A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [211]
We were also taught to collect wild mallow, which we all called by its Arabic name, khubeizeh, on plots of wasteland or in neglected backyards. This khubeizeh helped relieve the horrors of starvation somewhat. Mothers boiled or fried it and then used it to make rissoles or puree, which was green like spinach but tasted much worse. We also had a lookout round: every hour during daylight two of us kids had to keep watch from a suitable rooftop in Obadiah Street on the British army camp in Schneller Barracks, and every now and then one of us ran to the operations room in the apartment on Malachi Street to tell Garibaldi or one of his adjutants what the Tommies were up to and whether there were any signs of preparations for departure.
The bigger boys, from the fourth and fifth grades, were taught by Garibaldi to carry messages between the various Haganah posts at the end of Zephaniah Street and around the Bukharian Quarter. My mother begged me to "show real maturity and give up these childish games," but I couldn't do as she wanted. I was particularly good at collecting bottles: in a single week I managed to collect 146 empty bottles and take them in boxes and sacks to HQ. Garibaldi himself gave me a slap on the back and shot me a sidelong glance. I record here exactly the words he spoke to me as he scratched the hair on his chest through his open shirt: "Very nice. We may hear more of you one day." Word for word. Fifty-three years have gone by, and I have not forgotten to this day.
45
MANY YEARS later I discovered that a woman I knew as a child, Mrs. Abramski, Zerta, the wife of Yakov-David Abramski (both of them were frequent visitors to our home), kept a diary during those days. I vaguely remember that my mother sometimes sat on the floor in a corner of the corridor during bombardments, with an exercise book supported on a closed book on her knees, writing, ignoring the exploding shells and mortars and the bursts of machine-gun fire, deaf to the noise of a score of inmates who bickered all day long in our dark, smelly submarine, writing in her exercise book, indifferent to the Prophet Jeremiah's doom-laden mutterings and Uncle Joseph's lamentations, and the penetrating, babylike crying of an old woman whose mute daughter changed her wet diapers in front of all of us. I will never know what my mother was writing: no exercise book of hers has reached me. Maybe she burned them all before she killed herself. I do not have a single complete page in her handwriting.
In Zerta Abramski's diary I find written, among other things:
February 24,1948
I am weary ... so weary ... the storeroom full of belongings of the killed and injured ... Hardly anyone comes to claim these objects: there is no one to claim them, their owners are killed or lying wounded in the hospital. A man came in who had been wounded in the head and arm, but was able to walk. His wife had been killed. He found her clothes, her pictures, and some linen ... And these things that were bought with such love and joie de vivre are piled up in this basement ... And a young man, G., came in search of his belongings. He had lost his father and mother, his two brothers, and his sister in the Ben Yehuda Street car bombing. He himself escaped only because he did not sleep at home that night, he was on duty ... Incidentally: he was not interested in objects so much as in photographs. Among the hundreds of photographs ... that survived he was trying to find a few family photographs.
April 14, 1948
This morning they announced ... that for a coupon from the paraffin book (the head of the household's book) you can receive a quarter of a chicken per family at certain designated butchers. Some ofmy neighbors asked me to collect their ration, ifI was in line anyway, as they had to work and could not wait in line. Yoni, my son, offered to keep me a place in line before he went to school, but I told him I would do it myself. I sent Yair off to kindergarten and went to "Geula," where the butcher