The Hill of Evil Counsel

Longing

FROM DR. EMANUEL NUSSBAUM TO DR. HERMINE OSWALD, LATE OF KIBBUTZ TEL TOMER

Malachi Street, Jerusalem

September 2,1947

Dear Mina,

There is not much time left. You are probably in Haifa by now, perhaps packing your brassbound black leather trunk; your lips are pursed, you have just reprimanded some waiter or obsequious clerk, you are throbbing all over with efficiency and moral indignation, repeating to yourself over and over again, perhaps even aloud, the word "disgusting."

Or maybe you are not in Haifa. Perhaps you are already on board the ship bound for New York, sitting in your second-class cabin, wearing your reading glasses, digesting some uninspired article in one of your learned journals, untroubled and unexcited by the swell of the waves and the salt smell of the sea air, undistracted by the seagulls, the darkening expanse of the sea, or the strains of the tango wafting down from the ballroom. You are completely absorbed in yourself, no doubt. As always. Up to your ears in work.

I am simply guessing.

I do not know where you are at this moment. How could I know? You never answered either of the letters I wrote you two months ago, and you left no forwarding address. So, you've made up your mind to turn over a new leaf. Your gray eyes are fixed firmly on the future and on the assignments you have undertaken. You will not look back, remember, feel longing, regret. You are striding purposefully forward. Naturally, you are not entirely unacquainted with weakness of mind: after all, that is the subject of your research. But who can rival your firm resolve to turn over a new leaf from time to time? And you didn't leave me any address. I even wasted my time trying at the Kibbutz Tel Tomer office. She's through. Gone away. She's been invited to lecture in America. She may have left already. Sorry.

It is possible that eventually you will be stirred by courtesy or curiosity, and I shall suddenly receive an American postcard with a picture of colorful towers or some grandiose steel bridge. I have still not entirely given up hope, as I said to myself this morning while shaving. However, the sight of my face in the mirror almost stirs feelings of curiosity and sadness in me myself. And disgust, too. My illness has made my cheeks collapse inward, it has made my eyes so prominent that they terrify little children, and it has especially emphasized my nose, like a Nazi caricature. Symptoms. And my hair, that artistic gray mop that you used to enjoy running your fingers through for the static electricity, is all faded and thin. No more sparks. If it went on falling out at that rate for a few more months, I shouldn't have a hair left on my head. As if I had deliberately set out to make fun of the appearance of my dear father, by exaggerating it.

What have I to do with exaggeration? What have I to do with fun? I have always been, and still am, a quiet man. The happy medium, a balanced choice of words — these were always my pride. Albeit a silent pride. There were times, in our nights of love, when I would let go and a savage, pulsating side of me would temporarily take over. Now our love is finished, and I am my usual self again. I have settled back and found nothing. A salty waste. An arid plain. A few stray longings scattered here and there like thornbushes. You know. After all, inside you, too — forgive me — there is a barren desert. A different kind of desert, though. Scorched earth, a phrase I came across this morning in the paper in connection with the termination of the British Mandate.

Well, then.

Dear Mina, as I have already said, there is not much time left. War will break out here soon; almost everybody admits it now.

This morning I had a few neighbors in for a kind of meeting in my study. Even my own Kerem Avraham is already forming a sort of civil-defense committee. That's how far things have gone.

What will come of this war I haven't the faintest idea. Only all sorts of hopes and fears. You will be in a safe place, far from Jerusalem, far from Galilee and the valleys you have explored so thoroughly during these last years. It goes without saying that I shall not be able to play an active part in the war, either as a doctor on the battlefield or in a hospital behind the lines. The illness is progressing toward its final phases. Not in a continuous straight line, though. It is toying with me, with cunning ploys, temporary concessions, feigned moderation, a brilliant strategy of deception and false hopes. I almost smile to myself: doesn't it realize it's dealing with a doctor, and not, say, an artist? It can't take me in. These arabesques, the alternating alarms and all-clears, the false hopes, the avoidance of a frontal assault, how unnecessary they all are when the designated target is a man like me, an experienced diagnostician, an educated man, with a modest medical library at my disposal and with German as my mother tongue.

In short, I am my usual self: in a state of calm despair. The terminal stage will begin in the winter and be over before the spring, or it may begin in the spring and continue at most until the first heat waves of 1948.1 won't go into details. I trust, dear Mina, that there is no need to prove to you in writing that in the meantime I am quietly and confidently continuing with the routine of my daily life.

No news.

There's nothing much new that I can offer you in general.

I don't have much time to spare, either.

I spend most of the hours of day and night on the lookout to see what is happening in Jerusalem. Now and again I still try to make my modest patriotic contribution, such as this morning, in the meeting of the local defense committee. And I still keep up certain friendly neighborly contacts. And I am continuing my chemical experiments in my private laboratory, which may eventually render some service to the community in connection with the war effort.

Meanwhile, my observations have yielded a definite conviction that here in Jerusalem the summer is gradually, almost from day to day, relaxing its hold. There are already a few unobtrusive indications of the approach of autumn. The leaves have not begun to fall yet, of course, but there are hints of a slight change of tint, in the foliage, or in the refracted light at dawn or dusk. Or in both together: no contradiction is involved.

There is a shadow of clouds over our backyards. People speak softly and seriously. The twilight is beginning earlier, and its glow is more subdued than usual, more fantastic, a poet might add more desperate, a kind of bitter enthusiasm like a last act of love, which is full of wild abandon because it is the last and there is no more to come. At the end of the twilight, you can see a column of gray light over the western mountains and splashes of fire on the windowpanes, the towers, and the domes, and some water tank or other on a rooftop may go crazy and flare up. After this fire, the mountains are swathed in smoke. And a miracle: suddenly there is even a smell of smoke in Jerusalem.

So the lazy summer sunsets are over and gone. There is a new seriousness in the air. It is even cool outside in the early evening. Occasionally I have the feeling that there are fewer birds around. I must check this latest detail carefully, though, because common sense would indicate that autumn brings back the migrating birds.

So here I am, Mina, writing this letter to you slowly, on these small, smooth sheets of paper with my name printed at the top in Hebrew and German, which I used to use for writing prescriptions. You used to call these letters of mine "schoolboy notes." The difference is that this time, apparently, I shall not be brief. Or witty, either.

I am sitting at a table on the balcony, wearing a gray pullover but still with the peasant sandals you bought me in the Old City more than a year ago. Between the fingers that are writing to you and the toes in these sandals there seems to be a great distance now, not because I have suddenly grown taller, but because of the diseased organs in between. Dear Mina, the evening is still light enough for me to write, but I can sense the light beginning to fade. The whole city will be swathed, enfolded, district after district will attach itself to the cavalcade of night. The towers on top of the hills to the east will lead the procession, and the entire city will fall in behind, and march down into the enclosing desert. The nightly routine of Jerusalem. You have heard me say this before, and you called it all "poetic fantasy." There is nothing new. A particular pain has just started up and is almost tormenting me, as if a man like me is unlikely to take a mere hint. Very well. I shall swallow my pride and stifle the pain with an injection. Presently.

I should like to come back to the balcony and go on writing even when it is dark. The cool air is gentle and almost stimulating. I shall switch the lights on inside and try to bring the desk lamp out from the study. Will the extension cord reach? We shall see. I doubt it.

From the balcony opposite, across the neglected yard, my neighbor Mrs. Grill is questioning me:

"How are you feeling today, Dr. Emanuel, what does the radio say this evening, and when will your car be arriving?" My radio is the only one in the immediate neighborhood. Sometimes I serve as the link between the neighbors and what they call the outside world. The neighbors' boy Uri has taken to dropping in because I have permitted him to come and listen to the news, and so it was that he discovered my laboratory. As for the car, everyone here is saying that I shall soon have one of my own. The source of this rumor is apparently the boys, Uri's enemies. They know that I have stopped working as a doctor, they have somehow heard that I am doing some work for the Jewish Agency, and they have already invested me with a private car. I deny it gently. I apologize, as though I have been accused of doing something improper. Meanwhile, Mrs. Grill chuckles at me:

"Don't worry, Dr. Emanuel, we're used to keeping secrets. My husband's a veteran of the Trade Union, and as for me, I lost all my family in Lodz. You can count on us. We're not the sort to gossip."

"Perish the thought," I mutter. "It never entered my head to suggest that you… But the fact of the matter is that…" But she's already vanished: rushed back to her kitchen to save a pan of milk from boiling over or disappeared behind the linens she hangs out to dry on her balcony, among the crates and washtubs and suitcases. I am alone once more.

Let me tell you, in passing, about the Jewish Agency. I have a little cubbyhole tucked away behind my study, a storage room, a home laboratory, a darkroom. You complained once about the chemical smells that came from there and spread all over the apartment. I expect you remember. Well, I haven't given up my modest experiments. Some time ago I drew up a kind of memorandum about the possible military uses of a certain chemical of which we have relatively plentiful supplies. As a result, three weeks ago an engineer from the Jewish Agency or the Hagganah arrived in a great flurry to ask whether I would be willing to draw up an inventory of explosives that are legally stored in the Solel Boneh quarries in the mountains, and also of other explosives that are dispersed in various places in Jerusalem. And also to make a card index of useful chemicals held in Jewish factories in the city. And also to suggest all sorts of combinations and to work out what we have and what we would be short of in case of a prolonged war. We'd be short of everything, I replied; we wouldn't even have enough bread or water. My visitor smiled: he had decided I was possessed of a morbid sense of humor. "Dr. Nussbaum," he said, still smiling as he turned to leave, "everything will be all right. Just you compile the inventory. And leave the rest to us. We'll be prepared to try out any reasonable idea that occurs to you. Dushkin himself considers you one of the most brilliant minds in the field. We'll be in touch. Good-bye."

In short, I accepted. Anyway, the man didn't wait for an answer. As if he had given me an order. Ever since I had drawn up that memo, or perhaps since Dushkin had spoken to me in his usual effusive way at some meeting, someone must have been crediting me with magical powers, or expecting me to be a sort of alchemist for them. In brief, they would be very pleased but not at all surprised if I turned up tomorrow morning, tonight, clutching the formula for a powerful explosive that could be manufactured quickly, cheaply, in any kitchen, and of which a minute quantity would have a devastating effect. There is a slogan current here at the moment that is repeated every evening by the Underground on their short-wave broadcasts: "When your back's to the wall, even the incredible is possible." Admittedly, you or I could easily refute this slogan on a philosophical plane. But nevertheless, for the time being I accept it, both out of a sense of loyalty and because, with a little effort, I can discern a certain poetry in it. A crude poetry, it is true, but then, if I may so express myself, the state of affairs at the moment is crude.

A minor miracle has just occurred. I have managed despite everything to bring the desk lamp from my study out onto the balcony. The extension cord was almost long enough. A slight compromise: I moved the table a little nearer to the door. But I'm still outside, surrounded by a halo of electric light, with incredible shadows flickering on the stone wall behind me, and now what do I care if it's dark.

By the way, I have already numbered my little pages: I shall have to concentrate. On what? On the main point. Dear Mina, let me try to define just what the main point is at the moment. I shall put my empty cup down on the pages, because the wind is liable to blow up without warning, as usual here in the evening in the early autumn.

Well, then.

It has occurred to me to set down in writing various details about myself, about my immediate surroundings, certain observations about Jerusalem, and, in particular, my district, Kerem Avraham: things seen and heard. No doubt here and there cautious comparisons will emerge, and certain memories may find their way in. Don't worry, Mina: I don't intend to emhellish or sully our shared memories in writing this. No chains around your new life. America, I have read, is a good and wonderful country where all eyes are constantly on the future, where even longing is directed to the future, and everybody agrees that the past is condemned to silence.

Have you arrived yet, Mina, have you discovered a quiet café among the towers and bridges where you can sit down, put on your glasses, and spread out your notes? Are you getting used to speaking Red Indian? Or are you still on the boat, on your way, just passing, say, the Azores? Does the name Sierra Madre mean something to you yet? Dear Mina, are you all right?

Perhaps it isn't too late yet.

Perhaps you are still in Haifa, packing, getting ready, and I could still catch the evening train, arrive before midnight, find you in some small boardinghouse on the Carmel, and sit with you in silence looking out over the dark water, the shadow of the Galilean hills, with British warships ablaze with lights in the bay, and one of them suddenly bursting into a plaintive moan.

I don't know.

My health isn't up to the journey, either.

And if I do come, and if I manage to find you, you're sure to say:

"Emanuel. Why have you come? And what a mess you look."

If I say that I've come to say good-bye, my voice will betray me. Or my lips will tremble. And you will remark with cold sorrow:

"That's not true."

I shall be forced into silence. There will be embarrassment, awkwardness, probably physical pains as well. I shall be a burden on you.

No journey. After all, I have no idea where you are.

I don't even know why I am writing you this long letter, what the subject is, what, as they say, is on the agenda, what I am writing to you about. I'm sorry.

It is evening now. I've already said that twice, but still the evening continues. Below me, on the sidewalk, some girls are playing hopscotch, and Uri, out of their sight, is following their skipping from his hiding place among the shrubs with a slow movement of the muzzle of his ray gun. Now he has stopped and is sunk in thought or in dreams. From where I am sitting, I can see his head and the silhouette of the gun. This child is always on guard and always seems to be asleep at his post. Soon the children will be going indoors. The cries will die away, but there will be no quiet. I have pains; one of them is particularly cruel, but I shall persist in ignoring it and concentrate on recording the place and the time. Dear Mina, please don't read these words with your patient, ironic smile; try for once to smile innocently or not at all. I hate your irony. Always effortlessly piercing the barrier of words, deciphering what lies behind them, always forgiving. How desolate. Are the birds really changing guard in the fig tree and the mulberry as the blaze of oleanders dies down in the garden? Evening has come. Barking of dogs far away, echo of bells, shooting, a raven's croak. Such simple, instant, trivial things — why do they all sound to me as though never again.

Now the moment is approaching when the light in Jerusalem is distorted. It is the light of the stone that is beginning to make itself felt, as if it were not the last traces of the sun setting behind the clouds but, rather, the walls, the ramparts, the distant towers projecting the inner light of their souls. At this point you may exhale your cigarette smoke through your nostrils, as usual, and say to yourself, "What, again."

You may, I said. Meaning, I can't prevent it.

I could never prevent anything. Whatever happened, happened because you wanted it.

You said to me once: Here we are, Emanuel and Mina, two educated people, two people with similar backgrounds, and yet there is no reason for them to establish a permanent relationship.

I agree. On the one hand, Dr. Nussbaum, a gentle man, a man beset by doubts: even when he wants something he always suspects his motives, and frequently his smile is confused, like that of a man who has finally dared to tell a story and immediately starts wondering: Is it funny, has it been understood, is it out of place. On the other, Dr. Oswald, a bitter, determined woman; ever her rare compromises are almost a matter of life and death. She stubs out her cigarettes as though she were trying to bore a hole in the bottom of the ashtray.

Surely we both knew in advance it would be a mistake.

Yet even so, you saw fit to be linked to me for a while. As for me — is it proper for a man like me, a man in my condition, to say so? — I loved you. I still do.

Jerusalem

September 3, 1947

Dear Mina,

In my dreams at night you come back to me in a gray-brown dress, with knowing fingers. Quiet. Even your voice in the dreams is different, calmer, warmer.

At midnight I had a snack: a roll with olives, tomato, cucumber. I gave myself my nightly injection and took two different pain-killing tablets. In bed I read a few pages of the journal of an acute English pilgrim who visited the Holy Land eighty years ago and saw Jerusalem in a dismal light. It was O'Leary who lent me the book. Then I turned off the light and heard the distant humming of engines, probably a British military convoy making its way to Ramallah and the mountains of Samaria. Drowsily, unconcernedly, I could see in my mind's eye the desolate valleys, the miserable stone-built villages, some sacred tree wrapped in darkness among the boulders, with perhaps a fox sniffing in its shadows, and farther on the caves, embers of bonfires, ancient olive trees, the sadness of the deserted goat tracks in the night, the rustling thistles in the scented, late-summer breeze, and the column of British jeeps with dimmed headlights winding up the mountain road. A very ancient land. Then there was a whispering on the steps of the house. My father and his lawyer in the passage, arguing, chuckling, I can hardly catch the words, but the subject is apparently some fraud, some investigation that threatens me, legal arguments that can still perhaps save me from some great disgrace. I lock the study door and rush to the kitchen. I must push my father almost roughly out of there, while the lawyer bows to me sadly and tactfully. In vain I search feverishly for the source of the damp smoke. I cough and almost choke. I must hurry. Any moment now, the British police may arrive, and Uri's parents would blame me for everything. And then your brown dress on the kitchen balcony, and suddenly you. I don't try to resist. I drape my jacket carefully over the back of the chair, roll up my vest, even guide you to the line of my diaphragm and almost enjoy the sight of your knowing fingers. Unerringly, painlessly, you rip open the skin, penetrate the rib cage, seek and find the affected gland, and extract the revolting fluid from it with forceps and a fine scalpel. There is no bleeding. No pain. The nerve endings are like white worms. The muscle tissue tears with the sound of ripping cloth. And I sit and watch your fingers operating inside my body as in an illustrated textbook. Look, Emanuel, you smile, it's all over. Thank you, I whisper. And I add: I'd like to get dressed. And then the gland itself, bloated and bluish-green, looking like a gigantic tick, swollen with pus, walking insectlike on thin, hairy legs slowly down my thigh, my calf, onto the floor; I throw the tin mug at it and miss, you crush it under the toe of your shoe, and a greasy jet squirts out. Now get dressed and we'll have a drink, you say, coffee, you say, but the shrewd light glints in your eye as you change your mind: You mustn't drink coffee, Emanuel, you must make do with fresh fruit until you are a little stronger. Your hands in my hair. I feel good. I say nothing. My child, you say, how cold you are. And how pale. Now close your eyes. Stop thinking. Sleep quietly. I obey. Inside my closed eyes the kitchen fades, and there is only the jam jar on the kitchen table, swarming with wormlike glands, hairy, damp, with insect antennae, and in the bread, too, in the fruit bowl, there is even one crawling up my pajama sleeve. Never mind. I am at rest. With my eyes closed I can hear your voice, a Russian song. Where did you get this Russian, from the kibbutz in the Jezreel Valley, from the fields, take me there when my strength returns, and there I shall follow you. Dear Mina. At three o'clock, the bell of the clock tower in the Schneller Barracks pierces my sleep. I switch on the light; with a shaking hand I clutch the cup of cold tea, remove the glass saucer that covers it, have a sip, take another pill, and return to the English pilgrim and argue with him in my mind about the line of the watershed, which he unhesitatingly locates along the ridge of Mount Scopus and the Mount of Olives. With the dawn, I fall asleep again in the twilight, without turning off the light, and I hear you say that now you can reveal that you have borne me a child and lodged it in one of the kibbutzim in the valley to spare me the trouble of looking after it in my present condition. Your lips in my hair. You have not gone, Mina. No, I haven't gone. I am here. Every night I shall come to you, Emanuel, but during the day I must hide because of the searches and the curfew, until we have outwitted the enemy and the Hebrew state has gained its freedom. I fall asleep with my head in your lap and wake up to the sound of repeated bursts of sharp firing. Tonight the Irgun or the Stern Group has raided the British barracks again. Perhaps the first tentative engagements of the new war have begun. I get up.

Pale light in the window. A cock is crowing furiously in the next-door yard. And the strange boy is already up and about, poking in the junk and dragging discarded packing cases hither and thither. Six o'clock in the morning. A new day, and I must put the kettle on for my shaving water and my early-morning coffee. For another half hour I can still keep the night-child alive, our son, the baby you bore me and hid from me. At half past six the newspaper arrived, and at a quarter past seven I heard on the news that the London Times has warned the Zionists against a reckless gamble that may prove fatal, and advised them to make a realistic revision of their aspirations and to understand once and for all that the idea of a Jewish state will lead to a blood bath. Another solution must be devised that may be acceptable to the Arabs, too, at least to their more moderate elements. However, the paper will in no way sanction handing over the achievements of the Zionist settlers to Moslem religious fanatics; the achievements themselves are admirable, but the inflated political aspirations of the leaders of the Jewish Agency verge on adventurism. After the news, while I made my bed and dusted the highboy and the bookshelves, David Zakkai gave a talk about the night sky in September. Then there was a program of morning music, while outside in the street the kerosene vendors and icemen rang the bells of their pushcarts. Over and over again I weighed the words in my heart: Recklessness. Gamble. Adventurism.

At eight o'clock, I decided to go to the Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus, to invade Professor Dushkin's office for a quarter of an hour and ask him again how my illness was developing and what he made of last week's tests. The piercing desert light had already engulfed Jerusalem. A dry wind was blowing among the hills. And in the dusty bus the students were joking, mimicking the German accents of their lecturers with a Polish twist of humor. Along the way, in the suburb of Sheikh Jarrah, there were wickerwork stools spilling over onto the sidewalk from a coffeehouse, and on one of them I saw a young, educated Arab in a pin-striped suit and horn-rimmed spectacles sitting in motionless contemplation, the tiny coffee cup seemingly frozen in his hand. He did not take the trouble to direct so much as a glance at the Jewish bus. In my mind I could not refrain from comparing his silence with the clamor of the students in the bus and the histrionic laughter of the girls. And I was filled with apprehension.

Professor Dushkin roared my name delightedly and immediately shooed out of his office a clucking, shriveled nurse who had been filling out index cards. He slammed the door after her, thumped me on the shoulder, and proclaimed in a Russian bellow:

"Out with it! Let's talk frankly, as usual."

I asked him four or five short questions concerning the results of last week's tests and received the expected replies.

"But look here, my dear Emanuel," he exclaimed rumbustiously, "you remember what happened in the summer of '44, with Rabbi Zweik, the mystic from Safed. Yes. We came to exactly the same conclusions with him, and yet his tumor dissolved and his condition was, how shall we say, arrested. And he's still alive and kicking. It's a fact."

I smiled. "So what are you suggesting, that I should settle down to study mysticism?"

Professor Dushkin poured out tea. He pressed me to accept a biscuit. Idiocy, he declared, was rampant on all sides. Even among his own faculty. Even in politics. The leaders of the Jewish Agency, he considered, were political infants, loudmouthed amateurs, small-town autodidacts, illiterates, ignoramuses, and these were the people who had to pit their wits now against the sophisticated experts of Whitehall. It was enough to drive you crazy. Another glass of tea? What's the matter with you, of course you will. I've poured it out already, what do you want, have you only come here to irritate me? Drink! In a word, Shertok and Berl Locker. What more need I say: political Svidrigailovs everywhere. In December we'll have you in for some more tests, and if there's been no change for the worse by then, we'll be entitled to take it as an encouraging sign. No, more than a sign, a turning point! That's right. Meanwhile, how shall I put it, keep your spirits up, my friend. One cannot help admiring your composure.

As he spoke, I suddenly noticed a film of tears in his eyes. He was a heavily built, muscular, compact-looking man. He invariably wept at the first onset of emotion; he was always flushing and boiling over. I had secretly nicknamed him "Samovar."

I rose to take my leave.

So, no new tests just yet. And no treatment. Just as I had expected.

"Thanks, Dushkin," I said. "Thank you very much."

"Thanks?" he cried out as if I had wounded him. "What's the matter? What's got into you? Are you crazy? What have you got to thank me for all of a sudden?"

"You've been frank with me. And you've hardly uttered a single superfluous word."

"You're exaggerating, Emanuel," he said with sadness and emotion in his voice. "For once you're exaggerating. But of course," he added in his former tones, "of course when idiocy is on the rampage, any meeting like ours today is almost an occasion. Svidrigailovs, I say: political Svidrigailovs, and medical Svidrigailovs as well. Even here in our department there are all sorts of Shertoks and Berl Lockers living it up. Well. The bus into town leaves in ten minutes. Number nine as usual. No — don't run! There's no hurry, it'll be late. I swear it'll be late. After all, it's Hammekasher, not the Royal Navy. If you notice any change, come and see me at once. At two o'clock in the morning, even. You can be sure of a hot glass of tea. How I love you, Emanuel, how my heart weeps for you. Na! Enough. Since we were talking about that grubby saint Rabbi Zweik, who broke all the rules in our book and literally rose from the dead, let me repeat a little saying of his. He used to tell us that the Almighty sometimes plays a trick on His worshipers and shows them that if He wills He can save a life even by means of doctors and medicine. Now, fare you well, my friend. Be brave."

His eyes glistened again. He opened the door for me furiously and suddenly roared out in a terrible voice:

"Svidrigailov! Shmendrik! Come here at once! Run and clear the X-ray room for me immediately! Use force if necessary! Throw a bomb in, I don't care! But on the way show Dr. Nussbaum here to the elevator. No, to the bus stop. You're turning this Jerusalem of ours into a veritable Bedlam! As you see, gentlemen, at times I can be a terrible man. A cannibal. A tartar. That's what I am. Na! Be seeing you, Emanuel. And don't worry about me. You know me. I'll get over it. And also… Forget it. Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye."

Despite all this, I missed the bus. But I bore no grudge against Samovar. I waited on the bench at the bus stop for close to an hour. The city and the mountains seemed amazingly quiet. Minarets and domes in the Old City, buildings overflowing down the slopes of gray hills in the new town, here and there tiled roofs, empty plots, olive trees, and apparently not a soul in Jerusalem. Only the dry wind in the woods behind me, and birds chattering calmly from the British military cemetery.

But on the other side lay the desert. It was literally at my feet.

A neglected, rock-strewn terrain dotted with pieces of newspaper, thistles, and rusting iron, a wasteland of limestone or chalk. In other words, from the scenic point of view Mount Scopus is the threshold of the desert. I have a horror of this propinquity between myself and the desert. Over there are forsaken valleys, rocks baking in the sun, shrubs sculpted by the wind, and there are scorpions in the crevices of the rocks, strange stone huts, minarets on bald hilltops, the last villages. On the opposite slopes and in the Jordan valley are traces of ruined biblical towns, Sumieh, which my English pilgrim identifies with Beth-jesimoth, Abel-shittim, Beth-haran, Nimrin, which may be the ancient Beth-nimrah. And scattered among these ruins are camps of Bedouin tribes, goatskin tents, and dark shepherds armed with daggers. Justice through bloodshed. The simple law of the desert: love, honor, and death. And there is a venomous biblical snake called the asp. How I shudder, Mina, at this closeness to the desert.

Yes. Forgive me. You have already heard the gist of all this from me, in Haifa, at the Lev Ha-Carmel Café, over strawberry ice-cream sundaes. You remember. And you dismissed it all as "Viennese angst." I won't deny it: it is indeed angst. And perhaps even Viennese angst.

Did I ever tell you this as well?

From my window as a child, I could see the canal. There were barges. Sometimes at night a noisy holiday cruiser went past, a riot of multicolored lights. The water was spanned by two bridges, one arched and the other modern. Perhaps in your student days you chanced to pass by these places. Perhaps we passed each other in the street unawares. Night after night I could see the consumptive sidewalk artist smoking and choking, smoking as though he reveled in the agony of coughing, vomiting in the gutter, and smoking again. I have not forgotten. The row of street lamps along the quay. The shivering reflections in the water. The smell of that gray water. The streetwalker on the corner of the old bridge. The boardinghouse whose ground floor was a tavern called the Weary Heart, where I could always see art students, all sorts of women; one of them stood there once and cried without a sound and stamped her foot. On warm evenings, gentlemen wandered around as if searching for inspiration, their faces either lost in thought or bereft of hope. The souvenir vendor wandered from shop to shop. "Like trying to sell ice to Eskimos," my father would jest. Every hour we could hear the bell of the local church, over whose door was inscribed the legend THERE IS A WAY BACK in four languages, Latin, German, Greek, and Hebrew (only the Hebrew was written in curious characters, and there was a slight spelling mistake). Next to the church was the antique shop run by two Jewish partners, the fakers Gips and Gutzi, whom I told you about when we went to Degania together on the valley train. Do you remember, Mina? You laughed. You accused me of "poetic license." And you forgave me.

But you were wrong. Gips existed, and so did Gutzi. I am putting this down in writing now because I have come to the point where I feel obliged to insist, even if it means contradicting you: the truth comes first. As I wrote the word "truth," I paused for a moment. Yes, a slight hesitation. For what is the truth, Mina? Perhaps this: I did not give up Vienna for Jerusalem; I was driven out, more or less, and even though at the time I thought of this expulsion almost as the destruction of the rest of my life, in fact it gained me eight or nine years of life, and it has enabled me to see Jerusalem and to meet you. All the way from there to Malachi Street. To Mount Scopus. Almost to the edge of the desert. If I were not afraid of making you lose your temper I would use the word "absurd." You and Jerusalem. Jerusalem and I. We and the heirs of prophets, kings, and heroes. We turn over a new leaf only to smudge it with ancient neuroses. My child, my neighbors' child, Uri, sometimes shows me his private poems. He trusts me, because I do not laugh at him, and because he thinks of me as a secret inventor who is lying low because of a conspiracy while perfecting wonderful secret weapons for the Hebrew state. He writes poems about the ten lost tribes, Hebrew cavalrymen, great conquests, and acts of vengeance. Doubtless some little teacher, some messianic madman, has captured the child's imagination with the usual Jerusalemite blend of apocalyptic visions and romantic fantasies of Polish or Cossack cavalrymen. Sometimes I try my hand at writing my own educational stories, about Albert Schweitzer in Africa, the life of Louis Pasteur, Edison, that wonderful man Janusz Korczak. All in vain.

In the laundry on the roof of his house, Uri has a rocket made from bits of an old icebox and parts from an abandoned bicycle. The rocket is aimed at the Houses of Parliament in London. And I alone am responsible for the delay, because it is up to me, Dr. Einstein, Dr. Faust, Dr. Gog-and-Magog, to develop in my laboratory the formula for the secret fuel and the Hebrew atomic bomb.

He spends hours on end immersed in my huge German atlas. He is quiet, polite, clean, and tidy. He listens respectfully to what I say but rebukes me for my slowness. He pins little flags in the atlas to trace the course of the advance (with my permission, naturally). He plans a mock landing of Hebrew paratroops on the Suez Canal and along the Red Sea coast. He captures the British fleet off Crete and Malta. Occasionally I am invited to join in this game that is more than a game, in the role of Perfidious Albion, hatching dark plots, conducting desperate rear-guard actions on land and sea, in the Dardanelles, Gibraltar, the Red Sea approaches. Eventually I am forced to capitulate graciously, to cede the whole of the East to the forces of the Hebrew Kingdom, to enter into negotiations, to pencil in lightly the limits of spheres of influence, and to admit sportingly that I have lost the diplomatic war of minds just as I have already been conclusively routed on the battlefield. Only then will the ground be prepared for a military alliance, and the two of us together, Kingdom of Israel and British Empire, will be able to operate against the desert tribesmen. We would advance eastward in a carefully coordinated pincer movement until we encountered a forward patrol of the forces of the ten lost tribes, right at the edge of the map. I have permitted Uri to sketch in in blue pencil a large but Godforsaken Israelite kingdom in Central Asia, somewhere among the Himalayan Mountains.

The game is not entirely to my taste, but I join in nonetheless, and at times I even experience a certain secret thrill: A child. A strange child. My child.

"Dr. Nussbaum," Uri says, "please, if you don't feel well again, I can give you your supper. And I can go to the greengrocer's for you and to Ziegel's and buy whatever you need. Just tell me what."

"Thank you, Uri. There's no need. On the contrary; there's some chocolate in the kitchen cupboard — help yourself, and you may find some almonds, too. And then you must go home, so they don't worry about you."

"They won't worry. I can even stay overnight and keep an eye on the laboratory so you can get some sleep. Mommy and Daddy have gone away to a sanatorium. There's no one at home except Auntie Natalia, and she won't make any trouble for us — she's too busy with her own business. I can even stay out of doors all night if I want to. Or just stay quietly here with you."

"What about your homework?"

"It's done. Dr. Emanuel—"

"Yes, Uri."

"Nothing. Only you…"

"What did you want to ask me, Uri? Don't be shy. Ask."

"Nothing. Are you always… alone?"

"Recently, yes."

"Haven't you got any brothers or sisters? Haven't you thought about… getting married?"

"No. Why do you ask?"

"No reason. Only I haven't, either."

"Haven't what?"

"Nothing. I haven't got any brothers or sisters. And I… I don't need anybody."

"It's not the same, Uri."

"Yes, it is. And you don't call me a crazy child. Am I a crazy child?"

"No, Uri, you're not."

"Just the opposite. I'm your assistant. And that's a secret between you and me."

"Naturally," I say without a smile. "Now you must go. Tomorrow, if you like, we'll spend some time in the lab. I'll show you how to reduce certain substances to their elements. It will be a chemistry lesson, and you tell them that at home, please, if they ask you about your visits to me."

"Sure. You can count on me not to talk. I'll say it was chemistry lessons like you said. Don't worry, Dr. Emanuel. Bye."

"Wait a minute, Uri." I hesitate. "Just a minute."

"Yes?"

"Here, your sweater. Good night."

He leaves the house. Slips away down the back stairs. From my balcony I can watch his furtive passage among the shrubs. Suddenly I feel a surge of regret. What have I done. Have I gone mad. I mustn't. Then again: he's the neighbors' child, not mine. And naturally my illness is not catching. But all this will end badly. I'm sorry, Mina. You will certainly view this strange relationship in a totally negative light. And you will be right, as usual. I'm very sorry.

September 5

Evening again

Dear Mina,

I should have told Professor Dushkin there and then on Mount Scopus that I could on no account accept his harsh words about Moshe Shcrtok and Berl Locker. After all, these poor delegates of a tiny, isolated community are almost empty-handed. And I should have told the engineer from the Jewish Agency that it would be better for them to give up their useless fantasies about mysterious weapons and start making clear-sighted preparations for the departure of the British army and the impending war. And I should have tried to put up a fight — forgive me for using such a hyperbolic expression — to put up a fight for the soul of my child, my neighbors' child, to put a firm stop to his games of conquest, to get him out of my laboratory, to produce sensible arguments to counteract the romantic dreams with which his Cossack Bible teacher has apparently filled the boy's head.

But I cannot deny that these romantic dreams sometimes take hold of me, too, at night, in between the attacks of pain. Last night I helped Dr. Weizmann, disguised as a Catholic priest, to make his way secretly in the dark to one of the bridges over the Danube and empty phials of plague bacillus into the water. After all, we are already infected, Dr. Weizmann said; there's no hope for either of us, he said; if only we live long enough to see that our death does not go unavenged. I tried to remonstrate, I reminded him that we had both always despised such language, but he turned a tortured, eyeless face toward me and called me "Svidriga'ilov."

Early in the morning, I went out onto the balcony again. I found the light on in my neighbors' window across the yard. Zevulun Grill, who is a driver in the Hammekasher bus cooperative and a member of our local civil-defense committee, was standing in his kitchen slicing a sausage. He was probably making his sandwiches. I, too, put the kettle on for my shaving water and my morning coffee, and a strange, irrelevant phrase kept grating in my mind like a trashy popular tune that refuses to go away: a thorn in the flesh. I am a thorn in her flesh. We are a thorn in their flesh.

Dear Mina, I must record that yet another bad sign has joined all the others: for the first time I fell asleep fully dressed on the sofa. I woke up rumpled and disheveled at two o'clock and dragged myself to bed. So I shall have to hurry up.

"I went to the Tel Arza woods by myself after school," Uri said. "I've brought you a canful of that honey stuff that drips from pine trees when you break off a branch; hello, Dr. Nussbaum, I forgot to say it when I came in, and nobody followed me here because I was careful and made several detours on the way. This stuff smells a bit like turpentine, only different. My suggestion, which I thought of on the way back, is that we could try mixing it with a bit of gasoline and some acetone, then lighting it and seeing what the blast's like."

"Today, Uri, I suggest that we do something completely different. For a change. Let's close the windows, make ourselves comfortable, and listen to some classical music on the phonograph. Afterward, if you want to ask any questions, I may be able to explain some of the musical terms."

"Music," Uri said. "We get enough of that at home all day from my mother and her piano. Today you're not feeling well again, Dr. Emanuel, I can see, so maybe it's better if I come back tomorrow afternoon or Saturday morning to work by myself all alone on the experiments that are written in your notebook on the desk in the lab, with the sodium nitrate like you said, or the other thing, what's its name, nitric acid and nitrobenzine, does it say? Sorry to hurry you, only you're always saying that we must hurry up."

"I said that, Uri, I don't deny that I said it. But that was just in the game."

"You only call it a game because of the secrecy. Don't try to say you didn't really mean it 'cause I could see that you did. But never mind. I'll come back some other time."

"But Uri…"

"If it's one of your attacks, God forbid, then I'll run and call Dr. Kipnis, and if not, I'm ready to wash all the test tubes from the experiments in ten minutes and especially to fill the spirit lamp. Or if you like I'll go home now, and I'll report for duty the minute I see a slanting chink in your bath room blinds like we arranged. Meanwhile, bye-bye, Dr. Emanuel, and be well, 'cause what'll I do if anything happens to you suddenly."

Do I have the strength, do I have the right, to try to influence his mind?

The education of children is totally outside my province.

Outside, in the yard, the Grill children ambush him and make fun of him. I can't hear the words, and even if I could I don't suppose I could understand them. I can hear their evil laughter. And Uri's heroic silence.

What can I do.

I sit at the table on the balcony, writing you an account that is incapable of yielding results or conclusions. Forgive me.

Meanwhile, it is almost dark outside. I have stretched the desk lamp out here again from my study so that I can write to you under this evening sky. Soon the first stars will appear. It is almost as if I could still expect some illumination. As if here in Jerusalem even a man like me could momentarily be chosen for the role of messenger.

Moths around the lamp. I have stopped writing for a moment to make myself some coffee by the most primitive method: boiling water poured on the black powder. No milk, no sugar. I had a biscuit, too. Then I had an attack of weakness and nausea; a sour taste rose in my throat. I took a pill and gave myself an injection. Forgive me, Mina, these physical complaints bore me and have nothing to do with the matter at hand.

But what does have to do with the matter at hand? What is the matter at hand?

That is the question.

Maybe this: that my neighbors' children have reduced Uri to despair outside, and he has climbed up the mulberry tree like a hounded cat. I ought to intervene to protect him, or call his parents. His parents are away. His aunt, then, that Natalia who has come from some kibbutz. Not now: late at night, when he is asleep, I should go and talk to her. Explain, warn, apologize.

How absurd. What can I say? And how can I, a total stranger, call on her late at night?

And I know nothing at all about the education of children.

I shall go on watching. Now the boys who chased Uri have begun a sort of commando raid across the broken-down railings. Is it a hunt, from yard to yard, in the cellars, in the peeling entrance halls, and among the dusty shrubs that are dying here in the drought? They have Hebrew names that savor of the desert: Boaz, Joab, Gideon, Ehud, Jephthah. And because the darkness is still not complete, still touched by the last vestiges of light, I can manage from my balcony to make out the rules of the game: it is an air raid. They spread their arms wide, group themselves in spearhead formation, bend the top halves of their bodies forward, and stamp along pretending to be warplanes. Spread-eagle. Uttering sounds of explosions, drone of engines, and tattoo of machine guns. One of them happens to look up at my balcony, catches sight of me calmly writing by the light of the desk lamp, aims an invisible gun at me, and annihilates me with a single salvo. I accept it.

That is, I raise my hands in a gesture of surrender, and even spread a smile on my face, no doubt a Dutch uncle's smile, so as to reward him with a victorious thrill. But the dedicated warrior refuses to accept my surrender. He rejects it outright. He disregards my smile and my raised arms. The logic of war is pursued without favor or exception. I have been annihilated, and now I no longer exist. He goes on his way, surging forward to wipe out the last traces of the Jew-haters.

Friday night, and Jews in cheap suits are carrying prayer books under their arms as they go past my balcony on their way to the Faithful Remnant Synagogue to welcome the Sabbath. Probably they are secretly delighted at the sight of these child airplanes, muttering contentedly to themselves, "little pagans."

All through the summer the children have exposed their skin to the blazing rays of the sun. Needless to say, I have done my duty. I have warned my neighbors, their parents, time and again that excessive exposure is bad for the skin and can even harm their general development. In vain. The settlers here, Orthodox shopkeepers, municipal and Jewish Agency officials, refugees, thinkers and stamp collectors, former pioneers, teachers, and clerks — they all agree in elevating sunbathing almost to the level of a religion. Perhaps they imagine that Jewish children who take on a bronze color cease to be Jewish children and become Hebrews. A new, tough race, no longer timid and persecuted, no longer sparkling with gold and silver teeth, no longer with sweaty palms and eyes blinking through thick lenses. Total liberation from the fear of persecution by means of this colorful camouflage. But I must put in a word of reservation here: I am not at all well read in either zoology or anthropology, and hence the comparison between what is happening here and the mechanism of protective coloration that is found in a certain type of lizard whose name escapes me cannot be regarded as substantiated.

However, I shall record my own private observations.

Jerusalem, Kerem Avraham, mid-1940's: Bunem begat Zischa, and Zischa begat Myetek, and Myetek begat Giora. A new leaf.

Nevertheless, needless to say, I can see no benefit in this effort. At the close of a summer's day, Kerem Avraham exudes a smell of Eastern European immigrants. It is a sour smell. If I try to isolate its ingredients: Their sweat. Their fish. The cheap oil they use for frying. Nervous indigestion. Petty intrigues among neighbors motivated by repressed greed. Hopes and fears. Here and there a partially blocked drain. Their underwear, drying everywhere on clotheslines, especially the women's underwear, has a sanctimonious air. I am tempted to use the word "puritanical." And on every window sill here, cucumbers are pickling in old jam jars, cucumbers floating in liquid with garlic, dill, parsley, bay leaves. Is this also a place that in years to come someone will remember with longing? Can it be that when the time comes, someone will dream nostalgically of the rusting washtubs, the broken-down railings, the rough, cracked concrete, the peeling plaster, the coils of barbed wire, the thistles, the immigrant smells? Indeed, will we survive the war that is coming? What will happen, Mina — perhaps you have some suggestion, some consolation, to offer? No? This morning, on the short-wave broadcast of the Underground radio, they played a stirring song: "We shall climb together to the mountains,/ Climb toward the light of breaking day:/ We have left our yesterdays behind us,/ But tomorrow is a long, long way away." Here are the mountains, Mina, and here we are among them. Jewish immigrants. Our last reserves of strength. The tomorrow in the song is not for me, I know that. But my love and fears are directed desperately — forgive me — toward the darling child you bore me and hid away in a kibbutz in the Jezreel Valley. What lies in store for him? I imagine him lean and bronzed, barefoot, even his dreams filled with taps, screws, and cogwheels.

Or Uri.

Look, just like Dushkin, I have a tear In my eye. Suddenly I, too, am a Samovar. It is not sadness at my death, you know that, it's sadness for the people and their children and for the mountains all around. What will happen? What have we done, and what shall we do now? Yes. Angst. Don't smile like that.

Friday night. In every kitchen now they are cooking chicken necks stuffed with groats, stuffed intestines, stuffed peppers. The poor people have cheap sausage with mustard. For me, of course, only raw vegetables and fresh fruit. Even the quarrels, the insults hurled every now and again from balcony to balcony, are in Yiddish: Bist du a wilde chayye, Mister Menachem, du herst mich, bist du a meshuggener?

That is how it is in Jerusalem.

They say that in Galilee, in the valley, in Sharon, and in the remote parts of the Negev a kind of mutation in taking place: A new race of peasants is emerging. Laconic. Sarcastic. Single-minded. Dedicated.

I don't know.

You're the one who knows.

For two and a half years now, you have been wandering among the kibbutzim, dashing from place to place in their dusty trucks, making notes, interviewing, drawing comparisons, in khaki trousers and a man's shirt with large breast pockets, compiling statistics, sleeping in pioneer huts, sharing their frugal fare. Perhaps you can even speak to them in their own language. Perhaps you even love them.

A tough, spartan woman, uncompromising, strolling around those camps without the least embarrassment, collecting material for an original piece of social-psychological research. Stubbing out your cigarette as if you were pressing a pushpin into the table. Lighting up again at once, not blowing the match out but waving it almost violently to and fro. Entering the details of the dreams of the first native-born generation on little cards. "Patterns of Behavior and Normative Ideas Among the Products of a Collective Education." Mina, I am prepared to give my wholehearted admiration to those children, and to their pioneering parents, the enthusiasm, the silent heroism, the iron will, and the graceful manners.

And to you.

Mina, I take my hat off to you.

That is to say — forget it. A Viennese gesture. There, I've already regretted it.

As for me — what am I?

A weak Jew. Consumed by hesitations. Dedicated but apprehensive. And now, in addition to everything else, seriously ill. My modest contribution: here, in Jerusalem, in a neighborhood of lower-middle-class immigrants from Russia and Poland, I have put up a fight, as long as my strength lasted, without counting the hours, even working at night sometimes, against the dangers of diphtheria and dysentery.

Moreover, there are my chemical interests. Homemade explosives. It is possible that Uri can already see what I refuse to see. Perhaps a formula is really taking shape in my mind for the large-scale production of homemade explosives. Or at least I may be able to suggest a starting point to the Hagganah. In this area, at any rate. In the early hours of this morning, I devoted some thought to the salts we possess in relative abundance, such as potassium chlorate and barium nitrate. Any porous substance, such as chalk or charcoal, can be saturated with liquid oxygen. I must stop recording details like these. My heart is heavy because I do not want to devise formulas for explosives or to contribute to wars, but Uri is right, and so I am obliged to do so. But the sadness, Mina, how great it is. And the humiliation.

I have tried to resist this obligation. I have even taken certain steps. I refer to the poignant conversations I had at the beginning of the summer with an Arab friend, a colleague, a doctor from Katamon, Dr. Mahdi. Need I go into details? The abyss that divides two doctors of moderate views, who both abhor bloodshed. My pleas. His pleas. The historical argument. On the one hand and on the other. The moral argument. On the one hand and on the other. The practical argument. On the one hand and on the other. His certainty. My hesitations. I must try again. I must appeal to him at this late hour and ask him to arrange for me to meet the members of the Jerusalem Arab Committee and make them think again. I still have an argument or two left.

Only the heart says: It's all in vain. You must hurry up. Uri is right, and so is the Underground broadcast on the short waves: "To die — or to conquer the mountain."

I will not deny it, Mina: as usual I am very frightened.

And I am also ashamed of my fear. Let us not be halted by the corpses of the weak, as Bialik says, they died in servitude, may their dream be sweet to them, onions and garlic in plenty, bountiful fleshpots. I am quoting from memory. My copy of Bialik's poems is in the bookcase some five or six paces away, but I don't have the strength to get up. And anyway, I strenuously reject the line about the dream of onions and garlic. Insofar as it concerns me, you know full well what is in my dreams. Wild, even rough women — yes. Murderers and shepherdesses from the Bedouin — also. And my father's face with his lawyer, and sometimes longing for river and forest. But no onions and no garlic. There our national poet was mistaken, or perhaps he merely exaggerated so as to rouse the people's spirit. Forgive me. Once more I have trespassed on a domain in which I am no expert.

And you are in my dreams, too. You in New York, in a youthful dress, in some paved square that reminds me of Moshavot Square in Tel Aviv. There is a jetty there, and you are at the wheel of a dusty jeep, smoking, supervising Arab porters who are carrying cases of arms for the beleaguered Hebrew community. You are on duty. You are on a secret mission. You are throbbing with efficiency or moral indignation. "Shame on you," you reproach me. "How could you, and at a time like this? Disgusting." I admit it, fall silent, recoil, and retreat to the far end of the jetty. Reflected like a corpse in the water, I hear distant shots and suddenly agree with you in my heart. Yes, you are right. How could 1.1 must go at once, just as I am, without a suitcase, without an overcoat, this very minute.

The shame is more than I can bear. I wake up in pain and take three pills. I lie down again, wide awake and alarmed, and hear outside, just beyond the shutters, on a branch, at a distance of perhaps two feet from me, a night bird. It is uttering a bitter, piercing shriek, in a kind of frenzy of wounded self-righteousness, repeating its protest over and over again: Ahoo. Ahoohoo. Ahoo. Ahoooo.

Jerusalem

Saturday evening

September 6, 1947

Dear Mina,

It will not be easy for me to wean myself from this child.

He spent the whole morning here, painstakingly copying facts out of the gazetteer and sketching a military plan for the capture of the mountain ranges that command Jerusalem from the north. Then he marked on his map the crossroads and the strategic points. On a separate sheet of paper, he allocated storm troops to each of the key buildings in Jerusalem, such as the central post office, the David Building, the radio station, the Russian Compound, the Schneller Barracks, the YMCA tower, and the railway station. And all the while he did not disturb me as I lay resting on the sofa. He is a thin, fair-haired child; his movements are abrupt, embarrassment and aspirations shine in his green eyes, but his manners are impeccable. Twice he interrupted his game and made me some coffee. He straightened my blanket and replaced the sweat-drenched pillow under my head with a fresh one. It was almost noon before he apologetically asked me my opinion of his work. Despite all my principles I praised it.

Uri said:

"I've got to go home soon and have my lunch. Please rest so you'll be strong enough to do the experiment tonight. I'm leaving a Matosian cigarette pack here, Dr. Emanuel; inside there are four live bullets we can take the gunpowder out of. And in my sock I've got the pin from a hand grenade. It's a bit rusty, but it's all there. I found it, and I've brought it for you. From our roof I counted nine British tanks in a shed in Schneller. Cromwells. Is it true, Dr. Emanuel, that a tank is finished if you put some sugar in the engine?"

Again the excited glint flickers in his eyes and dies down. He still trusts me, but his patience is beginning to wear thin: "How much more time will you need for the experiments? A fortnight? More? By about December the Irgun and the Stern Group will have started to blow up enemy districts in the city, because the English are already moving troops to Haifa."

I smile:

"There may still be an agreement, Uri. I read in the paper that America may yet agree to govern the country until the storm dies down and the Arabs start getting used to the idea of a He-brew state. There is still some such possibility. Why must you be so enthusiastic for wars? I have already explained to you more than once that a war is a terrible thing, even if you win it. Perhaps we shall still manage to prevent it."

"You don't really mean that. It's just because I'm still a child and you think you've got to improve me, like my daddy. But nothing comes from words. I'm very sorry. Everything is war."

"And how, if you don't mind my asking, did you arrive at that rather sweeping conclusion?"

Now he stares at me in utter disbelief. He stands up. His hands are thrust deep into the pockets of his shorts. He comes over to the sofa, and as he leans over me his voice is trembling:

"I'm not an informer. You can speak frankly to me. Surely everything is war. That's how it is in history, in the Bible, in nature, and in real life, too. And love is all war. Friendship, too, even."

"Are you acquainted with love already, Uri?"

Silence.

And then:

"Dr. Emanuel, tell me, is it true that there's a Jewish professor in America who has invented a huge atomic bomb made from a drop of water?"

"You are referring apparently to the hydrogen bomb. That lies outside the range of my knowledge."

"All right. Don't tell me anything. There are military secrets that I'm not allowed to know. The main thing is that you do know all about it, and no one will ever get a word out of me."

"Uri. Listen. You are quite mistaken about that. Let me explain something to you. Listen carefully."

Silence.

I don't know what to explain to him, or in what words.

It's not true:

The truth is that I am afraid of losing him. In his short trousers, with the buckle shining on his army belt, with his gentle hand once or twice on my forehead, am I still perspiring, have I got a slight temperature.

And so once again I give in. I start explaining to him what a chain reaction is and, in schematic terms, about the relationship between matter and energy. For a long while he listens to me in silent concentration, his eyes fixed on my mouth, his nostrils flaring as if they have caught a distant whiff of the fire storm in Hiroshima, which I am telling him about. Now he really worships me, he loves me with all his heart.

And now I feel better, too, as a result of his enthusiasm. Suddenly I feel strong enough to get up, to invite Uri into my little laboratory, I am suddenly animated by a kind of pedagogic enthusiasm, I light the spirit lamp and demonstrate a simple exercise to him: water, steam, energy, motor power.

"And that's the whole principle." I chuckle happily.

"My lips are sealed, Dr. Emanuel. I won't talk, even if the British arrest me and torture me, they won't get a word out of me, because I've got a way of keeping quiet that I learned from Ephraim Nehamkin. They won't get anything out of me about what you've told me, you can trust me a hundred percent."

Once more the beautiful rage flashes in his green eyes and dies away. My child.

Eventually he takes his leave and promises to come back tomorrow afternoon. And even in the middle of the night, if he sees a slanting crack of light at my bathroom window. In which case, he'll slip out and come to me at once. Hell be at my command, he says. Bye.

When he had gone, I suddenly began to argue with you in my mind. To apologize for it all. To justify myself about our first meeting. To re-examine how I went, two years ago, in the summer of '45, for a rest to the sanatorium at Arza. How I decided then, mistakenly, that my morning attacks of sickness were the result of general fatigue. How I made up my mind to relax completely, and how you came bursting into my solitary life, you and my illness. And as I reflected, I put the blame, if one can so express it, on you.

Dear Mina, if you mind my writing all this, then skip the next few lines.

Please. Try to see it like this: a bachelor, a doctor, with reasonable financial security, in receipt of an occasional mail remittance from his father, who is a confectioner in Ramat Gan. His expenditures are few: a moderate rent, simple clothing, and food in keeping with the times and his surroundings, the occasional expenses of his scientific hobby. He has a little put away.

Moreover, for some time now he has experienced a certain tiredness, and slight attacks of nausea early in the morning, before the first cup of coffee. A medical colleague diagnoses the first signs of ulcers and orders complete rest. Besides, certain European habits of his youth persist: summertime is holiday time.

And so, Arza, in the hills behind Jerusalem. A relaxed Dr. Nussbaum, dressed in a light summer suit and an open-necked blue shirt, sits in a deck chair under the whispering pines, half reading a novel by Jacob Wassermann. The paths are covered with fine white gravel. Every footstep produces a crisp crunching sound, which charms him and reminds him of other times. In the background, inside the building, the phonograph is playing work songs. Nearby, in a hammock, a prominent figure in the community and the Labor Movement is dozing, the gentle breeze ruffling the pages of the newspaper spread open on his stomach. Dr. Nussbaum does not admit even to himself that he is waiting for this public figure to wake up so that he can engage him in conversation and make an impression on him.

A Health Service nurse named Jasmine circulates among the reclining figures, distributing to each a glass of fresh orange juice and biscuits, a kind of mid-morning snack. This Jasmine is a robust, buxom girl. The fine black down that covers her arms and legs stirs a sudden lust in Dr. Nussbaum. The capricious physical attraction he feels for simple Oriental women. He politely declines the orange juice and tries to engage Jasmine in a lighthearted conversation, but the words come with difficulty, and his voice, as always happens to him in such situations, sounds false. Jasmine lingers to bend over him and smooth his shirt collar over the lapels of his jacket. A momentary glimpse of her breasts arouses a certain boldness in him: as in his student days in Vienna, when he would drain a glass of brandy at a single gulp and find the courage to utter a mild obscenity. So he gives voice to a false explanation of his refusal of the orange juice, a sort of ambiguous hint about forbidden as against permitted pleasures. She does not understand. However, it seems that she is in no hurry to move on: she must find him not unattractive, this gentleman in his light suit and his graying hair. She probably thinks him highly intelligent and respected, but modest. It is possible that she can detect his welling lust. She laughs and asks what she can offer him instead of the juice. He can have whatever he wants, says Jasmine. No, he replies, with a polite smile in his eyes, what he wants she may not be able to give him out here, surrounded by all these other convalescents. Jasmine shows her teeth. She blushes, and her dark skin takes on a darker hue. Even her shoulders participate in her laughter. "If that's the way you are, then have a glass of my juice anyway." And he, now caught up in sweet game-fever, suggests she try another temptation. Again she does not understand. She is slightly taken aback. "Coffee, for instance," he hastens to add, in case he has gone too far. Jasmine reflects for a moment; perhaps she is still not quite sure — does he really want a cup of coffee, or is the game still on? On the clear summer air there comes the buzzing of a bee, the caw of a crow, and a British airplane droning far to the south over the Bethlehem hills. "I'll see to some coffee for you," Jasmine says, "as a special favor. Just for you."

It was at that point that you came into the picture. Actually, you were there already: an intense woman on a nearby rocking chair, in a simple, severe summer dress. Sitting and judging.

"If I might be permitted to intrude in this exchange," you say.

And I, in a trice, return from the harems of Baghdad to my Viennese manners:

"By all means, dear lady. Need you ask? We were merely indulging in idle banter. Please."

And so you advise me to choose fresh orange juice, rather than coffee, after all. From bitter experience that morning, you have discovered that the coffee here is ersatz, a kind of greasy black mud. Incidentally, I am not a total stranger to you: you once heard me lecture at a one-day conference at the Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus. I spoke about hygiene and the drinking water in Palestine, and impressed you with my sense of humor. Dr. Nussbaum, if you are not mistaken. No, you are surely not mistaken.

I hasten to reassure you, and you continue:

"Very pleased to meet you. Hermine Oswald. Mina for short. A pupil of pupils of Dr. Adler. Apparently we both share the same Viennese background. That is why I permitted myself to intervene and rescue you from the Health Service coffee. I have a bad habit of interfering without being asked. Yes. Nurse, please leave two glasses of grapefruit juice on the table here. Thank you. You may go now. What were we talking about? Ah, yes. Your lecture on the drinking water was entertaining, but quite out of place in that one-day conference."

You imagine I will agree with you on this point.

Dr. Nussbaum, naturally, hastens to agree wholeheartedly.

Meanwhile, Jasmine is receiving a noisy dressing down: the Trade Union official is grumbling, half an hour ago or more he asked her — or one of the other nurses, what's the difference — to put through an urgent telephone call for him to the office of Comrade Sprinzak. Has she forgotten? Is it possible?

You indicate him with your chin, smile, and explain to me sotto voce:

"Beginnings of egomania and overbearing behavior typical of short men. By the time he's seventy, he will be a positive monster."

We drift into lighthearted conversation. Jasmine, rebuked, has moved out of sight. You call her an "enfant sauvage." I ask myself whether you have overheard my foolish exchange with her, and find myself devoutly hoping that you have not.

"I react in exactly the same way as you," you are saying, "only in reverse. An Oriental taxi driver, or even a Yemenite newsboy, can throw me quite off balance. From a purely physical point of view, of course. These 'enfants sauvages' still retain — or so it would appear — some sort of sensual animal language that we have long forgotten."

Dr. Nussbaum, as you will surely recall, does not blush to hear all this. No. He blanches. He clears his throat. Hurriedly he produces a freshly laundered handkerchief from his pocket and wipes his lips. He begins to mumble something about the flies, which he has just noticed are all around. And so, without further delay, he changes the subject. He has an anecdote to relate about Professor Dushkin, who, you will recall, was in the chair at that medical conference at the Hadassah. Dushkin called everyone — the doctors, the High Commissioner, the leaders of the Jewish Agency, Stalin, everyone — Svidrigailovs.

"How unoriginal of him," you remark icily. "But Dr. Nussbaum, you may invoke whomsoever you will, Dushkin, Stalin, Svidrigai'lov, to change the direction of our conversation. It is not you but I who should apologize for the embarrassment I have caused."

"Perish the thought, Dr. Oswald, perish the thought," Dr. Nussbaum mutters like an idiot.

"Mina," you insist.

"Yes, with great pleasure. Emanuel," Dr. Nussbaum replies.

"You are uneasy in my company," you say with a smile.

"Heaven forbid."

"In that case, shall we take a little stroll together?"

You get up from your rocking chair. You never wait for an answer. I get up and follow you. You take me for a leisurely amble along the gravel path and beyond, down the wooded slope, to the shade of the cypress trees, toward the smell of resin and decay, until we come to the famous tree that was planted by Dr. Herzl and was later felled by some Arabs. And there we discovered, in the dry summer grass, a rusty earring with a Cyrillic inscription.

"It's mine!" you suddenly exclaim possessively, like a high-spirited schoolgirl. "I saw it first!"

A tearful grimace played around your mouth for a moment, as if I were really about to prize the earring from your fist by brute force.

"It's yours," I said, laughing, "even though I believe I saw it first. But have it anyway. As a gift."

Suddenly I added:

"Mina."

You looked at me. You did not speak. Perhaps for a full minute you looked at me and did not speak. Then you hurled the earring into the thistles and took hold of my arm.

"We are out for a stroll," you said.

"Yes, out for a stroll," I agreed happily.

What happened to us. What did you see in me.

No, I do not expect an answer. You are in New York. Up to your eyeballs in work, I expect. As usual. Who can rival your power of periodically turning over a new leaf.

If I were to try to examine myself through your eyes that day in Arza, I should not be much the wiser. You saw before you a withdrawn man with a pensive expression and a cautious way of moving. Rather a lonely man, to judge by outward appearances. Not lacking in sensuality, though, as you must have learned when you overheard him flirting with the girl Jasmine. Not bad looking, either, as I have already stated. A tall, thin man, inclined to turn pale in moments of emotion or embarrassment, his features angular and decidedly intellectual. Hair going slightly gray, but still falling luxuriantly over his forehead, enough perhaps to attract attention. He may have struck you as a rootless artist, he may have looked to you like an unconventional musician from the conservatoire of some German-speaking land, who had turned up here in Western Asia and now bore his degradation with silent, tight-lipped resignation: there is no way back. A melancholy man, yet capable nonetheless, in unusual circumstances, of wholehearted enthusiasm.

In brief, an orphan and a dominating aunt, according to your definition. A definition, however, that you only voiced some time later.

By lunchtime, we were already sharing a table. Chatting about the poet Gottfried Benn. And putting our heads together like a couple of conspirators, trying to work out the order in which the various tables were served. It was Jasmine who served us. As she poured the mineral water I was splashed slightly, because she was not paying attention. I did not complain; on the contrary, as she leaned over me her firm breasts almost brushed my shoulder. At their base, glimpsed through the opening of her white overall, there showed a network of blue veins, such as one sometimes finds in marble from Galilee.

My lust did not escape your notice. You were amused and began to tease me. You started asking me certain questions about my bachelor life. All without batting an eyelid, as if you were inquiring where I bought my shirts. Apparently your practical experience as a psychologist (before you devoted yourself to research) enabled you to ask me questions of a sort not normally exchanged by new acquaintances.

As for me, I blanched as usual. But I made up my mind this time not to evade your questions. Only I found the choice of words very difficult.

"This time you have not changed the subject to Svidrigailov," you observed ruthlessly.

Again we went for a walk together, this time beyond the perimeter, toward the buildings of the small farming settlement of Motza. My loneliness, and perhaps my extreme caution in the choice of my words, aroused your sympathy. You liked me, and you said so in a matter-of-fact tone of voice. Afternoon light on the hills. The gentle cypresses. A blaze of geraniums among the houses of the settlement, red-tiled roofs, a poinciana flaming red like a greeting from Tel Aviv. A light, dry breeze. Our conversation now is impersonal, Viennese as it were, a sort of exchange of views on the question of sexual pleasures and their relation to the emotions. You are remarkably free in the way you speak about anatomical and physiological details. You find my hesitancy appealing perhaps, but definitely surprising nonetheless: After all, Emanuel, we are both doctors, we are both perfectly familiar with these mechanisms, so why are you so embarrassed, secretly praying for me finally to change the subject?

I apologize; my embarrassment springs from the fact that in Hebrew the intimate particulars of the anatomy — very well, the sexual organs — have newly invented names, which seem rather sterile and lifeless, and that is why, paradoxically, I find it hard to utter them. You describe this explanation as "pilpulistic." You do not believe me. When all is said and done, what is to prevent my switching to German, or making use of the Latin terms? No, you do not believe me. Unhesitatingly you identify psychological inhibitions. Latent puritanism.

"Mina," I protest, "forgive me, please, but I'm not one of your patients yet."

"No. But we are making each other's acquaintance. We are taking a walk together. Why don't you ask me questions about myself?"

"I haven't got any questions. Only one, perhaps: you have been humiliated by someone, a man, perhaps a cruel man, a long time ago perhaps, viciously humiliated."

"Is that a question?"

"I was… voicing an impression."

Suddenly, forcefully, you take my head between your hands.

"Bend down."

I obey. Your lips. And a small discovery: tiny holes in the lobes of your ears. Is it possible that you once wore earrings? I do not ask.

Then you remark that I seem to you like a watch that has lost its glass. So vulnerable. So helpless. And so touching.

You touch my hair. I touch your shoulder. We walk on in silence. Darkness is falling. Overhead a bird of prey in the last rays of twilight. A vulture? A falcon? I do not know. And there is a hint of danger: outside the grounds of the sanatorium, Arab shepherds roam. Not far away is a notorious brigand village called Koloniyeh. We must be getting back. All around us the sadness of darkening rocks. Night is falling on an arid boulder-land. Far on the northern horizon, in the direction of Shu'afat and Beit Ikhsa, a star shell splits the sky, fades, shatters to shivers of light, and dies in the darkness.

After supper, a vulgar entertainer from the Broom Theater appeared in the dining room. He told jokes and made fun, in a heavy Russian accent, of the hypocrisy of the British government and the savagery of the Arab gangs. Finally, he even made faces at the audience. The Trade Union bigwig flushed, rose from his seat, and condemned such frivolity as being out of place in such critical times. The entertainer retired to a corner of the room and sat down, abashed, on the verge of tears. The audience was totally silent. When the speaker used the word "self-restraint," you suddenly burst into loud, resounding laughter, youthful laughter, which instantly provoked a reaction of astonished rage all around. At once people were laughing with you, or perhaps at you. We left the dining room. Darkness in the corridors and on the stairs. Almost immediately we were in each other's arms. Whispering, this time in German. You liked me, you said, you had a small volume of Rilke in your room, you said, and after all we were both adults and free agents.

In your room, almost without an exchange of words, rules were established at once. Orphan and dominating aunt. I must play the part of an ignorant, awkward, shy, but obedient pupil. But grateful. And very diligent. Yours to command in a whisper, and mine to obey in silence. You had all the details drawn up ready in your mind, as if you were carrying out an exotic program taken from an erotic handbook: Here. Now here. Slowly. Harder. More. Wait. Wait. Now. That's right.

Dear Mina, we both intended that night to be the first and the last. Adults, you said, free agents, you said, but, after all, who is an adult or a free agent, both of us were captured by a force that carried us away like twigs in a river. Perhaps because I was subjugated. Perhaps you had decided from the outset to subjugate me that night, and so I found myself a slave. But you, too, became a slaveowner, Mina, through my very subjugation. And again the following afternoon. And the next night. And again. And after the holidays you began sending postcards to me in Jerusalem with curt commands: Come to Haifa the day after tomorrow. Expect me on Saturday night. Come to Kate Graubert's pension in Talpiyot. I'll come to you for the festival. Tell Fritz that his fast is almost over. Hug Gips and Gutzi for me.

Until you finally taught me to call you Jasmine, to unleash the panting satyr, to conjure up a Baghdad harem in low-ceilinged boardinghouses. To torment and be tormented. To scream aloud. Again and again to grovel at your feet when it was all over, while you lit a cigarette, shook out the match, and studied our love-making in precise terms, like a general returning to a battlefield to analyze the fighting and learn lessons for the future.

No, Mina, there is no bitterness, no regret. On the contrary. Unbearable longing. Longing for your rare words of praise. And longing for your rebukes. For your mockery, too. And for your fingers. My own Jasmine, I am a sick man now, I don't have much time left. One might say I fell into your clutches. Or one might say I loved you out of humiliation.

New paragraph.

Let me return to my record of the place and the time. As I have already said, here I am, on the lookout.

Jerusalem, evening, summer's ending, signs of autumn, a man of thirty-nine, already retired for reasons of serious ill health, sitting on his balcony writing to a girl friend, or a former girl friend. He is telling her what he can see, and also what he is thinking. What the purpose is, what can be called the "subject," I have already said I do not know.

The daylight has been fading for an hour and a quarter now, and it is still not quite dark. I am at rest. On the face of it, this is a peaceful hour. Every Saturday evening there is a miracle of sound in Jerusalem: even the noises of the children playing, the cars, and the dogs, and in the distance a woman singing on the radio — ail these sounds are assimilated into the silence. Even the shouting down the road. Even a stray burst of machine-gun fire from the direction of Sanhedriya. The silence cloaks it all. In other words, on Saturday evening total silence reigns in Jerusalem.

Now the church and convent bells have started to ring out from nearby and far away, and they, too, are inside the silence. Tomorrow is Sunday. The color of the sky is dark-gray with a segment of orange between the clouds. They are fast-moving autumn clouds. And there is a flock of birds flying past. Larks, perhaps. Various people pass below my balcony in Malachi Street. A woman from next door with a basket. A student with an armload of books. And now a boy and a girl walking past rapidly, separated from each other by a good yard or so, not exchanging a word, yet there is no doubt that they are together and that their hearts are at rest.

Opposite, on the corner of Zechariah Street, an old Arab woman is sitting on the sidewalk. A peasant woman. Cross-legged and almost motionless. In front of her there is a large brass tray full of figs for sale. At the edge of the tray, a little pile of coins, no doubt milliemes and half-piasters, her day's takings. She comes here all the way from Sheikh Badr, or perhaps even from Lifta or Malha. How calm she is, and what a long journey she still has to make this evening. Meanwhile she is waiting. Chewing something. Mint leaves? I do not know. Soon she will get up, I almost said arise, balance the tray on her head, and pick her way in the dark among the thistles and boulders. Like a fine network of nerves, the footpaths stretch across the fields, joining the suburbs to the villages all around Jerusalem. A slow, sturdy old woman, at peace with her body and the desolate mountains; my heart yearns for that peace. As she goes on her way, the yellow lights of the street lamps will come on all over the neighborhood. Then the ringing of the bells will cease, and only the sadness of the evening will remain. Iron shutters will be closed. All the doors will be locked. Jerusalem will be in darkness, and I shall be alone in its midst. Suppose I have an attack in the night. Will the child really watch out for the slanting crack of light at my bathroom window, will he really slip out and come to me, be at my command?

Panic seizes me at the very possibility of such a thought's occurring to me. No. Tonight, as usual, I shall be alone. Good night.

Sunday

September 7, 1947

Dear Mina,

I do not know what words one can use to describe to you a blue autumn morning such as we had here today, before the westerly wind blew up, bringing with it a cold, cloudy evening. The whole morning was flooded a deep sky-blue. Much more than a tone or a color: it was such a pure, concentrated blue that it felt like a potion. The buildings and plants responded with a general awakening, as though redoubling their hold on their own colors, or giving concrete expression to a national slogan that is current at the moment in the Hebrew newspapers and Underground broadcasts: To any provocation we shall react twofold; we are determined to stand by what is ours to the last.

That is to say, the blazing geraniums, for instance, in gardens, in backyards, in olive cans on verandas, in window boxes. Or the Jerusalem stone: this morning it is truly "shouting from the walls," in a powerful, concentrated gray. An unalloyed gray, like the color of your eyes. Or the flowering creeper climbing up the olive tree next to the grocer's, dotted all over with points of dark-blue brilliance. It all looked like a painting by an overenthusiastic amateur who has not learned, and has no wish to learn, the secret of understatement. I am almost tempted to use biblical Hebrew words, like sardius, beryl, carbuncle — even though the precise meaning of these words is unknown to me.

Should this miracle be attributed to the clarity of the desert air? To the breath of autumn? To my illness, perhaps? Or to some change that is impending? I have no answer to all these questions. I must try to define my feelings in words, and so I go back to writing: Today I feel painful longings for sights that are present, as though they were recollected images. As though they had already passed, perhaps as though they had passed beyond recall forever. Longings so powerful that I feel an urgent need to do something at once, something unusual, perhaps to put on a light jacket and go out for a walk. To the Tel Arza woods. Among the knitting mothers and their infants sprawled on rugs. To recall the Sunday outings of my childhood to the Vienna woods, and suddenly to sense a smell of other autumns, elsewhere, a smell of lakes, mushrooms, droplets of dew on the branches of fir trees, the smell of Lederhosen, the smoke of holiday-makers' campfires, the aroma of freshly ground coffee. How strange I must have seemed this morning to the neighbors' wives in the Tel Arza woods: Look, there is Dr. Nussbaum out for a walk, tall and elegantly dressed, his hands clasped behind his back, smiling to himself as he treads the pine needles underfoot, as though he has just discovered an amusing solution.

"Good morning, Dr. Nussbaum, how are you this morning, and what are they saying at the Jewish Agency?"

"Good morning, a beautiful morning, Mrs. Litvak, I'm fairly well, thank you, and how your lovely little boy is growing. Little girl, I'm sorry. But still lovely."

"As you know, sir, happy are we who have been permitted to behold the light of Jerusalem with the eyes of the flesh and not merely with the eyes of the spirit, and surely what our eyes behold today is as nothing compared to the light that tomorrow will bring. Happy is he who waits."

"Yes indeed, Mr. Nehamkin, yes indeed. It's a wonderful day today, and I am very glad to see you so hale and hearty."

"Since you are also out for a stroll, sir, permit me to accompany you. Together we shall walk, and together our eyes shall behold, for, as it is written, the testimony of two witnesses is valid."

Only in this case the two witnesses were none too healthy. We were soon tired. My neighbor the poet Nehamkin apologized and turned for home, but not before assuring me that a momentous change would soon take place in Jerusalem.

And I, as usual, turned into the Kapitanski brothers' milk bar for a vegetarian lunch: tomato soup, two fried eggs, eggplant salad, buttermilk, and a glass of tea. Then I came home, and, without any pill or injection, I fell into a deep afternoon sleep: as if I had been drinking wine.

At half past four there was another meeting of the local committee in my apartment. As I must have written to you already, even Kerem Avraham is setting up its own civil-defense council.

Four or five representatives of the neighbors came, including Mrs. Litvak, who qualified as a nurse before she married. She brought some homemade biscuits with her, and refused to allow me to help her serve the coffee; all I had to do was to tell her where I kept the sugar and the tray — no, no need, she'd already found them. She had found the lemon, too. And how wonderfully tidy my kitchen was! She would bring her husband, Litvak, here one day to let him see with his own eyes and learn a thing or two. The head of a school for workers' children, and he couldn't even wash a glass properly. Still, it was her fate. She mustn't complain.

And so the meeting began, while we were still being served coffee and shortcake, and I was being treated like a guest in my own home.

"Well," said Mrs. Litvak, "let's get down to business. Dr. Nussbaum, would you like to begin."

"Perhaps we might take up where we left off last week," I suggested. "There's no need to start from scratch every time."

"We were talking about the possibility of an apartment we could use as an HQ," Comrade Lustig said, "somewhere where the committee could organize itself, which could be manned day and night in an emergency. Or at least a room, or a basement."

He spoke standing up, and when he had finished he sat down. Lustig is a little man, with puffy bags under his brown eyes, and a perpetual look of silent amazement on his face, as though he has just been called some terrible name in the street for no reason. Zevulun Grill, a flaming redhead, whose two missing front teeth give him the look of a dangerous brawler, added:

"We were also talking about a radio transmitter. And, as usual, we did nothing about it."

Ephraim Nehamkin, the curly-haired radio technician, nodded his head twice, as if Grill's words corresponded precisely to what one might expect from him, and anyone who harbored any illusions about him had better wake up before it was too late.

"Ephraim," I said, "it might be better if we conducted our discussion by means of words, rather than dumb show. Perhaps you'd like to tell us all what has made you so angry?"

"We've got one," Ephraim growled. "It's always the same old story with us: we talk about the past instead of the present."

"What have we got?"

"A radio. Didn't I say last week that I was putting a battery transmitter together for you. Anyway," he suddenly exploded, "what the hell do we need a transmitter for? To beg the English to do us a favor and stay here to save us from the Arabs? To prick the conscience of the world with biblical quotations? To explain nicely to the Arabs that they mustn't kill us, otherwise there'll be no one to cure their ringworm and their trachoma? What's the point of this whole committee, with two doctors and a bus driver? What the hell do you think you're doing?"

"Don't get so steamed up," Nachtshe said, smiling. "Simmer down. Everything'll be all right."

Nachtshe is a slim, strongly built young man who is a sort of occasional leader in one of the Socialist youth movements. His short trousers displayed his muscular, hairy legs. His hair was tousled. You must have heard of his father, Professor Guttmacher, the expert on Oriental mysticism, a world-famous scholar who is semiparalyzed. Sometimes, in the evenings, Nachtshe and his young charges light campfires in the woods, carry out night exercises with quarterstaves, or make the neighborhood re-echo to songs of rage and longing sung to Russian tunes.

"Instead of poking fun, why don't you tell us what you suggest," Grill demanded of Ephraim Nehamkin.

"An attack," Ephraim erupted in a deep growl, as if his heart were hoarse with emotion. "Organize a raid. That's what I suggest. Take the initiative. Go out to the villages. Shu'afat. Sheikh Jarrah. Issawiya. Burn down the mufti's house in the middle of the night. Or blow up the Najjara HQ. Hoist the blue-and-white flag on the minaret of Nabi Samwil, or even on the Temple Mount. Why not. Let's make them tremble, at long last. Let them start sending us deputations. Let them plead. What's the matter with us all."

At this point, Dr. Kipnis, the vet from Tel Arza, intervened. He was standing with his back to the window, wearing a gray battle-dress blouse and neatly pressed long khaki trousers. As he spoke, he kneaded his brown cap between his fingers, and he looked not at Ephraim but at Mrs. Litvak, as though she — or her black coif — were giving him hints on some vital principle.

"It seems to me, ladies and gentlemen," he began cautiously, "that we are venturing along the wrong road. I may claim to have some acquaintance with the neighboring villages."

"Of course you have," Ephraim whispered venomously. "Only they know you, too, and other Jews like you, and that's what's whetted their appetite."

"Excuse me," said Dr. Kipnis, "I didn't mean to get into an argument with you about your principles. At any rate, not at this moment. All I wanted to do was to try to evaluate the present situation, to discover what the possible lines of development are, and to make one or two suggestions."

"Let's get organized!" Comrade Lustig suddenly exclaimed, and he even thumped on the table. "Quit chattering! Let's get organized!"

As for me, the chairman, it was only with some difficulty that I resisted the temptation to return Nachtshe's fleeting smile, which was apparently directed at me alone.

"Dr. Kipnis," I said, "please continue. And it would be better if we did not keep interrupting one another."

"Very well. We have three possibilities open to us," said Dr. Kipnis, raising three piteously thin fingers and folding one of them back with each possibility he enumerated. "Firstly, the committee hands the whole country over to the Arabs, and we have to choose between a new Masada and a new Yavneh. Second, it recommends partition, and the Arabs either accept the verdict or have it imposed on them with the help of foreign powers. Not the British, naturally. In this eventuality, one of our tasks will be to be prepared for possible riots and — at the same time — to attempt to restore good relations with the Arab districts that surround us. To bury the hatchet, as they say."

"They must be driven out," Ephraim said wearily, "expelled, kicked out, what's the matter with you, let them go back to the desert where they belong. This is Jerusalem, Mr. Kipnis, the Land of Israel — maybe you've forgotten that, with your appeasement."

"Thirdly," the vet continued, apparently determined not to be deflected from his purpose by provocations, "total war. And in that case our local committee will not, of course, function independently, but will await orders from the national institutions."

"That's what I said," Lustig exclaimed delightedly, "we must get organized, organized, and again organized!"

"Dr. Kipnis," I insisted, "what exactly are you suggesting?"

"Yes, well. First of all, a delegation representing us, the Jewish districts of northwest Jerusalem, approaches the Jewish Agency, to explain the special difficulties arising from our geographical situation and to request instructions. I propose Dr. Nussbaum, Mrs. Litvak, and, naturally, Comrade Nachtshe. Second, a meeting with our neighbors. I mean the sheikhs and mukhtars. I am willing to volunteer myself for this assignment. We inform them that we, the inhabitants of the Jewish districts of northwest Jerusalem, will not take any hostile initiative, but will continue, no matter what happens to maintain neighborly relations. So that if they nevertheless choose the course of bloodshed, all the responsibility will fall on them, and they must accept the consequences and cannot complain that they have not been warned. And now I suggest that Comrade Nachtshe talk to us about the defense of our districts. He should at least outline the plans, on the assumption that we may have to withstand a local assault on our own for a while. That is all I have to say."

"Then I suggest that we start erecting barricades," said Lustig, and suddenly he burst out laughing. "Imagine — our Kerem Avraham as the Zionist Stalingrad."

"Let's be practical, please," I urged. "We still have to settle the allocation of tasks and so on."

"There's no risk," Ephraim remarked sadly, "of anyone here being practical. Forget it. Not here. Not in this Judenrat."

"I must insist," I said, with unnecessary sharpness.

Meanwhile, Nachtshe had returned from the kitchen. He had clearly made himself at home. He was chewing vigorously on a thick sandwich. From his bloodstained chin I detected that, besides cheese and onion, he had put some slices of tomato in it.

"Sorry," he said with a grin. "I was famished, so I raided your icebox. I didn't want to ask permission, in case I interrupted your symposium." As he spoke, he dropped crumbs shamelessly on the armchair and the rug. More crumbs clung to his mustache.

"Feel free," I said.

"Good," said Nachtshe. "Have we got over the ideological stage yet? Right. Well, then."

Nobody spoke. Even Comrade Lustig was silent for once.

"The English are going to pull out soon. That much is certain. And we're going to have problems. But I don't want to talk about the problems now. I'm here to talk about solutions. Well, then. We've got arms in the neighborhood. Only light arms at the moment. And thank God we've got a few boys who know what to do with them. We needn't go into details now. Sonya. Mrs. Litvak, I mean. You get all the old dears together in your apartment tomorrow — as you were today — to sew bags. Never mind what from. That's instead of knitting balaclava helmets for the troops. Balaclava helmets you can knit us another time. I need a thousand, twelve hundred bags. The youngsters can fill them with sand and gravel. They'll be used firstly for armed positions, then for windows in general. Protection against bullets and shells. Next. As of tomorrow morning, we keep a permanent watch on Schneller from the Kolodnys' balcony. That's another job for the youngsters. And another lookout post on Kapitanski's roof, toward Sheikh Jarrah and the police training school. I want Litvak to release twenty or thirty boys from the school for this, so that we know precisely what Tommy and Ahmed are both up to. Next. In the event that the English do pull out, or if we see that they're going to hand over the keys to King Abdullah's Bedouins, my boys will chip in and take over Schneller. That's got nothing to do with your committee, of course, but I wanted you to know, so that you can sleep soundly at night. Next. Communications. Ephraim. Tonight we'll come and look over what you've been putting together there, and if it's really what you say it is, then we'll tune you into Hagganah HQ. You and Lustig will take turns listening in, twenty-four hours a day. You'll sit quietly with the earphones on, and you won't argue with each other; you won't get up unless you need to take a piss or you have something to report to me. Now you, Grill. Listen carefully. There are two things. First, start collecting gardening tools from all over the district in your shed. Never mind whether people like it or not — requisition them. Whatever you can find, except watering cans. Spades, forks, hoes, everything. At a signal from me — as you were; at a signal from an authorized person — you and a few other neighbors grab the tools and get cracking, dig up the road at the bottom of Zephaniah Street, at the corner of Amos and Geulah, and the Tel Arza road. Dig in zigzags. Yes. Trenches. So they don't hit us with armor. And another thing, Grill. The HQ will be in your bedroom. That's because your house has three exits. You've got two days to get your wife out before we move in. Now, Kipnis. You, Kipnis, are not going to talk to the sheikhs and mukhtars. We don't want to risk any of the boys to go and rescue your mutilated corpse. Let's face it, doctor, after the war — by all means, why not, you're welcome to go and smoke the pipe of peace with them, and I'll even come with you for a good shish kebab. But in the meantime, if you're so set on your idea, why not send every sheikh a special-delivery registered letter proposing good neighborly relations. Go ahead. If it works, I shall personally beat my sword into a dagger. But till then, you just stay here and take charge of the grocer, the greengrocer, and the kerosene man for me. Make sure they bring in whatever they can get hold of. Only no black market and no panic. That's right, Sonya: hoarding. You heard. I want all the women to lay in supplies of canned food, biscuits, kerosene, sugar, as much as they can. Now let's talk about water. I want all the members of this committee — yes, all of you — to go from house to house and help move the water cisterns down from the roofs into the cellars. And then make sure they're full. And I want Almaliah to start making us tanks in his workshop. Water tanks, Ephraim, that's what I'm talking about, so don't jump off your chair. To begin with, anyway. Now our host. Nussbaum. You go to old Mrs. Vishniak's pharmacy tomorrow morning and check exactly what she's got and what she needs. Whatever she's short of, order it, at the committee's expense. And plenty of it. Your apartment here will be the first-aid station, with morphine and dressings and whatever else you need. Another thing: you, Grill, gradually start getting in supplies of gasoline for us. From your bus company or out of the rocks, I don't care where it comes from. Fifty gallons or so. The children are to collect several hundred bottles, and we — that's Ephraim and I — we'll start mixing cocktails. Nussbaum, you said you had something to suggest on this subject? Very good. But not now. It doesn't interest everyone. Now, is there anything else?"

"Yes," said Lustig, "we need to have some cyanide or something. If the Arabs do manage to get through despite everything, they'll butcher the children and violate the women. We need to be organized against even the worst eventualities."

"We're not in Warsaw now," said Nachtshe. "And if you come out with things like that outside this room, you'll be in trouble. And that's that."

"All right," muttered Comrade Lustig. "I've got the message."

"Any more questions?"

"Excuse me," I said. "What happens if the English don't pull out? Or if they hand over the whole of Jerusalem en bloc to King Abdullah?"

"If they don't go, they don't go. Don't ask me questions like that, ask Ben-Gurion. Who do you think I am? Right, then. Sonya, give these good people another cup of coffee. They're looking a bit pale all of a sudden. Dr. Nussbaum, thank you for your hospitality. I must be off now. As of lunchtime the day after tomorrow, anyone who wants me can find me or Akiva or Yigal in the Grills' bedroom. By the way, if the English come along to search or ask questions, don't forget that this district has a committee. Nobody knows me. I don't exist. Let the doctors talk to them. Nussbaum or Kipnis. That's all. Only don't worry, anybody: we haven't lost our hope, as the song says. Just one thing more: Ephraim, I want to say I'm sorry. If I've upset you at all, I didn't mean to. And now, good-bye."

He brushed the crumbs from his mustache, wiped the tomato juice off his chin, bared his perfect teeth in a broad grin, and left.

Hans Kipnis remarked softly:

"What can one say?"

Ephraim said:

"Don't you start all over again. You heard what you were told: you can write letters to all the sheikhs in the neighborhood."

Sonya Litvak said:

"Pray God he takes care of himself. What boys!"

Comrade Lustig:

"Like Cossacks. Always talking instead of getting organized. They'll end up by killing us, heaven forbid!"

And Dr. Nussbaum, dear Mina, your Dr. Nussbaum, said in an indulgent, ironic tone:

"With your permission, it seems to me that the meeting is over."

In my mind's eye I followed this angry, lissome youth as he disappeared from my apartment into the evening shadows. Nachtshe, short for Menahem or Nahum, Guttmacher, in his shorts, with his tousled hair, his eyes the color of late-summer dust, his loneliness. No doubt he went back to his comrades, in the woods or the wadi. Dropping with fatigue, perhaps. Probably he hasn't eaten a proper meal in days. And I asked myself: Has he known a woman, and if so, was it the same way as he tore into the sandwich, or was he perhaps trembling, confused?

And what could I do, Mina? What would you have done in my place? Trusted him and said nothing? Rebuked him and made fun of his bravado? Tried to analyze his dreams? Or perhaps fallen in love and conquered him for yourself?

I feel at a loss. Perhaps I should have silenced him, squashed his arrogance, called him to order? But could I have done it? In my heart of hearts, as you must surely have guessed, I had made him into the secret child you bore me and hid from me in a kibbutz somewhere in Galilee, or in the valleys; he had grown up surrounded by horses and agricultural machinery, and now he had come up to Jerusalem to rescue us all. I must stop and conclude this letter at once.

Only this: when my visitors had left, while I was still washing the coffee cups and picking the crumbs off my rug, the sky suddenly altered. A damp, icy rage began to blow up from the northwest. Gone was the savage blue. Jerusalem darkened. Subsided. Then the first drops, and it was wintry night outside. I shall also start collecting empty bottles. At any rate, Nachtshe will have to come to me to learn what to put into a Molotov cocktail if he wants it to blow up an armored car. I shall stop now. I'll take a pill. I won't go to bed, I'll spend this rainy night in my laboratory. Time is short. Henry Gurney, the British administration secretary, is on the radio urging the members of all communities in Palestine to calm down and maintain law and order until the situation improves. The "Voice of Jerusalem" announcer translates into official Hebrew: It is strictly forbidden to congregate in the streets, it is forbidden to interfere with the normal course of life.

September 8, 1947

Dear Mina,

The rain was light. Not the autumn rains yet, but a slow night drizzle. This morning the city brightened again, and a damp, fresh smell rose from the gardens. Even the falling leaves today were washed clean of dust. I could not get to sleep until just before the dawn. I did not even want to. An idea for a formula kept running through my head after yesterday's meeting, a simple, fascinating chemical possibility, and I could not relax. From time to time the pain became so intense that the desk, the ceiling, and the walls went misty. I deliberately did without an injection, because it seemed to me that it was precisely in this mist that my hope of clarifying my idea lay. You are smiling. The notion of illumination or inspiration coming out of a fog of pain may strike you as immature romanticism. So be it. I even jotted down in the night various symbols and figures on a scrap of paper. Suddenly, long after midnight, as the Schneller clock struck three or two, with my tongue and palate parched from thirst and pain, in a mood of ecstatic longing, I had the feeling that I had discovered the way to produce a chain reaction by an amazingly simple means, with no need for fantastic temperatures. A way of releasing energy from the cheapest and commonest substances. It may be precisely thus that the elemental life force may erupt with holy dreadfulness in the mind of, say, a composer who hears in the night the strains of his final symphony, which is not yet his, and who knows that there is no way of capturing it in notes. Ecstasy and despair. I can decipher the meaning of all this: it is the rumor of approaching death. The bit of paper I scrawled on in the night is in front of me now, and it is all nonsense. Scientific ravings in the style of Jules Verne or H. G. Wells. It is worthless. What is more, at the time I was so feverish that I could see the Dead Sea blazing in the eastward-facing window, illuminating the night with a kind of mineral glare as of hellfire, and I did not doubt for a moment that my nocturnal discovery was already operating in the outside world. In a twilight. You and Uri were con coding something in the laboratory. You and Jasmine and Nachtshe on the rug, making love and calling me to join you. And outside a mushroom of fire bursting into the heart of the night sky, while I, with the help of a simple mirror, followed it from here, from my room, over the mountains and across the valleys. I fell asleep fully dressed again, toward dawn, on the floor of my laboratory, and in my sleep I knew that the time had come to send for Dushkin, and with him came Rabbi Zweik, the sick mystic from Safed, and together they tried to talk you into agreeing that the only way to arrest the tumor in my glands was to operate and remove my head, while you maintained strenuously that a heavy concentration of X-rays directed at a mixture of sodium and phosphorus would unleash a chain reaction that would save my life and also radically alter the overall military situation.

In the morning, after my coffee and a shave, I found I had a slight temperature and also some blurring of vision. I could read the newspaper, and I can still write. But when I reached out to pick up a piece of buttered toast from the kitchen table, I missed and upset a pot of yogurt. I may add, with no reference at all to this development, that a British reconnaissance plane has been circling low over Jerusalem since the early hours of this morning, perhaps because it was announced semiofficially in this morning's paper that the commission of inquiry will indeed recommend the partition of the country, and that Jerusalem and Bethlehem will be under international control, and will not be handed over either to the Jews or to the Arabs. It was Uri who told me, on his way home from school, that without Jerusalem there would be no Hebrew state, or else a terrible war would break out between the Hagganah and the Palmach, on the one hand, and the Irgun and the Stern Group on the other, and that that was precisely what the British were planning.

Incidentally, he is now in command of my laboratory. He does whatever he likes. He made me comfortable on the sofa, covered me with a woolen blanket, made me some lemon tea, and even selected a record and put it on the phonograph to please me. He also put a hot-water bottle on my feet. And while I was lying there, too weak to object, the boy began unloading a crate of empty bottles. Then he went to the laboratory to brew some concoction, chop off match heads, mix solutions. I am gradually being driven out of my own home: Nachtshe and Sonya Litvak in my kitchen, Uri in my laboratory, you in my dreams. Soon I shall leave.

"Be careful there, Uri."

"I'm only doing what you showed me, Dr. Emanuel, don't worry, I'm doing exactly what it says in your notes on the desk here, and when you're better we'll work together again."

I am at peace. Mozart on the phonograph, and from the laboratory sounds of test tubes, the spirit lamp, simmering.

Outside, at the window, another early-autumn evening.

The simple, searing, trivial things, what urgent information are they straining to convey to me. The fading light, Mina, the cawing of crows, a yelping dog, a ringing bell, these things have been since time immemorial and will go on being forever. I can even hear a train hooting in the distance, toward Emek Refaim. And a baby crying. And the woman next door singing a Polish song. The simple, familiar, trivial things — why do they seem to be taking their leave of me tonight. And what am I to do except turn to the wall and die at once. At once, too, like an electric shock, this limpid certainty strikes me: there is a meaning. There is a reason. Perhaps there is a way. And there is still some time left for me to try to discover the meaning, the purpose. Only a sadness continues to gnaw: I have lived some forty years. I was banished, more or less, from one country to another. Here I have even achieved something, to the best of my modest ability. Here, too, I loved you. And now you are gone and I am still here. But not for long. I am being rudely banished from this place, too. And the conclusion, Mina, the moral, the reason? What, as they say here, is the matter at hand?

Maybe this: Autumn outside, and everything is closing in. Something needs to be done. It needs to be done immediately, hopeless though it may be. What it is, I wish I knew. The present moment — is irrevocable. It has been, and it is no more.

I remember: A summer's day in Vienna. Early afternoon. A nip in the air. Wispy clouds suspended in a pale, almost gray sky. In the street there is a subtle blend of smells, fried meat, garbage, and flowering gardens. Perhaps also the perfume of passing women. The cafes are crowded. Through their windows can be seen gentlemen ia light suits, smoking, arguing, or doing business. Others are leafing through magazines or doing the crossword puzzle. Some are playing chess. I am on my habitual way home from the faculty library. My heart is empty. There is a slight temptation, not a real desire, to go and spend the evening with Charlotte or Margot on the first floor of the Weary Heart. As I pass the bridge, I pause for a moment. There, just by the bridge, stand a pair of Negro beggars. One is beating a drum while the other is wailing a kind of tune. There is a hat on the sidewalk with a few pennies in it. Neither of them is young. Neither of them is old, either. It is as if they are outside the European age scale, subject to another biological clock.

I stop and linger, watching them from a short distance away. Not long ago I took a course in anthropology, yet I believe these are the first Negroes I have ever seen. Outside the circus, of course. Yes, they are woolly-haired. Coffee-skinned, not cocoa-colored. A slight shudder ripples through me. I brush aside a fleeting mental image of the shape of their sexual organs. The taller of the two, the one who is wailing or singing, has a pierced nose but no nose ring. The other one's nose is so amazingly long and flat that it revives the suppressed image of their sexual organs. I can neither leave nor take my eyes off them. I am chained to the spot, as it were, by fear, fascination, and disgust. They are standing with their backs to the bridge and the water. One is wearing sandals held together with bits of string, the other a pair of large, worn-out shoes and no socks. I am suddenly overcome with shame, like the time when, as a child, I was caught gaping at the low neckline of my Aunt Crete's dress. Hurriedly I toss a coin into the hat.

Something is urging me, after all, to head for the Weary Heart, to spend the evening with Charlotte or Margot, or even both together for a change. But my feet are rooted to the ground. I look at my watch, pretending to be waiting for someone. And I wait. In any case, without prior arrangement by telephone there can be no Margot or Charlotte.

Just then a group of youngsters in the uniform of a national youth movement draws to a halt beside the black beggars. I am fixed to the spot. They are quiet-looking boys, handsome, thirsty for knowledge, all with close-cropped hair, and from their bronzed skin one senses that their prolonged hikes in the mountains and forests have instilled in them an element of military toughness, although without undermining their fundamental good manners. Then their leader steps forward. He is a short, taut, athletic man of middle years, with ruthlessly cropped gray hair and thin, molded lips. There is something about his gait or the set of his shoulders that suggests that he would be equally at home on a river, alone in the mountains, or in a spacious mansion. The sort of man that my father longs for his only son to resemble, at least in outward appearance. The leader is wearing the same clean, neatly pressed uniform, distinguished only by his lanyard and by the colors of his badges and epaulets. He starts to explain something to the youths. His voice is clipped. Each short sentence ends in a bark. As he speaks, he waves a finger in the air; he has no compunction about pointing it an inch or two from the head of the nearer of the two Negroes. He indicates the outline of the skull. He emphasizes and demonstrates. I edge closer, to catch what he is saying. He is expatiating in a Bavarian accent on the subject of racial difference. His short lecture, as far as I can follow it, is a blend of anthropology, history, and ideology. The rhythm: staccato.

Some of his charges produce identical notebooks and pencils from the pockets of their brown shirts and take eager notes. The two Negroes, meanwhile, grin relaxedly from ear to ear. They roll their eyes ingratiatingly. They are brimming with good will, perhaps stupidity, innocent gaiety, respect, and gratitude. I must admit that at this moment they look to me like a pair of stray dogs about to be taken in by a new master. And all the while the leader is employing such words as evolution, selection, degeneration. From time to time he snaps his fingers loudly, and the two Negroes respond as one man with high-pitched laughs and flashing, milk-white teeth.

The leader holds out his thumb and forefinger, measures their foreheads without touching them, then measures his own and says, "Also."

The short lecture concludes with the word "Zivilisation."

The boys put their pencils and notebooks back in their pockets. The spell is broken. Silently they go on their way. To me they look very worried as they march briskly away downstream, toward the city center and the museums. For an instant they resemble a military patrol, a forward-reconnaissance party that has stumbled on an outlying detachment of enemy troops, disengaged and retreated to seek reinforcements.

The spell was broken. I, too, resumed my homeward journey. On the way, ruminating, I was almost inclined to agree: Europe is indeed in danger. The jungle races are indeed on the threshold. Our music, our laws, our sophisticated system of commerce, our subtle irony, our sensitivity to double meanings and ambiguities — all are in mortal peril. The jungle races are on the threshold. And surely history teaches us that the Mongol hordes have already swept once out of the depths of Asia and reached the very banks of the Danube and the gates of Vienna.

At home, Lisel was silently serving dinner. Father was also silent. His face was overcast. Business was going from bad to worse. There was an ugly atmosphere in the city. Things would never be the same again. On the radio, a minister was vowing to crush Communism, cosmopolitanism, and other destructive elements. The government had displayed great forbearance toward the parasites, the minister declared, and had been repaid only with ingratitude. Father turned it off. Still he said nothing. Perhaps he privately blamed the Eastern Jews who were pouring in in droves, bringing us nothing but trouble. I, too, ate my dinner in silence, and retired to my room. Margot, her shoulders, her neck, was still at the edge of my thoughts. And what could I tell Father? He was always convinced that his only son was up to his neck in student flirtations and had no idea what was going on in the city and the world.

At midnight, I went downstairs to the kitchen for a glass of water and found him sitting there alone, in his dressing gown, silently smoking, with his eyes closed.

"Are you in pain again, Father?"

He opened an eye.

"What are you blathering about, Emanuel?"

And after a short silence:

"I got some Zionist prospectuses in the mail today. Brochures from Palestine. With pictures."

I shrugged, excused myself, said good night, and returned to my room.

Precisely a week later, the letter arrived.

It was anonymous. On the envelope Father's name was typed, in correct style, with the address of his factory. He opened it in the presence of his secretary, Inge, and suddenly his world went dark. Inside the envelope there was a small sheet of good-quality notepaper, with a watermark and gold-embossed edges, but with no heading, date, or signature. There was just a single word, inscribed in the very middle of the page, in a fine, rounded hand: Jude. And an exclamation point.

What do you think of that, Inge, Father asked as soon as he had recovered his voice. It's a fact, Inge replied politely, and she added: There's nothing to get upset about, Herr Doktor. It's just a plain fact.

Father muttered, with bloodless lips: Have I ever denied it, Inge, I have never attempted to deny it.

In less than a month, an eager buyer was found for the house with its beautiful garden. A partnership in Linz purchased the factory. Inge was frostily dismissed, while Lisel was packed off to her village in the mountains with an old suitcase full of Mother's clothes.

Father and I had no difficulty in getting immigration certificates for Palestine from the British consul himself: the privilege of wealth.

Father had already managed to collect information and draw up detailed plans for the establishment of a small factory in a new town not far from Tel Aviv. He had already learned something about conditions there and had even made certain calculations. But from time to time, he would talk about his longing to be speedily reunited with Mother in a world where there was no evil. Old family friends still tried to reason with him, arguing, pleading with him to reconsider. They were of the opinion that shock and humiliation had provoked a self-destructive impulse in him. The Viennese Jews firmly believed at that time that everything could be explained by psychology, and that the situation would soon improve because whole nations do not suddenly take leave of their senses.

Father was like a rock: gray and unshakable.

Nevertheless, he adamantly refused to admit that Dr. Herzl had foreseen all this. On the contrary, he argued, it was Dr. Herzl and his friends who had plunged us all into this mess.

But a year later, in Ramat Gan, he changed his mind completely. He even joined the General Zionist party.

I received my medical diploma four days before our departure, on the morning we got our visas. I was summoned to the rector's office. They explained politely that they did not think I would feel comfortable at the official graduation ceremony, they were bound to take into account the general mood of the students, and so they had decided to hand me my diploma informally, in a plain buff envelope. Wide vistas, they said, opened up for a young doctor in western Asia. The ignorance, dirt, and disease there were unbelievable. They even mentioned Albert Schweitzer, who was healing lepers in the middle of the jungle in Africa. They mistakenly stressed that Schweitzer, too, was of Jewish extraction. Then they turned to the bitter feelings I must be harboring in my heart, and begged me to remember, even when I was far away, how much Vienna had given me, and not only that she had humiliated me. They wished me bon voyage and, after a slight hesitation, shook hands.

I do indeed remember. And what I feel in my heart is neither bitterness nor humiliation but — how can I write it when I can see before me the expression of cold irony on your mouth and the cigarette smoke pouring contemptuously from your nostrils — Jewish sorrow and rage. No, not in my heart, in the marrow of my bones. I won't make homemade explosives for the Hagganah. I'll make them the ultimate explosive. I shall surprise Uri, Nachtshe, Ben-Gurion himself. If only my strength holds out. I myself shall be the jungle races on the threshold. I am the Mongol hordes.

I'm joking again, as usual, at the wrong time, as usual, joking without being funny, in my usual ludicrous way.

We reached Palestine by way of the Tirol, Trieste, Piraeus, and a French steamship. Father did indeed set up a candy factory in Ramat Gan that became well known. He even married again, a husky, bejeweled refugee from southern Poland. Perhaps it was his wife's influence that made him become an active member of the General Zionist Council and of several committees.

He occasionally sends me money. Unnecessarily. I have enough of my own.

Twice a year, at Passover and the New Year, I used to visit them and spend a few days among the vases, tea sets, and chandeliers. In the evenings there was a stream of visitors: middle-aged men of affairs, party workers and businessmen, middlemen who enjoyed choolant and snuff and cracked bawdy jokes in three languages with chesty, man-of-the-world laughter. "Felix," they would say as they winked at Father, "Reb Pinhasel, when are you going to marry off the boy? When are you going to initiate him into the mysteries of business? What are they saying about him, a Socialist you've got in your family?" While Father's wife, with a gold watch held between the jaws and tail of a gold snake wrapped around her freckled wrist, would leap to my defense: "What do you mean, business? Business nothing. Our Emanuel will soon be a professor at the Hadassah, and we'll all have to line up for three months before he'll so much as look at us, and even then only as a special favor."

I did indeed work at Hadassah for a while and put up uncomplainingly with Alexander Dushkin's rumbustious despotism. One evening he summoned me to his home in Kiryat Shemuel, and at the end of the tea, the jokes, and the gossip, I was informed: "Next week you're being handed over lock, stock, and barrel to the government of Palestine. To the bacteriological department. They've issued me an ultimatum to hand over to them some first-rate Svidrigai'lov who'll keep an eye on the whole water supply of Jerusalem and the surrounding area. So I sold you to them right away. Free, gratis, and for nothing. I didn't even claim my thirty pieces of silver. The pay's not bad, and you'll be able to travel around at His Majesty's expense, from Hebron to Jericho and from Ramallah to Rosh Ha'ayin. You'll have your own private empire. You'll like O'Leary. He's an educated, cultivated sort of chap. Not like me, a Tartar cannibal. You and I, Nussbaum, let's speak frankly, well, you're more the phlegmatic type, while I'm a madman — anyway, we're horses of a different color. I just want to say, Emanuel," Dushkin suddenly roared, as his eyes filled with tears "that you'll always find my door and my heart open to you. Day or night. I really love you. Only don't let me down. Now what's the matter with your tea? Drink it up!"

So I took my leave of Samovar and joined Edward O'Leary and my dear friend Dr. Antoine al-Mahdi. And I started my tours of the springs and wells.

Two or three times a week, we went out into the country. We passed beautiful gardens, olive groves and vineyards, and tiny vegetable-patches. We saw minarets reaching upward from the hilltops. The three of us together forced our way through thorn hedges and tramped for hours on end to inspect some far-flung spring or Godforsaken well. The smell of dung and ashes brought me a sensation of peace and calm. Occasionally Antoine would say apologetically: "The cattle are cattle and so are the fellahin. You can't tell the difference." If O'Leary jokingly asked him, "Do you enjoy the thought that one day every villager will wear a tweed jacket and tie like you?" he would reply, "That would be against nature." Edward would chuckle: "And what about the Jews? In the kibbutzim you can find lawyers milking cows and mucking out." Antoine would flash me an affectionate smile: "The Jews are a remarkable people. They always go against nature."

We used to go to King Solomon's Pools. To Nahal Arugot in the Judean Desert. To the Elah Valley. We collected specimens in glass phials and took them back to the laboratory in Julian's Way to examine them under the microscope. O'Leary would lend us books by English travelers from the last century who described the desolate state of the country in all its details.

"How does she do it?" O'Leary would ask in tones of amusement. "How does this worn-out, barren old girl make them all fall madly in love with her? I was once in southern Persia: exactly the same miserable hills, dotted with gray rocks, with a few olive trees and pieces of old pottery. Nobody crossed half the world to conquer them."

"Woman comes from the earth," Dr. Mahdi said in a velvety whisper, in careful English. "Man comes from the rain. And desire comes from the Devil. Look at the Jordan. For thousands of years it has flowed into the Dead Sea, where there is neither fish nor tree, and it never comes out again. There's nothing like that in Persia, Edward, and the moral of the story is: if it's hard to get in, then it's hard to get out."

I would contribute an occasional remark, such as:

"The Land of Israel is full of simple symbols. Not only the Jordan and the Dead Sea — even the malaria and bilharzia here take on a symbolic significance."

"You two use similar words to express totally different sentiments. We all three do, actually."

"Is that really so?" O'Leary would murmur politely. He would refrain from offering an explanation and would deftly change the subject.

***

Antoine ran a private practice in the afternoons and evenings in Katamon, and I had my home clinic in Kerem Avraham. I learned to cultivate polite relations with my neighbors and to be a good listener in hard times. I lost track of the hours 1 spent battling against diphtheria and dysentery. If I was called out at night or over the weekend, when I was busy in my amateur laboratory or listening to music, I never complained. If the children made fun of me in the street for my German ways, I never lost my temper. I fulfilled my obligations, more or less.

Until you and I met in Arza, that is. And until my illness appeared.

So there you have a résumé of the story of my life. Some of it you knew already, and the rest you could probably have deduced, in your usual way, from an analysis of my behavior.

Now I shall return to my observations.

Uri has gone off, probably on instructions from one of Nachtshe's mysterious assistants, to stand on the Kapitanski brothers' roof and keep watch on the Sheikh Jarrah district and the traffic on the Ramallah road. And I, too, am on the lookout, sitting here on my balcony. The details I am amassing will be of no military use: A Jerusalem street vendor, what he sells, how he sells, who buys. My lower-middle-class Eastern European neighbors, and why they quarrel so much among themselves. And what, exactly, their communal ideal is. Their children, what is new about them and what is ancient. And the youths, boys like Nachtshe, Yigal, and Akiva, how, and with what measure of success, they all attempt to dress, talk, and joke on the basis of some abstract archetype from Galilee, from the Palmach, a venerated image of the pioneering hero.

And I myself: apart from my impending death and the code of pains and symptoms, why do I sometimes abhor these brave boys, and secretly call them "Asiatics," and sometimes feel a powerful love for them as though I have an unidentified son among them, a dark-skinned, barefoot, physically tough young man, an expert with machines and weapons, contemptuous of words, contemptuous of me and my worries? I don't know.

More rhetorical questions of an observer: What is regarded as funny here. What is considered embarrassing. What do they talk about and what do they pass over in silence. Who has come to Jerusalem, and where from, what did each of them hope to find here, and what has he actually found. Helena Grill compared to Sonya Litvak. The poet Nehamkin from the electrical and radio repair shop as contrasted with Comrade Lustig. What did they hope to find here and what have they actually found. And I don't exclude myself from the question.

Other questions: What is transitory in Jerusalem, and what is permanent. Why are the colors different here, the autumn colors and the evening colors. And on another level: What are the intentions of the British. Is there going to be a political vacuum. What are the real limits of our power, and how much is simply delusion and arrogance. Is Dr. Mahdi the real, deadly enemy. Is it weakness of will in me that I cannot desire his death, and that I keep trying to think up arguments that might convince him. Everything leads me on to the final point, to the single question: What is going to happen. What lies in store for us.

Because apart from this, what else have I got to think about? The sunsets, perhaps. The embers of my love for you. Doubts and hesitations. Pathetic preparations. Worries.

Mina. Where are you now, tonight. Come back.

These last words may seem to you like a cry for help. That was not what I meant. Forgive me. I'm sorry.

Tuesday, September 9

Dear Mina,

This morning I went to the Jewish Agency to hand in my report on readily available chemicals that may have military uses. On a separate sheet I offered some suggestions, even though it seemed to me that there was nothing new in them, and that any chemist in the university on Mount Scopus would have indicated precisely the same possibilities. My appointment was for nine o'clock, and I was a few minutes early. On the way, a fine drizzle lashed my cheeks. Later, the rain began to beat heavily on the windows of the office. They relieved me of the cardboard folder, thanked me, and then, to my great surprise, led me to Ben-Gurion's office. Somebody, apparently, had exaggerated and told him that there was a side doctor here in Jerusalem who also happened to be an original chemist with daring ideas on the subject of explosives. In brief, he had asked to see me without further delay. Somebody had spun a meaningless myth about me.

Ben-Gurion began with an inquisition. I was asked about my origins, my family, was I related in any way to Nussbaum the well-known educationalist, were my views not close to those of the pacifist Brith Shalom movement. A volcanic man, with gestures reminiscent of Dushkin's, running backward and forward between the window and the bookcase, refusing to waste time on qualifications or reservations. He kept interrupting me almost before I had begun speaking, and goaded me on: The danger was imminent. A critical moment had been reached and we were almost without resources. What we lacked in materials we would make up in spirit and inventiveness. The Jewish genius, he said, would not let us down. We were up to our necks in it. Mr. Ben-Gurion, I tried to say, if you will permit me… But he did not permit me. On the contrary, on the contrary, he said, you will receive everything you need, and you will start work this very night. Make a note of that, Motke. Right. And now, out with it, doctor: tell us what you need.

And I stood there in confusion, with my arms held stiffly at my sides, and explained awkwardly that there appeared to be some misunderstanding. I was not a new Albert Einstein. I was simply a doctor with a modest competence in chemistry, who had volunteered a memorandum and some minor suggestions. The Jewish genius, by all means, but not me. A misunderstanding.

And so I came home, covered with shame and confusion. If only I could live up to their great expectations. Comrade Rubashov writes in the Davar newspaper that we will withstand the coming tests. My heart shuddered at these words. Tests. A real war is coming, we are without resources, and enthusiastic amateurs persist in using words like "tests." No doubt you will be smiling at this point, not at Comrade Rubashov's words but at mine: I wrote "a real war." I can imagine from far away the exhalation of smoke from your nostrils, the twist of your lips.

Last night I heard the drone of engines from the direction of Chancellor Street. Another British convoy on its way northward toward the port of Haifa, perhaps with blacked-out headlights. Is this the beginning of the evacuation? Are we being left to shift for ourselves? What if there is no truth in the image of the fearless fighter from the hills of Galilee? What if regular armies cross the Jordan and the deserts and we fail the test?

This morning from my balcony I watched Sarah Zeldin the kindergarten teacher, a little old Russian woman with a blue apron and a wrinkled face. It was immediately after I got back from the Agency. She was teaching the little children to sing:

My pretty little village

Set on the mountainside,

With gardens, fields, and orchards

Extending far and wide,

and I could see at that moment an image of the little village, the mountainside, the broad expanse. I was seized with terror. But the children, Samson and Arnon and Eitan and Mrs. Litvak's Meirab, made fun of their teacher and piped, "My silly little village."

What's going to happen, Mina.

"The Irgun and the Stern Group will blow up all the bridges and capture the mountain passes as soon as the English start pulling out," Uri said, "because the Hagganah can't make up their minds if they really want us to have a Hebrew state or if they want us to go on begging on our knees. Look I've got a khaki battle-dress, Dr. Emanuel, it's a present from Auntie Natalia because Mommy and Daddy are coming home today."

"Have you done your homework?"

"Yes, I did it at school during break. A drunk Australian soldier went into Kapitanski's to look for girls, and he left his jeep outside on the sidewalk. He took his pistol in with him, but he'll never see his magazines again. Look, I've brought them for you. Three full up and one only half. From a Tommy gun. Also, I found a small crack in the wall of Schneller, perhaps I can squeeze through it at nighttime, as soon as I get the order and some leaflets and dynamite. But don't breathe a word to Nachtshe because he always does whatever they tell him from the Hagganah, and nobody knows where Ephraim's disappeared to. So you decide."

"All right," I said. "No secret visits to Schneller. That's an order. And no more stealing from Australian soldiers. Otherwise I shall be very angry."

Uri gave me a look of amazement, nodded twice, came to a decision in his mind, and at the end of the silence requested permission to ask me a personal question.

"Go ahead," I said. And I added secretly: Little fool. Dear little idiot. If only I were your father. Only if I were your father I don't know what I would say or do to make you understand at last. Understand what. I don't know.

"Well," I said, "what's your question?"

"Never mind. You said no, so that's that."

"What I meant was, not without an order. Not before the time is right."

"Dr. Emanuel, is it the illness?"

"Is what the illness?"

"Is it the illness that makes your hands shake like that, and… one of your eyes is a bit closed, and it keeps blinking."

"I wasn't aware of that."

"Your illness… is it something very dangerous?"

"Why do you ask that, Uri?"

"Nothing. Only that if it is you ought to teach me about everything in the lab, so that if anything…"

"Anything what?"

"Nothing. Don't worry, Dr. Emanuel. Give me a list and a shopping basket and I'll go to the greengrocer and to Ziegel's and get you anything you need."

"Why are you so concerned about me, child? Is it just because of the bomb I've still got to make?"

"No special reason. I don't know. That too, maybe."

"What too?"

"You're like an uncle to me. No, not an uncle, I mean someone serious."

"What about your parents? And your Auntie Natalia?"

"They just laugh at me. They say my head's stuffed full of nonsense. You don't laugh."

"No. Why should I laugh?"

"You don't think my head's stuffed full of nonsense?"

"No, Uri, not nonsense. Or else we've both got the same sort of nonsense in our heads."

Silence.

And then:

"Dr. Emanuel, are you ever going to get better?"

"I don't think so, Uri."

"But I don't want you to die."

"Why me specially?"

"Because to you I'm not a crazy child, and because you never tell me lies."

"You must go now, child."

"But I don't want to."

"You must."

"All right. Whatever you say. But I'll come back again."

And from the doorway, from outside, a fraction of an instant before he closed the door behind him:

"Don't die."

His departure left behind a total silence. Inside the silence, the throbbing of the blood in my temples. What is there left for me to do now, Mina. Sit down, perhaps, and copy out for you a few items from this morning's paper, because in New York you probably lack details of what's going on here in Palestine. I shall skip the headlines. To judge from them, the British government is fed up with our bombs, our slogans, our delegations, our regular disgusted memorandums. One of these nights they will order a curfew, impose a deathly silence on Jerusalem, and in the morning we'll wake up to find that they have upped and gone.

And what then, Mina?

Hebrew traffic police have started to operate in Tel Aviv with the consent of the British governor. They have eight policemen working in two shifts. A thirteen-year-old Arab girl is to stand trial before a military court, accused of possessing a rifle in the village of Hawara, Nablus district. Some illegal immigrants from the Exodus are being deported to Hamburg, and they say they will fight to the last to resist disembarkation. Fourteen Gestapo men have been sentenced to death in Lübeck. Mr. Solomon Chmelnik of Rehovot has been kidnapped and badly beaten up by an extremist organization but has been returned safe and sound. The "Voice of Jerusalem" orchestra is going to be conducted by Hanan Schlesinger. Mahatma Gandhi's fast is in its second day. The singer Edith de Philippe will be unable to perform this week in Jerusalem, and the Chamber Theater has been obliged to postpone its performance of You Can't Take It with You. On the other hand, two days ago the new Colonnade Building on the Jaffa road was opened, containing, among others, the shops of Mikolinski and Frei-man & Bein, and Dr. Scholl's chiropody. According to the Arab leader Musa Alami, the Arabs will never accept the partition of the country; after all, King Solomon ruled that the mother who was opposed to partition was the true mother, and the Jews ought to recognize the significance of this parable. And then again, Comrade Golda Myerson of the Jewish Agency Executive has proclaimed that the Jews will struggle for the inclusion of Jerusalem in the Hebrew state, because the Land of Israel and Jerusalem are synonymous in our hearts.

Late last night, an Arab set upon two Jewish girls in the vicinity of the Bernardiya Café, between Beit ha-Kerem and Bayit va-Gan. One of the girls escaped, and the other screamed for help until some of the local residents heard and succeeded in preventing the suspect's escape. In the course of investigations by Constable O'Connor, it emerged that the man is an employee of the Broadcasting Service and is distantly related to the influential Nashashibi family. Despite this, bail was denied, on account of the gravity of the alleged offense. In his defense, the prisoner declared that he had come out of the café drunk and had been under the impression that the two girls were prancing around naked in the dark.

One further item of news: Lieutenant Colonel Adderley, the presiding officer of the military court, hearing the case of Shlomo Mansoor Shalom, has found him guilty of distributing subversive pamphlets but found that he was of unsound mind. Mr. Gardewicz the probation officer requested that he not be sent to the lunatic asylum for fear of a deterioration in his condition, and pleaded with the judge that he be isolated in a private institution instead, so that his weak intellect might not be exploited by fanatics for their own criminal ends. Lieutenant Colonel Adderley regretted that he was 'unable to accede to Mr. Gardewicz's request since it was beyond his powers; he was obliged to commit the unfortunate man to custody pending a ruling by the High Commissioner, representing the Crown, on the possible exercise of lenience or clemency. I am copying out these tidbits of news to give you a clear idea of how things are here. No, that's not true: I am doing it to avoid sinking into all sorts of thoughts and emotions. On the radio, Cilia Leibowitz is giving a piano recital, and after the news we are promised a commentary by Gordus, and then some songs sung by Bracha Tsefira. I expect some of my neighbors will join me to listen to the news. Grill or Lustig, perhaps Litvak. Ephraim has not been seen around lately. Nachtshe has also disappeared. Only the poet Nehamkin strolls up and down Malachi Street, testing the substance of the stones of Jerusalem with the tip of his walking stick. Or perhaps he is tapping to discover a hollow spot, an ancient crevice in the rock on which we live, as is promised in his sacred scriptures. Happy is he who believes. My distant Jasmine, just as I was writing of a crevice in the rock a new pain came, unknown to me before, but resem bling a certain piercing pleasure that you revealed to me not long before you left me. It appears that later in the autumn Dr. Nussbaum will begin to lose control of his bowel movements. He will have to be transferred to the Hadassah Hospital. From his window he may be able to watch the delusive desert light at dawn, and the shimmering skyline of the Mountains of Moab. Professor Dushkin will not stint on the morphine, nor will he try to spin out the death agonies unnecessarily; we have an unspoken agreement. Then there will be interference with breathing and vision. The heart will weaken. The consciousness will fade. From then on, the patient will only occasionally utter connected speech. He may ramble in German. He may whisper your name. How I hope he will not scream. His father and stepmother will come to take their leave of him, and he and his father will make a supreme effort and try to exchange an anecdote or two in German, even if it means speaking through clenched teeth. Afterward everything will go black, and he will struggle on for a few hours, a day or two at the most. It will be the rainy season. It is very likely that the January rain will already be falling on his grave on Sanhedriya or on the Mount of Olives. What is going to happen in Jerusalem he does not know. Nobody knows. It seems that Musa Alami and Golda Myerson will not budge from their positions. But in the end these hard times, too, will come to an end, and you will forget him and his troubles. Perhaps you have already forgotten. The one person who may remember as time goes by, with mixed feelings and perhaps even with longing, is Uri, the son of the printer Kolodny. I beg you, Mina, if Jerusalem survives and if these letters reach you and if you wish to dispose of them, please, in years to come, make an effort to find this Uri and to let him have them. I expect you are sick and tired of me now. Enough.

They are sitting on their balcony as I write, Kolodny the printer, his wife, his sister, Natalia, and our mutual neighbor the poet Nehamkin from the radio repair shop. They are surrounded by geraniums in cans and cacti growing in boxes of earth. Where is the child? I implore you to watch out for the child, in case he takes it into his head to sneak into the Schneller Barracks and launch a single-handed raid on the British army. I cannot see Uri. And they seem so unperturbed, sitting there chatting, talking about politics, I expect, apparently calm. I consider their calmness nothing short of outrageous. Above their heads there is a yellow light bulb around which the insects are swarming dementedly. Kolodny the printer is a pale-faced, equable man, yet even he for some reason chooses to dress in what is almost a military uniform: wide khaki shorts, a brass-buckled belt, long khaki socks held up just below the knees by garters. The poet Nehamkin, on the other hand, is wearing his habitual Polish suit and silk tie: ready at a moment's notice. It seems to me that with the exception of us two, everyone in the neighborhood is more or less a pioneering type. They are all positive, constructive characters, apparently incapable of panic. And death is not a possibility. They are chatting. Laughing, Mrs. Kolodny passes around a bowl of oranges, but nobody takes one, and she smiles distractedly. What is transitory in Jerusalem and what is permanent. What will Uri look back to nostalgically in times to come. Corrugated-iron sheds. Plywood partitions. Empty yogurt pots. European manners blended with a certain crude gaiety. A city of immigrants on the edge of the desert whose flat rooftops are all festooned with drying sheets. The inhabitants are always scurrying from place to place with sunglasses pushed up on their foreheads. A general expression of "I'm very busy but I'll stop a moment just for you." An expression of "Business calls." An expression of "Sorry, we'll have a nice long chat some other time, but right now I must dash, we all have to do our duty."

I am not complaining, Mina. These are crucial times, and soon there will be a war. Everybody, even a man like me, must do his best to make his modest contribution to the general effort. Perhaps it is true that this is the last generation to live in chains. But is it really the last generation. Is it true that different times will come that I shall not know.

Only the women, it seems to me, are not strong enough: Iin ing up for rice, lining up for ice, waiting beside the kerosene cart, they seem to be on the point of fainting. And at times on summer afternoons, when Jerusalem is ablaze, swept by the desert light, I can hear Mrs. Kolodny playing her piano behind her shuttered windows, and it sounds like a desperate moan.

So the British will leave. The King David Hotel in Julian's Way will be emptied of its officers with their greased, neatly parted hair, emptied of its weary Englishwomen who sit on the hotel terrace looking out over the walls of the Old City as if fishing on the banks of the biblical past. No more morning sessions under the picture of the King in Edward O'Leary's office, where Dr. Mahdi from the Arab Council and Dr. Nussbaum from the Hadassah Hospital discuss ways of protecting the city's water supply from bacteria or destroying the breeding grounds of the mosquitoes in the Kedron Valley. Different times will come. "Excellent people like yourselves," says Dr. Mahdi, "such an intelligent, enlightened community, how have you all come to be captivated by such a terrible idea as Zionism?" I try my best: "For heaven's sake, Antoine, make an effort, just for once, try to see things from our point of view." And Edward, as always, firmly: "Gentlemen, perhaps we had better. Let's get back to the business at hand, if you don't mind."

What is the business at hand, Mina, my dear?

Perhaps you know?

Pitch-black outside. Crickets. Stars. Wind. I shall stop now.

Early hours of Wednesday morning

September 10

Dear Mina,

I shall not use the word "blame." You are not to blame for what you do to me in my dreams. But perhaps you are responsible, up to a point.

With a hint of a gray mustache, a smell of cigarette smoke emanating even from your hair, wearing army trousers and a large man's shirt with several pockets, you stand beside my bed. Antoine is feeling my Adam's apple; he is clasping my chin in both hands, to keep me from wriggling during the operation. His polite face is so close to mine that I can see a yellow boil with a pink rim on his nose. A slight asymmetry between the two wings of his mustache. He is chubby and well mannered, and he smells of eau de cologne as he smiles at me. "There, there," he says in English; "let's both try together," he says. Two strong young men are holding my legs above the knees, but apparently their minds are not on the operation, because they are whispering to each other and chuckling. You are holding out a scalpel, or perhaps it is not a scalpel but a kitchen knife, a bread knife. Samovar thanks you in his usual way, with a slight bow, and takes it from you. "Slowly," you tell him. "With him there's no need for you to hurry." "There." "Now there." "And here." He does exactly what you say. He is wearing rubber gloves. He is a bright crimson. And he cuts amazingly gently. I must try to say something, at once, before my head is severed from my neck. Perhaps I shall remind Antoine how he came to see me late one night last winter, and begged me to cure him of a dose of gonorrhea that he had apparently contracted on his last trip to Beirut. And how I put him up here in my apartment for four days and gave him injections. But I promised Antoine to carry his secret with me to the grave. 1 shall remain silent. How strange is the deepening cut in my throat: no blood, no pain. On the contrary, Relief. "That is all, Dr. Oswald," says Ben-Gurion, as if he cannot believe his eyes. "It is a very simple operation, after all." And I indicate with a movement of the lips that the meeting is now over.

I am awakened by heavy rain. The light refuses to come on: it would seem that there is a power failure in Jerusalem. I strike a match. Look at my watch. One o'clock. I must get up. Wind and rain at the window. This time it is the autumn rain at last. The insects that have been dancing around the balcony light in the evenings have been swept away. The pine trees and the stone are what has endured, washed clean of dust, purified by wind and water.

I must get dressed. I must go at once. Go where, Mina. The dead praise not the Lord. In New York, you have said, a neo-Viennese school is reassembling. You must be there to report on the collective recovery that is taking place in the hills of Galilee and the Jezreel Valley. On the beginning of the eclipse of centuries-old ethnic neuroses. There is a way, ladies and gentlemen, you will proclaim to those scholarly refugees, there is a way, and it lies open.

Will you tell them about me, too? Will you be able to use me at least as an example, a curiosity, a detail that sheds a certain light or casts a shadow on the new pioneering reality among those ancient hills?

I must go. Tonight. At once. Perhaps to Katamon, to knock on Antoine's door and implore him by everything that's holy. To plead with him. To plead for the lives of our children, his and mine. Or perhaps not to Katamon but to Haifa and the kibbutzim in the valley. Is it already too late? Are the wind and rain meant for me this time? The Schneller bell rings once, twice, and is silent. I am sitting writing to you by the light of a kerosense lamp, in my gray flannel dressing gown. I ought to get dressed and go. There is a way and it lies open. Happy is he who waits, says Mr. Nehamkin; he will surely reach his goal. He who waits will never reach his goal, my dear fellow: only those who travel ever reach their goal. What is that goal. There is a way and I must get up and go. Which is the way, Mina, that is what I do not know, but we have a son and he will be able to travel it. The man who is writing to you is tired and ill. He must give himself an injection, take his pills, and go quietly back to bed. Enough. The inscription on the parish church was in four languages in the Vienna of my childhood; in four languages it promised every man and woman that there is a way back. It is a lie, I tell you, a bald-faced lie.

I must go. Not tonight, tomorrow morning. I must go to Mount Scopus and tell Dushkin, as I promised I would, that my condition has taken a turn for the worse. It is not for me to work a minor miracle in Jerusalem, to win over Dr. Mahdi or to make a discovery that may turn the military situation on its head. "Dew underfoot and the stars up above,/ The Valley of Je2reel sparkles with love." So runs the song they are playing this early morning on the Hagganah short-wave broadcast. But here on Malachi Street, the trees are showing pale in the half-light of a murky dawn, and the rain has not stopped. As I wrote earlier, there is not much time left. You found me, used me, and set me aside. One of these days, you will come back to Jerusalem, a famous woman, a professor, the pioneer of a new discipline. You will bring fresh methods to the young Hebrew state. My death may even contribute to your fame. In the course of time they may mistakenly number me among the victims, and behind your back they will say that Professor Oswald lost her young fiancé in the war, an original scholar from Vienna. Jerusalem will overflow its boundaries and become a big city. Old men and old women shall dwell in her streets and rejoice therein, and no foe shall menace her gates. Just as my neighbor the poet promises us. There will be wide boulevards. There will be streetcars to link the various neighborhoods. Castles and towers will spring up. Perhaps they will make a river here and span it with bridges. It will be a beautiful, tranquil city. I shall close now, yours affectionately, and go back to bed. I have finished with recording time and place. This witness may stand down. He hopes that in due course, time, place, and witness will all be granted a kind of pardon. In Uri's longing, perhaps. Good night. Everything will be all right.

1975