My Michael Read online

  I whispered to my absent husband the most tender thing I had in me. About the twins. And about the pent-up girl who was queen of the twins. I hid nothing. All night long I played in the dark with the fingers of his left hand and he buried his head in the bedclothes and felt nothing. Once again I slept beside my husband.

  In the morning Michael was his usual self, subdued and efficient. Recently a fine line had begun to show under his left nostril. As yet it was barely visible, but if deeper wrinkles began to spread and cover his face, then my Michael would grow to look more and more like his father.

  19

  I AM AT REST. Events can touch me no more. This is my place. Here I am. As I am. There is a sameness in the days. There is a sameness in me. Even in my new summer dress with its high waistline, I am still the same. I was carefully made and beautifully wrapped, tied up with a pretty red ribbon and put on display, bought and unwrapped, used and set aside. There is a dreary sameness in the days. And especially when summer reigns in Jerusalem.

  What I have just written is a weary lie. There was a day, for instance, late in July 1953; a bright blue day full of sounds and sights. Our handsome greengrocer early in the morning, our Persian greengrocer Elijah Mossiah and his pretty daughter Levana. Mr. Guttmann the electrician from David Yelin Street promised to mend the iron within two days, and promised to keep his word. He also offered to sell me a yellow light bulb to keep mosquitoes away from the balcony at night. Yair was two years and three months old. He fell down the stairs, and so he beat them with his tiny fists. Spots of blood appeared on his knees. I dressed the wound without looking at the child's face. The previous evening we had seen a modern Italian film, The Bicycle Thief, at the Edison Cinema. At lunchtime Michael expressed reserved approval. He had bought an evening paper in town which mentioned South Korea and gangs of infiltrators in the Negev. There was a squabble between two Orthodox women in our street. An ambulance siren sounded in Rashi Street or one of the other streets nearby. A neighbor grumbled to me about the high price and poor quality of fish. Michael wore glasses because his eyes hurt. They were only reading glasses. I bought an ice cream for Yair and another for myself in Cafe Allenby in King George Street. I spilled ice cream on the sleeve of my green blouse.

  The Kamnitzer family upstairs had a son called Yoram, a dreamy, fair-haired boy of fourteen. Yoram was a poet. His poems were about loneliness. He brought me his manuscripts to read because he had heard that I had studied literature in my youth. I was the judge of his work. His voice trembled, his lips quivered, and a green flicker shone in his eyes. Yoram brought me a new poem, which he had dedicated to the memory of the poetess Rachel. Yoram's poem compared a life without love to a barren wilderness. A solitary wayfarer searches for a spring in the desert, but is led astray by mirages. By the side of the real spring he would finally collapse and die.

  "Imagine a well brought up, pious, Orthodox boy like you writing love poems," I laughed.

  For an instant Yoram had the strength to join in my laughter, but he had already begun to grip the arms of his chair and his fingers were pale as a girl's. He laughed with me, but suddenly his eyes filled. He snatched up the sheet of paper with the poem on it and crumpled it in his clenched hand. Suddenly he turned and fled from my apartment. By the door he paused.

  "I'm sorry, Mrs. Gonen," he whispered. "Goodbye."

  Regret.

  That evening Aunt Leah's friend, old Mr. Avraham Kadish-man, came to visit us. We drank coffee and he criticized the leftist government. Were the days all still the same? Days passed without leaving a trace. I owe myself a solemn duty to record in this journal the passing of every day, every hour, for my days are mine and I am at rest and the days flash past like hills seen from the train on the way to Jerusalem. I shall die Michael will die the Persian greengrocer Elijah Mossiah will die Levana will die Yoram will die Kadishman will die all the neighbors all the people will die all Jerusalem will die and there will be a strange train full of strange people and they like us will stand at the window and watch strange hills flashing past. I cannot even kill an ant on the kitchen floor without thinking of myself.

  And I also think of delicate things deep down inside my body. Delicate things which are mine, all mine, like my heart and my nerves and my womb. They are mine, they are my very own, but I shall never be allowed to see them or touch them because everything in the world is distance.

  If only I could overpower the engine and be the princess of the train, manipulate two lissom twins as if they were extensions of me, left hand and right hand.

  Or if only it could really happen that on the seventeenth of August, 1953, at six o'clock in the morning, a Bokharian taxi driver named Rahamim Rahamimov would finally arrive, powerfully built and smiling, on my doorstep, knock on the door and ask politely if Miss Yvonne Azulai is ready to leave. I would be absolutely ready to drive with him to Lydda Airport to fly Olympic to the snowbound Russian steppes at night in a sledge wrapped in bearskins the silhouette of the driver's massive skull and on the huge icy expanse lean wolves' eyes gleam. The rays of the moon fall on the neck of the solitary tree. Stop, driver, stop a moment, turn your head and let me see your face. His face is a woodcarving, coarse-grained in the soft white light. Icicles hang from the end of his tangled mustache.

  And the submarine Nautilus existed and still exists, gliding through the depths of the sea, huge, brightly lit and soundless in a gray ocean crisscrossed by warm currents and tangled underwater caverns at the roots of coral reefs in the archipelago, gliding deeper and deeper with powerful thrusts, it knows where it is going and why and is not at rest, unlike a stone, unlike a weary woman.

  And off the coast of Newfoundland, beneath the northern lights, the British destroyer Dragon patrols watchfully and her crew knows no rest for fear of Moby Dick, the noble white whale. In September Dragon will sail from Newfoundland to New Caledonia to carry supplies to the garrison there. Please, Dragon, don't forget the port of Haifa and Palestine and faroff Hannah.

  All these years Michael has nursed a hope of exchanging our apartment in Mekor Baruch for one in Rehavia or Beit Hakerem. He does not like living here. His aunts, too, wonder insistently why Michael lives surrounded by Orthodox people instead of in a civilized neighborhood. A scholar needs peace and quiet, the aunts maintain, and here the neighbors are noisy.

  It was my fault that we had still not managed to save enough even for a deposit on a new apartment, although Michael was considerate enough not to mention this fact to his aunts. Every year, with the return of spring, I am overcome by a mania for shopping. Electrical gadgets, a bright gray curtain to cover a whole wall, lots and lots of new clothes. Before I was married I bought few clothes. As a student I used to wear the same clothes right through the winter, a blue woolen dress my mother had knitted me or else a pair of brown corduroy trousers and a chunky red sweater such as girls at the University used to wear at that time to produce a casual effect. Nowadays I grew tired of new dresses after a few weeks. Every spring I felt a desire for new purchases. I stormed feverishly from shop to shop, as if the big prize was waiting for me somewhere, but always somewhere else.

  Michael wondered why I no longer wore the dress with the high waistline. I had been so pleased with it when I had bought it less than six weeks before. He fought back his surprise and silently nodded his head up and down as if expressing an understanding which made my blood boil. Maybe that was why I went into town with the express intention of shocking him with my prodigality. I loved his self-restraint. I wanted to shatter it.

  ***

  Dreams.

  Hard things plot against me every night. The twins practice throwing hand grenades before dawn among the ravines of the Judean Desert southeast of Jericho. Their twin bodies move in unison. Submachine guns on their shoulders. Worn commando uniforms stained with grease. A blue vein stands out on Halil's forehead. Aziz crouches, hurls his body forward. Halil drops his head. Aziz uncurls and throws. The dry shimmer of the explosion. The hills echo and re-echo, th
e Dead Sea glows pale behind them like a lake of burning oil.

  20

  THERE ARE old peddlers who wander around Jerusalem. They are not like the poor charcoal-seller in the story of little Hannah's dress. Their faces are not lit by an inner glow. They are enveloped in an icy hatred. Old peddlers. Weird craftsmen wandering about the city. They are weird. I have known them for years, them and their cries. Even when I was five or six I was terrified of them. I shall describe these, too—then perhaps they will stop frightening me at night. I try to decipher their ways, their orbits, to guess beforehand on which day each of them will come to cry his wares in our streets. Surely they, too, are subject to some scheme or regular pattern. "Gla-zier, gla-zier"—his voice is hoarse and stark. He carries no tools, no panes of glass, as if resigned to receiving no response to his cry. "Alte zachen, alte shich"—a great sack on his shoulder like the burglar in an illustration in a children's story. "Pri-mus stoves, pri-mus"—a heavy man with a huge, bony skull like the archetypal blacksmith. "Mattresses, mattresses"—the word resounding in his throat with an almost immoral suggestiveness. The knife-grinder carries about with him a wooden wheel worked by a treadle. He has no teeth, and his ears are hairy and protruding. Like a bat. Old craftsmen, weird peddlers, year after year they wander about the streets of Jerusalem untouched by time. As if Jerusalem is a wraiths' castle in the north, and they the avenging spirits lying in wait.

  I was born in Kiryat Shmuel, on the edge of Katamon, during the Feast of Succot in 1930. Sometimes I have a strange feeling that a bleak wasteland divides my parents' home from my husband's. I have never revisited the street where I was born. One Sabbath, in the morning, Michael, Yair, and I went for a walk to the edge of Talbiyeh. I refused to go any further. Like a spoiled child I stamped my foot. No, no. My husband and my child laughed at me, but they gave in.

  In Mea Shearim, in Beit Yisrael, Sanhedria, Kerem Avraham, Achva, Zichron Moshe, Nahalat Shiva live Orthodox people, Ashke-nazim with fur hats and Sephardim with striped robes. Old women huddle silently on low stools, as if there were spread out before them not a small town but a broad expanse of country, whose furthest horizons they must scan daily with the eyes of a hawk.

  There is no end to Jerusalem. Talpiot, a forgotten continent in the south, hidden amid her ever-whispering pine trees. A bluish vapor spreads up from the Judean Desert which borders Talpiot on the east. The vapor touches her small villas, and even her gardens, overshadowed by the pines. Beit Hakerem, a solitary hamlet lost beyond the windswept plain, hemmed in by rocky fields. Bayit Vagan, an isolated hill-fort where a violin plays behind windows kept shuttered all day, and at night the jackals howl to the south. Tense silence broods in Rehavia, in Saadya Gaon Street, after the sun has set. At a lighted window sits a gray-haired sage at his work, his fingers tapping at the keys of his typewriter. Who could imagine that at the other end of this very street stands the district of Shaarei Hesed, full of barefoot women wandering at night between colored sheets flapping in the breeze, and sly cats slipping from yard to yard? Is it possible that the old man playing tunes on his German typewriter cannot sense them? Who could imagine that beneath his western balcony spreads the Valley of the Cross, an ancient grove creeping up the slope, clutching at the outermost houses of Rehavia as if about to enfold and smother them in its luxuriant vegetation? Small fires flicker in the valley, and long-drawn-out, muffled songs rise out of the woods and reach out towards the windowpanes. At dusk crowds of white-toothed urchins make their way to Rehavia from the outskirts of the city to smash her stately street lamps with small, sharp stones. The streets are still calm: Kimhi, Maimonides, Nachmanides, Alharizi, Abrabanel, Ibn Ezra, Ibn Gabirol, Saadya Gaon. But then the decks of the British destroyer Dragon will still be calm after the mutiny has begun dimly to break out below. Towards nightfall in Jerusalem at the ends of the streets you can glimpse brooding hills waiting for darkness to fall on the shuttered city.

  In Tel Arza, in the north of Jerusalem, lives an elderly lady pianist. She practices ceaselessly and tirelessly. She is preparing for a new recital of pieces by Schubert and Chopin. The solitary tower of Nebi Samwil stands on a hilltop to the north, stands motionless beyond the border and stares night and day at the elderly pianist who sits innocently at her piano, her stiff back turned to the open window. At night the tower chuckles, the tall, thin tower chuckles, as though whispering to himself "Chopin and Schubert."

  One day in August Michael and I went out for a long walk. We left Yair with my best friend Hadassah, in Bezalel Street. It was summer in Jerusalem. Her streets had a new light. I am thinking of the time between half past five and half past six, the last light of the day. There was a caressing coolness. In the narrow lane which is Pri Hadash Street was a stone-paved yard, detached from the street by a broken-down fence. An ancient tree forced its way up between the unevenly laid paving stones. I do not know what kind of tree it was. When I had passed this way alone in the winter I had wrongly imagined that the tree was dead. Now new shoots had burst out from the trunk, clawing the air with pointed talons.

  From Pri Hadash Street we turned left into Josephus Street. A big, dark man wrapped in an overcoat, with a gray cap on his head, stared at me through the lighted window of a fish market. Am I mad, or is my real husband eyeing me furiously, reprovingly, through the lighted window of a fish market, wrapped in an overcoat and wearing a gray cap?

  Women had brought out all the substance of their houses onto their balconies: pinks and whites, sheets and quilts. A straight, slender girl stood on one of the balconies in Hashmonaim Street. Her sleeves were rolled up, and her hair wrapped in a scarf. She was beating an eiderdown angrily with a wooden bat, oblivious of our presence. On one of the walls was a faded slogan in red letters from the days of the underground: Judaea fell in blood and fire, in blood and fire will Judaea rise. The sentiment was alien to me, but I was moved by the music in the words.

  We had a long walk, Michael and I, that evening. We went down through the Bokharian Quarter and along Prophet Samuel Street to the Mandelbaum Gate. From here we took the curving lane through the Hungarian Buildings to the Abyssinian Quarter, to Mousrara and along the end of Jaffa Road to Notre Dame Square. Jerusalem is a burning city. Whole districts seem to be hanging in the air. But a closer glance reveals an immeasurable weightiness. The overpowering arbitrariness of the intertwining alleys. A labyrinth of temporary dwellings, huts and sheds leaning in smouldering anger against the gray stone that takes on now a blue, now a reddish tinge. Rusting gutters. Ruined walls. A harsh and silent struggle between the stonework and the stubborn vegetation. Waste-plots of rubble and thistles. And, above all, the wanton tricks of the light: if a stray cloud comes for a moment between the twilight and the city, immediately Jerusalem is different.

  And the walls.

  Every quarter, every suburb harbors a hidden kernel surrounded by high walls. Hostile strongholds barred to passers-by. Can one ever feel at home here in Jerusalem, I wonder, even if one lives here for a century? City of enclosed courtyards, her soul sealed up behind bleak walls crowned with jagged glass. There is no Jerusalem. Crumbs have been dropped deliberately to mislead innocent people. There are shells within shells and the kernel is forbidden. I have written "I was born in Jerusalem"; "Jerusalem is my city," this I cannot write. I cannot know what lurks in wait for me in the depths of the Russian Compound, behind the walls of Schneller Barracks, in the monastic lairs of Ein Kerem or in the enclave of the High Commissioner's palace on the Hill of Evil Counsel. This is a brooding city.

  In Melisanda Street, when the street lights had come on, a large and dignified man pounced on Michael, took hold of his coat button as if he was an old acquaintance and thus addressed my husband:

  "A curse upon you, O troubler of Israel. May you perish."

  Michael, who was not acquainted with the madmen of Jerusalem, was taken aback and went pale. The stranger smiled a friendly smile and added calmly:

  "So perish all enemies of the Lord, Amen Selah."

>   Michael may have been about to try to explain to the stranger that he must have mistaken him for his worst enemy, but the man put an end to the discussion by aiming at Michael's shoes:

  "I spit upon you and upon all your descendants forever and ever, Amen."

  Villages and suburbs surround Jerusalem in a close circle, like curious bystanders surrounding a wounded woman lying in the road: Nebi Samwil, Shaafat, Sheikh Jarrah, Isawiyeh, Augusta Victoria, Wadi Joz, Silwan, Sur Baher, Beit Safafa. If they clenched their fists the city would be crushed.

  Incredibly, in the evening the frail old scholars wander out for a breath of fresh air. They prod the pavement with their sticks like blind wanderers on a snowy steppe. Michael and I encountered a pair of them that evening in Luntz Street, behind Sansur House. They were strolling arm in arm, as if lending each other support in their hostile surroundings. I smiled and greeted them cheerfully. Both of them hastily raised their hands to their heads. One flourished his hat eagerly to return my greeting; the other's head was bare, and he waved in a symbolic or absent-minded gesture.

  21

  THAT AUTUMN Michael was appointed to an assistant lectureship in the Geology Department. This time he did not celebrate with a party, but marked the occasion by taking two days off work. We took Yair to Tel Aviv, where we stayed with Aunt Leah. The flat, shimmering city, the brightly colored buses, the sight of the sea and the taste of the salt breeze, the neatly trimmed trees planted along the sidewalks, all these aroused in me a poignant yearning, I knew not why or what for. There was tranquillity and a vague expectancy. We saw three school-friends of Michael's, and went to a couple of productions at the Habima Theatre. We hired a boat and rowed up the Yarkon towards Seven Mills. Reflections of broad eucalyptus trees fell trembling in the water. It was a very tranquil moment.