A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [22]
However, in the years when we used to walk to his Uncle Joseph's in Talpiot on Saturday afternoons, my father was still trying to educate us all to be as enlightened as he was. My parents often used to argue about literature. My father liked Shakespeare, Balzac, Tolstoy, Ibsen, and Tchernikhowsky. My mother preferred Schiller, Turgenev, Chekhov, Strindberg, Gnessin, Bialik, and also Mr. Agnon, who lived across the road from Uncle Joseph in Talpiot, although I have the impression there was not much love lost between the two men.
A polite but arctic chill fell momentarily on the little road if the two of them ever happened to meet, Professor Joseph Klausner and Mr. S. Y. Agnon; they would raise their hats an inch or so, give a slight bow, and probably each wished the other from the depth of his heart to be consigned for all eternity to the deepest hell of oblivion.
Uncle Joseph did not think much of Agnon, whose writing he considered prolix, provincial, and adorned with all sorts of over-clever cantorial grace notes. As for Mr. Agnon, he nursed his grudge and had his revenge eventually when he speared Uncle Joseph on one of his spits of irony, in the ludicrous figure of Professor Bachlam in his novel Shirah. Fortunately for Uncle Joseph, he died before Shirah was published, thus sparing himself considerable distress. Mr. Agnon, on the other hand, lived on for many a year, won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and earned a worldwide reputation for himself, although he was condemned to the bitter tribulation of seeing the little cul-de-sac in Talpiot in which they had both lived renamed Klausner Street. From that day until the day he died, he had to suffer the indignity of being the famous writer S. Y. Agnon of Klausner Street.
And so to this day a perverse fate has willed that Agnon's house should stand in Klausner Street, while a no less perverse fate has willed that Klausner's house should be demolished and replaced by a very ordinary square building that houses very average apartments, overlooking the hordes of visitors who pass through Agnon's house.
7
EVERY SECOND or third Saturday we would make the pilgrimage to Talpiot, to Uncle Joseph and Auntie Zippora's little villa. Our house in Kerem Avraham was some six or seven kilometers distant from Talpiot, a remote and somewhat dangerous Hebrew suburb. South of Rehavia and Kiriat Shmuel, south of Montefiore's Windmill, stretched an expanse of alien Jerusalem: the suburbs of Talbiyeh, Abu Tor, and Kata-mon, the German Colony, the Greek Colony, and Bakaa. (Abu Tor, our teacher Mr. Avisar once explained to us, was named after an old warrior whose name meant "father of the bull," Talbiyeh was once the estate of a man named Taleb, Bakaa means a "plain or valley, the biblical valley of the Giants," while the name Katamon is an Arabic corruption of the Greek kata monēs, meaning "beside the monastery.") Farther still to the south, beyond all these foreign worlds, over the hills and far away, at the end of the world, glimmered isolated Jewish dots, Mekor Hayyim, Talpiot, Arnona, and Kibbutz Ramat Rahel, which almost abutted on the extremities of Bethlehem. From our Jerusalem, Talpiot could be seen only as a tiny gray mass of dusty trees on a distant hilltop. From the roof of our house one night our neighbor Mr. Friedmann, an engineer, pointed out a cluster of shimmering pale lights on the far horizon, suspended between heaven and earth, and said: "That's Allenby Barracks, and over there you may be able to see the lights of Talpiot or Arnona. If there is more violence," he said, "I wouldn't like to be them. Not to mention if there's all-out war."
We would set out after lunch, when the city had shut itself off behind barred shutters and sunk into a Sabbath afternoon slumber. Total silence ruled in the streets and yards among the stone-built houses with their corrugated iron lean-tos. As though the whole of Jerusalem had been enclosed in a transparent glass ball.
We crossed Geulah Street, entered the warren-like alleys of the shabby ultra-Orthodox