by Amos Oz
The teacher let his shoulders droop. He was taller and more powerfully built than the arrogant officer. In the days of the War of Independence he had been a staff officer in the Negev, with the rank of lieutenant colonel. But at that moment he could not speak of these things to his pupils or to the drowsy youth who stood before him chewing something, perhaps gum, perhaps his tongue.
“I know,” he murmured, “you don’t need to tell me. I know.” The Beersheba sun drew sweat from every pore of his body. “I know this terrain much better than you do. I was fighting here in the Negev when you were so high.”
“OK,” said the curly-haired officer, “fine, OK, just don’t start giving me your memoirs now. If you know the terrain, you can stop wasting my time. I’ve got too many tourists making nuisances of themselves. Good-bye.”
“Just a moment,” said Dov angrily, “one moment, please. Listen. In my day they would have cleared the area of terrorists within twenty-four hours. What’s the matter with you people? You let infiltrators stroll around the Negev as if it were the Baghdad bazaar. What have you got to be so arrogant about? Why don’t you do something, instead of chasing girls?”
The schoolchildren were stunned. Even Ehud was taken aback. He turned. The ghost of a smile passed over his lips and disappeared.
“Pardon?”
“It’s just . . . what I meant was, perhaps we could talk about this, just the two of us. Not now. Why don’t you drop in some time? Why not, really?”
“Why not? Some night in the summer,” he said. “I’m taking these miserable clods of mine out for some training in the Adullam hills. Making tigers out of alley cats. That would be a real shock for you, wouldn’t it, if I turned up some time in the middle of the night to take a shower at your place and sleep for a couple of hours.”
Later, when the summer was over, Dov’s request was granted, and he was allowed to take a last look at the lean and tousled officer. Something about him had changed. The pride of those casual lips had disappeared. Little night predators had eaten half his face.
In the course of every one of these trips Dov Sirkin would raise his voice—only slightly—and give a brief and fluent lecture on terrace cultivation in Galilee, or on the export of minerals and merchandise to Africa and Asia through the Red Sea Straits. His eyes were as sharp as the needle of a compass. At times he would suddenly halt the bored and weary party, point to a silent ruin, and tell a story. Or he would show the hikers an innocent-looking mound and say: There is a mystery hidden here. Sometimes in the desert he would sniff out the skeleton of a camel, a hyena, or a jackal. Or a spring that an inexperienced traveler would be unable to find even if he was dying of thirst twenty paces from it.
After such trips Dov Sirkin used to ask the Hebrew teacher to lend him the notebooks in which the pupils had described their expedition—a thousand versions of a thousand trifling details. Even in the most mundane account Dov would find something of interest. Sometimes he even took the trouble to copy items from his pupils’ essays into his own journal, before returning the notebooks to the Hebrew teacher and the journal to the bottom drawer of the brown Berlin-style chest of drawers.
Geula used to come once a year, on the eve of Independence Day. After the festival she would always return to the kibbutz. Throughout the night and the morning after, she would sit by herself on Dov’s little balcony, watching with trembling lips the fireworks erupting in the Jerusalem sky and in the sky above the mountains and the desert, listening to the loudspeakers blasting out their message far away in the main thoroughfares of the city, chain-smoking as she watched the young people singing their festive songs. She called her father Dov. She never talked to him about herself, or about her mother and brother. She spoke sometimes about Ben-Gurion, about the politics of moderation and restraint as opposed to the politics of revenge and summary retaliation. Altermann she considered a very Polish poet, incorrigibly in love with the tools of power, in love with death. Dov tried hard to engage her in conversation, to understand, to influence, but Geula asked him not to disturb her as she listened to the dance music from Terra Sancta Square and imagined the distant revelry. At the funeral Dov said to her, “You must, you must believe me when I say that I had no idea. How could I have known?”
She did not answer but moved away from him. Her eyes were dry. Her teeth were clenched. And her mouth was like a curved Arabian sword.
After that she stopped visiting him and never again appeared in Dov’s apartment in Jerusalem.
9
DOV COMPLETED his sketch of the mountainous country and began to draw a raging river unlike any other river on the face of the earth. He carved out a huge canal, added a series of tributary waterways, and laid out a complicated network of gradients, slopes, dams, reservoirs, and lakes, complete with measurements. He also drew up an intricate scheme for calculating angles of incline, tolerance of road surfaces, pressure of water against the stress capacity of the dam, strength of rock, stability of the subsoil beneath lakewater, pressure of currents and winds, accumulations of eroded sand. About an hour earlier the sound of footsteps on the staircase had stopped. Now it returned. Somebody was treading the stairs, slowly, very heavily, leaning on the creaking old banister. The heart attack had come near the end of the school year. Between the first attack and the second there had been solid months of extreme discomfort and horrific nightmares: he was alone in the desert, alone on a raft in the middle of the ocean, alone in an airplane without any idea of how to handle the controls or how to land or avoid crashing into the mountains that drew closer by the second. Dov decided to give in. He retired from teaching and shut himself away in his room. There was nobody to interfere with his daily and nightly routine: light meals, a slow and pensive walk, the evening paper, music, working at his desk until daybreak, morning sleep, and at midday, yogurt, bread, and a cup of lemon tea.
He lived on a pension. In addition to this, he sometimes took original and perhaps artistic landscape photographs, which he would send to one of the weekly magazines. But these pictures were almost invariably printed on inferior paper and appeared at the bottom of page sixteen, between the recipes and crossword solutions. All that was left of their beauty was a smudgelike stain and a caption such as, “Monastery in the village of Ein-Kerem at evening, photographed by Sirkin.”
All these photographs find their way eventually into Zeshka’s massive old album. Week by week, one by one, she cuts the smudged pictures out of the magazine, sticking them with thick homemade paste to the black pages of her album. As she works her eyes sparkle with a kind of delight. And wrinkles of cold cunning converge around her sunken eyes. Behind her back we call her by the unkind nickname Owl.
Every morning, after finishing his night’s work and before going to bed, Dov Sirkin would stand at the window and gaze out eastward, watching the sun climb up from beyond the mountains of Moab, casting white flames on the surface of the Dead Sea, thrusting its rays like spears into the flanks of the bare mountains, striking down without mercy on the walls of shaded monasteries, heavy with bells. The day would begin.
At midday, after waking up, after tea, bread, yogurt, and olives, he would sit on his little balcony among potted cacti and dead houseplants, watching the street. The street was curved, with stone walls, gardens, rusty iron latticework at every window. And a long line of garbage cans along the sidewalk. Toward evening he used to go out for a walk, and in the course of his stroll he would sometimes photograph some unexpected scene. The charm of the approaching night, the distant cries of children, a radio blaring in a neighboring house, all of these contributed to a sense of peace. He ate supper at a small cooperative cafe: eggplant salad, fried egg with pickled cucumber, yogurt, and cafe au lait.
At night he sketched. All the drawers of his cupboard were crammed with drawings and photographs, plaster models, detailed arithmetical calculations regarding the properties of raw materials, development costs, building techniques, mechanical equipment, manpower, synchronized schedules for construction
and communication projects, integrated systems, geometrical and architectonic principles expressed numerically and in diagrams. There were also timetables for trains faster than the fastest trains in existence, winding railways plunging into giant tunnels, carved out of the bedrock of imaginary lands. Avenues of a thousand fountains bathed in dazzling light, crossroads of dream cities that never were and could never be. Exquisite spires of tall cities rising beyond the line of the mountain peaks and looking down on the bays of the sea, blue rollers breaking on the threshold of silence.
10
AT FOUR o’clock in the morning the wind began to walk the streets. It plucked the lid from a rusty garbage can and tossed it against the asphalt road and the stone steps.
Light, brisk footsteps approached the door of the apartment. For two hours the stranger had been loitering between the ground floor and Dov’s apartment. Now he suddenly began to hurry. He was running, racing up the stairs two at a time. He had no time to spare. What’s the matter, where’s the fire, Dov grumbled.
He stood up and stumbled to the door, his shoulders drooping.
Many years before, Dov used to seal the shutters of his little room on the edge of the kibbutz, closing the window and the curtain, shutting the stillness into the room and the night with its darkness outside. He would sit on the carpet and build a tower of bricks for his children: raising it higher and higher, laughing, making jokes, laying brick upon brick until it reached his waist, reached his shoulders, with the children watching in disbelief and starting to gasp and giggle in anticipation, and sure enough, in the end there was always an avalanche. From the sofa came the sound of Zeshka’s knitting needles, calmly going about their business. And the smell of coffee and the smell of children washed spotlessly clean. Outside, beyond the walls, the shutters and the curtain, the jackals were crying piteously. Geula laughed and Ehud laughed and Dov, too, would smile a neat smile to himself as if saying: Good.
The jackals are pathetic creatures, dripping saliva and mad-eyed. Their footsteps are soft and their tails quiver. Their eyes shoot out sparks of cunning or despair, their ears prick up, their mouths hang open and their white teeth flash, spittle and foam drip from their jaws.
The jackals circle on tiptoe. Their snouts are soft and moist. They dare not approach the lights of the perimeter fence. Around and around they shuffle, mustering as if in readiness for some obscure ritual. A ring of jackals prowls every night about the circle of shadows that encloses the island of light. Till daybreak they fill the darkness with their weeping, and their hunger breaks in waves against the illuminated island and its fences. But sometimes one of them goes insane and with bared teeth invades the enemy’s fortress, snatching up chickens, biting horses or cattle, until the watchmen kill him with an accurate volley from medium range. Then his brothers break into mourning, a howl of terror and impotence and rage and anticipation of the coming day.
Day will come. Or night.
Slowly, like black-robed priests in a ceremony of mourning, they will approach the young man’s corpse in no man’s land. With agile steps, as if caressing, not treading, the dust of the earth. With dripping muzzles. First they will form a circle, at a distance, and sniff softly. Then one of them will approach the body and bend down, probing with the tip of his snout. A lick, or a final sniff. Another will advance and rip open the tunic with razor-sharp teeth. A third and a fourth and a fifth will come to lap his blood. Then the first will give a low chuckle. The oldest jackal will cut himself a portion with his gleaming curved teeth. And then the whole pack will roar with laughter.
An everlasting curse stands between house dwellers and those who live in mountains and ravines. It happens sometimes in the middle of the night that a plump house-dog hears the voice of his accursed brother. It is not from the dark fields that this voice comes; the dog’s detested foe dwells in his own heart. “Ehud,” said Dov, and he gripped the doorknob.
First there was a light cough. Then a shudder. Great weariness. A shivering fit. A shuffling of feet. Sit down. Lie down. Fall. The pain was sharp and persistent, like a Latin monk repeating and repeating a thousand times the same obscure verse. The jackal pack of the Bethlehem hills gave a laugh. Their laughter ran through the empty streets of the night, Ramat Rachel, Talpiot, Bakah, the German Colony and the Greek Colony, Talbiah, and like a monkey the laughter climbed the gutters of the house and penetrated inward in a thousand jagged splinters. When the kibbutz was founded we believed that we really could turn over a new leaf, but there are things that cannot be set right and should be left as they have been since the beginning of time. I said, There are things that man can do if he wants them with all his heart. But I did not know that there is no point in leaving a fingerprint on the face of the water. I am the last, my child, and I am not laughing.
11
THE FIRST cracks appeared in the east, above the Mount of Olives and between the two towers. A light-shunning bird let out a shriek of hatred. Stealthily some pale-red force arrived and slipped through the chinks in the eastern shutter. Flocks of birds began frantically ripping the silence.
And then it was day. Kerosene sellers began to sing. Children with satchels appeared on their way to school. Yellow smells arose from vegetable stands. Newspaper vendors proclaimed the great tidings. A minister’s car appeared in the street, its tires squealing on the asphalt. Shop after shop opened up, folding iron shutters like winking eyes.
Around a stall laden with antiques stood a crowd of rosy-cheeked tourists. There was excitement. Among the knickknacks on the stall were sacred pictures on parchment screens, all of fine craftsmanship, genuine leather, strong and ancient, declared Rashid Effendi.
How sublime are the distant bells of the monasteries. How contemptible, how savage and irreverent are these jackals, answering the pure message of the bells with their twisted laughter. Malice inspires them, incorrigible malice, malice and sacrilege.
1962
The Trappist Monastery
1
IN THE AUTUMN the provocations intensified. There was no longer any reason for restraint. Our unit was ordered to cross the border at night and raid Dar an-Nashef.
“Tonight a nest of murderers will be wiped off the face of the earth,” our commander declared in his deep, calm voice, “and the whole Coastal Plain can breathe freely.” The men replied with a great cheer. Itcheh shouted loudest of all.
The whitewashed huts of the base camp looked clean and cheerful. Already the busy supply men were grappling with the steel doors of the armory. Mortars and heavy machine guns were brought out from the darkness into the light and laid in neat rectangles on the edge of the parade ground.
The last rays of the sun were fading in the west. Soon there was no dividing line between the peaks of the mountains to the east and the cloud banks that stooped over them. A small group of staff officers, wrapped in windbreakers, were conferring around a map that was spread out on the ground and held down by a stone at each corner. They were studying the map by the light of a pocket flashlight, and their voices were muffled. One man suddenly left the group and went bounding off toward the operations room: Rosenthal, thin and always immaculate; rumor had it that he was the son of a well-known candy manufacturer. Then a voice was heard calling out in the darkness, “Itamar, come on, it’s getting late.” And another voice replied, “Go to hell. Leave me alone.”
The battalion paraded in readiness for the sortie. On the edge of the square, facing the combatants who meandered sleepily into position in ragged ranks of three, stood a noisy group of general-duty men. They did not look sleepy; on the contrary, they were feverishly excited, talking in whispers, pointing with their fingers, giggling in shame or malice. Among them was a medical orderly named Nahum Hirsch who was forever scratching his cheeks; he had shaved in a hurry and his skin smarted with irritating little wounds. He took off his glasses and, staring at the combat troops, made a joke that was lost on his fellow orderlies. Nahum Hirsch rephrased the joke. They still did not find it funny, perhaps it
was too subtle for them to understand. They told him to shut up. So he kept quiet. But the night would not keep quiet; it began to resound with all kinds of different noises. From a distant orchard we heard the sound of an irrigation pump, throbbing as if dividing time itself into equal symmetrical squares. Next the generator began its dull persistent hum, and along the perimeter fences of the camp the searchlights were switched on. The parade ground, too, was suddenly floodlit, so that the soldiers and their weapons suddenly appeared pure white.
Far away, on the foothills of the eastern mountains, rose the beam of the enemy searchlight. It began wandering nervously, aimlessly, across the sky. Once or twice the trails of falling stars were caught in this beam and their light was swallowed by its glare. The combat troops huddled over their final cigarettes. Some had already taken a last deep gulp of smoke and were stubbing out the butts on the rubber soles of their heavy boots. Others tried hard to smoke slowly. A convoy of trucks with dimmed lights moved to the edge of the square and stopped there, engines still running. The commander said: “Tonight we shall obliterate Dar an-Nashef and bring a bit of peace to the Coastal Plain. We shall operate in two columns and with two rear-guard parties. We shall try to cause a minimum of civilian casualties, but we won’t leave a stone standing in that nest of murderers. Every man is to act precisely in accordance with his instructions. In the event of any unforeseen development, or if any man gets cut off from the rest, then use the brains that God gave you and I’ve sharpened for you. That is all. Take care. And I don’t want anyone drinking cold water when he’s sweating. I promised your mothers I’d take care of you. Now, let’s get going.”
