What it was, however, that he had discovered in his wanderings, Ephraim did not see fit to disclose to me.
Despite his scornful expression, despite his low brow and rough hands, he had various girls who came to him, including a skinny student from the university on Mount Scopus. Sometimes they would stay with him until daybreak. These visitors seemed to me unnecessary; not one of them was pretty or gay. I hated them because they called Ephraim by the ugly pet name Froike, and because I was afraid that love or lust would make him give away to them at night secrets that belonged to the two of us alone; I had sometimes seen in the movies how love can make even heroes lose their wits, and then there is no going back.
Once I helped set a trap with the Grill boys from next door. We tied a rusty tin can full of muddy water to a branch of the mulberry tree, and ran a fine cord from it across the lane. Then we hid in the tree. The skinny girl from Mount Scopus came down the lane, carefully stepped over the cord, cast a reproachful look up into the tree, and remarked sadly:
"You should be ashamed of yourselves."
The Grill boys began to laugh. I laughed with them. Then we put broken glass into some mailboxes.
Later, I felt suddenly ashamed. I felt ashamed for most of the morning, and at lunchtime I went to the workshop and made a clean breast of it to Ephraim. I didn't mention the Grill boys. I took all the blame upon myself. Ephraim locked the door, made me call our trap a stupid, childish prank, and forgave me. He taught me how to fill a tin can with gasoline and use a fuse to ignite it, so that when the time came I could play my part in the final battle and not go as a lamb to the slaughter, like the Jewish children in Europe.
Then Ephraim turned to the dry, dusty-looking girl who was sitting silently on his bed sewing a button on for him, and who seemed to me to have no lips:
"Uriel is in on it," he said. "He's a serious boy. And in general," he added, "there's excellent human material here in the neighborhood. This is Ruhama. And she's not what you think."
Ruhama straightened her glasses with two fingers, still holding the needle. She said nothing. I did not speak, either. Secretly I was convinced that it was this Ruhama who would betray us all to the British police. I thought it strange that Ephraim should be so irresponsible as to have her in his workshop and let her sit on his bed and even stay all night sometimes. Love, I thought to myself, could definitely wait until after the victory. She wasn't even pretty. She didn't even talk to me.
The old poet used to do everything in his power to stop the girls going to the workshop. Sometimes he would lie in wait for them at the gate. But the garden had two entrances, and in places the fence was broken down, and anyway Ephraim's room had a back entrance from the rocky garden, up three stone steps that were slippery with dead pine needles.
Sometimes the poet could not contain himself: he would intercept one of the girls and smile at her with extreme politeness:
"Excuse me, dear lady, but I think you must have made a mistake. I must inform you, with all due respect, that this is neither an alehouse nor a den of thieves. This is a private house. And anyway, the young man is not here, he is away on his travels, he has left no instructions — who am I to say when he will take it into his head to return?"
From the beginning of the summer holidays, there was a secret alliance between Mr. Nehamkin and me against these periodic incursions. He lay in wait in front of the house, while I lurked in the garden.
Ephraim, if he was not away on his wanderings, liked to sleep from after lunch until the evening twilight. He would sleep, soaked in sweat, on a mattress in his workshop. He would toss and groan in his sleep, ward something off with his fists, turn over suddenly with a moan. I would tiptoe in to listen in case he uttered secrets in his dreams, so that I could keep them from prying ears. Then I would tiptoe out again and resume my watch.
If ever one of the girls came to disturb Ephraim's slumbers, we would both, Mr. Nehamkin and I, waylay her at the gate. We were armed with uncompromising replies to the mincing question "Where's Froike?"
"I'm his lieutenant. He's not in," I would say darkly.
And Mr. Nehamkin would add softly:
"It is quite impossible to know when the young man will return from his wanderings. It may be tomorrow, or the day after, or it may not be for many days."
Sometimes the girl would ask us to pass along a note or a message. These we would always refuse. There was no need. There was no point. And in any case, in times like these, who accepts letters from strangers?
The girl would either protest or apologize, and promise to call again some other time. She would hesitantly employ some such word as "misunderstanding" or "regret" and be on her way.
The moment her back was turned, Mr. Nehamkin would begin to justify our action in carefully chosen words:
"We told no lie; nor did we mislead the young lady. After all, slumber is a kind of distant wandering to remote worlds. As for billets-doux and notes, it is explicitly forbidden for a man to make himself a messenger of sin."
On such occasions he would also add some cautious prognostication prompted by the sight of the girl disappearing down the lane:
"She will surely soon find herself another young man, or maybe even two, according to the desire of her heart, whereas we have only one Ephraim. Therefore we shall continue to stand as a bulwark and as one man, the wretched poet Nehamkin and the excellent child Uriel. We shall never allow strangers to lead us astray. The aged poet and the youth shall hold the fort and guard the truth. Now return in peace to your wonted sport, and I shall go on my weary way. Each to his allotted task. O, that it may be granted us to behold the deliverance of Jerusalem."
2
Mr. Nehamkin was round and cuddly like a teddy bear. He dragged his feet and always walked with the aid of a carved stick. He looked as though he found his body a tiresome burden, as though he was forced to drag it around with him from place to place against his will, like a man carrying a heavy bundle that was gradually coming undone. The poet had discovered in Holy Writ one or two vague hints that in the Judean Desert, below Jerusalem, a green sea was hidden that no eye had ever beheld, not the Dead Sea, not a sea at all, but springs or wells of water, where were the Essenes and dreamers whom not even the Roman legions had been able to discover, and that was where he meant to go one of these days to shrug off his burden and set off lightened and freed along his own unique road.
He would say:
"How sorry I am for them. I could weep for them. Eyes have they but they see not."
Or:
"Their mouths speak but their ears hear not. The decree has gone forth. Their time has expired. The sword is already flashing. But as for them, they eat and drink. To outward appearances they are fearlessly made, but in truth they are merely blinded. Sorrow and compassion rend my heart."
At times it seemed as though Mr. Nehamkin's prophecies were almost about to come true. Once, in the doorway of the grocer's, he bent over and whispered to me that the King of Israel would soon rise up from his hiding place in the clefts of the mountain and slay the High Commissioner and seize his throne in Jerusalem. Another time it was revealed to him in a dream that Hitler was not dead but had hidden himself away among the murderous Bedouins in the darkness of the tents of Kedar. And in the middle of the summer holidays, a few days before the fast of Ab, he took me among the drought-smitten oleanders in the garden and urged me to water the plants because the feet of the Messenger were already standing at the gates of Jerusalem. At five o'clock on the following morning, the neighborhood was awakened by sounds of shouting and moaning. I leaped into my gym shorts and rushed outside with no shoes on. The three Grill boys, Boaz, Joab, and Abner, were standing in the middle of the lane beating furiously on a broken tar drum. Half-dressed women ran out of the houses. Somebody shouted a question, and other voices shouted back. The dogs were barking as though they were out of their minds. From the Faithful Remnant Synagogue, the Venerable Rabbi Zischa Lufban emerged, with a retinue of saints and scholars, and cried out repeatedly in an awe-inspiring voice: