Under This Blazing Light (15 page)

I write so as to exorcise evil spirits. And I write, as Natan Zach puts it in one of his poems:

this is a song about people,

about what they think, and what they want,

and what they think they want.

(First published in 1975)

I was bom in Jerusalem; I lived there as a child; when I was nine I went through the siege and the shelling of Jerusalem. That was the first time I saw a corpse. A shell fired from the Arab Legion’s gun battery on Nebi Samwil hit a pious Jew and ripped his stomach open. I saw him lying there in the street. He was a short man with a straggly beard. His face as he lay there dying looked pale and surprised. It happened in July 1948.1 hated that man for a long time because he used to come back and scare me in my dreams. I knew that Jerusalem was surrounded by forces that wanted me dead.

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 twenty 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 council-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 twenty 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’. 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 Etsion 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, gunslits 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 Wailing 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 Tel Arza. Looking across from the observation post 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 Talpiyot. 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 crystallised 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 frantic 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 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 twenty 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 says after it was conquered. I arrived straight from El Arish in Sinai, in uniform, carrying a sub-machine-gun. I was not bom 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 submachine-guns came to the street where I lived in Jerusalem to kill us all. Twenty-two 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 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.

(First published in 1968)

When I sit down to write a story I already have the people. What are called the ‘characters’. Generally there is a man - or woman -at the centre, and others round about or opposite. I don’t know yet what will happen to them, what they will do to each other, but they have converged on me and I am already involved in conversations, arguments, even quarrels with them. There are times when I say to them: get out of here. Leave me alone. You are not right for me and I am not right for you. It’s too difficult for me. I’m not the right man. Go to somebody else.

Sometimes I persist, time passes, they lose interest, perhaps they really do go to some other writer, and I write nothing.

But sometimes they persist, like Michael’s Hannah, for example: she nagged me for a long time, she wouldn’t give up, she said, look, I’m here, I shan’t leave you alone, either you write what I tell you or you won’t have any peace.

I argued, I apologised, I said, look, I can’t do it, go to someone else, go to some woman writer, I’m not a woman. I can’t write you in the first person, let me be. No. She didn’t give up. And then, when I did write, so as to get rid of her and get back somehow to my own life, still every day and every night she was arguing about each line. She wanted me to write in this way or that, she wanted to put more and more things into the story, and I kept saying, this won’t do, it’s bad, it’s unnecessary, this is my novel not yours, after all you’re my obsession, not the other way round, I said, look, you don’t even exist, you’re nothing, only I can - maybe - rescue you from everlasting darkness and put you into words, so don’t bother me, stop telling me how to do it, it’s hard enough for me without you, that’s enough. (You must not confuse this with something else: I am not talking about a ‘model drawn from life’. There’s no such thing.)

That is, more or less, how the people in my stories come to me. And they start to bring with them their own way of speaking, their habits, their places. And the things they say or do to one another: their relationships, their troubles. I have the impression that I know what I want to do: the beginning, the middle and the end. There was even a time, when I was writing my first short stories, when I never sat down to write until I knew the whole story by heart, from beginning to end. I had a very good memory. I was twenty, twenty-something. I knew it all by heart, from the first word to the last. And the writing itself was like dictation - six, eight hours and I had a complete story which only needed a few slight corrections here and there. (Perhaps it was because I was in the army then, or working in the cottonfields, or a student, I didn’t have a desk or a room of my own and I was obliged to put the whole story together first and then simply copy it out of my head and onto the page.)