Amos Oz- n Alien City

Later I moved away from Jerusalem. I still love the city as one loves a disdainful woman. Sometimes, when I had nothing better to do, I used to go to Jerusalem to woo her. There are some lanes and alleys there that know me well, even if they pretend not to.

I liked Jerusalem because it was a city at the end of the road, a city you could get to but never go through; and also because Jerusalem was never really part of the State of Israel: with the exception of a few streets, it always maintained a separate identity, as though it was deliberately turning its back on all those flat white commercial towns: Tel Aviv, Holon, Herzlia, Netanya.

Jerusalem was different. It was the negation of the regular whitewashed blocks of flats, far from the plains of citrus groves, the gardens with their hedges, the red roofs and irrigation pipes sparkling in the sun. Even the summer blue of Jerusalem was different: the city repudiated the dusty off-white sky of the coastal plain and the Sharon valley. A shuttered, wintry city. Even in the summer it was always a wintry city. Rusty iron railings; grey stone, shading into pale blue or pink; dilapidated walls, boulders, morose, inward-looking courtyards. And the inhabitants: a taciturn, sullen race, always seemingly quelling an inner dread. Devout Jews, Ashkenazim in fur hats and elderly Sephardim in striped robes. Mild-mannered scholars straying as though lost among the stone walls. Dreamy maidens. Blind beggars mouthing prayers or curses. Street-idiots with a certain spark.

For 20 years Jerusalem stubbornly turned its back on the rhythm of free life: a very slow city in a frantic country; a remote, hilly old suburb of a flat land full of new building and threatening to explode from the pressure of seething energy.

The gloomy capital of an exuberant state.

And the suffocation: there were ruined streets, blocked alleys, barricades of concrete and rusty barbed wire. A city which was nothing but outskirts. Not a city of gold but of corrugated iron sheets, bowed and perforated. A city surrounded by the sound of alien bells at night, alien smells, alien vistas. A ring of hostile villages enclosed the city on three sides: Shuafat, Wadi Joz, Issawiya, Silwan, Bethany, Tsur Bahr, Beit Safafa. It seemed as though they had only to clench their fist to crush the city. In the winter night you could sense a malicious purpose coursing from over there.

And there was fear in Jerusalem: an inner fear that must never be named or expressed in words, but that gathered, accumulated, solidified in winding alleys and isolated lanes.

The city fathers, the authorities, the housing estates, the newly-planted trees, the traffic lights, all tried to tempt Jerusalem to be absorbed into the State of Israel, but Jerusalem, apart from one or two streets, refused to be absorbed. For 20 years Jerusalem stubbornly maintained a faded Mandatory character.

It remained gloomy Jerusalem: not part of Israel, but somehow over against it.

I also loved Jerusalem because I was born there.

It was a love without compassion: my nightmares were often set in Jerusalem. I no longer live there, but in my dreams I belong to Jerusalem and it will not let me go. I saw both of us entirely surrounded by foes, not just threatened on three sides. I saw the city falling to the enemy, spoiled and looted and burned as in the Bible, as in the legends of the Roman wars, as in the folklore of my childhood. And I too in these dreams was trapped inside Jerusalem.

I was told many stories as a child about the olden days and about the siege. In all of them Jewish children were slaughtered in Jerusalem. Jerusalem always fell, either heroically or helplessly, but there was always a slaughter and the stories ended with the city going up in flames and with Jewish children being stabbed to death. Sennacherib, the evil Titus, the crusaders, marauders, attackers, military rule, the high commissioner, searches, curfews, Abdullah the desert king, the guns of the Arab legion, the convoy to Mount Scopus, the convoy to the Etzion Bloc, an inflamed mob, excited crowds, bloodthirsty ruffians, irregular forces, everything was directed against me. And I always belonged to the minority, the besieged, those whose fate was sealed, who were living under a temporary stay of execution. This time too, as always, the city would fall, and all of us inside would die like that pious Jew lying in the street with his pale, surprised face, as though he had been rudely insulted.

And also this:

After the War of Independence was over, the city was left with a frontier through its heart. All my childhood years were spent in the proximity of streets that must not be approached, dangerous alleyways, scars of war damage, no-man's-land, gun slits in the Arab legion's fortifications, where occasionally a red Arab headdress could be glimpsed; minefields, thistles, blackened ruins. Twisted rusty arms reaching up among the waves of rubble. There were frequent sounds of shooting from over there, stray shots or machine-gun salvos. Passers-by caught in the legionnaires' firing line would be suddenly killed. And on the other side, opposite, throughout those years there was the other Jerusalem, the one that was surrounding my city, which sent alien guttural sounds rippling towards us, and smells, and flickering pale lights at night, and the frightening wail of the muezzin towards dawn. It was a kind of Atlantis, a lost continent: I only have a few faint memories of it from my early childhood. The colourful bustle of the narrow streets of the Old City, the arched alleyway leading to the Western Wall, a Mandatory Arab policeman with a bushy moustache, market stalls, buza, tamarind, a riot of dizzying colour, the tension of lurking danger. From over there, on the other side of the ceasefire line, a seething menace has been eyeing me through most of my life. "Just you wait. We haven't finished yet. We'll get you too some day." I can remember strolling along the streets of Musrara at dusk, to the edge of no-man's-land. Or distant views from the woods at Abu Tor. The shell-scarred square in front of Notre Dame. The spires of Bethlehem facing the woods at Ramat Rahel. The minarets of the villages round about. Barren hillsides falling away from the new housing in Talpiot. The Dead Sea glimmering far away and deep down like a mirage. The scent of rocky valleys at dawn.

On Sunday, 11 June 1967, I went to see the Jerusalem on the other side of the lines. I visited places that years of dreaming had crystallized as symbols in my mind, and found that they were simply places where people lived. Houses, shops, stalls, street signs.

I was thunderstruck. My dreams had deceived me, the nightmares were unfounded, the perpetual dread had suddenly been transformed into a cruel arabesque joke. Everything was shattered, exposed: my adored, terrifying Jerusalem was dead.

The city was different now. Out-of-the-way corners became bustling hubs. Bulldozers cleared new paths through rubble I had imagined would be there for ever. Forgotten areas filled with frenetic activity. Throngs of devout Jews, soldiers in battledress, excited tourists and scantily-clad women from the coastal towns all streamed eastwards. There was a rising tide in Jerusalem, as though the plain were swelling upwards and rushing into the breached city. Everybody was feeling festive, myself included.

What comes next is painful to write about. If I say again, "I love reunited Jerusalem," what have I said? Jerusalem is mine, yet a stranger to me; captured and yet resentful; yielding yet withdrawn. I could have taken no notice: the sky is the same sky, the Jerusalem stone is the same Jerusalem stone, Sheikh Jarrah and the streets of the American Colony are just like Katamon and the streets of the German Colony.

But the city is inhabited. People live there, strangers: I do not understand their language, they are living where they have always lived and I am the stranger who has come in from outside. True, the inhabitants are polite. They are almost offensively polite, as if they achieved the highest rung of happiness through being granted the honour of selling me a few coloured postcards and some Jordanian stamps. "Welcome." "We are all brothers." It's you we have been waiting for these last 20 years, to smile and say ahlan and salam aleikum and sell me souvenirs.

Their eyes hate me. They wish me dead. Accursed stranger.

I was in East Jerusalem three days after it was conquered. I arrived straight from El Arish in Sinai, in uniform, carrying a sub-machine-gun. I was not born to blow rams' horns and liberate lands from the "foreign yoke." I can hear the groaning of oppressed people; I cannot hear the groaning of oppressed lands.

In my childhood dreams Arabs in uniform carrying sub-machine-guns came to the street where I lived in Jerusalem to kill us all. 22 years ago the following slogan appeared in red letters on a courtyard wall: In blood and fire Judaea fell; in blood and fire Judaea will rise again. The words had been written during the night by someone from the anti-British underground. I don't know how to write about blood and fire. If I ever write anything about this war, I shan't write about blood and fire, I shall write about sweat and vomit, pus and piss.

I tried my hardest to feel in East Jerusalem like a man who has driven out his enemies and returned to his ancestral inheritance. The Bible came back to life for me: kings, prophets, the Temple Mount, Absalom's Pillar, the Mount of Olives. And also the Jerusalem of Abraham Mapu and Agnon's book Tmol Shilshom. I wanted to belong, I wanted to share in the general celebrations.

But I couldn't, because of the people.

I saw resentment and hostility, hypocrisy, bewilderment, obsequiousness, fear, humiliation and new plots being hatched. I walked the streets of East Jerusalem like a man who has broken into a forbidden place. City of my birth. City of my dreams. City of aspirations of my ancestors and my people. And here I was, stalking its streets clutching a sub-machine-gun, like a figure in one of my childhood nightmares: an alien man in an alien city.

Translated by Nicholas de Lange