• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1205 0

of Jerusalem feared that a similar fate awaited them. When the Voice of the Defender radio station announced the flight of the Arab residents from Talbieh and Katamon, I do not remember feeling sorry for Aisha and her brother. I merely extended, with my father, our matchstick frontier on the map of Jerusalem: the months of bombardment, hunger, and fear had hardened my heart. Where did Aisha go, with her little brother? To Nablus? Damascus? London? Or to the refugee camp at Deheisha? Today, if she is still alive, Aisha is a woman of sixty-five. And her little brother, whose foot I may have smashed, would be nearly sixty now. Perhaps I could set out to find them? To discover what happened to all the branches of the Silwani family, in London, South America, and Australia?

But suppose I found Aisha, somewhere in the world, or the person who was once that sweet little boy: how would I introduce myself? What could I say? What could I really explain? What could I offer?

Do they still remember? And if so, what do they remember? Or have the horrors they must have undergone since made them both forget the silly show-off in the tree?

It wasn't all my fault. Not all of it. All I did was talk, and talk, and talk. Aisha is to blame, too. It was Aisha who said to me, Come on, let's see you climb a tree. If she hadn't urged me on, it would never have occurred to me to climb the tree, and her brother—

It's gone forever. It can't be undone.

At the National Guard post in Zephaniah Street my father was given a very old rifle and put on night-watch duty in the streets of Kerem Avraham. It was a heavy, black rifle, with all sorts of foreign words and initials engraved on its worn butt. Father eagerly attempted to decipher the writing even before turning to study the rifle itself. It may have been an Italian rifle from the First World War, or an ancient American carbine. Father felt it all over, scrabbled around, pushed and pulled without success, and eventually put it down on the floor and turned to check the magazine. Here he scored an immediate and dazzling success: he managed to extract the bullets. He brandished a handful of bullets in one hand and the empty magazine in the other, and waved them exultantly at my tiny form as I stood in the doorway, while he made some sort of joke about the narrow-mindedness of those who had tried to discourage Napoleon Bonaparte.

But when he tried to press the bullets back into the magazine, his triumph turned to utter defeat: the bullets had got a whiff of freedom and obdurately refused to be reimprisoned. None of his stratagems and blandishments had the slightest effect. He tried to insert them the right way around and he tried them back to front, he tried doing it gently and he tried with all the force of his delicate scholar's fingers, he even tried putting them in alternately, one facing upward and the next downward and so on, but all in vain.

Undeterred, my father tried to charm the bullets into the magazine by reciting poetry at them in a voice laden with pathos: he gave them selections from Polish patriotic poetry, as well as Ovid, Pushkin, and Lermontov, entire Hebrew love poems from medieval Spain—all in the original languages with a Russian accent, and all without success. In a final paroxysm of rage he declaimed from memory extracts from Homer in ancient Greek, the Nibelungenlied in German, Chaucer in Middle English, and, for I know, from the Kalevala in Saul Tchernikhowsky's Hebrew translation, from the epic of Gilgamesh, in every possible language and dialect. All in vain.

Dejectedly, therefore, he wended his way back to the National Guard post in Zephaniah Street, with the heavy rifle in one hand, in the other the precious bullets in an embroidered bag originally intended for sandwiches, and in his pocket (pray God he did not forget it there) the empty magazine.

At the National Guard post they took pity on him and quickly showed him how easy it was to load the bullets into the magazine, but they did not give him the weapon or the ammunition back. Not that day, or in the days that