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By Root 1151 0

The only familiar person I saw was Mrs. Stich, the invalid mother of Menuchele Stich, the girl with the stoop that we called Nemuchele, "Shortie"; I caught sight of her in the distance, sitting dozing on a stool in an out-of-the-way yard, not far from the garbage cans. Every wall was festooned with strident handbills that waved puny fists in the air and threatened sinners with various forms of unnatural death: "The bounds of modesty have been breached," "We have suffered a great loss," "Touch not mine anointed," "Stones cry out from the wall for the evil decree," "Heavens behold the dreadful abomination the like of which has never been seen in Israel," and so forth.

For thirty years I had not set eyes on my teacher from the second grade in Children's Realm Private School, and now here I was suddenly standing on her doorstep. Instead of the dairy that belonged to Mr. Langermann, who used to sell us milk out of heavy round metal milk churns, the front of the building was occupied now by an ultra-Orthodox shop selling all kinds of haberdashery, cloth, buttons, fasteners, zippers, and curtain hooks. Surely Teacher Zelda didn't live here anymore?

But there was her letter box, the one out of which I used to fish her mail when I was little, because the lock had rusted up and it was impossible to open it. Now the door hung open: somebody, certainly a man, must have been more impatient than Teacher Zelda and me, and had smashed the lock once and for all. The wording had changed too: instead of "Zelda Schneersohn" it now said "Schneersohn Mishkowsky." No more Zelda, but no hyphen or "and" either. And what would I do if it was her husband who opened the door to me? What could I say to him? Or to her?

I almost turned tail and fled, like a startled suitor in a comedy film. (I hadn't known she was married, or that she had been widowed, I had not worked it out that I was eight when I left her apartment and now I was thirty-seven, older than she had been when I left her.)

This time, as then, it was quite early in the morning.

I really should have phoned her before coming to see her. Or written her a note. Perhaps she was angry with me? Perhaps she had not forgiven me for walking out on her? For this long silence? For not congratulating her on either the publication of her books or the literary prizes she had won? Perhaps, like some other Jerusalemites, she resented my spitting in the well from which I had drunk, in My Michael. Suppose she had changed beyond recognition? What if she was an entirely different woman now, twenty-nine years later?

I stood in front of the door for some ten minutes, I went out into the yard, I smoked a cigarette or two, I touched the washing lines from which I once used to pluck her modest brown or gray skirts. I identified the cracked paving stone that I cracked myself once when I tried to break almonds open with a stone. And I looked out beyond the red roofs of the Bukharian Quarter, toward the desolate hills there used be to the north. Now, though, the hills were no longer desolate but smothered in housing developments: Ramot Eshkol, Ma'alot Dafna, Givat Hamivtar, French Hill, and Ammunition Hill.

But what should I say to her? Hello, Dear Teacher Zelda? I hope I'm not disturbing you. My name is, ahem, such and such? Good morning Mrs. Schneersohn-Mishkowsky? I was a pupil of yours once, I don't know if you remember? Excuse me, may I take just a few minutes of your time? I like your poetry? You still look marvelous? No, I haven't come to interview you?

I must have forgotten how dark little ground-floor apartments in Jerusalem could be, even on a summer morning. Darkness opened the door to me: darkness full of brown smells. And out of the darkness the fresh voice that I remembered, the voice of a confident girl who loved words, said to me:

"Come on in, Amos."

And immediately afterward:

"You probably want us to sit outside in the yard?"

And then:

"You like your iced lemonade weak."

And then:

"I have to correct myself: you used to like your lemonade weak. But maybe there has been a change