by Amos Oz
Jet-black and frothy, the coffee bubbles in the steaming urns. Let it boil seven times, Geula Sirkin decides, a full seven times. Her lips are clenched. Her teeth are clenched. Her mouth is like a curved dagger.
4
AT SIX in the morning the sound of engines is heard from the direction of the tractor sheds, and the kibbutz members start moving down toward the dew-drenched fields. By eight o’clock the sky is already ablaze, its color changing from blue to a dirty white. Tractors, irrigation pipes, farming implements, all metal objects become inflamed. Put out your hand to touch or to take, and the response is white-hot hatred. The rusty faucets gurgle and emit splinters of iron.
At one time, many years ago, Dov Sirkin was in charge of all the orchards. He used to sing happily, ecstatically, as, stripped to the waist, he flitted like a knife among the rows of trees, appearing at one end of the orchard, shouting to scold and encourage the pickers, then disappearing and springing up at the other end. He had powerful shoulders and a chest and trunk like a bear’s: dark and dense.
Toward evening on summer days, he would wander around the orchards carrying on his shoulders a fair-haired little boy with slender, finely molded limbs, as pretty as a girl. Dov taught this boy to be ready to be tossed suddenly into the air without any warning, as high as the treetops, and to fall into his strong father’s arms without a cry of fear, without a sound.
“A man needs to be strong and self-assured,” he used to say, although he knew that these words were as yet beyond the child’s understanding. “To murder an innocent victim is the most repulsive crime in the world. To be the innocent victim yourself is almost as bad. And you, Ehud, you’re going to be a terribly strong man. So strong that nobody will be able to harm you, and you won’t need to harm other people, because they won’t dare start a fight. Now it’s getting dark and we’re going home. No, not together. You’re going on your own through the wadi and I’m going a different way. You must learn not to be afraid of the dark. Yes, there are all kinds of creatures in the wadi, but they will be afraid of you if you’re not afraid of them. Off you go.”
The orchard is laid out in blocks, each variety divided from the next by a neat furrow. Alexander the Great apples, coarse and lacking flavor. Gallia apples. Juicy Golden Delicious. Then come the peach trees, whose fruit is furry and smells intoxicating. And dark plums, and melancholy guavas, and then another block of apple trees of the variety called Incomparable. It was Dov Sirkin who laid out the plots and planted the saplings in the early days. This orchard would never have existed had it not been for Dov Sirkin and his persistence. He argued and threatened and bullied the founders of the kibbutz into accepting his schemes, and on two occasions he made mistakes and they told him he was mad, he should give up, and twice he uprooted and replanted. Twenty years ago he left his orchard and his family and the kibbutz and went out to roam the land. He did not even take the trouble to leave a letter behind.
Generations of jackals have passed away since then, but the young ones follow the lead of their fathers, and nothing is changed. In every generation the gray open spaces are filled night after night with sounds of wailing and jubilation, with cries of impiety, malice, and despair.
After the departure of Dov Sirkin the kibbutz was filled with noisy indignation: in those days, anybody who left the kibbutz was sure to be one of the weaklings, not a central pillar. And if one of the central pillars left, before going he would address a meeting and beat the table with his fist and call a spade a spade and expose once and for all the corruption that lay hidden behind the façade, and then sit back and listen to the speeches of reply in which they told him once and for all exactly what they thought of him and his motives. But Dov slipped away without any argument, without accusations or excuses: he disappeared early one morning and did not return in the evening, or the following day. Gone.
As time passed our anger subsided. There was perplexity. There was a shrugging of shoulders: He’s gone, let him go. We’ve known him a long time. We always knew.
Later a rumor sprung up concerning a girl from Mexico, an itinerant artist, and everything became clear. The kibbutz assumed responsibility for Zeshka and her children. It was Ehud who, at the age of fourteen and a half, constructed with his own hands the revolving milking-drum that transformed our dairy. When he was sixteen years old, he left school and began wandering about the mountains, and at that time he may already have been in the habit of slipping across the cease-fire line and returning unscathed. He made love behind the barn to girls from the Training Corps who were four or five years older than he. When he was drafted into the army he became more settled. At the age of twenty-three he was a major, and his name was known throughout the land. Only Geula caused us concern. Zeshka, too.
Dov went first to Haifa, where he worked on the docks to save a little money—he had sixty-two piasters in his pocket when he left the kibbutz. From Haifa he went to the Novomeisky mineral works on the shores of the Dead Sea. And from there he traveled to places both in Israel and abroad, and we lost track of him. In recent years—and this we know from a first-hand source—Dov Sirkin has settled in Jerusalem and become a geography teacher in the lower classes of a secondary school. His first heart attack forced him to slow down. After the second he gave up teaching and stayed at home. His face has turned very gray.
5
DOV SIRKIN was sitting in his home. It was night. He sat in his chair motionless and erect, not blinking, not yawning. He sketched with firm lines.
Two o’clock in the morning. An unshaded yellow electric light burned overhead. A flake of plaster drifted down from the ceiling and landed on an old wooden chair. Dov’s room was meticulously tidy. Every object lay in the exact spot where Dov had decided to place it, two years before the Declaration of Independence. Despite its precise order, the room seemed to be filled with a strident and unruly herd of piebald furniture. There was chaos in the combination of incongruous objects: the contrast between light, transparent curtains and an antique chest of drawers, an oval table dating from the years of Jerusalem’s Sephardic aristocracy and a dark wardrobe with legs carved in the shape of weird prehistoric creatures. In the middle of all this was a garish, flowery bedspread, colored red and blue and made of lingerie silk. A heavy chandelier hovered above the chaos. In the corner of the room a large flowerpot sent out twisted snakes of cactus in all directions, and in the center, at an ornate desk with gold and silver fittings, Dov Sirkin sat and sketched.
He laid down the compass and picked up a ruler. He put the ruler back in its place and began sharpening his pencil. He pressed too hard, breaking the point twice. Dov decided some compromise was necessary. From a heap of colored pencils he picked out a red and a black.
Many years before Dov had been a laborer in the port of Haifa, then a factory foreman, a trooper in His Majesty’s Bedouin Cavalry, an arms dealer in Latin America on behalf of the Jewish underground, a staff officer in the War of Independence, a development consultant in the Negev, and finally a teacher of geography, which in those days still retained its literal meaning of “drawing the Earth.”
He sat leaning forward with bowed head. His face cold, as if sparingly made, each detail for a purpose. There was a parsimonious look on his features, a pure, concentrated parsimony, without any element of avarice or enjoyment. Only his eyebrows were on a lavish scale, as if mocking the square forehead in whose folds they grew. His pencil squeaked on a page torn from a mathematics notebook.
And silence, the silence of a desolate suburb of Jerusalem at a desolate hour of the early morning, roaming the streets outside and plucking needles from the tops of the pine trees in the gardens. The plucked needles rustled softly, the sound penetrating the sealed shutters, penetrating bones. Cats bristled with fear on the balcony rails in the darkness. Dov turned his head to look at the door:
All right. Closed. Locked.
Then a faraway jackal let out a short bark, like the leader of an orchestra who is the first to tune his strings. Many years
had passed since Ehud’s one and only visit to this place: there was some youth congress in Jerusalem, or it may have been a camp for archeology enthusiasts, and the young man found out the address for himself and came and stayed for two days. That is, he appeared after midnight with a girl, smiled at his father wearily, and said that he would explain everything in the morning; then they both immediately fell asleep in their clothes. When Dov woke up at six o’clock the next morning, they had gone, and there was just a note saying, “Thanks a lot. Be seeing you. P.S.: everything’s OK.” The next night he arrived with two girls. He also brought some ancient pieces of pottery. Until three o’clock in the morning he worked at repairing a leaking hot-water pipe in the bathroom, and then he went out to join the girls, who were in their sleeping bags on the balcony. In the morning he was gone, leaving no trace besides the pipe that he had repaired.
Four years later they met briefly and by chance in Beersheba, and Ehud half-promised to come again to visit him. “Some night in the summer,” he said. “I’m taking these miserable clods out for training in the Adullam hills, trying to turn alley cats into tigers. And I’m sure you’ll be surprised if I turn up some time in the middle of the night to visit you and take a shower.” Dov did not believe this promise and hardly expected to hear footsteps at night during the next summer. At the end of that summer Dov Sirkin received a personal letter of condolence from the commander of the paratroopers, and among other expressions of eulogy appeared the words “Happy is the father.” He shook his head and decided to concentrate on his drawing and dispel these random thoughts. He was tired, but steeped in self-discipline. The churches behind the walls of the Old City, across the border in the Kingdom of Jordan, began to converse, in the language of bells, with the churches of Bethlehem, also on the alien side of the truce line. The bells of Bethlehem chimed in reply: Yes, here, yes, here He was born. And the bells of East Jerusalem sang: And here He died and here He arose.
6
DOV PUT down the black and red pencils. With the aid of his compass he drew a neat semicircle. Then he picked up the blue pencil and sketched for about a quarter of an hour without a break.
On the paper a gigantic port took shape. Its blue water flowed from his gray eyes to his fingers and through them to the pencil, which swallowed up the squares on the paper until almost the whole of the page was covered with blue. The jetties of Dov’s harbor were broader than the broadest jetties, the piers longer than any ever built by human hands, and the cranes more massive than the greatest cranes in the world. And the warehouses were as tall as the silence poking its dark fingers through the cracks in Dov Sirkin’s shutters. A complex of highways, connecting roads, bridges, tunnels, and approach routes writhed like a nest of snakes. Yellow machines spewed out giant sparks. Steel platforms and rubber conveyor belts were sketched in, capable of unloading whole mountains of merchandise from colossal ships. All in meticulous architectural perspective, in matching scale, lunatic fire trapped in the amber crystals of mathematics. If the greatest ship in the world were enticed to lay anchor between Dov’s quays in his harbor of the Jerusalem night, this ship would look like a beetle crawling on an elephant’s tusk.
The blue pencil shaded in the whole of the bay and then delicately scattered water into a network of canals. A stranger’s footsteps sounded on the stairs outside. Somebody leaned heavily on the banister. There was a creak. And silence.
Dov leapt up from his seat, rushed to the window, and checked the bolts of the shutters. They were screwed down. In the cracks the empty street appeared. Beam upon beam of desolate starlight stretched across the street, from rooftops to balcony rails, from garbage cans to the crowns of cypress trees, from the Municipal Information Bureau to the telephone booth, from the top of the stone steps to the cracks in the sidewalk. A silent crust covered the earth, and a blue vapor came down. Or dew.
Another fragment of plaster fell from the ceiling, larger than the first. Tiny flakes of whitewash were scattered over the bedspread that resembled the intimate clothing of a loose woman. The footsteps on the staircase ceased. Perhaps the stranger was now on the first floor. There was silence, no sound of a key turning in a lock, or of a bell ringing. He must be standing motionless, examining the peeling doors and perhaps taking in the names of the residents on the mailboxes. Dov clenched his teeth. His jaws tensed like a fist. He stood up, hid his plan of the port of Jerusalem in the antique chest of drawers, and returned to the writing desk. He ripped out a fresh sheet of graph paper, sat down, and started to draw a picture-map of a mountainous land.
7
HE WAS a gray man: gray eyes, face, and hair. But he almost invariably chose to wear a blue shirt of the kind favored by young athletes, and sandals of biblical style. Hidden beneath his shirt was a strong and hairy torso, crisscrossed with sinews. At first sight he seemed still in his prime, and he had the build of a stevedore. Only his heart was weak, but this was not evident to the eye. In the autumn he would be sixty years old.
He sketched the map of a mountainous land. A green police patrol car raced down the street, ripping the silence apart, and then silence returned and sewed up the breach with a cool, dreamy hand. The patrol car receded southward, toward the steep alleyways at the approaches to the railway station. On three sides the truce line encircled the city of Jerusalem. To the north and east of this line a different Jerusalem brooded. And to the south lay Bethlehem and, farther still, the godforsaken hills of Hebron, and at their feet, forever, the desert.
Dov drew a land of black basalt hills. To these hills he gave sharp snow-capped peaks tall enough to pierce the embroidered-silk screen of the stars. He drew monsters of rock, sharp daggers of stone, summits like drawn swords. And wild ravines cleaving the vaulted ranges. Here and there were ominous overhangs, threatening at any moment to hurl primeval cataracts of smashed rock down into the abyss. Canyons and gorges carved out in drunkenness. Brooding labyrinths and volcanic caves, the menace of a different silence.
At last he stopped drawing and stared at the page. His jaws were gray. He took a red crayon and began to write in the altitudes of his peaks. The foothills of these mountains could have laughed the summits of the Alps to scorn.
8
DRIVEN BY hunger and cold, perhaps by regret, one of the jackals of Bethlehem began to weep bitterly. At once he was answered by jackal packs from the heights of Bet Zafafa, from Zur Bahar, from the hill of Mar Elias, in an outburst of perverted laughter and malice. The wind stopped blowing, as if listening with rapt attention.
The stairs creaked again. A thrill passed through his body. His fingers turned pale. Heavily the stranger climbed another step, then another, and a third, coughed, and then paused. And again the stillness of death descended on the house, on the street, and on the city. This time Dov ran into the kitchen. Close the window. Seal the lattice. Keep the light on.
Until a few years before he had been teaching geography to a junior class of the national secondary school. Hundreds of pupils had passed through his hands over the years. They used to respect his grayness and obey his gray voice. Rumors proliferated among them and passed from generation to generation, rumors concerning the elderly schoolmaster who was once a leading figure in the underground and one of the founding fathers of the kibbutz movement. As they gripped the chalk his fingers looked strong and decisive. With one firm sweep of his hand he was capable of drawing a thin, straight line that no ruler in the world could have improved upon. Sometimes he would try to entertain his class: his jokes were thin, gray. Occasionally he would suddenly become animated by a sort of restrained pathos, and something would come alive in his eyes. This would be interpreted by his pupils as anger; it would fade and disappear as suddenly as it had arisen.
Two or three times a year he used to put on khaki clothes, take a bundle of maps and a smart army knapsack that always aroused envy in the hearts of his pupils, and lead a party of schoolchildren on a hiking tour. He cut a strange and almost eccentric figure in his hiking gear: tattered windbreaker
with many pockets and buckles, tall walking boots, a rather antiquated firearm that he called a Tommy gun. With his pupils from the intermediate classes he would often climb to the heights of the hills of Naphtali, and with his senior students he used to cross over Little Crater to the Scorpion’s Path and beyond, to the Meshar.
Once, during one of these trips, Dov’s party was held up in Beersheba. A representative of the Military Authority told them to change their route and not to pass through the Desert of Paran. For security reasons. In a general sense; he did not go into details. The officer was thin and tall, curly-haired, barefoot and taciturn, his uniform disgracefully casual. It was four years since Dov had seen this young man. Four years before the young man had come to Jerusalem for some congress or other and had spent two nights in Dov’s apartment. The first night he arrived with a girl whom he did not even bother to introduce to his father, and the second night there were two girls with him. Dov remembered the beauty of these girls, the softness of their voices, the muffled laughter from the sleeping bags in the early morning. Now he did not know what words he could use, or if the proper words even existed. His pupils pressed around him and the thin officer, and he found nothing to say.
“Anyway,” said Ehud casually, drawling as if too lethargic to move his lips and speak intelligibly, “anyway, as far as I’m concerned the best thing you can do is turn around and go home. We’ve got enough problems as it is. We don’t need schoolkids and teachers here. Still, seeing as you’ve got this far, you may as well go on a little farther. Head straight for Eilat, sing your “Southward Ho!” songs there, and go home. Don’t waste any time on the way.”
