by Amos Oz
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 ju
st 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 l
iteratures 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.
