8 Great Hebrew Short Novels

by Неизвестный

  He would spend whole days on end in the basement of the national library on Mount Scopus, endlessly covering little cards with feverish notes. When he came home in the evening, he would sometimes bare his rotting teeth in a grin and pronounce some cryptic prophecy:

  “I promise you that tonight a mighty explosion shall resound. The mountains shall drop sweet wine, and all the hills shall melt.”

  Because those were eventful days, his prophecies sometimes came true in a way. Then Mitya would smile modestly, like a humble artist who has won a prize with one of his works.

  During the last year of the World War, Hillel peeped through the keyhole and discovered that Mitya had huge maps hanging on all the walls of his room, from the ceiling almost to the floor. He had other maps spread out on his desk, on his bed, and on the straw matting. These maps were covered with thick black and red arrows, flags, buttons, and matchsticks.

  “Daddy, is Uncle Mitya a spy?”

  “That sort of foolishness is beneath your dignity, Hillel.”

  “Then why is he like that? Why has he got maps in his room, and arrows?”

  “You’re the spy, Hillel. You spied on Uncle Mitya. That’s not a nice thing to do, and you’ll promise me right now that you won’t do it again.”

  “I promise, but…”

  “You’ve promised. Now that’s the end of it. It’s wrong to talk about people behind their backs.”

  One day in 1944, Mitya proposed to Father that the British fleet should storm up the Bosphorus and through the Dardanelles “like a rod of anger,” gain mastery over the Black Sea, ravage half of the Crimea with fire, land “myriads of armies” all along the Slavic coasts, knock the heads of the two tyrants together, “and grind to dust the dragon and the crocodile of Egypt.” Father considered this utterance in silence, proffered a mild, sympathetic smile, and remarked that the Russians were now on the side of the Allies.

  “You are the generation of the wilderness. You are the seed of slaves,” Mitya replied vehemently. “You have all been stricken with blindness. Chamberlains. Arlozoroffs. Gandhis. Plebeians. Eunuchs. I don’t mean you personally, Dr. Kipnis, heaven forbid! I was speaking in the plural; you in general. I can see from your wife’s eyes that she agrees with me deep in her heart, but because she is wise and sensitive she prefers to remain silent, and of course she is quite right. Surely no remnant shall remain of all the eunuchs. When they cry with upraised voice and outstretched throat ‘eternal people,’ ‘forever and ever,’ ‘Jerusalem, the eternal city,’ surely every stone of Jerusalem bursts out laughing. Now I must beg your pardon and bid you good night. I’m sorry; good night.”

  Once, when Father was out working in the villages and Mother was at the hairdresser’s, Mitya trapped Hillel at the dark end of the corridor and addressed his fevered utterances to him: “We who have returned to Zion, and especially your generation, whose souls have not been perverted by exile, have an obligation to make children by force by the women of the fellahin. We must give them children who look like you. Masses of fair-haired children. Strong and fair and fearless. It’s a matter of life and death. A new breed, thoroughbred, lusty steppe-wolves instead of namby-pamby scholars. The old eunuchs will die off. Blessed are you, for you shall inherit the earth. Then a flame shall issue forth from Judah and consume Perfidious Albion. What could be easier? We know how they go out alone at night to gather firewood. They wear long dark dresses down to their ankles, but underneath their dresses they have nothing on at all. They must be conquered and mounted by force. With holy zeal. They have women who are dark and hairy as goats, and we have rods of fire. We must spill fresh blood, dark, warm blood. Your parents may call you Hillel, but I shall call you Itamar. Listen to me, young Itamar. You are a new recruit: I order you to learn to ride a horse, to use a dagger, to toughen yourself up. Here, take a biscuit: you can’t refuse; I’m your commanding officer. This’ll all be a closely guarded secret between the two of us: the Underground has no pity on traitors and informers. Who is this that cometh from Seir, with dyed garments from Edom? It is you and the rest of your generation. Nimrods, Gideons, Jephthahs, all of them skilled men of war. You shall see and behold with your own eyes, O new recruit Itamar, the whole British Empire brought down into the dust like a rag doll. The Inheritor shall come marching from the east. He shall ascend the mountain and discomfit the plain with an iron hand until those lascivious, black hairy she-goats of the fellahin scream at us in terror and delight. Lascivious she-goats! Now, take this shilling and run and buy yourself a mountain of chewing gum. It’s yours. Yes. From me. Never disobey orders, now, scram!”

  Suddenly his blazing eyes fell on Mother’s apron hanging on a peg beside the mirror in the corridor. He bared his teeth and hissed, “Painted Jezebel, mother of whoredoms!”

  And he shuffled furiously back to his room.

  Hillel ran out into the garden. He climbed up into his hideaway among the boughs of the fig tree, the sweaty shilling tightly clasped in his hand. He was tormented by ugly yet persistent images, Jezebel Fellahin women. Lascivious she-goats. Long dresses with nothing on underneath. Thoroughbreds. And the sweaty word “mounted.” His free hand felt for the fly of his trousers, but there were tears in his eyes. He knew that the asthma would start mercilessly as soon as he dared to touch his taut organ. Iron hand. Itamar. Rag doll. Marching from the east.

  If the old days of the Bible suddenly came back, I could be a judge in Israel. Or a king. Mitya could be a prophet in a hair mantle, and the bears would eat him like the wicked Turkish soldier. Father would pasture the royal flocks in the fields of Bethlehem. And Mother wouldn’t be a Jezebel.

  Among the flowerbeds, Dr. Kipnis appeared. His hair was still wet from the shower, his khaki shorts came down almost to his knees, and between his shorts and his sandals his legs showed brown, thin, and smooth. He was wearing nothing over his vest. His eyes, behind his glasses, looked like blue lakes in a snowy landscape.

  Father carefully connected the rubber hose to the garden tap. He made sure it was well attached, and he regulated the flow of water precisely. He stood alone, quietly watering his garden in the early-afternoon sunshine, humming to himself the song “Between the Euphrates and the Tigris.”

  The water carved out branching and interlacing furrows. From time to time, Father bent down to block its path and direct it where it was needed.

  Hillel suddenly felt an ecstatic, overwhelming love for his father. He scrambled out of his hideaway in the fig tree, ran up the path through the summer bird song through the breeze laden with the scent of the distant sea through the streaming afternoon sunlight, flung his arms around his father’s waist, and hugged him with all his might.

  Hans Kipnis passed the hose from his right to his left hand, stroked his son’s head tenderly, and said, “Hillel.”

  The boy did not reply.

  “Here, Hillel. Take it. If you want to water the garden for a bit, take the hose, and I’ll go and clip the hedge. You can. Only be very careful not to aim the water at the plants themselves.”

  “Dad, what does ‘Perfidious Albion’ mean?”

  “It’s what the fanatics call England when they want to be rude about it.”

  “What does ‘fanatics’ mean?”

  “They’re people who are always sure that they know best what’s right and what’s wrong and what ought to be done, and try their hardest to make everybody else think and act the same way.”

  “Is Uncle Mitya a fanatic?”

  “Uncle Mitya is a sensitive man who reads a lot of books and spends a lot of time studying the Bible. Because he worries a great deal about our plight, and also perhaps because of his personal sufferings, he sometimes uses words that are not quite the words I myself would choose to use.”

  “What about Mommy?”

  “She’s having a rest.”

  “No, I mean, is she also a fanatic.”

  “Mommy grew up surrounded by wealth and luxury. Sometimes it’s hard for her to get used to conditions here; yo
u were born here, and perhaps you are sometimes surprised by her moods. But you’re a clever boy, and I’m sure you’re not angry with Mommy when she’s sad or when she longs to be somewhere completely different.”

  “Daddy, I’ve got something to tell you.”

  “What is it, son?”

  “I’ve got a shilling that I don’t want at all. And I don’t want you to start asking me who gave it to me, ’cause I won’t say. I just want you to take it.”

  “All right. I’ll look after your shilling for you, and I won’t ask any questions. Only mind you don’t get your new sandals wet when you’re watering the grapes. Now I’m going to fetch the shears. Bye-bye. You ought to be wearing a hat in this heat.”

  Chapter ten

  Toward sunset, when the mountains were shrouded and the wind swept knowingly through the woods and the valleys and the bell of the Schneller Barracks resounded forlornly, the preparations were complete.

  All that remained was to wait for the taxi, say good-bye, and go. Nothing had been overlooked. Hans Kipnis, in his borrowed dress suit and impeccably polished black shoes, with his hair neatly parted and smoothed down with water, with his round glasses, looked like a mild, good-natured Evangelical minister setting out with a pounding heart for his wedding.

  “My own Dr. Zichel,” Mother said with a laugh, and bent over to straighten the white handkerchief in his top pocket.

  She was a little taller than he, and her scent was the scent of autumn. She was wearing her blue evening dress with its daring neckline. The light shone in her drop earrings. Ruth was erect and sensuous as she walked with a slow, rounded motion, like a large cat, to wait outside on the veranda. She turned her bare back on the house and looked out into the desolate twilight. Her blond plait had settled on the arch of her left shoulder. Her hip rubbed slowly, with a dreamy rhythm, against the cool stone parapet.

  And how the bells had rung throughout Warsaw at the national festival. How all the marble horsemen had reared up in every square. How her warm voice had carried over the playground of the school as she had read the searing lines of the Polish national poet:

  Slain cavalrymen never die,

  They fly high through the air like the wind,

  Their horses’ hoofs no longer touching the ground.

  At night in the storm in the snow you can hear them flying past,

  Foam-flecked winged steeds and valiant horsemen,

  Forever flying over forests and meadows and plains,

  Ghost warriors eternally riding into battle.

  At night in the storm in the snow they wing their way high over Poland.

  Cavalrymen never die, they become transparent and powerful as tears… .

  Ruth’s voice conveyed a melancholy echo of violins, the tempestuous thunder of war drums, the roar and sigh of the organ. How they had all loved her. The handsome Tadeusz had stood stiffly at attention half a pace behind her on the platform, holding aloft the blazing Torch of Liberty. Elderly teachers who had themselves fought as cavalry officers in the Great War for the liberation of Poland, and who still relived it in their dreams on happy nights, wept to hear her reciting. They stood with their eyes closed and strained toward her with all the force of their longing. She received their love and desire in her heart, and her heart was ready to bestow love on all good men.

  She had never throughout her school days encountered bad men until both her parents died within a month of each other, and her sister, Nyuta, suddenly married the widowed gynecologist and left with him for New York. She believed that if bad men really existed outside fairy stories, they must lurk in dark corners. They could never come near her, with her gleaming white tennis dress and her expensive racket. Hence she was inclined to feel a certain sympathy even for them, if they existed. Their lot must be a sad one. What a terrible thing it must be, to be a bad man.

  By seven o’clock, the mountains were growing dark. The lights of Jerusalem came on. In every house the iron shutters were pulled closed and the curtains were drawn. The inhabitants sank into worry and longing. For an instant the hills of Jerusalem seemed to be heaving and swelling like a sea in the dark.

  Hillel was left with Madame Yabrova the pianist and her niece, Binyamina. They would play the phonograph for him, give him supper, let him play for a little with their collection of dolls of all nations, and then put him to bed. Meanwhile the taxi arrived, with its yellow headlights, and gave a long horn blast that sounded like the cry of an animal.

  The whole street came out to see Dr. and Mrs. Kipnis off to the May Ball at the High Commissioner’s palace on the Hill of Evil Counsel. Mitya the lodger stood grinning darkly on the doorstep of the house, his silhouette hunched with suffering, clasping a half-drunk glass of tea between his hands. He was chewing the point of his shirt collar, and his lips were mouthing something in the darkness, a curse or a premonition of disaster. The elderly Professor Julius Wertheimer, keeping his place with his finger in a German edition of the New Testament, raised his hat slightly and said sadly, as if they were leaving on a long journey to another continent: “Don’t forget us.”

  Mrs. Vishniak the pharmacist waved them good-bye and good luck from where she sat on a wickerwork chair under the single Mandatory street lamp. Two tears hung from her painted eyelashes, because not long beforehand the announcer on “The Voice of Jerusalem” had said that times were changing and that things would never be the same again.

  At the last minute, Engineer Brzezinski emerged on the other side of the road, slightly drunk and holding a huge electric lamp. He was a big-boned man with thick red hair and freckles. He was panting like a woodcutter and trembling with emotion. He thundered to them at the top of his voice, “Just you tell them, doctor, tell them to their faces! Tell them to leave us alone! Tell them to go away! Tell them the White Paper is rotten! Tell them the whole country is getting more and more rotten every day! Tell them once and for all! And tell them that life as a whole is a rotten trick! Cheap! Miserable! Provincial! You let them know! And tell them that we, sam chort znayet, will never stop suffering and hoping until our last breath! Tell them!”

  Suddenly he fell silent and pointed his great lamp furiously up at the dark sky, as if he were trying to dazzle the stars themselves.

  Then the taxi choked, roared, and moved off in a cloud of dust.

  The street was left to itself. Everyone had gone indoors. Only the square-paned street lamp continued to shed its forlorn light in vain. The wind blew. The fig tree ruffled its leaves and settled down. Its fingers were still empty. Dogs barked in the distance. It was night.

  Chapter eleven

  Lyubov Binyamina was a short, heavy girl with a swarthy complexion and a pointed chin. She looked like a plump, slow-moving, melancholy partridge. Only her lips were painted a bright scarlet. Her heavy bust forced out the front of her dress almost violently. There was always something slovenly about her appearance: a dangling button, a bad cough, a yellow oil stain on her Viennese-style dress. She wore clumsy brown orthopedic shoes, even around the house. She had thick down on her arms, and she wore a man’s wristwatch. Hillel suddenly recalled the terrible things Mitya had said about the fellahin women going out alone at night to gather firewood, looking like hairy black she-goats. He bit his lip and tried hard to think of something else, but Binyamina kissed his earlobe and called him “child poet,” and he buried his face in the carpet and blushed to the roots of his curly hair.

  Madame Yabrova, by contrast, displayed the somewhat threadbare remnants of a former grandeur. She spoke with a heavy emphasis, in long, emotional sentences; in a strong voice coarsened by the Simon Arzdt cigarettes she chain-smoked. She would rush around the room, furiously wiping her mouth, picking things up and putting them down again, and turning on her heel with a kind of clumsy agility, like an aging prima donna. She had a slight gray mustache and bushy black eyebrows. Hillel could not take his eyes off her double chin; it reminded him of the pelican in the zoo on Prophet Samuel Street.

  Madame Yabrova had c
hanged, as she did every evening, into a theatrical mauve velvet evening gown. She filled the room with a mingled smell of mothballs, baked fish, and eau de cologne.

  After a few affectionate words, she suddenly released Hillel, silenced her niece with a hoarse reprimand, and exclaimed, “Be quiet. We must both be quiet. The child has an inspiration.”

  They earned their living by giving private music lessons, one on the piano and the other on the cello. They sometimes traveled by bus to remote settlements to favor the pioneers with Friday-night recitals. Their playing was always precise and free from frills and graces, if a trifle academic.

  Every available surface in their home was scattered with mementos: tiny ornaments, elaborately carved candlesticks, lumps of rock, handmade objects of wire and raffia, on the piano, the dining table, the coffee table, bronze busts including a glowering Beethoven, Oriental pots, plaster-of-Paris figurines, a china replica of Big Ben, dolls in motley national costumes, a copper Eiffel Tower, water-filled glass globes in which, when they were shaken or turned over, fake snow slowly fell on a rustic cottage or a village church.