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| The Main Post Office in Jerusalem |
The episode, which was to have a huge impact on the way I view the world, started with my left school shoe disintegrating when I was five. My mother reluctantly admitted that it was beyond salvation. Since my school operated a strict uniform policy and my only other shoes were a pair of scruffy sandals, before I could return to school we would have to go into town to buy another pair.
My father, a telecommunications engineer, had
left the family chequebook in his workroom in the main Jerusalem Post
Office. He gave my mother the key to the
drawer where he kept it, before jumping into the P&T van that
took him to Jericho, where he was currently working on an automatic telephone exchange.
My mother was in a hurry because she was teaching that
afternoon so we raced up to the Bethlehem Road but missed the always-overcrowded
Arab bus coming from Bethlehem. The cleaner Jewish bus my mother preferred stood
at its terminal on the other side of the level crossing.
To my delight, and my mother’s exasperation, the gates swung
shut in front of us. I pressed my face
against the wire gate as the awe-inspiring engine thundered past. It was a freight train so there were no
passengers to wave to but I was not too upset.
My father had told me that I could learn more about the economy of the
country from its trains than I could from any book. I hadn’t understood what he meant but I enjoyed
counting the different types of rolling stock.
Iron wagons like giants’ wheelbarrows piled high with huge rocks; steel
gaz containers shaped like enormous spectacle cases with red sea shells painted
on their sides; wooden sheep trucks with narrow slits below their roofs;
secretive packing cases on wheels filled with unknown treasure, and post office
vans with barred windows. In those vans,
Dad said, postal workers sorted parcels and letters for streets in Tel Aviv,
Haifa, and Gaza. I knew all about
sorting mail. When my mother had been seriously
ill, Dad had taken me to work and left me in the Post Office sorting shed with
the foreman I called Mr Parcelchief. Mr
Parcelchief taught me how to take parcels from sacks and throw them into the
correct rope net trolley when he read out the name of a country. I hoped I would see him again when we
collected the chequebook.
The Egged bus was still there when the gates opened, with
plenty of empty seats because no Arabs travelled on a Jewish bus in the summer
of 1939.
We left the bus outside the main Post Office, in my childish
opinion, the most elegant building in all Jerusalem. The doors, set in giant sized arches, led
into an enormous hall paved with white marble.
The counters of grey marble shone like mirrors. Gleaming pillars, as tall as the ones Samson
had pulled down, supported a carved ceiling from which hung chandeliers on rods
twice the length of broomsticks.
My mother moved to the bank of brass boxes that glistened across
an entire wall, unlocked our box, and took out letters she put in her pocket to
read later. Then, to my joy, we headed
for the door in the back wall that opened into the sorting shed.
Mr Parcelchief, wearing his usual crimson fez and smooth
grey checked suit with thin red lines running through it, salaamed my mother as
we entered, then waved at me.
‘Hello Miss Chiefhelper.
Ready for work? Here’s a parcel
for India.’
‘You don't have to
tell me what’s on it now,’ I told him proudly, ‘I can read. Sometimes I can even read double writing.’ I threw the parcel into the correct bin. He clapped, just like in the olden days.
My mother was already striding up the stairs to Dad's office.
‘I'll come and help again in the summer holidays,’ I
promised Mr. Parcelchief, before running
after her.
My mother took the
chequebook from Dad’s desk and looked at her watch. ‘Gracious, half past ten already!’
To save time we left by the fire escape at the rear of the
building.
At the shoe shop, the assistant x-rayed my feet before
producing a pair of black school shoes.
As we left the shop, with my shoes in a beautiful gold and
green cedar of Lebanon patterned paper bag, my mother looked at her watch
again, before dragging me helter-skelter to Jaffa gate. A fire engine speeding past, bells clanging,
held us up as we tried to cross the road but we managed to catch our bus just
as it was pulling away. However, it was
not long before the driver came to an abrupt and unexpected halt. Police had barred the way ahead with oil
drums.
My mother looked at her watch and blew out her breath in
frustration. ‘Not another protest march!’
The driver reversed the bus and took us through unfamiliar narrow
streets but ended up back on the Bethlehem Road near the station. We jumped off at our usual stop and raced
downhill so my mother wouldn’t be late for work.
Half way up our drive, Dewya, our maid-servant came running
to meet us, holding out a slip of paper.
‘Mrs Foster, Mrs Foster, Mr.
Foster rang. He says to call him
straight away on this number. It's very
urgent.’
My mother shot ahead.
When I reached the house, my mother was standing in the hall with the
phone pressed to her ear. The one-sided conversation
I overheard went something like this.
‘What?’ Pause ‘Oh no!
What time did it happen?’ - pause,
‘We were in the shoe shop then.’ pause –
‘We went out by the back way.’ A much
longer pause – ‘Oh no! .’ She sank down
on the hall chair - ‘All right then. I'll
expect you when I see you.’ She put the
phone down and placed her hands over her eyes.
I went closer. ‘What's
happened?’
My mother looked down at me and held my hand even though we
weren’t crossing a road. ‘A parcel bomb. It blew up in the Post Office.’
That sounded interesting.
‘Were all the parcels blown up?’
‘Not just the parcels, I'm afraid.’
I felt my stomach go
funny then. I didn't want to know any
more. I pulled my hand out of my
mother’s and went into the kitchen to ask Dewya if I could help lay the table.
Dad came home even later than usual. I crept down stairs in my pyjamas and peeped
round the door of the dining room. He
was spreading small photographs round his dinner plate.
My mother saw me. ‘Back
to bed, Peggy.’
‘No,’ Dad waved a
hand, ‘Better to let her look than have her imagining things. Peggy, these are photos the police took.’
I forced myself to
walk over to the table and peer down at the photos. Lumps of concrete and pieces of jagged marble
covered the Post Office's white floor. Metal
rods spilt out of pillars stripped to their concrete insides, but I couldn’t
see any bits of body. A question popped
out of my mouth although I didn't really want it answered. ‘Who was hurt?’
‘They took lots of
people to hospital.’ Dad clenched his
fists. ‘Most of them are going to be all
right. One person though, the one who
was holding the bomb when it went off, took the full blast. He’s dead, I am
afraid.’
‘It could have been Peggy,’ my mother muttered, ‘She was
holding a parcel only a few minutes earlier.’
I ran out of the room then without waiting for my father to
finish answering my question. I felt as
if I was deep inside my body, buried so
my fleshy outer part could get along without me.
My body crept back into the lounge. It kissed my mother and father good-night. I sensed it was smiling at them. It waited in front of my mother. Hidden inside
my body, I wanted her to pick me up, put me on her lap, and cuddle me but she
didn’t.
‘Thank goodness she is still too young to understand,’ I
heard her say as my body left the room again.
My body and I got together again after I had climbed back
into bed, and I knew it had never really left me. As I lay there, I couldn’t stop thinking of
what had happened to a dead dog I had watched decompose day after day when we
lived on Mt Carmel and realised that that must happen to most people too. All that talk about going to heaven was only
for special people like my parents. The
blown-up bits of Mr Parcelchief’s body were going to rot and stink like the
dog, because he hadn’t been SAVED and one day mine would too because I wasn’t
converted and I would be inside my rotting body unable to escape.
I didn’t talk about the bombing again with my parents, and
my father didn’t take me to work that summer holiday so it was only when I read
a list of pre-war Irgun attacks a few
days ago that I realised it wasn’t my friend, the foreman of the parcel
department, who had died, but an army officer who had been killed while
attempting to defuse the parcel bomb.
