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By Root 1262 0

lot of poverty of spirit among us Jews here in Jerusalem too, and not necessarily in the sense that "That Man" intended. Or the "dumb of spirit" who appear in Bialik's poem "May My Lot Be with You," who are actually the thirty-six hidden just men who keep the universe in existence. Another time she read me Bialik's poem about his pure-spirited father whose life was mired in the squalor of the taverns but who was himself untouched by squalor and impurity. It was only his son the poet who was touched by them, and how, as Bialik himself writes in the first two lines of "My Father," in which he talks only about himself and his impurity, even before he moves on to tell us about his father. She found it strange that scholars had not noticed that the poem about the pure life of the father actually opens with such a bitter confession about the impurity of the son's life.

Or maybe she did not say all this; after all, I didn't sit there with a pencil and notebook writing down everything she said to me. And more than fifty years have passed since then. Much of what I heard from Zelda that summer was beyond my comprehension. But day by day she raised the crossbar of my comprehension. I remember, for example, that she told me about Bialik, about his childhood, his disappointments, and his unfulfilled yearnings. Even things that were beyond my years. Among other poems she certainly read "My Father" to me, and talked to me about cycles of purity and impurity.

***

But what precisely did she say?

Now in my study in Arad on a summer day at the end of June 2001 I am trying to reconstruct, or rather to guess, to conjure up, almost to create out of nothing: like those paleontologists in the natural history museum who can reconstruct a whole dinosaur on the basis of two or three bones.

I loved the way Teacher Zelda placed one word next to another. Sometimes she would put an ordinary, everyday word next to another word that was also quite ordinary, and all of a sudden, simply because they were next to each other, two ordinary words that did not normally stand next to each other, a sort of electric spark jumped between them and took my breath away.

For the first time I am thinking

about a night when the constellations are only a rumor...

That summer Zelda was still unmarried, but sometimes a man appeared in the yard; he did not look young to me, and his appearance marked him out as a religious Jew. As he passed between us, he tore unawares the mass of invisible morning webs that had spun themselves between the two of us. Sometimes he shot me a nod with the fag end of a smile, and standing with his back to me, he had a conversation with Teacher Zelda that lasted seven years, if not seventy-seven. And in Yiddish, so that I should not understand a single word. Once or twice he even managed to draw out of her a peal of girlish laughter such as I had never managed to extract from her. Not even in my dreams. In my despair I conjured up a detailed image of the noisy cement mixer that had been stirring away at the bottom of Malachi Street for several days: I would hurl the body of this jester into the belly of that mixer at dawn, after murdering him at midnight.

I was a word child. A ceaseless, tireless talker. Even before my eyes opened in the morning, I had embarked on an oration that continued almost without interruption until lights out in the evening, and beyond, into my sleep.

But I had no one to listen to me. To the other children of my age everything I said sounded like Swahili or Double Dutch, while as for the grown-ups, they were all delivering lectures too, just like me, from morning till night, none of them listening to the others. Nobody listened to anybody else in Jerusalem in those days. And perhaps they did not even really listen to themselves (apart from good old Grandpa Alexander, who could listen attentively, and even derived a lot of pleasure from what he heard, but he listened only to ladies, not to me).

Consequently there was not a single ear in the whole world open to listen to me, except very rarely. And even if anyone