by Неизвестный
Father silently obeyed and opened all the windows.
The evening air of Jerusalem came in, and with it smells of cabbage, pine trees, and garbage.
He produced from his pocket a Health Service pillbox, carefully opened it, and handed Lady Bromley an aspirin. He did not know the English for “migraine,” and so he said it in German. Doubtless his eyes at that moment shone with a sympathetic optimism behind his round spectacles.
After a few minutes, Lady Bromley asked to be taken back to her seat. One of the high-ranking officials took down Father’s name and address and dryly thanked him. They smiled. There was a moment’s hesitation. Suddenly the official held out his hand. They shook hands.
Father went back to his seat in row 29, between his wife and his son. He said:
“It was nothing. It was just the climate.”
The lights went out again. Once more General Montgomery pursued General Rommel mercilessly across the desert. Fire and dust clouds filled the screen. Rommel appeared in close-up, biting his lip, while in the background, bagpipes skirled ecstatically.
Finally, the two anthems, British and Zionist, were played. The celebration was over. The people left the Edison Cinema and made for their homes. The evening twilight suddenly fell upon Jerusalem. In the distance, bald hills could be seen, with here and there a solitary tower. There was a sprinkling of stone huts on the faraway slopes. Shadows rustled in the side streets. The whole city was under the sway of a painful longing. Electric lights began to come on in the windows. There was a tense expectancy, as if at any moment a new sound might break out. But there were only the old sounds all around, a woman grumbling, a shutter squeaking, a lovesick cat screeching among the garbage cans in a backyard. And a very distant bell.
A handsome Bukharian barber in a white coat stood alone in the window of his empty shop and sang as he shaved himself. At that moment, a patrolling British jeep crossed the street, armed with a machine gun, brass bullets gleaming in its ammunition belt.
An old woman sat alone on a wooden stool beside the entrance of her basement shop. Her hands, wrinkled like a plasterer’s, rested heavily on her knees. The last evening light caught her head, and her lips moved silently. From inside the basement, another woman spoke, in Yiddish: “It’s perfectly simple: it’ll end badly.”
The old woman made no reply. She did not move.
Outside Ernpreis the pants presser’s, Father was accosted by a pious beggar, who demanded and received a two-mil piece, furiously thanked God, cursed the Jewish Agency twice, and swept an alley cat out of the way with the tip of his stick.
From the east, the bells rang out continuously, high bells and deep bells, Russian bells, Anglican bells, Greek bells, Abyssinian, Latin, Armenian bells, as if a plague or a fire were devastating the city. But all the bells were doing was to call the darkness dark. And a light breeze blew from the northwest, perhaps from the sea; it stirred the tops of the pale trees that the City Council had planted up Malachi Street and ruffled the boy’s curly hair. It was evening. An unseen bird gave a strange, persistent cry. Moss sprouted in the cracks in the stone walls. Rust spread over the old iron shutters and veranda railings. Jerusalem stood very quiet in the last of the light.
During the night, the boy woke up again with an attack of asthma. Father came in barefoot and sang him a soothing song:
Night is reigning in the skies,
Time for you to close your eyes.
Lambs and kids have ceased from leaping,
All the animals are sleeping.
Every bird is in its nest,
All Jerusalem’s at rest.
Toward dawn, the jackals howled in the wadi below Tel Arza. Mitya the lodger began to cry out in his sleep on the other side of the wall, “Leave him alone! He’s still alive! Y-a ny-e zna-yu.” And he fell silent. Then cocks crowed far away in the quarter of Sanhedriya and the Arab village of Shu’afat. At the first light, Father put on his khaki trousers, sandals, and a neatly pressed blue shirt with wide pockets, and set off for work. Mother went on sleeping until the women in the neighboring houses started beating their pillows and mattresses with all their might. Then she got up and in her silk dressing gown gave the boy a breakfast of a soft-boiled egg, Quaker Oats, and cocoa with the skin taken off; and she combed his curly hair.
Hillel said, “I can do it by myself. Stop it.”
An old glazier passed down the street, shouting, “Perfessional glazing! America! Anything repaired!” And the children called after him, “Loonie!”
A few days later, Father was surprised to receive a gold-embossed invitation for two to the May Ball at the High Commissioner’s palace on the Hill of Evil Counsel. On the back of the invitation, the secretary had written in English that Lady Bromley wished to convey to Dr. Kipnis her gratitude and profound apology, and that Sir Alan himself had expressed his appreciation.
Father was not a real doctor. He was actually a vet.
Chapter two
He had been born and brought up in Silesia. Hans Walter Landauer, the famous geographer, was his mother’s uncle. Father had studied at the Veterinary Institute in Leipzig, specializing in tropical and subtropical cattle diseases.
In 1932, he had emigrated to Palestine with the intention of establishing a cattle farm in the mountains. He was a polite young man, quiet, principled, and full of hopes. In his dreams he saw himself wandering with a stick and a haversack among the hills of Galilee, clearing a patch of forest, and building with his own hands a wooden house beside a stream, with a sloping roof, an attic, and a cellar. He meant to get together some herdsmen and a herd of cattle, roaming by day to new pastures and by night sitting surrounded by books in a room full of hunting trophies, composing a monograph or a great poem.
For three months he stayed in a guesthouse in the small town of Yesud-Hama’alah, and from morning to night he spent whole days wandering alone in eastern Galilee looking for water buffalo in the Hula Swamps. His body grew lean and bronzed, and his blue eyes, behind his round spectacles, looked like lakes in a snowy northern land. He learned to love the desolation of the distant mountains and the smell of summer, scorched thistles, goat dung, wood ash, the dusty east wind.
In the Arab village of Halsa, he met a wandering Bavarian ornithologist, a lonely and fervently evangelical man who believed that the return of the Jews to their land heralded the salvation of the world, and was collecting material for a great work on the birds of the Holy Land. Together they roamed to the Marj-’Ayun Valley, into the Mountains of Naphtali and the Hula Swamps. Occasionally, in their wanderings, they reached the remote sources of the Jordan. Here they would sit all day in the shade of the lush vegetation, reciting together from memory their favorite Schiller poems and calling every bird and beast by its proper name.
When Father began to worry what would happen when he came to the end of the money that his mother’s uncle the famous geographer had given him, he decided to go to Jerusalem to look into certain practical possibilities. Accordingly, he took his leave of the wandering Bavarian ornithologist, gathered his few possessions, and one fine autumn morning presented himself in the office of Dr. Arthur Ruppin at the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem.
Dr. Ruppin took at once to the quiet, bronzed boy who had come to him from Galilee. He also recalled that in his youth he had studied the tropical countries in Landauer’s great Atlas. When Father began to describe the project of a cattle farm in the hills of Galilee, he took down some hasty notes. Father concluded with these words, “It is a difficult plan to put into practice, but I believe it is not impossible.
Dr. Ruppin smiled sadly: “Not impossible, but difficult to put into practice. Very difficult!”
And he proceeded to point out one or two awkward facts.
He persuaded Father to postpone the realization of his plan for the time being, and meanwhile to invest his money in the acquisition of a newly-planted orange grove near the settlement of Nes Tsiyona, and also to buy without delay a small house in the new suburb of Tel Arza,
which was being built to the north of Jerusalem.
Father did not argue.
Within a few days, Dr. Ruppin had had Father appointed as a traveling government veterinary officer and had even invited him for coffee in his house in Rehavia.
For several years, Father would get up before sunrise and travel on sooty buses up to Bethlehem and Ramallah, down to Jericho, out to Lydda, to supervise the villagers’ cattle on behalf of the government.
The orange grove hear the settlement of Nes Tsiyona began to yield a modest income, which he deposited, along with part of his government salary, in the Anglo-Palestine Bank. He furnished his small house in Tel Arza with a bed, a desk, a wardrobe, and bookshelves. Above his desk he hung a large picture of his mother’s uncle the famous geographer. Hans Walter Landauer looked down on Father with an expression of skepticism and mild surprise, particularly in the evenings.
As he traveled around the villages, Father collected rare thistles. He also gathered some fossils and pieces of ancient pottery. He arranged them all with great care. And he waited.
Meanwhile, silence cut him off from his mother and sisters in Silesia.
As the years went by, Father learned to speak a little Arabic. He also learned loneliness. He put off composing his great poem. Every day he learned something new about the land and its inhabitants, and occasionally even about himself. He still saw in his dreams the cattle farm in Galilee, although the cellar and attic now seemed to him unnecessary, perhaps even childish. One evening, he even said aloud to his great-uncle’s picture, “We’ll see. All in good time. I’m just as determined as you are. You may laugh, but I don’t care. Laugh as much as you like.”
At night, by the light of his desk lamp, Father kept a journal in which he recorded his fears for his mother and sisters, the oppressiveness of the dry desert wind, certain peculiarities of some of his acquaintances, and the flavor of his travels among godforsaken villages. He set down, in carefully chosen words, various professional lessons he had learned in the course of his work. He committed to writing some optimistic reflections about the progress of the Jewish community in various spheres. He even formulated, after several revisions, a few arguments for and against loneliness, and an embarrassed hope for a love that might come to him, too, one day. Then he carefully tore out the page and ripped it into tiny pieces. He also published, in the weekly The Young Worker, an article in favor of drinking goats’ milk.
Sometimes, in the evening, he would go to Dr. Ruppin’s home in Rehavia, where he was received with coffee and cream cakes. Or else he would visit his fellow townsman, the elderly Professor Julius Wertheimer, who also lived in Rehavia, not far from Dr. Ruppin. Occasionally there was a distant sound of faint, persistent piano music, like the supplications of a desperate pride. Every summer, the rocks on the hillside roasted, and every winter Jerusalem was ringed with fog. Refugees and pioneers continued to arrive from various foreign parts, filling the city with sadness and bewilderment. Father bought books from the refugees, some of them musty books with leather bindings and gold tooling, and from time to time he exchanged books with Dr. Ruppin or with elderly Professor Julius Wertheimer, who was in the habit of greeting him with a hurried, embarrassed hug.
The Arabs in the villages sometimes gave him cold pomegranate juice to drink. Occasionally they would kiss his hand. He learned to drink water from an upraised pitcher without letting the pitcher touch his lips. Once a woman directed a dark, smoldering glance at him from some way off, and he trembled all over and hurriedly looked away.
He wrote in his journal: “I have been living in Jerusalem for three years, and I continue to yearn for it as though I were still a student in Leipzig. Surely there is paradox here. And in general,” Father continued thoughtfully and rather vaguely, “in general there are all sorts of contradictions. Yesterday morning, in Lifta, I was obliged to put down a fine, healthy horse because some youngsters had blinded it in the night with a nail. Cruelty for its own sake seems to me to be something sordid and thoroughly unnecessary. The same evening, in Kibbutz Kiryat Anavim, the pioneers played a Bach suite on the phonograph, which aroused in me profound feelings of pity for the pioneers, for the horse, for Bach, for myself. I almost cried. Tomorrow is the King’s birthday, and all the workers in the department are to receive a special bonus. There are all sorts of contradictions. And the climate is not kind, either.”
Chapter three
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 are cleverer than 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 so thin and pale. And he always looks sad.”
1
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 v
alleys, 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, and 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.
