The Ascent of Eli Israel Read online

  “I am really the mukhtar,” he said, handing Pirkl a glass of water. He had a sparse mustache, and his eyes wandered lazily. The goldfish swam rapidly back and forth.

  “A Jewish fish,” he said. “A gefilte fish,” he added, laughing.

  Pirkl drank the water, thankful but annoyed by the young Arab.

  “Can you keep a secret?” he said, spitting a date pit onto the ground. Pirkl nodded.

  “This fish. He does not belong to me. It is the only gold I got from the houses. Who has ever seen a fish in the desert?”

  Pirkl thanked him for the water and stood up to leave.

  “Wait, wait,” the young Arab said, his eyes looking past Pirkl. “I want to show you something.” He stood up and clubbed his way over to a cabinet, returning with a pile of photographs. He smiled. “Look. Jews!”

  Pirkl saw mutilated bodies, both male and female, their faces twisted, smashed, eyeless. Disemboweled bodies, here he saw an arm, there a leg, and wondered if he would recognize his father’s hand among those bodies. A bare bootless foot, burned and bloody. Would he know?

  Pirkl leaned over and heaved onto the ground. Only the water came out, clear and hot. He coughed and coughed and finally stood up. “I’m going.”

  “Wait, wait,” the young Arab said. “Please. Take the fish. He does not belong to me.”

  Pirkl grabbed the tiny fishbowl in his arms and ran up the cobbled street toward the once glorious Tiferet Israel Synagogue.

  “Careful,” the Arab called after him. “Don’t spill.”

  On the next street a half-dozen fierce-looking irregulars from the Liberation Army ransacked a house. Pirkl hid behind a wall as the men cut open a mattress in search of treasure, laughing as the stuffing flew out. One man wearing a British-style helmet fired his rifle into the mattress.

  Pirkl turned up a narrow alley, the blanket almost totally obscuring his face. The two mortar shells clinked together as he walked. Then he heard it, at first one voice, then hundreds, singing, he was sure he heard singing: the Shema. He ran toward the voices that seemed to be coming from out of the stones themselves. “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God. The Lord is one!” He ran as fast as he could without spilling the goldfish onto the maze-like streets.

  He arrived at Ashkenazi Square dazed, but exhilarated by the sound of the voices. Hundreds of people milled about; men with beards and sidecurls, wide-brimmed felt hats and long coats, carrying bundles in their arms; women wearing babushkas and long dresses stared blankly; boys in shorts and sandals and pigtailed girls huddled close to their parents, scratching at the earth with their feet.

  The dome of Tiferet Israel seemed to have been erased, supplanted only by the blue sky. All the windows were blown out and bullet holes peppered the walls. Pirkl pulled the blanket off his head as he noticed kaffiyeh-wearing men, with bandoliers slung across their chests, standing close by with rifles in their arms. He wandered confused through the crowd with the goldfish bowl in his arms.

  “It’s over,” a man in beige pants and shirt said in English, walking through the crowd. “It’s all over. Your rabbis are in the Armenian Seminary now discussing the terms of the surrender.” The letters “U.N.” were painted in white on his helmet.

  Surrender! Over! Pirkl thought. What is over? It can’t be. We still have my two mortars. We’re not done yet. I have bullets. I’ll fight. It can’t be over. The Old City is over?

  Most of the men were Orthodox Jews who would not have picked up a gun to fight.

  “Where are the fighters?” Pirkl asked a man swaying, lost in prayer. “Where is my father?” he asked another, who said something in Yiddish. “Why didn’t you fight instead of pray?” he said to another, kicking dust up at him.

  He saw a young girl standing alone on the edge of the crowd staring into the distance. She reminded him of Hannah the way her shoulder blades showed through the back of her dress, the way her hair was cut unevenly at the neck. He touched her arm softly and held out the goldfish to the girl.

  “Does this fish belong to you?”

  She looked through him as if he were not there and batted the fishbowl out of his hands. It shattered on the ground. Watching the fish struggle for a last breath of desert air, Pirkl wanted to cry, but he did not want his father to see him crying like a baby.

  “You are looking for the Portzim?” a man asked Pirkl. “Go to Rothschild House.”

  Pirkl went. And there he found more refugees gathering baskets and bedding onto their shoulders. One woman carried a baby in her arms and a box of matzo. He saw a crowd of men standing beneath the arches of Rothschild House, soldiers in beige short-sleeved shirts, some wearing wool caps, others bareheaded, exhausted, weary, standing with their hands at their sides. There were no more than two dozen of them and Pirkl scanned their faces. And then he saw his father standing with a coat slung coolly over his shoulder. Pirkl ran to him, threw his arms around his father’s waist.

  “Malchyk! What are you doing here?” his father asked, disentangling Pirkl from his waist. “Where’s your mother?”

  “Look what I brought,” Pirkl said, opening his satchel. “We’re not beat yet!”

  “Go back to the square. Get out of here.”

  The harshness of his father’s voice broke Pirkl’s heart. He had never heard him speak that way, and he burst into tears, throwing a bear hug around his father’s waist.

  “Look! I brought bullets.”

  “I want you to go back home,” his father said.

  “But, we still have my shells.”

  “Why didn’t you stay with your mother?” his father said, shaking his head.

  Pirkl knew he couldn’t go home now, he wasn’t a quitter. He stood in silence next to his father, writing his name in the dusty earth with his foot.

  A few minutes later a smartly dressed Arab Legion officer addressed the group of assembled soldiers in both English and Arabic. “From this moment on, you are prisoners of His Majesty King Abdullah of Transjordan and you cannot be harmed.”

  The prisoners were marched along the Gate of Heaven Road toward the old Turkish prison near Jaffa Gate. Pirkl felt his legs were too short as he walked behind his father, who did not say a word, or look back. One of the fighters put his Haganah cap on Pirkl’s head as they filed along Rehov Beit El, House of the Lord Street, and asked him his name. He said only his last name. The fighter tapped Pirkl’s father on the shoulder and said, “The youth brigade has taken over.” Before turning up Rehov Ha Yehudim, the Street of the Jews, Pirkl’s father finally did look around and he saw his downcast young son and the Jewish Quarter burning at their backs.

  From the prison window as he tried to sleep, Pirkl could see the Tower of David rising from the Citadel. He imagined climbing the stone walls of the tower, wrapping his arms around its neck and reaching out for the moon, hovering low over the blanched city; and there were no fires, and there was no bombing, only the scattered sky filled with stars and the lonely tooting of a single shepherd’s flute. Pirkl did not know then that he would spend the next half year in a Jordanian prison camp where he would sleep in a tent beneath a cold moon and become bar mitzvah in the Iraqi desert. He did not know that he would not return to the Old City until another nineteen years and another war had passed, and that he would enter Lion’s Gate as a soldier, only footsteps behind the future prime minister. He did not know as he knelt by the prison window that his mother searched hospitals and makeshift infirmaries for her only son. He imagined his mother standing on the rooftop of their apartment house in Rehavia sadly looking toward the walled city. And he called to her and waved his free arm and said, “Momma, I found him. I found him!”

  An Unwelcome Guest

  Yossi Bar-Yosef felt his young wife Devorah stir in sleep. He rolled over in bed, felt her warm breath against his face and lay watching her until she was still again. Then she slept quietly. A large round moon hung low over Jerusalem, its white light spilling into their Muslim Quarter apartment. He sat up in bed, reached for his kippah
on the nightstand, and placed it on his head. The night was silent in contrast to the chaos of the day; Arab merchants hawking fruits and vegetables, pilgrims shouting prayers and curses, army patrols strolling through the narrow stone streets. Now he could only hear his wife’s even breathing and the two soldiers joking quietly in Hebrew beneath their bedroom window. In a few hours the muezzin would call the Ishmaelites to prayer for the first time in the new day.

  He got out of bed and made his way to the kitchen by moonlight, nearly skipping all the way in his bare feet. It was the month of Tishri and the stone floors were chilly even for early autumn. He filled a pot with water, lit the gas with a match, and stood by the stove for a moment thinking of his wife, his Devorah Bee: her soft olive skin, her curly brown hair, her green eyes, the way her body felt beneath his.

  “You are welcome,” the Arab man said, startling Yossi. “Welcome. Have a seat,” he said gesturing to the empty chair at the kitchen table. “Welcome,” the Arab man said again, smiling.

  Yossi did not wonder how the old man had crept past the soldiers in the street, nor did he wonder how he had found his way through the locked door. He had waited every Passover for Elijah the Prophet to arrive and drink his cup of wine, and he prayed daily for the coming of the Messiah. Yossi knew that many people wandered the dreamy moonlit paths between sleep and prayer in this golden city of light and stone.

  The Arab may have been sixty-five or seventy years old. His face was cracked like a wadi in the heat of summer, his nose round, bulbous, and pocked like a Judean hilltop, his thin salt and pepper mustache ratty, careless, a goatherd’s mustache. He wore a black and white checked kaffiyeh on his head and a filthy striped caftan that reached almost to his slippered feet.

  “Sit,” said the Arab man in English. “We will share some tea and nana.”

  “What do you want here?”

  The Arab man said nothing.

  “My wife. She’s sleeping.”

  “She sleeps like a baby.”

  The thought of someone invading his new wife’s privacy, someone even imagining Devorah asleep infuriated Yossi. He took a step forward and whispered through his teeth, “Get out! Why are you — ”

  “The water is ready,” the Arab man said, cutting Yossi off.

  Yossi turned his attention to the pot. The water bubbled over, hissing against the stove’s flames.

  “My name is Ziad.”

  “Who are you?” Yossi asked.

  “I am Ziad Abu Youssif.”

  “You are in the wrong place. This is a private home,” Yossi said, returning with the pot of water.

  The old man only straightened his kaffiyeh on his head, smiled, and reached for a glass. He poured himself some water and said, “You are a rabbi?”

  “No. No. I am studying. Near the Kotel.”

  The Arab man smiled a brown-toothed smile. “So you are a rabbi.”

  “I’m not a rabbi yet. I am studying,” Yossi said, and then asked, “Why are you here?”

  “This is my home, rabbi,” the Arab man answered in an even tone. “A tea bag, please.”

  “Your home?” Yossi said, surprised. “This is my home.”

  “How long have you stayed here?” the Arab man asked.

  “Eight months.”

  “You are just married?” the Arab asked, taking a tea bag from a tin on the table. “Where are you from?”

  “New York,” Yossi answered.

  “I was born in that room, where you sleep. My first son, Youssif, the dark one, was born in the same room. My father was born where you are sitting. This was not always a kitchen.”

  “If this is your house what color are the tiles on the floor of my bedroom?”

  “The Jews are always changing things.”

  They sat in silence while their tea brewed in front of them. Then they drank. After a moment Yossi bit his lip at the corner, about to ask, “Why did you leave?” but before he had a chance, the old man said, “There were wars.”

  Yossi knew that many Arabs had fled Israel in 1948 and again during the Six-Day War. He had seen the squalid refugee camps and the anguished faces on his TV set, but he also knew the names Chmelnicki, Babi-Yar, and Auschwitz like a mantra. After a moment he said, “Abraham is your father as well as mine.”

  The old man did not seem to hear as he bent over to pick something up off the floor. It was a small wooden box. The Arab carefully placed it on the table between them. Yossi swallowed hard and thought about calling to the soldiers outside the window, but knew it would be useless. The bomb would go off before they could make it halfway up the stairs.

  It had only been eight months since he and Devorah had stood under the huppa, only eight months since he had first kissed her after stomping the traditional glass representing the fragility of life, eight months since he had first touched his virgin wife. That was supposed to be the beginning; a family, a Jewish family in the heart of Jerusalem, and now, they were about to be blown to bits like that bus he had seen smoldering in the spring rain on Jaffa Street.

  The Arab man undid a small latch and folded open a backgammon board.

  “You play shesh besh?” he asked.

  Yossi looked out the window and could see the moon higher over the city now, its light so bright, the face of the moon almost pulsing.

  “It’s the middle of the night.”

  The Arab began setting up the board, the white stones first, then the black stone disks in their places.

  The old man took the last sip of his tea. “I will play you for the house. If you lose, I will live here again. If I lose, I will return to the Street of Chains begging for baksheesh.”

  Yossi was not interested in hearing about a broken man begging for shekels. He said, “No,” and then said, “no,” again.

  “I am joking, of course,” the Arab man said. “We will play for the right to speak.”

  Yossi would not get back to sleep now. He could feel his blood boiling through his body, his hands shaking, the small hairs at the back of his neck standing on end. “Okay. I’ll play. Just let me check on my wife.”

  “But, it’s your turn to roll.” The Arab man had already rolled the first die: a four.

  Yossi imagined his Devorah Bee curled up in bed, wetting her lips in sleep, kicking her leg against a bad dream. He thought of her slightly rounded belly and the child swimming within it. He stood halfway up from his chair, then picked up the die and rolled a three.

  “My move first,” the Arab man said. “Some more tea.”

  The old man rolled a six and a one. He moved the black stone to his side of the outer board, covering it with the one. Yossi rolled a two and a one. Already, one of his stones was unprotected. The Arab picked up the dice in his large hands and rolled. Then Yossi rolled. Only the sound of the dice clicking against the wooden board could be heard above the old man’s labored breathing.

  “Do you speak Hebrew?” the Arab asked.

  “To read the Torah,” Yossi answered, head down.

  “Tell me, Rabbi, how did you get here?”

  Yossi tried to move his two white stones from the inner board but could not. His pieces were almost entirely blocked in.

  “Why here?” the Arab said.

  “ ‘If I should forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its strength.’ Tehillim. Psalm One thirty-seven,” Yossi said.

  “I do not forget,” the Arab man said, holding out his right hand.

  Yossi did not look up from the board and said matter-of-factly, “This land was given to Abraham by God. Abraham was the father of the Jews. We are here because we are Jewish. Because the land was promised to us by God.”

  The Arab rolled again, saying, “But we are both sons of Abraham.”

  Yossi rolled quickly and made his move. His mind was not on the game now. The Arab rolled the dice again.

  “Abraham was the best of men,” Yossi continued flatly, “but he contained some bad elements as we all do and those elements came out in his son Ishmael. He was the
son of a slave girl. A wild man.”

  The old man’s stones were all strongly in place on his side of the inner board. Yossi rolled but still could not move his two white stones trapped deep among the Arab’s black stones. The Arab rolled and began removing his pieces from the board. “Beit ‘Itab,” he whispered. “Beit Mahsir,” he said on his next roll. “Deir el Hawa,” he said, removing two more pieces. “Jarash.” “Lifta.” “El Maliha.” “Suba,” he said, winning the game. Yossi cleared the board and began to set up another game.

  “Deir Yassin!” the Arab said loudly. “Do you know Deir Yassin, Rabbi?”

  Yossi motioned for the man to be quiet, he did not want to wake up his wife. The Arab lowered his voice.

  “Do you know of Deir Yassin? No. It was a beautiful little village of orange and lemon trees, almond trees, and date palms on the outside of Jerusalem. Like the others, it is also erased from the face of the earth. Now it is called Givat Shaul. I’m sure you know Givat Shaul.”

  He did know Givat Shaul; his wife’s aunt and uncle lived in an apartment not far from the mental institution. He had visited once or twice, but never saw a sign of Deir Yassin.

  “You came to Deir Yassin one morning — ”

  Yossi interrupted, “I’ve never been — ”

  “It’s my time to speak. I won the game. Now you must listen.”

  Yossi shifted uncomfortably in his chair.

  “You came to Deir Yassin, a small quiet village at dawn. You were three hundred men with guns and mortars. You broke into homes, shot whole families, women and children, threw bombs into houses, machine-gunned us, butchered us, raped us. You took prisoners into the streets blindfolded and shot us dead. You left our bodies on the ground. You bound our hands, stripped us naked, put us in trucks, and drove us through the streets of Jerusalem. We were afraid and some of us ran.”

  Nonsense! Yossi thought. He had not even received his military training yet. He rolled the wooden die.

  “You tried to scare the Arabs out of Jerusalem,” the old man said and straightened his kaffiyeh. Then he rolled a three. It was Yossi’s turn to roll first. The moon had moved behind some clouds, leaving them in almost complete darkness.