by Amos Oz
Meanwhile, they had crossed Ussishkin Street and passed the square in front of the forlorn Cultural Center and were making their way toward the center of town. Now and again they passed muffled pedestrians, couples walking arm in arm, and once a pair of old women moving so slowly they seemed to be frozen. The cold was dry and biting, and Shmuel turned his head and tried to inhale the mist of Atalia’s breath, but he was afraid to get too close because he was not sure about his own breath. He suddenly felt a pleasant shiver down his spine as they walked arm in arm. It had been a long time since a woman had touched him. It had been a long time since any living being had touched him. The walls of Jerusalem stone reflected the lights of the cars and radiated a chilly pallor. Atalia said:
“And you so much want to ask me questions. You’re so full of questions. Look at yourself, you’re like a walking question mark. All right, then. Stop torturing yourself. Ask away. I’m granting you three questions.”
“What film are we going to see?” Shmuel asked. And, unable to stop himself, he added: “Wald says you’re a widow?”
Atalia replied in measured tones, almost gently:
“I was married for a year and a half to Micha, who was Gershom Wald’s only son. Then Micha was killed in the war. Micha was killed in the war, and we were left on our own. Wald is my ex-father-in-law. I was once his daughter-in-law. Now you and I are going to see a French film, a thriller with Jean Gabin at the Orion Cinema. Anything else?”
“Yes,” said Shmuel. But he did not continue. He quickly withdrew his arm from her clasp and put it around her shoulder, two layers of overcoats separating them. She let him do this, but she did not return his embrace, nor did she lean against him. His heart went out to her, but the words stuck in his throat.
It was cold in the Orion Cinema, and they both kept their coats on. The theater was half empty: this was the third week the film had been showing. Before the film there was a newsreel in which the brisk, bouncy figure of David Ben-Gurion could be seen climbing onto a tank, dressed in plain khaki. Then there was a report about a poor suburb of Tel Aviv whose houses had been flooded in the winter storms. Finally there was the ceremony of choosing the Queen of the Carmel, and Shmuel again put his coat-covered arm around the shoulder of Atalia’s coat. She did not react. When the previews of “Coming Soon” and “Next Week” were over, she shifted her position and, as if incidentally, removed his arm. Jean Gabin was pursued by his enemies until it seemed there was no hope, but he never for a moment lost his sang-froid or his self-control. His ironic, skeptical toughness, his imperturbable tenacity, made Shmuel feel so jealous that he turned to Atalia and asked in a whisper if she wished for a man like Jean Gabin. She replied that she didn’t make any wishes for herself. What was the point? Most men seemed to her to be childishly fixated on a constant stream of successes and triumphs, without which they turned sour, and withered. Shmuel fell silent, in despair at the realization that the woman sitting next to him was beyond his reach. His thoughts wandered, and he stopped following the action, and yet he noticed from time to time that Jean Gabin related to women, and particularly the heroine, with a hint of paternal irony not devoid of warmth. Shmuel longed to acquire that sort of irony himself, but he knew that it was neither in his character nor within his power. In the darkness his eyes filled with tears of pity, for himself, for Atalia, for Jean Gabin, for childish men, for the very existence of two different sexes. He recalled what Yardena had told him when she left and decided to marry Nesher Sharshevsky, her obedient hydrologist: “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 right, he thought.
After the film Atalia took him to an inexpensive restaurant, a little Middle Eastern place with few customers. The tables were covered with oilcloth. The walls were adorned with photographs of Herzl leaning on the railing of the balcony in Basel, of President Ben-Zvi, and of David Ben-Gurion. There was also an imaginative and fanciful drawing of Solomon’s Temple, looking like the Monte Carlo Casino which Shmuel had seen once on a picture postcard. The glass of the photographs was dotted with fly droppings. The reflections of the yellow light of the electric lamp on the counter capered and flickered on Herzl’s black beard. Three large fans were suspended from the ceiling; one of them was covered in cobwebs. Shmuel took out his inhaler because he was suddenly out of breath. After two or three puffs he felt better. Instead of her big wooden earrings Atalia was wearing delicate silver stalactites. They chatted for a while about French cinema versus American cinema, and about the nights in Jerusalem compared to those in Tel Aviv. Abruptly Shmuel said:
“On the way to the cinema, you granted me three questions and I wasted them. Will you grant me one more?”
“No,” said Atalia, “your quota of questions for today has been used up. Now it’s my turn. Tell me, is it true that you were a very spoiled child?”
And at once she added:
“You don’t have to answer. Your reply would be redundant.”
22
* * *
BUT SHMUEL STARTED TELLING her about his childhood. At first he was hesitant, afraid of boring her, but then he spoke excitedly, breathlessly, piling sentence on sentence, interrupting himself and beginning all over again, only to interrupt himself again and start from a new angle. He was born and grew up in Haifa, in Hadar Hacarmel, or to be more precise, he was born in Kiryat Motzkin, but when he was two years old his family moved to a rented flat in Hadar, or rather, they were forced to move because the shack they had lived in in Kiryat Motzkin burned down. It went up in flames at two o’clock in the morning because of a paraffin lamp that fell over. That fire was actually his earliest memory, though it was impossible to tell how much was authentic recall and how much a memory of a memory—that is, a vague, blurred memory reinforced and strengthened by stories his parents and his sister had told him over the years. Maybe he ought to begin at the beginning. His father had built that shack with his own hands when he emigrated from Latvia in 1932. He came from Riga, where he had studied cartography. “My father was about twenty-two when he arrived with his father, Grandpa Antek, who was already forty-five—despite which the British accepted him for the Palestine Police Force because he was an expert forger. But how did we get on to Grandpa Antek, we were talking about the burning of the shack? That’s what always happens to me. No sooner do I start talking about something than other stories come and take over my story, then those stories are submerged by earlier things, each subject edging in to clarify the previous one, until everything gets foggy. Why don’t we talk about you for a bit?”
“You were spoiled,” Atalia said.
His parents had not spoiled him at all when he was a child; perhaps they had merely been astonished by him. But Shmuel did not contradict her. He folded a paper napkin along its diagonal once, twice, and then a third time, made two precise ears, folded, pulled, released, and again a little boat appeared, which he floated across the table until it anchored next to Atalia’s fork. She took a toothpick from an ornate holder that stood in the center of the table and put it through the middle of the sail to serve as a mast, then she sailed the improved boat back across the table until it touched Shmuel’s hand so lightly he hardly felt it. Meanwhile the waiter appeared, a slightly stooped young man with a thick mustache and eyebrows that met above the bridge of his nose. Without being asked, he placed before them pitas, tahini, hummus, olives, pickles, vine leaves stuffed with meat, and a finely chopped salad glistening with olive oil. Atalia ordered a chicken kebab. Shmuel hesitated for a moment, then ordered the same. When Shmuel asked if she would like some wine, she responded with a derisive smile: in those days it was not usual to order wine in Middle Eastern restaurants in Jerusalem. She asked for some cold water. Shmuel said, “I’ll have the same,” and made a joke about their shared tastes. The joke fell flat, and he tried to rephrase it,
until Atalia smiled a smile that began at the corners of her eyes and gradually spread to the edges of her lips, and told him not to make an effort, there was no need, she was amused enough as it was.
After they moved to Hadar Hacarmel, his father started work in the government Land Survey Department. A few years later, he opened a private office for mapping and aerial photography in partnership with a thin Hungarian named László Vermes. The flat in Hadar was small: two cramped rooms and a kitchen, whose ceiling was always sooty from the paraffin wick stove and the Primus pressure stove. When his sister reached the age of twelve, they moved Shmuel out of the bedroom he had previously shared with her and put his bed in the passage. There he lay for hours on end, staring at the cobwebs above the heavy wardrobe. He could not invite friends there because the passage was dark and because in fact he hardly had any friends. Even now, he added, smiling through his bushy beard, he hardly had any friends, apart from the girlfriend who had left him to marry a successful hydrologist named Nesher Sharshevsky, and the six members of the Socialist Renewal Group, which had split into two factions, a majority and a minority faction. After the split there was no point, particularly since the two girls in the group had chosen to join the majority faction.
He saw Atalia’s hand resting on the table across from him, and as in a dream he extended his fingers toward it. Halfway across, he changed his mind. She was many years older than he, and he felt shy in her presence and afraid of making her laugh at him. It struck him that Atalia was old enough to be his mother. Or almost. He stopped talking, as if he had suddenly realized that he had overstepped the mark. His mother had touched him only rarely when he was little. Most of the time she had paid no attention to what he was saying; her thoughts were elsewhere.
“Now you’re having trouble deciding how to continue,” Atalia said. “Don’t try so hard. And there’s no need for you to talk all the time. I’m not going to run away this evening if you pause for a bit. In fact, I rather enjoy being with you, because you’re not a predator. Do you want some coffee?”
Shmuel began to explain that he never drank coffee in the evening because it stopped him getting to sleep, but he changed his mind in midsentence and said, Yes, why not, if she wanted a coffee, he would have one too. His older sister, Miri, who was studying medicine in Italy, had brainwashed him into believing that one should not drink coffee in the evening—or in the morning either, for that matter. When he was little she used to boss him around; she always knew what was right and what was wrong. She even knew better than their father. In any argument she was always right. “But how did we get on to Miri? Yes. Let’s have coffee, and I’ll have a little glass of arak. Would you like some too?”
“Let’s have coffee,” Atalia said, “and leave the arak for another time, if you don’t mind.”
Shmuel did not insist. Atalia paid the bill while he was fumbling in his pocket. On their way home a cat darted across the narrow street and disappeared into a garden. The streetlamps were ringed with murky mist. Shmuel said that he sometimes rambled on instead of saying what he meant to say. Atalia did not reply, and he felt emboldened to put his arm around her shoulder and draw it toward his. Since they had both put their winter coats back on, this touch was almost no touch. Atalia did not remove his arm but walked a little more slowly. Shmuel looked for something else to say, but could think of nothing. His eyes searched her face, trying to decipher it, but all he could see in the light of the streetlamp was a fine profile which seemed to him to be sunk in silent sadness. Finally he said:
“Look how empty it is here. Jerusalem on a winter night is truly a deserted city.”
“That’s enough,” Atalia said. “Don’t keep trying to find things to say to me. We can walk along together without talking. I can almost hear you even when you aren’t talking. Though that doesn’t happen too often.”
And when they reached the house she said:
“That was a nice evening. Thank you. Good night. The film was not bad.”
23
* * *
GERSHOM WALD SAID WITH A CHUCKLE:
“In the old days, yeshiva students used to ask a bridegroom the morning after the wedding, “Motse or matsa?” If he said motse, they commiserated with him, but if he said matsa, they shared his happiness.”
“I don’t get it,” Shmuel said.
Gershom Wald explained:
“The two words allude to two biblical verses: ‘I find (motse) more bitter than death the woman,’ and ‘Whoso findeth (matsa) a wife findeth a good thing.’ How about you—are you motse or matsa?”
“I’m still looking,” Shmuel said.
Wald looked at him with his chin inclined to one side, as if hearing words that had not been spoken, and said:
“Listen. For your own sake. If possible, don’t fall in love with Atalia. There’s no point. Or am I already too late?”
“Why are you so concerned about me?” Shmuel asked.
“Maybe it’s because there’s something rather touching about you. You’re like a caveman with a soul that’s exposed, like a wristwatch with the glass removed. Pour us both some tea, won’t you? Then would you kindly set the record player going and we shall listen to a Mendelssohn quartet. Have you ever noticed that every now and then a bittersweet strain creeps into Mendelssohn’s music, a heartrending echo of an old Jewish melody?”
Shmuel pondered Gershom Wald’s words for a while. He did not hasten to answer. In the batch of records he had brought here with him there was nothing by Mendelssohn. He had a few pieces by Bach, three or four other recordings of baroque music, Mozart’s Requiem, Fauré’s Requiem, seven or eight jazz records and popular French chansons, and a disc of revolutionary songs from the time of the Spanish Civil War.
“Mendelssohn,” he said. “Yes. Too emotional for my taste.”
Gershom Wald smiled.
“But you are such an emotional young man.”
Shmuel did not respond, but stood up and went to the kitchen to warm the old man’s porridge. He switched on the electric ring, put the saucepan of porridge on it, stirred, waited for three or four minutes, dipped the tip of the spoon in the porridge and tasted it, added a spoonful of sugar, stirred again, sprinkled some ground cinnamon on top, switched off the hotplate, spooned the porridge into a bowl, and carried it into the library. Here he spread a tea towel on the desk in front of the old man, served him the porridge, and waited. Mr. Wald ate unenthusiastically, and while he ate they both listened to the news. The commander of the French paratroopers in Algiers, a general by the name of Jacques Massu, had suddenly been recalled to Paris. There were rumors in the French capital that General de Gaulle was about to make a startling announcement about the future of Algeria. General Massu had told journalists at the airport that it was possible the army had made a mistake in deciding to put their faith in de Gaulle after the right-wing coup in Algeria a couple of years earlier.
“Anyone with eyes to see,” Gershom Wald said, “could have predicted how all this would end. ‘The rope has followed the bucket.’”
“Thousands more people will die,” said Shmuel.
The old man did not reply. He stared at Shmuel, his left eye screwed up, his right one wide open, as if he had just noticed something new in his appearance.
Shmuel was struck by the fact that in this entire library, with its numerous shelves and hundreds of books, there was not a single photograph of Micha, Gershom Wald’s dead son, his only son, who had been Atalia’s husband. Had Atalia chosen him because he resembled his father in some way? Had Atalia and her husband lived together here, in her room, before he was killed? There must have been a mother, too. Both Micha and Atalia must have had mothers. Shmuel felt bold enough to ask:
“Your son. Micha?”
The old man shrank in his chair. His ugly hands, which had been resting on the desk, were now clasped in his lap, his face turned gray, and he closed his eyes.
“Do you mind if I ask when he was killed? And how?”
Wald did not
reply. His eyes remained closed, as if he had to make a huge effort to remember, as if the reply demanded immense mental concentration. There was an empty tea glass on the desk in front of him, and he picked it up in his strong fingers and moved it about, but after a short while he changed his mind and returned it to its original spot. His voice when he spoke was dry and flat.
“On the night of the April 2, ’48. In the fighting on the road to Jerusalem.”
Then he fell silent, and said nothing more for a long time. Suddenly he shuddered, his shoulders shook, and this time his voice was low, almost a whisper.
“Now you must feed the fish. It’s time. Then leave me. Please go to your room.”
Shmuel took the bowl of porridge, which the old man had barely tasted, and the tea towel out to the kitchen, apologized for asking the question, said good night, stopped in the kitchen to eat his own portion of porridge, almost cold now, washed the dishes, and climbed up to the attic. Here he removed his shoes and sat for a while on his bed, his back resting against the wall, asking himself why he should not pack his few belongings tomorrow and go somewhere completely different. Maybe he could get a job as a night watchman in the Ramon Hills in the Negev, where a new desert town was being built. This house at the bottom of Rabbi Elbaz Lane now seemed to him like a prison in which he was gathering moss day by day. The old cripple with his witticisms and allusions and his solitary sorrow and the woman who was twice his age seemed to him tonight a pair of jailers who kept him here as if by bonds of enchantment, but he had the power to free himself from them simply by getting up and tearing his way through the invisible web in which they had ensnared him. Did he see in them a belated substitute for his parents? Yet he had moved to Jerusalem deliberately to get away from his parents once and for all, and it was weeks since he had exchanged a single word with anyone his own age. And he had not slept with a woman.