— No. It does not exactly have a harbor. The ships cast anchor at a distance from shore, and the stevedores come aboard and throw you down into dinghies.
— Mohammedans, of course.
— Local residents.
— Are you back to that again? Why should they be nomads? Where do you want them to wander to?
— In a word, they are not nomadic.
— Most in houses. Only a few in tents.
— I did not count.
— Don’t be in such a hurry to dismiss them…
— The Turks? They are adorably lazy and corrupt… We were not asked many questions. Mani’s British passport worked wonders.
— The immensity of the light.
— Because there is nothing to deflect it. No forests. No woods…
— Here and there you see a tree.
— Soft white sand. Golden dunes. They are pleasant to look at, but wearisome to walk in. Your legs grow enervated.
— It is a sunny country. There will be enough sunshine for all of us there, that much I could see at once.
— We went straight from the port to the train.
— Yes, a real train. It runs from Jaffa to Jerusalem. It is smaller and slower than our own trains, a bit childlike. But since we arrived on a Jewish holiday, and the passenger trains in Palestine are religious also, we had to —
— Does that please you? I knew it would.
— They grumble and put up with it. It is the price paid for the privilege of living in the Holy Land.
— To a fault. But loathe to be stuck in the sands of Jaffa — Mani had promised his household that he would arrive in time for the holiday — we hurried off to a freight train, which was transporting — guess what, Papa! — what do you think?
— Guess.
— Guess again…
— Barrels of water!
— Ordinary drinking water. It had been a dry, thirsty summer in Jerusalem, and — since the Danube has yet to be diverted there — they needed a resupply of water…
— A single pipe that cuts across the mountains.
— It is not a desert — not yet — but the countryside is neglected — you see nothing but boulders and rocks…
— A few olive trees — bushes — all sorts of brambles. There is a tindery smell of straw and sometimes a sharp whiff of mint…
— There are no mountains, Father. There are grayish hills, which look like… like… I don’t know what. Like hills…
— I was glad to be getting away from the sea, even though it was odd to be entering Palestine in such a fashion, in a sealed boxcar among big quiet barrels of water. And at the same time, I was delighted to be done with the diabolic motion of the waves.
— Linka had grown profoundly silent. She lay in a corner, in a light Egyptian smock she had bought in Port Said, red from the sun and frightened by the thought of soon meeting the family of her strange new love.
— How you keep coming back to the landscape! A person might think that nature meant more to you than people…
— I have told you that the car was sealed. There was but a small transom, through which I could not see very much. Near Jaffa, I believe, we passed an agricultural school — its name was…
— That’s correct. After it came an Arab town whose name I do not recall…
— Perhaps.
— No, it was not large. Nothing is large there.
— Back to your tents again? But why should there be tents? There were shanties — mud huts — stone houses set like boulders in the landscape…
— Perhaps there were a few tents. We did not see much, because dusk falls quickly there. One minute the sun is scorching hot and the next it is gone. The train was still laboring uphill to Jerusalem as the last glow of twilight faded away in the car…
— At seven in the evening, after traveling for five hours and stopping for two more.
— Jerusalem? A small, poor, harsh city. And yet oddly enough, it does not seem remote. There is nothing provincial about it. Nor will there ever be…
— Spirituality? I suppose. But what might that consist of? Perhaps of the name “Jerusalem.” That is all thè place has to vouch for it. Its name is greater than anything in it — than any mosque — than any church — than all its ramparts…
— How greedy you are for details, Father — you simply cannot get enough of them! It is all I can do to stick to my story and keep from blurting out its bloody end, whereas you want a pilgrim’s travelogue… It was nighttime when we arrived, and we saw neither ramparts, towers, spires, nor even men. It was a little country station, smaller even than Chozow’s, more rudimentary even than Wylicka’s. The only souls there were a few Arabs with wagons to load the water barrels on, and while Mani went looking for someone to take our luggage, Linka and I walked along the tracks to stretch our limbs — two travelers from faraway Galicia who had reached the end of the line, which was marked by a small barrier consisting of a wooden board. Beyond it was nothing, only a few brambles. We had arrived at the last stop. There were no switches, no sidings. It was a single, narrow, very finite line.
— Amen, Father.
— And all the way to Transjordan too. Why not? With northern and southern trunk lines, God willing…
— If the Jews make it their business to help Him a little… In any case, Linka, who had been immobilized throughout the ride, began imploring me all of a sudden to tell our Mani that we would not impose on him but would find lodgings elsewhere; she evidently was unprepared to face the fact that he had a home and a family. I refused. There were nothing but fields all around — Jerusalem seemed at that moment to be no more than a parable — the night was coming on fast — and if we had missed the first dinner of the holiday, there was still the second one, to which I had been invited in Basel. “Absolutely not,” I said — and before Linka could think of an answer, the porters arrived and loaded our baggage on two flat wagons with swinging oil lamps. And so off we drove through the fields into the evening, giving the city a wide berth to avoid irritating any worshipers who might be wending their way home from synagogue. We climbed a high hill on which stood a German orphanage named for a man called Schneller; lurched across a field along a goat track; and arrived at a large, isolated, two-story stone house.
— Of course, Father. All this was outside the walls of the old city. There are several small but attractive neighborhoods there, among them one of Jews from Bukhara that is not far from Mani’s house. There is even some greenery — upon my word, had I not known we had left Switzerland, I would have thought we were back there again…
— No, not only Jews, Father. The Arabs are venturing out of the old city too. The place is simply not big enough for everyone…
— Yes, it stood all by itself, in a solitude serendipitous at so holy a time, at the juncture between the two days of the holiday. It enabled the porters to unload in a hurry in an inner, flagstone-paved yard far from sacrilege-espying eyes — far from any eyes at all except those of an old Mohammedan peasant, who was crouched by a cistern with a cigarette cupped in his hand. Our Mani was beaming with excitement. “Come,” he whispered to us without climbing the stairs to the second story where his family was awaiting him, because he yearned to see his clinic — and we stealthily followed him into a large room full of white partitions that separated some beds, most of which were empty, although from several of them pregnant women regarded us with curiosity. We nodded hello to them; noted with surprise some large, white, well-scrubbed chamber pots all standing in a neat row; and saw a hefty matron approach us from the room’s far end, a blond woman dressed in white. Upon seeing that it was her doctor home from abroad, she let out a cry of joy and curtsied low to us — she could not shake our hands, you see, because her own were smeared with blood. Although I did not understand the Judaeo-Spanish that Mani spoke to her, I could tell that he was introducing me as a medical specialist who had come from afar to see his experimental clinic and its equipment. Repeatedly I heard him mention our estate as if it were a famous medical center — it was a name he could never get right and that Linka had long despaired of correcting his pronunciation of.