Amos Oz - The Hill of Evil Counsel

7

In Tel Arza no civic center was built, and the road was not paved. A stone quarry was started on one of the farther slopes. Mr. Cohen opened a small workshop producing modish furniture for the notables of Jericho and Bethlehem, the Governor of Jerusalem, and even for the palace of Emir Abdullah in Transjordan. Engineer Brzezinski climbed onto the roof of his house and rigged up an enormous radio antenna so as to be able to catch the signals of the farthest stations each night. He also built a telescope with his own hands, and installed it, too, on his roof, because he had promised himself that he would be the first to see them when they arrived.

At night the valleys all around were alive with sounds. The wildness of the rocks and mountains reached out to touch the house. Jackals howled nearby, and the blood froze at the thought of them padding softly, tensely, among the saplings, up to the shuttered windows, perhaps even onto the veranda. A single Mandatory street lamp, encased in small, square panes and topped with a green dome, cast a solitary light on the unpaved road. The fingers of the fig tree at the bottom of the garden were empty. There was nobody outside in the dark. The square-paned lamp cast its light in vain. All the residents were in the habit of shutting themselves up in their houses as soon as darkness fell. Every evening Madame Yabrova played the piano, and her niece, Lyubov Binyamina, the cello, with desolating sadness. Father's fellow townsman the elderly professor Julius Wertheimer collected clippings from foreign newspapers that mentioned anything to do with supernatural phenomena. He considered the laws of nature to be a practical joke, and he longed to find a loophole in them, perhaps some revealing formula that would enable him and the whole persecuted Jewish people to escape from the pull of gravity and to float up into spheres where the contagion had not yet spread.

Every night, far into the small hours, Engineer Brzezinski twiddled the tuning knob of his radio, seeking and finding and then abandoning different stations, Berlin, London, Milan, Vichy, Cairo, and Cyrenaica. Some of the neighbors said that he often brought bottles of arak back with him from his work on the northern shores of the Dead Sea, and that at night he got drunk on this frightful Oriental drink.

He would tell them how as a young man he had been the director of a gigantic engineering project in Russia, how he had set up the hydroelectric power station in Taganrog, "like writing an epic poem." Then he had fallen foul of Stalin; he was captured, imprisoned, tortured; he escaped by the skin of his teeth and finally reached Jerusalem via Afghanistan, Teheran, and Baghdad. But here, at the Dead Sea Works, he was given trifling little jobs to do: mending pumps, keeping an eye on the generator, repairing miserable fuse boxes, supervising some provincial transformer.

One night he suddenly shouted "Fire! Fire!" at the top of his voice. He had come across a broadcast of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony from some Nazi station in the Balkans.

Father immediately got out of bed, dressed, and bravely crossed the dirt road; he knocked on the door and called out politely, "Mr. Brzezinski, please, Mr. Brzezinski."

The door did not open. There was no fire, either. Only the smell of dying campfires borne on the wind from the depths of the wadi. And the wail of a distant muezzin, or perhaps it was a hungry jackal crying in the woods. On nights like these, Hillel would wake up with an attack of panic and asthma. He could see through the slats of the shutters the skull of the Turkish janissary hovering in the dark air, grinning at him with its dead teeth. He would pull the sheet up over his head and burst into tears. Then his father would get up and come into his bedroom with bare feet, to straighten the bedclothes and sing him a soothing song:

Night is reigning in the skies,

Time for you to close your eyes.

Lambs and kids have ceased from leaping,

All the animals are sleeping.

Every bird is in its nest,

All Jerusalem's at rest.

Then, toward dawn, Mitya the lodger might suddenly cry out in his sleep on the other side of the wall: "Ruthless! Don't touch him! He's still alive! Y-a ny-e zna-yu! Y-a ny-e po-ni-ma-yu! Nothing!"

Then silence.

Outside in the fields, there was nothing but jackals and milt until morning.

8

Mitya addressed Father:

"In that evening suit, Dr. Kipnis, you look like the spit and image of the martyred Haim Arlosoroff. There is no peace for the wicked. So I shall ask you a small diplomatic favor. Could you pass along a short message from me to the foreign High Commissioner? Just one or two urgent sentences? It is a message the High Commissioner has been secretly waiting for for some time, and he probably cannot understand why it has not yet come."

Father said:

"If I do actually manage to have a private conversation with the High Commissioner, which I very much doubt."

Mitya suddenly grinned, baring his rotten teeth. He chewed his shirt collar, with an expression of pain and disgust on his bony face and a fire in his eyes.

"Give him this message, word for word: Our true Messiah will surely come, he will not tarry. He will come whirling a flaming sword in his hand. He will come from the east and lay all the mountains low. He will not leave any that pisseth against the wall. Do you think, Dr. Kipnis, that you can repeat this message word for word without making a mistake?"

Father said:

"I don't think I can undertake to convey that message. And certainly not in English."

And Mitya, frantically stroking the oilcloth on the kitchen table, replied in a hoarse voice:

"Jerusalem, which slayeth its prophets, shall burn the new Hellenizers in hellfire."

At once he added politely:

"Good evening, Mrs. Kipnis. Pozhal'sta, why are you staring at me so cruelly, I was simply making a small joke with your husband. I shall never forgive myself if, heaven forbid, I have accidentally frightened you. Nikogda. I must beg your pardon right away; there, I've done it. How magnificent you look, Mrs. Kipnis, in your blue evening dress, if I may make so bold. How magnificent, too, is the springtime in our Jerusalem on the eve of the great destruction. And the hot tap in the bathroom is dripping and dripping and knows no rest. Surely we ought to do something without further delay. How much time do we have left? There, I've apologized and I've gone. Da. Good night. May the name of the wicked rot, and the innocent shall see it and be glad. Now good night once again to you all. Happy is he who waits His coming."

He nearly knocked the child over as he dashed back to his room, panting, his arms hanging limply at his sides, his fists clenched. But he did not slam his door; he closed it gently behind him as if taking great care not to hurt the door or the doorpost or the sudden silence he had left behind him.

Mother said:

"The High Commissioner could never understand how a boy like Mitya suffers. Even the King couldn't help. Or the Messiah himself, not that I believe in him."

She closed her eyes and continued in a different tone of voice:

"But I could. I could easily rescue him from the madness and death that are building up inside him. Yes, me. That's loneliness, Hans, that's real exile, despair, depression, persecution. I could come to him in the middle of the night in my nightgown, sweetly perfumed, and touch him; or at least I could bring him another woman in the night and happily stand by and watch. I could put out the rising fires and give him peace and quiet. So what if he smells. To the forests and the sea, every man and woman in the world stinks. Even you, Hans. And then to hear him moaning between my hands, shouting in disjointed Russian, singing, grunting like a felled ox. Then resting peacefully. I'd close his eyes with my fingers and lull him to sleep. Even the stars and mountains would love me for it. Now, stop looking at me like that. I want you to know once and for all how much I loathe, yes, loathe, your Wertheimers and Bubers and Shertoks. I wish your terrorists would blow them all sky high. And stop looking at me like that."