by Amos Oz
He lay on his back on the bed, trying to separate and join together complicated pictures in the plaster on the ceiling until his eyes closed. But even when they were closed, he continued to see the curved slope of the ceiling of the attic that had been allocated to him, something like a prison cell or an isolation room in a hospital for a patient with a rare infectious disease.
There was another object in the room, one for which Shmuel Ash found no use. He did not discover this object until he had been living in the attic for four or five days and nights, when he bent over and peered under his bed in pursuit of a sock that had gone absent without leave and hidden itself in the dark. Instead of the errant sock, his eyes were met in the darkness under the bed by sharp, shiny incisors set in the jaws of an evil-looking fox’s head carved on the handle of a magnificent black walking stick.
11
* * *
EVERY DAY GERSHOM WALD made himself comfortable in the chair behind his desk or on his couch and delivered mordant lectures to his telephonic interlocutors. He larded his speech with quotations and allusions, witticisms and plays on words, aimed at himself as often as at the listener. Shmuel sometimes had the impression that he was piercing and wounding the person on the other end of the line with a fine needle, using the kinds of insults that only literati can be hurt by. He would say, for example: “But why must you prophesy, my dear? As the Talmud tells us, since the day the Temple was razed to the ground, the gift of prophecy was given to fools like you and me.” Or: “Though you bray me in a mortar with a pestle, I shall not budge from my view.” And once he said: “Well, my dear, it is assuredly the case that neither of us resembles any of the four sons mentioned in the Passover Haggadah, but it sometimes occurs to me that we are particularly unlike the first of the four, the wise son.” Gershom Wald’s ugly face at that moment radiated pugnacity and malice, and his voice trilled with glee and childish triumph. But his blue-gray eyes under his the bushy white eyebrows belied the ironic tone and expressed detachment and sadness, as if they had played no part in this conversation but were fixed on something too terrible for him to bear. Shmuel knew nothing about the people at the other end of the line, except that they were apparently prepared to put up with Wald’s irony and forgive him for what seemed to Shmuel to verge on malicious mockery.
On second thought, it was not impossible that these various interlocutors, whom Wald invariably addressed as “my dear” or “my dear friend,” were one and the same person, perhaps someone not unlike Gershom Wald himself; perhaps he, too, was an elderly invalid confined to his study, and perhaps he, too, had a poor student who looked after him and tried, just like Shmuel himself, to guess who was the imagined double at the other end of the line.
Sometimes Mr. Wald would wrap himself in a sad silence, lying on his couch cocooned in his tartan plaid, thinking, dozing, waking, then would ask Shmuel to pour him some tea and would sever the connection, humming some vague tune to himself, perhaps a snatch of a song, or else some kind of compulsive throat-clearing.
Each evening at a quarter past seven, after the news, Shmuel warmed up the old man’s evening porridge, prepared for him by the neighbor, Sarah de Toledo. He sprinkled some brown sugar and ground cinnamon on it. There was enough porridge for both of them. At a quarter past nine, after the second news bulletin of the evening, he set before the old man a tray with six or seven pills and capsules and a glass of tap water.
One evening the old man looked up and scrutinized Shmuel’s body from top to toe and back again, as if eyeing some dubious object or feeling the other man with his rough fingers, for a long time, greedily, until perhaps he found what he had been looking for. Without any attempt at politeness he asked:
“Still, it stands to reason that you’ve a got a girl somewhere? Or something resembling a girl? Or at least you have had? Haven’t you? No woman at all? No girlfriend? Never?”
And at this he chuckled, as if he had been told a dirty joke.
Shmuel stammered:
“Yes. No. I did. I’ve had several. But —”
“So, why did the lady desert you? It’s not important. Forget that I asked. So, she left. Well, good luck to her. But our Atalia fascinates you, doesn’t she? She can ‘fascinate’ strangers without moving a finger. But she’s very fond of her solitary state. She lets men who are fascinated by her get closer to her, then she drives them away after a few weeks, or even just one week. ‘There be three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four which I know not . . . and more than the rest the way of a man with a maid.’ She told me once that she’s fascinated by strangers so long as they are more or less strangers. As soon as a stranger stops being a stranger he begins to bore her. And do you know the origin of the verb ‘to fascinate’? No? Have they given up teaching etymology at the university?”
“I’m not at the university anymore.”
“No, that’s right. You have been cast into outer darkness, into weeping and gnashing of teeth. ‘Fascinate’ comes from the Latin and originally meant to bewitch or cast a spell upon. But did you know that the related Latin word fascinus means a male member in a state of erection? Now there is a thought! And how about parents? What? You do have parents? Or you have had?”
“Yes. In Haifa.”
“Brothers and sisters?”
“One sister. In Italy.”
“And that grandfather you told me about. The one who served in the Mandate police and was murdered by our zealots because he wore the king’s uniform—was he also from Latvia?”
“Yes. And the truth of the matter is that he joined the British police so as to pass information and other things to the underground. He was really a kind of double agent, a secret fighter for the very organization whose members murdered him. They decided that he was a traitor.”
Gershom Wald thought about this for a while. He asked for a glass of water. He asked Shmuel to open the window a crack. Then he remarked sadly:
“It was a great mistake. A great and fatal mistake.”
“Whose mistake? The underground’s?”
“The girl’s. The one who left you. You’re a soulful young man. That’s what Atalia said to me a couple of days ago, and, as always, I know that she is right, because Atalia cannot be wrong. She was born being right. That’s how she was created. But being permanently in the right is like being scorched earth—isn’t that so?”
12
* * *
SHMUEL ASH WOKE EACH MORNING at nine or ten, though he had promised himself time and time again to get up at seven o’clock the next day, brew some strong coffee, and sit down to work.
He woke but did not open his eyes. He curled up in his quilt and started to argue aloud with himself: “Get up, lazybones, half the day has gone already.” And every morning he compromised with himself: “Just ten more minutes, what’s wrong with that? After all, you came here to get away from the rat race. It’s not worth feeling hunted again.”
Eventually he stretched, sighed a couple of times, dragged himself out of bed in his underwear, shivering with cold, and went over to the window to see how this winter’s day was different from the one before. The courtyard with its rain-polished flagstones, the fallen leaves blowing around on the ground, the rusty iron cistern lid, and the bare fig tree, the sight of all this filled him with peace and sadness. The bare fig tree reminded him of the fig tree in the New Testament, in Mark’s Gospel, the one that Jesus, leaving Bethany, after looking in vain for a fig to eat among its leaves, cursed angrily and caused it instantly to wither and die. But surely Jesus knew very well that no fig tree produces fruit before Passover. Instead of cursing it, couldn’t he have blessed it and worked a little miracle to make the fig tree bear fruit for him right then and there?
The sadness brought after it a strange, secret joy, as if someone inside him were glad to be sad. This joy gave him the impetus to thrust his frowzled head and beard under the tap and let the ice-cold water wash away the last traces of sleep.
Now he felt awake enough to
face the new day. He grabbed the towel and dried himself vigorously, as if scraping the cold from his body. He brushed his teeth energetically, gargled, and spat with a snort from the back of his throat. Then he dressed and put on a chunky pullover. He lit the stove, boiled the kettle, and made himself a Turkish coffee. While the coffee was bubbling he cast a glance at the leaders of the Cuban Revolution looking down on him from the sloping ceiling, and said enthusiastically, “Good morning, comrades.”
Holding the coffee cup in his right hand, he picked up the walking stick with the fox-head handle and stood at the window for a few more minutes. If he saw a cat gliding through the mist among the frozen bushes, he tapped the stick against the windowpane, as though urging the sharp-toothed fox to go a-hunting, or else sending distress signals to the outside world, to make someone notice them, the fox and him, and send somebody to rescue them from their attic prison. At times, he pictured Yardena sitting in the university cafeteria in a soft corduroy skirt, her fair hair pinned up on her head, liberally scattering laughter around her, because someone at her table was making fun of the way he, Shmuel, was coming down the stairs, his bearded head leading, his legs pursuing at the rear, and all of him gasping and panting.
After drinking his coffee Shmuel dusted his beard and his hair with baby talc, as if prematurely whitening them, then he descended the spiral staircase that led to the kitchen. He was careful not to make a sound, so as not to disturb Gershom Wald’s morning sleep. At the same time, nevertheless, he gave four or five forced coughs, in the hope of attracting Atalia to come and spend a few minutes in the kitchen.
Usually she was not there, though his nostrils seemed to catch a faint whiff of her scent of violets. He was overcome again with his morning sadness. But this time it brought no joy in its train, but turned into an attack of asthma, and he hurriedly took two deep breaths from the inhaler he always carried in his pocket. Then he opened the refrigerator door and stared inside for a few minutes, without the foggiest idea what he was looking for.
The kitchen was always clean and tidy. Her cup and plate were washed and drying on the drainer, her bread was wrapped in tissue paper inside the bread bin, not a crumb on the oilcloth, and only her chair, drawn back from the table a little, stood at an angle, as though she had left in a hurry.
Had she gone out? Or was she closeted in her silent room again?
Sometimes he could not contain his curiosity, and he tiptoed down the passage to listen at her door. There was no sound to be heard, but after a few moments of concentrated attention he sometimes thought he caught a sort of humming or a low rustling through the closed door. He tried to imagine what was inside that room, where he had never been invited or ever managed to catch a glimpse, even though several times he had lain in wait in the passage for the door to open.
After a few moments he still had no way of knowing whether the rustling or humming sound actually came from the other side of the door or was entirely inside his own head. He almost succumbed to the temptation to try the handle, stealthily. But he stopped himself and returned to the kitchen, his nostrils twitching like a puppy’s to catch a whiff of her perfume. He opened the refrigerator again, and this time he found a cucumber, which he consumed whole, skin and all.
He sat at the kitchen table for ten minutes or so, glancing at the headlines in the newspaper. In a day or two the new government would be sworn in. Its composition was still unclear. The leader of the opposition, Begin, had declared that there was no solution to the problem of the Palestinian refugees within the frontiers of the State of Israel, but there was a real and positive solution in the Greater Land of Israel, when the entire land was once again reunited. Meanwhile, the mayor of Safed had had a miraculous escape from death when his car tumbled down the mountainside. More rain was forecast all over the country, and in Jerusalem a light snowfall was possible.
13
* * *
SOMETIMES HE WOULD CLIMB back up to his attic and read for a couple of hours. He would start at the table and continue lying on his bed, until the book dropped onto his beard and his eyes closed to the sound of the wind rattling the windows and of the rain in the gutters. He enjoyed the vague thought that the rain was falling only a few fingers’ width away from his head, because the sloping ceiling of the attic slanted in such a way that he could touch it with his fingers as he lay in bed.
At midday he would get up, shrug on his shabby duffel coat, and put a shapka on his head, a type of Russian headgear introduced into the country by immigrants from Eastern Europe. He went out for a walk between one rain shower and the next. Skirting the new community center or continuing eastward toward Shmuel Hanagid Street, along the stone wall of the Ratisbonne Monastery, he passed the Yeshurun Synagogue and returned to Sha’arei Hesed along Keren Hakayemet Street and Ussishkin Street. Sometimes he took the fox-head walking stick with him without asking Atalia’s permission, and as he walked he would tap the paving stones with it or test the iron railings. He desperately hoped that he would not bump into anyone he knew from his student days, so he would not have to mumble explanations: why he had suddenly disappeared as if the earth had swallowed him up, where he had vanished to, what he was doing nowadays, why he was wandering the wintry streets like a huddled ghost, and why he was carrying that splendid walking stick with a silver fox-head handle.
He had no answer, and no excuse. And besides, he had signed an agreement not to breathe a word to a living soul about where he was working now.
But why not, in fact? He was simply working as a companion to an elderly invalid for a few hours a day—in other words, he was a sort of part-time caregiver, in exchange for free room and board and a small salary. What exactly did Gershom Wald and Atalia Abravanel want to hide from the outside world? What was the point of their secrecy? More than once he had been overcome with curiosity and longed to ply them both with questions, but Mr. Wald’s secret pain and Atalia’s cold aloofness had silenced his questions before he could put them into words.
Once he saw, or thought he saw, Nesher Sharshevsky, the expert on rainwater collection, on King George Street, next to Beit Hama’alot. As he pulled down his shapka to hide his face, Shmuel smiled to himself at the thought that this winter was giving dear Nesher Sharshevsky plenty of rainwater to collect. Maybe one of these days he would come to check the level of the water in the cistern with the iron lid in the courtyard of the house on Rabbi Elbaz Lane.
Another time, on Keren Hayesod Street, he nearly collided with Professor Gustav Yomtov Eisenschloss, and it was only thanks to the professor’s nearsightedness behind his pebble lenses that Shmuel Ash managed to slip into a courtyard at the last minute.
He ate his lunch in a little Hungarian restaurant on King George Street, always ordering the same meal: hot, spicy goulash soup with two slices of white bread, followed by fruit compote. Sometimes he would cut briskly across Independence Park, at his usual awkward half-run, tousled head chasing his beard, body leaning forward and chasing after his head, and his legs scurrying after his body as though afraid of being left behind. He tramped through puddles without even noticing, sharp drops falling from the trees onto his face, his gait close to a run, as if he were being chased. Finally he reached Hillel Street, and continued to Nahalat Shiva, until he stood at last, puffing and panting, in front of the house where Yardena had lived before her marriage, gazing up at the entrance as though it were not Yardena but Atalia who was liable to emerge at any moment. He pulled the inhaler out of his pocket and took three deep breaths.
Jerusalem seemed quiet and thoughtful that winter. From time to time, church bells rang out. A westerly breeze stirred the tops of the cypresses and plucked Shmuel’s heartstrings. Once in a while, a bored Jordanian sniper fired a stray shot toward the minefields and the wasteland that divided the Israeli from the Jordanian city. The stray shot seemed only to intensify the silence of the alleyways and the heavy gray mass of high stone walls that enclosed spaces concealing Shmuel knew not what—monasteries or orphanages or maybe m
ilitary installations. Broken glass had been set in the tops of these walls, and sometimes coils of rusting barbed wire had been added. Once, as he was passing the wall that enclosed the leper colony in Talbiyeh, he asked himself what life was like behind that wall. Probably not much different from his own life, he told himself, shut away in a low-ceilinged attic in the last house at the bottom of Rabbi Elbaz Lane, at the end of Jerusalem near the deserted boulder-strewn fields.
A quarter of an hour later he turned and crossed Nahalat Shiva and returned home by a roundabout route through Agron Street, until he eventually reached the iron gate of the low stone house and arrived, puffing and panting, slightly late, at his post in Mr. Wald’s library. He filled and lit the paraffin stove, fed the goldfish in their tank, and made tea. They exchanged pages from the newspaper. An old building in Tiberias had collapsed because of the winter rain and two residents had been injured. President Eisenhower had issued a warning against the machinations of Moscow. In Australia, a small settlement had been discovered of Aborigines who had never heard of the arrival of white men. And Egypt was building up stocks of modern Soviet weaponry.
