by Amos Oz
Meanwhile, Father's two assistants, Abrasha and Lilienblum, arrived, bringing the morning paper. I declared a ceasefire in the suburbs of Berlin and ran to see what the headlines said. The newspaper told of the extensive searches mounted by the British all over the country and of bloodshed in one of the kibbutzim: the pioneers had forcibly resisted the confiscation of their defensive arms; two had been shot and wounded and many others had been interned in detention camps.
Father placed a glass of black coffee before Abrasha and handed Lilienblum a glass of cafe au lait. Meanwhile, he turned the newspaper over and scrutinized the obituary column minutely, sighing as he did so. Then he took off his glasses, suddenly thrust aside his accounts and the remains of his breakfast, caught a tottering yogurt pot just in time, and at once stood up and suggested that they get to work. It was nearly half past eight.
Unless, of course, he said, anyone wanted some more coffee.
I followed them down to the printing press in the basement. I knew that before the curfew Father had hidden the seditious pamphlets in a sealed can and sunk it to the bottom of a tub of printer's ink. I wanted to see with my own eyes how they would bring this submarine to the surface and where they would put it next. But Father reflected and decided not to change the hiding place, because it had not failed him. He switched on the electric motor. At once he switched it off again. He carefully checked the pivots and the rollers. He squeezed a few drops of oil onto the pistons. Then he started the motor again and turned to his composing desk.
"It's all over with Linda," Abrasha declared suddenly with the air of one resuming an interrupted conversation. "And good riddance, too."
"What, again?" Father asked, and I could sense his schoolmasterly smile.
"Finished. She's nabbed the son of Hamidoff from Barclay's Bank, and they're off to Paris next weekend. No wedding."
"There's no point in feeling bad about it," Father said reassuringly. "You were too good for her anyway."
Lilienblum suddenly exploded with a dull groan:
"To hell with them. They're all the same shit. Englishmen, Frenchmen, women. They ought to be kicked out, all of them. And Dr. Weizmann, too."
Abrasha was a taciturn albino, with no eyebrows and delicate white skin and hair, as if he were made of paper. He started the cutting machine. My private name for this machine was the Guillotine. When the High Commissioner was kidnapped, they'd bring him here and in this very basement Ephraim would execute the sentence mercilessly, without batting an eyelid. We must have no pity on the foes of Israel. Let alone plead with them, like Dr. Weizmann. A shy, unconscious smile played around Abrasha's lips as he guillotined the edges of the pamphlets. And I stuffed the wriggly snakes of paper down the front of my vest.
Lilienblum, who was an Orthodox Jew, was arranging the letters in the oblong frame, using steel forceps. His glasses were steel-framed, too. He always addressed me in Yiddish as "little devil." He would wheedle in his stentorian voice:
"A Yiddishe yingele mit a goyish punin. A pogromshchik mit a goldene neshome."
But for once he spoke not to me but to himself, as if unable to contain himself at this morning's sordid news:
"Barclay's Bank. Women," he grunted. "Pfui. Shit!"
At this I went out into the yard. The spell of the early light had worn off. There was no freshness left in the trees or around them. The air was beginning to glow white-hot, just as I had predicted. The Grill boys were not back from their leopard hunt yet. When they wanted to tease me, they would always chant their stupid rhymes at me: "Uri, Uri, sound and fury." Or: "Uri wants to play; frighten him away." And they made up dirty stories about Ephraim Nehamkin and my mother. They had written in yellow paint on the broken-down gate: KRAZY FROIKE FUKS URIS MOM.
Underneath this inscription, I suddenly discovered now a postscript that I could not begin to understand but which I started scratching out furiously with my fingernails:
AND URI TO.
At a quarter past nine, the van from the Angel Bakery turned into the lane. For some reason it pulled up outside our gate. I stopped scratching at the writing and watched to see what on earth. It was hot. Angry wasps were mustering under the dripping tap. A stray butterfly fluttered aimlessly among the thistles. There was a dusty smell in the air. Zaki, the baker's boy, leaped down from the driver's cab. He glanced quickly up and down the lane, opened up the rear door of the van, and drew out from among the baskets of bread a kind of surprised, blinking gentleman, a diminutive gentleman in a dark suit, clutching a tool bag. I couldn't understand why they had fetched the doctor. Perhaps Mommy had fainted again, or Helena Grill had had a fit of hysterics. But since when did doctors arrive in bakers' vans? As Zaki and the doctor ran past me toward the basement steps, I suddenly identified the man: it wasn't the doctor, it was Mr. Szczupak, the proprietor of Riviera Fashions on King George Street. I remembered how Mommy had taken me there to help her choose a summer dress. Perhaps she had been disappointed at the selection. She had changed her mind, and instead of buying a dress decided to go to another shop and put down a deposit on a phonograph. I recalled that Mr. Szczupak was not upset but invited her to come back to his shop after the holidays. In the autumn he would have a new stock in, he said. The fashions would have changed, too.
From somewhere or other Ephraim appeared, in a blue overall. He caught up with Zaki and Mr. Szczupak, gently took the visitor by tie elbow, and escorted him downstairs to the printing press. Not a word passed between them. Zaki turned, slipped outside, scrutinized the rooftops and balconies briefly, sniffed the air, and made up his mind. He made a dash for the driver's cab and reversed the van up the lane and out into the road. A stench of gasoline mingled for a moment with the smell of dust. And then once more there was only dust and angry wasps around the dripping tap.
"Scram. Get out of here. This minute." Father ordered me out in an expressionless voice.
I had hardly ever heard him speak like that before.
I obeyed at once and left the press. But before I left I just had time to notice in a flash that it was not Mr. Szczupak after all, but another man who looked like him, an older man, a kind of faded, worn-out version of Mr. Szczupak. Perhaps his older brother. And I saw Ephraim and the visitor disappearing through a narrow passage between the piled-up rolls of paper. I felt an icy shiver down my spine. Even if they killed me. Even if they pulled out all my fingernails one by one. Even if they killed Bat-Ammi. I'd never tell.
10
At midday, the Grill boys came back from the hunt. I was pleased to see that the leopard had been too cunning for them. Still, they did not return empty-handed, and at that I was not so pleased. They had brought back a cardboard box full of brass cartridge-cases. Never mind. I didn't care. I knew, and they didn't. In three places—in the back entrance to the staircase, inside the door of the shed in the yard, and in another secret place, in the mulberry tree—I had hidden explosive booby traps the way I'd learned from Ephraim. They were cans full of kerosene with remote-control fuses. In the kerosene I had put live matches, broken glass, slivers of brass, and electric wires.
Let them come.
They'll pay with their own blood.
Let them come, I say.
I decided for once to overlook the Grill boys' taunts. True, their father was a cooperative bus driver, they had a sister and I didn't, they had cartridge cases, they were on the tracks of a leopard, and they hadn't taken me hunting with them. Never mind. What I had seen that morning Boaz Grill would never see, even in his wildest dreams.
Joab said:
"He's been trying to start something with Bat-Ammi. He begged her to let him see and she laughed at him and wouldn't let him and she told us all about it, how he cried and ran away home. Little rabbit. He thought he could do to Bat-Ammi what Froike Nehamkin does to his mom."
I said nothing.
"He doesn't know what to say. Look at him, turning his face away, as if we can't see that he's blubbering."
I said nothing.
I
could have told them that I had seen their mom changing her dress the day before in the mirror through the window during the curfew. But I kept quiet and said nothing.
"Bat-Ammi says he's still a baby. She says he hasn't got a single hair down there yet," Abner shrilled.
Suddenly I turned and rushed up the stairs, taking them two at a time, running up, onto the roof, to my lookout, not hearing their laughter or the things they were saying about my parents. Let them talk. I've got no time for them. I'm on the lookout.
Carefully, thoughtfully, I had selected a concealed position on the roof, among the junk and the water cisterns, behind the clotheslines. From here I could survey the whole city. The Schneller Barracks were spread out at my feet. I even had a telescope, made from a Quaker Oats package and some disks of bluish glass. I could see the English soldiers busily preparing for the High Commissioner's visit. From here, if I only had a machine gun, I could pick off the High Commissioner, the Grill boys, everyone. And then escape to the mountains and be a mountain boy. Forever.
Meanwhile, I took careful stock of the situation in Jerusalem. I could see the roofs of Kerem Avraham, a corner of the Bokharan Quarter, and farther on I could see Mount Scopus and the Mount of Olives shimmering on the bright horizon, towers and church spires, minarets, Shu'afat, Nabi Samwil, a giant, trunkless tree hovering on the blazing air beside the minaret of Nabi Samwil—I would head for that tree when it was all over. I could see the Tel Arza woods, too. Secretly, I was on the side of the leopard who was hiding there. I knew that they would never be able to catch it because it was everybody's nightmare, as Mother put it. I would follow the leopard beyond the mountains to the forests of leopards, and I would live among them like Kipling's Kim.
I could see the German houses at the approach to the suburb of Romema, and the brown tower from which the water ran at night in underground pipes till it reached even us. I could see tiled roofs and pitch-covered roofs, and forest upon forest of washing all over the city, as if the Hebrew state had suddenly sprung up and the whole city were dressed in multicolored bunting. And I could see the midday sunlight growing brighter and brighter as if it would never stop and I would be absorbed in the sunshine and become invisible and pass through walls like a moonbeam and wreak revenge and go to Bat-Ammi at night and say: Don't be afraid Bat-Ammi you can't see me but feel me it's me I've come to take you away from here let's leave this place and go to the forests of leopards and there we shall be.
The city was turning white. White summer dust had settled on the treetops. The light of Jerusalem was a desert light. In the heart of the Judean Desert there was a sea, not a sea at all but springs of water, the home of the Essenes and the dreamers whom the Roman legions had not been able to discover. From there the wind blew bearing a smell of dry dust and a smell of salt. This would be the last time I'd cry. There would be no more tears, even when the English tore out my fingernails one by one, I wouldn't tell about the man disguised as the doctor, as Mr. Szczupak, in Daddy's printing press.
Through the dust and salt came another smell, faintly: I could not tell whether it came from far away, from the Mountains of Moab, from the springs of water, or whether it originated nearby, in the house or even inside me. If you tried to say to those mountains, "With all the warmth of my heart and until my dying breath," they would burst out laughing. They might not even deign to laugh, because they were mountains and we were none of their business and they couldn't care less what happened to us here. Theirs was a different language. If only I knew the language of the mountains I would also be at rest, I couldn't care less what.
I'd learn.
Meanwhile, I wouldn't budge from my lookout post on the roof, to sound the alarm if they came again to search from house to house. The city of Jerusalem was stricken with sea-longing through the blue glass of the telescope I had made. The pine trees were smoke. The stone and corrugated iron were burnished brass, and the forests of washing were flights of birds in the wind.
I stood on guard on the roof till two o'clock in the afternoon. At two my father came out of the basement, followed by Abrasha, Ephraim, and Lilienblum. He locked the iron door. They exchanged a few words and left. They had left Mr. Szczupak in the basement, unless there was a tunnel underneath the electric motor.
Not Mr. Szczupak. His brother. Someone else. A man who had arrived in the baker's van disguised as a doctor, but underneath the disguise there was no Mr. Szczupak but a wiry youth a leopard whose eyes flashed lightning.
We ate at three o'clock: bean soup, rissoles, potatoes, and raw carrots. Then I drank down two glasses of iced lemonade and hurried back to my lookout post, so that I could be the first to give warning of danger.
But there was no danger. Only the deepening evening, gathering force among the pine trees. At six o'clock, a railway engine hooted away in the German Colony. It's a long, long way. I could observe the scorching sun gradually swathed in soot above Sheikh Badr and then drifting away to Givat Shaul and beginning to sink in the violet clouds and touching the hills and the hills turning violet too till it was impossible to tell what was hill and what was cloud and what was troops of horses at the edge of the sky.
Finally the horizon darkened. Jerusalem was left alone, dotted here and there with spots of yellow light. The street lamp in our lane also started to glow weakly. Mother came out onto the balcony to call me indoors.
In the living room, my father and Ephraim were sitting over the chessboard, one in a white vest and the other in a khaki shirt left unbuttoned on purpose to expose his dark chest.
The elderly poet dozed peacefully in the armchair.
He was deaf and tormented, his head withdrawn into his shoulders. I was suddenly reminded of the empty tortoise shell in the yard. I remembered how Ephraim had said that I would replace Mr. Nehamkin and be the poet and cashier. How he had regretted his words, and how he had reveled in the funeral oration his father would pronounce over the two of us when we had fallen side by side on the battlefield.
"Are we expecting a visitor?" I asked, and immediately was sorry I asked.
Ephraim pursed his lips.
"Did you say something?" he hissed venomously.
"Don't worry," Father put in anxiously. "Uri's all right."
Ephraim said:
"Don't talk so much, Kolodny. Every word is one word too many."
"That'll do now; stop it, the pair of you," Mother entreated. "Don't start quarreling."
Silence fell.
11
I could guess for myself what they had not told me. Underneath the printing press there was a steel trap door in the floor. From this trap door a winding staircase led down into an underground cavern under the house, an ancient catacomb or an Arab rock cave. Presumably Ephraim and his comrades were anxious to turn it into a bunker where we could shelter safely when the day of reckoning came. All along the cold rock walls, by lantern light, were ranged large cans of water and fuel, cans of provisions, ammunition crates, hand grenades, batteries and radio transmitters, maybe even some of Mr. Nehamkin's sacred books. And there, for the moment, Mr. Szczupak was resting till the heat was off; no, not Mr. Szczupak, the amazing lean leopard youth.
Perhaps he would come up tonight. Inside his doctor's bag he had a sniper's rifle, dismantled. The kitchen window commanded a view of the parade ground of the Schneller Barracks. The High Commissioner would come to review the troops, and suddenly a tiny flower would sprout on his forehead, and he would totter and fall. Then Ephraim and his comrades would emerge from their various hiding places and put the John of Gischala plan into operation. At a single stroke. I'll keep my clothes on tonight. I won't sleep. The earth will quake, cities will blaze, towers will topple to the ground. No more counting of the hours and days.
And when victory was ours, the Grill family would be carted off to the traitor's camps, but I would stand in the yard and say softly: All except Bat-Ammi. Let her be. She's all right. The commander would tell them to do as I said and release the girl at once.
"Where are you?" said Father. "Building castles in Spain?"
"The boy's miserable," said Mother.
"Nobody's miserable," I said. "I've come to give you a hand."
In the kitchen everything was carefully laid out on the black glass-topped trolley. Six teaspoons. Six cups. Six dessert plates. They'd brought out the best crockery tonight. Sugar, milk, lemon. Reinforcements of fruit and nuts. Paper napkins, each with a picture of a white-sailed fishing boat. The kettle began to whistle. Ephraim went out and came back with the visitor.
"Good evening," we all said.
He shrugged.
From close up, in the electric light, he was an immaculately dressed gentleman with woolly gray hair and wolflike jaws. He took off his jacket, blew some specks of dust off it, and draped it over the back of his chair. Then he pinched both trouser seams a little way above the knee, lifted them slightly, and sat down. Only then did he speak.
"All right."
When the visitor took off his jacket, I could see that his trousers were held up by a pair of striped suspenders, but that he was also wearing a tightly fastened belt.
Father said:
"Now, look here, Uri. Listen carefully. This is Mr. Levi. He's our guest. Mr. Levi is going to stay with us for a little while, because where he lives there are certain difficulties. As far as the neighbors are concerned, and the same goes even for Mr. Lilienblum and Comrade Abrasha, Mr. Levi is your uncle; he has just arrived from abroad on an illegal immigrant ship, and we are seeing about his papers. I hope I need say no more."
