Panther in the Basement Read online

  four

  This is how I remember Jerusalem in that last summer of British rule. A stone city sprawling over hilly slopes. Not so much a city as isolated neighborhoods separated by fields of thistles and rocks. British armored cars sometimes stood at the street corners with their slits almost closed, like eyes dazzled by the light. And their machine guns sticking out in front like pointing fingers: You there!

  At dawn the boys would go around sticking up posters from the Underground on walls and lampposts. On Saturday afternoons, in our backyard there were arguments with guests and a procession of glasses of scalding tea and biscuits that my mother made (and I would help her by printing star and flower shapes on the soft dough). In the course of these arguments both the guests and my parents would use words like "persecution," "extermination," "salvation," "intelligence," "heritage," "clandestine immigration," "siege," "demonstrations," "Haj Amin," "extremists," "kibbutzim," "the White Paper," "the Hagganah," "self-restraint," "settlements," "gangs," "the conscience of the world," "riots," "protests," "clandestine immigrants." Occasionally one of the guests would get carried away; often it would be one of the quiet ones, a skinny, pale-faced man with a cigarette trembling between his fingers and a shirt buttoned up to the neck, whose pockets were stuffed with notebooks and slips of paper, and he would explode with polite anger and shout expressions such as "like sheep to the slaughter," "Protected Jews," and then he would hurriedly add, as though in an attempt to correct the bad impression, "But we must on no account allow ourselves to be split, heaven forbid, we are all in the same boat."

  The empty laundry room on the roof was fitted up with a washbasin and electric light, and Mr. Lazarus, a tailor from Berlin, moved in. He was a small man, who blinked and nodded, and despite the heat of the summer he was always dressed in a shabby grey jacket and a waistcoat. And he always carried a green tape measure around his neck, like a necklace. His wife and daughters, people said, had been murdered by Hitler. How had Mr. Lazarus himself managed to survive? There were various rumors. Uncertainties. I had my doubts: What did they know? After all, Mr. Lazarus himself never said a word about what had happened. He put up a card in the entrance hall, half in German that I could not understand and half in Hebrew that he asked my mother to write for him: "Expert tailor and cutter from Berlin. Commissions of all sorts undertaken. Alterations to order. Latest fashions. Reasonable prices. Credit available." After a day or two somebody tore off the German half: we would not tolerate the language of the murderers here.

  My father found an old woolen cardigan at the back of the wardrobe and sent me up to the roof to ask Mr. Lazarus to be good enough to change the buttons and strengthen the seams. "Yes indeed, it's only an old rag, possibly unweara-ble," Father said, "but he seems to be hungry for bread up there, and charity is offensive. So let's send it up to him. He can change the buttons. Earn a few piasters. Make him feel he's appreciated."

  My mother said:

  "All right. New buttons. But why send the boy? Go yourself, talk to him, ask him in for a glass of tea."

  "Definitely," said Father, sheepishly, and a moment later he added decisively: "Yes indeed. We must definitely invite him."

  Mr. Lazarus fenced in the far corner of the roof with old bedsteads, reinforced with wire, and made a kind of coop or cage, spread out some straw from an old mattress, bought half a dozen hens, and asked Mother to add in Hebrew on the remaining half of his notice: "And fresh eggs for sale." But he would never sell one of his hens to be killed and eaten, even for a feast day. On the contrary, they said Mr. Lazarus had given each hen a name, and that he used to go out onto the roof at night to check that they were sleeping soundly. One day Chita Reznik and I hid among the water tanks and heard Mr. Lazarus arguing with his hens. In German. Declaring, insisting, explaining, even humming them a tune. Sometimes I took up some dry bread crumbs or a jar of reject lentils that my mother told me to pick out. When I was feeding the hens, Mr. Lazarus would sometimes come and touch me suddenly on the shoulder with his fingertips, then he would shake his fingers as though he had burned himself. We had lots of people who talked to thin air. Or to someone who wasn't there.

  On the roof, behind Mr. Lazarus's chicken run, I installed a lookout post from which I had an excellent view of the other roofs; I could even squint into the British army camp. I used to stand there, concealed among the water tanks, spying on their evening roll call, noting down particulars in a notebook, and then I aimed a sniper's rifle at them and wiped them all out with a single economical, precise salvo.

  From my lookout post on the roof I also had a view of faraway Arab villages scattered on the slopes of the hills, and the Mount of Olives and Mount Scopus, beyond the tops of which the desert abruptly began, while far away to the southeast lurked the Hill of Evil Counsel, on which stood Government House, the British High Commissioner's residence. I was working that summer on the last details of a plan to take it by storm, from three directions at once; I had even prepared a summary of the things I would say without any hesitation to the High Commissioner once he was caught and was being interrogated in my lookout post here on the roof.

  Once, I was up on the roof inspecting Ben Hur's window because I suspected he was being followed, when, instead of Ben Hur, his older sister, Yardena, appeared in the window. She stood in the middle of the room and spun around a couple of times on tiptoe, like a dancer, and suddenly unbuttoning her housecoat she took it off and put on a dress. Between the housecoat and the dress, some dark patches stood out against her white skin, a couple under her arms and another dizzying island of shadow under her belly, but they were covered up at once by her dress, which fell like a curtain from her neck to her knees before I had time to see what I had seen or to retreat from my lookout or even to close my eyes. I really would have closed them, only it was all over in an instant. In that instant I thought: Now I'm going to die. I deserve to die for this.

  Yardena had a fiancé and an ex-fiancé and it was said there was also a hunter from Galilee and a poet from Mount Scopus, as well as a shy admirer who only looked at her sadly and never had the courage to say anything more to her than "Good morning" and "What a nice day." In the winter I had shown her a couple of my poems and after a few days she had said, "You'll always write." These words were more wonderful to me than most of the words I have heard in the course of the years, because I really do write.

  That evening I made up my mind to speak to her boldly or at least to write to her boldly and apologize and explain that I hadn't meant to watch her and that I hadn't really seen anything. But I didn't do it, because I didn't know whether she had noticed me standing on the roof. Maybe she hadn't spotted me? I prayed she hadn't and yet I hoped she had.

  I knew by heart all the neighborhoods, villages, hills, and towers that were visible from my lookout post. In the Sinopsky Brothers grocery, in the queue at the clinic, on the Dorzions' balcony opposite, in front of the Shibboleth newsstand, people would stand and argue about the borders of the future Hebrew State. Would they include Jerusalem? Would they include the British naval base at Haifa? And what about Galilee? And the desert? Some hoped that the forces of the civilized world would come and protect us from being murdered by bloodthirsty Arabs. (Every nation had a fixed epithet, like a first name and a surname: perfidious Albion, tainted Germany, faraway China, Soviet Russia, rich America. Down on the coast there was bustling Tel Aviv. Far away from us, in Galilee, in the valleys, was the laboring Land of Israel. The Arabs were labeled bloodthirsty. Even the world had several epithets, depending on the atmosphere and the situation: civilized, free, wide, hypocritical. Sometimes people said: "The world that knew and said nothing." Sometimes they said: "The world will not stay silent about this.")

  In the meantime, until the British pulled out and the Hebrew State finally emerged, the grocer's and the greengrocer's opened at seven in the morning and closed at six in the evening in time for the curfew. The neighbors—the Dorzions, Dr. Gryphius, ourselves, Ben Hur and his parents—gathered at Dr. B
uster's because he had a radio. We listened in gloomy silence to the news on the Voice of Jerusalem. Sometimes, after dark, very softly, we listened to the clandestine broadcast of the Voice of Fighting Zion. Sometimes we stayed on after the news to listen to the appeals for missing relatives, in case they suddenly mentioned a relative murdered in Europe who turned out to have survived after all and had managed to make his way to the Land of Israel or at least to one of the DP camps that the British had set up in Cyprus.

  There was silence in the room during the broadcast, like a curtain stirring in the breeze in the dark. But as soon as the radio was turned off, everyone started talking. They talked incessantly. What had happened, what was going to happen, what might or could or should be done, what chances we had left: they talked as though they were afraid that something terrible would happen if a moment's silence should suddenly fall. If ever that cold grey silence peered over the shoulder of the discussion and arguments, they silenced it immediately.

  Everybody read the papers, and when they finished reading them they swapped with each other: Davar, Hamashkif, Hatsofeh, and Haarets passed from hand to hand. And because the days were much longer then than they are nowadays, and each paper had only four pages, in the evening they reread what they had already scoured in the morning. They stood in a little group on the sidewalk in front of the Sinopsky Brothers grocery and compared what was written in Davar about our moral strength with what Haarets said concerning the importance of patience: was there possibly something crucial lurking between the lines that had been missed on the first and second readings?

  Besides Mr. Lazarus, there were other refugees in the neighborhood, from Poland, Romania, Germany, Hungary, Russia. Most of the residents were not called "refugees," nor were they termed "pioneers" or "citizens": they were described as "the organized community," which was located more or less in the middle, beneath the pioneers and above the refugees, in opposition to the British and the Arabs but also opposed to the militants. But how could you tell the difference? Almost all of them, pioneers and refugees and militants, spoke with throaty rs and liquid Is, except for the orientals, who spoke with trilled rs and harsh guttural sounds. The parents hoped that we children would grow up to be a new kind of Jew, improved, broad-shouldered, fighters and tillers of the soil, which was why they stuffed us full of liver, chicken, and fruit, so that when the time came we would stand up, bold and suntanned, and not let the enemy lead us like sheep to the slaughter again. Sometimes they would feel nostalgic for the places they had come here from: they would sing songs in languages we didn't know, and they would give us rough translations, so that we, too, would know that once upon a time there had been rivers and meadows, forests and fields, thatched roofs and bells ringing in the mist. Because here in Jerusalem the waste plots stood parched in the summer sun and the buildings were made of stone and corrugated iron, and the sun scorched everything as though the war was here already. The dazzling light preyed on itself from morn to evening.

  Occasionally someone would say: "What's going to happen?" and somebody else would answer: "We must hope for the best," or "We've just got to carry on." My mother would sometimes sit bent over a box of photos and mementos for five or ten minutes, and I knew that I had to pretend not to see. Her parents and her sister Tanya had been murdered by Hitler in the Ukraine, along with all the Jews who had not managed to get here in time. Father once said:

  "It's incomprehensible. Simply unbelievable. And the whole world said nothing."

  He, too, grieved sometimes for his parents and his sisters, but not with tears: he would stand for half an hour or so, in the rather sour, angular pose of a man who is stubbornly in the right, and peer closely at the maps that were pinned up on the wall in the hallway. Like a general in his HQ: staring and saying nothing. His view was that we must drive out the British occupier and set up a Hebrew State here that all persecuted Jews all over the world could come to. He said, "It must evidently set a model of justice to the world, even toward the Arabs if they choose to stay and live here among us. Yes, despite everything the Arabs are doing to us, because of the people who are inciting them and egging them on, we will treat them with exemplary generosity, but definitely not out of weakness. When the free Hebrew State is finally established, no villain in the world will ever again dare to murder or humiliate Jews. If he does, we will smite him, because when the time comes we will have a very long arm indeed."

  When I was in the fourth or fifth grade at school I carefully traced the map of the world from Father's atlas in pencil on tracing paper, and I marked the promised Hebrew State: a green patch between the desert and the sea. From this green patch I drew a long arm across continents and seas, and at the end of the arm I put a fist that could reach everywhere. Even to Alaska. Beyond New Zealand.

  "But what have we done," I once asked over supper, "to make everyone hate us so?"

  My mother said:

  "It's because we have always been in the right. They can't forgive us that we've never hurt a fly."

  I thought, though I didn't say it: It follows that it is definitely not worth being in the right.

  And also: It explains Ben Hur's attitude. I am in the right, and I don't hurt a fly either. But from now on a new age will start: the age of the panther.

  Father said:

  "It is a sad and obscure question. In Poland, for example, they hated us because we were different, because we were strange, because we talked and dressed and ate differently from those around us. But a few miles away, across the border in Germany, they hated us for the opposite reason: in Germany we talked and ate and dressed and behaved exactly like everybody else. So the anti-Semites said: 'Look at them insinuating themselves, yes indeed, you can no longer tell who is a Jew and who isn't.' That is our fate: the excuses for hatred change but the hatred itself continues forever. And what is the conclusion?"

  "That we should try not to hate," said my mother.

  But Father, whose blue eyes blinked rapidly behind his glasses, said: "We must not be weak. To be weak is a sin."

  "But what have we done?" I asked. "How have we made them so angry?"

  "That question," Father said, "you should put to our persecutors, not to us. And now would Your Highness please pick up your sandals from under the chair and put them where they belong. No, not there. Not there either. Where they belong."

  At night we could hear shots and explosions in the distance: the Underground was coming out of its secret bases and attacking the centers of the British government. By seven o'clock we would have closed the doors and shutters and shut ourselves in till the morning. There was a night curfew in the city. A clear breeze blew in the abandoned streets, along in the alleys and up the winding stone steps. Sometimes we would jump at the sound of a trash-can lid knocked off by an alley cat in the dark. Jerusalem stood still and waited. Inside our apartment there was silence most of the evening. Father sat with his back to us, separated from us in the ring of light cast by his desk lamp, dug in among his books and index cards, his fountain pen scratching at the silence, stopping, hesitating, then scratching again, as though it was digging a tunnel. Father was checking, comparing, perhaps pinning down a stray detail in the notes he was gathering for his great book on the history of the Jews in Poland. My mother would sit on the other side of the room, in her rocking chair, reading or, with her open book face down on her lap, listening attentively to some sound I could not hear. At her feet on the rug I would finish reading the paper and start to sketch out the battle plan for the lightning raid by the Underground on the key government points in Jerusalem. Even in my dreams I defeated enemies, and I continued dreaming of wars for several years after that summer.

  The FOD Organization that summer consisted of only three fighters: Ben Hur, the commander in chief and also head of the Department of Internal Security and Interrogation. I was his second in command. Chita Reznik was a private and a leading contender for promotion when the organization expanded. Apart from being second in command, I was also regarded
as the brains: it was I who founded the organization, at the beginning of the summer holidays, and gave it its name, FOD (short for "Freedom Or Death"). It was my idea to collect nails, bend them, and scatter them on the approach road to the army camp so as to puncture the British tires. And I composed the slogans that Chita was ordered to paint in thick black letters on the walls of neighboring houses: "Brits, you're in the wrong—go back where you belong!" "With blood fire and sweat our freedom we'll get!" "Perfidious Albion, hands off Zion!" (I learned the expression "perfidious Albion" from Father.) Our plan for the summer was to finish building our secret rocket. In a derelict hut on the edge of the wadi, behind Chita's backyard, we already had the electric motor from an old refrigerator, some parts from a motorbike, and several dozen yards of electric wire, fuses, a battery, bulbs, and six bottles of nail varnish, from which we planned to extract the acetone to make explosives. By the end of the summer the rocket would be finished and aimed precisely at the façade of Buckingham Palace, where King George of England lived, and then we were going to send him a proud, firm letter: You have till the Day of Atonement to get out of our country, and if you don't, then our Day of Judgment will become your Day of Reckoning.

  What would the British have replied to this letter if we had only had another two or three weeks and managed to finish making our rocket? Perhaps they would have seen sense and cleared out, thus sparing themselves and us a good deal of blood and suffering. It's hard to know. But in the middle of the summer my secret relationship with Sergeant Dunlop was discovered. I had hoped it would last forever and never be found out. And because it was discovered, the writing appeared on the wall and I received the order to appear that evening at the edge of the Tel Arza Woods, to face a court-martial on a charge of treason.

  The fact is I knew in advance that the trial would make no difference. No explanations or excuses would help me. As in all clandestine movements everywhere and at all times, anyone who is branded a traitor is a traitor and that's that. It's pointless to try to defend yourself.