On the sill of the deep-set window that faced north, my battlefields were laid out. Corks, pushpins, silver foil, matchboxes, and empty cigarette packs were battleships, troops, and tanks. I conducted cunning mopping-up operations by the army of Bar Kochba and Marshal Budënny against the Nazi storm troopers. By the middle of the summer holidays my Maccabees had conquered Athens, breached the walls of Rome, burned its palaces and razed its towers, and raced on to besiege Berlin and London. By the time the winter rain and snow made the roads impassable, we would force them to surrender unconditionally.
It was Ephraim who had outlined the strategy.
"Always attack on the flank," he instructed me, "always from the desert, from the forest, from the mountains, always from where you are least expected."
His eyes glowed as he spoke, and he could not keep his hands still. He would add in a whisper, "Only don't trust them. Never trust them. They're all thirsting for our blood."
He it was, too, who hit on the idea of the dry-land submarines, which we called "X-ray subs"; they could travel underground through the sea of molten lava and demolish whole cities by torpedoing them from underneath.
"The earth shall tremble," he would say, "cities shall be burned to ashes, towers shall totter, and only then shall we know rest."
How I loved to see him swell with rage and then subside into silence.
My heart went out to him as he promised me earthquakes, tottering towers, and rest.
I would plead, "But when, Ephraim?"
He would respond with one of his cold, practical smiles. And say nothing.
Worse still, he would suddenly abandon me and tease me mercilessly.
"Now, Uri, you just go on playing with your toys. I've got real work to do. Every detail has to be taken care of well in advance."
All night long, Ephraim would experiment with cosmic radio waves and frequencies, in an attempt to isolate the death ray. If I begged him to give me at least a hint of what the death ray was, he would burst out, with a desperate grin:
"Sting ray. Disarray. Hip-hip-hooray. Why don't you learn to keep your mouth shut and wait for orders like a proper soldier, or else go and play with marbles and tops and paper darts with the other kids. Go on. Scram. Why are you always following me around? What do you think I am, your nursemaid? Go on, now, piss off."
I withdrew from the workshop with my tail between my legs, like a field marshal stripped of his decorations and insignia and ignominiously discharged. I sat down on the cracked stone steps. I tickled myself behind the knees with pine needles. I tried in vain to hypnotize a stupid cat on the garden fence. And repented.
Ephraim and his father the poet ran their small workshop jointly. Mr. Nehamkin received the radios and electrical implements for repair and kept a record of them, collected overdue payments, exchanged views and surmises about the political situation with the customers, adducing evidence from Holy Writ, and entered details of income and expenditure in his copperplate hand in a large ledger. He was empowered to authorize a discount or even credit in certain cases.
Ephraim sometimes allowed his father and me to wind galvanized copper wire onto wooden spools. Once he took advantage of his father's hardness of hearing to promise me in an undertone:
"When he's dead, I'll take you on instead. You can be the poet and cashier then."
At once he changed his mind.
"No, we'll die first, and he'll pronounce flowery orations over our graves. They were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided. Surely each night they shall arise and continue to fight the great fight for their people. Someining like that. The war is going to be a tough and bloody one. Only the generations to come will enjoy rest."
When he was not away on his wanderings, Ephraim used to sit all morning daydreaming among the broken irons and phonographs and antiquated radios. Sometimes he would explode with rage and attack these useless gadgets with screwdriver and pliers. He dismantled them completely, combined parts from different sources, and succeeded in transforming a heap of worthless junk into a gleaming piece of modern equipment. His favorite word was "rejuvenation." His work, as he described it, was to rejuvenate antediluvian equipment whose owners had given it up as beyond repair. But when his fit of rage had passed, he lapsed once more into drowsiness. The gray summer dust settled everywhere. Flies buzzed busily, while a spider lay in wait for them in its thicket in the corner. Ephraim would yawn like a whining fox, stretch himself furiously, spit twice on the floor, and repair Mrs. Vishniak's iron almost as an afterthought. Then he would plunge back into his usual morning reverie.
At lunchtime, he would fry potatoes for us all and share some sausages with his father. Then he would strip off his overalls and collapse onto the sweaty mattress in his underwear, as if exhausted by a hard morning's work. He slept restlessly till the onset of twilight, while we guarded him from the girls.
But in the evenings, I saw Ephraim come to hidden life, and then I was truly his lieutenant. He shinned up the drainpipe like a shadowy cat, rigged up various antennas on the roof, and began experimenting with frequencies. My task was to sit in the dark workshop among the glowing receivers and write down what I heard. Until I was called home to bed, and he continued on his own to search relentlessly for the single elusive signal that he was trying to isolate from the stream of astral rays.
Once he condescended to favor me with a simplified explanation. Gravity is a form of radiation. Here, look: in my left hand a hammer, in my right a cigarette; they both hit the ground at exactly the same time, but not with the same impact. Nature always contrives to produce opposing pairs: life and death, fire and water, hope and despair. So there must be some contrary ray somewhere that counteracts the ray of gravity and once we've found it everything will be possible and now just you scram and forget everything you've heard.
I could not understand the scientific meaning of all this. But as a military man myself, I fully realized what fate lay in store for the British Empire once we had mastered this secret ray.
Once in a while, one of the girls would slip through our defenses and manage to reach Ephraim and spend the night with him. But even on these nights, Ephraim did not switch off the receivers that brought him the astral signals. Lovemaking must have taken place inside his room to the accompaniment of piercing bleeps and whistles from outer space. Or perhaps not love, but some other kind of union that was not ugly, not sweaty, something I would have given my life to share and once I even crept up behind the shuttered window in the dark and hid like an owl in the sticky pepper tree and strained with all my might to hear and I shivered at the sounds I heard in the darkness because I did not know if they were sobs or muffled laughs or radio signals from the stars, and suddenly I panicked and the pepper tree smeared me with a bitter stickiness and I thought that everything was about to shatter to smithereens and that Ephraim and the girl would die and Mr. Nehamkin and Mommy and Daddy would die and I would be left all alone in the ashes of Jerusalem and the smell of the pepper tree would give me away and bloodthirsty gangs would swoop down on Jerusalem out of the mountains and I would be all alone. So I slipped down from the tree and crept around the house in the dark. I was startled by a startled cat. I stood at the window of the old poet's room, pressed my face against the wire mesh, and shouted in a whisper: