Judas

by Amos Oz

  “Sometimes you’re quite touching. Though I have no heart to touch.”

  At that moment Shmuel regretted that his face was covered by an unkempt beard.

  They started walking toward Rabbi Elbaz Lane but stopped by a telephone kiosk, because Atalia wanted to make a phone call.

  “I’ll wait here,” Shmuel said.

  After five or six minutes, Atalia came out and bestowed on Shmuel one of her rare smiles, a faint smile that began at the corners of her eyes and only later reached the corners of her lips. She took his arm, squeezed it lightly, and said:

  “Okay. I’ll see you this evening. Not for a late-night ambush on Mount Zion this time, or for supper and a film, but at a place I’m sure you don’t know. Fink’s Bar. Have you heard of Fink’s? All sorts of people get together there over a glass of vermouth or whiskey—journalists, foreign correspondents, theater people, consuls of various countries, lawyers, UNO army officers, men and women who are married but not to each other, sometimes young poets who come with their girlfriends to see and be seen. I have to sit there for an hour or two this evening, to watch an important man. Only to watch him. That’s all. If you’re so keen, you can talk to me, while I’m watching, about the Jews and Jesus and Judas. I promise to listen at least part of the time, even if my eyes are busy.”

  And she added:

  “We’ll be a couple. Because of your beard and your mane of hair, you look more or less ageless. People will take you for my companion. And in fact they’ll be right: this evening you will be my companion.”

  “There’s something I have to tell you,” Shmuel said. “It’s like this: several times I’ve dreamed of you at night. You and your father. Your father looked a bit like Albert Camus in a photo I saw once in a newspaper. In the dreams you are even more beyond my reach than in real life.”

  “Beyond your reach,” Atalia said. “How banal.”

  “What I mean is . . . ,” Shmuel said, but couldn’t explain.

  “Your predecessors in the attic also began to tell me their dreams. Then they left us, each one in turn. You’ll leave us soon too. This monotonous life in a dark, aging house with a garrulous old man and an embittered woman for company doesn’t suit a young man like you. You’re so full of ideas. So full of brain waves. One day you may write a book, if you can get over your laziness. Soon you’ll be off to search for signs of life elsewhere. Maybe to the university. Or maybe to Haifa, back to your mom and dad.”

  “They’re building a new town in the Negev, on the edge of the Ramon Crater. Before I came to you, I was thinking of going there. I was hoping they might give me a job as a night watchman or a warehouseman. But no. I’m going to stay with you two till you throw me out. I’m not going anywhere. Anyway, I’ve got no willpower left. My willpower has faded, if you can say that.”

  “Why should you stay with us?”

  Shmuel mustered all his courage and muttered:

  “Don’t you know, Atalia?”

  “It’ll end badly,” Atalia said as they reached the front door and she turned the key in the lock. “Be careful of that step. Tread on it gently. Come to Fink’s Bar at ten o’clock. You’ll have to get there on your own. I’ll be waiting for you. It’s on Hahistadrut Street at the corner of King George Street, opposite the Tel Or cinema and the Cooperative Restaurant. Don’t eat first. I’ll treat you to a proper dinner tonight instead of your usual leftover scraps. Don’t worry, the bureau will pick up the bill.”

  Shmuel inhaled the smell of the house, that smell of fresh laundry, of cleanness, of starch and ironing, mingled with a hint of the odor of old age. He went up to his room, threw his cap and coat on the bed, took a long piss, was so impatient that he flushed before he’d finished, coughed, flushed again, and cursed himself for the expression “beyond my reach,” which he’d used earlier about Atalia. Then he went down to the library and found Gershom Wald sitting at the desk, with the crutches resting at an angle against his wicker couch. The old man was reading a book, scribbling notes on a piece of paper covered in crossings-out, his thick white mustache bristling like a brindled polecat, his snowy eyebrows thick and bushy, and his lips moving soundlessly. At that moment Shmuel felt close to the old man. As though he had known and loved him since childhood. But almost everything they talked about in their protracted conversations on these long winter evenings suddenly seemed to him to be very far from what they truly ought to be talking about.

  42

  * * *

  “THEY CALLED HIM A TRAITOR,” Wald said, “because he fraternized with Arabs. He went to see them in Katamon, Sheikh Jarrah, Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Beit Jallah. He often entertained them here in his home. All sorts of Arab journalists used to come here. Public figures. Union leaders. Teachers. They called him a traitor because in ’47 and even in ’48, at the height of the fighting in the War of Independence, he continued to argue that the decision to create a Jewish state was a tragic mistake. Yes. It would be better, he used to say, if instead of the crumbling British Mandate we had an international mandate or a temporary regime of American trusteeship. It was fairly certain, he said, that permission would be given for a hundred thousand Holocaust survivors from the DP camps scattered around Europe to come here—even the Americans would support such a one-off immigration—and the Jewish presence would grow from six hundred and fifty thousand to three-quarters of a million. That would resolve the urgent distress of the displaced European Jews. After that, it would be best to call a halt. We should let the Arabs gradually absorb the fact of our presence here, over ten or twenty years. In the meantime, things might calm down a little, on condition that we did not brandish the claim to a Jewish state. Arab opposition, Abravanel asserted, was mainly not directed against the existing Zionist enterprise, which consisted essentially of a handful of small towns and a few dozen villages along the coastal plain, but flowed from fear of the power buildup of the Jews and their far-reaching ambitions. In the course of long years of conversations with his Arab friends in Palestine and the neighboring countries, he had come to the conclusion that the Arabs were principally afraid of what they imagined as the superiority of the Jews in skills, technology, cunning, and motivation, which would eventually lead them to spread and to take control of the entire Arab region. What they feared, Abravanel claimed, was not so much the tiny Zionist embryo but the destructive giant contained within it.”

  “Some giant,” Shmuel remarked softly. “That’s a joke. After all, compared to them we are no more than a drop in the ocean.”

  “That’s not how the Arabs see it, according to Abravanel. The Arabs do not believe for a moment in the Zionist rhetoric, that a handful of Jews came here to find a tiny refuge from their persecutors in Europe. There was once a prime minister of Iraq, Hamdi al-Pachachi, who declared in 1947 that when the number of Jews in Palestine reached one million, no one in Palestine would be able to resist them. When their number reached two million, no one in the whole Middle East could resist them. And if they reached three or four million, the whole Muslim world would be powerless to withstand them. It was these fears, Shealtiel Abravanel said—fear of the new crusaders, a superstitious belief in the satanic powers of the Jews, the Arab dread that the Jews would demolish the mosques on the Temple Mount and replace them with the Jewish Temple, and set up a Jewish empire from the Nile to the Euphrates—these were the source of the Arabs’ fierce opposition to the gradually emerging reality of a Jewish entity extending from the coast to the foothills of the mountains. We still had the ability to soothe these Arab fears, Shealtiel Abravanel believed, if we worked with patience, with goodwill, with tireless efforts to talk to the Arabs, by setting up joint trade unions, by opening up Jewish settlements to Arab residents, by opening our schools and our university to Arab students, and above all by abandoning the pretentious idea of setting up a separate state for Jews with a Jewish army, Jewish rule, and attributes of sovereignty that would belong to the Jews, and to the Jews alone.”

  “His thinking,” Shmuel said sadly
, “has something attractive, even moving, about it, but it’s just too sweet-natured. I actually think that more than the Arabs feared the future power of the Jews, they were tempted by their present weakness. Shall we have a glass of tea now? And maybe a few biscuits? And soon you’ve got to take your cough syrup and two pills.”

  “They called him a traitor,” Wald repeated, ignoring the offer of tea, “because the slim chance which opened up in the mid-thirties of setting up a state for Jews here, albeit in a tiny section of the country, dazzled most of us. Including myself. Abravanel, for his part, did not believe in any state. Not even a binational one. Or a state shared by Jews and Arabs. The very idea of a world divided into hundreds of states with border crossings, barbed-wire fences, passports, flags, armies, and separate currencies seemed to him like an archaic, primitive, murderous delusion, an anachronistic idea that would soon disappear. He would say to me: Why do you need to rush to set up another Lilliputian statelet here, with blood and fire, at the cost of perpetual war, when soon all states are going to vanish, to be replaced by various communities speaking different languages living side by side with each other, among each other, without the lethal toys of sovereignty, armies, border crossings, and all sorts of deadly weaponry.”

  “Did he try to win converts to his ideas? Among the leadership? In the press? In the wider public?”

  “He tried. In little circles. Both among Arabs and among Jews. At least twice a month he would travel to Ramallah and Bethlehem, to Jaffa, Haifa, or Beirut. He took part in private meetings in Rehavia, in the salons of immigrant scholars from Germany. Yes. It would be better for us not to try to set up either an Arab state or a Jewish state, he argued: let us live here next to each other and among each other, Jews and Arabs, Christians and Muslims, Druze and Circassians, Greeks and Latins and Armenians, a group of neighboring communities not divided by any barriers. Maybe the Arab fear of what appeared to them as the ambitious Zionist scheme to Judaize the whole land would gradually be dispelled. In our schools the children would learn Arabic, and in their schools they would learn Hebrew. Or better still, he said, let’s develop joint schools. Thirty years of British troublemaking based on the principle of divide and rule would finally come to an end. And in this way, not in a single day or a single year, the first shoots of trust and even personal friendship between Jews and Arabs might sprout. And, in fact, shoots like this existed under British rule, in Haifa, Jerusalem, Tiberias, Jaffa, and other places. Many Jews and Arabs were linked by ties of business and were often invited into each other’s homes. Like Abravanel and his friends. Surely there is so much that these two peoples share: the Jews and the Arabs, in their different ways, have been the victims of Christian Europe through long historical periods. The Arabs were humiliated by the colonial powers and suffered the ignominy of oppression and exploitation, while the Jews suffered generation upon generation of contempt, banishment, persecution, exile, massacre, and finally genocide unparalleled in human history. Surely there is a deep historic basis for ties of sympathy and understanding between these two victims of Christian Europe, Shealtiel used to say.”

  “I like that,” said Shmuel. “A little naïve. Overly optimistic. Totally contrary to what Stalin said about the national question. But attractive.”

  He stood up, switched on the light, and went from window to window closing the shutters, which creaked on their hinges. As he opened the windows to pull the shutters to, the library was flooded with cold, dry Jerusalem air that bit the throat and pinched the lungs. Shmuel felt for the inhaler in his pocket but put off using it. Gershom Wald continued:

  “If the Jews persisted in setting up an independent Jewish state when the British Mandate came to an end, Abravanel warned, on that day a bloody war would break out between them and the whole Arab world, or perhaps the entire Muslim world. Half a million Jews against hundreds of millions of Muslims. That war, Abravanel predicted, the Jews could not win. Even if a miracle occurred and they managed to overcome the Arabs in one round, or two, three, or four, in the end Islam would get the upper hand. The war would continue for generations, because each Jewish victory would only deepen and redouble the Arab fear of the Jews’ satanic abilities and their crusading ambitions. Shealtiel used to repeat these words, or something like them, to me here in this very room. Before it all happened. Even before I lost my son, my only son, in the Jerusalem hills on the night of April 2. He used to talk standing up, by the window, with his back to the darkness outside and his face turned not toward me but toward that painting by Rubin over there. He was very fond of the landscape in the picture. He loved the mountains of Galilee and the slopes of the valleys and the Carmel. He loved Jerusalem and the desert and the little Arab villages on the coastal plain and in the foothills. He also loved the lawns in the kibbutzim and the Jewish settlements, with their casuarina trees and their red-tiled roofs. There was no contradiction.

  “A few weeks after Micha and Atalia married, in 1946, Shealtiel turned up one evening at my little flat on the Gaza Road and invited me to come and live with them here in this house. There’s plenty of room for all of us, he said. Why should you live on your own? I was a history teacher at the Rehavia Gymnasium. And, in fact, I was well on the way to retirement. At that time Micha and Atalia were living in your attic. This room was Shealtiel Abravanel’s library. The only books I brought with me are the novels now in my bedroom. He used to pace back and forth in this room, from wall to wall, from the windows to the door, from the door to the bead curtain in the doorway to the kitchen, with short, quick steps, expounding his vision of a multiplicity of communities. He called the state—any state—a ravening dinosaur. Once he came back here very upset after a half hour face-to-face meeting with David Ben-Gurion and David Remez in Ben-Gurion’s office in the Jewish Agency building, and he said to me—I can remember how his voice shook as he spoke—‘That little man sometimes sounds like a hysterical woman! He has become a false messiah. Another Shabbetai Zevi. Or Jacob Frank. And he is going to embroil all of us—Jews, Arabs, and in fact the whole world—in catastrophic bloodshed which will have no end.’ And he went on: ‘Ben-Gurion may yet manage in his lifetime, and even quite soon, to be the king of the Jews. King for a day. A pauper king. The Paupers’ Messiah. But future generations will curse him. He has already dragged his more cautious comrades after him. He has sown the seeds of nationalistic radicalism within them. The real tragedy of humankind,’ Shealtiel used to say, ‘is not that the persecuted and enslaved crave to be liberated and to hold their heads high. No. The worst thing is that the enslaved secretly dream of enslaving their enslavers. The persecuted yearn to be persecutors. The slaves dream of being masters. As in the book of Esther.’”

  Gershom Wald stopped for a moment, then, shaking his head, he added:

  “No. In no way. I did not believe in any of it. Not for a minute. I even made fun of him. It did not occur to me for a second that Ben-Gurion ever aspired to dominate the Arabs. Shealtiel lived in a Manichaean world. He had set up a sort of utopian paradise and portrayed the opposite as hell. Meanwhile, they had started calling him a traitor. They said he had sold himself to the Arabs for a lot of money. They said he was the bastard son of an Arab. Hebrew newspapers mockingly called him the Muezzin, or Sheikh Abravanel, or the Sword of Islam.”

  “How about you?” Shmuel asked, so overwhelmed that he forgot to feed the goldfish or to give the old man his evening pills. “Didn’t you quarrel with him?”

  “Me?” Gershom Wald sighed. “I was powerless. At one time I used to argue with him passionately. Until the night of April 2. That night all the arguments between us died once and for all. The disaster stifled our arguments. In any case, by that time his ideas did not have a chance in this country. We could all see plainly that the Arabs would not tolerate our presence here even if we abandoned the idea of setting up a Jewish state. It was as clear as day, even to the moderates among us, that the Arab position did not leave room for the tiniest shadow of compromise. And I was already a dead man.
”

  “I was only thirteen at the time,” Shmuel said. “I was in a youth movement. I believed like everyone else that we were the righteous few, while they, the Arabs, were the wicked many. I had no doubt that their aim was to wrest the strip of land under our feet away from us by force. The whole Arab world was unanimously resolved to destroy the Jews or drive us into the sea. Such were the cries of the muezzins from the minarets at midday on Fridays. Although, when I was little, Arab clients used to come to my father’s small land surveyor’s office in Haifa. Occasionally a landowner, an effendi wearing a red tarboosh and suspenders, and a suit with a gold chain that wound around his belly and ended at a gold watch hidden in a side pocket. These visitors would be received with liqueurs and sweetmeats, and my father and his partner would converse with them in a leisurely, comfortable manner in rounded, courteous English or French. They would praise the sea breeze at evening or the olive harvest. And sometimes they invited us, my mother and father, my sister and me, to eat cakes in their homes on Allenby Street. The servants brought tray after tray of coffee or strong Arab tea, peanuts, walnuts, almonds, halva, and baklava. They smoked a cigarette together, and then another, and agreed that all politics is totally unnecessary and brings only sorrow and harm to us all. That without politics, life could be peaceful and beautiful. Until one day Jewish buses began to be attacked in Haifa, Jewish fighters launched bloody retaliatory raids on villages around the bay, and inflamed Arab mobs butchered the Jewish workers in the refineries. Then more retaliatory raids followed, Jewish and Arab snipers took up positions on rooftops behind barriers of sandbags, and fortified checkpoints were set up at the crossings between Arab and Jewish neighborhoods. And in April ’48, a month or so before the British left, tens of thousands of Haifa Arabs boarded a fleet of fishing boats and other vessels and fled en masse to Lebanon. On the last day, Jewish leaders were still distributing leaflets begging them to stay. However, in Lydda and many other places we did not beg them to stay but murdered them and drove them out. Even in Haifa these leaflets did not do much good: the Arabs there were in mortal panic. They were terrified of being massacred: a rumor had spread that the Jews meant to kill them all, just as they had killed the inhabitants of the Arab village of Deir Yassin, which used to be right here, on the other side of that hill, not far from this house. Overnight, Haifa was emptied of most of its Arab inhabitants. To this day, when I’m at home, I walk through Arab neighborhoods that are now full of recent Jewish immigrants, or wander in the early evening among alleyways where the few thousand Arabs who chose to stay in Haifa still live, and I wonder whether what happened really had to happen. My father, on the other hand, maintains to this day that there was no alternative. That the War of Independence in 1948 was a total war for life or death, us or them, a war that was not fought between two armies but between two entire populations, street against street, neighborhood against neighborhood, a window of one house against a window of the house opposite. In such wars, my father says, civil wars, entire populations are always uprooted. It’s the same everywhere. The same thing happened between Greece and Turkey. Between India and Pakistan. Between Poland or Czechoslovakia and Germany. I used to listen to him, and I used to listen to my mother’s view, that it was all the fault of the British, who promised the land twice over and enjoyed stirring up one people against the other. Atalia told me once that her father did not belong to his time. He may have come too late, or too soon. But he didn’t belong to his own time. He and Ben-Gurion were both men with great dreams. I, on the other hand, sometimes see the cracks. You may have influenced me somewhat in the matter of the cracks. I have learned in our evening chats to have doubts. Maybe that’s why I shall never be a real revolutionary, just a café revolutionary. I’m going to the kitchen now to warm up our porridge. Do you mind if I leave you a little early tonight, because Atalia has invited me to have dinner with her in some club or bar that I’ve never been to before.”