Panic seizes me at the very possibility of such a thought's occurring to me. No. Tonight, as usual, I shall be alone. Good night.
Sunday
September 7, 1947
Dear Mina,
I do not know what words one can use to describe to you a blue autumn morning such as we had here today, before the westerly wind blew up, bringing with it a cold, cloudy evening. The whole morning was flooded a deep sky-blue. Much more than a tone or a color: it was such a pure, concentrated blue that it felt like a potion. The buildings and plants responded with a general awakening, as though redoubling their hold on their own colors, or giving concrete expression to a national slogan that is current at the moment in the Hebrew newspapers and Underground broadcasts: To any provocation we shall react twofold; we are determined to stand by what is ours to the last.
That is to say, the blazing geraniums, for instance, in gardens, in backyards, in olive cans on verandas, in window boxes. Or the Jerusalem stone: this morning it is truly "shouting from the walls," in a powerful, concentrated gray. An unalloyed gray, like the color of your eyes. Or the flowering creeper climbing up the olive tree next to the grocer's, dotted all over with points of dark-blue brilliance. It all looked like a painting by an overenthusiastic amateur who has not learned, and has no wish to learn, the secret of understatement. I am almost tempted to use biblical Hebrew words, like sardius, beryl, carbuncle — even though the precise meaning of these words is unknown to me.
Should this miracle be attributed to the clarity of the desert air? To the breath of autumn? To my illness, perhaps? Or to some change that is impending? I have no answer to all these questions. I must try to define my feelings in words, and so I go back to writing: Today I feel painful longings for sights that are present, as though they were recollected images. As though they had already passed, perhaps as though they had passed beyond recall forever. Longings so powerful that I feel an urgent need to do something at once, something unusual, perhaps to put on a light jacket and go out for a walk. To the Tel Arza woods. Among the knitting mothers and their infants sprawled on rugs. To recall the Sunday outings of my childhood to the Vienna woods, and suddenly to sense a smell of other autumns, elsewhere, a smell of lakes, mushrooms, droplets of dew on the branches of fir trees, the smell of Lederhosen, the smoke of holiday-makers' campfires, the aroma of freshly ground coffee. How strange I must have seemed this morning to the neighbors' wives in the Tel Arza woods: Look, there is Dr. Nussbaum out for a walk, tall and elegantly dressed, his hands clasped behind his back, smiling to himself as he treads the pine needles underfoot, as though he has just discovered an amusing solution.
"Good morning, Dr. Nussbaum, how are you this morning, and what are they saying at the Jewish Agency?"
"Good morning, a beautiful morning, Mrs. Litvak, I'm fairly well, thank you, and how your lovely little boy is growing. Little girl, I'm sorry. But still lovely."
"As you know, sir, happy are we who have been permitted to behold the light of Jerusalem with the eyes of the flesh and not merely with the eyes of the spirit, and surely what our eyes behold today is as nothing compared to the light that tomorrow will bring. Happy is he who waits."
"Yes indeed, Mr. Nehamkin, yes indeed. It's a wonderful day today, and I am very glad to see you so hale and hearty."
"Since you are also out for a stroll, sir, permit me to accompany you. Together we shall walk, and together our eyes shall behold, for, as it is written, the testimony of two witnesses is valid."
Only in this case the two witnesses were none too healthy. We were soon tired. My neighbor the poet Nehamkin apologized and turned for home, but not before assuring me that a momentous change would soon take place in Jerusalem.
And I, as usual, turned into the Kapitanski brothers' milk bar for a vegetarian lunch: tomato soup, two fried eggs, eggplant salad, buttermilk, and a glass of tea. Then I came home, and, without any pill or injection, I fell into a deep afternoon sleep: as if I had been drinking wine.
At half past four there was another meeting of the local committee in my apartment. As I must have written to you already, even Kerem Avraham is setting up its own civil-defense council.
Four or five representatives of the neighbors came, including Mrs. Litvak, who qualified as a nurse before she married. She brought some homemade biscuits with her, and refused to allow me to help her serve the coffee; all I had to do was to tell her where I kept the sugar and the tray — no, no need, she'd already found them. She had found the lemon, too. And how wonderfully tidy my kitchen was! She would bring her husband, Litvak, here one day to let him see with his own eyes and learn a thing or two. The head of a school for workers' children, and he couldn't even wash a glass properly. Still, it was her fate. She mustn't complain.
And so the meeting began, while we were still being served coffee and shortcake, and I was being treated like a guest in my own home.
"Well," said Mrs. Litvak, "let's get down to business. Dr. Nussbaum, would you like to begin."
"Perhaps we might take up where we left off last week," I suggested. "There's no need to start from scratch every time."
"We were talking about the possibility of an apartment we could use as an HQ," Comrade Lustig said, "somewhere where the committee could organize itself, which could be manned day and night in an emergency. Or at least a room, or a basement."
He spoke standing up, and when he had finished he sat down. Lustig is a little man, with puffy bags under his brown eyes, and a perpetual look of silent amazement on his face, as though he has just been called some terrible name in the street for no reason. Zevulun Grill, a flaming redhead, whose two missing front teeth give him the look of a dangerous brawler, added:
"We were also talking about a radio transmitter. And, as usual, we did nothing about it."
Ephraim Nehamkin, the curly-haired radio technician, nodded his head twice, as if Grill's words corresponded precisely to what one might expect from him, and anyone who harbored any illusions about him had better wake up before it was too late.
"Ephraim," I said, "it might be better if we conducted our discussion by means of words, rather than dumb show. Perhaps you'd like to tell us all what has made you so angry?"
"We've got one," Ephraim growled. "It's always the same old story with us: we talk about the past instead of the present."
"What have we got?"
"A radio. Didn't I say last week that I was putting a battery transmitter together for you. Anyway," he suddenly exploded, "what the hell do we need a transmitter for? To beg the English to do us a favor and stay here to save us from the Arabs? To prick the conscience of the world with biblical quotations? To explain nicely to the Arabs that they mustn't kill us, otherwise there'll be no one to cure their ringworm and their trachoma? What's the point of this whole committee, with two doctors and a bus driver? What the hell do you think you're doing?"