The Ascent of Eli Israel Read online

  “Good morning,” she said.

  “The reinforcements are ready,” he answered.

  “You make a handsome soldier.”

  His mother interrupted, “Pirkl is not a soldier. He’s too young.”

  “I’m older than David when he killed Goliath.”

  “Don’t talk nonsense.”

  “What is he, a worthless shmatte, a worthless old rag?” his grandmother said. “Let him go. Every man must fight for Jerusalem. He will soon be bar mitzvah. He smells like a man,” she said, pinching her sharp nose.

  “You belong at home . . .” his mother began.

  “But what about the brave Trumpeldor?” Pirkl shot back.

  “He was killed at Tel Hai,” his mother answered, shaking her head.

  “Defending Tel Hai,” his grandmother said. “He didn’t die in vain.”

  “You’re not going to look for your father. Promise me,” his mother said.

  Pirkl smiled, but didn’t say anything. He thought of the Russian-born, one-armed Joseph Trumpeldor. His father’s hero.

  Pirkl’s grandmother winked at him.

  “All right,” his mother said. “Come straight back, Malchyk! Just go to the barricade. Hold this above your head,” she said, handing him a piece of white muslin cloth. “Hold it high so the snipers can see. Look for the Red Cross, leave the package, tell them it is for those trapped in the city. They will listen to a child.”

  “Let him go!” his grandmother said. Though he was just five feet tall, she still had to reach up to kiss his cheek. “Be strong and brave,” she said.

  His grandmother had packed a small satchel filled to the top with two loaves of stale bread, three cans of asparagus soup, a tin of chocolate spread, a package of dried fruit, some potatoes, a cup of dried beans, sweet halvah, candles, a blanket, week-old copies of Ha’aretz and some small dark jars which contained a liquid that must have been medicine.

  His heart quickened, he could feel it boiling in his chest as he bounced down the stairs. The full weight of the hamsiin hit him as he stepped out into the magic pink light of morning. He walked around behind the apartment house and emptied the bag onto the ground next to a jagged bowl-shaped crater where a twenty-five-pounder had hit one night during heavy shelling, and dug in the dry earth where Tsrili, the soldier injured at Ramat Rahel, would later be buried.

  When his mother was busy tending to the wounded, he had hidden a pair of three-inch Davidka mortar shells made out of old pipes, a few dozen Enfield rifle bullets, three bayonets, and the pièce de résistance, a round Thompson submachine gun magazine. He held the magazine to his chest, like a stack of precious 78 rpm records that his mother used to play on the phonograph. And for a moment, he saw his parents dancing and laughing in their living room, his mother’s head thrown back with such joy, he could hardly recognize her now.

  He pressed the bullets into the stale bread until they all disappeared into the now-heavy loaves; wrapped the bayonets thickly in the old newspapers, and swaddled the Thompson magazine in the blanket, piling dried fruit on top in case he was stopped and asked the contents of his bag. Pirkl imagined his two rockets, marked “Dear King Abdullah” and “For Haj Amin Mufti,” hitting their targets squarely on top of their heads. Two shells can win the war, he thought, and pictured himself riding along King George V Avenue in an open car with Hannah at his side. His reverie was interrupted by the thump of shelling from the east.

  Hannah lived in the next apartment house with her mother and stepfather who were Communists. She was the first girl his own age Pirkl had ever thought was pretty, with her long almond-shaped face, spinning green eyes, and brandnew breasts. He liked her for that, but he also liked the fact that her parents let her do as she wished. Sometimes in the evenings, during the bombing, she would throw rocks at Pirkl’s window and he would meet her in the stairwell where they would kiss in the thick darkness. She promised soon that Pirkl could touch her there.

  He gathered up the cans of soup, the potatoes and the beans, the chocolate spread, some dried fruit, and even the sweet halvah, and left them on the doorstep outside her flat. She had gotten so skinny, Pirkl thought, so light, he could have carried her on his back all the way to the Old City. He heard her stepfather behind the door glumly singing the “Internationale.” Pirkl ran off to gather his satchel humming “Hatikvah,” The Hope, the nation’s anthem.

  Skipping over shell craters and tangled telephone wires, counting broken windows and garbage piles, Pirkl continued humming as he went. He counted in Hebrew, and then English, then in Russian. Sometimes he mixed the three together.

  Farther on down the road Pirkl could see the barricade, and behind that no-man’s-land. A high nasal voice called to him from behind a low stone wall, “Hey, boy. Curlyhead! Come here.” Pirkl stopped beneath an almond tree and adjusted the heavy bag on his back, about to move on.

  “Boy, you are going to the Ancient City?”

  “Who wants to know?” Pirkl asked.

  “I know,” the voice said. “I know.”

  And then, the oldest man Pirkl had ever seen stood up from behind the wall. He was barefoot and dressed entirely in black, with a black felt hat tilted back on his giant head. He had a wild white beard, wispy like dry grass, and his eyes were pale and glassy.

  “Come here, boy,” the holy man said, holding out his long bony hand.

  Pirkl could see the veins in his hand so clearly they might have been above the skin. His back was hunched and he smelled of old books and damp soil. And then he spoke and his breath smelled of fish bones that had been almost picked clean.

  “You are going to the Ancient City.”

  Pirkl put his bag down. “Do you live there?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you ran?” Pirkl said.

  The holy man laughed, but instead of a laugh it was a breath and not a breath, as if he had one of those fish bones caught in his throat. “I ran?”

  “How long did you live there?”

  “Five hundred years,” the man answered, then wheezed and laughed again. “Your name, boy.”

  Pirkl told him. He could not stop looking into the man’s glassy cataracted eyes, dreamy like cracked crystal balls.

  “Your mother?”

  He could hear heavy machine-gunning in the distance and the savage boom, boom, boom of the bigger guns.

  “Rosa,” Pirkl said.

  “Take this,” the holy man said, slipping a small silver amulet into Pirkl’s hand. He gripped his arm tight and did not let go. Pirkl closed his eyes and began to sway. He thought he felt the old man reach into his overall pockets, but he ignored it, thinking the poor man was simply searching for hidden food. The old man’s pink tongue rolled around in his toothless mouth trying to form words, his voice high-pitched and broken: “In the name of Shaddai who created heaven and earth and in the name of the angel . . .” He was shaking faster and Pirkl felt an ache in his groin and a vibration down his spine. “In the name of Pirkl son of Rosa, protect him in all of his two-hundred and forty-eight organs against danger and the two-edged sword. Help him, deliver him, save him . . .” He felt the man’s soft hand sliding against him and electricity buzzing down all the knuckles of his spine and out into his rib cage. “Vanquish and bring low those who rise against him. May all who seek his harm be destroyed, humbled, smashed so that not a limb remains whole . . .” He felt a fire in his legs and arms now, burning through his veins and arteries, a white fire cleansing his very soul. “Save him, deliver him from all sorcery, from wicked men, from sudden death. Grant him grace, and love and mercy before the throne of God and before all beings who behold him.” The old man let go of Pirkl’s arm, and his eyes snapped open. He continued to chant, his stinking pink mouth an open wound, “Yah Yah Yah Yau Yau Yau Yah Zebaot. Amen Amen Amen.” And all at once the electricity was gone and Pirkl felt his body shiver as if he had exploded. The man again broke into a sepulchral laugh and Pirkl noticed the man had wet his pants. He felt damp in his own pants. He had b
een tricked by a madman.

  “Pirkl, Pirkl, beautiful boy,” the man cackled, taking the amulet back into his long bony hands. “Pirkl, Pirkl.”

  He walked away laughing, and Pirkl grabbed him by the shoulder not concerned anymore that the old man might crumble into dust.

  “Why did you touch me?”

  “For luck,” the old man said. “For luck.”

  “I don’t need luck,” Pirkl said, sickened and angry.

  “You want to die as a lamb?”

  “I’m not going to die.”

  “Child, you exaggerate your own importance. Death is in the air.” And with that, he raised his nose to the sky, sniffing, his nose hairs waving like tiny spider’s legs.

  “Come with me,” he said, sliding a finger into his toothless mouth.

  Then Pirkl said a word so foul that he had never said it aloud before. The old man’s face dropped and he began to shuffle away.

  “If you must go,” he said, color rising to his pallid face, “enter through the small door, my little dung beetle.”

  When Pirkl reached the barricade, he removed the bayonets from his heavy satchel, throwing them on the ground in disgust. He was sticky and felt something dripping down his leg and wiped it up with the gauze his mother had given him to ward off sniper fire. Through a peephole, he could see a park where he once played, strewn with barbed wire and rough cement blocks. He didn’t smell death in the air, only burned gunpowder and dust. His father, the best person in the whole world, was only a few hundred meters away, inside that stony prison. Pirkl felt tears surge up from his belly and he wanted to run to him as fast as his legs could carry him.

  Though it was still early morning, a white sun made the whole world look like an overexposed photograph. Pirkl removed his wool cap, and standing on top of his own small shadow, peered through the peephole again. The Old City. “I can dribble a football that far,” he thought. “Kick it right through Jaffa Gate.”

  Pirkl made a bet with himself as he walked along the barricade that he would not be spotted moving across noman’s-land. He was simply too small to be of any consideration, too much a part of the landscape to be noticed. With the satchel humped up on his back, covered with dust, he might be mistaken for a camel.

  He found a breach in the barrier and slipped through, scraping his arm on a bracelet of barbed wire, and began walking toward the flames and pounding shells. “This is easy,” he thought, heading toward the well-fortified Jaffa Gate. He had just begun whistling “Song of the Barricades” when he heard a bullet ricochet past him, then another. Pirkl could not see where the marksman was shooting from, but dove facefirst onto the ground and crawled behind a pile of stones, closing his eyes. His heart beat hard behind his eyelids.

  With his face pressed into the dry earth, Pirkl thought of Hannah. He once told her he would die if he didn’t touch her there. And now he was sure he would die.

  “You won’t die,” she had said, her lips against his, her words disappearing into his mouth.

  He spoke back into her mouth, “I will!”

  “No you won’t. If I let you touch it now, what is there to look forward to?”

  “Lots of things,” Pirkl said, kissing her dry lips.

  “No,” she said. “You will have to live. So you can touch it later.”

  “Please.”

  “Not now,” she said, placing his hands on her behind and pulling him closer. She smelled of kerosene and sweat.

  Pirkl wanted to tell Hannah that he loved her, he loved her so much, but said, “When do you think my father will come home?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Stalin took my father when I was three. His father died in a pogrom in Dokszyce. But don’t worry,” she said. “You can get a new father.”

  What would happen if he died in no-man’s-land? Would Hannah cry for him and call him brave and wish she had let him touch her, Pirkl wondered. Sweat poured down his neck, tickling him, the way Hannah’s fingers did. His mouth was full of soot, he didn’t dare raise his head. Would his mother know the moment a bullet ripped through his body? Would she feel his last breath fade away the way she felt his first breath when he came into the world?

  Some dried apricots spilled out of the satchel onto the ground. “My last meal on earth, and I don’t even like apricots.” Then a horrifying thought crept into Pirkl’s mind: If my father is dead, would I know? He is defending the Old City and bombs are falling. Can he walk between a million raindrops and not get wet?

  The sniper must have thought he had hit his target, for the ricocheting bullets stopped, as did the bombing within the Old City. Only the odd report of machine-gun fire echoed from within the walls. Pirkl removed the awkward Thompson magazine from his bag and laid it beside the pile of rocks, pushed himself up off the ground and ran as fast as he could back toward the barricade and the breach he had slipped through. Not a shot was fired.

  Down by the Yemin Moshe neighborhood he decided to try again. Of course Jaffa Gate, the main gate in the west, would be heavily guarded. It was stupid to try, Pirkl thought. And Zion Gate, too, was a fortress. But the little gate! He peered up at the city and he could see fires burning from within the Jewish Quarter. The bombing had stopped.

  In the winter his father had taken him to Montefiore’s Windmill at the top of Yemin Moshe, which offered a majestic view of the Old City and the valley below. To the south, his father pointed out the British High Commissioner’s “Government House” on a gray hilltop. He chuckled at the irony that the seat of the mandatory government would be located on the Hill of Evil Counsel. They looked out on the walled city that seemed to be almost buried in the mountains, and down below, the Hinnom Valley, or Gehenna. His father told him that in ancient times, pagans had built a shrine to Moloch, an angry god hungry for human flesh. Children were sacrificed in that valley, and their blood flowed all the way to the Dead Sea. Pirkl asked his father if children were still sacrificed. He said, no, not if they were good.

  Now he was in that valley, making his way across the burnished earth to the Old City, and the Union Jack was gone from that gray hill, replaced by mortars and cannons. He imagined walking over the bones of children burned in the bronze arms of Moloch. Down he went and he heard goats bleating in the distance and he heard the mournful clanging of their bells. Across the valley he counted ten white dots moving slowly among the twisted olive trees. Every once in a while he heard the rat-tat of gunfire from within the city.

  He wanted to eat some of the dried fruit as he walked along, but was afraid he would not have enough when he reached his father. His bag was lighter now, and he cursed himself for leaving behind the Thompson magazine. He only had the two mortars for King Abdullah and the Grand Mufti, as well as the two loaves of bullet-loaded bread. Loose dried fruit tumbled around in his satchel. He could make out tiny figures on the ramparts as he passed Mount Zion and the mighty edifice of Dormition Abbey. “Moloch, come out wherever you are,” Pirkl thought defiantly. “I’m walking through your valley.”

  Pirkl climbed the steep eastern slope of the valley on his way to the little gate of which the madman had spoken. Pirkl smiled. Dung Gate, the smallest and most insignificant entrance into the city, so small that a man on horseback would have to dismount to enter, a gate that once served as an open sewer in times of antiquity. Dung Gate, the closest gate to the Jewish Quarter and his father.

  He stepped through the barbed wire and dust and rubble, sweating furiously. He was so thirsty his head began to buzz. Still not a sound from within the city, but the smell of smoke and death burned in his nose. He removed the thin blanket from within his satchel and wrapped it around his face like a kaffiyeh.

  A solitary legionnaire sitting languidly in an opening above the gate waved and said, “Marhaba.” Pirkl smiled and said the same.

  The gate was even smaller than Pirkl remembered. He noticed the decorous Star of David carved above it and mumbled the Sheheheyanu, a prayer said on joyous occasions that he remembered hearing old men mutt
ering.

  Skirting the Arab Muhgrabi Quarter, he walked uphill toward the battered cupola of the Tiferet Israel Synagogue. The narrow streets were littered with rotting vegetables, twisted bed frames, scattered clothing, smashed crockery, books, photographs, broken furniture, rubble, and all the debris one might have acquired in a lifetime. A terrible sadness rose up from within Pirkl; he wanted to scream out and curse and stamp his feet.

  He came to a small storefront where a young Arab sat at a round table.

  “Hello,” the Arab said in English.

  Pirkl ignored him and continued to walk.

  “ ‘Hello,’ I said. Come back or I will shout that there is a Jew still alive.”

  Pirkl froze.

  “The Jews are surrendering today,” the Arab said to him.

  Pirkl shook his head and thought of his handsome father and him singing: “On the barricades we will meet at last / And lift freedom on high from the chains of the past.”

  “You’re lying,” Pirkl said.

  “You have lost the Holy City.”

  “No,” Pirkl said.

  “An Arab flag flies over the Haram.”

  “It can’t be,” Pirkl said, and then thought, “We have taken Katamon and Bakaa and Talbiyeh. We’ve recaptured Ramat Rahel.”

  “You look thirsty. I have water and some dates.”

  Pirkl sat down, suddenly exhausted, deflated, and thirsty.

  “This morning, two rabbis carried a white bedsheet between two broomsticks. They have surrendered.”

  “We would never give up Jerusalem,” Pirkl said, trailing off, “. . . rather die.”

  “What is in the bag?’

  Pirkl hesitated. “Some dried fruit.”

  “Good. We will share.” The young Arab stood up and limped over to a stone counter. His leg was twisted so that the foot faced the wrong way. “I am the mukhtar, the mayor.”

  “I am the Messiah,” Pirkl said.

  There was a small fishbowl in the middle of the table. A single goldfish swam in a few inches of murky water.