Judas

by Amos Oz

  “He didn’t reach this view overnight. The Arab revolt in 1936, Hitler, the underground movements, the killings, the retaliation operations of the Jewish underground, the hangings by the British, and especially his conversations with his Arab friends—all these brought him to the view that there was in fact room for the two communities and that it would be better for them to exist side by side, or one within the other, without the framework of a state. To exist as a mixed community, or as a conglomerate of two communities, with neither threatening the other’s future. But you may be right. You may all be right. Perhaps he really was a naïve man. Perhaps it really was preferable for what you did here to happen—for tens of thousands to go to the slaughter and for hundreds of thousands to go into exile. The Jews here are actually a single big refugee camp, and so are the Arabs. And now the Arabs live day by day with the disaster of their defeat, and the Jews live night by night with the dread of their vengeance. That way apparently you’re all much better off. Both peoples are consumed by hatred and poison, and they both emerged from the war obsessed with vengeance and soaked in self-righteousness. Entire rivers of vengeance and self-righteousness. And as a consequence the whole land is covered with cemeteries and strewn with the ruins of hundreds of wretched villages.

  “There are answers, Atalia. But I won’t offer them. I’m afraid of hurting you.”

  “Nothing can hurt me anymore,” Atalia said. “Except perhaps an armor-piercing shell.”

  And with that, she stood up, crossed the library with four sharp steps, and paused by the window.

  “They slaughtered him,” she said, not with sadness or hatred but with a fierceness that resembled euphoria. “They slit his throat. That’s what. At the age of thirty-seven he was sent to accompany one of the convoys heading for Jerusalem, with a Sten gun and a few hand grenades. It was April 2, 1948. The road to Jerusalem wound through a deep valley, and Arab snipers shot at the convoys from the hills, on both sides of the road. Apparently it was nearly evening. The convoy commanders were afraid of getting stuck there on the narrow road through the wadi in the dark. Some of the fighters got out of their armored trucks and were told to dismantle a roadblock that the Arabs had made from rocks. Others, Micha among them, ran up the hillside with the intention of storming and destroying the snipers’ positions with homemade hand grenades. Their attack was repulsed. As night fell they withdrew, dragging the injured and dead on their backs. But not all of them. As the convoy was approaching Jerusalem, someone realized that Micha was missing. Before dawn, a platoon went out to comb the slopes. His comrades, most of them ten or fifteen years his junior. They scoured the area all through the morning until they found him. He may have lain there dying all night. He may have called for help. He may have tried to crawl down toward the road on his stomach, bleeding. Or he may have been found by Arabs immediately after his comrades withdrew. They cut his throat, stripped the lower half of his body bare, cut off his penis, and put it in his mouth. We’ll never know if they killed him before or after they castrated him. It’s still an open question. They left it forever to my imagination. So that I’ll never be short of something to think about at night. Night after night. They didn’t tell me. They didn’t tell me anything. Anything at all. I only discovered by accident: about a year after he died, one of his comrades was killed in a work accident in Galilee, and I was sent his diary to read. It was there, in the diary, that I discovered, written in fewer than a dozen words, how Micha was found among the rocks. And ever since then I can see only him. I see him all the time, with the bottom half of his body naked, his throat slit, and his severed penis thrust between his teeth. I see him every day. Every night. Every morning. When I close my eyes, I see him. When I open them again, I see him. And I went on living here, with the two grandfathers who would never be grandfathers. I went on looking after both of them. What else is there left for me to do? I can’t love men. You’ve held the whole world in your hands for thousands of years and you’ve turned it into a horror show. A slaughterhouse. Perhaps I can just use you. Or sometimes even take pity on you and try to comfort you a little. What for? I don’t know. Perhaps because you are so crippled.”

  Shmuel said nothing.

  “Abravanel died a couple of years later. He died alone here, in the next room. He died hated and reviled by everyone. Even by himself. All his Arab friends were on the other side of the new borders. They had been expelled from their homes in Katamon, Abu Tor, Baka. He had no Jewish friends left. He was ‘the Traitor.’ Between Micha’s death and Abravanel’s, Abravanel, Gershom Wald, and I lived here, just the three of us, with no one else. Like in a submarine. Me and the two grandfathers of the child I never had. Wald disagreed with Abravanel on everything, he disagreed with him fundamentally, but they didn’t argue anymore. Ever. Micha’s death had silenced them both. At one stroke all the arguments had gone. The words were choked. Silence reigned between them, and also between them and me. Wald must have suffered from this silence. He loves talking, and he needs to talk all the time. Abravanel, on the other hand, was comfortable with the silence. I looked after them both, and I worked for a few hours a day in a real estate office on Strauss Street. One evening shortly after the seven o’clock news, Abravanel was sitting in the kitchen, drinking coffee and reading the paper as usual. He sat there on his own in the kitchen every evening, drinking coffee and reading the paper. Suddenly his head fell and hit the coffee cup, overturning the cup. The right lens of his glasses shattered, as if a rifle bullet had hit him in the eye. The newspaper was soaked with coffee, which ran over the table, his chest, his knees, and onto the floor. And that’s how I found him. Coffee, newspaper, smashed glasses, his face on the flowered oilcloth, as if he had dropped off to sleep at the kitchen table, though his forehead and hair were lying in a pool of coffee. I inherited some of Abravanel’s ideas, but I didn’t love him, except perhaps when I was a little girl. He was definitely an honest man, and a brave and original one, but he never wanted to be a father and he didn’t know how, and in fact he was not much of a husband either. Once, when I was four, he forgot me in a shop in Ben Yehuda Market because he got into an argument with a priest, and to pursue the argument he went with him to the Jaffa Road and on as far as Abyssinia Street. Another time he was angry with my mother so he forbade her to leave the house for a fortnight, and to make sure she didn’t, he hid her three pairs of shoes. Once he found her drinking a glass of wine in the kitchen and laughing out loud with a Greek friend of his. As a punishment he locked her in the attic. He was a solitary, self-centered, fanatical man. A walking exclamation mark. Having a family didn’t suit him. Perhaps he was meant to be a recluse.”

  38

  * * *

  JESUS AND ALL HIS APOSTLES were Jews and the children of Jews. But in the Christian imagination the only one remembered as a Jew—and who represented the Jewish people—was Judas Iscariot. When the men sent by the priests and the Temple guard came to arrest Jesus, the other apostles were alarmed and feared for their lives and scattered in a panic in every direction, and only Judas remained there. He may have kissed Jesus to strengthen his resolve. He may have accompanied the jailers to the place where they took the teacher. Peter also went there, but before daybreak he had denied Jesus three times. Judas did not deny him. How ironic it is, Shmuel wrote in his notebook, that the first and last Christian, the only Christian who did not abandon Jesus for a moment and did not deny him, the only Christian who believed in Jesus’ divinity to his final moment on the cross, the Christian who believed to the end that Jesus would indeed descend from the cross before all Jerusalem and all the world, the only Christian who died with Jesus and did not outlive him, the only one whose heart was truly broken by Jesus’ death, is the one who has been considered, by hundreds of millions of people on five continents and over thousands of years, the archetypal, the most heinous and most despicable, Jew. As the incarnation of treachery, the incarnation of Judaism, the incarnation of the connection between Judaism and betrayal.

  In mo
dern times, Shmuel wrote in his notebook, the historian Heinrich Graetz wrote that Jesus is the only mortal of whom “one can say without exaggeration that he achieved more after his death than in his lifetime.” Shmuel added in the margin in his hasty scrawl: Not true. Not only Jesus. Judas Iscariot also achieved much more after his death than in his lifetime.

  Alone in his attic on a winter’s night, with strong, steady rain falling on the sloping roof close to his head and gurgling in the gutters, the cypresses bowed by the westerly wind, a night bird uttering a single harsh screech, Shmuel sat bent over his papers, taking an occasional swig from the open bottle of cheap vodka that stood before him on the desk, and wrote in his notebook:

  The Jews almost never spoke about Judas. Anywhere. Not a word. Even when they mocked the crucifixion, and the resurrection that took place, according to the Gospels, on the third day. Jews in every generation, including those who penned polemical writings against Christianity, were too afraid to touch Judas. Even those Jews who believed, like Graetz and Klausner, that Jesus was born and died a Jew and was close to the Essene sect, hated by the priests and sages because he associated with sinners, publicans, and harlots, they too passed over Judas in silence. Even those who held the view that Jesus was a charlatan, a cunning magician, the bastard child of a Roman soldier, all refrained from saying a word about Judas. They were ashamed of him. They disavowed him. Perhaps they were afraid to conjure up the memory of the man whose image had absorbed rivers of hatred and loathing in the course of eighty generations. Stir not up nor awaken.

  Shmuel remembered well the image of Judas in several famous paintings of the Last Supper: a repulsive, twisted creature sitting shrunk like a reptile at the end of the table where all the other diners were handsome, dark-haired where they were blond, with twisted nose and large ears, with rotting yellow teeth, with a mean and greedy expression on his malicious face.

  At Golgotha, on the Friday that was also the eve of Passover, the mob mocked the crucified one: “Save thyself and come down from the cross.” And Judas too pleaded with him: “Come down, Rabbi. Come down now. The hour is late and the crowd is dispersing. Come down. Tarry no more.”

  Is there really, Shmuel wrote in his notebook, not a single believer who asked himself how it can be that a man who has sold his teacher for the paltry sum of thirty pieces of silver goes and hangs himself from sorrow immediately afterward? No other apostle died with Jesus of Nazareth. Judas was the only one who did not wish to go on living after the death of the Savior.

  But Shmuel could not find in any text that he knew of the slightest attempt to defend that man, the man without whom there would have been no crucifixion, no Christianity, no Church, the man without whom the man from Nazareth would have been forgotten, just like dozens of other rough and ready Galilean wonderworkers and preachers.

  It was after midnight when Shmuel powdered his beard, cheeks, forehead, and neck with baby talc, put on his old duffel coat and shapka, picked up the stick with the fox-head handle, and went down to the kitchen. He intended to spread a thick slice of bread with cream cheese for himself, as he was suddenly hungry, and to wander around the empty streets until he finally felt tired. Maybe in his heart of hearts he was hoping to bump into Atalia in the kitchen. Perhaps she too could not sleep? But the kitchen was empty and dark, and when Shmuel switched on the light, he caught sight of a plump brown cockroach scuttling under the refrigerator. Shmuel laughed. Why are you running away? I won’t harm you. What have I got against you? What have you done to me? And in what way am I better than you?

  He opened the refrigerator and found some vegetables, a bottle of milk, and a package of cheese. He helped himself to a large chunk of cheese with his fingers, placed it on a slice of bread, put that in his mouth, and chewed, paying no attention to the crumbs that clung to his beard. He deliberately scattered some crumbs on the floor, for the cockroach’s breakfast. Then he shut the refrigerator and crossed the passage on tiptoe, because he knew that Gershom Wald, who was recuperating now, was sitting at his desk or lying on his couch in the library. On the way, he paused for a moment and listened at Atalia’s closed door. Since he heard no sound, he left the house and stepped into the darkness, locking the front door behind him and testing the paving stones in the yard with his stick.

  The rain had decreased to a fine drizzle. The wind had dropped. A deep silence held sway in the lane. The air was cold and crisp, cleansing his lungs and clearing his head of the cheap vodka fumes. All the windows and shutters were closed, no lights were on. The old-fashioned British Mandate streetlamp with its inlaid rectangles of glass gave little light but scattered a mass of nervous shadows that moved on the road and the walls. Shmuel advanced, with his head butting forward and his body dragged after, legs struggling not to be left behind, up Rabbi Elbaz Lane toward Ussishkin Street. Here he turned toward the Nahlaot, along a route similar to the one he had followed a few weeks before with Atalia. He remembered the silence that had hung between them on that walk, and he thought about the things she had told him now about Micha’s death and about the death of her father, whom she never referred to as “my father” but always called him by his family name, Abravanel. He asked himself what he was doing spending all winter in this house full of the smell of death, between Abravanel’s ghost and the old man who kept on talking like a broken mechanical toy and the unreachable woman who loathed the entire male sex. Even if on rare occasions her pity could be stirred. And he replied that he was shutting himself away. Just as he had decided he would do when Yardena had married Nesher Sharshevsky and he had given up studying. So far he had kept to his plan. But are you really shutting yourself away? Surely, even when you are sitting shut away in your attic room, your heart is downstairs, in the kitchen or on the threshold of Atalia’s closed door.

  A frozen, skinny alley cat, its belly hollow from hunger, its ribs protruding, tail tucked between its legs, stood shrinking between two dustbins, staring at Shmuel with glittering eyes, tense, ready to flee in an instant. Shmuel stopped, looked at the cat, and was suddenly filled with the compassion that sometimes took hold of him when he encountered someone whose luck had run out. This feeling hardly ever led to action. In his mind, he said to the cat: Just don’t you run away from me too. We’re rather alike, you and I, aren’t we? We’re both alone in the dark in this drizzle, wondering what happens next. We’re both looking for some source of warmth, and while we’re looking we recoil. He moved closer, his stick preceding him. The cat did not withdraw from its position between the dustbins, but bristled, arched its back, bared its teeth, and gave two hisses of quiet warning. The dim sound of a shot rang out in the darkness, followed by a short salvo of sharp shots, much closer, assailing the silence. Shmuel could not imagine which direction the sounds came from. Israeli Jerusalem was surrounded by Jordanian Jerusalem on three sides, and all along the border there were fortified firing positions, barbed-wire fences, concrete walls, and minefields. From time to time a Jordanian sniper hit a passerby, or random fire was exchanged by both sides.

  After the shooting, the silence of a winter’s night descended once more upon Jerusalem. Shmuel bent down in the roadway, stretched his hand out toward the cat, and tried to call it. To his astonishment, instead of running away the cat took three or four cautious steps toward him, sniffing the air, its whiskers quivering in the lamplight, eyes flashing with a devilish gleam, and tail erect. Its soft, lithe steps looked like a dance. Shmuel regretted coming empty-handed. He recalled the cheese in the fridge and was sorry not to have brought a few slices. He could have boiled an egg before coming out and fed it now to this starving alley cat.

  “I haven’t got anything. I’m sorry,” he said softly. But the cat, unimpressed, moved closer to Shmuel as he bent down, and sniffed his outstretched fingers. Instead of leaving in disappointment, it chose to rub the side of its head against his outstretched fingertips, letting out a heartbreaking wail. Shmuel, astonished and excited, left his fingers extended so that the cat could go on rubbing
itself against them. Then, taking courage, he laid his stick down on the asphalt and stroked the cat’s head and back with his other hand, tickling it gently on the neck and under the ears. It was a gray-white cat, not very big, little more than a kitten, in fact, soft and warm and woolly to the touch. As Shmuel’s hand stroked it, a low, steady purring sound broke from its throat.

  After a minute, the cat rubbed itself twice against Shmuel’s bent leg, let out another faint wail, then turned and walked off without a backward glance, disappearing between the dustbins with springy panther’s steps.

  Shmuel went on his way, crossed Mahane Yehuda, and passed through the area of Mekor Baruch, whose walls bore announcements by rabbis and synagogue functionaries, denunciations, curses, and bans: “We have suffered a great loss,” “Touch not mine anointed,” “It is forbidden to vote in the impure elections,” “The Zionists are continuing the work of Hitler (may his name be blotted out!).”

  His feet led him to the alley in the area of Yegia Kapayim, where his regular haunt was from the days of the Socialist Renewal Group, the proletarian café where the six members of the Group used to sit around two tables pushed together, a table or two’s distance from that gathering of craftsmen, plasterers, electricians, printer’s apprentices, and plumbers with whom the members of the Group did not speak, though occasionally somebody asked one of them for a light.