A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [69]
In 1920 the suburb of Kerem Avraham, Abraham's Vineyard, was founded below Finn's farm: its huddled little houses were built among the plantations and orchards of the farm and progressively ate into them. The consul's house itself underwent various transformations after the death of his widow Elizabeth Anne Finn: first it was turned into a British institute for young offenders, then it became a property of the British administration, and finally an army HQ.
Toward the end of World War II the garden of Finn's house was surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence, and captured Italian officers were imprisoned in the house and the garden. We used to creep out at nightfall to tease the POWs. The Italians greeted us with cries of Bambino! Bambino! Buon giorno bambino! and we responded by shrieking Bambino! Bambino! Il Duce morte! Finito il Duce! Sometimes we shouted Viva Pinocchio! and from beyond the fences and the barriers of language, war, and Fascism there always echoed like the second half of some ancient slogan the cry: Gepetto! Gepetto! Viva Gepetto!
In exchange for the sweets, peanuts, oranges, and biscuits that we threw to them over the barbed-wire fence, as though to monkeys in the zoo, some of them passed us Italian stamps or displayed to us from a distance family photographs with smiling women and tiny children stuffed into suits, children with ties, children with jackets, children of our age with perfectly combed dark hair and a forelock shining with brilliantine.
One of the POWs once showed me, from behind the wire, in return for an Alma chewing gum in a yellow wrapper, a photo of a plump woman wearing nothing but stockings and a suspender belt. I stood staring, for a moment, wide-eyed and struck dumb with horror, as though someone in the middle of the synagogue on the Day of Atonement had suddenly stood up and shouted out the Ineffable Name. Then I spun around and fled, terrified, sobbing, hardly seeing where I was running. I was six or seven at the time, and I ran as though there were wolves on my tail, I ran and ran and did not stop fleeing from that picture until I was eleven and a half or so.
*Based on the Hebrew book Architecture in Jerusalem: European Christian Building outside the Walls, 1855-1918, by David Kroyanker (Keter: Jerusalem, 1987), pp. 419-21.
After the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 the Finns' house was used successively by the Home Guard, the Border Patrol, the Civil Defense, and the paramilitary youth movement, before becoming a religious Jewish girls' school by the name of Beit Bracha. I occasionally stroll around Kerem Avraham, turning from Geula Street, which has been renamed Malkei Israel Street, into Malachi Street, then left into Zechariah Street, walk up and down Amos Street a few times, then up to the top end of Obadiah Street, where I stand at the entrance to Consul Finn's house for a few minutes and gaze at the house. The old house has shrunk over the years, as though its head has been pushed down into its shoulders with an ax blow. It has been Judaized. The trees and shrubs have been dug up, and the whole area of the garden has been asphalted over. Pinocchio and Gepetto have vanished. The paramilitary youth movement has also disappeared without a trace. The old frame of a broken sukkah left over from the last Sukkot festival stands in the front yard. There are sometimes a few women wearing snoods and dark dresses standing at the gate; they stop talking when I look at them. They do not look back at me. They start whispering as I move away.
When he arrived in Jerusalem in 1933, my father registered for an MA at the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus. At first he lived with his parents in the dark little apartment in