The Hill of Evil Counsel (Harvest Book)

by Amos Oz

  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 y
ou 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.
r />   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."