A Tale of Love and Darkness

by Amos Oz

  Some people reported that various well-connected Jews, rich people from Rehavia, contractors and wholesalers with connections to the British, high-ranking civil servants in the Mandatory administration, had been tipped that they would be better off going abroad as soon as possible, or at least sending their families to some safe haven. They mentioned such and such a family that had pushed off to America, and various well-to-do business people who had quit Jerusalem overnight and settled in Tel Aviv with their families. They must know for certain something that the rest of us could only imagine. Or they could imagine what was just a nightmare for us.

  Others told of groups of young Arabs who combed our streets at night, armed with pots of paint and brushes, marking the Jewish houses and allocating them in advance. They claimed that armed Arab gangs, under the orders of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, already controlled all the hills around the city, and the British turned a blind eye to them. They said that the forces of the Trans-Jordanian Arab Legion, under the command of the British Brigadier Sir John Glubb, Glubb Pasha, were already deployed in various key positions across the country so that they could crush the Jews before they could even try to raise their heads. And that the fighters of the Muslim Brotherhood, whom the British had allowed to come in from Egypt with their arms and set up fortified positions in the hills around Jerusalem, were digging themselves in just across from Kibbutz Ramat Rahel. Some expressed the hope that when the British left, the American president, Truman, would step in despite everything. He would send his army in quickly, two gigantic American aircraft carriers had already been spotted off Sicily heading east; President Truman surely wouldn't allow a second Holocaust to happen here less than three years after the Holocaust of the Six Million. Surely the rich and influential American Jews would put pressure on him. They couldn't just stand idly by.

  Some believed that the conscience of the civilized world, or progressive public opinion, or the international working class, or widespread guilt feelings over the sorry fate of the Jewish survivors, would all act to thwart the "Anglo-Arab plot to destroy us." At the very least, some of our friends and neighbors encouraged themselves at the onset of that strange, threatening autumn with the comforting thought that even if the Arabs didn't want us here, the last thing the peoples of Europe wanted was for us to go back and flood Europe again. And since the Europeans were far more powerful than the Arabs, it followed that there was a chance that we might be left here after all. They would force the Arabs to swallow what Europe was trying to spew forth.

  One way or another, virtually everyone prophesied war. The underground broadcast passionate songs on the short waves. Grits, oil, candles, sugar, powdered milk, and flour almost vanished from the shelves in Mr. Auster's grocery shop: people were beginning to stock up in readiness for what was to come. Mother filled the kitchen cupboard with bags of flour and matzo meal, packets of rusks, Quaker oats, oil, preserves, canned food, olives, and sugar. Father bought two sealed canisters of paraffin and stored them under the basin in the bathroom.

  Father still went off every day, as usual, at half past seven in the morning, to work in the National Library on Mount Scopus, on the No. 9 bus that went from Geula Street along Mea Shearim and crossed Sheikh Jarrah not far from Silwani Villa. He came home a little before five, with books and offprints in his battered briefcase and more tucked under his arm. But Mother asked him several times not to sit by the window in the bus. And she added some words in Russian. We suspended our regular Saturday afternoon walks to Uncle Joseph and Aunt Zippora's house for the time being.

  I was barely nine, and already I was a devout newspaper reader. An avid consumer of the latest news. A keen expositor and debater. A political and military expert whose views were valued by the neighbors' children. A strategist with matchsticks, buttons, and dominoes on the matting. I would dispatch troops, execute tactical outflanking movements, forge alliances with one foreign power or another, store up trenchant arguments that were capable of winning over the stoniest British heart, and compose speeches that would not only bring the Arabs to understanding and reconciliation and make them ask for our forgiveness, but could even bring tears of sympathy for our sufferings to their eyes, mixed with profound admiration for our noble hearts and moral grandeur.

  I conducted proud yet pragmatic talks at that time with Downing Street, the White House, the Vatican, the Kremlin, and the Arab rulers. "Hebrew state! Free immigration!" demonstrators from the affiliated community shouted in marches and public gatherings, one or two of which Mother let Father take me along to. While every Friday, Arab crowds, marching angrily after they came out of the mosques, roared "Idbah al-Yahud!" (Butcher the Jews!) and "Falastin hi arduna wa al-Yahud kilbuna!" (Palestine is our land, and the Jews are our dogs!). If I had the chance, I could easily convince them rationally that while our slogans contained nothing that could hurt them, their slogans, shouted by inflamed mobs, were not very nice or civilized, and in fact they showed up the people who were shouting them in rather a shameful light. In those days I was not so much a child as a bundle of self-righteous arguments, a little chauvinist dressed up as a peace lover, a sanctimonious, honey-tongued nationalist, a nine-year-old Zionist propagandist. We were the goodies, we were in the right, we were innocent victims, we were David against Goliath, a lamb among wolves, the sacrificial lamb, whereas they—the British, the Arabs, and the whole Gentile world—they were the wolves, the evil, hypocritical world that was always thirsting for our blood, more shame on them.

  When the British government announced the intention of ending its rule in Palestine and returning the mandate to the United Nations Organization, the UN set up a Special Committee on Palestine (UN-SCOP) to examine conditions in Palestine and also among the hundreds of thousands of displaced Jews, survivors of the Nazi genocide, who had been living for two years and more in DP camps in Europe.

  At the beginning of September 1947, UNSCOP published its majority report, recommending that the British mandate should end at the earliest opportunity. Instead, Palestine should be partitioned into two independent states, one for the Arabs and one for the Jews. The area allocated to the two states was almost equal in size. The complicated, winding border that separated them was drawn roughly in accordance with the demographic distribution of the respective populations. The two states would be linked by a common economy, currency, etc. Jerusalem, the committee recommended, should be a neutral corpus separatum, under international trusteeship with a governor appointed by the UN.

  These recommendations were submitted to the General Assembly for its approval, which required a two-thirds majority. The Jews gritted their teeth and agreed to accept the partition proposal: the territory allocated to them did not include Jerusalem or Upper and Western Galilee, and three quarters of the proposed Jewish state was uncultivated desert land. Meanwhile the Palestinian Arab leadership and all the nations of the Arab League declared at once that they would not accept any compromise, and that they intended "to resist by force the implementation of these proposals, and to drown in blood any attempt to create a Zionist entity on a single inch of Palestinian soil." They argued that the whole of Palestine had been Arab land for hundreds of years, until the British came and encouraged hordes of foreigners to spread all over it, flattening hills, uprooting ancient olive groves, purchasing land, plot by plot, by subterfuges from corrupt landlords, and driving out the peasants who had farmed it for generations. If they were not stopped, these crafty Jewish colonists would swallow up the whole of the land, eradicating every trace of Arab life, covering it with their red-roofed European colonies, corrupting it with their arrogant and licentious ways, and very soon they would take control of the holy places of Islam and then they would overflow into the neighboring Arab countries. In no time at all, thanks to their deviousness and technical superiority, and with the support of British imperialism, they would do here exactly what the whites had done to the indigenous populations in America, Australia, and elsewhere. If they were allowed to set up a state here, even
a little one, they would undoubtedly use it as a bridgehead, they would flood in, millions of them, like locusts, settle on every hill and valley, rob these ancient landscapes of their Arab character, and swallow everything up before the Arabs had time to shake themselves out of their slumber.

  In the middle of October the British High Commissioner, General Sir Alan Cunningham, uttered a veiled threat to David Ben-Gurion, who was the executive head of the Jewish Agency: "If troubles begin," he remarked sadly, "I fear that we will not be able to help you; we will not be able to defend you."*

  Father said:

  "Herzl was a prophet and he knew it. At the time of the First Zionist congress in 1897 he said that in five years, or at the latest in fifty years, there would be a Jewish State in the Land of Israel. And now fifty years have passed, and the state is literally standing at the gate."

  Mother said:

  *Dov Joseph, The Faithful City: The Siege of Jerusalem, 1948 (London, 1962), p. 31.

  "It's not standing. There is no gate. There's an abyss."

  Father's reprimand sounded like the crack of a whip. He spoke in Russian, so that I would not understand.

  And I said, with a joy I could not conceal:

  "There's going to be a war soon in Jerusalem! And we'll beat them all!"

  But sometimes, when I was all alone in the yard toward sunset or early on Saturday morning when my parents and the whole neighborhood were still asleep, I would freeze with a stab of terror, because the picture of the girl Aisha picking up the unconscious child and silently carrying him in her arms suddenly seemed to me like a chilling Christian picture that Father showed me and explained to me in a whisper when we visited a church once.

  I remembered the olive trees I saw from the windows of that house, which had left the world of the living ages before and become part of the realm of the inanimate.

  Jest a minute rest a minute jest a rest a jesta resta.

  By November a sort of curtain had begun to divide Jerusalem. The buses still ran there and back, and fruit sellers from the nearby Arab villages still did their rounds in our street, carrying trays of figs, almonds, and prickly pears, but some Jewish families had already moved out of the Arab neighborhoods, and Arabs families had begun to leave the west of the city for the southern and eastern parts.

  Only in my thoughts could I sometimes go to the extension of St. George's Street northeastward, and stare wide-eyed at the other Jerusalem: a city of old cypress trees that were more black than green, streets of stone walls, interlaced grilles, cornices, and dark walls, the alien, silent, aloof, shrouded Jerusalem, the Abyssinian, Muslim, pilgrim, Ottoman city, the strange, missionary city of crusaders and Templars, the Greek, Armenian, Italian, brooding, Anglican, Greek Orthodox city, the monastic, Coptic, Catholic, Lutheran, Scottish, Sunni, Shi'ite, Sufi, Alawite city, swept by the sound of bells and the wail of the muezzin, thick with pine trees, frightening yet alluring, with all its concealed enchantments, its warrens of narrow streets that were forbidden to us and threatened us from the darkness, a secretive, malign city pregnant with disaster.

  The whole Silwani family, I was told after the Six Day War, left Jordanian Jerusalem in the 1950s and early 1960s. Some went to Switzerland and Canada, others settled in the Gulf emirates, a few moved to London, and some others to Latin America.

  And what about their parrots? "Who will be my destiny? Who will be my prince?"

  And what about Aisha? And her lame brother? Where on earth is she playing her piano, assuming she still has one, assuming she has not grown old and worn out among the dusty, heat-blasted hovels in some refugee camp where the sewage runs down the unpaved streets.

  And who are the fortunate Jews who now live in what was once her family home in Talbieh, a neighborhood built of pale blue and pinkish stone with stone vaults and arches?

  It was not because of the approaching war but for some other, deeper reason that I would be suddenly seized with dread in those autumn days of 1947 and feel aching pangs of yearning mixed with shame and the certainty of impending punishment and also some ill-defined pain: a sort of forbidden longing, blended with guilt and sorrow. For that orchard. For that well that was covered with a sheet of green metal, and the blue-tiled pool where golden fish sparkled for an instant in the sunlight before disappearing into the forest of water lilies. For the soft cushions trimmed with fine lace. For the richly textured rugs, one of which showed birds of paradise among trees of paradise. For the stained-glass trefoils, each of which colored the daylight a different shade: red leaf, green leaf, gold leaf, purple leaf.

  And for the parrot who sounded like an inveterate smoker: "Mais oui, mais oui, chere mademoiselle," and its soprano counterpart that answered in a voice like a silver bell: "Tfaddal! S'il vous plaît! Enjoy!"

  I was there once, in that orchard, before I was banished from it in disgrace, I did touch it once, with my fingertips—

  "Bas! Bas, ya 'eini! Bas min fadlak! Usqut!"

  Early in the morning I would wake to the smell of first light and see through the iron slats of the closed shutters the pomegranate tree that stood in our yard. Hidden in this tree every morning an invisible bird would repeat joyfully and precisely the first five notes of Fur Elise.

  Such an articulate fool, such a noisy little fool.

  Instead of approaching her like the New Hebrew Youth approaching the Noble Arab People, or like a lion approaching lions, perhaps I could simply have approached her like a boy approaching a girl. Or couldn't I?

  42

  "JUST LOOK how that strategist of a child has occupied the whole apartment again. You can't move in the corridor, it's so full of fortifications and towers made out of building blocks, castles made out of dominoes, mines made out of corks, and borders made out of spillikins. In his room there are battlefields of buttons from wall to wall. We're not allowed in there, it's out of bounds. That's an order. And even in our room he's scattered knives and forks all over the floor, presumably to mark out some Maginot Line or navy or armored corps. If it goes on like this, you and I will have to move out into the yard. Or into the street. But the moment the paper arrived, your child dropped everything, he must have declared a general cease-fire, and he lay back on the sofa and read it from cover to cover, including the small ads. Now he's running a line from his HQ behind his wardrobe right through the apartment to Tel Aviv, which is apparently on the edge of the bathtub. If I'm not mistaken, he's about to use it to speak to Ben-Gurion. Like yesterday. To explain to him what we ought to be doing at this point and what we ought to watch out for. He might already have started giving Ben-Gurion orders."

  In one of the bottom drawers here in my study in Arad I found a battered cardboard box last night, containing various notes that I made when I was writing the novellas that make up The Hill of Evil Counsel, more than twenty-five years ago. Among other things there are some messy notes that I made in a library in Tel Aviv in 1974 or 1975 from newspapers from September 1947. And so, in Arad, on a summer morning in 2001, like an image reflected in a mirror reflected in another mirror, my notes from twenty-seven years ago remind me of what the "strategist of a child" read in the paper of September 9, 1947:

  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. The "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 Edis de Philippe will be unable to perform this week in Jerusalem, and the Chamber Theatre has been obliged to postpone its performance of You Can't Take It wi
th You. On the other hand, two days ago the new Colonnade Building on the Jaffa Road was opened, containing, among other shops, Mikolinski, Freidmann & Bein, and the chiropodist Dr. Scholl. 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 the parable. And then again, Comrade Golda Myerson [later Meir] of the Jewish Agency Executive has declared that the Jews will fight for the inclusion of Jerusalem in the Hebrew State, because the Land of Israel and Jerusalem are synonymous in our hearts.

  A few days later the paper reported:

  Late last night, an Arab set upon two Jewish girls in the vicinity of the Bernardiya Café, between Beit Hakerem and Bayit Vagan. One of the girls escaped, and the other screamed for help, and some of the local residents heard and succeeded in preventing the suspect from escaping. 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 refused, on account of the gravity of the alleged offense. In his defense the prisoner stated 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.