A Tale of Love and Darkness

EVERY SECOND or third Saturday we would make the pilgrimage to Talpiot, to Uncle Joseph and Auntie Zippora's little villa. Our house in Kerem Avraham was some six or seven kilometers distant from Talpiot, a remote and somewhat dangerous Hebrew suburb. South of Rehavia and Kiriat Shmuel, south of Montefiore's Windmill, stretched an expanse of alien Jerusalem: the suburbs of Talbiyeh, Abu Tor, and Kata-mon, the German Colony, the Greek Colony, and Bakaa. (Abu Tor, our teacher Mr. Avisar once explained to us, was named after an old warrior whose name meant "father of the bull," Talbiyeh was once the estate of a man named Taleb, Bakaa means a "plain or valley, the biblical valley of the Giants," while the name Katamon is an Arabic corruption of the Greek kata monēs, meaning "beside the monastery. ")

Farther still to the south, beyond all these foreign worlds, over the hills and far away, at the end of the world, glimmered isolated Jewish dots, Mekor Hayyim, Talpiot, Arnona, and Kibbutz Ramat Rahel, which almost abutted on the extremities of Bethlehem. From our Jerusalem, Talpiot could be seen only as a tiny gray mass of dusty trees on a distant hilltop. From the roof of our house one night our neighbor Mr. Friedmann, an engineer, pointed out a cluster of shimmering pale lights on the far horizon, suspended between heaven and earth, and said: "That's Allenby Barracks, and over there you may be able to see the lights of Talpiot or Arnona. If there is more violence," he said, "I wouldn't like to be them. Not to mention if there's all-out war."