A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [25]
On the wide pavement, in the shade of two ancient pine trees in front of a coffeehouse, three or four gentlemen of mature years sat on wicker stools around a low wooden table, all wearing brown suits and each sporting a gold chain that emerged from his buttonhole, looped across his belly, and disappeared into a pocket. They drank tea from glasses or sipped coffee from little decorated cups, and rolled dice onto the backgammon boards in front of them. Father greeted them cheerily in Arabic that came out of his mouth sounding more like Russian. The gentlemen stopped talking for a moment, eyed him with mild surprise, and one of them muttered something indistinct, perhaps a single word, or perhaps a reply to our greeting.
At half past three we passed the barbed wire fence around Allenby Barracks, the British military base in south Jerusalem. I had often stormed into this camp, conquered, subdued, and purged it, and raised the Hebrew flag over it in my games on the rush mat. From here I would press on toward the heart of the foreign occupier, sending groups of commandos to the walls of the High Commissioner's residence on the Hill of Evil Counsel, which was captured again and again by my Hebrew troops in a spectacular pincer movement, one armored column breaking into the residence from the west from the barracks, while the other arm of the pincers closed in with complete surprise from the east, from the barren eastern slopes that descended toward the Judaean desert.
When I was a little more than eight, in the last year of the British Mandate, a couple of fellow conspirators and I built an awesome rocket in the backyard of our house. Our plan was to aim it at Buckingham Palace (I had discovered a large-scale map of central London in my father's collection).
I typed out on my father's typewriter a polite letter of ultimatum addressed to His Majesty King George VI of England of the House of Windsor (I wrote in Hebrew—he must have someone there who can translate for him): If you do not get out of our country in six months at the latest, our Day of Atonement will be Great Britain's Day of Reckoning. But our project never came to fruition, because we were unable to develop the sophisticated guiding device (we planned to hit Buckingham Palace but not innocent English passersby) and because we had some problems devising a fuel that would take our rocket from the corner of Amos and Obadiah Streets in Kerem Avraham to a target in the middle of London. While we were still tied up in technological research and development, the English changed their minds and hurriedly left the country, and that is how London survived my national zeal and my deadly rocket, which was made up of bits of an abandoned refrigerator and the remains of an old bicycle.
Shortly before four we would finally turn left off Hebron Road and enter the suburb of Talpiot, along an avenue of dark cypresses on which a westerly breeze played a rustling tune that aroused in me wonder, humility, and respect in equal measure. Talpiot in those days was a tranquil garden suburb on the edge of the desert, far removed from the city center and its commercial bustle. It was planned on the model of well-cared-for Central European housing schemes constructed for the peace and quiet of scholars, doctors, writers, and thinkers. On either side of the road stood pleasant little single-story houses set in pretty gardens, in each of which, as we imagined, dwelt some prominent scholar or well-known