A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [224]
In the early months after the war you even needed a special permit to leave Jerusalem to go to Tel Aviv and the rest of the country. But all sorts of clever or pushy people, anyone with a bit of money who knew the way to the black market, anyone with connections to the new administration, hardly felt the shortages. And some people managed to grab themselves apartments and houses in the prosperous Arab neighborhoods whose residents had fled or been expelled, or in the closed zones where British army and civil service families had lived before the war: Katamon, Talbieh, Bakaa, Abu Tor, and the German Colony. The poorer Arabs from Musrara, Lifta, and el-Maliha were replaced by thousands and thousands of poor Jewish families who had fled or been thrown out of the Arab countries. Huge transit camps were set up in Talpiot, the Allenby Barracks, and Beit Mazmil, rows of corrugated iron shacks with no electricity, drains, or running water. In winter the paths between the huts became a gooey porridge, and the cold pierced the bone. Accountants from Iraq, goldsmiths from Yemen, tradesmen and shopkeepers from Morocco, and watchmakers from Bucharest were crowded into these huts and employed for a pittance on government schemes of rock clearing and reforesting in the Jerusalem hills.
Gone were the "heroic years" of World War II, the genocide of European Jewry, the partisans, mass enlistment in the British army and the Jewish Brigade, which the British set up for the war against Nazism, the years of the struggle against the British, the underground, the illegal immigration, the new "tower and stockade" villages settlements, the war to the death against the Palestinians and the regular armies of five Arab states.
Now that the years of euphoria were over, we were suddenly living in the "morning after": gray, gloomy, damp, mean, and petty. These were the years of blunt Okava razor blades, tasteless Shenhav toothpaste, smelly Knesset cigarettes, the roaring sports commentators Nehemia Ben-Avraham and Alexander Alexandroni on the Voice of Israel, cod-liver oil, ration books, Shmulik Rozen and his quiz shows, the political commentator Moshe Medzini, the Hebraization of surnames, food rationing, government work schemes, lines at the grocer's, larders built into kitchen walls, cheap sardines, Inkoda canned meat, the Mixed Israeli-Jordanian Armistice Committee, Arab infiltrators from the other side of the armistice line, the theater companies—Ohel, Habima, Doh-Re-Mi, Chisbatron—Djigan and Schumacher the comedians, the Mandelbaum Gate crossing, retaliatory raids, washing children's hair with paraffin to get rid of the lice, "Help for the Transit Camps," "abandoned property," the Defense Fund, no-man's-land, and "Our blood will no longer be shed with impunity."
And once more I went to school each morning at the Tachkemoni Religious Boys' School on Tachkemoni Street. The pupils were poor children, schooled to beatings, whose parents were artisans, manual workers, and small traders; they came from families of eight or ten, some of them were always hungry for my sandwiches; some had shaved heads, and we all wore black berets at an angle. They would gang up on me at the water fountains in the playground and splash me, because they quickly discovered that I was the only only child, the weakest among them, and that I was easily offended or upset. When they went out of their way to devise new humiliations for me, I sometimes stood panting in the middle of a circle of my sneering tormentors, beaten up, covered with dust, a lamb among wolves, and suddenly to the astonishment of my enemies I would start to beat myself, scratch myself hysterically, and bite my arm so hard that a bleeding watch shape appeared. Just as my mother did in my presence two or three times when she was overwhelmed.
But sometimes I made up stories of suspense for