by Amos Oz
Shmuel adjusted his position, carefully straightened the leg that was in plaster, took a cushion out from under his head and placed it between his knees, and said:
“In 1921, the writer Nathan Agmon, who sold better under the name of Nathan Bistritzky, published a dramatic tale, which is essentially a play, entitled Jesus of Nazareth. In Bistritzky’s play Judas comes back on the evening of the Last Supper from the house of Caiaphas, the High Priest, where he has learned that the leading priests have decided that Jesus must die. Judas urges Jesus to join him, saying that they must flee from Jerusalem that very night. But Bistritzky’s Jesus refuses to flee: his soul is weary, he says, and he wishes to die. He asks Judas to help him die by betraying him, by testifying that Jesus does indeed profess to be the Messiah, or the king of the Jews. On hearing this, Judas ‘pulls away from him in terror,’ ‘withdraws his hands in horror,’ and calls Jesus ‘a snake . . . a snake disguised as a dove.’ Jesus replies: ‘So crush me then.’ Judas brazenly reproaches him: ‘Don’t be so sanctimonious,’ and pleads with his master not to impose the dreaded mission on him. Jesus stands his ground: ‘I command you to hand me over, for I wish to die upon the cross.’ Judas refuses. He turns away from Jesus with the intention of fleeing to his town. But some inner force, too strong for him, makes him retrace his steps at the last minute, kneel before his teacher, kiss his hands and his feet, and meekly accept the dreadful mission that has been imposed upon him. The traitor, in this version, is actually a faithful disciple: in handing Jesus over to his pursuers, all he is doing is submissively fulfilling the task his master has forced upon him.”
Gershom Wald said with a snigger:
“If Pilate had ordered Judas to be crucified on Jesus’ right side instead of the good robber, Judas would have been raised by the Christians to the rank of a saint. His crucified image would adorn tens of thousands of churches, millions of Christian babies would be baptized ‘Judas,’ popes would have adopted his name. Nevertheless, I say to you, Judas or no Judas, Jew-hatred would not disappear. Or even diminish. With or without Judas, the Jew would continue to incarnate the role of the traitor in the eyes of the faithful. Generations of Christians would remind us how the crowd before the crucifixion shouted, ‘Crucify him! Crucify him! His blood be on us, and on our children.’ And I’m telling you, Shmuel, the row between us and the Muslim Arabs is only a small episode in history, a brief and fleeting moment. In fifty or a hundred or two hundred years no memory of it will remain, while what is between us and the Christians is a deep, dark affair that will go on for another hundred generations. So long as each Christian baby learns with its mother’s milk that God-killers still tread the earth, or the offspring of God-killers, we shall know no rest. It seems you already know how to use your crutches. Soon you and I will be able to dance together on eight legs. So I’ll expect you tomorrow afternoon, as usual, in the library. Now I shall telephone one of my beloved enemies, rake him over the coals, and tomorrow you will sit with me and lecture me about world reform, Fidel Castro and Jean-Paul Sartre, and the greatness of the communist revolution in China, and I, as is my wont, shall laugh, because in my view this world cannot be mended.”
46
* * *
AND ON ONE of the following days, which was a Saturday with dark low clouds in the sky, when the house at the bottom of Rabbi Elbaz Lane stood shrouded in shadows between the thick walls of cypress trees, Shmuel Ash tried climbing up the spiral staircase to his attic room at nine o’clock in the morning. He propped his crutches at the foot of the stairs, took hold of the railing with both hands, and endeavored to hop on one leg from step to step, with the leg that was in plaster thrust out in front in the air, with the knee bent, so as not to hit it on the next step up. But after three steps he suffered an asthma attack. He gave up, sat on the third step for a few minutes to rest, and hopped down to the bottom of the stairs again. There he picked up his crutches and limped back to his temporary quarters on the ground floor, threw himself down on the sofa, and breathed in deeply from the inhaler. He lay on his back for a quarter of an hour, mentally arguing with Shealtiel Abravanel. Why did Shealtiel regard the Jews as the single nation in the world who did not deserve a land of their own, a homeland, self-determination, be it only in a small part of their ancestral land, a tiny state, smaller than Belgium, smaller even than Denmark, a state of which three-quarters was barren desert? Had some sinister punishment been handed out to the Jews to the end of time? “Because of our sins we were exiled from our land”? Because the Jews were God-killers? Did Abravanel himself believe that an eternal curse lay upon the Jews and the Jews alone?
And even if we suppose that Shealtiel Abravanel was right in his opinion that all nation-states were a disaster and a scourge, even if he was right in saying that the scourge of nationalism would soon disappear and all states would wither, surely at least until the vision of a stateless world finally became a reality, at least so long as every nation had bars on its windows and bolts and locks on its doors, was it not also right that the Jewish nation should have a small house with bolts and bars, just like all the others? And especially after a third of this nation was slaughtered a few years earlier, only because they did not have a house or a door with a lock or a piece of territory of their own? Or an army and weapons to defend themselves? When the day came that all the nations would finally rise up to demolish the walls dividing them, then definitely, by all means, we too would willingly demolish the walls we had built around us and happily join in the general festivities. Even if, out of neurotic caution, perhaps this time we would not necessarily be the first in the world to give up our bolts and bars. Perhaps this time, for a change, we would be the third in the world or the fourth in our region. Just to be on the safe side. And if we are to be like everyone else, Shmuel continued to argue with Atalia’s father, was it not only fair to ask where in this world was the land of the Jews if not here in the Land of Israel, which was the only home they had ever had? A land that had enough space for the two nations who could live here side by side in friendship and cooperation? And maybe someday they would both live here under the banner of humanistic socialism, a shared economy, a federal constitution, and justice for all people.
It occurred to him to share this thought with Atalia, and so he got up and hobbled to the kitchen, calling her name two or three times. But she was not there or did not hear him calling, though she had assured him that her hearing was acute. As he limped toward the sink to get a glass of water, he bumped into a corner of the table and lost one of his crutches. He tottered and nearly fell, but at the last moment he managed to grab the side of the cupboard and steady himself, in doing so pulling down and smashing to the ground a jar of jam and another of pickled cucumbers. Their contents and splinters of glass scattered on the kitchen floor. With his left hand he clung to the edge of the counter, and he tried to bend down without his injured leg touching the floor and use his right hand to pick up the pieces and clean up the mess. But in bending down he lost his balance, the crutch he was leaning on slipped in the sticky pool of jam, and he fell on his side and rolled over on the floor, hitting his shoulder hard on the marble drainer by the sink as he fell.
It was morning. The old man was fast asleep, as he always was in the morning. It was Atalia who, at last, emerged from her room, wearing a blue flannel dressing gown, her hair freshly washed and steaming. She pulled him up into a sitting position, and while she felt his back and the rest of his body with both hands, Shmuel assured her that everything was fine and that this time he had not injured himself or broken any bones. After a moment, he changed his mind and complained of a pain in his neck. She bent down and raised him up on his good leg, put his arm around her shoulders, and helped him, leaning on her and hopping on one leg, back to his room, where she laid him down on her father’s sofa. She said, without a question mark at the end of the sentence:
“What am I going to do with you.”
And then she said:
“Perhaps we should take on
another student to look after the two of you.”
And as Shmuel, ashamed of himself, said nothing, she added:
“Look. You’re all covered in jam.”
She disappeared and came down three or four minutes later from the attic room carrying clean underwear and a long-sleeved T-shirt, a pair of baggy trousers, and his threadbare gray pullover. She took a pair of large scissors from a drawer in the desk and cut the left leg of the clean trousers along its full length, so that he could put it on over the plaster cast. Then she leaned over Shmuel and undressed him as she had done a few days earlier. When he attempted to cover his private parts with his hand, she pulled it away sharply, like an impatient doctor with a child, and said:
“Don’t get in my way.”
Shmuel shut his eyes tight, the way he used to when he was a small boy and his mother washed him in the bathtub and he was afraid of getting soap in his eyes. But this time Atalia had not brought a cloth soaked in soapy water and did not wash his body, but slowly caressed his hairy chest three or four times, slid a finger over his lips, and, leaning away from him for a moment, said: “Just don’t say anything now. Nothing.” She picked up a pillow from the bed and covered her father’s photograph, which stood staring at them in the middle of the secretaire, then undid her blue flannel dressing gown and let it fall to her feet. Before Shmuel dared to open his eyes, he felt her warm body enfolding his, and her fingers, without any preliminaries, putting him inside her. And because Shmuel had not touched a woman for several months, it was all over almost before it had begun.
She stayed with him for a few minutes, her hands groping as if looking for something she had lost in his thick curls, his beard, and the hair on his chest. Then she removed her hand, picked up her dressing gown and wrapped herself in it from her neck to her ankles, and tied the belt tightly around her waist. She left the room and returned carrying a basin, sponge, and towel, briskly washed and dressed Shmuel, and covered him carefully with the blanket, tucking his feet and shoulders in. Finally, she turned and removed the pillow with which she had buried her father’s picture. Shealtiel Abravanel looked thoughtful and calm. Without so much as a glance at the photo, she drew the curtains, turned out the light, and left, closing the door behind her.
Shmuel lay on his back with his eyes closed, stunned. Then he got up and found his crutches and hurried after her to the kitchen. He felt he ought to say something, to break the violent silence that Atalia had imposed on them, but he could find nothing to say. While the water boiled, Atalia went out and came back with a mop, a floor cloth, and a dustpan. She washed the kitchen floor and dried it meticulously. Then she washed her hands in cold water and made them both coffee. When she put the cups down in front of them on the kitchen table, she looked up at him blankly, as if he were a child of strangers who had been entrusted to her against her will, to be entirely her responsibility, and while she quite liked him, she had no idea what more she could do with him. Shmuel pulled her hand toward him, clasped the fingers, and drew them to his lips. He still couldn’t find anything to say. He still didn’t entirely believe that what had happened a few minutes earlier in Shealtiel Abravanel’s room had really taken place. He was embarrassed and ashamed about his body’s feverish haste and the fact that he had not managed or even had time to try to gratify her too. It had come and gone in an instant, and in an instant, too, she had pulled away from him and wrapped herself in her dressing gown. At that moment Shmuel longed to take her in his arms and make love to her again, now, here on the kitchen floor, or standing up, leaning against the marble counter, to demonstrate how eager he was to repay her at least something for the grace she had lavished on him in her father’s room. Atalia said calmly:
“Just look at him.”
And she added:
“There’s a fantasy in which a woman decides to bestow his first sexual experience on a dazed young boy and harvests the full crop of his shy, enthusiastic gratitude. I read somewhere that if a woman grants a young man his first time, she goes straight to paradise. Not you, not you, I know you’ve had a girlfriend, or maybe several. And I’m not going to any paradise. I’ve no business there.”
Shmuel said:
“Atalia.”
And then he said:
“I can be whatever you like. A virgin boy. A monk. A knight. A ravenous savage. A poet.”
Then, startled by what he had said, he corrected himself:
“Almost from my first day here, I —”
Atalia interrupted him:
“That’s enough. Be quiet. Stop talking now.”
She cleared the table and put the cups in the sink, then silently left the kitchen. The scent of violets trailing after her contained a hint of something new and intoxicating. Shmuel sat there for another quarter of an hour on his own, feverishly excited, beside himself. What you think happened, he said to himself, only happened in your imagination. You dreamed it. It didn’t really happen.
Picking up his crutches and leaning on them, he made his way with special care back to Shealtiel Abravanel’s room. There he stood on one leg for a while, staring at the map of the Levant. Then his glance rested on the fine, thoughtful face of the man with a mustache, who reminded him of Albert Camus. He went across to the window, opened the curtains and the shutters, and looked out to see if the rain had stopped. It had indeed stopped, but a powerful west wind was testing the panes of glass. Westward, there extended only forlorn windswept fields. Your time has come to get up and leave this place. You know that the biblical words “The place thereof shall know it no more” apply to all the dwellers in this house, both the living and the dead. And you know, too, how the time of your predecessors in the attic room ended. How are you better than they? How have you improved the world all the days of this winter?
Suddenly his heart ached for Atalia, for her orphaned state, her loneliness, the perpetual coldness that surrounded her, her beloved who was slaughtered like a lamb on the mountainside alone in the darkness of the night, the child she would never have, and for his own inability to revive, if only for a few weeks, a little of what had died and been buried in her.
At the end of the empty fields, the ruins of the destroyed Arab village of Sheikh Badr, on which for ten years now a gigantic festival hall was being erected, stood wet and crumbling in the gloom. The structure had been abandoned while it was still being built, then built a little more and abandoned for a long time. It was a gray, unfinished skeleton with partially constructed walls, wide staircases raked by the rain, and dark concrete joists with rusty iron reinforcements protruding from them like the fingers of the dead.
47
* * *
ALONE IN THE EMPTY tavern a short while before closing time, a short while before the arrival of the Sabbath and the Passover festival. A glass of wine and a dish of lamb in a sauce are on the table in front of him, but, though he has not eaten or drunk since last night, he does not touch the meat or the wine or the washed fruit that the pregnant servant girl has placed before him. As soon as he set eyes on this poor, short, pockmarked girl, he knew that she had no living soul, no friend or relation, in the world, and that she must have been made pregnant one autumn evening by some wayfarer, by someone staying in the tavern, or perhaps by the innkeeper himself. In a few weeks, when the birth pangs assailed her, she would be cast out from here into outer darkness and no one in heaven or on earth could save her. She would give birth in the dark and roll in her blood all alone in some forsaken cavern, among bats and spiders, like a beast of the field. Then she and her babe would grow hungry, and if she did not manage to find employment as a serving girl in a tavern, she would surely become a cheap wayside whore. The world was devoid of mercy. Three hours ago in Jerusalem, grace and mercy were murdered, and henceforth the world was empty. Not for a moment did this thought silence in his ears the echo of the screams that lasted for six hours and that even now in this empty tavern would not leave him. He could not stop catching, from far away beyond valleys and hills, the wailing and
the tortured groans; he caught them in his skin, in the hair on his head, in his lungs and his entrails. As if the screams still continued and echoed there in the place of crucifixion and only he had arisen and fled from them outside the city, to this remote tavern.
He sat hunched on the wooden bench with his back to the wall, with his eyes closed, trembling all over, though the evening was warm and humid. The little dog that had attached itself to him on the way lay at his feet under the table. This skinny, mangy, light brown cur had an open wound on its flank, oozing pus; it was an abandoned dog schooled all its days to hunger, loneliness, and kicks from strangers’ boots. For six hours the crucified man had not ceased to groan and sob. So long as his death throes continued, he wept, shouted, and screamed with pain, calling over and over again for his mother, calling for her repeatedly in a shrill, piercing voice, like the crying of a fatally wounded infant abandoned in a field alone, parched with thirst as the last of its blood seeped out under the beating sun. It was a desperate scream, rising and falling and rising again, freezing the heart, Mother, Mother, then a penetrating shriek, and again, Mother. Then another piercing wail, followed by a long, drawn-out howl, fainter and fainter, from the depths of his soul.
