by Amos Oz
If they bumped into each other in the kitchen or the passage, she would ask how his leg was. He would reply that it was almost better. His injured leg, he understood, granted him a short respite, a few more days, a week at the outside. Not a word was said about the possibility of his returning to the attic, despite the fact that he was capable of hobbling upstairs if she told him that the time had come to vacate Shealtiel Abravanel’s room. But she didn’t.
Most of the morning he sat by himself at the kitchen table, biting into a slice of bread and jam, tracing simple lines on the blue flowers printed on the oilcloth. He did not know what these flowers were called. He suddenly regretted never having thought to bring her a bunch of flowers. Or some perfume. Or perhaps a scarf. Or a pair of delicate earrings. He could easily have surprised her once or twice. Bought her a book of poems. Complimented her on one of her dresses. Never again would he fold little paper boats for her and sail them across the breakfast table. Never again would he follow her at night through the labyrinthine alleyways of Jerusalem in pursuit of hungry cats.
One whole morning he sat at Shealtiel Abravanel’s secretaire writing a long letter to Yardena and Nesher Sharshevsky. The idea was to tell them about what had happened to him here and possibly hint at what had taken place between him and Atalia. But halfway through, he realized there was no point. And he recalled his written agreement not to tell a soul about what occurred in this house. He tore the letter into little pieces and flushed them down the toilet, and decided instead to write to his sister and his parents. He was sitting wondering what he could say to them when he felt tired and limped to the kitchen in the hope of bumping into Atalia. She did not come. Maybe she had gone to work. Perhaps she was sitting alone in her room, reading or quietly listening to music. He spread two thick slices of black bread with cream cheese and chomped his way crudely through both, one after the other, washing them down with black coffee.
He went on sitting for a long time in the kitchen, picking up crumbs from the oilcloth one by one and pressing them into a squashed mass that he threw in the trash. He made up his mind not to bother taking down the posters on the walls of his attic room, the pictures of the leaders of the Cuban Revolution. He would leave them for the benefit of his successor. He would also leave the reproduction of the picture of the Pietà, because it suddenly struck him as too cloying, with its throngs of chubby little angels hovering in the air. As if the pain had been forgiven.
He still had no idea where he would go from here, but he felt that the opinions he had held since his youth were fading, just as the Socialist Renewal Group was becoming less important to him and his research on Jewish views of Jesus had become more and more involved, and he could not imagine how to finish it, because the old story of Jesus and the Jews had not yet ended and was not going to end soon. There was no end to that story. He knew now that everything was in vain and that there was no point and never had been any. He felt an urge to leave this cellar-like house and go to wide-open places, to the mountains or the desert, or perhaps to sail away to sea.
Early one evening he put on his student coat, buttoned it, turned up the collar, squashed his shapka on top of his curls which had grown wilder and longer than ever, took the stick with the fox-head handle, and limped out into the lane. The streetlamp from the period of British rule was on, and cast a little light and many patches of shadow. There was not a soul outside, but lamps shone feebly in the windows, and at the foot of the lane to the west the remains of the sunset were still dying, glimmering splashes of purple wine on a crimson backcloth. Shmuel walked around the lane, straining his eyes in the dim light to make out the names of the residents in the neighboring houses. Finally he managed to read on a little ceramic plaque the names of Sarah and Avram de Toledo, painted in black letters on a pale blue background. He hesitated for a while before knocking at the door. He knew Sarah de Toledo from her short visits, but he had never exchanged more than a few words of greeting with her. The husband, a short, broad, compact man with a square, anvil-like head, opened the door a crack and eyed with suspicion the stranger who stood before him. Shmuel introduced himself and asked if he could have a few words with Mrs. de Toledo, please.
Avram de Toledo did not reply. He closed the door and seemed to be having a whispered conversation with someone in the depths of the house. Then he opened the door a crack again and asked if Shmuel would mind waiting a little longer. Then he turned his head and had a discussion with someone whose voice Shmuel could not hear. Finally he said:
“Come in. Mind the step.”
And he added in a hoarse voice:
“Thirsty?”
Then he said:
“Sarah’s just coming.”
He sat Shmuel down in an armchair with two burgundy-colored cushions, excused himself, and left the room, but Shmuel had the impression that he was standing nearby, in the passage, still keeping an eye on him from the shadows.
The room was lit by a dim ceiling light fixture with two yellow bulbs. A third bulb was burned out. In addition to the chair he was sitting in, there were two more old chairs in the room, which did not match each other or his chair, a threadbare low couch, a paraffin heater, a heavy wardrobe on curved legs, a black dining table, and a shelf attached by two strings to two nails in the wall. On the shelf stood a row of ten or twenty religious books with gold writing gleaming on their spines. The crude turquoise-colored vase in the middle of the table was also decorated in gold, and had two wide handles. In one corner of the room was a large, rough, dark wooden chest which probably contained bedding or clothes and objects for which there was no room in the wardrobe. It was covered in a colorful embroidered cloth.
Some ten minutes passed before Sarah de Toledo came in, wearing a loose housecoat, with a dark shawl covering her head and shoulders, and slippers on her feet. She remained standing in the shadow between the passage and the room, leaning with her back against the wall, and asked Shmuel if heaven forbid something bad had happened. Shmuel reassured her that everything was perfectly all right. He was sorry to disturb her at such an hour, but he would like to be allowed to put a question to her. Did she know the previous owner of the house, Mr. Abravanel, and what sort of man was he?
Sarah de Toledo did not speak. She nodded a few times, slowly, as if agreeing with herself, or as if lamenting some deed that was done and could not be undone.
“He loved Arabs,” she said at last in a sad voice. “He did not love us. Maybe the Arabs paid him.”
After another short silence she added:
“He did not love anyone. He did not love Arabs either. When all the Arabs fled, or when we helped them to flee, he stayed at home. He didn’t go with them. He didn’t love anyone. Will you stay? Would you like a glass of coffee?”
Shmuel declined with thanks, rose, and turned to leave. Sarah de Toledo said:
“I’ll be there tomorrow lunchtime. How come hardly anyone ever comes to see Mr. Wald? How can that be? Hasn’t he got any family? Friends? Pupils? He’s such a good man. A clever man. So learned. His son died in the war, poor thing, his only son, and he’s got no one left except for that girl who’s not a girl anymore, Mr. Abravanel’s daughter. She was the wife of the son, but only for one year. Maybe a year and a half. She’s got nobody left either. You study college?”
Shmuel explained that he used to be a student, but that now, soon, he intended to start looking for a job. Before he left he said:
“Thank you. I’m sorry. Excuse me.”
The short, compact man emerged quickly from the darkness of the passage and accompanied Shmuel to the front door.
“My wife wants to stop working at your place. She’s not so young anymore. And your house, I think, maybe it brings bad luck.”
Shmuel stood under the streetlamp for another quarter of an hour. Waiting. For whom, he did not know. Meanwhile, he thought to himself that there was nothing so extraordinary about standing and waiting: most people live from day to day waiting without knowing who or what they are waiti
ng for. With that thought, he hobbled back to the house, hastened to the library, and asked the old man if he needed anything: tea, or biscuits, or maybe he could peel him an orange.
Gershom Wald said:
“She has a small radio in her room. On evenings when she doesn’t go out, she listens to music broadcasts. Or she jumps from station to station and listens to programs from Arabic stations. Her father taught her a little Arabic, but apparently she did not inherit his dreams about brotherhood between Jews and Arabs. All she inherited from him is his anger. His anger and resentment. Maybe she has other dreams. Maybe you know? In his last years, when he sat shut away in this house, he almost stopped talking about his vision of brotherhood between the two nations. Once he told me that when he was young he believed wholeheartedly, as we all did, that we Jews were setting up a homeland here without evicting anyone and without doing anything wrong. Yes. By the 1920s he had begun to have doubts, and in the 1930s he realized that the two nations were moving swiftly on trajectories that would inevitably lead them to a head-on collision, to a bloody war at the end of which only one of them would survive. The losers would not be able to remain here. But he did not quickly abandon his youthful views. For quite a few years he swallowed his doubts and continued to toe the line and to say more or less what everyone expected of a representative of the Jerusalem Sephardi aristocracy in the institutions of the Zionist movement. From time to time, he called for dialogue with the neighboring nation. From time to time, he warned against the ways of violence. But his words received almost no attention. The others accepted with indifference and even with a certain boredom the fact that now and then Shealtiel Abravanel displayed a sensitivity, a Sephardi sensitivity supposedly, to the complexities of the Arab problem. In his thinking he was already moving away from all his colleagues. He still believed that the Jews were right to aspire to establish a homeland here, but he had reached the conclusion that that home should be shared between Jews and Arabs. It was only in the 1940s that he began to raise a distinctive voice sometimes in meetings of the Council of the Jewish Agency and the Zionist Executive Committee. In 1947, when he expressed a solitary view against the United Nations partition plan and against an independent Israel, some people began to call him a traitor. They thought he had gone out of his mind. In the end, as you know, they gave him twenty-four hours to decide between resignation and dismissal. After his resignation, he shut up completely. He did not say a single word in public. He wrapped himself in resentment like a shroud. He realized that no one was listening to him. On the eve of the creation of the state and during the War of Independence, in any case, there was no chance that anyone would bother to listen to views like his. We all understood by 1947 that the impending war would be a war to the death and that if we were defeated, not one of us would be left alive. On April 2, Micha, my only son, was killed. My son, my only son, was killed. Micha. For more than ten years now I’ve stayed awake all night. Night after night, they come and slaughter him among the rocks on that hillside in that pine forest. And after that the three of us were shut up here in this coffin, after that we were shut away. During the months of the Jordanian siege of Jerusalem the thick stone walls protected us from bullets and shells. Atalia was the only one who left the house occasionally to queue for the paraffin cart and the ice cart, and she also stood with our ration cards in the long lines for food. After the war was over, he continued to shut himself away at home, he severed his last remaining links with the outside world, he stopped answering letters, he refused to go to the phone, he read the newspapers in his room all morning, and it was only to me and to his daughter that he expressed at unexpected moments his despair at the new state, which he considered to be given over to the worship of militarism, drunk on victory, and consumed by hollow chauvinistic euphoria. He thought Ben-Gurion was suffering from a messianic complex and considered his former friends runts and lackeys. He shut himself away in his room for hours on end, writing. What he wrote there I do not know. He left nothing behind other than the scent of disappointment and a sadness that fills the house to this day. It must be his ghost, refusing to leave these rooms. Soon you will leave too, and I shall be left alone with her. She will no doubt find me some other young eccentric who will consent to take your place. She always finds someone, she always turns his head, sometimes she gives in for a moment, and then she sends him packing. Visitors sometimes come to her at night and leave at night. I usually don’t see them, but I hear them. They come and they go. Why? That I cannot say. Maybe she hasn’t found what she’s looking for yet. Or maybe she isn’t looking for anything but just flitting from nectar to nectar like a hummingbird. Or the opposite: she is always mourning, even when she finds herself a partner for a night or two. Who knows? For thousands of years we have taught ourselves to believe that women are different from us, as different as can be, absolutely different. Perhaps we were exaggerating. What do you think? Soon you’ll go on your way, and I shall miss you sometimes, especially at our times, when the light is fading and the evening gets into my bones. I live from one leave-taking to the next.”
50
* * *
AT THE BEGINNING OF MARCH, the winter rains stopped. The air was still cold and dry, glassy, but in the mornings the sky brightened and a strong, luminous azure spread over the city and over the hills and valleys. The cypresses and the stone walls on Rabbi Elbaz Lane stood washed of dust and appeared lit from within by a sharp, precise light. As if they were created this very morning. The newspaper headlines told of a powerful earthquake in Agadir, in Morocco, in which thousands of people had died. Gershom Wald said: “Life is but a fleeting shadow. Even death is but a fleeting shadow. Only pain remains. It goes on and on. Always.”
At the end of the lane wound the shallow wadi, where a few pools of rainwater still stood. Far away, beyond the wadi, empty fields and forsaken hillsides spread, on which here and there a solitary olive tree stubbornly grew. The olive trees seemed from a distance as though they had long ago left the vegetable kingdom and joined the realm of the inanimate. Now that the winter was over, the fields and hillsides were covered in a dark green carpet dappled in places with rain flowers: cyclamens, anemones, and poppies. In the distance could still be seen the ruins of the deserted Arab village of Sheikh Badr, and above the ruins, rising like a primeval dragon, the clumsy skeletal outlines of the gigantic half-built festival hall.
Sometimes, toward evening, low dark clouds lay upon the Jerusalem sky, as if winter had changed its mind and returned to rest upon the city, but by morning they dispersed and limpid azure once more spread over the minarets and domes, spires and high walls, winding alleys, iron gates and stone steps and water cisterns. The rains had departed from Jerusalem and only scattered puddles remained. The glazier, the peddler, and the rag-and-bone man went again from street to street announcing their arrival with hoarse cries. As if the three of them had been sent to warn the city of a plague or a fire. Geraniums blazed on windowsills and balcony railings. The trees were full of the shrill twittering of birds, as if they had received some sensational news they had to spread urgently all around the city.
One morning, Atalia entered without knocking on the door of her father’s dark room. She brought Shmuel an old, faded khaki army kit bag, which she put down on his bed. Shmuel guessed that it had once belonged to Micha. Then he remembered that it was his own kit bag, the one in which he had brought his belongings and books here at the beginning of the winter. Atalia said:
“Your foot is nearly better.”
She said this as a statement, not a question. She added:
“I’ve come to help you. You’ll never manage to pack on your own.”
Then she went up to the attic and back twice and brought down all his clothes and books, though his injury was almost healed and he could have brought his belongings down on his own. When he asked why she had taken it upon herself to do what he could have done unaided, she replied:
“I wanted you to rest a little longer.”
�
�I’ve been resting here for more than three months,” he said.
“If you stay with us any longer you’ll turn into a fossil,” she said. “Like us. You’ll grow moss. As it is, you’ve aged here.”
And she added:
“Three months is enough. You need to be among young people, boys and girls, students, wine, parties, fun. What you had here was some time out, which you apparently needed, but just for the winter. The winter is over. It’s time for the bear to wake up.”
“The bear won’t forget the honey.”
“The world is full of honey. And it’s waiting for you.”
He almost reached out to seize her shoulders, to hug her and press her body to his and feel her breasts against his chest one last time. But an inner voice reminded him that he was her guest. So he restrained himself and fought back the tears that choked his throat and almost filled his eyes. And yet there was also a vague joy that he would soon be leaving.
Shmuel’s clothes, books, and toiletries were piled in disorder on the sofa. His coat and cap were here too, as well as some notebooks and cardboard folders. Atalia bent over and helped him pack everything she could into the kit bag. Suddenly she turned to her father’s bookcase and plucked from it a tiny, delicate blue jug of Hebron glass, which may have been a present from one of Abravanel’s Arab friends, wrapped it in several thicknesses of newspaper, tucked it between the layers of his clothes and underwear in the kit bag, and said:
“A small gift. From me. For the journey. I expect you’ll break it. Or lose it. Or forget who gave it to you.”
She went on squeezing more of his clothes and papers in, and even his small typewriter. But in the midst of packing she straightened herself and announced:
