The Hill of Evil Counsel

The Hill of Evil Counsel

1

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 closed 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 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 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, "Perfes-sional 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.

2

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 2932, 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 be-lieved 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 con-cluded 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 of? 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 pic toe:

"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 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 ate 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."

3

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 ate 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.

4

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?"

5

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."

Father did not answer, because he sensed that these words were not directed at him and that they should never have been spoken.

His khaki shorts came down almost to his knees. Between his knees and his sandals his legs showed brown, thin, and smooth. Behind his round spectacles his face bore an expression of permanent gratitude, or of slight, pleased surprise. And in moments of embarrassment he was in the habit of saying:

"I don't know. It's just as well not to know everything. There are all sorts of things in the world that are better left alone."

6

Here is how Mother appeared as a girl in her old photograph album: a blonde schoolgirl with a kind of inner, autumnal beauty. Her fingers clasping a broad-brimmed white hat. Three doves on a fence behind her, and a mustached Polish student sitting on the same fence, smiling broadly.

She had been considered the best reader in her class at the high school. At the age of twelve, she had already attracted the enthusiastic attention of the elderly Polish literature teacher. The aging humanist, Mother would recall, was deeply moved by her charming recitations of gems of Polish poetry. "Ruth's voice," the pedagogue would exclaim with hoarse enthusiasm, "echoes the spirit of poetry, eternally playing among streams in a meadow." And because he secretly considered himself a poet, he would add, overcome by the force of his emotions, "If gazelles could sing, they would surely sing like little Ruth."

When Mother repeated this sentence she would laugh, because the comparison seemed to her absurd. Not because of the idea of gazelles singing, but because she simply couldn't sing. Her affections at that time were directed toward small pets, celebrated philosophers and artists, dancing, dresses trimmed with lace, and silk scarves, and also her poor friends who had neither lace-trimmed dresses nor silk scarves. She was fond of the unfortunates she came across, the milkman, the beggar, Grandma Gittel, the maids, and her nanny, even the local idiot. Provided that suffering had not disfigured their outward appearance, and provided that they carried themselves woefully, as if acknowledging their guilt and attempting to atone for it.

She translated from Polish a story she had written on her fifteenth birthday. She copied it out neatly and told Hillel to read it aloud:

"The blue sea allows the sun's rays to draw up its water, to make clouds that look like dirty cotton wool, to pour down rain on mountains, plains, and meadows — but not on the ugly desert — and eventually all the water collects and has to flow back once more into the sea. To return to it with a caress."

Suddenly she fell into a rage, snatched the paper Out of the boy's hands, and tore it into shreds.

"All gone!" she cried with desperate pathos. "Dead and done for! Lost!"

Outside, a wintry Jerusalem Sabbath, windswept, lashed by dead leaves. Inside the little house in Tel Arza, the kerosene heater burned with a blue flame. On the table there was tea and oranges, and a vase of chrysanthemums. Two of the walls were lined with Father's books. Shadows fell on them. The wind howled from the wadi. Mists touched the outside of the window, and the panes rattled. With a kind of bitter mockery. Mother spoke of her childhood in Warsaw, rowing on the Wisla, playing tennis in white clothes, the Seventh Cavalry Regiment parading down the Avenue of the Republic every Sunday. Occasionally she turned abruptly to Father and called him Dr. Zichel instead of Dr. Kipnis, Hans, Hanan. Father would rest his fingers on his high brow, unperturbed, unsurprised, silently smiling at the recollection of the acute remark he had made in Zichel's Café to the writer Agnon and the philosopher Buber. They had both been delighted; they had consulted him about the strawberry ice cream, and even complimented his companion.

When Mother was sixteen, she allowed the handsome Tadeusz to kiss her at the bridge: first on the forehead, later on the lips, but she let him go no further. He was a year and a half younger than she, an elegant, handsome youth, without a trace of acne, who excelled at tennis and sprinting. Once he had promised her that he would love her forever. But forever at that time seemed to her like a small circle bathed in pleasant light, and love like a game of tennis on a clear blue Sunday morning.

Handsome Tadeusz's father had been killed in the Polish war of independence. Tadeusz also had a cute dimple when he smiled, and wore sports shirts all through the summer. Mother loved to kiss Hillel suddenly on his own dimple and say:

"Just like this one."

Every year, on the national holiday, Ruth and Tadeusz would both stand on a decorated stage in the school playground. Old chestnut trees spread their branches overhead like a rustling bridal canopy. Tadeusz's task was to light the Torch of Liberty — the same liberty for which his father had given his life. Pupils and teachers stood in serried ranks, frozen in a strained silence, while the wind toyed with the flags of the Republic — no, don't touch the photograph — and Ruth recited the immortal lines by the national poet. Bells rang out joyously from atop every church in Warsaw. And in the evening, at the ball at the home of the director of the opera house, her parents permitted her to dance one waltz with General Godzinski himself.

Then Zionism broke out. The handsome Tadeusz joined the National Youth Corps, and because she refused to spend a weekend with him at his aunt's in the country, he sent her a disgusting note: "Zidoivka. Dirty Jewess." The old teacher who was fond of the phrase "singing gazelles" died suddenly of a liver disease. And both her parents, too, in a single month. The only memento she had left was the sepia photographs, printed on thick card stock with ornamental borders.

Nyuta, her elder sister, quickly found herself a widowed gynecologist named Adrian Staub. She married him and went with him to New York. Meanwhile, Mother came to Palestine to study ancient history on Mount Scopus. She took a small room at the end of the world, in the suburb of Neve Sha'anan. Nyuta Staub sent her a modest allowance every month. In that room she was loved by several wonderful men, including, one Hanukkah festival, the furious poet Alexander Pan.

After a year, she felt defeated by the country and the language, and decided to join her sister and brother-in-law in New York. Then Dr. Ruppin introduced her to Father, and he told her shyly about his dream of setting up a cattle farm in the hills of Galilee with his own hands. He had a fine Galilean smell. She was desperately tired. And the Aurora changed course, sailed to the West Indies, and never reached Haifa.

To the northeast, in the white summer light, one could see Mount Scopus from the window of the house in Tel Arza, crowned by a marble dome, a wood, and two towers. These lonely towers seemed from a distance to be shrouded in a kind of veil of solitude. At the end of the Sabbath the light faded slowly, hesitantly, poignantly:

As though forever. And as though there were no going back.

Father and Mother used to sit facing each other in the room that Father called his study. The celebrated geographer Hans Walter Landauer gazed down skeptically on them from his large portrait. And their pudgy son built complicated brick castles on the mat, demolishing each suddenly with a wave of his hand because he always wanted to build a new one. At times he would ask an intelligent question of his father, and he always received a considered reply. At other times he buried his face in his mother's dress, demanded to be cuddled, and then, embarrassed at seeing her eyes fill with tears, returned silently to his game.

Sometimes Mother asked:

"What's going to happen, Hans?"

And Father would answer:

"I confidently hope that things will take a turn for the better."

As Father uttered these words, Hillel recalled how last Pentecost he had gone out with his friends to hunt lions or discover the source of the Nile in the woods of Tel Arza. He recalled how a faded golden button had suddenly flashed at him, and blue cloth, how he had knelt down and dug with both hands, tearing away the pine needles, to uncover the treasure, and found a rotting military tunic, a terrible, sweet smell coming from the tarnished gold, and how as he went on digging he had discovered white ivory among disintegrating buckles, large and small white tusks, and all of a sudden the ivory was attached to an empty skull that smiled at him with a kind of chilling affection, and then the dead teeth and the eye sockets. Never, never again would he search for the source of the Nile anywhere. Never.

On weekdays Father traveled around the villages wearing khaki trousers, sandals, a neatly pressed blue shirt with wide pockets stuffed full of notebooks and writing pads. In winter he wore brown corduroy trousers, a jacket, a cap, and over his shoes he wore galoshes that looked like twin black warships.

But on Sabbath Eve, after his bath, he would appear in a white shirt and gray trousers, his damp hair combed and neatly parted, smelling of shaving lotion and almond-scented soap. Then Mother would kiss him on the nose and call him her great big child. And Hillel would laugh.

Every morning, a bib with a picture of a smiling rabbit was tied around Hillel's neck. He ate Quaker Oats, a soft-boiled egg, and yogurt. On the Quaker Oats package was a wonderful picture of an admiral with a bold and resolute look on his face, a three-cornered Napoleon hat on his head, and a telescope in his only hand.

In Europe at that time, there was a world war going on. But in the streets of Jerusalem, there were only singing bands of friendly soldiers, Australians, New Zealanders, Senegalese looking like chocolate-cream soldiers, lean Scots wallowing in beer and homesickness. The newspapers carried maps with arrows. Sometimes, at night, a long military convoy crossed Jerusalem from north to south with dimmed headlights, and a smothered roar seemed to sound in the darkness. The city was very still. The hills were hushed. The towers and domes looked thoughtful. The inhabitants followed the distant war with anxiety but without any passion. They exchanged conjectures and interpretations. They expected a change for the better that would surely come about soon and might even perhaps make itself felt in Jerusalem.

7

In Tel Arza no civic center was built, and the road was not paved. A stone quarry was started on one of the farther slopes. Mr. Cohen opened a small workshop producing modish furniture for the notables of Jericho and Bethlehem, the Governor of Jerusalem, and even for the palace of Emir Abdullah in Transjordan. Engineer Brzezinski climbed onto the roof of his house and rigged up an enormous radio antenna so as to be able to catch the signals of the farthest stations each night. He also built a telescope with his own hands, and installed it, too, on his roof, because he had promised himself that he would be the first to see them when they arrived.

At night the valleys all around were alive with sounds. The wildness of the rocks and mountains reached out to touch the house. Jackals howled nearby, and the blood froze at the thought of them padding softly, tensely, among the saplings, up to the shuttered windows, perhaps even onto the veranda. A single Mandatory street lamp, encased in small, square panes and topped with a green dome, cast a solitary light on the unpaved road. The fingers of the fig tree at the bottom of the garden were empty. There was nobody outside in the dark. The square-paned lamp cast its light in vain. All the residents were in the habit of shutting themselves up in their houses as soon as darkness fell. Every evening Madame Yabrova played the piano, and her niece, Lyubov Binyamina, the cello, with desolating sadness. Father's fellow townsman the elderly professor Julius Wertheimer collected clippings from foreign newspapers that mentioned anything to do with supernatural phenomena. He considered the laws of nature to be a practical joke, and he longed to find a loophole in them, perhaps some revealing formula that would enable him and the whole persecuted Jewish people to escape from the pull of gravity and to float up into spheres where the contagion had not yet spread.

Every night, far into the small hours, Engineer Brzezinski twiddled the tuning knob of his radio, seeking and finding and then abandoning different stations, Berlin, London, Milan, Vichy, Cairo, and Cyrenaica. Some of the neighbors said that he often brought bottles of arak back with him from his work on the northern shores of the Dead Sea, and that at night he got drunk on this frightful Oriental drink.

He would tell them how as a young man he had been the director of a gigantic engineering project in Russia, how he had set up the hydroelectric power station in Taganrog, "like writing an epic poem." Then he had fallen foul of Stalin; he was captured, imprisoned, tortured; he escaped by the skin of his teeth and finally reached Jerusalem via Afghanistan, Teheran, and Baghdad. But here, at the Dead Sea Works, he was given trifling little jobs to do: mending pumps, keeping an eye on the generator, repairing miserable fuse boxes, supervising some provincial transformer.

One night he suddenly shouted "Fire! Fire!" at the top of his voice. He had come across a broadcast of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony from some Nazi station in the Balkans.

Father immediately got out of bed, dressed, and bravely crossed the dirt road; he knocked on the door and called out politely, "Mr. Brzezinski, please, Mr. Brzezinski."

The door did not open. There was no fire, either. Only the smell of dying campfires borne on the wind from the depths of the wadi. And the wail of a distant muezzin, or perhaps it was a hungry jackal crying in the woods. On nights like these, Hillel would wake up with an attack of panic and asthma. He could see through the slats of the shutters the skull of the Turkish janissary hovering in the dark air, grinning at him with its dead teeth. He would pull the sheet up over his head and burst into tears. Then his father would get up and come into his bedroom with bare feet, to straighten the bedclothes and sing 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.

Then, toward dawn, Mitya the lodger might suddenly cry out in his sleep on the other side of the wall: "Ruthless! Don't touch him! He's still alive! Y-a ny-e zna-yu! Y-a ny-e po-ni-ma-yu! Nothing!"

Then silence.

Outside in the fields, there was nothing but jackals and milt until morning.

8

Mitya addressed Father:

"In that evening suit, Dr. Kipnis, you look like the spit and image of the martyred Haim Arlosoroff. There is no peace for the wicked. So I shall ask you a small diplomatic favor. Could you pass along a short message from me to the foreign High Commissioner? Just one or two urgent sentences? It is a message the High Commissioner has been secretly waiting for for some time, and he probably cannot understand why it has not yet come."

Father said:

"If I do actually manage to have a private conversation with the High Commissioner, which I very much doubt."

Mitya suddenly grinned, baring his rotten teeth. He chewed his shirt collar, with an expression of pain and disgust on his bony face and a fire in his eyes.

"Give him this message, word for word: Our true Messiah will surely come, he will not tarry. He will come whirling a flaming sword in his hand. He will come from the east and lay all the mountains low. He will not leave any that pisseth against the wall. Do you think, Dr. Kipnis, that you can repeat this message word for word without making a mistake?"

Father said:

"I don't think I can undertake to convey that message. And certainly not in English."

And Mitya, frantically stroking the oilcloth on the kitchen table, replied in a hoarse voice:

"Jerusalem, which slayeth its prophets, shall burn the new Hellenizers in hellfire."

At once he added politely:

"Good evening, Mrs. Kipnis. Pozhal'sta, why are you staring at me so cruelly, I was simply making a small joke with your husband. I shall never forgive myself if, heaven forbid, I have accidentally frightened you. Nikogda. I must beg your pardon right away; there, I've done it. How magnificent you look, Mrs. Kipnis, in your blue evening dress, if I may make so bold. How magnificent, too, is the springtime in our Jerusalem on the eve of the great destruction. And the hot tap in the bathroom is dripping and dripping and knows no rest. Surely we ought to do something without further delay. How much time do we have left? There, I've apologized and I've gone. Da. Good night. May the name of the wicked rot, and the innocent shall see it and be glad. Now good night once again to you all. Happy is he who waits His coming."

He nearly knocked the child over as he dashed back to his room, panting, his arms hanging limply at his sides, his fists clenched. But he did not slam his door; he closed it gently behind him as if taking great care not to hurt the door or the doorpost or the sudden silence he had left behind him.

Mother said:

"The High Commissioner could never understand how a boy like Mitya suffers. Even the King couldn't help. Or the Messiah himself, not that I believe in him."

She closed her eyes and continued in a different tone of voice:

"But I could. I could easily rescue him from the madness and death that are building up inside him. Yes, me. That's loneliness, Hans, that's real exile, despair, depression, persecution. I could come to him in the middle of the night in my nightgown, sweetly perfumed, and touch him; or at least I could bring him another woman in the night and happily stand by and watch. I could put out the rising fires and give him peace and quiet. So what if he smells. To the forests and the sea, every man and woman in the world stinks. Even you, Hans. And then to hear him moaning between my hands, shouting in disjointed Russian, singing, grunting like a felled ox. Then resting peacefully. I'd close his eyes with my fingers and lull him to sleep. Even the stars and mountains would love me for it. Now, stop looking at me like that. I want you to know once and for all how much I loathe, yes, loathe, your Wertheimers and Bubers and Shertoks. I wish your terrorists would blow them all sky high. And stop looking at me like that."

Father said:

"That will do, Ruth. The boy can hear you; he understands almost everything."

She drew the child violently toward her, pressed his head against her, and covered his face with rough kisses. Then she said quietly:

"Yes, you're quite right. You've already forgiven me, Hans. The red taxi will be here soon, and we'll go to the ball. Stand still, Hans, while I tie your silly bow tie for you. I've really got no complaint against Buber and the rest of them. There, now you've remembered how to smile. At last. Why are you smiling?" Father said nothing.

9

Mitya had left his kibbutz in the Jezreel Valley because of an ideological argument at the end of the week in which Hitler had captured Warsaw. At the same time, he had also suddenly inherited some jewelry from his only relation, a forgotten aunt who had died in Johannesburg.

He had hastily sold the jewelry to a crafty Armenian goldsmith in the Old City and decided to settle in Jerusalem to study, with the aim of proving once and for all that the natives of Palestine were descended from the ancient Hebrews. He tried to produce conclusive proof that all the Arabs, nomads and peasants alike, were simply Israelites who had been forcibly converted to Islam and whom it was our duty now to rescue. Their clothes, the shape of their skulls, the names of their villages, their eating habits, and their forms of worship all bore abundant witness, he claimed, to the truth that the Jewish Agency was trying to hush up. But they could not pull the wool over his eyes.

For a pioneer, he was a skinny lad, with drooping shoulders and abrupt gestures. He was an uncompromising vegetarian, who called meat eating "the source of all impurity." His hair was thin, fair, almost white. When Mitya stood by himself in the kitchen making tea in his glass with its ring of worn gold paint, Hillel would sometimes observe a lonely, fanatical glint in his eye. His birdlike profile looked as though he were forever suppressing a sneeze. And he would chew the points of his shirt collar with his rotten teeth.

On his arrival, he had paid Father two years' rent in advance, and was given permission to look over the headlines in the daily newspaper and to use the typewriter occasionally. Once he typed out with two fingers an "Epistle to Those Who Are at Ease in Zion," in which he voiced various complaints and sounded a prophecy of doom. But the newspapers all either rejected his letter or simply ignored it. And once he hinted to Father that since the Babylonian Beasts had murdered the heroic Abraham Stern, code-named "Yair," he himself had become the secret commander of the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel. Father did not believe this any more than he believed Engineer Brzezinski, who said that Mitya was a dangerous Communist agent in disguise.

Mitya was ruthlessly clean and tidy.

Whenever he had finished in the lavatory, he would produce a small can inscribed in English, "Baby's Delight," and sprinkle the seat with perfumed talcum powder. When he had read the newspaper he would fold it neatly in four and place it carefully on the end of the bookshelf. If ever he met anyone as he came out of the bathroom or the lavatory (which he called "the throne room"), he would turn pale and mutter an embarrassed apology. He cleaned and scrubbed his own room twice a day.

Despite all this, a faint yet repulsive smell, like that of old cooking fat, always accompanied him in the corridor and escaped from under his door; it even clung to his glass with the worn gold ring.

No one was allowed into his room.

He had fitted a double Yale lock onto his door, and he always locked it even when he only went to wash. Sometimes he would cry out in his sleep in the early hours of the morning. In Russian.

***

During the summer months, Mitya would set off on foot in the direction of Mount Scopus, crossing hills and valleys with his disjointed gait, spurning roads and paths, advancing in a line straight as an arrow in flight. He would traverse the suburb of Sanhedriya like a hurricane, skirting the police training school, with his birdlike head thrust forward, a distant look in his eye, and finally, panting but undeterred, he would emerge into the district of Sheikh Jarrah, where he would always break his journey to drink his morning coffee among mustached, kaffiyeh-wrapped Arabs, with whom he attempted persistently to enter into conversation, but without success, since he could speak only classical Arabic, and that with a heavy Russian accent. The Arab coffee-drinkers nicknamed him al-Hudhud, "the hoopoe," perhaps because of his crest of thinning hair.

He would spend whole days on end in the basement of the national library on Mount Scopus, endlessly covering little cards with feverish notes. When he came home in the evening, he would sometimes bare his rotting teeth in a grin and pronounce some cryptic prophecy:

"I promise you that tonight a mighty explosion shall resound. The mountains shall drop sweet wine, and all the hills shall melt."

Because those were eventful days, his prophecies sometimes came true in a way. Then Mitya would smile modestly, like a humble artist who has won a prize with one of his works.

During the last year of the World War, Hillel peeped through the keyhole and discovered that Mitya had huge maps hanging on all the walls of his room, from the ceiling almost to the floor. He had other maps spread out on his desk, on his bed, and on the straw matting. These maps were covered with thick black and red arrows, flags, buttons, and matchsticks.

"Daddy, is Uncle Mitya a spy?"

"That sort of foolishness is beneath your dignity, Hillel."

"Then why is he like that? Why has he got maps in his room, and arrows?"

"You're the spy, Hillel. You spied on Uncle Mitya. That's not a nice thing to do, and you'll promise me right now that you won't do it again."

"I promise, but…"

"You've promised. Now that's the end of it. It's wrong to talk about people behind their backs."

One day in 1944, Mitya proposed to Father that the British fleet should storm up the Bosporus and through the Dardanelles "like a rod of anger," gain mastery over the Black Sea, ravage half of the Crimea with fire, land "myriads of armies" all along the Slavic coasts, knock the heads of the two tyrants together, "and grind to dust the dragon and the crocodile of Egypt." Father considered this utterance in silence, proffered a mild, sympathetic smile, and remarked that the Russians were now on the side of the Allies.

"You are the generation of the wilderness. You are the seed of slaves," Mitya replied vehemently. "You have all been stricken with blindness. Chamberlains. Arlosoroffs. Gandhis. Plebeians. Eunuchs. I don't mean you personally, Dr. Kipnis, heaven forbid! I was speaking in the plural; you in general. I can see from your wife's eyes that she agrees with me deep in her heart, but because she is wise and sensitive she prefers to remain silent, and of course she is quite right. Surely no remnant shall remain of all the eunuchs. When they cry with upraised voice and outstretched throat 'eternal people,' 'forever and ever,' 'Jerusalem, the eternal city,' surely every stone of Jerusalem bursts out laughing. Now I must beg your pardon and bid you good night. I'm sorry; good night."

Once, when Father was out working in the villages and Mother was at the hairdresser's, Mitya trapped Hillel at the dark end of the corridor and addressed his fevered utterances to him:

"We who have returned to Zion, and especially your generation, whose souls have not been perverted by exile, have an obligation to make children by force by the women of the fellahin. We must give them children who look like you.

Masses of fair-haired children. Strong and fair and fearless. It's a matter of life and death. A new breed, thoroughbred, lusty steppe-wolves instead of namby-pamby scholars. The old eunuchs will die off. Blessed are you, for you shall inherit the earth. Then a flame shall issue forth from Judah and consume Perfidious Albion. What could be easier. We know how they go out alone at night to gather firewood. They wear long dark dresses down to their ankles, but underneath their dresses they have nothing on at all. They must be conquered and mounted by main force. With holy zeal. They have women who are dark and hairy as goats, and we have rods of fire. We must spill fresh blood, dark, warm blood. Your parents may call you Hillel, but I shall call you Ithamar. Listen to me, young Ithamar. You are a new recruit: I order you to learn to ride a horse, to use a dagger, to toughen yourself up. Here, take a biscuit: you can't refuse, I'm your commanding officer. This'll all be a closely guarded secret between the two of us: the Underground has no pity on traitors and informers. Who is this that cometh from Seir, with dyed garments from Edom? It is you and the rest of your generation. Nimrods, Gideons, Jephthahs, all of them skilled men of war. You shall see and behold with your own eyes, O new recruit Ithamar, the whole British Empire brought down into the dust like a rag doll. The Inheritor shall come marching from the east. He shall ascend the mountain and discomfit the plain with an iron hand until those lascivious, black hairy she-goats of the fellahin scream at us in terror and delight. Lascivious she-goats! Now, take this shilling and run and buy yourself a mountain of chewing gum. It's yours. Yes. From me. Never disobey orders. Now, scram!"

Suddenly his blazing eyes fell on Mother's apron hanging on a peg beside the mirror in the corridor. He bared his teeth and hissed:

"Painted Jezebel, mother of whoredoms!"

And he shuffled furiously back to his room.

Hillel ran out into the garden. He climbed up into his hide-away among the boughs of the fig tree, the sweaty shilling tightly clasped in his hand. He was tormented by ugly yet persistent images. Jezebel. Fellahin women. Lascivious she-goats. Long dresses with nothing on underneath. Thoroughbreds. And the sweaty word "mounted." His free hand felt for the fly of his trousers, but there were tears in his eyes. He knew that the asthma would start mercilessly as soon as he dared to touch his taut organ. Iron hand. Ithamar. Rag doll. Marching from the east.

If the old days of the Bible suddenly came back, I could be a judge in Israel. Or a king. Mitya could be a prophet in a hair mantle, and the bears would eat him like the wicked Turkish soldier. Daddy would pasture the royal flocks in the fields of Bethlehem. And Mommy wouldn't be a Jezebel.

Among the flower beds, Dr. Kipnis appeared. His hair was still wet from the shower, his khaki shorts came down almost to his knees, and between his shorts and his sandals his legs showed brown, thin, and smooth. He was wearing nothing over his vest. His eyes, behind his glasses, looked like blue lakes in a snowy landscape.

Father carefully connected the rubber hose to the garden tap. He made sure it was well attached, and he regulated the flow of water precisely. He stood alone, quietly watering his garden in the early-afternoon sunshine, humming to himself the song "Between the Euphrates and the Tigris."

The water carved out branching and interlacing furrows. From time to time, Father bent down to block its path and direct it where it was needed.

Hillel suddenly felt an ecstatic, overwhelming love for his father. He scrambled out of his hideaway in the fig tree, ran up the path through the summer bird song through the breeze laden with the scent of the distant sea through the streaming afternoon sunlight, flung his arms around his father's waist, and hugged him with all his might.

Hans Kipnis passed the hose from his right to his left hand, stroked his son's head tenderly, and said, "Hillel."

The boy did not reply.

"Here, Hillel. Take it. If you want to water the garden for a bit, take the hose, and I'll go and clip the hedge. You can. Only be very careful not to aim the water at the plants themselves."

"Daddy, what does 'Perfidious Albion' mean?"

"It's what the fanatics call England when they want to be rude about it."

"What does 'fanatics' mean?"

"They're people who are always sure that they know best what's right and what's wrong and what ought to be done, and try their hardest to make everybody else think and act the same way."

"Is Uncle Mitya a fanatic?"

"Uncle Mitya is a sensitive man who reads a lot of books and spends a lot of time studying the Bible. Because he worries a great deal about our plight, and also perhaps because of his personal sufferings, he sometimes uses words that are not quite the words I myself would choose to use."

"What about Mommy?"

"She's having a rest."

"No, I mean, is she also a fanatic."

"Mommy grew up surrounded by wealth and luxury. Sometimes it's hard for her to get used to conditions here; you were born here, and perhaps you are sometimes surprised by her moods. But you're a clever boy, and I'm sure you're not angry with Mommy when she's sad or when she longs to be somewhere completely different."

"Daddy, I've got something to tell you."

"What is it, son?"

"I've got a shilling that I don't want at all. And I don't want you to start asking me who gave it to me, 'cause I won't say. I just want you to take it."

"All right. I'll look after your shilling for you, and I won't ask any questions. Only mind you don't get your new sandals wet when you're watering the grapes. Now I'm going to fetch the shears. Bye-bye. You ought to be wearing a hat in this heat."

10

Toward sunset, when the mountains were shrouded and the wind swept knowingly through the woods and the valleys and the bell of the Schneller Barracks resounded forlornly, the preparations were complete.

All that remained was to wait for the taxi, say good-bye, and go. Nothing had been overlooked. Hans Kipnis, in his borrowed dress suit and impeccably polished black shoes, with his hair neatly parted and smoothed down with water, with his round glasses, looked like a mild, good-natured Evangelical minister setting out with a pounding heart for his wedding.

"My own Dr. Zichel," Mother said with a laugh, and bent over to straighten the white handkerchief in his top pocket.

She was a little taller than he, and her scent was the scent of autumn. She was wearing her blue evening dress with its daring neckline. The light shone in her drop earrings. Ruth was erect and sensuous as she walked with a slow, rounded motion, like a large cat, to wait outside on the veranda. She turned her bare back on the house and looked out into the desolate twilight. Her blond plait had settled on the arch of her left shoulder. Her hip rubbed slowly, with a dreamy rhythm, against the cool stone parapet.

And how the bells had rung throughout Warsaw at the national festival. How all the marble horsemen had reared up in every square. How her warm voice had carried over the playground of the school as she had read the searing lines of the Polish national poet:

Slain cavalrymen never die,

They fly high through the air like the wind,

Their horses' hoofs no longer touching the ground.

At night in the storm in the snow you can hear them flying past,

Foam-flecked winged steeds and valiant horsemen,

Forever flying over forests and meadows and plains,

Ghost warriors eternally riding into battle.

At night in the storm in the snow they wing their way high over Poland.

Cavalrymen never die, they become transparent and powerful as tears….

Ruth's voice conveyed a melancholy echo of violins, the tempestuous thunder of war drums, the roar and sigh of the organ. How they had all loved her. The handsome Tadeusz had stood stiffly at attention half a pace behind her on the platform, holding aloft the blazing Torch of Liberty. Elderly teachers who had themselves fought as cavalry officers in the great war for the liberation of Poland, and who still relived it in their dreams on happy nights, wept to hear her reciting. They stood with their eyes closed and strained toward her with all the force of their longing. She received their love and desire in her heart, and her heart was ready to bestow love on all good men.

She had never throughout her school days encountered bad men until both her parents died within a month of each other, and her sister, Nyuta, suddenly married the widowed gynecologist and left with him for New York. She believed that if bad men really existed outside fairy stories, they must lurk in dark corners. They could never come near her, with her gleaming white tennis dress and her expensive racket. Hence she was inclined to feel a certain sympathy even for them, if they existed. Their lot must be a sad one. What a terrible thing it must be, to be a bad man.

***

By seven o'clock, the mountains were growing dark. The lights of Jerusalem came on. In every house the iron shutters were pulled closed and the curtains were drawn. The inhabitants sank into worry and longing. For an instant the hills of Jerusalem seemed to be heaving and swelling like a sea in the dark.

Hillel was left with Madame Yabrova the pianist and her niece, Binyamina. They would play the phonograph for him, give him supper, let him play for a little with their collection of dolls of all nations, and then put him to bed. Meanwhile the taxi arrived, with its yellow headlights, and gave a long horn blast that sounded like the cry of an animal.

The whole street came out to see Dr. and Mrs. Kipnis off to the May Ball at the High Commissioner's palace on the Hill of Evil Counsel.

Mitya the lodger stood grinning darkly on the doorstep of the house, his silhouette hunched with suffering, clasping a half-drunk glass of tea between his hands. He was chewing the point of his shirt collar, and his lips were mouthing something in the darkness, a curse or a premonition of disaster. The elderly professor Julius Wertheimer, keeping his place with his finger in a German edition of the New Testament, raised his hat slightly and said sadly, as if they were leaving on a long journey to another continent:

"Don't forget us."

Mrs. Vishniak the pharmacist waved them good-bye and good luck from where she sat on a wickerwork chair under the single Mandatory street lamp. Two tears hung from her painted eyelashes, because not long beforehand the announcer on "The Voice of Jerusalem" had said that times were changing and that things would never be the same again.

At the last minute, Engineer Brzezinski emerged on the other side of the road, slightly drunk and holding a huge electric lamp. He was a big-boned man with thick red hair and freckles. He was panting like a woodcutter and trembling with emotion. He thundered to them at the top of his voice:

"Just you tell them, doctor, tell them to their faces! Tell them to leave us alone! Tell them to go away! Tell them the White Paper is rotten! Tell them the whole country is getting more and more rotten every day! Tell them once and for all! And tell them that life as a whole is a rotten trick! Cheap! Miserable! Provincial! You let them know! And tell them that we, sam chort znayet, will never stop suffering and hoping until our last breath! Tell them!"

Suddenly he fell silent and pointed his great lamp furiously up at the dark sky, as if he were trying to dazzle the stars themselves.

Then the taxi choked, roared, and moved off in a cloud of dust.

The street was left to itself. Everyone had gone indoors. Only the square-paned street lamp continued to shed its forlorn light in vain. The wind blew. The fig tree ruffled its leaves and settled down. Its fingers were still empty. Dogs barked in the distance. It was night.

11

Lyubov Binyamina was a short, heavy girl with a swarthy complexion and a pointed chin. She looked like a plump, slow-moving, melancholy partridge. Only her lips were painted a bright scarlet. Her heavy bust forced out the front of her dress almost violently. There was always something slovenly about her appearance: a dangling button, a bad cough, a yellow oil stain on her Viennese-style dress. She wore clumsy brown orthopedic shoes, even around the house. She had thick down on her arms, and she wore a man's wristwatch. Hillel suddenly recalled the terrible things Mitya had said about the fellahin women going out alone at night to gather firewood, looking like hairy black she-goats. He bit his lip and tried hard to think of something else, but Binyamina kissed his ear lobe and called him "child poet," and he buried his face in the carpet and blushed to the roots of his curly hair.

Madame Yabrova, by contrast, displayed the somewhat threadbare remnants of a former grandeur. She spoke with a heavy emphasis, in long, emotional sentences, in a strong voice coarsened by the Simon Arzdt cigarettes she chain-smoked. She would rush around the room, furiously wiping her mouth, picking things up and putting them down again, and turning on her heel with a kind of clumsy agility, like an aging prima donna. She had a slight gray mustache and bushy black eyebrows. Hillel could not take his eyes off her double chin; it reminded him of the pelican in the 200 on Prophet Samuel Street.

Madame Yabrova had changed, as she did every evening, into a theatrical mauve velvet evening gown. She filled the room with a mingled smell of mothballs, baked fish, and eau de cologne.

After a few affectionate words, she suddenly released Hillel, silenced her niece with a hoarse reprimand, and exclaimed:

"Be quiet. We must both be quiet. The child has an inspiration."

They earned their living by giving private music lessons, one on the piano and the other on the cello. They sometimes traveled by bus to remote settlements to favor the pioneers with Friday-night recitals. Their playing was always precise and free from frills and graces, if a trifle academic.

Every available surface in their home was scattered with mementos: tiny ornaments, elaborately carved candlesticks, lumps of rock, handmade objects of wire and raffia, on the piano, the dining table, the coffee table, bronze busts including a glowering Beethoven, Oriental pots, plaster-of-Paris figurines, a china replica of Big Ben, dolls in motley national costumes, a copper Eiffel Tower, water-filled glass globes in which, when they were shaken or turned over, fake snow slowly fell on a rustic cottage or a village church.

One whole shelf was alive with woolly animals: polar bears, leopards, deer, centaurs, zebras, monkeys, elephants, all wandering hopelessly through a forest of green baize or dyed cotton wool. Every quarter of an hour a headless cuckoo popped out of the wall clock and emitted a sound resembling a hoarse bark.

Hillel was seated in a deep armchair surrounded by large philodendrons. Here he huddled in his gym shorts and cotton undershirt, with his legs tucked beneath him.

He thought about the fanatics, of whom Daddy had said that they thought they always knew best what was right and what was wrong and what ought to be done, and wondered in a panic whether Daddy and Mommy might not be secret fanatics, because they, too, always seemed to think they knew best.

Madame Yabrova said:

"If you promise me never to pick your nose, you may have a piece of marzipan after your supper. Lyubov, krasavitsa, put down that filthy novel of yours for a moment and pop into the kitchen to get some bread and butter and jam for our guest. Spassibo."

Lyubov said:

"It's not a filthy novel, Auntie. It's nothing of the sort. It's true it's not exactly suitable for children, it's got all sorts of disasters and erotic scenes in it, but there's nothing dirty about it. And anyway, Hillel's almost a grown man. Just look at him."

Madame Yabrova snickered:

"Bozhe moi, Lyubov! Nothing dirty, indeed! Smut! Filth! That's all she has in her head. The body, Lyubov, is the purest thing there is in the whole world. Writers should write about love and suchlike with proper reticence. Not with all sorts of filth. Hillel is old enough, I can see, to know what is love and what is simply disgusting."

Hillel said:

"I don't like jam. I want some marzipan, please."

The room smelled dank and brown. In six vases of assorted shapes and sizes, last weekend's gladioli drooped and wilted. The windows were all closed to keep out the wind or the sounds of the night. Mommy and Daddy were far away. The shutters were closed, too. The curtains were drawn. Madame Yabrova was chain-smoking her Simon Arzdt cigarettes. The air was turning gray. She reached out to touch the child, who had glumly eaten half a buttered roll; she felt the muscles of his arm and exclaimed dramatically:

"Molodyetz! Soldatchik!"

Madame Yabrova put a record on the phonograph. Two suites for flute were followed without an interruption by an infectious dance tune. She kicked off her shoes and moved heavily around the room in her bare feet in time to the music.

Meanwhile, Hillel had consumed a soft-boiled egg from a chipped enamel mug, and rounded off his meal with a piece of marzipan. He played for a while with the glass globes with fake snowflakes. He was tired, drowsy, and miserable. He was suddenly seized with a vague apprehension.

Lyubov Binyamina Even-Hen came back into the room in a pink dressing gown. Her heavy, restless breasts were straining at the top button. Madame Yabrova switched on the lamp on the piano, which was. carved in the form of a blue nymph, and turned off the overhead light. The elaborate glass chandelier went dark, and so did the room. Drowsily Hillel let himself be fed a spoonful of plum preserve that tasted like sticky-sweet glue. Shadows played on the walls and the furniture. The two women came and went, whispering, exchanging secret giggles in Russian. Through his drooping eyelids, through the haze of cigarette smoke, Hillel seemed to see Binyamina slowly, painstakingly unfastening all the hooks and catches of her aunt's velvet dress. The two women seemed to be floating on the smoke and mingling with the blocks of shadow. They were seemingly dancing on the carpet, dancing and smoking in time to the music of the phonograph among the ornaments and figurines, one in a pink dressing gown and the other in a black petticoat.

Then, in the dark, they leaned over him from either side of the deep armchair, stroked his curly hair and his cheeks with honeyed fingers, felt his chest through his cotton shirt, and carried him off to bed in their arms. His nostrils suddenly caught a strange smell. His eyes were shut tight with tiredness, but some sudden stimulus, a throb of sly curiosity, made him open them just a crack. The light was poor. The air in the room was full of smoke and sweat and eau de cologne. He caught a strange, heart-pinching glimpse of the waistband of Binyamina's knickers through the opening in the front of her dressing gown. And a faint sucking sound behind the bed. A moist whisper. Russian. A vague, unfamiliar feeling thrust its way up and down his spine. Not knowing what it was, he lay motionless on his back and glimpsed a shoulder, a hip, unknown curves, and his heart pounded and pounded like a frightened rabbit's.

He went on breathing deeply, calmly, as if he were fast asleep. Now even he was shocked at his slyness. Sleep had deserted him completely. He could feel the blood throbbing in his ankles. He smelled a blend of strong smells, and he knew that a large woman was blowing on his cheek to see if he was asleep. The sheet rustled. Fear and excitement clashed in his breast, and he decided to go on pretending to be a little boy fast asleep. He suddenly remembered the gleam in Uncle Mitya's eye as he spoke about she-goats. He also remembered the words "Perfidious Albion," but he could not remember what they meant. Hands were pulling at his gym shorts. His organ, which was taut like a thin pencil, was being touched with something like warm, sticky jam. He gritted his teeth, and forced himself with all his might not to recoil, not to stop his rhythmic breathing. Asleep. Feeling nothing. Not here. Far away. Only don't let it stop now the feel of velvet she-goats silk jam pink transparent more more. And the naughty Oriental girls who knocked him down on piles of gravel and pulled and pulled his hair and one of them was beginning to grow breasts under her vest. Mommy. A wet, licking feeling up his spine. And pinching. Then the slender pencil began to sneeze convulsively between the fingers of the musical women. The boy stifled a moan. Madame Yabrova let out a low, fleshy laugh. And Lyubov Binyamina suddenly panted like a thirsty dog.

The lamp on the piano went out. The room was dark and still. He opened his eyes and saw nothing but darkness. There was not a sound to be heard. Nothing stirred. In that moment Hillel knew that Daddy and Mommy would never come back and girls would never fight with him again on the gravel heap and there would be no more Mitya or anyone, they had all gone away and would never return. He was alone in the house alone in the neighborhood there was no one in Tel Arza no one in Jerusalem no one in the whole country he was left all alone with the jackals and the woods and the nibbled skeleton of the Turkish janissary.

12

The guest of honor at the ball was the Hero of Malta, Admiral Sir Kenneth Horace Sutherland, V.C., K.B.E., Deputy First Sea Lord.

He was standing, tall, pink-faced, and broad-shouldered, on the edge of the illuminated fountain, resplendent in his spotless white uniform and gleaming medals. He was holding a cocktail in his right hand, while in his left he twirled a single magnificent rose. He was surrounded by officers and gentlemen, by red-fezzed Arab dignitaries with gold watch chains strung across their bellies, and by wistful, sparkling-eyed English ladies, while tall, pitch-black Sudanese servants moved everywhere brandishing silver salvers, with snow-white napkins draped over their hooked arms.

Admiral Sutherland was telling a slightly risqué story, in a dry delivery spiced with naval slang, about the American general George Patton, a performing monkey, and a hot-blooded Italian actress by the name of Silvana Lungo. When he got to the punch line, the men guffawed and the ladies let out shocked shrieks.

Colored lights shone under the water in the marble pool, more lights hung suspended in the air, paper lanterns glowed among the trees, and the light breeze ruffled the pines. The gently sloping lawns were dotted with rose beds and divided by impeccably kept gravel paths. The palace itself floated on the beams of concealed floodlights. Its arches of Jerusalem stone were delicately, almost tenderly, carved.

At the foot of the veranda clustered some prominent figures of the Jewish community, including many of the leading lights of the Jewish Agency, the two elderly bankers Shealtiel and Toledano, Mr. Rokeah, the mayor of Tel Aviv, and Mr. Agronski of the Palestine Post. They were gathered in an excited semicircle around Captain Archibald Chichester-Browne, the British government spokesman, with whom they were engaged in a good-natured altercation. But for once the captain was disinclined to be serious. He pronounced one or two uncharitable remarks about the Arab League, which the prominent Jews interpreted as a favorable sign. Moshe Shertok dropped a hint to the others that they should be satisfied with this achievement and change the subject immediately, so as not to overstep the mark.

And so the conversation turned to the potash works that were rapidly being developed beside the Dead Sea. Captain Chichester-Browne took the opportunity to compare the Jewish kibbutzim to the early Christian communities that had once existed in the same region, and while on the subject, he even saw fit to praise Professor Klausner's work on the origins of Christianity. His audience drew further encouragement from these remarks, and mentally noted with glee that he had voiced two favorable sentiments in rapid succession. The captain then took his leave of the Zionist gentlemen with a charming, carefully modulated smile; he gestured ironically with his chin toward a group of Arab dignitaries from Bethlehem, winked at Moshe Shertok, and remarked confidentially that the other gentlemen were also demanding their pound of flesh. With that, he turned on his heel and walked over to join them.

After advancing slowly in a procession with other guests, Dr. and Mrs. Kipnis were eventually presented to the Military Governor of Jerusalem, to Lady Cunningham, and finally to Sir Alan himself.

Old Lady Bromley was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps she had fainted again. Sir Alan and Lady Cunningham greeted Father: "Pleased to meet you," "So glad you could come." Sir Alan allowed his grave blue glance to rest searchingly for a moment on Mother's black eyes as he said, "If I may say so, dear lady, your beauty and that of Jerusalem were molded by the same divine inspiration. I dare to hope that you will not be bored by our modest entertainment."

Mother responded to the compliment with one of her beautiful autumnal smiles. It hovered on her lips, as fine and transparent as the tears of the slain cavalrymen in the Polish poem.

Then a steward showed them to the bar and handed them over to an Armenian barman. Father immediately opted for a tomato juice, while Mother, after a moment's hesitation, the smile still playing faintly around her lips, asked for a glass of cherry brandy. They were conducted to a pretty wicker table and seated between Mr. Tsipkin, the Citrus King, and Madame Josette al-Bishari, the headmistress of the Arab National High School for Girls. They exchanged polite remarks.

Presently, the Military Governor of Jerusalem delivered a short, witty address from the veranda of the palace. He began with a reference to the crushing defeat inflicted on the enemies of humanity by Great Britain and her allies in May of the previous year. He paid a tribute to the guest of honor, Admiral Sir Kenneth Horace Sutherland, the Hero of Malta, and declared that the world had not yet seen the German, Italian, or lady who could resist him. He also paid tribute to the holy character of Jerusalem. He delivered an impassioned plea for fellowship and understanding among the adherents of the various religions. He added jokingly that if love did suddenly spring up among the different religious groups, the first thing the lovers would do would be to kick out the British. It was well known, he said, that in a love affair there was no place for a third party. But we British had always believed in miracles, and the idea of a Trinity was not entirely unfamiliar to Jerusalem; so whatever happened we would continue to haunt Palestine in the role of Holy Spirit, for which, of course, we were uniquely suited. A toast to the Crown. A toast to the Hero of Malta. Another toast to Sir Alan and his charming lady. And, if they would kindly refill their glasses, a final toast to the spring and to amity among all the inhabitants of the Holy Land, Moslems, Christians, Jews, and Socialists.

Then the dancing began.

From among the trees, which were hung with colored lights, the musicians of the police and military bands advanced in threes, their buckles gleaming. The whole hill resounded with the sound of percussion and brass. From behind the palace, fireworks lit up the sky over the city and the desert. The admiral, flushed and tipsy, roared, "Heave ho, me hearties! Splice the main brace! All guns fire!"

How colorfully the ladies' ball gowns blossomed by the light of the lanterns and fireworks. How riotously the music flowed into the heart of the night. How joyfully, how frenziedly, the couples whirled, the ladies twined like young vines, the men whispering sweet words into their ears. The Sudanese servants, coal-black faces atop white tunics, stared in amazement.

The last days of Rome must have been like this, Father thought to himself. As the idea flashed through his mind, his optimistic blue eyes may have reflected a momentary sadness behind his round glasses.

Mother was immediately snatched up by Mr. Tsipkin, the Citrus King. Then she could be seen, blond and radiant, in the arms of the Swedish consul. Then again resting lightly against the shoulder of a dark giant sporting a pair of Latin mustachios. With hardly a pause to draw breath, she was swept up by a one-eyed, battle-scarred colonel with predatory yellow teeth.

Father looked away. He struck up a desultory conversation with his neighbor, Madame Josette al-Bishari. No doubt he was telling her all about the cattle he inspected, or perhaps preaching with ill-suppressed zeal about the benefits of drinking goats' milk.

The High Commissioner himself was wandering, lost in thought, among the guests. He paused for a moment at the table where Madame al-Bishari and Dr. Kipnis sat; abstractedly he picked up a cocktail biscuit, eyed it cautiously, and returned it to the dish. He smiled faintly at Madame Josette or Dr. Kipnis or perhaps toward the lights of Jerusalem behind their shoulders, and eventually he spoke:

"Well, well. I see you are both sitting it out. Why aren't you dancing? I expect you're secretly hatching some sort of intrigue; but I've caught you red-handed, in the name of the Crown. Just my little joke. Good evening to you both."

He turned and moved away, a slim, erect figure, to continue his tour of the tables.

Father said, in English with a heavy German accent:

"I know a man who superficially resembles Sir Alan but hates him bitterly."

Madame Josette answered at once, in fluent German, with a kind of strangled fervor:

"Anyway, there's no hope."

"I am unable to agree with you on that point, madame," Father said.

Madame Josette smiled patiently. "I shall try to explain myself by means of a small illustration. Take yourselves, for example. You have been leaving Europe for Palestine for forty years now. You will never arrive. At the same time, we are moving away from the desert toward Europe, and we shall never arrive, either. There is not even the ghost of a chance that we shall meet one another halfway. I suppose, sir, that you consider yourself a social democrat?"

Father expressed surprise. "Surely we are meeting at this very moment?"

To these words he received no reply.

The headmistress of the National High School for Girls slowly gathered up her belongings from the table, her silk handkerchief, her Virginia cigarettes, her fan with its picture of Notre Dame; she apologized in French, which Father could not understand, and a feminine slyness glimmered for an instant in her eyes. She moved slowly away from the table, an elegant yet unremarkable woman, thickening slightly around the hips, in a long Marlene Dietrich dress. Then she was gone.

He followed her with his eyes until she had vanished in the throng. Then he caught sight of his wife, thrown high above the lawn, with her mouth gaping open in a soundless exclamation of pleasure, then landing gently in the broad hands of the Hero of Malta. She was disheveled and excited, her lips parted, her blue dress lifted above her knees.

Admiral Sutherland laughed hoarsely and gave an exaggerated bow. He seized her hand and raised the palm to his lips, kissing, blowing, nuzzling. She touched his cheek quickly. Then the music changed, and they started dancing again, pressed tightly together, with her head on his shoulder and his arm around her waist.

The fireworks had finished. The music was dying away. Guests were already leaving, and still she whirled with the Hero of Malta on the dance floor on the lawn toward the wood, until the darkness and the trees hid them from Father's sight.

Meanwhile the High Commissioner had withdrawn. The Military Governor had left, in a convoy of armored cars and armed jeeps, for the King David Hotel. The last guests had taken their leave and disappeared toward the parking lot. Captain Chichester-Browne and even the Sudanese servants had deserted the lawns and vanished into the inner recesses of the palace.

Darkness fell on the Hill of Evil Counsel. The paper lanterns went out one by one. Only the searchlights continued to claw the gentle slope and the bushes that were gradually sinking into ever-deeper shadows. A dry coldness rose from the Judean Desert, which bounded the palace on the east. And groups of palace guards armed with Bren guns began to patrol the grounds.

Father stood alone beside the deserted fountain, which was still pouring out jets of light and water. Now he spotted a single goldfish in the marble pool. He was cold, and desperately tired. His mother and sisters had probably been murdered in Silesia or somewhere else. The cattle farm in Galilee would never exist, the monograph or poem would never be written. Hillel would have to be sent to a boarding school in one of the kibbutzim. He will hate me for it all his life. Dr. Ruppin is dead. Buber and Agnon will also die. If a Hebrew state is ever established, I shall not be running its veterinary service. If only the Underground would come this very minute and blow the whole place sky high. But that's not a nice thought. And I—

In his borrowed dress suit, with a white handkerchief peeping out of his top pocket, with the strange bow tie and his comical glasses, Hans Kipnis looked like a pathetic suitor in a silent film.

He closed his eyes. He suddenly remembered the wandering Bavarian ornithologist with whom he had cut a virgin path many years before to the remote sources of the Jordan in the farthest corner of the country. He recalled the coldness of the water and the snowy peaks of Mount Hermon. When he opened his eyes again, he saw Lady Bromley. She appeared like a wizened ghost from among the bushy oleanders, old, spoiled, seething with venomous zeal, in a dark shawl, doubled up with malicious glee.

"What you have lost tonight, sir, you will never find again. If you like, you can leave a message with me for the head gardener. But even he cannot save you, because he is a drunken Greek and a pathetic queer. Go home, my dear doctor. The party's over. Life nowadays is just like a stupid party. A little light, a little music, a little dancing, and then darkness. Look. The lights have been turned out. The leftovers have been thrown to the dogs. Go home, my dear doctor. Or must I wake up poor Lieutenant Grady and tell him to drive you?"

"I am waiting for my wife," said Father.

Lady Bromley let out a loud, ribald guffaw. "I have had four husbands, and none of them, I repeat, none of them ever said anything as fantastic as that. In all my life I've never heard a man talk like that, except perhaps in vulgar farces."

"I should be deeply grateful, madam, if you could give me some assistance, or direct me to someone who can help me. My wife has been dancing all evening, and she may have had a drop too much to drink. She must be around somewhere. Perhaps she has dozed off."

Lady Bromley's eyes suddenly flashed, and she growled wickedly:

"You are the native doctor who poked his fingers into my corset ten days ago. How rotten and charming. Come here and let me give you a big kiss. Come. Don't be afraid of me."

Father rallied his last resources. "Please, madam, please help me. I can't go home without her."

"That's rich," gloated Lady Bromley. "Listen to that. That's wonderful. He can't go home without his wife. He needs to have his wife next to him every night. And these, ladies and gentlemen, are the Jews. The People of the Book. The spiritual people. Huh! How much?"

"How much what?" Father asked, stunned.

"Really! How much will that rotten drunkard Kenneth have to pay you to calm down and keep your mouth shut? Huh! You may not believe it, but in the twelve months since the end of the war, that stupid young hothead has already sold three woods, two farms, and an autograph manuscript of Dickens, all for cash to silence the poor husbands. What a life. How rotten and charming. And to think that his poor father was once a gentleman in waiting to Queen Victoria!"

"I don't understand," said Father.

Lady Bromley gave a piercing, high-pitched laugh like a rusty saw and said, "Good night, my sweet doctor. I am really and truly grateful to you for your devoted attention. Jewish fingers inside my corset. That's rich! And how enchanting the nights are here in Palestine in springtime. Look around you: what nights! By the way, our beloved Alan also used to have a thriving sideline in other men's wives when he was a cadet. But that leech Trish soon sucked him dry. Poor Trish. Poor Alan. Poor Palestine. Poor doctor. Good night to you, my poor dear Othello. Good night to me, too. By the way, who was the raving lunatic who had the nerve to call this stinking hole Jerusalem? It's a travesty. Au revoir, doctor."

At three o'clock in the morning, Father left the palace on foot and headed in the direction of the German Colony. Outside the railway station, he was given a lift by two pale-faced rabbis in a hearse. They were on their way, they explained, from a big wedding in the suburb of Mekor Hayim to their work at the burial society in Sanhedriya. Hans Kipnis arrived home shortly before four, in the misty morning twilight. At the same time, the admiral, his lady friend, his driver, and his bodyguard crossed a sleeping Jericho with blazing headlights and with an armed jeep for escort, and turned off toward the Kaliah Hotel on the shore of the Dead Sea. A day or two later, the black-and-silver Rolls Royce set out eastward, racing deep into the desert, across mountains and valleys, and onward, to Baghdad, Bombay, Calcutta. All along the way, Mother soulfully recited poems by Mickiewicz in Polish. The admiral, belching high-spiritedly like a big, good-natured sheepdog, ripped open her blue dress and inserted a red, affectionate hand. She felt nothing, and never for an instant interrupted her gazelle song. Only her black eyes shone with joy and tears. And when the admiral forced his fingers between her knees, she turned to him and told him that slain cavalrymen never die, they become transparent and powerful as tears.

13

The following day, a heat wave hit Jerusalem. Dust rose from the desert and hung over the mountains. The sky turned deep gray, a grotesque autumnal disguise. Jerusalem barred its shutters and closed in on itself. And the white boulders blazed spitefully on every hillside.

All the neighborhood was gathered excitedly in the garden. Father stood, in khaki shorts and a vest, staring tiredly and blankly up into the fig tree. His face looked innocent and helpless without his round glasses.

Mrs. Vishniak clapped her hands together and muttered in Yiddish, "Gott in Himmel." Madame Yabrova and her niece tried angry words and gentle ones. They held out the threat of the British police, the promise of marzipan, the final threat of the kibbutz.

Engineer Brzezinski, red-faced and panting, tried unsuccessfully to join two ladders together. And Mitya the lodger took advantage of the general confusion to trample the flower beds, one after another, uprooting saplings and tearing out plants and throwing them over his shoulder, chewing his shirt collar and hissing continuously through his rotting teeth, "Lies, falsehood, untruth, it's all lies."

Father attempted one last plea. "Come down, Hillel. Please, son, get down. Mommy will come back and it'll all be like before. Those branches aren't very strong. Get down, there's a good boy. We won't punish you. Just come down now and everything will be exactly the same as before."

But the boy would not hear. His eyes groped at the murky gray sky, and he went on climbing up, up to the top of the tree, as the scaly fingers of the leaves caressed him from all sides, up to where the branches became twigs and buds, and still on, up to the very summit, up into the gentle trembling, to the fine delicate heights where the branches became a high-pitched melody into the depths of the sky. Night is reigning in the skies, time for you to close your eyes. Every bird is in its nest, all Jerusalem's at rest. He saw nothing, no frantic people in the garden, no Daddy, no house and no mountains, no distant towers, no stone huts scattered among the boulders, no sun, no moon, no stars. Nothing at all. All Jerusalem's at rest. Only a dull-gray blaze. Overcome with pleasure and astonishment, the child said to himself, "There's nothing." Then he gathered himself and leaped on up to the last leaf, to the shore of the sky.

At that point the firemen arrived. But Engineer Brzezinski drove them away, roaring: "Go away! There's no fire here! Lunatics! Go to Taganrog! Go to Kherson, degenerates! That's where the fire is! In the Crimea! At Sebastopol! There's a great fire raging there! Get out of here! And in Odessa, too! Get out of here, the lot of you!"

And Mitya put his arms carefully around Father's shaking shoulders and led him slowly indoors, whispering gently and with great compassion, "Jerusalem, which slayeth its prophets, shall burn the new Hellenizers in hellfire."

In due course, the elderly Professor Julius Wertheimer, together with his cats, also moved into the little stone house in Tel Arza. An international commission of inquiry arrived in Jerusalem. There were predictions and hopes. One evening Mitya suddenly opened up his room and invited his friends in. The room was spotlessly clean, except for the slight persistent smell. The three scholars would spend hours on end here, drinking tea and contemplating an enormous military map, guessing wildly at the future borders of the emerging Hebrew state, marking with arrows ambitious campaigns of conquest all over the Middle East. Mitya began to address Father by his first name, Hanan. Only the famous geographer Hans Walter Landauer looked down on them with a look of skepticism and mild surprise from his picture.

Then the British left. A picture of the High Commissioner, Sir Alan Cunningham, appeared in the newspaper Davar, a slim, erect figure in a full general's uniform, saluting the last British flag to be run down, in the port of Haifa.

A Hebrew government was finally set up in Jerusalem. The road in Tel Arza was paved, and the suburb was joined to the city. The saplings grew. The trees looked very old. The creepers climbed over the roof of the house and all over the fence. Masses of flowers made a blaze of blue. Madame Yabrova was killed by a stray shell fired on Tel Arza from the battery of the Transjordanian Legion near Nabi Samwil. Lyubov Binyamina Even-Hen, disillusioned with the Hebrew state, sailed from Haifa aboard the Moledet to join her sister in New York. There she was run over by a train, or she may have thrown herself underneath it. Professor Buber also died, at a ripe old age. In due course Father and Mitya were appointed to teaching posts at the Hebrew University, each in his own subject. Every morning they packed rolls and hard-boiled eggs and a Thermos of tea and set off together by bus for the Ratisbone and Terra Sancta buildings, where some of the departments of the university were housed temporarily until the road to Mount Scopus could be reopened. The elderly Professor Julius Wertheimer, however, finally retired and devoted himself single-mindedly to keeping house for them. The whole house gleamed. He even discovered the secret of perfect ironing. Once a month Hanan and Mitya went to see the child at school in the kibbutz. He had grown lean and bronzed. They took him chocolate and chewing gum from Jerusalem. On the hills all around Jerusalem, the enemy set up concrete pillboxes, bunkers, gun sites.

And waited.

1974