Panther in the Basement

by Amos Oz

  Father said:

  "If and when we are searched, it is essential that you two should know what it is about, for two reasons: first, there is not much room in here and one of you might find it by accident and thus cause an incident. Second, if they do find the hiding place, they may question us separately, and I want us all to have an identical explanation. Not contradict each other. (The explanation that Father asked us to memorize had to do with Professor Schlossberg, who had lived alone on the floor above us and died the previous winter. He left Father fifty or sixty books in his will. Our unanimous reply to questioning was to be that the brown paper package came into our apartment with the late professor's books.)

  "It will be a white lie," Father said, and his shortsighted blue eyes looked through his spectacle frames straight into my own. For an instant a rare, mischievous glint shone in his eyes, the kind I had seen only occasionally, as when he recounted how he had delivered a crushing reply to some scholar or writer, who had been left "speechless, as though thunderstruck." "We shall permit ourselves to use this white lie in case of need, only because of the danger, and we shall do it with regret, because a lie is a lie. Always. Even a white lie is still a lie. Kindly take note of that."

  Mother said:

  "Instead of lecturing him, why don't you find time to play with him once in a while? Or at least talk to him? A conversation: do you remember? Two people sit down together, they both talk and they both listen? Both trying to follow what the other is saying?"

  Father picked up the package, cradled it in his arms like a crying baby, and carried it from the kitchen to the room that served as my parents' bedroom, my father's study, and a living room for all of us. Its walls were lined with bookshelves from floor to ceiling. There was no space for a single picture or ornament.

  Father's bookshelves were organized with an iron logic into sections and subsections: by subjects and fields and languages and, alphabetically, by the authors' names. The top brass, the field marshals and generals of the library, that is, the special tomes that always gave me a thrill of respect, were priceless, heavy books clad in splendid leather bindings. On their rough leather surface my fingers sought out the delightful impression of the golden lettering, like the chest of some field marshal in the Fox Movietone newsreels bedecked with rows and rows of gleaming medals and decorations. When a single ray of light from Father's desk lamp fell on their ornate gold ornamentation, a flickering sparkle leaped toward my eyes, seeming to invite me to join them. These books were my princes, dukes, earls, and barons.

  Above them, on the shelf just below the ceiling, hovered the light cavalry: periodicals in many-colored wrappers, arranged by topic, date, and country of origin. In striking contrast to the heavy armor of the commanding officers, these cavalrymen were dressed in light robes of exciting colors.

  Around the cluster of field marshals and generals stood large clumps of brigade and regimental officers, rough, tough-shouldered books, in strong cloth bindings, dusty, slightly faded, as though dressed in sweaty, grubby camouflage battle dress, or like the fabric of old flags, tested in battle and hardship.

  Some of the books showed a narrow gap between their cloth bindings and their bodies, like the cleavage of the barmaid in the Orient Palace. If I peeped inside I could see only a fragrant darkness, and catch a faint echo of the scent of the book's body, vague, fascinating, and forbidden.

  Ranking lower than the officer books in their cloth bindings were the hundreds and hundreds of simple books bound in rough cardboard, smelling of cheap glue—the grey and brown privates of the library. Even lower than these privates in my estimation were the rabble of semiregular militias: unbound books whose pages were held together by tired rubber bands or wide strips of sticky paper. There were also some shabby bandit books, in disintegrating yellowish paper wrappers. Finally, beneath these, were the lowest of the low, the nonbooks, a mixed multitude of mendicant leaflets, offprints, handbills, and, on the lowest rung of the bookcase, flotsam and jetsam huddled on the bottommost, waiting for Father to remove them to some asylum for unwanted publications, and meanwhile here they were, temporarily camped, out of kindness, not of right, heaped up, crowded together, until today or tomorrow the east wind with the birds of the desert would sweep their corpses away, until today or tomorrow, or at the latest by the winter, Father would find the time to sort them out ruthlessly and throw most of these charity cases (brochures, gazettes, magazines, journals, pamphlets) out of the apartment, to make room for other beggars, whose day would not be slow to arrive. (Father took pity on them, however. Again and again he promised himself to sort them, make a selection, get rid of some, but I had the feeling that not a single printed page ever left our apartment, although it was bursting at the seams.)

  A fine, dusty smell hovered around these bookcases, like the deposit left by a turbulent, yet exciting, foreign air. To this day you can take me to a room with my eyes closed and my ears plugged, and I can tell at once, without the slightest doubt, if it is a room full of books. I take in the smells of an old library not with my nostrils but through my skin, a kind of grave, pensive place laden with book dust finer than any other dust, blended with the savor that emanates from old paper, mingled with the smell of glues ancient and modern, pungent thick almond scents, sourish sweat, intoxicating alcohol-based adhesives, a distant whiff of the world of seaweed and iodine, and undertones of the lead smell of thick printer's ink, and a smell of rotting paper, eaten away by damp and mildew, and of cheap paper that is crumbling to dust, contrasting with the rich, exotic, dizzying aromas emanating from fine imported art paper that excite the palate. The whole overlaid with a covering of dark air that has been fixed motionless for years upon years, caught in the secret spaces between the rows of books and the wall behind them.

  In the wide, heavy bookcase to the left of Father's desk the bulky reference works were assembled, like the supporting artillery dug in to the rear of the storm troops: row upon row of multivolume encyclopedias in various languages, dictionaries, a gigantic biblical concordance, an atlas, lexicons and handbooks (including one book entitled Index of Indexes, in which I hoped to find deep secrets but which actually contained nothing but lists of thousands of books with weird names). The encyclopedias, dictionaries, and lexicons were nearly all field marshals and generals, that is to say, splendid leather-bound tomes with gold writing that my fingertips longed to stroke and fondle, that fascinated me, not only with the delight of touching them but also with longing for the endless expanse of knowledge that was beyond my reach because it was in foreign languages, knowledge of the cross, the hussar, the steeple, the forest, the cottage, and the meadow, the carriage and the streetcar, the cornice, porch, and gable. And what am I in comparison? Nothing but a young Hebrew Underground fighter, whose life is devoted to driving out the foreign oppressor but whose soul is bound up with his because the oppressor, too, comes from lands with rivers and forests, where belfries stand forth proudly and weathervanes rotate sedately on the roofs.

  Around the golden letters that were stamped on the leather bindings were decorative flowers and sprigs, the emblems of the publishing house or library, which seemed to me like the arms and blazons of so many royal and noble houses. There were even winged dragons and pairs of furious golden lions supporting a closed or unrolled scroll, or an impression of a castle, or twisted crosses like the piercing crooked serpent we learned about in Bible class.

  Occasionally Father would lay his hand on my shoulder and invite me on a guided tour. This is the rare Amsterdam edition. The Talmud printed by the widow and brothers Romm. These are the arms of the Kingdom of Bohemia that no longer exists. This binding is made of deerskin, which is why it is pinkish, the color of raw flesh. And here we have a priceless edition of the Year of the Creation 5493 (corresponding to the civil year 1733), perhaps from the library of the great Moses Hayyim Luzzatto, who may even have handled it himself. It has no equal, even in the rare-books collection in the National Library on Mount Scopus, and—who knows?�
��there may be only another dozen copies left in the whole world, or even seven or fewer. (Father's words made me think of Abraham bargaining with God about the number of righteous men in Sodom.)

  From here to here is Greek. On the shelf above, Latin, the language of ancient Rome. Over there, all along the north wall, extends the Slavic world, whose very alphabet is a mystery to me. Here are the French and Spanish sections, and on the shelf over there, looking dark and serious, as though in formal dress, the representatives of the Germanic world whisper together in their own corner. (Complicated curly letters, "Gothic letters," Father said, without elaborating, and this Gothic script seemed to me like a sinister labyrinthine maze of intersecting paths.) While over there, in a glass-fronted bookcase, crowd the assembled texts of our forefathers (never foremothers: forefathers, before-fathers, ancient ghosts): the Mishnah, the two Talmuds, the Babylonian and the Jerusalemite, law and lore, hymns and angelologies, Mekhilta and Zohar, novellae and responsa, glossaries and grammars, Teacher of Knowledge and Stone of Help, Path of Life and Breastplate of Judgment, fables, lives of the saints, constituting a kind of dark suburb, a strange, gloomy landscape like a huddle of miserable hovels lit by a faint lantern, and yet they were not entirely foreign to me, these distant relations, because even bizarre titles like Tosefta, Spread Table, Yosippon, and The Duties of the Hearts were inscribed in Hebrew characters that gave me at least some right to speculate about what was spread on the Spread Table or what were the Duties that lay upon those Hearts.

  Then came the history sections: four cramped bookcases, in one of which some refugee tomes were squeezed, latecomers who had found no resting place and had to make do by reclining precariously on the shoulders of their longer-established predecessors. Two of these four cases were devoted to the history of nations and two to that of the Jewish people. In the former I found on the bottom shelf the dawn of mankind, the beginning of civilization, and on the next shelf up ancient history, and then the Middle Ages (blood-chilling drawings, dark-robed doctors in devilish masks bending over dying victims of the Black Death). Above these, in bright daylight, the Renaissance and the French Revolution, and higher still, so high they were almost touching 'the ceiling, were books about the October Revolution and the World Wars, which I strove to study in order to learn a lesson from an examination of the mistakes of earlier generals. Those books that I could not read because they were in foreign languages I nevertheless scanned page by page in tireless search of illustrations and maps. Many of these are engraved on my memory to this day: The Exodus from Egypt. The Collapse of the Walls of Jericho. The Battle of Thermopylae: dense forests of lances, javelins, spears, and helmets reflecting the flashing sunlight. The map of the travels of Alexander the Great, with bold arrows extending from the borders of Greece to Persia and even to India. And a picture of heretics being burned in a town square, showing the flames already licking at their feet, and yet their eyes are closed in piety and spiritual concentration, as though they can hear at last the celestial music. And the expulsion of the Jews from Spain: masses of refugees bearing parcels and sticks crowded together in a decrepit ship on a stormy sea seething with monsters that seem happy about the fate of the banished Jews. Also a detailed plan of the eastern Diaspora, with thick circles around Salonica, Smyrna, and Alexandria. A vivid color picture of an old synagogue in Aleppo. And faraway communities of scattered Jews sprouting at the edges of the map, in Yemen, Cochin, Ethiopia (which was called Abyssinia at that time). And a picture of Napoleon in Moscow, and Napoleon again in Cairo at the foot of the pyramids: a small, portly man with a three-cornered hat on his head, one hand pointing boldly toward the vast expanse of the horizon, the other concealed coyly inside his coat. The wars of the Hasidim and their opponents: portraits of grim-faced rabbis. A detailed map of the spread of the Hasidic courts and the receding lines of defense behind which the retreating Mitnagdim entrenched themselves without abandoning their opposition. And stories of exploration and discovery, with fleets of sailing ships whose carved prows pass through straits in unknown archipelagoes, of inaccessible continents, empires, the Wall of China, Japanese palaces that no man could enter and live, and savage inhabitants dressed in feathers, with bones stuck through their noses. And maps of the whale hunters, the polar sea, and the Bering Sea, Alaska, and the Gulf of Murmansk. And here is Theodor Herzl leaning on an iron railing and staring proudly and dreamily toward the lake that stretches at his feet. Immediately after Herzl, the first pioneers appear, few and miserable, huddled like abandoned sheep in a desolate landscape consisting of nothing but sand and a solitary olive tree, slightly to one side. And a map of the early Jewish settlement: a few scattered acres, spreading from map to map and strengthening from table to table. And here is Comrade Lenin, in a cap, making a speech, firing with enthusiasm crowds waving clenched fists. This Lenin looks to me a bit like our own Dr. Weitzmann, who never stops pleading with the British instead of hitting at them. (How about Sergeant Dunlop? Should we hit at him, too?) And here is a map of the Nazi camps, with photographs of skeletal Jewish survivors. And here are plans of famous battles, Tobruk, Stalingrad, Sicily, and here at last marches the Jewish Brigade, Hebrew warriors with the six-pointed star on their sleeves, in Africa and Italy, and pictures of tower-and-stockade kibbutzim in the hills, in the desert, in the valleys, intrepid pioneers mounted on horses or tractors, with rifles slung aslant their chests, their faces calm and courageous.

  I would shut the book and replace it in its correct spot. Then I would take down another, and again turn the pages, searching, particularly for illustrations and maps. By the end of an hour or two I was slightly intoxicated, a panther in the basement, bursting with oaths and vows, clearly aware of what I had to do and what I had to devote my life to, and for what, when the moment of truth came, I had to sacrifice it for.

  At the front of the big German atlas, even before the map of Europe, came a dizzying map of the whole universe, with nebulas extending away beyond the bounds of the imagination and endless expanses of unfamiliar stars. Father's library resembled that map. It contained familiar planets, but it also had its mysterious nebulas, Lithuanian and Latin, Ukrainian and Slovak, and even a very ancient language named Sanskrit. And there was Aramaic, and there was Yiddish, which was a kind of satellite of Hebrew, a craggy, pitted orb floating wanly over our heads, among the tattered clouds. And light-years away from Yiddish there were more and more firmaments, where the Epic of Gilgamesh twinkled remotely, and Enuma Elish, and the Homeric Hymns and Siddhartha, and wonderful poems called, for example, Nibelungenlied, Hiawatha, Kalevala. Musical names that thrill the tip of my tongue and my palate when I roll them around in my mouth and pronounce them inwardly, in a whisper, only to myself: Dante Alighieri, Montesquieu, Chaucer, Shchedrin, Aristophanes, Till Eulenspie-gel. And I recognize each one by its color and binding and its place in its own galaxy, and know who its neighbors are.

  And what about me? Who am I within this great universe? A blind panther. An ignorant savage. A scamp who spends his time messing around in the Tel Arza Woods. A wretched plaything in the hands of some wretched Ben Hur. Instead of shutting myself up at once, from today, from this morning, here among these books.

  For ten years?

  For thirty?

  Breathing deeply, plunging into the well, starting to crack one riddle after another?

  What a long journey, how many bewildering secrets are contained within these tomes whose very names I can just about decipher. I cannot even imagine where to find the first link in the key chain attached to the key of the casket containing the key to the safe in which the key to the outermost court of all may perhaps be waiting for me.

  First of all I must overcome the difficulty of the Roman alphabet. Mother said she could teach it to me in less than half an hour. After that, if I helped her with the washing up after supper, she promised to teach me the Cyrillic alphabet. She reckoned that could be done in an hour or an hour and a half. As for Father, he promised that the Greek alphabet was very similar
to the Cyrillic.

  After that I would learn Sanskrit, too.

  And I would learn another dialect, that Father called Hochdeutsch, which he translated as "High German."

  The name High German had a flavor of bygone times, of walled towns with wooden drawbridges guarded by twin turrets capped by conical roofs. Within the walls of these towns lived austere scholars with black robes and bare heads, who sat night after night reading and studying and writing by the light of a candle or oil lamp in a cell whose only window was barred. I would be like them: cell, lattice, candle at night, desk, pile of books, and silence.

  The bookshelves reduced the size of the room considerably. And it was not a large room to start with. Here, below the ranks of books, was my parents' bed. At night they opened it up to sleep in, and in the morning they closed it like a book, with the mattress inside, thus turning it into a green-covered sofa. There were five embroidered cushions on it, which I used for the five hills of Rome when I led the forces of Bar Kochba to the foot of the Capitol and subdued the Empire. Another time they represented the hills commanding the road to the Negev, or white whales that I pursued across the Seven Seas to the shores of Antarctica.

  Between the sofa bed and Father's desk, between the desk and the coffee table and the two wicker stools, and between them and Mother's rocking chair, there were canals or straits, all coming together at the little rug at the foot of the rocking chair. This arrangement of furniture afforded me fascinating opportunities to deploy columns of ships or land armies, enacting breakouts, outflanking movements, assaults, ambushes, and stubborn resistance in densely built-up areas.

  Father put the package in a place that he had cleverly selected in the middle of a row of a uniform edition of gems of world literature in Polish translation. This series had a light-brown binding, so the parcel blended in and almost disappeared among the books. Like a real dragon in a dense tropical forest full of gigantic trees that all looked like dragons. He repeated his warning to me and Mother. Don't touch. Don't go near it. The whole library was henceforth out of bounds. If anyone needed a book, would they kindly address themselves to him. (I found this insulting. Admittedly Mother might make a mistake or forget what she was doing while dusting, but what about me? I knew the whole library by heart. I could locate every section, district, and cranny blindfold. I could find my way around almost as well as Father himself. (Like a young panther in the jungle he was born and raised in.) I decided not to remonstrate: by eight o'clock tomorrow morning they would both be out of the apartment and I would be the High Commissioner of this whole kingdom. Including the place of the "dragon." Including the dragon itself.