A Tale of Love and Darkness (49 page)

In the meantime the cool of the night is still holding its own. There is a pleasant smell of dust that has soaked up a lot of dew, blended with a faint smell of sulfur, goat droppings, thistles, and dead campfires. This is the smell of the Land of Israel from time immemorial. I go down into the wadi and advance along a winding path to the edge of the cliff from which I have a view of the Dead Sea, nearly three thousand feet below, fifteen and a half miles away. The shadow of the hills to the east falls on the water and gives it the color of old copper. Here and there a sharp needle of light manages to pierce the cloud for a moment and touch the sea. The sea responds with a dazzling shimmer, as though there is an electric storm raging under the surface.

From here to there stretch empty slopes of limestone dappled with black rocks. Among these rocks, exactly on the horizon at the top of the hill facing me, suddenly there are three black goats and with them a human figure standing motionlessly draped in black from head to foot. A Bedouin woman? And is that a dog next to her? And suddenly they've all disappeared beyond the line of the hills, the woman, the goats, and the dog. The gray light casts doubt on every movement. Meanwhile other dogs give voice in the distance. A little farther on, among the rocks by the side of the path, lies a rusty shell casing. How did it end up here? Maybe one night a camel caravan of smugglers passed here on their way from Sinai to the southern part of Mount Hebron, and one of the smugglers lost the shell casing, or threw it away after wondering what he would do with it.

Now you can hear the full depths of the desert silence. It isn't the quiet before the storm, or the silence of the end of the world, but a silence that only covers another, even deeper, silence. I stand there for three or four minutes inhaling silence like a smell. Then I turn back. I walk back up from the wadi to the end of my road, arguing with an angry chorus of dogs that start barking at me from every garden. Perhaps they imagine that I'm threatening to help the desert invade the town.

In the branches of the first tree in the garden of the first house a whole parliament of sparrows are deep in a noisy argument, all interrupting each other with deafening shrieks: they seem to be roaring rather than chirping. As though the departure of the night and the breaking of the day are unprecedented developments that justify an emergency meeting.

Along the road an old car is starting up with a hoarse coughing fit, like a heavy smoker. The newspaper boy vainly tries to make friends with an uncompromising dog. A thickset, tanned neighbor, with a thicket of
gray hair on his bare chest, a retired colonel, whose foursquare body reminds me of a tin trunk, is standing half naked in blue running shorts, watering the bed of roses in front of his house.

"Your roses are looking wonderful. Good morning, Mr. Shmuelevich."

"What's so good about it?" he assails me. "Has Shimon Peres finally stopped selling out the whole country to Arafat?"

And when I remark that some people see it differently, he adds bitterly:

"It seems one holocaust wasn't enough to teach us a lesson. Do you really call this disaster peace? Have you ever heard of the Sudetenland? Or Munich? Or Chamberlain? Well?"

I do indeed have a detailed, reasoned reply to this, but thanks to the reserves of calm I have built up earlier, in the wadi, I bring up the words:

"Somebody was playing the Moonlight Sonata in your house about eight o'clock last night. I was walking past and I even stopped to listen for a few minutes. Was it your daughter? She played beautifully. Tell her."

He moved the hose to the next bed and smiled at me like a shy schoolboy who has suddenly been chosen as class monitor by secret ballot. "That wasn't my daughter," he says, "she's gone off to Prague. That was
her
daughter. My granddaughter, Daniella. She came third out of the whole Southern Region in the Young Talent Competition. Though everyone without exception says she should have been second. She writes beautiful poems too. So sensitive. Would you have time to take a look at them? Maybe you could give her some encouragement. Or even send them to a newspaper, for publication. They'd be bound to publish them if you sent them."

I promise Mr. Shmuelevich that I'll read Daniella's poems when I have a chance. Gladly. Certainly. Why not. Don't mention it.

In my heart I enter this promise as my contribution to the advancement of peace. Back in my study, with a mug of coffee in my hand and the morning paper spread out on the sofa, I stand at the window for another ten minutes. I hear on the news about a seventeen-year-old Arab girl who has been seriously injured by a round of bullets after she tried to stab an Israeli soldier with a knife at a roadblock outside Bethlehem. The early morning light, which was blended with a gray mist, has begun to glow and turned to a harsh, uncompromising blue.

***

At my window there is a little garden, a few shrubs, a vine, and a sickly lemon tree: I don't know yet if it will live or die, its foliage is pale, its trunk is bent like an arm that someone is forcing backward. The Hebrew word for "bent," which happens to begin with the letters AK, reminds me of what my father used to say, that every word that begins with AK signifies something bad. "And you must have noticed yourself, Your Highness, that your own initials, whether by chance or not, are also AK."

Maybe I should write an article today for
Yediot Aharonot
, to try to explain to Mr. Shmuelevich that getting out of the conquered territories will not weaken Israel but actually strengthen us. And that it's a mistake to see the Holocaust and Hitler and Munich everywhere.

Mr. Shmuelevich told me once, on one of those long summer evenings when you think the evening light will never fade, when the two of us were sitting in vests and sandals on his garden wall, how he was taken to the Maidanek death camp when he was about twelve with his parents, his three sisters, and their grandmother, and he was the only one who survived. He didn't want to tell me how he survived. He promised he'd tell me some other time. But every other time he chose instead to open my eyes, so I shouldn't believe in peace, so I should stop being naive, so I should get it firmly in my head that their only aim is to butcher us all and all their talk of peace is a trap, or a sleeping draught that the whole world has helped them brew and given us to lull us to sleep. Just as then.

I decide to put off writing the article. An unfinished chapter of this book is waiting for me on my desk in a heap of scribbled drafts, crumpled notes, and half pages full of crossings out. It's the chapter about Teacher Isabella Nahlieli from Children's Realm School and her army of cats. I'm going to have to make some concessions there and delete some incidents about cats and about Getzel Nahlieli, the cashier. They were quite amusing incidents, but they do not contribute anything to the progress of the story. Contribute? Progress? I don't know what can contribute to the progress of the story, because as yet I have no idea where this story wants to go, and in fact why it needs contributions. Or progress.

Meanwhile the eleven o'clock news has finished and I've had a second mug of coffee and I'm still staring out the window. A pretty little turquoise-colored bird peers at me for a moment out of the lemon tree:
it moves to and fro, leaps from a branch to a twig, and shows off the lightning of its feathers in the dappled light and shade. Its head is nearly violet, its neck is a dark metallic blue, and it is wearing a delicate yellow waistcoat. Welcome back. What have you come to remind me about this morning? The Nahlielis? Bialik's poem "A twig fell on a wall and dozed"? My mother, who used to spend hours standing at the window, with a glass of tea getting cold in her hand, with her face to the pomegranate bush and her back to the room? That's enough. I must get down to work. Now I have to use the rest of the calm I stored up in the wadi this morning before the sun rose.

Just before noon I drive into town to sort out one or two things at the post office, the bank, the clinic, and the stationer's. A tropical sun is scorching the streets and their dusty, thin-looking trees. The desert light is white-hot now and so cruel to your eyes that they turn of their own accord into two narrow slits.

There is a short line at the cash dispenser and another one at Ouak-nine's newspaper stand. In Tel Aviv, in the summer holiday of 1950 or 1951, not far from Auntie Haya and Uncle Tsvi's apartment at the north end of Ben Yehuda Street, my cousin Yigal pointed out to me a newspaper kiosk that was kept by David Ben-Gurion's brother and told me that anyone who wanted to could simply go up and talk to him, to this brother of Ben-Gurion's, who really looked a lot like him. You could even ask him questions. Like, How are you, Mr. Gruen? How much is a chocolate wafer, Mr. Gruen? Is there going to be another war soon, Mr. Gruen? The only thing you mustn't do is ask him about his brother. That's the way it is. He really doesn't like being asked questions about his brother.

I was very jealous of the people in Tel Aviv. In Kerem Avraham we didn't have any celebrities or even brothers of celebrities. All we had were the Minor Prophets in our street names: Amos Street, Obadiah Street, Zephaniah Street, Haggai, Zechariah, Nahum, Malachi, Joel, Habakkuk, Hosea, Micah, and Jonah. The lot.

A Russian immigrant is standing on the corner of the square in the center of Arad. His violin case lies open on the pavement in front of him, for coins. The tune is quiet, poignant, reminiscent of fir forests with cottages, streams, and meadows, which bring back to me my mother's stories when she and I used to sit together sorting lentils or shelling peas in our soot-blackened little kitchen.

But here in the square at the center of Arad the desert light banishes ghosts and dispels any memory of fir forests and misty autumns. The musician, with his shock of gray hair and his thick white mustache, reminds me a little of Albert Einstein, and a little too of Professor Samuel Hugo Bergman, who taught my mother philosophy on Mount Scopus; in fact I attended some unforgettable lectures of his myself at the Givat Ram Campus in 1961, on the history of dialogical philosophy from Kierkegaard to Martin Buber.

There are two young women, possibly of North African extraction, one of them very thin and wearing a semitransparent top and a red skirt, the other in a trouser suit replete with belts and buckles. They stop in front of the musician and listen to his playing for a minute or two. He is playing with his eyes closed and doesn't open them. The women exchange whispers, open their handbags, and each puts a shekel in the case.

The thin woman, whose upper lip is slightly drawn up toward her nose, says:

"But how can you tell they're real Jews? Half the Russians who come here, I've heard they're simply
goyim
who just take advantage of us to get the hell out of Russia and come here for the free handouts."

Her friend says:

"What do we care, let them all come, let him play in the street, Jew, Russian, Druze, Georgian, what difference is it to you? Their children will be Israelis, they'll go in the army, eat meatballs in pita with pickles, take out a mortgage, and moan all day long."

The red skirt remarks:

"What's the matter with you, Sarit? If they let in anyone who wants to come for free, including foreign workers and Arabs from Gaza and the territories, who's going to—"

But the rest of the discussion drifts away from me toward the parking lot of the shopping mall. I remind myself that I have not made any progress yet today and the morning is no longer young. Back in my study. The heat is beginning to be too much, and a dusty wind brings the desert indoors. I close the windows and shutters and draw the curtain, block every crack, just as Greta Gat, my child sitter, who was also a piano teacher, always used to seal her apartment and turn it into a submarine.

This study was built by Arab workers not many years ago. They laid the floor and checked it with a spirit level. They erected the door and
window frames. They concealed the plumbing and electrical wiring in the walls and put in an outlet for the telephone. A large-bodied carpenter, an opera lover, made the cupboards and put up the bookshelves. A contractor who emigrated from Romania in the late 1950s sent for a truckload of rich topsoil from somewhere for the garden and laid it over the lime, chalk, flint, and salt that have always lain on these hills, like putting a plaster on a wound. In this good topsoil the previous occupant planted shrubs and trees and a lawn, which I do my best to look after but without overdoing the love, so that this garden doesn't suffer the same fate as the one my father and I planted with such good intentions.

A few dozen pioneers, including loners who loved the desert or were searching for solitude and also a few young couples, came and settled here in the early 1960s: miners, quarry workers, regular army officers, and industrial workers. Lova Eliav, with a handful of other town planners seized by Zionist enthusiasm, planned, sketched out, and immediately constructed this town, with its streets, squares, avenues, and gardens, not far from the Dead Sea, in an out-of-the-way place that at that time, in the early 1960s, was not served by any main road, water pipeline, or power supply, where there were no trees, no paths, no buildings, no tents, no signs of life. Even the local Bedouin settlements mostly came into being after the town was built. The pioneers who founded Arad were passionate, impatient, talkative, and busy. Without a second thought, they vowed to "conquer the wilderness and tame the desert."

Somebody is passing the house now in a little red van; he stops at the mailbox on the corner and extracts the letters I posted yesterday. Somebody else has come to replace the broken curbstone of the pavement opposite. I must find some way to thank them all, the way a bar mitzvah boy publicly thanks everyone who has helped him come this far: Aunt Sonia, Grandpa Alexander, Greta Gat, Teacher Zelda, the Arab man with bags under his eyes who rescued me from the dark cell where I was trapped in that clothes shop, my parents, Mr. Zarchi, the Lembergs next door, the Italian prisoners of war, Grandma Shlomit with her war on germs, Teacher Isabella and her cats, Mr. Agnon, the Rudnickis, Grandpa Papa the carter from Kiriat Motskin, Saul Tchernikhowsky, Auntie Lilenka Bar Samkha, my wife, my children, my grandchildren,
the builders and electricians who made this house, the carpenter, the newspaper boy, the man in the red mail van, the musician playing his violin on the corner of the square who reminded me of Einstein and Bergman, the Bedouin woman and the three goats I saw this morning before dawn, or did I just imagine them, Uncle Joseph who wrote
Judaism and Humanity
, my neighbor Shmuelevich who is afraid of another Holocaust, his granddaughter Daniella who played the Moonlight Sonata yesterday, Minister Shimon Peres who went to talk to Arafat again yesterday in the hope of finding some compromise formula despite everything, and the turquoise bird that sometimes visits my lemon tree. And the lemon tree itself. And especially the silence of the desert just before sunrise, that has more and more silences wrapped up inside it. That was my third coffee this morning. That's enough. I put the empty mug down at the edge of the table, taking particular care not to make the slightest noise that would injure the silence that has not vanished yet. Now I will sit down and write.