by Amos Oz
3
Mother said:
"I shall wear my blue dress with the V-shaped neckline, and I shall be the belle of the ball. We'll order a taxi, too."
Father said:
"Yes, and don't forget to lose a glass slipper."
Hillel said:
"Me, too."
But children are not taken to May Balls at the High Commissioner's palace. Even good children, even children who ate cleverer than is usual for their age. And the ball would certainly not end before midnight. So Hillel would spend the evening next door with Madame Yabrova the pianist and her niece, Lyubov, who called herself Binyamina Even-Hen. They would play the phonograph for him, give him his supper, let him play a little with their collection of dolls of all nations, and put him to bed.
Hillel tried to protest:
"But I still have to tell the High Commissioner who's right and who's wrong."
Father replied patiently:
"We are right, and I'm sure the High Commissioner knows it in his heart of hearts, but he has to carry out the wishes of the King."
"I don't envy that king because God is going to punish him and Uncle Mitya calls him King Chedorlaomer of Albion and he says the Underground will capture him and execute him because of what he's done to the Remnant of Israel," the boy said excitedly and all in one breath.
Father replied mildly, choosing his words with care:
"Uncle Mitya sometimes exaggerates a little. The King of England is not Chedorlaomer, but George the Sixth. He will probably be succeeded on the throne by one of his daughters, because he has no son. To kill a man except in self-defense is murder. And now, Your Majesty King Hillel the First, finish up your cocoa. And then go and brush your teeth."
Mother, with a hairpin between her teeth and holding a pair of amber earrings, remarked:
"King George is very thin and pale. And he always looks so sad."
When he reached the end of the third form, Hillel wrote a letter and typed it in triplicate on his father's typewriter. He sent two of the copies to the King in London and to the High Commissioner: "Our land belongs to us, both according to the Bible and according to justice. Please get out of the Land of Israel at once and go back to England before it is too late."
The third copy passed from hand to hand among the excited neighbors. Madame Yabrova the pianist said, "A child poet!" Her niece, Lyubov Binyamina, added: "And look at his curly hair! We ought to send a copy to Dr. Weizmann, to give him a little joy." Brzezinski the engineer said that it was no good exaggerating, you couldn't build a wall out of fine words. And from Gerald Lindley, Secretary, there came a brief reply on official government notepaper: "Thank you for your letter, the contents of which have been duly noted. We are always receptive to the opinions of the public. Yours faithfully."
And how the geraniums blazed in the garden in the blue summer light. How the pure light was caught by the fingers of the fig tree in the yard and shattered into nervous fragments. How the sun burst up early in the morning behind Mount Scopus to torment the whole city and suddenly turn the gold and silver domes to dazzling flames. How joyfully or desperately the throngs of birds shrilled.
The metal drainpipe absorbed the heat and was sweet to the touch in the morning. The clean gravel that Father had spread along the path that wound down from the veranda steps to the fence and to the fig tree to the bottom of the garden was white and pleasant under bare feet.
The garden was small, logically planned, uncompromisingly well kept: Father's dreams had laid out square and rectangular flower beds among the rocky gulleys, a lonely island of clear, sober sanity in the midst of a savage, rugged wasteland, of winding valleys, of desert winds.
And surrounding us was the estate of Tel Arza, a handful of new houses scattered haphazardly on a hilltop. The mountains might move in one night and silently enfold everything, the houses, the hesitant saplings, the hopes, the unpaved road. A herd of Arab goats would arrive to munch and trample chrysanthemums, narcissuses, snapdragons, sparse beginnings of lawn here and there. And the shepherd would stand silent and motionless, watching the ravaging goats and looking perhaps like a scorched cypress tree.
All day Hillel could see the ranges of bare mountains all around. At times he could sense in the bright-blue flood the autumn piling up in unseen valleys.
Autumn would come. The light would fade to gray. Low clouds would seize the mountains. He would climb to the top of the fig tree, and from there in the autumn light he might be able to see the sea and the desert, the islands in the tattered clouds, the mysterious continents that Father had told him about dryly and Mother with tears of longing.
Father used to say that the beautiful lands had vomited us up here in blind hatred, and that therefore we would build ourselves a land a thousand times as beautiful here. But Mother would call the land a backyard, and say that there would never be a river, a cathedral, or a forest here. Uncle Mitya the lodger used to chuckle through his rotten teeth and utter broken phrases about birth pangs, death throes, Jerusalem killing its prophets, God's curse on ruined Babylon. He was also a vegetarian.
Hillel could not make out from these words whether Mitya agreed with Father or with Mother. What Mother said seemed to him incongruous, and he would go down to the bottom of the garden to hide among the branches of the fig tree and sniff for the autumn. Autumn would come. Autumn sadness would accompany him to school, to his music lessons with Madame Yabrova, to the "Zion's Ransom" lending library, to his bed at night, into his dreams. While a rainstorm raged outside, he would compose an article for the class newspaper. The word "forest," which Mother had used when she wanted to denigrate the land, cast a strange, melancholy spell over him.
4
Hillel was a pudgy, awkward little boy. He had a hiding place at the end of the garden, behind the fig tree or up among its branches, which he called his "hideaway." He would hide himself away there and secretly eat sticky sweets that the women gave him, and dream of Africa, the sources of the Nile, the lions in the jungle.
At night he would wake up with attacks of asthma. Especially in the early summer. Feverish, suffocated, he would see the horrific smile of the terrifying white thing through the slats of the shutters and burst into tears. Until Father appeared holding a small flashlight, to sit on his bed and sing him a soothing song. Aunts, neighbors, and nursery-school teachers adored Hillel, with Russian kisses and Polish displays of affection. They called him "Little Cherry." Sometimes they would leave heavy lip marks on his cheeks or his mouth. These women were plump and excitable. Their faces wore an expression of bitter complaint: Life has not been as kind to me as I deserve.
Madame Yabrova the pianist and her niece, Lyubov, who called herself Binyamina Even-Hen, in the determined way they played the piano, seemed to be nobly refraining from repaying life for what it had done to them. Mrs. Vishniak the pharmacist would grumble to Hillel and say that little children were the only hope of the Jewish people, and particularly of herself. At times Hillel wrapped himself in introspection or sadness, and then he would delight them with a sweet phrase, such as:
"Life is a circle. Everyone goes around and around."
And stir ripples of emotion.
But the children of Tel Arza called him by the unpleasant nickname "Jelly." Unkind, skinny girls, vicious Oriental girls, enjoyed knocking him down on a heap of gravel and pulling his blond hair. Keys and amulets hung around their necks. They emitted a pungent smell of peanuts, sweat, soap, and halvah.
Hillel would always wait until they had had enough of him and his curls. Then he would get up and shake the dust off his gym shorts and his cotton undershirt; gasping for breath, his eyes full of tears, he would bite his lip and begin to forgive. How nobly forgiveness shone in his eyes: those girls did not know what they were doing; they probably had unhappy fathers and brothers who were high up in the underworld or in football; their mothers and sisters probably went out with British soldiers. It was a terrible thing to be born an Oriental girl. And one of them had even
started to grow breasts under her sweaty vest. Hillel reflected, forgave, and was filled with love of himself for his ability to understand and to forgive.
Then he would run to Mrs. Vishniak's pharmacy to cry a little, not because of the scratches but because of the cruel lot of the girls and his own magnanimity. Mrs. Vishniak would kiss him, console him with sticky candy, tell him about the mill on the banks of the blue river, which no longer existed. He would tell her, in carefully chosen words, about a dream he had had the previous night, interpret the dream himself, and leave behind a delicate mood of poetry as he went off to practice the piano in the dark, airless house of Madame Yabrova and Binyamina. He returned the caresses he had received from Mrs. Vishniak to the haughty bronze Beethoven on top of the sideboard. After all, Herzl, in his youth, was called a madman in the street. And Bialik was always being beaten.
In the evening, before he went to bed, Hillel would be summoned to his father's room in his pajamas. This room was called the study. It contained bookshelves, a desk, and a glass-fronted showcase of fossils and ancient pots; the whole was skeptically surveyed from a sepia photograph by the famous geographer Hans Walter Landauer.
He had to utter an intelligent sentence or two for the benefit of the guests. Then he was kissed and sent off to bed. From across the corridor came the sounds of the grownups talking passionately, and Hillel in his bed caught their passion and began to pamper his tiny organ with his fingers through the opening of his pajama trousers.
Later, the forlorn sound of Lyubov Binyamina's cello came to him through the darkness, and he suddenly despised himself. He called himself "Jelly." He was filled with sorrow for all men and women. And fell asleep compassionately.
"He's a real mensh," Mrs. Vishniak would say in Yiddish. "Clever. Witty. A little devil. Just like the whole family."
Beyond the low fence, which Father had made from iron posts and old netting and painted in bright colors, began the wasteland. Plots of scrap iron, dust, smelling of thistles, of goat dung; and farther on, the wadi and the lairs of foxes and jackals; and still farther down, the empty wood where the children once discovered the remains of a half-eaten Turkish soldier in the stinking tatters of a janissary's uniform. There were desolate slopes teeming with darting lizards and snakes and perhaps hyenas at night, and beyond this wadi, empty, stony hills and more wadis, in which Arabs in desert robes roamed with their flocks all day long. In the distance were more and more strange mountains and strange villages stretching to the end of the world, minarets of mosques, Shu'afat, Nabi Samwil, the outskirts of Ramallah, the wail of a muezzin borne on the wind in the evening twilight, dark women, deadly-sly, guttural youths. And a slight hint of brooding evil: distant, infinitely patient, forever observing you unobserved.
Mother said:
"While you, Hans, are dancing like a teddy bear with that old lady you treated, I shall sit all alone in my blue dress on a wickerwork chair at the end of the veranda, sipping a martini and smiling to myself. But later on I, too, shall suddenly get up and dance, with the Governor of Jerusalem, or even with Sir Alan himself. Then it will be your turn to sit it out by yourself, and you won't feel at all like smiling."
Father said:
"The boy can hear you. He understands exactly what you're saying."
And Hillel said:
"So what?"
For the occasion, Father borrowed from his neighbor Engineer Brzezinski an English evening suit made by the Szczupak textile factory in Lodz. Mother sat on the shady balcony all morning altering it to fit him.
At lunchtime, Father tried the suit on at the mirror, shrugged his shoulders, and remarked:
"It's ridiculous."
Mother, laughing, said:
"The boy can hear you. He understands everything."
Hillel said:
"So what? 'Ridiculous' isn't a dirty word."
Father said:
"No word is dirty in itself. In general, dirt lies either behind words or between them."
And Mother:
"There's dirt everywhere here. Even in the grand ideas you're always putting into Hillel's head. Even in your stray remarks. And that's also ridiculous."
Father said nothing.
That morning the newspaper Davar said that the politics of the White Paper were leading up a blind alley. Hillel, with an effort of the imagination, could almost visualize the "blind alley."
Mitya the vegetarian lodger padded barefoot from his room to the kitchen to make himself a glass of tea. He was a tall, etiolated young man with thinning hair. His shoulders always drooped, and he walked with short, nervous steps. He had an odd habit of suddenly chewing the tip of his shirt collar, and also of angrily stroking every object he came across, table, banister, bookshelf, Mother's apron hanging on a hook in the kitchen. And he would whisper to himself. Engineer Brzezinski declared hotly that one day it would emerge that this Mitya was really a dangerous Communist in disguise. But Mother good-naturedly offered to launder his few clothes with the family wash.
As Mitya shuffled to the kitchen, he waved his hand in every direction in greeting, as though confronting a large crowd. Suddenly his glance fell on the words "blind alley" in the headline on the center page of Davar, lying open on the oilcloth on the kitchen table. He bared his bad teeth and snarled furiously:
"What rubbish."
Then, clasping the hot glass in his large white hands, he strode stormily back to his room, locking his door behind him.
Mother said softly:
"He's just like a stray dog."
After a short pause, she added:
"He washes five times a day, and after each time he puts on scent, and even so he always smells. We ought to find him a girl friend. Perhaps a new immigrant from the Women's Labor Bureau, poor but charming. Now, Hans, you go and shave. And Hillel—go on with your homework. What am I doing in this madhouse?"
5
She had come from Warsaw as a young woman to study ancient history at the university on Mount Scopus. Before a year was up, she was in despair at the country and the language. Nyuta, her elder sister in New York, had sent her a ticket to go from Haifa to America aboard the Aurora. A few days before the date of her departure, Dr. Ruppin had introduced her to Father, shown him her beautiful water colors, and expressed in German his sadness that the young lady was also leaving us, that she, too, found the country unbearable and was sailing to America in disappointment.
Hans Kipnis looked at the water colors for a while and suddenly thought of the wandering German ornithologist with whom he had traveled to the remote sources of the Jordan. He traced the lines of one of the pictures delicately with his finger, hurriedly withdrew his hand, and uttered some remarks about loneliness and dreams in general and in Jerusalem in particular.
Mother smiled at him, as though he had accidentally broken a precious vase.
Father apologized and lapsed into an embarrassed silence.
Dr. Ruppin had a pair of tickets for a concert that night by a recently formed refugee chamber orchestra. He was glad to present the tickets to the young couple: he could not go anyway, because Menahem Ussishkin the Zionist leader had unexpectedly arrived from abroad a day or two earlier, and as usual had convened a frantic meeting for that evening.
After the concert, they strolled together along Princess Mary's Way. The shopwindows were brightly lit and decorated, and in one of them a small mechanical doll bobbed up and down. For a moment, Jerusalem looked like a real city. Ladies and gentlemen walked arm in arm, and some of the gentlemen were smoking cigarettes in short cigarette holders.
A bus stopped beside them, and the driver, who was wearing shorts, smiled at them invitingly, but they did not get on. An army jeep with a machine gun mounted on it rolled down the street. And in the distance a bell rang. They both agreed that Jerusalem was under some cruel spell. Then they agreed to meet again the next day to eat a strawberry ice cream together at Zichel's Café.
At a nearby table sat the philosopher Martin Buber and the writer'
S. Y. Agnon. In the course of a disagreement, Agnon jokingly suggested that they consult the younger generation. Father made some remark; it must have been perceptive and acute, because Buber and Agnon both smiled; they also addressed his companion gallantly. At that moment Father's blue eyes may perhaps have lit up behind his round spectacles, and his sadness may have shown around his mouth.
Nineteen days later, the Nazis publicly declared their intention of building up their armed forces. There was tension in Europe. The Aurora never reached Haifa; she changed her course and sailed instead to the West Indies.
Father arranged to see his fellow townsman Professor Julius Wertheimer, who had been his patron ever since he had arrived in Palestine. He said he wanted to consult him on a personal matter. He was confused, furtive, obstinate, and tongue-tied.
Professor Wertheimer listened in an anxious silence. Then he drove his cats out of the room and closed the door behind them. When they were alone, he warned Father obliquely not to complicate his private life unnecessarily. And it was precisely these words that brought Father to the certainty that he was finally in love.
Ruth and Hans were married in Jerusalem on the day that Hitler declared in Nuremberg that he was bent on peace and understanding and that he detested war. The guests consisted of the officials of the veterinary department, including two Christian Arabs from Bethlehem, the Ruppin family, some refugees and pioneers, a few neighbors from Tel Arza, and an emaciated revolutionary student from the university who could not take his blazing eyes off the beautiful bride. He it was who toasted the happy couple on behalf of all their friends and vowed that right would triumph and that we would see as much with our own eyes. But he spoiled the effect of his words by getting thoroughly drunk on one bottle of Nesher beer and calling the bridegroom and bride respectively "burzhui" and "artistka." The guests departed, and Father hired a taxi to convey Mother's few belongings from her simple room in Neve Sha'anan to the house he had been making ready for several years in the suburb of Tel Arza.
