A Tale of Love and Darkness (48 page)

Books were the slender lifeline that attached our submarine to the outside world. We were surrounded on all sides by mountains, caves, and deserts, the British, the Arabs, and the underground fighters, salvos of machine-gun fire in the night, explosions, ambushes, arrests, house-to-house searches, stifled dread of what awaited us in the days to come. Among all these the slender lifeline still wound its way to the real world. In the real world there were the lake and the forest, the cottage, the field and the meadow, and also the palace with its turrets, cornices, and gables. There the foyer, embellished with gold, velvet, and crystal, was lit by chandeliers with a mass of lights like the seven heavens.

In those years, as I said, I hoped I would grow up to be a book.

Not a writer but a book. And that was from fear.

Because it was slowly dawning on those whose families had not arrived in Israel that the Germans had killed them all. There was fear in Jerusalem, but people tried as hard as they could to bury it deep inside their chests. Rommel's tanks had reached almost to the gateway of the Land of Israel. Italian planes had bombed Tel Aviv and Haifa during the war. And who knew what the British might do to us before they left?
And after they had left, hordes of bloodthirsty Arabs, millions of fanatical Muslims, would be bound to butcher the whole lot of us in a few days. They would not leave a single child alive.

Naturally the grown-ups tried hard not to talk about these horrors in the presence of children. At any rate, not in Hebrew. But sometimes a word slipped through, or somebody cried out in his sleep. All our apartments were as tiny and cramped as cages. In the evening after lights out I could hear them whispering in the kitchen, over tea and biscuits, and I caught Chelmno, Nazis, Vilna, partisans,
Aktionen
, death camps, death trains, Uncle David and Aunt Malka and little cousin David who was the same age as me.

Somehow the fear got into me. Children of your age don't always grow up. Sometimes bad people come and kill them in the cradle, or in kindergarten. In Nehemiah Street once there was a bookbinder who had a nervous breakdown, and he went out on his balcony and screamed, Jews, help, hurry, soon they'll burn us all. The air was heavy with dread. And I may have already gathered how easy it is to kill people.

Books are not difficult to burn either, it's true, but if I grew up to be a book, there was a good chance that at least one copy might manage to survive, if not here then in some other country, in some city, in some remote library, in a corner of some godforsaken bookcase. After all, I had seen with my own eyes how books manage to hide in the dusty darkness between the crowded rows, underneath heaps of offprints and journals, or find a hiding place behind other books—

SOME THIRTY
years later, in 1976, I was invited to spend a couple of months in Jerusalem and give some guest lectures at the Hebrew University. I was offered a studio room in the campus on Mount Scopus, and every morning I sat and wrote the story "Mr. Levi" in
The Hill of Evil Counsel.
The story takes place on Zephaniah Street at the end of the British Mandate, and so I went for a walk on Zephaniah Street and the adjoining streets, to see what had changed since then. The Children's Realm Private School had long since closed. The yards were full of junk. The fruit trees had died. The teachers, clerks, translators, and cashiers,
bookbinders, domestic intellectuals, and writers of letters to the newspaper had mostly disappeared, and the district had filled up over the years with poor ultra-Orthodox Jews. Almost all our neighbors' names had disappeared from the letter boxes. The only familiar person I saw was Mrs. Stich, the invalid mother of Menuchele Stich, the girl with the stoop that we called Nemuchele, "Shortie"; I caught sight of her in the distance, sitting dozing on a stool in an out-of-the-way yard, not far from the garbage cans. Every wall was festooned with strident handbills that waved puny fists in the air and threatened sinners with various forms of unnatural death: "The bounds of modesty have been breached," "We have suffered a great loss," "Touch not mine anointed," "Stones cry out from the wall for the evil decree," "Heavens behold the dreadful abomination the like of which has never been seen in Israel," and so forth.

For thirty years I had not set eyes on my teacher from the second grade in Children's Realm Private School, and now here I was suddenly standing on her doorstep. Instead of the dairy that belonged to Mr. Langermann, who used to sell us milk out of heavy round metal milk churns, the front of the building was occupied now by an ultra-Orthodox shop selling all kinds of haberdashery, cloth, buttons, fasteners, zippers, and curtain hooks. Surely Teacher Zelda didn't live here anymore?

But there was her letter box, the one out of which I used to fish her mail when I was little, because the lock had rusted up and it was impossible to open it. Now the door hung open: somebody, certainly a man, must have been more impatient than Teacher Zelda and me, and had smashed the lock once and for all. The wording had changed too: instead of "Zelda Schneersohn" it now said "Schneersohn Mishkowsky." No more Zelda, but no hyphen or "and" either. And what would I do if it was her husband who opened the door to me? What could I say to him? Or to her?

I almost turned tail and fled, like a startled suitor in a comedy film. (I hadn't known she was married, or that she had been widowed, I had not worked it out that I was eight when I left her apartment and now I was thirty-seven, older than she had been when I left her.)

This time, as then, it was quite early in the morning.

I really should have phoned her before coming to see her. Or written her a note. Perhaps she was angry with me? Perhaps she had not forgiven me for walking out on her? For this long silence? For not congratulating her on either the publication of her books or the literary prizes she had won? Perhaps, like some other Jerusalemites, she resented my spitting in the well from which I had drunk, in
My Michael.
Suppose she had changed beyond recognition? What if she was an entirely different woman now, twenty-nine years later?

I stood in front of the door for some ten minutes, I went out into the yard, I smoked a cigarette or two, I touched the washing lines from which I once used to pluck her modest brown or gray skirts. I identified the cracked paving stone that I cracked myself once when I tried to break almonds open with a stone. And I looked out beyond the red roofs of the Bukharian Quarter, toward the desolate hills there used be to the north. Now, though, the hills were no longer desolate but smothered in housing developments: Ramot Eshkol, Ma'alot Dafna, Givat Hamivtar, French Hill, and Ammunition Hill.

But what should I say to her? Hello, Dear Teacher Zelda? I hope I'm not disturbing you. My name is, ahem, such and such? Good morning Mrs. Schneersohn-Mishkowsky? I was a pupil of yours once, I don't know if you remember? Excuse me, may I take just a few minutes of your time? I like your poetry? You still look marvelous? No, I haven't come to interview you?

I must have forgotten how dark little ground-floor apartments in Jerusalem could be, even on a summer morning. Darkness opened the door to me: darkness full of brown smells. And out of the darkness the fresh voice that I remembered, the voice of a confident girl who loved words, said to me:

"Come on in, Amos."

And immediately afterward:

"You probably want us to sit outside in the yard?"

And then:

"You like your iced lemonade weak."

And then:

"I have to correct myself: you used to like your lemonade weak. But maybe there has been a change since then?"

Naturally I am reconstructing that morning and our conversation from memory—like trying to restore an ancient ruined building on the
basis of seven or eight stones that are still left standing. But among the few stones left standing exactly as they were, neither reconstructed nor invented, are these words: "I have to correct myself:...But maybe there has been a change since then?" That is exactly what Zelda said to me on that summer morning in late June 1976. Twenty-nine years after our honey summer. And twenty-five years before the summer morning that I am writing this page (in my study in Arad, in an exercise book full of crossings out, on July 30, 2001: this is therefore a recollection of a visit that was also meant, in its day, to conjure up a recollection or to scratch at old wounds. In all these recollections, my task is a bit like that of someone trying to build something out of old stones that he is digging out of the ruins of something that was also, in its day, built out of stones from a ruin).

"I have to correct myself," Teacher Zelda said. "Maybe there has been a change since then?"

She could have said it in so many different ways. For instance, she might have said: Maybe you don't like lemonade anymore? Or: Maybe you like it very strong now? Or she might have asked, quite simply: What would you like to drink?

She was a person of precision. Her intention was to allude at once, happily, without a hint of bitterness, to our private past, hers and mine (lemonade, not too strong), but to do so without subordinating the present to the past ("Maybe there has been a change since then?"—with a question mark—thus offering me the choice, and also shouldering me with the responsibility for the continuation, for the rest of the visit. Which I had initiated).

I said (certainly not without a smile):

"Thank you. I'd love to have some lemonade like before."

She said:

"That's what I thought, but I felt I ought to ask."

Then we both drank iced lemonade (instead of the icebox there was now a little refrigerator, an obsolete model that was showing signs of its age). We reminisced. She had indeed read my books, and I had read hers, but we passed over all that in five or six sentences, as though hurrying past an unsafe stretch of road.

We talked about what had happened to the Nahlielis, Isabella and Getzel. About other common acquaintances. About the changes that had
taken place in Kerem Avraham. My parents and her late husband, who had passed away some five years before my visit, we also mentioned at a run, then went back to walking pace to talk about Agnon and perhaps also about Thomas Wolfe
(Look Homeward, Angel
was translated into Hebrew around that time, although it is possible that we had both read it in English). As my eyes became accustomed to the darkness, I was amazed to see how little the apartment had changed. The dreary brown dresser with its thick coat of varnish was still crouching in its usual corner like an old dog. The china tea set still dozed behind its glass panes. On the dresser there were photographs of Zelda's parents, who looked younger than she did, and a picture of a man who I imagined must be her husband, but I still asked who he was. Her eyes suddenly lit up and sparkled mischievously; she grinned at me as though we had just done something naughty together, then she pulled herself together and said simply:

"That's Chayim."

The round brown table seemed to have shrunk over the years. In the bookcase there were old prayer books in battered dark covers, and a few big new religious books in splendid leather bindings with gold tooling, as well as Schirmann's history of Hebrew poetry in Spain, a lot of books of poetry and modern Hebrew novels, and a row of paperbacks. When I was a child, this bookcase had loomed very, very large; now it only loomed shoulder-height. On the dresser and various shelves there were silver Sabbath candlesticks, a number of Hanukkah lamps, little ornaments made of olive wood or copper, and a sad potted plant on the chest of drawers and a couple more on the windowsill. The whole scene was dominated by a dim light saturated with brown smells: it was unmistakably the room of a religious woman. Not an ascetic place, but one that was withdrawn and reserved, and also somehow depressing. There had indeed been, as she had put it, a change. Not because she had aged, or because she had become loved and famous, but perhaps because she had become earnest.

Yet she had always been a person of precision, earnestness, and inner seriousness. It's hard to explain.

I never saw her again after that morning. I heard that she finally moved to a new area. I heard that over the years she had a number of close
women friends who were younger than herself and younger than me. I heard that she had cancer, and that one Friday night in 1984 she died in terrible pain. But I never went back to see her, I never wrote to her, I never sent her any of my books, and I never set eyes on her again except a couple of times in literary supplements and once more, on the day of her death, for less than half a minute, toward the end of the TV news (and I wrote about her, and her room, in
The Same Sea).

When I stood up to go, it turned out that the ceiling had become lower over the years. It almost touched my head.

The years had not changed her much. She had not become ugly, or fat, or shriveled, the lightning of her eyes still flashed out occasionally while we talked, like a beam sent to search all my hidden recesses. Yet even so, something had changed. As though over the decades that I had not seen her, Teacher Zelda had grown to resemble her old-fashioned apartment.

She was like a silver candlestick, like a candlestick glowing dimly in a dark void. And I should like to be as precise here as it is possible to be: in that last meeting Zelda seemed to me like the candle, the candlestick, and the dark void.

EVERY MORNING
, a little before or a little after sunrise, I am in the habit of going out to discover what is new in the desert. The desert begins here in Arad at the end of our road. An easterly morning breeze comes from the direction of the Mountains of Edom, stirring little eddies of sand here and there that try unsuccessfully to rise up from the ground. Each of them struggles, loses its whirlwind shape, and dies down. The hills themselves are still hidden by the mist that comes up from the Dead Sea and covers the rising sun and the highlands with a gray veil, as though it were autumn already instead of summer. But it is a false autumn: in another couple of hours it will be dry and hot again here. Like yesterday. Like the day before yesterday, like a week ago, like a month ago.