by Amos Oz
Why did he curse it? What harm had it done him? There was no fault to be found in that tree. Surely no fig tree gives fruit or can give fruit before the Passover. If in his soul he desired to eat figs, what was there to prevent him from working one of his wonders and causing the fig tree to put forth her green figs at once, long before their time, just as he had turned stones into loaves and water into wine? Why did he curse the tree? How had the fig tree wronged him? How had he forgotten his own gospel and become full of cruelty and loathing? It was there, beneath that fig tree, at that instant, that my eyes should have been opened wide to see that, after all, he was no more than flesh and blood like the rest of us. Greater than us, more wonderful than us, immeasurably deeper than all of us, but flesh and blood. I should have taken hold of the hem of his garment, there and then, and turned him and all of us around: We are retracing our steps and returning to Galilee right now. We are not going to Jerusalem. You must not go to Jerusalem. They will kill you in Jerusalem. We belong in Galilee. We shall return there and wander from village to village, spending the night wherever we may. You will do your best to heal the suffering and spread your gospel of love and compassion, and we shall follow you until our time comes.
But I ignored the cursing of the fig tree. I insisted on taking him to Jerusalem. And now evening is falling and the Sabbath and the festival are beginning. Not for me. The world is empty. A last faint light is caressing the hilltops, and this light is no different from the evening light we saw yesterday and the day before. Even the breeze blowing from the sea is just like the breeze that blew over us last night. The whole world is empty. Perhaps it is not too late to turn back to the tavern, to return to the ugly, pockmarked, pregnant serving girl, take her under my wing, be a father to the child in her belly and remain with her and the child until my dying day. We could adopt the stray dog. But the tavern is locked and dark, and there is no living soul there. A first star has appeared in the darkening sky, and I whisper to it, Star, do not believe. Then, in a bend in the road, that fig tree is waiting for me. I stand and carefully examine each branch, one at a time. I find the right branch and tie the rope to it.
48
* * *
THEY OCCASIONALLY BUMPED INTO each other in the kitchen. She would make a cheese and parsley omelet and butter the bread, and put some vegetables, a dish, and a knife on the table for him to prepare a salad. He would chop the vegetables, and often he would splash tomato juice on his trousers or cut his finger. On one occasion, she stopped him sprinkling white sugar on the salad instead of salt. Shmuel sought some pretext, however flimsy, to remind her indirectly of what had happened. But Atalia could not be easily caught.
“You look nice this morning in that green dress. And the necklace. And the scarf.”
“You should look at your shirt instead. You’ve skipped two buttons.”
“I think you and I ought to talk.”
“We are talking.”
“And where could this conversation about necklaces and buttons lead us?”
“Where is it supposed to lead us? Just don’t start lecturing. Keep your lectures for Wald. You and he can shower each other with lectures. Wait. Don’t say anything. The old man has been coughing in his sleep all morning. And you with your crutches, you can’t even make him an occasional cup of tea.”
“I know. I’m just a burden. Tomorrow or the day after I’ll set you free. I’ll arrange for someone to come and collect my things.”
Atalia laid two fluttering fingers on the back of his neck and said that there was no reason to be in a hurry. In another day or two his plaster cast would be replaced by an elastic bandage, and a few days after that he wouldn’t need the crutches anymore. Or he might use just one crutch for a while.
“I can still remember almost word for word the ad you pinned up in the cafeteria in the Kaplun Building at the university a few months ago. The ad that brought me here. Why don’t you put up the same notice again, and I’ll vacate the attic for the next person?”
“The next one won’t put sugar on the salad. We’ve got rather used to you.”
“But I’ll never get used to you, Atalia. And I’ll never forget you.”
“I’ve asked Sarah de Toledo to look in a couple of times every afternoon and evening over the next few days while your leg is in plaster. She will make you both tea, and she’ll serve you the porridge between seven and eight o’clock. She’s also agreed to wash the dishes and feed the goldfish. Before she leaves she will close the shutters. Of course you will forget us after two or three weeks. Everybody does. The city is full of girls. You’ll find others. Younger ones. You’re a tender-hearted, generous boy. Girls love these qualities because they are so rare in men. And, in the meantime, your only task is to sit and chat with Wald in the afternoons and evenings. Try not to agree with him about anything. Try to provoke arguments and disagreements to keep him awake and on his toes for at least a few hours a day. I’m struggling as hard as I can to make sure he doesn’t fade away. I have to go out now. You sit quietly and finish eating. There’s nowhere for you to hurry to. Look at you, sitting staring at me, feeling sorry for yourself. That’s enough self-pity. There’s little enough pity in the world. It’s a shame to waste it.”
At that, she stopped talking and shot him a sharp look, as if appraising him all over again. Suddenly she laughed and said:
“All sorts of women will love you, with your wild beard and your disheveled curls that are impossible to comb. Even with a garden rake. Always in a muddle and always touching and, in fact, also quite dear. You’re not a predator. You never boast, you never throw your weight around, you’re not too much in love with yourself. And another thing I like about you: everything is always written on your face. You’re a child with no secrets. You’re always running around between all sorts of loves, but really you don’t run around at all—you simply wait with your eyes closed for love to come and find you and make a fuss over you without your having to wake up. I like all that. Jerusalem nowadays is full of young men with thick voices and thick arms who were all, without exception, war heroes in the Palmach or the trenches, and now they’re at university, studying something or other, writing something or other, researching something or other, migrating from department to department, some of them are teaching. And if they’re not at university, they’re working for the government, they’re involved in secret operations, going on hush-hush missions, and they’re all dying to tell you, dying to tell any girl, in strict confidence, all sorts of top-secret state business they’re engaged in, in a leading role. There are also those who pounce on you in the street as if they’ve just this minute come down from some hilltop trench. As if they haven’t set eyes on or touched a woman for the last ten years. I like it that you’re not like them: you’re not entirely awake and you sometimes seem to be elsewhere. Leave the dishes in the sink. Sarah de Toledo is coming today and she’ll tidy everything up.”
At half past eleven that night, when he had been reading in bed and his eyes were closing with tiredness, he started suddenly and covered his body hastily with the blanket as she came to him barefoot. He hadn’t heard her open the door or close it behind her. By the feeble light of the streetlamp through the slats of the shutters, she went first to the desk and turned her father’s photograph face-down. Then, without uttering a word, she removed the blanket and sat down on the bed next to him. She leaned over and ran her fingers through the hair on his chest and stroked his stomach and his thighs and held his penis in her hand. When he tried to whisper something, she covered his mouth with her other hand. Then she took both of his hands and laid one of them on each breast, and brought her lips to his forehead and fluttered her tongue on it and on his eyelids. Slowly and gently she led him step by step, as if he were half asleep. But this night she did not get up and abandon him as soon as he was slack, but stayed to guide him like a visitor in an unknown land, patiently holding his fingers in hers and familiarizing them with her body, until she taught him how to repay pleasure with
pleasure. For a while, she lay next to him without moving, her breathing so slow and peaceful she seemed almost to have fallen asleep in his bed. But she whispered, “Don’t fall asleep,” and she got up again and rode his body, and this time she did things to him that he knew only from his dreams, and this time he also managed to give her body pleasure. It was one o’clock in the morning when she left him, after ruffling his curls and stroking his lips for a moment with one soft finger, whispering, “You are probably the only one out of all of them that I’m going to remember.” Then she replaced her father’s picture in an upright position on the desk. And she floated away in her nightdress, closing the door behind her without making a sound.
At half past eight the following morning she entered his room again. This time she was dressed in her black skirt and tight, red, high-necked pullover and a fine silver necklace. She helped him to dress, supported his shoulder as he hobbled to the toilet, waited behind the door while he finished and brushed his teeth and wet his beard and dusted it with baby talc. When he came out, she kissed him hurriedly and lightly on the mouth; she didn’t say a word about what had taken place the previous night, but turned and went on her way, leaving behind a faint echo of violets. He stood there for a while, perhaps waiting for her to come back and give him some explanation. Perhaps he was regretting not kissing her at last in the dizzying furrow that descended from her nostrils to her upper lip. Finally he smiled, without realizing he was doing so. He limped to the library to wait for the old man. While he waited, he took down from a shelf the Arabian Nights in Yosef Yoel Rivlin’s Hebrew translation and read it for a while. In his mind, he compared the book with the Song of Songs and the Letters of Abelard and Heloise, wondering if someday he would manage to write her a beautiful love letter. He pulled his inhaler out of his pocket, inhaled deeply, and held his breath, trapping the vapor in his lungs, then released it with a single long exhalation.
All that afternoon, Gershom Wald lay on his wicker couch, with his ugly hands spread out on the arms of the couch like a couple of worn tools, his bushy white mustache quivering in the light of the lamp as if the old man were whispering to himself. But when he spoke aloud, his voice contained its usual hint of mockery, as though to negate his own words, thoroughly and sarcastically, even as he spoke them:
“According to Joseph Klausner, Jesus of Nazareth was not a Christian at all, he was a thoroughgoing Jew. He was born a Jew and he died a Jew and it never occurred to him to found a new religion. The father of the Christian religion was Paul, Saul of Tarsus. Jesus only wanted to awaken hearts and to make the corrupted Jews—the Sadducees and the Pharisees on the one hand, and the publicans and prostitutes on the other—repent, to bring them back to the original pure springs of faith. You have been sitting in my house for the past several weeks and every day you have been telling me a story in installments, about how in almost every generation some professedly wise Jew has appeared and cast a stone at him. Mostly these ‘stones’ were contemptible and cowardly, with all sorts of gossip about his origins and the circumstances of his birth and petty objections to his healings and miracles. Maybe one day you will sit down and write for us about those miserable Jews and denounce their petty-mindedness. Maybe you will bring Judas into your story, because they poured pitcherfuls of filth on him as well as on Jesus. Even though without Judas there would have been no Church and no Christianity. I shall not say a word about your relations with her. Now she is showing you some kindness. Don’t you believe it. Or do believe it. As you wish. Those who were here before you cast their eyes upon her and sometimes she gave way and maybe granted some of them two or three nights, then she sent them packing. Now your time has come. The fact is that each time I am astonished all over again: the way of a man with a maid and the way of a maid with a man are among the things that have ‘no fixed measure.’ But what does a man like me understand of the vagaries of a woman’s heart? Sometimes I have the impression that—but no. Not a word. Better pass over it in silence.”
After a couple of days, Atalia took Shmuel in a taxi to the outpatient clinic, where they x-rayed him and removed the plaster cast, replacing it with a tight elastic bandage. He tried to joke about his fall and even attempted a poor pun, but Atalia cut him short:
“Stop it. It’s not funny.”
Shmuel tried to tell her the story about Rothschild and the beggar, and then the one about Ben-Gurion meeting Stalin in the afterlife. She listened in silence. Twice she nodded. Then she put her cold fingers on his hand and said in her quietest voice:
“Shmuel. That will do.”
Then she said:
“We’ve almost grown accustomed to you.”
After a long silence, she added:
“If you are comfortable in that room, as far as I’m concerned you can stay there for a few more days. Until your foot is better. When you’re ready, leave me a note on the kitchen table and I’ll come and help you pack your belongings from upstairs and downstairs. Abravanel’s room is only happy when it’s empty, darkened, and locked. With his photograph talking to the walls day and night. Even when I was a child, I thought of that room as a dark monastic cell. Or a prison cell. Solitary confinement. I had no brothers or sisters. I’ll tell you something that you don’t have to listen to. But you are actually only here in our house to listen. You are paid to listen. When I was a little girl of ten, my mother left us and went to Alexandria to find a Greek businessman who was a frequent visitor of Abravanel’s. He liked to recite poetry in five or six languages. Occasionally he stayed the night up in the attic room. I was always convinced that this Greek, who was not a young man, was only interested in Abravanel and was indifferent to my mother and me. It’s true that he was a polite man: he always kissed her hand, sometimes he brought her a bottle of perfume, and Bakelite dolls for me with muslin dresses and a little button on their tummy. If you pressed the button they would cry. Or laugh. But he almost never stopped to talk to my mother or to me. He only spoke for hours to Abravanel. Sometimes the two of them argued in low voices. Sometimes they sat in this room smoking till late at night, reading poetry and speaking to each other in Greek. It was only when he went to the kitchen to request fresh coffee that the Greek man lingered for a few minutes and conversed in whispers with my mother in French. Sometimes he made her laugh aloud. She loved laughing, and I was amazed at her because in our home laughter was a rare visitor. One evening I was standing at the kitchen door and I saw that her hand was resting casually on his shoulder. In the winter he used to bring a bottle of wine. One day, when Abravanel was in Beirut and I was on a school trip, she got up early in the morning, packed an ancient suitcase, and went to Alexandria to look for the Greek. He was not particularly good-looking, but his eyes sometimes sparkled with good humor and wit. She left a letter behind in the kitchen saying that she had no choice, that nobody has any choice, we are all at the mercy of forces that make us do what they want. There were all sorts of feelings in her letter that I don’t remember and don’t want to remember. After she left, Abravanel turned this room into his own penal colony. He would summon me and sit me down by his desk, just to lecture me. He never asked me a question. Not once. Ever. Not about how I was doing at school, about my friends, where I had vanished to yesterday, whether there was anything I needed, if I missed her, how I’d slept the previous night, or whether it was tough growing up without a mother. Whenever I asked him for money, he gave it to me at once without question. But he never brought me with him when he went to meet people. He never took me to the cinema or a café. He never told me a story. Never went shopping with me. If I ever went into town on my own to buy a new dress, he never noticed. If a girlfriend came to visit me, he would shut himself in his room. If I was ill, he would call the doctor and ask Sarah de Toledo to come and help around the house. Once I left home without saying a word to him. I didn’t leave a note. I stayed with a girlfriend for five or six nights. When I returned, he asked quietly, perhaps even without looking at me, ‘What’s the matter, I didn’t see you
yesterday. Where did you get to?’ And once, when I reminded him that I would be fifteen the following Monday, he turned away and searched for something on his bookshelves. He stood like that for a few minutes, with his back to me, scrabbling about on the shelves. Eventually he pulled out a book and gave it to me as a present, an anthology of Middle Eastern poetry in translation, and he wrote on the flyleaf: ‘To my dear Atalia, in the hope that this book will explain to you where we are living.’ Then he sat me down on the sofa and he sat at his desk and gave me a long lecture about the golden age of Jewish-Muslim relations. All I said was ‘Thank you.’ I took the book, went to my room, and closed the door behind me. But why am I suddenly telling you old stories about Abravanel? In a few days you will leave us too. This room will be locked again and the shutters closed. It’s right for this room to always be locked. It doesn’t need anyone. I have the feeling you don’t love your parents either. You’re also a kind of private investigator. But now even you hardly ever ask me anything.”
49
* * *
WITHIN A FEW DAYS, Shmuel was able to manage without the crutches and supported himself occasionally with the fox-head walking stick. He was able once again to make a glass of tea for Gershom Wald every hour or two, to feed the goldfish, to turn the light on when it got dark, and to go and wash the dishes in the kitchen. Ostensibly, everything was back to normal, but Shmuel knew in his heart that his days in this house were numbered.
Had she also brought his predecessors down from the attic room and opened her father’s room for them for two or three nights before throwing them out? Had she also turned her father’s photo face-down for them or smothered it under a pillow? He did not dare to ask, and Atalia did not say. But she sometimes looked at him with amused affection and smiled as if to say, Don’t worry.