A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [173]
Books were the slender lifeline that attached our submarine to the outside world. We were surrounded on all sides by mountains, caves, and deserts, the British, the Arabs, and the underground fighters, salvos of machine-gun fire in the night, explosions, ambushes, arrests, house-to-house searches, stifled dread of what awaited us in the days to come. Among all these the slender lifeline still wound its way to the real world. In the real world there were the lake and the forest, the cottage, the field and the meadow, and also the palace with its turrets, cornices, and gables. There the foyer, embellished with gold, velvet, and crystal, was lit by chandeliers with a mass of lights like the seven heavens.
In those years, as I said, I hoped I would grow up to be a book.
Not a writer but a book. And that was from fear.
Because it was slowly dawning on those whose families had not arrived in Israel that the Germans had killed them all. There was fear in Jerusalem, but people tried as hard as they could to bury it deep inside their chests. Rommel's tanks had reached almost to the gateway of the Land of Israel. Italian planes had bombed Tel Aviv and Haifa during the war. And who knew what the British might do to us before they left? And after they had left, hordes of bloodthirsty Arabs, millions of fanatical Muslims, would be bound to butcher the whole lot of us in a few days. They would not leave a single child alive.
Naturally the grown-ups tried hard not to talk about these horrors in the presence of children. At any rate, not in Hebrew. But sometimes a word slipped through, or somebody cried out in his sleep. All our apartments were as tiny and cramped as cages. In the evening after lights out I could hear them whispering in the kitchen, over tea and biscuits, and I caught Chelmno, Nazis, Vilna, partisans, Aktionen, death camps, death trains, Uncle David and Aunt Malka and little cousin David who was the same age as me.
Somehow the fear got into me. Children of your age don't always grow up. Sometimes bad people come and kill them in the cradle, or in kindergarten. In Nehemiah Street once there was a bookbinder who had a nervous breakdown, and he went out on his balcony and screamed, Jews, help, hurry, soon they'll burn us all. The air was heavy with dread. And I may have already gathered how easy it is to kill people.
Books are not difficult to burn either, it's true, but if I grew up to be a book, there was a good chance that at least one copy might manage to survive, if not here then in some other country, in some city, in some remote library, in a corner of some godforsaken bookcase. After all, I had seen with my own eyes how books manage to hide in the dusty darkness between the crowded rows, underneath heaps of offprints and journals, or find a hiding place behind other books—
38
SOME THIRTY years later, in 1976, I was invited to spend a couple of months in Jerusalem and give some guest lectures at the Hebrew University. I was offered a studio room in the campus on Mount Scopus, and every morning I sat and wrote the story "Mr. Levi" in The Hill of Evil Counsel. The story takes place on Zephaniah Street at the end of the British Mandate, and so I went for a walk on Zephaniah Street and the adjoining streets, to see what had changed since then. The Children's Realm Private School had long since closed. The yards were full of junk. The fruit trees had died. The teachers, clerks, translators, and cashiers, bookbinders, domestic intellectuals, and writers of letters to the newspaper had mostly disappeared, and the district had filled up over the years with poor ultra-Orthodox Jews. Almost all our neighbors' names had disappeared from the letter boxes.