Amos Oz - The Hill of Evil Counsel

"It's all over with Linda," Abrasha declared suddenly with the air of one resuming an interrupted conversation. "And good riddance, too."

"What, again?" Father asked, and I could sense his schoolmasterly smile.

"Finished. She's nabbed the son of Hamidoff from Barclay's Bank, and they're off to Paris next weekend. No wedding."

"There's no point in feeling bad about it," Father said reassuringly. "You were too good for her anyway."

Lilienblum suddenly exploded with a dull groan:

"To hell with them. They're all the same shit. Englishmen, Frenchmen, women. They ought to be kicked out, all of them. And Dr. Weizmann, too."

Abrasha was a taciturn albino, with no eyebrows and delicate white skin and hair, as if he were made of paper. He started the cutting machine. My private name for this machine was the Guillotine. When the High Commissioner was kidnapped, they'd bring him here and in this very basement Ephraim would execute the sentence mercilessly, without batting an eyelid. We must have no pity on the foes of Israel. Let alone plead with them, like Dr. Weizmann. A shy, unconscious smile played around Abrasha's lips as he guillotined the edges of the pamphlets. And I stuffed the wriggly snakes of paper down the front of my vest.

Lilienblum, who was an Orthodox Jew, was arranging the letters in the oblong frame, using steel forceps. His glasses were steel-framed, too. He always addressed me in Yiddish as "little devil." He would wheedle in his stentorian voice:

" A Yiddishe yingele mit a goyish punin. A pogromshchik mit a goldene neshome. "

But for once he spoke not to me but to himself, as if unable to contain himself at this morning's sordid news:

"Barclay's Bank. Women," he grunted. " Pfui. Shit!"

At this I went out into the yard. The spell of the early light had worn off. There was no freshness left in the trees or around them. The air was beginning to glow white-hot, just as I had predicted. The Grill boys were not back from their leopard hunt yet. When they wanted to tease me, they would always chant their stupid rhymes at me: "Uri, Uri, sound and fury." Or: "Uri wants to play; frighten him away." And they made up dirty stories about Ephraim Nehamkin and my mother. They had written in yellow paint on the broken-down gate: KRAZY FROIKE FUKS URIS MOM.

Underneath this inscription, I suddenly discovered now a postscript that I could not begin to understand but which I started scratching out furiously with my fingernails:

AND URI TO.

At a quarter past nine, the van from the Angel Bakery turned into the lane. For some reason it pulled up outside our gate. I stopped scratching at the writing and watched to see what on earth. It was hot. Angry wasps were mustering under the dripping tap. A stray butterfly fluttered aimlessly among the thistles. There was a dusty smell in the air. Zaki, the baker's boy, leaped down from the driver's cab. He glanced quickly up and down the lane, opened up the rear door of the van, and drew out from among the baskets of bread a kind of surprised, blinking gentleman, a diminutive gentleman in a dark suit, clutching a tool bag. I couldn't understand why they had fetched the doctor. Perhaps Mommy had fainted again, or Helena Grill had had a fit of hysterics. But since when did doctors arrive in bakers' vans? As Zaki and the doctor ran past me toward the basement steps, I suddenly identified the man: it wasn't the doctor, it was Mr. Szczupak, the proprietor of Riviera Fashions on King George Street. I remembered how Mommy had taken me there to help her choose a summer dress. Perhaps she had been disappointed at the selection. She had changed her mind, and instead of buying a dress decided to go to another shop and put down a deposit on a phonograph. I recalled that Mr. Szczupak was not upset but invited her to come back to his shop after the holidays. In the autumn he would have a new stock in, he said. The fashions would have changed, too.

From somewhere or other Ephraim appeared, in a blue overall. He caught up with Zaki and Mr. Szczupak, gently took the visitor by tie elbow, and escorted him downstairs to the printing press. Not a word passed between them. Zaki turned, slipped outside, scrutinized the rooftops and balconies briefly, sniffed the air, and made up his mind. He made a dash for the driver's cab and reversed the van up the lane and out into the road. A stench of gasoline mingled for a moment with the smell of dust. And then once more there was only dust and angry wasps around the dripping tap.

"Scram. Get out of here. This minute." Father ordered me out in an expressionless voice.

I had hardly ever heard him speak like that before.

I obeyed at once and left the press. But before I left I just had time to notice in a flash that it was not Mr. Szczupak after all, but another man who looked like him, an older man, a kind of faded, worn-out version of Mr. Szczupak. Perhaps his older brother. And I saw Ephraim and the visitor disappearing through a narrow passage between the piled-up rolls of paper. I felt an icy shiver down my spine. Even if they killed me. Even if they pulled out all my fingernails one by one. Even if they killed Bat-Ammi. I'd never tell.

10

At midday, the Grill boys came back from the hunt. I was pleased to see that the leopard had been too cunning for them. Still, they did not return empty-handed, and at that I was not so pleased. They had brought back a cardboard box full of brass cartridge-cases. Never mind. I didn't care. I knew, and they didn't. In three places — in the back entrance to the staircase, inside the door of the shed in the yard, and in another secret place, in the mulberry tree — I had hidden explosive booby traps the way I'd learned from Ephraim. They were cans full of kerosene with remote-control fuses. In the kerosene I had put live matches, broken glass, slivers of brass, and electric wires.

Let them come.

They'll pay with their own blood.

Let them come, I say.

I decided for once to overlook the Grill boys' taunts. True, their father was a cooperative bus driver, they had a sister and I didn't, they had cartridge cases, they were on the tracks of a leopard, and they hadn't taken me hunting with them. Never mind. What I had seen that morning Boaz Grill would never see, even in his wildest dreams.

Joab said:

"He's been trying to start something with Bat-Ammi. He begged her to let him see and she laughed at him and wouldn't let him and she told us all about it, how he cried and ran away home. Little rabbit. He thought he could do to Bat-Ammi what Froike Nehamkin does to his mom."

I said nothing.

"He doesn't know what to say. Look at him, turning his face away, as if we can't see that he's blubbering."

I said nothing.

I could have told them that I had seen their mom changing her dress the day before in the mirror through the window during the curfew. But I kept quiet and said nothing.

"Bat-Ammi says he's still a baby. She says he hasn't got a single hair down there yet," Abner shrilled.

Suddenly I turned and rushed up the stairs, taking them two at a time, running up, onto the roof, to my lookout, not hearing their laughter or the things they were saying about my parents. Let them talk. I've got no time for them. I'm on the lookout.

Carefully, thoughtfully, I had selected a concealed position on the roof, among the junk and the water cisterns, behind the clotheslines. From here I could survey the whole city. The Schneller Barracks were spread out at my feet. I even had a telescope, made from a Quaker Oats package and some disks of bluish glass. I could see the English soldiers busily preparing for the High Commissioner's visit. From here, if I only had a machine gun, I could pick off the High Commissioner, the Grill boys, everyone. And then escape to the mountains and be a mountain boy. Forever.