A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [202]
Was the Silwani family, in their villa in Sheikh Jarrah (a mere forty minutes' walk from here), also sitting around a piece of paper at their kitchen table this very minute, making the same calculations in reverse? Were they worrying, just like us, which way Greece would vote, and chewing the tip of a pencil over the final decision of the Scandinavian countries? Did they also have their optimists and pessimists, their cynics and their prophets of doom? Were they also trembling every night, imagining that we were scheming, stirring things up, cunningly pulling strings? Were they also all asking what would happen here, what would come to pass? Were they just as frightened of us as we were of them?
And how about Aisha, and her parents in Talbieh? Was her whole family sitting in a room full of men with mustaches and jeweled women with angry faces and eyebrows that met above their noses, gathered in a circle around bowls of sugared orange peel, whispering among themselves and planning to "drown us in blood"? Did Aisha still sometimes play tunes she had learned from her Jewish piano teacher? Or was she forbidden to?
Or perhaps they were standing in a silent circle around their little boy's bed? Awwad. His leg had been amputated. Because of me. Or he was dying from blood poisoning. Because of me. His curious, innocent puppy-dog eyes were closed. Pressed tight with suffering. His face drawn and pale as ice. His forehead racked with pain. His pretty curls lying on the white pillow. Jest a moment rest a moment. Groaning and shaking with pain. Or quietly crying in a high-pitched baby voice. And his sister sitting by his bedside hating me because it was my fault, everything was my fault, it was my fault she was beaten so cruelly, so thoroughly, over and over again, on her back, her head, her frail shoulders, not the way a girl who has done something wrong is sometimes beaten, but like a stubborn horse. It was my fault.
Grandpa Alexander and Grandma Shlomit used to come around sometimes on those September evenings in 1947 to sit with us and take part in Father's vote-counting stock exchange. Also Hannah and Hayim Toren, or the Rudnickis, Auntie Mala and Uncle Staszek, or the Abramskis, or our neighbors the Rosendorffs and Tosia and Gustav Krochmal. Mr. Krochmal had a tiny lock-up shop down Geula Street where he sat all day wearing a leather apron and horn-rimmed glasses, repairing dolls:
Reliable healer from Danzig, toy doctor
Once, when I was about five, Uncle Gustav mended my red-haired ballerina doll, Tsilly, for me for nothing, in his miniature workshop. Her freckled nose had broken off. Skillfully, with a special glue, Mr. Krochmal repaired her so well that you could hardly see the scar.
Mr. Krochmal believed in dialogue with our Arab neighbors. In his view, the residents of Kerem Avraham ought to get together a small, select deputation and go and hold talks with the mukhtars, sheikhs, and other dignitaries of the nearest Arab villages. After all, we had always enjoyed good neighborly relations, and even if the rest of the country was going out of its mind, there was no logical reason why here, in northwest Jerusalem, where there had never been any conflict or hostility between the two sides—
If he could only speak a little Arabic or English, he himself, Gustav Krochmal, who had applied his healing skills for many years to Arab and Jewish dolls alike, without distinction, would pick up his walking stick, cross the empty field that divided us from them, knock on their doors, and explain to them, in simple terms, from house to house—
Sergeant Wilk, Uncle Dudek, a handsome man who looked like an English colonel in a film and actually did serve the British at that time as a policeman, came around one evening and stayed for a while, bringing a box of langues de chat from a special chocolate factory. He drank a cup of coffee and chicory mixture, ate a couple of biscuits, and dazzled me with his smart black uniform with its row of silvery buttons,