by Неизвестный
When Mother was sixteen, she allowed the handsome Tadeusz to kiss her at the bridge: first on the forehead, later on the lips, but she let him go no further. He was a year and a half younger than she, an elegant, handsome youth, without a trace of acne, who excelled at tennis and sprinting. Once he had promised her that he would love her forever. But forever at that time seemed to her like a small circle bathed in pleasant light, and love like a game of tennis on a clear blue Sunday morning.
Handsome Tadeusz’s father had been killed in the Polish war of independence. Tadeusz also had a cute dimple when he smiled, and wore sports shirts all through the summer. Mother loved to kiss Hillel suddenly on his own dimple and say, “Just like this one.”
Every year, on the national holiday, Ruth and Tadeusz would both stand on a decorated stage in the school playground. Old chestnut trees spread their branches overhead like a rustling bridal canopy. Tadeusz’s task was to light the Torch of Liberty—the same liberty for which his father had given his life. Pupils and teachers stood in serried ranks, frozen in a strained silence, while the wind toyed with the flags of the Republic—no, don’t touch the photograph—and Ruth recited the immortal lines by the national poet. Bells rang out joyously from atop every church in Warsaw. And in the evening, at the ball at the home of the director of the opera house, her parents permitted her to dance one waltz with General Godzinski himself.
Then Zionism broke out. The handsome Tadeusz joined the National Youth Corps, and because she refused to spend a weekend with him at his aunt’s in the country, he sent her a disgusting note: “Zidowka. Dirty Jewess.” The old teacher who was fond of the phrase “singing gazelles” died suddenly of a liver disease. And both her parents, too, in a single month. The only memento she had left was the sepia photographs, printed on thick card stock with ornamental borders.
Nyuta, her elder sister, quickly found herself a widowed gynecologist named Adrian Staub. She married him and went with him to New York. Meanwhile, Mother came to Palestine to study ancient history on Mount Scopus. She took a small room at the end of the world, in the suburb of Neve Sha’anan. Nyuta Staub sent her a modest allowance every month. In that room she was loved by several wonderful men, including, one Hanukah festival, the furious poet Alexander Pan.
After a year, she felt defeated by the country and the language, and decided to join her sister and brother-in-law in New York. Then Dr. Ruppin introduced her to Father, and he told her shyly about his dream of setting up a cattle farm in the hills of Galilee with his own hands. He had a fine Galilean smell. She was desperately tired. And the Aurora changed course, sailed to the West Indies, and never reached Haifa.
To the northeast, in the white summer light, one could see Mount Scopus from the window of the house in Tel Arza, crowned by a marble dome, a wood, and two towers. These lonely towers seemed from a distance to be shrouded in a kind of veil of solitude. At the end of the Sabbath the light faded slowly, hesitantly, poignantly—as though forever. And as though there were no going back.
Father and Mother used to sit facing each other in the room that Father called his study. The celebrated geographer Hans Walter Landauer gazed down skeptically on them from his large portrait. And their pudgy son built complicated brick castles on the mat, demolishing each suddenly with a wave of his hand because he always wanted to build a new one. At times he would ask an intelligent question of his father, and he always received a considered reply. At other times he buried his face in his mother’s dress, demanded to be cuddled, and then, embarrassed at seeing her eyes fill with tears, returned silently to his game.
Sometimes Mother asked: “What’s going to happen, Hans?”
And Father would answer, “I confidently hope that things will take a turn for the better.”
As Father uttered these words, Hillel recalled how last Pentecost he had gone out with his friends to hunt lions or discover the source of the Nile in the woods of Tel Arza. He recalled how a faded golden button had suddenly flashed at him, and blue cloth, how he had knelt down and dug with both hands, tearing away the pine needles, to uncover the treasure, and found a rotting military tunic, a terrible, sweet smell coming from the tarnished gold, and how as he went on digging he had discovered white ivory among disintegrating buckles, large and small white tusks, and all of a sudden the ivory was attached to an empty skull that smiled at him with a kind of chilling affection, and then the dead teeth and the eye sockets. Never, never again would he search for the source of the Nile anywhere. Never.
On weekdays Father traveled around the villages wearing khaki trousers, sandals, a neatly pressed blue shirt with wide pockets stuffed full of notebooks and writing pads. In winter, he wore brown corduroy trousers, a jacket, a cap, and over his shoes he wore galoshes that looked like twin black warships.
But on Sabbath Eve, after his bath, he would appear in a white shirt and gray trousers, his damp hair combed and neatly parted, smelling of shaving lotion and almond-scented soap. Then Mother would kiss him on the nose and call him her great big child. And Hillel would laugh.
Every morning, a bib with a picture of a smiling rabbit was tied around Hillel’s neck. He ate Quaker Oats, a soft-boiled egg, and yogurt. On the Quaker Oats package was a wonderful picture of an admiral with a bold and resolute look on his face, a three-cornered Napoleon hat on his head, and a telescope in his only hand.
In Europe at that time, there was a world war going on. But in the streets of Jerusalem, there were only singing bands of friendly soldiers, Australians, New Zealanders, Senegalese looking like chocolate-cream soldiers, lean Scots wallowing in beer and homesickness. The newspapers carried maps with arrows. Sometimes, at night, a long military convoy crossed Jerusalem from north to south with dimmed headlights, and a smothered roar seemed to sound in the darkness. The city was very still. The hills were hushed. The towers and domes looked thoughtful. The inhabitants followed the distant war with anxiety but without any passion. They exchanged conjectures and interpretations. They expected a change for the better that would surely come about soon and might even perhaps make itself felt in Jerusalem.
Chapter seven
In Tel Arza no civic center was built, and the road was not paved. A stone quarry was started on one of the farther slopes. Mr. Cohen opened a small workshop producing modish furniture for the notables of Jericho and Bethlehem, the Governor of Jerusalem, and even for the palace of Emir Abdullah in Transjordan. Engineer Brzezinski climbed onto the roof of his house and rigged up an enormous radio antenna so as to be able to catch the signals of the farthest stations each night. He also built a telescope with his own hands, and installed it, too, on his roof, because he had promised himself that he would be the first to see them when they arrived.
At night the valleys all around were alive with sounds. The wildness of the rocks and mountains reached out to touch the house. Jackals howled nearby, and the blood froze at the thought of them padding softly, tensely, among the saplings, up to the shuttered windows, perhaps even onto the veranda. A single Mandatory street lamp, encased in small, square panes and topped with a green dome, cast a solitary light on the unpaved road. The fingers of the fig tree at the bottom of the garden were empty. There was nobody outside in the dark. The square-paned lamp cast its light in vain. All the residents were in the habit of shutting themselves up in their houses as soon as darkness fell. Every evening Madame Yabrova played the piano, and her niece, Lyubov Binyamina, the cello, with desolating sadness. Father’s fellow townsman, the elderly Professor Julius Wertheimer, collected clippings from foreign newspapers that mentioned anything to do with supernatural phenomena. He considered the laws of nature to be a practical joke, and he longed to find a loophole in them, perhaps some revealing formula that would enable him and the whole persecuted Jewish people to escape from the pull of gravity and to float up into spheres where the contagion had not yet spread.
Every night, far into the small hours, Engineer Brzezinski twiddled the tuning knob of his ratio, seeking and finding and then
abandoning different stations, Berlin, London, Milan, Vichy, Cairo, and Cyrenaica. Some of the neighbors said that he often brought bottles of arak back with him from his work on the northern shores of the Dead Sea, and that at night he got drunk on this frightful Oriental drink.
He would tell them how as a young man he had been the director of a gigantic engineering project in Russia, how he had set up the hydroelectric power station in Taganrog, “like writing an epic poem.” Then he had fallen foul of Stalin; he was captured, imprisoned, tortured; he escaped by the skin of his teeth and finally reached Jerusalem via Afghanistan, Teheran, and Baghdad. But here, at the Dead Sea Works, he was given trifling jobs to do: mending pumps, keeping an eye on the generator, repairing miserable fuse boxes, supervising some provincial transformer.
One night he suddenly shouted “Fire! Fire!” at the top of his voice. He had come across a broadcast of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony from some Nazi station in the Balkans.
Father immediately got out of bed, dressed, and bravely crossed the dirt road; he knocked on the door and called out politely, “Mr. Brzezinski, please, Mr. Brzezinski.”
The door did not open. There was no fire, either. Only the smell of dying campfires borne on the wind from the depths of the wadi. And the wail of a distant muezzin, or perhaps it was a hungry jackal crying in the woods. On nights like these, Hillel would wake up with an attack of panic and asthma. He could see through the slats of the shutters the skull of the Turkish janissary hovering in the dark air, grinning at him with its dead teeth. He would pull the sheet up over his head and burst into tears. Then his father would get up and come into his bedroom with bare feet, to straighten the bedclothes and sing him a soothing song:
Night is reigning in the skies,
Time for you to close your eyes.
Lambs and kids have ceased from leaping,
All the animals are sleeping.
Every bird is in its nest,
All Jerusalem’s at rest.
Then, toward dawn, Mitya the lodger might suddenly cry out in his sleep on the other side of the wall: “Ruthless! Don’t touch him! He’s still alive! Y-any-e zna-yu! Y-a ny-e po-ni-ma-yu! Nothing!”
Then silence.
Outside in the fields, there was nothing but jackals and mist until morning.
Chapter eight
Mitya addressed Father, “In that evening suit, Dr. Kipnis, you look like the splitting image of the martyred Haim Arlozoroff. There is no peace for the wicked. So I shall ask you a small diplomatic favor. Could you pass along a short message from me to the foreign High Commissioner? Just one or two urgent sentences? It is a message the High Commissioner has been secretly awaiting for some time, and he probably cannot understand why it has not yet come.”
Father said, “If I do actually manage to have a private conversation with the High Commissioner, which I very much doubt.”
Mitya suddenly grinned, baring his rotten teeth. He chewed his shirt collar, with an expression of pain and disgust on his bony face and a fire in his eyes.
“Give him this message, word for word: Our true Messiah will surely come, he will not tarry. He will come whirling a flaming sword in his hand. He will come from the east and lay all the mountains low. He will not leave any that pisseth against the wall. Do you think, Dr. Kipnis, that you can repeat this message word for word without making a mistake?”
Father said, “I don’t think I can undertake to convey that message. And certainly not in English.”
And Mitya, frantically stroking the oilcloth on the kitchen table, replied in a hoarse voice, “Jerusalem, which slayeth its prophets, shall burn the new Hellenizers in hellfire.”
At once he added politely, “Good evening, Mrs. Kipnis. Pozhal’sta, why are your staring at me so cruelly, I was simply making a small joke with your husband. I shall never forgive myself if, heaven forbid, I have accidentally frightened you. Nikogda. I must beg your pardon right away; there, I’ve done it. How magnificent you look, Mrs. Kipnis, in your blue evening dress, if I may make so bold. How magnificent, too, is the springtime in our Jerusalem on the eve of the great destruction. And the hot tap in the bathroom is dripping and dripping and knows no rest. Surely we ought to do something without further delay. How much time do we have left? There, I’ve apologized and I’ve gone. Da. Good night. May the name of the wicked rot, and the innocent shall see it and be glad. Now good night once again to you all. Happy is he who waits His coming.”
He nearly knocked the child over as he dashed back to his room, panting, his arms hanging limply at his sides, his fists clenched. But he did not slam his door; he closed it gently behind him as if taking great care not to hurt the door or the doorpost or the sudden silence he had left behind him.
Mother said: “The High Commissioner could never understand how a boy like Mitya suffers. Even the King couldn’t help. Or the Messiah himself, not that I believe in him.”
She closed her eyes and continued in a different tone of voice: “But I could. I could easily rescue him from the madness and death that is building up inside him. Yes, me. That’s loneliness, Hans, that’s real exile, despair, depression…persecution. I could come to him in the middle of the night in my nightgown, sweetly perfumed, and touch him; or at least I could bring him another woman in the night and happily stand by and watch. I could put out the rising fires and give him peace and quiet. So what if he smells. To the forests and the sea, every man and woman in the world stinks. Even you, Hans. And then to hear him moaning between my hands, shouting in disjointed Russian, singing, grunting like a felled ox. Then resting peacefully. I’d close his eyes with my fingers and lull him to sleep. Even the stars and mountains would love me for it. Now, stop looking at me like that. I want you to know once and for all how much I loathe, yes, loathe, your Wertheimers and Bubers and Shertoks. I wish your terrorists would blow them all sky-high. And stop looking at me like that.”
Father said, “That will do, Ruth. The boy can hear you; he understands almost everything.”
She drew the child violently toward her, pressed his head against her, and covered his face with rough kisses. Then she said quietly: “Yes, you’re quite right. You’ve already forgiven me, Hans. The red taxi will be here soon, and we’ll go to the ball. Stand still, Hans, while I tie your silly bow tie for you. I’ve really got no complaint against Buber and the rest of them. There, now you’ve remembered how to smile. At last. Why are you smiling?”
Father said nothing.
Chapter nine
Mitya had left his kibbutz in the Jezreel Valley because of an ideological argument at the end of the week in which Hitler had captured Warsaw. At the same time, he had also suddenly inherited some jewelry from his only relation, a forgotten aunt who had died in Johannesburg.
He had hastily sold the jewelry to a crafty Armenian goldsmith in the Old City and decided to settle in Jerusalem to study, with the aim of proving once and for all that the natives of Palestine were descended from the ancient Hebrews. He tried to produce conclusive proof that all the Arabs, nomads and peasants alike, were simply Israelites who had been forcibly converted to Islam and whom it was our duty now to rescue. Their clothes, the shape of their skulls, the names of their villages, their eating habits, and their forms of worship all bore abundant witness, he claimed, to the truth that the Jewish Agency was trying to hush up. But they could not pull the wool over his eyes.
For a pioneer, he was a skinny lad, with drooping shoulders and abrupt gestures. He was an uncompromising vegetarian, who called meat eating “the source of all impurity.” His hair was thin, fair, almost white. When Mitya stood by himself in the kitchen making tea in his glass with its ring of worn gold paint, Hillel would sometimes observe a lonely, fanatical glint in his eye. His birdlike profile looked as though he were forever suppressing a sneeze. And he would chew the points of his shirt collar with his rotten teeth.
On his arrival, he had paid Father two years’ rent in advance, and was given permission to look over the headlines in the dai
ly newspaper and to use the typewriter occasionally. Once he typed out with two fingers an “Epistle to Those Who Are at Ease in Zion,” in which he voiced various complaints and sounded a prophecy of doom. But the newspapers all either rejected his letter or simply ignored it. And once he hinted to Father that since the Babylonian Beasts had murdered the heroic Abraham Stern, code-named “Yair,” he himself had become the secret commander of the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel. Father did not believe this any more than he believed Engineer Brzezinski, who said that Mitya was a dangerous Communist agent in disguise.
Mitya was ruthlessly clean and tidy.
Whenever he had finished in the lavatory, he would produce a small can inscribed in English, “Baby’s Delight,” and sprinkle the seat with perfumed talcum powder. When he had read the newspaper he would fold it neatly in four and place it carefully on the end of the bookshelf. If ever he met anyone as he came out of the bathroom or the lavatory (which he called “the throne room”), he would turn pale and mutter an embarrassed apology. He cleaned and scrubbed his own room twice a day.
Despite all this, a faint yet repulsive smell, like that of old cooking fat, always accompanied him in the corridor and escaped from under his door; it even clung to his glass with the worn gold ring.
No one was allowed into his room.
He had fitted a double Yale lock onto his door, and he always locked it even when he only went to wash. Sometimes he would cry out in his sleep in the early hours of the morning. In Russian.
During the summer months, Mitya would set off on foot in the direction of Mount Scopus, crossing hills and valleys with his disjointed gait, spurning roads and paths, advancing in a line straight as an arrow in flight. He would traverse the suburb of Sanhedriya like a hurricane, skirting the police training school, with his birdlike head thrust forward, a distant look in his eye, and finally, panting but undeterred, he would emerge into the district of Sheikh Jarrah, where he would always break his journey to drink his morning coffee among mustached, kefiyeh-wrapped Arabs, with whom he attempted persistently to enter into conversation, but without success, since he could speak only classical Arabic, and that with a heavy Russian accent. The Arab coffee-drinkers nicknamed him al-Hudhud, “the hoopoe,” perhaps because of his crest of thinning hair.