by Amos Oz
Black goats kept the boy company; he led them to pasture and watched them all day long munching the sparse grass, risking their lives on the sheer crags of the narrow strip of pasture that survived among the rocky ravines, for the place was on the edge of the desert. He was also accompanied by emaciated dogs, his brother Azur’s dogs. They were rough dogs, and savagery always lurked beneath their obsequiousness. Wild birds also flocked to Jephthah, shrieking their reproaches in his ears.
Early in the morning birds screeched in the distance. In the evening, as twilight fell, the crickets shrilled as though they had an urgent, fearful message to deliver. In the dark Jephthah heard a fine stillness pierced occasionally by the cry of a fox or jackal, punctuated by a hyena’s laughter.
Sometimes desert nomads raided the estate at night. In the darkness Gilead’s shepherds lay in wait for the foe, who came as softly as a breath; if he slew he stole silently away, and if he was slain he died as silently. In the morning they would find a man lying on his back under the olive trees, his hand perhaps still clutching the haft of the knife that was sunk in his flesh and his eyes turned inward. Shepherd or foeman alike.
Seeing the whites of the corpse’s bulging eyes, Jephthah would say to himself: A corpse turns his eyes inward, perhaps there he finds other sights to see.
Sometimes Jephthah dreamed of his own death, and he seemed to feel strong, kindly hands bearing him down to the plain. Softly, sweetly, a light drizzle touched him, and a little shepherd girl said: Here for a while we shall sit and rest until after the rain and the light.
In the summertime the vegetation ran riot in the orchards and the ripening fruit filled out with moisture. Powerful juices coursed through the veins of the apple trees. The vine shoots seemed to shudder with the pressure of pent-up sap. Goats sported wantonly and the bull bellowed and raged. In the women’s quarters and in the shepherds’ booths there was heavy panting; toward dawn the boy could hear in his slumber a sound like a dying beast’s groans. Women also occupied his dreams: Jephthah was filled with longing for delicate forces he could not name, not silk, not water, not skin, not hair, but a yearning for a warm, melting touch, hardly a touch at all, perhaps river-thoughts, smells, colors, and not that, either.
He did not like words and therefore he was silent.
In his dreams on summer nights in his youth, he forced his way gently upstream.
In the morning, when he rose, he took the dagger and slowly, patiently tested with it everything he found in the courtyard: Dust. Bark. Wool. Stone. Water.
Jephthah did not display his father’s moods. He was a strong, finely shaped boy; colors, sounds, smells, and objects attracted him much more than words or people. When he was twelve he could handle an ax, a ewe, a cudgel, or a bridle. As he did so, a controlled excitement could sometimes be discerned in him.
And now the hatred of his brothers Jamin, Jemuel, and Azur began to close in all around him. They wished him ill because he was the son of another woman, because of his haughty silence, and because of the arrogant calm that seemed at every moment to be concealing stubborn, secretive thoughts which brooked no sharing. If ever the brothers invited him to join in their games, he played with them without saying anything. If he won a contest he did not boast or gloat, but merely shut himself up in a silence which increased their hatred sevenfold. And if one of the brothers defeated Jephthah, it always seemed as though he himself had voluntarily renounced the victory out of calculation or contempt, or because he had lost his concentration in the middle of the game.
The three brothers, Jamin, Jemuel, and Azur, were solidly built, broad-shouldered youths. In their own way they knew joys and laughter. Jephthah, on the other hand, the son of the other woman, was slim and fair. Even when he laughed he seemed withdrawn. He had a habit of fixing his gaze on others and refusing to look away. A fleeting yellow spark would flash in his eyes, compelling others suddenly to yield.
Because of Pitdah’s spells, or perhaps because of fear of their father, the brothers did not dare to mistreat Jephthah as they wished. They merely hissed from a distance in a whisper: Just you wait.
Once Pitdah said: Weep, Jephthah, cry out to our god Milcom, he will hearken and protect you from their whispering hatred.
But in this matter Jephthah did not heed his mother. He did not weep to Milcom god of Ammon but merely bowed low and said to his mother: As my lady mother says. As though he considered Pitdah to be the lady of the house.
She wanted to bring down on her son the blessing of Milcom god of Ammon, because she foresaw that she would die and that the boy would be left alone among strangers. And so she brewed her potions at night and fed them at night to Jephthah. When her fingers touched his cheek he would tremble.
In his heart Jephthah had no faith in these potions, but neither did he refuse to drink them. He loved their strange, pungent smell, the smell of his mother’s fingers. And she would speak to him of Milcom, whom the Ammonites worshiped with wine and silk. Not like your father’s god, a barren god who afflicts and humiliates those who love him. No, Milcom loves marauders, he loves those who are merry with wine, he loves those who pour out their hearts in song, and the music that blurs the line between ecstasy and rage.
Of the God of Israel Pitdah said: Woe to those who sin against him and woe to those who worship him in faith; he will afflict them both alike with agonies because he is a solitary god.
Jephthah observed the stars in the summer sky over the estate and the desert. They seemed to him to be all alone, each star by itself in the black expanse, some of them circling all night long from one end of the sky to the other, while others remained rooted to one spot. There was no sorrow in all the stars, nor was there any joy in them. If one of them suddenly fell, none of the others noticed or so much as blinked, they simply went on flickering coldly. The falling star left behind it a trail of cold fire, and the fiery trail also faded and gave way to darkness. If you stood barefoot and strained to listen, you might hear a silence within the silence.
The household priest who taught the other brothers also taught Jephthah to read and write from the holy scriptures. Once Jephthah asked the priest why God was more merciful to Abel and Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, and Ephraim, and why he preferred them to their elder brothers, Cain, Ishmael, Esau, and Manasseh: surely all the evil in the scriptures came from God himself, surely it was to him that the blood of Abel cried from the earth.
The household priest was a corpulent man with small, anxious eyes. He was constantly shrinking from the wrath of the lord of the house. The priest replied to Jephthah that the ways of God were wonderful and who could say to God why or wherefore. At night Jephthah dreamed of God coming heavy and shaggy, a bear-God with rapacious jaws who growled at him panting gasping and panting as though he were throbbing with lust or boiling rage. Jephthah cried out in his dream. People occasionally cried out in their sleep in Gilead’s house, and at the end of their cries there was silence.
Milcom, too, crept into Jephthah’s dreams on those summer nights. Warm currents coursed luxuriantly through his veins as the silken fingers touched his skin and sweet juices washed through him to the soles of his feet.
Next morning Jephthah would appear solitary and withdrawn in the great courtyard, skipping from shadow to shadow, and the yellow glint had even faded from the pupils of his eyes.
When Jephthah was a boy of about fourteen, he began to be favored with signs. As he walked alone in the fields or followed the flocks down into one of the gullies, he was beset by signs, and he felt that it was to him alone that they were directed, that he was being called. But he could not discover what the signs were or who was calling him. Sometimes he fell on his knees as the household priest had taught him and struck his head on the rock and pleaded aloud: Now, now.
In his mind he weighed the love of God against the love of Milcom. He found the love of Milcom very easy, it came to him at almost no cost, like the love of a dog. You play with it for a moment and you have won its heart; it will come close, lick
your hand, and perhaps even guard your sleep in the field.
But to ask for the love of God Jephthah did not dare, because he did not know what. If a momentary pride flared up inside him and he made a mental comparison, saying: I am the youngest, I am like Abel and Isaac and Jacob, sons of their parents’ old age, at once he would recall that he was the son of another woman, like Ishmael, who was the son of the Egyptian woman.
One day the lord told his household that God must be approached not in the way that a butterfly approaches a flower but as it approaches the fire.
The boy heard these words and he also put them to the test.
He began to seek out dangers with which to challenge himself. He tested himself on the mountain crags, in the shifting sands, in the well. He even pitted himself against a wolf. One night he went out alone and unarmed to find the wolf and fight it at the mouth of its lair, and with his bare hands he broke the beast’s back, and returned home from the test merely bitten and scratched. He was trying to court God’s favor, and in the autumn he even trained himself to pass his hand through the fire without crying out.
Some of these acts were seen by the household priest, and he went and told the lord that the Ammonite was passing his hand through fire. Gilead heard the priest out, then his face clouded with rage, he gave a wild laugh, cursed the priest, and gave him a blow that sent him sprawling.
That night Gilead the Gileadite gave orders for the concubine’s son to be found and brought to him. A fire was burning in the hall, because it was a cold desert night and the air was dry and biting. The walls of the hall were hung with saddles, iron chains, shields, threshing sledges, and spears of polished bronze. All these objects caught the firelight and reflected it gloomily.
Gilead fixed his gray eyes on the other woman’s son and stared at him long and hard. He could not recall why he had sent for him at night, or why the dogs were barking outside in the dark. At the end of his silence Gilead said:
“My son, I am told that you pass your hand through the fire and that you do not cry out when you do it.”
Jephthah said:
“That is the truth.”
Gilead said:
“And why should you do such a wrong and painful thing?”
Jephthah said:
“To prepare myself, Father.”
“Prepare yourself for what?”
“I do not know for what.”
As Jephthah spoke to his father he looked at the broad, rough hand that rested heavily on an earthen tray. At the sight of his father’s hand his own pale, thin hand filled with fear and longing. Perhaps he imagined that his father might speak to him lovingly. Perhaps he imagined that his father might ask for his love. At that moment, for the first and only time in his whole life, Jephthah suddenly yearned to be a woman. And he did not know what. In the brazier the fire blazed and sparks of firelight glowed dully on the bronze weapons hanging on the walls, and in the lord’s eyes, too, a certain spark gleamed.
Gilead said in a whisper:
“Very well, put your hand in the fire and let us see.”
Jephthah looked entreatingly into his father’s face, but Gilead the Gileadite’s face was hidden in the flickering light and shadow, for the tongues of fire in the brazier were darting restlessly hither and thither. The boy said:
“My father’s word is my command.”
Gilead said:
“Put your hand in now.”
Jephthah said:
“If you will love me.”
As he put out his hand his teeth showed as if he were laughing, but Jephthah was not laughing.
Suddenly his father shouted:
“My son, do not touch the fire. That is enough.”
But Jephthah did not want to hear, and he did not avert his eyes. The fire touched the flesh, and beyond the fence the desert stretched to the most distant hills.
After this episode Gilead said to Jephthah his son:
“You are tainted as your father is tainted. And yet I cannot bring myself to hate you.”
Then the lord poured wine from the earthen pitcher into two rough cups and said:
“Jephthah, you will take wine with me.”
And because neither the man nor the boy could trust words or liked words, half the night passed before either of them spoke another word.
Finally Gilead rose to his feet and spoke.
“Now, my son, go. Do not hate your father and do not love him. It is an ill thing that we must be each of us son to a father and father to a son and man to a woman. Distance upon distance. Now, don’t stand there staring. Go.”
4
AFTER THESE things it sometimes happened that father and son rode out together toward dawn in the open country. They would cross the bed of the ravine and mount the slope that led up to the expanse of broad sands, and very slowly, as though riding in a dream, they would traverse the parched plateau. Stubborn, forlorn shrubs sprouted here and there among the crevices of the rock. They seemed less like plants than like the loins of the barren boulders. A baneful white light beat mercilessly down. When they had ridden far away, a fitful conversation might flare up between them.
Gilead might say:
“Jephthah, where do you want to go.”
And Jephthah, his eyes narrowed against the brutally blazing light, would reply, after a silence:
“To my own place. Home.”
Then Gilead, with a hint of a smile fleeting across his stony face, would ask:
“Well, why don’t we turn around and ride for home.”
And Jephthah, himself almost smiling, his voice remote and abstracted:
“That is not my home.”
“Then where is your home, what home do you want to go to.”
“That, Father, is what I do not yet know.”
After this exchange, silence would close in once more. But now they were both within the same silence and not in two separate silences. The boy would be full of love, and lovingly he would stroke his horse’s mane. Once, when they came to the valley of black basalt, he asked his father:
“What is the desert trying to say, what thought is the wasteland, why does the wind come and why does it suddenly drop, with what sense must a man hear the thronging sounds, and with what sense may he hear the silence?”
To which Gilead replied:
“You for yourself. I for myself. Every man for himself.”
And after a moment he added, this time with a shadow of compassion in his voice:
“There is a lizard. Now it has gone.”
And with that they both relapsed into their shared silence.
As they rode back to the farm, Gilead the Gileadite might stretch out his broad, rough hand and suddenly hold his son’s bridle for a moment or two. And they rode close together.
Then he would let go as they came through the fence. Jephthah would be dismissed to join the other youngsters in the farmyard, while Gilead would go into the house.
During the last winter Pitdah sometimes came to Jephthah’s bedroom at night. Barefoot, she would come and sit on the edge of his bed, whispering spells. She was given to laughing suddenly, a soft, warm laugh, until the boy could no longer contain himself and laughed along with her, without making a sound. Or else she would sing him gentle Ammonite songs about the vast expanses of water or the buck in the vineyards or about suffering and grace.
She would take his hand in hers and draw his fingers slowly up her arm slowly over her shoulder slowly around her soft neck. And she would entice him to Milcom god of pleasure, whispering rapid strange words, the secret of his own flesh and everything of which flesh was capable. And she also entreated him to flee from the desert to the places of shade and water before the desert succeeded in parching his blood and his flesh.
Jephthah had never set eyes on the sea in his life, he did not know its smell or the sound of its waves in the night, but he called his mother, Sea, sea.
One night, after she had left him, Jephthah had a dream. The bald, shriveled steward came
and sheared a ewe closely, then sheared her again until her skin showed pink and sickly, crisscrossed with countless veins, and the servant sheared her yet again and slaughtered the ewe, not by the throat but by the belly, and black blood gushed and bubbled and stuck to Jephthah’s skin in his dream and then God came heavy and iron-shouldered clad in a bearskin and he was hot and parched. On a carpet of vine leaves Milcom lay wrapped in silk and jewels, and Jephthah saw God force his way into the silk as a ram forces his way with bloodshot eyes into a ewe stooping submissively as if stupefied by the powerful rage unleashed against her.
Jephthah woke from this bad dream drenched in sweat. He opened his eyes and lay trembling feverishly and saw darkness, and he closed his eyes and again saw nothing but darkness and he started to whisper a prayer which he had learned from the household priest and still he saw darkness and he tried singing his mother’s songs but still the darkness did not release him and he lay on his bed as though petrified because he imagined that while he was dreaming they had all, his father and mother, the priest and the maidservants, the sheep and the shepherds and his stepbrothers and the farmdogs and even the wandering nomads outside, been carried off dead and he was left all alone by himself and outside in the dark the desert stretched to the ends of the earth.
One night at the end of that winter Pitdah died. The maidservants said, The Ammonite whore has died by her sorcery. So she was buried on the following day in the plot reserved for outcasts.
On the horizon at the end of the plain that morning a gray sandstorm rose up tall and furious in the distance, and all the air was filled with dust and the smell of a gathering tempest. All the land was covered with a fine ash. And meanwhile the household priest tossed earth onto the dead woman’s grave and uttered a dark oath: Leave us now and go to the accursed place from which you were taken and do not return to us either in the dark or in a dream, lest the curse of God pursue you even in your death and the demons of destruction hound you. Go, go, accursed one, go and never return, and let us have rest. Amen.
