That night I could not get to sleep. I lay on my back on our mattress in the far corner of the corridor, surrounded by the snores, mutterings, and intermittent moans of old people. I was dripping with sweat as I lay between my parents, and by the faint trembling light of the single candle in the bathroom, in the fetid air, I suddenly thought I saw the form of a tortoise, not Mimi, the little tortoise I loved to stroke with my finger (there was no possibility of a cat or a puppy: forget it!), but a terrifying gigantic monster-tortoise, dripping blood and mashed bones, floating through the air, digging with its sharp-clawed paws and chuckling mockingly at me from above all the people sleeping in the corridor. Its face was horrible, crushed and torn by a bullet that had entered its eye and come out in the place where even a tortoise has a sort of ear hole, although it has no actual ear.
I may have tried to wake Father. He did not wake up: he was lying motionless on his back breathing deeply, like a contented baby. But Mother took my head and pressed it to her bosom. Like the rest of us, she was sleeping in her clothes, and the buttons of her blouse hurt my cheek a little. She hugged me hard but didn't try to comfort me; instead she sobbed with me, smothering her crying so that no one would hear, and her lips whispered over and over again: Piri, Piroshka, Piriii. All I could do was stroke her hair and her cheeks, and kiss her, and it was as though I was the grown-up and she was my child, and I whispered, There there, Mummy, it's all right, I'm here.
Then we whispered a little more, she and I. Tearfully. And later on, after the faint flickering candle at the end of the corridor went out and only the wails of the shells broke the silence and the hill on the other side of our wall shuddered with every shell that fell, instead of my head on her chest Mother put her wet head on my chest. That night I understood for the first time that I would die too. That everyone would die. And that nothing in the world, not even my mother, could save me. And I could not save her. Mimi had an armored shell, and at any sign of danger he would withdraw, hands, feet, and head, inside his shell. And that hadn't saved him.
***
In September, during a cease-fire that interrupted the fighting in Jerusalem, we had visitors on Saturday morning: Grandpa and Grandma, the Abramskis, and maybe some others. They drank tea in the yard and discussed the successes of the Israeli army, and the terrible dangers of the peace plan put forward by the UN mediator, the Swede Count Bernadotte, a scheme behind which the British were undoubtedly lurking and whose aim was to crush our young state to death. Somebody had brought a rather large, ugly new coin from Tel Aviv: it was the first Hebrew coin to be minted, and it was passed excitedly from hand to hand. It was a twenty-five prutot coin, and it had a picture of a bunch of grapes, a motif that Father said was taken straight from a Jewish coin of the Second Temple period, and above the bunch of grapes was a clear Hebrew legend: ISRAEL. To be on the safe side, it was written not just in Hebrew but in English and Arabic as well.
Mrs. Zerta Abramski said:
"If only our dear late parents, and their parents, and all the generations, had been privileged to see and hold this coin. Jewish money—" Her voice choked. Mr. Abramski said:
"It is fitting to give thanks with the appropriate benediction. Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who hast given us life, preserved us, and permitted us to reach this time!"
Grandpa Alexander, my elegant, hedonistic grandfather, so beloved of the fair sex, said nothing, but simply touched the overlarge nickel coin to his lips and kissed it twice, gently, and his eyes brimmed. Then he passed it on. At that moment the street was startled by the wail ofan ambulance on its way to Zephaniah Street, and ten minutes later the siren howled again on its way back, and Father may have seen in this a pretext to make some pallid joke about the last trump or something of the sort. They sat and chatted and may even have had another glass of tea, and after half an hour or so the Abramskis took their leave, wishing us all the best, and Mr. Abramski, who loved rhetorical flourishes, probably uttered a few high-flown phrases. While they were still standing in the doorway, a neighbor arrived and gently called them over to a corner of the yard, and they were in such a hurry to follow him that Aunt Zerta forgot her handbag. A quarter of an hour later the Lembergs came, looking bewildered, to tell us that while his parents were visiting us, Yonatan Abramski, twelve-year-old Yoni, had been playing in Nehemiah Street, when a Jordanian sniper firing from the Police Training School had hit him with a single shot in the middle of his forehead, and the boy had lain there dying for five minutes, vomited, and expired before the ambulance reached him.
I found this in Zerta Abramski's diary:
September 23,1948
On the eighteenth of September, at a quarter past ten on Saturday morning, my Yoni,Yoni my child, my whole life, was killed ... He was hit by an Arab sniper, my angel, he only managed to say "Mummy," to run a few yards (my wonderful, pure boy was standing near the house) before he fell ... I did not hear his last word, neither did I answer him when he called out to me. When I returned, my sweet, beloved child was no longer alive. I saw him at the mortuary. He looked so wonderfully beautiful, he seemed to be asleep. I embraced him and kissed him. They had put a stone under his head. The stone moved, and his head, his cherubic head, moved a little. My heart said, He is not dead, my son, look, he's moving ... His eyes were half shut. Then "they" came—the mortuary workers—came and insulted me and reprimanded me rudely and disturbed me: I had no right to embrace and kiss him ... I left.
But a few hours later I returned. There was a "curfew" (they were searching for the killers of Bernadotte). On every street corner policemen stopped me ... They asked for my permit to be out during the curfew. He, my slain son, was my only permit. The policemen let me into the mortuary. I had brought a cushion with me. I removed the stone and put it to one side: I could not bear to see his dear, wonderful head resting on a stone. Then "they" came back and tried to make me leave. They said that I ought not to touch him. I did not heed them. I continued to embrace and kiss him, my treasure. They threatened to lock the door and leave me with him, with the essence of my whole life. This was all that I wanted. Then they reconsidered and threatened to call the soldiers. I was not afraid of them ... I left the mortuary a second time. Before I left, I embraced and kissed him. The next morning I came to him again, to my child ... Once more I embraced and kissed him. Once again I prayed to God for vengeance, vengeance for my baby, and once again they drove me out ... And when I came back again, my wonderful child, my angel, was in a closed coffin, yet I remember his face, all of him, everything about him I remember.*
46
TWO FINNISH missionary ladies lived in a little apartment at the end of Ha-Turim Street in Mekor Baruch, Aili Havas and Rauha Moisio. Aunt Aili and Aunt Rauha. Even when the conversation turned to the shortage of vegetables, they both spoke high-flown, biblical Hebrew, because that was the only Hebrew they knew. If I knocked at their door to ask for some wood that we could use for the Lag Baomer bonfire, Aunt Aili would say with a gentle smile, as she handed me an old orange crate: "And the shining of a flaming fire by night!" If they came around to our apartment for a glass of tea and a bookish conversation while I was fighting against my cod-liver oil, Aunt Rauha might say: "The fishes of the sea shall shake at His presence!"
Sometimes the three of us paid them a visit in their Spartan one-room apartment, which resembled an austere nineteenth-century girls' boarding school: two plain iron bedsteads stood facing each other on either side of a rectangular wooden table covered with a dark blue tablecloth, with three plain wooden chairs. Beside each of the matching beds was a small bedside table with a reading lamp, a glass of water, and some sacred books in black covers. Two identical pairs of bedroom slippers peered out from under the beds. In the middle of the table there was always a vase containing a bunch of everlasting flowers from the nearby fields. A carved olive-wood crucifix hung in the middle of the wall between the two beds. And at the foot of each bed stood a chest of drawers made from a thick shiny wood of a sort
we did not have in Jerusalem, and Mother said it was called oak, and she encouraged me to touch it with my fingertips and run my hand over it. My mother always insisted that it was not enough to know the various names of objects but you should get to know them by sniffing them, touching them with the tip of your tongue, feeling them with your fingertips, to know their warmth and smoothness, their smell, their roughness and hardness, the sound they made when you tapped them, all those things that she called their "response" or "resistance." Every material, she said, every piece of clothing or furniture, every utensil, every object had different characteristics of response and resistance, which were not fixed but could change according to the season or the time of day or night, the person who was touching or smelling, the light and shade, and even vague propensities that we have no means of understanding. It was no accident, she said, that Hebrew uses the same word for an inanimate object and a desire. It was not only we who had or did not have a desire for one thing or another, inanimate objects and plants also had an inner desire of their own, and only someone who knew how to feel, listen, taste, and smell in an ungreedy way could sometimes discern it.
Father observed jokingly:
*Zerta Abramski, "Excerpts from the Diary of a Woman from the Siege of Jerusalem, 1948," in The Correspondence of Yakov-David Abramski, edited and annotated by Shula Abramski (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim, 5751/1991), pp. 288-89.
"Our Mummy goes one further than King Solomon. Legend says that he understood the language of every animal and bird, but our Mummy has even mastered the languages of towels, saucepans, and brushes."
And he went on, beaming mischievously:
"She can make trees and stones speak by touching them: Touch the mountains, and they shall smoke, as it says in the Psalms."
Aunt Rauha said:
"Or as the prophet Joel put it, The mountains shall drop down new wine, and the hills shall flow with milk. And it is written in the twenty-ninth Psalm: The voice of the Lord maketh the hinds to calve."
Father said:
"But coming from someone who is not a poet, such things are always liable to sound somewhat, how shall I put it, prettified. As if they are trying to sound very deep. Very mystical. Very hylozoical. Trying to make the hinds to calve. Let me explain the meaning of these difficult words, mystical and hylozoical. Behind them both is a clear, rather unhealthy, desire to blur realities, to dim the light of reason, to blunt definitions, and to muddle distinct domains."
Mother said:
"Arieh?"
And Father, in a conciliatory tone (because although he enjoyed teasing her, goading her, and even occasionally gloating, he enjoyed even more repenting, apologizing, and beaming with goodwill, just like his own father, Grandpa Alexander), said:
"Nu, that's enough, Fanitchka. I've finished. I was only having a bit of fun."
The two missionaries did not leave Jerusalem during the siege: they had a strong sense of mission. The Savior himself seemed to have charged them with the task of boosting the spirits of the besieged and helping as volunteers to treat the wounded at the Shaarei Tsedek Hospital. They believed that every Christian had a duty to try to atone, in deeds rather than words, for what Hitler had done to the Jews. They considered the establishment of the State of Israel as the finger of God. As Aunt Rauha put it, in her biblical language and gravely pronunciation: It is like the appearance of the rainbow in the cloud, after the flood. And Aunt Aili, with a tiny smile, no more than a twitch of the corner of her mouth: "For it repented the Lord of all that great evil, and He would no longer destroy them."
Between bombardments they used to walk around our neighborhood, in their ankle boots and headscarves, carrying a deep bag of grayish hessian, distributing a jar of pickled cucumbers, half an onion, a piece of soap, a pair of woolen socks, a radish, or a small quantity of black pepper to anyone prepared to receive it from them. Who knows how they got hold of all these treasures. Some of the ultra-Orthodox rejected these gifts in disgust, some drove the two ladies away from their doors contemptuously, others accepted the gifts but spat on the ground the missionaries' feet had trodden on the moment their backs were turned.
They did not take offense. They were constantly quoting verses of consolation from the Prophets, which seemed strange to us in their Finnish accent, which sounded like their heavy boots tramping on gravel. "For I will defend this city, to save it." "No enemy or foe shall come into the gates of this city." "How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace ... for the wicked shall no more pass through thee..." "Fear not, O Jacob my servant, saith the Lord: for I am with thee; for I will make a full end of all the nations whither I have driven thee."
Sometimes one of them would volunteer to take our place in the long line for water that was distributed from a tanker, half a bucket per family on Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays only, assuming the tanker had not been pierced by shrapnel before it reached our street. Or else one of them would go around our tiny barricaded apartment handing out half a "mixed vitamin" tablet to each of the many inmates. Children received a whole tablet. Where did the two missionaries get hold of these wonderful gifts? Where did they replenish their gray hessian bag? Some said one thing and some another, and some warned me not to accept anything from them because their only objective was "to take advantage of our distress and make converts for that Jesus of theirs."
Once I plucked up my courage and asked Aunt Aili—even though I knew what the answer would be: "Who was Jesus?" Her lips quivered slightly as she replied hesitantly that he was still alive, and that he loved us all, particularly those who mocked or despised him, and if I filled my heart with love, he would come and dwell within my heart and bring me suffering but also great happiness, and the happiness would shine forth out of the suffering.
These words seemed so strange and full of contradictions that I felt a need to ask Father too. He took me by the hand and led me to the mattress in the kitchen, which was Uncle Joseph's refuge, and asked the famous author of Jesus of Nazareth to explain to me who and what Jesus was.
Uncle Joseph was lying on his mattress, looking exhausted, gloomy, and pale, his back resting on the blackened wall and his glasses raised onto his forehead. His answer was very different from Aunt Aili's: Jesus of Nazareth was, in his view, "one of the greatest Jews of all time, a wonderful moralist who loathed the uncircumcised of heart and fought to restore to Judaism its original simplicity and wrest it from the power of hair-splitting rabbis."
I did not know who the uncircumcised of heart or the hair-splitting rabbis were. Nor did I know how to reconcile Uncle Joseph's Jesus, who loathed and fought to wrest, with Aunt Aili's Jesus who neither loathed nor fought nor wrested but did the exact opposite, he especially loved sinners and those who despised him.
In an old folder I came across a letter that Aunt Rauha wrote to me from Helsinki in 1979, on behalf of both of them. She wrote in Hebrew, and among other things she said:
...We too were pleased that you won the Euro-Viseo Song Contest. And how about the song?
The faithful here were very glad that they from Israel sang: Hallelujah! There is no more fitting song ... I was able also to see the film Shoah, which caused tears and pains of conscience from the countries that persecuted to such an extent, without any end, without any sense. The Christian countries must ask much pardon from the Jews. Your father said once that he cannot understand why the Lord allows such terrible things ... I always said to him that the Lord's secret is on high. Jesus suffers with the people of Israel in all its sufferings. The faithful also have to bear their share of the sufferings of Jesus that he let them suffer ... Nevertheless the atonement of Christ on the cross covers all the sins of the world, of all mankind. But this you can never understand with your brain ... There were Nazis who received pains of conscience and repented before their death. But their repentance did not make the Jews who died come back to life. We all need atonement and grace each day. Jesus says: Do not fear those who kill the bod
y, because they are not able to kill the soul. This letter is from me and from Aunt Aili. I received a heavy blow to my back six weeks ago when I fell inside the bus, and Aunt Aili does not see so well.
With love,
Rauha Moisio
And once when I went to Helsinki, because one of my books had been translated into Finnish, the two of them suddenly turned up in the cafeteria of my hotel, both wearing dark shawls that covered their heads and shoulders, like a pair of old peasant women. Aunt Rauha was leaning on a stick and was gently holding Aunt Aili's hand, as she was now almost blind. Aunt Aili helped her to a corner table. They both demanded the right to kiss me and bless me. It was not easy to get them to allow me to order them each a cup of tea, "but nothing else please!"
Aunt Aili smiled slightly: it was not so much a smile as a faint quivering of her lips; she was on the verge of saying something, changed her mind, placed her right fist inside her left hand, as though putting a diaper on a baby, moved her head once or twice as though in lament, and finally she said:
"Praise be to God for permitting us to see you here in our land, though I do not understand why your dear parents were not vouchsafed to be among the living. But who am I to understand? The Lord has the answers. We can merely wonder. Please, I'm sorry, will you allow me to feel your dear face? It is only because my eyes have failed."
Aunt Rauha said of my father: "Blessed be his memory, he was the dearest of men! He had such a noble spirit! Such a humane spirit!" And of my mother she said: "Such a suffering soul, peace be upon her! She had many sufferings, because she saw into the heart of people, and what she saw was not so easy for her to bear. As the prophet Jeremiah says, 'The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?'"