by Amos Oz
Shmuel placed a checkered tea towel over Gershom Wald’s shirt, tucked the corner under his collar, served him the warmed-up porridge on which he had sprinkled some sugar and cinnamon, and spread two thick slices of bread with margarine and cream cheese for himself. Atalia had told him not to eat anything before they met at Fink’s, but hunger got the better of him.
Gershom Wald said, while he ate the porridge:
“I consider Ben-Gurion the greatest Jewish leader of all time. Greater than King David. Maybe one of the greatest statesmen in history. He is a clearheaded, sharp-sighted man who understood a long time ago that the Arabs will never accept our presence here of their own free will. They will never agree to share either territory or power with us. He realized long before his comrades that nothing is going to be offered us on a silver salver, that no amount of sweet-talking will induce the Arabs to like us, and he also saw that no external power will protect us when the Arabs set out to uproot us all from here. As early as the 1930s, after long talks with Arab leaders, including Shealtiel Abravanel’s lovely and pleasant friends, Ben-Gurion arrived at the conclusion that whatever we did not achieve for ourselves would not be handed to us on a plate. Micha used to go for weapons training at night in the Tel Arza woods because he knew that too. We all knew. Only I didn’t know that my son—I didn’t imagine that my son—I didn’t even want to think about it. He’s not a boy anymore, I said to myself, he’s thirty-seven years old and nearly a professor. Sometimes, in the weeks after the disaster, without his saying a word, I seemed to hear Shealtiel Abravanel asking me silently if I still believed that it was all worthwhile. The question that Shealtiel never asked wounded me over and over, as if he had stuck a knife in my throat. And after that we didn’t speak to each other. Neither of us. We shut up. Everything faded away. Except for very occasional exchanges about repairing the roof or buying an electric refrigerator. Now, please leave the bowl with the spoon in the sink. Don’t bother to wash them up and put them away. Then run off to chase after the hem of her dress. For my part, I don’t expect any good from your pursuit of her. You were not meant for her and she was not meant for you. In fact, she was not meant for any man. She will be a woman on her own till her dying day. And after I die, she will be a woman alone in this empty house. No stranger will come. Or perhaps he will come, and be thrown out the next day, or after a while, leaving just as he came. You’re going to be thrown out soon as well, and I’ll lose you, too. Get a move on. Put on your best shirt and hurry on your way. Don’t worry about me. I shall go on sitting here with my books and notebooks until the dawn watch, and then I shall get myself to bed under my own steam. Go, Shmuel. Go to her. You no longer have any choice.”
43
* * *
BUT SHMUEL ASH DID NOT make it to his date with Atalia that evening. As he was about to dash out of the house, with his shapka on his disheveled head, his duffel coat done up to the neck, and one of his trouser buttons missing, he tripped on the improvised step inside the front door. He didn’t trip, in fact, but stepped with all his weight on one end of the step, which made it lift like a lever and hurled him backward. He turned over, his back thumped against the wall, his head hit the other wall and then the flagstones, and he finally landed on his back with his left foot twisted under him. A sharp pain pierced his ankle. At first he was more preoccupied by the pain in his head than by the pain in his ankle. The cap was dislodged and rolled down the passage. Shmuel lay sprawled on his back, and pushing his fingers under his head, he could feel a pool of blood forming. He lay there for a few minutes without moving and then, to his surprise, found that he was laughing. Laughing and groaning at the same time. Despite the pain, the fall made him laugh as if it had happened to someone else, or as if he had pulled off a surprising, even amusing, prank. While he was trying unsuccessfully to stand up or at least to get to his knees, Gershom Wald’s crutches sounded in the distance. The old man had heard the impact of the fall, limped into the passage, and now took in at a glance the bent body, the blood that was flowing from the thicket of hair and forming a rivulet on the floor, the twisted ankle. He turned back, hurried on his crutches to his desk, and telephoned for an ambulance. Then he hobbled back down the passage and, leaning his weight on one crutch, bent over, took a handkerchief out of his pocket, pressed it to Shmuel’s bleeding head, and said:
“This house does not bring you much luck. In fact, it brings none of us much luck.”
Shmuel laughed.
“I’m going to need crutches now. If not a wheelchair. There will be four crutches here.” But his laugh trailed off into a groan of pain.
In about twenty minutes an unshaven paramedic wearing a white gown arrived, accompanied by two agile, darker-skinned stretcher-bearers, both thin and as alike as a pair of twins, except that one had preternaturally long arms; both were bald, and the one with long arms, Shmuel noticed, had a fleshy wart on the left side of his head. The stretcher-bearers carried Shmuel to the ambulance. They barely spoke a word. The paramedic bent over and took Shmuel’s pulse, then cut off a patch of his curls with a small pair of scissors, disinfected the bleeding wound on his head, and covered it with several layers of gauze and a sticking plaster. And since Shmuel had overturned the wooden step when he fell, the stretcher-bearers had to raise the stretcher at an angle as they climbed up from the passage to the area in front of the door. First they laid the foot of the stretcher on the higher surface, then the one with the wart climbed from the passage onto the flat surface in front of the door and dragged the foot of the stretcher over the threshold. Meanwhile, his colleague replaced the wooden step that had turned upside down and, taking hold of the two handles on either side of the injured man’s head, he heaved the stretcher up and the two of them carried it out into the garden, through the broken gate, and into the flashing ambulance, which stood with its engine running and its rear doors open, facing the gate.
On the way, the paramedic wrapped Shmuel’s head in a white bandage on which a bloodstain immediately spread. It was a few minutes before ten when they brought him to the emergency ward of Shaare Zedek Hospital on the Jaffa Road. They injected him with a painkiller and x-rayed his ankle. They found a hairline fracture, put his ankle in plaster, and left him in the orthopedic ward for further observation.
At seven o’clock the next morning, Atalia arrived, wearing a pale blue pullover, a dark blue skirt and a red scarf, with her big wooden earrings dangling from her ears, and a small silver brooch in the form of a shell, half concealed by the cascade of hair over her left shoulder. She stood in the doorway scanning the eight beds in the ward, four on each side, two of which were empty. When she caught sight of Shmuel she did not hurry over to him but stayed by the door for a moment, looking at him as if she had discovered some new aspect of his appearance. His eyes caressed her with a submissive gentleness that lightly touched her heart. Shmuel was lying covered with a sheet in the third bed on the left. The leg in plaster was exposed and raised. When she came over to him, he closed his eyes. Atalia leaned across, delicately straightened the sheet, and gently stroked his beard. She felt the bandage and ruffled his curls.
He opened his eyes. Cautiously he stroked the hand that was stroking him and was about to smile. But an expression spread on his face that reflected both the pain and the pleasure.
“Does it hurt a lot?”
“No. Hardly at all. Yes.”
“Have they given you any painkillers?”
“Yes, they have.”
“Didn’t they help?”
“No. Hardly at all. A little.”
“I’ll go and speak to them. They’ll give you something that’ll help. Do you want a drink first? Some water?”
“Never mind.”
“Yes or no?”
“Never mind. Thank you.”
“They told me you’ve cracked your ankle joint.”
“Did you wait for me last night?”
“Till nearly midnight. I thought you’d forgotten. No, I didn’t. I thought you�
�d fallen asleep.”
“I didn’t fall asleep. I was running to see you, I was afraid I was late, and I fell over the step.”
“Were you running because you were excited?”
“No. Perhaps. Yes.”
Atalia laid a cool hand on Shmuel’s bandaged forehead and brought her face so close to his that for an instant his nostrils caught the scent of violets and the toothpaste smell of her breath. Then she went off in search of a doctor or nurse who could give him something to relieve the pain. She felt responsible for his injury, though she could find no logical explanation for this feeling. Nevertheless, she decided to stay with him until he was sent home at lunchtime, after the doctors’ rounds. A tall, thin nurse whose hair was gathered in a little coil at the back of her neck came and gave Shmuel a pill with a glass of water and told him that the physiotherapist would be there at ten o’clock to show him how to use crutches, after which he would probably be discharged. He recalled the hospital in Haifa where he was taken when he was little, after the scorpion bite. He remembered the touch of his mother’s cold hand on his forehead. He put out a hand to feel, and found Atalia’s hand; he held on to it and interlaced his fingers with hers.
“You’re always running,” Atalia said. “Why do you run all the time? If you hadn’t been running, you wouldn’t have fallen over in the passage.”
Shmuel said:
“I was running to you, Atalia.”
“There was no reason for you to run. The man I was supposed to watch at Fink’s Bar never turned up. I sat there on my own till nearly midnight waiting for you. Two young men, one after the other, came over to my table, and one of them tried to interest me in some gossip about an actress, the other in a confidential snippet about the exploits of the secret services. But I sent them both packing. I told them that I was waiting for someone and preferred to wait on my own. I drank a gin and tonic, nibbled some peanuts and almonds, and went on waiting. Why I waited for you I don’t know. Maybe because I was sure that you must have got lost.”
Shmuel did not reply. He tightened his hold on her fingers and looked for something to say. Not finding anything, he drew the hand that was clasped in his to his lips and pressed them to her fingers, not in a kiss but a touch.
Just before ten, a short, plump lad appeared, with red cheeks that looked as if they had been flayed. He was wearing a crumpled white gown and a drab skullcap secured with a clip on his thinning hair. He got Shmuel out of bed, made him stand on one leg, and started to teach him how to use crutches. Perhaps because he had had so many opportunities to watch Gershom Wald, Shmuel had no difficulty in learning how to position the crutches under his armpits, take firm hold of the handgrips, and advance cautiously down the space between the rows of beds with the leg that was in plaster raised slightly off the ground. Atalia and the physiotherapist supported him on either side. Within a quarter of an hour he was able to leave the ward with the assistance of his two angels, walk on his crutches to the end of the corridor, and return nimbly back again. Then, after a short rest, he went on another expedition, this time under his own steam. Atalia stayed a couple of paces behind, ready to support him if necessary. Shmuel said:
“Look. I can walk on my own.”
Then he said:
“It’ll be a few weeks before I can go back to work.”
Atalia replied:
“There’s no problem. You’ll be back at work this evening. The two of you can sit facing each other as usual. The old man will talk and you will naturally disagree with him about everything he says. I’ll take care of the porridge and the tea and I’ll feed the goldfish.”
When they had returned to Rabbi Elbaz Lane in a taxi called by Atalia, she cut the left leg of his corduroy trousers and helped him put them on over the plaster. Then she laid him down in the library on Gershom Wald’s wicker couch, gave him a glass of tea and a slice of bread and cheese, and went off to open the next room, to air it out and prepare it for Shmuel’s stay. This was the ground-floor room that was always kept locked, the room where Shmuel had never set foot, her father’s room. She made up a bed for him on the narrow sofa. He could not climb up to his attic room while his leg was in plaster. Shmuel had longed to penetrate this locked room almost from the day he arrived in the Abravanel house. He had been expecting a revelation. Or an inspiration. As if this were the sealed heart of the house. And now, thanks to his accident, the door had finally been opened for him. He wondered what dreams he would dream here this night.
44
* * *
HE LAY ON HIS BACK on the sofa that had been Shealtiel Abravanel’s bed, with his plaster-covered foot raised on three cushions and his pink toes peeping out from the bottom, open end of the cast. His bandaged head rested on two more cushions. He was wearing his corduroy trousers, which Atalia had cut so that he could get his leg in with the plaster cast, and a pajama top that belonged to Gershom Wald. He was sucking a sweet toffee, and an open book lay face-down on his chest—Yizhar’s Days of Ziklag—which he didn’t feel like reading. A faint smell of melted candle wax and dried flowers hung in the air. He found the unfamiliar smell pleasant, though he had no idea what it was. Shmuel inhaled the strange odor deep into his lungs and wondered if this was how rooms that had been shut up for many years always smelled, or whether it was the smell of candles that had burned here years earlier on long winter evenings, or a trace of the smell of the ostracized, hated man who had spent the last years of his life here in total solitude. A slanting beam of sunlight filtered through the slats of the shutters, and innumerable tiny specks of dust whirled in it, like so many brightly lit worlds in a shining Milky Way. Shmuel tried to fix his gaze on one of these shining specks, no different from all the rest, and to track its path. After a moment he lost it. Shmuel enjoyed lying on this sofa in this room, and the pleasant feeling percolated through his limbs, bringing back memories of his solitary days of illness when he was a child in Haifa, in that house he disliked, in the dark passage where his bed stood, between damp-stained walls.
What did Shealtiel Abravanel do after he was ostracized? What did he do during the siege of Jewish Jerusalem, the shelling, the house-to-house fighting, the fall of the Jewish Quarter in the Old City, the shortage of water, the lines for flour, oil, paraffin, powdered milk, and powdered eggs? Did he write notes to himself? Memoirs? Prophecies? Did he try to draw his angry daughter close to him? Did he somehow try to maintain indirect ties with his friends in Arab Jerusalem, beyond the firing lines? Did he draw up a memo to send to the interim government? Did he feverishly follow the course of the fighting? Did he shut himself up here and think day and night about his mortal adversary David Ben-Gurion, who at that time was commanding the bloody fighting from his tiny office on a hill in Ramat Gan?
The color of the walls and the ceiling was white which had faded almost to gray. There was no ceiling light, only a wall light at the head of the sofa on which Shmuel was lying, and a lamp on Shealtiel Abravanel’s desk. This desk, unlike Gershom Wald’s, was completely clear. There was not a single book, booklet, newspaper, or piece of paper on it. No pen, pencil, or ruler; no cup filled with rubber bands or paper clips. Nothing. Only the desk lamp, shining at the top of a hunched metal tube and shaded by a hemisphere of metal. The desk was free of dust, and Shmuel wondered whether the woman who came to clean the house once a week entered this locked room, or whether it was Atalia who dusted the few pieces of furniture from time to time.
