quarter at the top of Ahva, passed underneath washing lines heavy with black, yellow, and white clothes, among rusty iron railings of neglected verandas and outside staircases, climbed up through Zikhron Moshe, which was always swathed in poor Ashkenazi cooking smells, of chollent, borscht, garlic and onion and sauerkraut, and continued across the Street of the Prophets. There was not a living soul to be seen in the streets of Jerusalem at two o'clock on a Saturday afternoon. From the Street of the Prophets we walked down Strauss Street, which was perpetually bathed in shadow from the ancient pine trees in the shade of two walls, on the one side the moss-grown gray wall of the Protestant Hospital run by the Deaconesses, and on the other the grim wall of the Jewish hospital, Bikkur Holim, with the symbols of the twelve tribes of Israel embossed on its splendid bronze gates. A pungent odor of medicines, old age, and Lysol escaped from these two hospitals. Then we crossed Jaffa Road by the famous clothes shop, Maayan Shtub, and lingered for a moment in front of Ahiasaf Brothers bookshop, to allow my father to feast his hungry eyes on the abundance of new Hebrew books in the window. From there we walked the whole length of King George V Avenue, past splendid shops, cafés with high chandeliers, and rich stores, all empty and locked for the Sabbath, but with their windows beckoning to us through barred iron grilles, winking with the seductive charm of other worlds, whiffs of wealth from distant continents, scents of brightly lit, bustling cities dwelling securely on the banks of wide rivers, where there were elegant ladies and prosperous gentlemen who did not live their lives between one attack or government decree and the next, knowing no hardship, relieved of the need to count every penny, free from the oppressive rules of pioneering and self-sacrifice, exempt from the burdens of Community Chest and Medical Fund contributions and rationing coupons, comfortably installed in beautiful houses with chimney stacks rising from their roofs or in spacious apartments in modern blocks, with carpets on the floor, with a doorman in a blue uniform guarding the entrance and a boy in a red uniform manning the elevator, and servants and cooks and butlers and factotums at their beck and call. Ladies and gentlemen who enjoyed a comfortable life, unlike ours.
Here, in King George V Avenue, as well as in German-Jewish Rehavia and rich Greek and Arab Talbieh, another stillness reigned now, unlike the devout stillness of those indigent, neglected Eastern European alleys: a different, exciting, secretive stillness held sway in King George V Avenue, empty now at half past two on a Saturday afternoon, a foreign, in fact specifically British, stillness, since King George V Avenue (not only because of its name) always seemed to me as a child to be an extension of that wonderful London Town I knew from films: King George V Avenue with its rows of grand, official-looking buildings extending on both sides of the road in a continuous, uniform facade, without those gaps of sad, neglected yards defaced by rubbish and rusting metal that separated the houses in our own areas. Here on King George V Avenue there were no dilapidated verandas, no broken shutters at windows that gaped like a toothless old mouth, paupers' windows revealing to passersby the wretched innards of the home, patched cushions, gaudy rags, cramped piles of furniture, blackened frying pans, moldy pots, misshapen enamel saucepans, and a motley array of rusty tin cans. Here on either side of the street was an uninterrupted, proud facade whose doors and lace-curtained windows all spoke discreetly of wealth, respectability, soft voices, choice fabrics, soft carpets, cut glass, and fine manners. Here the doorways of the buildings were adorned with the black glass plates of lawyers, brokers, doctors, notaries, and accredited agents of well-known foreign firms.
As we walked past Talitha Kumi Buildings, my father would explain the origin of the name, as though he had not done so a fortnight before