My Michael Read online

  A famous scholar came into the cafe in the company of two women. Michael leaned toward me to whisper his name in my ear. His lips may have brushed my hair. I said:

  "I can see right through you. I can read your mind. You're saying to yourself: 'What's going to happen next? Where do we go from here?' Am I right?"

  Michael reddened suddenly like a child caught stealing sweets:

  "I've never had a regular girlfriend before."

  "Before?"

  Thoughtfully Michael moved his empty cup. He looked at me. Deep down, underneath his meekness, a suppressed sneer lurked in his eyes.

  "Till now."

  A quarter of an hour later the famous scholar left with one of the women. Her friend moved over to a table in a corner and lit a cigarette. Her expression was bitter.

  Michael remarked:

  "That woman is jealous."

  "Of us?"

  "Of you, perhaps." He tried to cover up. He was ill at ease, because he was trying too hard. If only I could tell him that his efforts did him credit. That I found his fingers fascinating. I could not speak, but I was afraid to keep silent. I told Michael that I adored meeting the celebrities of Jerusalem, the writers and scholars. It was an interest I had inherited from my father. When I was small my father used to point them out to me in the street. My father was extremely fond of the phrase "world-famous." He would whisper excitedly that some professor who had just vanished into a florist's shop was world-famous, or that some man out shopping was of international fame. And I would see a diminutive old man cautiously feeling his way like a stranger in an unfamiliar city. When we read the Books of the Prophets at school, I imagined the Prophets as being like the writers and scholars my father had pointed out to me: men of refined features, bespectacled, with neatly trimmed white beards, their pace troubled and hesitant, as if they were walking down the steep slope of a glacier. And when I tried to imagine these frail old men thundering against the sins of the people, I smiled; I thought that at the height of their fury their voices would dry up and they would merely emit a high-pitched shriek. If a writer or university professor came into his shop in Jaffa Road, my father would come home looking as if he had seen a vision. He would repeat solemnly casual words they had spoken, and study their utterances as if they were rare coins. He was always looking for hidden meanings in their words, because he saw life as a lesson from which one had to learn a moral. He was an attentive man. Once my father took me and my brother Emanuel to the Tel Or Cinema on a Saturday morning to hear Martin Buber and Hugo Bergmann speak at a meeting sponsored by a pacifist organization. I still remember a curious episode. As we were leaving the auditorium Professor Bergmann stopped in front of my father and said, "I really did not expect to see you in our midst today, my dear Dr. Liebermann. I beg your pardon—you are not Professor Liebermann? Yet I feel certain we have met. Your face, sir, seems very familiar." Father stuttered. He blanched as if he had been accused of some foul deed. The professor, too, was confused, and apologized for his mistake. Perhaps on account of his embarrassment the scholar touched my shoulder and said, "In any case, my dear sir, your daughter—your daughter?—is a very pretty girl." And beneath his mustache a gentle smile spread. My father never forgot this incident as long as he lived. He used to recount it again and again, with excitement and delight. Even when he sat in his armchair, clad in a dressing gown, his glasses perched high on his forehead and his mouth drooping wearily, my father looked as if he were silently listening to the voice of some secret power. "And you know, Michael, still, to this day, I sometimes think that I shall marry a young scholar who is destined to become world-famous. By the light of his reading lamp my husband's face will hover among piles of old German tomes; I shall creep in on tiptoe to put a cup of tea down on the desk, empty the ashtray, and quietly close the shutters, then leave without his noticing me. Now you'll laugh at me."

  3

  TEN O' CLOCK.

  Michael and I each paid our own checks, as students do, and went out into the night. The sharp frost seared our faces. I breathed out, and watched my breath mingle with his. The cloth of his overcoat was coarse, heavy, and pleasant to touch. I had no gloves, and Michael insisted I wear his. They were rough, worn leather gloves. Streams of water ran down the gutter toward Zion Square, as if something sensational was happening in the center of town. A tightly wrapped couple walked past, their arms round each other. The girl said:

  "That's impossible. I can't believe it."

  And her partner laughed:

  "You're very naïve."

  We stood for a moment or two, not knowing what to do. We only knew that we did not want to part. The rain stopped and the air grew colder. I found the cold unbearable. I shivered. We watched the water running down the gutter. The road was shiny. The asphalt reflected the broken yellow glare of car headlights. Disjointed thoughts flashed through my mind—how to keep hold of Michael for a little longer.

  Michael said:

  "I'm plotting against you, Hannah."

  I said:

  "Be careful. You might find yourself hoist on your own petard."

  "I'm plotting dark deeds, Hannah."

  His trembling lips betrayed him. For an instant he looked like a big, sad child, a child with most of its hair shaved off. I wanted to buy him a hat. I wanted to touch him.

  Suddenly Michael raised his arm. A taxi screeched to a sodden halt. Then we were together inside its warm belly. Michael told the driver to drive wherever he felt like taking us, he didn't mind. The driver shot me a sly glance, full of filthy pleasure. The panel lights cast a dim red glow on his face, as if the skin had been peeled off and his red flesh laid bare. That taxi driver had the face of a mocking satyr. I have not forgotten.

  We drove for about twenty minutes, with no idea where we were going. Our warm breath misted up the windows. Michael talked about geology. In Texas people dig for water and suddenly an oil well gushes up instead. Perhaps there are untapped supplies of oil in Israel too. Michael said "lithosphere." He said "sandstone," "chalk bed." He said "Pre-Cambrian," "Cambrian," "metamorphic rocks," "igneous rocks," "tectonics." For the first time then I felt that inner tension which I still feel whenever I hear my husband talking his strange language. These words relate to facts which have meaning for me, for me alone, like a message transmitted in code. Beneath the surface of the earth, opposed endogenic and exogenic forces are perpetually at work. The thin sedimentary rocks are in a continuous process of disintegration under the force of pressure. The lithosphere is a crust of hard rocks. Beneath the crust of hard rocks rages the blazing nucleus, the siderosphere.

  I am not absolutely certain that Michael used these exact words during that taxi ride, in Jerusalem, at night, in the winter of 1950. But some of them I heard from him for the first time that night, and I was gripped. It was like a strange, sinister message, which I could not decipher. Like an unsuccessful attempt to reconstruct a nightmare which has faded from memory. Elusive as a dream.

  Michael's voice as he spoke these words was deep and restrained. The dashboard lights glared red in the darkness. Michael spoke like a man weighed down with a grave responsibility, as if accuracy was at that moment of supreme importance. If he had taken my hand and pressed it in his I should not have withdrawn it. But the man I loved was carried away on a subdued tide of enthusiasm. I had been wrong. He could be very strong when he wanted to be. Much stronger than I. I accepted him. His words lulled me into that mood of tranquillity which I experience after a siesta; the tranquillity of waking to twilight, when time seems soft and I am tender and things around are tender.

  The taxi passed through drenched streets which we could not identify because the windows were misted up. The windshield wipers caressed the windshield. They beat in twin, steady rhythm, as if in obedience to some inviolable law. After twenty minutes' drive Michael told the driver to stop, because he was not rich and our trip had already cost him the price of five lunches in the student restaurant at the end of Mamillah Road.

&n
bsp; We got out of the taxi in a place which was unfamiliar: a steep alleyway paved with dressed stones. The paving stones were rain-lashed, for in the meantime the rain had started again. A fierce wind beat at us. We walked slowly. We were soaked to the skin. Michael's hair was drenched. His face was amusing; he had the look of a crying child. Once he stretched out a single finger and wiped away a drop of rain which was clinging to the tip of my chin. Suddenly we were in the square in front of the Generali Building. A winged lion, a rain-soaked, frozen lion, gazed down on us from above. Michael was ready to swear that the lion was laughing under his breath.

  "Can't you hear him, Hannah? Laughing! He's looking at us and laughing. And I for one am inclined to agree with him."

  I said:

  "Maybe it's a pity that Jerusalem is such a small city that you can't get lost in it."

  Michael accompanied me along Melisanda Street, the Street of the Prophets, and then along Strauss Street, where the medical center is. We did not meet a living soul. It was as if the inhabitants had abandoned the city and left it to the two of us. We were lords of the city. When I was a child I used to play a game I called "Princess of the City." The twins acted the part of submissive subjects. Sometimes I made them act rebellious subjects, and then I would humble them relentlessly. It was an exquisite thrill.

  In winter, at night, the buildings of Jerusalem look like gray shapes against a black backcloth. A landscape pregnant with suppressed violence. Jerusalem can sometimes be an abstract city: stones, pine trees, and rusting iron.

  Stiff-tailed cats crossed the deserted streets. The alley walls reflected a counterfeit echo of our footsteps, making them dull and long. We stood outside the door of my house for about five minutes. I said:

  "Michael, I can't invite you up to my room for a hot glass of tea, because my landlord and his wife are religious people. When I took the room I promised them not to entertain men there. And it's half past eleven now."

  When I said "men" we both smiled.

  "I didn't expect you to invite me up to your room now," Michael said. I said:

  "Michael Gonen, you're a perfect gentleman, and I'm grateful to you for this evening. All of it. If you were to invite me to share another evening like it with you, I don't suppose I should refuse."

  He bent over me. Forcefully he gripped my left hand in his right. Then he kissed my hand. The movement was abrupt and violent, as if he had been rehearsing it all along the way, as if he had mentally counted to three before he bent over to kiss me. Through the leather of the glove he had lent me when we left the cafe a strong, warm wave entered me. A moist breeze stirred the treetops and fell quiet. Like a duke in an English film Michael kissed my hand through his glove, only Michael was drenched and he forgot to smile and the glove was not white.

  I took off both gloves and handed them to him. He hurriedly put them on while they were still warm from the heat of my body. An invalid coughed wretchedly behind the closed shutters on the first floor.

  "How strange you are today," I smiled.

  As if I had known him on other days, too.

  4

  I HAVE FOND memories of an attack of diphtheria I suffered as a child of nine. It was winter. For several weeks I lay on my bed opposite the south-facing window. Through the window I could see a gloomy expanse of fog and rain: South Jerusalem, the shadow of the Bethlehem hills, Emek Refaim, the rich Arab suburbs in the valley. It was a winter world without details, a world of shapes in an expanse ranging in color from light to dark gray. I could see the trains, too, and I could follow them with my eyes a long way along Emek Refaim from the soot-blackened station as far as the curves at the foot of the Arab village of Beit Safafa. I was a general on the train. Troops loyal to me commanded the high ground. I was an emperor in hiding. An emperor whose authority was undiminished by distance and isolation. In my dreams the southern suburbs were transformed into the St. Pierre and Miquelon islands, which I had come across in my brother's stamp album. Their name had caught my fancy. I used to carry my dreams over into the world of waking. Night and day were one continuous world. My high fever contributed to this effect. Those were dizzy, multicolored weeks. I was a queen. My cool mastery was challenged by open rebellion. I was captured by the mob, imprisoned, humiliated, tortured. But a handful of loyal supporters in dark corners were plotting to rescue me. I had confidence in them. I relished my cruel sufferings because out of them rose pride. My returning authority. I was reluctant to recover. According to the doctor, Dr. Rosenthal, there are some children who prefer to be ill, who refuse to be cured, because illness offers, in a sense, a state of freedom. When I recovered, at the end of the winter, I experienced a feeling of exile. I had lost my powers of alchemy, the ability to make my dreams carry me over the dividing line between sleeping and waking. To this day I feel a sense of disappointment on waking. I mock at my vague longing to fall seriously ill.

  After saying good night to Michael I went up to my room. I made some tea. For a quarter of an hour I stood in front of the paraffin heater warming myself and thinking of nothing in particular. I peeled an apple, sent to me by my brother Emanuel from his kibbutz, Nof Harim. I recalled how Michael had tried three or four times to light his pipe without success. Texas is a fascinating place: A man digs a hole in his garden to plant a fruit tree, and suddenly a jet of oil gushes out. This was a whole dimension I had never considered before, the hidden worlds which lie beneath every spot I tread. Minerals and quartzes and dolomites and all that kind of thing.

  Then I wrote a short letter to my mother and my brother and his family. I told them all that I was well. In the morning I must remember to buy a stamp.

  In the literature of the Hebrew Enlightenment there are frequent references to the conflict between light and darkness. The writer is committed to the eventual triumph of light. I must say that I prefer the darkness. Especially in summer. The white light terrorizes Jerusalem. It puts the city to shame. But in my heart there is no conflict between darkness and light. I was reminded of how I had slipped on the stairs that morning in Terra Sancta College. It was a humiliating moment. One of the reasons why I enjoy being asleep is that I hate making decisions. Awkward things sometimes happen in dreams, but some force always operates which makes decisions for you, and you are free to be like the boat in the song, with all the crew asleep, drifting wherever the dream carries you. The soft hammock, the sea gulls, and the expanse of water which is both a gently heaving surface and also a maelstrom of unplumbed depths. I know that the deep is thought of as a cold place. But it is not always so, and not entirely. I read in a book once about warm streams and underwater volcanoes. At a point deep below the freezing ocean depths there is sometimes a warm cave hidden. When I was small I read and reread my brother's copy of Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. There are some rich nights when I discover a secret way through the watery depths and the darkness among green and clammy sea-creatures until I beat at the door of the warm cavern. That is my home. There a shadowy captain waits for me surrounded by books and pipes and charts. His beard is black, his eyes hold a hungry gleam. Like a savage he seizes me, and I soothe his raging hatred. Tiny fish swim through us, as if we were both made of water. As they pass through they impart minute flickers of searing pleasure.

  I read two chapters of Mapu's Love of Zion for the next day's seminar. If I were Tamar I would make Amnon crawl to me on his knees for seven nights. When he finally confessed the torments of his love in scriptural language I would order him to transport me in a sailing ship to the isles of the archipelago, to that faraway place where Red Indians turn into delectable sea-creatures with silver spots and electric sparks, and sea gulls float in blue space.

  Sometimes at night I see a bleak Russian steppe. Frozen plains coated with a crust of bluish frost which reflects the flickering light of a wild moon. There is a sledge and a bearskin rug and the black back of a shrouded driver and furiously galloping horses and wolves' eyes glowing in the darkness round about and a solitary dead tree stan
ds on the white slope and it is night within night on the steppe and the stars keep sinister watch. Suddenly the driver turns toward me a heavy face carved by some drunken sculptor. Icicles hang from the ends of his tangled mustache. His mouth is slightly open, as if it is he who is producing the howl of the biting wind. The dead tree which stands all alone on the slope on the steppe is not there by chance, it has a function which on waking I cannot name. But even when I wake I remember that it has a function. And so I return not entirely empty-handed.

  In the morning I went out to buy a stamp. I posted the letter to Nof Harim. I ate a roll and yoghurt and drank a glass of tea. Mrs. Tarnopoler, my landlady, came into my room to ask me to buy a can of paraffin on my way home. While I drank my tea I managed to read another chapter of Mapu. At Sarah Zeldin's kindergarten one of the girls said:

  "Hannah, you're as happy as a little girl today!"

  I put on the blue woolen dress and tied a red silk kerchief round my neck. When I looked in the mirror I was delighted to see that with the neckerchief I looked like a daring girl who is suddenly likely to lose her head.

  Michael was waiting for me at midday at the entrance to Terra Sancta, by the heavy iron gates with their dark metal ornaments. He was carrying a box full of geological specimens in his arms. Even if it had occurred to me, say, to shake hands with him, I could not have.

  "Oh, it's you, is it?" I said. "Who do you think you're waiting for? Did anyone tell you to wait here?"

  "It's not raining now and you're not soaking wet," Michael said. "When you're wet you're much less bold."