A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [187]
Mr. Silwani stopped next to us and chatted in English for a few minutes with Auntie Mala and Uncle Staszek, joking, smiling, perhaps complimenting Auntie on her drop earrings. Then, as he was excusing himself and about to move on to his other guests, he hesitated, suddenly turned to me, and said with a pleasant smile in stumbling Hebrew:
"If the young sir would like to go out in the garden. There are some children in the garden."
Apart from Father, who liked to call me Your Highness, nobody had ever called me sir before. For one glorious moment I really did see myself as a young Hebrew gentleman whose status was not one whit less exalted than that of the young foreign gentlemen who were outside in the garden. When the free Hebrew state was finally established, Father used to quote enthusiastically from Vladimir Jabotinsky, our nation would be able to join the comity of nations, "like a lion confronting other lions."
Like a lion confronting other lions I therefore left the smoke-filled room. From the spacious veranda I took in the view of the walls of the Old City, the towers and domes. Then slowly, imperiously, with a strong sense of national awareness, I descended the flight of stone steps and walked toward the arbor of vines and beyond, into the orchard.
41
OUT IN THE arbor there was a group of five or six girls in their mid-teens. I gave them a wide berth. Then some rowdy boys sauntered past me. A young couple were strolling under the trees, deep in whispered conversation but not touching each other. At the other end of the orchard, near the corner of the wall, around the rough trunk of a leafy mulberry tree, someone had erected a kind of bench without legs, and here a pale-faced girl was sitting with her knees together. Her hair and eyelashes were black, her neck was slim, her shoulders were frail, and her bobbed hair fell over a brow that seemed to me to be illuminated from within by a light of curiosity and joy. She was dressed in a cream blouse under a long navy blue dress with broad straps. on the lapel of her blouse she wore an ivory brooch that reminded me of one that belonged to my Grandma Shlomit.
At first sight this girl seemed to be my age, but from the slight curve of her blouse and the unchildlike look of curiosity and also of warning in her eyes as they met mine (for an instant, before my eyes looked away), she must have been two or three years older, perhaps eleven or twelve. Still, I managed to see that her eyebrows were rather thick and joined in the middle, in contrast with the delicacy of her other features. There was a little child at her feet, a curly-haired boy of about three who may have been her brother; he was kneeling on the ground and was absorbed in picking up fallen leaves and arranging them in a circle.
Boldly and all in one breath I offered the girl a quarter of my entire vocabulary of foreign words, perhaps less like a lion confronting other lions and more like the parrots in the room upstairs. Unconsciously I even bowed a little bow, eager to make contact and thus to dispel any prejudices and to advance the reconciliation between our two peoples:
"Sabah al-heir, Miss. Ana ismi Amos. Wa-inti, ya bint? Votre nom's'il vous plait, Mademoiselle? Please your name kindly?"
She eyed me without smiling. Her joined eyebrows gave her a severe look beyond her years. She nodded a few times, as though making a decision, agreeing with herself, ending the deliberation, and confirming the findings. Her navy blue dress came down below her knees, but in the gap between the dress and her shoes with the butterfly buckles I caught sight of the skin of her calves, brown and smooth, feminine, already grown up; my face reddened, and my eyes fled again, to her little brother, who looked back at me quietly, unsuspectingly, but also un-smilingly. Suddenly he looked very much like her with his dark, calm face.
Everything I had heard from my parents, from neighbors, from Uncle Joseph, from