A pair of Belgian birdwatchers teach the little girls to look up at the sky. The young man’s finger on his lips, signaling silence, the young woman’s finger points upward. Their identical noses are sharp, as are their identical chins, and they both wear the same round, gold-rimmed glasses. Behind their backs the girls call them “the twins” and laugh.
A cloth cap on his head, the lock plastered to his forehead pointing like an arrow to one black eye, Shaya Gotthilf stands in the little kitchen and flourishes the omelet pan like a paintbrush. Fate and the need to earn a living have made him a hotel proprietor, and once in possession of the establishment he also gave it his name, but Shaya looks more like an artist or a scholar than a service provider.
An observer less inclined to enthuse herself than Alice would have pointed out that, when it came to service, Pension Gotthilf did not always meet conventional expectations—and that’s putting it mildly. The omelet is fried in the cheapest oil, the chrysanthemums in the Armenian pottery vases should have been thrown out the day before yesterday, and the feel of the bed linen testifies to a long life and many launderings. The Arab maid in her embroidered dress does not clean well, and from time to time, when due to confusion or illness or some other temporary difficulty the mother forgets to pay her, Jamilla does not come to work at all. The dark-haired daughter rebels. The fair-haired one smiles her slow smile and languidly pushes the vacuum cleaner about, without reaching underneath the radiators that give off a weak heat.
You won’t find luxury here—Alice would say—but the place has atmosphere. There is something about the house that closes one’s eyelids like honey and invites all who enter it to daydream. And it seems as if the daydreams of the guests did not leave with them, but are still stirring between the stones: the dreams of those who came to Jerusalem to dig up the treasures of her kings and Temple, of those who came to find in it a crown for themselves, and those who sought to redeem it.
Squeals of laughter from the little girls in the courtyard. A deaf-mute acrobat is teaching them to catch and throw a ball blindfolded. The older girl’s eyes are covered with a red scarf, the younger refused the blindfold but keeps her eyes closed and doesn’t cheat. The pealing of church bells is heard in the distance and mingles with the closer chimes of the old grandfather clock in the library. Hundreds of volumes are collected in Shaya’s library, available to anyone who wishes to consult them, and the girls’ father would fix his eyes on whoever entered the room, as if he wanted to etch the picture of a person holding a book on his heart.
“My foundlings,” Shaya calls his books, which for the most part were picked up after being thrown out in the street. Volumes in Hebrew, English, French, Russian, German, Hungarian, Romanian, Polish, and Serbian. Volumes in brown, gold-lettered covers in languages unknown to their loving owner, who could not bear the sight of a book abandoned in the street because its owner had died. “With me at least they have a home,” says Shaya, a solemn note in his voice. The hand of fate sent a refugee child, his mother’s only son, to Palestine. A great love for an exquisite Jerusalem beauty set him down in this house in its bower of greenery. But the same hand might have acted differently, and it’s easy to imagine a different Shaya: Shaya Gotthilf of Manhattan, sharp-witted journalist and thinker; Shaya Gotthilf the Dutchman; Shaya the painter; Professor Shaya Gotthilf expounding his wide-ranging views from coast to coast in America, often invited as well to the capital cities of Europe. Shaya has a rich imagination, he could easily see himself in any of these incarnations. And even though he does not elaborate on them, Alice reads his fantasies, swallows his illusions whole, and enthuses:
Anyone else with such prodigious talents would have felt constrained by these narrow hotel walls, but Shaya sees himself as lacking for nothing: abundance is an attribute of the soul, not something outside it. A hotel, however small, is an entire universe, and a lively soul will always find interest in it. To his elder daughter Shaya often says, “This is your real school,” and he never scolds her when she plays hooky from her regular school.
“More than once she came home from school with tears in her eyes,” he says, without anger or bitterness, “but here, among people who know her and love her, here she can learn real things at her own pace, the way children used to learn once.”
Shaya thinks that “the separation between real life and educational institutions is insufferable.” But when his young daughter asked to go to a boarding school and even sat for the entrance exams without informing her parents, he gave her his blessing and with great effort also paid the fees. “Children are like plants,” he explained. “If you water a cactus too much it will rot, while another plant receiving the same amount of water will shrivel and die. A parent, above all, must be a good gardener.”
And perhaps he really should have been a gardener. For he quenches the thirst of his guests as well: with a glass of home-made cherry liqueur; with a word of wisdom; with an striking quotation. He dispenses his advice freely to the honeymooners from a kibbutz, to the guests of a festival taking place in the city, to the elderly immigrant whose stay is being paid for by the Jewish Agency until he finds a place of his own. Shaya only keeps his harmonica for himself and refuses to play it even when urged to do so. But on summer nights when the windows are open, a passerby in the streets of Beit Hakerem might hear a harmonica playing “A wandering star” somewhere in the distance.
I have been working with Alice for years and her ability to deceive can still surprise me; the naturalness with which she flutters her eyelashes and performs her legerdemain; draws our attention to a ball of dust under the radiator so that we won’t notice the used condoms next to the bed. Knows that the superficial dirt distracts from the sordid filth, that admitting the existence of the dust creates the illusion of honesty.
Alice flits quickly past the reception office of the pension and leaves Erica, the mother, sighing over her “weak heart,” as if she were some romantic nineteenth century heroine, to her fate. Six years, she states briefly, are the difference in age between her and the father. The couple claims six years, but the actual difference is nine. Alice, like everyone else, finds it easy to pass over the sickly mother and fill our ears with the pretentious ideas of the father.
Convenient to ignore the fact that one little daughter in a fancy dress hasn’t been bathed for two weeks, and the other, suffering daughter, has been left to act as a servant in the house, crawling on all fours to gather up the muck of wet, used tissues.
Not a thought to little girls fraternizing unsupervised with strangers. Not a word about the parents’ screaming quarrels with Jamilla, and not a word about the never-ceasing torture through which the two of them put each other. The man wants to sell the pension and the woman refuses: the pension is her inheritance, and her father, who put his whole life into it would turn over in his grave.
In private the man begs, implores, coaxes. Outside the range of hearing of the guests, but definitely within the hearing of his daughters, the man describes in glowing terms the personal and familial happiness awaiting them if they would only sell the house. The woman softens, agrees on principle to sell, but not now. Never now. Next year if everything is all right, after her health improves, after the price goes up, first they have to get another, more serious offer, first they have to get their affairs in order, and in any case it’s impossible until after the end of the season.
Just because of her obstinacy we’re stuck here. Just because of your mother’s petty fears of moving without insurance certificates in hand. Wouldn’t you like to live, girls, for example, in an artist colony in Italy? Or if it has to be a pension, then why not in Cyprus? You know that with the money the agent is already prepared to pay us, cash in hand, we could buy a little house exactly like the one on the postcard? Wouldn’t you like to live in a little house like that with a veranda on the roof? Wouldn’t you like a little donkey of your own to ride on? And if your mother doesn’t want to go abroad—how about right here in Israel? A small apartment in Tel Aviv, facing the sea, wonderful winters, five minutes’ walk to the theater and ten cinemas to choose from. Sitting in cafés with famous people passing by. There’s no need to be afraid all the time. You have to know how to think big because it’s the only way to succeed. Remember, children, what your father says, at least remember this: don’t be afraid.
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