The poet Nehamkin lived with his only son, Ephraim, who was an electrician and ideologist. Like most of the children of the district, I, too, believed that this Ephraim played some secret and terrible role in the Hebrew Underground. In outward appearance, he was short, dark, wiry-haired, a technician who almost always wore blue overalls and found it hard to keep his hands still. He repaired irons and radios, and even built transmitters with his own hands. He sometimes disappeared for days on end, to return, eventually, suntanned and withdrawn, with an expression of contempt or disgust on his face, as if in the course of his wanderings he had seen things that had filled him with despair. Ephraim and I shared a secret. At the end of the winter, he had made me his lieutenant. One of his lieutenants, that is.
What it was, however, that he had discovered in his wanderings, Ephraim did not see fit to disclose to me.
Despite his scornful expression, despite his low brow and rough hands, he had various girls who came to him, including a skinny student from the university on Mount Scopus. Sometimes they would stay with him until daybreak. These visitors seemed to me unnecessary; not one of them was pretty or gay. I hated them because they called Ephraim by the ugly pet name Froike, and because I was afraid that love or lust would make him give away to them at night secrets that belonged to the two of us alone; I had sometimes seen in the movies how love can make even heroes lose their wits, and then there is no going back.
Once I helped set a trap with the Grill boys from next door. We tied a rusty tin can full of muddy water to a branch of the mulberry tree, and ran a fine cord from it across the lane. Then we hid in the tree. The skinny girl from Mount Scopus came down the lane, carefully stepped over the cord, cast a reproachful look up into the tree, and remarked sadly:
"You should be ashamed of yourselves."
The Grill boys began to laugh. I laughed with them. Then we put broken glass into some mailboxes.
Later, I felt suddenly ashamed. I felt ashamed for most of the morning, and at lunchtime I went to the workshop and made a clean breast of it to Ephraim. I didn't mention the Grill boys. I took all the blame upon myself. Ephraim locked the door, made me call our trap a stupid, childish prank, and forgave me. He taught me how to fill a tin can with gasoline and use a fuse to ignite it, so that when the time came I could play my part in the final battle and not go as a lamb to the slaughter, like the Jewish children in Europe.
Then Ephraim turned to the dry, dusty-looking girl who was sitting silently on his bed sewing a button on for him, and who seemed to me to have no lips:
"Uriel is in on it," he said. "He's a serious boy. And in general," he added, "there's excellent human material here in the neighborhood. This is Ruhama. And she's not what you think."
Ruhama straightened her glasses with two fingers, still holding the needle. She said nothing. I did not speak, either. Secretly I was convinced that it was this Ruhama who would betray us all to the British police. I thought it strange that Ephraim should be so irresponsible as to have her in his workshop and let her sit on his bed and even stay all night sometimes. Love, I thought to myself, could definitely wait until after the victory. She wasn't even pretty. She didn't even talk to me.
The old poet used to do everything in his power to stop the girls going to the workshop. Sometimes he would lie in wait for them at the gate. But the garden had two entrances, and in places the fence was broken down, and anyway Ephraim's room had a back entrance from the rocky garden, up three stone steps that were slippery with dead pine needles.
Sometimes the poet could not contain himself: he would intercept one of the girls and smile at her with extreme politeness:
"Excuse me, dear lady, but I think you must have made a mistake. I must inform you, with all due respect, that this is neither an alehouse nor a den of thieves. This is a private house. And anyway, the young man is not here, he is away on his travels, he has left no instructions—who am I to say when he will take it into his head to return?"
From the beginning of the summer holidays, there was a secret alliance between Mr. Nehamkin and me against these periodic incursions. He lay in wait in front of the house, while I lurked in the garden.
Ephraim, if he was not away on his wanderings, liked to sleep from after lunch until the evening twilight. He would sleep, soaked in sweat, on a mattress in his workshop. He would toss and groan in his sleep, ward something off with his fists, turn over suddenly with a moan. I would tiptoe in to listen in case he uttered secrets in his dreams, so that I could keep them from prying ears. Then I would tiptoe out again and resume my watch.
If ever one of the girls came to disturb Ephraim's slumbers, we would both, Mr. Nehamkin and I, waylay her at the gate. We were armed with uncompromising replies to the mincing question "Where's Froike?"
"I'm his lieutenant. He's not in," I would say darkly.
And Mr. Nehamkin would add softly:
"It is quite impossible to know when the young man will return from his wanderings. It may be tomorrow, or the day after, or it may not be for many days."
Sometimes the girl would ask us to pass along a note or a message. These we would always refuse. There was no need. There was no point. And in any case, in times like these, who accepts letters from strangers?
The girl would either protest or apologize, and promise to call again some other time. She would hesitantly employ some such word as "misunderstanding" or "regret" and be on her way.
The moment her back was turned, Mr. Nehamkin would begin to justify our action in carefully chosen words:
"We told no lie; nor did we mislead the young lady. After all, slumber is a kind of distant wandering to remote worlds. As for billets-doux and notes, it is explicitly forbidden for a man to make himself a messenger of sin."
On such occasions he would also add some cautious prognostication prompted by the sight of the girl disappearing down the lane:
"She will surely soon find herself another young man, or maybe even two, according to the desire of her heart, whereas we have only one Ephraim. Therefore we shall continue to stand as a bulwark and as one man, the wretched poet Nehamkin and the excellent child Uriel. We shall never allow strangers to lead us astray. The aged poet and the youth shall hold the fort and guard the truth. Now return in peace to your wonted sport, and I shall go on my weary way. Each to his allotted task. O, that it may be granted us to behold the deliverance of Jerusalem."
2
Mr. Nehamkin was round and cuddly like a teddy bear. He dragged his feet and always walked with the aid of a carved stick. He looked as though he found his body a tiresome burden, as though he was forced to drag it around with him from place to place against his will, like a man carrying a heavy bundle that was gradually coming undone. The poet had discovered in Holy Writ one or two vague hints that in the Judean Desert, below Jerusalem, a green sea was hidden that no eye had ever beheld, not the Dead Sea, not a sea at all, but springs or wells of water, where were the Essenes and dreamers whom not even the Roman legions had been able to discover, and that was where he meant to go one of these days to shrug off his burden and set off lightened and freed along his own unique road.
He would say:
"How sorry I am for them. I could weep for them. Eyes have they but they see not."
Or:
"Their mouths speak but their ears hear not. The decree has gone forth. Their time has expired. The sword is already flashing. But as for them, they eat and drink. To outward appearances they are fearlessly made, but in truth they are merely blinded. Sorrow and compassion rend my heart."
At times it seemed as though Mr. Nehamkin's prophecies were almost about to come true. Once, in the doorway of the grocer's, he bent over and whispered to me that the King of Israel would soon rise up from his hiding place in the clefts of the mountain and slay the High Commissioner and seize his throne in Jerusalem. Another time it was revealed to him in a dream that Hitler was not dead but had hidden himself away among the murderous Bedouins in the darkness of the tents of Kedar.
And in the middle of the summer holidays, a few days before the fast of Ab, he took me among the drought-smitten oleanders in the garden and urged me to water the plants because the feet of the Messenger were already standing at the gates of Jerusalem. At five o'clock on the following morning, the neighborhood was awakened by sounds of shouting and moaning. I leaped into my gym shorts and rushed outside with no shoes on. The three Grill boys, Boaz, Joab, and Abner, were standing in the middle of the lane beating furiously on a broken tar drum. Half-dressed women ran out of the houses. Somebody shouted a question, and other voices shouted back. The dogs were barking as though they were out of their minds. From the Faithful Remnant Synagogue, the Venerable Rabbi Zischa Lufban emerged, with a retinue of saints and scholars, and cried out repeatedly in an awe-inspiring voice:
"Come out, unclean! Come out in the name of G—d!"
But it was only excited neighbors who came out of every doorway, and many of them were in their pajamas. Helena Grill ran from one man to another, begging them at least to save the children. I caught sight of Mr. Nehamkin standing mildly and thoughtfully at the gate of his garden. He was wearing a dark-blue suit, a Polish tie, a flaming paper flower in his buttonhole, and a polite smile of forgiveness on his face; he was clasping his walking stick by its tiger's-head handle.
Mother chose to stay indoors. She sent father to wake up Mrs. Vishniak the pharmacist. Mother was always afraid that somebody might faint or that there might be an accident. But there was no accident. We saw a colorful procession wending its way toward us out of the east, from the direction of the Bokharan Quarter. At its head was a little old man with an unwashed air, riding on a little ass. He must have been ill, or perhaps only exhausted, because he was propped up on either side by Kurdish porters. They were lean and dark-bristled, with sacks tied around their waists.
Following close on the heels of the old man came the whole Bokharan Quarter, men, women, and children, just like the Exodus from Egypt we were learning about at school. Someone was beating on an old tin can, others were chanting guttural hymns, or mumbling prayers and incantations. The ass seemed to me piteously meek and wretched. It was far from healthy, and it wasn't even white. I looked around for Ephraim, but he was nowhere to be seen. His old father beamed at me, touched my hair, and said peacefully:
"Blessed are they that believe."
The procession, meanwhile, had turned off Zephaniah Street onto Amos Street. It continued westward along the stone wall of the Schneller Barracks and came to a halt outside the main gate, opposite the clock tower.
All the children of the neighborhood, myself among them, rushed from either flank of the procession up to the gate. Here we stopped, because the British sentries had cocked their Tommy guns and rested them, pointing at the crowd, on top of the sandbag barricade.
The Schneller tower was crowned by an indecipherable inscription in Gothic characters. The clock itself had stopped many years before. It chimed regularly every half hour, day and night, but its hands were lifeless. They pointed immovably to precisely three minutes past three. A rumor ran through the crowd: the stranger who had arrived out of nowhere at midnight would work a miracle and make time run backward. He would summon King David and all his horsemen out of the top of the tower. The massed troops of the ten lost tribes would come sweeping down from the mountains. The old Bokharan women started beating their breasts with their wrinkled fists. A cripple began to declaim, "This is the day which the Lord hath made," then suddenly thought better of it and fell silent. Together with Boaz, Joab, and Abner and all the other boys of the neighborhood, I chanted ecstatically:
"Free immigra-tion, He-brew state!"
"Woe upon me," cried Rabbi Lufban, but nobody heard him.
The British blocked the road with an armored car. An officer stood up in it holding a loudspeaker. He was presumably telling the crowd to disperse, but there must have been some flaw, since we could only see his lips moving. The noise died down. There was a silence like the still, small voice we had learned about at school, and in the silence birds and a cockcrowing far away. It was just before the dawn. The light was gray and blue. The cypress trees and the great water tower on top of Romema Hill seemed to be receding into the gentle mist. Then the old man straightened himself up on his ass,'drew a filthy handkerchief from the folds of his robe, and hawked and spat into it. The people were silent. He folded the handkerchief and put it away, raised his head, carefully put on a pair of spectacles, pointed to the clock or perhaps to the tower with a trembling finger, and mumbled some words that I did not catch; but I could see him swelling, reddening, coming to the boil, and suddenly he cried out in a clear, strong voice:
"Let the sun rise and let the deed be done. Now!"
At that very moment the sun rose, gigantic, yellow, dazzling the mountaintop to the east, blazing on the Paternoster and Augusta Victoria towers, shimmering on the Mount of Olives, flashing terribly on the wooded slopes, gleaming off the cisterns on all the roofs of Geula, Ahva, Kerem Avraham and Mekor Baruch. I felt like running away, because it looked as though the whole of Jerusalem were on fire.
Everybody, believers and skeptics alike, Mr. Nehamkin, Rabbi Lufban—all watched the sun rise and turned their eyes as one man toward the clock tower. Even the British officer in the armored car looked around.
But the clock had not moved: still three minutes past three.
Far away, in the Geran Colony, a train howled. Somebody lit a cigarette. There was whispering. A woman began to laugh or sob. Then the old man sighed, slipped off the back of the gray donkey, leaned trembling on the arms of his Kurdish bodyguard, and said sadly:
"Another time."
At once, in furious Yiddish, the Venerable Rabbi Zischa Lufban ordered his disciples to send the scoffers and workers of iniquity straight back to the dark holes they had crawled out of and put an end to this blasphemous charade. The British officer, too, finally managed to make his loudspeaker work and gave the crowd five minutes to disperse peacefully.
I elbowed my way through to Mr. Nehamkin.
"Please, Mr. Nehamkin, what's going to happen now?"
He transferred his carved walking stick to his other hand, touched my forehead tenderly, and smoothed my hair back from my eyes. His hand was cold and ancient, but his voice was like a caress:
"We, Uriel, we have stamina. We shall go on waiting."
After a while, the British police appeared from the direction of Romema and began to disperse the throng. But they were powerless to undo what had been done: under cover of the press and tumult, almost as though it had all been prearranged, Ephraim and his comrades had plastered the walls, shutters, telegraph poles, and shopwindows with subversive posters. They proclaimed in inflammatory slogans that the days of Nazi-British rule were numbered, that the Hebrew Underground had passed sentence of death on the High Commissioner and would soon execute the sentence, and that as Judea had fallen in blood and fire, so in blood and fire it would arise again.
Then the saints returned to their synagogue, the Bokharans went their various ways, the shops opened, the mountains gradually caught fire, and another cruel summer's day began in Jerusalem.
3
Whenever he came home from his wanderings, Ephraim would visit us in the late afternoon, to give me a clandestine examination in radio waves and frequencies, to play a game of chess with my father, and to gaze from a distance at my mother.
While my father and Ephraim were absorbed in their game of chess, my mother would sit at the piano, with her face toward the window and her back to the room. Ephraim looked at her not longingly, like the heroes in the pictures, but with an ex-pression that resembled dismay. I myself was dismayed at their silence. At that time, distant sounds of firing could be heard almost every evening in Jerusalem. Father chewed mint leaves: he was always afraid of having bad breath. Ephraim smoked so much that sometimes his eyes watered. Mother played the same étude over and over again, as if she had made up her mind never to move on until she had received an answer. O
utside the wind touched the trees as if pleading for silence. But there was silence anyway.
On the sill of the deep-set window that faced north, my battlefields were laid out. Corks, pushpins, silver foil, matchboxes, and empty cigarette packs were battleships, troops, and tanks. I conducted cunning mopping-up operations by the army of Bar Kochba and Marshal Budënny against the Nazi storm troopers. By the middle of the summer holidays my Maccabees had conquered Athens, breached the walls of Rome, burned its palaces and razed its towers, and raced on to besiege Berlin and London. By the time the winter rain and snow made the roads impassable, we would force them to surrender unconditionally.
It was Ephraim who had outlined the strategy.
"Always attack on the flank," he instructed me, "always from the desert, from the forest, from the mountains, always from where you are least expected."
His eyes glowed as he spoke, and he could not keep his hands still. He would add in a whisper, "Only don't trust them. Never trust them. They're all thirsting for our blood."
He it was, too, who hit on the idea of the dry-land submarines, which we called "X-ray subs"; they could travel underground through the sea of molten lava and demolish whole cities by torpedoing them from underneath.
"The earth shall tremble," he would say, "cities shall be burned to ashes, towers shall totter, and only then shall we know rest."
How I loved to see him swell with rage and then subside into silence.
My heart went out to him as he promised me earthquakes, tottering towers, and rest.
I would plead, "But when, Ephraim?"
He would respond with one of his cold, practical smiles. And say nothing.