I do indeed remember. And what I feel in my heart is neither bitterness nor humiliation but — how can I write it when I can see before me the expression of cold irony on your mouth and the cigarette smoke pouring contemptuously from your nostrils — Jewish sorrow and rage. No, not in my heart, in the marrow of my bones. I won't make homemade explosives for the Hagganah. I'll make them the ultimate explosive. I shall surprise Uri, Nachtshe, Ben-Gurion himself. If only my strength holds out. I myself shall be the jungle races on the threshold. I am the Mongol hordes.
I'm joking again, as usual, at the wrong time, as usual, joking without being funny, in my usual ludicrous way.
We reached Palestine by way of the Tirol, Trieste, Piraeus, and a French steamship. Father did indeed set up a candy factory in Ramat Gan that became well known. He even married again, a husky, bejeweled refugee from southern Poland. Perhaps it was his wife's influence that made him become an active member of the General Zionist Council and of several committees.
He occasionally sends me money. Unnecessarily. I have enough of my own.
Twice a year, at Passover and the New Year, I used to visit them and spend a few days among the vases, tea sets, and chandeliers. In the evenings there was a stream of visitors: middle-aged men of affairs, party workers and businessmen, middlemen who enjoyed choolant and snuff and cracked bawdy jokes in three languages with chesty, man-of-the-world laughter. "Felix," they would say as they winked at Father, "Reb Pinhasel, when are you going to marry off the boy? When are you going to initiate him into the mysteries of business? What are they saying about him, a Socialist you've got in your family?" While Father's wife, with a gold watch held between the jaws and tail of a gold snake wrapped around her freckled wrist, would leap to my defense: "What do you mean, business? Business nothing. Our Emanuel will soon be a professor at the Hadassah, and we'll all have to line up for three months before he'll so much as look at us, and even then only as a special favor."
I did indeed work at Hadassah for a while and put up uncomplainingly with Alexander Dushkin's rumbustious despotism. One evening he summoned me to his home in Kiryat Shemuel, and at the end of the tea, the jokes, and the gossip, I was informed: "Next week you're being handed over lock, stock, and barrel to the government of Palestine. To the bacteriological department. They've issued me an ultimatum to hand over to them some first-rate Svidrigai'lov who'll keep an eye on the whole water supply of Jerusalem and the surrounding area. So I sold you to them right away. Free, gratis, and for nothing. I didn't even claim my thirty pieces of silver. The pay's not bad, and you'll be able to travel around at His Majesty's expense, from Hebron to Jericho and from Ramallah to Rosh Ha'ayin. You'll have your own private empire. You'll like O'Leary. He's an educated, cultivated sort of chap. Not like me, a Tartar cannibal. You and I, Nussbaum, let's speak frankly, well, you're more the phlegmatic type, while I'm a madman — anyway, we're horses of a different color. I just want to say, Emanuel," Dushkin suddenly roared, as his eyes filled with tears "that you'll always find my door and my heart open to you. Day or night. I really love you. Only don't let me down. Now what's the matter with your tea? Drink it up!"
So I took my leave of Samovar and joined Edward O'Leary and my dear friend Dr. Antoine al-Mahdi. And I started my tours of the springs and wells.
Two or three times a week, we went out into the country. We passed beautiful gardens, olive groves and vineyards, and tiny vegetable-patches. We saw minarets reaching upward from the hilltops. The three of us together forced our way through thorn hedges and tramped for hours on end to inspect some far-flung spring or Godforsaken well. The smell of dung and ashes brought me a sensation of peace and calm. Occasionally Antoine would say apologetically: "The cattle are cattle and so are the fellahin. You can't tell the difference." If O'Leary jokingly asked him, "Do you enjoy the thought that one day every villager will wear a tweed jacket and tie like you?" he would reply, "That would be against nature." Edward would chuckle: "And what about the Jews? In the kibbutzim you can find lawyers milking cows and mucking out." Antoine would flash me an affectionate smile: "The Jews are a remarkable people. They always go against nature."
We used to go to King Solomon's Pools. To Nahal Arugot in the Judean Desert. To the Elah Valley. We collected specimens in glass phials and took them back to the laboratory in Julian's Way to examine them under the microscope. O'Leary would lend us books by English travelers from the last century who described the desolate state of the country in all its details.
"How does she do it?" O'Leary would ask in tones of amusement. "How does this worn-out, barren old girl make them all fall madly in love with her? I was once in southern Persia: exactly the same miserable hills, dotted with gray rocks, with a few olive trees and pieces of old pottery. Nobody crossed half the world to conquer them."
"Woman comes from the earth," Dr. Mahdi said in a velvety whisper, in careful English. "Man comes from the rain. And desire comes from the Devil. Look at the Jordan. For thousands of years it has flowed into the Dead Sea, where there is neither fish nor tree, and it never comes out again. There's nothing like that in Persia, Edward, and the moral of the story is: if it's hard to get in, then it's hard to get out."
I would contribute an occasional remark, such as:
"The Land of Israel is full of simple symbols. Not only the Jordan and the Dead Sea — even the malaria and bilharzia here take on a symbolic significance."
"You two use similar words to express totally different sentiments. We all three do, actually."
"Is that really so?" O'Leary would murmur politely. He would refrain from offering an explanation and would deftly change the subject.
***
Antoine ran a private practice in the afternoons and evenings in Katamon, and I had my home clinic in Kerem Avraham. I learned to cultivate polite relations with my neighbors and to be a good listener in hard times. I lost track of the hours 1 spent battling against diphtheria and dysentery. If I was called out at night or over the weekend, when I was busy in my amateur laboratory or listening to music, I never complained. If the children made fun of me in the street for my German ways, I never lost my temper. I fulfilled my obligations, more or less.
Until you and I met in Arza, that is. And until my illness appeared.
So there you have a résumé of the story of my life. Some of it you knew already, and the rest you could probably have deduced, in your usual way, from an analysis of my behavior.
Now I shall return to my observations.
Uri has gone off, probably on instructions from one of Nachtshe's mysterious assistants, to stand on the Kapitanski brothers' roof and keep watch on the Sheikh Jarrah district and the traffic on the Ramallah road. And I, too, am on the lookout, sitting here on my balcony. The details I am amassing will be of no military use: A Jerusalem street vendor, what he sells, how he sells, who buys. My lower-middle-class Eastern European neighbors, and why they quarrel so much among themselves. And what, exactly, their communal ideal is. Their children, what is new about them and what is ancient. And the youths, boys like Nachtshe, Yigal, and Akiva, how, and with what measure of success, they all attempt to dress, talk, and joke on the basis of some abstract archetype from Galilee, from the Palmach, a venerated image of the pioneering hero.
And I myself: apart from my impending death and the code of pains and symptoms, why do I sometimes abhor these brave boys, and secretly call them "Asiatics," and sometimes feel a powerful love for them as though I have an unidentified son among them, a dark-skinned, barefoot, physically tough young man, an expert with machines and weapons, contemptuous of words, contemptuous of me and my worries? I don't know.