“It’s name is . . .” I began, then concluded lamely, “I, forget.”
“It don’t look the same now,” I went on after a pause. “They’ve ben fixin’ it up awful.”
Here the missionary handed to my mother another photograph he had sought out.
“I was there myself six months ago, Mrs. Standing.” He pointed with his finger. “That is the Jaffa Gate where I walked in and right up to the Tower of David in the back of the picture where my finger is now. The authorities are pretty well agreed on such matters. El Kul’ah, as it was known by—”
But here I broke in again, pointing to rubbish piles of ruined masonry on the left edge of the photograph.
“Over there somewhere,” I said. “That name you just spoke was what the Jews called it. But we called it something else. We called it . . . I forget.”
“Listen to the youngster,” my father chuckled. “You’d think he’d ben there.”
I nodded my head, for in that moment I knew I had been there, though all seemed strangely different. My father laughed the harder, but the missionary thought I was making game of him. He handed me another photograph. It was just a bleak waste of a landscape, barren of trees and vegetation, a shallow canyon with easy-sloping walls of rubble. In the middle distance was a cluster of wretched, flat-roofed hovels.
“Now, my boy, where is that?” the missionary quizzed.
And the name came to me!