Chapter 7 A Tale of Love and Darkness (7)

We went out for a stroll after lunch, when the city shut itself behind closed shutters and indulged in its Sabbath afternoon nap.The streets and courtyards among the corrugated iron lean-to stone houses fell into silence, as if the whole of Jerusalem was shrouded in a transparent glass ball.We crossed Geulah Street, into the crowded alleys of a run-down ultra-Orthodox ghetto in Ahava, past black, yellow and white clothes chained to dilapidated balconies and outside stair railings. The laundry line, up Zikron Moses Street, where there was always the smell of poor Ashkenazi Jews cooking, like Holrant Sabbath stew, borscht, garlic, onions, and pickles, Continue through Prophet Street.At two o'clock in the afternoon on the Sabbath, there was not a soul to be seen in the streets of Jerusalem.We walked from Prophets Street to Strauss Street, a street always shaded by ancient pine trees, protected by two high walls, the mossy gray walls of the Deaconess's Protestant hospital on the one hand, and the other on the other. On one side is the eerie wall of Bikul Horim, a Jewish hospital, with symbols of the Twelve Tribes of Israel carved on its stately bronze doors.The smell of medicine and the pungent smell of old Lysol wafted from the two hospitals.Then, we crossed Jaffa Street next to the famous clothing store Ma'ayan Stube, and stopped for a while in front of the bookstore run by the brothers Athiasaf, allowing Dad to feast his eyes on the large number of new Hebrew books in the window.From there, we walked the entire length of King George's Fifth Avenue, passing shops, cafes with high chandeliers, and expensive shops that were empty and locked on the Sabbath, but through the windows Iron railings beckoned to us, winking at us with the seductive charm of another world, smelling of the wealth of distant continents and the scent of brightly lit bustling cities carefree on the banks of broad rivers.There are elegant ladies and promising gentlemen who don't live with raids or decrees, don't know what hardship is, don't have to count coins one by one, don't have to be suppressed by pioneers and self-sacrifice rules, with No community fund, medical money and ration coupon obligations, leisurely installation of multi-flue chimneys on the roof of a beautiful home or a spacious unit in a modern color, with carpet on the floor and a doorman in a blue uniform guarding the door , the elevator man in a red uniform drives the elevator, and the servants, cooks, butlers, and house agents do what they are told.Ladies and gentlemen enjoy the comfortable life - not like us.Here, King George Street, as well as in Rejavea for the German Jews, and Talibiya for the wealthy Greeks and Arabs, is now overwhelmed by another silence.It is different from the devout silence of the poor and deserted jewish alleys of Eastern Europe on the Sabbath--a very different, stirring, secret silence that lingers on King George Street.Now at two-thirty on the Sabbath the street is empty, and it is an exotic, indeed very English silence, for King George Street--not just because of the name--has always seemed to me as a child An extension of the fantastic city of London seen in the film.King George Street has rows of tall and formal buildings that stretch along both sides of the road with a uniform appearance. Unlike our residential area, there are poor unattended courtyards between residents, and the garbage and scrap iron are getting more and more damaged. its appearance.Here in King George Street there are no dilapidated balconies, no windows with broken shutters like toothless muzzles, no poor man's windows exposing their wretched possessions, no patch upon patch There were mattresses, gaudy rugs, piles of crowded furniture, dark frying pans, moldy kettles, oddly shaped enamelled saucepans, and rows of colorful and rusty cans.Here, the street is lined with the proud façades of uninterrupted buildings, doors and screened windows discreetly speaking of wealth and dignity, soft voices, fine fabrics, soft carpets, carved glass, Be graceful.Here, the doors of the buildings are decorated with black glass panels bearing the names of lawyers, brokers, doctors, legal drafters and agents officially recognized by prominent foreign companies.When we passed Tarita Kumi House, Dad liked to explain the origin of the name, as if he hadn't done it two weeks ago, or a month ago.Mom likes to say, that's enough, Arieh, we've heard it, and you're explaining Taritakumi again.We pass the Scheiber Pit, the foundations of buildings that were never built, the Vlumin House, which later became the temporary residence of the Parliament, and the semicircular Bauhaus building of the Hama Alot Building, which All comers are guaranteed a taste of the harsh thrills of the pedantic German-Jewish aesthetic.We stopped for a while, took a closer look at the walls of the old city, intersected with the Mamilla Muslim cemetery, urged each other to hurry up (it's already 2:45! There is still a lot of road!), and continued to walk through the Jeshuron Jewish Synagogue, before the clumsy arc-shaped building of the Jewish Agency. (Dad would lower his voice, as if revealing state secrets to me: "That's where our government sits, and Dr. Weizmann, Kaplan, Schertock, and sometimes even David Ben

Gurion himself.Here beat the heart of the Hebrew government.It's a pity that this is not a relatively dignified national cabinet! ”) Then he will explain to me what the "Shadow Cabinet" is, what will happen to us if the British finally leave, and whether it will be good or bad for them to leave. From there we will go down to Tara Santa College (Papa has been working there for ten years. After the War of Independence, or after the siege of Jerusalem, the road to the Watch Hill teaching building was blocked. The Periodicals Department of the National Library found it in a corner on the third floor Temporary shelter.) About ten minutes walk from Tarasanta is the arc-shaped David Building, where the city stops abruptly, and the open fields are displayed in front of it. Standing nearby. The windmill wings of Jemin Moses can be seen on the left, and on the upper right slope, the last few houses of the Talibiya district. As we step out of the boundaries of the Hebrew city, we feel a sense of unspoken Nervous, as if we were crossing an invisible frontier into a foreign land. A little after three o'clock, we would walk along a road that would have left the ruins of an ancient Ottoman pilgrim's inn (above it a Scottish The church) is separated from the abandoned train station. The scenery here is very different, rather muddy, old and stale. This place suddenly reminds me of my mother on a small Muslim street on the edge of a small town in western Ukraine. The small town is her hometown And Dad, inevitably, began to talk about Jerusalem in the Turks, about the decrees of Jemal Pasha, about the beheadings and floggings that took place in front of the crowds gathered in the paved square just in front of the railway station. The railway station, As we know, it was built in the late nineteenth century by a Jerusalemite Jew named Joseph Baiy Naon, who received a charter from the Ottoman Empire.

We walked down Hebron Road from the square in front of the railway station, past the British military defenses, and past a chain of huge fuel containers that read "Vacuum Fuel" in three languages.There's something weird and funny about the Hebrew mark, lacking vowels.Dad laughs and says it's yet another proof that the introduction of separate vowels to modernize Hebrew writing is imperative.He said that the vowels are traffic directors when reading.On our left, there are several forks leading to the Arab settlement of Abutor, and on our right are the charming alleys of the German settlement, a quiet and peaceful Bavarian village full of singing birds and chickens. Dogs are barking, pigeon houses and red tile roofs are dotted between the pines and cypresses from time to time, and the lush trees shade the gardens inside the small stone walls.Every house here has a cellar and an attic, and its special meaning makes a child like me - born without a dark basement under your feet, a ghostly attic above your head, no wardrobe, no chest of drawers, no floor-to-ceiling The big pendulum clock, the place in the yard where there is no well for the potter's wheel—sentimental pain in my heart.We continued along Hebron Road, past the pink stone mansions that housed wealthy high society people, Christian Arab professionals, senior staff of government administration and members of the Arab High Council, Madham Be Alimatnawi, Haji Rushdie Ali Afefi, Dr. Emily Adwan Ali Bustani, lawyer Henry Tawil Tutah and the wealthy residents.Here all the shops are open, the cafes are full of laughter and music, as if we had left the Sabbath behind and stopped before an imaginary wall blocking the way between Yemen Moshi and the Scottish Asylum.On the wide sidewalk, under the shadow of two ancient pines in front of the coffee house, three or four men, no longer young, were sitting around a low wooden table on wicker stools, all dressed in brown uniforms and The gold chain, the gold chain protruding from the buttonhole, went around the belly and disappeared into a pocket.These gentlemen drank tea from glasses, or sipped coffee from small carved cups, and threw dice on a backgammon board.Baba greeted them cheerfully in Arabic that sounded like Russian from him.The gentlemen fell silent for a moment, looking at him with a little surprise, and one of them muttered something vaguely, perhaps only one word, perhaps really answering our greeting.At 3:30, we pass the electrified barbed wire fence of Allenby Barracks, the British military base in South Jerusalem.When I played on the rug, I often stormed into this barracks with lightning speed, conquered, subdued, cleaned, and let the Hebrew banner fly over it.From here I will strike straight into the heart of the foreign invaders, sending battalions of commandos to the walls of the High Commander of Malicious Hills, my Hebrew forces conquering Malicious Hills again and again in a spectacular pincer movement, a From the west, a heavily armed column broke into the house from the barracks, while another force unexpectedly cut off the rear from the east, on the eastern slope leading to the Judean desert.When I was a little over eight years old, in the last year of the British Mandate for Palestine, two accomplices and I built a rocket in the back yard of our house.Our aim was to launch it towards Buckingham Palace (I found a large map of central London in my dad's atlas).I typed a courteous letter on my father's typewriter with an ultimatum to His Majesty King George VI at Windsor Palace (I'm writing in Hebrew, there will be someone there to translate for him): Do not leave our country within six months and our Yom Kippur will be Judgment Day for the British Empire.But our engineering never came to fruition, because we couldn't develop sophisticated navigational designs (we planned to hit Buckingham Palace, not innocent British passers-by), because we couldn't devise a fuel that would take our rockets from Kerim Abraham The Amos and Orfadia streets shoot out towards central London.Just as we were throwing ourselves into technological research and development, the British changed their minds and hurried away, and so London survived my national fervor and deadly rockets.The rocket is made from a discarded refrigerator and broken bicycle parts.It was almost four o'clock when we finally left Hebron Road and came to the outskirts of Tarapiute.A breeze blowing from west to east, rustling from an avenue of dark cypresses on either side, stirred in me a feeling of wonder, humiliation, and awe.In those days, Tarapiute was quiet and peaceful, full of flowers, located on the edge of the desert, away from the city center and commercial noise.Modeled after the well-cared-for Central European housing planning model, the Tara Piut scheme was built for scholars, physicians, writers and thinkers in search of tranquility.On either side of the road there are pleasant little one-storey houses set among beautiful flowers, and in each house, as we imagined, a distinguished scholar, or a professor as famous as our Uncle Joseph, though he was childless , but is well-known throughout the country, and even spread his fame to distant foreign countries through the translation of his works.We turned right into Cora Hadolot Street until we reached the edge of the pine forest, then turned left and came outside Uncle's house.Mom would say, it's ten minutes before four o'clock, are they still resting?Why don't we just sit quietly on a garden bench and wait for a few minutes?Either that, we're a little late today, it's a quarter past four, the samovar must be ready, and Aunt Zippora must be setting out the fruit.Two Washington palm trees stood like sentinels on both sides of the gate, and beyond that was a paved path. The thuja hedges on both sides led from the gate to the wide steps, and we walked from the steps to the front porch. The Proverbs of Uncle Joseph: Judaism and Humanism.Over the door was a smaller and brighter brass plate, inscribed in Hebrew and Roman letters: Prof. Dr. Joseph Klausner.Underneath it was a small card tacked on with thumbtacks. Aunt Cipolla wrote in round handwriting: Do not call between two and four o'clock.thanks.