Panther in the Basement

by Amos Oz

  Father wrote his slogans at night, when he wasn't researching the history of the Jews. He quoted lines of English poetry in them, to stir their hearts. In the morning on his way to work he handed the sheet of paper, concealed inside his newspaper, to his contact man (the boy who looked like a stork and helped in the Sinopsky Brothers grocery). The slogans were then taken to the secret printing press (in the Kolodnys' cellar). A couple of days later they appeared on walls of buildings, on lampposts, and even on the walls of the police station where Sergeant Dunlop was based.

  If the CID discovered Mother's locked drawer or the drafts of Father's slogans, the two of them would be imprisoned in the Russian Compound, and I would be left on my own. I would go away to the mountains and live the life of a mountain boy.

  I saw a film at the Edison Cinema about a gang of counterfeiters: a whole family, brothers, cousins, and in-laws. When I got home I asked Mother if we were also a family of outlaws. She said:

  "What have we done? Have we robbed anybody? Have we cheated anybody? Have we shed anybody's blood, heaven forbid?"

  And Father:

  "Certainly not. On the contrary: British law is actually illegal. Their very rule here rests on repression and falsehood, because they were given Jerusalem by the nations of the world on the basis of their commitment to establish a Jewish national home, and now they are urging the Arabs on to destroy this home and even helping them to do it." As he spoke, anger blazed in his blue eyes, which were magnified by the lenses of his glasses. My mother and I exchanged covert glances, because Father's anger was a gentle, literary anger. Driving out the British and repelling the Arab armies required a different sort of anger, a savage anger far from words, a kind of anger that did not exist in our home or in our neighborhood. Maybe it existed only in Galilee, in the valleys, in the kibbutzim in the Negev, in the mountains where every night the fighters of the real Underground trained. Maybe in those places the right sort of anger was building up. We didn't know what that anger was, but we did know that without it we were all doomed. Out there, in the desert, in the plain, on the Carmel range, in the burning valley of Beit Shean, a new breed of Jews was growing up, who were not pale and bespectacled like us but bronzed and strong; they were pioneers, and they had wellsprings of the real, murderous kind of anger. The indignant anger that occasionally flashed from Father's glasses made Mother and me smile imperceptibly. Less than a wink. A mini-conspiracy, an Underground within the Underground, as though for an instant she had opened a forbidden drawer in my presence. As though she was hinting to me that there were certainly two adults and a child in the room, but that in her mind at least I was not necessarily the child. Not all the time, anyway. I suddenly went over and hugged her hard while Father was switching on his desk lamp and sitting down to go on gathering facts for his history of the Jews in Poland. So why was the sweetness of that moment mingled with the sour sense of squeaking chalk, the dull taste of treachery?

  At that moment I made up my mind to tell them:

  "I'm done with Ben Hur and Chita. We're not friends any more."

  Father had his back to us and his face to the piles of books that lay open on his dask. He asked:

  "What have you done now? When will you learn to be loyal to your friends?"

  I said:

  "We've had a split."

  Father turned in his chair and inquired in his self-righteous voice: "A split? Between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness?"

  And Mother:

  "They're shooting out there in the dark again. It sounds close."

  sixteen

  I have already mentioned how fascinated I am by people like Ben Hur, people who are always thirsty, whose unquenchable thirst gives them the drowsy cruelty of a wild cat—cool authority with half-closed eyes. And like the heroes of King David we studied in Bible class, I always feel a strange urge to put everything I have on the line for them. To risk my life fetching them water from enemy wells. All in the vague hope of hearing afterward from the corner of the leopard's mouth the magical words: "You're OK, Proffy."

  There is another kind of people who enthralls me, apart from those thirsty leopards. On the face of it these people are the diametrical opposite of the leopards, but actually they do have something in common that is impossible to define but not hard to spot. I mean people who are always lost. Like Sergeant Dunlop, for instance. Both at the time I am writing about and now as I write, I have always found something poignantly endearing about lost people, who go through life as though the world is a bus station in a strange city, where they have got off by mistake and now have no idea where they went wrong or how to get away, or where to.

  He was fairly broad and tall, a large pudgy man, but he was gentle. Rather cartilaginous. Despite his uniform and his gun, the sergeant's stripes on his sleeve, the glint of the silvery numbers on his shoulders, the black peaked cap, he looked like a man who has just come out of the light into the dark, or out of darkness into bright light.

  He looked like a man who once lost something very precious, and now he can't remember what it was he lost, what it looks like, or what he would do with it if he found it. So there he was wandering in his own inner chambers, in the corridors, in the basement, in the storerooms, and even if he stumbled on whatever it was he had lost, how would he recognize it? He would walk wearily past and keep on searching. He would plod onward in his big boots, getting ever farther away and more lost. I did not forget that he represented the enemy, and yet I had a kind of urge to hold out a hand to him. Not to shake hands, but to support him. Like a baby, or a blind man.

  Almost every evening I used to slink into the Orient Palace, with a copies of English for Overseas Students and Our Language for Immigrant and Pioneer under my arm. I no longer cared if the leopard and his sidekick were still trailing me along the alleys.

  What more did I have to lose?

  I quickly crossed the decadent front room, with its cigarette smoke and its stench of beer, ignoring the ribald laughter, restraining the urge of my fingertips to stroke the green baize of the billiard table, not seeing the barmaid's cleavage; in a straight line, with the determination of an arrow in flight, I sped into the back room and landed beside his table.

  More than once I had come in vain; he was not there, even though we had made an arrangement. Sometimes he forgot. Sometimes he had got muddled. Sometimes when he finished his day's work in the accounts department he was suddenly sent on some outdoor assignment, standing guard by the post office or checking identity cards at a roadblock. And occasionally, so he hinted to me, he was confined to barracks because he had been slow in saluting or because one of his boots was shinier than the other.

  Who has ever seen, in real life or in a film, a scatterbrained enemy? Or a shy one? Sergeant Dunlop was a scatterbrained and shy enemy. Once, I asked him if he had a wife or children waiting for him back home in Canterbury. (This was intended as an inoffensive way of hinting to him that the time had definitely come for the British to get out of our land, for their own good as well as ours.) Sergeant Dunlop was alarmed by my question, his heavy head withdrew into his shoulders like a startled tortoise, his big freckled hands scampering in confusion from his knees to the tabletop and back again, and then he turned red from his cheeks to his forehead and ears, like a wine stain spreading on a white tablecloth. He embarked on a lengthy apology in his rococo Hebrew: for the time being he "walked his path in solitude," even though the Good Lord had told us specifically in the Good Book that "it is not good for the man to be alone."

  Sometimes I found Sergeant Dunlop waiting for me at his usual table, his shirttails hanging out of his trousers, his belly flopping over his belt and obscuring its shiny buckle, a slack, fleshy man. He might be playing himself at checkers, and on my arrival he would give a little start, apologize, and hurriedly put the pieces away in the box. He would say something like:

  "Either way, I shall soon lose." And he would smile a sort of please-don't-take-any-notice-of-me smile, and halfway through smilin
g he would blush, and it seemed as though the blushing increased his embarrassment, and so redoubled itself.

  "On the contrary," I said to him once, "either way, you will win."

  He thought about this, got the point, and smiled sweetly, as though I had uttered a remark that was beyond the wisest philosopher. After thinking it over again he replied:

  "Not so. In my victory I shall defeat myself."

  Nevertheless, he agreed to play me, just once, and won, which filled him with rueful embarrassment. He started to apologize as though by beating me he had personally added to the crimes of the oppressive British régime.

  Sometimes in the course of my English lessons he would apologize for the complicated tense system and the large number of irregular verbs. He seemed to be blaming himself and his sloppiness for the fact that English so often makes do with one word where Hebrew has two: for instance, one speaks of "a glass of water" and "a pane of glass"; "a dining table" and "a statistical table"; "a grizzly bear" and "to bear a burden"; "a hot day" and "a hot curry"; "to make a date" and "to eat a date." Whereas in his own Hebrew lessons, whenever he handed in the homework I set him, he would ask humbly:

  "Well? A brutish man knoweth not? Neither doth a fool understand?"

  If I praised his work, his childlike eyes would light up, and a modest, heartwarming smile would tremble on his lips before overflowing to his round cheeks; it seemed to spread all over his body under his uniform. He would murmur:

  "I am not worthy of this praise."

  But sometimes, right in the middle of a lesson, we would put our business on one side and talk. Sometimes he would get carried away and tell me all the barracks gossip, chuckling as though he was shocked by the naughtiness that was coming out of his mouth: who was undermining whose authority, who was hoarding candy or cigarettes, who never took a bath, who had been seen drinking in the bar with someone he claimed was his sister.

  If we discussed the political situation, I became an angry prophet and he merely nodded and said "Indeed" or "Woe." Once he said:

  "The people of the Prophets. The people of the Book. If only they could come to their inheritance without shedding innocent blood."

  Sometimes the conversation turned to Biblical stories, and then it was my turn to listen open-mouthed while he amazed me with observations that our teacher Mr. Zerubbabel Gihon could not have contemplated in his wildest dreams. It emerged, for instance, that Sergeant Dunlop did not like King David, even though he felt sorry for him. His David was a village boy who was cut out to be a poet and a lover, but God made him king, which did not suit him, and condemned him to living a life of wars and intrigues. Small wonder that at the end of his life David was tormented by the same evil spirit that he himself had inflicted on his predecessor, Saul, who was a better man than he. In the end the two of them, the ass driver and the shepherd, suffered the same fate.

  Sergeant Dunlop talked about Saul and David and Michal and Jonathan and Absalom and Joab in tones of faint wonderment, as if they, too, were youngsters from the Hebrew Underground with whom he had once sat in the Orient Palace, learning Hebrew from them and teaching them a little Philistine in return. He felt affection and compassion for Saul and Jonathan, but he was fondest of all of Saul's daughter Michal, who never had a child, and he also liked Paltiel, son of Laish, who wept for her until Avner banished him and so, pursuing, yet not pursuing the wife who was no longer his, he, too, was banished from the stage and disappeared from the chronicle.

  But apart from Paltiel, I thought, almost all of them were traitors: Jonathan and Michal betrayed their father, Saul; Joab and the other sons of Zeruiah, the fair Absalom, Amnon, Adonijah, son of Hagith, were all traitors, and the worst traitor of all was King David himself, David about whom we sing the song, "David King of Israel lives, lives, lives on still." They all seemed faintly comical in Sergeant Dunlop's version: miserable fusspots who seemed rather like the CID officers that he told me snippets of gossip about: one was jealous, another obsequious, a third suspicious. In his stories they all seemed trapped in a surreal web of infatuations, desires, jealousies, and intrigues, and the pursuit of power and vengeance. (Here they are again, those thirsty men, those parched leopards whose thirst no water in the world can quench, ever. Pursuing and pursued. Blind men, digging a pit and falling into it.)

  I looked in vain for a crushing reply that would rescue the honor of King David and Mr. Gihon—and in fact the honor of our whole people. I knew that it was my duty in these conversations to defend something or other from what Sergeant Dunlop was thinking and saying. But what was it I was supposed to defend? I did not know then (and I don't fully know today). And yet my heart went out to them all, to Saul, abandoned and deceived, tried by Samuel for betrayal and condemned to paying with his crown and his life for not having a heart of stone. To Michal and Jonathan, whose souls were so bound to the soul of the enemy of their family that they did not hesitate to betray their father and his throne and to follow the leopard. I even felt kindly towards David, the traitor-king who betrayed all those who loved him and was betrayed by almost all of them in turn.

  Why couldn't we all get together just once in the back room of the Orient Palace, Sergeant Dunlop, Mother, Father, Ben Gurion, Ben Hur, Yardena, the Grand Mufti Haj Amin, my teacher Mr. Gihon, the leaders of the Underground, Mr. Lazarus, and the High Commissioner, all of us, even Chita and his mother and his two alternate fathers, and chat for an hour or two, and understand each other at last, make some concessions, be reconciled, and forgive one another? Why couldn't we all go down to the bank of the stream together to see if the blue shutter had been carried back yet?

  "That is enough for today," Sergeant Dunlop would cut through my dreams. "Let us part now and return tomorrow: in the sweat of our brow we shall increase knowledge; oh, that we might not also increase sorrow."

  Whereupon we would part, without shaking hands, because he had understood of his own accord that I was forbidden to shake hands with the foreign oppressor. So we made do with a nod of the head on meeting and parting.

  And what was the secret information that I managed to get out of Sergeant Dunlop as a result of our relationship?

  Not much; just a tidbit here and there.

  Something about the sleeping arrangements in the fortified police station.

  Something (quite important actually) about the night duty rosters.

  Personal relations among the officers and among their wives. Some details about barracks routine.

  And something else that cannot perhaps be seen as the result of my spying, but which I shall mention here anyway. On one occasion Sergeant Dunlop said that in his opinion after the end of the British Mandate a Hebrew State would be set up here and the words of the Prophets would come true exactly as recorded in the Bible, and yet he felt sorry for the peoples of Canaan, by which he meant the local Arabs, and particularly for the villagers. He believed that, after the British army had left, the Jews would arise and defeat their enemies, the stone-built villages would be destroyed, the fields and gardens would be turned into haunts of jackals and foxes, the wells would dry up, and the peasants and farmers and olive pickers, the dressers of sycamore trees and shepherds and drivers of she-asses would all be driven out into the wilderness. Perhaps it was the Creator's decree that they should become a persecuted people, instead of the Jews, who were returning at long last to their inheritance. "Wonderful are the ways of the Lord," Sergeant Dunlop said sadly and with an air of faint astonishment, as though he had suddenly reached a conclusion that had been long awaiting him: "the one he loves he chastizes, and the one he would uproot he loves."

  seventeen

  Arumor spread around the neighborhood: the British were about to impose a general, day and night, curfew and to conduct extensive house-to-house searches for Underground fighters and caches of arms.

  When Father came home from work that afternoon he called the three of us to a short meeting in the kitchen. There was something we had to discuss seriously and candidly. He
closed the door and the window, sat down in his well-pressed khaki clothes with their wide pockets, and placed a small package wrapped in brown paper on the table in front of him. There was something inside it, he said, or, strictly speaking, some things, that we had been asked to hide until the troubles were over. It was certainly reasonable to suppose that the searches would not pass us by, but it was believed that it was easier to find a hiding place for this thing, or these things, in our apartment. And we were definitely prepared to stand the test.

  I thought: He's right not to tell us what's in the package, so as not to alarm Mother. (What if he doesn't know himself? That's not possible: Father does know.) As for me, I immediately assumed that the package contained dynamite or TNT or nitroglycerine or something much stronger, some new-found, revolutionary explosive substance the like of which had never been seen before: some doomsday compound that we had developed here in the secret Underground laboratories. A spoonful of it could blow up half the city.

  How about me?

  Half a teaspoonful would be enough for our rocket that would threaten the King's palace in London. This was the moment of opportunity I had been waiting for. I must at all costs secretly extract from the package the quantity I needed.

  If I succeeded, the FOD would get down on its knees to plead with me to forgive them and come back.

  And I would forgive them. Contemptuously. And agree to come back. But I would have to secure a few serious concessions: to reorganize the command from scratch, put Ben Hur in his place, abolish the Department of Internal Security and Interrogation, and find a way of preventing arbitrary decisions and protect fighters from the dangers of internal malice.