A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [215]
At midnight between Friday, May 14, 1948, and Saturday, May 15, at the end of thirty years of the British Mandate, the state whose birth David Ben-Gurion had announced in Tel Aviv a few hours earlier came into being. After a gap of some nineteen hundred years, Uncle Joseph declared, Jewish rule was once more established here.
But at one minute past midnight, without war being declared, the infantry columns, artillery, and armor of the regular Arab armies poured into the country, from Egypt to the south, Trans-Jordan and Iraq to the east, and Lebanon and Syria to the north. On Saturday morning Tel Aviv was bombed by Egyptian planes. The Arab Legion, the half-British army of the Kingdom of Trans-Jordan, and regular Iraqi troops, as well as armed Muslim volunteers from several other countries, had all been invited in by the British to seize key points around the country before the formal ending of the Mandate.
The noose was tightening around us. The Trans-Jordanian Legion captured the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, cut off the highway to Tel Aviv and the coastal plain with massive forces, took control of the Arab districts of the city, stationed artillery on the hills around Jerusalem, and began a massive bombardment whose aim was to cause losses among the civilian population, break their spirit, and bring them to submission. King Abdullah, London's protégé, already saw himself as King of Jerusalem. The legion's gun batteries were commanded by British artillery officers.
At the same time the Egyptian army was reaching the southern outskirts of Jerusalem and attacked the kibbutz of Ramat Rahel, which changed hands twice. Egyptian planes dropped fire bombs on Jerusalem and, among other things, destroyed the old people's home in Romema, not far from us. Egyptian mortars joined the Trans-Jordanian artillery in bombarding the civilian population. From a hill close to the Mar Elias Monastery the Egyptians pounded Jerusalem with 4.2 inch shells. Shells fell on the Jewish areas at a rate of one every two minutes, and the streets were raked by continuous rifle fire. Greta Gat, my piano-playing child sitter who always smelled of wet wool and washing soap, Aunt Greta, who used to drag me off to clothes shops with her, for whom my father used to compose his silly rhymes, went out on her veranda one morning to hang out her washing. A Jordanian sniper's bullet, they said, went in her ear and came out her eye. Zippora Yannai, Piri, my mother's shy friend who lived in Zephaniah Street, went out in the yard for a moment to fetch a floor cloth and a bucket and was killed on the spot by a direct hit from a shell.
And I had a little tortoise. During the Passover holiday in 1947, some six months before the outbreak of war, Father joined some people from the Hebrew University for a day trip to Jerash in Trans-Jordan. He set off early in the morning, with a bag of sandwiches and a genuine army water bottle, which he wore proudly on his belt. He came back that evening, full of happy stories of the trip and the wonders of the large Roman theater, and he brought me a present of a little tortoise he found there "at the foot of an amazing Roman stone arch."
Although he had no sense of humor and possibly had no clear idea of what a sense of humor was, my father always loved jokes, witticisms, and wordplay, and whenever he made anyone smile with his remarks, his face would light up with modest pride. Thus he decided to call the tortoise by the comical name of Abdullah-Gershon, in honor of the king of Trans-Jordan and the city of Jerash (Gerash in Hebrew). Whenever we had visitors, he would call the tortoise solemnly by his full name, like a master of ceremonies announcing