My Michael (3 page)

In winter, at night, the buildings of Jerusalem look like gray shapes against a black backcloth. A landscape pregnant with suppressed violence. Jerusalem can sometimes be an abstract city: stones, pine trees, and rusting iron.

Stiff-tailed cats crossed the deserted streets. The alley walls reflected a counterfeit echo of our footsteps, making them dull and long. We stood outside the door of my house for about five minutes. I said:

"Michael, I can't invite you up to my room for a hot glass of tea, because my landlord and his wife are religious people. When I took the room I promised them not to entertain men there. And it's half past eleven now."

When I said "men" we both smiled.

"I didn't expect you to invite me up to your room now," Michael said. I said:

"Michael Gonen, you're a perfect gentleman, and I'm grateful to you for this evening. All of it. If you were to invite me to share another evening like it with you, I don't suppose I should refuse."

He bent over me. Forcefully he gripped my left hand in his right. Then he kissed my hand. The movement was abrupt and violent, as if he had been rehearsing it all along the way, as if he had mentally counted to three before he bent over to kiss me. Through the leather of the glove he had lent me when we left the cafe a strong, warm wave entered me. A moist breeze stirred the treetops and fell quiet. Like a duke in an English film Michael kissed my hand through his glove, only Michael was drenched and he forgot to smile and the glove was not white.

I took off both gloves and handed them to him. He hurriedly put them on while they were still warm from the heat of my body. An invalid coughed wretchedly behind the closed shutters on the first floor.

"How strange you are today," I smiled.

As if I had known him on other days, too.

I
HAVE FOND
memories of an attack of diphtheria I suffered as a child of nine. It was winter. For several weeks I lay on my bed opposite the south-facing window. Through the window I could see a gloomy expanse of fog and rain: South Jerusalem, the shadow of the Bethlehem hills, Emek Refaim, the rich Arab suburbs in the valley. It was a winter world without details, a world of shapes in an expanse ranging in color from light to dark gray. I could see the trains, too, and I could follow them with my eyes a long way along Emek Refaim from the soot-blackened station as far as the curves at the foot of the Arab village of Beit Safafa. I was a general on the train. Troops loyal to me commanded the high ground. I was an emperor in hiding. An emperor whose authority was undiminished by distance and isolation. In my dreams the southern suburbs were transformed into the St. Pierre and Miquelon islands, which I had come across in my brother's stamp album. Their name had caught my fancy. I used to carry my dreams over into the world of waking. Night and day were one continuous world. My high fever contributed to this effect. Those were dizzy, multicolored weeks. I was a queen. My cool mastery was challenged by open rebellion. I was captured by the mob, imprisoned, humiliated, tortured. But a handful of loyal supporters in dark corners were plotting to rescue me. I had confidence in them. I relished my cruel sufferings because out of them rose pride. My returning authority. I was reluctant to recover. According to the doctor, Dr. Rosenthal, there are some children who prefer to be ill, who refuse to be cured, because illness offers, in a sense, a state of freedom. When I recovered, at the end of the winter, I experienced a feeling of exile. I had lost my powers of alchemy, the ability to make my dreams carry me over the dividing line between sleeping and waking. To this day I feel a sense of disappointment on waking. I mock at my vague longing to fall seriously ill.

After saying good night to Michael I went up to my room. I made some tea. For a quarter of an hour I stood in front of the paraffin heater warming myself and thinking of nothing in particular. I peeled an apple, sent to me by my brother Emanuel from his kibbutz, Nof Harim. I recalled how Michael had tried three or four times to light his pipe without success. Texas is a fascinating place: A man digs a hole in his garden to plant a fruit tree, and suddenly a jet of oil gushes out. This was a whole dimension I had never considered before, the hidden worlds which lie beneath every spot I tread. Minerals and quartzes and dolomites and all that kind of thing.

Then I wrote a short letter to my mother and my brother and his family. I told them all that I was well. In the morning I must remember to buy a stamp.

In the literature of the Hebrew Enlightenment there are frequent references to the conflict between light and darkness. The writer is committed to the eventual triumph of light. I must say that I prefer the darkness. Especially in summer. The white light terrorizes Jerusalem. It puts the city to shame. But in my heart there is no conflict between darkness and light. I was reminded of how I had slipped on the stairs that morning in Terra Sancta College. It was a humiliating moment. One of the reasons why I enjoy being asleep is that I hate making decisions. Awkward things sometimes happen in dreams, but some force always operates which makes decisions for you, and you are free to be like the boat in the song, with all the crew asleep, drifting wherever the dream carries you. The soft hammock, the sea gulls, and the expanse of water which is both a gently heaving surface and also a maelstrom of unplumbed depths. I know that the deep is thought of as a cold place. But it is not always so, and not entirely. I read in a book once about warm streams and underwater volcanoes. At a point deep below the freezing ocean depths there is sometimes a warm cave hidden. When I was small I read and reread my brother's copy of Jules Verne's
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
There are some rich nights when I discover a secret way through the watery depths and the darkness among green and clammy sea-creatures until I beat at the door of the warm cavern. That is my home. There a shadowy captain waits for me surrounded by books and pipes and charts. His beard is black, his eyes hold a hungry gleam. Like a savage he seizes me, and I soothe his raging hatred. Tiny fish swim through us, as if we were both made of water. As they pass through they impart minute flickers of searing pleasure.

I read two chapters of Mapu's
Love of Zion
for the next day's seminar. If I were Tamar I would make Amnon crawl to me on his knees for seven nights. When he finally confessed the torments of his love in scriptural language I would order him to transport me in a sailing ship to the isles of the archipelago, to that faraway place where Red Indians turn into delectable sea-creatures with silver spots and electric sparks, and sea gulls float in blue space.

Sometimes at night I see a bleak Russian steppe. Frozen plains coated with a crust of bluish frost which reflects the flickering light of a wild moon. There is a sledge and a bearskin rug and the black back of a shrouded driver and furiously galloping horses and wolves' eyes glowing in the darkness round about and a solitary dead tree stands on the white slope and it is night within night on the steppe and the stars keep sinister watch. Suddenly the driver turns toward me a heavy face carved by some drunken sculptor. Icicles hang from the ends of his tangled mustache. His mouth is slightly open, as if it is he who is producing the howl of the biting wind. The dead tree which stands all alone on the slope on the steppe is not there by chance, it has a function which on waking I cannot name. But even when I wake I remember that it has a function. And so I return not entirely empty-handed.

In the morning I went out to buy a stamp. I posted the letter to Nof Harim. I ate a roll and yoghurt and drank a glass of tea. Mrs. Tarnopoler, my landlady, came into my room to ask me to buy a can of paraffin on my way home. While I drank my tea I managed to read another chapter of Mapu. At Sarah Zeldin's kindergarten one of the girls said:

"Hannah, you're as happy as a little girl today!"

I put on the blue woolen dress and tied a red silk kerchief round my neck. When I looked in the mirror I was delighted to see that with the neckerchief I looked like a daring girl who is suddenly likely to lose her head.

Michael was waiting for me at midday at the entrance to Terra Sancta, by the heavy iron gates with their dark metal ornaments. He was carrying a box full of geological specimens in his arms. Even if it had occurred to me, say, to shake hands with him, I could not have.

"Oh, it's you, is it?" I said. "Who do you think you're waiting for? Did anyone tell you to wait here?"

"It's not raining now and you're not soaking wet," Michael said. "When you're wet you're much less bold."

Then Michael drew my attention to the sly, leering smile of the bronze statue of the Virgin on top of the building. Her arms were outstretched as if she were trying to embrace the whole city.

I went downstairs to the library basement. In a narrow, gloomy passage, lined with dark, sealed boxes, I met the kindly librarian, a short man who wore a skullcap. I was in the habit of exchanging greetings and witticisms with him. He too, as if making a discovery, asked me:

"What has come over you today, young lady? Good news? If you will permit me to say so, 'bright joy illumines Hannah in a most amazing manner.'"

In the Mapu seminar the lecturer related a typical anecdote, a story about a fanatically orthodox Jewish sect who claimed that ever since Abraham Mapu had published
Love of Zion
there had been more benches in the houses of ill fame, Heaven forbid.

What has got into everyone today? Have they been talking to each other?

Mrs. Tarnopoler, my landlady, had bought a new stove. She beamed benignly at me.

T
HAT EVENING
the sky brightened a little. Blue patches drifted eastward. The air was damp.

Michael and I arranged to meet outside the Edison Cinema. Whichever of us arrived first would buy two tickets for the film, which starred Greta Garbo. The heroine of the film dies of unrequited love after sacrificing her body and her soul for a worthless man. Throughout the film I suppressed an overpowering desire to laugh. Her suffering and his worthlessness seemed like two terms in a simple mathematical equation, which I was not tempted to try to solve. I felt full to overflowing. I laid my head on Michael's shoulder and watched the screen sideways, until the pictures turned into a capering succession of different tones graded between black and white, but mainly various shades of light gray.

As we came out Michael said:

"When people are contented and have nothing to do, emotion spreads like a malignant tumor."

"What a trite remark," I said.

Michael said:

"Look here, Hannah, art isn't my subject. I'm just a humble scientist, as they say."

I refused to relent:

"That's also trite."

Michael smiled:

"Well?"

Whenever he cannot answer he smiles, just like a child who notices grownups doing something ridiculous—an embarrassed, embarrassing smile.

We strolled down Isaiah Street toward Geula Street. Sharp stars glittered in the Jerusalem sky. Many of the street lamps of the British Mandate period were destroyed by shell-fire during the War of Independence. In 1950 most of them were still shattered. Shadowy hills showed in the distance at the ends of the streets.

"This isn't a city," I said, "it's an illusion. We're crowded in on all sides by the hills—Castel, Mount Scopus, Augusta Victoria, Nebi Samwil, Miss Carey. All of a sudden the city seems very insubstantial."

Michael said:

"When it's been raining Jerusalem makes one feel sad. Actually, Jerusalem always makes one feel sad, but it's a different sadness at every moment of the day and at every time of the year."

I felt Michael's arm round my shoulder. I buried my hands in the pockets of my warm corduroy trousers. Once I took one hand out and touched him under the chin. He was clean-shaven today, not like the first time we had met, in Terra Sancta. I said he must have shaved especially to please me.

Michael was embarrassed. He just happened, he lied, to have bought a new razor that day. I laughed. He hesitated a moment, then decided to join in.

In Geula Street we saw an Orthodox woman, wearing a white kerchief, open a second-floor window and squeeze half her body out as if she were about to throw herself down into the street. But she merely closed the heavy iron shutters. The hinges groaned as if with despair.

When we passed the playground of Sarah Zeldin's kindergarten I told Michael that I worked there. Was I a strict teacher? He imagined I was. What made him think that? He didn't know what to answer. Just like a child, I said, starting to say something and not knowing how to finish. Expressing an opinion and not daring to defend it. A child.

Michael smiled.

From one of the yards, on the corner of Malachi Street, came the sound of cats screeching. It was a loud, hysterical shriek, followed by two strangled wails, and finally a low sob, faint and submissive, as if there were no sense, no hope.

Michael said:

"They're crying out in love. Did you know, Hannah, that cats are most in heat in winter, on the coldest days? When I'm married I shall keep a cat. I always wanted to have one but my father wouldn't let me. I'm an only child. Cats cry out in love because they're not bound by any constraint or convention. I imagine that a cat in heat feels as if it's been grabbed hold of by a stranger and is being squeezed to death. The pain is physical. Burning. No, I didn't learn that in geology. I was afraid you'd make fun of me talking like this. Let's go."

I said:

"You must have been a very spoiled child."

"I was the hope of the family," Michael said. "I still am. My father and his four sisters, they all bet on me as if I was their racehorse and as if my university education was a steeplechase. What do you do in the morning in your kindergarten, Hannah?"

"What a funny question. I do exactly what any other kindergarten teacher does. Last month, at Hanukah, I glued together paper tops and cut out cardboard Maccabees. Sometimes I sweep the dead leaves from the paths in the yard. Sometimes I tinkle on the piano. And I often tell the children stories, from memory, about Indians, islands, travels, submarines. When I was a child I adored the books my brother had by Jules Verne and Fenimore Cooper. I thought that if I wrestled and climbed trees and read boys' books I'd grow up to be a boy. I hated being a girl. I regarded grown-up women with loathing and disgust. Even now I sometimes long to meet a man like Michael Strogoff. Big and strong,
but at the same time quiet and reserved. He must be silent, loyal, subdued, but only controlling the spate of his inner energies with an effort. What do you mean? Of course I'm not comparing you to Michael Strogoff. Why on earth should I? Of course not."