How long was I there?
There is no one left to ask now. Greta Gat was killed in the siege of Jewish Jerusalem in 1948. An Arab Legion sniper with a diagonal black belt and a red kaffieh fired an accurate shot at her from the direction of the Police Academy that was on the cease-fire line. The bullet, so locals related, went in through Auntie Greta's left ear and came out of her eye. To this day, when I try to imagine what her face was like, I have nightmares about one spilled eye.
Nor have I any means to establish where in Jerusalem that clothes shop was, with its abundance of warrens, caves, and forest tracks, some sixty years ago. Was it an Arab shop? An Armenian one? And what stands on the site now? What happened to those forests and winding tunnels? And the alcoves behind the curtains, the counters, and all the changing cubicles? And the kennel where I was buried alive? Or the witch disguised as a wood nymph, whom I pursued and then fled in terror? What happened to my very first temptress, who drew me into her forest hideaway until I found myself inside her secret lair where suddenly she deigned to show me her face, which with nothing more than a look I managed to transform into a horror, the face of a slain fox, both vicious and desperately sad.
It is possible that Auntie Greta, when she finally deigned to reemerge glittering anew from her limbo, clad in a shiny dress, was alarmed not to find me waiting for her in the place where she had fixed me, on the wicker stool opposite the fitting room. No doubt she was startled and her face blushed so deeply that it turned almost purple. What has happened to the child? He is usually such a responsible and obedient child, a very cautious child, not at all adventurous, not even particularly brave.
We must imagine that at first Auntie Greta tried to find me on her own: perhaps she imagined that the child had waited and waited until he got bored and now was playing hide-and-seek with her to punish her for being away so long. Maybe the little scamp was hiding here behind the shelves? No? Or here among the coats? Perhaps he was standing and staring at waxwork models of half-dressed girls? Perhaps he was looking out at the people in the street from the inside of the shopwindow? Or had he simply found the toilet all by himself? Or a faucet to drink some water? A clever boy, quite a responsible boy, no question of that, only a bit absentminded, muddled, lost in all sorts of daydreams, always getting lost in the stories I tell him or he tells himself. Perhaps he's gone out in the street, after all? Frightened I might have forgotten him, trying to find his own way home? What if a strange man appeared and held out his hand and promised him all sorts of wonderful things? And what if the child let himself be tempted? And went off? With a stranger?
As Auntie Greta's apprehension intensified, she stopped blushing and turned white instead, and she started to shiver as though she had caught a cold. Eventually no doubt she raised her voice, she burst out crying, and everyone in the shop, assistants and shoppers alike, came to help and set to work looking for me. They may have called my name, combed the maze-like alleys of the shop, searched all the forest tracks in vain. And because apparently it was an Arab shop, one may imagine that crowds of children a little older than me were summoned and sent out to search for me in the neighborhood, in the narrow streets, in pits, in the nearby olive grove, in the courtyard of the mosque, in the goat pasture on the hillside, in the passages leading to the bazaar.
Was there a telephone? Did Auntie Greta phone Mr. Heinemann's pharmacy on the corner of Zephaniah Street? Did she or did she not manage to apprise my parents of the terrible news? Apparently not, otherwise my parents would have reminded me of it over and over again, for years to come, at any sign of disobedience they would have brandished a reenactment of that terrible experience of loss and mourning, however short-lived, that the crazy child had inflicted on them, and how in an hour or two their hair had almost turned white.
I remember that I did not shout there in the total darkness. I did not make a sound. I did not try to shake the locked door or hammer on it with my little fists, maybe because I was still trembling with fear that the witch with the killed fox's face was still sniffing around after me. I remember that the fear was replaced there, at the bottom of that silent sea of ink, by a strange sweetness: being there was a little like snuggling up warmly to my mother under a winter blanket while gusts of cold and darkness touched the windowpanes from the outside. And a bit like playing at being a deaf and blind child. And a bit like being free of all of them. Completely.
I hoped they would soon find me and get me out of there. But only soon. Not right away.
I even had a small, solid object there, a sort of round metal snail, smooth and pleasant to touch. Its dimensions exactly matched my hand, and my fingers thrilled as they closed around it, felt it, stroked it, clenched a little and relaxed a little, and sometimes pulled and drew out—only a little—the tip of the thin, lithe lodger within, like the head of a snail that peeps out for a moment, curiously, curls this way and that, and instantly retreats inside its shell.
It was a retractable measuring tape, a thin, lithe strip of steel, coiled within a steel case. I amused myself with this snail for a long while in the dark, unsheathing it, stretching it, extending it, letting go suddenly and causing the steel snake to dart back into the shelter of its lair with the speed of lightning until the case had drawn it all back into its belly, received its entire length, and responded with a final slight shudder, a quivering click that was very pleasant to my enfolding hand.
And again unsheathing, releasing, stretching, and this time I extended the steel snake to its full length, sending it far away into the depth of the dark space, feeling with it for the end of the darkness, listening to the popping of its delicate joints as it stretched and its head moved farther and farther away from its shell. Eventually I allowed it to come home gradually, releasing just a tiny bit and stopping, another tiny bit and stopping again, trying to guess—because I'd seen nothing, literally nothing—how many soft puk-puk pulses there would be before I heard the decisive tluk of the final locking that indicated that the snake had vanished from head to tail back into the womb from which I had allowed it to emerge.
How had this good snail suddenly come into my possession? I can't remember whether I had snatched it as I went past, in my knight-errant journey, in one of the twists and turns of the maze, or if my fingers had come across it inside that kennel, after the stone was rolled back to seal the mouth of my tomb.
One may reasonably imagine that, on reflection, Auntie Greta decided that from every angle it would be best not to tell my parents. She certainly saw no reason to alarm them after the event, when everything had ended well and safely. She may have feared that they would judge her to be an insufficiently responsible child sitter, and that she would thereby lose a modest but regular and much-needed source of income.
Between me and Auntie Greta the story of my death and resurrection in the Arab clothes shop was never mentioned or even hinted at. There was not so much as a conspiratorial wink. She may have hoped that in time the memory of that morning would fade and we would both come to think that it had never happened, that it had been only a bad dream. She may even have been a little ashamed of her extravagant excursions to clothes shops: after that winter's morning she never again made me her partner in crime. She may even have managed, thanks to me, to recover somewhat from her addiction to dresses. A few weeks or months later I was taken away from Auntie Greta and sent to Mrs. Pnina Shapiro's kindergarten in Zephaniah Street. We continued, however, for a few years to hear the sound of Auntie Greta's piano dimly in the distance, at dusk, a persistent, lonely sound beyond the other noises of the street.
It had not been a dream. Dreams dissolve with time and make way for other dreams, while that dwarf witch, that elderly child, the face of the killed fox, still sniggers at me with sharp teeth, among which is a single gold incisor.
And there was not only the witch: there was also the snail I had brought back from the forest, the snail I hid from my father and mother, and that sometimes, when I was alone, I dared to take out and play with un
der the bedclothes, causing it long erections and lightning retreats back into the depth of its lair.
A brown man with big bags under his kind eyes, neither young nor old, with a green-and-white tailor's tape measure around his neck and both ends dangling down onto his chest. He moved in a weary sort of way. His brown face was wide and sleepy, and a shy smile flickered for a moment and died under his soft gray mustache. The man leaned over me and said something to me in Arabic, something I could not understand but that I nevertheless translated into words in my heart, Don't be frightened, child, don't be frightened anymore now.
I remember that my rescuer had square, brown-framed reading glasses, which suited not an assistant in a women's clothes shop but rather, perhaps, a heavily built carpenter getting on in years, who hums to himself as he walks along dragging his feet, with a dead cigarette butt between his lips and a worn folding ruler peeping out of his shirt pocket.
The man eyed me for a moment, not through the lenses of his glasses, which had slipped down his nose, but over the top of them, and after scrutinizing me closely and hiding another smile or shadow of a smile behind his neat mustache, he nodded to himself two or three times and then reached out and took my hand, which was cold with fear, into his warm hand, as though he were warming a freezing chick, and drew me out of that dark recess, raised me high in the air, and squeezed me quite hard to his chest, and at that I began to cry.
When the man saw my tears, he pressed my cheek against his slack cheek, and said, in his low, dusty voice, pleasantly reminiscent of a shaded dirt road in the country at dusk, in Arabs' Hebrew, question, answer, and summing up:
"Everything all right? Everything all right. OK."
And he carried me in his arms to the office, which was located in the bowels of the shop, and there the air was full of smells of coffee and cigarettes and woolen cloth and the aftershave lotion of the man who had found me, different from my father's, much sharper and fuller, a smell that I wanted my father to have too. And the man who had found me said a few more words to the assembled company in Arabic, because there were people in the office standing and sitting between me and Auntie Greta, who was weeping in a corner, and he said one sentence to Auntie Greta too, and she blushed very deeply, and with that, with a long, slow, responsible movement, like a doctor feeling to find out where exactly it hurts, the man passed me over into Auntie Greta's arms.
But I was not so keen to be in her arms. Not quite yet. I wanted to stay a little longer pressed to the chest of the man who had rescued me.
After that they talked for a while, the others, not my man, he did not talk but just stroked my cheek and patted me twice on the shoulder and left. Who knows what he was called? Or if he's still alive? Is he living in his home? Or in dirt and poverty, in some refugee camp?
Then we went home on the No. 3A bus. Auntie Greta washed her face and mine too, so that it wouldn't show that we'd been crying. She gave me some bread and honey, a bowl of boiled rice, and a glass of lukewarm milk, and for dessert she gave me two pieces of marzipan. Then she undressed me and put me to bed in her bed, and she gave me lots of cuddles and mewing sounds that ended in sticky kisses, and as she tucked me in, she said, Sleep, sleep a little, my darling child. Perhaps she was hoping to wipe away the evidence. Perhaps she was hoping that when I woke from my siesta, I would think that it had all happened in a dream and wouldn't tell my parents, or if I did, she could smile and say that I always had such dreams in the afternoon, someone really ought to write them down and publish them in a book, with pretty color pictures, so that all the other children could enjoy them too.
But I didn't go to sleep, I lay quietly under the blanket playing with my metal snail.
I never told my parents about the witch, the bottom of the inky sea, or the man who rescued me: I didn't want them to confiscate my snail. And I didn't know how I would explain to them where I'd found it. I could hardly say I'd brought it back as a souvenir from my dream. And if I told them the truth, they would be furious with Auntie Greta and me. What's that?! His Highness?! A thief?! Has His Highness gone out of his mind?
And they would take me straight back there and force me to give my snail back and say I was sorry.
And then the punishment.
Later in the afternoon Father came to pick me up from Auntie Greta's. As usual, he said, "His Highness looks a little pale today. Has he had a hard day? Have his ships been shipwrecked, heaven forbid? Or have his castles been captured by foes?"
I did not reply, even though I could definitely have made him unhappy. For instance, I could have told him that since that morning I had another father apart from him. An Arab father.
While he was putting on my shoes, he joked with Auntie Greta. He always courted women with witticisms. And he always chatted on endlessly so as not to allow any room for a moment's silence. All his life my father was afraid of silence. He always felt himself to be responsible for the life of the conversation and saw it as a sign of failure and guilt on his part if it flagged for an instant. So he made up a rhyme in honor of Auntie Greta, something like this:
"It's not illegal yet, I bet, to flirt and pet with Gret."
Perhaps he went even further and said:
"Greta dear, Greta dear, you have really touched me here," pointing at his heart.
Auntie Greta blushed immediately, and because she was embarrassed at blushing, she blushed even more deeply, and her neck and chest turned purple like an eggplant, despite which she managed to mutter:
"Nu, but really, Herr Doktor Klausner," but her thighs nodded to him slightly, as though they longed to execute a little pirouette for him.
That same evening Father took me on a long, detailed tour of the remains of Inca civilization: eager for knowledge, we crossed oceans and mountains, rivers and plains together in the big German atlas. With our own eyes we saw the mysterious cities and the remains of palaces and temples in the encyclopedia and in the pages of a Polish book with pictures. All evening Mother sat in an armchair reading, with her legs tucked under her. The paraffin heater burned with a quiet, deep blue flame.
And every few minutes the silence of the room was emphasized by three or four soft mutters as air bubbled through the veins of the heater.
31
THE GARDEN wasn't a real garden, just a smallish rectangle of trampled earth as hard as concrete, where even thistles could scarcely grow. It was always in the shade of the concrete wall, like a prison yard. And in the shade of the tall cypress trees on the other side of the wall, in the Lembergs' garden next door. In one corner a stunted pepper tree struggled to survive, with gritted teeth; I loved to rub its leaves between my fingers and inhale its exciting smell. Opposite, near the other wall, was a single pomegranate tree or bush, a disillusioned survivor of the days when Kerem Avraham was still an orchard, which obstinately flowered year after year. We children did not wait for the fruit but ruthlessly cut off the vase-shaped unripe buds, into which we would insert a stick that was a finger's length or so, and thus make them into pipes like those the British smoked, and a few better-off people in our neighborhood who wanted to imitate the British. Once a year we opened a pipe shop in a corner of the yard. Because of the color of the buds it sometimes looked as though there was a reddish glow at the tip of each of our pipes.
Some agriculturally minded visitors, Mala and Staszek Rudnicki from Chancellor Street, once brought me a gift of three little paper bags containing radish, tomato, and cucumber seeds. So Father suggested we should make a vegetable patch. "We'll both be farmers," he said enthusiastically. "We'll make a little kibbutz in the space by the pomegranate tree, and bring forth bread from the earth by our own efforts!"
No family in our street had a spade, fork, or hoe. Such things belonged to the new, suntanned Jews, who lived over the hills and far away—in the villages and kibbutzim in Galilee, the Sharon, and the Valleys. So Father and I set out to conquer the wilderness and make a vegetable garden almost with our bare hands.
Early on Saturday morning
, when Mother was still asleep and the whole neighborhood too, the two of us crept outside, wearing white vests and khaki shorts and hats, skinny, narrow-chested, townies to our slim fingertips, as pale as two sheets of paper but well protected by the thick coating of cream that we had rubbed into each other's shoulders. (The cream, called Velveta, was calculated to frustrate all the wiles of the spring sun.)
Father led the parade, wearing boots and armed with a hammer, a screwdriver, a kitchen fork, a ball of string, an empty sack, and the letter opener from his desk. I marched behind, all excited, full of the fierce joys of agriculture, carrying a bottle of water, two glasses, and a small box containing a plaster, a little bottle of iodine, a little stick to apply the iodine with, a strip of gauze, and a bandage, first aid in case of mishaps.
First Father brandished the letter opener ceremoniously, bent down, and drew four lines on the ground. In this way he marked out once and for all the boundaries of our plot, which was about two meters square, or just a little larger than the world map that hung on the wall of our corridor between the doors of the two rooms. Then he instructed me to get down on my knees and hold tightly, with both hands, a sharpened stick that he called a peg. His plan was to hammer a peg into each corner of the plot and surround it all with a border of taut string. The trodden earth, however, was as hard as cement and resisted all Father's efforts to hammer in the pegs. So he put down the hammer, with a martyred expression removed his glasses, deposited them carefully on the kitchen windowsill, returned to the battlefield, and redoubled his efforts. He sweated profusely as he battled, and without his glasses he once or twice narrowly missed my fingers, which were holding the peg for him. The peg, meanwhile, was fast becoming flattened.