by Amos Oz
Contents
* * *
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
Author’s Note
Translator’s Note
Sample Chapter from BETWEEN FRIENDS
Buy the Book
Read More from Amos Oz
About the Author and Translator
Connect with HMH
First U.S. edition, 2016
Copyright © 2014 by Amos Oz
Translation copyright © 2016 by Nicholas de Lange
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.
www.hmhco.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-0-544-46404-9
First published in Hebrew as Habshura Al-Pi Yehudah
First published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus, 2016
Cover design by Martha Kennedy
eISBN 978-0-544-54745-2
v1.1016
To Deborah Owen
See the traitor run in the field alone.
Let the dead not the living now cast the first stone.
—Nathan Alterman, “The Traitor,”
from The Joy of the Poor
1
* * *
HERE IS A STORY from the winter days of the end of 1959 and the beginning of 1960. It is a story of error and desire, of unrequited love, and of a religious question that remains unresolved. Some of the buildings still bore the marks of the war that had divided the city a decade earlier. In the background you could hear the distant strains of an accordion, or the plaintive sound of a harmonica from behind closed shutters.
In many flats in Jerusalem you might find van Gogh’s starry whirlpool skies or his shimmering cypresses on the living room wall, rush mats on the floors of the small rooms, and Doctor Zhivago or Yizhar’s Days of Ziklag lying open, face-down, on a foam sofa bed that was covered with a length of Middle Eastern cloth and piled with embroidered cushions. A paraffin heater burned all evening long with a blue flame. In a corner of the room a tasteful bunch of thorn twigs sprouted from a mortar shell casing.
At the beginning of December, Shmuel Ash abandoned his studies at the university and decided to leave Jerusalem, because his relationship had broken down, because his research had stalled, and especially because his father’s finances had collapsed and Shmuel had to look for work.
Shmuel was a stocky, bearded young man of around twenty-five, shy, emotional, socialist, asthmatic, liable to veer from wild enthusiasm to disappointment and back again. His shoulders were broad, his neck was short and thick, and his fingers, too, were thick and short, as if they each lacked a knuckle. From every pore of Shmuel Ash’s face and neck curled wiry hairs like steel wool: this beard continued upward till it merged with the tousled hair of his head and downward to the curling thicket of his chest. From a distance he always seemed, summer and winter alike, to be agitated and pouring with sweat. But close up, it was a pleasant surprise to discover that instead of a sour smell of sweat, his skin somehow exuded a delicate odor of talcum powder. He would be instantly intoxicated by new ideas, provided they were wittily dressed up and involved some paradox. But he also tended to tire quickly, possibly on account of an enlarged heart and his asthma.
His eyes filled easily with tears, which caused him embarrassment and even shame. A kitten mewling by a wall on a winter’s night, having lost its mother perhaps, and darting heartrending glances at Shmuel while rubbing itself against his leg, would make his eyes well up. Or if, at the end of some mediocre film about loneliness and despair at the Edison Theater, it turned out that the bad guy had a heart of gold, he could be choked with tears. And if he spotted a thin woman with a child, total strangers, coming out of Shaare Zedek Hospital, hugging each other and sobbing, he would start weeping too.
In those days, it was usual to see crying as something that women did. A weeping male aroused revulsion, and even faint disgust, rather like a woman with a beard. Shmuel was ashamed of this weakness of his and made an effort to control it, but in vain. Deep down he shared the ridicule that his sensitivity aroused, and was reconciled to the thought that there was some flaw in his virility, and that therefore it was likely that his life would be sterile and that he would achieve nothing much.
But what do you do, he sometimes asked himself with disgust, beyond feeling pity? For instance, you could have picked that kitten up, sheltered it inside your coat, and brought it back to your room. Who would have stopped you? And as for the sobbing woman with the child, you could simply have gone up to them and asked if there was anything you could do to help. You could have sat the child down on the balcony with a book and some biscuits while you and the woman sat side by side on your bed discussing what had happened to her and what you might try to do for her.
A few days before she left him, Yardena said: “Either you’re like an excited puppy, rushing around noisily—even when you’re sitting on a chair you’re somehow chasing your own tail—or else you’re the opposite, lying on your bed for days on end like an unaired quilt.”
She was alluding, on the one hand, to his perpetual tiredness and, on the other, to a certain choppy quality in his gait, as if he were always about to break into a run. He would leap up steps two at a time. He rushed across busy roads at an angle, risking his life, not looking right or left, hurling himself into the heart of a skirmish, his bushy, bearded head thrust forward, his body leaning with it, as if eager for the fray. His legs always seemed to be chasing after his body, which in turn was pursuing his head, as if they were afraid of being left behind when he disappeared around the next corner. He ran all day long, frantically, out of breath, not because he was afraid of being late for a class or a political meeting but because at every moment, morning or evening, he was struggling to do everything he had to do, to cross off all the items on his daily list, and to return at last to the peace and quiet of his room. Each day of his life seemed to him like a laborious circular obstacle course, from the time he was wrenched from sleep in the morning until he was back under his quilt again.
He loved to lecture anyone who would listen, particularly his comrades from the Socialist Renewal Group: he loved to clarify, to state the facts, to contradict, to refute, and to reinvent. He spoke at length, with enjoyment, wit, and brio. But when the reply came, when it was his turn to listen to others’ ideas, Shmuel was suddenly impatient, distracted, tired, until his eyes closed and his tousled head sank down onto his shaggy chest.
He enjoyed haranguing Yardena too, sweeping away received ideas, drawing conclusions from
assumptions and vice versa. But when she spoke to him, his eyelids drooped after a minute or two. She accused him of not listening to a word she was saying, he denied it, she asked him to repeat what she had just said, and he changed the subject and told her about some blunder committed by Ben-Gurion. He was kindhearted, generous, brimming with goodwill, and as soft as a woolen glove, going out of his way to make himself useful, but at the same time he was muddled and impatient. He never knew where he had put his other sock, what exactly his landlord wanted from him, or to whom he had lent his lecture notes. On the other hand, he was never muddled when he stood up to quote with devastating accuracy what Kropotkin had said about Nechayev after their first meeting, and what he had said two years later. Or which of Jesus’ apostles was less talkative than the rest.
Though Yardena liked his bouncy spirit, his helplessness, and the exuberance that made her think of a friendly, high-spirited dog, always nuzzling you, demanding to be petted, and drooling in your lap, she had decided to leave him and accept a proposal of marriage from her previous boyfriend, a hard-working, taciturn hydrologist by the name of Nesher Sharshevsky, a specialist in rainwater collection, who nearly always managed to anticipate whatever she might want next. He had bought her a pretty scarf for her secular birthday, and two days later, on her religious birthday, he had given her a small green oriental rug. He even remembered her parents’ birthdays.
2
* * *
SOME THREE WEEKS BEFORE Yardena’s marriage, Shmuel finally abandoned his master’s thesis, “Jewish Views of Jesus,” a project he had embarked on with immense enthusiasm, galvanized by the daring insight that had flashed into his mind when he chose the topic. But once he began to check details and explore sources, he soon discovered that there was nothing novel about his brilliant idea, which had appeared in print before he was born, in the early thirties, in a footnote to a short article by his eminent teacher, Professor Gustav Yomtov Eisenschloss.
The Socialist Renewal Group also underwent a crisis. The Group met regularly every Wednesday evening at eight o’clock in a soot-stained, low-ceilinged café in a back alley in the district known as Yegia Kapayim. Artisans, plumbers, electricians, painters, and printers met occasionally to play backgammon in this café, which to the members of the Group made it seem a more or less proletarian location. The plasterers and radio repairers, however, did not join the members of the Group, though sometimes one of them asked a question or made a remark from a couple of tables away, or else one of the members of the Group would fearlessly approach the backgammon players’ table and ask a representative of the working class for a light.
After protracted argument, nearly all the participants in the Group were reconciled to the revelations of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union regarding Stalin’s reign of terror, but there was a resolute faction that demanded of the comrades that they reconsider not only their allegiance to Stalin but also their attitude toward the very principles of the dictatorship of the proletariat as formulated by Lenin. A couple of the comrades went so far as to use the ideas of the young Marx to challenge the ironclad teachings of the later Marx. When Shmuel Ash attempted to contain the erosion, four of the six members of the Group declared a split and announced that they were setting up a separate cell. Among the four who split off were the two girls in the Group, without whom there was no longer any point.
That very same month, Shmuel’s father lost his final appeal in a series of lawsuits lasting several years against his old partner in a small company in Haifa (Shahaf Ltd., Drawing, Mapping, and Aerial Photography). Shmuel’s parents had no choice but to discontinue the monthly allowance that had maintained him throughout his student days. So he went downstairs to the yard and found behind the dustbin shed some used cardboard boxes which he took up to his rented room in Tel Arza, and every day he randomly crammed more of his books and clothes and possessions into them. He still had no idea where he would move to.
Some evenings he would roam the rainy streets, like a bewildered bear roused from hibernation. With his lumbering gait he plowed the streets of the city center, which were almost deserted of human life because of the cold and the wind. Several times after nightfall he stood stock-still in the rain in one of the narrow streets of Nahalat Shiva, staring at the iron gate of the building where Yardena no longer lived. Sometimes his feet led him wandering through remote wintry parts of the town that he did not know—Nahlaot, Beit Yisrael, Ahva, or Musrara—splashing though puddles and avoiding dustbins overturned by the wind. Once or twice he nearly hit his head, thrust forward like a charging bull’s, against the concrete wall that divided Israeli from Jordanian Jerusalem.
He paused absent-mindedly to peer at bent signs warning him through the coils of rusting barbed wire: STOP! BORDER AHEAD! BEWARE, MINES! DANGER—NO MAN’S LAND! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED—YOU ARE ABOUT TO CROSS AN AREA EXPOSED TO ENEMY SNIPERS! Shmuel hesitated between these signs as if they were offering him a varied menu from which he had to make a choice.
Most evenings, he wandered like this in the rain, soaked to the bone, shivering with cold and despair, his unruly beard dripping, until at last he crept wearily back to his bed and curled up in it till the next evening: he got tired easily, perhaps because of his enlarged heart. In the twilight he heaved himself out of bed, put on his clothes and his coat that was still damp from the previous evening’s excursion, and wandered again to the edge of town as far as Talpiyot or Arnona. Only when he was stopped by the gate of Kibbutz Ramat Rahel and a suspicious night watchman shone a flashlight in his face did he turn on his heel and head for home with nervous, hurried steps. After hastily consuming two slices of bread and some yogurt, he took off his wet clothes and burrowed under his quilt again, trying in vain to get warm. Eventually he would fall asleep, and sleep till the following evening.
Once he met Stalin in a dream. The meeting took place in a low back room in the grimy café where the Socialist Renewal Group convened. Stalin told Professor Gustav Eisenschloss to relieve Shmuel’s father of all his troubles and his losses, while Shmuel, for some reason, showed Stalin, from the roof of the Dormition Abbey on Mount Zion, a distant view of a corner of the Wailing Wall beyond the border, in the Jordanian sector. He failed to explain to Stalin, who was smiling under his mustache, why the Jews rejected Jesus and why they still stubbornly continued to turn their backs on him. Stalin called Shmuel Judas. At the end of the dream the flickering skinny figure of Nesher Sharshevsky offered Stalin a whimpering puppy in a metal box. At the sound of the puppy’s whimpering Shmuel woke up, with a vague feeling that his rambling explanations had only made matters worse, because they aroused in Stalin not only suspicion but also contempt.
The wind and the rain battered the window of his room. Toward dawn, as the storm grew stronger, a metal laundry tub attached to the balcony railing banged with a hollow sound against the balustrade. Two dogs, far away from his room and possibly far from each other, did not stop barking all night long, and sometimes the barking turned into howls.
So it occurred to him to leave Jerusalem and find some easy work somewhere a long way off, perhaps as a night watchman in the Ramon Hills, where he had heard that a new desert town was being built. But in the meantime, he received the invitation to Yardena’s wedding: apparently she and Nesher Sharshevsky, her compliant hydrologist, the expert on rainwater collection, were in a great hurry to get married. They couldn’t manage to hold on until the end of the winter. Shmuel made up his mind to surprise them, to surprise the whole gang, by accepting the invitation: breaking with convention, he would simply turn up, loud and cheery, wreathed in smiles, patting shoulders; the unexpected guest, he would walk into the wedding ceremony, where only family and close friends were supposed to be present, and then he would throw himself wholeheartedly into the party afterward, contributing to the merriment and the program, his famous imitation of Professor Eisenschloss.
But on the morning of Yardena’s wedding, Shmuel Ash suffered a severe attack of asthma a
nd dragged himself to the clinic, where they tried in vain to help him with an inhaler and various allergy pills. When his condition worsened, he was taken from the clinic to Bikur Cholim Hospital.
Shmuel spent the hours of Yardena’s marriage in the emergency ward. Then, for the whole of her wedding night, he was breathing through an oxygen mask. The next day he decided to leave Jerusalem without delay.
3
* * *
AT THE BEGINNING of December, on a day when sleet was beginning to fall in Jerusalem, Shmuel Ash announced to Professor Gustav Yomtov Eisenschloss and his other lecturers (in the Departments of History and Religious Studies) that he was abandoning his studies. Outside in the wadi, patches of fog drifted like dirty cotton wool.
Professor Eisenschloss was a small, compact man with thick beer-bottle lenses in his spectacles, and movements that reminded you of a cuckoo darting busily out of a clock. He exploded on hearing Shmuel’s news.
“But how can this be! What nonsense is this! What has come over us suddenly? Jewish views of Jesus, indeed! Obviously, a fruitful field without parallel opens up before us! In the Talmud! The Tosefta! The Midrash! In our folklore! In the Middle Ages! We must surely be about to make an important breakthrough here! Well? But supposing we continue our researches one step at a time? Without a doubt we shall very soon find ourselves reconsidering this negative idea—to defect in midcourse!”
Having said which, he breathed on the lenses of his spectacles and polished them vigorously with a crumpled handkerchief. Abruptly extending his hand, he said in a different, slightly embarrassed voice:
“If, however, we have encountered—heaven forbid!—some difficulty of a financial nature, there might be some discreet manner of mobilizing, one step at a time, some modest assistance.” He pressed Shmuel’s hand again, so hard that the bones made a faint cracking sound, and declared fiercely: