The Hill of Evil Counsel

Mr. Levi

1

Once upon a time, many years ago, there lived in Jerusalem an old poet by the name of Nehamkin. He had come from Vilna and settled in a low stone house with a tiled roof in a narrow alley off Zephaniah Street. Here he wrote his poems, and here every summer he sat in a deck chair in the garden counting the hours and the days.

This quarter of the city had been built in a large orchard on a hillside, with a view of the mountains that surround Jerusalem. Every passing breeze caused a shiver. Fig trees and mulberry trees, pomegranates and grapevines, were forever rustling and whispering as though asking us to be quiet. The poet Nehamkin was already slightly deaf, but he tried to capture the rustling of the trees in his poems, interpreting it in his own way. The whisper of the leaves in the breeze, the scent of the blossoms, the smell of dry thistles in the late summer, all seemed to him to be hinting at an important event that was imminent. His poems were always full of surmises.

One by one, simple stone-built houses sprang up among the trees of the orchard. They had balconies with rusty iron railings, low fences, and gates adorned with a Star of David or the word ZION.

Little by little the settlers neglected the trees. Shady pines gradually overwhelmed the vines and pomegranates. Occasional bursts of pomegranate blossom were snuffed out by the children before they ever bore fruit. Among the untended trees and the outcrops of rock, there were attempts at planting oleanders, violets, and geraniums. But the flower beds were quickly forgotten, trampled underfoot, filled with thorns and broken glass, and these plants, too, if they did not wither and die, grew wild. In the backyards of the houses, ramshackle sheds proliferated, built out of the packing cases in which the settlers had transported their belongings from Russia and Poland. Some of them nailed empty olive cans to wooden poles, called them dovecotes, and waited for the doves to come. In the meantime, the only birds to nest in the area were crows and swallows. Somewhere there lurked a persistent cuckoo.

The residents longed to leave Jerusalem and settle somewhere less extreme. Some of them fixed their sights on other suburbs, such as Beit ha-Kerem, Talpiyot, or Rehavia. They believed almost without exception that the hard times would soon be over, the Hebrew state would be set up, and everything would change for the better. Surely they had completed in full their term of suffering. Meanwhile, the first children were born and grew up in the neighborhood, and it was almost impossible to explain to them why and from where their parents had come here, and what it was they were waiting for.

The poet Nehamkin lived with his only son, Ephraim, who was an electrician and ideologist. Like most of the children of the district, I, too, believed that this Ephraim played some secret and terrible role in the Hebrew Underground. In outward appearance, he was short, dark, wiry-haired, a technician who almost always wore blue overalls and found it hard to keep his hands still. He repaired irons and radios, and even built transmitters with his own hands. He sometimes disappeared for days on end, to return, eventually, suntanned and withdrawn, with an expression of contempt or disgust on his face, as if in the course of his wanderings he had seen things that had filled him with despair. Ephraim and I shared a secret. At the end of the winter, he had made me his lieutenant. One of his lieutenants, that is.

What it was, however, that he had discovered in his wanderings, Ephraim did not see fit to disclose to me.

Despite his scornful expression, despite his low brow and rough hands, he had various girls who came to him, including a skinny student from the university on Mount Scopus. Sometimes they would stay with him until daybreak. These visitors seemed to me unnecessary; not one of them was pretty or gay. I hated them because they called Ephraim by the ugly pet name Froike, and because I was afraid that love or lust would make him give away to them at night secrets that belonged to the two of us alone; I had sometimes seen in the movies how love can make even heroes lose their wits, and then there is no going back.

Once I helped set a trap with the Grill boys from next door. We tied a rusty tin can full of muddy water to a branch of the mulberry tree, and ran a fine cord from it across the lane. Then we hid in the tree. The skinny girl from Mount Scopus came down the lane, carefully stepped over the cord, cast a reproachful look up into the tree, and remarked sadly:

"You should be ashamed of yourselves."

The Grill boys began to laugh. I laughed with them. Then we put broken glass into some mailboxes.

Later, I felt suddenly ashamed. I felt ashamed for most of the morning, and at lunchtime I went to the workshop and made a clean breast of it to Ephraim. I didn't mention the Grill boys. I took all the blame upon myself. Ephraim locked the door, made me call our trap a stupid, childish prank, and forgave me. He taught me how to fill a tin can with gasoline and use a fuse to ignite it, so that when the time came I could play my part in the final battle and not go as a lamb to the slaughter, like the Jewish children in Europe.

Then Ephraim turned to the dry, dusty-looking girl who was sitting silently on his bed sewing a button on for him, and who seemed to me to have no lips:

"Uriel is in on it," he said. "He's a serious boy. And in general," he added, "there's excellent human material here in the neighborhood. This is Ruhama. And she's not what you think."

Ruhama straightened her glasses with two fingers, still holding the needle. She said nothing. I did not speak, either. Secretly I was convinced that it was this Ruhama who would betray us all to the British police. I thought it strange that Ephraim should be so irresponsible as to have her in his workshop and let her sit on his bed and even stay all night sometimes. Love, I thought to myself, could definitely wait until after the victory. She wasn't even pretty. She didn't even talk to me.

The old poet used to do everything in his power to stop the girls going to the workshop. Sometimes he would lie in wait for them at the gate. But the garden had two entrances, and in places the fence was broken down, and anyway Ephraim's room had a back entrance from the rocky garden, up three stone steps that were slippery with dead pine needles.

Sometimes the poet could not contain himself: he would intercept one of the girls and smile at her with extreme politeness:

"Excuse me, dear lady, but I think you must have made a mistake. I must inform you, with all due respect, that this is neither an alehouse nor a den of thieves. This is a private house. And anyway, the young man is not here, he is away on his travels, he has left no instructions — who am I to say when he will take it into his head to return?"

From the beginning of the summer holidays, there was a secret alliance between Mr. Nehamkin and me against these periodic incursions. He lay in wait in front of the house, while I lurked in the garden.

Ephraim, if he was not away on his wanderings, liked to sleep from after lunch until the evening twilight. He would sleep, soaked in sweat, on a mattress in his workshop. He would toss and groan in his sleep, ward something off with his fists, turn over suddenly with a moan. I would tiptoe in to listen in case he uttered secrets in his dreams, so that I could keep them from prying ears. Then I would tiptoe out again and resume my watch.

If ever one of the girls came to disturb Ephraim's slumbers, we would both, Mr. Nehamkin and I, waylay her at the gate. We were armed with uncompromising replies to the mincing question "Where's Froike?"

"I'm his lieutenant. He's not in," I would say darkly.

And Mr. Nehamkin would add softly:

"It is quite impossible to know when the young man will return from his wanderings. It may be tomorrow, or the day after, or it may not be for many days."

Sometimes the girl would ask us to pass along a note or a message. These we would always refuse. There was no need. There was no point. And in any case, in times like these, who accepts letters from strangers?

The girl would either protest or apologize, and promise to call again some other time. She would hesitantly employ some such word as "misunderstanding" or "regret" and be on her way.

The moment her back was turned, Mr. Nehamkin would begin to justify our action in carefully chosen words:

"We told no lie; nor did we mislead the young lady. After all, slumber is a kind of distant wandering to remote worlds. As for billets-doux and notes, it is explicitly forbidden for a man to make himself a messenger of sin."

On such occasions he would also add some cautious prognostication prompted by the sight of the girl disappearing down the lane:

"She will surely soon find herself another young man, or maybe even two, according to the desire of her heart, whereas we have only one Ephraim. Therefore we shall continue to stand as a bulwark and as one man, the wretched poet Nehamkin and the excellent child Uriel. We shall never allow strangers to lead us astray. The aged poet and the youth shall hold the fort and guard the truth. Now return in peace to your wonted sport, and I shall go on my weary way. Each to his allotted task. O, that it may be granted us to behold the deliverance of Jerusalem."

2

Mr. Nehamkin was round and cuddly like a teddy bear. He dragged his feet and always walked with the aid of a carved stick. He looked as though he found his body a tiresome burden, as though he was forced to drag it around with him from place to place against his will, like a man carrying a heavy bundle that was gradually coming undone. The poet had discovered in Holy Writ one or two vague hints that in the Judean Desert, below Jerusalem, a green sea was hidden that no eye had ever beheld, not the Dead Sea, not a sea at all, but springs or wells of water, where were the Essenes and dreamers whom not even the Roman legions had been able to discover, and that was where he meant to go one of these days to shrug off his burden and set off lightened and freed along his own unique road.

He would say:

"How sorry I am for them. I could weep for them. Eyes have they but they see not."

Or:

"Their mouths speak but their ears hear not. The decree has gone forth. Their time has expired. The sword is already flashing. But as for them, they eat and drink. To outward appearances they are fearlessly made, but in truth they are merely blinded. Sorrow and compassion rend my heart."

At times it seemed as though Mr. Nehamkin's prophecies were almost about to come true. Once, in the doorway of the grocer's, he bent over and whispered to me that the King of Israel would soon rise up from his hiding place in the clefts of the mountain and slay the High Commissioner and seize his throne in Jerusalem. Another time it was revealed to him in a dream that Hitler was not dead but had hidden himself away among the murderous Bedouins in the darkness of the tents of Kedar. And in the middle of the summer holidays, a few days before the fast of Ab, he took me among the drought-smitten oleanders in the garden and urged me to water the plants because the feet of the Messenger were already standing at the gates of Jerusalem. At five o'clock on the following morning, the neighborhood was awakened by sounds of shouting and moaning. I leaped into my gym shorts and rushed outside with no shoes on. The three Grill boys, Boaz, Joab, and Abner, were standing in the middle of the lane beating furiously on a broken tar drum. Half-dressed women ran out of the houses. Somebody shouted a question, and other voices shouted back. The dogs were barking as though they were out of their minds. From the Faithful Remnant Synagogue, the Venerable Rabbi Zischa Lufban emerged, with a retinue of saints and scholars, and cried out repeatedly in an awe-inspiring voice:

"Come out, unclean! Come out in the name of G — d!"

But it was only excited neighbors who came out of every doorway, and many of them were in their pajamas. Helena Grill ran from one man to another, begging them at least to save the children. I caught sight of Mr. Nehamkin standing mildly and thoughtfully at the gate of his garden. He was wearing a dark-blue suit, a Polish tie, a flaming paper flower in his buttonhole, and a polite smile of forgiveness on his face; he was clasping his walking stick by its tiger's-head handle.

Mother chose to stay indoors. She sent father to wake up Mrs. Vishniak the pharmacist. Mother was always afraid that somebody might faint or that there might be an accident. But there was no accident. We saw a colorful procession wending its way toward us out of the east, from the direction of the Bokharan Quarter. At its head was a little old man with an unwashed air, riding on a little ass. He must have been ill, or perhaps only exhausted, because he was propped up on either side by Kurdish porters. They were lean and dark-bristled, with sacks tied around their waists.

Following close on the heels of the old man came the whole Bokharan Quarter, men, women, and children, just like the Exodus from Egypt we were learning about at school. Someone was beating on an old tin can, others were chanting guttural hymns, or mumbling prayers and incantations. The ass seemed to me piteously meek and wretched. It was far from healthy, and it wasn't even white. I looked around for Ephraim, but he was nowhere to be seen. His old father beamed at me, touched my hair, and said peacefully:

"Blessed are they that believe."

The procession, meanwhile, had turned off Zephaniah Street onto Amos Street. It continued westward along the stone wall of the Schneller Barracks and came to a halt outside the main gate, opposite the clock tower.

All the children of the neighborhood, myself among them, rushed from either flank of the procession up to the gate. Here we stopped, because the British sentries had cocked their Tommy guns and rested them, pointing at the crowd, on top of the sandbag barricade.

The Schneller tower was crowned by an indecipherable inscription in Gothic characters. The clock itself had stopped many years before. It chimed regularly every half hour, day and night, but its hands were lifeless. They pointed immovably to precisely three minutes past three. A rumor ran through the crowd: the stranger who had arrived out of nowhere at midnight would work a miracle and make time run backward. He would summon King David and all his horsemen out of the top of the tower. The massed troops of the ten lost tribes would come sweeping down from the mountains. The old Bokharan women started beating their breasts with their wrinkled fists. A cripple began to declaim, "This is the day which the Lord hath made," then suddenly thought better of it and fell silent. Together with Boaz, Joab, and Abner and all the other boys of the neighborhood, I chanted ecstatically:

"Free immigra-tion, He-brew state!"

"Woe upon me," cried Rabbi Lufban, but nobody heard him.

The British blocked the road with an armored car. An officer stood up in it holding a loudspeaker. He was presumably telling the crowd to disperse, but there must have been some flaw, since we could only see his lips moving. The noise died down. There was a silence like the still, small voice we had learned about at school, and in the silence birds and a cockcrowing far away. It was just before the dawn. The light was gray and blue. The cypress trees and the great water tower on top of Romema Hill seemed to be receding into the gentle mist. Then the old man straightened himself up on his ass,'drew a filthy handkerchief from the folds of his robe, and hawked and spat into it. The people were silent. He folded the handkerchief and put it away, raised his head, carefully put on a pair of spectacles, pointed to the clock or perhaps to the tower with a trembling finger, and mumbled some words that I did not catch; but I could see him swelling, reddening, coming to the boil, and suddenly he cried out in a clear, strong voice:

"Let the sun rise and let the deed be done. Now!"

At that very moment the sun rose, gigantic, yellow, dazzling the mountaintop to the east, blazing on the Paternoster and Augusta Victoria towers, shimmering on the Mount of Olives, flashing terribly on the wooded slopes, gleaming off the cisterns on all the roofs of Geula, Ahva, Kerem Avraham and Mekor Baruch. I felt like running away, because it looked as though the whole of Jerusalem were on fire.

Everybody, believers and skeptics alike, Mr. Nehamkin, Rabbi Lufban — all watched the sun rise and turned their eyes as one man toward the clock tower. Even the British officer in the armored car looked around.

But the clock had not moved: still three minutes past three.

Far away, in the Geran Colony, a train howled. Somebody lit a cigarette. There was whispering. A woman began to laugh or sob. Then the old man sighed, slipped off the back of the gray donkey, leaned trembling on the arms of his Kurdish bodyguard, and said sadly:

"Another time."

At once, in furious Yiddish, the Venerable Rabbi Zischa Lufban ordered his disciples to send the scoffers and workers of iniquity straight back to the dark holes they had crawled out of and put an end to this blasphemous charade. The British officer, too, finally managed to make his loudspeaker work and gave the crowd five minutes to disperse peacefully.

I elbowed my way through to Mr. Nehamkin.

"Please, Mr. Nehamkin, what's going to happen now?"

He transferred his carved walking stick to his other hand, touched my forehead tenderly, and smoothed my hair back from my eyes. His hand was cold and ancient, but his voice was like a caress:

"We, Uriel, we have stamina. We shall go on waiting."

After a while, the British police appeared from the direction of Romema and began to disperse the throng. But they were powerless to undo what had been done: under cover of the press and tumult, almost as though it had all been prearranged, Ephraim and his comrades had plastered the walls, shutters, telegraph poles, and shopwindows with subversive posters. They proclaimed in inflammatory slogans that the days of Nazi-British rule were numbered, that the Hebrew Underground had passed sentence of death on the High Commissioner and would soon execute the sentence, and that as Judea had fallen in blood and fire, so in blood and fire it would arise again.

Then the saints returned to their synagogue, the Bokharans went their various ways, the shops opened, the mountains gradually caught fire, and another cruel summer's day began in Jerusalem.

3

Whenever he came home from his wanderings, Ephraim would visit us in the late afternoon, to give me a clandestine examination in radio waves and frequencies, to play a game of chess with my father, and to gaze from a distance at my mother.

While my father and Ephraim were absorbed in their game of chess, my mother would sit at the piano, with her face toward the window and her back to the room. Ephraim looked at her not longingly, like the heroes in the pictures, but with an ex-pression that resembled dismay. I myself was dismayed at their silence. At that time, distant sounds of firing could be heard almost every evening in Jerusalem. Father chewed mint leaves: he was always afraid of having bad breath. Ephraim smoked so much that sometimes his eyes watered. Mother played the same étude over and over again, as if she had made up her mind never to move on until she had received an answer. Outside the wind touched the trees as if pleading for silence. But there was silence anyway.

On the sill of the deep-set window that faced north, my battlefields were laid out. Corks, pushpins, silver foil, matchboxes, and empty cigarette packs were battleships, troops, and tanks. I conducted cunning mopping-up operations by the army of Bar Kochba and Marshal Budënny against the Nazi storm troopers. By the middle of the summer holidays my Maccabees had conquered Athens, breached the walls of Rome, burned its palaces and razed its towers, and raced on to besiege Berlin and London. By the time the winter rain and snow made the roads impassable, we would force them to surrender unconditionally.

It was Ephraim who had outlined the strategy.

"Always attack on the flank," he instructed me, "always from the desert, from the forest, from the mountains, always from where you are least expected."

His eyes glowed as he spoke, and he could not keep his hands still. He would add in a whisper, "Only don't trust them. Never trust them. They're all thirsting for our blood."

He it was, too, who hit on the idea of the dry-land submarines, which we called "X-ray subs"; they could travel underground through the sea of molten lava and demolish whole cities by torpedoing them from underneath.

"The earth shall tremble," he would say, "cities shall be burned to ashes, towers shall totter, and only then shall we know rest."

How I loved to see him swell with rage and then subside into silence.

My heart went out to him as he promised me earthquakes, tottering towers, and rest.

I would plead, "But when, Ephraim?"

He would respond with one of his cold, practical smiles. And say nothing.

Worse still, he would suddenly abandon me and tease me mercilessly.

"Now, Uri, you just go on playing with your toys. I've got real work to do. Every detail has to be taken care of well in advance."

All night long, Ephraim would experiment with cosmic radio waves and frequencies, in an attempt to isolate the death ray. If I begged him to give me at least a hint of what the death ray was, he would burst out, with a desperate grin:

"Sting ray. Disarray. Hip-hip-hooray. Why don't you learn to keep your mouth shut and wait for orders like a proper soldier, or else go and play with marbles and tops and paper darts with the other kids. Go on. Scram. Why are you always following me around? What do you think I am, your nursemaid? Go on, now, piss off."

I withdrew from the workshop with my tail between my legs, like a field marshal stripped of his decorations and insignia and ignominiously discharged. I sat down on the cracked stone steps. I tickled myself behind the knees with pine needles. I tried in vain to hypnotize a stupid cat on the garden fence. And repented.

Ephraim and his father the poet ran their small workshop jointly. Mr. Nehamkin received the radios and electrical implements for repair and kept a record of them, collected overdue payments, exchanged views and surmises about the political situation with the customers, adducing evidence from Holy Writ, and entered details of income and expenditure in his copperplate hand in a large ledger. He was empowered to authorize a discount or even credit in certain cases.

Ephraim sometimes allowed his father and me to wind galvanized copper wire onto wooden spools. Once he took advantage of his father's hardness of hearing to promise me in an undertone:

"When he's dead, I'll take you on instead. You can be the poet and cashier then."

At once he changed his mind.

"No, we'll die first, and he'll pronounce flowery orations over our graves. They were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided. Surely each night they shall arise and continue to fight the great fight for their people. Someining like that. The war is going to be a tough and bloody one. Only the generations to come will enjoy rest."

When he was not away on his wanderings, Ephraim used to sit all morning daydreaming among the broken irons and phonographs and antiquated radios. Sometimes he would explode with rage and attack these useless gadgets with screwdriver and pliers. He dismantled them completely, combined parts from different sources, and succeeded in transforming a heap of worthless junk into a gleaming piece of modern equipment. His favorite word was "rejuvenation." His work, as he described it, was to rejuvenate antediluvian equipment whose owners had given it up as beyond repair. But when his fit of rage had passed, he lapsed once more into drowsiness. The gray summer dust settled everywhere. Flies buzzed busily, while a spider lay in wait for them in its thicket in the corner. Ephraim would yawn like a whining fox, stretch himself furiously, spit twice on the floor, and repair Mrs. Vishniak's iron almost as an afterthought. Then he would plunge back into his usual morning reverie.

At lunchtime, he would fry potatoes for us all and share some sausages with his father. Then he would strip off his overalls and collapse onto the sweaty mattress in his underwear, as if exhausted by a hard morning's work. He slept restlessly till the onset of twilight, while we guarded him from the girls.

But in the evenings, I saw Ephraim come to hidden life, and then I was truly his lieutenant. He shinned up the drainpipe like a shadowy cat, rigged up various antennas on the roof, and began experimenting with frequencies. My task was to sit in the dark workshop among the glowing receivers and write down what I heard. Until I was called home to bed, and he continued on his own to search relentlessly for the single elusive signal that he was trying to isolate from the stream of astral rays.

Once he condescended to favor me with a simplified explanation. Gravity is a form of radiation. Here, look: in my left hand a hammer, in my right a cigarette; they both hit the ground at exactly the same time, but not with the same impact. Nature always contrives to produce opposing pairs: life and death, fire and water, hope and despair. So there must be some contrary ray somewhere that counteracts the ray of gravity and once we've found it everything will be possible and now just you scram and forget everything you've heard.

I could not understand the scientific meaning of all this. But as a military man myself, I fully realized what fate lay in store for the British Empire once we had mastered this secret ray.

Once in a while, one of the girls would slip through our defenses and manage to reach Ephraim and spend the night with him. But even on these nights, Ephraim did not switch off the receivers that brought him the astral signals. Lovemaking must have taken place inside his room to the accompaniment of piercing bleeps and whistles from outer space. Or perhaps not love, but some other kind of union that was not ugly, not sweaty, something I would have given my life to share and once I even crept up behind the shuttered window in the dark and hid like an owl in the sticky pepper tree and strained with all my might to hear and I shivered at the sounds I heard in the darkness because I did not know if they were sobs or muffled laughs or radio signals from the stars, and suddenly I panicked and the pepper tree smeared me with a bitter stickiness and I thought that everything was about to shatter to smithereens and that Ephraim and the girl would die and Mr. Nehamkin and Mommy and Daddy would die and I would be left all alone in the ashes of Jerusalem and the smell of the pepper tree would give me away and bloodthirsty gangs would swoop down on Jerusalem out of the mountains and I would be all alone. So I slipped down from the tree and crept around the house in the dark. I was startled by a startled cat. I stood at the window of the old poet's room, pressed my face against the wire mesh, and shouted in a whisper:

"Mr. Nehamkin! Please! Mr. Nehamkin!"

But he did not hear me. He could not possibly hear me. He was sitting, as usual, building a model of the Temple out of used matchsticks, following the descriptions in Scripture and in other sources. It was a project that had been going on for years, and its completion was receding further and further into the distance, because, as he explained to me, the evidence of the various sources was inconsistent, and he was constantly obliged to dismantle and rebuild it, now according to one plan and now according to another.

With his large, pale fingers, he dipped matchstick after matchstick into a bowl of flour-and-water paste. He had a piece of twine gripped between his teeth, and all the time he hummed to himself:

Our Father, our King,

Have mercy upon us and answer us

Although we deserve it not.

Afterward, lying in bed, scratched and smelling of pepper, I could hear the fervent worshipers in the Faithful Remnant Synagogue, gathered for the Midnight Vigil. The summer would soon be over, and the Days of Awe would be upon us.

And outside, in the warm darkness, something was enraging or terrifying the dogs of the neighborhood and making them hesitate between barking and howling.

4

Ephraim was a sharp-witted but impatient chess player. Father sometimes managed to beat him because he refused to take risks and always conducted a cautious defensive campaign.

"Slow but sure," Ephraim would say condescendingly when Father occasionally succeeded in capturing a defenseless pawn on the outskirts of the field of combat.

Father was not offended. He merely urged:

"Concentrate, Ephraim. Don't give up yet. I shouldn't mind changing places with you, even with your present setup."

Ephraim dismissed this offer with a single contemptuous word: "Today!" He suggested they quit chattering and get on with the real business:

"You're just trying to confuse me with your speechifying, Kolodny. But any moment now, you'll find yourself in a spot, and then you won't feel much like making speeches."

"We'll soon see," Father replied mildly. "Meanwhile I'm besieging your castle, and I've made a good meal of your pawn."

"Make the most of it," Ephraim said angrily. "Nibble the bait to your heart's content; I'm ready with my rod and line."

"We'll see," Father repeated affectionately.

They sat facing each other across the heavy brown living-room table: Ephraim short and dark, his head held forward as if ready to charge, his shirt deliberately unbuttoned to show off his curly-haired chest; Father in a vest and a pair of khaki shorts that were a bit too large for him, his cheeks pink and close-shaven, the corners of his eyes wrinkled in a smile that I secretly called his "schoolmasterly smile."

The chessboard lay on the table between them, surrounded by nuts, biscuits, apples, and pale-blue paper napkins printed with pictures of white-sailed fishing boats. There was also a china ashtray in the form of a woman's cupped hand. Among the various delicacies stood a yogurt pot containing some wilting white roses. From time to time, a yellowing petal landed gently on the oilcloth that covered the table, and found a rejuvenating echo in the vividly colored roses that were printed all over it. Father would instantly seize the dead petal, fix it with a concentrated stare, and fold it skillfully into ever-smaller squares.

Ephraim would pick up a knight or a bishop, tap it impatiently on the boards as if calling Father to order, and say:

"Why ponder, Kolodny? You've got no choice."

Father:

"Yes. You're right, I'm just trying to decide which is the lesser of two evils."

Mother, from her perch on the piano stool, said:

"Calm down, you two. It's not worth getting worked up over a game."

This remark seemed to me to be uncalled for: it was not Father and Ephraim who were getting worked up.

The living room was simply and cheerfully furnished. The curtains were bright and airy, the ceiling was painted pale-blue, and the walls were patterned with tiny flowers, as if the decorator had fancied himself a gardener, rather than a painter. Behind the sliding glass doors of the sideboard, the dinner service was neatly displayed in serried ranks, like troops ready to be reviewed by a high-ranking officer. There was a chandelier with four intertwining branches, each surmounted by a bud-shaped light bulb.

On the other side of the room hung a bookshelf containing a Bible with a modern commentary, the Gazetteer of Palestine, a history of the Jews and a concise world history, the complete poems of Bialik, selected poems of Chernikhovsky, and Gur's Hebrew Dictionary. A volume entitled Gems of Literature lay on its side on top of the other books, because there was no room for it on the shelf. Above the sideboard hung a picture of a pioneer pushing a plow through a field in the Jezreel Valley, oblivious of the black crows hovering over Mount Gilboa in the top corner of the picture. On top of Mother's piano stood a plaster bust of Chopin, which I secretly called Mr. Szczupak because it reminded me a little of the proprietor of Riviera Fashions on King George Street. The bust bore a legend in Polish that Mother translated for me as "With all the warmth of my heart and until my dying breath." Next to my window sill, the Jewish National Fund collection box hung from a thick nail. It was adorned with a map of the country, with the areas we had already won back filled in in brown. I could not restrain myself: I took my box of paints and drew one arrow from Jerusalem northward through Gilead and the Golan toward Mount Lebanon, and another southeastward to the borders of Moab on the shores of the Dead Sea. As a result of this pincer movement, it became possible to paint the whole map brown, and so to gain possession of the whole country. At first Father was angry, and insisted that I carefully wash and dry the box and remove every trace of this piece of cleverness. Then he changed his mind, his face broadened into one of his schoolmasterly smiles, and he said:

"All right. Leave it as it is. You were carried away by a flight of fancy. So be it."

Mother said:

"Every Friday we put two mils in the box, and yet it never fills up. Perhaps even money evaporates in this heat. Instead of talking, Kolodny, maybe you wouldn't mind going out and buying a quarter-block of ice for the icebox. Or else send your son. I don't mind which of you goes, only get cracking, before all the vegetables perish."

If Ephraim won the game of chess, Father would take it in good part and remark cheerfully:

"After all, it's only a game."

But if Ephraim's concentration was distracted by Mother's presence or by some ideological brainstorm, so that he made one crass mistake after another and lost the game, Father's face would be covered with shame and confusion: "Look, Ephraim," he would whisper anxiously, "look what a spot you've got yourself into. What shall we do now?"

Ephraim would respond with a short burst of silent fury. He would pick up a nut and crush it between his teeth, glance at Mother's shoulders or beyond, at the hillside, which was visible through the window, and hiss through pursed lips:

"So, Kolodny, so you've won. So what? Now let's play seriously, for once."

As if the game that had just finished had merely been for practice. As if his losing had merely been a small gesture to my ungrateful father, and now the time had come for the real game in which no quarter would be given.

Mother would generally prevent the outbreak of this real game by interrupting her playing, coming over to the table, laying one hand on Father's shoulder and the other on the back of Ephraim's chair, and saying:

"That's enough. Stop it, the pair of you. Now let's all have a nice glass of tea."

At once Father and his guest would exclaim in unison:

"No, really! There's no need. Honestly! Don't take the trouble!"

Mother would ignore their protests and turn to me.

"Will you give me a hand, Uri?"

I would immediately abandon the corks and silver foil, impose a cease-fire on all fronts, and follow Mother to the kitchen. I loved to arrange everything carefully on the black glass-topped trolley and wheel it into the living room: five tall glasses with glass saucers; five dessert plates; five pastry forks with one broad prong and two narrow ones; five long teaspoons; sugar; milk, lemon; reinforcements of nuts and biscuits. Soon the kettle would come to a boil, and Mother would pour the tea. Meanwhile my job was to go down the steps and across the lane and wake the old poet from his midsummer afternoon's dream. Approaching his deck chair in the corner of the untended garden among the parched oleanders and the beds of thistles, I would address him politely:

"Mr. Nehamkin! Please! Mr. Nehamkin! We're having tea, and they'd like to know if you would care to join us."

At first the old man would not move. He would simply open his blue eyes and stare at me in surprise. Then a tired, hopeless smile would spread on his tortoiselike face, and his hand would point gently toward the pepper tree, where unseen birds were shrilling ecstatically.

"What's the matter, child, what's happened? Is there a fire, heaven forbid?"

At once he would add:

"Young Uriel. Yes? Speak up and let's hear what you have to say for yourself."

"They're drinking tea, Mr. Nehamkin, and chatting, and they'd like you to join them."

"What. Oh. One might have thought there was a fire, heaven forbid. But I see there's nothing burning. I shall certainly come. Indeed I shall. Come, let us go together, as one man: the poet and the youth. We shall go forth and come again with rejoicing, and surely we shall not return empty."

As we proceeded across the lane, through the garden and up the steps, the old man would already have embarked on his gentle homily, his velvet voice kissing the rare, carefully chosen words and caressing the ends of his sentences, as if it were all one to him whether his audience consisted of all the people or of me alone, or if there were no one at all to hear him. He spoke about the shamefulness of ignoring the misery of others, the completion of the full term of suffering, the ironies of fate, and the need to withstand the test. He was still speaking when we arrived, and Ephraim and Father rose to greet him and take the walking stick with its carved tiger's head handle and seat him at the table between Mother and the window. While they were seating him at the table, Mother poured the tea, and still he did not interrupt his homily; nor did he see fit to recommence it, but he continued to unburden himself of the ideas that, as he put it, had been gathering in his heart during his lengthy meditations:

"… There is no shepherd for the flock and no pillar of fire. Only the pillar of smoke that obscures all eyes. All eyes are darkened. Surely a thousand years are as a day. O, that a heavenly voice might sound, or a consuming fire flash forth. O, that something might happen at long last to put an end to the lamentation of Zion. We can continue no longer. We are almost doomed. No, ladies and gentlemen, no, I shall not drink a second glass of tea. No power in the world will make me drink any more, lest I be in your eyes as a glutton and a drunkard. I am well satisfied with a single glass. On the other hand, how can I refuse you, dear lady? I shall gladly drink a second glass with you, provided it is no trouble. And after that, with your permission, I shall recite one or two humble verses, then take my leave of you and go on my weary way. My thanks and blessings be upon you: very pleasant have you been unto me."

A short silence followed this speech.

Ephraim looked at Mother, and Father looked at Ephraim.

I took advantage of the opportunity to slip away from the table and return to my battlefield, to the cigarette packs and pushpins, some of which represented Panzer divisions and others, bands of Maccabees lying in ambush in the pass of Beth Heron, the few against the many.

Through the window I could see the parade ground inside the Schneller Barracks. Antlike soldiers were sweeping the parade ground, whitewashing the trunks of the pines and eucalyptus trees, marking off areas with rope, piling up roof tiles. In the evening light they seemed pitifully tiny and lost, these soldiers needlessly risking their lives.

The whole city was surrounded by mountains, and as night fell they tightened their grip on us. They could discern no difference between man and man, man and woman, woman and child. Perhaps they had already discovered the death ray and were preparing to surge up and merge with the sunset clouds. Or silently waiting for the stars to come out. A distant melody seemed to charge the sky each evening. Who was singing, and who but me could hear?

Beyond the mountains begins the silence. Beyond the mountains lies the icy northern sea. Beyond the mountains there is nothing. One evening I shall leave them to nibble their nuts and set out on my own across Tel Arza and the valleys through the chariot-clouds and bear-clouds and crocodile-clouds and dragon-clouds, until I arrive beyond the mountains to see what is beyond the mountains. Without haversack or water bottle I shall set out to discover what it is that the mountains want of us all the time. I shall go to the caves. There I shall be a mountain boy all alone all day all summer long in the rocks and the sun and wind and they will never know how the earth quakes and why towers topple.

At the end of the short silence, Father might suddenly decide that the time had come to make a fresh start.

"Well," he would say, "good evening to you, Mr. Nehamkin, and to you, Ephraim. I believe one may hazard a guess that autumn will not be late this year, even though at present it seems as though the summer will never end. They have already started meeting at night in the synagogue to say the Penitential Prayers."

The old man's only reply was:

"Things are getting worse."

And Ephraim, looking like a man dying of thirst with his curls hanging wildly over his thrust-out forehead, would add:

"Everything's going to change here soon. Nothing will be the same."

There ensued a political discussion that filled me with a sense of panic, for I realized how little they all understood. The discussion developed into an argument. Father cited various examples from the distant and more recent past. Then he expressed reservations about them because he considered that history does not repeat itself. Ephraim, in a fit of impatience, called all these examples and reservations rubbish. Me cut Father short and insisted vehemently that they consider general principles instead of boring details. Mr. Nehamkin rebuked Ephraim with these words:

"Arrogance is a deadly sin."

"You keep out of this, you and your deadly sins," Ephraim retorted.

"You seem to have forgotten," Mr. Nehamkin said, smiling as though relishing his son's wit, "the causes of the destruction of Jerusalem. Let me remind you, beloved son of mine, of the reasons why Jerusalem was destroyed: internecine strife, envy, and groundless hatred. I should have thought the moral was self-evident."

"That's totally muddled thinking," said Ephraim. And presently he added:

"You're also a bit muddled, Kolodny. Let's drop this subject. The only one who might be on the right track is your son, only he's slightly batty. Excuse me, Mrs. Kolodny. I've said nothing about you, and I won't say anything about you now. We've all said enough, anyway."

At this point, Mother suggested a change of mood. She promised Mr. Nehamkin that we would listen to his new poem. Afterward she could return to her piano, and try to get to the end of the étude she was practicing, and Father and Ephraim could play that return match they were so looking forward to. Twilight had begun, Mother said, and would continue for a while. Should we turn on the light or not. It would still be twilight in an hour's time. Uri could take his new ball and play outside until it got really dark. What was the point of people like us getting worked up over politics; after all, there was nothing we could do about it. So please would they calm down.

5

Outside, in the blue evening light, children were playing "I love my love with an A." Boaz and Abner Grill poured some kerosene on the sidewalk outside the house. When the evening light touched the pool of kerosene, a riot of color broke out, breathtaking rainbows of purple, orange, blue, fire, gray, turquoise. How I loved this time of day. Joab made fun of me as usual with his stupid rhyme, "Uri, Uri, sound and fury," but I couldn't have cared less. The evening light was on everything. Bat-Ammi, the Grill boys' sister, sat on the fence nibbling sunflower seeds. "Why don't you answer them back?" she asked, laughing. "Because I don't care," I said. "You do care, and how!" She laughed. And from all the houses from every radio came streaming into the evening light into the enchanted pool of colors the British marching song "It's a long way to Tipperary, it's a long way to go." I didn't know where that place was, and I didn't care. "Look at Kolodny, he's always staring at Bat-Ammi," said Abner.

Let them say what they like, I thought to myself. Who cares. Good-for-nothings. As if we didn't all know who chalked on the wall: URI LOVES BAT-AMMI. As if I didn't know who crossed out LOVES and started to write another word instead, but gave up in a funk. Coward.

Next evening, after tea, Ephraim expressed the opinion that this autumn was going to be a crucial one. Father disagreed; he suggested that the world had finally learned its lesson, and that from now on everything would be different. And we would benefit, he believed, from this change: Russia and America would pull together; the shattered British would not be able to oppose them. The moment of truth was approaching, and it was up to us to display both caution and determination. Ephraim needn't have sacrificed his pawn, he added with surprise: he could easily have moved his rook to cover it. If only we knew two things for certain, (A) what exactly we hoped to achieve and (B) the real limits of our strength, then he believed we could gain the upper hand. For the time being, at any rate. And as for the pawn, he was prepared to allow Ephraim to reconsider: let's put it back where it was, so, and move the rook here. Now we can proceed from a more or less reasonable position. But Ephraim swept the pawn off the board and expressed a total lack of concern at his fate. So what. He could win easily, even without the pawn. He didn't want any favors. Dithering disgusted him.

"Don't do me any favors, Kolodny. You're the defender, and I'm the attacker. So why are you suddenly feeling sorry for me. You ought to be feeling sorry for yourself."

Mother was sitting at the piano. This time she was not playing, but staring out of the window at the darkening mountains, or perhaps at the birds. Her sadness suddenly moved Mr. Nehamkin. He addressed her in a tender tone of voice, as if praying alone in the open air.

"Mrs. Kolodny, please, don't make fun of us. Don't be too hard on us. After all, it's only our misery that makes us exaggerate. Surely you can read us like an open book, and you can see how we are wearing ourselves out with waiting. How you must despise us all. You must be longing desperately to escape from us and our chatter. Once and for all. So you sit at the window and lift up your eyes to the hills. Will you not let the light of your countenance shine upon us?"

Mother said nothing.

"We shall continue to wait," Mr. Nehamkin pleaded, "and our ears will strain to catch the sound of His footsteps when He comes. I beg of you, will you not let the light of your countenance shine upon us?"

"Don't worry, Mr. Nehamkin," said Mother.

And after a while she added:

"It'll be dark soon. Don't worry."

I could not suppress a malicious smile at the words "our ears will strain"; after all, Mr. Nehamkin himself was growing more deaf day by day.

"Yes indeed, you are quite correct," the old man said with a start. "It is really growing dark. I must postpone reciting my modest verses till another day, and hasten on my way. The hour is growing late. Behold my stick, and behold the door. How great is the task that still awaits us."

Deep in the dark behind a loose stone in the wall of the printing press in the basement was a box. I had hidden it there myself, wrapped it in a silk stocking, covered it with sawdust, and mixed crushed garlic with the dust to baffle the bloodhounds. When Ephraim finally managed to isolate his astral ray, we would hide it away in this box. What was the point of all their endless arguments: Jewish Agency, commissions of inquiry, Bevin and Henry Gurney, great powers. The autumn would come, and Ephraim and I would go up on the roof and burn the whole of England to ashes with one long-distance ray. A crucial autumn. The shattered British. A and B. What do I care about all their talk. I'm for the mountains.

Mr. Nehamkin took his leave. He shook hands with Father, bowed to Mother, and pinched my cheek. Then he went on his way, shuffling in his worn-out shoes westward after the sun where it was setting behind the tiled roofs of the German houses near Romema. And on the handle of his walking stick, the tiger bared its cruel fangs; as though primeval forests had sprung up in Jerusalem overnight.

Father and Ephraim concluded their return game, either jubilantly or shamefacedly, and went downstairs together to switch off the printing press in the basement.

Then Father came back alone. Mother turned on the light. She decided to postpone the ironing until the next day. And we had a simple supper of salad, omelette, yogurt, bread, and olives.

Father would put on Mother's apron and wash up. He would rinse the plates one by one in a bowl of cold water. I would stand next to him and dry them. Mother would put some of them away and lay the others out on the kitchen table, ready for tomorrow's breakfast. It would be calm. We might sit down together to sort through the collection of picture postcards. I would be sent off to wash and get into my pajamas, while they sat outside on the balcony inhaling the smells of the night. From my bedroom window I would be able to see the lights in the workshop and Ephraim's room: all night long he would experiment with radio waves and listen to the wailing of the stars, while the old man would add or remove a row of matchsticks in the wall of his Temple. If the left-hand shutter were to be closed, I would know that Ruhama or Esther the divorcee or some other girl had managed to force an entry. Things that I adamantly refused to think about were happening there, to the accompaniment of the wailing of the stars. I don't want to know. I don't even care. I think fighting men shouldn't indulge in love and suchlike. Love can wait till after the victory. Love can make you suddenly give away secrets, and then there is no going back. I remember that when they wrote URI LOVES BAT-AMMI on the wall I asked her if she thought we might ever get married. Of course, I added, only after the British have been driven out and the Hebrew state has been established.

Bat-Ammi thought that she could only fall in love with a man who knew exactly what he wanted and could never be deflected from his purpose. Someone determined but considerate, she said.

I promised to guard her secret, so that no one would take advantage of her.

That made her laugh.

"Calm down," she said. "Why are you shaking like that? What do you want to have secrets with me for? What's the matter with you?"

I said that nothing was the matter and I didn't need to calm down. Bat-Ammi let me count with my finger the flowers her mother had embroidered around the neck of her Russian blouse. "But don't start getting ideas," I said.

"What's the matter with you? Who's getting ideas about who? Calm down."

I was sorry for Bat-Ammi, and that was why I did not argue with her. Let her say what she liked. I was sorry for her because that summer she'd started growing breasts and, her big brothers said, hairs, too. I was sad because there was no way back, and Bat-Ammi could never stop these growths and be the same as she had been before. Even if she tried with all her might, she could never go back now. She was never consulted about it. She had to turn into a woman, and I was sorry for her. She would never ever be a little girl again. She would never be able to ride a boy's bike.

It's none of my business. I don't want to think about what Bat-Ammi's growing and things like that. I'm Ephraim's lieutenant. I'm going to live beyond the mountains all on my own in the sun in the wind without disgusting thoughts. I'm going to be tough.

Before getting into bed, I watched Bat-Ammi's big brothers roasting potatoes in a bonfire in the garden and burning a rag effigy. I expect they had called it Ernest Bevin, to get their revenge on the anti-Semitic British minister. Presently the moon appeared, sailing quickly between two water cisterns on the roof opposite. The Grill brothers peed into the fire onto their potatoes and they didn't know I was standing at my window watching. They scattered furtively, bubbling over with malicious glee, lying in wait for the girls coming back from their evening classes at the Lemel School. They were going to tempt the girls into eating the potatoes they had peed on. They would nudge one another, and they wouldn't be able to contain their snickers.

Even at night, by the light of the moon, the British soldiers did not stop bustling about their parade ground inside the Schneller Barracks. They seemed to me to be dropping with fatigue as I watched from my window. What a long way to Tipperary. People were saying that next week the High Commissioner might be coming to review the garrison. They were also saying that the commander of the Underground was hiding somewhere in Jerusalem, planning the last details of the Revolt.

Half asleep, I could catch snatches of my parents' conversation from the rear balcony. Father said:

"Tomorrow or the day after, we'll start printing New Year's cards. The beginning of August is only two days off."

Mother said: "Your Ephraim will end up electrocuting himself or blowing himself up. If he's not working all night, he's away for days on end. I think he's making mines and bombs and things for the boys. He's already turned Uri's mind. I've got a feeling it's all going to end in trouble."

Father said:

"Ephraim's in love with you, or something."

He gave a quick little laugh, as if he had accidentally said a dirty word.

Mother answered seriously:

"What a mistake."

But she did not specify whether it was Father or Ephraim who was making the mistake.

Then they fell silent. Father was probably quietly chewing his mint leaves, while Mother was deep in thought. The moon had left my window and crossed the lane. Perhaps it had stopped over our roof and was feeling the sheets and vests on the clothesline. I put my light out. I hid my head under the pillow and made myself a cellar. It's going to be a crucial autumn. What does crucial autumn mean. Where does Ephraim go on his wanderings. Printing New Year's cards seemed to me boring, pathetic, and shameful. There are those dogs barking again. And then the usual shouts. Comrade Grill, who was a driver in the Hammekasher bus cooperative and always came home after ten o'clock, had presumably awakened his four children as usual, lined them up in the passage, and given them a good hiding for all the day's pranks. In the middle of the beating Boaz suddenly cursed his father with the words "I wish you were dead." A moment later there was a rumbling, grating sound, like barrels being rolled. Helena Grill let out a piercing scream that must have roused the whole neighborhood:

"Murderer! Cossack! Help! He's murdering the child!"

At once there was silence.

It was my duty to get up right away and rescue Bat-Ammi.

Too late. The Grill household was in blackest silence. The Cossacks had come and butchered them and their children. A thick stream of blood was pouring down the stairs and would soon reach the street. I'll stay awake all night, I decided, I'll hear with my own ears once and for all whether there are spies abroad, whether Mother sneaks out before dawn, or Ephraim comes creeping to our house, whether the commander of the Underground rides through the night on his horse. I'll stay awake till I've found out. But as soon as I had made the decision I fell asleep, because yet another blazing blue summer's day had come to an end and I was very tired.

6

The soil in the backyards had turned to khaki in the summer heat; the parched oleanders had gone gray. The geranium stems were taking on a coppery tinge. Dry thistles stood waiting for the fire.

There was junk scattered everywhere, broken crockery, rusty cans, flattened cartons, remains of mattresses, fragments of the foreign packing cases in which the settlers had transported their belongings from Poland and Russia.

One morning I made up my mind to rejuvenate it all. To make a garden.

I made a furious start by attacking the rude words that the Grill boys had scratched on the rusty gate. I scrubbed at them with a damp cloth. In vain. I covered them with mud. In vain. I found a broken bottle and tried to scrape the writing off. I did not notice the cut until my gym shorts and vest and even my hair were covered with blood. So I abandoned the operation. After the victory, when the British had been driven out, a new era would begin. Then we would plant the whole country with beautiful gardens. Meanwhile, I went indoors, bleeding like a hero in the pictures, and Mother had a terrible fright.

Mother used to spend most of the morning lying with her feet up on the sofa. She covered her eyes with a damp dish towel. A jug of iced lemonade and a package of aspirin stood close at hand. Every hour or two, she made up her mind to ignore the climate and get up, put on her blue housecoat, and tackle the mounting piles of ironing. Sometimes the broom froze in her hands and she stood leaning on it as if in despair. She would suddenly close all the windows and shutters to keep the terrible light out of the house, then change her mind abruptly and throw them wide open because she felt suffocated. At times she would rush through the kitchen and bathroom turning all the faucets full on, so as to fill the house with the sound of running water. If I tried to follow her and surreptitiously turn them off, she would scream at me to stop, let her hear the water, stop tormenting her, all of us. Sometimes she went so far as to call us all savages.

But she would soon come to herself, turn off the faucets, laugh at the heat, put on some make-up, and dress in a low-cut blouse and white slacks, and then she put me in mind of one of the beautiful girls that the heroes in the pictures were always falling in love with, Esther Williams, Yvonne de Carlo.

One morning, Ephraim came and fitted her a special bedside lamp that strained the light and cast a dim blue glow like starlight. Mother was afraid of the dark and hated the light.

At lunchtime, when Father came up from the printing press, his nostrils twitched, and he said blankly, "Who's been here this morning? Whose smell is this?"

Mother laughed. Ephraim Nehamkin, she said, had dropped in to play chess with her. What was wrong with that. And he had also put up a marvelous lamp by her bedside.

"Ephraim again," Father said politely, and he smiled his schoolmasterly smile.

A few days earlier, Mother had asked Ephraim to invite her to his workshop to see how the bombs were loaded with dynamite. Ephraim had apologized, muttered an embarrassed denial, reaffirmed his friendship, groped for the right words, and finally managed to promise that everything would turn out all right. Mother had burst out and called him a charlatan.

I didn't know this word. All that I could get out of Father was that the word "charlatan" was a gross insult that did not fit an openhearted lad like Ephraim.

On reconsideration, Mother withdrew what she had said, agreed that the word "charlatan" did not suit Ephraim, but implored Father to stop talking: didn't he know that her head always ached in the summer, why did he always have to contradict her and torment her all day long with his arguments?

In the workshop I found old newspapers, silence, and dust. No bleeps or whistles. No frequencies. Ephraim had disappeared once again on his wanderings. There was only the old poet, dipping his matchsticks in paste; suddenly he seized a nail file and started demolishing layer after layer of his Temple to remove some tower or other for which there was insufficient evidence in the sources.

The three Grill boys went out to the Tel Arza woods to hunt a leopard whose spoor they had come across some days earlier. It had probably come up at night from the ravines of the Judean Desert, and perhaps it was hiding even in the daytime in a cave in the woods. Or perhaps it was not a leopard but a hyena, which we called by its Arabic name, dhaba'. If the dhaba' finds you alone at night it comes out and blocks your path with its hunched back and bristles like an enormous hedgehog and starts laughing at you hideously to make you go mad with fright until in a panic you start running in the wrong direction toward the mountains and the wilderness and you go on running till you drop dead and then the hyena comes and rips you to shreds.

"Bat-Ammi," I said, "I've got a secret I can't tell you."

"Stop showing off. You haven't got any secret except the same as all the other boys that come and want me to touch them and feel it."

"No, not that. I meant something else."

"If you meant something else, why are you shivering like a rabbit? Calm down, little rabbit. You've got nothing to shiver about."

"I can kill the High Commissioner if I feel like it. I can destroy the whole of England with a single blow."

"Yes, and I can turn myself into a bat. Or into Shirley Temple."

"Do you want me to share my secret with you on condition that you let me give you a kiss just on the forehead just once and I can talk to you for a long time?" I asked without pausing to draw breath.

"I can pee standing up. Like a boy. But I'm not going to show you."

"Bat-Ammi, listen to me, cross my heart it's not because of that, you may think I'm one of those but I'm not, with me it's something different, cross my heart, just let me talk to you for a moment and give me a chance to explain."

"You're no different," said Bat-Ammi sadly, "you're just the same as the others. Just take a look at yourself, you're shaking like a leaf. You're a boy, Kolodny, and you're just the same as all the other boys and you want the same thing as them only you're too scared to say. Look, you've even got pimples on your face. What's the matter, why are you running away? What's wrong? What are you running away for, what have I said? You're nuts!"

Beyond the mountains. To be all alone there. To be a mountain boy.

A few days later, Ephraim came back from his wanderings. He was sun-tanned and withdrawn, and as usual his face wore an expression of contempt or disgust, as if in the course of his wanderings he had seen things that had filled him with despair. Mr. Nehamkin and I took up our positions in the garden so that he would be able to rest for a day or two at least. Every hour or so, we patrolled the broken-down fence together, toward the gate, and occasionally we permitted ourselves a sally into the lane. And we did manage to repel the young divorcee Esther, who taught crafts in the Lemel Girls' School.

We told her that Ephraim was far away, and she believed us, apologized, and promised to call again tomorrow.

"You must never use the word 'tomorrow' lightly," Mr. Nehamkin said to her reproachfully, in his velvet voice. "It is impossible to know what the day may bring forth. And particularly in days such as these."

I added maliciously:

"He doesn't need visitors. He's got enough to do."

But we did not succeed in stopping Ruhama, the lipless student from Mount Scopus. At the hottest time of the afternoon, when the shutters were all closed and the streets were deserted and the whole city was swept by gray fire from the desert, I came and found her sitting in a blue sarafan on the stone steps, which were covered with dead pine needles. Her hair was full of dust. She was twisting a piece of galvanized wire between her fingers. Perhaps she was passing the time by making some sort of model. She seemed to be immune to the heat, as if she herself were a heat wave.

"Hello," I said. "I'm his lieutenant. He doesn't need any visitors."

"You're just the neighbors' little boy at your games again. You ought to be ashamed of yourself," Ruhama said sadly.

"There's no reason for you to wait for him, any of you. He'll never marry any of you. You'd be better off forgetting him. He doesn't need all this."

"You're still little," her glasses laughed at me, "and you don't understand anything. He does need it. And how. Everybody does. You can sit here for a bit, if you like. You'll grow up yourself soon, and then you'll need it, too. You'll be dying for it. And then you won't be such a little hero. What are you staring at my knees for? Do you want me to give you a box on the ear?"

When Ruhama raised her voice and threatened to give me a box on the ear, she looked as though she was choking back a sob, and I, too, suddenly started shaking and I could feel the tears coming and I turned and ran as fast as my legs would carry me to the front yard into the blinding sunshine. The Grill boys were struggling sweatily among the thistles with a kitten they were trying to hang from a low bough of the mulberry tree. I started throwing stones at them from a distance. Then they caught me and hit me on the back, in the stomach, in the face, but the kitten managed to escape among the pitch barrels. I, too, hid behind the barrels so that they would not see me crying. From there I saw Mr. Nehamkin showing Ruhama out and shuffling after her to the gate and down the lane, trying to comfort her. I could not hear the words; I could only sense his gentleness and compassion, until she was comforted and went on her way.

When she was gone I emerged.

"What's going to happen, please, Mr. Nehamkin?"

"We shall continue to suffer and to wait, Uriel. I am very sorry for us all. Eyes have we but we see not. To outward appearances we are fearlessly made, but in truth we are consumed by our afflictions. From now on, my boy, we shall redouble our vigilance, you and I: the versifier and the youth shall hold the fort and guard the truth. Do not weep, young Uriel; surely we have shed tears enough already in our long years of exile."

Ephraim woke up toward evening. He thrust his curly head under the faucet and returned, dripping and silent, to his work. He lit a cigarette with wet hands. He did not utter a word. For an hour and a half or so, until Mother came out onto the balcony to call me home, I sat on the floor in my gym shorts and "Young Maccabeans" T-shirt, with my hands clasped around my knees, and watched him dismantle and reassemble a complicated switchboard full of knobs, switches, and buttons. Ephraim was doggedly silent. I did not interrupt him. Once he looked up, chuckled sourly at the sight of me, and said with surprise:

"You still here?"

I smiled at him. I wanted to be big and helpful, but at the same time I wanted to stay little so that he would go on loving me. I was afraid to tell Ephraim how we watched over him while he slept, and how we had driven Esther and Ruhama away from the house. I was ashamed at the thought of how Ruhama and I had made each other miserable to the point of tears, and how we had almost broken down and cried together.

Ephraim said:

"We're making progress, despite everything."

"But when will we be able to start?" I asked.

He stood up and bent over me and cupped my head roughly in his hands; his lips touched my forehead and my cheeks and he could see close up where I had lost one of my front teeth and maybe even the new one that was beginning to grow there.

"Be patient, Uri. The fire will break out at the proper moment, all over the country at once. We're making progress, despite everything."

7

At half past five one Friday afternoon, when the white-hot light was beginning to fade and a different, more passive light was descending on the lane, a curfew was imposed and house-to-house searches began.

The wistfulness of Sabbath Eve, the hesitant rustle of the breeze in the leaves, which the poet was forever trying to decipher in his verses, the uneasy marriage of tin and stone, the closing in of the slowly moving mountains all around, the scents of Sabbath, had all been crudely shattered. Police cars with loudspeakers dispelled the silence of the streets. A metallic voice warned the populace in Hebrew and English that the searches might continue all night. No one was to go outside. Not even onto the balconies. Obey orders. No hoarding. Cooperate. Anyone found out of doors would be risking his own life. We were hereby warned.

As soon as the car had vanished and the metallic voice faded away to other streets, Helena Grill rushed onto her balcony and tried to muster her children. She stood, disheveled and frantic, among the tubs of cactus and asparagus fern, cursing her children and her husband, sobbing in Yiddish, and when she caught sight of me crossing the yard, she called after me, "Idiot!"

Other neighbors went running to the grocer's, which had reopened, to snatch up eggs, milk, canned food, and bread. There were some who feared that the curfew would last for several days. Others repeated various rumors.

Still, this was by no means the first time. In those days, the authorities were in the habit of suddenly cordoning off one district or another and searching the houses for Underground cells or illegal arms.

At the sound of Helena Grill's shouts, Father hurried out of the kitchen, where he had been meticulously dicing onions. He took off Mother's apron, which he had been wearing, carefully folded it, and put it away. He wiped his brow with the back of his hand and went downstairs into the yard. Extracting the Grill boys one by one from the disused garden shed, he dispatched them to their home. Then he shut himself up for a while with his printing press in the basement. Eventually he came back upstairs, smelling of onions and printer's ink. He washed his hands and face and started to chew his mint leaves. His eyes were still streaming from the onions as he assured Mother that we had nothing to worry about. They wouldn't find anything, even if they dismantled the printing press down to its last screw.

"You're sure," Mother said. Father inquired whether this was a question, a compliment, or a complaint.

"I'm not sure," Mother replied, and Father responded politely:

"Of course."

I knew perfectly well that Father was right: we had nothing to worry about. They would never find the subversive leaflets, which had originated with Ephraim, then been put into prophetic language by Mr. Nehamkin, and finally printed on yellow paper by Father and his two assistants. Nor would they find my box, which was hidden behind the loose stone, because I had wrapped it in a silk stocking stuffed with sawdust sprinkled with crushed garlic to baffle the bloodhounds.

They were bound to fail: after all, we were the righteous few, and they were the tyrants.

It was six o'clock in the evening when the neighborhood was sealed off. The streets were deserted. Armored cars converged on us from three directions and drew up arrogantly, perpendicular to the road, with two wheels on the sidewalk. Machine guns were trained on our windows and rooftops. Gleaming brass ammunition belts hung down from the guns. There was even a light gun mounted on a carriage, stationed halfway down Zephaniah Street, pointing toward the glimmering mountains, as if it were from the mountains that the legions of the Underground would emerge to burst into Jerusalem.

Four truckloads of troops arrived from the Schneller Barracks. From the living-room window I watched the soldiers jump down and fan out at a run along the garden walls, covering one another as they went. Each soldier was armed with a submachine gun and a commando knife in a black sheath, and equipped with a rectangular haversack, a water bottle, and ammunition pouches; they were wearing gaiters. Despite all this, those British troops did not look in the least like the soldiers in the pictures. Most of them looked etiolated; the Judean sun that bronzed us was not kind to them.

The soldier who stationed himself outside our gate reminded me, despite his uniform and kit, of the shy young cashier in the Chancellor Road branch of the Anglo-Palestine Bank. He was smiling timidly, tucking his shirt into the top of his shorts, and suddenly started to pick his nose furiously; apparently it never occurred to him that he might be under observation.

I felt sorry for him. And for the Underground fighters who had to be in hiding. I felt sorry for my mother. For Mr. Nehamkin, who was lying alone in his bed suffering from a bad attack of summer flu. And for Ephraim, who had vanished hurriedly on his wanderings as soon as the curfew was announced, to meet his fate in some Godforsaken place where the hyena might be lurking. I even felt sorry for Helena Grill, although she had called me an idiot for no reason at all. There was nothing but sorrow as far as the eye could see. The refugees who were being turned away daily from the shores of our country and being sent off to desert islands like Zanzibar or Mauritius. Bloodthirsty gangs were prowling in the villages. Maybe Jerusalem and the Promised Land of the Bible were not here after all, but in some other corner of the earth; surely in the course of thousands of years some mistake might have arisen. And it was there that the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valley bloomed, and there that rest and peace were to be found. Maybe the Hebrew state had already been established there, and only we had been forgotten among these mountains. For a moment I longed to pardon all the foes of Israel, to forgive them everything; the Maccabees would never live again, the lions had eaten Bar Kochba, Eleazar the Hasmonean had been crushed by an elephant, and Josef Trumpeldor had been murdered by brigands. Enough. How much longer would Ruhama sit and shrivel in the sun on the workshop steps, and how much longer would we have to drive her away?

I dispelled these thoughts. There was a biblical slogan pinned up on the wall of my classroom that said, THE ADVERSARY AND THE ENEMY SHALL NOT ENTER INTO THE GATES OF THIS CITY. But now the enemy was here in our midst and we were still powerless. It was I who had written in red paint on the wall of the synagogue the words FREEDOM OR DEATH: I could not suddenly give up. Let them come. Let them search. We would withstand the test. And then we would continue the struggle to our last gasp, because we had No Alternative.

Meanwhile, orders kept pouring out in English. The troops invaded the gardens. A light evening breeze stirred, lost its nerve, and retreated. Even the dogs had fallen silent. A reprimand sounded. Perhaps one of the soldiers had made a mistake or been smitten with remorse. Their captain appeared at the end of our lane. He was a stocky, harassed-looking man with sloping shoulders. A short swagger stick danced in his hand. He seemed to be splitting his men up into small teams, changing his mind, and starting all over again. I started preaching inwardly to the captain. Demonstrating what a terrible injustice had been done to the Jewish people. Proving it from the Bible. Telling him about the suffering of the Jews. After all, they were lords of continents and islands, while we had only this tiny patch of land, and we would never budge from it. In those days there was a rumor that somewhere in or around Jerusalem was hiding the commander of the Hebrew Underground, the leader of the Zealots, whom I secretly called the King of Israel. How little we all knew about the commander of the Underground.

Some said one thing, some another.

Once, when Ephraim had just returned from his wanderings, he had deigned to hint to us that the commander could make himself invisible at will by means of a secret scientific trick. Comrade Grill, who was a driver in the Hammekasher bus cooperative, had once testified on oath to the women that one night, when his bus had broken down in the open country south of Jerusalem, between the suburb of Arnona and the kibbutz of Ramat Rahel, just as the bells of Bethlehem were striking midnight a solitary horseman mounted on a magnificent steed had ridden up by the light of the full moon and paused beside him for a moment before galloping off into the distance toward the Hill of Evil Counsel and Mount Zion beyond. He had even addressed Comrade Grill by his first name and said, "Zevulun, do not fear that you are alone tonight. The night is full of warriors."

There were those who maintained that the commander of the Underground was a Jewish general who had been the deputy of the Soviet Marshal Zhukov; he had commanded the successful tank offensive against the Nazi lines in the Rostov area in '44 and had later slipped into Palestine illegally, via the Caucasus and the Levant, to build up the secret Hebrew shadow army.

No one could persuade Mr. Nehamkin to abandon his firmly held opinion: for seven years a superman had been hiding in the ravines of the Judean Desert, herding goats and camels among the clefts in the rock, a seer of visions, swathed darkly in a desert robe like the chief of one of the tribes, sending his battle orders up to Jerusalem with barefoot urchins who were indistinguishable from the Bedouin children. Never, said Mr. Nehamkin, would the British be able to lay their hands on this superman, and he it was who, when the day came, would ascend the throne of the kings of Judah in Jerusalem. Mr. Nehamkin had dedicated some of his poems to him, including the cycle "A Waking Trance," the "Songs of War and Vision," an "Ode to Him That Cometh from Seir," and a short elegy entitled "Steel and Yearning."

Father used to listen politely to all this talk, Comrade Grill's story, Mr. Nehamkin's poems, Mother's playing. But he always suggested that it be treated with cautious skepticism. Who knew? It might be so, or then again it might not. However, in the absence of concrete facts we were entitled to indulge in guesses, and he himself would not withhold his own theory from us: there was no one commander. The old days, Father opined, were dead and buried. There was probably some sort of a committee, a small council, four or five clever Jews, not necessarily young ones, either, presumably planted here and there in perfectly innocent positions, as businessmen, schoolteachers, or pharmacists, while secretly directing the Underground operations. Anybody could be one of them, Father said. We had no means of identifying them. Even the fanciful story of our neighbor Comrade Grill, about the horseman, the broken-down bus, and the moonlight, might be not so much an innocent fantasy as a highly cunning piece of bluff. All in all, he thought, the results spoke for themselves: the British were finding Palestine about as comfortable as a bed of nails, as the saying went. Almost every night our windows rattled and tall flames could be seen in the strongholds of the British administration: Bevingrad, Schneller, Allenby Barracks, Russian Compound, King David Hotel, the secret-police headquarters on Mamiliah Road. They were getting to be like a cat on hot bricks, as the saying went. He doubted if even the High Commissioner slept soundly at night in his palace. The main thing, he thought, was to maintain the right balance between Hebrew zeal and Jewish common sense; we should never lose sight of practicalities, and avoid premature action.

Mother would say:

"Instead of printing greeting cards, your father ought to be a minister in the government."

The poet Nehamkin would add:

"But the hands are the hands of Jacob. You are not very forbearing toward us, Mrs. Kolodny. Forgive us, it is only the misery speaking through our mouths. After all, we have only the best of intentions; why, then, do you judge us so severely?"

They won't get anything out of me, even if they drag me off to the interrogation cells in the Russian Compound. Not even if they burn me with lit cigarettes, just like the Grill boys did to Mrs. Vishniak's parrot. Even if they pull my fingernails out one by one I won't talk. I'll maintain a scornful silence. After all, I am Ephraim's lieutenant. At least, one of his lieutenants. The day before yesterday I spent three whole hours in the workshop, trembling with pride, drawing lines and arrows on a map of Jerusalem to plan the "John of Gischala" operation. Ephraim only gave me very general instructions, as usual:

"Always attack on the flank. Always from the forest. Always from the valleys. From the most unexpected quarter."

He inspected my plans silently, correcting, smiling, making slight changes, adding something here, removing something there, muttering "a brilliant solution," sadly pointing out some careless detail. All at once he was overcome with emotion: he hugged me and stroked my hair and my shoulders and breathed on me, and then suddenly he pushed me away.

Whenever I cried out in the night, Mommy and Daddy both used to get up and make me a glass of hot cocoa and sit on my bed and say, "There, there." Until I calmed down.

Maybe they thought that I should not have been allowed to read The Hound of the Baskervilles. Maybe they suspected that the Grill hooligans were having a bad effect on me. I said nothing, because I had sworn I'd never tell.

8

The twilight was dimming. Only on the windows of the house opposite, traces of blood and fire still blazed. The lane was drenched in shadows. We stood at the living-room window, with Mother leaning on Father's arm and me in the middle in front of them; we looked as though we were posing for a birthday picture for the photographer Mr. Kovacs. We looked out. We waited. We said nothing. Outside, the troops of the Sixth Airborne Regiment split up into small teams and started to enter the houses. Somewhere, far away, a single shot was fired. The Schneller clock began to strike seven. I knew that the clock was never to be trusted, because its hands always stood at three minutes past three. The patches of blood died away in the window opposite; it was dark, but the darkness was still gray, not black, and the sky still seemed to be reflecting distant fires. But we could see no fire, only the remains of the Grill boys' bonfire smoldering smokily.

It seemed as though darkness were falling on our stone houses, on the dying orchard, on the rusty corrugated-iron balconies, falling on the broken fences and thistles, falling on the barking of the dogs and on the whole earth, not just for the night but forever. Mother broke the silence:

"This time they're not looking for pamphlets. They're not even looking for arms and explosives. They're looking for him."

Father said:

"Don't worry. If they do catch someone, someone else will take his place."

Mother said:

"They'll never catch him."

And I:

"Only there are all sorts of informers, and they might give him away."

"No informer can betray him to them, Uri," said Mother, "because he isn't there. I mean he isn't anywhere. He simply doesn't exist. He was invented by the Jewish Agency. By the Arabs. By us. The British invented him with their typical British madness, and now they're running after him with their Tommy guns and ransacking our houses and turning the whole country upside down, but they haven't got an earthly hope of catching him because he's like music, like longing. He's just their nightmare. He's everybody's nightmare. Let them search!" she suddenly exclaimed with almost desperate glee. "Let them search till they go right out of their minds. Don't you answer me back. Either of you. Keep quiet, the two of you. I'm the only one who can talk to them. Don't you interfere or they'll say to you, 'You bastard, you bloody Jew.' Come in, please, Captain, come in and do your duty. There's a jug of iced lemonade in the icebox. Please help yourselves. And then do your duty. Nice evening isn't it."

They came inside and stood awkwardly in the passage, by the coat hooks where, in the summer months, there hung only Father's cap, a silk scarf, and the shopping basket. The captain apologized, returned Mother's greeting, explained politely that he and his men could not accept a drink when they were on duty, suddenly remembered to doff his cap in the presence of a lady, and asked for permission to glance around the other rooms. They would be as quick as possible, of course. He was so sorry.

We said nothing. Mother was our spokesman. She said, "Of course."

And she smiled.

The soldiers, three thin young men in khaki shorts and army socks up to their knees, stood pressed in the doorway as if ready to vanish at the slightest hint that they were not wanted. Meanwhile, the captain had managed to overcome his initial embarrassment. He was still behaving as though we and they were a group of well-mannered strangers stranded together by regrettable circumstances in a broken elevator. Even when he asked my father to stand with his hands up and his face to the wall, and my mother to be kind enough to sit down in the armchair with the dear little boy on her lap, the pleasant-faced captain still seemed to be merely volunteering helpful, boy-scout-like suggestions that would enable us all to make our escape from the elevator, perhaps by somewhat athletic methods, and thus reduce to a minimum the unpleasantness that had occurred to us all despite the good will and indisputable respectability of all parties involved.

Nevertheless, he did not remove his hand from the black holster. In recent times there had been some unbelievably nasty incidents in Palestine, always at unexpected moments and in apparently respectable places.

The three soldiers inspected the bookshelves one by one, carefully moving the complete poems of Bialik and the Gems of Literature aside to see what lurked behind them; they lifted the lid of the piano and sniffed among the strings; they took down the picture of the pioneer pushing the plow through a field in the Jezreel Valley oblivious of the crows, tapped on the wall behind, and listened intently to the sound. The bust of Chopin was lifted up and then reverently replaced. The captain apologized for his curiosity and wished to know who it was and what the inscription meant. Mother translated once more from Polish, "With all the warmth of my heart and until my dying breath."

"I am very sorry," the captain said in a tone of hushed awe, as if he had accidentally disturbed some religious ritual or defiled a holy object.

They proceeded methodically, searching the wardrobes, peering under the beds, hitting the walls gently with the butts of their Tommy guns, and listening for an echo. All the time I was sitting with Mommy on the armchair, and I kept my eyes averted so as not to have to see my father standing with his face to the wall and his hands raised in the air. Secretly I recited to myself the four cardinal rules for standing up to torture in interrogations. It was Ephraim who had taught them to me; perhaps he had invented them himself.

But there was no interrogation.

The captain only voiced a polite request: would Father kindly show them over the printing press that, according to their notes, was in the basement of the building.

When the search was concluded, they took with them various samples; since they could not read them, they were obliged to appropriate one copy of each item for examination. These were labels for matzoh packages, appeal forms for the Diskin Orphanage, receipts and counterfoils, and copies of a newsletter for thrifty housewives. With this the captain was satisfied. Ke regretted any unpleasantness we might have been caused. He expressed a hope for better times, which were bound to come soon. One of the soldiers called me a "boy scout." Another belched, and started at a stern look from the captain.

Then they left.

The lane was already in darkness. A solitary street lamp, swinging in the breeze, cast nervous circles of light on the asphalt. How unnecessary this yellow light was: the curfew still remained in force after the searches. There was not a soul in our lane. Besides the stray dogs. These dogs lived off our garbage cans. Nobody here wanted a pet dog. But nor would anybody volunteer to drive them away or put them down. Let them be.

Father said:

"They behaved perfectly correctly. You've got to admit it."

Mother said:

"What disgusting sycophants."

"What do you expect," Father rejoined. "That's just their manners. The iron fist in a velvet glove, as they say."

"Not them. You. Both of you. Don't answer me back. That's enough."

Outside, in the empty lane, the stray dogs raised their drooling muzzles to the moon and let out a howl.

Father said:

"Come along, Uri. Tonight you and I will fix supper. Mommy's not feeling very well."

9

The curfew was lifted on Saturday night.

The searches were now concentrated, according to rumor, in the southernmost suburbs: Bayit Vagan, Mekor Hayyim, Arnona, Talpiyot.

Father gave it as his opinion that everything Ephraim had said about a scientific trick that made the commander of the Underground invisible and so on was sheer fantasy. It was more reasonable to suppose that he followed a simple rule of moving from district to district on the heels of the hunt, always slipping into a neighborhood that had just been searched. This solution appeared to Father at least logical, if not necessarily conclusive.

Mother said:

"Which means that now he's here."

"If you choose to think so," Father said with a smile.

"It's Saturday night," Mother said, ignoring his smile. "If you stopped your constant yammering for a moment, we might be able to hear the church bells in the distance. Surely the bells are calling to somebody. The evening is calling to somebody. The birds are clamoring for attention. They've built bell towers on every hilltop in Jerusalem to ring out to the distance. When will they finally call to us? Perhaps they've already called, and we were so busy talking we didn't hear. Why can't we have some silence? Please, Kolodny, leave my arm alone. Leave me alone, too. Why do you keep pestering me?"

"Calm down," Father begged.

And as an afterthought he added:

"We haven't been out for ages. Why don't we go to the movies and sit in a café like civilized human beings. Life must go on, after all."

Early on Sunday morning, Mother went down into the garden carrying a tub of washing. I followed her downstairs without her noticing. The morning sky was grubby and overcast, as if autumn had arrived. But I knew these mornings; I told myself that it wasn't autumn yet, and that actually it was a sure sign of a blazing-hot day. I noticed a quick tremor run through her neck and shoulders. She stood all alone in the low gray light, which imparted a bluish, doubt-ridden hue to the stone, the trees, and the asphalt. It looked as though the light were a stream, and the houses on either side were its banks in a fog, and everything in between was being swept away by the leisurely current. The garbage cans, waiting along the sidewalk, were in the stream. A smell of fish. The smell of the oleanders. And a faint, almost pleasant reek was also in the stream. Not a stream. A ripple of light. A veil. Somewhere nearby there lived a persistent cuckoo that never stopped repeating a single urgent phrase as if it were impossible to remain silent. On the perches of the dovecote stood three lazy pigeons, exchanging views and opinions. They totally disregarded the cuckoo's interruptions.

My mother stood barefoot on the carpet of pine needles the shade of the restless trees, pegging the sheets up on the clothesline. There were moments, when she stood with her arms outstretched, when I had difficulty restraining myself from running and suddenly hugging her from behind and telling her secrets about Bat-Ammi and the John of Gischala plan. Far away, a radio was playing light morning music. My mother could sing, but she wasn't singing. The grocer, the greengrocer, and the barber had rolled up their shutters and opened their shops. Only Mrs. Vishniak the pharmacist was late getting up, as usual. The greengrocer was setting out boxes of apples, onions, eggplants, and pumpkins on the sidewalk. The wasps swooped down angrily. In the window of the grocer's shop was a flypaper covered with dead flies, and a jar of different-colored hard candies, two for a mil. There was an olive tree between the two shops. A flowering creeper clasped its branches with a blue flame. From a distance it looked as though the olive tree had gone out of its mind and set itself on fire. Women were draping their bedclothes over their balcony railings to get rid of the night smells. The quilts and pillowcases gave Zephaniah Street a poignant air of gaiety; it was impossible to banish thoughts about night and the neighbors' wives at night among the quilts.

On the deep window sills, among the asparagus ferns growing in old cans, stood sealed jars in which cucumbers were being pickled in a pale-green liquid with bay leaves and parsley and little cloves of garlic. When the Hebrew state was finally established, we would all get up and go to the valleys and the open fields. All summer long, we would live in watchmen's booths in the orchards. We would gallop on our horses to the springs and rivulets, lead our herds and flocks to pasture. We would leave Jerusalem to its fate at the hands of the pious.

I carved strips of pine bark with a penknife borrowed from Ephraim, to add another frigate to the fleet of warships that was riding at anchor on a shelf in my room, waiting for the great day.

Among the dead pine needles in the garden sprouted ears of wild corn; they, too, were turning yellow, as if trying to assimilate to the dry thistles. There were broken bottles, scraps of newspaper, blackening boards under one of which I once found a tortoise withdrawn in terror and I waited for ages for it to calm down and put its head out until I couldn't wait any longer and picked it up and it turned out that there was no tortoise only an empty shell and the tortoise was long dead or else it had gone off in a huff.

My frigate snapped in two. I was bored with the fleet. I started to carve my name on a rusty can. The penknife made a grating sound on the tin, and Mother, the washtub clasped to her hip, turned to me in exasperation and begged me to stop driving her mad so early in the morning.

"I'm working," I said.

"You're a mad child, that's what you are, and you're trying to drive me mad, too."

"You're just working yourself up, Mrs. Kolodny," 1 said politely, like Father.

And to myself I added: We must always keep control of our temper. Not be drawn into unnecessary conflicts. We have the initiative and they are gradually losing their balance.

"I'm going to rest," Mother said. "I'm hot. If anybody calls, tell them I'm not at home."

After breakfast, one of the most decisive battles for Berlin was engaged on my window sill. The armored spearheads of the Hebrew, Russian, and American columns were penetrating the city from the forests and the lakes, snapping up the remains of the Nazi divisions, crushing the barricades under their tracks, shattering the buildings with their gunfire. Nine more days and the summer holidays would be over and the fifth form would begin. By then the foe must be vanquished. The monster must be bearded in its lair and made to surrender unconditionally.

Helena Grill appeared on the balcony opposite. She began collecting the bedding that was spread on the railing. Inside her nightdress, through the unbuttoned dressing gown, I could see her strong breasts. I struggled with all my might to ward off Ephraim's rough hands. The Grill boys must have gone down to the Tel Arza woods again, to see if the leopard had got caught in the clever trap they had set for it before the curfew. Comrade Grill was driving his green Fargo bus on the number 8 route toward Mekor Hayyim, picking up passengers at the bus stops and demanding that they step to the rear, please. He had a ticket punch in his bus and a set of little silvery Panpipes: you put the various coins in at the top and slipped the change out at the bottom with a flick of the finger. I was enchanted with the punch and the silver Panpipes. If Bat-Ammi agreed to marry me after the victory, I would let her feel me with her finger through my gym shorts on condition that I could play her father's Panpipes, feed different-sized coins in at the top, and take them out again at the bottom, punch star-shaped holes in the tickets. Helena Grill was still standing on the balcony. She was watering the geranium that grew in a rusty olive can. The water from the watering can looked like slivers of glass caught by the light. She was singing to herself in Polish; the song sounded to me full of longing and remorse.

Meanwhile, Father's two assistants, Abrasha and Lilienblum, arrived, bringing the morning paper. I declared a ceasefire in the suburbs of Berlin and ran to see what the headlines said. The newspaper told of the extensive searches mounted by the British all over the country and of bloodshed in one of the kibbutzim: the pioneers had forcibly resisted the confiscation of their defensive arms; two had been shot and wounded and many others had been interned in detention camps.

Father placed a glass of black coffee before Abrasha and handed Lilienblum a glass of cafe au lait. Meanwhile, he turned the newspaper over and scrutinized the obituary column minutely, sighing as he did so. Then he took off his glasses, suddenly thrust aside his accounts and the remains of his breakfast, caught a tottering yogurt pot just in time, and at once stood up and suggested that they get to work. It was nearly half past eight.

Unless, of course, he said, anyone wanted some more coffee.

I followed them down to the printing press in the basement. I knew that before the curfew Father had hidden the seditious pamphlets in a sealed can and sunk it to the bottom of a tub of printer's ink. I wanted to see with my own eyes how they would bring this submarine to the surface and where they would put it next. But Father reflected and decided not to change the hiding place, because it had not failed him. He switched on the electric motor. At once he switched it off again. He carefully checked the pivots and the rollers. He squeezed a few drops of oil onto the pistons. Then he started the motor again and turned to his composing desk.

"It's all over with Linda," Abrasha declared suddenly with the air of one resuming an interrupted conversation. "And good riddance, too."

"What, again?" Father asked, and I could sense his schoolmasterly smile.

"Finished. She's nabbed the son of Hamidoff from Barclay's Bank, and they're off to Paris next weekend. No wedding."

"There's no point in feeling bad about it," Father said reassuringly. "You were too good for her anyway."

Lilienblum suddenly exploded with a dull groan:

"To hell with them. They're all the same shit. Englishmen, Frenchmen, women. They ought to be kicked out, all of them. And Dr. Weizmann, too."

Abrasha was a taciturn albino, with no eyebrows and delicate white skin and hair, as if he were made of paper. He started the cutting machine. My private name for this machine was the Guillotine. When the High Commissioner was kidnapped, they'd bring him here and in this very basement Ephraim would execute the sentence mercilessly, without batting an eyelid. We must have no pity on the foes of Israel. Let alone plead with them, like Dr. Weizmann. A shy, unconscious smile played around Abrasha's lips as he guillotined the edges of the pamphlets. And I stuffed the wriggly snakes of paper down the front of my vest.

Lilienblum, who was an Orthodox Jew, was arranging the letters in the oblong frame, using steel forceps. His glasses were steel-framed, too. He always addressed me in Yiddish as "little devil." He would wheedle in his stentorian voice:

"A Yiddishe yingele mit a goyish punin. A pogromshchik mit a goldene neshome."

But for once he spoke not to me but to himself, as if unable to contain himself at this morning's sordid news:

"Barclay's Bank. Women," he grunted. "Pfui. Shit!"

At this I went out into the yard. The spell of the early light had worn off. There was no freshness left in the trees or around them. The air was beginning to glow white-hot, just as I had predicted. The Grill boys were not back from their leopard hunt yet. When they wanted to tease me, they would always chant their stupid rhymes at me: "Uri, Uri, sound and fury." Or: "Uri wants to play; frighten him away." And they made up dirty stories about Ephraim Nehamkin and my mother. They had written in yellow paint on the broken-down gate: KRAZY FROIKE FUKS URIS MOM.

Underneath this inscription, I suddenly discovered now a postscript that I could not begin to understand but which I started scratching out furiously with my fingernails:

AND URI TO.

At a quarter past nine, the van from the Angel Bakery turned into the lane. For some reason it pulled up outside our gate. I stopped scratching at the writing and watched to see what on earth. It was hot. Angry wasps were mustering under the dripping tap. A stray butterfly fluttered aimlessly among the thistles. There was a dusty smell in the air. Zaki, the baker's boy, leaped down from the driver's cab. He glanced quickly up and down the lane, opened up the rear door of the van, and drew out from among the baskets of bread a kind of surprised, blinking gentleman, a diminutive gentleman in a dark suit, clutching a tool bag. I couldn't understand why they had fetched the doctor. Perhaps Mommy had fainted again, or Helena Grill had had a fit of hysterics. But since when did doctors arrive in bakers' vans? As Zaki and the doctor ran past me toward the basement steps, I suddenly identified the man: it wasn't the doctor, it was Mr. Szczupak, the proprietor of Riviera Fashions on King George Street. I remembered how Mommy had taken me there to help her choose a summer dress. Perhaps she had been disappointed at the selection. She had changed her mind, and instead of buying a dress decided to go to another shop and put down a deposit on a phonograph. I recalled that Mr. Szczupak was not upset but invited her to come back to his shop after the holidays. In the autumn he would have a new stock in, he said. The fashions would have changed, too.

From somewhere or other Ephraim appeared, in a blue overall. He caught up with Zaki and Mr. Szczupak, gently took the visitor by tie elbow, and escorted him downstairs to the printing press. Not a word passed between them. Zaki turned, slipped outside, scrutinized the rooftops and balconies briefly, sniffed the air, and made up his mind. He made a dash for the driver's cab and reversed the van up the lane and out into the road. A stench of gasoline mingled for a moment with the smell of dust. And then once more there was only dust and angry wasps around the dripping tap.

"Scram. Get out of here. This minute." Father ordered me out in an expressionless voice.

I had hardly ever heard him speak like that before.

I obeyed at once and left the press. But before I left I just had time to notice in a flash that it was not Mr. Szczupak after all, but another man who looked like him, an older man, a kind of faded, worn-out version of Mr. Szczupak. Perhaps his older brother. And I saw Ephraim and the visitor disappearing through a narrow passage between the piled-up rolls of paper. I felt an icy shiver down my spine. Even if they killed me. Even if they pulled out all my fingernails one by one. Even if they killed Bat-Ammi. I'd never tell.

10

At midday, the Grill boys came back from the hunt. I was pleased to see that the leopard had been too cunning for them. Still, they did not return empty-handed, and at that I was not so pleased. They had brought back a cardboard box full of brass cartridge-cases. Never mind. I didn't care. I knew, and they didn't. In three places — in the back entrance to the staircase, inside the door of the shed in the yard, and in another secret place, in the mulberry tree — I had hidden explosive booby traps the way I'd learned from Ephraim. They were cans full of kerosene with remote-control fuses. In the kerosene I had put live matches, broken glass, slivers of brass, and electric wires.

Let them come.

They'll pay with their own blood.

Let them come, I say.

I decided for once to overlook the Grill boys' taunts. True, their father was a cooperative bus driver, they had a sister and I didn't, they had cartridge cases, they were on the tracks of a leopard, and they hadn't taken me hunting with them. Never mind. What I had seen that morning Boaz Grill would never see, even in his wildest dreams.

Joab said:

"He's been trying to start something with Bat-Ammi. He begged her to let him see and she laughed at him and wouldn't let him and she told us all about it, how he cried and ran away home. Little rabbit. He thought he could do to Bat-Ammi what Froike Nehamkin does to his mom."

I said nothing.

"He doesn't know what to say. Look at him, turning his face away, as if we can't see that he's blubbering."

I said nothing.

I could have told them that I had seen their mom changing her dress the day before in the mirror through the window during the curfew. But I kept quiet and said nothing.

"Bat-Ammi says he's still a baby. She says he hasn't got a single hair down there yet," Abner shrilled.

Suddenly I turned and rushed up the stairs, taking them two at a time, running up, onto the roof, to my lookout, not hearing their laughter or the things they were saying about my parents. Let them talk. I've got no time for them. I'm on the lookout.

Carefully, thoughtfully, I had selected a concealed position on the roof, among the junk and the water cisterns, behind the clotheslines. From here I could survey the whole city. The Schneller Barracks were spread out at my feet. I even had a telescope, made from a Quaker Oats package and some disks of bluish glass. I could see the English soldiers busily preparing for the High Commissioner's visit. From here, if I only had a machine gun, I could pick off the High Commissioner, the Grill boys, everyone. And then escape to the mountains and be a mountain boy. Forever.

Meanwhile, I took careful stock of the situation in Jerusalem. I could see the roofs of Kerem Avraham, a corner of the Bokharan Quarter, and farther on I could see Mount Scopus and the Mount of Olives shimmering on the bright horizon, towers and church spires, minarets, Shu'afat, Nabi Samwil, a giant, trunkless tree hovering on the blazing air beside the minaret of Nabi Samwil — I would head for that tree when it was all over. I could see the Tel Arza woods, too. Secretly, I was on the side of the leopard who was hiding there. I knew that they would never be able to catch it because it was everybody's nightmare, as Mother put it. I would follow the leopard beyond the mountains to the forests of leopards, and I would live among them like Kipling's Kim.

I could see the German houses at the approach to the suburb of Romema, and the brown tower from which the water ran at night in underground pipes till it reached even us. I could see tiled roofs and pitch-covered roofs, and forest upon forest of washing all over the city, as if the Hebrew state had suddenly sprung up and the whole city were dressed in multicolored bunting. And I could see the midday sunlight growing brighter and brighter as if it would never stop and I would be absorbed in the sunshine and become invisible and pass through walls like a moonbeam and wreak revenge and go to Bat-Ammi at night and say: Don't be afraid Bat-Ammi you can't see me but feel me it's me I've come to take you away from here let's leave this place and go to the forests of leopards and there we shall be.

The city was turning white. White summer dust had settled on the treetops. The light of Jerusalem was a desert light. In the heart of the Judean Desert there was a sea, not a sea at all but springs of water, the home of the Essenes and the dreamers whom the Roman legions had not been able to discover. From there the wind blew bearing a smell of dry dust and a smell of salt. This would be the last time I'd cry. There would be no more tears, even when the English tore out my fingernails one by one, I wouldn't tell about the man disguised as the doctor, as Mr. Szczupak, in Daddy's printing press.

Through the dust and salt came another smell, faintly: I could not tell whether it came from far away, from the Mountains of Moab, from the springs of water, or whether it originated nearby, in the house or even inside me. If you tried to say to those mountains, "With all the warmth of my heart and until my dying breath," they would burst out laughing. They might not even deign to laugh, because they were mountains and we were none of their business and they couldn't care less what happened to us here. Theirs was a different language. If only I knew the language of the mountains I would also be at rest, I couldn't care less what.

I'd learn.

Meanwhile, I wouldn't budge from my lookout post on the roof, to sound the alarm if they came again to search from house to house. The city of Jerusalem was stricken with sea-longing through the blue glass of the telescope I had made. The pine trees were smoke. The stone and corrugated iron were burnished brass, and the forests of washing were flights of birds in the wind.

I stood on guard on the roof till two o'clock in the afternoon. At two my father came out of the basement, followed by Abrasha, Ephraim, and Lilienblum. He locked the iron door. They exchanged a few words and left. They had left Mr. Szczupak in the basement, unless there was a tunnel underneath the electric motor.

Not Mr. Szczupak. His brother. Someone else. A man who had arrived in the baker's van disguised as a doctor, but underneath the disguise there was no Mr. Szczupak but a wiry youth a leopard whose eyes flashed lightning.

We ate at three o'clock: bean soup, rissoles, potatoes, and raw carrots. Then I drank down two glasses of iced lemonade and hurried back to my lookout post, so that I could be the first to give warning of danger.

But there was no danger. Only the deepening evening, gathering force among the pine trees. At six o'clock, a railway engine hooted away in the German Colony. It's a long, long way. I could observe the scorching sun gradually swathed in soot above Sheikh Badr and then drifting away to Givat Shaul and beginning to sink in the violet clouds and touching the hills and the hills turning violet too till it was impossible to tell what was hill and what was cloud and what was troops of horses at the edge of the sky.

Finally the horizon darkened. Jerusalem was left alone, dotted here and there with spots of yellow light. The street lamp in our lane also started to glow weakly. Mother came out onto the balcony to call me indoors.

In the living room, my father and Ephraim were sitting over the chessboard, one in a white vest and the other in a khaki shirt left unbuttoned on purpose to expose his dark chest.

The elderly poet dozed peacefully in the armchair.

He was deaf and tormented, his head withdrawn into his shoulders. I was suddenly reminded of the empty tortoise shell in the yard. I remembered how Ephraim had said that I would replace Mr. Nehamkin and be the poet and cashier. How he had regretted his words, and how he had reveled in the funeral oration his father would pronounce over the two of us when we had fallen side by side on the battlefield.

"Are we expecting a visitor?" I asked, and immediately was sorry I asked.

Ephraim pursed his lips.

"Did you say something?" he hissed venomously.

"Don't worry," Father put in anxiously. "Uri's all right."

Ephraim said:

"Don't talk so much, Kolodny. Every word is one word too many."

"That'll do now; stop it, the pair of you," Mother entreated. "Don't start quarreling."

Silence fell.

11

I could guess for myself what they had not told me. Underneath the printing press there was a steel trap door in the floor. From this trap door a winding staircase led down into an underground cavern under the house, an ancient catacomb or an Arab rock cave. Presumably Ephraim and his comrades were anxious to turn it into a bunker where we could shelter safely when the day of reckoning came. All along the cold rock walls, by lantern light, were ranged large cans of water and fuel, cans of provisions, ammunition crates, hand grenades, batteries and radio transmitters, maybe even some of Mr. Nehamkin's sacred books. And there, for the moment, Mr. Szczupak was resting till the heat was off; no, not Mr. Szczupak, the amazing lean leopard youth.

Perhaps he would come up tonight. Inside his doctor's bag he had a sniper's rifle, dismantled. The kitchen window commanded a view of the parade ground of the Schneller Barracks. The High Commissioner would come to review the troops, and suddenly a tiny flower would sprout on his forehead, and he would totter and fall. Then Ephraim and his comrades would emerge from their various hiding places and put the John of Gischala plan into operation. At a single stroke. I'll keep my clothes on tonight. I won't sleep. The earth will quake, cities will blaze, towers will topple to the ground. No more counting of the hours and days.

And when victory was ours, the Grill family would be carted off to the traitor's camps, but I would stand in the yard and say softly: All except Bat-Ammi. Let her be. She's all right. The commander would tell them to do as I said and release the girl at once.

"Where are you?" said Father. "Building castles in Spain?"

"The boy's miserable," said Mother.

"Nobody's miserable," I said. "I've come to give you a hand."

In the kitchen everything was carefully laid out on the black glass-topped trolley. Six teaspoons. Six cups. Six dessert plates. They'd brought out the best crockery tonight. Sugar, milk, lemon. Reinforcements of fruit and nuts. Paper napkins, each with a picture of a white-sailed fishing boat. The kettle began to whistle. Ephraim went out and came back with the visitor.

"Good evening," we all said.

He shrugged.

From close up, in the electric light, he was an immaculately dressed gentleman with woolly gray hair and wolflike jaws. He took off his jacket, blew some specks of dust off it, and draped it over the back of his chair. Then he pinched both trouser seams a little way above the knee, lifted them slightly, and sat down. Only then did he speak.

"All right."

When the visitor took off his jacket, I could see that his trousers were held up by a pair of striped suspenders, but that he was also wearing a tightly fastened belt.

Father said:

"Now, look here, Uri. Listen carefully. This is Mr. Levi. He's our guest. Mr. Levi is going to stay with us for a little while, because where he lives there are certain difficulties. As far as the neighbors are concerned, and the same goes even for Mr. Lilienblum and Comrade Abrasha, Mr. Levi is your uncle; he has just arrived from abroad on an illegal immigrant ship, and we are seeing about his papers. I hope I need say no more."

" 'Course not," I said.

And Mother:

"Mr. Levi, you will stay for dinner, won't you? And in the meantime, how about a cup of tea?"

The visitor kept his doctor's bag on his lap. When Mother spoke, he scrutinized her with his slow, cold eyes; he eyed her bosom, inspected her hips and legs, and then transferred his gaze to Father and Ephraim in turn. His thumb stroked his bristly mustache for an instant, his head nodded up and down a few times as if he were coming to an inevitable conclusion, and he said:

"Everything's perfectly all right."

Father said:

"We do the best we can."

"But what's that child doing here?" the visitor suddenly exclaimed. "Admittedly children are our future, but they tend to be noisy."

So Mother and I went out to the kitchen. Mother started cutting thin slices of white bread, and I set to work making a salad in a wooden bowl. On cat's paws, like a thief, he followed us out. We didn't hear him coming, but suddenly he passed between us across the kitchen and stood at the window. "Perfect," he said as he turned back toward us. A hint of a smile spread on his wolflike jaws. And was suppressed.

"I was just making the tea," Mother said.

"I'm sorry, I've changed my mind. I won't be wanting any tea just yet. You can go now, and take the child with you. I'll stay here."

And he added emphatically:

"Alone."

We left everything in the kitchen and returned to the living room. The poet was expounding in carefully chosen words and a silken voice a new idea that had occurred to him in the course of his meditations.

"Night after night there are lights shining outside the city. Bonfires suspended, as it were, between heaven and earth. I am not speaking from my groaning heart but from what can be seen and observed. He was accounted as nothing and despised, but he is the expectation of the nations. I humbly request a glass of plain tap water, for the heart itself is weakened by yearning. Not fruit juice, not lemonade, but just plain tap water if you please. Provided it is not too much trouble. He will not tarry long, for we are surely wearied and our strength is failing. I shall just drink my water, and then I shall be on my way. Would that every heart were as innocent as a day-old babe's. Farewell to you all. I shall be on my way now; pray, do not despise me. The Capital has a Leader. Behold my stick, and behold the door. Farewell to those who remain from him who goes on his way."

But having spoken these words, the old man did not get to his feet. He simply sighed deeply and remained sitting where he was. At that instant the visitor floated in and sank into the vacant armchair. He still clung to his bag of tools.

"Can I offer you cigarettes, matches, an ashtray?" Father inquired.

"Everything's all right," said Mr. Szczupak's brother.

"Please go ahead if you wish to smoke, Mr. Levi."

"I heard you the first time," the man replied sharply, "and I also asked for silence. How can I concentrate with all this noise?"

We fell silent.

Father sank deep in thought, picked up a black knight from the chessboard, eyed it with a sad smile, and suddenly put it back in its place. He chose instead to advance a pawn. Quick as a flash, Ephraim slid a white bishop almost to the edge of the board and exclaimed furiously:

"There!"

"You're in trouble again," Father whispered.

Mother saw fit to remind them both that Mr. Levi had asked us to keep quiet.

In the ensuing silence, the visitor slipped across the room to the net curtain, with the doctor's bag in his hand and his back to the room, and inspected the yard, or perhaps my battlefield on the window sill. Then he returned to his chair and mouthed silently:

"The child, please."

"Uri," Father said with alarm, "you heard. Say good night. Mommy will bring you your supper. Good night."

"No arguments," said Mother.

Mr. Levi chuckled at her, showing his fine white teeth.

"Children," he exclaimed, "pictures, a piano! Games of chess! And flowers! What a way to live in times like these! A cozy nest, indeed! We must be out of our minds! I wouldn't say no to a small glass of vodka. What, no vodka? What have you got? Only tokay from Rishon Le-Tsiyon, I suppose. I might have guessed. Never mind. Everything's perfectly all right."

"The wind whirleth about continually." Mr. Nehamkin suddenly woke up and started speaking with passion. "And the wind returneth again in a circle. That is one side of the coin. But the other side, Mrs. Kolodny, you know what the other side of the coin is: the thing that hath been shall not be again, and that which shall be — no eye hath seen it. And you have a visitor. Good evening, Mr. Visitor. May you, too, be permitted to behold the deliverance of Jerusalem."

As he spoke, he struck the floor magisterially with his stick, as though he were trying to rouse the carved tiger from its wooden slumber.

"Do I have to put up with this decrepit imbecile as well?" asked Mr. Levi.

Father apologized:

"It's his age. It can't be helped."

And Ephraim added:

"We're doing the best we can, Mr. Levi."

Mother began to clear away the tea things and set the table for supper. Father noticed me and exploded shrilly:

"What are you doing here? Can't you understand what you're told?"

"Right," I said. And in a flash I swept away the pushpins and silver foil, smashed the battle lines, stuffed everything frantically into the toy box, troops, battleships, commanders, headquarters, artillery. Finished. That war was over.

And I fled from the room without saying good night.

I didn't even wash. I lay down on my bed fully dressed in the dark and whispered to myself: Quiet, calm down, relax, nothing's lost, even ordinary soldiers take part in the fighting and the victory, be calm.

But there was no calm and there could be none.

Night in the window. Night inside the room. Summer stars and barking dogs.

In the dark I stowed into my old haversack everything that my groping hand encountered: socks, water bottle, buckles, straps, a scout belt, an old sweater, a package of chewing gum, a pocket knife.

I was prepared.

12

Early in the morning, before five o'clock, I woke in a panic. The windowpanes were shaking. Masses of heavy aircraft were rumbling low over Jerusalem. Half-light flickering outside. Zevulun Grill was trying repeatedly to start up his bus. The engine groaned and struggled with a dull rattle. There were no aircraft. Comrade Grill set off. I left the window and sneaked into the kitchen.

Mommy and Daddy were sitting facing each other silently. They were still wearing yesterday's clothes. Dirty cups on the oilcloth. Dregs of coffee. Remains of biscuits and fruit. An ashtray full of cigarette butts and the air full of smoke. Daddy's eyes were tired and bloodshot:

"Hello, Uri. Do you realize it's only five o'clock?"

"Morning," I said. "Where is everybody?"

"Where's who, Uri?"

"Everybody. Mr. Levi. Ephraim. Mr. Nehamkin. Everybody."

"Go and wash your face, son, and comb your hair. That's no way to look."

"First tell me what happened."

"Nothing's happened. Relax."

"Where is everybody?"

Father hesitated. He hadn't shaved. Bristles on his neck. His brow furrowed:

"There's some bad news, Uri. Mr. Nehamkin got sick during the night. We had to get Mrs. Vishniak out of bed and ring for an ambulance. We took him to the Hadassah Hospital. Now he's resting and getting his strength back. They're going to examine him today."

"And where's Ephraim and Mr. Levi?"

"Ephraim has had to go away again for a few days. He has to travel occasionally. This time it may be a long while before he comes home again. Now go and get washed, and then come back and have a cup of cocoa."

"Where's Mr. Levi?"

Daddy looked at Mommy. Mommy said nothing. She was wearing summery white slacks and a low-cut, flower-patterned blouse. She looked as though she were going on a journey, too.

"Mr. Levi," I said. "The one who was here last night."

At the end of a silence Daddy spoke sadly:

"Mr. Nehamkin will get better, we hope. The doctor at Hadassah was optimistic. He's just had a slight stroke, and now he needs to rest."

"Did you take Mr. Levi to Hadassah, too?"

"Now go and wash, Uri," Daddy said, and he stressed the sh of "wash," as though telling me to be quiet.

"What have you both been up to?" I exclaimed with horror.

Mommy said nothing.

Daddy got up, emptied the ashtray, put the dirty cups in the sink, wiped the oilcloth with a damp rag, and dried it with a dish towel.

"If you like," he said, "you can come with us to visit Mr. Nehamkin in the hospital this afternoon. Provided they tell us on the phone that he's well enough to have visitors. Now go and wash. I've told you three times already."

"Not till you tell me where Mr. Levi is."

"Why does he keep tormenting me, this son of yours?"

Mommy said nothing.

Daddy made up his mind. He took me by the shoulders, then relaxed his grip; his lips touched my forehead.

"He's got a slight temperature," he said.

Suddenly he pulled me onto his lap and ran his hand over my hair, and his voice sounded sad but firm:

"Uri. You've been talking strangely ever since you got up. First of all, you wake up screaming in the night because you've had a bad dream, and then you get up before five o'clock and start to nag. All right. It's your age. It's understandable. We're not angry. But you must make an effort. Listen carefully. Last night we had two visitors: Ephraim Nehamkin and his father. The same as usual. In the middle of the night we had to call for an ambulance. I've already explained. Period. Now kindly go and get washed, if you don't mind. That's all."

I said:

"Mommy."

And suddenly, with a sob:

"You're both rotten."

I snatched a box of matches from beside the primus stove and rushed out of the kitchen and the house. I lit the fuses on all three bombs. None of them would light, even though I wasted one match after another. Ephraim had deceived me. I was nobody's lieutenant. The High Commissioner would never come to Schneller, and if he did come, I couldn't care less. Mr. Szczupak was selling dresses at Riviera Fashions. Mr. Nehamkin was going to die, and with him his springs of water. For all I cared, Ruhama could come and stay all night. There had never been a leopard in the Tel Arza woods. There would never be a Hebrew state. Even Abrasha's Linda had run away to Paris with the son of Barclay's Bank. You can watch me crying. Never mind. You'll cry, too, poor Bat-Amroi. You've also been thrown out of the house at half past five in the morning. Now there's just the two of us outside, and all the rest of Jerusalem's indoors. I'll take you somewhere far away the other side of the mountains and you'll teach me what my mother and Froike and the rest of them… Come on, Bat-Ammi, let's go. We won't be sad.

Bat-Ammi is sitting on a stone. She has blue gym shorts like mine, only fastened with elastic. And she has an orange shirt, and her brothers are nowhere around. There's nobody around. The sun is beginning to come out. Light is shining again off the drainpipes and windows and corrugated-iron walls, and the clouds are blazing. Fiery horsemen can be seen galloping on mountains of fire above the Kedron Valley, transfixing the foes of Israel with lances of fire. The same as usual. Go away, horsemen, go to Tel Aviv even and to the sea. Without me. Bat-Ammi has a notebook open on her lap and she stops writing and doesn't ask me to tell her what and she doesn't tell me to calm down.

What is Bat-Ammi writing in her notebook on a big stone in the yard at half past five in the morning? She is making a note in her autograph book: When snow is black and pigs can fly, only then will my memory die.

Shall I write something, too?

I write:

Our little bear is feeling ill,

He stayed up late and caught a chill.

Soon the shops will start opening. The greengrocer will put crates of grapes out on the sidewalk. The wasps will come. Singsong sounds of Talmud study will come from the synagogue. Father and his two assistants will start printing New Year's greeting cards. There's a pile of shirts waiting for Mommy to iron. And there's a minor miracle here this morning: the bread hasn't come yet, but the air is full of the smell of fresh-baked bread. I remember: we've got to go on waiting. What has been has been, and a new day is beginning.

1975