A Tale of Love and Darkness (54 page)

In the middle of October the British High Commissioner, General Sir Alan Cunningham, uttered a veiled threat to David Ben-Gurion, who was the executive head of the Jewish Agency: "If troubles begin," he remarked sadly, "I fear that we will not be able to help you; we will not be able to defend you."*

Father said:

"Herzl was a prophet and he knew it. At the time of the First Zionist congress in 1897 he said that in five years, or at the latest in fifty years,
there would be a Jewish State in the Land of Israel. And now fifty years have passed, and the state is literally standing at the gate."

Mother said:

*Dov Joseph,
The Faithful City: The Siege of Jerusalem
, 1948 (London, 1962), p. 31.

"It's not standing. There is no gate. There's an abyss."

Father's reprimand sounded like the crack of a whip. He spoke in Russian, so that I would not understand.

And I said, with a joy I could not conceal:

"There's going to be a war soon in Jerusalem! And we'll beat them all!"

But sometimes, when I was all alone in the yard toward sunset or early on Saturday morning when my parents and the whole neighborhood were still asleep, I would freeze with a stab of terror, because the picture of the girl Aisha picking up the unconscious child and silently carrying him in her arms suddenly seemed to me like a chilling Christian picture that Father showed me and explained to me in a whisper when we visited a church once.

I remembered the olive trees I saw from the windows of that house, which had left the world of the living ages before and become part of the realm of the inanimate.

Jest a minute rest a minute jest a rest a jesta resta.

By November a sort of curtain had begun to divide Jerusalem. The buses still ran there and back, and fruit sellers from the nearby Arab villages still did their rounds in our street, carrying trays of figs, almonds, and prickly pears, but some Jewish families had already moved out of the Arab neighborhoods, and Arabs families had begun to leave the west of the city for the southern and eastern parts.

Only in my thoughts could I sometimes go to the extension of St. George's Street northeastward, and stare wide-eyed at the other Jerusalem: a city of old cypress trees that were more black than green, streets of stone walls, interlaced grilles, cornices, and dark walls, the alien, silent, aloof, shrouded Jerusalem, the Abyssinian, Muslim, pilgrim, Ottoman city, the strange, missionary city of crusaders and Templars, the Greek, Armenian, Italian, brooding, Anglican, Greek Orthodox city, the monastic, Coptic, Catholic, Lutheran, Scottish, Sunni, Shi'ite, Sufi, Alawite city, swept by the sound of bells and the wail of the muezzin,
thick with pine trees, frightening yet alluring, with all its concealed enchantments, its warrens of narrow streets that were forbidden to us and threatened us from the darkness, a secretive, malign city pregnant with disaster.

The whole Silwani family, I was told after the Six Day War, left Jordanian Jerusalem in the 1950s and early 1960s. Some went to Switzerland and Canada, others settled in the Gulf emirates, a few moved to London, and some others to Latin America.

And what about their parrots? "Who will be my destiny? Who will be my prince?"

And what about Aisha? And her lame brother? Where on earth is she playing her piano, assuming she still has one, assuming she has not grown old and worn out among the dusty, heat-blasted hovels in some refugee camp where the sewage runs down the unpaved streets.

And who are the fortunate Jews who now live in what was once her family home in Talbieh, a neighborhood built of pale blue and pinkish stone with stone vaults and arches?

It was not because of the approaching war but for some other, deeper reason that I would be suddenly seized with dread in those autumn days of 1947 and feel aching pangs of yearning mixed with shame and the certainty of impending punishment and also some ill-defined pain: a sort of forbidden longing, blended with guilt and sorrow. For that orchard. For that well that was covered with a sheet of green metal, and the blue-tiled pool where golden fish sparkled for an instant in the sunlight before disappearing into the forest of water lilies. For the soft cushions trimmed with fine lace. For the richly textured rugs, one of which showed birds of paradise among trees of paradise. For the stained-glass trefoils, each of which colored the daylight a different shade: red leaf, green leaf, gold leaf, purple leaf.

And for the parrot who sounded like an inveterate smoker: "
Mais oui, mais oui, chere mademoiselle
," and its soprano counterpart that answered in a voice like a silver bell: "
Tfaddal! S'il vous plaît!
Enjoy!"

I was there once, in that orchard, before I was banished from it in disgrace, I did touch it once, with my fingertips—

"
Bas! Bas, ya 'eini! Bas min fadlak! Usqut!
"

Early in the morning I would wake to the smell of first light and see through the iron slats of the closed shutters the pomegranate tree that stood in our yard. Hidden in this tree every morning an invisible bird would repeat joyfully and precisely the first five notes of
Fur Elise.

Such an articulate fool, such a noisy little fool.

Instead of approaching her like the New Hebrew Youth approaching the Noble Arab People, or like a lion approaching lions, perhaps I could simply have approached her like a boy approaching a girl. Or couldn't I?

"
JUST LOOK
how that strategist of a child has occupied the whole apartment again. You can't move in the corridor, it's so full of fortifications and towers made out of building blocks, castles made out of dominoes, mines made out of corks, and borders made out of spillikins. In his room there are battlefields of buttons from wall to wall. We're not allowed in there, it's out of bounds. That's an order. And even in our room he's scattered knives and forks all over the floor, presumably to mark out some Maginot Line or navy or armored corps. If it goes on like this, you and I will have to move out into the yard. Or into the street. But the moment the paper arrived, your child dropped everything, he must have declared a general cease-fire, and he lay back on the sofa and read it from cover to cover, including the small ads. Now he's running a line from his HQ behind his wardrobe right through the apartment to Tel Aviv, which is apparently on the edge of the bathtub. If I'm not mistaken, he's about to use it to speak to Ben-Gurion. Like yesterday. To explain to him what we ought to be doing at this point and what we ought to watch out for. He might already have started giving Ben-Gurion orders."

In one of the bottom drawers here in my study in Arad I found a battered cardboard box last night, containing various notes that I made when I was writing the novellas that make up
The Hill of Evil Counsel
, more than twenty-five years ago. Among other things there are some messy notes that I made in a library in Tel Aviv in 1974 or 1975 from
newspapers from September 1947. And so, in Arad, on a summer morning in 2001, like an image reflected in a mirror reflected in another mirror, my notes from twenty-seven years ago remind me of what the "strategist of a child" read in the paper of September 9, 1947:

Hebrew traffic police have started to operate in Tel Aviv with the consent of the British governor. They have eight policemen working in two shifts. A thirteen-year-old Arab girl is to stand trial before a military court, accused of possessing a rifle in the village of Hawara, Nablus District. The "illegal" immigrants from the
Exodus
are being deported to Hamburg, and they say they will fight to the last to resist disembarkation. Fourteen Gestapo men have been sentenced to death in Lübeck. Mr. Solomon Chmelnik of Rehovot has been kidnapped and badly beaten up by an extremist organization but has been returned safe and sound. The Voice of Jerusalem orchestra is going to be conducted by Hanan Schlesinger. Mahatma Gandhi's fast is in its second day. The singer Edis de Philippe will be unable to perform this week in Jerusalem, and the Chamber Theatre has been obliged to postpone its performance of
You Can't Take It with You.
On the other hand, two days ago the new Colonnade Building on the Jaffa Road was opened, containing, among other shops, Mikolinski, Freidmann & Bein, and the chiropodist Dr. Scholl. According to the Arab leader Musa Alami, the Arabs will never accept the partition of the country; after all, King Solomon ruled that the mother who was opposed to partition was the true mother, and the Jews ought to recognize the significance of the parable. And then again, Comrade Golda Myerson [later Meir] of the Jewish Agency Executive has declared that the Jews will fight for the inclusion of Jerusalem in the Hebrew State, because the Land of Israel and Jerusalem are synonymous in our hearts.

A few days later the paper reported:

Late last night, an Arab set upon two Jewish girls in the vicinity of the Bernardiya Café, between Beit Hakerem and Bayit Vagan. One of the girls escaped, and the other screamed for help, and some of the local residents heard and succeeded in preventing the suspect from escaping. In the course of investigations by Constable O'Connor, it emerged
that the man is an employee of the Broadcasting Service and is distantly related to the influential Nashashibi family. Despite this, bail was refused, on account of the gravity of the alleged offense. In his defense the prisoner stated that he had come out of the café drunk and had been under the impression that the two girls were prancing around naked in the dark.

And another day in September 1947:

Lieutenant-Colonel Adderley has presided over a military court hearing the case of Shlomo Mansoor Shalom, a distributor of illegal leaflets who was found to be of unsound mind. The probation officer, Mr. Gardewicz, requested that the prisoner should not be committed to a lunatic asylum, for fear of a deterioration in his condition, and pleaded with the judges that he should be isolated in a private institution instead, lest his weak intellect be exploited by fanatics for their own criminal ends. Lt.-Col. Adderley regretted that he was unable to accede to Mr. Gardewicz's request, since it was beyond his powers; he was obliged to commit the unfortunate man to custody pending a ruling by the High Commissioner, representing the Crown, on the possible exercise of special leniency or clemency. On the radio, Cilla Leibowitz is giving a piano recital, and after the news we are promised a commentary by Mr. Gordus; to round off the evening Miss Bracha Tsefira will give a rendition of a selection of folk songs.

One evening Father explained to his friends who had come over for a glass of tea that ever since the middle of the eighteenth century, long before the appearance of modern Zionism and unconnected with it, the Jews constituted a clear majority of the population of Jerusalem. At the beginning of the twentieth century, still before the beginning of the Zionist immigrations, Jerusalem, under Ottoman Turkish rule, was already the most populous city in the country: it had fifty-five thousand inhabitants, of whom some thirty-five thousand were Jews. And now, in the autumn of 1947, there were about a hundred thousand Jews living in Jerusalem and some sixty-five thousand non-Jews, made up of Muslim and Christian Arabs, Armenians, Greeks, British, and many other nationalities.

But in the north, east, and south of the city there were extensive Arab neighborhoods, including Sheikh Jarrah, the American colony, the Muslim and Christian Quarters in the Old City, the German Colony, the Greek Colony, Katamon, Bakaa, and Abu Tor. There were Arab towns, too, in the hills around Jerusalem, Ramallah and el-Bireh, Beit Jalla and Bethlehem, and many Arab villages: el-Azariya, Silwan, Abu-Dis, et-Tur, Isawiya, Qalandaria, Bir Naballah, Nebi Samwil, Biddu, Shuafat, Lifta, Beit Hanina, Beit Iksa, Qoloniya, Sheikh Badr, Deir Yassin, where more than a hundred inhabitants would be butchered by members of the Irgun and the Stern Gang in April 1948, Suba, Ein Karim, Beit Mazmil, el-Maliha, Beit Safafa, Umm Tuba, and Sur Bahir.

To the north, south, east, and west of Jerusalem were Arab areas, and only a few Hebrew settlements were scattered here and there around the city: Atarot and Neve Yaakov to the north, Kalya and Beit ha-Arava on the shore of the Dead Sea to the east, Ramat Rahel and Gush Etsion to the south, and Motsa, Kiriat Anavim and Maale ha-Hamisha to the west. In the war of 1948 most of these Hebrew settlements, together with the Jewish Quarter inside the walls of the Old City, fell into the hands of the Arab Legion. All the Jewish settlements that were captured by the Arabs in the War of Independence, without exception, were razed to the ground, and their Jewish inhabitants were murdered or taken captive or escaped, but the Arab armies did not allow any of the survivors to return after the war. The Arabs implemented a more complete "ethnic cleansing" in the territories they conquered than the Jews did: hundreds of thousands of Arabs fled or were driven out from the territory of the State of Israel in that war, but a hundred thousand remained, whereas there were no Jews at all in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip under Jordanian and Egyptian rule. Not one. The settlements were obliterated, and the synagogues and cemeteries were razed to the ground.

In the lives of individuals and of peoples, too, the worst conflicts are often those that break out between those who are persecuted. It is mere wishful thinking to imagine that the persecuted and the oppressed will unite out of solidarity and man the barricades together against a ruthless oppressor. In reality, two children of the same abusive father will not necessarily make common cause, brought close together by their shared
fate. Often each sees in the other not a partner in misfortune but in fact the image of their common oppressor.

That may well be the case with the hundred-year-old conflict between Arabs and Jews.

The Europe that abused, humiliated, and oppressed the Arabs by means of imperialism, colonialism, exploitation, and repression is the same Europe that oppressed and persecuted the Jews, and eventually allowed or even helped the Germans to root them out of every corner of the continent and murder almost all of them. But when the Arabs look at us, they see not a bunch of half-hysterical survivors but a new offshoot of Europe, with its colonialism, technical sophistication, and exploitation, that has cleverly returned to the Middle East—in Zionist guise this time—to exploit, evict, and oppress all over again. And when we look at them, we do not see fellow victims either; we see not brothers in adversity but pogrom-making Cossacks, bloodthirsty anti-Semites, Nazis in disguise, as though our European persecutors have reappeared here in the Land of Israel, put keffiyehs on their heads, and grown mustaches, but they are still our old murderers, interested only in slitting Jews' throats for fun.