A Tale of Love and Darkness (45 page)

Teacher Isabella was also a cat herder. Wherever she went, she was surrounded by a flock of admiring cats that got under her feet, clung to the hem of her dress, impeded her progress, and almost tripped her up, so devoted were they to her. They were of every possible color, and they would claw their way up her dress and lie down on her broad shoulders, curl up in the book basket, settle like broody hens on her shoes, and fight among themselves with desperate wails for the privilege of snuggling in her bosom. In her classroom there were more cats than pupils, and they kept perfectly quiet so as not to disturb the students; as tame as dogs, as well brought up as young ladies from good families, they sat on her desk, on her lap, on our little laps, on our satchels, on the windowsill and the box that held equipment for PE, art, and crafts.

Sometimes Teacher Isabella reprimanded the cats or issued orders. She would wave her finger at one or another of them and threaten to tweak its ears or pull its tail out if it did not improve its behavior instantly. The cats, for their part, always obeyed her promptly, unconditionally,
and without a murmur. "Zerubbabel, you should be ashamed of yourself!" she would suddenly shout. Immediately some poor wretch would detach himself from the huddled mass on the rug beside her desk and creep away in disgrace, his belly almost touching the floor, his tail between his legs and his ears pressed back, making his way to the corner of the room. All eyes—children's and cats' alike—were fixed on him, witnessing his disgrace. So the accused would crawl into the corner, miserable, humiliated, ashamed of himself, repenting his sins, and perhaps hoping humbly up to the last minute for some miraculous reprieve.

From the corner the poor thing sent us a heartrending look of guilt and supplication.

"You child of the muck heap!" Teacher Isabella snarled at him contemptuously, and then she would pardon him with a wave of her hand:

"All right. That's enough. You can come back now. But just remember that if I catch you once more—"

She had no need to finish her sentence, because the pardoned criminal was already dancing toward her like a suitor, determined to make her head spin with his charms, barely mastering his joy, tail erect, ears pricked forward, with a spring in the pads of his dainty paws, aware of the secret power of his charm and using it to heartbreaking effect, his whiskers gleaming, his coat shiny and bristling slightly, and with a flicker of sanctimonious feline slyness in his glowing eyes, as though he were winking at us while swearing that from now on there would be no more pious or upright cat than he.

Teacher Isabella's cats were schooled to lead productive lives, and indeed they were useful cats. She had trained them to bring her a pencil, some chalk, or a pair of socks from the closet, or to retrieve a stray teaspoon that was lurking under some piece of furniture; to stand at the window and give a wail of recognition if an acquaintance approached, but to issue a cry of alarm at the approach of a stranger. (Most of these wonders we did not witness with our own eyes, but we believed her. We would have believed her if she had told us that her cats could solve crossword puzzles.)

As for Mr. Nahlieli, Teacher Isabella's little husband, we hardly ever saw him. He had usually gone to work before we arrived, and if for any reason he was at home, he had to stay in the kitchen and do his duty there quietly during school hours. If it had not been for the fact that
both we and he occasionally had permission to go to the toilet, we would never have discovered that Mr. Nahlieli was actually only Getzel, the pale boy who took the money at the cooperative store. He was nearly twenty years younger than his wife, and if they had wanted to, they could have passed for mother and son.

Occasionally when he had to (or dared to) call out to her during a class, because he had either burned the beef patties or scalded himself, he did not call her Isabella but Mum, which is presumably what her herd of cats also called her. As for her, she called her youthful husband some name taken from the world of birds: Sparrow or Finchy or Thrush or Warbler. Anything except Wagtail, which was the literal meaning of the name Nahlieli.

There were two primary schools within half an hour's walk for a child from our home. One was too socialist, and the other was too religious. The Berl Katznelson House of Education for Workers' Children, at the north end of Haturim Street, flew the red flag of the working class on its roof side by side with the national flag. They celebrated May Day there with processions and ceremonies. The headmaster was called Comrade by teachers and pupils alike. In summer the teachers wore khaki shorts and biblical sandals. In the vegetable garden in the yard pupils were prepared for farming life and personal pioneering in the new villages. In the workshops they learned productive skills such as woodwork, metalwork, building, mending engines and locks, and something vague but fascinating called fine mechanics.

In class the pupils could sit anywhere they liked; boys and girls could even sit together. Most of them wore blue shirts fastened at the chest with the white or red laces of the two youth movements. The boys wore shorts with the legs rolled up as far as the crotch, while the girls' shorts, which were also shamelessly short, were secured to their thighs with elastic. The pupils called the teachers by their first names. They were taught arithmetic, homeland studies, Hebrew and history, but also subjects like the history of Jewish settlement in the Land, history of the workers' movement, principles of collective villages, or key phases in the evolution of the class war. And they sang all kinds of working class anthems, starting with the Internationale and ending with "We are all pioneers" and "The blue shirt is the finest jewel."

The Bible was taught at the House of Education for Workers' Children as a collection of pamphlets on current affairs. The prophets fought for progress and social justice and the welfare of the poor, whereas the kings and priests represented all the iniquities of the existing social order. Young David, the shepherd, was a daring guerrilla fighter in the ranks of a national movement to liberate the Israelites from the Philistine yoke, but in his old age he turned into a colonialist-imperialist king who conquered other countries, subjugated peoples, stole the poor man's ewe-lamb, and ruthlessly exploited the sweat of the working people.

Some four hundred yards away from this red House of Education, in the parallel street, stood the Tachkemoni national-traditional school, founded by the Mizrahi religious Zionist movement, where the pupils were all boys who kept their heads covered during class. Most of the pupils came from poor families, apart from a few who came from the old Sephardi aristocracy, which had been thrust aside by the more assertive Ashkenazi newcomers. The pupils here were addressed only by their surnames, while the teachers were called Mr. Neimann, Mr. Alkalai, and so forth. The headmaster was addressed as Mr. Headmaster. The first lesson every day began with morning prayers, followed by study of the Torah with Rashi's commentary, classes where the skullcapped pupils read the
Ethics of the Fathers
and other works of rabbinic wisdom, the Talmud, the history of the prayers and hymns, all sorts of commandments and good deeds, extracts from the code of Jewish law, the
Shulhan Arukh
, the cycle of the Jewish high days and holidays, the history of the Jewish communities around the world, lives of the great Jewish teachers down the ages, some legends and ethics, some legal discussions, a little poetry by Judah Hallevi or Bialik, and among all this they also taught some Hebrew grammar, mathematics, English, music, history, and elementary geography. The teachers wore jackets even in summer, and the headmaster, Mr. Ilan, always appeared in a three-piece suit.

My mother wanted me to go to the House of Education for Workers' Children from the first grade on, either because she did not approve of the rigorous religious separation of boys and girls or because Tachke-moni, with its heavy old stone buildings, which were built under Turkish rule, seemed antiquated and gloomy compared to the House of Education for Workers' Children, which had big windows, light, airy classrooms, cheerful beds of vegetables, and a sort of infectious youthful joy. Perhaps it reminded her in some way of the Tarbuth gymnasium in Rovno.

As for my father, he worried himself about the choice. He would have preferred me to go to school with the professors' children in Rehavia or at least with the children of the doctors, teachers, and civil servants who lived in Beit Hakerem, but we were living in times of riots and shooting, and both Rehavia and Beit Hakerem were two bus rides away from our home in Kerem Avraham. Tachkemoni was alien to my father's secular outlook and to his skeptical, enlightened mind. The House of Education, on the other hand, he considered a murky source of leftist indoctrination and proletarian brainwashing. He had no alternative but to weigh the black peril against the red peril and choose the lesser of two evils.

After a difficult period of indecision Father decided, against my mother's choice, to send me to Tachkemoni. He believed that there was no fear that they would turn me into a religious child, because in any case the end of religion was nigh, progress was driving it out fast, and even if they did succeed in turning me into a little cleric there, I would soon go out into the wide world and shake off that archaic dust, I would give up any religious observance just as the religious Jews themselves with their synagogues would disappear off the face of the earth in a few years, leaving nothing behind but a vague folk memory.

The House of Education, on the other hand, presented in Father's view a serious danger. The red tide was on the upsurge in our land, it was sweeping through the whole world, and socialist indoctrination was a one-way road to disaster. If we sent the child there, they would instantly brainwash him and stuff his head full of all sorts of Marxist straw and turn him into a Bolshevik, one of Stalin's little soldiers, they would pack him off to one of their kibbutzim and he would never come back ("None that go into her return again," as Father put it).

But the way to Tachkemoni, which was also the way to the House of Education for Workers' Children, ran along the side of the Schneller Barracks. From sandbagged positions on top of the walls, nervous, Jew-hating, or simply drunken British soldiers sometimes fired on passersby in the street below. Once they opened fire with a machine gun and killed
the milkman's donkey because they were afraid that the milk churns were full of explosives, as had happened in the bombing of the King David Hotel. Once or twice British drivers even ran pedestrians over with their jeeps, because they had not got out of the way fast enough.

These were the days after the World War, the days of the underground and terrorism, the blowing up of the British headquarters, infernal devices planted by the Irgun in the basement of the King David Hotel, attacks on CID HQ in Mamilla Road and on army and police installations.

Consequently my parents decided to postpone the frustrating choice between the darkness of the Middle Ages and the Stalinist trap for another two years and send me for the time being to Mrs. Isabella Nahlieli's Children's Realm. The great advantage of her cat-ridden school was that it was literally within hailing distance of our home. You went out of our yard and turned left, passed the entrance to the Lembergs' and Mr. Auster's grocery shop, carefully crossed Amos Street opposite the Zahavis' balcony, went down Zechariah Street for thirty yards, crossed it carefully, and there you were: a wall covered with passionflowers, and a gray-white cat, the sentry cat, announcing your arrival from the window. up twenty-two steps, and you were hanging up your water bottle on the hook in the entrance to the smallest school in Jerusalem: two classes, two teachers, a dozen pupils, and nine cats.

WHEN I FINISHED
my year in the first grade, I passed from the volcanic realm of Teacher Isabella the cat herder into the cool, calm hands of Teacher Zelda in the second grade. She had no cats, but a sort of blue-gray aura surrounded her and at once beguiled and fascinated me.

Teacher Zelda talked so softly that if we wanted to hear what she was saying, we not only had to stop talking, we had to lean forward on our desks. Consequently we spent the whole morning leaning forward, because we did not want to miss a word. Everything that Teacher Zelda said was enchanting and rather unexpected. It was as if we were learning another language from her, not very different from Hebrew and yet distinctive and touching. She would call stars the "stars of heaven," the abyss was "the mighty abyss," and she spoke of "turbid rivers" and "nocturnal deserts." If you said something in class that she liked, Teacher Zelda would point to you and say softly: "Look, all of you, there's a child who's flooded with light" If one of the girls was daydreaming, Teacher Zelda explained to us that just as nobody can be blamed for being unable to sleep, so you couldn't hold Noa responsible for being unable to stay awake at times.

Any kind of mockery Teacher Zelda called "poison." A lie she called "a Fall." Laziness was "leaden," and gossip "the eyes of the flesh." She called arrogance "wing-scorching," and giving anything up, even little things like an eraser or your turn to hand out the drawing paper, she called "making sparks." A couple of weeks before the festival of Purim, which was our favorite festival in the whole year, she suddenly announced: There may not be a Purim this year. It may be put out before it gets here.

Put out? A festival? We were all in a panic: we were not only afraid of missing Purim, but we felt a dark dread of these powerful, hidden forces, whose very existence we had not been told about before, that were capable, if they so wished, of lighting or putting out festivals as though they were so many matches.

Teacher Zelda did not bother to go into details but just hinted to us that the decision of whether to extinguish the festival depended mainly on her: she herself was somehow connected to the invisible forces that distinguished between festival and nonfestival, between sacred and profane. So if we didn't want the festival to be put out, we said to each other, it would be best for us to make a special effort to do at least the little we could to make sure Teacher Zelda was in a good mood with us. There is no such thing as a little, Teacher Zelda used to say, to someone who has nothing.