A Tale of Love and Darkness Read Free

square wasn't there anymore. It had been moved, complete with its little trees, benches, sandpit, birds, and swing, to the other end of the
road. I was astonished: I couldn't understand how Ben Gurion and the duly constituted authorities could allow such a thing. How could somebody suddenly pick up a square and move it? What next—would they move the Mount of Olives, or the Tower of David? Would they shift the Wailing Wall?
    People in Jerusalem talked about Tel Aviv with envy and pride, with admiration, but almost confidentially: as though the city were some kind of crucial secret project of the Jewish people that it was best not to discuss too much—after all, walls have ears, and spies and enemy agents could be lurking around every corner.
    Telaviv. Sea. Light. Sand, scaffolding, kiosks on the avenues, a brand-new white Hebrew city, with simple lines, growing up among the citrus groves and the dunes. Not just a place that you buy a ticket for and travel to on an Egged bus, but a different continent altogether.

    For years we had a regular arrangement for a telephone link with the family in Tel Aviv. We used to phone them every three or four months, even though we didn't have a phone and neither did they. First we would write to Auntie Hayya and Uncle Tsvi to let them know that on, say, the nineteenth of the month—which was a Wednesday, and on Wednesdays Tsvi left his work at the Health Clinic at three—we would phone from our pharmacy to their pharmacy at five. The letter was sent well in advance, and then we waited for a reply. In their letter, Auntie Hayya and Uncle Tsvi assured us that Wednesday the nineteenth suited them perfectly, and they would be waiting at the pharmacy a little before five, and not to worry if we didn't manage to phone at five on the dot, they wouldn't run away.
    I don't remember whether we put on our best clothes for the expedition to the pharmacy, for the phone call to Tel Aviv, but it wouldn't surprise me if we did. It was a solemn undertaking. As early as the Sunday before, my father would say to my mother, Fania, you haven't forgotten that this is the week that we're phoning Tel Aviv? On Monday my mother would say, Arieh, don't be late home the day after tomorrow, don't mess things up. And on Tuesday they would both say to me, Amos, just don't make any surprises for us, you hear, just don't be ill, you hear, don't catch cold or fall over until after tomorrow afternoon. And that evening they would say to me, Go to sleep early, so you'll be in good
shape for the phone call, we don't want you to sound as though you haven't been eating properly.
    So they would build up the excitement. We lived in Amos Street, and the pharmacy was a five-minute walk away, in Zephaniah Street, but by three o'clock my father would say to my mother:
    "Don't start anything new now, so you won't be in a rush."
    "I'm perfectly OK, but what about you with your books, you might forget all about it."
    "Me? Forget? I'm looking at the clock every few minutes. And Amos will remind me."
    Here I am, just five or six years old, and already I have to assume a historic responsibility. I didn't have a watch—how could I?—and so every few moments I ran to the kitchen to see what the clock said, and then I would announce, like the countdown to a spaceship launch: twenty-five minutes to go, twenty minutes to go, fifteen to go, ten and a half to go—and at that point we would get up, lock the front door carefully, and set off, the three of us, turn left as far as Mr. Auster's grocery shop, then right into Zechariah Street, left into Malachi Street, right into Zephaniah Street, and straight into the pharmacy to announce:
    "Good afternoon to you, Mr. Heinemann, how are you? We've come to phone."
    He knew perfectly well, of course, that on Wednesday we would be coming to phone our relatives in Tel Aviv, and he knew that Tsvi worked at the Health Clinic, and that Hayya had an important job in the Working Women's League, and that