A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [223]
Sometimes I imagined I could identify, among the thick treetops, a corner of the roof of Silwani Villa. I believed that they were much better off than we were: they had not been shelled for long months, they had not been subjected to hunger and thirst, they had not been made to sleep on mattresses in foul-smelling basements. And yet I often talked to them in my heart. Just like Mr. Gustav Krochmal, the doll repairer from Geula Street, I longed to put on my best clothes and go to them at the head of a deputation for peace and reconciliation, to prove to them that we were in the right, to apologize and receive their apology, to be treated to biscuits and sugared orange peel, to demonstrate our forgiveness and magnanimity, to sign an agreement of peace, friendship, and mutual respect with them, and maybe also to convince Aisha and her brother and all the Silwani family that the accident had not been entirely my fault, or not only my fault.
Sometimes we were woken in the early hours by machine-gun salvos from the direction of the armistice line, a mile or so from where we lived, or the wailing of the muezzin on the other side of the new border: like a hair-raising lament, the howl of his prayer penetrated our sleep.
Our apartment was emptied of all the visitors who had sought refuge in it. The Rosendorffs went back to their apartment on the next floor up; the vacant old lady and her daughter folded their bedding away into a sack and disappeared; Gita Miudovnik, the widow of the man who wrote the arithmetic textbook, whose mangled body had been identified by my father because of the socks he had lent him, also left. And Uncle Joseph with his sister-in-law Haya Elitsedek returned to the Klausner house in Talpiot, with the brass plate bearing the motto Judaism and humanity over the front door. They had to do some work on the house because it had been damaged in the fighting. For several weeks the old professor mourned the thousands of books that had been swept off the shelves and thrown on the floor or used to make barricades and shelters against bullets fired through the windows of the house, which had become firing positions. Ariel Elitsedek, the prodigal son, was found safe and sound after the war, but he kept arguing and cursing the wretched Ben-Gurion, who could have liberated the Old City and the Temple Mount and had not done so, who could have driven all the Arabs out to the Arab countries and had not done so, all because he and his fellow reds who had seized the leadership of our beloved state had been perverted by socialistic pacifism and Tolstoyan vegetarianism. Soon, he believed, a new, proud national leadership would arise, and our forces would be unleashed to liberate every part of the fatherland at last from the yoke of the Arab conqueror.
Most Jerusalemites, however, did not yearn for more war, and were not concerned about the fate of the Wailing Wall and Rachel's tomb, which had vanished behind the concrete curtain and the minefields. The shattered city licked its wounds. All through that winter and throughout the following spring and summer, long gray lines formed in front of the grocers, greengrocers, and butchers. The austerity regime had arrived. Lines formed behind the ice man's cart, lines formed behind the paraffin seller's cart. Food was distributed in exchange for coupons from ration books. The sale of eggs and a little bit of chicken was restricted to children and invalids with medical certificates. Milk was measured out in limited quantities. Fruit and vegetables were rarely seen in Jerusalem. Oil, sugar, grits, and flour appeared intermittently, monthly or fortnightly. If you wanted to buy simple clothes, shoes, or furniture you had to use up precious coupons from your dwindling ration books. Shoes were made from reused leather, and their soles were as thin as cardboard. The furniture was shoddy. Instead of coffee people drank ersatz coffee