by Amos Oz
“Abravanel. Micha. The war. He’s been writing up some research for years now, or maybe a book, about Shealtiel Abravanel, and also a memoir about his son’s life. Maybe he links the ostracism and banishment of Abravanel to his son’s death. Maybe he thinks there is some connection between them.”
“Connection? What connection?”
She did not reply. She rose, filled a glass with water from the tap, and drank it noisily like a thirsty peasant. Then she wiped her mouth with the back of a faintly wrinkled hand.
“Come on. Let’s go. The moon will be up soon. I love to watch it rise from the hills and soar over the rooftops.”
They went out into the dark yard, which was in the shadow of the trees, a shadow deepened by the row of cypresses behind the house. Shmuel could barely make out the iron lid of the cistern. Atalia held his elbow and guided him along the path paved with dressed Jerusalem stone. Through the sleeve of his threadbare coat he could feel the warmth of her hand and each of her fingers, and he longed with all his being to lay his own hand on hers, which was now guiding him on the steps. But he was afraid of her sarcasm. Instead of touching her, he took the inhaler out of his pocket. After one deep breath he felt better and put the inhaler back in his pocket.
Rabbi Elbaz Lane was empty. A streetlamp from the time of the British Mandate, inlaid with little rectangular panels of glass, waved in the breeze on a cable strung across the lane. The lamp cast a ceaseless, restless movement of wave-like shadows onto the paving stones. The westerly breeze was light and silent, as if it had been sent to cool a glass of tea.
Shmuel said:
“Tell me what sort of man your father was.”
Atalia replied in a soft voice, almost in a whisper:
“Let’s not talk now. Let’s walk without talking. Let’s listen to the sounds of the night.”
At the end of Rabbi Elbaz Lane the moon leapt above the tiled roofs, red and huge, like a demented sun determined to burst forth in the night, against every law of nature. Shmuel disliked this moon, because it had condemned him to silence. Atalia stopped, her hand still holding his elbow as if afraid he might stumble, and looked for a long time at the moon, or at the ring of brightness that surrounded it and poured down to whiten the walls of Jerusalem stone with a pallid, skeletal glow. Suddenly she said:
“I don’t know why we think of the moon as white. It isn’t white. It’s all bloodshot.”
Then they walked in silence along the narrow streets of the Nahlaot, Atalia leading and Shmuel following half a stride behind. She had let go of his sleeve, but from time to time she touched his shoulder gently to steer him to the left or right. A boy and girl passed them with their arms around each other, walking on up the street. The boy said:
“I don’t believe it. It just can’t be true.”
The girl replied:
“Just wait. You’ll see.”
The boy said something they couldn’t hear, but his voice sounded abject.
“How deep the silence is,” Atalia said. “You can almost hear the stones breathing.”
Shmuel opened his mouth to reply, but changed his mind, guessing correctly that she didn’t want him to break the silence. So he said nothing and went on walking half a pace behind her. Suddenly his hand reached out and his fingers stealthily stroked the back of her neck and slid over the silver chain under her hair. His eyes filled with tears, because he guessed that nothing was possible between them. Atalia could not see his eyes brimming in the dark but she slowed her pace. What a fool you are, Shmuel said to himself, a fool and a coward. You could have pulled her body to you just now, put your arms around her shoulders and kissed her lips. But some inner voice warned him: No, don’t try it, you’ll only make a fool of yourself.
They wandered the streets for forty or fifty minutes. They crossed Agrippa Street and walked the length of Mahane Yehuda Market, which was deserted and shuttered, with dizzying smells of fruit and rubbish and overripe vegetables and offal and spices and faint decay coming from the darkened stalls. They emerged onto the Jaffa Road at the square opposite the sundial that had been placed on top of one of the buildings in the days of Ottoman rule. Atalia lingered, facing the sundial for a short while, then suddenly answered the question Shmuel had asked her earlier about her father:
“He didn’t belong in our time. He may have come too late. He may have been ahead of his time. He belonged in a different time.”
Then she turned, with Shmuel behind her turning in her footsteps, to head for home, this time by different back alleys. They hardly exchanged a word all the way, apart from “Look out, there’s a step” or “That washing hanging across the road is dripping straight on our heads.” Atalia wanted this silence, and Shmuel did not dare contravene her wishes, though he was seething with excitement. Meanwhile, the moon had lost its bloody tinge; it had climbed up above the wall of the Bezalel Museum and was illuminating the whole city with a ghostly light. When they got home, Atalia took off her overcoat and helped Shmuel to free himself from his coat, as he had caught his arm in the torn lining.
“Thank you for this evening,” Atalia said. “I enjoyed it. It’s nice to be with you sometimes, especially when you don’t talk. No, I don’t want to eat anything now, thanks. You can make yourself something, if you like, from whatever you find in the refrigerator, and you can talk to yourself at the same time, as usual. You’re full of words I didn’t let you say. I’m off to my room. Good night. Don’t worry, we didn’t waste the evening. And don’t forget to turn off the light on the steps when you go up.”
With that, she turned and left on her flat-heeled shoes. Her orange dress shone in the doorway for a moment, then faded from view. A faint scent of violets hung in the air, and Shmuel inhaled it deeply. His heart, which the doctors had discovered to be enlarged ever since he was a child, beat hard, and he pleaded with it to calm down.
He decided therefore to eat two slices of bread and butter and cheese, to open a jar of yogurt, and perhaps fry himself an egg. But then he lost his appetite, which was replaced by a vague sadness. He went to his room, lay down in his underwear, and stared at the moon, which was in the center of the window. After twenty minutes he changed his mind, went back downstairs, opened a can of sweet corn and one of corned beef, and ate them both while standing in front of the open refrigerator. His appetite had returned.
29
* * *
HE THOUGHT ABOUT HIS PARENTS’ little flat in a side street in Hadar, in Haifa, the one his family had moved to after the shack in Kiryat Motzkin burned down. The larger of its two rooms was used as living room, dining room, and also his parents’ bedroom, while his sister Miri slept in the other. His own bed in the passage stood between the door to the tiny kitchen and the door to the toilet. At the head of his bed was a box painted brown that served as a clothes chest, a desk where he did his homework, and a bedside table. At eleven years old Shmuel was a thin, slightly stooped child, with big staring eyes, matchstick legs, and knees that were always scratched. It was years later, when he finished his military service, that he grew his tousled mane of hair and the caveman beard that hid his long, narrow face. He disliked the mane, the beard, and the childish face underneath, but he felt that the wild beard concealed something a man should be ashamed of.
As a child he had three or four friends, all of them from among the weakest pupils in his class. One of them was an immigrant from Romania, and another suffered from a slight stammer. Shmuel had a sizable stamp collection, and he loved to show it to his friends and to lecture them about the value and special features of rare stamps and about the various countries. He was a knowledgeable and talkative child, but he was almost incapable of listening when others were talking, and would lose interest after three or four sentences. He was especially proud of stamps from countries that had ceased to exist, such as Ubangi-Shari, Austria-Hungary, or Bohemia and Moravia. He could lecture his friends interminably about the wars and revolutions that had wiped these states off the map, those that had first bee
n conquered by the Nazis and later by Stalin, and those that had become provinces of the new countries that arose in Europe following World War I, such as Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. The names of faraway countries like Trinidad and Tobago or Kenya, Uganda, and Tanganyika aroused some vague longing in him. In his imagination he would sail off to those remote regions and take part in the wars of daring guerrilla movements fighting for freedom from the foreign conqueror. He lectured his friends with enthusiasm and ardor, making up whatever he did not know. He read whatever he could get hold of: adventure stories, travel stories, detective stories, horror stories, and also love stories, which he didn’t understand but which stirred a secret pleasure in him. Moreover, when he was twelve he decided to read the entire Hebrew Encyclopedia, volume by volume and entry by entry, in order, because everything interested him and even the things he could not understand fired his imagination. But when he was nearly halfway through the letter alef, he grew tired and gave up.
Once he went with his friend Menahem, a boy whose family had come from Transylvania, on an expedition in one of the overgrown wadis that ran down the western slope of Mount Carmel. They put on boots and hats, and each carried a stick, a water bottle, and a rucksack containing blankets to make a tent, and brought pitas, hard-boiled eggs, and potatoes to roast over a fire. They set off at half past five, just before sunrise, crossed the neighborhood, went down into the wadi, and advanced along the winding slope until almost eleven o’clock, counting birds they saw that neither of them knew the name of. Apart from the ravens, that is, which wheeled with guttural shrieks among the crags. Shmuel released some wild cries into the wadi and waited for the echo. At home he was never allowed to raise his voice.
By eleven the sun was hot and beat down on their faces, and both of them were red and dripping with salty sweat. Shmuel pointed to a level area between two oak trees and suggested they camp there and rest, then put up a tent, light a fire, and roast the potatoes. He knew from books about tall oak trees in Europe, though these oaks on the slopes of Mount Carmel were not trees at all but more like tangled bushes which gave hardly any shade. For a long while they both struggled with tent pegs and blankets, trying to erect a tent, but the poles refused to stick in the ground, even though they both used a stone as a hammer, taking turns, one holding the pole and the other hitting it with the stone. Shmuel bent down to pick up a bigger stone and a piercing scream burst from his chest. A scorpion had stung him on the back of his hand, at the base of the middle finger. The pain was sharp and burning, and so was the panic. And because they did not understand at first what had happened, Shmuel thought that perhaps a sliver of broken glass had penetrated deep in his flesh. Menahem took the hand, which was swelling, and tried to find and extract the splinter or piece of glass. Then he poured water from his water bottle on the sting, but the pain did not diminish, in fact it got worse, and Shmuel writhed and groaned, so Menahem suggested he sit down on a blanket while he went to get help. Suddenly Shmuel noticed a yellow scorpion crawling slowly among the dead leaves, perhaps the scorpion that had stung him, or another one. He began to tremble all over: he was certain he was going to die. A wave of terror and despair swept through him and sent him running quickly down the wadi, holding his burning hand with the other, stumbling as he ran, his feet catching on stones and dry branches. Once or twice he fell flat on his face, but he got up and went on running as fast as he could, panting wildly, while his friend Menahem ran after him but could not catch up with him because the fear and pain gave Shmuel wings.
Menahem, because he did not know what to do, started shouting for help in a weak, frightened voice, as though it was he who had been stung, and so the two of them ran on down the rocky slope, Menahem shouting as he ran and Shmuel running ahead and increasing the distance between them, no longer shouting but trembling all over.
Eventually they reached a new road that they didn’t know, and they stopped, panting and terrified. After a few minutes a woman in a car stopped and took them to the hospital, where they were separated. Shmuel was given an injection and Menahem was given a glass of cold water. Shmuel fainted when he had the injection, and when he came to, he saw his mother and father leaning over him, their faces almost touching, as if at long last some transient truce had been agreed between them. He was proud of himself for having brought about this peace.
They both looked weak and confused. They kept looking at him in a frightened way, as if they were dependent on him now, and as if he had to take care of them. His hand was bandaged and the pain had subsided, to be replaced by a sort of pleasant pride that welled up inside him. “It’s nothing,” he murmured, “only a scorpion sting, it doesn’t kill you.” When these last words left his lips, he felt a flutter of disappointment, because in his mind’s eye he saw his parents mourning for him and bitterly regretting all the wrongs they had done him since he was small. After a few hours the duty doctor discharged him and told him to rest at home, to eat little but to drink lots of fluids. His parents rang for a taxi. They dropped Menahem off on their way home.
At home they put Shmuel in his sister’s bed, and banished Miri to Shmuel’s corner in the passage, between the kitchen and the toilet. For two days they fed him on hot chicken soup, chicken livers with potato purée and boiled carrots, and vanilla-flavored custard. After two days they said to him:
“That’s enough of being coddled. Tonight you’re going back to your own bed, and tomorrow, back to school.” Then came the rebukes and reprimands. His friend Menahem came to visit, all guilty, humble, and meek, as though it was he who had stung Shmuel. He even brought him a present, a rare, valuable stamp that Shmuel had coveted for a long time, a Nazi stamp with a swastika and a picture of Hitler. After a few days the swelling went down, but Shmuel never forgot the warm delight he had experienced along with the fear of death, and the secret sweetness at the sight of his parents and sister grieving over his fresh grave and feeling sorry for all the times they had wronged him since he was born. He also remembered the two prettiest girls in his class, Tamar and Ronit, standing before his tombstone, hugging each other tearfully. And he remembered the touch of his sister Miri’s hand on his forehead and his hair. She was bending over and stroking him as he lay on her bed in her room, as she had never stroked him before or since. In his family they hardly ever touched one another. He sometimes received a burning slap in the face from his father, and on rare occasions his mother laid her cool fingers on his forehead for a moment. Maybe she was just checking to see if he had a fever. He never saw his parents touch each other, not even to brush a crumb off a sweater, but throughout his childhood years he felt that his mother nursed a private sense of being insulted, while his father suppressed a lasting resentment. His parents barely spoke to one another, and if they did, it was only about practical arrangements. A plumber. Forms. Shopping. Whenever his father spoke to his mother, his mouth twisted downward as if he had a toothache. What the reasons were for his mother’s umbrage and his father’s resentment he neither knew nor cared. From his earliest memories, when he was two or three, his parents were already distant from each other. Though they hardly ever quarreled in his presence, sometimes he saw his mother with red eyes. Now and then his father went out on the balcony to smoke a cigarette and stayed there alone for fifteen or twenty minutes, and when he came back inside, he sat down in his armchair and hid behind the newspaper. His parents were polite, reserved people who didn’t believe in raising their voices. Throughout his childhood and his teens Shmuel was ashamed of them and was always angry at them, without knowing what he was angry about or why. Was it for their weakness? Their perpetual humiliation, the humiliation of immigrants who went out of their way to win the favor of strangers? For the warmth they did not lavish on him, because it was not in them? For the suppressed hostility that prevailed between them almost all of the time? For their miserliness? And yet they always took care of anything he needed: despite their parsimony, he was never short of clothes or books, an album or catalog for his stamp collection,
a bicycle for his bar mitzvah; they even paid for him to study at the university, until they went bankrupt. Despite which he was unable to love his mother or his father. He loathed the mixture of submissiveness and bitterness they showed at all times. The depressing, low-ceilinged passageway they made him sleep in for the whole of his childhood and adolescence. His father’s meekness, the way he was constantly reciting the slogans of the ruling party, and his mother’s cowed silence. Throughout his childhood, he invented totally different parents for himself, strong, warmhearted, devoted parents, maybe professors from the Technion, well-to-do scholars from the Upper Carmel, witty parents who radiated affection and charm, people capable of inspiring respect, love, and awe in himself and others. He never mentioned this to anyone, not even his sister. When he was little she used to call him an adopted child, a foundling, and she used to say, “We found you in the forests of Mount Carmel.” Her father would sometimes correct her: “What are you talking about? We didn’t find him in the forests of Mount Carmel, we found him in an alleyway near the port.” His mother would say meekly, “It wasn’t like that at all—the fact is that none of the four of us found the others on purpose.” Shmuel was always angry at himself for being angry with them, and always blamed himself for his disloyalty. As if for all those years he was an enemy agent planted in the midst of his family.
As for Miri, she was a pretty girl with chestnut hair who always held herself upright. By the time she reached the age of fourteen or fifteen she was surrounded by a pack of giggling girls and tall boys, some of whom were two or three years older than she, and one of them was an officer in the commandos.
Shmuel carried the scorpion sting with him as one of the few sweet memories of his childhood. For all those years he had been enclosed by the walls of the gloomy passage he slept in, walls sooty from the paraffin heater that was lit during power cuts, and by the low, damp-infested ceiling. For a space of two or three days it was as if a crack had opened in one of the walls and through it something had emerged that Shmuel had never ceased to long for when he was growing up, and even now that he was an adult, when he remembered the scorpion sting he was filled with a vague urge to forgive the whole world and to love everyone who crossed his path.
