by Amos Oz
At lunchtime, when Father came up from the printing press, his nostrils twitched, and he said blankly, "Who's been here this morning? Whose smell is this?"
Mother laughed. Ephraim Nehamkin, she said, had dropped in to play chess with her. What was wrong with that. And he had also put up a marvelous lamp by her bedside.
"Ephraim again," Father said politely, and he smiled his schoolmasterly smile.
A few days earlier, Mother had asked Ephraim to invite her to his workshop to see how the bombs were loaded with dynamite. Ephraim had apologized, muttered an embarrassed denial, reaffirmed his friendship, groped for the right words, and finally managed to promise that everything would turn out all right. Mother had burst out and called him a charlatan.
I didn't know this word. All that I could get out of Father was that the word "charlatan" was a gross insult that did not fit an openhearted lad like Ephraim.
On reconsideration, Mother withdrew what she had said, agreed that the word "charlatan" did not suit Ephraim, but implored Father to stop talking: didn't he know that her head always ached in the summer, why did he always have to contradict her and torment her all day long with his arguments?
In the workshop I found old newspapers, silence, and dust. No bleeps or whistles. No frequencies. Ephraim had disappeared once again on his wanderings. There was only the old poet, dipping his matchsticks in paste; suddenly he seized a nail file and started demolishing layer after layer of his Temple to remove some tower or other for which there was insufficient evidence in the sources.
The three Grill boys went out to the Tel Arza woods to hunt a leopard whose spoor they had come across some days earlier. It had probably come up at night from the ravines of the Judean Desert, and perhaps it was hiding even in the daytime in a cave in the woods. Or perhaps it was not a leopard but a hyena, which we called by its Arabic name, dhaba'. If the dhaba' finds you alone at night it comes out and blocks your path with its hunched back and bristles like an enormous hedgehog and starts laughing at you hideously to make you go mad with fright until in a panic you start running in the wrong direction toward the mountains and the wilderness and you go on running till you drop dead and then the hyena comes and rips you to shreds.
"Bat-Ammi," I said, "I've got a secret I can't tell you."
"Stop showing off. You haven't got any secret except the same as all the other boys that come and want me to touch them and feel it."
"No, not that. I meant something else."
"If you meant something else, why are you shivering like a rabbit? Calm down, little rabbit. You've got nothing to shiver about."
"I can kill the High Commissioner if I feel like it. I can destroy the whole of England with a single blow."
"Yes, and I can turn myself into a bat. Or into Shirley Temple."
"Do you want me to share my secret with you on condition that you let me give you a kiss just on the forehead just once and I can talk to you for a long time?" I asked without pausing to draw breath.
"I can pee standing up. Like a boy. But I'm not going to show you."
"Bat-Ammi, listen to me, cross my heart it's not because of that, you may think I'm one of those but I'm not, with me it's something different, cross my heart, just let me talk to you for a moment and give me a chance to explain."
"You're no different," said Bat-Ammi sadly, "you're just the same as the others. Just take a look at yourself, you're shaking like a leaf. You're a boy, Kolodny, and you're just the same as all the other boys and you want the same thing as them only you're too scared to say. Look, you've even got pimples on your face. What's the matter, why are you running away? What's wrong? What are you running away for, what have I said? You're nuts!"
Beyond the mountains. To be all alone there. To be a mountain boy.
A few days later, Ephraim came back from his wanderings. He was sun-tanned and withdrawn, and as usual his face wore an expression of contempt or disgust, as if in the course of his wanderings he had seen things that had filled him with despair. Mr. Nehamkin and I took up our positions in the garden so that he would be able to rest for a day or two at least. Every hour or so, we patrolled the broken-down fence together, toward the gate, and occasionally we permitted ourselves a sally into the lane. And we did manage to repel the young divorcee Esther, who taught crafts in the Lemel Girls' School.
We told her that Ephraim was far away, and she believed us, apologized, and promised to call again tomorrow.
"You must never use the word 'tomorrow' lightly," Mr. Nehamkin said to her reproachfully, in his velvet voice. "It is impossible to know what the day may bring forth. And particularly in days such as these."
I added maliciously:
"He doesn't need visitors. He's got enough to do."
But we did not succeed in stopping Ruhama, the lipless student from Mount Scopus. At the hottest time of the afternoon, when the shutters were all closed and the streets were deserted and the whole city was swept by gray fire from the desert, I came and found her sitting in a blue sarafan on the stone steps, which were covered with dead pine needles. Her hair was full of dust. She was twisting a piece of galvanized wire between her fingers. Perhaps she was passing the time by making some sort of model. She seemed to be immune to the heat, as if she herself were a heat wave.
"Hello," I said. "I'm his lieutenant. He doesn't need any visitors."
"You're just the neighbors' little boy at your games again. You ought to be ashamed of yourself," Ruhama said sadly.
"There's no reason for you to wait for him, any of you. He'll never marry any of you. You'd be better off forgetting him. He doesn't need all this."
"You're still little," her glasses laughed at me, "and you don't understand anything. He does need it. And how. Everybody does. You can sit here for a bit, if you like. You'll grow up yourself soon, and then you'll need it, too. You'll be dying for it. And then you won't be such a little hero. What are you staring at my knees for? Do you want me to give you a box on the ear?"
When Ruhama raised her voice and threatened to give me a box on the ear, she looked as though she was choking back a sob, and I, too, suddenly started shaking and I could feel the tears coming and I turned and ran as fast as my legs would carry me to the front yard into the blinding sunshine. The Grill boys were struggling sweatily among the thistles with a kitten they were trying to hang from a low bough of the mulberry tree. I started throwing stones at them from a distance. Then they caught me and hit me on the back, in the stomach, in the face, but the kitten managed to escape among the pitch barrels. I, too, hid behind the barrels so that they would not see me crying. From there I saw Mr. Nehamkin showing Ruhama out and shuffling after her to the gate and down the lane, trying to comfort her. I could not hear the words; I could only sense his gentleness and compassion, until she was comforted and went on her way.
When she was gone I emerged.
"What's going to happen, please, Mr. Nehamkin?"
"We shall continue to suffer and to wait, Uriel. I am very sorry for us all. Eyes have we but we see not. To outward appearances we are fearlessly made, but in truth we are consumed by our afflictions. From now on, my boy, we shall redouble our vigilance, you and I: the versifier and the youth shall hold the fort and guard the truth. Do not weep, young Uriel; surely we have shed tears enough already in our long years of exile."
Ephraim woke up toward evening. He thrust his curly head under the faucet and returned, dripping and silent, to his work. He lit a cigarette with wet hands. He did not utter a word. For an hour and a half or so, until Mother came out onto the balcony to call me home, I sat on the floor in my gym shorts and "Young Maccabeans" T-shirt, with my hands clasped around my knees, and watched him dismantle and reassemble a complicated switchboard full of knobs, switches, and buttons. Ephraim was doggedly silent. I did not interrupt him. Once he looked up, chuckled sourly at the sight of me, and said with surprise:
"You still here?"
I smiled at him. I wanted to be big and helpful, but at the same time
I wanted to stay little so that he would go on loving me. I was afraid to tell Ephraim how we watched over him while he slept, and how we had driven Esther and Ruhama away from the house. I was ashamed at the thought of how Ruhama and I had made each other miserable to the point of tears, and how we had almost broken down and cried together.
Ephraim said:
"We're making progress, despite everything."
"But when will we be able to start?" I asked.
He stood up and bent over me and cupped my head roughly in his hands; his lips touched my forehead and my cheeks and he could see close up where I had lost one of my front teeth and maybe even the new one that was beginning to grow there.
"Be patient, Uri. The fire will break out at the proper moment, all over the country at once. We're making progress, despite everything."
7
At half past five one Friday afternoon, when the white-hot light was beginning to fade and a different, more passive light was descending on the lane, a curfew was imposed and house-to-house searches began.
The wistfulness of Sabbath Eve, the hesitant rustle of the breeze in the leaves, which the poet was forever trying to decipher in his verses, the uneasy marriage of tin and stone, the closing in of the slowly moving mountains all around, the scents of Sabbath, had all been crudely shattered. Police cars with loudspeakers dispelled the silence of the streets. A metallic voice warned the populace in Hebrew and English that the searches might continue all night. No one was to go outside. Not even onto the balconies. Obey orders. No hoarding. Cooperate. Anyone found out of doors would be risking his own life. We were hereby warned.
As soon as the car had vanished and the metallic voice faded away to other streets, Helena Grill rushed onto her balcony and tried to muster her children. She stood, disheveled and frantic, among the tubs of cactus and asparagus fern, cursing her children and her husband, sobbing in Yiddish, and when she caught sight of me crossing the yard, she called after me, "Idiot!"
Other neighbors went running to the grocer's, which had reopened, to snatch up eggs, milk, canned food, and bread. There were some who feared that the curfew would last for several days. Others repeated various rumors.
Still, this was by no means the first time. In those days, the authorities were in the habit of suddenly cordoning off one district or another and searching the houses for Underground cells or illegal arms.
At the sound of Helena Grill's shouts, Father hurried out of the kitchen, where he had been meticulously dicing onions. He took off Mother's apron, which he had been wearing, carefully folded it, and put it away. He wiped his brow with the back of his hand and went downstairs into the yard. Extracting the Grill boys one by one from the disused garden shed, he dispatched them to their home. Then he shut himself up for a while with his printing press in the basement. Eventually he came back upstairs, smelling of onions and printer's ink. He washed his hands and face and started to chew his mint leaves. His eyes were still streaming from the onions as he assured Mother that we had nothing to worry about. They wouldn't find anything, even if they dismantled the printing press down to its last screw.
"You're sure," Mother said. Father inquired whether this was a question, a compliment, or a complaint.
"I'm not sure," Mother replied, and Father responded politely:
"Of course."
I knew perfectly well that Father was right: we had nothing to worry about. They would never find the subversive leaflets, which had originated with Ephraim, then been put into prophetic language by Mr. Nehamkin, and finally printed on yellow paper by Father and his two assistants. Nor would they find my box, which was hidden behind the loose stone, because I had wrapped it in a silk stocking stuffed with sawdust sprinkled with crushed garlic to baffle the bloodhounds.
They were bound to fail: after all, we were the righteous few, and they were the tyrants.
It was six o'clock in the evening when the neighborhood was sealed off. The streets were deserted. Armored cars converged on us from three directions and drew up arrogantly, perpendicular to the road, with two wheels on the sidewalk. Machine guns were trained on our windows and rooftops. Gleaming brass ammunition belts hung down from the guns. There was even a light gun mounted on a carriage, stationed halfway down Zephaniah Street, pointing toward the glimmering mountains, as if it were from the mountains that the legions of the Underground would emerge to burst into Jerusalem.
Four truckloads of troops arrived from the Schneller Barracks. From the living-room window I watched the soldiers jump down and fan out at a run along the garden walls, covering one another as they went. Each soldier was armed with a submachine gun and a commando knife in a black sheath, and equipped with a rectangular haversack, a water bottle, and ammunition pouches; they were wearing gaiters. Despite all this, those British troops did not look in the least like the soldiers in the pictures. Most of them looked etiolated; the Judean sun that bronzed us was not kind to them.
The soldier who stationed himself outside our gate reminded me, despite his uniform and kit, of the shy young cashier in the Chancellor Road branch of the Anglo-Palestine Bank. He was smiling timidly, tucking his shirt into the top of his shorts, and suddenly started to pick his nose furiously; apparently it never occurred to him that he might be under observation.
I felt sorry for him. And for the Underground fighters who had to be in hiding. I felt sorry for my mother. For Mr. Nehamkin, who was lying alone in his bed suffering from a bad attack of summer flu. And for Ephraim, who had vanished hurriedly on his wanderings as soon as the curfew was announced, to meet his fate in some Godforsaken place where the hyena might be lurking. I even felt sorry for Helena Grill, although she had called me an idiot for no reason at all. There was nothing but sorrow as far as the eye could see. The refugees who were being turned away daily from the shores of our country and being sent off to desert islands like Zanzibar or Mauritius. Bloodthirsty gangs were prowling in the villages. Maybe Jerusalem and the Promised Land of the Bible were not here after all, but in some other corner of the earth; surely in the course of thousands of years some mistake might have arisen. And it was there that the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valley bloomed, and there that rest and peace were to be found. Maybe the Hebrew state had already been established there, and only we had been forgotten among these mountains. For a moment I longed to pardon all the foes of Israel, to forgive them everything; the Maccabees would never live again, the lions had eaten Bar Kochba, Eleazar the Hasmonean had been crushed by an elephant, and Josef Trumpeldor had been murdered by brigands. Enough. How much longer would Ruhama sit and shrivel in the sun on the workshop steps, and how much longer would we have to drive her away?
I dispelled these thoughts. There was a biblical slogan pinned up on the wall of my classroom that said, THE ADVERSARY AND THE ENEMY SHALL NOT ENTER INTO THE GATES OF THIS CITY. But now the enemy was here in our midst and we were still powerless. It was I who had written in red paint on the wall of the synagogue the words FREEDOM OR DEATH: I could not suddenly give up. Let them come. Let them search. We would withstand the test. And then we would continue the struggle to our last gasp, because we had No Alternative.
Meanwhile, orders kept pouring out in English. The troops invaded the gardens. A light evening breeze stirred, lost its nerve, and retreated. Even the dogs had fallen silent. A reprimand sounded. Perhaps one of the soldiers had made a mistake or been smitten with remorse. Their captain appeared at the end of our lane. He was a stocky, harassed-looking man with sloping shoulders. A short swagger stick danced in his hand. He seemed to be splitting his men up into small teams, changing his mind, and starting all over again. I started preaching inwardly to the captain. Demonstrating what a terrible injustice had been done to the Jewish people. Proving it from the Bible. Telling him about the suffering of the Jews. After all, they were lords of continents and islands, while we had only this tiny patch of land, and we would never budge from it. In those days there was a rumor that somewhere in or around Jerusalem was hiding t
he commander of the Hebrew Underground, the leader of the Zealots, whom I secretly called the King of Israel. How little we all knew about the commander of the Underground.
Some said one thing, some another.
Once, when Ephraim had just returned from his wanderings, he had deigned to hint to us that the commander could make himself invisible at will by means of a secret scientific trick. Comrade Grill, who was a driver in the Hammekasher bus cooperative, had once testified on oath to the women that one night, when his bus had broken down in the open country south of Jerusalem, between the suburb of Arnona and the kibbutz of Ramat Rahel, just as the bells of Bethlehem were striking midnight a solitary horseman mounted on a magnificent steed had ridden up by the light of the full moon and paused beside him for a moment before galloping off into the distance toward the Hill of Evil Counsel and Mount Zion beyond. He had even addressed Comrade Grill by his first name and said, "Zevulun, do not fear that you are alone tonight. The night is full of warriors."
There were those who maintained that the commander of the Underground was a Jewish general who had been the deputy of the Soviet Marshal Zhukov; he had commanded the successful tank offensive against the Nazi lines in the Rostov area in '44 and had later slipped into Palestine illegally, via the Caucasus and the Levant, to build up the secret Hebrew shadow army.
No one could persuade Mr. Nehamkin to abandon his firmly held opinion: for seven years a superman had been hiding in the ravines of the Judean Desert, herding goats and camels among the clefts in the rock, a seer of visions, swathed darkly in a desert robe like the chief of one of the tribes, sending his battle orders up to Jerusalem with barefoot urchins who were indistinguishable from the Bedouin children. Never, said Mr. Nehamkin, would the British be able to lay their hands on this superman, and he it was who, when the day came, would ascend the throne of the kings of Judah in Jerusalem. Mr. Nehamkin had dedicated some of his poems to him, including the cycle "A Waking Trance," the "Songs of War and Vision," an "Ode to Him That Cometh from Seir," and a short elegy entitled "Steel and Yearning."
