You have been a prisoner for exactly one month. The Red Cross tells us not to worry. The newspapers here don’t write about you anymore. My parents, adorable as always and even more so, do their best to keep up my spirits. My mother tells me funny stories; every day my father, good civil servant that he is, brings me more documentation on the laws protecting prisoners of war. “Believe me,” he says, “the whole world is protecting Elhanan.” My mother adds, “And God, too, no? Are you saying that God isn’t protecting him?” You see how it is.
I’m angry with myself. I should never have let you leave for the Old City. I should have explained to your commanders that your health didn’t permit it. And that we were expecting a child. I should have, I should have.
Will you be home in time for the birth of our son? I know it will be a son. Hurry home, Elhanan. The doctor says it won’t be long.
In your absence, I talk to our son. I talk about you. And all we did together in Europe. Sometimes I burst out laughing. The look on your face, aboard the Cretan, when I announced our marriage!
I love you, and I want our son to know it. I love him, and I want you to know it. How happy we will be, we three together!
What is it that I love about you? Your excessive shyness? The attention you pay to other people’s fears and desires? The way you turn aside when certain memories force their way into your mind? You know what? I’m going to surprise you. What I love about you is myself. Don’t laugh; I love the image you receive of me. In you, thanks to you, I feel purer and more deserving. Because of you I feel closer to God. At breakfast this morning I even said so to my parents. Of course my mother wept. And naturally my father philosophized: “Normally it’s the opposite. Because of God we feel closer to others. But you’ve always had the spirit of contradiction.” After sighing, my mother said innocently, “What do you want from her? To me her vision and yours are the same.” She is wonderful, my mother. Her shortcuts are as good as the ablest thinkers’ eloquence.
I must tell you, for example, her comment about the Altalena. But I’m forgetting: do you know anything about that depressing and tragic story? Altalena is the name of a ship that the Irgun chartered in Europe to transport a thousand armed fighters and a lot of ammunition, which Israel needed, believe me. But our prime minister David Ben-Gurion claimed that the head of the Irgun, Menachem Begin, was in fact mounting a coup. How can we tell if he was right? At any rate, Palmach units shelled the Altalena and set it afire. The upshot was that twenty-odd Irgun fighters, survivors of the death camps, were killed by Jewish bullets. In a radio broadcast, a sobbing Begin ordered his troops not to retaliate: anything but a civil war, he said. For his part, Ben-Gurion told the Knesset that on the day the Third Temple is reconstructed, they would display the cannon that had shelled the Altalena. My mother’s comment: “I weep for the Jews who fired as much as I do for those who fell.” My father’s? A brief and angry, “They’re insane.”
We do live in crazy times. Count Bernadotte, the big shot from the Red Cross and the United Nations, says he’s strictly neutral, but everybody else says he’s pro-Arab. Our administration is organized along British lines: civil servants take themselves very seriously. We have a finance minister without finances. In the meantime, refugees are streaming in from Germany, and deportees from Kenya and Cyprus. Jerusalem is still under siege: the road is open only for huge convoys. You can imagine how they’re greeted—by general jubilation. Everything is rationed, meat, milk, bread. Our neighbor on this floor—you remember him? a skinny, distinguished-looking bachelor?—is leaving for Belgium, where he has family. By the way: to go abroad you need military authorization. You can’t do anything anymore without permits. You see? We’re finally a state like all the others.
Just the same, one thing surprises me: nobody talks about the Old City anymore. Abandoned? Poor thing. Since you left, I can imagine how demoralized it must have become. And yet, at the highest levels, they’d already decided on an operation to relieve it, involving combined forces of Palmach, Irgun and Lehi. With a reckless courage that everybody understood and was hoping for, the troops fought their way in. For ten hours the Old City was in our hands. And then, nobody knows how or why, they were forced to withdraw. An officer told one of our friends (Rafi, you know who I mean, a blond fellow, Yardena’s buddy) that an elite unit had been ordered to evacuate a key point, thus letting the Jordanian Legionnaires retake it without a shot fired. Who’s responsible for that mishap? In cases like that we always say, “History will judge.” Always blame it on history.
And if you become a historian? I’d give a lot to hear you discuss these times with your son. Am I talking foolishness? You’re right, Elhanan, my love. I’d give a lot to see you right now. And even more to see your face when you take your first look at our son, who will—yes indeed, my love—bear your father’s name.
I hope he loves you, and I hope he is loved. I hope he learns all about our common past and is proud of it. You’ll teach him his first lessons. Promise? It is your duty as a father. And I, poor woman, will hold my peace in the next room, or even in the kitchen, and listen to you; and if I weep, don’t be angry.
In the first lesson I want you to say this to him (I had it from my own father): “To learn is to receive, and then it is to give, and then it is to receive again.”
You gave me a son, my love.
You gave me life.
Bless me as I bless you.
“Why didn’t you go back to Jerusalem to live?”
“I was afraid.”
“Afraid to live there?”
“Afraid I wasn’t worthy of living there. Do you understand? Without your mother, how could I wake beneath the same sky that we blessed together every morning? Jerusalem. I can see it now, and I can see us when we first arrived. I was full of faith in your mother and myself. I turned to her and said, ‘I love you,’ and through her I was declaring my love for Jerusalem.”
“Tell me a memory of Jerusalem.”
“A blue cloud shot with red, almost incandescent. A silence full of melodious prayers.”
“Go on.”
“A beggar.”
“A beggar? Not my mother?”
“You’re right—your mother is Jerusalem. But when I recall the road to Jerusalem, it’s always a beggar that I see. He offers to share his meal with me.”
“And you accept?”
“I accept everything from Jerusalem. Only in Jerusalem can a Jew learn the art of receiving.”