A Tale of Love and Darkness (53 page)

And in Jerusalem, even though no violence had broken out as yet, it felt as though all of a sudden an invisible muscle was suddenly flexed. It was not sensible to go to those areas anymore.

So Father bravely telephoned the offices of Silwani and Sons Ltd in Princess Mary Street, introduced himself in English and in French, and asked, in both languages, to be put through to Mr. al-Silwani senior. A young male secretary answered him with cold politeness, asked him in fluent English and in French to be kind enough to hold the line for a few moments, and came on again to say that he had been authorized to take a message for Mr. Silwani. So Father dictated a brief message about our feelings, our regrets, our anxiety for the health of the dear child, our readiness to meet any medical expenses in full, and our sincere wish to effect a meeting at an early date to clarify and to try to right the wrong. (Father had a pronounced Russian accent in English and in French. When he said "the," it sounded like "dzee," while "locomotive" came out as "locomotsif.")

We received no answer from the Silwani family, either directly or via Mr. Knox-Guildford, Staszek Rudnicki's boss. Did Father endeavor to discover by other means how serious little Awwad's injuries were? What
Aisha had or hadn't said about me? If he did indeed manage to find anything out, they didn't say a word to me. To the day my mother died and afterward, to the day of his own death, my father and I never talked about that Saturday. Not even incidentally. And even many years later, some five years after the Six Day War, at Mala Rudnicki's memorial service, when poor Staszek talked half the night in his wheelchair and reminisced about all sorts of good and terrible times, he did not mention that Saturday at Silwani Villa.

And once, in 1967, after we conquered East Jerusalem, I went there on my own, quite early one Saturday morning in the summer, along the same route that we had taken that earlier Saturday. There were new iron gates, and a shiny black German car was parked in front of the house, fitted with gray curtains. On top of the wall that surrounded the garden there was broken glass that I did not remember. The green treetops showed above the wall. The flag of a certain important consulate fluttered above the roof, and beside the new iron gates there was a gleaming brass plate bearing the name of the state in question, in Arabic and in Latin characters, and its coat of arms. A guard in plain clothes came and stared at me curiously; I mumbled something and walked on toward Mount Scopus.

The cut on my chin healed in a few days. Dr. Hollander, the pediatrician at the clinic on Amos Street, removed the stitches put in at the first-aid station that Saturday morning.

From the day the stitches came out, a veil descended over the entire episode. Auntie Mala and Uncle Staszek were also enlisted in the cover-up. Not a word. Neither about Sheikh Jarrah nor about little Arab children nor about iron chains nor about orchards and mulberry trees, nor about scars on the chin. Taboo. It never happened. Only Mother, in her usual way, challenged the walls of censorship. Once, in our own special place, at the kitchen table, at our own special time, when Father was out of the house, she told me an Indian fable:

Once upon a time there were two monks who imposed all sorts of disciplines and afflictions on themselves. Among other things, they resolved to cross the whole Indian subcontinent on foot. They also determined to make the journey in complete silence: they were not to
utter a single word, even in their sleep. Once, however, when they were walking on the bank of a river, they heard a drowning woman crying for help. Without a word the younger monk leaped into the water, carried the woman to the bank on his back, and laid her down wordlessly on the sand. The two ascetics continued their journey in silence. Six months or a year passed, and suddenly the younger monk asked his companion: Tell me, do you think I sinned in carrying that woman on my back? His friend answered with a question: What, are you still carrying her?

Father, for his part, went back to his research. At that time he was deep in the literatures of the ancient Near East, Akkadia and Sumeria, Babylonia and Assyria, the discoveries of early archives in Tel el-Amarna and Hatushash, the legendary library of King Assurbanipal, whom the Greeks called Sardanapalus, the stories of Gilgamesh, and the short myth of Adapa. Monographs and reference works piled up on his desk, surrounded by a regular army of notes and index cards. He tried to amuse Mother and me with one of his usual wisecracks: If you steal from one book, you're a plagiarist; if you steal from five books, you're a scholar; if you steal from fifty books, you're a great scholar.

Day by day that invisible muscle under Jerusalem's skin was tensing. Wild rumors circulated in our neighborhood; some of them were bloodcurdling. Some said that the British government in London was about to withdraw the army, so as to enable the regular forces of the member states of the Arab League, which was nothing but an arm of the British dressed up in desert robes, to defeat the Jews, conquer the land and then, once the Jews had gone, let the British in by the back door. Jerusalem, some of the strategists in Mr. Auster's grocery maintained, would soon be King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan's capital, and we Jewish residents would be put on board ships and taken to refugee camps in Cyprus. Or we might be dispersed to DP camps in Mauritius and the Seychelles.

Others did not hesitate to claim that the Hebrew underground movements, the Irgun, the Stern Gang, and the Haganah, by their bloody actions against the English, particularly by blowing up the British HQ in the King David Hotel, had brought disaster upon us. No empire in history had turned a blind eye to such humiliating provocations, and the British had already decided to punish us with a savage bloodbath. The overhasty outrages of our fanatical Zionist leaders had made us so hated by the British public that London had decided simply to allow the Arabs to slaughter the lot of us: so far the British armed forces had stood between us and a general massacre by the Arab nations, but now they would step aside, and our blood would be on our own heads.

Some people reported that various well-connected Jews, rich people from Rehavia, contractors and wholesalers with connections to the British, high-ranking civil servants in the Mandatory administration, had been tipped that they would be better off going abroad as soon as possible, or at least sending their families to some safe haven. They mentioned such and such a family that had pushed off to America, and various well-to-do business people who had quit Jerusalem overnight and settled in Tel Aviv with their families. They must know for certain something that the rest of us could only imagine. Or they could imagine what was just a nightmare for us.

Others told of groups of young Arabs who combed our streets at night, armed with pots of paint and brushes, marking the Jewish houses and allocating them in advance. They claimed that armed Arab gangs, under the orders of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, already controlled all the hills around the city, and the British turned a blind eye to them. They said that the forces of the Trans-Jordanian Arab Legion, under the command of the British Brigadier Sir John Glubb, Glubb Pasha, were already deployed in various key positions across the country so that they could crush the Jews before they could even try to raise their heads. And that the fighters of the Muslim Brotherhood, whom the British had allowed to come in from Egypt with their arms and set up fortified positions in the hills around Jerusalem, were digging themselves in just across from Kibbutz Ramat Rahel. Some expressed the hope that when the British left, the American president, Truman, would step in despite everything. He would send his army in quickly, two gigantic American aircraft carriers had already been spotted off Sicily heading east; President Truman surely wouldn't allow a second Holocaust to happen here less than three years after the Holocaust of the Six Million. Surely the rich and influential American Jews would put pressure on him. They couldn't just stand idly by.

Some believed that the conscience of the civilized world, or progressive public opinion, or the international working class, or widespread guilt feelings over the sorry fate of the Jewish survivors, would all act to thwart the "Anglo-Arab plot to destroy us." At the very least, some of our
friends and neighbors encouraged themselves at the onset of that strange, threatening autumn with the comforting thought that even if the Arabs didn't want us here, the last thing the peoples of Europe wanted was for us to go back and flood Europe again. And since the Europeans were far more powerful than the Arabs, it followed that there was a chance that we might be left here after all. They would force the Arabs to swallow what Europe was trying to spew forth.

One way or another, virtually everyone prophesied war. The underground broadcast passionate songs on the short waves. Grits, oil, candles, sugar, powdered milk, and flour almost vanished from the shelves in Mr. Auster's grocery shop: people were beginning to stock up in readiness for what was to come. Mother filled the kitchen cupboard with bags of flour and matzo meal, packets of rusks, Quaker oats, oil, preserves, canned food, olives, and sugar. Father bought two sealed canisters of paraffin and stored them under the basin in the bathroom.

Father still went off every day, as usual, at half past seven in the morning, to work in the National Library on Mount Scopus, on the No. 9 bus that went from Geula Street along Mea Shearim and crossed Sheikh Jarrah not far from Silwani Villa. He came home a little before five, with books and offprints in his battered briefcase and more tucked under his arm. But Mother asked him several times not to sit by the window in the bus. And she added some words in Russian. We suspended our regular Saturday afternoon walks to Uncle Joseph and Aunt Zippora's house for the time being.

I was barely nine, and already I was a devout newspaper reader. An avid consumer of the latest news. A keen expositor and debater. A political and military expert whose views were valued by the neighbors' children. A strategist with matchsticks, buttons, and dominoes on the matting. I would dispatch troops, execute tactical outflanking movements, forge alliances with one foreign power or another, store up trenchant arguments that were capable of winning over the stoniest British heart, and compose speeches that would not only bring the Arabs to understanding and reconciliation and make them ask for our forgiveness, but could even bring tears of sympathy for our sufferings to their eyes, mixed with profound admiration for our noble hearts and moral grandeur.

I conducted proud yet pragmatic talks at that time with Downing
Street, the White House, the Vatican, the Kremlin, and the Arab rulers. "Hebrew state! Free immigration!" demonstrators from the affiliated community shouted in marches and public gatherings, one or two of which Mother let Father take me along to. While every Friday, Arab crowds, marching angrily after they came out of the mosques, roared "
Idbah al-Yahud!
" (Butcher the Jews!) and "
Falastin hi arduna wa al-Yahud kilbuna!
" (Palestine is our land, and the Jews are our dogs!). If I had the chance, I could easily convince them rationally that while our slogans contained nothing that could hurt them, their slogans, shouted by inflamed mobs, were not very nice or civilized, and in fact they showed up the people who were shouting them in rather a shameful light. In those days I was not so much a child as a bundle of self-righteous arguments, a little chauvinist dressed up as a peace lover, a sanctimonious, honey-tongued nationalist, a nine-year-old Zionist propagandist. We were the goodies, we were in the right, we were innocent victims, we were David against Goliath, a lamb among wolves, the sacrificial lamb, whereas they—the British, the Arabs, and the whole Gentile world—they were the wolves, the evil, hypocritical world that was always thirsting for our blood, more shame on them.

When the British government announced the intention of ending its rule in Palestine and returning the mandate to the United Nations Organization, the UN set up a Special Committee on Palestine (UN-SCOP) to examine conditions in Palestine and also among the hundreds of thousands of displaced Jews, survivors of the Nazi genocide, who had been living for two years and more in DP camps in Europe.

At the beginning of September 1947, UNSCOP published its majority report, recommending that the British mandate should end at the earliest opportunity. Instead, Palestine should be partitioned into two independent states, one for the Arabs and one for the Jews. The area allocated to the two states was almost equal in size. The complicated, winding border that separated them was drawn roughly in accordance with the demographic distribution of the respective populations. The two states would be linked by a common economy, currency, etc. Jerusalem, the committee recommended, should be a neutral
corpus separatum
, under international trusteeship with a governor appointed by the UN.

These recommendations were submitted to the General Assembly for its approval, which required a two-thirds majority. The Jews gritted their teeth and agreed to accept the partition proposal: the territory
allocated to them did not include Jerusalem or Upper and Western Galilee, and three quarters of the proposed Jewish state was uncultivated desert land. Meanwhile the Palestinian Arab leadership and all the nations of the Arab League declared at once that they would not accept any compromise, and that they intended "to resist by force the implementation of these proposals, and to drown in blood any attempt to create a Zionist entity on a single inch of Palestinian soil." They argued that the whole of Palestine had been Arab land for hundreds of years, until the British came and encouraged hordes of foreigners to spread all over it, flattening hills, uprooting ancient olive groves, purchasing land, plot by plot, by subterfuges from corrupt landlords, and driving out the peasants who had farmed it for generations. If they were not stopped, these crafty Jewish colonists would swallow up the whole of the land, eradicating every trace of Arab life, covering it with their red-roofed European colonies, corrupting it with their arrogant and licentious ways, and very soon they would take control of the holy places of Islam and then they would overflow into the neighboring Arab countries. In no time at all, thanks to their deviousness and technical superiority, and with the support of British imperialism, they would do here exactly what the whites had done to the indigenous populations in America, Australia, and elsewhere. If they were allowed to set up a state here, even a little one, they would undoubtedly use it as a bridgehead, they would flood in, millions of them, like locusts, settle on every hill and valley, rob these ancient landscapes of their Arab character, and swallow everything up before the Arabs had time to shake themselves out of their slumber.