A Tale of Love and Darkness (8 page)

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 professor like our Uncle Joseph, who although he was childless was famous throughout the land and even in faraway countries through the translations of his books.

We turned right into Kore Hadorot Street as far as the pine wood, then left, and there we were outside Uncle's house. Mother would say: It's only ten to four, they may still be resting. Why don't we sit down quietly on the bench in the garden and wait for a few minutes? Or else: We're a little late today, it's a quarter past four, the samovar must be bubbling away and Aunt Zippora will have put the fruit out.

Two Washingtonias stood like sentries on either side of the gate, and beyond them was a paved path flanked on either side by a thuja hedge that led from the gate to the wide steps, up which we went to the front porch and the door, above which was engraved on a fine brass plate Uncle Joseph's motto:

JUDAISM AND HUMANISM

On the door itself was a smaller, shinier copper plate on which was engraved both in Hebrew and Roman letters:

PROFESSOR DR. JOSEPH KLAUSNER

And underneath, in Aunt Zippora's rounded handwriting, on a small card fixed with a thumbtack, was written:

Please refrain from calling between two and four o'clock. Thank you.

ALREADY IN
the entrance hall I was seized by respectful awe, as though even my heart had been asked to remove its shoes and walk in stockinged feet, on tiptoe, breathing politely with mouth closed, as was fitting.

In this entrance hall, apart from a brown wooden hat tree with curling branches that stood near the front door, a small wall mirror, and a
dark woven rug, there was not an inch of space that was not covered with rows of books: shelves upon shelves rose from the floor to the high ceiling, full of books in languages whose alphabets I could not identify, books standing up and other books lying down on top of them; plump, resplendent foreign books stretching themselves comfortably, and other wretched books that peered at you from cramped and crowded conditions, lying like illegal immigrants crowded on bunks aboard ship. Heavy, respectable books in gold-tooled leather bindings, and thin books bound in flimsy paper, splendid portly gentlemen and ragged, shabby beggars, and all around and among and behind them was a sweaty mass of booklets, leaflets, pamphlets, offprints, periodicals, journals, and magazines, that noisy crowd that always congregates around any public square or marketplace.

A single window in this entrance hall looked out, through iron bars reminiscent of a hermit's cell, at the melancholy foliage of the garden. Aunt Zippora received us here, as she received all her guests. She was a pleasant elderly woman, bright of face and broad of beam, in a gray dress with a black shawl around her shoulders, very Russian, with her white hair pulled back and arranged in a small, neat bun, her two cheeks proffered in turn for a kiss, her kindly round face smiling at you in welcome. She was always the first to ask how you were, and usually didn't wait for your answer but launched straight into news of our dear Joseph, who hadn't slept a wink again all night, or whose stomach was back to normal again after protracted problems, or who had just had a wonderful letter from a very famous professor in Pennsylvania, or whose gallstones were tormenting him again, or who had to finish an important long article by tomorrow for Ravidovitch's
Metsuda,
or who had decided to ignore yet another insult from Eisig Silberschlag, or who had finally decided to deliver a crushing response to the abuse issuing from one of those leaders of the Brit Shalom gang.

After this news bulletin Aunt Zippora would smile sweetly and lead us into the presence of the uncle himself.

"Joseph is waiting for you in his drawing room," she would announce with a peal of laughter, or "Joseph is in the living room already, with Mr. Krupnik and the Netanyahus and Mr. Jonitchman and the Schochtmans, and there are some more honored guests on their way." And sometimes she said: "He's been cooped up in his study since six
o'clock this morning, I've even had to take him his meals there, but no matter, no matter, just you come straight through, do come along, he'll be glad, he's always so glad to see you, and I'll be glad too, it's better for him to stop working for a while, to take a little break, he is ruining his health! He doesn't spare himself at all!"

Two doors opened off the entrance hall: one, a glass door whose panes were decorated with flowers and festoons, led to the living room, which also served as a dining room; the other, a heavy, somber door, led us into the professor's study, sometimes known as the "library."

Uncle Joseph's study seemed to me the antechamber to some palace of wisdom. There are more than twenty-five thousand volumes, Father once whispered to me, in your uncle's private library, among them priceless old tomes, manuscripts of our greatest writers and poets, first editions inscribed to him personally, volumes that were smuggled out of Soviet Odessa by all sorts of devious subterfuges, valuable collectors' items, sacred and secular works, virtually the whole of Jewish literature and a good deal of world literature as well, books that Uncle bought in Odessa or acquired in Heidelberg, books that he discovered in Lausanne or found in Berlin or Warsaw, books he ordered from America and books the like of which exist nowhere but in the Vatican Library, in Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, classical and modern Greek, Sanskrit, Latin, medieval Arabic, Russian, English, German, Spanish, Polish, French, Italian, and languages and dialects I had never even heard of, like Ugaritic and Slovene, Maltese and Old Church Slavonic.

There was something severe and ascetic about the library, about the straight black lines of the dozens of bookshelves extending from the floor to the high ceiling and even over the doorways and windows, a sort of silent, stern grandeur that brooked no levity or frivolity and compelled all of us, even Uncle Joseph himself, always to speak in a whisper here.

The smell of my uncle's enormous library would accompany me all the days of my life: the dusty, enticing odor of seven hidden wisdoms, the smell of a silent, secluded life devoted to scholarship, the life of a secretive hermit, the severe silence of ghosts billowing up from the deepest wells of knowledge, the whisper of dead sages, outpourings of secret
thoughts of long-buried authors, the cold caress of the desires of preceding generations.

From the study too, through three tall, narrow windows, could be seen the gloomy, rather overgrown garden, immediately beyond whose wall began the desolation of the Judaean desert and the rocky slopes that cascaded down toward the Dead Sea. The garden was hemmed in by tall cypresses and whispering pines, among which stood occasional oleanders, weeds, unpruned rose bushes, dusty thujas, darkened gravel paths, a wooden garden table that had rotted under the rain of many winters, and an old, stooped, and half-withered pride of India. Even on the hottest days of summer there was something wintry, Russian, and downcast about this garden, whose cats were fed by Uncle Joseph and Aunt Zip-pora, childless as they were, on kitchen scraps, but where I never saw either of them stroll or sit in the evening breeze on one of the two discolored benches.

I was the only one who wandered in this garden, always alone, on those Sabbath afternoons, escaping from the tedious conversation of the scholars in the sitting room, hunting leopards in its undergrowth, digging under its stones for a hoard of ancient parchments, dreaming of conquering the arid hills beyond its wall with a wild charge of my troops.

All four high, wide walls of the library were covered with crowded but well-ordered books, rank upon rank of precious blue-, green-, and black-bound volumes embossed in gold or silver. In places they were so cramped that two rows of books were forced to stand one behind the other on a single shelf. There were sections with florid Gothic lettering that made me think of spires and turrets, and zones of Jewish holy books, Talmuds and prayer books and law codes and Midrashic compilations, a shelf of Hebrew works from Spain and another with books from Italy, and a section with the writings of the Hebrew Enlightenment, from Berlin and elsewhere, and an endless expanse of Jewish thought and Jewish history and early Near Eastern history, Greek and Roman history, Church history both ancient and modern, and the various pagan cultures, Islamic thought, eastern religions, medieval history, and there were wide Slavic regions that left me mystified, Greek territories, and
gray-brown areas of ring binders and cardboard folders stuffed with offprints and manuscripts. Even the floor was covered with dozens of piledup books, some of them laid open facedown, some full of little markers, while others huddled like frightened sheep on the high-backed chairs that were intended for visitors, or even on the windowsills; while a black ladder that could be moved all around the library on a metal track gave access to the upper shelves that clung on under the high ceiling. Occasionally, I was permitted to move it from bookcase to bookcase very carefully on its rubber wheels. There were no pictures, plants, or ornaments. Only books, more books, and silence filled the room, and a wonderful rich smell of leather bindings, yellowing paper, mold, a strange hint of seaweed and old glue, of wisdom, secrets, and dust.

In the center of his library, like a large dark destroyer that had dropped anchor in the waters of a mountain-girt bay, stood Professor Klausner's desk, entirely covered with piles and piles of reference works, notebooks, an assortment of different pens, blue, black, green, and red, pencils, erasers, inkwells, containers full of paper clips, rubber bands, and staples, manila envelopes, white envelopes, and envelopes with attractive colorful stamps on them, sheets of paper, leaflets, notes, and index cards, foreign volumes piled open on top of open Hebrew volumes, interleaved here and there with sheets torn from a spiral-bound pad, inscribed with the cobwebs of my uncle's spidery handwriting, full of crossings out and corrections, like corpses of bloated flies, full of little slips of paper, and Uncle Joseph's gold-rimmed spectacles lay on top of the pile as though hovering over the void, while a second, black-framed, pair lay on top of another pile of books, on a little trolley beside his chair, and a third pair peered out from among the pages of an open booklet on a small chest that stood beside the dark sofa.

On this sofa, curled up in the fetal position, covered to his shoulders in a green and red tartan rug, like a Scottish soldier's kilt, his face bare and childlike without his glasses, lay Uncle Joseph himself, thin and small, his elongated brown eyes looking both happy and a little lost. He gave us a feeble wave of his translucent white hand, smiled a pink smile between his white mustache and his goatee, and said something like this:

"Come in, my dears, come in, come in" (even though we were already in the room, standing right in front of him, though still close to the door, huddled together—my mother, my father, and myself—like a
tiny flock that had strayed into a strange pasture) "and please forgive me for not standing up to greet you, do not judge me too harshly, for two nights and three days now I have not stirred from my desk or closed my eyes, ask Mrs. Klausner and she will testify on my behalf, I am neither eating nor sleeping, I do not even glance at the newspaper while I finish this article, which, when it is published, will cause a great stir in this land of ours, and not only here, the whole cultural world is following this debate with bated breath, and this time I believe I have succeeded in silencing the obscurantists once and for all! This time they will be forced to concur and say Amen, or at least to admit that they have nothing more to say, they have lost their case, their game is up. And how about you? Fania my dear? My dear Lonia? And dear little Amos? How are you? What is new in your world? Have you read a few pages from my
When a Nation Fights for Its Freedom
to dear little Amos yet? I believe, my dears, that of all that I have written there is nothing that is more suitable than
When a Nation Fights for Its Freedom
to serve as spiritual sustenance to dear Amos in particular and the whole of our wonderful Hebrew youth in general, apart perhaps from the descriptions of heroism and rebellion that are scattered through the pages of my
History of the Second Temple.