by Amos Oz
At the sound of these words the boy Jephthah picked up a small stone and touched his lips with it, and suddenly he pleaded out of the depths: God love me and I will be your servant, touch me and I will be the leanest and most terrible of your hounds, only do not be remote.
After the burial the sky closed in. Massive, dark shapes sped in succession on the wind, as though sent to crash against the wall of mountains to the east or to break through that same mountain wall. Later still, white flashes struck and then the low thunder rolled. The house built entirely of black volcanic stone stood in the midst of the storm looking as though it had already been burned.
Jephthah returned from the burial ground and entered the house. Pressed against the dark wall in the shadow of the entrance hall stood his three half-brothers, Jamin, Jemuel, and Azur, as though awaiting his return. He passed between them in the narrow hall, and their chests almost brushed his shoulders as he passed, yet not one of them moved or stirred. Only the wolflike look in their eyes groped at Jephthah’s skin as he passed between them in the entrance to the house. He did not speak and the brothers did not speak to him, they did not even speak to one another, not a whisper passed among them. All day long the three of them paced up and down the passages of the house; every footfall gave an impression of supreme delicacy, even though the brothers were generally clumsy men.
Jamin, Jemuel, and Azur paced up and down the house on tiptoe all day long, as though their brother Jephthah were dangerously ill.
Toward evening their mother Nehushtah left her bed and her bedchamber and went to stand at a window. But contrary to her habitual custom, she did not look through the window to see what was outside, but stood with her back to the window and her eyes on the orphan boy. With a chalk-white hand Nehushtah daughter of Zebulun stroked her hair. She said to her sons:
“From now on he, too, is an orphan cub.”
And the sons said:
“Because his mother is dead.”
She added in a whisper:
“You are all large and dark, but one of you is quite different, fair and very thin.”
And Jamin, the eldest, said:
“Thin and fair, but not one of us. The night is falling.”
That same night Nehushtah his stepmother suddenly came to see Jephthah in his room on the rooftop. She opened the door and stood barefoot in the doorway, just as Pitdah used to come barefoot, but between Nehushtah’s white fingers there was a white candle, and its flame was trembling violently. Jephthah saw her wan smile as she came close to his bed and passed a cold, damp hand across his brow. She whispered to him:
“Orphan. Go to sleep now, orphan.”
He did not know what to say to her.
“You are mine now, thin little orphan cub. Go to sleep now.”
With her fingertips she touched the curls on his chest for a moment. Then stopped.
When she left the room the stepmother blew out the lamp. She took both the lamp and the candle out with her when she went. It was dark.
All night long the storm raged outside. The wind hurled itself drunkenly against the walls of the house. The pillars groaned and the wooden ceiling whistled and creaked. In the yard the dogs went mad. The terrified cattle moaned and wailed in the darkness.
Jephthah stood watching at the door until dawn in case they came. He gripped his knife between his teeth. He imagined that beyond the door he could hear soft footsteps padding up and down, the whisper of cloth rubbing against stone, a rustling sound on the topmost stair. And outside a hyena laughed, a bird screeched, iron clanged at the edge of the shadows. The house and the farm stood strange and sinister.
At first light Jephthah slipped out through the window of his room and shinned down the vine with his knife between his teeth. He stole bread, water, a horse, and a dagger from the empty farmyard and fled to the desert to escape from Jamin, Jemuel, and Azur his brothers, his father’s sons.
Gilead the Gileadite, the lord of the property, had not appeared at the graveside of his servant Pitdah in the plot reserved for outcasts, nor after the burial, in the evening or the night.
The sun rose and the storm ceased. The desert sand drank up all the puddles of water and once more became arid and brilliant in the terrible light.
The whiteness of those wide expanses rose uncompromising and merciless.
Only in the crannies of the rocks did a little water still remain, dazzled by the blinding sunlight. For a moment Jephthah imagined that the hollows of the stones were clutching the remains of last night’s lightning. He had seen all these sights before in his dreams. Everything, the mountains, the sand dunes, the wind, and the dazzle, everything called out to him, Come, come.
After a few hours, when his horse had carried him well away from his father’s house, his mind suddenly cleared. To the Ammonites. It was time for him to go to the children of Ammon. With the Ammonite bands he would return when the right time came and set fire to the whole farm. As the fire consumed everything, Jephthah the Ammonite would emerge through the flames carrying the unconscious body of the old man in his arms. He would lay him down among the embers and ashes and crouch over him to give him water and dress his wounds. When Gilead had lost his wife, his farm, and his sons, what would he have left except his last son, who had saved his life.
And then they could both set out together to look for the sea.
The following night, by the light of a clay lamp, the household clerk wrote in the household records: Jephthah shall have no inheritance in his father’s house because he is the son of another woman. And the household clerk wrote further in the household records: Darkness and wrath surely beget wrath and darkness. This whole affair is evil: evil is he who has fled and evil are those that remain. Evil will also be our latter end. May God forgive his servant.
5
JEPHTHAH DWELLED for many days among the Ammonites in the city of Abel-Keramim. From his childhood he spoke their language and knew their laws and their songs, because his mother had been an Ammonite woman who was snatched by the Gileadites when they raided the Ammonite settlements beyond the desert.
Indeed, in Abel-Keramim he also discovered his mother’s father and all her brothers, who were great men, and they adopted Jephthah and took him into the palaces and temples. The Ammonite princes honored and exalted Jephthah, because the sound of his voice was cold and lordly and a yellow glint sometimes appeared in his eye, and also because he was very sparing in his use of words.
They said:
“This man was born to be a leader.”
And they also said:
“Truly it seems that this man is always at rest.”
And also:
“It is very hard to know.”
When shooting arrows or carousing, Jephthah sometimes seemed to those around him to be moving slowly, almost wearily or with a slight hesitancy. How deceptive this was: like a knife reposing between folds of silk.
He had the power to say to a stranger: Rise, come, go; and the man would rise or come or go, although Jephthah made not a sound, only his lips moved. Even when he turned to one of the elders of the city and said, Now speak, I am listening, or, Do not speak, I am not listening, the elder felt an inner compulsion to reply; Yes, my lord.
He was loved by many women in the city of Abel-Keramim. Like his father Gilead before him, he was endowed with powers of sadness and powers of silent dominion. Women longed to dissolve the power and penetrate the sadness and also to submit to them. At night, between the silken sheets, they whispered into his ear: You stranger. When his skin touched theirs they would cry out. And he, mute and remote, knew how to extract from them a gushing melody, as well as slow, tormented tunes, a fervent arching and swelling beyond endurance, patiently sailing upstream night after night to the very limit of the soul.
In those days Gatel ruled over the children of Ammon. He was a boy king. When Jephthah came before King Gatel the king looked at him as a sickly youth looks at a racing charioteer, and asked him to tell him stories: let the stranger
tell the king stories to sweeten his sleep at night.
And so Jephthah sometimes came to King Gatel at the end of the day to tell him about rending a wolf barehanded, about the wars of shepherds and nomads, about whitening bones in the desert at midday, about the terror of the night sounds that rise from the desert at the middle watch.
Sometimes the king would plead, More, more; sometimes he would implore, Don’t leave me, Jephthah, sit here till I fall asleep, because of the dark; and sometimes he would suddenly burst out laughing feebly like a haunted man, unable to stop unless Jephthah laid a hand on his shoulder and said to him: That’s enough, Gatel.
Then the king of the Ammonites would stop laughing and turn his pitiful blue eyes on Jephthah and beg, More, more.
In the course of time King Gatel made Jephthah his confidant and was always watching attentively for the yellow spark which did or did not glint in Jephthah’s eye.
The elders of Ammon looked askance on all this: A young slave has come to the city out of the sand dunes, and now the king is under his spell, and must we watch and say nothing.
King Gatel was an assiduous reader of the chronicles of ancient times. He had set his heart on being like one of those mighty kings who had brought many lands under their dominion. But because he loved words with all his being and always paid more attention to the words in which his chronicle would be written than to the victorious deeds themselves, he was smitten by serious doubts about even simple questions. If he had to select a new groom, or order the construction of a new turret, or in general to choose between two different courses of action, he would torment himself with doubts all night long because he could always see both sides of the problem.
If ever Jephthah deigned to hint which was the better course or which would end badly, Gatel would be overcome with gratitude and affection, of which he was unable to express to Jephthah even the smallest part, because it is the way of words to delude the man who courts them.
He would say:
“Let’s ride to Aroer or Rabbat-Ammon to see if the figs are ripe yet.”
Then he would add:
“Or perhaps we shouldn’t, because the stars do not favor a journey today.”
Or else:
“I had a pain in my ear and in my knee all night. And now I have a toothache and a bellyache. Tell me another story about that boy you told me about, the one who could speak the language of the dogs. Don’t leave me.”
And so it came to pass that King Gatel fell in love and confusion, and would stamp his foot with longing if Jephthah did not come to the palace in the morning. And within the palace a secret enmity was hatched. People said to one another:
“This will lead to no good.”
Abel-Keramim was a large and happy city. Its wines flowed abundantly, its women were round-hipped and sweet-scented, its servants were eager and merry, its maidservants were easygoing, and all its horses were swift. Chemosh and Milcom had showered the city with delights. Every evening the trumpets sounded for banquets, and at night sounds of players and musicians rose up and rows of torches blazed in the squares of the city until morning light appeared and the caravans set out through the city gates.
Jephthah did not stand aloof from the pleasures of Abel-Keramim. He tried everything and saw everything, but he touched it all with his fingertips only, because his heart was far away and he said to himself: Let the Ammonites play before me. Three or even four women flocked to him in the same night, and Jephthah loved to revel with them and enjoy them one by one while they enjoyed each other in unison and he would enter among them a scourge of lust a rod of rage and sometimes after all the sound and fury they would sing him Ammonite songs about expanses of water or bucks in the vineyard or suffering and grace while he lay back among them awash on a sea like a dream-swept child. At first light he would say to them all, Now, go, that’s enough. And he would sit at the window watching the fingers of light and the pallor of the mountains and the distant conflagration and finally also the sun.
The summer came and went. The autumn winds snatched at the treetops. Old horses suddenly reared and whinnied. Jephthah sat at the window and remembered his father’s house. He suddenly longed to be sitting in the stable with the household priest and his three brothers Jamin, Jemuel, and Azur while the priest read to them from a holy book and outside the water ran in the channels, the orchards were cloaked in wintry sadness, and the scent of autumn rose from the vineyards as the vine leaves fell. The longing pierced and stung him with the sharpness of an arrow until his soul was writhing in torment.
He rose and stood at the window while, behind him on his couch, one of the beautiful women lay sleeping, her hair covering her face, breathing peacefully. It sounded to him like a soft evening breeze, and all of a sudden he could not remember who she was, or even whether he had already been with her or if he still had to go to her, and why.
Jephthah sat down on the end of the bed and began singing his mother’s songs to the sleeping woman. But his voice was rough and the song came out bitter and rasping. He reached out and touched her cheek with his fingertips, and she did not wake up. He rose and returned to the window and saw dark clouds hurrying eastward in a panic, as though something were happening beyond the eastern horizon and he must arise and go there at once, now, before it was too late. But he did not know what the place was or why it might be too late or who it was who was calling him to go, and he only said to himself:
“Not here.”
And then Jephthah also thought: My brother Azur is not Abel and I am not Cain. O Lord of the asp in the desert, do not hide yourself from me. Call me, call me, gather me to you. If I am not worthy to be your chosen one, take me to be your hired assassin: I shall go in the night with my knife in your name to your foes, and in the morning you may hide your face from me as you will, as if we were strangers. You are the lord of the fox and the vulture and I love your wrath and I do not ask you to lift up the brightness of your countenance toward me. Your wrath and barren sorrow are all I want. Surely anger and sadness are a sign to me that I am made in your image, I am your son, I am yours, and you will take me to you by night, for in the image of your hatred am I made, O lord of the wolves at night in the desert. You are a weary and a desperate God, and whomsoever you love, him will you burn with fire, for you are jealous. I say to you cursed be your love, O God, and cursed be my love of you. I know your secret for I am in your secret: you paid heed to Abel and his offering but in your heart it was Cain, Cain, that you loved, and therefore you spread your wrathful care upon Cain and not upon his simplehearted brother. And you chose Cain and not Abel to be a fugitive and a vagabond upon the face of this evil earth, and you set the seal of your image upon his brow to wander to and fro in all the land and to stamp your seal the seal of a barren God upon people and hills, O God of Cain, O God of Jephthah son of Pitdah. Cain is a witness and I am a witness to your image, O lord of the lightning in the forest of the fire in the granary of the howling of maddened dogs in the night, I know you for you are in me. I the son of the Ammonite woman loved my mother, and my mother clove to my father out of the depths, and out of the depths my father cried to you. Give me a sign.
The city of Abel-Keramim stood at the crossroads of the caravan routes, and as dusk fell long lines of caravans from afar passed under its gates, laden with all the riches of Egypt, spices and perfumes and copper from Assyria, glassware from Phoenicia, fragrant game from the land of Edom to the south, from Judea grapes and olives, wines from the Euphrates, silk from Aleppo, little blue-eyed boys from the blue isles of the sea, Hittite harlots, bracelets, myrrh, and concubines; by nightfall everything was gathered within the walls, the heavy gates were barred, and the whole city was filled with torchlight and tumult. Sometimes the golden domes caught flashes of light and seemed to sparkle with blood and fire and all the temples overflowed with strains of ecstatic music.
Jephthah wallowed in wine, women, and court life. Despite all this luxury, his visage appeared as if scorched by fire. On his couch a
t night he was caressed by the fairest women of the city; they sipped his wintry powers like dazed birds. Their lips fluttered among the hair of his chest and they whispered to him: You stranger. He said nothing, but his eyes turned inward because nowhere around could they find.
In the course of time jealousy began to swell in the city. The notables of Ammon were jealous because of their wives and daughters, and also on account of the king. The elders said in their council: Ammon serves King Gatel, and King Gatel is like a woman in the hands of Jephthah the Gileadite, and this Jephthah is not one of us but belongs only to himself.
These words even reached the ears of the king, who already despised himself for his love of Jephthah. Sometimes at night he would say to himself, Why do I not have this fair-haired man killed.
But he hesitated, because he could see both sides of the question.
When the words of the elders reached his ears, and rumor whispered that the king was like a harlot before the stranger, his eyes brimmed with tears. All the days of his youth he had dreamed of waging great wars like one of the mighty kings of old, but he did not know how to make war, and whenever he so much as set foot outside his palace the sunlight made his head reel and the very smell of a horse always made his teeth chatter. Therefore he summoned Jephthah one day and said to him: Take men, chariots, and lances, take horses and horsemen, take priests and magicians, and go to the land of Gilead to conquer the land into which your mother was carried to servitude. If you refuse to go that will prove that the elders are right, that you are not one of us but a stranger. I am the king and I have spoken. Fetch me a glass of water.