A Tale of Love and Darkness (57 page)

His voice was swallowed up in a roar that burst from the radio, overflowing from the galleries in the hall at Lake Success, and after a couple more seconds of shock and disbelief, of lips parted as though in thirst and eyes wide open, our faraway street on the edge of Kerem Avraham in northern Jerusalem also roared all at once in a first terrifying shout that tore through the darkness and the buildings and trees, piercing itself, not a shout of joy, nothing like the shouts of spectators in sports grounds or excited rioting crowds, perhaps more like a scream of horror and bewilderment, a cataclysmic shout, a shout that could shift rocks, that could freeze your blood, as though all the dead who had ever died here and all those still to die had received a brief window to shout, and the next moment the scream of horror was replaced by roars of joy and a medley of hoarse cries and "The Jewish People Lives" and somebody trying to sing Hatikvah and women shrieking and clapping and "Here in the Land Our Fathers Loved," and the whole crowd started to revolve slowly around itself as though it were being stirred in a huge cement mixer, and there were no more restraints, and I jumped into my trousers but didn't bother with a shirt or sweater and shot out our door, and some neighbor or stranger picked me up so I wouldn't be trampled underfoot, and I was passed from hand to hand until I landed on my father's shoulders near our front gate. My father and mother were standing there hugging one another like two children lost in the woods, as I had never seen them before or since, and for a moment I was between them inside their hug and a moment later I was back on Father's shoulders and my very cultured, polite father was standing there shouting at the top of his voice, not words or wordplay or Zionist slogans, not even cries of joy, but one long naked shout like before words were invented.

Others were singing now, everyone was singing, but my father, who couldn't sing and didn't know the words of the popular songs, did not
stop but went on with his long shout to the end of his lungs
aaaahhh
, and when he ran out of breath, he inhaled like a drowning man and went on shouting, this man who wanted to be a famous professor and deserved to become one, but now he was all just
aaahhhh.
And I was surprised to see my mother's hand stroking his wet head and the back of his neck, and then I felt her hand on my head and my back too because I might unawares have been helping my father shout, and my mother's hand stroked the two of us over and over again, perhaps to soothe us or perhaps not, perhaps out of the depths she was also trying to share with him and me in our shout and with the whole street, the whole neighborhood, the whole city, and the whole country, my sad mother was trying to participate this time—no, definitely not the whole city but only the Jewish areas, because Sheikh Jarrah, Katamon, Bakaa, and Talbieh must have heard us that night wrapped in a silence that might have resembled the terrified silence that lay upon the Jewish neighborhoods before the result of the vote was announced. In the Silwanis' house in Sheikh Jarrah and in Aisha's home in Talbieh and the home of the man in the clothes shop, the beloved man Gepetto with the bags under his compassionate eyes, there were no celebrations tonight. They must have heard the sounds of rejoicing from the Jewish streets, they may have stood at their windows to watch the few joyful fireworks that injured the dark sky, pursing their lips in silence. Even the parrots were silent. And the fountain in the pool in the garden. Even though neither Katamon, Talbieh, nor Bakaa knew or could know yet that in another five months they would fall empty, intact, into the hands of the Jews and that new people would come and live in those vaulted houses of pink stone and those villas with their many cornices and arches.

Then there was dancing and weeping on Amos Street, in the whole of Kerem Avraham and in all the Jewish neighborhoods; flags appeared, and slogans written on strips of cloth, car horns blared, and "Raise the Banner High to Zion" and "Here in the Land Our Fathers Loved," sho-far blasts sounded from all the synagogues, and Torah scrolls were taken out of the holy arks and were caught up in the dancing, and "God Will Rebuild Galilee" and "Come and Behold How Great Is This Day," and later, in the small hours of the morning, Mr. Auster suddenly opened his
shop, and all the kiosks in Zephaniah Street and Geula Street and Chancellor Street and Jaffa Road and King George opened, and the bars opened up all over the city and handed out soft drinks and snacks and even alcoholic drinks until the first light of dawn, bottles of fruit drink, beer, and wine passed from hand to hand and from mouth to mouth, strangers hugged each other in the streets and kissed each other with tears, and startled English policemen were also dragged into the circles of dancers and softened up with cans of beer and sweet liqueurs, and frenzied revelers climbed up on British armored cars and waved the flag of the state that had not been established yet, but tonight, over there in Lake Success, it had been decided that it had the right to be established. And it would be established 167 days and nights later, on Friday, May 14, 1948, but one in every hundred men, women, old folk, children, and babies in those crowds of Jews who were dancing, reveling, drinking, and weeping for joy, fully one percent of the excited people who spilled out onto the streets that night, would die in the war that the Arabs started within seven hours of the General Assembly's decision at Lake Success—to be helped, when the British left, by the regular armed forces of the Arab League, columns of infantry, armor, artillery, fighter planes, and bombers, from the south, the east, and the north, the regular armies of five Arab states invading with the intention of putting an end to the new state within one or two days of its proclamation.

But my father said to me as we wandered there, on the night of November 29,1947, me riding on his shoulders, among the rings of dancers and merrymakers, not as though he was asking me but as though he knew and was hammering in what he knew with nails: Just you look, my boy, take a very good look, son, take it all in, because you won't forget this night to your dying day and you'll tell your children, your grandchildren, and your great-grandchildren about this night when we're long gone.

And very late, at a time when this child had never been allowed not to be fast asleep in bed, maybe at three or four o'clock, I crawled under my blanket in the dark fully dressed. And after a while Father's hand lifted my blanket in the dark, not to be angry with me because I'd got into bed with my clothes on but to get in and lie down next to me, and he was in
his clothes too, which were drenched in sweat from the crush of the crowds, just like mine (and we had an iron rule: you must never, for any reason, get between the sheets in your outdoor clothes). My father lay beside me for a few minutes and said nothing, although normally he detested silence and hurried to banish it. But this time he did not touch the silence that was there between us but shared it, with just his hand lightly stroking my head. As though in this darkness my father had turned into my mother.

Then he told me in a whisper, without once calling me Your Highness or Your Honor, what some hooligans did to him and his brother David in Odessa and what some Gentile boys did to him at his Polish school in Vilna, and the girls joined in too, and the next day, when his father, Grandpa Alexander, came to the school to register a complaint, the bullies refused to return the torn trousers but attacked his father, Grandpa, in front of his eyes, forced him down onto the paving stones in the middle of the playground and removed his trousers too, and the girls laughed and made dirty jokes, saying that the Jews were all so-and-sos, while the teachers watched and said nothing, or maybe they were laughing too.

And still in a voice of darkness with his hand still losing its way in my hair (because he was not used to stroking me), my father told me under my blanket in the early hours of November 30,1947, "Bullies may well bother you in the street or at school someday. They may do it precisely because you are a bit like me. But from now on, from the moment we have our own state, you will never be bullied just because you are a Jew and because Jews are so-and-sos. Not that. Never again. From tonight that's finished here. Forever."

I reached out sleepily to touch his face, just below his high forehead, and all of a sudden instead of his glasses my fingers met tears. Never in my life, before or after that night, not even when my mother died, did I see my father cry. And in fact I didn't see him cry that night either: it was too dark. Only my left hand saw.

A few hours later, at seven o'clock, while we and probably all our neighbors were asleep, shots were fired in Sheikh Jarrah at a Jewish ambulance that was on its way from the city center to Hadassah Hospital on Mount
Scopus. All over the country Arabs attacked Jewish buses on the highways, killed and wounded passengers, and fired with light arms and machine guns into outlying suburbs and isolated settlements. The Arab Higher Committee headed by Jamal Husseini declared a general strike and sent the crowds into the streets and mosques, where religious leaders called for a jihad against the Jews. A couple of days later, hundreds of armed Arabs came out of the Old City, singing bloodthirsty songs, roaring verses from the Qur'an, howling "
idbah al-Yahud
" (butcher the Jews), and firing volleys in the air. The English police accompanied them, and British armored cars, it was reported, led the crowd that burst into the Jewish shopping center at the eastern end of Mamilla Road and looted and set fire to the whole area. Forty shops were burned down. British soldiers and policemen formed barriers across Princess Mary Street and prevented the defense forces of the Haganah from coming to the help of the Jews who were caught in the shopping center, and even confiscated their arms and arrested sixteen of them. The following day, in retaliation, the paramilitary Irgun burned down the Rex Cinema, which was apparently under Arab ownership.

In the first week of the troubles some twenty Jews were killed. By the end of the second week about two hundred Jews and Arabs had died throughout the country. From the beginning of December 1947 until March 1948 the initiative was in the hands of the Arab forces; the Jews in Jerusalem and elsewhere had to content themselves with static defense, because the British thwarted the Haganah's attempts to launch counterattacks, arrested its men, and confiscated their weapons. Local semiregular Arab forces, together with hundreds of armed volunteers from the neighboring Arab countries and some two hundred British soldiers who had defected to the Arabs and fought beside them, blocked the highways and reduced the Jewish presence to a fragmented mosaic of beleaguered settlements and blocks of settlements that could be kept supplied with food, fuel, and ammunition only by means of convoys.

While the British still continued to govern and used their power mainly to help the Arabs in their war and to tie the Jews' hands, Jewish Jerusalem was gradually cut off from the rest of the country. The only road linking it with Tel Aviv was blocked by Arab forces, and convoys carrying food and supplies were able to make their way up from the
coast only at irregular intervals and at the cost of heavy losses. By the end of December 1947, the Jewish parts of Jerusalem were de facto under siege. Regular Iraqi forces, whom the British administration had allowed to take control of the waterworks at Rosh ha-Ayin, blew up the pumping installations and Jewish Jerusalem was left without water, apart from wells and reservoirs. Isolated Jewish areas like the Jewish Quarter within the walls of the Old City, Yemin Moshe, Mekor Hayim, and Ramat Rahel underwent a siege within a siege as they were cut off from the other Jewish parts of the city. An "emergency committee" set up by the Jewish Agency supervised the rationing of food and the tankers that traveled the streets between bouts of shelling distributing a bucket of water per person every two or three days. Bread, vegetables, sugar, milk, eggs, and other foodstuffs were strictly rationed and were distributed to families under a system of food coupons, until supplies ran out and instead we received occasional meager rations of powdered milk, dry rusks, and strange-smelling egg powder. Drugs and medical supplies had almost run out. The wounded were sometimes operated on without anesthetic. The electricity supply collapsed, and since it was virtually impossible to obtain paraffin, we lived for several months in the dark, or by candlelight.

Our cramped basement-like apartment was turned into a kind of bomb shelter for the residents of the apartments above us, being safer from shelling and shooting. All the windowpanes were taken out, and we barricaded the windows with sandbags. We lived in uninterrupted cavelike darkness, night and day, from March 1948 until the following August or September. In this thick darkness, breathing fetid air that had no escape, we were joined at intervals by some twenty or twenty-five persons, neighbors, strangers, acquaintances, refugees from front-line neighborhoods, who slept on mattresses and mats. They included two very elderly women who sat all day on the floor in the corridor staring into space, a half-crazed old man who called himself the Prophet Jeremiah and constantly lamented the destruction of Jerusalem and foretold for all of us Arab gas chambers near Ramallah "where they've already started gassing 2,100 Jews per day," as well as Grandpa Alexander and Grandma Shlomit, and Grandpa Alexander's widowed elder brother
(Aunt Tsipora had died in 1946), Uncle Joseph himself—Professor Klausner—with his sister-in-law Haya Elitsedek: the two of them had managed, virtually at the last minute, to escape from Talpiot, which was cut off and encircled, and taken refuge with us. Now the two lay fully dressed, with their shoes on, alternately dozing and waking—because on account of the darkness it was hard to tell night from day—on the floor in our tiny kitchen, which was considered the least noisy place in the apartment. (Mr. Agnon, too, we were told, had left Talpiot with his wife and was staying with friends in Rehavia.)

Uncle Joseph was constantly lamenting, in his reedy, rather tearful voice, the fate of his library and his precious manuscripts, which he had had to leave behind in Talpiot and who knew if he would ever see them again. As for Haya Elitsedek, her only son, Ariel, had joined up and was fighting to defend Talpiot, and for a long time we did not know if he was alive or killed, wounded or taken prisoner.*