by Неизвестный
He closed his eyes. He suddenly remembered the wandering Bavarian ornithologist with whom he had cut a virgin path many years before to the remote sources of the Jordan in the farthest corner of the country. He recalled the coldness of the water and the snowy peaks of Mount Hermon. When he opened his eyes again, he saw Lady Bromley. She appeared like a wizened ghost from among the bushy oleanders, old, spoiled, seething with venomous zeal, in a dark shawl, doubled up with malicious glee.
“What you have lost tonight, sir, you will never find again. If you like, you can leave a message with me for the head gardener. But even he cannot save you, because he is a drunken Greek and a pathetic queer. Go home, my dear doctor. The party’s over. Life nowadays is just like a stupid party. A little light, a little music, a little dancing, and then darkness. Look. The lights have been turned out. The leftovers have been thrown to the dogs. Go home, my dear doctor. Or must I wake up poor Lieutenant Grady and tell him to drive you?”
“I am waiting for my wife,” said Father.
Lady Bromley let out a loud, ribald guffaw. “I have had four husbands, and none of them, I repeat, none of them ever said anything as fantastic as that. In all my life I’ve never heard a man talk like that, except perhaps in vulgar farces.”
“I should be deeply grateful, madam, if you could give me some assistance, or direct me to someone who can help me. My wife has been dancing all evening, and she may have had a drop too much to drink. She must be around somewhere. Perhaps she has dozed off.”
Lady Bromley’s eyes suddenly flashed, and she growled wickedly, “You are the native doctor who poked his fingers into my corset ten days ago. How rotten and charming. Come here and let me give you a big kiss. Come. Don’t be afraid of me.”
Father rallied his last resources. “Please, madam, please help me. I can’t go home without her.”
“That’s rich,” gloated Lady Bromley. “Listen to that. That’s wonderful. He can’t go home without his wife. He needs to have his wife next to him every night. And these, ladies and gentlemen, are the Jews. The People of the Book. The spiritual people. Huh! How much?”
“How much what?” Father asked, stunned.
“Really! How much will that rotten drunkard Kenneth have to pay you to calm down and keep your mouth shut? Huh! You may not believe it, but in the twelve months since the end of the war, that stupid young hothead has already sold three woods, two farms, and an autograph manuscript of Dickens, all for cash to silence the poor husbands. What a life! How rotten and charming. And to think that his poor father was once a gentleman-in-waiting to Queen Victoria!”
“I don’t understand,” said Father.
Lady Bromley gave a piercing, high-pitched laugh like a rusty saw and said, “Good night, my sweet doctor. I am really and truly grateful to you for your devoted attention. Jewish fingers inside my corset. That’s rich! And how enchanting the nights are here in Palestine in springtime. Look around you: what nights! By the way, our beloved Alan also used to have a thriving sideline in other men’s wives when he was a cadet. But that leech Trish soon sucked him dry. Poor Trish. Poor Alan. Poor Palestine. Poor doctor. Good night to you, my poor dear Othello. Good night to me, too. By the way, who was the raving lunatic who had the nerve to call this stinking hole Jerusalem? It’s a travesty. Au revoir, doctor.”
At three o’clock in the morning, Father left the palace on foot and headed in the direction of the German Colony. Outside the railway station, he was given a lift by two pale-faced rabbis in a hearse. They were on their way, they explained, from a big wedding in the suburb of Mekor Hayim to their work at the burial society in Sanhedriya. Hans Kipnis arrived home shortly before four, in the misty morning twilight. At the same time, the admiral, his lady friend, his driver, and his bodyguard crossed a sleeping Jericho with blazing headlights and with an armed jeep for escort, and turned off toward the Kaliah Hotel on the shore of the Dead Sea. A day or two later, the black-and-silver Rolls Royce set out eastward, racing deep into the desert, across mountains and valleys, and onward, to Baghdad, Bombay, Calcutta. All along the way, Mother soulfully recited poems by Mickiewicz in Polish. The admiral, belching high-spiritedly like a big, good-natured sheepdog, ripped open her blue dress and inserted a red, affectionate hand. She felt nothing, and never for an instant interrupted her gazelle song. Only her black eyes shone with joy and tears. And when the admiral forced his fingers between her knees, she turned to him and told him that slain cavalrymen never die, they become transparent and powerful as tears.
Chapter thirteen
The following day, a heat wave hit Jerusalem. Dust rose from the desert and hung over the mountains. The sky turned deep gray, a grotesque autumnal disguise. Jerusalem barred its shutters and closed in on itself. And the white boulders blazed spitefully on every hillside.
The entire neighborhood was gathered excitedly in the garden. Father stood, in khaki shorts and a vest, staring tiredly and blankly up into the fig tree. His face looked innocent and helpless without his round glasses.
Mrs. Vishniak clapped her hands together and muttered in Yiddish, “Gott in Himmel.” Madame Yabrova and her niece tried, angry words and gentle ones. They held out the threat of the British police, the promise of marzipan, the final threat of the kibbutz.
Engineer Brzezinski, red-faced and panting, tried unsuccessfully to join two ladders together. And Mitya the lodger took advantage of the general confusion to trample the flower beds, one after another, uprooting saplings and tearing out plants and throwing them over his shoulder, chewing his shirt collar and hissing continuously through his rotting teeth, “Lies, falsehood, untruth, it’s all lies.”
Father attempted one last plea. “Come down, Hillel. Please, son, get down. Mommy will come back and it’ll all be like before. Those branches aren’t very strong. Get down, there’s a good boy. We won’t punish you. Just come down now and everything will be exactly the same as before.”
But the boy would not hear. His eyes groped at the murky gray sky, and he went on climbing up, up to the top of the tree, as the scaly fingers of the leaves caressed him from all sides, up to where the branches became twigs and buds, and still on, up to the very summit, up into the gentle trembling, to the fine delicate heights where the branches became a high-pitched melody into the depths of the sky. Night is reigning in the skies, time for you to close your eyes. Every bird is in its nest, all Jerusalem’s at rest. He saw nothing, no frantic people in the garden, no Daddy, no house and no mountains, no distant towers, no stone huts scattered among the boulders, no sun, no moon, no stars. Nothing at all. All Jerusalem’s at rest. Only a dull-gray blaze. Overcome with pleasure and astonishment, the child said to himself, “There’s nothing.” Then he gathered himself and leaped on up to the last leaf, to the shore of the sky.
At that point the firemen arrived. But Engineer Brzezinski drove them away, roaring: “Go away! There’s no fire here! Lunatics! Go to Taganrog! Go to Kherson, degenerates! That’s where the fire is! In the Crimea! At Sebastopol! There’s a great fire raging there! Get out of here! And in Odessa, too! Get out of here, the lot of you!”
And Mitya put his arms carefully around Father’s shaking shoulders and led him slowly indoors, whispering gently and with great compassion, “Jerusalem, which slayeth its prophets, shall burn the new Hellenizers in hellfire.”
In due course, the elderly Professor Julius Wertheimer, together with his cats, also moved into the little stone house in Tel Arza. An international commission of inquiry arrived in Jerusalem. There were predictions and hopes. One evening Mitya suddenly opened up his room and invited his friends in. The room was spotlessly clean, except for the slight, persistent smell. The three scholars would spend hours on end here, drinking tea and contemplating an enormous military map, guessing wildly at the future borders of the emerging Hebrew state, marking with arrows ambitious campaigns of conquest all over the Middle East. Mitya began to address Father by his first name, Hanan. Only the famous geographer Hans Walter Landauer looked down on
them with a look of skepticism and mild surprise from his picture.
Then the British left. A picture of the High Commissioner, Sir Alan Cunningham, appeared in the newspaper Davar, a slim, erect figure in a full general’s uniform, saluting the last British flag to be run down, in the port of Haifa.
A Hebrew government was finally set up in Jerusalem. The road in Tel Arza was paved, and the suburb was joined to the city. The saplings grew. The trees looked very old. The creepers climbed over the roof of the house and all over the fence. Masses of flowers made a blaze of blue. Madame Yabrova was killed by a stray shell fired on Tel Arza from the battery of the Transjordanian Legion near Nabi Samwil. Lyubov Binyamina Even-Hen, disillusioned with the Hebrew state, sailed from Haifa aboard the Moledet to join her sister in New York. There she was run over by a train, or she may have thrown herself underneath it. Professor Buber also died, at a ripe old age. In due course Father and Mitya were appointed to teaching posts at the Hebrew University, each in his own subject. Every morning they packed rolls and hard-boiled eggs and a Thermos of tea and set off together by bus for the Ratisbone and Terra Sancta buildings, where some of the departments of the university were housed temporarily until the road to Mount Scopus could be reopened. The elderly Professor Julius Wertheimer, however, finally retired and devoted himself single-mindedly to keeping house for them. The whole house gleamed. He even discovered the secret of perfect ironing. Once a month Hanan and Mitya went to see the child at school in the kibbutz. He had grown lean and bronzed. They took him chocolate and chewing gum from Jerusalem. On the hills all around Jerusalem, the enemy set up concrete pillboxes, bunkers, and gun sites.
And waited. 1974
Yehoshua Kenaz
Musical Moment
Translated by Betsy Rosenberg
Chapter one
How glorious it was, the bird with green and purple feathers, lolling plump and pampered on the copper tray that reflected back a broken image. Its gangly neck looped over the cool metal rim with an air of languor or self-love, head tucked under, beak just grazing the bloodstained wattle, glassy-eyed, stupefied, forlorn, lost in lament for its own disaster.
I never tired of gazing at this picture. Every Sabbath afternoon when we visited my father’s Aunt Frieda, I would stare and stare at it, trying with all my might to solve the riddle: what was the meaning of the dangerously pleasant sensation it evoked in me? A little to the right of the painting, in a corner of the room, Father’s aged grandmother sat in her armchair, a clean, well-starched kerchief tied around her head in a triangle, the vertex resting on the nape of her neck, the broad base overhanging her blind eyes, shading them. She would sit there in her chair like a complete stranger; an emissary from another world. Her face was doughy and her toothless mouth would gape open occasionally as if she wanted to say something, but then it would snap shut again, her lips compressed, resigned to the futility of words. Sometimes a smile would flicker over her face only to disappear behind the myriad wrinkles into the look of resignation.
Aunt Frieda would open the door for us, handsomely dressed as always, a chestnut-colored wig curling down her neck and a delicate pair of amber earrings dangling from her lobes. She was old but still pretty, elegant, slender and tall, and I remember her face as a vision of benevolence. Her husband, my father’s uncle, used to stand next to his aged mother and shout in her ear whenever someone arrived. There were times when the old woman’s deafness muddled her mind or else memory failed her, and then Father’s uncle would explain in their language how the visitor who had just walked in was related to them, and she would nod to show that she understood. Now and again she would mutter to him in her croaky voice and he would burst out laughing and banter with her to everyone’s amusement.
A pale green cloth with a golden fringe covered the round table beside which sat my two German “aunties,” Aunt Frieda’s daughters. We listened to more banter between Frieda’s husband and his mother about the coming of the Messiah or some such thing, until Frieda begged him to stop. Then she sliced the yellow cake she had set on the table, and we drank it down with a glass of thick, sweet wine.
My two aunties chattered away in their spirited German, and having settled something between them, threw me an appraising look and turned to my parents to discuss the matter of my blinking. Mother and Father quickly tried to change the subject, signaling the aunties that I was bound to understand what they said. Then Father squeezed my shoulder to show he didn’t care one bit about my blinking and Mother informed them in their language that they were never to mention the matter in front of me again because that would only upset me and make the blinking worse. That surprised me, because I wasn’t upset in the least, and I told myself that if even my own mother didn’t know what my real feelings were, maybe no one ever would.
Father’s cousin Erna was a feisty woman, a real dynamo, and exceedingly obstinate, whereas her sister was the self-effacing type, a conciliator inclined to melancholy. Those two were practically inseparable, although each had a family of her own. Erna ignored my parents’ cautions. She was a firm believer in self-control and mind over matter. She rose from the table, grabbed my hand, and told me to come along. Father smiled at me encouragingly, knowing what I was in for with his cousin. Erna led me to the far side of the room, sat me down on the big, dark leather couch, and seated herself beside me. She leaned over, her face so close to mine I could see her pores and her faintly quivering wrinkles. Behind Erna’s shoulder I saw the old woman sitting in the corner, and above her, a little to the left, the picture of the dying bird. Auntie Erna began by informing me that in her opinion this whole blinking business was the result of my being a spoiled little boy. It was exactly like thumb sucking. And just as we know how to combat thumb sucking, so we have ways to combat this blinking business too. Now, as everyone knows, thumb-sucking is combatable by sprinkling a little mustard or hot pepper on the offending finger, and then when the child puts his thumb in his mouth, the results are so disastrous he will think twice before trying it again, unless, of course, he wants a second taste of hell. And there are shrewd ways to combat blinking too; only, she wouldn’t reveal them just yet. But we must always remember that the war on blinking, like the war on thumb sucking, is fought solely for the sake of the child, the child and his “Familie”. Auntie Erna pronounced “Familie” in her special German accent, beaming with virtue and supreme responsibility. We know for a fact, she said, that thumb-suckers can do themselves a great deal of harm. There are certain juices produced in the mouth that erode whatever they contact and these may gradually wear the thumb down to a tiny stump that eventually drops off, leaving the poor child with a handicap for the rest of his life. And as to blinking, it is a well-known fact that the lid is attached to the eye by a set of tiny muscles that protect our precious organ from dust and foreign objects. If, however, these muscles are repeatedly abused, they degenerate like the worn-out hinges on a door that bangs every time the wind blows, leaving the house open to havoc. Now, when little children abuse these muscles and wear them out, they open their eyes in their sleep sometimes, like certain animals do, and then have horrifying nightmares.
“We must put a stop to this at once!” said Auntie Erna. “It is a source of distress for your parents and an embarrassment to the entire ‘Familie.’ People ask questions, they don’t understand. So if not for your own sake, then at least for the sake of “die Familie”, you must make every effort to put a stop to this ugly, ugly blinking.”
Auntie Erna winced as she pronounced the words “ugly, ugly,” twisting her face and writhing and squeezing her eyes shut and compressing her lips, and then opening her eyes again, bulging them out, and suddenly squeezing them shut again to show me how awful it looked. It was so exaggerated, I could see, that I burst out laughing, and Erna couldn’t help laughing with me, though she continued to say, “But that’s how it looks, I tell you, that’s just how it looks.”
My other auntie, Erna’s sister, approached the leather couch and asked E
rna to leave me alone and come back to the table. She would not sit down without Erna. Erna muttered something in their language and her sister smiled dejectedly and gave a little shrug, and stood there a little while longer before returning to the table alone.
Auntie Erna came up with a new step-by-step strategy to stop my blinking. I was to count to twenty between blinks. Once I got used to that, I was to count to thirty, and then forty. By the time I reached a hundred, she assured me, the habit would be broken. She suggested that we start there and then with the first exercise, from the simple to the difficult, and count to twenty without blinking. I did as she instructed. Watching her face, I began to count quietly. When I got to seven, I felt a strong urge to blink, if only for an instant, but I controlled myself.
Gradually the room grew dim around me, and my eyes came to rest on Father’s old grandmother who was sitting nearby, sequestered from the world, and through the dimness I thought I saw her clasp her hands over her head in alarm. She was probably just straightening her kerchief, but I didn’t perceive it like that. Auntie Erna sounded far away as she slowly counted: nine, ten, eleven. Her sonorous voice was stern and unrelenting like a clock of doom—twelve, thirteen, fourteen—and my eyes brimmed over from the strain and I couldn’t see Father’s grandmother anymore because my lashes were all gluey.
Mother and Father hurried over to rescue me from Auntie Erna, who emitted little huffs of disapproval. My failure implied her own, the failure of her strategy and perhaps of the entire “Familie,” and she raged at my parents for being too lenient and spoiling me. “He’ll never stop,” she said, “I tell you, he’ll never stop. He isn’t even willing to make an effort, not for his sake, not for yours, and not for ‘die Familie.’ ”