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AND NOW, THE CITY. The dream of Herzl. The taboo of Moses. The agony of Abraham. The boy Isaac. The flourished knife. But where is the lamb for sacrifice? The hill of Moriah. The scattered seed. The Covenant. Commandments by the bucketful. Thou shalt not this, thou shalt not that, et cetera. The land defiled vomiteth out her inhabitants. Burnt offerings. Abominations. The shepherd king who smoteth the lame and the blind. New foundations: the Ark of the Lord. The House, built of stone made ready beforehand - the bowls, the snuffers, the basons, the spoons, the tongs of pure gold, the censers. The House of God! No backdoor hawkers, no riff-raff, no spitting, no smoking! Moneylenders by appointment only. No strangers. No schmutz. No perverts. No onanists, sodomites or women. None impure in either thought or deed.Nevertheless - BLOK, trudging up from the junction of the Jaffa Road, the low stone tin-de-siecle houses, the honking vans, trucks, chuffing buses, the chafing crowds bent against March gusts, shuffling shoppers, trippers, idlers, soldiers on leave, soldiers on duty, weighed down by armaments and pouches, poking in waste bins, hassling Arabs for identity cards, proof of the legitimacy of strangers ... Men of religion, women of the domestic hearth, perambulating the next generation, lawyers, accountants, itinerants, thieves, market analysts, civil servants, secretaries, shop assistants, pickpockets, brain surgeons, brush salesmen, tourists, jejune and japanese jews, jentiles, All Human Life Is Here. Thin Avi, loyal friend of Blok's childhood, by his side, ready to catch the elbow of the semi-invalid as he toils on rubbery legs up the unfinished pedestrian precinct of Ben Yehuda Street, past the early stake-outs at open air cafes, the sullen American youths gnawing at ice cream and the intangible roots of their parents' neuroses, through the narrow alley of the vendor of foreign newspapers and magazines, Le Monde, The Sunday Times, Herald Tribune, Newsweek, Paris Match, Der Stern, the world outside, down into Shamai Street in the direction of the accommodation agency (eighteen hundred dollars from the State! and Papa Blok's sanction: `You have a home with your mother and me, Avremel, but I know you'll want to stand on your own feet; live as you want to live.'): `FLATS, FLATS, FLATS WITH ICARUS - WE GIVE WINGS TO THE HOPES OF THE HOMELESS.'
Buzzing, strobing neon lights upon silent young men and women sitting on stools too high for any but the tallest to rest their feet on the floor, glumly turning the pages of huge ledgers chained to an adjoining wall. Thin Avi, his ideals scraped raw both by History and Current Affairs, facing the stern-faced lady working her teeth through a cheese sandwich behind a wooden counter with non-negotiable demands:
`A two-room flat for my friend here. Centrally located. Under two hundred dollars. No bugs. No religious neighbours.'
`This is Jerusalem,' said the lady primly. `You'll take what you can get.'
She dragged over the master ledger, reeling off the mod cons available. `Two rooms Gilo, no bath. One room Tel Arza, no shower. Two in Rassco, supply your own heating. In Saint Simon, luxus, nine months deposit.' Thin Avi vetoing each location in turn: `You don't want to live in the colonies... that street is far too orthodox… retired policemen live all over that one... a fascist stronghold... football fans... too many new Russian immigrants... a nest of Labour Party pensioners... Not that my friend, of course, is prejudiced. But where one lives, of course you understand.'
`Under two hundred dollars, you can forget paradise,' she said, giving them an address in Katamon D.
`We shall take the Number 18 bus,' said Avi. Blok nodded, as his friend took his elbow. The bus was packed to capacity with men and women heading home from the Mahaneh Yehuda market. Enormous shopping bags and baskets crammed with lettuces, cabbages, tomatoes, aubergines, potatoes, watermelons, carrots, marrows, turnips, oranges, grapes, plums, the fruits of the earth. Moved reluctantly as Blok and Avi pressed down the aisle of the bus and then replaced on their toes. At each stop another mass of humanity climbs aboard, pushing the luckless in the aisle further and further back amid loud demands and protests, until the interior of the vehicle is one pressed lump of flesh, cloth, textile fibres, sweaty hair. Women scream as heavy boots demolish their purchases, men trip over melons, onions, bananas squelch, crushing against knees, a pungent odour as of a glue factory on an indifferent day. As the driver presses his front door shut passengers cram illegally through the back door. A pregnant woman's fare is passed forward over people's heads, change reluctantly rendered and passed back the same way, small coins dropping down open collars. `Thank you, thank you! God will bless you!' cries the blessed one. `Next time. . .'the driver mumbles, his eyes baleful in his rearview mirror, the bus fending for itself down the Jaffa Road, his tone suggesting moral imperatives that cannot be sustained......Past the Generali building with its winged stone lion, the Street of Shlomzion the Queen, King David, the grand hotel overlooking the Valley and the walls of the Old City to one side, the stone tower of the YMCA on the other, landmark of a Jerusalem of a quieter and more tolerant age, they say, past the iconic diad of the Montefiore windmill and the Dormition Church on Mount Zion, skirting the Ottoman railway station, down Emek Refa'im - the Valley of the Ghosts Road, past the Semadar Cinema and Bank Discount and Ari's Pizza and the Rumanian Grill, the crush alleviated little by little along the way as the shoppers begin to disembark, until, the last hundredweight of carrots removed off Blok's feet, Thin Avi plucks him off the bus, pulling his tottering figure up a labyrinth of newly reasphalted roads, low houses whose patios have not quite decided yet to be gardens or garbage dumps, abandoned hoes and trowels everywhere, cement spilling from torn sacks lying by piles of bricks intended for unbuilt extensions, fat ladies on wicker chairs hidden by sagging laundry lines. An old man coughing in an open doorway. Ritual calls to small children to cease whatever they are at. Clothespegs underfoot. A young lady in a flyer's parka, holding a child of about two in her arms: Come in, yes, this is the right address, the self-contained flat is in the rear. A room large enough for a midget to swing a quail on Yom Kippur, and, through the connecting wall, the ominous thumpa-thumpathump of Seventies' hi-fidelity rock. Even here, modern times. `Two hundred and fifty dollars a month.'
`No,' said Blok.
Exit, with Thin Avi, walking on, west, towards the Rabbi Herzog highway, cars, trucks and buses toiling by the brown sides of hills crowned with new apartment blocks: Jerusalem of new angular concrete, prosperity and the housing shortage. The clouds chasing a patch of blue sky towards the Monastery of the Cross. They took a Number 22 bus back into town, to Icarus.
`More wings,' Thin Avi ordered, curtly.
`Some people you can't satisfy,' the lady said. She scribbled on a torn-off note. `Try this one. It's very central. The landlord is not the world's best charmer. But you have to look behind the face.
Indeed. A picturesque old house in Ussishkin Street, red roofed and walled in well-worn stone. The third floor flat solid with congealed dust, old broken furniture and debris, cracked shoes, wooden clogs, hairless brooms, cardboard boxes inlaid with cockroach droppings. The landlord, a terribly decayed old man in a dressing gown, whose son, built as a retired sumo wrestler, sang the praises of the household. Neither Blok nor Avi wished to look behind the face.
`Three hundred dollars a month.'
A sigh, another exit, opposite the tall white building in which the Nazi mass murderer Adolf Eichmann had been tried and sentenced to death by hanging. Now it was a Cultural Centre with a fine theatre and a workshop studio where new immigrants and other lovers of Zion - or so they were assumed to be - could learn Hebrew in five months for a small fee and much sweat and dolour, unlocking, or so they hoped, the coded inner world of the Ingathered Exiles. For those not yet cognizant, adjacent billboards were covered with peeling posters in English, promoting a course of lectures by the learned Rabbi Levine, who had begun life as an agent for the FBI in America, but was now domiciled in the Holy Land, campaigning for the expulsion of the Arab population, the banning of marriage and sexual relations between Jews and non Jews and the establishment of a theocratic state. His dark bright eyes gazed shrewdly upon Blok from xeroxed portraits, as on one yet far, far from enlightenment but still not beyond hope. VISIT THE MUSEUM OF THE FUTURE HOLOCAUST. The poster added, enticingly: FREE OF CHARGE. The picture of an eye, shedding a lone tear, was appended.
`We have moved on, since you locked yourself away from us,' said Avi. `Even you can't stop the march of time.'Time!
Hanging like lead weights on his buttocks, anchoring him to the only armchair in Esther and Avi's apartment, temporarily accommodated at the fourth floor of a Bak'a apartment block, amid rolled up sheets, cardboard boxes of old papers, documents and social service reports, defunct handbags, shoes, paintbrushes, half finished canvases propped against walls, the latest burst of her artistic endeavours. Esther's cat, Adolphe, named, she assured friends, after the French-Hollywood ladies' man, Menjou, scavenging among the gouache tubes and old nylons, sniffing about Blok's socks and feet, on those occasions he deigned to show. A huge ruffled black beast, scarred with a thousand combats, with one eye in a permanent squint; Esther informed Blok he was the terror of the neighbourhood, his stamping ground enclosing twenty garbage skips. `He is my reminder that nature is wild,' she said. But Blok responded only with a raised eyebrow. He had maintained, since his release, a low verbal profile, restricting himself to a handful of key phrases: `No.' `Um.' `Uh-huh?' `Uh-huh.' `Mmmm.' And a range of shrugs, nods of the head, drooping of eyelids, inclined eyebrows. Palm up, requesting an end of the matter. Forefinger and thumb, rubbing nose. Passage of the right or left hand over barren scalp, in the rare moments it is not hidden by the old `sock' cap he had found in Avi's army kitbag: the old `Palmah' commando icon, visage of an old lost age. Although Esther assured him: `Bald is beautiful. There's nothing then between you and God.' A farrago of raised and wiggled eyebrows, as Blok pastes into the pages of his returned scrapbook an item lining one of Esther's junk drawers:(Undated, Yediot Rishonot, probably early 1975):
WITHIN THREE YEARS THERE WILL BE TWO WARS, THEN - THE REDEMPTION -
- says Sh- Sh- (see picture), the man who prophesied the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, based on verses from the Bible, the Zohar and the books of the Kabbalah. He says the enemy will conquer part of Jerusalem for a short while, and Israel will operate unconventional weapons - but there is no need to worry: the footsteps of the Messiah are near.. . . In Zohar Bereshit (Zohar Genesis) these words appear: `And all the nations will combine against the Daughter-of-Jacob to destroy her . . .' Pointing to the internal situation of the State, which also hints at the `Time of the End', Sh- quotes the Zohar (Neso, page 125) relating that, at the approach of the End `many and manifest will be the deeds of corruption in Israel, the people's leaders will take bribes, they will not support the pupils of the Wise and the rulers will be of the rabble'.
The main purpose of the rabble - writes the Gaon of Vilna - is to couple Esau with Ishmael and to separate between Messiah Son of David and Messiah Son of Joseph (his harbinger) whose joint task it is to bring Redemption to Israel. Therefore one must break the power of the rabble in Israel, which power lies mainly at the gates of Jerusalem and especially at `iftecha de'karta' - the Opening of the City - which lies on the western mid-line (perhaps a hint of the Government Offices District?)
…`For me this is not mysticism but physics,' declares Sh-… `Empirical answers do not suffice when we are talking of the Jewish people or of Jewish problems…'
Rabbi Levine, secure upon his poster, smiled: `My time will come!'
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