by Amos Oz
Yardena must be at work now, in the press-clipping agency where she had worked since before her marriage. She would be sitting there, on the first floor of an old building on Rav Kook Street, in a dimly lit room, underlining in pencil the names of the clients of the agency wherever they appeared in the newspapers. Perhaps she had once or twice come across the name of her Nesher Sharshevsky, who was himself probably sitting at his desk in the Institute for Research on Seas and Lakes, hard at work on a report, his face as usual expressing calm contentment, like someone sucking a sweet. Only you are roaming the streets of Jerusalem, doing nothing. The days are slipping by, winter will pass, then summer will come, and then winter again, and you will slowly rot between memories of Yardena and fantasies of Atalia. At night Yardena sleeps in Nesher Sharshevsky’s arms, and her warm, chestnutty smell permeates their double bed. Are you still in love with her? Or maybe you are not in love with her but with Atalia, a love that you do not admit to and that is totally unthinkable?
In his mind’s eye he compared Yardena to Atalia with her long, soft hair falling over one shoulder of her embroidered dress. Her way of walking, which had something of an inner dance to it, her hips more awake than she was. An assertive woman, full of secrets, who relates to you with a mixture of sarcasm and detached curiosity, a woman who does not stop giving you orders, and who always looks at you with a faint mockery, blended perhaps with a few slivers of pity. You gather this pity into your heart. She might be thinking of you as no more than an abandoned puppy.
What does Atalia see in you from the heights of her condescending irony? She probably sees an ex-student, an ex-researcher, a wild, disheveled, muddled youth who is attracted to her but would never dare express his emotions, which are childlike sentiments, in words. Does your presence sometimes annoy her? Does it amuse her? Or maybe it does both?
On a rough concrete wall a large rat, perhaps a sewer rat, stood motionless. The creature fixed its little black eyes on Shmuel as though it were about to ask him a question. Or perhaps to put him to a test. Shmuel stopped and looked at the rat for a moment or two as if to say, Don’t be afraid of me, my hands are empty and I’ve got nothing to hide. One of them, Shmuel understood, would have to give way now. Right away. And so he did indeed give way, and went on without a backward glance. After five paces he reconsidered, felt ashamed of himself, and turned back. But the creature had vanished and the wall was deserted.
At twenty past twelve Shmuel Ash entered the little restaurant on King George Street and sat down at his usual corner table, where almost every day he ate his lunch, which also served as his breakfast. Without inquiring what he wanted, the waiter, who was also the proprietor, a short, fat Hungarian with a red face and a forehead always covered with beads of sweat even in winter (Shmuel supposed he suffered from high blood pressure), brought him a deep bowl of hot, spicy goulash soup. Shmuel always ate goulash soup, accompanied by several slices of white bread, and he always rounded off his meal with fruit compote.
Once, the previous winter, he had sat here with Yardena. While they both ate their lunch, Shmuel had talked to her about the increasing isolationism of the leftist faction in the workers’ party, MAPAM. Suddenly she had looked at him, startled, and grabbed his arm. She pulled him sharply to his feet, hurriedly paid the bill, held him with her fingernails as if she had just been seized by an attack of indecipherable rage, and dragged him to his room in Tel Arza. All along the way she did not utter a single word, and he, as though stunned, allowed himself to be dragged along behind her. As soon as they got up to his room, she pushed him by the shoulders, flat on his back in bed, and without a sound she lifted her dress and got on top of him; she rode him violently, subduing him as if taking revenge, and she did not let him go until she had come twice. He had tried to cover her mouth with his hand to silence her, so as not to alarm the landlady in the next room. Then she straightened her dress, drank two glasses of tap water, and left.
Why did she leave him? What did that Nesher Sharshevsky have that he didn’t? What wrong had he done? What did she see in her dull hydrologist, whose square body resembled a packing case and who liked to talk in complicated, winding sentences about subjects that always bored everyone in the room? He would come out with sentences like “Tel Aviv is a much less ancient town than Jerusalem, but on the other hand it is more modern,” “There’s a great difference between old people and young people,” or “That’s the way it is: the majority decides and the minority simply has to abide by the majority view.”
“An excited puppy”—that was what Yardena had called Shmuel the last time they had spoken. Though inwardly he had agreed with her, at the same time he had felt full of shame and humiliation.
He stood up, paid for his meal, and paused for a moment at the counter to glance at the headlines in the evening paper. The Israel Defense Forces were purging the southern sector of the Israeli-Syrian border. Nasser, the Egyptian president, was threatening again, while Ben-Gurion was warning. Why were Nasser’s warnings always called threats, whereas Ben-Gurion’s threats were called warnings?
Then he went out into the street, which was bathed in a pleasant winter light, a light of pine trees and stones. He was suddenly assailed by a strange, sharp feeling that anything was possible, that what was lost only seemed to be lost, but that in fact nothing was completely lost and what would happen depended only on his audacity. He decided to change there and then. To change his whole life from that moment on. Henceforth he would be calm and bold, a man who knew what he wanted and did everything in his power to achieve it, with no holding back and no hesitation.
27
* * *
ATALIA FOUND SHMUEL SITTING at the desk, bent over an old book he had borrowed from the National Library. She was wearing a light-colored skirt and a blue pullover that was too big for her and gave her a warm, homey look. Her face looked younger than her forty-five years; it was only her veined hands that betrayed her age. She sat down on the edge of his bed, leaned back against the wall, crossed her legs, straightened her skirt, and said, without apologizing for this sudden invasion of his territory:
“You’re working. I’m disturbing you. What are you reading?”
“Yes. Please,” Shmuel said. “Do disturb me. I really want you to. I’m tired of this work. In fact, I’m tired all the time. I’m even tired when I’m asleep. How about you? Are you free? Shall we go out for a little walk? It’s a bright day outside, the sort of winter’s day you only get in Jerusalem. Shall we go out?”
Ignoring the invitation, Atalia said:
“Are you still doing research on stories about Jesus?”
“Jesus and Judas. Jesus and the Jews,” Shmuel said. “How Jews down the ages have seen Jesus.”
“And why do you find that so interesting? Why not how they saw Muhammad? Or Buddha?”
“It’s like this,” Shmuel said. “I can easily understand why the Jews rejected Christianity. But Jesus wasn’t a Christian. He was born and died a Jew. It never crossed his mind to found a new religion. It was Paul, Saul of Tarsus, who invented Christianity. Jesus himself says explicitly, ‘Think not that I am come to destroy the law.’ If only the Jews had accepted him, the whole of history would have been different. There would never have been a Christian Church. And the whole of Europe might have adopted a milder, purer form of Judaism. And we would have been spared exile, persecutions, pogroms, the Inquisition, blood libels, and even the Holocaust.”
“And why did the Jews refuse to accept him?”
“That is precisely the question I ask myself, Atalia, but I still haven’t found an answer. He was, in today’s terms, a kind of Reform Jew. Or rather, a fundamentalist Jew, not in the fanatical sense of ‘fundamentalist,’ but in the sense of a return to the pure roots. He longed to purify the Jewish faith of all sorts of self-satisfied cultic accretions that had attached themselves to it, all sorts of fatty protrusions that the priests had cultivated and that the Pharisees had burdened it with. It was only natural for the priests to s
ee him as the enemy. I believe that Judas son of Simeon Iscariot was one of those priests. Or maybe he was just close to them. Maybe he was sent by the Jerusalem priests to join the community of those who believed in Jesus so as to spy on them and report their doings to Jerusalem. But he turned into a follower of Jesus and loved him so dearly that he became the most devoted of all his disciples and even served as the treasurer of the whole group. One day, if you like, I’ll tell you what I think is the Gospel of Judas Iscariot. But I am amazed at the simple people, why they didn’t accept Jesus in their masses, they who were groaning beneath the yoke of the rich, bloated priesthood in Jerusalem.”
“I don’t like the expression ‘simple people.’ There’s no such thing as the simple people. There’s a man and a woman, and another woman and another man, and each of them has reason and feelings and inclinations and moral judgments of one sort or another. Though a man’s moral judgment, if it exists at all, only exists in the brief moments when his urges are satisfied.”
“When you came in I was studying what the Ramban writes about Jesus. The Ramban, Rabbi Moses ben Nahman, whom the Christians call Nahmanides, was one of the most learned Jews who ever lived. And that was in the thirteenth century; he was born in Gerona, in Spain, and died here in this country, in Acre. He tells of a ‘disputation’ he was made to participate in by King James I of Aragon, a public debate that lasted for four successive days between the Ramban and an apostate Jew by the name of Pablo Christiani, also known as Friar Paul. There was something terrifying and blood-chilling about those public debates that the Jews were forced to engage in during the Middle Ages. If the Christian won, the Jews had to pay for their defeat with their blood, because it had been proved that their scriptures lied. And if the Jew won, the Jews still had to pay with their blood, for their impudence. The Christian priest tried to prove by means of quotations from the Talmud—remember that he was an apostate Jew—that the Talmud contains insults against Christianity as well as clear hints that Christianity is the true faith and that Jesus really was the Messiah, who came into our world and will return to it one day. The Ramban claims in his writings that he won this debate decisively, but in reality it appears that the disputation was stopped with no decision reached. Maybe the Ramban was as afraid of winning as he was of losing. Neither reason nor nature, he argued in this disputation, which is known as the Barcelona Disputation, can tolerate the story of the virgin birth, or that of Jesus’ death on the cross and his resurrection three days later. His main reasoning was as follows: it says explicitly in the holy scriptures that with the coming of the Messiah bloodshed will cease in the world, and that nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore. These are the words of the prophet Isaiah. And yet, from the days of Jesus to the present, bloodshed has not ceased for a moment. Moreover, in the book of Psalms it says expressly that the Messiah ‘shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth.’ Now Jesus had no dominion, either in his lifetime or after his death. It was Rome that ruled the Land of Israel and the world, and even today (says the Ramban) the Muslims rule over more territory than the Christians. And the Christians themselves, the Ramban concludes, shed far more blood than all the other nations.”
“All that sounds quite convincing to me,” said Atalia. “I think maybe your Ramban did win the debate after all.”
“No,” Shmuel said, “these are not convincing arguments, because they don’t contain a hint of an attempt to engage with the gospel itself, the gospel of Jesus, the gospel of universal love, and forgiveness, and grace, and compassion.”
“Are you a Christian?”
“I’m an atheist. Three-and-a-half-year-old Yossi Siton, who was run over and killed while he was chasing his green ball yesterday not far from here, on the Gaza Road, is sufficient proof that there is no God. I don’t believe for a moment that Jesus was God or the Son of God. But I love him. I love the words he used, such as ‘If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!,’ or ‘My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death,’ or ‘Let the dead bury their dead,’ or ‘Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted?’ I have loved him ever since I first read his teachings in the New Testament, when I was fifteen years old. And I believe that Judas was the most loyal and devoted of all his disciples and that he never betrayed him, but, on the contrary, he meant to prove his greatness to the whole world. I’ll explain to you one day, if you want to hear. Maybe we could go out again one evening, if you like, and sit down together in a quiet place where we can talk.”
As he said this, he looked at her crossed knees in their nylon stockings and wondered whether the stockings were held up by garters or a suspender belt, and he shrank back in his chair so she would not notice he was stiffening beyond all hope.
“You’re blushing under your Neanderthal beard again,” Atalia said. “This evening you and I will go to the early show at the cinema. There’s a neorealist Italian film. My treat.”
Startled and excited, Shmuel murmured:
“Yes. Thank you.”
Atalia came and stood behind him. She held his tousled head in her cool hands and pressed it for a moment against her breast. Then she turned and left the room without closing the door. Shmuel listened to the sound of her footsteps on the stairs until it stopped. A deep silence fell on the house. He drew the inhaler out of his pocket and took two breaths.
28
* * *
THAT EVENING HE ASKED Gershom Wald if he could leave at half past seven just this once.
“We’re going out, Atalia and I,” he said, all aglow like a little boy who has been kissed by the queen of the class.
“The honey will eat the bear. Well, you heartbroken thing. Just be careful she doesn’t singe your beard.”
Later he waited for her impatiently in the kitchen. He did not dare to knock on the door of her room. On the kitchen table’s oilcloth there were a few crumbs from her supper. Shmuel licked his fingertip and picked them up one by one, then dropped them into the sink and washed the sink and his finger. As if this would prove to Atalia that he had been right. Right about what? He had no answer to this question. He looked at an old print hanging on the wall just above the table, a colorful poster for the Jewish National Fund showing a tough, muscular pioneer, his sleeves rolled up with geometrical precision. The top button of his shirt was undone, revealing a suntanned, hairy chest. He was holding the handles of an iron plow drawn by a brown horse or mule striding toward the horizon where the sun was kissing the line of the hilltops. Sunset or sunrise? The picture gave no clue, but Shmuel imagined that the scene showed sunrise rather than sunset, as in the song: ‘To the mountains, to the mountains we are striding, / Striding at the dawning of the day. / We have left all our yesterdays behind us / And tomorrow is a long, long way away!’ He pondered the fact that after the sunrise would come a sunset, as always happens, and maybe the sunset was already here. Was Micha Wald tough and suntanned? Did he look like the pioneer in the poster? Did Ben-Gurion want us all to look like that pioneer?
More than once Shmuel had composed a fierce letter in his mind to David Ben-Gurion, and once he even committed a draft to writing. It was full of crossings-out. He explained to Ben-Gurion that it was a tragedy for the State of Israel that he had abandoned the socialism of his youth, and he went on to argue that the policy of retaliatory raids was a fruitless and dangerous policy, since violence begets violence, and vengeance begets vengeance. Shmuel had destroyed this letter before he finished writing it. Sometimes he conducted sharp arguments in his mind with the prime minister, which resembled to some extent the arguments he had had in the Socialist Renewal Group, except that in the former he secretly hoped not only to be victorious and convince Ben-Gurion, but also to win his admiration and even his affection.
Atalia appeared in a close-fitting orange winter dress. Her eyes were delicately outlined in kohl. She had a fine silver ch
ain around her neck. On her lips there hovered not exactly a smile, but rather something that might have been a secret promise of a smile. She said in astonishment:
“You must have been waiting for me since this morning. If not since yesterday evening.”
At this moment she seemed painfully beautiful. He knew very well that this woman was beyond his reach, and yet his whole body felt strained as if holding her tight in his arms. She sat down facing him at the kitchen table and said:
“No. We’re not going to see a film this evening. The sky is clear and there is a full moon. We’re going to put our coats on and take a walk, to see what the moonlight does to the alleyways.”
Shmuel agreed instantly. Atalia added:
“I don’t know if I like Jerusalem or simply put up with it. But whenever I leave Jerusalem for more than two or three weeks, the city begins to appear in my dreams, and always bathed in moonlight.”
Shmuel, in a sudden access of boldness, asked:
“What else do you dream about?”
Atalia answered without a smile:
“Good-looking young men.”
“Like me?”
“You’re not a young man, you’re an old child. Tell me, you did remember to warm up Wald’s porridge, didn’t you?”
“Yes, and I sprinkled some sugar and cinnamon on it. He’s already eaten it. Not all of it. There was some left over and I finished it. Now he’s writing. I’ve no idea what. He’s never told me what he writes and I haven’t dared ask. Do you know, Atalia? Or can you guess what it is that keeps him so busy?”
