Soumchi Read online

  Who Shall Ascend unto the Hill of the Lord?

  In which negotiations are concluded, a contract signed and a number of plans discussed, as are faraway places where no white man has ever set foot.

  In the last house but one in Zephania Street lived my friend, Aldo Castelnuovo, whose father was famous for his conjuring tricks with matches and playing cards; besides which he owned a large travel agency, The Orient Express. I knew that Aldo, of all people, must see my new bicycle. It was the one thing his parents had not bought him, though they had bought him almost everything else. They would not allow Aldo a bicycle because of the various dangers involved and, in particular, because it might hinder Aldo's progress on the violin. It was for this reason that I whistled to Aldo furtively, from outside his house. When Aldo appeared he took the situation in at a glance, managing to smuggle the bicycle quickly into a disused shed in their back garden without his mother having suspected anything at all.

  Afterwards, we both went into the house and shut ourselves up in Aldo's father's library (Professore Emilio Castelnuovo having gone to Cairo for four days on business). It greeted me, as usual, with a smell both gloomy and enticing, made up of muttered secrets and hushed carpets, stealthy plots and leather upholstery, illicit whisperings and distant journeys. All day long, all summer long, the library shutters were kept closed to prevent sunlight fading the beautiful leather bindings with their gold-lettered spines.

  We took out the huge German Atlas and compared carefully every possible route on the map of Africa. Aldo's mother sent the Armenian nanny, Louisa, to us with a dish full of nuts—peanuts and almonds, walnuts and sunflower seeds—also orange juice in delicate blue glasses, still sweating with cold.

  When we had demolished the peanuts and walnuts and begun on the sunflower seeds, the conversation turned to bicycles in general and my bicycle in particular. If Aldo were secretly to own a bicycle, it should be possible, we decided, to keep it hidden from all suspicious eyes, at the back of the disused shed. And then, early on Saturday mornings, while his parents were still safely fast asleep, he would be able to creep out; there would be nothing to stop him riding right to the end of the world.

  I pronounced expert opinions on a thousand and one relevant items, approving or disapproving of them accordingly. On spokes and valves and safety valves; on batteries as compared to dynamos; on hand brakes (which, applied at speed, would send you flying immediately) as against back pedal brakes (let them go on a downhill slope and you might as well start saying your prayers); on ordinary carriers as compared to spring carriers, on lamps and reflectors, and so on and so forth. Afterwards, we returned to the subject of the Zulu and the Bushmen and the Hottentot, what each tribe had in common and in which way each one was unique, and which of them was the most dangerous. I spoke, eagerly, about the terrible Mahdi of Khartoum in the capital city of Sudan, about the real, original Tarzan from the forests of Tanganyika, through which I would have to pass on my journey to the source of the River Zambezi in the land of Obangi-Shari. But Aldo was not listening any more. He was miles away, deep in his own thoughts and seemed to grow more nervous every minute. Suddenly he cut me short, and, in a voice high and trembling with excitement, burst out:

  "Come on! Come to my room: I'll show you something better than you've dreamed in all your life!"

  "O.K. But quick," I begged. "I've got to get started on my journey today."

  Yet, even so I followed him out of the library. To reach Aldo's room meant traversing almost the entire length of the Castelnuovos' house. It was very large, all its carpets and curtains spotlessly clean, yet contriving at one and the same time to be both faintly gloomy and a touch exotic. In the sitting room, for instance, there was a brown grandfather clock with golden hands and square Hebrew letters instead of numbers. There were low cupboards along the walls and on top of them rows and rows of small antiques made of wood or solid silver. There was even a silver crocodile, but its tail was no ordinary tail—it acted as a lever also. If you pulled it and then pressed very lightly the crocodile would crack nuts between its jaws for the benefit of the Castelnuovos' guests. Moreover, the door of the hallway between the drawing room and the oblong dining room was guarded balefully night and day by Caesario, a large woollen dog, stuffed with seaweed and glowering at you with black buttons in place of eyes.

  In the dining room itself stood an enormous table made of mahogany, wearing what looked like felt stockings on each of its thick legs. And on the wall of the dining room in letters of gold, this inscription appeared: Who shall ascend unto the hill of the Lord? Who shall stand in His holy place? The answer to that question, He who has clean hands and a pure heart—which happened also to be the Castelnuovo family motto—was to be found on the opposite wall encircling the family crest, a single blue gazelle, each of its horns a Star of David.

  From the dining room, a glass door led to a little cubbyhole called "The Smoking Room." An enormous painting hid one wall entirely. It showed a woman in a delicate muslin dress, a silk scarf concealing all her face except for her two black eyes, while, with one white hand, she held out to a beggar a golden coin so bright and shining it sprayed small sparks in all directions, like sparks from a fire. But the beggar himself continued to sit there peacefully. He wore a clean white cloak, his beard too was white, his eyes closed, his face radiant with happiness. Beneath the picture on a small copper plaque was engraved the single word CHARJIY.

  I marvelled so often in this house. At Louisa, for instance, the Armenian nanny who looked after Aldo; a dark and very polite girl of sixteen or seventeen whom I never saw without a clean white apron on top of her blue dress, both dress and apron looking newly ironed. She could talk Italian with Aldo, yet obeyed his order without question, She was also exceedingly courteous to me, calling me "the young gentleman," in a strange, almost dreamlike, Hebrew until sometimes, even to myself, I began to seem like a real young gentleman. Could she be the daughter of the woman in that great picture in the smoking room; and if not, why the likeness between them? And then, was CHARITY the name of the picture? Or the name of the woman in the picture? Or even the name of the painter who had painted it? Our teacher in Class Two had been called Margolit Charity. It was she who had given Aldo the Hebrew name "Aided." But who could give a name like Aided to a boy in whose house there was a room just for smoking?

  (My parents' flat, with its two rooms and kitchen, separated by a short corridor, had only plain wooden tables and chairs with rush seats. Anemones or sprays of almond blossom flowered there in yoghourt jars in spring, while in summer and autumn the same jars sprouted branches of myrtle. The picture on the wall of the larger of our rooms showed a pioneer carrying a hoe and looking, for no obvious reason, towards a row of cypresses.)

  At the far end of the smoking room was a strange low door. We went through it and down five steps to the wing of the house which contained Aldo's room. His window looked out on the crowded red roofs of the Mea Shearim quarter, and beyond them, eastwards, onto church towers and mountains.

  "Now," said Aldo, as if about to perform some kind of magic, "now, just take a look at this."

  And at that, he bent down and pulled from a large and brightly patterned box, section after section of dismantled railway track, several small stations and a railway official made of tin. There followed the most marvellous blue engine, with a quantity of red carriages. Then we lay down on the floor and began to put it all together, the track layout, the signaling system, even the scenery. (It too was made of brightly painted tin; hills and bridges, lakes and tunnels; tiny cows had even been painted on the hillsides, grazing peacefully alongside the steep track.)

  And when at last all was ready, Aldo connected the electric plug and the whole enchanted world sprang instantly to life. Engines whistled, coach wheels clicked busily along the tracks, barriers went up and came down again, signal lights flashed intermittently at crossings and switches; freight trains and passenger trains, exchanging hoots of greeting, passed or overtook each other on
parallel rails—magic upon magic, enchantment on enchantment.

  "This," said Also with a slight disdain, "this I got as a present from my godfather, Maestro Enrico. He's Viceroy of Venezuela now." I was silent with awe.

  But in my heart I was thinking:

  Lord God Almighty. King of the Universe.

  "As far as I am concerned," added Aldo with indifference, "the whole thing's pretty boring. Not to say a waste of time. Myself, I'd rather play my violin than play with toys these days. So you might as well have it. If you still play with toys, that is,"

  "Hallelujah, Hallelujah," my soul sang within my breast. But I still said nothing.

  "Of course"—Aldo grew more precise—"of course, I don't mean as a present. As a swap In exchange for your bicycle. Do you agree?"

  Wow, I thought to myself. Wow. And how. But out loud, I said, "O.K. Done. Why not?"

  "And of course," went on Aldo immediately, "of course I don't mean the whole thing. Just one section of it in exchange for your bike; one engine, that is, five carriages and three meters of circular track. After all, your bike doesn't have a crossbar. What I'm going to do now is fetch a blank contract from Father's drawer, and if you haven't had second thoughts and changed your mind—which you still have a perfect right to do—we can sign it there and then and shake hands on it. In the meantime, you may start choosing the amount of track and the number of carriages that we agreed, plus your one engine—one of the small ones of course, not the large. I'll be back in a minute. Ciao."

  But I was not listening any more, I couldn't hear anything except my own heart galloping away inside my breast and bellowing out: "Shoe—shoe—shoe—shoe—shoey-shoe" (which was a nonsense song absolutely everyone was singing in those days).

  In a minute the contract had been signed and I had left the Castelnuovos' house, bursting out into Zephania Street like a train out of a tunnel, carrying carefully in front of me a shoe box gift-wrapped and tied up with blue ribbon. To judge by the light and the coolness of the air, it was half an hour or so till dusk and suppertime. I would set out the railway, I thought, in the wild and untamed landscape of our garden. I would dig a winding river, I thought, and fill it with water and make the railway cross it on a bridge. I'd raise hills and scoop out valleys, run a tunnel beneath the hanging roots of the fig tree and from there my new railway would erupt into the wilderness itself, into the barren Sahara and beyond, up to the source of the River Zambezi in the land of Obangi-Shari, through deserts and impenetrable forests where no white man had ever set foot.

  Your Money or Your Life

  in which we confront an old enemy, a hitter and cunning foe, who will stop at nothing. To avoid unnecessary bloodshed, we are obliged to fight our way through a thicket of intrigue and even to tame a young wild beast.

  To judge from the fading light and cooler air, night and suppertime were approaching fast. At the comer of Jonah Street I stopped for a moment to read a new inscription on the wall. Two mornings ago it had been empty, but here now in black paint was a fierce slogan against the British and David Ben-Gurion, It was such a silly, irritating slogan in fact, even the spelling mistake seemed shocking.

  British go hom

  Get out Ben Gurion

  I identified its author immediately. Goel. For this was no slogan from the Underground, This had to be the work of Goel Germanski himself. Having determined which, I took out a notebook and pencil and started to copy the inscription down. I need to make a note of everything like that, since I am going to be a poet when I grow up.

  I was still standing there, writing, when Goel himself appeared. Large and silent, he crept up behind me, moving as precisely as a wolf in a forest. He grabbed my shoulders in his two strong hands and did not let me go. I did not struggle. For one thing, I don't, on principle, pick fights with boys stronger than myself. For another, I had not forgotten that I was clutching my railway, my dearest possession, in a box beneath my arm. Consequently, I needed to take particular care.

  Goel Germanski was our class hoodlum, our neighborhood hoodlum, you could say. He was very tough and muscular, the son of the deputy headmaster of our school. His mother, it was rumored, "worked in Haifa for the French." Since our heavy defeat at Purim at the hands of the Bokarim quarter, we had been enemies, Goel and I. These days we did talk to each other, even went so far as to discuss our defeat, but always using the third person. And if I saw on Goel a certain ominous smile, I would do my best to be found on the opposite side of the street. For Goel's smile said this, approximately:

  "Everyone except you knows that something very nasty is about to get you; any time now you'll know it too; all the rest of us will be laughing, only you will be laughing on the other side of your face."

  Meanwhile, Goel had gripped my shoulders and asked, smiling, "So what's his little game then?"

  "Please let me go," I begged politely. "It's late and I'm already supposed to be back home,"

  "Is that so then?" inquired Goel, letting go my shoulders. But he did not stop staring at me suspiciously, as if I had said something amazingly cunning; yet, if I had hoped thereby to fool Goel Germanski himself, then I had another think coming. That was how Goel looked at me.

  Then he added very quietly:

  "So he wants to go home, huh."

  It was no question the way he said it. It was more as if he was pointing at some nasty aspect of my character which he was only just discovering, much to his sorrow and disappointment.

  "I'm late already," I explained gently.

  "Just get an earful of this," cried Goel to some invisible audience. "So he's late, huh? So all at once he wants to go home, huh? He's nothing but a dirty British spy, that's all he is. But as from right now we've got him fixed, him and his informing. As from right now we've fixed him for good."

  "To start with," I corrected him cautiously, my heart pounding under my T-shirt, "to start with, I'm not a spy."

  "So he isn't is he?" winked Goel, simultaneously friendly and malevolent. "So how come he's copying that stuff from the wall, how come?"

  "So what?" I inquired. And then, with a burst of courage, added: "The street doesn't belong to him. The street's public property."

  "That's what he thinks," explained Goel, with a schoolmasterly patience, "that's what he thinks. Because right now he's going to start opening up that parcel of his and letting us take a good look inside."

  "No I'm not,"

  "Open up."

  "No."

  "For the third and last time. He'll open up. If he knows what's good for him. That Soumchi. That scab. That dirty British spy. He'll open up, and fast, else I'll give him a hand right now."

  So I untied the blue ribbon, removed the fine wrappings, revealed to Goel Germanski my railway, in all its glory.

  After a brief, awed silence, Goel said, "And is he going to tell me he got all that from Sergeant Dunlop? Just for informing and nothing else?"

  "I'm not an informer. I teach Sergeant Dunlop Hebrew sometimes and he teaches me English. That's all. I'm not an informer."

  "Then how come the railway? How come the engine? Unless, maybe, this well-known benefactor suddenly started handing out goodies to the poor?"

  "It's none of his business," I said in the ensuing silence, heroically.

  In return, Goel Germanski grabbed hold of my T-shirt and shook me against the fence, two or three times. He did not shake me savagely but delicately rather—1 might have been a winter coat from which he was trying to remove dust and the smell of mothballs.

  And when he had quite finished, he inquired anxiously, as though concerned for my welfare, "Maybe he's ready to do some talking now?"

  "O.K.," I said. "O.K. O.K. If he'll let go of me. I swapped it. If he must know."

  "He wouldn't be lying by any chance?" Goel sounded suspicious suddenly, wore on his face an expression of the deepest moral concern.

  "Cross my heart. It's the absolute truth," I swore. "I swapped it with Aldo, There's even a contract in my pocket to prove it. Then he
can see for himself. I swapped it for the bike I got from my uncle."

  "Uncle Wetmark," Goel pointed out.

  "Uncle Zemach," I corrected him.

  "A girl's bike," said Goel.

  "With a lamp and a dynamo," I insisted.

  "Aldo Castelnuovo?" said Goel.

  "As a swap," I said. "Here's the contract,"

  "Right," said Goel, And thereafter looked thoughtful. We were silent for a little while. In the sky, and outside, in the courtyard, it was still daylight. But I could smell the evening approaching now. Goel broke the silence at last.

  "Right," he said. "He's made one swap. Now here's another for him, if he wants. Psssst, Keeper. Here: down, sit! Sit! Right, like that. Good dog. Yes, you are. This is Keeper; he'd better take a good look at him before he makes up his mind. There's no dog like him today. Not even for fifty pounds apiece. They don't sell dogs with such pedigrees any more. His father belongs to King Farouk of Egypt; his mother to Esther Williams, in the pictures."

  At Goel's shrill whistle and the sound of the name Keeper, a very young and enthusiastic Alsatian had sprung from the nearest courtyard and begun prancing all around us, panting and yelping and leaping and quivering, dancing with happiness, exploding with excitement, still so nearly a puppy he waggled his whole hindquarters, instead of just his tail. He fawned and fawned on Goel: he pressed himself against him, as if attempting to implant himself; begged his attention, to stay with him forever; flattered and beseeched him; clambered over him, his paws trembling with joy, his eyes firing sparks of wolfish love at him. In the end he was standing on his hind legs, scrabbling with all his might at Goel's stomach, until Goel checked him suddenly, with a masterful, "That's enough! Sit!"