by Meir Shalev
And when the unloading was finished and the trucks had departed and the curious neighbors had scattered, Yordad removed the brass nameplates and the tiny screws from his pocket—the tip of his tongue sticking out here, too, moving with exertion—and affixed them to the new doors: first, the Y. MENDELSOHN, PRIVATE on the door of the apartment and then the DR. YAACOV MENDELSOHN, PEDIATRICIAN on the small ground-floor flat.
“There we go, Raya,” he said, taking a small step backward to review his handiwork. “You see? Just like in Tel Aviv. Exactly. The clinic is downstairs and we are on the second floor.”
He gave each of the screws a final tightening. “Now,” he said, “you children go find some friends. And we, Raya, shall drink our first cup of coffee in our new home. The kettle has not yet been unpacked, but I remembered to bring an immersion heater and two cups, and there are some cookies, and perhaps we will chat a bit. There is even a cypress tree growing here, which you love so well, and here is a surprise!”
A boy rode up on a bicycle, winded and sweating, then sprinted up the stairs clutching a bouquet of gladioluses. “These are for Mrs. Mendelsohn,” he said. “Sign here, please.” Yordad smiled broadly tensely, and signed, saying, “To celebrate our new home.”
My mother filled the kitchen sink with water and plunged the stems of the gladioluses into it. “Thank you, Yaacov,” she said. “They are very beautiful, and this was very nice of you. Later, when we open the boxes, I’ll move them to a vase.”
Benjamin and I went outside. Waiting for us on the street were a band of children and the Jerusalem summer, which did not cease demanding to be compared to its Tel Aviv brother, and praised. I said to Benjamin, “Let’s go back home and help set things up,” to which he responded, “You go back. I want to play”
It took very little time for my brother to learn the Jerusalem names and rules of children’s games. He continued to steal from the kiosk, which here was known as Dov’s kiosk, and when summer vacation was over he started first grade and did not have to join a class that had been formed several years earlier and fight for his status. He was swift and cunning, charming and golden, and with ease he captured a place for himself. I was sent to the third grade and, as expected, came up against a closed and suspicious pack of children. At first they poked fun at me, for a slow, thick, new child with bristly hair and a low forehead is always made fun of, but shortly they began to invite me to their homes as well, because the rumor was spreading among the parents that not only Benjamin but I, too, was the son of Dr. Mendelsohn, the famous pediatrician who had come from Tel Aviv
10
AT THAT TIME, the Jerusalem neighborhood of Beit Hakerem was bordered by open land. The shallow valley that descends from the entrance to the city—the very one we would ascend several years later to the pogrom my mother inflicted on the buses—continues southward and spills into the Refaim Creek. This was where my mother took what she called “our big trek,” the place from which she plundered the bulbs of cyclamen and anemones and brought them to her garden. Another valley known for the oversized rock called the “elephant boulder” that lay in its course, descended to the Soreq Creek. “Our little trek” was carried out there, on the back of the ridge that ran above this valley, and its sole purpose was to be able to gaze in a straight line all the way home, westward, to the distant Mediterranean. From this ridge, you commanded us to believe, we could see Tel Aviv
“Come, let’s take our little trek,” you would say, and we knew that once again we would take in the pale and distant strip of shoreline, the great expanse of blue-gray beyond, the ever-present mists inside which you repeatedly claimed lay Tel Aviv. I could not see Tel Aviv, but I believed you that it was there: Tel Aviv and the sea and the house with the balcony and the morning glory that climbed and turned blue there and the royal poinciana tree growing redder in the garden, a tree that loves heat and provides shade and that has never managed to take up residency in cold Jerusalem.
“A tree with brains,” my mother proclaimed at the end of every song of longing or praise that waxed poetic about the royal poinciana and its flowers. “It is a fact that there is not one single royal poinciana tree in all of Jerusalem. And anyone who plants one is condemning it to death, because trees can’t run away when they’re unhappy They stay put until the end.”
She and my brother, light as gazelles, skipped from boulder to boulder—in Jerusalem, terrible and evil things happen if you step on the ground, not on cracks —while I lagged behind them, my head bent, my eyes scouting the earth. At the place where the incline steepened, we stopped. The view to the far distance opened up before us. “That is where we come from, Tel Aviv,” my mother said, just as she had said in that very spot many times before.
“Not true,” Benjamin said. “We’re from Jerusalem now”
She flushed. “You don’t say ‘Not true’ to your mother!”
When Benjamin failed to answer, even casting a cheeky gaze at her, she grew angry “Did you understand me, Benjamin?”
Benjamin maintained his silence.
“Did you understand that, Benjamin? I want to hear a ‘yes’ from you!”
“Yes,” Benjamin said.
A large flock of pigeons passed by overhead on their way to the flour mill, which supplied them with residual grains of wheat. My mother tented her hand over her eyes and squinted to follow their progress with a gaze that only years later, when I had begun leading groups of bird-watchers around Israel, I came to learn was the gaze of one accustomed to observing birds as they migrate, fly to distant places, return. Then she pointed once again to the two strips of sea and shore far to the west, the one narrow, of golden sea sand, the other turning blue then gray, wide and melting into the endless heavens.
“Over there,” she said. Then suddenly she thrust two fingers into her mouth and whistled loudly “You two whistle too—let them know we’re here.”
Benjamin and I were taken by surprise. Such whistles were not part of the repertoire of virtues we credited her as having. But the moment she whistled, it seemed she had always been doing just that. Quickly she taught us to whistle: with two fingers from one hand, with one finger from each hand, and with one single finger. “Louder,” she said, “so they’ll hear us down there.”
On occasion I still make that little trek of ours today, because even in Jerusalem I have my loitering walk, a very different loitering walk from the one I take in Tel Aviv, but just as fixed. I visit Yordad in his home, then my mother—first the home in which she lived, then her grave on the Mount of Repose—and then I try to re-create our two treks. At that lookout point, from where we glanced westward with my mother, new housing has been erected, so in order to take in the two distant strips, one narrow and golden, the other bluish-gray I must stand between the buildings, on a rise that has become a road, and then descend the slope slightly, stop, whistle, and look out. A cloud of pollution has been added to the haze and the distance, crouching there and obscuring the coastal plane. Now, however, I have an excellent and expensive pair of Swarovski 10 x 40 binoculars, bought for me— naturally—by my wife, Liora, which proves the truth of my mother’s statement and Benjamin’s error. After seeing them in the hands of bird-watchers from Munich who could not praise their merits enough, I told Liora about them, then found a pair on my bed, wrapped with festive wrapping paper and a bow At the time I thought how nice it would have been to find Liora herself in my bed, with no wrapping at all (if I may be permitted one additional, humble request), but that is the way things are and a man of my age and position must run his life wisely, and with resignation.
Chapter Three
1
IMET Tirzah Fried—Tiraleh, luvey the contractor who renovated my new house for me—when I was eleven years old. I remember the day well. Summer vacation. An afternoon. Suddenly a hush fell on the street. Boys lifted their heads from games of marbles. Girls skipping rope froze in mid-twirl. Men fell silent, licking their lips. Women became Lot’s wife, pillars of salt. From around the be
nd in the road there appeared the American car, the white convertible with the red interior that every person in Jerusalem knew: the Ford Thunderbird belonging to the contractor Meshulam Fried, a large and spacious car that would stand out in any place and at any time, but especially in the lightly automobiled Jerusalem of those years.
The car parked next to our building. A short, thick man with black hair extricated himself from behind the wheel. Two children about my age, a boy and a girl, both looking very much like him, sat in the back seat. By chance I was standing at the window of our flat, and when I saw them I was overcome with trepidation. For a moment I thought my mother’s stories and Benjamin’s scorn were true: my real father and my real brother and my real sister had come to return me to my family
The man took the boy in his arms and carried him into our clinic. I was surprised to watch Yordad come out to him, something he had never done for any other patient.
“This way, please, Mr. Fried,” he said. “Come in this way.”
The man and the boy disappeared inside the clinic and I stood watching the girl, who had moved up to the front seat. My astonishment turned to pleasantness, my dread to curiosity But just then Benjamin and his gang of friends gathered to ogle the car. Benjamin told them, “It came to my house!” as he drew close, encircling the car, examining the dimensions of the round rear lights, the convertible top, the chrome plating that distorted reflections of the children’s faces, the red leather bucket seats.
“Do you know what kind of car you’re sitting in?” he asked the girl.
“My father’s car.”
A small smile flickered at the corner of her mouth. For a brief moment she was beautiful; then just as quickly she went back to being my look-alike.
“It’s a Ford Thunderbird,” Benjamin said, regaining his composure. “V-8 engine, three hundred horsepower. There’s only one of these in all of Jerusalem, maybe the whole country!” And because the girl was not impressed he added, importantly: “It’s an American car from the United States.”
The girl waved at me and smiled. I left the window, came down the stairs, and stood next to the car with the others. Her eyes lit up. “Want to sit next to me?”
I sat in the driver’s seat. Benjamin was quick to announce, “I’m his brother!” and scrambled to climb into the back seat, but the girl said, “I didn’t invite you!” and so, stunned, he stood riveted in his place.
“I’m Tirzah Fried,” she said to me. I said nothing. I had never before heard a child introduce herself that way “And you are who?” she asked.
“I’m Yair Mendelsohn,” I answered in a rush. “I’m the doctor’s son.”
“You don’t look like him,” she said. “You don’t look like that kid, either, who says he’s your brother.”
Benjamin and his friends sauntered off, and Tirzah added what I already knew myself: “You look like me and Meshulam and my brother Gershon.”
“Who’s Meshulam?”
“Meshulam Fried. He’s my father, and Gershon’s.”
“What’s wrong with your brother?” I asked.
“He has rheumatism. He swelled up and my parents are afraid something’s going to happen to his heart and he’ll die.”
“Don’t worry,” I said, full of importance, “my father will save him. He’s a very good doctor.”
And that is what happened. Tirzah Fried’s brother did not have arthritis but was allergic to penicillin. The doctor who made the diagnosis had ordered more and more penicillin for him, and his condition had worsened rapidly Meshulam Fried, who had built a whole wing of the Hadassah Hospital, had decided to turn to Dr. Mendelsohn, the new pediatrician from Tel Aviv
Dr. Mendelsohn grasped the mistake at once. “If you continue to give him penicillin,” he said, “your son will die.”
“Thank you very much,” the contractor said. And to his son he whispered, “You say thanks to the doctor, too, Gershon, say thank you that Professor Mendelsohn his very selfness is taking care of you.”
Gershon said thank you, and in the weeks following the white Thunderbird convertible continued to visit. Sometimes it was to bring Gershon to Dr. Mendelsohn and sometimes it was to bring Yordad to the Fried home. On occasion it was the contractor himself who would chauffeur Yordad, and at other times one of his foremen. And when Yordad said he could forgo the privilege, preferring to come in our own little Ford Anglia “instead of traversing Jerusalem in the car of the president of the United States,” Meshulam said, “It is not to make you feel privileged, Professor Mendelsohn, that Meshulam Fried sends his car. It is to make sure you will come.”
Meshulam Fried was capacious of hand and heart, amusing, emotional, and eruptive. All those traits were spread before us then in the stunning fan of a peacock’s tail and have remained so to this very day some forty years later. He was unfamiliar with the music to which Yordad listened, he drank libations from which Yordad abstained, he spoke loudly and with ridiculous mistakes and on occasion even spluttered obscenities. But Dr. Mendelsohn, who in general stayed away from people, found in him a good friend, a male friend, something every man needs, and something that I, for one, have never been prudent enough to find.
From every such visit Yordad returned with a small basket of chilled figs in hand. “They have a whole orchard,” he said, telling us of the contractor’s garden, and his fruit trees, and of the garden shed he’d built with a tin roof so that he could sit and enjoy listening to the pounding rain.
And he put another sheet of tin outside the bedroom window,” Yordad said, “so that he can hear the sound of the rain at night, too. And by the way, Yairi, the patient’s sister asked why you haven’t come along for a visit.”
Two days later I joined him. Benjamin was beside himself with jealousy He remained at home, trying to digest the unfathomable: that someone could prefer me to him, and that the convertible top on the Thunderbird exposed me to the gazes of all the neighborhood children.
The Fried family lived in Arnona, at the southeast corner of the city. The distance between our houses, the sudden appearance of an endless desert landscape, the sweet, far-off singing of two muezzins, heard but not seen, their voices entwined and competing with each other, the close and distant chiming of herds and churches —all these gave me the feeling that I was traveling to the other side of the world.
“This is the border,” Yordad told me, confirming my feelings. “You see, Yairi, right there on the other side of those cypress trees, that’s the kingdom of Jordan! And over there,” he added solemnly, “are the hills of Moab. Look how beautiful they are in the light from the setting sun and how close they appear to be. If you reach out your hand perhaps you’ll be able to touch them. Right there is where Moses stood on Mount Nebo and looked in this direction, and he also thought it was very close, but from the other side.”
The trip made together, the conversation, the warmth of his nickname for me—Yairi—and his hand on my shoulder, the compliance of the setting sun, which illuminated whatever he wished lit up—all these bolstered my stature. I was overwhelmed with love for him, and the anticipation of more such excursions with him.
The Fried home astonished me: large-windowed and built of pink Jerusalem stone, it managed, in spite of its immensity, to project a feeling of humility and simplicity on its surroundings. Fruit trees encircled it, and Tirzah, who was waiting for me by the front gate, invited me to pick pomegranates in the front and prickly pears in the back, and to pluck figs of all kinds—yellow and green and purple and black. Her mother, Goldie Fried, a quiet redheaded woman, served us fresh lemonade with thick slabs of bread slathered in butter, along with a jar of her homemade pickles; then she disappeared. Her pickles were so delicious that on subsequent visits I would already begin to salivate when we neared the train station, a distance of three kilometers from the pickle jar and the Fried home, just as I am salivating now from a distance of nearly forty years.
“Look, look at this guy,” Meshulam would say, holding one of these pickles ov
er his plate. “Even Caesar’s table didn’t know from pickles like my Goldie’s.”
He was terribly proud of his Goldie and loved everything she did. “A woman of valor! The cherry in the crown! She runs the house and the family and the money in the bank, and I’m in charge of the workers and the trees in the garden.”
Meshulam Fried’s contracting business was large and complex, but his garden was simple—not the garden of a rich man, like the one I saw years ago in America, my in-laws’ garden, all fertilized and coiffed and styled and irrigated, and cared for by two gardeners, but, rather, an unkempt garden whose owners refused to employ a gardener (“That confuses the plants!”) and who colored it only with wildflowers and bushes.
Meshulam told me their names in order, for once without making any errors or mutilating any words: autumn crocuses and saffron, anemones and priest’s hood, narcissus, wild garlic, rockrose, star thistles, buttercups, Spanish broom and cassia, strawflower, wild snapdragons, poppies, mandrakes. In summer the last shoots of the rose mallow, the hollyhock, the pink bindweed, and, finally, in fall, the squill. Here there was no fishpond with a small copper fountain, as there was in Liora’s parents’ garden, and anyway there were no goldfish here. Still, among the rocks darted green lizards and large skinks and two tortoises that moved so quickly, as Tirzah used to recount, making me laugh, that they chased after cats.
Tirzah split each fig and gave one half to me while she bit into the other half. She explained that every fig tastes different from the next, even if they grew on the same tree. “Meshulam told me it isn’t nice if someone gets a good fig and someone else gets a rotten one, so you have to split every fig between the people eating them.”
