"Come out, unclean! Come out in the name of G — d!"
But it was only excited neighbors who came out of every doorway, and many of them were in their pajamas. Helena Grill ran from one man to another, begging them at least to save the children. I caught sight of Mr. Nehamkin standing mildly and thoughtfully at the gate of his garden. He was wearing a dark-blue suit, a Polish tie, a flaming paper flower in his buttonhole, and a polite smile of forgiveness on his face; he was clasping his walking stick by its tiger's-head handle.
Mother chose to stay indoors. She sent father to wake up Mrs. Vishniak the pharmacist. Mother was always afraid that somebody might faint or that there might be an accident. But there was no accident. We saw a colorful procession wending its way toward us out of the east, from the direction of the Bokharan Quarter. At its head was a little old man with an unwashed air, riding on a little ass. He must have been ill, or perhaps only exhausted, because he was propped up on either side by Kurdish porters. They were lean and dark-bristled, with sacks tied around their waists.
Following close on the heels of the old man came the whole Bokharan Quarter, men, women, and children, just like the Exodus from Egypt we were learning about at school. Someone was beating on an old tin can, others were chanting guttural hymns, or mumbling prayers and incantations. The ass seemed to me piteously meek and wretched. It was far from healthy, and it wasn't even white. I looked around for Ephraim, but he was nowhere to be seen. His old father beamed at me, touched my hair, and said peacefully:
"Blessed are they that believe."
The procession, meanwhile, had turned off Zephaniah Street onto Amos Street. It continued westward along the stone wall of the Schneller Barracks and came to a halt outside the main gate, opposite the clock tower.
All the children of the neighborhood, myself among them, rushed from either flank of the procession up to the gate. Here we stopped, because the British sentries had cocked their Tommy guns and rested them, pointing at the crowd, on top of the sandbag barricade.
The Schneller tower was crowned by an indecipherable inscription in Gothic characters. The clock itself had stopped many years before. It chimed regularly every half hour, day and night, but its hands were lifeless. They pointed immovably to precisely three minutes past three. A rumor ran through the crowd: the stranger who had arrived out of nowhere at midnight would work a miracle and make time run backward. He would summon King David and all his horsemen out of the top of the tower. The massed troops of the ten lost tribes would come sweeping down from the mountains. The old Bokharan women started beating their breasts with their wrinkled fists. A cripple began to declaim, "This is the day which the Lord hath made," then suddenly thought better of it and fell silent. Together with Boaz, Joab, and Abner and all the other boys of the neighborhood, I chanted ecstatically:
"Free immigra-tion, He-brew state!"
"Woe upon me," cried Rabbi Lufban, but nobody heard him.
The British blocked the road with an armored car. An officer stood up in it holding a loudspeaker. He was presumably telling the crowd to disperse, but there must have been some flaw, since we could only see his lips moving. The noise died down. There was a silence like the still, small voice we had learned about at school, and in the silence birds and a cockcrowing far away. It was just before the dawn. The light was gray and blue. The cypress trees and the great water tower on top of Romema Hill seemed to be receding into the gentle mist. Then the old man straightened himself up on his ass,'drew a filthy handkerchief from the folds of his robe, and hawked and spat into it. The people were silent. He folded the handkerchief and put it away, raised his head, carefully put on a pair of spectacles, pointed to the clock or perhaps to the tower with a trembling finger, and mumbled some words that I did not catch; but I could see him swelling, reddening, coming to the boil, and suddenly he cried out in a clear, strong voice:
"Let the sun rise and let the deed be done. Now!"
At that very moment the sun rose, gigantic, yellow, dazzling the mountaintop to the east, blazing on the Paternoster and Augusta Victoria towers, shimmering on the Mount of Olives, flashing terribly on the wooded slopes, gleaming off the cisterns on all the roofs of Geula, Ahva, Kerem Avraham and Mekor Baruch. I felt like running away, because it looked as though the whole of Jerusalem were on fire.
Everybody, believers and skeptics alike, Mr. Nehamkin, Rabbi Lufban — all watched the sun rise and turned their eyes as one man toward the clock tower. Even the British officer in the armored car looked around.
But the clock had not moved: still three minutes past three.
Far away, in the Geran Colony, a train howled. Somebody lit a cigarette. There was whispering. A woman began to laugh or sob. Then the old man sighed, slipped off the back of the gray donkey, leaned trembling on the arms of his Kurdish bodyguard, and said sadly:
"Another time."
At once, in furious Yiddish, the Venerable Rabbi Zischa Lufban ordered his disciples to send the scoffers and workers of iniquity straight back to the dark holes they had crawled out of and put an end to this blasphemous charade. The British officer, too, finally managed to make his loudspeaker work and gave the crowd five minutes to disperse peacefully.
I elbowed my way through to Mr. Nehamkin.
"Please, Mr. Nehamkin, what's going to happen now?"
He transferred his carved walking stick to his other hand, touched my forehead tenderly, and smoothed my hair back from my eyes. His hand was cold and ancient, but his voice was like a caress:
"We, Uriel, we have stamina. We shall go on waiting."
After a while, the British police appeared from the direction of Romema and began to disperse the throng. But they were powerless to undo what had been done: under cover of the press and tumult, almost as though it had all been prearranged, Ephraim and his comrades had plastered the walls, shutters, telegraph poles, and shopwindows with subversive posters. They proclaimed in inflammatory slogans that the days of Nazi-British rule were numbered, that the Hebrew Underground had passed sentence of death on the High Commissioner and would soon execute the sentence, and that as Judea had fallen in blood and fire, so in blood and fire it would arise again.
Then the saints returned to their synagogue, the Bokharans went their various ways, the shops opened, the mountains gradually caught fire, and another cruel summer's day began in Jerusalem.
3
Whenever he came home from his wanderings, Ephraim would visit us in the late afternoon, to give me a clandestine examination in radio waves and frequencies, to play a game of chess with my father, and to gaze from a distance at my mother.
While my father and Ephraim were absorbed in their game of chess, my mother would sit at the piano, with her face toward the window and her back to the room. Ephraim looked at her not longingly, like the heroes in the pictures, but with an ex-pression that resembled dismay. I myself was dismayed at their silence. At that time, distant sounds of firing could be heard almost every evening in Jerusalem. Father chewed mint leaves: he was always afraid of having bad breath. Ephraim smoked so much that sometimes his eyes watered. Mother played the same étude over and over again, as if she had made up her mind never to move on until she had received an answer. Outside the wind touched the trees as if pleading for silence. But there was silence anyway.