by Amos Oz
Sheinbaum moved to hit the brat, but the blow landed on thin air because the child had leapt aside. The old man beckoned to the blond commander, and they held a brief consultation. The boy was in no immediate danger, because he was not in direct contact with the cable, but he must be rescued soon. This comedy could not go on forever. A ladder would not help much: he was too high up. Perhaps the knife could be got up to him again somehow, and he could be persuaded to cut the last strap and jump into a sheet of canvas. After all, it was a perfectly routine exercise in parachute training. The main thing was to act quickly, because the situation was humiliating. Not to mention the children. So the short officer removed his shirt and wrapped a knife in it. Gideon stretched his hands downward and tried to catch the bundle. It slipped between his outstretched arms and plummeted uselessly to the ground. The children snickered. Only after two more unsuccessful attempts did Gideon manage to grasp the shirt and remove the knife. His fingers were numb and heavy with blood. Suddenly he pressed the blade to his burning cheek, enjoying the cool touch of the steel. It was a delicious moment. He opened his eyes and saw an inverted world. Everything looked comical: the truck, the field, his father, the army, the kids, and even the knife in his hand. He made a twisted face at the gang of children, gave a deep laugh, and waved at them with the knife. He tried to say something. If only they could see themselves from up here, upside down, rushing around like startled ants, they would surely laugh with him. But the laugh turned into a heavy cough; Gideon choked and his eyes filled.
9
GIDEON’S UPSIDE-DOWN antics filled Zaki with demonic glee.
“He’s crying,” he shouted cruelly, “Gideon’s crying, look, you can see the tears. Pinocchio the hero, he’s sniveling with fear-o. We can see you, we can.”
Once again Shimshon Sheinbaum’s fist fell ineffectually on thin air.
“Zaki,” Gideon managed to shout in a dull, pain-racked voice, “I’ll kill you, I’ll choke you, you little bastard.” Suddenly he chuckled and stopped.
It was no good. He wouldn’t cut the last strap by himself, and the doctor was afraid that if he stayed as he was much longer he was likely to lose consciousness. Some other solution would have to be found. This performance could not be allowed to go on all day.
And so the kibbutz truck rumbled across the plowland and braked at the point indicated by Shimshon Sheinbaum. Two ladders were hastily lashed together to reach the required height, and then supported on the back of the truck by five strong pairs of hands. The legendary blond officer started to climb. But when he reached the place where the two ladders overlapped, there was an ominous creak, and the wood began to bend with the weight and the height. The officer, a largish man, hesitated for a moment. He decided to retreat and fasten the ladders together more securely. He climbed down to the floor of the truck, wiped the sweat from his forehead, and said, “Wait, I’m thinking.” Just then, in the twinkling of an eye, before he could be stopped, before he could even be spotted, the child Zaki had climbed high up the ladder, past the join, and leapt like a frantic monkey up onto the topmost rungs; suddenly he was clutching a knife—where on earth had he got it from? He wrestled with the taut strap. The spectators held their breath: he seemed to be defying gravity, not holding on, not caring, hopping on the top rung, nimble, lithe, amazingly efficient.
10
THE HEAT beat down violently on the hanging youth. His eyes were growing dimmer. His breathing had almost stopped. With his last glimmer of lucidity he saw his ugly brother in front of him and felt his breath on his face. He could smell him. He could see the pointed teeth protruding from Zaki’s mouth. A terrible fear closed in on him, as though he were looking in a mirror and seeing a monster. The nightmare roused Gideon’s last reserves of strength. He kicked into space, flailed, managed to turn over, seized the strap, and pulled himself up. With outstretched arms he threw himself onto the cable and saw the flash. The hot wind continued to tyrannize the whole valley. And a third cluster of jets drowned the scene with its roaring.
11
THE STATUS of a bereaved father invests a man with a saintly aura of suffering. But Sheinbaum gave no thought to this aura. A stunned, silent company escorted him toward the dining hall. He knew, with utter certainty, that his place now was beside Raya.
On the way he saw the child Zaki, glowing, breathless, a hero. Surrounded by other youngsters: he had almost rescued Gideon. Shimshon laid a trembling hand on his child’s head, and tried to tell him. His voice abandoned him and his lips quivered. Clumsily he stroked the tousled, dusty mop of hair. It was the first time he had ever stroked the child. A few steps later, everything went dark and the old man collapsed in a flower bed.
As Independence Day drew to a close the khamsin abated. A fresh sea breeze soothed the steaming walls. There was a heavy fall of dew on the lawns in the night.
What does the pale ring around the moon portend? Usually it heralds a khamsin. Tomorrow, no doubt, the heat will return. It is May, and June will follow. A wind drifts among the cypresses in the night, trying to comfort them between one heat wave and the next. It is the way of the wind to come and to go and to come again. There is nothing new.
1962
Before His Time
1
THE BULL WAS warm and strong on the night of his death.
In the night, Samson the bull was slaughtered. Early in the morning, before the five o’clock milking, a meat trader from Nazareth came and took him away in a gray tender. Portions of his carcass were hung on rusty hooks in the butcher shops of Nazareth. The ringing of the church bells roused droves of flies to attack the bull’s flesh, swarming upon it and exacting a green revenge.
Later, at eight o’clock in the morning, an old effendi arrived, carrying a transistor radio. He had come to buy Samson’s hide. And all the while Radio Ramallah piped American music into the palm of his hand. It was the wildest of tunes, some unbearably mournful piece of jazz. The church bells accompanied the wailing melody. As the tune came to an end, the transaction was concluded. The bull’s hide was sold. What will you do, O Rashid Effendi, with the hide of Samson the mighty bull? I will make ornaments from it, objects of value, souvenirs for rich tourists, pictures in many colors on a screen of hide: here is the alleyway where Jesus lived, here is the carpenter’s workshop with Joseph himself inside, here little angels are striking a bell to proclaim the birth of the Saviour, here the kings are coming to bow down before the cradle, and here is the Babe with light on His forehead, parchment work, real bullskin, all handmade with an artist’s vision.
Rashid Effendi went to Zaim’s cafe to spend the morning at the backgammon table. In his hand the radio with its cheerful music, and at his feet, in a sack, the hide of the dead bull.
And a Nazareth breeze, heavy with smells, plucked at the bells and the treetops, stirring the hooks in the butcher shops, and the flesh of the bull gave out a crimson groan.
2
SAMSON THE bull was at the height of his powers, the pride of the kibbutz herdsman, the finest bull in the valley. Had it not been that his potency failed, Yosh would not have come to him suddenly in the night to slit his throat.
Samson was asleep on his feet, his head bowed. The steam of his breath mingled with the smell of sticky cattle sweat. The beam of the pocket flashlight caressed his chest and lingered on his neck. The bull sensed nothing.
Poisoned bait, thought Yosh. The howl of the jackals rose from the darkness. In late autumn a stray jackal had broken into the cattle shed, rabid or crazed with hunger, and had bitten Samson in the leg. Samson killed him with a kick, but the poison in the bite killed the bull’s potency. Thus was sealed the fate of the most ferocious bull in the Valley of Jezreel.
With a gentle, quiet hand Yosh gripped the bull’s jaw and raised the dark head. The bull breathed deeply. His eyes quivered, almost winked. Yosh pressed the point of the knife to Samson’s gullet. The bull’s nostrils flared suddenly and his foreleg kicked at the balls of dung beneath him. Still he did not
open his eyes. Nor did he open them for a long while—not until the blade had pierced his hide and flesh and jugular vein.
First to appear were a few thin, tentative drops. The bull let out a muffled groan of unease and swung his head from side to side as if shaking off an obstinate fly, or expressing violent disagreement on a conversational point. Then came a weak, hesitant trickle, as if from a trivial scratch.
“Well,” said Yosh.
Samson lashed his muddy hindquarters with his tail and exhaled nervously, warmly.
“Well, get on with it,” said Yosh, and he thrust his hand into his pocket. The cigarette that appeared between his lips was moist and somehow unclean. What possessed Yosh to stub out the match on the forehead of the dying bull? The flame died and darkness returned. The bull was groaning in pain now, but his groaning was restrained, and he fell silent, took two clumsy paces backward, raised his head, and stared at the man.
And as he lifted his wonderful head the blood burst out from the wound and streamed down in black torrents, bubbling in the flashlight beam. Yosh felt disgust and impatience.
“Well, really,” he said.
The sight of the spurting blood tickled his bladder. Something prevented him from urinating in the presence of the dying bull. But his patience was ready to snap, and he smoked nervously and angrily. Samson was dying very slowly. His blood was warm and sticky. The bull fell on his knees, his forelegs first, then unhurriedly he lay down. His drooping horns tried to butt, searching in vain for a target.
The bull’s eyes died first, while his hide still quivered. Then his hide was still, and there was just one foreleg poking at the straw like a blind man’s stick. The leg stopped moving, and all was quiet. The tail flicked weakly once, and once again, like a hand waving good-bye. And when his blood had all drained away, Samson curled up as if he chose to die in the fetal position.
“Well, well,” said Yosh.
Then the herdsman finished his cigarette and emptied his bladder and turned and went to the little kitchen where Zeshka kept watch at night.
Zeshka, the estranged wife of Dov Sirkin, gave Yosh a drink of warm, sweet milk in an earthenware cup. She was an old, wrinkled woman with sunken eyes like an owl’s. The earthenware cup was large and thick. There was something sharp and nervous in Zeshka’s movements. Her body was stunted, shriveled. Steam rose from the cup, and a film of grease floated on the surface of the milk.
3
EVERY NIGHT, until daybreak, Zeshka sits in the little kitchen where special food is prepared for the babies and the sick children. Her angular face rests on her knees. Her knees are gripped in her arms, like a closed penknife. Every hour she wraps herself up in a long, rough overcoat and goes out to patrol the nursery buildings. She straightens a blanket here, closes a window there, but she does not like this new breed of children, and she feels that there is now no need for children or parents or anything but total quiet.
In between she sits on her bench, not moving, not thinking, as if in the no man’s land on the frontiers of sleep. But she is not asleep. If a child cries in the night or coughs in the distance, she sniffs her way to him and touches him and says:
“Shh. That’s enough, now.”
Or: “That’s enough, now. Quiet.”
And to herself she says:
“So be it.”
Ever since that day, long ago, when Dov Sirkin left his family and his kibbutz, Zeshka has been growing bitter. She speaks ill of the kibbutz and of certain individuals in particular. We do our best to be patient. When her eldest son, Ehud, was killed in a ferocious reprisal raid, we stood by her and guarded her against the threat of insanity. We would come in turns to sit with her in the evening hours. We sent her to a craft training course. And when it occurred to her to demand without shame that we allow her to serve as a regular night watchman, relieving her of all other duties, we did not insist on our principles but said: All right. By all means. You are a special case, and we have decided to grant your request. But please bear in mind . . . and so on.
If Samson had chosen to die with a wild shriek rather than a groan of resignation, Zeshka would certainly have nodded her head and said, “Right,” or “That’s it.” But Samson chose to die quietly, and Yosh sipped the drink that she prepared for him and left without saying more, without telling one of his stories from the old days. Sometimes he would stay for a while and even tell jokes. Tonight he came, drank, and went out into the darkness.
And then, until the light of morning, the jackals.
Outbursts of weeping, outbursts of laughter, sometimes you would think a child was being burned alive next door. And sometimes it sounds as if lustful men are clinging to a loose woman, pushing her this way and that and scratching and tickling her until she shrieks and laughs and they groan and then even Zeshka smiles and says to herself:
“Yes, that’s right.”
At five or at five-fifteen, when the sky grows pale and a ghostly luster appears on the mountains in the east, long before sunrise, Zeshka goes to her room to sleep. On the way she pauses in the younger members’ quarters, knocks loudly on Geula’s door, and shouts:
“Time to get up. It’s well after five. Good morning. Get up!”
Geula Sirkin, the surviving child of Zeshka and Dov, wakes up in hatred and rises to wash her face under the cold-water faucet. She runs to the dining hall, and if anyone says, “Good morning, Geula,” she may reply wearily, drowsily, “Fine. All right.” When she gets to the kitchen she switches on the big urns and makes coffee for the workers. Her nails are cracked, her hands rough and scabby, and there are two bitter creases at the corners of her mouth. Her legs are thin and pale and covered with a down of black hairs. That is why she always wears trousers, never a skirt or a dress. And although she is now more than twenty years old, there are still adolescent pimples on her cheeks. She is also in the habit of reading modern poetry.
Coffee in big urns, thinks Geula, is revolting stuff. You make proper coffee in an Arabic coffeepot. Ehud did not come home on leave often, but every visit had been a delight to the unmarried girls. And sometimes to the married girls as well. He used to prepare coffee like a primeval wizard, with spells and whispered incantations. And he would laugh suddenly as if to say: What do you know, and what could you know, about the terrors of bazooka fire at close range? But he was a man of few words. He just burst out laughing and asked why they were all hanging around him, as if they had no homes to go to, as if they had nothing to do. And long before he died, his eyes were full of death. He did not leave the kibbutz, but he did not live there, either: his army service was extended from year to year, and he became a legendary figure in the army and in the border settlements; he was twenty-three years old and they gave him command of a battalion. He roamed the land in a tattered uniform and sandals, with a submachine gun plundered from the corpse of a Syrian. He took part in all the reprisal raids—he did not miss a single one. Once he set out, while suffering from a severe case of pneumonia, and blew up the police station in Bet Ajar. It was he who caught, singlehanded, in a night expedition to Mount Hebron, Isa Tubasi, the murderer of the Yaniv family from the moshav of Bet Hadas. When he returned from his solitary mission to Mount Hebron he said to his sister, Geula, “I killed him and six others as well. I had to.”
As the coffee urns begin to steam and Geula smokes her first cigarette of the day on an empty stomach, the jackals of the valley disperse to their hiding places. The smell of Samson’s blood has disturbed their night. The jackals of the valley are feeble creatures, dripping saliva, mad-eyed. They have diffident paws and quivering tails. Sometimes one of them goes mad with hunger or jubilation and breaks into the farmyard and starts biting until the watchmen shoot him. And his comrades laugh maliciously amid their bitter whining.
At one time, many years ago, Dov Sirkin would lay poisoned bait for these jackals, also little gin traps that he himself had designed and constructed. He laughs longest who laughs last, Dov Sirkin used to say. Later he got up and left the kibb
utz and his family and went out to roam the land. To his wife he said, “A man must try to leave some fingerprints that will remain after he is dead; otherwise there is no point in being born at all.”
According to the orders of the general staff, our soldiers are forbidden to withdraw from enemy territory until all the wounded and the dead have been evacuated. How was it that Ehud’s corpse was left in no man’s land? Two commissions of inquiry had investigated this disgraceful episode and lessons had been learned. For three nights Ehud lay in no man’s land. The enemy soldiers tried to retrieve the body so they could display it in one of their cities and thus soften the humiliation of their defeat in this and other battles. Crazed with anger and shame, Ehud’s comrades thwarted the enemy’s purpose with a heavy, continuous stream of fire from our frontier. The enemy forces also covered the dead man and would not let his comrades retrieve him. Night after night Ehud’s comrades risked their lives, crawling into that godforsaken patch of ground, riddled with bushes and mines, but they were driven back again and again. The enemy set up powerful searchlights and scattered the darkness. On the fourth night, and at the cost of six casualties, Ehud’s comrades succeeded in recovering him—in spite of all the dangers, and although they had been ordered to abandon the attempt. They brought him to the camp, and from there to his home, and they said to him: Ehud, our friend, you would not have deserted us even to save your life, and we have not deserted you. Rest in peace.
But the jackals had torn his face and ruined his beautiful square chin. Dov Sirkin appeared at his son’s funeral looking mortally ill. Zeshka did not talk to him and he did not talk to her. He tried to speak to Geula, but she did not answer.
