— No, Father, I did not participate in that day’s birth, nor in any others. I had come to Jerusalem to be a tourist and an observer, not to deliver babies. I went to bed and had a long, sweet sleep, and that evening, when the Sabbath was over, I told Linka about my move to Christ’s Church. I did not propose that she join me. “You were right,” I said. “It is best that you stay here to avoid any injury to his feelings Take a holiday from me and have many happy birth-days, so that — when your turn comes — you will know how to do it gladly and without pain.” At first my moving out so resolutely gave her a fright. Yet I knew that only by distancing myself in such a way could I eventually muster the strength to break the chains of his captivity…
— He was holding us captive, Father, without our knowing it…
— No. That evening they all helped me move — Mani, his children, Linka of course, and even the Swede, who came along for “a breath of fresh air.” Everyone carried some bundle of mine and we proceeded to the Jaffa Gate, where I took them all up to my room. We opened the window for a view of the Russian church with its onion domes and then went downstairs to that Anglican study house for a cup of tea with the men of the cloth, who were delighted with my escorts’ English. After that, I took Linka to see the Wailing Wall. She faced it in aloof silence. “What,” I asked, “will you not even give it one little kiss? This morning I gave it two.” But she would not. And so we parted. I had given her her freedom.
— No. Of course we saw each other afterward. But I had given her her freedom — for the first time — and she knew it.
— I mean that you have always complained that I hound her — that I interfere — that I do not mind my own business — that I try to influence her. And so I gave her her freedom…
— The words speak for themselves.
— The entire ten days in that children’s room next to the parents’ bedroom, with the Turkish doll in the fez pirouetting over her.
— Who?
— Ah, the girl. She slept in the grandmother’s big bed.
— In the clinic, behind a partition.
— I do not know.
— Perhaps…
— Occasionally.
— Perhaps… I have no way of knowing… I was a good several versts away.
— The room had to be paid for, of course. Apart from Englishmen and pilgrims, only Christ himself is allowed to stay there free of charge…
— Half a pound sterling per diem.
— Exactly a thaler.
— No, it was not cheap. But I was treated nobly; no effort was spared to make me comfortable. And their whiskey, Papa — it is unparalleled — a most mellow, a divinely inspired brew.
— The city, Papa. The city itself.
— No, not the inhabitants. The city is forever greater than its inhabitants. I plunged into it as deeply as I could — I roamed all about and around it, exploring it layer by layer — because I knew that I would never be back.
— Heavens, no, Father; I am not anti-Jerusalem; I am a-Jerusalem. After all, suppose there were no Jerusalem? I have freed myself — but with no illusions — from the dream that you will all continue to stumble about in, lost between imagination and reality — between accusation and guilt — between the fear to go on and the fear to stay put; angered by your hopeless entanglement. I have taken the honorable way out; I know what I am leaving behind…
— I wandered.
— In the narrow streets — the souks — the courtyards. Inside and outside the walls…
— I was not always alone. When Mani saw that the city interested me, he and Linka sometimes joined me. And being eager to present us and publicize his return home, he invited us all to high tea at the home of the British consul, whom he appeared to regard as his patron. Everyone there was quite taken with Linka’s lilting English. Another time, we startled the Turkish pasha one morning with a surprise visit, at which we were served coffee too bitter for words. At the Armenian patriarch’s, on the other hand, we spent an evening sipping chilled wine. And one day Mani hired a private carriage in which he put his mother, his two children, Linka, and me, and took us to a Mohammedan village on a slope outside Jerusalem. We went to see a sheikh of sorts, a venerable old friend of the family, who apparently knew Mani’s father and grandfather; Mani visited him every year during the autumn holidays. We were ushered into a large room where the old sheikh was seated on a cushion in front of a splendid wall carpet with a dagger thrust into it. He was surrounded by the members of his household, most of them rheumy-eyed with disease. Venerable though he was, he was thrilled by our visit and appeared to be a fervent admirer of Mani’s mother; he bowed his head when she spoke to him and chose fruit for her from a tray set before him and laid it on her plate — figs, apples, and bunches of grapes that he pressed on her so attentively that I almost thought he was about to put them in her mouth with his own palsied hands. He was also delighted to be introduced to the two of us; he addressed Linka as “Madame Mani,” being under the impression that Mani had taken a second wife, and immediately put a cluster of grapes on her plate too. His family took a great interest in me and wanted to know if I was a settler in Jerusalem or merely a tourist. Mani, who acted as our interpreter, began, I believe, to explain that I was touring with an eye to settling, but I cut him short at once with a wave of my hand and a word I had learned in the streets of the walled city: hallass — which means, “That will do.” They were so greatly pleased with it that they all laughed and repeated it after me —“hallass, hallass!”—while Mani looked quite crestfallen. In the carriage on the way back I felt for the first time his anxiety over our coming departure. All of a sudden he said in low tones, “Perhaps, after all, you will stay on through the holidays to see a Palestinian autumn.”
— Autumn.
— He was simply casting about for something. But I had made up my mind not to remain a day longer, even though the better I got to know the city, the more it grew on me. He noticed how it intrigued me and sometimes sent his son along with me as my guide. Perhaps too, he just wanted the boy out of the house. On the last days of our stay I would rise in late morning, descend to the quiet chapel below, and be met there by young Mani, who had a way of appearing all at once from behind the baptismal font or the altar. Sometimes I found him standing and preaching to himself, his old man’s features passionate with anger.
— Hebrew, even though my pronunciation made him jeer, so that I constantly had to correct it to keep him from regarding my speech as a foreign and incomprehensible language. Still, he was a pleasant walking companion, with a quick, light stride and no end of ideas where to take me. In my last days there, we ventured increasingly beyond the walls; to the Mount of Olives, for example, which has no olives but large quantities of graves. We would stand there among the flocks of black goats, looking out for a long while at the city, and then head down past St. Elizaveta’s, which he called the Church of Onions, and across the Hill of Evil Counsel to the Russian Compound. Everywhere, I noticed, he sought to befriend the Turkish soldiers; he invariably headed in the direction of their posts, waving to them when he saw them and calling out a few Turkish words. And everywhere too, I had the same feeling of cosmic space; “I am freeing myself of this city forever,” I told myself, as I followed the boy back down amid the walls, through the narrow streets and courts of the souk, “without illusion or resentment.” I was no longer an unknown stranger in Jerusalem; the same Jewish and Arab peddlers who had eyed me wordlessly a few days before now stopped me to greet me. It was then that I knew that our journey had come to its true end.