by Amos Oz
14
* * *
ONE MORNING HE CAME down to find Atalia in the kitchen, sitting at the oilcloth-covered table reading a book. The book was lying on the table, and she was clasping a cup of steaming coffee with both hands and all ten fingers. Shmuel gave a little cough and said:
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you.”
“Well, you have,” Atalia said. “Sit down.”
Her brown eyes scrutinized him with faint mockery, as if she were fully confident of her own femininity but slightly doubtful about the young man sitting opposite. Or as if wordlessly asking him, Well, have you finally got some little surprise for me, or are you just hanging around as usual?
Shmuel lowered his eyes and saw the tips of her black high-heeled shoes under the table. The hem of her green woolen dress which came down almost to her ankles. He took a deep breath and the scent of violets made him feel dizzy. Then he weighed his options, picked up the salt shaker in his left hand and the pepper pot in his right, and said:
“Nothing special. I just came down to look for the bread knife, or . . .”
“You’ve sat down. Why invent excuses?”
With this she looked at him, not smiling yet but with a gleam in her eyes that promised that a smile was definitely in the cards—all it needed was a little effort from him.
He put down the salt and pepper, tore a page from the notebook that was lying on the table, and folded it in half. He bent up two ears in the folded page, one on each side. Then he folded the page along the margin, pulled it and folded it again, making first a triangle and then an oblong, then folded it again into two congruent triangles, then into an oblong again, pulled it in both directions, and handed her a paper boat, with the words:
“A surprise. For you.”
She took the boat from his hand and sailed it thoughtfully the width of the oilcloth, until it found a safe anchorage between the salt and the pepper. And she nodded to herself, apparently in complete agreement with herself. Shmuel looked at the deeply chiseled furrow that ran firmly down from her small nostrils to the center of her upper lip. Now he also noticed that she was wearing just a hint of lipstick. As if in response to his look, Atalia raised her cup and drained the rest of her coffee. Then, summing up her observations, she said to him in her rich, languid voice, seeming to caress each syllable before sending it on its way:
“You came here to be alone, and now after only three weeks it seems that loneliness is weighing on you.”
She said this more like a diagnosis than a question. Shmuel heard that something in her words which reminded him of a warm, darkened room, with closed shutters and a table lamp with a dark shade. Suddenly he ached with all his being to touch her feelings, to stir some curiosity, or admiration, or maternal affection, or even mockery, no matter what, as long as he could prevent her from getting up and hiding away in her room. Or, worse still, going out. Sometimes when she went out she did not come back till late. Sometimes she did not return until the next day.
“I went through a slightly difficult period before I came here,” he said. “And it still hasn’t been entirely resolved. I had a crisis. Or, more precisely, a personal failure.”
Now the smile trembled in the corners of her lips, as if she were trying to beg him to stop, not to tell her about it. As if she were embarrassed on his behalf.
“I’ve finished my coffee,” she said. “How about you? You were looking for a bread knife, weren’t you?”
She took a long, sharp knife from a drawer in the kitchen table and handed it carefully to Shmuel. As she did so, her smile finally broke out. This time it was not an ironic smile, but one that lit up her whole face with sympathy and affection.
“Talk,” she said. “If you like. I’ll sit and listen.”
Shmuel absent-mindedly took the knife from her. He had forgotten to bring over the breadboard. Her smile dazzled him, and he told her, in seven or eight sentences, about his girlfriend Yardena who had suddenly decided, with no explanation, to marry her previous boyfriend, that dull hydrologist she had found for herself. Then he passed the knife from one hand to the other, waved it in the air, tested the blade on the tip of his fingernail, and said:
“But can we know anything at all about women’s mysterious preferences?”
He was hoping to offer her—or their conversation—some fuel, or at least a signpost.
Atalia removed her smile and concluded with the words:
“There’s no such thing as women’s mysterious preferences. Where did you hear such nonsense? I have no idea why couples separate, because I have no idea how they get together in the first place. Or why. In other words, it’s no use asking me about women’s preferences. Or men’s, for that matter. I have no womanly insights to offer you. Maybe Wald—maybe you should talk to him about this. He’s an expert on everything, after all.”
With that, she picked up four or five crumbs from the oilcloth, put them in Shmuel’s paper boat, sailed the boat gently toward him, and stood up: a handsome woman in her mid-forties, her wooden earrings swaying slightly as she rose, her body caressing her dress from within. His nostrils caught a whiff of her delicate scent of violets as she passed him. But when she reached the door, she paused and said:
“Maybe, little by little, we’ll anesthetize you, so it hurts less. These walls are accustomed to swallowing pain. Leave the cup—I’ll wash it later. But don’t wait for me here. Or yes, wait, if you’ve got nothing better to do. Wald would no doubt say, ‘Blessed is he that waiteth.’ I’ve no idea how long.”
Shmuel brought the knife close to the oilcloth, but found nothing to cut, changed his mind, put it down carefully next to the salt shaker, and said:
“Yes.”
After a moment he corrected himself:
“No.”
But she had already gone, leaving him to cut the paper boat he had made for her into little pieces.
15
* * *
SOMETIME IN THE MID-NINTH CENTURY, or a little earlier, a Jew whose name is unknown sat down and wrote a tract mocking Jesus and the Christian faith. There is no doubt that the author, who wrote his work in Arabic, lived in a Muslim country, for otherwise he would not have dared to deride Christianity as he did. The tract is called Qissat mujadalat al-Usquf—that is, The Story of the Disputation of the Priest. It tells of a Christian priest who has converted to Judaism, and after his conversion he addresses the Christians and explains to them why their faith is false. The author is clearly knowledgeable about Christianity and is familiar with its scriptures, as well as with some later Christian writings.
In the course of the Middle Ages this text was translated by Jews from Arabic into Hebrew and renamed The Polemic of Nestor the Priest (whether by way of allusion to the Nestorian Church, or to the Hebrew words for “contradiction” or “hidden,” or perhaps simply because Nestor was the name of the converted priest). Over the years, various versions of the composition came into being. In some of them quotations in Latin or Greek were inserted, and some of them apparently migrated from Spain to the Rhineland and eventually reached Byzantine lands.
The main purpose of The Polemic of Nestor the Priest is to point out some striking inconsistencies in the Gospel stories, to refute the doctrine of the Trinity, and to challenge the divinity of Jesus. The book employs various means in the pursuit of these ends, some of which contradict one another. On the one hand, Jesus is described as an out-and-out Jew, who kept the commandments and never intended to found a new religion or to be considered divine, and it was only after his death that Christianity arose and distorted his image for its own needs and elevated him to the rank of a deity. On the other hand, the work does not shy away from deploying crude and ribald hints about the dubious circumstances surrounding Jesus’ birth. The author even mocks Jesus’ suffering and his lonely death on the cross. And, yet again, logical and theological arguments are advanced in the book aimed at refuting the principal tenets of the Christian faith.
Shmuel Ash ex
amined these contradictory features carefully, and he wrote on a slip of paper that he attached to a draft of his notes that the anonymous Jewish author of this dubious polemic claims, almost in the same breath, that Jesus was a proper Jew; that he was the illegitimate offspring of his mother’s adultery, and was necessarily tainted, like every human fetus, with the unclean blood of his mother’s womb; that Adam was not born of a woman yet no one considers him divine; and that Enoch and Elijah, too, did not die but were taken up into heaven, and yet they are not thought of as Sons of God. Moreover, the prophets Elisha and Ezekiel worked more miracles and resurrected more corpses than Jesus did, not to mention the wonders and miracles wrought by Moses. Finally the author mocks and ridicules the crucifixion, recalling how the crowd scoffed at the dying Jesus on the cross and made fun of him with the words “Save thyself, and come down from the cross,” and Nestor ends by quoting a verse from scripture showing that any hanged man bears a curse, as it is written, “He that is hanged is accursed of God.”
When Shmuel told Gershom Wald about the claims advanced by Nestor the Priest, as well as about some other popular Jewish texts from the Middle Ages—the Toldot Yeshu, Ma’ase Talui, and other such scurrilous works—the old man brought both his big hands down hard on his desk and exclaimed:
“What filth! What disgusting filth!”
Gershom Wald was convinced that Nestor never existed and that there had never been any converted priest, but that all these foul texts were written by narrow-minded little Jews because they were afraid of the attractive power of Christianity and tried to exploit the protection of Muslim rule by attacking the figure of Jesus while sheltering safely beneath the cloak of Muhammad.
Shmuel disagreed: “But The Polemic of Nestor the Priest shows a certain acquaintance with the world of Christianity, a knowledge of the Gospels, familiarity with Christian theology.”
Gershom Wald, however, comprehensively dismissed this familiarity—what familiarity? There is no familiarity here beyond a bundle of disgusting clichés bandied about by the crowds in the marketplace. The language of these Jews, when they attack Jesus and his followers, is identical to the foul language of anti-Semites when they attack the Jews and Judaism.
“Surely if you want to challenge Jesus the Christian,” Wald said sadly, “you have to elevate yourself, not descend into the gutter. It is indeed possible and even fitting to take issue with Jesus, for example on the question of universal love. Is it really possible for us all, without exception, to love all of us, without exception, all of the time? Did Jesus himself love everyone all of the time? Did he, for example, love the moneychangers at the gates of the Temple, when in a fit of rage he violently overturned their tables? Or when he proclaimed, ‘I came not to send peace on earth, but a sword’—did he forget at that moment his own exhortation to general love and his commandment to turn the other cheek? Or when he urged his apostles to be wise as serpents and harmless as doves? And especially when he said, according to Luke, ‘But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me.’ What happened at that moment to the injunction to love even—and especially—your enemies? Surely anyone who loves everybody does not really love anybody. There. That’s how you can argue with Jesus the Christian. Not with insults from the gutter.”
Shmuel said:
“The Jews who wrote this polemic were certainly writing under the influence of their oppression and persecution by the Christians.”
“Such Jews,” Wald said with a contemptuous snigger, “such Jews, if they had only had the power, would certainly have oppressed and persecuted the followers of Jesus, probably no less than the Christian Jew-haters have persecuted the Jews. Judaism and Christianity, and Islam too, all drip honeyed words of love and mercy so long as they do not have access to handcuffs, grills, dominion, torture chambers, and gallows. All these faiths, including those that have appeared in recent generations and continue to mesmerize adherents to this day, all arose to save us and all just as soon started to shed our blood. Personally I do not believe in world reform. No. I do not believe in any kind of world reform. Not because I consider that the world is perfect as it is—certainly not, the world is crooked and grim and full of suffering—but whoever comes along to reform it soon sinks in rivers of blood. Now let’s drink a glass of tea and leave aside these obscenities you’ve brought me today. If only all religions and all revolutions vanished from the face of the earth someday, I tell you—all of them, without exception—there would be far fewer wars in the world. Man, Immanuel Kant once wrote, is by nature a crooked piece of timber. And we must not try to straighten him, lest we sink up to our necks in blood. Listen to that rain outside. It’s nearly time for the news.”
16
* * *
OUTSIDE THE CLOSED SHUTTERS of the library, the wind suddenly died down and the rain stopped. A deep, damp silence filled the darkening city. Only two persistent birds tried repeatedly to punctuate the silence. Gershom Wald lay, angular and hunchbacked, on his wicker couch, covered in a woolen blanket, leafing slowly through a book in a foreign language with gilded curlicues on its cover. The desk lamp cast a warm yellow ring of light around him, from which Shmuel was excluded. The old man had already managed to have a long argument on the telephone this evening with one of his regular sparring partners: consistency, he had insisted, may not always be a quality one should be proud of, far from it, but inconsistency shames him who displays it.
Wald and Shmuel had drunk one tea and then another, Shmuel had fed the two goldfish in their glass bowl, and they had talked a little about the decision of the Jordanian authorities in East Jerusalem to delay the passage of the Israeli convoy to the encircled Hebrew University buildings. They had talked about the wave of attacks launched by young anti-Semites all over Germany and the decision of the Senate of the City of Berlin to outlaw neo-Nazi organizations. According to the newspaper, Dr. Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Zionist Organization, had stated that Nazis were behind this new wave of attacks on Jewish institutions in Europe. Shmuel went out to the kitchen, picking up the empty biscuit plate on his way, and when he returned he handed the old man his evening pills, to swallow with the last sips of his tea.
Suddenly the man said:
“So, how about your sister? The one who has gone to study medicine in Italy? Have you told her about your present state?”
“My present state?”
“Yes, you came here to hide away from life and you have fallen in love: as if a man did flee from a lion and a bear met him. Have you ever thought, my young friend, how right the English were when they invented the excellent phrase ‘to fall in love’?”
“Me?” Shmuel stammered. “But I —”
“And when the English were still living in the treetops, one of our own, the wisest of men, already knew that ‘love covereth all sins’—in other words, that love is in fact bound up with falling down to the bottom stair, to the lower depths of the world of sin. And in the selfsame book it is also written that hope deferred maketh the heart sick. Is your sister younger than you or older?”
“Older. Five years older. But she wouldn’t —”
“If not she, then who? A person like you does not turn to his parents at such a time. Or to his teachers. Perhaps your friends would stand by you? Have you got any friends?”
Shmuel, hoping to change the subject, replied that his friends had distanced themselves from him, or rather, he had distanced himself from them, because the whole socialist movement had undergone a great upheaval following the exposure of the deviations of the Stalin era, resulting in a rift developing between him and his friends. So as to prevent Mr. Wald from talking to him again about love and loneliness, Shmuel embarked on a detailed account of the Socialist Renewal Group which used to convene weekly in the dingy café in a back alley in Yegia Kapayim until it broke up recently on account of the split. From there he went on to talk about the legacy of Lenin and what Stalin had done with it, and he pr
oceeded to muse aloud about the question of what sort of legacy Stalin had left to his heirs: Malenkov, Molotov, Bulganin, and Khrushchev.
“Should we really put an end to a grand idea and abandon all hope of reforming the world just because the Party there, in the Soviet Union, became corrupted and lost its way? Should we condemn a wonderful figure like Jesus just because the Spanish Inquisition claimed to be acting in his name?”
“So apart from your sister, and apart from Lenin and Jesus, you have no close friends in the whole world? Never mind. You are not obliged to answer. You are a valiant warrior in the army of world reformers, and I am merely part of the corruption of the world. When the new world triumphs, when all men are honest, simple, productive, strong, equal, and upright, doubtless it will be made illegal for deformed creatures like me, who only consume but contribute nothing, and who sully everything with their sophistries and sarcasm, to exist. So. Even she, I mean Atalia, will no doubt be redundant in the pure world that will arise after the revolution, a world that will have no use for single widows who are not enlisted in the ranks of the world reformers but wander here and there, doing all sorts of good and bad things, breaking innocent hearts on the way, and enjoying a fixed allowance from their father’s estate plus a widow’s pension from the Ministry of Defense.”
“Atalia? A widow?”
“And they won’t have any need of you, my friend, not even a shadow of a hint of a need, when the great revolution finally becomes a reality. What will they care about Jewish views of Jesus? What will they care about dreamers like Jesus? Or like you? What will they care about the Jewish question? What will they care about any question? After all, they themselves will be the answer to every question. They will be the ultimate exclamation mark. And I’m telling you, my dear, pay heed and attend: if I had to choose a thousand times between our age-old sufferings, yours and mine and everyone else’s, and their salvation and redemption, or indeed all the salvations and redemptions in the world, I’d rather they left us all the pain and sorrow and kept their world reform for themselves, seeing that it always involves slaughter, crusades, jihad or gulag, or the wars of Gog and Demagogue. And now, my dear, if you don’t mind, we shall perform a small experiment on you. We shall ask you three favors: to be kind enough to close the shutters, to refill the heater, and to make us both some more tea. We shall ask you, and we shall watch the outcome of these three requests.”
