RACHEL EYTAN
587
threw the book in the goat pen. I rushed out to find the goat chew–
ing, page after page, with her long yellow teeth, shaking her beard
with a look of disgust. When she saw me she stamped her hoof. This
was my first encounter with a very particular kind of book critic: the
book hater .
My advanced age gave me no extra privileges . Lights-out was
at eight, after the babies had fulfilled their duties and been unhitched
from their potties and placed in their iron cribs. My own duty was to
fall asleep at lights-out. Wasting electricity was a crime, and the
dormitory had only a tiny blue night-light attached to a doorjamb, in
case of emergency or air raid. Sometimes I would spend the entire
night tossing in my bed, yearning violently to read.
I soon found a ladder down to the porch. "Cling to the ladder of
wisdom," wrote the medieval philosopher Abraham Ibn Ezra. And
from then on, I used to stand at the top of this ladder - as soon as
Suzy the baby-nurse left - night after night, wrapped in a torn army
blanket from the Ottoman period, shifting a book from right to left,
one line at a time, under the pale blue light.
It
was there that I made my first bewildered, entranced ac–
quaintance with Romain Rolland, Kerenin the cuckold and Pierre
Bazaukhov, my eternal- but nonexclusive -love . I got my ration of
contraband books from a neighbor, a kindly woman, a pharmacist
with a vast library . I read until my ears rang.
My joy in this bounty continued until Suzy, a refugee from
Nazi Germany, came in on an unexpected midnight visit. She
shrieked as though she had seen a ghost, and the ladder began to
fall, slowly, as if in a dream .
Head wounds cause heavy bleeding. To the screams of the ter–
rified babies Aunt Hasya banished the "leetle hoodlum" to a small
detention room.
It was Gabriel's room. Aunt Hasya's oldest son, Gabriel, was
active in the Irgun underground and was hiding out from the British
police. I found that out that first night from his diary, which I
discovered stuck between some old school books. Every few weeks
Gabriel would show up on a Friday, and then Aunt Hasya would
make him and his sister, who had a Betty Grable hairdo, a grand
Sabbath dinner on Soldiers' Dependents Fund money. Afterwards
he would shut himself up in his room . The diary was written in an
accountant's ledger-book, in a style that made mejealous. The moon
was its one fixed hero, with heroines shifting between ellipses along
