Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Amos Oz
Title Page
The Hill of Evil Counsel
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Mr Levi
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Longing
Copyright
The Hill of Evil Counsel is a fusion of history and imaginative narrative, re-creating the twilight world of Jerusalem during the fading days of the British Mandate. In these three closely linked stories, Oz vividly evokes the stifling atmosphere of impending crisis as real personalities rub shoulders with fictional characters whose hopes and fears are hauntingly portrayed.
Born in Jerusalem in 1939, Amos Oz is the internationally acclaimed author of many novels and essay collections, translated into thirty languages. His novels include My Michael, Black Box, To Know a Woman and his most recent book is his memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness. He has received several international awards, including the Prix Fémina, the Israel Prize and the Frankfurt Peace Prize. He lectures in literature at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev. He is married with two daughters and a son, and lives in Arad, Israel.
Fiction
My Michael
Elsewhere, Perhaps
Touch the Water, Touch the Wind
Unto Death
A Perfect Peace
Where the Jackals Howl
Black Box
To Know a Woman
Fima
Don’t Call it Night
Panther in the Basement
The Same Sea
Non-Fiction
In the Land of Israel
The Slopes of Lebanon
Under this Blazing Light
Israel, Palestine & Peace
Help Us to Divorce: Israel & Palestine:
Between Right and Right
A Tale of Love and Darkness
For Children
Soumchi
IT WAS DARK. In the dark a woman said: I’m not afraid. A man replied: Oh, yes, you are. Another man said: Quiet.
Then dim lights came on at either side of the stage, the curtains parted, and all was quiet.
In May 1946, one year after the Allied victory, the Jewish Agency mounted a great celebration in the Edison Cinema. The walls were draped with the flags of Great Britain and the Zionist Movement. Vases of gladioli stood on the front of the stage. And a banner carried a quotation from the Bible: PEACE BE WITHIN THY WALLS AND PROSPERITY WITHIN THY PALACES.
The British Governor of Jerusalem strode up to the stage with a military gait and delivered a short address, in the course of which he cracked a subtle joke and read some lines of Byron. He was followed by the Zionist leader Moshe Shertok, who expressed in English and Hebrew the feelings of the Jewish community. In the corners of the auditorium, on either side of the stage, and by all the doors stood British soldiers wearing red berets and carrying submachine guns, to guard against the Underground. In the dress circle could be discerned the stiffly seated figure of the High Commissioner, Sir Alan Cunningham, with a small party of ladies and army officers. The ladies were holding opera glasses. A choir of pioneers in blue shirts sang some work songs. The songs were Russian, and, like the audience, they were wistful, rather than happy.
After the singing there was a film of Montgomery’s tanks advancing across the Western Desert. The tanks raised columns of dust, crushed trenches and barbed-wire fences under their tracks, and stabbed the gray desert sky with their antennas. The auditorium was filled with the thunder of guns and the noise of marching songs.
In the middle of the film, there was a slight disturbance in the dress circle.
The film stopped suddenly. The lights came on. A voice was raised in a reproach or a curt command: Is there a doctor in the house?
In row 29, Father immediately got to his feet. He fastened the top button of his white shirt, whispered to Hillel to take care of Mother and keep her calm until things were sorted out, and, like a man plunging into a burning building at the risk of his life, turned and pushed his way to the staircase.
It transpired that Lady Bromley, the High Commissioner’s sister-in-law, had been taken suddenly faint.
She was wearing a long white dress, and her face, too, was white. Father hurriedly introduced himself to the heads of the administration and proceeded to lay her limp arm across his shoulders. Like a gentle knight carrying a sleeping beauty, he helped Lady Bromley to the ladies’ powder room. He seated her on an upholstered stool and handed her a glass of cold water. Three high-ranking British officials in evening dress hurried after him, stood in a semicircle around the patient, and supported her head as she took a single, painful sip. An elderly wing commander in uniform extracted her fan from her white evening bag, opened it carefully, and fanned her face.
Her Ladyship opened her eyes wearily. She stared almost ironically for a moment at all the men who were bustling around her. She was angular and wizened, and with her pursed lips, her pointed nose, and her permanent sardonic scowl, she looked like some thirsty bird.
“Well, doctor,” the wing commander addressed Father in acid tones, “what do you think?”
Father hesitated, apologized twice, and suddenly made up his mind. He leaned over, and with his fine, sensitive fingers he undid the laces of the tight corset. Lady Bromley felt immediately better. Her shriveled hand, which resembled a chicken leg, straightened the hem of the dress. A crease appeared in the tightly dosed mouth, a kind of cracked smile. She crossed her old legs, and her voice when she spoke was tinny and piercing.
“It’s just the climate.”
“Ma’am—” one of the officials began politely.
But Lady Bromley was no longer with him. She turned impatiently to Father:
“Young man, would you be kind enough to open the windows. Yes, that one, too. I need air. What a charming boy.”
She addressed him in this way because, in his white sports shirt worn outside his khaki trousers, and with his biblical sandals, he looked to her more like a young servant than like a doctor. She had passed her youth among gardens, apes, and fountains in Bombay.
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 Bokharan 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 woo’den 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 crew 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.
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 he spent whole days wandering alone from morning to night in eastern Galilee looking for water buffalo in the Huleh 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 Huleh 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 appeared one fine autumn morning 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 young 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 near 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 granduncle’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 God forsaken 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 the 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.”
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 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.
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?”
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.
There, in Tel Arza, in the little stone-built house facing the rocky wadis, there was born to them a year later a fair-haired son.
When Mother and the baby came home from the hospital, Father indicated his diminutive estate with a sweep of his hand, gazed raptly at it, and pronounced these words:
“For the moment this is a remote suburb. There are only young saplings growing in our garden. The sun beats down all day on the shutters. But as the years pass, the trees will grow, and we shall have plenty of shade. Their boughs will shelter the house. Creepers will climb over the roof and all over the fence. And the flowers will bloom. This will be our pleasure garden when Hillel grows up and we grow old together. We shall make an arbor of vines where you can sit all day through the summer, painting beautiful water colors. We can even have a piano. They’ll build a civic center, they’ll pave the road, our suburb will be joined to a Jerusalem ruled by a Hebrew government with a Hebrew army. Dr. Ruppin will be a minister and Professor Buber will be president or perhaps even king. When the time comes, I may become director of the veterinary service. And immigrants will arrive from every country under the sun.”
Suddenly he felt ashamed of his speech, and particularly regretted his choice of some of the words. A momentary sadness trembled around his mouth, and he added hastily, in a matter-of-fact tone:
“Poetry. Philosophizing. A pleasure garden with overhanging vines, all of a sudden. Now I’ll go and fetch a block of ice, and you must lie down and rest, so that you won’t have a migraine again tonight. It’s so hot.”
Mother turned to go indoors. By the veranda steps she stopped and looked at the miserable, rusty pots of geraniums. She said:
“There won’t be any flowers. There’ll be a flood. Or a war. They’ll all die.”