A Tale of Love and Darkness (20 page)

In 1920 the suburb of Kerem Avraham, Abraham's Vineyard, was founded below Finn's farm: its huddled little houses were built among the plantations and orchards of the farm and progressively ate into them. The consul's house itself underwent various transformations after the death of his widow Elizabeth Anne Finn: first it was turned into a British institute for young offenders, then it became a property of the British administration, and finally an army HQ.

Toward the end of World War II the garden of Finn's house was surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence, and captured Italian officers were imprisoned in the house and the garden. We used to creep out at nightfall to tease the POWs. The Italians greeted us with cries of
Bambino! Bambino! Buon giorno bambino!
and we responded by shrieking
Bambino! Bambino! Il Duce morte! Finito il Duce!
Sometimes we shouted
Viva Pinocchio!
and from beyond the fences and the barriers of language, war, and Fascism there always echoed like the second half of some ancient slogan the cry:
Gepetto! Gepetto! Viva Gepetto!

In exchange for the sweets, peanuts, oranges, and biscuits that we threw to them over the barbed-wire fence, as though to monkeys in the zoo, some of them passed us Italian stamps or displayed to us from a distance family photographs with smiling women and tiny children stuffed into suits, children with ties, children with jackets, children of our age with perfectly combed dark hair and a forelock shining with brilliantine.

One of the POWs once showed me, from behind the wire, in return for an Alma chewing gum in a yellow wrapper, a photo of a plump woman wearing nothing but stockings and a suspender belt. I stood staring, for a moment, wide-eyed and struck dumb with horror, as though someone in the middle of the synagogue on the Day of Atonement had suddenly stood up and shouted out the Ineffable Name. Then
I spun around and fled, terrified, sobbing, hardly seeing where I was running. I was six or seven at the time, and I ran as though there were wolves on my tail, I ran and ran and did not stop fleeing from that picture until I was eleven and a half or so.

*Based on the Hebrew book
Architecture in Jerusalem: European Christian Building outside the Walls, 1855-1918
, by David Kroyanker (Keter: Jerusalem, 1987), pp. 419-21.

After the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 the Finns' house was used successively by the Home Guard, the Border Patrol, the Civil Defense, and the paramilitary youth movement, before becoming a religious Jewish girls' school by the name of Beit Bracha. I occasionally stroll around Kerem Avraham, turning from Geula Street, which has been renamed Malkei Israel Street, into Malachi Street, then left into Zechariah Street, walk up and down Amos Street a few times, then up to the top end of Obadiah Street, where I stand at the entrance to Consul Finn's house for a few minutes and gaze at the house. The old house has shrunk over the years, as though its head has been pushed down into its shoulders with an ax blow. It has been Judaized. The trees and shrubs have been dug up, and the whole area of the garden has been asphalted over. Pinocchio and Gepetto have vanished. The paramilitary youth movement has also disappeared without a trace. The old frame of a broken
sukkah
left over from the last Sukkot festival stands in the front yard. There are sometimes a few women wearing snoods and dark dresses standing at the gate; they stop talking when I look at them. They do not look back at me. They start whispering as I move away.

When he arrived in Jerusalem in 1933, my father registered for an MA at the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus. At first he lived with his parents in the dark little apartment in Kerem Avraham, in Amos Street, about two hundred yards east of Consul Finn's house. Then his parents moved to another apartment. A couple named Zarchi moved into the Amos Street apartment, but that young student, whose parents pinned such high hopes on him, paid rent to go on living in his room, which had its own entrance through the veranda.

Kerem Avraham was still a new district: most of the streets were un-paved, and the vestiges of the vineyard that gave it its name were still visible in the gardens of the new houses, in the form of vines and pomegranate bushes, fig and mulberry trees, that whispered to each other whenever there was a breeze. At the beginning of summer, when the windows were opened, the smell of greenery flooded the tiny rooms. From the rooftops and at the ends of the dusty streets you could catch sight of the hills that surrounded Jerusalem.

One after the other, simple square stone houses sprang up, two- or three-story buildings that were divided up into large numbers of cramped apartments each with two tiny rooms. The gardens and verandas had iron railings that soon rusted. The wrought-iron gates incorporated a six-pointed star or the word
ZION
. Gradually dark cypresses and pines supplanted the pomegranates and vines. Here and there, pomegranates grew wild, but the children snuffed them out before the fruit had a chance to ripen. Among the untended trees and the bright outcrops of rock in the gardens some people planted oleander or geranium bushes, but the garden beds were soon forgotten, as washing lines were strung out over them and they were trampled underfoot or filled with thistles and broken glass. If they did not die of thirst, the oleanders and geraniums grew wild, like scrub. All sorts of storehouses were erected in the gardens, sheds, corrugated-iron shacks, improvised huts made from the planks of the packing cases in which the residents brought their belongings here, as though they were trying to create a replica of the shtetl in Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, or Lithuania.

Some fixed an empty olive can to a pole, set it up as a dovecote, and waited for the doves to come—until they gave up hope. Here and there somebody tried to keep a few hens, someone else tended a little vegetable patch, with radishes, onions, cauliflower, parsley. Most of them longed to get out of here and move somewhere more cultured, like Re-havia, Kiryat Shmuel, Talpiot, or Beit Hakerem. All of them tried hard to believe that the bad days would soon be over, the Hebrew state would be established, and everything would change for the better: surely their cup of sorrow was full to overflowing? Shneour Zalman Rubashov, who later changed his name to Zalman Shazar and was elected President of Israel, wrote something like this in a newspaper at that time: "When the free Hebrew state finally arises, nothing will be the same as it was! Even love will not be what it was before!"

Meanwhile the first children were born in Kerem Avraham, and it was almost impossible to explain to them where their parents had come from, or why they had come, or what it was that they were all waiting for. The people who lived in Kerem Avraham were minor bureaucrats
in the Jewish Agency, or teachers, nurses, writers, drivers, shorthand typists, world reformers, translators, shop assistants, theorists, librarians, bank tellers or cinema ticket sellers, ideologues, small shopkeepers, lonely old bachelors who lived on their meager savings. By eight o'clock in the evening the grilles on the balconies were closed, the apartments were locked, shutters were barred, and only the streetlamp cast a gloomy yellow puddle on the corner of the empty street. At night you could hear the piercing shrieks of night birds, the barking of distant dogs, stray shots, the wind in the trees of the orchard: for at nightfall Kerem Avra-ham went back to being a vineyard. Fig trees, mulberries and olives, apple trees, vines and pomegranates rustled their leaves in every garden. The stone walls reflected the moonlight back up into the branches in a pale, skeletal glow.

Amos Street, in one or two pictures in my father's photograph album, looks like an unfinished sketch for a street. Square stone buildings with iron shutters and iron grilles on the verandas. Here and there on the windowsills pale geraniums bloom in pots between the sealed jars of cu-cumbers or peppers pickling in garlic and dill. In the center between the buildings there is no road yet but only a temporary building site, a dusty track scattered with building materials, gravel, piles of half-finished stones, sacks of cement, metal drums, floor tiles, heaps of sand, coils of wire for fencing, a mound of wooden scaffolding. Some spiny prosopis still sprout among the mess of building materials, covered with whitish dust. Stonemasons sit on the ground in the middle of the track, barefoot, naked from the waist up, with cloths draped around their heads, in baggy trousers, the sound of their hammers striking the chisels and cutting grooves in the stones filling the air with the drumbeats of some strange, stubborn atonal music. Hoarse shouts ring out from time to time from the end of the street, "
Ba-rud! Ba-rud
" (explosion), followed by the thunderous haul of shattered stones.

In another, formal picture, as though taken before a party, there stands right in the center of Amos Street, in the midst of all this commotion, a rectangular black hearse-like automobile. A taxi or a hired car? Impossible to tell from the photo. It is a gleaming, polished car of the 1920s, with thin tires like a motorcycle, and metal spokes, and a strip
of chrome running along the edge of the hood. The hood has louvers on the side to let in the air, and on the tip of its nose the shiny chrome radiator cap protrudes like a pimple. In front, two round headlights hang from a sort of silvery bar, and the headlights too are silvery and gleam in the sun.

By the side of this magnificent automobile the camera has caught Alexander Klausner, General Agent, resplendent in a cream-colored tropical suit and a tie, with a panama hat on his head, looking rather like Errol Flynn in a film about European aristocrats in equatorial Africa or in Burma. At his side, stronger, taller, and wider than he, stands the imposing figure of his elegant wife Shlomit, his cousin and mistress, a grande dame, stately as a battleship, in a short-sleeved summer frock, wearing a necklace and a splendid fedora hat with muslin veil set at a precise angle on her perfectly coiffed hairdo, and clutching a parasol. Their son Lonia, Lionichka, is standing at their side like a nervous bridegroom on his wedding day. He looks faintly comical, with his mouth slightly open, his round spectacles slipping down his nose, his shoulders drooping, confined, and almost mummified in a tight suit, and a stiff black hat that looks as though it has been forced onto his head: it comes halfway down his forehead like an upturned pudding basin, and gives the impression that only his overlarge ears prevent it from slipping down to his chin and swallowing up the rest of his head.

What was the solemn event for which the three of them had dressed up in their finery and ordered a special limousine? There is no way of knowing. The date, to judge by other photographs on the same page of the album, is 1934, the year after they arrived in the country, when they all still lived in the Zarchis' apartment on Amos Street. I can make out the number of the automobile without difficulty, M 1651. My father would have been twenty-four, but in the picture he looks like a fifteen-year-old disguised as a respectable middle-aged gentleman.

When they first arrived from Vilna, all three Klausners lived for a year or so in the two-and-a-half-room apartment in Amos Street. Then Grandma and Grandpa found themselves a little place to rent, with a single room plus a tiny room that served as Grandpa's "den," his safe haven from his wife's fits of rage and from the hygienic scourge of her war on germs. The new apartment was the one in Prague Lane, between Isaiah Street and Chancellor Street, now renamed Strauss Street.

The front room in the old apartment on Amos Street now became my father's student sitting room. Here he installed his first bookcase, containing the books he had brought with him from his student days in Vilna; here stood the old, spindly-legged plywood table that served as his desk, here he hung his clothes behind a curtain that concealed the packing case that did duty as his wardrobe. Here he invited his friends for intellectual conversations about the meaning of life, literature, the world, and local politics.

In one photograph, my father sits comfortably behind his desk, thin, young, and stern, his hair combed back, wearing those serious, black-framed spectacles and a long-sleeved white shirt. He is sitting in a relaxed pose, at an angle to the desk, with his legs crossed. Behind him is a double window, one half of which is open inward, but the shutters are still closed so that only thin fingers of light penetrate between the slats. In the picture my father is deeply engrossed in a big book that he is holding up in front of him. On the desk in front of him another book lies open, and there is something else that looks like an alarm clock with its back to the camera, a round tin clock with little slanting legs. To Father's left stands a small bookcase laden with books, one shelf bowing under the weight of the thick tomes it is carrying, foreign books apparently that have come from Vilna and are clearly feeling rather cramped, warm, and uncomfortable here.

On the wall above the bookcase hangs a framed photograph of Uncle Joseph, looking authoritative and magnificent, almost prophetic with his white goatee and thinning hair, as though he were peering down from a great height on my father and fixing him with a watchful eye, to make sure he does not neglect his studies, or let himself be distracted by the dubious delights of student life, or that he doesn't forget the historic condition of the Jewish nation or the hopes of generations, or—heaven forbid!—underestimate those little details out of which, after all, the big picture is made up.

Hanging on a nail underneath Uncle Joseph is the collecting box of the Jewish National Fund, painted with a thick Star of David. My father looks relaxed and pleased with himself, but as serious and resolute as a monk: he is taking the weight of the open book on his left hand, while
his right hand rests on the pages to the right, the pages he has already read, from which we may deduce that it is a Hebrew book, read from right to left. At the place where his hand emerges from the sleeve of his white shirt I can see the thick black hair that covered his arms from elbow to knuckles.

My father looks like a young man who knows what his duty is and intends to do it come what may. He is determined to follow in the footsteps of his famous uncle and his elder brother. Out there, beyond the closed shutters, workmen are digging a trench under the dusty roadway to lay pipes. Somewhere in the cellar of some old Jewish building in the winding alleyways of Sha'arei Hesed or Nahalat Shiv'a the youths of the Jerusalem Hagganah are training in secret, dismantling and reassembling an ancient illicit Parabellum pistol. On the hilly roads that wind among menacing Arab villages, Egged bus drivers and Tnuva van drivers are steering their vehicles, their hands strong and suntanned on the wheel. In the wadis that go down to the Judaean desert, young Hebrew scouts in khaki shorts and khaki socks, with military belts and white
kaffiyehs
, learn to recognize with their feet the secret pathways of the Fatherland. In Galilee and the Plains, in the Beth Shean Valley and the Valley of Jezreel, in the Sharon and the Hefer Valley, in the Judaean lowlands, the Negev and the wilderness around the Dead Sea, pioneers are tilling the land, muscular, silent, brave, and bronzed. And meanwhile he, the earnest student from Vilna, plows his own furrow here.