No Peace Yet

Throughout the day the campanile on the roof of the nearby convent attracted a flock of pigeons. When the bell rang they would burst from the campanile and hover at a distance until the reverberations died down. The convent was a massive two-storied building with a red roof. It stood at a right angle to the street, as did our house, but it was not as long. On weekdays it was also a girls' school.

Across the street was the Sadowsky maternity home, surrounded by a high stone wall with an iron gate. We could peep at the newborn babies through a small wire-screened window in the outer wall. They lay in tiny bassinettes around the room and their thin wailing could be heard if you listened attentively, but the casement window was usually closed and there was the traffic and street noise to overcome. From time to time a nurse entered the room and attended to the babies. There was an air of mild mystery. One day I saw a sight that stirred my imagination. The iron gate opened and a couple emerged from the inner courtyard and walked to a waiting car. There were some people attending them. The young woman was crying uncontrollably and the man was supporting her very tenderly. I watched the scene in great fascination, because it was not every day that it was vouchsafed to one to see an adult crying. But then I realized a more important fact about the scene - there was no baby, no swaddled bundle in anybody's arms as the couple got into the car and drove away. In the early afternoon the Polish soldiers from down the street would crawl up, their eyes looking poached, to the little grocery beside the convent to buy vodka - "for their breakfast," the grocer would remark in Hebrew when they left. They were notorious all over the neighbourhood. In the evenings Edna's mother would take her little dog and walk up and down the street, clad in a tight dress, her hair fluffed out, hips and handbag swinging. I thought she was very elegant and feminine. I don't know at what stage I understood what was going on. To my parents' credit be it said that they never told me not to visit Edna. There was only the faintest whiff of disapproval, and perhaps a hint of relief when that family left the neighbourhood.

The great flagstoned terrace that stretched the length of our house on the side facing the convent was a world in itself. There were two cisterns sunk in it, with high stone rims and iron lids. When the water supply failed water could be drawn from them and only needed boiling to be made quite drinkable. We, the children who lived in the upper storey, could reach the terrace by one of two ways: down the central staircase - where if we made the slightest noise we were yelled at by a German-Jewish woman with a scary medusa head - or down the outside staircase, and through the entrance to the courtyard. We roamed about like a small herd, dashing this way and that and irritating the grown-ups. The grocer's wife was forever pleading with us to stop shouting, or whistling, or singing, because of her headache. Or we'd fly down the steep street on our wooden scooters. The street was perfect for it, like a ski slope, and we often ended up at the bottom with bloodied knees, elbows or noses. Below and behind the house where the Polish officers lived, the Moslem cemetery sprawled - a great expanse of empty hillside with scattered white tombs near the top, along King George Street, and down at the bottom, close to the Mamilla pool. Beyond the cemetery the buildings rose in a great semi-circle, and in time the area would be sealed off with barbed wire and renamed - in popular speech - "Bevingrad," after Ernest Bevin, the British Colonial Secretary who had the misfortune to preside over the dismantling of the Empire.

But at the time I am speaking of, the Generali Building, like the King David Hotel, the YMCA and the rest of the complex favoured by the British, was still benign. The enemy was the Germans, and the time came when the threat of their approach was strong enough for us children to feel it. I remember the name El Alamein quite clearly. I remember excited talk about hollow signet-rings and about emergency measures to send the women and children away. One sensed the heightening of tension. Only some years later did I understand what the plans were in the event that the Germans conquered Palestine. My father and his comrades proposed to make a last stand on the Carmel, but the women and children were to be sent away to safety. My father contacted a young Bedouin with whom he had made friends in Acre prison before the war, and arranged for my mother and me to be taken in by his tribe in the Negev. My mother's fair complexion and blue eyes could be explained by saying that she was a Circassian. So that but for General Montgomery and his men I might now be an old Bedouin woman, minding my numerous grandchildren in a goatskin tent.

Once or twice the air-raid alarm sounded in Jerusalem. That was when the Italian airforce bombed Palestine. They actually did destroy a few houses in Tel Aviv, but they never approached Jerusalem. All the residents came clattering down the central staircase and huddled in the darkness in the deepest recess of the great old pile. Then the All Clear sounded and we went home again. What made it a war for us was chiefly the rationing, which, though not austere, was enough to make us forget the sight and smell of white bread, butter, cream and refined sugar. And there was the presence of all those colourful troops that passed through Palestine - Australians in broad-rimmed hats pinned up on one side, Africans and Indians in bright uniforms, the Free French and the Poles. The Aussies were the most popular with the kids, as they were unfailingly friendly and gave away sweets. The Tommies were sometimes friendly and sometimes so drunk and disorderly as to be a menace to the population. There was a NAAFI on our street, just above the maternity home, and the Tommies would come pouring out of it after dark, singing, peeing against the walls and accosting anything in skirts.

There was the iron din from the government garage that lay between our house and the convent. All day long there was a hammering and banging and shouting and the radio blaring. Several times a day the convent bell rang out, powerful and sonorous, drowning all other sounds. On the other side of the house stood the Orion Cinema, a great barn of a place which offered three shows a day - at three o'clock in the afternoon and at seven and nine in the evening. Egyptian films were popular, and Abdul Wahab, Laila Mourad and Farid al-Atrash alternated with Betty Grable, Gary Cooper and Leslie Howard.

And smells, the rough reek of hot metal from the garage, the stink of urine in the alley behind the cinema, the heavy odours of European cookery from the convent kitchen, or of olives and salt fish from the grocery, the fragrance of za'atar seasoning from the sellers of qa'ak bread, the steamy atmosphere redolent of bleach and hot starch in the laundry downstairs, the aroma of the sticky gum of the almond trees in nearby gardens with which we "spun" little pieces of pretend gauze across our bent fingers, the heady scents of jasmine and orange-blossom and other popular perfumes, the appetizing whiff of peanuts roasted by tall white-robed Sudanese on street corners. And in winter, the smell of kerosene from the stove, striving in vain to warm the great high places of our flat.

Sometimes I walk down this street as it is today and wonder. Not much of it is left. They have even changed its name. I close my eyes and try to imagine that it's all a dream, that when I open them I will see the street of my childhood. Perhaps I have been standing here and fantasizing, and when I return to reality it will be 1945, give or take a year, the street will be as it was and I a dreaming child. But of course it's no use. The gods know that this is just a ruse to win my youth back and they are up to all the tricks that men and women have used since time immemorial. So I open my eyes again and there is that dull insignificant street with its changed name, and I am an old woman standing on the pavement with her eyes shut.

The house had been built in the early 19th century as a caravanserai off the Jaffa Road, for people who arrived after the gates of the Old City were shut. There they could stop with their cattle and horses, watering them from the cisterns in the courtyard, and store their merchandise in the vaulted caverns beneath it. They might also prefer to stay there, amid the fields and pines, rather than in the crowded alleys inside the Old City. Two classes of suites were available, spacious high-ceilinged ones facing southeast towards the Old City, with its holy shrines and souks, and humbler ones facing northwest, towards the bare hills. When, in the 1880s, the city began to burst out of its stone girdle and spread over the surrounding hills and dells, one of the first areas was a cluster of little houses called Nahlat Shiv'a, in the valley below our house. After that, the house changed functions and hands. It was a convent, it was a hospital. Finally it became an apartment house, the property of a wealthy Christian Arab by the name of Sheeber, who owned several other properties in the new city.

We lived on the privileged side of the building, with a grandstand view of the city. By this time the view of the Old City walls was blocked by the new buildings which had risen along Jaffa Road leading to the Jaffa Gate. From our windows we could see the huddled roofs of Nahlat Shiv'a and rising beyond them a part of the Moscobia - the Russian Compound - with its greeny domes, the Generali Building and the stately pile of the main post office. Handsome as it was, this view did not compare with the view from the top of the outside staircase at the street end of the house. That view swept over the Moslem cemetery of Mamilla, to the ridge with the YMCA with its white minaret-like tower, and the King David Hotel and beyond them to the farther range of Mount Scopus crested by the Victoria Augusta Hospital, and into the eternal haze that hung above the abyss of the Dead Sea. As time passed I saw a great deal of life from the top of that staircase.

The house was built like a mediaeval fortress, its wall a metre thick, three layers of Jerusalem stone. Consequently the windows, the high arched windows, formed wonderful commodious seats. I spent much of my childhood perched on the window seat in my room, gazing at the view and especially at the sky. To the right, the convent roof provided the daylong drama of the pigeons, and in the evening thousands of swallows performed a vast ballet across the radiant silver sky. When it grew dark the birds disappeared and the stars came out. The wartime blackout left the stars undisturbed and they could shine and twinkle to their hearts' content. Indoors, my parents are at their usual occupations. My father sits at his desk, typing very fast with two fingers, a long ivory cigarette holder gripped betwen his teeth, so that the smoke from the oval Egyptian cigarette - "Matossian" or "Latif" - will not get into his eyes. On the desk stand two little ebony elephants with ivory tusks and eyes, one bigger than the other, also a "Bezalel" brass ashtray and a little clay oil lamp from Roman times that my uncle Yosef, the engineer, found somewhere in the north. On the wall over the desk hangs a black-and-white photograph of Nefertiti - "my rival," says my mother.

My mother sits curled up in the great armchair near the round table which is covered with a heavy embroidered tablecloth. She is reading, of course. She devoured books the way an alcoholic drinks. It may be one of her favourite Russian classics, or a detective story in English or German. Although her Hebrew was quite good, she never got around to reading it for pleasure. She would read the newspapers and magazines, but not literature. Or she might be sewing, by hand or on her big Singer sewing machine, altering my father's old pre-war suits for herself, or making a dress for me out of some remnant. These are not only days of rationing, they are also hard times for us as a family. The general prosperity which the war has brought to Palestine has not reached us. My father is too busy helping to build a nation to do anything more profitable than editing his party's daily newspaper or turning out the occasional translation. One by one my mother's modest jewels disappeared. But if she resented their loss she never said a word.

Asher Beilin, then a fairly well-known writer and columnist, lived directly below us, in a ground-floor flat that opened on to the great terrace. One day he published a description of the house in his column and I remember my father reading it aloud delightedly. It was all more or less there - the laundry run by a prolific red-haired, ultra-orthodox, psalm-chanting family; the three whores, two of whom were patriotic Zionists and the third "went with the English" and was therefore shunned by the Zionists in the house; the Polish countess and her golden-haired daughter - they did not stay long; the famous portrait painter on the first floor with his two daughters, Daphne and Chloe; the crippled radio broadcaster, and the Lebanese lady and her daughter who worked as interpreters for the Allied powers and kept numerous cats in their flat...

But these were only the more colourful personages who lived in Beit Sheeber. Most of the residents were perfectly ordinary people who made an ordinary living from humdrum activities. The father of my closest friend, Nora, was a chemist who worked for the government and earned just enough to make ends meet. He was a German Jew and his wife a gentile German woman whom he had married before Hitler came to power. Shortly before the war they came to Palestine with their baby daughter. His parents had arrived earlier, having benefited from the shortlived arrangement that permitted bourgeois Jews to emigrate from Germany and take some of their property with them. They lived in a nice house in one of the quiet suburbs of Jerusalem, and sometimes Nora's parents would take me with them to visit Grosspapa und Grossmama. This family spoke German and lived in a time capsule. Their books were all German classics, in gothic characters which I could not decipher, and Nora was brought up on "Max und Moritz" and the Brothers Grimm. In one of the big volumes of "Maerchen" from which stories were read aloud (by this time I had picked up enough German to follow the gist of the tale), there was a terrifying portrait of "Der Teufel," the devil, which haunted my nightmares. They ate German food and had German pictures on the wall and sang German songs. The picture of big blonde Inge, Nora's mother, sitting at the window, sewing and singing lieder, remains in my memory as the quintessence of all things German. The fact that we were at war with Germany, let alone that they themselves had fled from Germany because of its racist laws, did not seem to affect them. Somewhere in space there was an ideal Germany and to it they owed allegiance.

There were many such people in Jerusalem in those days, people living a private dream superimposed upon the reality of our city and life. Far more eccentric and exquisite than Nora's family, yet in the same general style, was Else Lasker Schler, the great German-Jewish poet who was stranded in the Middle East and lived in a fantasy world which combined German imagery with biblical fantasy. She insisted that the poems she was writing in the most marvellous German were actually written in Hebrew. She was a familiar figure on the streets and in the cafs of Jerusalem - tattered and bedizened like a bag-lady, her frail figure bent double. But her eyes still blazed with a black flame and she fed stray cats and dogs when she herself was starving.

Then there was an imposing character in a striped galabiya and tarboosh, who went around telling anyone who would listen that the solution to all our problems was for the Jews to convert to Islam. He was a Persian Jew whose ancestors in Mashhad had been forcibly converted and lived a double life for several generations - like the Marranos in Spain - until they emigrated to Palestine and reverted to Judaism. He, however, returned to Islam and believed that this was the answer to all the sectarian and communal problems in the Middle East. Then there was a dentist who believed that he was a direct descendant of the House of David and that only the restoration of the ancient monarchy would set things right in the Middle East. He was treated with great indulgence, perhaps because he was a good dentist. And of course there was the Polish linguist Charapusta, an endearing character who spoke both major Semitic languages to perfection - too well, in fact. A familiar figure in the city, he would enter Caf Atara and order the Hebrew equivalent of wassail for all the swains and maidens in the tavern. I suppose he did the same in the Arab establishments. There were other, less appealing oddballs in our city, including a very respectable civil servant, dressed in an impeccable European suit and carrying a briefcase, who made it a habit to expose himself to little girls. Nora and I were subjected to his attentions one afternoon when we were sitting on our favourite perch on top of the outside staircase. He was so solemn about it that it took us a moment to realize that there was something unusual about his appearance, and then we fled downstairs, shrieking in dismay.

Nora attended a nearby primary school run by the Labour movement. I was sent to the small private school of Mrs Eshkoli. My mother, a product of Vienna University, modern child psychology and the Montessori method, was attracted by this extraordinary woman and her little school, which was run according to the latest ideas. I went there from the age of five - the first year being nursery school - until I was ten. The nursery school class and the first grade were held in Mrs Eshkoli's house, around the corner from us; the next three grades were in a building a fair distance away. I never did like school in any shape or form, but I think the years under Mrs Eshkoli's tutelage were free from trauma. We were not merely educated in that school, our physical being was considered to be of equal importance. On warm mornings in the autumn and spring we were made to strip down to our underpants and lie on the terrace in rows, each child on a little towel, and bake in the sun, after having been smeared all over with olive oil from a large can. The classrooms were high-ceilinged and flagstone-floored, very cold in winter despite the smelly oil stoves, so that we often suffered from chilblains. The walls were decorated with pictures depicting North, East, South and West. North was a snowy fir forest with reindeer; East was a desert with a distant oasis in its sandy folds, South was a lush Indian village with coconut palms and an elephant, and West was the sea, with mighty green waves and a sailing ship. There were other, typical classroom illustrations, including some of our own creations. In those days teachers were still free to tell children how to draw, and I was sometimes scolded - oh, very gently - for leaving the corners of my drawings unfilled.

A kind of fairy tale haze hangs over those years in my memory. In my imagination Abdul Wahab, Leslie Howard and the Caliph of Baghdad hobnobbed with biblical figures - whom I imagined as Gustav Dor depicted them in his illustrations. Whenever we went to the Dead Sea to visit my uncle Issya, my mother's younger brother who worked in the power station in Sedom, I matched the view from the upper reaches of the Judaean wilderness looking down on the Dead Sea with Dor's engraving showing Lot and his wife fleeing from the Cities of the Plain when God destroyed them with fire and brimstone. The Dor imagery lingers in my mind to this day. Some years ago I visited Egypt for the first time, and seeing the great colonnades in Luxor I at once recalled the scenes with Pharaoh and Joseph and Joseph's brothers, exactly as Dor depicted them in that setting. The Bible was a source of fantasy and magic, since I was not taught it as gospel but only as ancient, quasi-historical literature. Samson the hero and the femme fatale Delilah, King David and his desperadoes, my namesake Jael, who killed Sisera with a tent-peg, the barbaric fate of Jephthah's daughter - they were as romantic as anything dished up by Alexander Korda. The war years were, curiously enough, a quiet spell for us. The nationalist struggle in Palestine was more or less suspended for the duration. The Zionists were eager to take part in the Allied war effort and the Palestinian Arabs were uncomfortably aware of the fact that their leader, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, was in Berlin helping the war effort on the other side. There is no doubt that there were pro-Axis sympathies in the Arab world, from Iraq to Egypt, because any enemy of the British was a potential ally of Arab nationalism. But similar sentiments could be found in the fringes of the Zionist movement too, specifically in the underground splinter group known as Lehi, or by the British as the "Stern Gang." Before the war they had tried to flirt with the Nazis, believing that their nuisance value under the British Empire would endear them to the satanic forces in Berlin, who would assist them in some way. But the Germans simply ignored their overtures, and when the war broke out and the full nature of the beast became plain to see, no more such hopes were entertained.

We in Palestine were neither bombed nor dispossessed nor evacuated nor hungry and terrified like the people of Europe. Only the horror was in the air, the rumours of an unprecedented massacre of the Jews, and those rumours filtered down to us children. Stalingrad and Normandy were mentioned, and Palermo and other battlefields in Italy, where friends and relatives fought, but I was too small to understand the significance of these names. And then one day it was over. Again and again the radio repeated that it was all over. There was excitement in the air and my father said to me, "Let's go and buy newspapers." We went out to Ben-Yehuda Street and bought several newspapers from a street vendor. The headlines shouted "The war is over! It is finished! "So now there is peace?" I asked my father. "No," he answered. "The war is over, but there is no peace yet." I was nine years old. Those words must have impressed me profoundly, because many years later they were what I dredged up when asked to recall a scene from my childhood. The World War was over, but for us the days of rage and conflict were just beginning.