A Tale of Love and Darkness (50 page)

I HAD NEVER
seen a house like it in my life before that morning.

It was surrounded by a thick stone wall that concealed an orchard shady with vines and fruit trees. My astonished eyes looked instinctively for the tree of life and the tree of knowledge. There was a well in front of the house set in a wide terrace paved with blocks of smooth pinkish stone with delicate pale-blue veins. An arbor of thick vines shaded a corner of this terrace. Some stone seats and a low, wide stone table tempted you to linger in this arbor, to take your ease, to rest in the shade of the vines and listen to the buzzing of the summer bees, the singing of the birds in the orchard, and the trickle of the fountain—because at one end of the arbor there was a little pool in the form of a five-pointed star made of stone and lined with blue tiles decorated with Arabic writing. In the middle of the pool a fountain bubbled quietly. Groups of goldfish swam slowly to and fro among the clumps of water lilies.

From the terrace the three of us, excited, polite, and humble, walked up the stone steps to a wide veranda with a view of the northern walls of the Old City with the minarets and domes beyond. Wooden chairs
with cushions and footstools and some mosaic-covered tables were scattered around the veranda. Here too, as in the arbor, one felt an urge to sprawl facing the view of the city walls, to doze in the shade of the foliage or calmly drink in the silence of the hills and the stone.

We did not linger in the orchard or in the arbor or on the veranda but pulled the bell pull next to the double iron doors, which were painted the color of mahogany and skillfully carved in relief with all sorts of pomegranates, grapes, winding tendrils, and symmetrical flowers. While we waited for the door to open, Uncle Staszek turned his head to us again and put his finger to his lips one more time, as though to signal a final warning to Auntie Mala and me: manners! composure! diplomacy!

Along all four walls of the spacious reception room stood soft sofas, their carved wooden backs adjacent and touching one another. The furniture was carved with leaves, buds, and flowers, as though to represent inside the house the garden and orchard that surrounded it on the outside. The sofas were upholstered in a variety of striped fabrics in shades of red and sky blue. On each sofa there was a mass of colorful embroidered cushions. There were rich carpets on the floor, one of them woven with a scene of birds of paradise. In front of each sofa there was a low table, the top of which was formed by a wide round metal tray, and each tray was richly engraved with abstract designs of interwoven forms that recalled Arabic writing; in fact, they may well have been stylized Arabic inscriptions.

On each side of the room six or eight doors opened. The walls were draped with rugs, and between the rugs the plaster was visible; it too was patterned with flowers, and colored pink, lilac, and pale green. Here and there, beneath the high ceiling, ancient weapons were hung as decorations: Damascus swords, a scimitar, daggers and spears, pistols, longbarreled muskets and double-barreled rifles. Facing the entrance, and flanked by a burgundy-covered sofa on one side and a lemon-colored one on the other, stood a huge, heavily ornamented brown sideboard in baroque style looking like a small palace, with many glass-fronted compartments containing porcelain cups, crystal goblets, silver and brass goblets, and numerous ornaments of Hebron or Sidon glass.

In a deep recess in the wall between two windows nestled a green vase inlaid with mother-of-pearl from which rose several peacocks' feathers. Other recesses housed large brass pitchers and glass or earthenware beakers. Four fans hung from the ceiling, constantly making a wasplike buzz and stirring the smoke-laden air. In between the fans a huge, splendid brass chandelier sprouted from the ceiling, resembling a great tree with a profusion of branches, boughs, twigs, and tendrils all blooming with shining stalactites of crystal and quantities of pear-shaped lightbulbs that were all lit despite the summer morning light streaming through the open windows. The arches of the windows were fitted with stained glass representing wreaths of trefoils, each of which colored the daylight a different color: red, green, gold, and purple.

Two cages hung from brackets on facing walls, each containing a pair of solemn parrots whose feathers were a riot of orange, turquoise, yellow, green, and blue. Every now and again one of them would exclaim in a hoarse voice like that of a heavy smoker: "
Tfaddal! S'il vous plaît!
Enjoy!" And from the other cage, at the other end of the room, a wheedling soprano voice replied at once in English: "Oh, how very, very sweet! How lovely!"

Above the lintels of the doors and windows and on the flowery plaster Quranic verses or lines of poetry were inscribed in curling green Arabic writing, and between the rugs on the wall there were family portraits. Some were of portly, plump-faced, clean-shaven effendis, wearing red fezzes with black tassels, and squeezed into heavy blue suits, with gold chains suspended across their bellies and disappearing into their vest pockets. Their predecessors were mustachioed men with an authoritative air and a sullen mien, robed in responsibility, awe-inspiring, with a commanding presence, wearing embroidered robes and gleaming white keffiyehs held in place by black rings. There were also two or three mounted figures, ferocious-looking bearded men riding on magnificent horses, galloping at such speed that their keffiyehs trailed behind and their horses' manes streamed; they had long daggers thrust through their belts and curved scimitars tied at the side or brandished aloft.

The deep-set windows of this reception hall faced north and east toward Mount Scopus and the Mount of Olives, a pine copse, rocky slopes, the Ophel, and the Augusta victoria hospice, its tower crowned like an
imperial helmet with a sloping gray Prussian roof. A little to the left of Augusta Victoria stood a fortified building with narrow loopholes topped with a dome: this was the National Library, where my father worked, and around it were ranged the other buildings of Hebrew University and Hadassah Hospital. Below the skyline could be seen some small stone houses scattered over the hillside, small flocks among the boulders and fields of thorns, and the occasional old olive tree that seemed to have long since abandoned the living world and joined the realm of the inanimate.

In the summer of 1947 my parents went to stay with some acquaintances in Netanya, leaving me with Uncle Staszek, Auntie Mala, and Chopin and Schopenhauer Rudnicki for the weekend. ("Just you behave yourself there! Impeccably, do you hear! And give Auntie Mala a hand in the kitchen and don't disturb Uncle Staszek, and keep yourself occupied, take a book to read and keep out of their way, and let them sleep late on Saturday morning! Be as good as gold! You can do it when you really want to!")

The writer Hayyim Hazaz once decreed that Uncle Staszek should get rid of his Polish name, "that smelt of the pogroms," and persuaded him to take the first name of Stav, meaning "autumn" in Hebrew, because it sounded a little like Staszek but had a certain flavor of the Song of Songs. And that is how they appeared in Auntie Mala's handwriting on the card that was attached to the door of their apartment:

Malka and Stav Rudnicki
Please do not knock
during the usual rest times.

Uncle Staszek was a thickset, compact man with powerful shoulders, dark, hairy nostrils like caverns, and bushy eyebrows, one of which was always raised quizzically. He had lost one of his incisors, which sometimes gave him a villainous look, particularly when he smiled. He worked for a living in the registered mail department of the main post office in Jerusalem, and in his spare time he was collecting material on little cards for an original piece of research on the medieval Hebrew poet Immanuel of Rome.

Ustaz Najib Mamduh al-Silwani, a resident of Sheikh Jarrah in the northeast of the city, was a wealthy businessman and the local agent of a number of large French firms whose business extended as far as Alexandria and Beirut and from there branched off to Haifa, Nablus, and Jerusalem. It so happened that at the beginning of the summer a considerable money order or bank draft, or it may have been some share certificates, went missing. Suspicion fell on Edward Silwani, Ustaz Najib's eldest son and his partner in the firm of Silwani and Sons. The young man was questioned, so we were told, by the assistant head of the CID in person, and he was subsequently taken to the remand center in Haifa for further questioning. Ustaz Najib, after attempting to rescue his son in various ways, eventually turned in desperation to Mr. Kenneth Orwell Knox-Guildford, the postmaster general, and begged him to renew the search for a lost envelope that he had, he swore, sent in person, the previous winter, by registered post.

Unfortunately he had mislaid the receipt. It had vanished as though the Devil himself had swallowed it.

Mr. Kenneth Orwell Knox-Guildford, for his part, after assuring Ustaz Najib of his sympathy but informing him candidly and sadly that there was not much hope of the search resulting in a positive outcome, nevertheless entrusted Staszek Rudnicki with the task of investigating the matter and discovering whatever there was to learn about the possible fate of a registered letter sent several months previously, a letter that might or might not have existed, that might or might not have been mislaid, a letter of which there was no trace either in the possession of the sender or in the post office ledger.

Uncle Staszek lost no time in investigating, and discovered that not only was there no entry for the letter in question, but that the whole page had been carefully torn out of the ledger. There was no sign of it. Staszek's suspicions were immediately aroused. He made inquiries, found out which clerk was on duty at the registered counter at the time, and questioned the other clerks too until he discovered when the page had last been seen in the ledger. Once he had done this, it was not long before he identified the culprit (the youngster had held the envelope up to the light and seen the draft, and the temptation had been too much for him).

So the lost property was restored to its owner, young Edward al-Silwani was released from custody, the honor of the respectable firm of
Silwani and Sons once more shone forth from the company's letterhead without blot or stain, while dear Mr. Stav was invited together with his wife to partake of coffee at Silwani Villa in Sheikh Jarrah on Saturday morning. As for the dear child, their friends' son who would be staying with them, whom they had no one to leave with on Saturday morning, of course, what a question, he must come with them, the whole Silwani family was impatient to express their gratitude to Mr. Stav for his efficiency and integrity.

After breakfast on Saturday therefore, just before we set out, I put on my best clothes, which my parents had left with Auntie Mala especially for the visit ("The Arab attaches great importance to outward appearances!" Father insisted): a gleaming white shirt, freshly ironed, its sleeves rolled up with splendid precision; navy blue trousers with cuffs and a neat crease down the front; and a serious-looking black leather belt with a shiny metal buckle that, for some reason, bore the image of the two-headed imperial Russian eagle. On my feet I wore a pair of sandals that Uncle Staszek had polished for me with the same brush and black polish that he had used for his own best shoes and Auntie Mala's.

Despite the heat of the August day, Uncle Staszek insisted on wearing his dark woolen suit (it was his only one), his snow-white silk shirt, which had made the journey with him fifteen years ago from his parents' home in Lodz, and the unobtrusive blue silk tie he had worn on his wedding day. As for Auntie Mala, she agonized for three quarters of an hour in front of the mirror, tried out her evening dress, changed her mind, tried a dark pleated skirt with a light cotton blouse, changed her mind again, and looked at herself in the girlish summer frock she had bought recently, with a brooch and a silk scarf, or with a necklace and without the brooch and the scarf, or with the necklace and a different brooch but without the scarf, with or without drop earrings?

Suddenly she decided that the airy summer frock with the embroidery around the neck was too frivolous, too folksy for the occasion, and she went back to the evening dress she had started with. In her predicament Auntie Mala turned to Uncle Staszek and even to me, and made us swear to tell the truth and nothing but the truth, however painful: wasn't this outfit too dressy, too theatrical for an informal visit on a hot day? Wasn't it wrong for her hairdo? And while we were looking at her hair, what did we think, really and truly, should she tie her plaits up around her head, or should she undo them and let her hair fall loose over her shoulder, and if so which one?

Finally, reluctantly, she opted for a plain brown skirt, a long-sleeved blouse set off with a pretty turquoise brooch, and a pair of pale blue drop earrings to match her beautiful eyes. And she unplaited her hair and let it fall freely over both shoulders.

On the way, Uncle Stav, his thickset body crammed uncomfortably into his heavy suit, explained to me some of the facts of life resulting from the historical difference between cultures. The Silwani family, he said, was a highly respected Europeanized family whose menfolk had been educated in excellent schools in Beirut and Liverpool and could all speak Western languages well. We ourselves, for our part, were definitely Europeans, although perhaps in rather a different sense of the word. We, for example, attached no importance to outward appearances but only to inner cultural and moral values. Even a universal genius like Tolstoy had not hesitated to walk around dressed as a peasant, and a great revolutionary like Lenin had mostly despised bourgeois dress and preferred to wear a leather jacket and a worker's cap.

Our visit to Silwani Villa was not like Lenin visiting the workers or like Tolstoy among the simple folk: it was a special occasion. In the eyes of our more respectable and enlightened Arab neighbors, who adopted a more Western European culture most of the time, Uncle Staszek explained, we modern Jews were mistakenly portrayed as a sort of rowdy rabble of rough paupers, lacking manners and not yet fit to stand on the lowest rung of cultural refinement. Even some of our leaders were apparently portrayed in a negative light among our Arab neighbors, because they dressed in a very simple way and their manners were crude and informal. Several times in his work at the post office, both at the public counters and behind the scenes, he had had the opportunity to observe that the new Hebraic style, sandals and khaki, rolled-up sleeves and open neck, which we considered pioneer-like and democratic and egalitarian, was viewed by the British and particularly by the Arabs as uncouth, or as a vulgar kind of display, showing a lack of respect for others and contempt for the public services. Of course this impression was fundamentally mistaken, and there was no need to repeat that we believed in the simple life, in making do with little and in renouncing all outward show. But in the present circumstances, a visit to the mansion of a well-known and highly respected family, and on other similar occasions, it was proper for us to behave as though we had been entrusted with a diplomatic mission. Consequently we had to take great care about our appearance, our manners, and our way of talking.