SHARONA BEN-TOY
595
huddle of the Old City, and West Jerusalem sprawled in apartment
blocks over the hills. Near the finger of the YMCA tower, black smoke
flowed into the sky.
I don't know if, at that moment, Avram saw his career in the Science
Corps, or the Hell Car that began it. But Hell Cars occur under certain
conditions that clear-sighted people anticipate. I think that this is what
he foresaw, and what in fact happened, during the winter siege of '48.
For it is one thing to sit out a Jerusalem winter reading professional
journals and drinking hot tea, while a little kerosene stove flickers red
and blue, shedding rosy warmth on the files and the sleeping cat.
It
is
quite another thing to pass the winter without kerosene. Also without
food, because the trucks carrying produce and supplies to Jerusalem
were stopped at British roadblocks, stripped of their weapons, and sent
into Arab ambushes along the mountain pass.
The university closed . Faculty grumbled about their students scat–
tered through the underground, to ride point on convoys and smuggle
grenades under their skirts, instead of focussing on their dissertations.
Professors went home and collected from their children the dirty leaves
of wild geraniums, plucked in the park by gangs of fighting kids who
didn 't care that they were all Jews. December skies opened:
Jerusalemites tottered against a mind-stripping wind, through puddles
that rocked like seas, their shoes breaking the ice over yellow mud. The
night streets were black. Candles flickered in cafes as smoke-filled as
rations allowed . West Jerusalem was unemployed. People went out at
night to cluster together and keep the frostbite off their souls. The
Workers Cooperative Restaurant served a dim beverage that people
nursed as they talked with a truck driver from a coastal kibbutz.
"What's happening," they asked, "to all the milk we used to drink?"
"Jerusalem was our largest client, " the kibbutznik shrugged, so much
flesh on his shoulders and jowls. "Now we make cheese, butter, yogurt,
we drink milk at meals instead of fruit juice. We even feed milk to the
cows."
Only knowing that the driver had risked his life in a food convoy
kept the rage from their grins. And hunger was just one face of the war.
In cold apartments, people camped in the rooms that still had ceilings.
As you washed the dishes, a bullet cracked against the faucet. Every
window in West Jerusalem was afflicted with a mange of cardboard .
Sleep was wrecked by the loud retching and monkey chatter of Bren and
Sten guns.
That is what Avram foresaw from the porch of the National Library,
and the reason he remained on the deserted university campus. He sat
