A Tale of Love and Darkness (52 page)

Everything I had heard from my parents, from neighbors, from Uncle Joseph, from my teachers, from my uncles and aunts, and from rumors came back to me at that moment. Everything they said over glasses of tea in our backyard on Saturdays and on summer evenings about mounting tensions between Arab and Jew, distrust and hostility, the rotten fruit of British intrigues and the incitement of Muslim fanatics who painted us in a frightening light to inflame the Arabs to hate us. Our task, Mr. Rosendorff once said, was to dispel suspicions and to explain to them that we were in fact a positive and even kindly people. In brief, it was a sense of mission that gave me the courage to address this strange girl and try to start a conversation with her: I meant to explain to her in a few convincing words how pure our intentions were, how abhorrent was the plot to stir up conflict between our two peoples, and how good it would be for the Arab public—in the form of this graceful-lipped girl—to spend a little time in the company of the polite, pleasant Hebrew people, in the person of me, the articulate envoy aged eight and a half. Almost.

But I had not thought out in advance what I would do after I had used up most of my supply of foreign words in my opening sentence. How could I enlighten this oblivious girl and get her to understand once and for all the rightness of the Jewish return to Zion? By charades? By dance gestures? And how could I get her to recognize our right to the Land without using words? How, without any words, could I translate for her Tchernikhowsky's "O, my land, my homeland"? Or Jabotinsky's "There Arabs, Nazarenes and we / shall drink our fill in happy manner, / when both the banks of Jordan's stream / are purged by our unsullied banner"? In a word, I was like that fool who had learned how to advance the king's pawn two squares, and did so without any hesitation, but after that had no idea at all about the game of chess, not even the names of the pieces, or how they moved, or where, or why.

Lost.

But the girl answered me, and actually in Hebrew, without looking at me, her hands resting open on the bench on either side of her dress, her eyes fixed on her brother, who was laying a little stone in the center of each leaf in his circle:

"My name is Aisha. That little one is my brother. Awwad."

She also said:

"You're the son of the guests from the post office?"

And so I explained to her that I was definitely not the son of the guests from the post office, but of their friends. And that my father was a rather important scholar, an
ustaz
, and that my father's uncle was an even more important scholar, who was even world famous, and that it was her honored father, Mr. Silwani, who had personally suggested that I should come out in the garden and talk to the children of the house.

Aisha corrected me and said that Ustaz Najib was not her father but her mother's uncle: she and her family did not live here in Sheikh Jar-rah but in Talbieh, and she herself had been going to lessons from a piano teacher in Rehavia for the past three years, and she had learned a little Hebrew from the teacher and the other pupils. It was a beautiful language, Hebrew, and Rehavia was a beautiful area. Well kept. Quiet.

Talbieh was well kept and quiet, too, I hastened to reply, repaying one compliment with another. Would she be willing for us to talk a little?

Aren't we talking already? (A little smile flickered for an instant around her lips. She straightened the hem of her dress with both her hands, and uncrossed and recrossed her legs. And for an instant her knees appeared, the knees of a grown-up woman already, then her dress straightened again. She looked slightly to my left now, where the garden wall peered at us among the trees.)

I therefore adopted a representative position, and expressed the view that there was enough room in this country for both peoples, if only they had the sense to live together in peace and mutual respect. Somehow, out of embarrassment or arrogance, I was talking to her not in my own Hebrew but in that of Father and his visitors: formal, polished. Like a donkey dressed up in a ballgown and high-heeled shoes: convinced for some reason that this was the only proper way to speak to Arabs and girls. (I had hardly ever had an occasion to talk to a girl or
an Arab, but I imagined that in both cases a special delicacy was required: you had to talk on tiptoe, as it were.)

It transpired that her knowledge of Hebrew was not extensive, or perhaps her views were not the same as mine. Instead of responding to my challenge, she chose to sidestep it: her elder brother, she told me, was in London, studying to be a "solicitor and a barrister."

Puffed up with representativity, I asked her what she was thinking of studying when she was older.

She looked straight into my eyes, and at that moment, instead of blushing, I turned pale. Instantly I averted my eyes, and looked down at her serious little brother Awwad, who had already laid out four precise circles of leaves at the foot of the mulberry tree.

How about you?

Well, you see, I said, still standing, facing her, rubbing my clammy palms against the sides of my shorts, well, you see, it's like this—

You'll be a lawyer too. From the way you speak.

What makes you think that exactly?

Instead of replying, she said: I'm going to write a book.

You? What kind of a book will you write?

Poetry.

Poetry?

In French and English.

You write poetry?

She also wrote poetry in Arabic, but she never showed it to anyone. Hebrew was a beautiful language, too. Had anyone written any poetry in Hebrew?

Shocked by her question, swollen with indignation and a sense of mission, I began there and then to give her an impassioned recital of snatches of poetry. Tchernikhowsky. Levin Kipnes. Rahel. Vladimir Jabotinsky. And one poem of my own. Whatever came to mind. Furiously, describing circles in the air with my hands, raising my voice, with feeling and gestures and facial expressions and occasionally even closing my eyes. Even her little brother Awwad raised his curly head and fixed me with brown, innocent lamblike eyes, full of curiosity and slight apprehension, and suddenly he recited in clear Hebrew: Jest a minute! Rest a minute! Aisha, meanwhile, said nothing. Suddenly she asked me if I could climb trees.

All excited and perhaps a little in love with her and yet trembling with the thrill of national representativity, eager to do anything she wanted, I instantly transformed myself from Jabotinsky into Tarzan. Taking off the sandals that Uncle Staszek had polished for me that morning till the leather gleamed like jet, oblivious of my neatly pressed best clothes, I took a jump and swung myself up onto a low branch, scrabbled with my bare feet against the gnarled trunk, and without a moment's hesitation climbed up into the tree, from one fork to the next and upward, toward the topmost branches, not caring about scratches, ignoring bruises, grazes, and mulberry stains, up beyond the line of the wall, beyond the tops of the other trees, out of the shade, up to the topmost part of the tree, until my tummy was clinging to a sloping branch that bent under my weight like a spring, and I groped and suddenly discovered a rusty iron chain with a heavy iron ball, also rusty, attached to the end of it, the devil only knew what it was for and how it had got to the top of the mulberry tree. Little Awwad looked at me thoughtfully, doubtfully, and called again: Jest a minute! Rest a minute!

These were apparently the only Hebrew words he knew.

I held on to my sighing branch with one hand, and with the other, uttering wild war cries, I waved the chain and whirled the iron ball in quick circles, as though brandishing some rare fruit for the young woman underneath. For sixty generations, so we had learned, they had considered us a miserable nation of huddled yeshiva students, flimsy moths who start in a panic at every shadow,
awlad al-mawt
, children of death, and now at last here was muscular Judaism taking the stage, the resplendent new Hebrew youth at the height of his powers, making everyone who sees him tremble at his roar: like a lion among lions.

But this awesome tree lion that I was exultantly acting the part of in front of Aisha and her brother was unaware of approaching doom. He was a blind, deaf, foolish lion. Eyes had he but he saw not, ears neither did he hear. He just whirled the chain, straddling his swaying branch, piercing the air with stronger and stronger revolutions of his iron apple, like those heroic cowboys he had seen in the cinema, describing loops in the air with their lassos as they rode along.

He did not see or hear or imagine or beware, this eager brother's keeper, this flying lion, even though nemesis was well on the way, and everything was ready for the horror to come. The rusty iron ball at the
end of the rusty chain was whirling in the air, threatening to wrench his arm out of his shoulder socket. His arrogance. His folly. The poison of his rising virility. The intoxication of vainglorious chauvinism. The branch he was lying on to perform his demonstration was already groaning under his weight. And the delicate, thoughtful girl with the thick black eyebrows, the poetess, was looking up at him with a pitying smile, not a smile of admiration or awe for the new Hebrew man but a faintly contemptuous expression, an amused, indulgent smile, as if to say, that's nothing, all those efforts of yours, it's nothing at all, we've seen much more than that already, you can't impress us with that, if you really want to surprise me someday, you'll have to try seven times as hard.

(And from the depth of some dark well there may have flashed before him for a brief instant a faint memory of a thick forest in a women's clothes shop, a primeval jungle through which he had once pursued a little girl, and when he finally caught up with her, she turned out to be a horror.)

And her brother was still there, at the foot of the mulberry tree, he had finished making his precise, mysterious circles out of fallen leaves and now, tousled, serious, responsible-looking, and sweet, he was toddling after a white butterfly in his shorts and red shoes when suddenly from the top of the mulberry tree someone called his name in a terrified roar, Awwad Awwad run, and he may just have had time to look up into the tree with his round eyes, he may just have had time to see the rusty iron apple that had broken free from the end of the chain and was rushing toward him like a shell straight toward him getting darker and bigger and flying straight at the child's eyes, and it would surely have smashed his skull in if it had not missed his head by an inch and whizzed right down past the child's nose to land with a heavy dull thud crushing his little foot through his tiny red shoe, the doll-like shoe that was suddenly covered with blood and started to fountain blood through the lace holes and to gush out through the seams and over the top of the shoe. Then a single long, piercing, heartrending shriek of pain rose above the tops of the trees and then your whole body was seized with trembling like frosty needles and everything was silent all around you in an instant as though you had been shut up inside an iceberg.

***

I don't remember the unconscious child's face when his sister carried him away in her arms, I don't remember if she screamed too, if she called for help, if she spoke to me, and I don't remember when or how I got down from the tree or if I fell down with the branch that collapsed beneath me, I don't remember who dressed the cut on my chin that trickled blood down onto my best shirt (I still have a mark on my chin), and I can hardly remember anything that happened between the injured boy's only shriek and the white sheets that evening, as I lay still shivering all over curled up fetus-like with several stitches in my chin in Uncle Staszek and Auntie Mala's double bed.

But I do remember to this day, like two sharp burning coals, her eyes beneath the mourning border of her black eyebrows that joined in the middle: loathing, despair, horror, and flashing hatred came from her eyes, and beneath the loathing and the hatred there was also a sort of gloomy nod of the head, as though she were agreeing with herself, as if to say I could tell right away, even before you opened your mouth I should have noticed, I should have been on my guard, you could sniff it from a long way away. Like a bad smell.

And I can remember, vaguely, somebody, a hairy, short man, with a bushy mustache, wearing a gold watch on a very wide bracelet, maybe he was one of the guests, or one of the host's sons, dragging me roughly out of there, pulling me by my torn shirt, almost at a run. And on the way I could see a furious man, standing by the well in the middle of the paved terrace, hitting Aisha, not punching her with his fists, not slapping her cheeks, but hitting her hard, repeatedly, with the flat of his hand, slowly, thoroughly, on her head, her back, her shoulder, across her face, not the way you punish a child but the way you vent your rage on a horse. Or an obstinate camel.

Of course my parents intended, and so did Staszek and Mala, to get in touch and ask how the child Awwad was and how serious his injuries were. Of course they intended to find some way to express their sorrow and shame. They might have considered offering suitable compensation. It might have been important to them to make our hosts see with their own eyes that our side had not come off unscathed either, but he had cut his chin and needed two or three stitches. It is possible that my
parents and the Rudnickis even planned a return visit to Silwani Villa, in which they would bring presents for the injured youngster, while my task would be to express my humble remorse by prostrating myself on the threshold or putting on sackcloth and ashes, to demonstrate to the al-Silwani family in particular and to the Arab people in general how sorry and ashamed and embarrassed we were, but at the same time too high-minded to seek excuses or extenuating circumstances, and sufficiently responsible to shoulder the full burden of embarrassment, remorse, and guilt.

But while they were still conferring, arguing with each other about the timing and the manner, possibly suggesting that Uncle Staszek should go and ask his boss Mr. Knox-Guildford to put out some informal feelers on our behalf and find out how the land lay with the Silwani family, how angry they still were and how they could be mollified, how helpful a personal apology would be and in what spirit they would receive our offer to put matters right, while they were still laying plans and exploratory measures, the Jewish high holidays arrived. And even before that, on the first day of September 1947, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine presented its recommendations to the General Assembly.