I could see the German houses at the approach to the suburb of Romema, and the brown tower from which the water ran at night in underground pipes till it reached even us. I could see tiled roofs and pitch-covered roofs, and forest upon forest of washing all over the city, as if the Hebrew state had suddenly sprung up and the whole city were dressed in multicolored bunting. And I could see the midday sunlight growing brighter and brighter as if it would never stop and I would be absorbed in the sunshine and become invisible and pass through walls like a moonbeam and wreak revenge and go to Bat-Ammi at night and say: Don't be afraid Bat-Ammi you can't see me but feel me it's me I've come to take you away from here let's leave this place and go to the forests of leopards and there we shall be.
The city was turning white. White summer dust had settled on the treetops. The light of Jerusalem was a desert light. In the heart of the Judean Desert there was a sea, not a sea at all but springs of water, the home of the Essenes and the dreamers whom the Roman legions had not been able to discover. From there the wind blew bearing a smell of dry dust and a smell of salt. This would be the last time I'd cry. There would be no more tears, even when the English tore out my fingernails one by one, I wouldn't tell about the man disguised as the doctor, as Mr. Szczupak, in Daddy's printing press.
Through the dust and salt came another smell, faintly: I could not tell whether it came from far away, from the Mountains of Moab, from the springs of water, or whether it originated nearby, in the house or even inside me. If you tried to say to those mountains, "With all the warmth of my heart and until my dying breath," they would burst out laughing. They might not even deign to laugh, because they were mountains and we were none of their business and they couldn't care less what happened to us here. Theirs was a different language. If only I knew the language of the mountains I would also be at rest, I couldn't care less what.
I'd learn.
Meanwhile, I wouldn't budge from my lookout post on the roof, to sound the alarm if they came again to search from house to house. The city of Jerusalem was stricken with sea-longing through the blue glass of the telescope I had made. The pine trees were smoke. The stone and corrugated iron were burnished brass, and the forests of washing were flights of birds in the wind.
I stood on guard on the roof till two o'clock in the afternoon. At two my father came out of the basement, followed by Abrasha, Ephraim, and Lilienblum. He locked the iron door. They exchanged a few words and left. They had left Mr. Szczupak in the basement, unless there was a tunnel underneath the electric motor.
Not Mr. Szczupak. His brother. Someone else. A man who had arrived in the baker's van disguised as a doctor, but underneath the disguise there was no Mr. Szczupak but a wiry youth a leopard whose eyes flashed lightning.
We ate at three o'clock: bean soup, rissoles, potatoes, and raw carrots. Then I drank down two glasses of iced lemonade and hurried back to my lookout post, so that I could be the first to give warning of danger.
But there was no danger. Only the deepening evening, gathering force among the pine trees. At six o'clock, a railway engine hooted away in the German Colony. It's a long, long way. I could observe the scorching sun gradually swathed in soot above Sheikh Badr and then drifting away to Givat Shaul and beginning to sink in the violet clouds and touching the hills and the hills turning violet too till it was impossible to tell what was hill and what was cloud and what was troops of horses at the edge of the sky.
Finally the horizon darkened. Jerusalem was left alone, dotted here and there with spots of yellow light. The street lamp in our lane also started to glow weakly. Mother came out onto the balcony to call me indoors.
In the living room, my father and Ephraim were sitting over the chessboard, one in a white vest and the other in a khaki shirt left unbuttoned on purpose to expose his dark chest.
The elderly poet dozed peacefully in the armchair.
He was deaf and tormented, his head withdrawn into his shoulders. I was suddenly reminded of the empty tortoise shell in the yard. I remembered how Ephraim had said that I would replace Mr. Nehamkin and be the poet and cashier. How he had regretted his words, and how he had reveled in the funeral oration his father would pronounce over the two of us when we had fallen side by side on the battlefield.
"Are we expecting a visitor?" I asked, and immediately was sorry I asked.
Ephraim pursed his lips.
"Did you say something?" he hissed venomously.
"Don't worry," Father put in anxiously. "Uri's all right."
Ephraim said:
"Don't talk so much, Kolodny. Every word is one word too many."
"That'll do now; stop it, the pair of you," Mother entreated. "Don't start quarreling."
Silence fell.
11
I could guess for myself what they had not told me. Underneath the printing press there was a steel trap door in the floor. From this trap door a winding staircase led down into an underground cavern under the house, an ancient catacomb or an Arab rock cave. Presumably Ephraim and his comrades were anxious to turn it into a bunker where we could shelter safely when the day of reckoning came. All along the cold rock walls, by lantern light, were ranged large cans of water and fuel, cans of provisions, ammunition crates, hand grenades, batteries and radio transmitters, maybe even some of Mr. Nehamkin's sacred books. And there, for the moment, Mr. Szczupak was resting till the heat was off; no, not Mr. Szczupak, the amazing lean leopard youth.
Perhaps he would come up tonight. Inside his doctor's bag he had a sniper's rifle, dismantled. The kitchen window commanded a view of the parade ground of the Schneller Barracks. The High Commissioner would come to review the troops, and suddenly a tiny flower would sprout on his forehead, and he would totter and fall. Then Ephraim and his comrades would emerge from their various hiding places and put the John of Gischala plan into operation. At a single stroke. I'll keep my clothes on tonight. I won't sleep. The earth will quake, cities will blaze, towers will topple to the ground. No more counting of the hours and days.
And when victory was ours, the Grill family would be carted off to the traitor's camps, but I would stand in the yard and say softly: All except Bat-Ammi. Let her be. She's all right. The commander would tell them to do as I said and release the girl at once.
"Where are you?" said Father. "Building castles in Spain?"
"The boy's miserable," said Mother.
"Nobody's miserable," I said. "I've come to give you a hand."
In the kitchen everything was carefully laid out on the black glass-topped trolley. Six teaspoons. Six cups. Six dessert plates. They'd brought out the best crockery tonight. Sugar, milk, lemon. Reinforcements of fruit and nuts. Paper napkins, each with a picture of a white-sailed fishing boat. The kettle began to whistle. Ephraim went out and came back with the visitor.
"Good evening," we all said.
He shrugged.
From close up, in the electric light, he was an immaculately dressed gentleman with woolly gray hair and wolflike jaws. He took off his jacket, blew some specks of dust off it, and draped it over the back of his chair. Then he pinched both trouser seams a little way above the knee, lifted them slightly, and sat down. Only then did he speak.
"All right."
When the visitor took off his jacket, I could see that his trousers were held up by a pair of striped suspenders, but that he was also wearing a tightly fastened belt.
Father said:
"Now, look here, Uri. Listen carefully. This is Mr. Levi. He's our guest. Mr. Levi is going to stay with us for a little while, because where he lives there are certain difficulties. As far as the neighbors are concerned, and the same goes even for Mr. Lilienblum and Comrade Abrasha, Mr. Levi is your uncle; he has just arrived from abroad on an illegal immigrant ship, and we are seeing about his papers. I hope I need say no more."