by Amos Oz
For the first time I am thinking
about a night when the constellations are only a rumor...
That summer Zelda was still unmarried, but sometimes a man appeared in the yard; he did not look young to me, and his appearance marked him out as a religious Jew. As he passed between us, he tore unawares the mass of invisible morning webs that had spun themselves between the two of us. Sometimes he shot me a nod with the fag end of a smile, and standing with his back to me, he had a conversation with Teacher Zelda that lasted seven years, if not seventy-seven. And in Yiddish, so that I should not understand a single word. Once or twice he even managed to draw out of her a peal of girlish laughter such as I had never managed to extract from her. Not even in my dreams. In my despair I conjured up a detailed image of the noisy cement mixer that had been stirring away at the bottom of Malachi Street for several days: I would hurl the body of this jester into the belly of that mixer at dawn, after murdering him at midnight.
I was a word child. A ceaseless, tireless talker. Even before my eyes opened in the morning, I had embarked on an oration that continued almost without interruption until lights out in the evening, and beyond, into my sleep.
But I had no one to listen to me. To the other children of my age everything I said sounded like Swahili or Double Dutch, while as for the grown-ups, they were all delivering lectures too, just like me, from morning till night, none of them listening to the others. Nobody listened to anybody else in Jerusalem in those days. And perhaps they did not even really listen to themselves (apart from good old Grandpa Alexander, who could listen attentively, and even derived a lot of pleasure from what he heard, but he listened only to ladies, not to me).
Consequently there was not a single ear in the whole world open to listen to me, except very rarely. And even if anyone did deign to listen to me, they got tired of me after two or three minutes, although they politely pretended to go on listening and even feigned enjoyment.
Only Zelda, my teacher, listened to me. Not like a kindly aunt wearily lending an experienced ear out of pity to a frantic youngster who had suddenly boiled over on her. No, she listened to me slowly and seriously, as if she was learning things from me that pleased her or aroused her curiosity.
Furthermore, Zelda, my teacher, did me the honor of gently fanning my flames when she wanted me to speak, putting twigs on my bonfire, but when she had had enough, she did not hesitate to say:
"That's enough for now. Please stop talking."
Other people stopped listening after three minutes but let me go prattling on to my heart's content for an hour or more, all the time pretending to listen while they thought their own thoughts.
All this was after the end of the second grade, after I'd finished at Children's Realm School and before I started at Tachkemoni. I was only eight, but I had already got into the habit of reading newspapers, newsletters, and all sorts of magazines, on top of the hundred or two hundred books I had devoured by then (almost anything that fell into my hands, quite indiscriminately: I scoured my father's library and whenever I found a book written in modern Hebrew, I dug my teeth into it and took it off to gnaw on it in my corner).
I wrote poetry too: about Hebrew battalions, about the underground fighters, about Joshua the conqueror, even about a squashed beetle or the sadness of autumn. I presented these poems to Zelda, my teacher, in the morning, and she handled them carefully, as though conscious of her responsibility. What she said about each poem I don't remember. In fact, I have forgotten the poems.
But I do remember what she said to me about poems and sounds: not the sound of voices from above speaking to the poet's soul, but about the different sounds that various words make: "rustling," for example, is a whispering word, "strident" is a screeching word, "growl" has a deep, thick sound, while "tone" has a delicate sound and the word "noise" is itself noisy. And so forth. She had a whole repertoire of words and their sounds, and I am asking more of my memory now than it is capable of yielding.
I may also have heard this from Zelda, my teacher, that summer when we were close: if you want to draw a tree, just draw a few leaves. You don't need to draw them all. If you draw a man, you don't have to draw every hair. But in this she was not consistent: one time she would say that at such and such a place I had written a bit too much, while another time she would say that actually I should have written a little more. But how do you tell? I am still looking for an answer to this day.
Teacher Zelda also revealed a Hebrew language to me that I had never encountered before, not in Professor Klausner's house or at home or in the street or in any of the books I had read so far, a strange, anarchic Hebrew, the Hebrew of stories of saints, Hasidic tales, folk sayings, Hebrew leavened with Yiddish, breaking all the rules, confusing masculine and feminine, past and present, pronouns and adjectives, a sloppy, even disjointed Hebrew. But what vitality those tales had! In a story about snow, the writing itself seemed to be formed of icy words. In a story about fires, the words themselves blazed. And what a strange, hypnotic sweetness there was in her tales about all sorts of miraculous deeds! As though the writer had dipped his pen in wine: the words reeled and staggered in your mouth.
Teacher Zelda also opened up books of poetry to me that summer, books that were really, but really, unsuitable for someone of my age: poems by Leah Goldberg, Uri Tzvi Greenberg, Yocheved Bat-Miriam, Esther Raab, and Y. Z. Rimon.
It was from her that I learned that there are some words that need to have total silence all around them, to give them enough space, just as when you hang pictures there are some that cannot abide having neighbors.
I learned a great deal from her, in class and also in her courtyard. Apparently she did not mind sharing some of her secrets with me.
Only some of them, though. For instance, I had not the slightest idea, and she never gave me the faintest hint, that besides being my teacher, my beloved, she was also Zelda the poet, some of whose poems had been published in literary supplements and in one or two obscure magazines. I did not know that, like me, she was an only child. Nor did I know that she was related to a famous dynasty of Hasidic rabbis, that she was a first cousin of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneersohn (their fathers were brothers). And I did not know that she had also studied drawing, or that she belonged to a drama group, or that even then she enjoyed a modest reputation among small circles of poetry lovers. I did not imagine that my rival, her other suitor, was Rabbi Chayim Mishkowsky, or that two years after our summer, hers and mine, he would marry her. I knew almost nothing about her.
At the beginning of the autumn in 1947 I entered the third grade of the Tachkemoni Religious Boys' School. New thrills filled my life. And anyway, it wasn't appropriate for me to go on being tied like a baby to the skirts of a teacher from the elementary classes: neighbors were raising their eyebrows, their children had begun to make fun of me, and I even made fun of myself. What's wrong with you that you keep running to her every morning? What will you look like when the whole neighborhood starts talking about the crazy little boy who takes down her washing and sweeps her yard and probably even dreams of marrying her in the middle of the night when the stars are shining?
A few weeks after that, violent clashes broke out in Jerusalem, then came the war, the shelling, the siege and starvation. I drifted away from Teacher Zelda. I no longer ran around at seven o'clock in the morning, washed and scrubbed with my hair plastered down, to sit with her in her yard. I no longer took her poems I had written the night before. If we met in the street, I would mumble hurriedly, "Good morning, how are you, Teacher Zelda," without a question mark, and run away without waiting for an answer. I was ashamed of everything that had happened. And I was also ashamed of the way I had ditched her so suddenly, without even bothering to tell her I had ditched her and without even offering an explanation. And I was ashamed of her thoughts, because she must surely know that in my thoughts I had not ditched her yet.
After that we were finally freed from Kerem Avraham. We moved to Rehavia, the area my father
had dreamed of. Then my mother died and I went to live and work in the kibbutz. I wanted to leave Jerusalem behind me once and for all. All the links were severed. Now and then I would come across a poem by Zelda in a magazine and so I knew that she was still alive and that she was still a person with feelings. But after my mother's death I had recoiled from all feelings, and I especially wanted to put a distance between myself and women with feelings. In general.
The year my third book, My Michael, the action of which takes place more or less in our neighborhood, was published, Zelda's first collection, Leisure, also appeared. I thought of writing her a few words to congratulate her, but I didn't. I thought of sending her my book, but I didn't. How could I know if she still lived in Zephaniah Street or if she had moved somewhere else? In any case, I had written My Michael to draw a line between myself and Jerusalem, not to reconnect with her. Among the poems in Leisure I discovered Teacher Zelda's family and I also met some of our neighbors. Then two more books of poems appeared, The Invisible Carmel and Neither Mountain nor Fire, which aroused the love of thousands of readers and earned her eminent literary prizes and salvos of acclaim, which Teacher Zelda, a solitary woman, seems to have dodged, and to which she appeared indifferent.
All Jerusalem in my childhood, in the last years of British rule, sat at home and wrote. Hardly anyone had a radio in those days, and there was no television nor video nor CD player nor Internet nor e-mail, not even the telephone. But everyone had a pencil and a notebook.
The whole town was locked indoors at eight o'clock in the evening because of the British curfew, and on evenings when there was no curfew, Jerusalem locked itself in of its own accord, and nothing stirred outside except the wind, the alley cats, and the puddles of light from the street lamps. And even these hid themselves in the shadows whenever an English jeep went past, patrolling the streets with its searchlight and its gun. The evenings were longer because the sun and the moon moved more slowly, and the electric light was dim because everyone was poor: they saved on bulbs and they saved on lighting. And sometimes the power was cut off for several hours or several days, and life continued by the light of sooty paraffin lamps or candles. The winter rains were also much stronger than they are now, and with them the fists of the wind and the echoes of the thunder and lightning also beat on the barred shutters.
We had a nightly ritual of locking up. Father would go outside to close the shutters (they could be closed only from the outside); bravely he went out into the jaws of the rain and the dark and the unknown perils of the night, like those shaggy Stone Age men who used to emerge boldly from their warm caves to look for food or to defend their women and children, or like the fisherman in The Old Man and the Sea, so Father went out on his own to brave the ferocious elements, covering his head with an empty bag as he confronted the unknown.
Each evening, when he returned from Operation Shutters, he locked the front door from the inside and put the bar in place: iron brackets were set into both doorposts, and into those Father fixed the flat iron bar that guarded the door against marauders or invaders. The thick stone walls defended us from evil, along with the iron shutters, and the dark mountain that stood heavily just on the other side of our back wall, guarding us like a gigantic, taciturn wrestler. The whole outside world was locked out, and inside our armored cabin there were just the three of us, the stove, and the walls covered with books upon books from floor to ceiling. So the whole apartment was sealed off every evening and slowly sank, like a submarine, beneath the surface of the winter. Because right next to us the world suddenly ended: you turned left outside the front yard, two hundred yards farther on at the end of Amos Street you turned left again, you walked three hundred yards as far as the last house on Zephaniah Street, and that was also the end of the road and the end of the city and the end of the world. Beyond that there were just empty rocky slopes in the thick darkness, ravines, caves, bare mountains, valleys, dark rain-swept stone villages: Lifta, Shuafat, Beit Iksa, Beit Hanina, Nebi Samwil.
And so each evening all the residents of Jerusalem locked themselves away in their homes like us, and wrote. The professors and scholars in Rehavia, Talpiot, Beit Hakerem, and Kiriat Shemuel, the poets and writers, the ideologues, the rabbis, the revolutionaries, the apocalypticists, and the intellectuals. If they did not write books, they wrote articles. If they did not write articles, they wrote verses or composed all sorts of pamphlets and leaflets. If they did not write illegal wall posters against the British, they wrote letters to the newspaper. Or letters to each other. The whole of Jerusalem sat each evening bent over a sheet of paper, correcting, erasing, writing, and polishing. Uncle Joseph and Mr. Agnon, on either side of their little street in Talpiot. Grandpa Alexander and Teacher Zelda. Mr. Zarchi, Mr. Abramski, Professor Buber, Professor Scholem, Professor Bergman, Mr. Toren, Mr. Netanyahu, Mr. Wislawski, and perhaps even my mother. My father researched and laid bare Sanskrit motifs that had crept into the Lithuanian national epic, or Homeric influences on White Russian poetry. As though he were raising a periscope from our little submarine at night and looking toward Danzig or Slovakia. Our neighbor to the right, Mr. Lemberg, sat and wrote his memoirs in Yiddish, while our neighbors to the left, the Bukhovskis, probably also wrote each evening, and the Rosendorffs upstairs and the Stichs across the road. Only the mountain, the neighbor beyond our back wall, always kept silent and did not write a single line.
Books were the slender lifeline that attached our submarine to the outside world. We were surrounded on all sides by mountains, caves, and deserts, the British, the Arabs, and the underground fighters, salvos of machine-gun fire in the night, explosions, ambushes, arrests, house-to-house searches, stifled dread of what awaited us in the days to come. Among all these the slender lifeline still wound its way to the real world. In the real world there were the lake and the forest, the cottage, the field and the meadow, and also the palace with its turrets, cornices, and gables. There the foyer, embellished with gold, velvet, and crystal, was lit by chandeliers with a mass of lights like the seven heavens.
In those years, as I said, I hoped I would grow up to be a book.
Not a writer but a book. And that was from fear.
Because it was slowly dawning on those whose families had not arrived in Israel that the Germans had killed them all. There was fear in Jerusalem, but people tried as hard as they could to bury it deep inside their chests. Rommel's tanks had reached almost to the gateway of the Land of Israel. Italian planes had bombed Tel Aviv and Haifa during the war. And who knew what the British might do to us before they left? And after they had left, hordes of bloodthirsty Arabs, millions of fanatical Muslims, would be bound to butcher the whole lot of us in a few days. They would not leave a single child alive.
Naturally the grown-ups tried hard not to talk about these horrors in the presence of children. At any rate, not in Hebrew. But sometimes a word slipped through, or somebody cried out in his sleep. All our apartments were as tiny and cramped as cages. In the evening after lights out I could hear them whispering in the kitchen, over tea and biscuits, and I caught Chelmno, Nazis, Vilna, partisans, Aktionen, death camps, death trains, Uncle David and Aunt Malka and little cousin David who was the same age as me.
Somehow the fear got into me. Children of your age don't always grow up. Sometimes bad people come and kill them in the cradle, or in kindergarten. In Nehemiah Street once there was a bookbinder who had a nervous breakdown, and he went out on his balcony and screamed, Jews, help, hurry, soon they'll burn us all. The air was heavy with dread. And I may have already gathered how easy it is to kill people.
Books are not difficult to burn either, it's true, but if I grew up to be a book, there was a good chance that at least one copy might manage to survive, if not here then in some other country, in some city, in some remote library, in a corner of some godforsaken bookcase. After all, I had seen with my own eyes how books manage to hide in the dusty darkness between the crowded rows, underneath heaps of offprints and journals, or find a hidi
ng place behind other books—
38
SOME THIRTY years later, in 1976, I was invited to spend a couple of months in Jerusalem and give some guest lectures at the Hebrew University. I was offered a studio room in the campus on Mount Scopus, and every morning I sat and wrote the story "Mr. Levi" in The Hill of Evil Counsel. The story takes place on Zephaniah Street at the end of the British Mandate, and so I went for a walk on Zephaniah Street and the adjoining streets, to see what had changed since then. The Children's Realm Private School had long since closed. The yards were full of junk. The fruit trees had died. The teachers, clerks, translators, and cashiers, bookbinders, domestic intellectuals, and writers of letters to the newspaper had mostly disappeared, and the district had filled up over the years with poor ultra-Orthodox Jews. Almost all our neighbors' names had disappeared from the letter boxes. The only familiar person I saw was Mrs. Stich, the invalid mother of Menuchele Stich, the girl with the stoop that we called Nemuchele, "Shortie"; I caught sight of her in the distance, sitting dozing on a stool in an out-of-the-way yard, not far from the garbage cans. Every wall was festooned with strident handbills that waved puny fists in the air and threatened sinners with various forms of unnatural death: "The bounds of modesty have been breached," "We have suffered a great loss," "Touch not mine anointed," "Stones cry out from the wall for the evil decree," "Heavens behold the dreadful abomination the like of which has never been seen in Israel," and so forth.
For thirty years I had not set eyes on my teacher from the second grade in Children's Realm Private School, and now here I was suddenly standing on her doorstep. Instead of the dairy that belonged to Mr. Langermann, who used to sell us milk out of heavy round metal milk churns, the front of the building was occupied now by an ultra-Orthodox shop selling all kinds of haberdashery, cloth, buttons, fasteners, zippers, and curtain hooks. Surely Teacher Zelda didn't live here anymore?