I was all for moving right now, but Daniel says he won’t let me live here on my own. While the students were staying we had a kind of open-air campsite. We didn’t even put up a tent because it would have been very stuffy inside it. We cooked on an open hearth and ate once a day, in the evening. In the morning we just ate a very little—pancakes with honey and coffee.
Can you imagine it? I am keeping all the accounts, paying the roofers we had to hire. We put on a tiled roof. It was expensive but we got help.
Brother Daniel spent very little time here so I took nearly all the decisions on my own. Even in the summer he has a lot of work, but the main crowds of tourists come in the autumn for the Jewish festivals. He conducts tours all over Israel. I was able to go along with him this summer, although not very far. Only to Zichron Yaakov. Do you remember the Rose of Sharon mentioned in the Bible? It originated in the Sharon Valley. There had been no cultivation there for 1,000 years. There were swamps everywhere, but then at the end of the 19th century, 10 Jewish families came from Bessarabia. They wanted to turn the region into orchards again but were getting nowhere until Baron Rothschild gave them money and sent experts. Then they made real progress and drained all the swamps. They started making the land workable again. Daniel showed us those vineyards and orchards. You can see the luxuriant plantations from Rothschild’s grave, because he directed in his will that he should be buried here. What a fortunate man—how wisely he used his money! Swamps were turned into orchards and now fruit from those orchards is sent all over the world. There is a genetic laboratory there where they perform miracles. The most interesting thing, though, is that Daniel knows all this. He pointed out different cultivars to us and told us about the flowers. He knows exactly which plants have been here since biblical times and which are later introductions. In Zichron Yaakov there is even a small botanical garden with plants mentioned in the Bible. The only tree missing is the Cedar of Lebanon. For some reason it won’t grow by itself. Now in order to grow a cedar they have to go to great lengths. Every tree has to be specially tended. Each one has a special passport, and yet in olden times there were forests of cedars and oaks here.
Can you imagine, there is a science of biblical palaeo-botany! Its scholars have recreated a picture of what grew here 2,000 to 3,000 years ago. As we were looking around the garden, the botanist himself came, Musa, a local Arab. He showed us a plant which didn’t look anything special but which is like the bush out of which God spoke to Moses. The plant has a very high content of volatile oils and even, he said, if you carefully light a match, the oil will burn and there will be flames around the bush, but the bush itself will not be consumed. The burning bush!
Musa is from an old Arab family and was educated in England. They have a lot of land here and they used to own the plot where there is now a prison for Palestinians who are fighting the Jews in all sorts of illegal ways. It is called Damun Prison, but we did not go there because we were short of time. I did manage to see another amazing place, though, along with the rest of the group, out toward Shechem. It was there that Joseph’s brothers were grazing cattle. At first he couldn’t find them, and when he did they threw him into a dry well because they were angry about his interpretation of a dream. Daniel showed us just such a dry well, possibly the very one. Some 20 kilometers away there is another, and it was probably from one of these, within an area of about 20 kilometers, that he was dragged and sold to passing merchants. Not far away, a caravan route passed along a dried-up riverbed—a “wadi.” So the whole story described first in the Bible and later by Thomas Mann quite literally took place here. The merchants bought Joseph as a slave. He cost far less than you would pay nowadays for a sheep, and they took him to Egypt. Such is the story, and in some places you can still see the caravan route. Right beside that dry well we came across two Arab boys grazing goats.
Musa said goats are the worst pests in the country: they ate all of Ancient Greece and Palestine. I listened to him with my ears flapping and realized that what I want most of all in the world is to go and study at Jerusalem University. Daniel says that it is perfectly possible. He had thought about it himself, but it would be difficult for him to do without me. You can’t imagine how pleased I was to hear that. Now I am quickly finishing off this letter and will give it to a German girl who is going back to Germany and will drop it in a mailbox in Munich. I hope your health is all right and that you won’t be cross with me for not coming back this holiday.
If everything gets organized as Daniel intends, I shall start studying at the University in January. I have absolutely no idea how I will get on, but I am very keen.
Best wishes to everybody at home,
Your Hilda
6. September 1966, Haifa
A
NOTE
H
ILDA FOUND THAT EVENING IN HER BAG
Hilda,
If you wouldn’t mind my coming to your building site, please call me on 05-12-47 and just say you have no objection.
Musa
7. 1996, Haifa
F
ROM A CONVERSATION BETWEEN
H
ILDA AND
E
WA
M
ANUKYAN
No, it doesn’t surprise me at all that three days talking to Daniel caused your life to change direction. After all, I myself only survived thanks to him. For many years he tended me like a goat. The story began thirty years back and came to an end long ago. I sometimes feel it was not my life at all but something out of a cheap novel.
In autumn 1966 I found a note in my bag from Musa, I phoned him and he came. I knew his family was very rich and I hoped this meant he wanted to make a donation toward the building work.
I was twenty, and for my age I was exceptionally silly in feminine terms. When a man looked at me I was afraid there was something wrong with my appearance, a stain on my blouse perhaps, or a torn stocking. I always had a very low opinion of myself, and my stepbrothers called me a plank.
As a child I was very self-conscious about being so tall. I wanted to be short and chubby and have a well-filled brassière, but there was absolutely nothing for me to put a brassière on. I was only fit to be trained up for some kind of sport, skiing or racing, something where you need long legs. Unfortunately, I hated races and my lack of competitiveness was instantly detected by every coach whose path I crossed. The sport was my stepfather’s idea. He was a great sports fan, but anything he suggested I automatically disliked. In those years my mother did not take much interest in me because my younger brother, Axel, was sickly and she was constantly fussing over him. Too much height and too little love was how I diagnosed myself many years later.
After I had moved to Israel my mother had an operation for cancer and our relations got better. It’s probably no exaggeration to say they only really began after she became ill. I know much more about her now than I did when I was young and have come to understand her better. Although I only go back to Munich to visit her every two or three years, we correspond constantly and are very close. She has come out here several times in spite of her ill-health. When I was young, though, we were distant and I was a very lonely girl.
When I met Daniel, I stopped being unhappy, because he spread happiness around himself. From the moment I saw him, I knew I wanted to be by his side. He was a father figure for me, of course, and well aware of it. For many people he was a substitute father, or elder brother, a replacement for a child which had died, or even a husband. Half the women parishioners were secretly in love with him. Some made no secret of it. One crazy woman pursued him with her love for a good eight years until he managed to find her a husband.