Where the Jackals Howl
Page 24
Silently he stood without moving at the entrance to his father’s estate, and his eyes were closed.
Then the old man Gilead raised his hand to silence the singers and players, and the cheering crowds so that the judge of Israel could speak to the people.
All the people stopped to listen. Only the torchlight trembled in the silent breeze.
The judge of Israel opened his mouth to speak to the people, and suddenly he collapsed on the ground, howling like a wolf that has been pierced by an arrow.
My lady mother, his lips said. And one of the elders of the tribe who was present thought in his heart: This man is deceptive; he is not one of us.
9
SHE ASKED him for two months, and he, as though he had forgotten everything, said to her:
“Leave this place, go to another country and never come back to me.”
The girl laughed and answered:
“Put this cloak over your head and eyes and moo, and we’ll watch you and laugh.”
And he, lost among his longings, said:
“Look, Pitdah, on the fence, there’s a lizard. Now it’s gone.”
For two months she wandered in the mountains and her maidens followed after her. The shepherds fled at their approach. If she passed through one of the villages, the villagers hid indoors. Silently they went clad in white along moonswept ravines. What was the message of this ghostly pallor, dead silver light on dead hilltops. No wild beast touched them. Olive trees twisted with age did not dare to scratch their skin. Their footfall was muffled by the dust like the rustling of leaves in the breeze. With what sense must one listen to the many sounds, and with what sense listen to stillness. Man and woman, father, mother, and son, father and mother and daughter, a pair of brothers, winter, autumn, spring, and summer, water and wind, all are merely distance upon distance, and whether you scream or laugh or remain silent, everything without exception will be absorbed into the stillness of the stars and the sadness of those hills.
Pitdah was dark and beautiful as she walked and laughed in her bridal wreath, and wretched nomads who saw her from a distance said: She is a stranger, the daughter of a stranger, no man may approach her and live.
When two months had passed she returned. Jephthah had set up an altar on one of the mountains, and the fire and the knife were in his hand. In later times the wandering tribesmen would speak around their campfires at night of the great joy they had both shown, she a bride on her marriage couch and he a youthful lover stretching out his fingers to the first touch. And they were both laughing as wild beasts laugh in the dark of night, and they did not speak, only Jephthah said to her, Sea, sea.
You have chosen me out of all my brothers and dedicated me to your service. You shall have no other servant before me. Here is the dark beauty under my knife; I have not withheld my only daughter from you. Grant me a sign, for surely you are tempting your servant.
Afterward the night beasts shrieked among the rocks and the barren desert stretched to the tops of the distant hills.
10
SIX YEARS did Jephthah the Gileadite judge Israel. He sank up to his neck in blood, and he provoked Gilead against Ephraim to destroy Israel, just as he had spoken in his youth to Gatel king of Ammon saying: I have no part in Israel nor any inheritance among the children of Ammon; I shall put both you and your enemies to the sword, for I have been a stranger all the days of my life.
And after six years he tired of judging and returned alone to the desert. No man approached him, for there was a deathly fear upon all the nomads of the Land of Tob. Only his half-brother Azur would come down and leave him bread and water at a distance. And the lean hounds always came down with him.
For a whole year Jephthah dwelt alone in a cave in the Land of Tob. He studied all the night sounds which came up from the wilderness when the desert bristled, until he could utter them all himself, and then he decided: Enough.
In the chronicle of the household the household scribe wrote:
And after him Ibzan of Beth-lehem judged Israel. And he had thirty sons and thirty daughters.
1966
1974–75
* [The Hebrew word ruah has multiple meanings: wind, spirit, intellect, ghost, to mention only a few. In this story it also refers to the ideological convictions of the old man. The title is borrowed from Ecclesiastes 11:5.—TRANS.]
[back]