Here, in King George V Avenue, as well as in German-Jewish Rehavia and rich Greek and Arab Talbieh, another stillness reigned now, unlike the devout stillness of those indigent, neglected Eastern European alleys: a different, exciting, secretive stillness held sway in King George V Avenue, empty now at half past two on a Saturday afternoon, a foreign, in fact specifically British, stillness, since King George V Avenue (not only because of its name) always seemed to me as a child to be an extension of that wonderful London Town I knew from films: King George V Avenue with its rows of grand, official-looking buildings extending on both sides of the road in a continuous, uniform facade, without those gaps of sad, neglected yards defaced by rubbish and rusting metal that separated the houses in our own areas. Here on King George V Avenue there were no dilapidated verandas, no broken shutters at windows that gaped like a toothless old mouth, paupers' windows revealing to passersby the wretched innards of the home, patched cushions, gaudy rags, cramped piles of furniture, blackened frying pans, moldy pots, misshapen enamel saucepans, and a motley array of rusty tin cans. Here on either side of the street was an uninterrupted, proud facade whose doors and lace-curtained windows all spoke discreetly of wealth, respectability, soft voices, choice fabrics, soft carpets, cut glass, and fine manners. Here the doorways of the buildings were adorned with the black glass plates of lawyers, brokers, doctors, notaries, and accredited agents of well-known foreign firms.
As we walked past Talitha Kumi Buildings, my father would explain the origin of the name, as though he had not done so a fortnight before and a month before that, and my mother protested that he would put us all to sleep with his explanations. We passed Schiber's Pit, the gaping foundations of a building that was never built, and the Frumin Building, where the Knesset would later have its temporary home, and the semicircular Bauhaus facade of Beit Hama'alot, which promised all who entered the severe delights of pedantic German-Jewish aesthetics, and we paused for a moment to look out over the walls of the Old City across the Mamillah Muslim Cemetery, hurrying each other along (It's a quarter to three already, and there's still a long way to go!), walking on past the Yeshurun Synagogue and the bulky semicircle of the Jewish Agency building. (Father would half-whisper, as though disclosing state secrets: "That's where our cabinet sits, Doctor Weizmann, Kaplan, Shertok, sometimes even David Ben-Gurion himself. This is the throbbing heart of the Hebrew government. What a pity it's not a more impressive national cabinet!" And he would go on to explain to me what a "shadow cabinet" was and what would happen in the country when the British finally left, as one way or another they surely would.)
From there we walked downhill toward the Terra Sancta College (where my father was to work for ten years, after the War of Independence and the siege of Jerusalem, when the university buildings on Mount Scopus were cut off and the Periodicals Department of the National Library, among others, found a temporary refuge here, in a corner of the third floor).
From Terra Sancta a twenty-minute walk brought us to the curved David Building, where the city suddenly stopped and you were confronted by open fields on your way to the railway station in Emek Refaim. To our left we could see the sails of the windmill at Yemin Moshe, and up the slope to our right the last houses in Talbiyeh. We felt a wordless tension as we left the confines of the Hebrew city, as though we were crossing an invisible border and entering a foreign country.
Soon after three o'clock we would walk along the road that divided the ruins of the Ottoman pilgrims' hostel, above which stood the Scottish church, and the locked railway station. There was a different light here, a cloudier, old, mossy light. This place reminded my mother of a little Muslim street on the outskirts of her hometown in western Ukraine. At this point Father would inevitably start to talk about Jerusalem in the days of the Turks, about the decrees of Jemal Pasha, about decapitations and floggings that took place before a crowd gathered right here on the paved square in front of this very railway station, which was, as we knew, built at the end of the nineteenth century by a Jerusalem Jew named Joseph Bey Navon, who had obtained a concession from the Ottomans.
From the square in front of the railway station we walked down Hebron Road, passing in front of the fortified British military installations and a fenced-off cluster of massive fuel containers over which a sign in three languages proclaimed vacuum oil. There was something strange and comical about the Hebrew sign, lacking as it did any vowels. Father laughed and said this was yet more proof that it was high time to modernize Hebrew writing by introducing separate letters for vowels, which, he said, are the traffic police of reading.
To our left a series of roads led downhill toward the Arab quarter of Abu Tor, while to our right were the charming lanes of the German Colony, a tranquil Bavarian village full of singing birds, barking dogs, and crowing cocks, with dovecotes and red-tiled roofs dotted here and there among cypresses and pine trees, and little stone-walled gardens shaded by leafy trees. Every house here was built with a cellar and an attic, words the very sound of which afforded sentimental pangs to a child like me, born in a place where no one had a dark cellar under his feet or a dimly lit attic above his head, or a larder or a hamper or a chest of drawers or a grandfather clock or a well in his garden fitted with a hoist.
As we continued down Hebron Road, we passed the pink stone mansions of wealthy effendis and Christian Arab professionals and senior civil servants in the British mandatory administration and members of the Arab Higher Committee, Mardam Bey al-Matnawi, Haj Rashed al-Afifi, Dr. Emile Adwan al-Boustani, the lawyer Henry Tawil Tutakh, and the other wealthy residents of the suburb of Bakaa. All the shops here were open, and sounds of laughter and music came from the coffeehouses, as if we had left the Sabbath itself behind us, held back behind an imaginary wall that blocked its way somewhere between Yemin Moshe and the Scottish Hospice.
On the wide pavement, in the shade of two ancient pine trees in front of a coffeehouse, three or four gentlemen of mature years sat on wicker stools around a low wooden table, all wearing brown suits and each sporting a gold chain that emerged from his buttonhole, looped across his belly, and disappeared into a pocket. They drank tea from glasses or sipped coffee from little decorated cups, and rolled dice onto the backgammon boards in front of them. Father greeted them cheerily in Arabic that came out of his mouth sounding more like Russian. The gentlemen stopped talking for a moment, eyed him with mild surprise, and one of them muttered something indistinct, perhaps a single word, or perhaps a reply to our greeting.
At half past three we passed the barbed wire fence around Allenby Barracks, the British military base in south Jerusalem. I had often stormed into this camp, conquered, subdued, and purged it, and raised the Hebrew flag over it in my games on the rush mat. From here I would press on toward the heart of the foreign occupier, sending groups of commandos to the walls of the High Commissioner's residence on the Hill of Evil Counsel, which was captured again and again by my Hebrew troops in a spectacular pincer movement, one armored column breaking into the residence from the west from the barracks, while the other arm of the pincers closed in with complete surprise from the east, from the barren eastern slopes that descended toward the Judaean desert.
When I was a little more than eight, in the last year of the British Mandate, a couple of fellow conspirators and I built an awesome rocket in the backyard of our house. Our plan was to aim it at Buckingham Palace (I had discovered a large-scale map of central London in my father's collection).
I typed out on my father's typewriter a polite letter of ultimatum addressed to His Majesty King George VI of England of the House of Windsor (I wrote in Hebrew—he must have someone there who can translate for him): If you do not get out of our country in six months at the latest, our Day of Atonement will be Great Britain's Day of Reckoning. But our project never came to fruition, because we were unable to develop the sophisticated guiding device (we planned to hit Buckingham Palace but not innocent English passersby) and because we had some problems devising a fuel that would
take our rocket from the corner of Amos and Obadiah Streets in Kerem Avraham to a target in the middle of London. While we were still tied up in technological research and development, the English changed their minds and hurriedly left the country, and that is how London survived my national zeal and my deadly rocket, which was made up of bits of an abandoned refrigerator and the remains of an old bicycle.
Shortly before four we would finally turn left off Hebron Road and enter the suburb of Talpiot, along an avenue of dark cypresses on which a westerly breeze played a rustling tune that aroused in me wonder, humility, and respect in equal measure. Talpiot in those days was a tranquil garden suburb on the edge of the desert, far removed from the city center and its commercial bustle. It was planned on the model of well-cared-for Central European housing schemes constructed for the peace and quiet of scholars, doctors, writers, and thinkers. On either side of the road stood pleasant little single-story houses set in pretty gardens, in each of which, as we imagined, dwelt some prominent scholar or well-known professor like our Uncle Joseph, who although he was childless was famous throughout the land and even in faraway countries through the translations of his books.
We turned right into Kore Hadorot Street as far as the pine wood, then left, and there we were outside Uncle's house. Mother would say: It's only ten to four, they may still be resting. Why don't we sit down quietly on the bench in the garden and wait for a few minutes? Or else: We're a little late today, it's a quarter past four, the samovar must be bubbling away and Aunt Zippora will have put the fruit out.
Two Washingtonias stood like sentries on either side of the gate, and beyond them was a paved path flanked on either side by a thuja hedge that led from the gate to the wide steps, up which we went to the front porch and the door, above which was engraved on a fine brass plate Uncle Joseph's motto:
JUDAISM AND HUMANISM
On the door itself was a smaller, shinier copper plate on which was engraved both in Hebrew and Roman letters:
PROFESSOR DR. JOSEPH KLAUSNER
And underneath, in Aunt Zippora's rounded handwriting, on a small card fixed with a thumbtack, was written:
Please refrain from calling between two and four o'clock. Thank you.
8
ALREADY IN the entrance hall I was seized by respectful awe, as though even my heart had been asked to remove its shoes and walk in stockinged feet, on tiptoe, breathing politely with mouth closed, as was fitting.
In this entrance hall, apart from a brown wooden hat tree with curling branches that stood near the front door, a small wall mirror, and a dark woven rug, there was not an inch of space that was not covered with rows of books: shelves upon shelves rose from the floor to the high ceiling, full of books in languages whose alphabets I could not identify, books standing up and other books lying down on top of them; plump, resplendent foreign books stretching themselves comfortably, and other wretched books that peered at you from cramped and crowded conditions, lying like illegal immigrants crowded on bunks aboard ship. Heavy, respectable books in gold-tooled leather bindings, and thin books bound in flimsy paper, splendid portly gentlemen and ragged, shabby beggars, and all around and among and behind them was a sweaty mass of booklets, leaflets, pamphlets, offprints, periodicals, journals, and magazines, that noisy crowd that always congregates around any public square or marketplace.
A single window in this entrance hall looked out, through iron bars reminiscent of a hermit's cell, at the melancholy foliage of the garden. Aunt Zippora received us here, as she received all her guests. She was a pleasant elderly woman, bright of face and broad of beam, in a gray dress with a black shawl around her shoulders, very Russian, with her white hair pulled back and arranged in a small, neat bun, her two cheeks proffered in turn for a kiss, her kindly round face smiling at you in welcome. She was always the first to ask how you were, and usually didn't wait for your answer but launched straight into news of our dear Joseph, who hadn't slept a wink again all night, or whose stomach was back to normal again after protracted problems, or who had just had a wonderful letter from a very famous professor in Pennsylvania, or whose gallstones were tormenting him again, or who had to finish an important long article by tomorrow for Ravidovitch's Metsuda, or who had decided to ignore yet another insult from Eisig Silberschlag, or who had finally decided to deliver a crushing response to the abuse issuing from one of those leaders of the Brit Shalom gang.
After this news bulletin Aunt Zippora would smile sweetly and lead us into the presence of the uncle himself.
"Joseph is waiting for you in his drawing room," she would announce with a peal of laughter, or "Joseph is in the living room already, with Mr. Krupnik and the Netanyahus and Mr. Jonitchman and the Schochtmans, and there are some more honored guests on their way." And sometimes she said: "He's been cooped up in his study since six o'clock this morning, I've even had to take him his meals there, but no matter, no matter, just you come straight through, do come along, he'll be glad, he's always so glad to see you, and I'll be glad too, it's better for him to stop working for a while, to take a little break, he is ruining his health! He doesn't spare himself at all!"
Two doors opened off the entrance hall: one, a glass door whose panes were decorated with flowers and festoons, led to the living room, which also served as a dining room; the other, a heavy, somber door, led us into the professor's study, sometimes known as the "library."
Uncle Joseph's study seemed to me the antechamber to some palace of wisdom. There are more than twenty-five thousand volumes, Father once whispered to me, in your uncle's private library, among them priceless old tomes, manuscripts of our greatest writers and poets, first editions inscribed to him personally, volumes that were smuggled out of Soviet Odessa by all sorts of devious subterfuges, valuable collectors' items, sacred and secular works, virtually the whole of Jewish literature and a good deal of world literature as well, books that Uncle bought in Odessa or acquired in Heidelberg, books that he discovered in Lausanne or found in Berlin or Warsaw, books he ordered from America and books the like of which exist nowhere but in the Vatican Library, in Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, classical and modern Greek, Sanskrit, Latin, medieval Arabic, Russian, English, German, Spanish, Polish, French, Italian, and languages and dialects I had never even heard of, like Ugaritic and Slovene, Maltese and Old Church Slavonic.
There was something severe and ascetic about the library, about the straight black lines of the dozens of bookshelves extending from the floor to the high ceiling and even over the doorways and windows, a sort of silent, stern grandeur that brooked no levity or frivolity and compelled all of us, even Uncle Joseph himself, always to speak in a whisper here.
The smell of my uncle's enormous library would accompany me all the days of my life: the dusty, enticing odor of seven hidden wisdoms, the smell of a silent, secluded life devoted to scholarship, the life of a secretive hermit, the severe silence of ghosts billowing up from the deepest wells of knowledge, the whisper of dead sages, outpourings of secret thoughts of long-buried authors, the cold caress of the desires of preceding generations.
From the study too, through three tall, narrow windows, could be seen the gloomy, rather overgrown garden, immediately beyond whose wall began the desolation of the Judaean desert and the rocky slopes that cascaded down toward the Dead Sea. The garden was hemmed in by tall cypresses and whispering pines, among which stood occasional oleanders, weeds, unpruned rose bushes, dusty thujas, darkened gravel paths, a wooden garden table that had rotted under the rain of many winters, and an old, stooped, and half-withered pride of India. Even on the hottest days of summer there was something wintry, Russian, and downcast about this garden, whose cats were fed by Uncle Joseph and Aunt Zip-pora, childless as they were, on kitchen scraps, but where I never saw either of them stroll or sit in the evening breeze on one of the two discolored benches.
I was the only one who wandered in this garden, always alone, on those Sabbath afternoons, escaping from the tedious conversation of the scholars in the
sitting room, hunting leopards in its undergrowth, digging under its stones for a hoard of ancient parchments, dreaming of conquering the arid hills beyond its wall with a wild charge of my troops.
All four high, wide walls of the library were covered with crowded but well-ordered books, rank upon rank of precious blue-, green-, and black-bound volumes embossed in gold or silver. In places they were so cramped that two rows of books were forced to stand one behind the other on a single shelf. There were sections with florid Gothic lettering that made me think of spires and turrets, and zones of Jewish holy books, Talmuds and prayer books and law codes and Midrashic compilations, a shelf of Hebrew works from Spain and another with books from Italy, and a section with the writings of the Hebrew Enlightenment, from Berlin and elsewhere, and an endless expanse of Jewish thought and Jewish history and early Near Eastern history, Greek and Roman history, Church history both ancient and modern, and the various pagan cultures, Islamic thought, eastern religions, medieval history, and there were wide Slavic regions that left me mystified, Greek territories, and gray-brown areas of ring binders and cardboard folders stuffed with offprints and manuscripts. Even the floor was covered with dozens of piledup books, some of them laid open facedown, some full of little markers, while others huddled like frightened sheep on the high-backed chairs that were intended for visitors, or even on the windowsills; while a black ladder that could be moved all around the library on a metal track gave access to the upper shelves that clung on under the high ceiling. Occasionally, I was permitted to move it from bookcase to bookcase very carefully on its rubber wheels. There were no pictures, plants, or ornaments. Only books, more books, and silence filled the room, and a wonderful rich smell of leather bindings, yellowing paper, mold, a strange hint of seaweed and old glue, of wisdom, secrets, and dust.