• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

But a few hours later I returned. There was a "curfew" (they were searching for the killers of Bernadotte). On every street corner policemen stopped me ... They asked for my permit to be out during the curfew. He, my slain son, was my only permit. The policemen let me into the mortuary. I had brought a cushion with me. I removed the stone and put it to one side: I could not bear to see his dear, wonderful head resting on a stone. Then "they" came back and tried to make me leave. They said that I ought not to touch him. I did not heed them. I continued to embrace and kiss him, my treasure. They threatened to lock the door and leave me with him, with the essence of my whole life. This was all that I wanted. Then they reconsidered and threatened to call the soldiers. I was not afraid of them ... I left the mortuary a second time. Before I left, I embraced and kissed him. The next morning I came to him again, to my child ... Once more I embraced and kissed him. Once again I prayed to God for vengeance, vengeance for my baby, and once again they drove me out ... And when I came back again, my wonderful child, my angel, was in a closed coffin, yet I remember his face, all of him, everything about him I remember.*

46

TWO FINNISH missionary ladies lived in a little apartment at the end of Ha-Turim Street in Mekor Baruch, Aili Havas and Rauha Moisio. Aunt Aili and Aunt Rauha. Even when the conversation turned to the shortage of vegetables, they both spoke high-flown, biblical Hebrew, because that was the only Hebrew they knew. If I knocked at their door to ask for some wood that we could use for the Lag Baomer bonfire, Aunt Aili would say with a gentle smile, as she handed me an old orange crate: "And the shining of a flaming fire by night!" If they came around to our apartment for a glass of tea and a bookish conversation while I was fighting against my cod-liver oil, Aunt Rauha might say: "The fishes of the sea shall shake at His presence!"

Sometimes the three of us paid them a visit in their Spartan one-room apartment, which resembled an austere nineteenth-century girls' boarding school: two plain iron bedsteads stood facing each other on either side of a rectangular wooden table covered with a dark blue tablecloth, with three plain wooden chairs. Beside each of the matching beds was a small bedside table with a reading lamp, a glass of water, and some sacred books in black covers. Two identical pairs of bedroom slippers peered out from under the beds. In the middle of the table there was always a vase containing a bunch of everlasting flowers from the nearby fields. A carved olive-wood crucifix hung in the middle of the wall between the two beds. And at the foot of each bed stood a chest of drawers made from a thick shiny wood of a sort we did not have in Jerusalem, and Mother said it was called oak, and she encouraged me to touch it with my fingertips and run my hand over it. My mother always insisted that it was not enough to know the various names of objects but you should get to know them by sniffing them, touching them with the tip of your tongue, feeling them with your fingertips, to know their warmth and smoothness, their smell, their roughness and hardness, the sound they made when you tapped them, all those things that she called their "response" or "resistance." Every material, she said, every piece of clothing or furniture, every utensil, every object had different characteristics of response and resistance, which were not fixed but could change according to the season or the time of day or night, the person who was touching or smelling, the light and shade, and even vague propensities that we have no means of understanding. It was no accident, she said, that Hebrew uses the same word for an inanimate object and a desire. It was not only we who had or did not have a desire for one thing or another, inanimate objects and plants also had an inner desire of their own, and only someone who knew how to feel, listen,