Then the moment came to surprise them both. One Saturday morning I appeared in the kitchen, still in my pajamas, and without saying a word I opened the book on the table between them, my finger pointed to each word in turn and I said the word aloud just as my finger touched it. My parents, dizzy with pride, fell into the trap, unable to imagine the enormity of the deception, both convinced that the special child had taught himself to read.
But in the end I really did teach myself. I discovered that each word had its own special shape. As though you could say, for instance, that "dog" looks like a round face, with a nose drawn in profile on one side and a pair of glasses on the other; while "eye" actually looks like a pair of eyes with the bridge of a nose between them. In this way I managed to read lines and even whole pages.
After another couple of weeks I started making friends with the letters themselves. The F of Flag looks like a flag waving at the beginning of the flag. The S of Snake looks just like a snake. Daddy and Mummy are the same at the end, but the rest is quite different: Daddy has a pair of boots in the middle with legs sticking up from them, while Mummy has a row of teeth that look like a smile.
The very first book I can remember was a picture book about a big, fat bear who was very pleased with himself, a lazy, sleepy bear that looked a bit like our Mr. Abramski, and this bear loved to lick honey even when he wasn't supposed to. He didn't just lick honey, he stuffed himself with it. The book had an unhappy ending followed by a very unhappy ending, and only after that did it come to the happy ending. The lazy bear was horribly stung by a swarm of bees, and in case that was not enough, he was punished for being so greedy by suffering from toothache, and there was a picture of him with his face all swollen, and a white cloth tied right around his head and ending with a big knot on top, just between his ears. And the moral was written in big red letters:
IT'S NOT GOOD TO EAT TOO MUCH HONEY!
In my father's world there was no suffering that did not lead to redemption. Were the Jews miserable in the Diaspora? Well, soon the Hebrew State would be established and then everything would change for the better. Had the pencil sharpener got lost? Well, tomorrow we'd buy a new and better one. Did we have a bit of a tummy ache today? It would get better before your wedding. And as for the poor, stung bear, whose eyes looked so miserable that my own eyes filled with tears looking at him? Well, here he was on the next page healthy and happy, and he was no longer lazy because he had learned his lesson: he had made a peace treaty with the bees, to the benefit of both sides, and there was even a clause in it granting him a regular supply of honey, admittedly a reasonable, moderate amount, but forever and ever.
And so on the last page the bear looked jolly and smiling, and he was building himself a house, as though after all his exciting adventures he had decided to join the ranks of the middle class. He looked a bit like my father in a good mood: he looked as though he was about to make up a rhyme or pun, or call me Your Honorable Highness ("only in fun!").
All this more or less was written there, in a single line on the last page, and this may actually have been the first line in my life that I read not by the shapes of the words but letter by letter, the proper way, and from now on every letter would be not a picture but a different sound:
TEDDY BEAR IS VERY HAPPY!
TEDDY BEAR IS FULL OF JOY!
Except that within a week or two my hunger had turned into a feeding frenzy. My parents were unable to separate me from books, from morning till evening and beyond.
They were the ones who had pushed me to read, and now they were the sorcerer's apprentice: I was the water that couldn't be stopped. Just come and look, your son is sitting half naked on the floor in the middle of the corridor, if you please, reading. The child is hiding under the table, reading. That crazy child has locked himself in the bathroom again and he's sitting on the toilet reading, if he hasn't fallen in, book and all, and drowned himself. The child was only pretending to fall asleep, he was actually waiting for me to leave, and after I left the room, he waited a few moments, then switched the light on without permission, and now he seems to be sitting with his back against the door so that you and I can't get in, and guess what he's doing. The child can read fluently without vowels. Do you really want to know what he's doing? Well, now the child says he'll just wait for me to finish part of the newspaper. Now we've got another newspaper addict in the house. That child didn't get out of bed the whole weekend, except to go to the toilet. And even then he took his book with him. He reads all day long, indiscriminately, stories by Asher Barash or Shoffmann, one of Pearl Buck's Chinese novels, The Book of Jewish Traditions, The Travels of Marco Polo, The Adventures of Magellan and Vasco da Gama, Advice for the Elderly in Case of Influenza, the Newsletter of the Beit Hakerem District Council, The Kings of Israel and Judah, Notable Events of 1929, pamphlets about agricultural settlement, back issues of Working Women's Weekly, if it goes on like this, he'll soon be eating bindings and drinking compositor's ink. We're going to have to step in and do something. We must put a stop to this: it's already becoming odd and in fact rather worrying.
36
THE BUILDING down Zechariah Street had four apartments. The Nahlielis' apartment was on the first floor, at the back. Its windows overlooked a neglected backyard, partly paved and the other part overgrown with weeds in winter and thistles in summer. The yard also housed washing lines, garbage cans, traces of a bonfire, an old suitcase, a corrugated iron lean-to, and the wooden remains of a ruined sukkah. Pale blue passionflowers bloomed on the wall.
The apartment contained a kitchen, a bathroom, an entrance passage, two rooms, and eight or nine cats. After lunch Isabella, who was a teacher, and her husband Nahlieli the cashier used the first room as their living room, and at night they and their army of cats slept in the tiny second room. They got up early every morning and pushed all the furniture out into the passage and set out three or four school desks in each of the rooms, with three or four benches, each of which could seat two children.
Thus between eight a.m. and noon their home became the Children's Realm Private Elementary School.
There were two classes and two teachers at Children's Realm, which was all the small apartment could hold, with eight pupils in the first grade and another six in the second grade. Isabella Nahlieli was the proprietor of the school and served as headmistress, storekeeper, treasurer, syllabus organizer, sergeant major of discipline, school nurse, maintenance woman, cleaner, class teacher of the first grade, and responsible for all practical activities. We always called her Teacher Isabella.
She was a loud, jolly, broad woman in her forties, with a hairy mole that looked like a stray cockroach above her upper lip. She was irascible, temperamental, strict, yet overflowing with a rough warmheartedness. In her plain loose cotton-print frocks with their many pockets she looked like a thickset, sharp-eyed matchmaker from the shtetl, who could weigh your character, inside and out, with a single look of her experienced eye and a couple of well-aimed questions. In a moment she had got to the bottom of who you were, with all your secrets. While she interrogated you, her raw red hands would be fidgeting restlessly in her innumerable pockets, as though she was just about to pull out the perfect bride for you, or a hairbrush, or some nose drops, or at least a clean hankie to wipe away that embarrassing green booger on the end of your nose.
Teacher Isabella was also a cat herder. Wherever she went, she was surrounded by a flock of admiring cats that got under her feet, clung to the hem of her dress, impeded her progress, and almost tripped her up, so devoted were they to her. They were of every possible color, and they would claw their way up her dress and lie down on her broad shoulders, curl up in the book basket, settle like broody hens on her shoes, and fight among themselves with desperate wails for the privilege of snuggling in her bosom. In her classroom there were more cats than pupils, and they kept perfectly quiet so as not to disturb the students; as tame as dogs, as well brought up as young ladies from good families, they sat on her desk, on her l
ap, on our little laps, on our satchels, on the windowsill and the box that held equipment for PE, art, and crafts.
Sometimes Teacher Isabella reprimanded the cats or issued orders. She would wave her finger at one or another of them and threaten to tweak its ears or pull its tail out if it did not improve its behavior instantly. The cats, for their part, always obeyed her promptly, unconditionally, and without a murmur. "Zerubbabel, you should be ashamed of yourself!" she would suddenly shout. Immediately some poor wretch would detach himself from the huddled mass on the rug beside her desk and creep away in disgrace, his belly almost touching the floor, his tail between his legs and his ears pressed back, making his way to the corner of the room. All eyes—children's and cats' alike—were fixed on him, witnessing his disgrace. So the accused would crawl into the corner, miserable, humiliated, ashamed of himself, repenting his sins, and perhaps hoping humbly up to the last minute for some miraculous reprieve.
From the corner the poor thing sent us a heartrending look of guilt and supplication.
"You child of the muck heap!" Teacher Isabella snarled at him contemptuously, and then she would pardon him with a wave of her hand:
"All right. That's enough. You can come back now. But just remember that if I catch you once more—"
She had no need to finish her sentence, because the pardoned criminal was already dancing toward her like a suitor, determined to make her head spin with his charms, barely mastering his joy, tail erect, ears pricked forward, with a spring in the pads of his dainty paws, aware of the secret power of his charm and using it to heartbreaking effect, his whiskers gleaming, his coat shiny and bristling slightly, and with a flicker of sanctimonious feline slyness in his glowing eyes, as though he were winking at us while swearing that from now on there would be no more pious or upright cat than he.
Teacher Isabella's cats were schooled to lead productive lives, and indeed they were useful cats. She had trained them to bring her a pencil, some chalk, or a pair of socks from the closet, or to retrieve a stray teaspoon that was lurking under some piece of furniture; to stand at the window and give a wail of recognition if an acquaintance approached, but to issue a cry of alarm at the approach of a stranger. (Most of these wonders we did not witness with our own eyes, but we believed her. We would have believed her if she had told us that her cats could solve crossword puzzles.)
As for Mr. Nahlieli, Teacher Isabella's little husband, we hardly ever saw him. He had usually gone to work before we arrived, and if for any reason he was at home, he had to stay in the kitchen and do his duty there quietly during school hours. If it had not been for the fact that both we and he occasionally had permission to go to the toilet, we would never have discovered that Mr. Nahlieli was actually only Getzel, the pale boy who took the money at the cooperative store. He was nearly twenty years younger than his wife, and if they had wanted to, they could have passed for mother and son.
Occasionally when he had to (or dared to) call out to her during a class, because he had either burned the beef patties or scalded himself, he did not call her Isabella but Mum, which is presumably what her herd of cats also called her. As for her, she called her youthful husband some name taken from the world of birds: Sparrow or Finchy or Thrush or Warbler. Anything except Wagtail, which was the literal meaning of the name Nahlieli.
There were two primary schools within half an hour's walk for a child from our home. One was too socialist, and the other was too religious. The Berl Katznelson House of Education for Workers' Children, at the north end of Haturim Street, flew the red flag of the working class on its roof side by side with the national flag. They celebrated May Day there with processions and ceremonies. The headmaster was called Comrade by teachers and pupils alike. In summer the teachers wore khaki shorts and biblical sandals. In the vegetable garden in the yard pupils were prepared for farming life and personal pioneering in the new villages. In the workshops they learned productive skills such as woodwork, metalwork, building, mending engines and locks, and something vague but fascinating called fine mechanics.
In class the pupils could sit anywhere they liked; boys and girls could even sit together. Most of them wore blue shirts fastened at the chest with the white or red laces of the two youth movements. The boys wore shorts with the legs rolled up as far as the crotch, while the girls' shorts, which were also shamelessly short, were secured to their thighs with elastic. The pupils called the teachers by their first names. They were taught arithmetic, homeland studies, Hebrew and history, but also subjects like the history of Jewish settlement in the Land, history of the workers' movement, principles of collective villages, or key phases in the evolution of the class war. And they sang all kinds of working class anthems, starting with the Internationale and ending with "We are all pioneers" and "The blue shirt is the finest jewel."
The Bible was taught at the House of Education for Workers' Children as a collection of pamphlets on current affairs. The prophets fought for progress and social justice and the welfare of the poor, whereas the kings and priests represented all the iniquities of the existing social order. Young David, the shepherd, was a daring guerrilla fighter in the ranks of a national movement to liberate the Israelites from the Philistine yoke, but in his old age he turned into a colonialist-imperialist king who conquered other countries, subjugated peoples, stole the poor man's ewe-lamb, and ruthlessly exploited the sweat of the working people.
Some four hundred yards away from this red House of Education, in the parallel street, stood the Tachkemoni national-traditional school, founded by the Mizrahi religious Zionist movement, where the pupils were all boys who kept their heads covered during class. Most of the pupils came from poor families, apart from a few who came from the old Sephardi aristocracy, which had been thrust aside by the more assertive Ashkenazi newcomers. The pupils here were addressed only by their surnames, while the teachers were called Mr. Neimann, Mr. Alkalai, and so forth. The headmaster was addressed as Mr. Headmaster. The first lesson every day began with morning prayers, followed by study of the Torah with Rashi's commentary, classes where the skullcapped pupils read the Ethics of the Fathers and other works of rabbinic wisdom, the Talmud, the history of the prayers and hymns, all sorts of commandments and good deeds, extracts from the code of Jewish law, the Shulhan Arukh, the cycle of the Jewish high days and holidays, the history of the Jewish communities around the world, lives of the great Jewish teachers down the ages, some legends and ethics, some legal discussions, a little poetry by Judah Hallevi or Bialik, and among all this they also taught some Hebrew grammar, mathematics, English, music, history, and elementary geography. The teachers wore jackets even in summer, and the headmaster, Mr. Ilan, always appeared in a three-piece suit.
My mother wanted me to go to the House of Education for Workers' Children from the first grade on, either because she did not approve of the rigorous religious separation of boys and girls or because Tachke-moni, with its heavy old stone buildings, which were built under Turkish rule, seemed antiquated and gloomy compared to the House of Education for Workers' Children, which had big windows, light, airy classrooms, cheerful beds of vegetables, and a sort of infectious youthful joy. Perhaps it reminded her in some way of the Tarbuth gymnasium in Rovno.
As for my father, he worried himself about the choice. He would have preferred me to go to school with the professors' children in Rehavia or at least with the children of the doctors, teachers, and civil servants who lived in Beit Hakerem, but we were living in times of riots and shooting, and both Rehavia and Beit Hakerem were two bus rides away from our home in Kerem Avraham. Tachkemoni was alien to my father's secular outlook and to his skeptical, enlightened mind. The House of Education, on the other hand, he considered a murky source of leftist indoctrination and proletarian brainwashing. He had no alternative but to weigh the black peril against the red peril and choose the lesser of two evils.
After a difficult period of indecision Father decided, against my mother's choice, to send me to Tachkemoni. He believed tha
t there was no fear that they would turn me into a religious child, because in any case the end of religion was nigh, progress was driving it out fast, and even if they did succeed in turning me into a little cleric there, I would soon go out into the wide world and shake off that archaic dust, I would give up any religious observance just as the religious Jews themselves with their synagogues would disappear off the face of the earth in a few years, leaving nothing behind but a vague folk memory.
The House of Education, on the other hand, presented in Father's view a serious danger. The red tide was on the upsurge in our land, it was sweeping through the whole world, and socialist indoctrination was a one-way road to disaster. If we sent the child there, they would instantly brainwash him and stuff his head full of all sorts of Marxist straw and turn him into a Bolshevik, one of Stalin's little soldiers, they would pack him off to one of their kibbutzim and he would never come back ("None that go into her return again," as Father put it).
But the way to Tachkemoni, which was also the way to the House of Education for Workers' Children, ran along the side of the Schneller Barracks. From sandbagged positions on top of the walls, nervous, Jew-hating, or simply drunken British soldiers sometimes fired on passersby in the street below. Once they opened fire with a machine gun and killed the milkman's donkey because they were afraid that the milk churns were full of explosives, as had happened in the bombing of the King David Hotel. Once or twice British drivers even ran pedestrians over with their jeeps, because they had not got out of the way fast enough.
These were the days after the World War, the days of the underground and terrorism, the blowing up of the British headquarters, infernal devices planted by the Irgun in the basement of the King David Hotel, attacks on CID HQ in Mamilla Road and on army and police installations.