A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [172]
The whole town was locked indoors at eight o'clock in the evening because of the British curfew, and on evenings when there was no curfew, Jerusalem locked itself in of its own accord, and nothing stirred outside except the wind, the alley cats, and the puddles of light from the street lamps. And even these hid themselves in the shadows whenever an English jeep went past, patrolling the streets with its searchlight and its gun. The evenings were longer because the sun and the moon moved more slowly, and the electric light was dim because everyone was poor: they saved on bulbs and they saved on lighting. And sometimes the power was cut off for several hours or several days, and life continued by the light of sooty paraffin lamps or candles. The winter rains were also much stronger than they are now, and with them the fists of the wind and the echoes of the thunder and lightning also beat on the barred shutters.
We had a nightly ritual of locking up. Father would go outside to close the shutters (they could be closed only from the outside); bravely he went out into the jaws of the rain and the dark and the unknown perils of the night, like those shaggy Stone Age men who used to emerge boldly from their warm caves to look for food or to defend their women and children, or like the fisherman in The Old Man and the Sea, so Father went out on his own to brave the ferocious elements, covering his head with an empty bag as he confronted the unknown.
Each evening, when he returned from Operation Shutters, he locked the front door from the inside and put the bar in place: iron brackets were set into both doorposts, and into those Father fixed the flat iron bar that guarded the door against marauders or invaders. The thick stone walls defended us from evil, along with the iron shutters, and the dark mountain that stood heavily just on the other side of our back wall, guarding us like a gigantic, taciturn wrestler. The whole outside world was locked out, and inside our armored cabin there were just the three of us, the stove, and the walls covered with books upon books from floor to ceiling. So the whole apartment was sealed off every evening and slowly sank, like a submarine, beneath the surface of the winter. Because right next to us the world suddenly ended: you turned left outside the front yard, two hundred yards farther on at the end of Amos Street you turned left again, you walked three hundred yards as far as the last house on Zephaniah Street, and that was also the end of the road and the end of the city and the end of the world. Beyond that there were just empty rocky slopes in the thick darkness, ravines, caves, bare mountains, valleys, dark rain-swept stone villages: Lifta, Shuafat, Beit Iksa, Beit Hanina, Nebi Samwil.
And so each evening all the residents of Jerusalem locked themselves away in their homes like us, and wrote. The professors and scholars in Rehavia, Talpiot, Beit Hakerem, and Kiriat Shemuel, the poets and writers, the ideologues, the rabbis, the revolutionaries, the apocalypticists, and the intellectuals. If they did not write books, they wrote articles. If they did not write articles, they wrote verses or composed all sorts of pamphlets and leaflets. If they did not write illegal wall posters against the British, they wrote letters to the newspaper. Or letters to each other. The whole of Jerusalem sat each evening bent over a sheet of paper, correcting, erasing, writing, and polishing. Uncle Joseph and Mr. Agnon, on either side of their little street in Talpiot. Grandpa Alexander and Teacher Zelda. Mr. Zarchi, Mr. Abramski, Professor Buber, Professor Scholem, Professor Bergman, Mr. Toren, Mr. Netanyahu, Mr. Wislawski, and perhaps even my mother. My father researched and laid bare Sanskrit motifs that had crept into the Lithuanian national epic, or Homeric influences on White Russian poetry. As though he were raising a periscope from our little submarine at night