My Michael (12 page)

There is no end to Jerusalem. Talpiot, a forgotten continent in the south, hidden amid her ever-whispering pine trees. A bluish vapor spreads up from the Judean Desert which borders Talpiot on the east. The vapor touches her small villas, and even her gardens, overshadowed by the pines. Beit Hakerem, a solitary hamlet lost beyond the windswept plain, hemmed in by rocky fields. Bayit Vagan, an isolated hill-fort where a violin plays behind windows kept shuttered all day, and at night the jackals howl to the south. Tense silence broods in Rehavia, in Saadya Gaon Street, after the sun has set. At a lighted window sits a gray-haired sage at his work, his fingers tapping at the keys of his typewriter. Who could imagine that at the other end of this very street stands the district of Shaarei Hesed, full of barefoot women wandering at night between colored sheets flapping in the breeze, and sly cats slipping from yard to yard? Is it possible that the old man playing tunes on his German typewriter cannot sense them? Who could imagine that beneath his western balcony spreads the Valley of the Cross, an ancient grove creeping up the slope, clutching at the outermost houses of Rehavia as if about to enfold and smother them in its luxuriant vegetation? Small fires flicker in the valley, and long-drawn-out, muffled songs rise out of the woods and reach out towards the windowpanes. At dusk crowds of white-toothed urchins make their way to Rehavia from the outskirts of the city to smash her stately street lamps with small, sharp stones. The streets are still calm: Kimhi, Maimonides, Nachmanides, Alharizi, Abrabanel, Ibn Ezra, Ibn Gabirol, Saadya Gaon. But then the decks of the British destroyer
Dragon
will still be calm after the mutiny has begun dimly to break out below. Towards nightfall in Jerusalem at the ends of the streets you can glimpse brooding hills waiting for darkness to fall on the shuttered city.

In Tel Arza, in the north of Jerusalem, lives an elderly lady pianist. She practices ceaselessly and tirelessly. She is preparing for a new recital of pieces by Schubert and Chopin. The solitary tower of Nebi Samwil stands on a hilltop to the north, stands motionless beyond the border and stares night and day at the elderly pianist who sits innocently at her piano, her stiff back turned to the open window. At night the tower chuckles, the tall, thin tower chuckles, as though whispering to himself "Chopin and Schubert."

One day in August Michael and I went out for a long walk. We left Yair with my best friend Hadassah, in Bezalel Street. It was summer in Jerusalem. Her streets had a new light. I am thinking of the time between half past five and half past six, the last light of the day. There was a caressing coolness. In the narrow lane which is Pri Hadash Street was a stone-paved yard, detached from the street by a broken-down fence. An ancient tree forced its way up between the unevenly laid paving stones. I do not know what kind of tree it was. When I had passed this way alone in the winter I had wrongly imagined that the tree was dead. Now new shoots had burst out from the trunk, clawing the air with pointed talons.

From Pri Hadash Street we turned left into Josephus Street. A big, dark man wrapped in an overcoat, with a gray cap on his head, stared at me through the lighted window of a fish market. Am I mad, or is my real husband eyeing me furiously, reprovingly, through the lighted window of a fish market, wrapped in an overcoat and wearing a gray cap?

Women had brought out all the substance of their houses onto their balconies: pinks and whites, sheets and quilts. A straight, slender girl stood on one of the balconies in Hashmonaim Street. Her sleeves were rolled up, and her hair wrapped in a scarf. She was beating an eiderdown angrily with a wooden bat, oblivious of our presence. On one of the walls was a faded slogan in red letters from the days of the underground:
Judaea fell in blood and fire, in blood and fire will Judaea rise.
The sentiment was alien to me, but I was moved by the music in the words.

We had a long walk, Michael and I, that evening. We went down through the Bokharian Quarter and along Prophet Samuel Street to the Mandelbaum Gate. From here we took the curving lane through the Hungarian Buildings to the Abyssinian Quarter, to Mousrara and along the end of Jaffa Road to Notre Dame Square. Jerusalem is a burning city. Whole districts seem to be hanging in the air. But a closer glance reveals an immeasurable weightiness. The overpowering arbitrariness of the intertwining alleys. A labyrinth of temporary dwellings, huts and sheds leaning in smouldering anger against the gray stone that takes on now a blue, now a reddish tinge. Rusting gutters. Ruined walls. A harsh and silent struggle between the stonework and the stubborn vegetation. Waste-plots of rubble and thistles. And, above all, the wanton tricks of the light: if a stray cloud comes for a moment between the twilight and the city, immediately Jerusalem is different.

And the walls.

Every quarter, every suburb harbors a hidden kernel surrounded by high walls. Hostile strongholds barred to passers-by. Can one ever feel at home here in Jerusalem, I wonder, even if one lives here for a century? City of enclosed courtyards, her soul sealed up behind bleak walls crowned with jagged glass. There is no Jerusalem. Crumbs have been dropped deliberately to mislead innocent people. There are shells within shells and the kernel is forbidden. I have written "I was born in Jerusalem"; "Jerusalem is my city," this I cannot write. I cannot know what lurks in wait for me in the depths of the Russian Compound, behind the walls of Schneller Barracks, in the monastic lairs of Ein Kerem or in the enclave of the High Commissioner's palace on the Hill of Evil Counsel. This is a brooding city.

In Melisanda Street, when the street lights had come on, a large and dignified man pounced on Michael, took hold of his coat button as if he was an old acquaintance and thus addressed my husband:

"A curse upon you, O troubler of Israel. May you perish."

Michael, who was not acquainted with the madmen of Jerusalem, was taken aback and went pale. The stranger smiled a friendly smile and added calmly:

"So perish all enemies of the Lord, Amen Selah."

Michael may have been about to try to explain to the stranger that he must have mistaken him for his worst enemy, but the man put an end to the discussion by aiming at Michael's shoes:

"I spit upon you and upon all your descendants forever and ever, Amen."

Villages and suburbs surround Jerusalem in a close circle, like curious bystanders surrounding a wounded woman lying in the road: Nebi Samwil, Shaafat, Sheikh Jarrah, Isawiyeh, Augusta Victoria, Wadi Joz, Silwan, Sur Baher, Beit Safafa. If they clenched their fists the city would be crushed.

Incredibly, in the evening the frail old scholars wander out for a breath of fresh air. They prod the pavement with their sticks like blind wanderers on a snowy steppe. Michael and I encountered a pair of them that evening in Luntz Street, behind Sansur House. They were strolling arm in arm, as if lending each other support in their hostile surroundings. I smiled and greeted them cheerfully. Both of them hastily raised their hands to their heads. One flourished his hat eagerly to return my greeting; the other's head was bare, and he waved in a symbolic or absent-minded gesture.

T
HAT AUTUMN
Michael was appointed to an assistant lectureship in the Geology Department. This time he did not celebrate with a party, but marked the occasion by taking two days off work. We took Yair to Tel Aviv, where we stayed with Aunt Leah. The flat, shimmering city, the brightly colored buses, the sight of the sea and the taste of the salt breeze, the neatly trimmed trees planted along the sidewalks, all these aroused in me a poignant yearning, I knew not why or what for. There was tranquillity and a vague expectancy. We saw three school-friends of Michael's, and went to a couple of productions at the Habima Theatre. We hired a boat and rowed up the Yarkon towards Seven Mills. Reflections of broad eucalyptus trees fell trembling in the water. It was a very tranquil moment.

That autumn, too, I went back to working five hours a day at old Sarah Zeldin's kindergarten. We began to repay the money we had borrowed after our wedding. We even paid back some of the money we had had from Michael's aunts. But we could not begin to save up for a deposit on a new apartment because on Passover Eve I went out without consulting Michael and bought an expensive modern sofa and three matching armchairs at Zuzovsky's.

As soon as Michael received planning permission from the municipality we bricked up the balcony. We called the new room the study. Here Michael put his desk, and his bookshelves were also moved in. I bought Michael the first volume of the
Encyclopaedia Hebraica
as a present on our fourth wedding anniversary. Michael bought me an Israeli-made radio.

Michael sat up late at night working. A glass door separated the new study from my bedroom. Through the glass door the reading lamp threw giant shadows on the wall opposite my bed. At night Michael's shadow intruded on my dreams. If he opened a drawer or moved a book, put on his glasses or lit his pipe, dark shadows lapped the wall facing me. The shadows fell in total silence. At times they took on shapes. I closed my eyes hard, but still the shapes would not relax their grip. When I opened my eyes the whole room seemed to tumble with every movement of my husband at his desk at night.

I was sorry that Michael was a geologist and not an architect. If only he could be poring at night over plans of buildings, roads, strong fortresses, or a naval harbor in which the British destroyer
Dragon
might anchor.

Michael's hand was delicate and steady. What neat diagrams he drew. He drew a geological plan on thin tracing paper, and his lips as he worked were tightly pressed together. He seemed to me like a general or a statesman, taking a fateful decision with icy calm. If Michael had been an architect perhaps I could have come to accept the shadow he cast on my bedroom wall at night. Strange and terrifying at night was the thought that Michael was exploring unknown layers in the depths of the earth. As if he were desecrating and provoking at night an unforgiving world.

Eventually I got up and made myself a glass of mint tea, as I had learned to do from Mrs. Tarnopoler, who was my landlady before I was married. Or else I turned on the light and read until midnight or one o'clock, when my husband would silently lie down beside me, say good night, kiss me on the lips, and pull the bedclothes over his head.

The books I read at night gave no indication that I had once been a student of literature: Somerset Maugham or Daphne du Maurier in English, in paperbacks with glossy covers; Stefan Zweig, Romain Rolland. My taste had become sentimental. I cried when I read André Maurois'
Women Without Love
in a cheap translation. I cried like a schoolgirl. I had not lived up to my professor's expectations. I had never fulfilled the hopes he had expressed for me shortly after my wedding.

When I stood by the kitchen sink I could see down into the garden below. Our garden was neglected, full of mud in the winter and dust and thistles in the summer. Broken dishes rolled around in the garden. Yoram Kamnitzer and his friends had built stone forts whose ruins remained. At the end of the garden stood a broken tap. There is a Russian steppe, there is Newfoundland, there are the isles of the archipelago, and I am exiled here. But at times my eyes are opened and I can see Time. Time is like a police van patrolling the streets at night, a red light flashing rapidly, the wheels moving slowly by comparison. The wheels swish softly. Cautiously moving. Slowly. Menacing. Prowling.

I wanted to imagine that inanimate objects obey a different rhythm because they have no thoughts.

For example, on a branch of the fig tree which sprouted in our garden a rusty bowl had hung suspended for years. Perhaps a long-dead neighbor had once thrown it from the window of the flat above and it had caught in the branches. It was already hanging covered in rust outside our kitchen window when we first arrived. Four, five years. Even the fierce winds of winter had not brought it to the ground. On New Year's Day, however, I stood at the kitchen sink and saw with my own eyes how the bowl dropped from the tree. No breeze stirred the air, no cat or bird moved the branches. But strong forces came to fruition at that moment. The rusty metal crumbled and the bowl clattered to the ground. What I mean to say is this: All those years I had observed complete repose in an object in which a hidden process was taking place, all those years.

M
OST OF OUR
neighbors are Orthodox, with a lot of children. At the age of four Yair sometimes comes out with questions which I cannot answer. I send him with his questions to his father. And Michael, who sometimes speaks to me as if I were an unruly little girl, converses with his son as man to man. The sounds of their conversation reach me in the kitchen. They never interrupt each other. Michael has taught Yair to end whatever he has to say with the words "I have finished." Michael himself sometimes uses this expression when he comes to the end of one of his answers. This was the method my husband chose to teach his son that people should not interrupt one another.

Yair might ask, for instance, "Why does everyone think something different?" Michael would reply, "People are different." Yair would then ask, "Why aren't there two men or two children the same?" Michael would admit that he didn't know the answer. The child would pause for a moment, consider carefully, then say perhaps:

"I think Mummy knows everything, because Mummy never says, 'I don't know.' Mummy says, 'I know but I can't explain.' I think if you can't explain how can you say you know? I've finished."

Michael, perhaps with a restrained smile, would try to explain to his son the difference between thinking something and saying it.

Whenever I overheard a conversation like this I could not help remembering my late father, who was an attentive man who always scrutinized every utterance he heard, even from a child, for signs or hints of some truth which was denied him, at whose threshold he must prostrate himself all his life.

At the age of four and five Yair was a strong, silent child. Sometimes he displayed a tendency towards extraordinary violence. Perhaps he had discovered how timid the neighbors' children were. His drowsy gestures could even inspire awe in older children. He occasionally came home beaten and bruised by other children's parents. Usually, however, he refused to tell us who was responsible for his wounds. If Michael pressed him, the reply often was: