Panther in the Basement

by Amos Oz

  Straight line: so what?

  While I was in detention in my room, in the dark, I used my mind just as my father had asked me: I reassessed every step, false or not, that I had taken the night I was caught by the British policeman. And I came to certain conclusions. First, there was no doubt that my parents had been right. My being late had been a pointless risk. No clever resistance fighter gets into a confrontation with the enemy unless it is on his own initiative and with the objective of securing an advantage. Any contact between the enemy and the resistance that is not initiated by the latter only benefits the enemy. I had taken an unnecessary risk by staying in the Sanhedriya caves until after curfew had begun, because I was dreaming dreams. A true resistance fighter must subjugate even his dreams to the pursuit of victory. At a time when the fate of the nation was being sealed, dreaming for its own sake was a luxury that only girls might perhaps indulge in. A fighter must be on his guard, especially against dreaming about Yardena, who, although she was almost twenty, still had a girlish habit of arranging the hem of her skirt after she sat down, as if her knee was a baby that needed to be covered up properly, not too little so as to catch cold and not too much so that it will not be able to breathe. And when she played the clarinet it was as though the music came not from the instrument but straight out of her body, passing through the clarinet only to pick up some sweetness and sadness, and taking you to a real, silent place where there is no enemy, no struggle, and where everything is free from shame and treachery and clear of thoughts of betrayal.

  That's enough, idiot.

  With such thoughts I reached the Orient Palace, with one voice pleading with me to turn around and go home before I got into deep trouble and another making fun of me for being a scaredy-cat, and a third, which was less a voice than a steel vise, urging me to go inside. So I slipped into the bar, avoiding the billiard players in the front room and hoping they did not notice me, repressing the urge to touch the green baize with my fingertips. (To this day I find it hard when I see baize to resist feeling its softness.) A couple of British soldiers with red berets, the sort we called poppies, their tommy guns hanging from their shoulders, were chatting with the barmaid, who laughed as she leaned forward to give them the tankards of frothy beer and a good look at her cleavage, but I didn't spare her a glance. I crossed the smoke and the smell of beer and intrigues and made it safely to the back room. At a table covered with flowery oilcloth, I spotted my man. He was not quite as I remembered him. He was stranger, more serious, more British. He was sitting bent over a book; his thick thighs were crossed, his uniform crumpled and untidy. He wore wide khaki shorts down to his knees, and a wide wrinkled shirt of greenish khaki (as opposed to the yellowish khaki of local manufacture that my father wore). On his shoulders I could see the silvery glint of his policeman's number, which I had memorized on the first night: 4479. An easy, pleasant number. His pistol had slipped around again and was squashed between his back and the back of the chair. In front of him on the table were an open Bible, a dictionary, a glass of yellowish lemonade that had lost its fizz, two more books, an exercise book, a crumpled handkerchief, and an open bag of candy. As he beamed at me, his face looked slack, as though he had too much skin, which had a slightly unhealthy hue, like melted vanilla ice cream. His cap, the one that he had placed briefly on my head that night, was lying at the edge of the table, looking more authoritative and official than Sergeant Dunlop himself. His hair was brown and thinning, and he had a ruler-sharp part right in the middle of his head, like the watershed that we had been learning about in geography.

  From his vague smile I realized that he didn't remember me.

  "Hello, Sergeant Dunlop," I said in Hebrew.

  He went on smiling, but then blinked.

  "It's me. From the curfew. You arrested me in the street and took me home and released me. You suggested we should teach each other Hebrew and English, sir. So here am.

  Sergeant Dunlop reddened and said:

  "Oh. Ah."

  He still didn't remember a thing. So I reminded him:

  "'Let not the lad go astray in the darkness.' Don't you remember, sir? About a week ago. You say enemies not enimies?"

  "Oh. Ah. So it is thou. Sit down. And what is thy wish this time?"

  "You suggested we should study together. Hebrew and English. I'm ready."

  "Oh. So. Thou earnest according to thy promise. Blessed is he that waiteth and cometh."

  And that is how our lessons began. By the second meeting I had agreed that he should order a lemonade for me, even though in principle we shouldn't accept anything from them, not a thread or a shoelace. But I weighed it and decided that it was my duty to gain his confidence and dispel any hint of suspicion from his mind, so that I could get him to provide the information we needed. And that is the only reason I forced myself to take a few sips of the lemonade, and also accepted a couple of crackers.

  We read a few chapters together from Samuel and Kings. We discussed them in modern Hebrew, which Sergeant Dunlop hardly recognized. The words for crane, pencil, shirt filled him with wonder because they have grown out of ancient words. Meanwhile, I learned from him that English has a tense that has no equivalent in Hebrew, the present continuous, in which every verb ends with a sound like the touch of glass on glass: ing. In fact, the ring of glass on glass helped me to understand this English tense: I imagined a light clink of glasses and with it a faint chime of this continuous present, moving further and further away, weakening, growing fainter and fainter, fading in the distance with a delightful continuousness that was pleasant to listen to, right to the end, without turning to any other activity while the sound was dimming, disappearing, dissipating, and fading. Such listening could fittingly be called a Continuous present.

  When I told Sergeant Dunlop about the sound of glass that helped me to grasp the continuous present, he tried to praise me, but he got in a muddle and uttered some English words that I did not fully understand. What I did understand was that, like everyone on our side, he found it easier to express ideas than feelings. I myself had a feeling at that moment (a mixture of affection and shame), but I stifled it because an enemy is an enemy and because I was not a girl. (So? What about girls? What have they got that attracts us so? Not like glass on glass, more like a ray of light on glass? And until when is this feeling forbidden? Until we are grown up? Until there are no enemies left?) After the third or fourth meeting we shook hands, because spies are allowed to and because I had managed to teach Sergeant Dunlop the difference between the silent and the mobile shva in Hebrew. I had never been a teacher, yet here was the sergeant calling me a brilliant teacher, and I was pleased, but nevertheless I said, "You're exaggerating, sir." (I had to explain the Hebrew word for 'exaggerate,' because it's not in the Bible. Though a kind of locust or grasshopper has a similar name. I must check whether there's any connection.)

  Sergeant Dunlop was a patient, slightly absentminded teacher, but when we swapped roles, he became a quiet, attentive pupil. When he was writing Hebrew, he concentrated so hard that his tongue stuck out of the corner of his mouth, like a baby's. Once he muttered "Christ," but immediately corrected himself in embarrassment and said in Hebrew, "God Almighty." I had a special reason to shake his hand warmly at the end of the fourth lesson, because I had managed to extract a precious piece of information from him:

  "Ere the summer shall cease," he said, "I shall arise and return to the land of my birth, for the days of our unit in Jerusalem shall speedily come to an end."

  I tried to conceal my excitement under a mask of politeness as I inquired:

  "What is your unit?"

  "Jerusalem Police. Northern Division. Section Nine. Speedily shall the British depart from the land. We are wearied. Our day is reaching its evening."

  "But when?"

  "According to the time of life, perhaps."

  What a stroke of blessed luck, I thought, that it's me here and not Chita or Ben Hur, because they would never have known that "according to the t
ime of life" means exactly one more year. And so they would have failed to discover a vital military secret. It was my duty to communicate it with lightning speed to the FOD and even to the real Underground. (But how? Through my father? Or Yardena?) My heart sang in my chest like a panther in a basement. Never before had I done such a wonderfully helpful thing and perhaps I never would again. And yet almost at the same instant I tasted in my mouth the sour, nauseous taste of low-down treachery: a shudder as from the sound of scraping chalk.

  "And what will happen after the British evacuation, Sergeant Dunlop?"

  "It's all written in the Good Book. 'For I will defend this city, to save it.' 'The adversary and the enemy shall not enter into the gates of this city.' 'There shall yet be old men and old women dwelling in the streets of Jerusalem, and the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing.'"

  How could I imagine that these meetings had already brought me under suspicion? That the Internal Security squad of the FOD High Command was watching my every move? I felt not a shadow of anxiety. I was convinced that Ben Hur and Chita were happy with my angling. Until one morning Chita, on Ben Hur's orders, painted on the wall of our house the words I mentioned at the beginning of my story, which I find it hard to repeat. And at lunchtime I found a note under the door: I was to appear in the Tel Arza Woods, to be interrogated, to stand trial for treachery. Instead of a panther in the basement, they saw me as a knife in the back.

  twelve

  At night, after lights-out, I used to lie in the dark listening. Outside, on the other side of the wall, was an empty, sinister world. Even our familiar garden, with the pomegranate tree and the village I had built out of matchboxes underneath it, was not ours at night: it belonged to the curfew and to evil. From garden to garden groups of fighters advanced in the darkness on desperate missions. British patrols armed with searchlights and tracker dogs roamed the empty streets. Spies, detectives, and traitors were pitted in a war of brains. Casting their nets. Planning cunning ambushes. The empty streets were lit by a ghostly light from streetlamps wreathed in summer mist. Beyond our street, beyond the confines of our neighborhood, lay more deserted streets, lanes, alleys, steps, arches, all pervaded by the darkness that was full of eyes, pierced by the barking of dogs. Even the row of buildings on the other side of our street seemed on those nights of curfew to be cut off from us by a river of deep darkness. As though the Dorzions, Mrs. Ostrowska, Dr. Gryphius, Ben Hur, and his sister Yardena were all on the other side of mountains of darkness. Beyond the same dark mountain were the Shibboleth newsstand and the Sinopsky Brothers grocery, protected by iron shutters and two padlocks. I felt that the phrase "beyond the same dark mountain" could be felt with your fingertips like thick black baize. Above our heads Mr. Lazarus's roof was swathed in darkness and the hens were pressed close together. On those nights all the hills that surrounded Jerusalem were mountains of darkness. And what was there beyond the hills? Stone-built villages, clustering around minarets. Empty valleys where foxes and jackals roamed and even the occasional hyena. Bloodthirsty gangs. And angry ghosts from bygone days.

  I lay huddled, wide awake, until the silence became more heavily charged than it could bear, and then it began to be pierced by shots. Sometimes it was a distant stray burst of fire from the direction of Wadi Joz or Isawiya. At others a sharp, knifelike salvo maybe from Sheikh Jarrah or staccato machine-gun fire from Sanhedriya. Was it us? The real Underground? Brave boys signalling to each other from rooftop to rooftop with faint pocket flashlights? Sometimes after midnight a succession of heavy explosions came from south of the city, from the direction of the German Colony or, further still, from the Valley of Hinnom or Abu Tor or the Allenby Camp or the hills of Mar Ilias along the way to Bethlehem. A dim rumble rolled through the thickness of the ground under the asphalt of the roads and the foundations of the buildings making the windowpanes chatter and rising up from the floor into my bed, producing a cold shudder.

  The only telephone in the vicinity was at the pharmacy. Sometimes late at night I seemed to hear repeated ringing from three streets away, pleading out there where there was not a living soul. And the closest radio was in Dr. Buster's flat, six buildings eastward. We would know nothing until dawn broke. Not even if the British tiptoed out of Jerusalem and left us alone, surrounded by masses of Arabs. Not even if hordes of armed marauders forced their way into the city. Not even if the Underground stormed Government House.

  Through the other wall, from my parents' room, I could hear only silence. My mother might have been reading, in her dressing gown, or writing out a shopping list for the institution where she worked. My father would sit up till one, sometimes two o'clock, his back hunched, his head outlined by a halo of light from his desk lamp, intent on filling cards with information he needed for his book on the history of the Jews in Poland. Sometimes he would make a note in pencil in the margin of a book: The evidence is inconclusive, or, This could be interpreted differently, or even, Here the author is definitely mistaken. Sometimes he would incline his self-righteous, weary head and whisper to some tome on one of the shelves: "This summer too will pass. Winter will come. And it is not going to be easy." My mother would reply: "Please don't say that." Father: "Why don't I get you a glass of tea. Then you must get some sleep. You're so tired." There was a hesitancy in his voice, a midnight gentleness. In the hours of daylight he mostly spoke like a judge passing sentence.

  One day a minor miracle occurred: one of Mr. Lazarus's hens laid some eggs and sat on them till five chirping chicks hatched out. Even though we had never seen a cock. My mother made some joking remark, but Father rebuked her:

  "Stop it. The boy can hear."

  Mr. Lazarus refused to sell the chicks. He gave each one a name. He spent the whole day pottering around on the sunbaked roof, with an expression of faint surprise, wearing a waistcoat, with a tape measure around his neck. He had hardly any work. Most of the time he argued in German with his hens, shouted at the chicks and forgave them, scattered seed, crooned lullabies, changed the sawdust, or stooped down and picked up a favorite chick, which he cradled against his breast and rocked like a baby.

  Father said:

  "If we have a little bread left over, or a cupful of soup—"

  And my mother:

  "I've sent him some already. The boy took it up, and some groats from yesterday too; we must go on saying it's for the chickens so as not to offend him. But what will happen in the long run?"

  Father replied:

  "We must do whatever we can, and hope."

  My mother said:

  "There you go, talking like the radio again. Stop it. The boy can hear."

  Every evening the three of us sat in the kitchen, after supper and the start of the curfew, playing Monopoly. My mother would clasp a glass of tea in her hands, absorbing its warmth even though it was summer. And we would sort stamps and stick them in the album. Father liked to recount various facts about each country we came across. My mother soaked the stamps off the paper. After twenty minutes I fished the loosened stamps out of the basin of water and laid them out to dry on a sheet of blotting paper. The stamps lay there face downward like the photograph of Italian prisoners of war captured by Field Marshal Montgomery in the Western Desert: they sat in rows on the burning sand, with their hands tied behind their backs and their faces hidden between their knees.

  Then Father would identify the dried stamps with the help of the thick English catalogue that had on its cover an enlarged drawing of the stamp with a black swan, the most valuable stamp in the world, even though its face value was only one penny. I would pass Father the transparent hinges on my outstretched hand, my eyes fixed on his lips. Father talked about some countries with polite loathing; others commanded his respect. He would talk about the population, the economy, the principal towns, the natural resources, the archeological sites, the political regime, the artistic treasures. He always spoke especially about the great painters, musicians, and poets, who, by his account, were almost all Jews,
or of Jewish descent, or at least half-Jews. Sometimes he would touch me on the head, or on the back, groping inside himself for some stifled affection, and suddenly he would say:

  "Tomorrow you and I shall go to the newsdealer. I'll buy you a pencil case. Or something else, if you like. You're not happy enough."

  Once he said:

  "I'm going to tell you something, a secret I've never told anybody. Please keep it just between the two of us. I'm a bit color-blind. These things happen. It's a hereditary defect. It looks as though you'll have to see some things for the two of us. Yes indeed; after all, you are imaginative and intelligent." And there were words that Father used without realizing that they made Mother sad. Carpathians, for example. Or belfry. Also opera, carriage, ballet, cornice, clock square. (What is a cornice, in fact? Or a gable? A weather vane? A porch? What does a groom look like? Or a chancellor? A gendarme? A bell ringer?)

  According to our fixed agreement my father or mother would come to my room at precisely ten-fifteen to make sure I had really turned my bedside light off. My mother would sometimes stay for five or ten minutes; she would sit on the edge of my bed and reminisce. Once she told me how, when she was a little girl of eight, she had sat one summer morning on the bank of a stream in the Ukraine, next to a flour mill. The water was dotted with ducks. She described the bend in the river where it disappeared into the forest. That was where things that the water carried away always disappeared: b^k from trees or fallen leaves. In the yard of the mill she found a broken shutter painted pale blue and threw it into the stream. She imagined that this stream, which came out of the forest and vanished into it again, had more bends inside the forest that completed a circle. So she sat there for two or maybe three hours, waiting for her shutter to complete the circuit and reappear. But only ducks came back.