by Amos Oz
When he reached the café, which was closed, its rusty iron shutter rolled down, Shmuel stood rooted to the spot, asking himself what on earth he was doing here. And he asked himself the question Atalia had asked him a few hours earlier:
How come you weren’t killed?
He peered at his wristwatch. Ten past one. There was not a living soul to be seen in the entire area. Only in one window a feeble light glowed, and he pictured a young rabbinical student sitting there reciting psalms. He said to him in his heart: You and I are both searching for something that has no fixed measure. And for that reason we will not find it even if we search till morning and the next night and every night to come until the day of our death, and maybe after that.
On his way home, as he went up Zikhron Moshe Street, Shmuel thought about the death of Micha Wald, the brilliant mathematician who had been married to Atalia, and might have loved her, and she might have loved him, before she became so acidic. Even though his wife and his father-in-law were opposed to the war, even though they were opposed to the creation of the state, even though they were opposed with all their being to his enlisting for a fight they considered cursed, and even though he himself, like his father, had a disability, he still volunteered for the War of Independence. And he went on the assault that night, April 2, 1948, up a mountainside. Shmuel tried to visualize the injured man, not a youngster from the Palmach but a thirty-seven-year-old married man, not too fit, and perhaps, who knows, asthmatic like me, not adept at leaping about the mountains. His comrades withdrew back down the mountain, in the dark, to the convoy that was stuck on the road, unaware that he had been left behind. Was he afraid to call out in case the enemy fighters heard him? Did he lose consciousness? Or perhaps he tried with the last of his strength to crawl down the slope toward the road and the convoy? Or perhaps, on the contrary, he shouted and shouted with all the agony of his injuries, and that was how the Arab fighters found him in the dark. When they found him, did he try to talk to them? In their own language? Did he know Arabic like his father-in-law? Did he try to fight them? Did he plead for his life? He must have known, as everyone knew, that in that war, in the early months, both sides took hardly any prisoners. Did he realize, in a terrible, desperate panic, what they were going to do to him when they pulled his trousers down? Did the blood freeze in his veins? Shmuel started trembling and put one hand on his trousers, as if to protect his own penis, and hurried his steps, though the drizzle had stopped and there was just a biting cold with the smell of rotting leaves and damp earth in the Jerusalem air. How come you weren’t killed?
Shortly before Davidka Square a police car with a flashing light screeched to a halt beside him, a window opened, and a nasal tenor voice with a distinct Romanian accent asked:
“Where you going, sir?”
“Home,” Shmuel said, though he had not decided yet if his ramble had ended for the night. He had intended to walk the streets until his strength ran out.
“Identity card.”
Shmuel moved the stick from hand to hand, undid his duffel coat with frozen fingers, felt in one pocket and then the other pocket of his shirt, and then in the back pocket of his trousers, and finally pulled out and handed to the Romanian policeman the cover of his identity card—identity cards consisted of a booklet with a cardboard cover. He continued to search and turned his pockets inside out until, in the depths of one of them, he found the body of the document. The policeman switched on a little light in the roof of his car, looked at the certificate, and handed the cover and the document back to Shmuel.
“Lost your way?”
“Why?” Shmuel asked.
“It says on your identity card that you live in Tel Arza.”
“Yes. That is, no. I’m staying now, no, not staying, I’m working on Rabbi Elbaz Lane. In Sha’arei Hesed.”
“Working? At this time of night?”
“The thing is,” Shmuel said, “I work there, but I also sleep there at night. That is, the room is part of my pay. It doesn’t matter. It’s a bit hard to explain.”
“Have you been drinking?”
“No. That is, yes. A little. The fact is that I had a few sips before I came out.”
“And where exactly are you going, sir, if you don’t mind my asking, on a freezing cold night like this?”
“Nowhere special. Just wandering around. Trying to clear my head.”
But the policeman was getting bored. He said something to his colleague, who was at the wheel, and then said to Shmuel as he rolled up the window:
“It’s not so healthy to wander around the streets alone at this time of night. A person could catch a sudden cold. Or meet a wolf.”
And he added:
“Okay, just go straight home, and I mean straight home. This is not a time that decent people are out of doors. Make sure we don’t see you again tonight.”
It was a little after two o’clock when Shmuel Ash, frozen, soaked, and tired, returned home to Rabbi Elbaz Lane. He entered silently, on tiptoe, so the old man would not hear him. Then he remembered that Wald was still unwell and would certainly be fast asleep in his bed facing the picture of his slain son. So he switched on the light in the kitchen, looked around for his cockroach, which had apparently retired for the night, ate a thick slice of bread and jam and some olives, and drank a glass of water, because he was too lazy to make himself tea, even though he was frozen and dying for something hot. Then he quietly climbed up to his attic, lit the heater, took off his duffel coat and his shoes, took three long swigs from the vodka bottle, undressed, and stood for a short while in front of the heater in his long johns. Suddenly he said to himself: It won’t do you any good. And while he himself did not understand what these words meant, they soothed him a little and he got into bed and took two puffs from his inhaler—though he was not short of breath, he thought he could feel an attack coming on. Then he curled up under his quilt and fell asleep almost as soon as his head touched the pillow. He forgot to put out the light and the heater, and he forgot to put the cork back in the vodka bottle.
The following morning, he woke at eleven o’clock, dressed, picked up his stick, and went out, bleary and weary, to eat goulash soup and apple compote at his Hungarian restaurant on King George Street. The truth is he should have looked in on the invalid as soon as he got up, to ask if he needed anything. He ought to have washed him. Changed his sweat-soaked pajamas. Served him some tea and fed it to him on a teaspoon. Given him a pill and plumped up his pillows. But he went out without doing any of this, because he had been told when he first came here that the old man was always asleep in the morning. And besides, Atalia would surely have looked in to see how he was, or Bella, the cleaner, or the neighbor, Sarah de Toledo. Even so, you should have gone in to see if he needed you for anything. He might have been lying there awake, waiting for you. He might have been lying awake all night and found some new words he wanted to say to you. He might have needed to tell you something else about his son. How could you have forsaken him? Now, in the Hungarian restaurant, over a bowl of steaming goulash soup, Shmuel was sorry from the depths of his heart. But he said to himself: Too late.
39
* * *
GERSHOM WALD RECOVERED in the middle of February. Only an annoying dry cough lingered. Once more, at five o’clock in the afternoon he limped on his crutches from his bedroom to the library, where Shmuel sat with him until ten or eleven. He rarely mentioned his son. But whenever irony made him raise his left eyebrow, Shmuel recalled Micha and the horror of his lonely death. Gershom Wald and Shmuel listened to the news together. They discussed the first atom bomb exploded by France. They discussed the free movement of shipping in the Suez Canal, and Ben-Gurion’s declaration that Nasser’s threats were empty rhetoric. Then Shmuel would go up to his attic and the old man stayed where he was, with his books and papers, until five or six in the morning. Wald slept the whole morning in his bedroom, which Shmuel was now allowed to enter occasionally, to fetch a pair of glasses that had been forgotten b
y the bedside or to turn off the radio that had been left on.
Since the evening when Gershom Wald, on fire with a high temperature, had told Shmuel about his son’s death, their relationship had changed: the old man’s compulsive chatter seemed to have calmed. He still indulged, from time to time, in witticisms and wordplay, misquoting biblical verses, educating Shmuel with high-flown lectures about the Uganda Question or the contrast between old age and youth. Sometimes he spoke for half an hour on the phone with one of his invisible interlocutors. Joking. Quoting. Exchanging witticisms. But sometimes he stayed silent for an hour or two. He sat in his leather-upholstered chair at his desk or lay on his wicker couch, covered with the tartan blanket, reading a book, his thick glasses slipping down his nose, his white mustache quivering, little blue eyes scampering along the lines, one eyebrow slightly raised, his lips moving as he read, his silvery mane lending a certain splendor to his fascinating ugliness. Sometimes they exchanged pages from Davar. At nine o’clock they listened to the news. Shmuel sat facing Gershom Wald on the visitor’s chair, reading Yizhar’s Days of Ziklag, with which he had been wrestling intermittently all winter, except when he was reading the New Testament or consulting one of the books he had brought with him from Tel Arza about Jewish views of Jesus. There was a book by Solomon Zeitlin, Who Crucified Jesus?, which had appeared in Hebrew translation a little earlier, in 1958, and also a book in English by Morris Goldstein, Jesus in the Jewish Tradition, as well as some offprints of articles by his teacher, Professor Gustav Yomtov Eisenschloss. None of these books and articles mentioned Judas Iscariot except for some routine remarks about his treachery and the fact that many simple Christians considered him the hated archetype of all Jews, in every country and century.
A deep silence descended on the library. From outside, far away, there could sometimes be heard, between rain showers, the sounds of children playing. Occasionally the paraffin bubbled in the tube inside the heater that stood in a corner and gave out a pleasant warmth. The old man could again make his own way, without crutches, from the desk to the wicker couch and back again, relying on the strength of the muscles in his arms and back alone. He never allowed Shmuel to assist him.
But on the days that followed a change took place: the old man allowed Shmuel to support his shoulders while he adjusted the cushions behind his back. When he lay down on the wicker couch Shmuel gently covered him with the tartan blanket. Every hour he gave him a glass of hot tea to which he still added some lemon and honey and a little brandy, though the flu had cleared up. He made himself some tea with honey as well. Once the total silence was broken by the voice of the old man, who looked up from his book and said, as if continuing a conversation with himself:
“They all thought he was crazy. People abused and reviled him, they called him a traitor, they called him an Arab-lover, they even spread a persistent rumor in Jerusalem that one of his grandfathers had been an Arab gardener from Bethlehem, but nobody took the trouble to argue with him. As though he were voicing some obsession and not an idea. As if his truth was not worth disputing.”
“Are you talking about Atalia’s father?” Shmuel asked.
“The very same. I also made it a rule not to debate with him. We were quite distant from one another. He used to read Davar every morning, and when he had finished he would come in here and leave it silently on my desk. We exchanged not a word apart from ‘sorry,’ ‘thank you,’ or ‘would you mind kindly opening the window.’ Once or twice he broke his silence and said to me that the founding fathers of Zionism deliberately exploited the age-old religious and messianic energies of the Jewish masses and enlisted these in the service of a political movement that was fundamentally secular, pragmatic, and modern. But one of these days, he said, this Frankenstein’s monster will turn on its creator: the religious and messianic energies, the irrational energies that the founders of Zionism endeavored to harness to their secular, contemporary struggle, would burst forth and sweep away everything those founding fathers intended to achieve here. He resigned from the Zionist Executive Committee not because he had ceased to be a Zionist but because he believed that they had all deviated from the path, that they had been carried away with their eyes closed by Ben-Gurion’s lunacy, that they had gone off the rails and become overnight followers of Jabotinsky, if not of Stern. And, in fact, he did not resign—he was thrown out. Both from the Zionist Executive Committee and from the Council of the Jewish Agency. They gave him twenty-four hours to decide whether to place a letter of resignation on Ben-Gurion’s desk or to be expelled formally, in disgrace, from both bodies, by unanimous vote. He wrote a reasoned letter of resignation, but it was classified. No newspaper would publish it. Almost total silence surrounded his resignation. Yes. Perhaps they were expecting him to take his own life. Or convert to Islam. Or emigrate. I sent Atalia seven years ago to look for the letter, or a copy of it, in the Zionist Archives. She returned empty-handed. They did not say that it had been classified or lost, they brazenly insisted that no such letter had ever existed. It had sunk like lead in the mighty waters. Two years after the War of Independence he died here in this house. He died alone in the kitchen. He sat down one morning, as was his wont, to read the paper and suddenly he bent over the table as though to wipe some stain off the oilcloth and hit his head and died. When he died, he was possibly the most lonely and most hated man in Israel. His world was in ruins. His wife had left him many years earlier. The heart is so deceitful, above all things, and desperately wicked—who can know it?, to quote the prophet Jeremiah. Don’t most of us sometimes wish in the darkest recesses of our hearts that we had a different father? After Shealtiel’s death, Atalia searched his bedroom for any notes, articles, manuscripts. She scoured all the cupboards, turned out all the drawers, but found nothing. Not a single piece of paper apart from his will, in which he left her this house, some plots of land in Talpiyot, and his life savings, and urged her in strong words to let me go on living here for the rest of my days. He seems to have destroyed all his papers with his own hands. His personal archive. His invaluable correspondence with well-known Arabs in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Ramallah, Beirut, Cairo, Damascus. No, he didn’t burn it. He seems to have torn it all up into tiny pieces over several days and flushed it down the toilet. There is nothing left except the will, which Atalia has. She showed it to me once, years ago, and I remember its closing words: “All this has been written and sealed by me, being of sound mind, perhaps the only sound mind left here in Jerusalem.” She found him in the kitchen with the newspaper spread out in front of him, his coffee spilled on the paper and his head pressed down on the table as though this stiff-necked man had finally decided to expose his neck to us all. You’ve asked me to try to describe him. Well. Descriptions are not my strong point. I could put it like this: he was a short, dark-skinned man with black-framed glasses, always elegantly turned out in a gray or navy blue suit, with a triangle of white handkerchief showing in his breast pocket. He had a small, neat black mustache and piercing black eyes and a fierce look that made us all lower our eyes. He always smelled of a well-known make of toilet water. I remember his hands, which were shapely and not like a man’s hands but more like those of a beautiful woman. Despite our differences of opinion, which grew stronger, he was as dear to me as a brother. A lost brother, a doomed brother, a brother who has strayed from the path, but a brother nonetheless. It was he, after all, who took me in here, to live in this house, after our children’s marriage, so that he would have someone to talk to. Perhaps he was afraid of being left alone in the company of the young couple. Perhaps he secretly hoped that when the time came we would raise the grandchildren together, all under one roof, like a Jerusalem family in bygone days. Like the family he himself grew up in, in this house, the family of Jehoiachin Abravanel. He did not know that Micha and Atalia were finding it hard to have a baby.”
Shmuel asked:
“You say that after the disaster you made it a rule not to debate with him. But why didn’t you argue with him? Afte
r all, you love arguing and you’re good at it. You might have been able to change his opinions. You might have been able to relieve his solitude. And yours.”
“The distance was too great,” said Gershom Wald, smiling sadly under his mustache. “He was firm in his view that Zionism could not be achieved through confrontation with the Arabs, whereas I had understood by the end of the forties that it could not be achieved without some such confrontation.”
“And how about Atalia? Is she closer to your views or her father’s?”
“She is more extreme than he was. She told me once that the very presence of the Jews in the Land of Israel is based on injustice.”
“In that case, why doesn’t she leave?”
“I don’t know,” said Gershom Wald. “I have no answer to that question. There was a certain distance between us even before he died. And yet we are well suited to each other. Not so much like father-in-law and daughter-in law as, say, a couple who have been together for a long time and whose routine prevents the slightest friction. She looks after me and I leave her alone. Yes. The main reason for your presence here is so that she will be relieved of having to speak to me. You are paid, like your predecessors, so that your presence will channel my desire to talk toward you. But now even my desire to talk is abandoning me. Soon you will start suffering from latent unemployment: one glass of tea after another, one handful of pills after another, and prolonged silence on both sides. As lead in the mighty waters. Will you tell me some more now about Jewish views of Jesus? It’s been a while since you’ve told me about the lies and slanders that generations upon generations of persecuted Jews invented so as to poke out a cowardly tongue behind the back of their own flesh and blood but whom their persecutors chose to see as the redeemer and savior.”
