring themselves to see him. Even at the funeral, I was told, my father walked with his parents while my mother's sisters walked with their parents and not a word was exchanged between the two camps.

     I was not present at my mother's funeral: Aunt Lilia, Leah Kalish-Bar-Kamcha, who was considered our expert on feelings in general and children's upbringing in particular, feared the burial might have an adverse effect on the child's psyche. And from then on the Mussmans never set foot in our home in Jerusalem, and Father, for his part, did not go and see them or make any contact, because he was very hurt by their suspicions. For years I was the go-between. During the first week I even carried oblique messages concerning my mother's personal effects, and a couple of times I conveyed the effects themselves. In the years that followed, the aunts used to interrogate me cautiously about daily life at home, about my father's and grandparents' health, about my father's new wife and even about our material circumstances, but they insisted on cutting my answers short with: I'm not interested in knowing. Or: That'll do; what we've already heard is more than enough.
     My father, too, sometimes asked me for a hint or two about the aunts, their families or my grandparents in Kiriat Motskin, but two minutes after I began to reply, his face turned yellow with pain and he gestured to me to stop and not go into further details. When my Grandma Shlomit died, in 1958, my aunts and my grandparents on my mother's side asked me to convey their condolences to Grandpa Alexander, whom the Mussmans considered the only member of the Klausner family who had a really warm heart. And fifteen years later, when I told Grandpa Alexander about the death of my other grandfather, he wrung his hands and then covered his ears with his hands and raised his voice, more in anger than in sorrow, and said: "Bozhe moi! He was such a young man still! A simple man, but an interesting one! Deep! You now, tell them all that my heart weeps for him! Make sure you tell them with these very words: Alexander Klausner's heart weeps at the untimely death of dear Mr. Hertz Mussman!"
    


     Even after the mourning period was over, when the apartment was finally empty and my father and I locked the door and were alone together, we hardly talked. Except about the most essential things. The kitchen door is jammed. There was no mail today. The bathroom's free but there's no toilet paper. We also avoided meeting each other's eyes, as though we were ashamed of something we had both done that it would have been better if we hadn't, and at the very least it would have been better if we could have been ashamed quietly without a partner who knew everything about you that you knew about him.

     We never talked about my mother. Not a single word. Or about ourselves. Or about anything that had the least thing to do with emotions. We talked about the Cold War. We talked about the assassination of King Abdullah and the threat of a second round of fighting. My father explained to me the difference between a symbol, a parable, and an allegory, and the difference between a saga and a legend. He also gave me a clear and accurate account of the difference between liberalism and social democracy. And every morning, even on these gray, damp, misty January mornings, at first light there always came from the soggy bare branches outside the pitiful chirping of the frozen bird, Elise: "Ti-da-di-da-di—," but in the depth of this winter it did not repeat the song several times as it had done in the summer, but said what it had to say once, and fell silent. I have hardly ever spoken about my mother till now, till I came to write these pages. Not with my father, or my wife, or my children or with anybody else. After my father died, I hardly spoke about him either. As if I were a foundling.
    


     During the first weeks after the disaster the house went to the dogs. Neither my father nor I cleared away the leftover food from the oilcloth-covered kitchen table, we did not touch the dishes that we submerged in the murky water in the sink, until there were no clean ones left and we had to fish out a couple of plates, forks, and knives, and rinse them under the faucet, and after we had used them, we put them back on the pile of dishes that was beginning to stink. The garbage can overflowed and smelled because neither of us wanted to empty it. We threw our clothes over the nearest chair, and if we needed a chair, we simply threw anything that was on it to the floor, which was thick with books and papers and fruit peel and dirty handkerchiefs and yellowing newspapers. Gray coils of dust drifted around the floors. Even when the toilet was getting blocked, neither of us lifted a finger. Piles of dirty laundry overflowed from the bathroom into the corridor, where it met a jumble of empty bottles, cardboard boxes, used envelopes, and wrapping paper. (This was more or less how I described Fima's apartment in Fima.)

     And yet, in all the chaos, a deep mutual consideration prevailed in our silent home. My father finally gave up insisting on my bedtime and left me to decide when to turn my light out. As for me, when I came home from school to the empty, neglected apartment, I made myself something simple to eat: a hard-boiled egg, cheese, bread, vegetables, and some sardines or tuna from a can. And I made a couple of slices of bread with egg and tomato for my father too, even though he had generally had something to eat earlier in the canteen at Terra Sancta.
     Despite the silence and the shame, Father and I were close at that time, as we had been the previous winter, a year and a month before, when Mother's condition took a turn for the worse and he and I were like a pair of stretcher bearers carrying an injured person up a steep slope.
     This time we were carrying each other.
     All through that winter we never opened a window. As though we were afraid to lose the special smell of the apartment. As though we were comfortable with each other's smells. Even when they got very thick and concentrated. Dark half moons appeared under Father's eyes like those my mother had when she couldn't sleep. I would wake up in the night in a panic and peep into his room to see if he was sitting up like her, staring sadly at the window. But my father did not sit at the window staring at the clouds or the moon. He bought himself a little Phillips wireless set with a green eye and put it by his bed, and he lay in the dark listening to everything. At midnight, when the Voice of Israel stopped broadcasting, to be replaced by a monotonous buzz, he reached out and tuned to the BBC World Service from London.
    


     Late one afternoon Grandma Shlomit suddenly appeared, carrying two dishes of food she had cooked for us. The moment I opened the door she was appalled at what met her eyes and by the stench that assailed her nostrils. Almost without a word she turned tail and ran. But by seven o'clock next morning she was back, armed this time with two cleaning women and a whole arsenal of cleaning materials and disinfectants. She set up her tactical command HQ on a bench in the yard opposite the front door, from where she directed the mopping-up operations, which lasted for three days.

     So the apartment was put to rights, and my father and I stopped neglecting the household chores. One of the cleaners was hired to come in twice a week. The apartment was thoroughly aired and cleaned, and a couple of months later we even decided to have it painted.
     But ever since those weeks of chaos I have been subject to a compulsive desire for tidiness that makes the lives of those around me a misery. Any scrap of paper that is not in its right place, any unfolded newspaper or unwashed cup threatens my peace of mind, if not my sanity. To this day, like some kind of secret policeman or like Frankenstein's monster, or with something of my Grandma Shlomit's obsession with cleanliness and tidiness, I scour the house every few hours, ruthlessly banishing to the depths of Siberia any poor object that has the misfortune to find itself on a surface, or hiding away in some G-dforsaken drawer any letter or leaflet that someone has left on the table because he or she was called to the phone, and emptying out, rinsing, and putting facedown in the dishwasher a cup of coffee that one of my victims has left to cool down a bit, mercilessly clearing away keys, spectacles, notes, medicines, a piece of cake that someone has unwisely taken his eyes off for a moment: everything falls into the jaws of this greedy monster so that there will be some order at last in this topsy-turvy house. So that it doesn't so much as hint at the way my father and I lived at that time when we tacitly agreed that we should sit down among the ashes and scrape ourselves with a potsherd, just so she should know.
    


     Then one day my father made a furious assault on Mother's drawers and her side of their closet: the only things that survived his wrath were a few items that her sisters and parents had requested as keepsakes, via me, and in fact on one of my trips to Tel Aviv I took them with me in a cardboard box tied up with a stout length of cord. All the rest—dresses, skirts, shoes, underwear, notebooks, stockings, head scarves, neckerchiefs, and even envelopes full of photographs from her childhood—he stuffed into waterproof sacks that he had brought from the National Library. I accompanied him like a puppy from room to room and watched his frenzy of activity; I neither helped nor hindered him. Soundlessly I watched my father furiously pull out the drawer of her bedside table and empty all the contents, cheap jewelry, notebooks, pill boxes, a book, a handkerchief, an eyeshade, and some loose change, into one of his sacks. I did not say a word. And my mother's powder compact and hairbrush and her toilet things and her toothbrush. Everything. I stood hushed and terrified, leaning on the doorpost and watching my father tear her blue dressing gown off the hook in the bathroom with a ripping sound and cram it into one of the sacks. Was this the way Christian neighbors stood and stared, aghast, not knowing their own hearts because of the conflicting emotions, as their Jewish neighbors were taken away by force and crammed into cattle trucks? Where he took the sacks, whether he gave it all away to the poor people in the transit camps or the victims of that winter's floods, he never told me. By evening not a trace of her was left. But a year later, when my father's new wife was settling in, a packet of six plain hairpins appeared that had somehow managed to survive hidden for a whole year in the narrow gap between the bedside table and the side of the closet. My father pursed his lips and threw this away too.

    


     A few weeks after the cleaners came in and the apartment was purged, my father and I gradually went back to holding a sort of daily staff meeting in the kitchen each evening. I began, telling him briefly about my day at school. He told me about an interesting conversation he had had that day, standing between the bookshelves, with Professor Goitein or Doctor Rotenstreich. We exchanged views about the political situation, about Begin and Ben-Gurion or about General Neguib's military coup in Egypt. We hung up a card in the kitchen again and wrote down, in our handwriting that was no longer similar, what we had to buy at the grocer's or the greengrocer's, and that we both had to go to have our hair cut on Monday evening, or to buy a little present for Aunt Lilenka for her new diploma or for Grandma Shlomit, whose age was a closely guarded secret, for her birthday.

     After a few more months my father resumed his habit of polishing his shoes till they shone when the electric light hit them, shaving at seven o'clock in the evening, putting on a starched shirt and a silk tie, dampening his hair before he brushed it back, splashing himself with aftershave, and going out "to chat with his friends" or "for a discussion about work."
     I was left alone at home, to read, dream, write and rewrite. Or I would go out and roam the wadis, checking the state of the fences around the no-man's-land and minefields along the ceasefire line that divided Jerusalem between Israel and Jordan. As I walked in the dark, I hummed to myself, Ti-da-di-da-di. I no longer aspired "to die or to conquer the mountain." I wanted everything to stop. Or at least I wanted to leave home and leave Jerusalem for good and go and live in a kibbutz: to leave all the books and feelings behind me and live a simple village life, a life of brotherhood and manual labor.

 62


     MY MOTHER ended her life at her sister's apartment in Ben Yehuda Street, Tel Aviv, in the night between Saturday and Sunday, January 6, 1952. There was a hysterical debate going on in the country at the time about whether Israel should demand and accept reparations from Germany on account of property of Jews murdered during the Hitler period. Some people agreed with David Ben-Gurion that the murderers must not be allowed to inherit the looted Jewish property, and that the monetary value should definitely be repaid in full to Israel to help with the absorption of the survivors. Others, headed by the opposition leader Menachem Begin, declared with pain and anger that it was immoral and a desecration of the memory of those who had been killed that the victims' own state should sell easy absolution to the Germans in exchange for tainted lucre.

     It rained heavily almost without a break all over Israel through that winter of 1951-52. The River Ayyalon, Wadi Musrara, burst its banks and flooded the Montefiore district of Tel Aviv and threatened to flood other districts as well. Heavy flooding did extensive damage to the transit camps with their tents and their corrugated iron or canvas huts, which were crowded with hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees who had fled from Arab lands leaving everything behind them and refugees from Hitler from Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Some transit camps were cut off by the floods, and there was a risk of starvation and epidemic. The state of Israel was less than four years old, and a little over a million citizens lived in it; almost a third of them were penniless refugees. Because of the heavy cost of defense and the absorption of immigrants and because of an inflated bureaucracy and clumsy management, the coffers of the state were empty, and the education, health, and welfare services were on the verge of collapse. At the beginning of that week, David Horowitz, the director-general of the Treasury, had flown to America on an emergency mission to obtain short-term credit to the tune of ten million dollars in a matter of a day or two so as to stave off disaster. My father and I discussed all these subjects when he got back from Tel Aviv. He had taken my mother to Auntie Haya and Uncle Tsvi's on Thursday and spent the night there, and when he got back on Friday, he learned from Grandma Shlomit and Grandpa Alexander that I seemed to have caught a cold but had nevertheless insisted on getting up and going to school. Grandma suggested we stay and celebrate Sabbath with them: she thought we both looked as though we were starting some sort of virus. But we opted to go home. On the way home from their house in Prague Lane, Father saw fit to report to me earnestly, like one grown-up to another, that when they got to Auntie Haya's, my mother's state of mind had immediately improved: the four of them had gone out together on Thursday night to a little café on the corner of Dizengoff Street and Jabotinsky Street, a stone's throw from Haya and Tsvi's. They had intended to stay out for only a short while, but they had ended up sitting there till closing time, talking about people and books. Tsvi had recounted all sorts of interesting stories about hospital life, and Mother had looked well and joined in the conversation, and that night she had slept for several hours, though she had apparently woken up in the small hours of the morning and gone to sit in the kitchen so as not to disturb anyone. Early in the morning when my father had left to get back to Jerusalem in time to put in a few hours at work, my mother had promised that there was no need to worry about her, the worst was over, and she had asked him to take very good care of the child: when they had left for Tel Aviv the previous day, she had had the impression that he was coming down with a cold.
     Father said:
     "Your mother was quite right about the cold, so let's hope she was right about the worst being over, too."
     I said:
     "I've only got a little bit of homework left. When I've finished, would you have time to stick some of the new stamps in the album?"
     On Saturday, it rained for most of the day. It rained and it rained. It didn't stop. My father and I spent a few hours poring over our stamp collection. Our heads sometimes touched. We compared each stamp with its picture in the big fat British catalogue, and Father found the right place for it in the album, either in a set we had already started or on a new page. On Saturday afternoon we both lay down and rested, he in his bed and I back in my room, in the bed that had become my mother's sick bed recently. After our rest we were invited to Grandpa and Grandma's again, to eat gefilte fish in a golden sauce surrounded with slices of boiled carrot, but since by now we both had severe colds and coughs and it was still pouring with rain outside, we decided that we would be better off staying at home. The sky was so overcast that we had to turn the lights on at four o'clock. Father sat at his desk and worked for a couple of hours on an article for which he had already extended the deadline twice, with his glasses slipping down his nose, bent over his books and little cards. While he worked, I lay on the rug at his feet reading a book. Later we played checkers: he beat me once, I won once, and the third time we drew. It is hard to say if he meant it to turn out like that or if it just happened. We had a light snack and drank some hot tea and we both took a couple of Palgin or APC tablets from Mother's collection of pills. To help us fight our colds. Then I went to bed, and we both got up at six o'clock, and at seven Tsippi the pharmacist's daughter came over to tell us that we'd just had a phone call from Tel Aviv and they would ring again in ten minutes, Mr. Klausner was to go to the pharmacy immediately, and her father had said to say it was rather urgent please.
    


     Auntie Haya told me that on Friday Uncle Tsvi, who was the administrative director of Tsahalon Hospital, had called in a specialist from the hospital, who had volunteered to come over after work. The specialist examined my mother thoroughly, unhurriedly, pausing to chat with her and continuing his examination, and when he had finished, he had said that she was tired, tense, and a little run down. Apart from the insomnia he could not find anything specifically wrong with her. Often the psyche is the worst enemy of the body: it doesn't let the body live, it doesn't let it enjoy itself when it wants to or get the rest it is begging for. If only we could extract it the way we extract the tonsils or the appendix, we would all live healthy and contented lives till we were a thousand years old. He thought that there was not much point now in having the tests at the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem on Monday, but they couldn't do any harm. He recommended complete rest and avoidance of any excitement. It was particularly important, he said, that the patient should get out of the house for at least an hour or even two hours every day, she could even dress up warmly and take an umbrella and simply walk around town, looking at shop windows or at handsome young men, it didn't matter what, the crucial thing was to get some fresh air. He also wrote her a prescription for some new, very strong sleeping pills that were apparently even newer and stronger than the new pills that the new doctor in Jerusalem had prescribed. Uncle Tsvi hurried out to the duty pharmacist's in Bugrashov Street to buy the pills, because it was Friday afternoon and all the other pharmacists had already closed for Sabbath.

     On Friday night Auntie Sonia and Uncle Buma had come over with a tin food container with a handle, soup for everyone and fruit compote for dessert. The three sisters had crowded into the little kitchen for an hour or so preparing dinner. Auntie Sonia had suggested that my mother should go and stay with her, in Wessely Street, to give Haya a break, but Auntie Haya wouldn't hear of it, and even told her younger sister off for this strange suggestion. Auntie Sonia was offended, but said nothing. At the Sabbath dinner table the atmosphere was a little dampened by Sonia's umbrage. My mother seems to have taken on my father's usual role and tried to keep the conversation going somehow. At the end of the evening she complained of feeling tired and apologized to Tsvi and Haya for not having the strength to help them clear away and wash up. She took the new tablets that the Tel Aviv specialist had prescribed, and to be on the safe side she also took some of the tablets that the Jerusalem specialist had given her. She fell into a deep sleep at ten o'clock but woke up a couple of hours later and made herself a strong cup of coffee in the kitchen, and spent the rest of the night sitting on a kitchen stool. Just before the War of Independence the room where my mother was staying had been let to the head of Haganah intelligence, Yigael Yadin, who later, when the state was established, became Major-General Yigael Yadin, deputy chief of staff and head of operations of the newly formed Israeli army, but he continued to rent that room. Consequently the kitchen where my mother sat up that night, and the previous night too, was a historic kitchen, because during the war several informal meetings were held there that crucially shaped the course of the conflict. There is no way of knowing whether my mother thought about this in the course of that night, between one strong coffee and the next, but if she did, it is doubtful that she found it of interest.
     ***

     On Saturday morning she told Haya and Tsvi that she had decided to go for a walk and look at handsome young men, as per the doctor's instructions. She borrowed an umbrella and a pair of lined rubber boots from her sister and went for a walk in the rain. There cannot have been many people in the streets of north Tel Aviv that wet and windy Saturday morning. That morning, January 5,1952, the temperature in Tel Aviv was five or six degrees Celsius. My mother left her sister's apartment in 175 Ben Yehuda Street at eight or eight-thirty. She may have crossed Ben Yehuda Street and turned left, or northward, toward Nordau Boulevard. She hardly encountered any shop windows on her walk, apart from the unlit window of the Tnuva Dairy where a greenish poster was fixed to the inside of the glass with four strips of brown sticky paper, showing a plump village girl against a background of verdant meadows, and above her head, against the bright blue sky, a cheery legend declared: "Milk every morning and milk every night will give you a life of good health and delight." There were still many vacant lots, the remains of the sand dunes, between the buildings in Ben Yehuda Street that winter, full of dead thistles and squills densely covered with white snails as well as scrap iron and rain-soaked rubbish. My mother saw the rows of plastered buildings that already, three or four years after they were erected, showed signs of dilapidation: peeling paint, crumbling plaster turning green with mildew, iron railings rusting in the salt sea air, balconies closed in with hardboard and plywood as in a refugee camp, shop signs that had come off their hinges, trees that were dying in the gardens for want of loving care, run-down storage sheds between the buildings, made of reused planks, corrugated iron, and sheets of tarpaulin. Rows of garbage cans, some of which had been overturned by alley cats, the contents spilling out onto the gray concrete pavement. Washing lines stretched across the street from balcony to balcony. Here and there rain-soaked white and colored underwear whirled helplessly on the lines in the high wind. My mother was very tired that morning, and her head must have been heavy from lack of sleep, hunger, and all the black coffee and sleeping pills, so that she walked slowly like a sleepwalker. She may have left Ben Yehuda Street before she reached Nordau Boulevard and turned right into Belvedere Alley, which despite its name had no view but only low plastered buildings made of concrete blocks, with rusting iron railings, and this alley led her to Motskin Avenue, which was not an avenue at all but a short, wide, empty street, only half built and partly unpaved, and from Motskin Avenue her tired feet took her to Tahon Lane and on to Dizengoff Street, where it began to rain heavily, but she forgot about the umbrella that was hanging on her arm and walked on bareheaded in the rain, with her pretty handbag hanging from her shoulder, and she crossed Dizengoff Street and went wherever her feet carried her, perhaps to Zangwill Street and then on to Zangwill Alley, and now she was really lost, without the faintest idea how to get back to her sister's or why she had to get back, and she did not know why she had come out except to follow the instructions of the specialist who had told her to walk the streets of Tel Aviv to look at handsome young men. But there were no handsome young men this rainy Saturday morning, either in Zangwill Street or in Zangwill Alley, or in Sokolov Street from which she came to Basle Street, or in Basle Street or anywhere else. Perhaps she thought about the deep shady orchard behind her parents' house in Rovno, or about Ira Steletskaya, the engineer's wife from Rovno who burned herself to death in the abandoned hut belonging to Anton the coachman's son. Or about the Tarbuth gymnasium and the vistas of river and forest. Or the lanes of old Prague and her student days there, and someone about whom apparently my mother never told us, or her sisters, or her best friend, Lilenka. Occasionally someone ran past, in a hurry to get out of the rain. Occasionally a cat went by, and my mother called to it, trying to ask something, to exchange views, or feelings, to ask for some simple feline advice, but every cat she addressed fled from her in a panic as though even from a distance it could smell that she was doomed.

    


     Around midday she returned to her sister's, where they were shocked at her appearance because she was frozen and soaked through and because she jokingly complained that there were no handsome young men in the streets of Tel Aviv: if only she had found some, she might have tried to seduce them, men always looked at her with desire in their eyes, but soon, very soon there would be nothing left to desire. Her sister Haya hurried to run her a hot bath, and my mother got in; she refused to taste a crumb of food because any food made her feel sick; she slept for a couple of hours, and in the late afternoon she dressed, put on the wet raincoat and the boots that were still damp and cold from her morning walk, and went out again as the doctor had ordered to search the streets of Tel Aviv for handsome young men. And this afternoon, because the rain had let up a bit, the streets were not so empty and my mother did not wander aimlessly, she found her way to the corner of Dizengoff Street and JNF Boulevard and from there she walked down Dizengoff Street past the junctions with Gordon Street and Frishman Street with her pretty black handbag hanging from her shoulder, looking at the beautiful shop windows and cafés and getting a glimpse of what Tel Aviv considered as Bohemian life, although to her it all looked tawdry and secondhand, like an imitation of an imitation of something she found pathetic and miserable. It all seemed to deserve and need compassion, but her compassion had run out. Toward evening she went home, refused to eat anything again, drank a cup of black coffee and then another, and sat down to look at some book that fell upside down at her feet when her eyes closed, and for some ten minutes or so Uncle Tsvi and Auntie Haya thought they heard light, irregular snoring. Then she woke up and said she needed to rest, that she had a feeling that the specialist had been quite right when he told her to walk around the town for several hours every day, and she had a feeling that tonight she would fall asleep early and would finally manage to sleep very deeply. By half past eight her sister had made her bed again with fresh sheets, and slid a hot-water bottle under the quilt because the nights were cold and the rain had just started up again and was beating against the shutters. My mother decided to sleep fully dressed, and to make quite sure that she didn't wake up again to spend an agonized night in the kitchen, she poured herself a glass of tea from the vacuum flask that her sister had left by her bedside, waited for it to cool down a little, and when she drank it, she took her sleeping pills. If I had been there with her in that room overlooking the backyard in Haya and Tsvi's apartment at that moment, at half past eight or a quarter to nine on that Saturday evening, I would certainly have tried my hardest to explain to her why she mustn't. And if I did not succeed, I would have done everything possible to stir her compassion, to make her take pity on her only child. I would have cried and I would have pleaded without any shame and I would have hugged her knees, I might even have pretended to faint or I might have hit and scratched myself till the blood flowed as I had seen her do in moments of despair. Or I would have attacked her like a murderer, I would have smashed a vase over her head without hesitation. Or hit her with the iron that stood on a shelf in a corner of the room. Or taken advantage of her weakness to lie on top of her and tie her hands behind her back, and taken away all those pills and tablets and sachets and solutions and potions and syrups of hers and destroyed the lot of them. But I was not allowed to be there. I was not even allowed to go to her funeral. My mother fell asleep, and this time she slept with no nightmares, she had no insomnia, in the early hours she threw up and fell asleep again, still fully dressed, and because Tsvi and Haya were beginning to suspect something, they sent for an ambulance a little before sunrise, and two stretcher bearers carried her carefully, so as not to disturb her sleep, and at the hospital she would not listen to them either, and although they tried various means to disturb her good sleep, she paid no attention to them, or to the specialist from whom she had heard that the psyche is the worst enemy of the body, and she did not wake up in the morning either, or even when the day grew brighter, and from the branches of the ficus tree in the garden of the hospital the bird Elise called to her in wonderment and called to her again and again in vain, and yet it went on trying over and over again, and it still tries sometimes.


     Amos Oz is the author of numerous works of fiction and essay collections. He has received the Koret Jewish Book Award, the Prix Femina, the Israel Prize, and the Frankfurt Peace Prize, and his books have been translated into more than thirty languages. Amos Oz lives in Israel.

     Nicholas de Lange is a professor at the University of Cambridge and writes on a variety of subjects. He has won many prizes for his translations.