A Tale of Love and Darkness

by Amos Oz

  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! God 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 God hates us so I hate him back! I hate God! 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 w
ere 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 w
ere 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.