by Amos Oz
Toward dawn a stranger entered and took Stefa by the arm. He bowed twice, assumed a well-modulated waiter's smile, politely escorted Stefa down into the underground levels of the ancient castle, through mossy cellars, twisting caverns deep below the walls, winding staircases, a rock-hewn labyrinth, among rust-eaten shields and bleached human bones, the stinking depths of Poland, onward, eastward, into the rising sun we march, a new dawn will break over the forests, the landscape will brighten again, golden wheatfields stretching into the distance, onward, always eastward.
The stranger was amazingly thin, deadly-looking, and extremely tall. He protected Stefa all along the way and saw her safely, and just in time, behind the Russian lines.
Large, laughing peasant women greeted her with their languorous songs, everywhere accompanied by the sweet sadness of the balalaika.
And the war ended.
11
Promised Land:
There to live in liberty, there to flourish, pure and free, there our hopes shall he fulfilled— thought through action may be stilled.
Death to the nightmares, look the light in the eye, make a new start in the blue brightness of summer. Settle. Down. In Sharon, rose of Sharon blooming, in the valley, lily of the valley, and on the mountains, the feet of the messenger. And the thin, mischievous mustache will come off once and for all. Start a new life. Reconciled, back to the land, youth regained, healing for body and soul, rest for the weary, balm for the wounded, let there be light.
In 1949, after several painful experiences, Pomeranz was finally forced to the realization that the only safe refuge for a Jew was in his own state in his own ancestral land, and so the wandering Jew arrived at last in Israel. He had some savings, in various Balkan currencies and in dollars, and he had also acquired on his travels a certain business sense. But he did not set his sights high. He wanted to live in the country, to work on the land, in peace. To find his own level. He determined to earn his living somehow, somewhere, while he prepared his body and his soul for working on the land, perhaps in a kibbutz. For the time being he was given a one-room apartment in Tiberias, overlooking the Sea of Galilee, in an Arab house whose occupants had fled.
He found a small secure shop in a narrow side street which seemed to suit his purpose. He rented it, cleaned it out, decorated it, he lavished his savings on a counter and shelves, a fan, a chair, a picture, he arranged the shop, rearranged it, his whole body trembling with the effort and the passion.
When the preparations were complete he excitedly printed on a large card a two-word Hebrew poem:
POMERANZ
WATCHMAKER
Pomeranz was forty-three years old when he wrote these words. For an instant he suddenly experienced a belated love. Something inside him was swept away, dissolved, released.
Next he settled on a routine. The bars on the outside of his window curved in rusty arabesques. He painted them. He revived the geraniums in the window boxes. The low ceiling, arching gently above his head, seemed to be trying to testify to Emanuel Zaicek's theory of universal circularity.
No longer young, starting new daily habits in a new place, in an alien climate, surrounded by unfamiliar objects. A need for great caution in small things, buying a brush, plugging in the tall thin kettle, crossing the road, the strange salesmen and policemen, the neighbors' dogs and children, duplicated circulars in Hebrew script.
Opposite his shop there was a garage for automobile repairs. A rickety shed. There was a young man working there, almost a boy, with sunburned skin and a mustache. Pomeranz stared at him from his shop because this handsome, self-confident youth was in the habit of talking to himself. When there was no one else about in the garage, generally during the hottest hours of the day, Pomeranz could see him through his shop window bending over a heap of junk, kicking, muttering, making a pleading gesture with his hand, then canceling it with a wave of dismissal, raising his hand to his face as if at the sight of a calamity, drooping his head, shoulders, and arms in despair, once more muttering, then suddenly clapping his hand to his mouth and disappearing hurriedly into the shed. The air was full of the smell of dust steeped with grease and gasoline, of metal being soldered in sweltering heat, the painful groan of an engine refusing to start.
The work of mending watches and clocks brought about a cool feeling of enjoyment, a gradual rallying of the forces of order. It was an experience resembling convalescence, an almost mathematical delight, something approaching music.
He would focus a narrow beam of light on his work, fix a magnifying glass in his left eye socket, pick up a fine pair of tweezers. His hands had learned to be calm and controlled. Time that was out of joint he set right, and restored a steady movement. Sometimes he took the pleasure he got from the work into account when fixing the price of a repair.
After work he went home, put on a clean shirt, and served himself bread, yoghurt, fresh dates, and coffee. He sat back in the rocking chair he had bought, and gazed out the window for an hour or two at the swaying curves of the palm trees, at the distant mountains and at their reflection in the water of the lake. Slowly, with great caution, he debated with the blazing light, and with the alien, disturbing landscape. Negotiating, considering terms, bargaining formulae, examining alternative suggestions, perpetually on his guard against baits and snares. It was a fascinating, if tiring, procedure. Gradually there was a healing, because Europe was far away, and the refuge seemed, so far as any refuge could be, safe and secure.
Journey's end, Pomeranz said to himself.
Time passed, and Pomeranz, still squinting, still dreamy, began to resume his old researches, which he had neglected for more than ten years now, somewhere in the twilight zone between pure mathematics and theoretical physics. The way back was difficult and exhausting, because here, overlooking the Sea of Galilee, the very figures seemed to play a different tune. Mathematical arabesques.
In spring, in autumn, and even on beautiful winter days, Pomeranz was in the habit of taking a short walk as the day ended. Gentle and pensive as a westerly breeze, as a distant caress, he passed through the streets of Tiberias, testing with the tip of his cane the solidity of a park bench, of the paving stones, tapping the trunk of a palm tree and standing motionless for a moment, with his eyes closed and his senses strained. Perhaps he would hear an answer.
Was it not conceivable that it would happen here, a hint, a sound, a sign?
Sometimes his wanderings led him to the shore of the darkening lake, near a wooden jetty or a little fishing harbor. Here he would stand for a long while, as the shadows enfolded him, looking like a secret agent on a preliminary reconnaissance.
He would turn to go, nodding his head as if caught up in a complicated inner debate.
On his way back up the hill he would linger, trying to count the birds shrilling in the trees, solemnly contemplating the view of the darkening mountains on the other side of the lake, committing as many details as possible to memory. Then he would head for home.
Tiberias seemed to him an insubstantial town, built on shallow foundations, perhaps hesitating between two contrasting rhythms. Tall palm trees reaching longingly skyward; low arches bowing and prostrating themselves. But surely the haughtiness of the palms and the submissiveness of the arches were simply two different expressions of the same underlying idea.
Here and there the authorities had set up green-painted benches, surrounded by a few pathetic plants and a display of written prohibitions. Here and there somebody had begun to put up a monumental building, but had had second thoughts when he reached the second story, realized what he had not seen at the outset, and changed his mind. Flimsy housing developments spread up the hillside month by month. Little square matchboxes, uniformly whitewashed, like a drawing by an unimaginative child. Neat row upon neat row, apartment houses, submitting to the harsh rule of the white summer light and obediently offering their whiteness in return. Pomeranz had no difficulty in understanding this sudden Jewish passion for neatness. For whitewash. For clean-cut
lines. For simplicity and uncompromising brightness. For building here and just so and quickly, without any concession to the rolling hills and gently curving domes. Tense as a clenched fist. And if the earth curves and arches beneath us, if hills softly ripple beneath the modern streets, then surely this undulation will merely serve to excite still further the fire blazing in our breasts, and set the land aflame with a blaze of green.
The lake, for its part, sometimes roused feelings of nostalgia, and at times he could sense a passing breeze of silent, elusive mockery.
Then, night by night, the sly conspiracy of the stars against a crescent moon. The night wind had a message to deliver, and Pomeranz concentrated and strained his senses.
There were, naturally, superficial relations with four or five people. The grocer, who at six o'clock would listen to two different news broadcasts simultaneously on two radio sets, in French and Arabic, who was surrounded by piles of newspapers and magazines, and was daily expecting a major disaster. Pomeranz would exchange a few sentences with him, bloodcurdling political speculations, apocalyptic forecasts, international conspiracies and maneuvers. Then there were the meter readers, the neighbors, their dogs, their children, regular and occasional customers. They all crossed his path without impinging on him, because he did not want to encroach or to make friends, but only to sit quietly and calculate, sit and silently listen.
The summer in Tiberias was long and white-hot. For nine or ten months everything roasted in an opaque white glare, and a fine dust filled the air; in the morning crowds of birds ran amok, and at midday even a handrail would scorch the hand that touched it All summer long, dark men swarmed the streets, exuding a warm, brown peaceful smell like freshly baked bread. To Pomeranz their presence was amazing, not Jewish, but not Gentile either; it called for cautious observation and a new exertion of the senses. Slowly. Without taking risks.
He would suddenly remember snow. From here it seemed to him an absurd, lunatic image, perhaps a painted scene in an old-fashioned opera. The snow-capped peak of Mount Hermon which could sometimes be seen from Tiberias reminded him of the cheap gaudy oil paintings which peasants who had made good hung in their new houses, above the pianos on which their daughters were forced to practice to the point of despair.
Tiberias smelled of baking fish in the afternoon, and of rotting fish at night. And at almost every hour of the night and day there blew from the lake a slight, stubborn smell of putrefaction. Peanuts, fizzy lemonade, lottery tickets, chocolate-ices, Egged buses, evening papers—all constantly clamored for recognition, at least de facto.
In contrast to all this there were hints of an entirely different presence. It was commonly believed and persistently maintained that close at hand, just beyond the boulder-strewn slopes opposite, on the other side of the scorched mountain range, lay the veiled city of Damascus, and Abana and Pharpar, its rivers. Springs and fountains, myrrh and frankincense almost within touching distance.
The need to guard against nostalgia.
Concentrate your attention on the here-and-now: Tiberias, summer, Israel, nineteen-fifty-one, opposite an automobile repair shop, twenty past two in the afternoon, twenty-one minutes past, twenty-two, a cigarette and a bottle of lemonade. And the boy across the street arguing with himself among his junk, and the air full of the smell of dust steeped with grease and gasoline.
Thousands of Jews living in broad daylight in Tiberias, openly, unashamed, with no second line of defense, no bunkers, no split-second disguises, no secret way out, as if it were all over and done with. To the dreamy son of a watchmaker the whole situation was terrible and wonderful. An inconceivable state of affairs, which the heart longed to believe.
Occasionally he tried to sense from a distance, using his thoughts like radar beams, his faraway town of M——. Steeples, bells, and forests. The smell of Stefa's fur coat. Jaroslaw Avenue. The statue of Copernicus. The piles of the bridge and the black river. The attempt was doomed to failure. Those places did not exist and never had existed, because they could not exist and never could have.
But this place, this real place, this hot, panting place, the paraffin cart with its bell, the health clinic, the traffic policeman, the carpet of peanut shells, ration cards, queuing for flour, the smell of fish, and these big brown Jews—could this place possibly exist?
12
The stranger who steered Stefa by the arm and politely escorted her eastward toward the Russian lines was suspiciously tall thin and deadly. He was no more than a black tail-coat, starched shirt-front, and white tie.
The whole devastated continent seemed to yield to him in total obedience: German guards saluted and made way, officers offered their services, detectives, gendarmes, partisan bands provided guides through the dense forests and shared their food and wine, fishermen ferried them on rafts, peasants lavished hospitality, commissars went out of their way to assist and to please, onward always eastward, toward peasant women joyfully gathering potatoes, toward wide-stretching cornfields, into the rising sun.
Stefa was handed over to the Revolutionary Bureau for Polish Affairs in Krasnoyarsk. After a few simple tests a use was found for her. At first she was set to work editing various publications in Polish, pamphlets, an Open Letter to the Reluctant Intellectual, an address to the workers engaged in rebuilding the ruins of Warsaw, a letter from the Central Committee to the writers of the New Poland on their great day.
This was just a modest beginning. It was not what she was born for.
Soon she could be seen with visiting Polish intellectuals at the theater, in the coffee houses, or boating on the lake, resplendent in evening dress and jet earrings. Stefa could arouse a wild fervor in her guests: in her company they all talked compulsively, some of them seemed fired by grandiose visions and battered her with complex combinations of ideas, others were poetically inspired and painted grandiloquent pictures of a heavenly Warsaw, a New Kingdom of Poland in the Aegean Islands, a synthesis of rival salvations, while Stefa ruthlessly egged them on, drawing the very marrow out of their bones, until the Polish intellectuals sank into a delicious weariness. She had to restrain them forcibly from kneeling down and kissing her feet; she escorted them back to their hotels; they always collapsed as if drunk into a chair in the hotel foyer, and she returned home well after midnight.
Next morning she would draw up a report. Single out, categorize, appraise, recommend:
One way or the other.
Higher and higher the stranger led Stefa. Once a week he would take her for a brief ideological conversation with a group of ancient retired revolutionaries, fathers of the great Revolution. And nightly high and low he slavered over her body with an almost inaudible hissing.
Not alone.
In the small hours of the morning all the ancient revolutionaries clustered into her bed and inscribed slogans and redeeming notions on her white back with slobbering Cyrillic tongues. They clasped her waist with cold, purple-veined fingers, large dead nails of yellow tallow. They were toothless, most of them, and feverish, schooled in lubricity, steering their pleasures with cold stratagems, breathing faint odors and coarse odors in her face, moving methodically, crackling as if their skeletons had collapsed beneath their parchment-pale skins. She would wriggle, with muffled sobs, struggling in vain to kick and escape, the old men were weak but numerous and experienced, and all her efforts only served to inflame still further the swarming lascivious tangle, the sweat ran, the wallowing melee became more and more sticky, frothy, moaning, pierced intermittently by sharp, cruel screams. Between the bodies thick pungent juices squelched. They were so abandoned, those ancient fathers of the great Revolution; till daybreak they were not sated. Stefa sank slowly in the slimy slushy sewage, veins bulging ready to burst, uprooted gray hairs caught in her nails, solitary teeth straining to dig into her breast or her lower belly, sometimes wrenched from the rotting gums, dead lips stifling her lips and her sobs and her screams. Till daybreak.
But eventually it transpired that the stranger who had bro
ught her here was in fact not tall, not thin or deadly, not even real.
An abstract form had come to Stefa. Not even a form. A theoretical possibility. A passing shadow. A nothing.
Cyrillic letters, lecherous fathers of the great Revolution, all these were really no more than twilight shades of a period of change.
So Stefa Pomeranz left Krasnoyarsk for Moscow. No more appraisals of the reliability of delicate playwrights, no more reports on professors who saw both sides of every question.
Here in Moscow Stefa was put in charge of political propaganda that was directly connected with the salvation of the new Poland. A small team was set up. A plan was approved. Certain people saw Stefa as a rising star. Others immediately accepted their opinion. All Stefa's gifts, all her charms radiated a sense of perfect discretion and receptiveness.
Next winter, to an accompaniment of vodka and cymbals, Stefa was married in Moscow to a little spy master by the name of Fedoseyev. He was in charge of one of the secret departments, and a great future was prophesied for him too. He was a cold, blue-jawed man, whose beard no razor in the world could contain for longer than three hours. He was gloomy most of the time, in the Russian manner, he was forever loving beauty in all its forms—both in art and in nature—and he was also a good chess player. What disgusted Stefa more than all these things was his habit of secretively pursing his fleshy lips as if he were forever sucking a sour sweet and successfully exercising himself to conceal the fact.
Stefa and her team devised a comprehensive campaign. A close but unobtrusive watch was set on the Polish intelligentsia. Stefa would occasionally amuse herself by reading a photocopied love letter from some celebrated Marxist to a Martha Pinch-me-not, or listening to the broken whispers of two or three disappointed world reformers on a tape recorder. Some of these men were marched into her bureau in Moscow on their way to the vast developments in the northeastern regions of the Soviet State. It was in her power, sometimes, to spare one of them, in which case she would correct his misguided thinking, wag her finger at him like a schoolmistress, imprison him with one of her smiles, forgive him, and permit him to go back safely to Warsaw and justify her confidence in him. Once she even intervened on behalf of an aging musicologist and released him when springtime came to go to his beloved Palestine. Once there, he hastened to send her a colored picture postcard, some holy tomb, a Jewish soldier, and a pair of palm trees under an unimaginably blue sky. And he added in Polish: Be assured, Comrade, of the gratitude and blessing of a weary soul.