A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [192]
And once, in 1967, after we conquered East Jerusalem, I went there on my own, quite early one Saturday morning in the summer, along the same route that we had taken that earlier Saturday. There were new iron gates, and a shiny black German car was parked in front of the house, fitted with gray curtains. On top of the wall that surrounded the garden there was broken glass that I did not remember. The green treetops showed above the wall. The flag of a certain important consulate fluttered above the roof, and beside the new iron gates there was a gleaming brass plate bearing the name of the state in question, in Arabic and in Latin characters, and its coat of arms. A guard in plain clothes came and stared at me curiously; I mumbled something and walked on toward Mount Scopus.
The cut on my chin healed in a few days. Dr. Hollander, the pediatrician at the clinic on Amos Street, removed the stitches put in at the first-aid station that Saturday morning.
From the day the stitches came out, a veil descended over the entire episode. Auntie Mala and Uncle Staszek were also enlisted in the cover-up. Not a word. Neither about Sheikh Jarrah nor about little Arab children nor about iron chains nor about orchards and mulberry trees, nor about scars on the chin. Taboo. It never happened. Only Mother, in her usual way, challenged the walls of censorship. Once, in our own special place, at the kitchen table, at our own special time, when Father was out of the house, she told me an Indian fable:
Once upon a time there were two monks who imposed all sorts of disciplines and afflictions on themselves. Among other things, they resolved to cross the whole Indian subcontinent on foot. They also determined to make the journey in complete silence: they were not to utter a single word, even in their sleep. Once, however, when they were walking on the bank of a river, they heard a drowning woman crying for help. Without a word the younger monk leaped into the water, carried the woman to the bank on his back, and laid her down wordlessly on the sand. The two ascetics continued their journey in silence. Six months or a year passed, and suddenly the younger monk asked his companion: Tell me, do you think I sinned in carrying that woman on my back? His friend answered with a question: What, are you still carrying her?
Father, for his part, went back to his research. At that time he was deep in the literatures of the ancient Near East, Akkadia and Sumeria, Babylonia and Assyria, the discoveries of early archives in Tel el-Amarna and Hatushash, the legendary library of King Assurbanipal, whom the Greeks called Sardanapalus, the stories of Gilgamesh, and the short myth of Adapa. Monographs and reference works piled up on his desk, surrounded by a regular army of notes and index cards. He tried to amuse Mother and me with one of his usual wisecracks: If you steal from one book, you're a plagiarist; if you steal from five books, you're a scholar; if you steal from fifty books, you're a great scholar.
Day by day that invisible muscle under Jerusalem's skin was tensing. Wild rumors circulated in our neighborhood; some of them were bloodcurdling. Some said that the British government in London was about to withdraw the army, so as to enable the regular forces of the member states of the Arab League, which was nothing but an arm of the British dressed up in desert robes, to defeat the Jews, conquer the land and then, once the Jews had gone, let the British in by the back door. Jerusalem, some of the strategists in Mr. Auster's grocery maintained, would soon be King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan's capital, and we Jewish residents would be put on board ships and taken to refugee camps in Cyprus. Or we might be dispersed to DP camps in Mauritius and