by Amos Oz
30
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ONE TUESDAY, DURING A BREAK between two rain showers, Shmuel got up early, at nine o’clock, thrust his tousled head under the tap, and let the stream of cold water banish the remnants of his slumber. Then he dressed and went down to the kitchen, ate a slice of bread and cheese, and drank two glasses of thick Turkish coffee. It was not yet ten when he walked to the bus stop on Keren Hakayemet Street and took the bus to the National Library at Givat Ram. This time he left the stick with the sharp-toothed fox handle behind. A diminutive, bespectacled woman, whose face radiated goodwill and kindliness but who had a slight mustache, directed him to the reading room of the Newspaper Department. Here he requested and was given nine monthly volumes of the daily newspaper Davar, from June 1947 to February 1948. He settled in his seat, laid some sheets of paper he had brought with him on the table in front of him, along with a pen that he had taken from Gershom Wald’s desk, and started to work his way patiently through the binders, issue by issue and page by page.
The only other reader in the room was an older, angular man with a goatee, protruding ears, and gold-framed pince-nez. Shmuel noticed that he was almost completely devoid of eyebrows. The man was turning the pages of a thick-bellied weekly that Shmuel could not see the title of, but he noticed that it was an old foreign magazine and also noticed that the man was feverishly taking notes on pieces of paper while chewing his lower lip.
After half an hour Shmuel finally found a small item relating to Shealtiel Abravanel, a member of the Zionist Executive Committee and the Council of the Jewish Agency. It was a modest paragraph tucked away in the middle pages of Davar, and it reported that on June 18, 1947, Abravanel requested permission to give evidence to the United Nations’ special commission examining the question of the future of Palestine. Abravanel had asked to be allowed to submit a minority view, or rather, an individual view, to the commission concerning the conflict between Jews and Arabs. To suggest an original and peaceable solution. The Council of the Jewish Agency had turned down his request, arguing that the Jewish Agency and the Zionist Executive Committee should speak with a single voice to the UN commission rather than present several discordant views. The Davar report added that Abravanel had deliberated whether to appear before the commission despite the Jewish Agency’s ruling, but had decided to accept the majority’s authority, perhaps because of hints that if he did presume to appear before the commission in his individual capacity, he would no longer have a place in the central institutions of the Jewish community in Palestine.
Shmuel Ash copied this item on a sheet of paper, which he folded and tucked in his shirt pocket. Then he perused the issues for September and October, paused to read the details of the recommendation of the UN commission that Palestine should be partitioned into two states, one Jewish and the other Arab, then pressed on in search of other references to the story of Shealtiel Abravanel, but he could discover no mention of a public debate and no appeal by Abravanel to Jewish or Arab public opinion.
After three hours or so he felt hungry, but decided that as long as the man with the goatee was sitting and working at the table opposite him he would not abandon his researches. He held firm to this decision for twenty minutes, then gave up and went to the cafeteria in the nearby Kaplun Building, where he used to slake his hunger when he was a student. He very much hoped he would not run into any of his former friends. If they started asking him questions, what would he tell them?
It was already half past one. He asked for a cheese sandwich, a yogurt, and a cup of coffee. Then, because he still felt peckish, he ordered another sandwich and another yogurt and another coffee, and this time he also bought a piece of cake to go with his coffee. When he had finished, he struggled with sleepiness. His body relaxed in the chair and his eyelids fluttered and closed. He sat for a quarter of an hour in a corner of the cafeteria, his bearded chin drooping on his chest; then he mustered the last of his willpower and returned to the reading room and sat down at his table. The man with no eyebrows and a goatee and gold-framed pince-nez was still taking feverish notes on little slips of paper. As he went past, Shmuel noticed that the title of the weekly magazine the man was reading was in Cyrillic characters, and that the notes he was taking seemed to be in Russian. He did not linger, but requested the volumes of Davar that he hadn’t looked at yet, returned to his table, and continued to scan the newspaper page by page.
As he got closer to the resolution of the UN General Assembly, on November 29, 1947, he almost forgot what he had come for and greedily devoured one issue after another, one article after another, as though the result of the fateful vote in the Assembly were still in the balance and each wavering vote could still tip the outcome one way or the other. He thought about Wald’s view of Ben-Gurion’s historic greatness and found pros and cons. At half past four he remembered his duties, returned the bound volumes of Davar to the librarian, gathered up his papers, forgot the pen, and ran, puffing and panting, to the bus stop, so as to report for duty at Gershom Wald’s by five o’clock. As he was running to the bus stop he had an asthma attack, so he stopped running, pulled out the inhaler, and took a couple of deep breaths. He reached the stop less than a minute after the bus had left, and had to wait for the next one.
From the bus, he ran home with the last of his strength.
He reached the house with the stone-paved courtyard on Rabbi Elbaz Lane at twenty past five, sweaty and panting, and found Gershom Wald deep in one of the witty, sarcastic conversations he often had with his friends. Shmuel waited till the end of the conversation, and apologized for being late.
“As you know,” the invalid said, “I don’t run away. As it is written in our holy scriptures, ‘Blessed are they that dwell in thy house.’ Yes. And you, if I may inquire, have you been pursuing one of the roes and the hinds of the field? To judge by your expression, it would appear that the roe succeeded in eluding you.”
“A glass of tea?” Shmuel asked. “A slice of cake, perhaps?”
“Sit down, young man. It is the bear’s nature to walk slowly, and you have been running, just to please me. There was no reason for you to run. As the prophet Amos says in Bialik’s poem, ‘From my cattle I learned to walk slow.’ I am pleased with you even when you are late. Dreamers are always late. And yet, as another poet says, ‘Dreams do not speak in vain.’”
Then the old man spoke for a long time on the telephone again with one of his interlocutors, quoting, joking, needling, then quoting again. When the conversation had ended, he turned back to Shmuel and asked about his teachers at the university. They chatted for a quarter of an hour about a professor who had fallen in love with a young student whose parents were friends of the professor’s. Wald loved gossip, and Shmuel was not averse to it either. Then Shmuel asked abruptly:
“Shealtiel Abravanel. Atalia’s father. Your son’s father-in-law. What can you tell me about him?”
Wald sank in thought. He stroked his cheek, then stared at his hand as if the answer to Shmuel’s question were written on it. Finally he said:
“He, too, was a dreamer. He may not have studied Jesus or Jewish views of Jesus, but in his own way he also believed, like Jesus, in universal love, the love of all those created in the divine image for all others created in that image. Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. For every one that asketh, receiveth; and he that seeketh, findeth; and to him that knocketh, it shall be opened; and so on. I, my dear, do not believe in the love of all for all. Love is a limited commodity. A man can love five men and women, maybe ten, sometimes fifteen. And even that, only rarely. But if a man comes to me and declares that he loves all the undeveloped countries, or that he loves Latin America, or that he loves the female sex—that is not love, it is rhetoric. Lip service. A slogan. We were not born to love more than a handful of people. Love is intimate, strange and full of contradictions. Sometimes we love someone out of self-love, out of egoism, out of fancy, out of physical desire, out
of a wish to rule over the beloved and enslave him, or the opposite, out of some urge to be enslaved by the object of our love. In fact, love is very much like hatred: love and hatred are much closer than most people imagine. For instance, whether you love or hate someone, in either case you are always anxious to know where they are, whom they are with, how they are, if they are happy, what they are up to, what they are thinking, what they are afraid of. The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? Thus spake the prophet Jeremiah. Thomas Mann writes somewhere that hatred is simply love with a minus sign placed before it. Jealousy is the proof that love is like hatred, because in jealousy, love and hatred are mixed together. In the Song of Songs, in the selfsame verse, we are told that love is strong as death, jealousy is cruel as the grave. Atalia’s father dreamed that Jews and Arabs were bound to love one another, if only the misunderstandings between them were removed. But he was mistaken. There is not and never has been any misunderstanding between Jews and Arabs. On the contrary. For several decades they have shared a complete and total understanding: the local Arabs cling to this land because it is their only land, and they have no other, and we cling to this land for the very same reason. They know that we can never give it up, and we know that they will never give it up. The mutual understanding is perfectly clear. There is no misunderstanding between us and there never has been. Atalia’s father was one of those people who believe that every conflict is merely a misunderstanding: a spot of family counseling, a handful of group therapy, a drop or two of goodwill, and at once we shall all be brothers in heart and soul and the conflict will disappear. He was one of those people convinced that all that is required to resolve a conflict is for both parties to get to know each other, and immediately they will start to like each other. All we have to do is drink a glass of strong sweet coffee together and converse in a friendly fashion, and all at once the sun will rise and the foes will fall on each other’s necks in tears, as in a Dostoyevsky novel. Whereas I say to you, my dear, that if two men love the same woman, or two peoples claim the same land, they can drink rivers of coffee together and those rivers will not quench their hatred, neither can the floods drown it. And I say this also to you, notwithstanding all that I have said so far: blessed are the dreamers, and cursed be the man who opens their eyes. True, the dreamers cannot save us, neither they nor their disciples, but without dreams and without dreamers the curse that lies upon us would be seven times heavier. Thanks to the dreamers, maybe we who are awake are a little less ossified and desperate than we would be without them. Now, please be kind enough to fetch me a glass of water, and don’t forget to feed the fish in the aquarium. It would be interesting to know what exactly a fish sees when it looks through the glass at the room, the bookcases, the square of light at the window. Your Jesus was also a great dreamer, perhaps the greatest dreamer who ever lived. But his disciples were not dreamers. They were hungry for power, and in the end, like all those who hunger for power, they became shedders of blood. Please don’t trouble to reply. I know what you are going to say, and I can recite the words of your reply from beginning to end and vice versa. Yes. We have spoken enough for today, and now I want to read Gogol quietly. I reread Gogol every two or three years. He knew almost everything there is to know about our nature. And he fell about laughing. But don’t you read him. No, you should read Tolstoy. He suits you much better. Bring me the cushion from the sofa. Yes, that one. Thank you. Please place it behind my back. Thank you. There is no one like Tolstoy for dreamers.”
The following morning Shmuel Ash managed to wake at nine again, and by half past ten he was in the reading room of the Newspaper Department, and had found the issue of Davar dated November 30, 1947. A bold headline proclaimed HEBREW STATE WILL SOON ARISE above the news that UN ASSEMBLY DECIDES BY 2/3 MAJORITY TO ESTABLISH FREE JEWISH STATE IN PALESTINE. Below this headline was written: “Palestine will be partitioned into two independent states, one Jewish and one Arab, linked by economic ties and a joint currency. Jerusalem and Bethlehem will be under international jurisdiction.” Under this announcement came the details of the General Assembly vote, with a list of the states for and against and abstaining. As Shmuel read this report he felt a powerful emotion and his eyes filled, as if the events described in the paper had just occurred. He noticed that the man from yesterday, with no eyebrows, a goatee, and pince-nez, was eyeing him curiously. But when their eyes met, the stranger hurriedly looked down at his papers, and Shmuel, too, lowered his gaze.
When he had satisfied his hunger with three cheese sandwiches, a yogurt, and two cups of coffee in the cafeteria in the Kaplun Building, he returned to the reading room to find, in addition to Goatee, a young woman wearing a sarafan, with her hair done up in a coiled plait and looking like a pioneer from a kibbutz. She might have been a student or a young teacher. She looked vaguely familiar. He went across to her and, leaning over, asked in a whisper if she needed any help. The teacher gave a faint smile and whispered, “Thank you, I’m fine.”
Shmuel apologized, in a whisper, for disturbing her, and returned to his table and the volumes of Davar from December 1947 and January 1948. Half an hour or so before his time ran out and he had to rush back to his post at Wald’s, he came across another item relating to Shealtiel Abravanel. Like its predecessor, it was tucked away in the middle pages of the paper, on page 3, under a piece about a call by the Haganah militia to all owners of trucks and vans to register them at the offices of the National Guard. The date of the paper was December 21, 1947. The report stated that Comrade Shealtiel Abravanel had resigned the previous day from his positions on the Zionist Executive Committee and the Council of the Jewish Agency following differences of opinion with his colleagues in both bodies. It was also reported that Abravanel himself had declined to answer the Davar correspondent’s question about the reasons for his resignation. A brief statement issued on his behalf merely stated that in Comrade Abravanel’s view, the line adopted by Comrade David Ben-Gurion and others would inevitably lead to a bloody war between the two peoples living in this land, whose outcome was far from clear and which could be seen as a reckless gamble with the very life or death of the six hundred thousand Jews of Palestine. In Abravanel’s opinion, the statement continued, the way was still open to a historic compromise between the two peoples inhabiting the land. The correspondent added that Shealtiel Abravanel, a well-known lawyer and an Arabist, had served on both bodies for close to nine years.
At half past three the man with the goatee rose, closed the volume he had been reading, gathered up his pile of Cyrillic notes, and left. Shmuel continued for a while to leaf through the issues of Davar, but he was really waiting for the young woman to leave so he could follow her out and possibly engage her in conversation. But as four o’clock arrived, and then a quarter past four, and the woman was still poring over her papers, Shmuel remembered his obligations and hurried on his way.
31
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ONE MORNING, when the two of them were in the kitchen and Shmuel had poured coffee for Atalia and himself into two glasses, and sweetened and stirred it, he felt uncharacteristically bold and asked her:
“What do you do?”
“Right now I’m drinking coffee with a muddled young man.”
“No, I mean what do you do in general?”
“I work.”
“In an office? As a teacher?”
“I work in a private investigation agency. But it seems now that our roles are reversed, and you’re investigating me.”
Shmuel ignored the sarcasm. He was on fire with curiosity.
“And what do you investigate?”
“Infidelity, for instance. Adultery. Grounds for divorce proceedings.”
“Like in a detective story? You trail people, with your collar turned up, wearing dark glasses—men who keep mistresses, married women who have lovers?”
“That too.”
“And what else?”
“Mostly the actual financial situation of pot
ential business partners. Or the sources of income of investors. Or the ownership of property whose landlords cannot be reached or live far away. Are you, by any chance, interested in discovering something about someone?”
“Yes. You.”
“Perhaps you should approach a rival agency and pay them to follow me.”
“And what will they discover? Infidelity? Adultery? Hidden property?”
“You’re living here like a recluse but your imagination seems to be running wild.”
“Do you want to censor my imagination?”
“Not censor, no. But I wouldn’t mind taking a peep. You’re something of an orphan, even though your parents are still alive. There’s an air of despair about you sometimes. And that’s not what our Wald needs. He needs a witty, amusing conversation partner who will constantly disagree with him.”
“Who are the people he argues with on the phone?”
“Two old acquaintances from before the Flood. Eccentrics like him. Stubborn. Opinionated. Extinct volcanoes. Retired people who sit at home all day honing arguments. People a bit like him. Only they are even lonelier than he is, because they can’t afford to keep a Shmuel Ash to amuse them for a few hours every day. Though, in fact, you’re not that amusing. Or maybe you’re amusing precisely when you don’t mean to be.”
