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, gun sites.
And waited.
1974
Mr. Levi
1
Once upon a time, many years ago, there lived in Jerusalem an old poet by the name of Nehamkin. He had come from Vilna and settled in a low stone house with a tiled roof in a narrow alley off Zephaniah Street. Here he wrote his poems, and here every summer he sat in a deck chair in the garden counting the hours and the days.
This quarter of the city had been built in a large orchard on a hillside, with a view of the mountains that surround Jerusalem. Every passing breeze caused a shiver. Fig trees and mulberry trees, pomegranates and grapevines, were forever rustling and whispering as though asking us to be quiet. The poet Nehamkin was already slightly deaf, but he tried to capture the rustling of the trees in his poems, interpreting it in his own way. The whisper of the leaves in the breeze, the scent of the blossoms, the smell of dry thistles in the late summer, all seemed to him to be hinting at an important event that was imminent. His poems were always full of surmises.
One by one, simple stone-built houses sprang up among the trees of the orchard. They had balconies with rusty iron railings, low fences, and gates adorned with a Star of David or the word ZION.
Little by little the settlers neglected the trees. Shady pines gradually overwhelmed the vines and pomegranates. Occasional bursts of pomegranate blossom were snuffed out by the children before they ever bore fruit. Among the untended trees and the outcrops of rock, there were attempts at planting oleanders, violets, and geraniums. But the flower beds were quickly forgotten, trampled underfoot, filled with thorns and broken glass, and these plants, too, if they did not wither and die, grew wild. In the backyards of the houses, ramshackle sheds proliferated, built out of the packing cases in which the settlers had transported their belongings from Russia and Poland. Some of them nailed empty olive cans to wooden poles, called them dovecotes, and waited for the doves to come. In the meantime, the only birds to nest in the area were crows and swallows. Somewhere there lurked a persistent cuckoo.
The residents longed to leave Jerusalem and settle somewhere less extreme. Some of them fixed their sights on other suburbs, such as Beit ha-Kerem, Talpiyot, or Rehavia. They believed almost without exception that the hard times would soon be over, the Hebrew state would be set up, and everything would change for the better. Surely they had completed in full their term of suffering. Meanwhile, the first children were born and grew up in the neighborhood, and it was almost impossible to explain to them why and from where their parents had come here, and what it was they were waiting for.
The poet Nehamkin lived with his only son, Ephraim, who was an electrician and ideologist. Like most of the children of the district, I, too, believed that this Ephraim played some secret and terrible role in the Hebrew Underground. In outward appearance, he was short, dark, wiry-haired, a technician who almost always wore blue overalls and found it hard to keep his hands still. He repaired irons and radios, and even built transmitters with his own hands. He sometimes disappeared for days on end, to return, eventually, suntanned and withdrawn, with an expression of contempt or disgust on his face, as if in the course of his wanderings he had seen things that had filled him with despair. Ephraim and I shared a secret. At the end of the winter, he had made me his lieutenant. One of his lieutenants, that is.