A Tale of Love and Darkness Read Online Free PDF Page B

that the British imposed on Jerusalem. And even if there wasn't a curfew, who wanted to be out of doors in the dark at that time in Jerusalem? Everything was shut and shuttered, the cobblestone streets were deserted, every passing shadow in those narrow streets was trailed by three or four other shadows.
    Even when there was no power cut, we always lived in dim light because it was important to economize: my parents replaced the forty-watt bulbs with twenty-five-watt ones, not just for economy but on principle, because a bright light is wasteful, and waste is immoral. Our tiny apartment was always crammed full with the sufferings of the whole human race. The starving children in India, for whose sake I had to finish everything that was put on my plate. The survivors of Hitler's hell whom the British had deported to detention camps in Cyprus. The ragged orphan children still wandering around the snowbound forests of devastated Europe. My father used to sit working at his desk till two in the morning by the light of an anemic twenty-five-watt bulb, straining his eyes because he didn't think it was right to use a stronger light: the pioneers in the kibbutzim in Galilee sit up in their tents night after night writing books of verse or philosophical treatises by the light of guttering candles, and how can you forget about them and sit there like Rothschild with a blazing forty-watt bulb? And what will the neighbors say if they see us suddenly lit up like a ballroom? He preferred to ruin his eyesight rather than draw the glances of others.
    We were not among the poorest. Father's job at the National Library brought him a modest but regular salary. My mother gave some private lessons. I watered Mr. Cohen's garden in Tel Arza every Friday for a shilling, and on Wednesdays I earned another four piasters by putting empty bottles in crates behind Mr. Auster's grocery, and I also taught Mrs. Finster's son to read a map for two piasters a lesson (but this was on credit and to this day the Finsters have not paid me).
    Despite all these sources of income, we never stopped economizing. Life in our little apartment resembled life in a submarine, as they showed it in a film I saw once at the Edison Cinema, where the sailors had to close a hatch behind them every time they went from one compartment to another. At the very moment I switched on the light in the toilet with one hand I switched off the light in the passage with the other, so as not to waste electricity. I pulled the chain gently, because it was wrong to empty the whole Niagara cistern for a pee. There were other functions (that we never named) that could occasionally justify a full flush. But for a pee? A whole Niagara? While pioneers in the Negev were saving the water they had brushed their teeth with to water the plants? While in the detention camps in Cyprus a whole family had to make a single bucket of water last for three days? When I left the toilet, I switched off the light with my left hand and simultaneously switched on the light in the passage with my right hand, because the Shoah was only yesterday, because there were still homeless Jews roaming the Carpathians and the Dolomites, languishing in the deportation camps and on board unseaworthy hulks, as thin as skeletons, dressed in rags, and because there was hardship and deprivation in other parts of the world too, the coolies in China, the cotton pickers in Mississippi, children in Africa, fishermen in Sicily. It was our duty not to be wasteful.
    Apart from which, who could say what each day would bring? Our troubles were not yet over, and it was as good as certain that the worst was still to come. The Nazis might have been vanquished, but there were more pogroms in Poland, Hebrew speakers were being persecuted in Russia, and here the British had not yet said their last word, the Grand Mufti was talking about butchering the Jews, and who knew what the
Arab states were planning for us, while the cynical world supported