Panther in the Basement

by Amos Oz

  Father hurriedly offered an explanation, and a guided tour. My mother whispered to him, "Don't get carried away," but in vain. He was already swept on a mounting tide of pedagogy and started to explain in English:

  "This is strictly a private library. For purposes of research, sir."

  The officer did not seem to understand. He inquired politely whether Father was a bookseller. Or a bookbinder.

  "No, a scholar, sir." Father spoke emphatically, syllable by syllable, in that Slavic English of his. And he added: "An historian."

  "Interesting," remarked the officer, his face reddening as though he had been reprimanded.

  After a moment, as his self-respect returned and he perhaps recalled his rank and his task, he repeated firmly:

  "Very interesting."

  Then he asked if there were any books in English. His question offended Father, but also excited him. It was like throwing live ammunition on a bonfire. With one shot the arrogant officer had wounded both Father's pride as book collector and scholar and our historic standing as one of the great cultured peoples of the world. Did that conceited goy imagine he was in some native hovel in a Malayan village? Or in a hut full of Ugandan tribesmen?

  At once, brimming and overflowing with enthusiasm, as though he were defending the very claims of Zionism, Father started to pull down one English book after another, announcing aloud the title and date of publication and the edition, and thrusting them one by one into the officer's arms, as though he were formally introducing long-established guests to a new arrival at the party. "Lord Byron, Edinburgh edition. Milton. Shelley and Keats. And here is an edition of Chaucer with a commentary. Robert Browning, an early limited edition. Complete Shakespeare: Johnson, Steevens, and Reed edition. And here, on this shelf, is where the philosophers live: here is Bacon, Mill, Adam Smith, John Locke, Bishop Berkeley, and the incomparable David Hume. And here is a luxury edition of—"

  The officer, reassured, unbent somewhat, and from time to time found the courage to extend a cautious finger and gently touch the coats of these fellow countrymen. Meanwhile, Father triumphantly darted backward and forward between the visitor and the bookshelves, pulling out books left right and center and handing him more and more of them. Mother repeatedly tried to signal to him with desperate grimaces from where she stood next to the sofa that in another moment he would bring disaster on us all with his own hands.

  In vain.

  Father forgot everything: he forgot the package, he forgot the Underground, he forgot the sufferings of our people, and he forgot those who rise up against us in every generation to annihilate us; he forgot my mother and me. He was transported to unimaginable heights of missionary ecstasy: If he could only manage finally to convince the British, who were a fundamentally civilized and moral people, that we, their subjects suffering here in a far-flung corner of the Empire, are really wonderful, cultured, civilized, book-reading, poetry- and philosophy-loving people, then at once they would undergo a change of heart and all the misunderstandings would be removed. Then at last both they and we would be free to sit face to face and talk to one another properly about things that were, when all was said and done, the meaning and purpose of life.

  Once or twice the officer tried to get a word in edgewise, to ask a question, or perhaps only to take his leave and get on with doing his duty, but no force in the world could halt Father in full spate: blind and deaf to the world, he continued with the ardor of a zealot revealing the treasures of his shrine.

  The thin officer could only murmur from time to time "Indeed" or "How very interesting," as though he was under a spell. The two soldiers began to whisper to each other. The burned one stared foolishly at my mother. His friend chuckled and scratched himself Mother, for her part, had seized the hem of the curtain and her fingers were moving desperately from one pleat to the next, straightening, kneading, stretching each pleat separately.

  How about me?

  My duty was to find some secret way of warning Father, who was gradually drawing the British officer toward the deadly shelf. But how could I? All I was able to do was at least not to look in the direction it was better not to look. Suddenly the brown paper package succumbed to an urge to turn traitor: it started to make itself conspicuous, to stand out in the row of books, like a fang among milk teeth, looking out of place and different from the others in color, height, and thickness.

  Seduction suddenly took hold of me again. As happens to me sometimes in Mr. Zerubbabel Gihon's thunderous Bible lessons, when it starts with a little sensation in my chest, a tickle in my throat, nothing to speak of, it stirs and stops and stirs again and starts to get stronger and press against the sluice gates; in vain I try to last another minute, another second, press my lips together, clench my teeth, tense my muscles, but the laughter bursts out like a cascade, gushes out, so that I have to rush out of the classroom. The same thing happened that morning of the search, only it was not a tickle of laughter, but a tickle of betrayal. Seduction.

  Just as when you feel a sneeze coming, and it starts by trickling out of your brain and pinching the base of your nose till it brings tears to your eyes, and even if you try to smother it, it's obvious that you haven't got a hope, that it's bound to happen. Just so I started to guide the enemy toward the package that the Underground had asked us to hide, the package that apparently contained the detonation device of the Hebrew atom bomb, which had the potential to liberate us now and for all time from the destiny of being forever defenseless lambs at the mercy of wolves.

  "Quite warm," I said.

  Then:

  "Very warm." "Cooler." "Lukewarm." "Colder again." "Freezing."

  And a little later:

  "Getting warmer. Warmer. Hot. Nearly burning."

  I can't explain it. Even today. It may have been a vague wish that the thing that was bound to happen should finally happen. And stop hanging like a rock above our heads. Like having a wisdom tooth extracted: let's get it over with.

  Because it's unbearable.

  Nevertheless, my sense of responsibility got the better of me. I didn't say my hot and cold out loud, but only inside, behind my sealed lips.

  The English officer gently deposited on the coffee table the mountain of books that had been piled in his arms and almost reached his chin. He thanked Father twice, apologized again to my mother for the unpleasantness and the nuisance, and rebuked in a whisper one of the soldiers who was touching a wall map with his finger. As they were leaving, when they were through the door but it had not yet closed behind them, he turned to look at me, and suddenly he gave me a wink, as if to say:

  Well, what can we do?

  And off they went.

  Two days later the general curfew was canceled and once again there was only a night curfew. The rumor went around the neighborhood that in Mr. Vitkin's flat, Mr. Vitkin from Barclay's Bank, they had found a pistol magazine full of bullets. They said he was taken off in handcuffs to the Russian Compound. And the brown paper package disappeared from among the gems of world literature after a couple of days. It had evaporated. There was no gap on the shelf. As if it had all been a dream.

  twenty

  I have already explained about the locked medicine drawer and my mother's role in the Underground. During the night curfew, when I was awakened by shooting or the rumble of an explosion, I would sometimes try not to fall asleep again even when silence returned. Tensely I lay there hoping to catch the sound of hurried footfalls on the sidewalk outside my window, a scratching at the door, whispered voices in the hallway, groans of pain stifled by clenched teeth. It was my duty not to know who had been injured. Not to see, not to hear a thing, not even to try to imagine the spare mattress being spread out on the kitchen floor in the night, only to disappear before day dawned.

  All that summer I waited. No wounded fighter ever came.

  Four days before the end of the summer holidays, before I started the seventh grade, my parents went to Tel Aviv to take part in a memorial evening for the town they had c
ome from.

  My mother said:

  "Listen carefully. Yardena has offered to spend the night here to look after you because we are sleeping over in Tel Aviv. Be as good as gold. Don't be a nuisance. Help Yardena. Eat what's put on your plate; don't forget there are dead children in the world who would have lived for another week if they had only had the food you leave on your plate."

  There's a pit inside the stomach that science hasn't discovered yet, and all the blood drained into that pit from my head, my heart, my knees, and turned into an ocean and roared like the ocean.

  I summoned up what was left of my voice and answered, folding the newspaper that was lying on the table into two, four, eight:

  "It'll be fine. You go."

  And I tried to fold it in half again but I couldn't.

  The question I was asking myself as I folded the paper was whether science had discovered, and if not whether I myself could discover within the next couple of hours, a way of making someone disappear without trace for twenty-four hours or so. Vanish completely. Not exist. Not just to be vacant, like, say, the spaces between the stars, but to vanish and yet to go on being here, to see and hear everything. To be me and also a shadow. Be present without being present.

  Because what was I going to do alone with Yardena? What could I do about my shame? And in our home, too? Should I ask her to forgive me? Before or after finding out (how can you find out, fool?) whether or not she looked out and noticed somebody watching her from the roof on the opposite side of the street? And if she did, whether she noticed who it was? Did I really have to confess? And if so, how could I convince her that it was just an accident? That I really didn't see anything. That I definitely wasn't the notorious peeping torn who had been seen on the roofs in our neighborhood and people talked about in whispers and had been trying to catch without success for several months now. And that when I saw her (only once! only for about ten seconds!) I wasn't thinking about her body but the schemes of the British occupier? That it was just an accident? (What was? What did I see? Nothing. A dark patch, a bright patch, another dark patch.) Perhaps I should tell her a lie? What lie? How? And what about the thoughts I'd had about her since then?

  I'd do better to keep my mouth shut.

  We'd both do better to try to pretend that what happened didn't happen. Just as my parents said nothing about the package that was hidden here during the search. Just as they said nothing about lots of things, those silences that were like bites.

  My parents set off at three, not before extracting a whole string of promises from me: Remember, be careful, don't forget, make sure, on no account, take special care, heaven forbid. As they left they said:

  "The icebox is full of food and don't forget to show her where everything is and be nice and helpful and don't be a nuisance. And remember specially to tell her that the sofa in our room is made up as a bed for her and tell her there's a note for her in the kitchen and that the icebox is full, and you're to be in bed by ten and remember to lock the front door with both keys and remind her to turn the lights out."

  I was alone. I waited. A hundred times I went around each room making sure it was neat and nothing was out of place. I was afraid and yet somehow hoping that she might have forgotten she had promised to come. Or that she wouldn't make it before the curfew started and I'd be alone all night. Then I got my mother's sewing basket out of the wardrobe and sewed a button on my shirt, not because it had come off but because it was loose and I didn't want it to fall off just when Yardena was here. Then I cleared away the spent matches that we kept in a separate box next to the new ones to reuse, as an economy measure, for lighting the kerosene cooker from the stove or vice versa. I hid them right at the back, behind the spices, because I was afraid that Yardena would see them and think we were poor or mean or not very neat. Then I stood in front of the full-length mirror on the back of the wardrobe door, breathing the faint scent of mothballs that always clung to the wardrobe and made me think of winter. I looked at the mirror for a while and tried to decide once and for all, objectively, as Father demanded, what I looked like.

  I looked like a pale, thin, angular child, with a face that was always changing and with very restless eyes.

  Is that the look of a traitor?

  Or of a panther in the basement?

  I felt a sad pain at the thought that Yardena was already almost grown up.

  If only she could really know me, she might realize that I am simply trapped inside the shell of a talkative child, but that inside, peeping out—

  No: better stop there. The word peeping hurt like a slap around the face. Which I well deserved. If it somehow came out that Yardena felt like giving me my slap this evening, I might actually feel better. I hope she's forgotten, I hope she'll never come, I thought, and I ran to peep—no, not peep—take a look, from the corner of the bathroom window, because from there you could see almost as far as the Sinopsky Brothers grocery shop on the corner. Since I was in the bathroom, I decided to wash my face and neck, not with the ordinary soap that Father and I used, but with my mother's scented soap. Next I wet my hair with water and combed it and straightened my part, then I fanned my head with the paper, to dry my hair quickly, because what would happen if Yardena arrived at this very moment and realized I had wet my hair just for her. I cut my fingernails a bit, too, even though I'd already cut them on Friday, just to be on the safe side, but I was sorry I'd done it, because now my fingernails looked as if I'd been chewing them.

  I waited till nine minutes to seven. The curfew was about to begin. Several times since then I've found myself waiting for a woman and wondering whether or not she would come, and if she did, what we would do, and what I looked like, and what I should say to her, but no wait was ever as tense and cruel as that time when Yardena almost didn't turn up.

  I have just written the words "waiting for a woman," because Yardena was then almost twenty, whereas I was twelve and a quarter, which was barely sixty-two percent of her age; in other words, we were separated by thirty-eight percent of her age, as I calculated with a pencil on one of the blank cards from Father's desk as the clock approached seven and the beginning of curfew, and I had convinced myself that that was that, there was no hope, Yardena had forgotten me, and with good reason.

  I worked it out like this: In another ten years, when I reached the age of twenty-two and a quarter, and Yardena was thirty, I would still be only seventy-four percent of her age, which was definitely better than the current sixty-two percent but still pretty grim. As the years went on the distance between us would gradually decrease (in percentages), but the depressing part was that this decreasing gap would decrease more and more slowly. Like an exhausted marathon runner. I went over the calculation three times, and each time the gap decreased more and more slowly. It seemed to me completely unfair and illogical that in the years immediately ahead I would go leaping toward her in tens of percent and then, in our years of middle age and old age, the percentage gap between us would decrease at a snail's pace. Why? And was it impossible for the decreasing gap to be closed completely? Ever? (Laws of nature. OK. I know. But when my mother told me her story about the blue shutter, she said that in the old days the laws of nature were completely different. There was a time when the earth was flat and the sun and the stars revolved around it. Now all we had left revolving around us was our own moon, and who knew if that law, too, wouldn't be revoked some day in the future? It followed that change in general was always change for the worse.)

  When Yardena was a hundred, I worked out, I would be ninety-two and a quarter, and the percentage gap between us would be reduced to less than eight (which was not bad, compared to the thirty-eight of this evening). But what good would the decreasing gap between our ages be to a decrepit old couple?

  I switched off this thought and the desk lamp, tore up the calculations and threw them in the toilet, then pulled the chain, and since I was in the bathroom anyway I decided to brush my teeth. While I was brushing them I made up my mind to be di
fferent: from now on I would be a quiet, straightforward, logical, and above all brave man. In other words: if a last-minute miracle happened and Yardena really did turn up after all, even though the curfew had almost begun, I would say to her straight out, simply and succinctly, that I was sorry about what happened on the roof and it wouldn't happen again. Ever.

  But how could I?

  She arrived at five to seven. She had brought us fresh-baked rolls from Angel's Bakery, where she worked as a clerk. She was wearing a light sleeveless summer dress, with a pattern of cyclamens and a row of big buttons all the way down the front, like polished river pebbles arranged in a row by a child. She said:

  "Ben Hur didn't want to come. He wouldn't say what's happened. What's up between you, Proffy? Have you had another row?"

  All the blood that had drained into the pit under my stomach gushed up and flushed hotly into my face and ears. Even my own blood was betraying me, and embarrassing me in front of Yardena. What is closer to a man than his own blood? And now even my blood had turned traitor.

  "It wasn't a personal row; it was a rift."

  Yardena said:

  "Ah. A rift. Proffy, whenever you use words like that you sound just like Voice of Fighting Zion. And where are your own words? Haven't you got any words of your own? Didn't you ever have any?"

  "Look," I said very seriously.

  And a few moments later I repeated:

  "Look."

  "There's nothing much to look at."

  "What I wanted you to know, and this doesn't concern only your brother, but questions of principle—"

  "OK, fine. Questions of principle. If you like, we'll have a discussion later about the extent of the rift in the Underground and the questions of principle. But not now, Proffy." (Underground! How much did she know about us? And who had dared to tell her? Or was she just guessing?) "Later. Right now I'm famished. Let's fix ourselves a wild supper. Not just a salad and yogurt. Something much more exciting." She scrutinized the kitchen thoroughly, peering into closets and drawers, casting an eye over the pots and pans, investigating the icebox, checking the spices and condiments, examining the two kerosene burners. Then she pondered for a while, making all sorts of vague sounds to herself, mmm and ouf and ahh, and then, still sunk in thought like a general devising battle plans, she instructed me to start preparing some vegetables—no, not there, over here—tomatoes, green peppers, onions, about this much. Then she put the chopping board down on the counter, took the big butcher's knife out of the drawer, and discovering the pot of chicken soup that my mother had left for us in the icebox she took a cupful of it. Then she cut the chicken in pieces, and heated some oil in a frying pan. She laid the vegetables I prepared for her on a corner of the drainboard. When the oil began to bubble, she fried some cloves of garlic in it and browned the chicken pieces on both sides, until the mingled smells of chicken, garlic, and hot oil made my mouth water and sent urgent spasms through my palate, throat, and stomach. Yardena said: