A Tale of Love and Darkness

  He did not break into his partner's sentence and finish it for her.

  He did not cut in to sum up what she was saying so as to move on to another subject.

  He did not let his interlocutress talk into thin air while he prepared in his head the reply he would make when she finally finished.

  He did not pretend to be interested or entertained, he really was. Nu, what: he had an inexhaustible curiosity.

  He was not impatient. He did not attempt to deflect the conversation from her petty concerns to his own important ones.

  On the contrary: he loved her concerns. He always enjoyed waiting for her, and if she needed to take her time, he took pleasure in all her contortions.

  He was in no hurry, and he never rushed her. He would wait for her to finish, and even when she had finished, he did not pounce or grab but enjoyed waiting in case there was something more, in case she was carried along on another wave.

  He loved to let her take him by the hand and lead him to her own places, at her own pace. He loved to be her accompanist.

  He loved getting to know her. He loved to understand, to get to the bottom of her. And beyond.

  He loved to give himself. He enjoyed giving himself up to her more than he enjoyed it when she gave herself up to him.

  Nu, what: they talked and talked to him to their heart's content, even about the most private, secret, vulnerable things, while he sat and listened, wisely, gently, with empathy and patience.

  Or rather with pleasure and feeling.

  There are many men around who love sex but hate women.

  My grandfather, I believe, loved both.

  And with gentleness. He never calculated, never grabbed. He never rushed. He loved setting sail, he was never in a hurry to cast anchor.

  He had many romances in his twenty-year Indian summer after my grandmother's death, from when he was seventy-seven to the end of his life. He would sometimes go away with one or another of his lady friends for a few days to a hotel in Tiberias, a guesthouse in Gedera, or a "holiday resort" by the seaside in Netanya. (His expression "holiday resort" was apparently his translation of some Russian phrase with Chekhovian overtones of dachas on the Crimean coast.) Once or twice I saw him walking down Agrippa Street or Bezalel Street arm in arm with some woman, and I did not approach them. He did not take any particular pains to conceal his love affairs from us, but he did not boast about them either. He never brought his lady friends to our house or introduced them to us, and he rarely mentioned them. But sometimes he seemed as giddy with love as a teenager, with veiled eyes, humming to himself, an absentminded smile playing on his lips. And sometimes his face fell, the baby pink left his cheeks like an overcast autumn day, and he would stand in his room furiously ironing shirts one after the other, he even ironed his underwear and sprayed it with scent from a little flask. and occasionally he would speak harshly but softly to himself in Russian, or hum some mournful Ukrainian melody, from which we deduced that some door had shut in his face, or, on the contrary, he had become embroiled again, as on his amazing trip to New York when he was engaged, in the anguish of two simultaneous loves.

  Once, when he was already eighty-nine, he announced to us that he was thinking of taking an "important trip" for two or three days, and that we were on no account to worry. But when he had not returned after a week, we were beset with worries. Where was he? Why didn't he phone? What if something had happened to him, heaven forbid? After all, a man of his age...

  We agonized: should we involve the police? If he was lying sick in some hospital, heaven forbid, or had got into some sort of trouble, we would never forgive ourselves if we hadn't looked for him. On the other hand, if we rang the police and he turned up safe and sound, how could we face his volcanic fury? If Grandpa didn't appear by noon on Friday, we decided after a day and a night of dithering, we would have to call the police. There was no alternative.

  He turned up on Friday, about half an hour before the deadline, pink with contentment, brimming with good humor, amusement, and enthusiasm, like a little child.

  "Where did you disappear to, Grandpa?"

  "Nu, what. I was traveling."

  "But you said you'd only be away for two or three days."

  "So what if I did? Nu, I was traveling with Mrs. Hershkovich, and we were having such a wonderful time we didn't notice how the time was flying."

  "But where did you go?"

  "I've told you, we went away to enjoy ourselves for a little. We discovered a quiet guesthouse. A very cultured guesthouse. A guesthouse like in Switzerland."

  "A guesthouse? Where?"

  "On a high mountain in Ramat Gan."

  "Couldn't you at least have phoned us? So we wouldn't be so worried about you?"

  "We didn't find a phone in the room. Nu, what. It was such a wonderfully cultured guesthouse!"

  "But couldn't you have phoned us from a public telephone? I gave you the tokens myself."

  "Tokens. Tokens. Nu, shto takoye, what are tokens?"

  "Tokens for the public phone."

  "Oh, those jetons of yours. Here they are. Nu, take them, little bed-wetter, take your jetons along with the holes in the middle of them, take them, only be sure to count them. Never accept anything from anyone without counting properly first."

  "But why didn't you use them?"

  "The jetons7. Nu, what. I don't believe in jetons."

  And when he was ninety-three, three years after my father died, Grandpa decided that the time had come and that I was old enough for a man-to-man conversation. He summoned me into his den, closed the windows, locked the door, sat down solemnly and formally at his desk, motioned to me to sit facing him on the other side of the desk. He didn't call me "little bed-wetter," he crossed his legs, rested his chin in his hands, mused for a while, and said:

  "The time has come we should talk about women."

  And at once he explained:

  "Nu. About woman in general."

  (I was thirty-six at the time, I had been married fifteen years and had two teenage daughters.)

  Grandpa sighed, coughed into his palm, straightened his tie, cleared his throat a couple of times, and said:

  "Nu, what. Women have always interested me. That is to say, always. Don't you go understanding something not nice! What I am saying is something completely different, nu, I am just saying that woman has always interested me. No, not the 'woman question'! Woman as a person."

  He chuckled and corrected himself:

  "—interested me in every way. All my life I am all the time looking at women, even when I was no more than a little chudak, nu, no, no, I never looked at a woman like some kind of paskudniak, no, only looking at her with all respect. Looking and learning. Nu, and what I learned, I want to teach you now also. So you will know. So now you, listen carefully please: it is like this."

  He paused and looked around, as though to make certain that we were really alone, with no one to overhear us.

  "Woman," Grandpa said, "nu, in some ways she is just like us. Exactly the same. But in some other ways," he said, "a woman is entirely different. Very very different."

  He paused here and pondered it for a while, maybe conjuring up images in his mind, his childlike smile lit his face, and he concluded his lesson:

  "But you know what? In which ways a woman is just like us and in which ways she is very very different—nu, on this," he concluded, rising from his chair, "I am still working."

  He was ninety-three, and he may well have continued to "work" on the question to the end of his days. I am still working on it myself.

  He had his own unique brand of Hebrew, Grandpa Alexander, and he refused to be corrected. He always insisted on calling a barber (sapar) a sailor (sapan), and a barber's shop (mispara) a shipyard (mispana). Once a month, precisely, this bold seafarer strode off to the Ben Yakar Brothers' shipyard, sat down on the captain's seat, and delivered a string of de-tailed, stern orders, instructions for the voyage ahead. He used to tell me off sometimes: "Nu, it's time yo
u went to the sailor, what do you look like! A pirate!" He always called shelves shlevs, even though he could manage the singular, shelf, perfectly well. He never called Cairo by its Hebrew name, Kahir, but always Cairo; I was called, in Russian, either khoroshi malchik (good boy) or ty durak (you fool); Hamburg was Gamburg; a habit was always a habitat: sleep was spat, and when he was asked how he had slept, he invariably replied "excellently!" and because he did not entirely trust the Hebrew language, he would add cheerfully in Russian "Khorosho! Ochen khorosho!!" He called a library biblioteka, a teapot chainik, the government partats, the people oilem goilem, and the ruling Labor Party, Mapai, he sometimes called geshtankt (stink) or iblaikt (decay).

  And once, a couple of years before he passed away, he spoke to me about his death: "If, heaven forbid, some young soldier dies in battle, nineteen-years-old, maybe twenty-years-old boy, nu, it is a terrible disaster but it's not a tragedy. To die at my age though—that's a tragedy! A man like me, ninety-five years old, nearly a hundred, so many years getting up every morning at five o'clock, taking a cold douche every morning every morning since nearly hundred years, even in Russia cold douche in the morning, even in Vilna, hundred years now eating every morning every morning slice of bread with salty herring, drinking glass of chai and going out every morning every morning always to stroll half an hour in the street, summer or winter, morning stroll, this is for the motion, it gets the circulation going so well! And right away after that coming home every day every day and reading a bit newspaper and meanwhile drinking another glass chai, nu, in short, it's like this, dear boy, this bakhurchik of nineteen, if he is killed, Heaven forbid, he still hasn't had time to have all sorts of regular habitats. When would he have them? But at my age it is very difficult to stop, very very difficult. To stroll in the street every morning—this is for me old habitat. And cold douche—also habitat. Even to live—it's a habitat for me, nu, what, after hundred years who can all at once suddenly change all his habitats? Not to get up anymore at five in the morning? No douche, no salt herring with bread? No newspaper no stroll no glass hot chai? Now, that's tragedy!'

  18

  IN THE YEAR 1845 the new British Consul James Finn together with his wife Elizabeth Anne arrived in Ottoman-ruled Jerusalem. They both knew Hebrew, and the consul even wrote books about the Jews, for whom he always harbored a sympathy. He belonged to the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews, although so far as is known he was not directly involved in missionary work in Jerusalem. Consul Finn and his wife believed fervently that the return of the Jewish people to their homeland would hasten the salvation of the world. More than once he protected Jews in Jerusalem from harassment by the Ottoman authorities. James Finn also believed in the need to make the Jews lead "productive" lives—he even helped Jews gain a proficiency in building work and adapt themselves to agriculture. To this end he purchased in 1853, at a cost of £250 sterling, a desolate rocky hill a few miles from Jerusalem intra muros, to the northwest of the Old City, an uninhabited and untilled piece of land that the Arabs called Karm al-Khalil, which translated means "Abraham's Vineyard." Here James Finn built his home and set up an "Industrial Plantation" that was intended to provide poor Jews with work and train them for "useful" lives. The farm extended over some ten acres, James and Elizabeth Anne Finn erected their house on the summit of the hill, and around it extended the agricultural colony, the farm buildings, and the workshops. The thick walls of the two-story house were built of dressed stone, and the ceilings were constructed in oriental style, with crossed vaults. Behind the house, around the edge of the walled garden, wells were sunk, and stables, a sheep pen, a granary, storehouses, a wine press and cellar, and an olive oil press were constructed.

  Some two hundred Jews were employed on the Industrial Plantation in Finn's farm in work such as removing stones, building walls, fencing, planting an orchard, and growing fruit and vegetables, as well as developing a small stone quarry and engaging in various building trades. In the course of time, after the consul's death, his widow set up a soap factory in which she also employed Jewish workers. Not far from Abraham's Vineyard, almost at the same time, the German Protestant missionary Johann Ludwig Schneller founded an educational institute for Christian Arab orphans fleeing from the fighting between Druse and Christians in the Lebanon mountains. It was a large property surrounded by a stone wall. The Schneller Syrian Orphanage, like Mr. and Mrs. Finn's Industrial Plantation, was based on a desire to train its inmates for a productive life in handicrafts and agriculture. Finn and Schneller, in their different ways, were both pious Christians who were moved by the poverty, suffering, and backwardness of Jews and Arabs in the Holy Land. Both believed that training the inhabitants for a productive life of work, building, and agriculture would wrest the "Orient" from the clutches of degeneration, despair, indigence, and indifference. They may indeed have believed, in their different ways, that their generosity would light the way of Jews and Muslims into the bosom of the Church.*

  In 1920 the suburb of Kerem Avraham, Abraham's Vineyard, was founded below Finn's farm: its huddled little houses were built among the plantations and orchards of the farm and progressively ate into them. The consul's house itself underwent various transformations after the death of his widow Elizabeth Anne Finn: first it was turned into a British institute for young offenders, then it became a property of the British administration, and finally an army HQ.

  Toward the end of World War II the garden of Finn's house was surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence, and captured Italian officers were imprisoned in the house and the garden. We used to creep out at nightfall to tease the POWs. The Italians greeted us with cries of Bambino! Bambino! Buon giorno bambino! and we responded by shrieking Bambino! Bambino! Il Duce morte! Finito il Duce! Sometimes we shouted Viva Pinocchio! and from beyond the fences and the barriers of language, war, and Fascism there always echoed like the second half of some ancient slogan the cry: Gepetto! Gepetto! Viva Gepetto!

  In exchange for the sweets, peanuts, oranges, and biscuits that we threw to them over the barbed-wire fence, as though to monkeys in the zoo, some of them passed us Italian stamps or displayed to us from a distance family photographs with smiling women and tiny children stuffed into suits, children with ties, children with jackets, children of our age with perfectly combed dark hair and a forelock shining with brilliantine.

  One of the POWs once showed me, from behind the wire, in return for an Alma chewing gum in a yellow wrapper, a photo of a plump woman wearing nothing but stockings and a suspender belt. I stood staring, for a moment, wide-eyed and struck dumb with horror, as though someone in the middle of the synagogue on the Day of Atonement had suddenly stood up and shouted out the Ineffable Name. Then I spun around and fled, terrified, sobbing, hardly seeing where I was running. I was six or seven at the time, and I ran as though there were wolves on my tail, I ran and ran and did not stop fleeing from that picture until I was eleven and a half or so.

  *Based on the Hebrew book Architecture in Jerusalem: European Christian Building outside the Walls, 1855-1918, by David Kroyanker (Keter: Jerusalem, 1987), pp. 419-21.

  After the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 the Finns' house was used successively by the Home Guard, the Border Patrol, the Civil Defense, and the paramilitary youth movement, before becoming a religious Jewish girls' school by the name of Beit Bracha. I occasionally stroll around Kerem Avraham, turning from Geula Street, which has been renamed Malkei Israel Street, into Malachi Street, then left into Zechariah Street, walk up and down Amos Street a few times, then up to the top end of Obadiah Street, where I stand at the entrance to Consul Finn's house for a few minutes and gaze at the house. The old house has shrunk over the years, as though its head has been pushed down into its shoulders with an ax blow. It has been Judaized. The trees and shrubs have been dug up, and the whole area of the garden has been asphalted over. Pinocchio and Gepetto have vanished. The paramilitary youth movement has also disappeared without a trace. The old frame of a b
roken sukkah left over from the last Sukkot festival stands in the front yard. There are sometimes a few women wearing snoods and dark dresses standing at the gate; they stop talking when I look at them. They do not look back at me. They start whispering as I move away.

  When he arrived in Jerusalem in 1933, my father registered for an MA at the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus. At first he lived with his parents in the dark little apartment in Kerem Avraham, in Amos Street, about two hundred yards east of Consul Finn's house. Then his parents moved to another apartment. A couple named Zarchi moved into the Amos Street apartment, but that young student, whose parents pinned such high hopes on him, paid rent to go on living in his room, which had its own entrance through the veranda.

  Kerem Avraham was still a new district: most of the streets were un-paved, and the vestiges of the vineyard that gave it its name were still visible in the gardens of the new houses, in the form of vines and pomegranate bushes, fig and mulberry trees, that whispered to each other whenever there was a breeze. At the beginning of summer, when the windows were opened, the smell of greenery flooded the tiny rooms. From the rooftops and at the ends of the dusty streets you could catch sight of the hills that surrounded Jerusalem.

  One after the other, simple square stone houses sprang up, two- or three-story buildings that were divided up into large numbers of cramped apartments each with two tiny rooms. The gardens and verandas had iron railings that soon rusted. The wrought-iron gates incorporated a six-pointed star or the word ZION. Gradually dark cypresses and pines supplanted the pomegranates and vines. Here and there, pomegranates grew wild, but the children snuffed them out before the fruit had a chance to ripen. Among the untended trees and the bright outcrops of rock in the gardens some people planted oleander or geranium bushes, but the garden beds were soon forgotten, as washing lines were strung out over them and they were trampled underfoot or filled with thistles and broken glass. If they did not die of thirst, the oleanders and geraniums grew wild, like scrub. All sorts of storehouses were erected in the gardens, sheds, corrugated-iron shacks, improvised huts made from the planks of the packing cases in which the residents brought their belongings here, as though they were trying to create a replica of the shtetl in Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, or Lithuania.