by Amos Oz
“Time for a break. Come to the kitchen. Let’s have a coffee together for ten minutes. I’ll sit at the table and you can serve the coffee. You can make me one more paper boat. If there’s one thing in the world that no one can beat you at, that’s making paper boats. You can also make yourself some bread and jam or bread and cheese, so that you don’t leave me hungry.”
Shmuel murmured:
“I’m leaving you hungrier than when I arrived.”
Atalia, choosing to ignore this hint, said:
“I have the impression that you’ve managed to do some writing here in these last few months, despite everything. Everybody except me spends their time here sitting and writing. They never stop writing. There must be something in the walls. Or in the cracks in the floor.”
“I’d give a lot to read what your father wrote.”
“He didn’t leave us anything. I told you, at the end he was careful to destroy every last bit of paper. As though erasing his own life.”
“You’ll see—one day they’ll write about him. They’ll do research. Somebody will remember him, maybe years from now. I believe that somebody will dig around in the archives and unearth his story.”
“But there was no story. He didn’t do anything, after all. He spoke up once or twice, and they booted him out, and he felt offended, shut himself away, and never said another word. That’s all. There was no story.”
“I’m having trouble breathing,” Shmuel said. “I’m sorry. I think I need my inhaler. But I’ve no idea where it is. Maybe we’ve packed it?”
Atalia got up, left the kitchen, and returned a couple of minutes later. She handed Shmuel his inhaler, and said simply:
“The air isn’t good for you here. It’s always closed. It’s stifling.”
She stood and finished drinking her coffee, took her cup to the sink, washed and dried it, put it back in the cupboard, approached him from behind, and covered his eyes with her hands for a moment, as in a children’s game.
“That’s how you’ve been living here with me all winter, blindfolded.”
Standing at the door, she said:
“How I’d love to be blindfolded too. At least sometimes. On sleepless nights. When a man touches me. You don’t need to write to us, and don’t telephone. There’s no need. You must turn over a new leaf.”
Shmuel Ash was left sitting by himself at the kitchen table, still holding the inhaler, surprised that she had not bothered to ask him where he was going, or if he had anywhere to go. Perhaps she forgot to ask. Maybe she didn’t want to know. It was as if she had simply bent down to stroke a stray cat in the street, and when it began to purr she felt pity for a moment, got out a piece of cheese or sausage and put it down in front of the creature, patted it a few times on the head, then turned and went on her way. She always stands apart.
After devouring three thick slices of bread and jam and leaving a stain on his pullover, he took his plate and cup to the sink and washed them for the last time. Then he went to finish packing.
He intended to wait in Shealtiel Abravanel’s room until the old man woke up from his morning sleep to say goodbye, although he had no idea with what words the two of them could part. Then he would hoist the kit bag on his back and go on his way. He would definitely go on his way. He would not linger. He would take the stick with the fox-head handle with him without asking permission. Neither she nor the old man needed that walking stick. At least he would have a little keepsake. He had spent three months here, from the beginning to the end of winter, and the meager pocket money they had paid him might last three or four weeks. At least he would have a walking stick. He would not be leaving here entirely empty-handed. The stick, he reckoned, rightfully belonged to him.
Atalia had stuffed his clothes, some books, his notebooks, and his toiletries tightly into the kit bag. And yet he had a strong sense that he was missing something, and stood wondering what it was he’d forgotten and what might be left in the attic. He wanted to climb up to his old room and check whether Atalia had really brought all his things down, and to say goodbye to the posters and the reproduction that he had decided to leave on the wall for the benefit of his successor. Instead, he wrote a note to Atalia and put it on the kitchen table: “Please could you send whatever was left upstairs to my parents’ address in Haifa? Whenever.” Then he added the address.
While he was finishing his packing, Gershom Wald appeared. He pushed the door open with his shoulder, limped into the middle of the room, and stood there leaning heavily on his crutches, seeming to occupy a far larger volume of space than he really did. He fixed his gaze not on Shmuel but on the stuffed kit bag on the sofa. He was a clumsy, deformed man with broad shoulders; his strange head looked as if it had not been finished; his body resembled an ancient tree beaten year after year by the winter winds; his wide hands clasped the grips of the crutches; his twisted, hooked nose gave him the look of a sinister Jew in an anti-Semitic caricature; his white hair hung down over the nape of his neck, almost reaching his shoulders; his hoary mustache grew thick over his tightly pursed lips; and his little blue eyes pierced you so keenly you had to look away. Shmuel felt a lump in his throat, and his heart went out to this solitary man. He sought for the right words, but in the end all he said was:
“Please don’t be angry with me.”
Embarrassment and sorrow made him add:
“I came to say goodbye to you.”
Although, in fact, he had not come. On the contrary, it was the old man who had come to Abravanel’s room on his crutches to say goodbye to Shmuel.
Gershom Wald loved words, and he always used them expansively and unhesitatingly. But this time all he said was:
“I’ve lost one son. Come here, boy. Move closer, please. Closer. A little more.” And he leaned forward and planted a single kiss in the middle of Shmuel’s forehead with strong, cold lips.
51
* * *
AS HE LEFT THE HOUSE on Rabbi Elbaz Lane, he remembered to tread very carefully on the loose wooden step. He closed the iron door behind him and stopped to look at it for a moment. It was a double metal door painted green, to which was attached the knocker in the shape of a blind lion’s head. In the center of the right-hand leaf of the door was the legend
RESIDENCE OF JEHOIACHIN ABRAVANEL WHOM G-D PROTECT, TO SHEW THAT THE LORD IS UPRIGHT
He remembered the day he had arrived, how he had stood in front of this door and hesitated, wondering whether to knock or to change his mind. For a moment he wondered if there was any way back into this house. Not now. Not now. But someday maybe. Maybe years from now. Maybe only after he’d managed to write The Gospel According to Judas. He waited by the door for two or three minutes, knowing full well that no one would call him back, yet waiting for a call.
No call came, apart from the sounds of distant dogs barking dimly from the direction of the ruins of Sheikh Badr. Shmuel turned his back to the door, crossed the stone-paved yard, and went out into the lane without trying to close the rusty gate that always stood half closed and half open. It had been stuck like this for many years. There was no one to repair it. There may not have been any point by now. Shmuel found a vague confirmation that he had been right in the fact that the gate had been stuck for all those years. Right about what? He could not answer this question. Above the gate he saw the iron arch with those words hammered out within it:
AND A REDEEMER SHALL COME UNTO ZION
MAY IT BE SPEEDILY REBUILT 5674
He carried the kit bag on one shoulder all the way to the central bus station, holding the walking stick in his other hand. Because of the weight and the vague pain in his foot he advanced slowly, limping a little, shifting the kit bag occasionally from shoulder to shoulder and the stick from hand to hand. At the corner of Bezalel Street he caught sight of his teacher, Professor Gustav Yomtov Eisenschloss, coming toward him with a briefcase in one hand and a string bag full of oranges in the other. He was deep in conversation or argument with a middle-aged woman whom Shmuel also
knew, though he could not for the life of him remember where from. While he was hesitating, he did not remember to greet his teacher until the pair had already passed him. He said to himself that the professor with his thick lenses had probably not recognized him under the big kit bag, and even if he had, what could the two of them say to each other now? How had generations of Jews seen Jesus? How had Judas seen him? What earthly use could this subject be to any living being?
At the bus station he waited for ten minutes in the wrong line. When he got to the front, the cashier told him that this counter was reserved for soldiers with travel warrants and for civilians with an order to report for reserve army service. Shmuel apologized, stood in line for a quarter of an hour or more at another counter, and wondered whether it would not be better for him to go straight to his parents in Haifa. Now that his sister was in Rome, he would not have to sleep in the sooty passage. Maybe they would give him Miri’s room this time, with the nice window looking out over the bay. But his parents now seemed like strangers to him, as if they were both just a shadow of a dim memory, as if this winter he had been adopted by the elderly invalid and the widow and from now on he belonged to them alone.
When he bought his ticket, he discovered that the next bus to Beersheba left in an hour’s time. He put the kit bag and the walking stick on his left shoulder so that his right hand would be free. He bought two salty bagels at the kiosk and drank a fizzy drink and suddenly felt an urgent need to ring Gershom Wald and say to him, You are dear. Would he be able to say these three words, even from a distance, on the phone, without the old man piercing him with one of his ironic looks? Or perhaps Atalia herself would pick up the phone, and he would shamelessly beg her to let him come back to his attic room right away and give her his word that from now on . . . But from now on what, he had no idea. He had meant to hang up the receiver, but instead he turned around and handed it to a thin, pale soldier who was waiting patiently behind him.
While he was sitting on a dusty bench with his kit bag between his knees, staring at the throngs of armed soldiers running around from platform to platform, Shmuel decided to use the time to jot down a few lines for himself, so as not to forget. But he couldn’t find a notebook or a pen in his pockets. So instead of writing he composed in his head a short letter to the prime minister and minister of defense, Ben-Gurion. Then he canceled this letter, asked a small female soldier to keep an eye on his things for a minute, and went back to the kiosk. He drank another fizzy drink and bought two more bagels, one for himself for the journey and one for the female soldier who was looking after his belongings.
Shmuel Ash left Jerusalem at three o’clock in the afternoon on an Egged bus to Beersheba. A few months previously, he had heard about the new town that was being built in the desert on the rim of the Ramon Crater. He knew not a soul there. He intended to find somewhere to leave his kit bag and his walking stick and to look for a job as a night watchman on a building site, or as a janitor in the primary school, or as a librarian or assistant librarian in the library. There was bound to be a small library there. Every small town has a library. And if not a library, a cultural center.
Once he had found somewhere to rest his head, he would sit down and write to his parents and his sister and try to explain to them where his life was rolling to. He might also write a few lines to Yardena and maybe to Rabbi Elbaz Lane. He had no idea what he could write to them, but he hoped that in a new place it would eventually dawn on him what it was he was in search of.
Meanwhile, he sat on his own at the back of the bus, in the middle of the empty back seat. The bulky kit bag was clasped between his spread knees because he had totally failed to squeeze it into the overhead rack. He had managed to place the stick with the fox-head handle on the rack, and he had laid his coat and shapka on top of it, though he knew for certain that he would forget them when the time came to leave the bus at the end of the journey.
The bus left behind the gloomy stone-built houses at the end of the Jaffa Road, passed the gas stations at the exit from the city and the turn toward Givat Shaul, and emerged among the mountains. In an instant Shmuel was swept by a wave of warm happiness. The sight of the empty mountains, the young forests, and the wide sky made him feel as if he were waking up at last from a hibernation that had gone on for too long. As if he had spent the whole winter in solitary confinement and now he was free. In fact, it was not just the winter or the house on Rabbi Elbaz Lane. It was everything . . . All through his student years in Jerusalem, the university campus, the library, the cafeteria, the seminar rooms, his previous room in Tel Arza, Jewish views of Jesus and Judas’ view of Jesus, Yardena, who had always treated him like an amusing but slightly ridiculous pet that made a mess everywhere, and Nesher Sharshevsky, the hard-working hydrologist she had found herself, the whole city which was always shrinking into itself as though waiting for some blow to fall at any moment, Jerusalem with its grim stone arches and its blind beggars and its wrinkled, pious old women sitting motionless for hours on end, shriveling in the sun on little stools at the entrance to their dark basements. The prayer-shawl-clad worshipers who passed at a run like huddled shadows, backward and forward from alley to alley on their way to the darkness of the synagogues. The dense cigarette smoke in low-ceilinged cafés full of students in thick polo-necked pullovers, all world reformers, all constantly interrupting each other. The heaps of rubbish piled up in the empty lots between the stone-built houses. The high stone walls enclosing churches and convents. The line of barricades and barbed-wire fences and minefields surrounding Israeli Jerusalem on three sides and separating it from Jordanian Jerusalem. Salvos of shots in the night. The stifled despair that always lay over the city.
He was happy to be leaving Jerusalem behind and to feel that every moment that passed took him farther away from it.
Outside the bus window, the hillsides were verdant. It was spring in the land, and wildflowers were blooming by the roadside. The hill country beyond the city seemed wide open, primeval, indifferent, wrapped in a great tranquility. A pale daytime moon, floating above tatters of clouds, stayed in the window of the bus. What are you doing here, Shmuel wondered, it’s not your time. In Bab el-Wad the road wound between forested hills on one of which, in springtime twelve years before, Micha Wald had bled to death—alone, among the rocks all night, until he passed out and died, abandoned, before dawn. It was thanks to his death that I received the gift of this winter in his house, enfolded by his father and his wife. It was he who presented me with this winter. I wasted it. Even though I enjoyed free time and solitude in abundance there.
The bus stopped for a ten-minute break by the kiosk at Hartov Junction. Shmuel went to the restroom and bought another bagel, and he drank another fizzy drink. The air was warm and luxuriant. A pair of white butterflies chased each other in a dance. Shmuel inhaled the scents of springtime in deep drafts, filling his lungs, until he felt dizzy. When he returned to his seat, he found that new passengers had gotten on the bus, people from the nearby villages. Some were wearing work clothes and looked suntanned, though the spring had begun only a few days earlier. Some carried their tools with them, or baskets containing live chickens, eggs, or homemade cheese. On the seats in front of him two young women were carrying on a lively conversation in a language he couldn’t understand. A group of schoolchildren or members of a youth movement on their way home from a trip were sitting at the front. They were singing songs from the war and the campfires at the top of their voices. The driver, a rotund middle-aged man dressed in crumpled khaki, joined in the singing. He held the steering wheel in one hand and with his other he thumped out the rhythm on the dashboard with his ticket-punch. New villages, all established since the war, flashed past the window. They were white, red-roofed villages with cypress trees in the yards and long, corrugated iron roofs of cowsheds and henhouses. Between the villages, fruit orchards and fields of young wheat and barley, clover and alfalfa, stretched as far as the distant foothills.
The bus made another
ten-minute stop at Kastina Junction. People got on and off, and Shmuel, too, got out and wandered among the dusty platforms that smelled of burnt gasoline. He had a feeling that he had been expected in this place for a long time and that people were surprised at the delay and hoping that he would explain himself or apologize. He bought an evening paper at the kiosk but did not read it. Instead, he looked up to see if the pale moon was still accompanying him. He thought that that moon belonged to Jerusalem and should have stayed there and stopped following him, but it was still hovering above the wispy clouds and had merely become even paler. The driver hooted to get the passengers to board, and Shmuel returned to his seat. He did not take his eyes off the vineyards and orchards that flashed past the window. Everything made him happy and warmed his heart. On either side of the road were rows of eucalyptus trees, planted for a military purpose, to camouflage the traffic from enemy planes. As he traveled south, the new villages, here in the Lachish region, were less frequent, and only the wide fields extended along the road, until they were slowly replaced by bare low hills. These hills, too, had been painted green by the winter rains, but Shmuel knew that the green was temporary, and that in a few weeks’ time the hills would once more stand parched and baking in the sun, with only a few thorny bushes, blasted by the heat, clinging to them as with sharpened claws.
When, toward evening, the bus reached the station in Beersheba, Shmuel left the unread paper on the seat, shouldered his kit bag, took his coat, stick, and cap down from the rack, bought another fizzy drink and downed it almost in one swallow, then set off to discover when and where he could catch a bus to the new town on the rim of the Ramon Crater. At the information desk, he was told that the last bus for Mitzpeh Ramon had already left, and that the next one would be at six o’clock the following morning. He knew he should ask something else, but he could not for the life of him think what to ask. And so he walked away from the bus station, limping slightly, with the kit bag on his left shoulder, the coat on his right shoulder, and the stick in his right hand, and wandered for a while in the little town which he hardly knew. From the ends of the new streets he could see desolate expanses of desert, low, flat sandhills on which here and there were scattered the black tents of Bedouin shepherds.