A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [70]
Kerem Avraham was still a new district: most of the streets were un-paved, and the vestiges of the vineyard that gave it its name were still visible in the gardens of the new houses, in the form of vines and pomegranate bushes, fig and mulberry trees, that whispered to each other whenever there was a breeze. At the beginning of summer, when the windows were opened, the smell of greenery flooded the tiny rooms. From the rooftops and at the ends of the dusty streets you could catch sight of the hills that surrounded Jerusalem.
One after the other, simple square stone houses sprang up, two- or three-story buildings that were divided up into large numbers of cramped apartments each with two tiny rooms. The gardens and verandas had iron railings that soon rusted. The wrought-iron gates incorporated a six-pointed star or the word ZION. Gradually dark cypresses and pines supplanted the pomegranates and vines. Here and there, pomegranates grew wild, but the children snuffed them out before the fruit had a chance to ripen. Among the untended trees and the bright outcrops of rock in the gardens some people planted oleander or geranium bushes, but the garden beds were soon forgotten, as washing lines were strung out over them and they were trampled underfoot or filled with thistles and broken glass. If they did not die of thirst, the oleanders and geraniums grew wild, like scrub. All sorts of storehouses were erected in the gardens, sheds, corrugated-iron shacks, improvised huts made from the planks of the packing cases in which the residents brought their belongings here, as though they were trying to create a replica of the shtetl in Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, or Lithuania.
Some fixed an empty olive can to a pole, set it up as a dovecote, and waited for the doves to come—until they gave up hope. Here and there somebody tried to keep a few hens, someone else tended a little vegetable patch, with radishes, onions, cauliflower, parsley. Most of them longed to get out of here and move somewhere more cultured, like Re-havia, Kiryat Shmuel, Talpiot, or Beit Hakerem. All of them tried hard to believe that the bad days would soon be over, the Hebrew state would be established, and everything would change for the better: surely their cup of sorrow was full to overflowing? Shneour Zalman Rubashov, who later changed his name to Zalman Shazar and was elected President of Israel, wrote something like this in a newspaper at that time: "When the free Hebrew state finally arises, nothing will be the same as it was! Even love will not be what it was before!"
Meanwhile the first children were born in Kerem Avraham, and it was almost impossible to explain to them where their parents had come from, or why they had come, or what it was that they were all waiting for. The people who lived in Kerem Avraham were minor bureaucrats in the Jewish Agency, or teachers, nurses, writers, drivers, shorthand typists, world reformers, translators, shop assistants, theorists, librarians, bank tellers or cinema ticket sellers, ideologues, small shopkeepers, lonely old bachelors who lived on their meager savings. By eight o'clock in the evening the grilles on the balconies were closed, the apartments were locked, shutters were barred, and only the streetlamp cast a gloomy yellow puddle on the corner of the empty street. At night you could hear the piercing shrieks of night birds, the barking of distant dogs, stray shots, the wind in the trees of the orchard: for at nightfall Kerem Avra-ham went back to being a vineyard. Fig trees, mulberries and olives, apple trees, vines and pomegranates rustled their leaves in every garden. The stone walls reflected the moonlight back up into the branches in a pale, skeletal glow.
Amos