Where the Jackals Howl

by Amos Oz

  That night Jephthah dreamed of the desert. In his dream he was climbing a crag in the desert and was trapped halfway up the rock face, because it was as smooth as Sidonian glass and he could neither climb up nor go down but only close his eyes, because beneath his feet there was a sheer drop onto the sharp white rocks far below. The wind howled all around him like a wild beast. Just then he felt a woman’s hand caress his back, and her touch weakened his grip on the rock face, and he yearned to give up and to go to where she was calling him. In the depth of the cave there was a damp wind and the light was grim and lurid, but the woman was there at his side and there was stillness, cool water, and rest.

  When he woke up in the morning he knew that his stay in the land of Ammon was at an end and that the time had come for him to leave. Outside the city reached up toward heaven with all its palm trees and gold-domed towers. When the morning light touched the gold the whole city began to blaze. This was a sadness Jephthah had not expected. He had innocently supposed that a man could simply get up and go without looking back. He almost changed his mind. It was as if the city were clutching at his robe with sharp claws of longing and would not let him go.

  But King Gatel sent urgent word: Where is my war, I have waited a whole day now and there is no war or anything, what are you waiting for, Jephthah.

  Jephthah delayed no longer.

  He rose and fled to the desert.

  He did not go alone, but took with him the daughter whom one of the women had borne to him.

  Pitdah was seven years old when she was taken out of the city into the desert on the back of her father’s horse. She was an Ammonite, like her mother. She had passed her childhood among maidservants, eunuchs, and silks. Jephthah had lived in Abel-Keramim for ten years.

  When they left the city by the Dung Gate Pitdah laughed for joy, for she loved riding; she fondly imagined that she was being taken out into the desert for a day’s ride and that at evening she would be brought back to her mother and the cat. But when the first night broke on her in the wilderness, she was alarmed and began to scream and stamp her feet, and she cursed her father and even kicked the horse with her strong little legs. Her mouth, pursed with rage, was a pitiful spectacle.

  She did not stop screaming until the sounds of the desert soothed her to sleep.

  In the morning Jephthah gave her a little pipe he had made from a reed. Pitdah could play the songs of Abel-Keramim which the harlots and concubines sang in the squares of the city at night. Some of them were the same songs his mother Pitdah had sung to him. As she played Jephthah could hear the water running in the channels in the orchards on Gilead’s farm. His heart went out to her whenever she said the word Father. And he rode very slowly, and to take her mind off the heat and the discomfort of the journey he told her story after story, about the barehanded slaying of the wolf and about his brother Azur who could understand the language of dogs. That day Jephthah used more words than on any other day in his whole life.

  After a few days Pitdah stopped asking for her mother and her home. He revealed to her that their goal was the sea. When she asked what that might be, he replied that the sea was a vast hilly land where the hills were made not of sand but of water. When she asked him what was there he replied that perhaps there was peace. And when she wanted to know why the earth did not soak up the sea in an instant as it soaks up all water, he did not know what to answer and only said:

  “Now cover your head from the sun.”

  Pitdah said:

  “When will we reach the sea like you said.”

  Jephthah said:

  “I don’t know. I’ve never been there. Look, Pitdah, a lizard; now it’s gone.”

  Sometimes when she looked up at her father there was a tired light in her eyes. She might have been sick from the sands and the sun, or perhaps she was merely alarmed. At night he would enfold her in his cloak to protect her against the biting cold.

  When the moon began to wane, Jephthah and his daughter arrived at a cave in the mountains in a place called the Land of Tob. There was a spring there, and several oak trees which cast a deep, soft shade. Beside the spring there were some mossy stone troughs, where desert nomads gathered to water their mangy flocks. They pitched their black goat-hair tents on the slope of the hill. That was where Pitdah learned to collect sticks and to make a fire at the entrance to the cave. Jephthah would go hunting and bring back a roebuck or a tortoise, which he would roast in the fire.

  At night they saw a hollow moon rolling gently along the line of mountain peaks as though cautiously testing the surface of the desert before flooding it with silvery pallor. In the moonlight the jagged mountains looked like thirsty jaws.

  Early in the morning Pitdah would go down to the troughs to fetch water, and, returning barefoot to her father, she would wake him up by splashing handfuls of cold water in his face. After he was up she played on her pipe, while Jephthah sat silently absorbing the music as though it were wine.

  The desert nomads who roamed the Land of Tob were all malcontents or outcasts. Jephthah joined them. Cadaverous women hugged the girl and fussed over her all day long, because in the Land of Tob no child was ever born. Its inhabitants wandered restlessly between the desert plains and the mountain ravines. Sometimes the Land of Tob was raided, either by Ammonite troops or by bands of Israelites bent on killing the nomads. These nomads were desperate men: some were killers and some were fleeing from killers; some were haters whose hatred the settled lands could not contain, others were hated men with hounds on their heels; there were also soothsayers, and dreamers who lived on roots and herbs so as not to increase suffering in the world.

  Above the land there stretched a sky of molten iron; the earth was copper-colored, parched and cracked. But the nights in the Land of Tob were powerful and heady like black wine. A blessed coolness descended calmly over all each night, bringing relief to the outcasts, to the mangy flocks, and to the desperate wasteland itself.

  One day Jephthah and his daughter were brought before the chieftain of the nomads.

  He was a lean, shriveled old man; his face was like aged leather, and only the line of his jaw retained a vestige of strength or ruthlessness. Jephthah stood before him in the gully of a lifeless riverbed. He was silent because he chose to hear first the words that the old chieftain would address to him. The old man, too, sprawled drowsily on his gray camel, waiting for the stranger to speak. For a long while they were both silent, each testing the strength of the other’s silence with stubborn patience, while a circle of thin women surrounded them at a distance.

  The chieftain sat like a lizard in the sun, without flickering an eyelid. In front of his camel Jephthah stood rooted to the spot with a face of stone. At his feet his daughter Pitdah scrabbled and burrowed in the sand, trying to discover where the ants came from. Everything was still. Only the shadow of the two men, the one mounted on his camel and the other standing on his feet, moved gently, as the sun climbed higher into the white sky. It was a long silence. Finally the old man spoke, in a parched voice:

  “Who are you, stranger?”

  Jephthah said:

  “I am the son of Gilead the Gileadite, my lord, by an Ammonite servant woman.”

  “I did not ask your name or your father’s name; I asked, who are you, stranger.”

  “I am a stranger, as you say, my lord.”

  “And why have you come to this place. You have been sent by the Ammonites or by the Israelites to spy on us and to betray us to our mortal foes.”

  “I have no part in Israel, or any inheritance among the children of Ammon.”

  “You are a desperate man, stranger. I can see that your eyes are turned inward like the eyes of a desperate man. Whom do you worship.”

  “Not Milcom.”

  “Whom do you worship.”

  “The Lord of the wolves in the desert at night. In the image of his hatred am I made.”

  “And the girl.”

  “My daughter Pitdah. And she is growing more like the de
sert every day.”

  “You are a warrior. Come out with us to kill and plunder, like one of these young men. Come out with us tonight.”

  “I am a stranger, my lord. I have lived out my life among strangers.”

  6

  JEPHTHAH FOUND favor among the wandering men of the Land of Tob.

  In the course of time he fought with them against their attackers and joined them in several raids on the settled lands, for these nomads hated all house dwellers. They slipped by night through the fences of the farms and flitted like ghosts within. The slain died silently and the killers stole as silently away. They came with knives or daggers. And with fire. By morning charred embers smoked in the ruins of the farm, in the land of Ammon or of Israel. And Jephthah rose ever higher among them because he was endowed with the attributes of lordship. He had the power to impose his will on others without a movement, by his voice alone. As always, he spoke little, because he did not love words and he did not trust them.

  One night the Jephthahites stole into the farm of Gilead the Gileadite, on the border of the land of Gilead, at the edge of the desert.

  Shadowy shapes scurried along the paths of the estate, among the dark orchards and the dense foliage of the vineyards, to the door of the house that was built of black volcanic stone. But Jephthah did not allow the house to be burned with its inmates, because a sudden longing rose within his hatred and he recalled the words his father had spoken on a faraway night and a faraway day. You are tainted as your father is tainted. You for yourself. I for myself. Every man for himself. There is a lizard; now it has gone.

  He knelt on all fours and drank from the irrigation channel. Then he gave a shrill birdlike whistle, and his men gathered and slipped away into the wasteland without setting fire to the farm.

  The nomads raided Ammon and Israel alike. Every man’s hand was against them, and anyone who found them would slay them. They slept all day in crevices, crannies, and caves, with the dark shapes of their meager flocks scattered in the shade of the oak trees beside the mossy rock-hewn troughs. Lean black-robed women watched over the flocks by day, while the sun dissolved everything with its white-hot hatred. And by night the nomads emerged from their hiding places to raid the settled lands. On their return they sang a bitter song, like a long-drawn-out wail. Occasionally a man would let out a shout in the middle of the song, and suddenly fall silent.

  Pitdah, too, found favor in the eyes of the nomads. She was a darkly beautiful girl, and her movements were always dreamy, as if she were made of a fragile substance, as if even the ground beneath her feet and the objects between her fingers were all longing to break and she had always to be careful.

  The bitter women adored Pitdah, because no child was ever born in the Land of Tob. She would play her pipe to the hillsides and the boulders even when there was no one to hear her. Whenever Jephthah heard her playing in the distance, it seemed to him like the sound of the wind in the vineyards on his father’s estate, the plashing of the water as it ran in the channels in the shade of the orchard. Pitdah dreamed even when she was awake, and Jephthah’s heart went out to her if she told him one of her dreams or if she suddenly said to him: Father.

  He loved her savagely. But he was careful whenever he stroked her hair or hugged her shoulder because he would recall how his father Gilead had held him when he himself was a small boy. He would say:

  “I shall not hurt you. Give me your hand.”

  And the girl would reply:

  “But I can’t help laughing, because of the way you’re looking at me.”

  He loved her savagely. Whenever he chanced to think of a strange man coming one day to take Pitdah away from him, his blood rebelled in his veins. Some short, fleshy man might clasp Pitdah in his hairy arms, reeking of sweat and onions, licking and biting her lips, groping downwards with clumsy fingers toward her delicate recesses. At the sight of his bloodshot eyes she laughed aloud, and he cooled his burning brow with the flat of his dagger and whispered to her: Play, Pitdah, play; and he sat listening to the music like a man going blind until the rage subsided and only a dry sadness remained like a taste of ashes in his throat. Sometimes the power of his love made Jephthah bellow wildly like his father Gilead before him, and sometimes he yearned to be able to brew her potions in the night and conjure away the threatening evil.

  Jephthah and the nomads could see her growing before their eyes. When she was not gathering firewood or watering the flocks with the gaunt women, she would sit in a gully playing with pebbles from the brook, building towers, walls, castles, turrets, and gates, and suddenly she would destroy them all with glee and burst out laughing. She would also weave wreaths of thistles, when the thistles were in flower. She seemed to be in a dream, and her rounded lips were slightly parted. Sometimes she would hold up in her sun-darkened hands a whitening bone she had found, and sing to it, and blow on it, and even touch it to her hair.

  She knew how to carve little figures from branches of shrubs, a galloping horse, a resting lamb, a black old man leaning on a stick. Sometimes odd occurrences that were no laughing matter made Jephthah’s daughter laugh warmly. If a woman was tying bundles onto a camel and the camel was startled and all the bundles fell off, Pitdah would erupt in soft, low laughter. Or if one of the nomads stood with his back to her and his head bent motionlessly forward, as if he were sunk deep in thought as he pissed among the rocks, she would laugh uncontrollably and would not stop even if the man lost his temper and shouted at her.

  If one of the men suddenly stared at her sideways, with gaping eyes and parted lips and the tip of his tongue protruding between his teeth, Pitdah would laugh aloud. And if Jephthah caught sight of the man staring at his daughter and his eyes began to flash cold rage, Pitdah would move her eyes back and forth between them as though drawing a line, laughing louder than ever. Even when he shouted, That’s enough, she could not stop laughing; sometimes she would infect him with her laughter and he could not stop, either. The young nomads interpreted all this as a sign of happiness, but the women considered it something that would not end well. The nomads’ wives taught Pitdah to weave and cook and milk goats, and to tame a stubborn billy goat. The girl could do all these things easily, and her thoughts always seemed to be far away.

  Once she said to her father Jephthah:

  “At night you go out to fight and you win, and in the daytime you sleep, and then even the flies on your face are stronger than you are.”

  Jephthah said:

  “Everybody has to sleep.”

  Pitdah said:

  “Snakes never sleep; they can’t even close their eyes, because they have no eyelids.”

  Jephthah said:

  “It is written in the holy writings that the snake is more cunning than any other beast of the field.”

  Pitdah:

  “How sad to be more cunning than any other beast of the field. And how sad never to sleep and never to close your eyes and dream at night. If the snake was really cunning, it would find a way to close its eyes.”

  “What about you.”

  “I love watching you sleeping on the ground after your night fights, with the flies walking all over your face. I love you, Father. And I love myself, too. And the places where you never take me, where the sun sets in the evening. You have forgotten the sea, but I remember. Now, put this cloak over your head and moo, and I’ll watch you and laugh.”

  In his dreams Jephthah saw a procession of princes and powerful men coming to ask him for his daughter’s hand. Their faces were crooked; like dogs they must be chased away with a stick or a stone, because Pitdah was not for them. Very slowly and heavily his father Gilead appeared in Jephthah’s dreams, and he, too, put out his broad, rough hand to touch Pitdah and she ran away from him and hid behind the troughs and he ran after her and Jephthah cried out in his sleep. Or else the boys appeared, Azur and Jamin and Gatel and Jemuel, and they surrounded Pitdah in his dream with hundreds of white fingers to tear off her clothes and she laughed with them and he scream
ed at the sight of them because they had no eyelids and their eyes were wide open and gaping at her not closing not blinking and they closed around her and he woke up with a cry and found that he was holding the dagger and his hand was shaking.

  Touch me, O God, you have not touched me yet, how long shall we wait for you. Reach out for me with your hand and with fingers of fire. Here I am before you upon one of the mountains, holding the lamb for a burnt offering, and behold the fire and the wood, but where is the knife. I shall desire your shadow all the days of my life. If you appear in the mountain I shall be burning dust. If you shine forth in the crescent moon or in the reflection of the moon in water, there your servant will be in the white sands or in the depths of the water. If the dogs howl and pour out their hearts in their howling, that is a sign that you are loving and wrathful. Send me your wrath, O God, and let me be touched by it, surely you are a solitary God and I, too, am all alone. You shall have no other servant before me. I am your son and I shall bear witness all my life to your inscrutable terrors, O Lord of the wildcat stalking the lifeless riverbeds by night, night after night.

  In the course of time Jephthah became the chieftain of the nomads. He spoke little, and when he did speak his voice was very soft. Anyone who wanted to hear him had to lean toward him and listen attentively.

  At that time the king of Ammon invaded the land of Israel. He conquered all the cities and farms and made slaves of their inhabitants. Some managed to escape, but the rest were under the sway of King Gatel. The king never left his palace, but passed his time filling scroll after scroll with orders for his generals, and also writing the Book of the Wars of King Gatel.