by Amos Oz
A few moments later he boarded the first bus that stopped, without bothering to check its number or its destination. He sat down behind the driver still humming to himself, shamelessly out of tune, the song about Johnny Guitar. He saw no reason to get off before the terminus, which happened to be Prophet Samuel Street. Despite the cold and the wind, Fima was in very good form.
29
Before the Sabbath
HE was so happy that he did not feel hungry, despite having eaten nothing since the early morning, apart from the biscuits he nibbled in Yael’s kitchen. When he got off the bus, the rain had stopped. Among the wisps of dirty cloud, islands of blue were shining. For some reason it seemed that the clouds were standing still and the blue islands were floating westwards. And he felt that this blueness was aimed at him and was calling him to follow.
Fima began walking up Ezekiel Street. The first two lines of the song about Johnny Guitar were still resounding in his chest. But how did the song go on? Where in the world did Johnny end up? Where is he playing now?
There was a Sabbath eve smell in the Bukharian Quarter, even though it was still only half past twelve. Fima vaguely attempted to identify the components of this thick smell which reminded him of his childhood and of that fine excitement that used to course through him and through Jerusalem as the Sabbath approached. The smell sometimes began to fill the world even on Thursday afternoon, with the washing and the scrubbing and the cooking. The maid used to cook stuffed chicken’s necks sewn up with a needle and thread. His mother would make a plum compote that was as sweet and sticky as glue. And sweet stewed carrots, and gefilte fish, and pies, or a strudel, or pastries filled with raisins. And all kinds of jams and marmalades, one of which was called varyennye in Russian. Vividly there came back to Fima, as he walked, the smell and appearance of the wine-coloured borscht, a semi-solid soup with blobs of fat floating on the surface like gold rings, which he used to fish for with a spoon when he was little.
And every Friday his mother would wait for him precisely at midday at the gate of his school, with her blond plait framing her head like a wreath and a brown tortoiseshell comb planted at her golden nape. They would go together to do the last-minute shopping in Mahane Yehuda Market, he with his satchel on his back and she clutching her wicker shopping basket, a sapphire ring gleaming on her finger. The smells of the market, sharp, savoury Oriental smells, filled them both with childish glee. As though they were conspiring secretly against the heavy Ashkenazic sweetness of the pies at home and the cloying carrot and the strudel and the compote and the sticky jams. And indeed, his father disliked these Friday raids on the market. He grumbled sardonically that the child ought to be doing his homework or improving his body with exercises, and in any case they paid a fortune to have a maid, whose job it was to do the shopping, and surely one could buy everything nearby in Rehavia, so there was no need to drag the child among those filthy stalls with foul liquids swilling on the pavement. The Levant was swarming with germs, and all those pungent spices with their clamorous smells were nothing but a camouflage for filth. He made a joke of his wife’s attraction to the enchantments of the Thousands and One Nights, and what he termed her weekly quest for Ali Baba. Fima trembled inwardly at the recollection of the illicit thrill of helping his mother to choose from among various kinds of black olives, with their almost indecent smell and their sharp, dizzying taste. Sometimes he vaguely noticed the smouldering look one of the stallholders fixed on his mother, and although he was too young to know its meaning, he could faintly feel, as in a dream, an echo of a tremor that ran through his mother’s body and seemed to overflow into his own. He could hear her voice now, in the distance. Look what they’ve done to you, stupid. But this time he answered cheerfully, Never mind, you’ll see that I still haven’t said my last word.
On their way home after the market he always insisted on carrying the basket. His other arm he linked in hers. They always had lunch on Fridays in a little vegetarian restaurant in King George Street, a red-curtained establishment that made him think of abroad as he knew it from the cinema. It was run by a refugee couple, Mr and Mrs Danzig, a charming pair who looked so alike they might have been brother and sister. As indeed, Fima thought, perhaps they were. Who could tell? Their gentle manners brought a smile to his mother’s face like a beam of light. Fima felt a pang of longing as he recalled it. At the end of their meal, Mrs Danzig always placed two exact squares of almond chocolate in front of Fima. And she would say with a smile:
‘That is for gutt-boy who didn’t leave anything on his plate.’
She pronounced ‘gutt-boy’ without an article, as though it were his name. As for Mr Danzig, he was a round man with one cheek that was like raw butcher’s meat: Fima did not know if he had a chronic skin disease or a strange birthmark, or if it was a mysterious trace of an extensive burn. Mr Danzig would intone a verse, like a ritual, at the end of those Friday lunches:
‘Efraim iss a lovely child,
He finish all his dinner;
So now he vill be strong and vild,
And in our town the vinner –
Vot town?’
Fima’s role in this ceremony was to reply:
‘Jerusalem!’
But once, he rebelled and perversely answered: ‘Danzig!’ which he knew from his father’s stamp collection and also from the heavy German atlas that he used to browse in for hours on end, spread-eagled on the carpet in a corner of the salon, especially on winter evenings. This reply made Mr Danzig smile wistfully and say something that ended with mein Kind. Meanwhile his mother’s eyes for some reason filled with tears, and she suddenly squeezed Fima’s head to her bosom and covered his face with a volley of quick kisses.
What became of the Danzigs? They must have died ages ago. A branch of a bank had stood for years on the site of that little restaurant that gleamed with a cleanness which even now, a thousand years later, Fima could feel in his nostrils, and which for some reason smelled to him like fresh snow. On each table, on the spotless white tablecloth, there was always an upright rose in a glass vase. The walls were adorned with calm landscapes of lakes and forests. Sometimes at a table in the far corner near the potted palms a slim British officer would be lunching on his own. He would sit stiffly, with his peaked cap parked at the foot of the rose. Where have those pictures of lakes and forests ended up? Where in the world is that lonely English officer eating now? A city of longings and madness. A refugee camp, not a city.
But you could still get away from it. You could take Dimi and Yael away from here and join a kibbutz in the desert. You could propose to Tamar or to Annette Tadmor, settle down with her in Magdiel, and get a job as a clerk in a bank, in the health service, or in national insurance, and start writing poetry again in the evenings. Start a new chapter. Get a little closer to the Third State.
His feet led him of their own accord into the maze of narrow streets which is the Bukharian Quarter. Slowly he shuffled underneath gaudily bedecked washing lines stretched across the grey street. On balconies with rusting wrought-iron balustrades he could see dried skeletons of palm booths left over from the festival of Sukkoth, heaps of scrap iron and junk, suspended washing coppers, mouldering packing cases, jerry cans, all the refuse of the run-down flats. Almost every window here was curtained in garish colours. On the windowsills stood glass jars inside which cucumbers were slowly pickling in a broth of garlic, dill and parsley. Fima suddenly felt that these guttural places, built around courtyards with ancient stone wells, smelling of grilled meat, onions, baking pastry, spiced dishes, and smoke, offered him a simple, straightforward answer to a question he had totally failed to frame. But he felt something hammering urgently at his chest both outside and within, gently plucking and gnawing, like the long-forgotten music of Johnny Guitar, like the lakes and forests on the walls of the little restaurant that his mother used to take him to after shopping in the market on Fridays. And he said to himself:
‘That’s enough. Drop it.’
Like some
one scratching at a sore, unable to stop even though he knew he should.
In Rabbenu Gershom Street he passed three short, plump women who looked so alike that Fima supposed they were sisters, or perhaps a mother with her daughters. He eyed them with an intrigued gaze. They were lush, generously fleshed women, as curvaceous as slave girls in a painting of an Oriental seraglio. His imagination pictured their expansive, abundant nakedness, then their submissive, obedient surrender, like waitresses dishing out warm helpings to a queue of starving men without taking the trouble to distinguish the recipients or their handouts, bestowing the gift of their bodies indifferently, out of habit, and with a hint of boredom. The boredom and indifference seemed far more sexual and provocative to Fima at that moment than any sensuous excitement in the world. A moment later came a wave of shame that extinguished his desire. Why had he forgone Yael’s body that morning? If he had only invested a little more cunning and patience, if he had only persevered, surely she would have given in. Without desire, but so what? Was it a question of desire?
But then, what was it a question of?
The three women disappeared round the corner, but Fima stayed rooted to the spot, staring blankly, excited and ashamed. Surely the truth was that this morning he had not craved Yael’s emaciated body. Rather, he had longed vaguely for a different kind of union, not a carnal union, nor the union of child and mother, perhaps no union at all, something that Fima could not even name, but nevertheless he felt that this thing, elusive as it was and too fine to be defined, if he could only be blessed with it once, just once might change his life for the better.
On second thoughts he changed his mind. The words ‘change his life for the better’ seemed to suit a muddled, acne-ridden adolescent rather than a man who was capable of leading a nation out of crisis and onto the road to peace.
Later, Fima lingered outside a tiny shoeshop which was also a cobbler’s, to inhale the smell of caoutchouc, the intoxicating cobbler’s glue. And meanwhile he caught a snatch of conversation between a middle-aged religious man, who looked like the bursar of a charitable foundation or a minor synagogue functionary, and an overweight, shabby, unshaven reservist in ill-fitting fatigues.
The soldier said:
‘The thing with them is, the boy always looks after the granny. He doesn’t budge from her side all day long. Every thirty seconds he checks to make sure she hasn’t got away again, Heaven forbid! Her head’s gone to pieces but she’s still got the use of her legs, and take it from me, she’s as quick as a cat on them.’
The older man, the bursar, remarked sadly:
‘The mind inside the head looks like a piece of cheese. Sort of yellowy-white, with wrinkles. They showed it on the TV. And when your memory goes, the scientists have discovered that it comes from the dirt. It’s little worms that get inside and nibble at the cheese. Till it’s all rotten. You can even get a whiff of it sometimes.’
The soldier corrected him knowledgeably:
‘It’s not worms, its bactaria. The size of a grain of sand. You can hardly see them even with a magnifying glass, and there are hundreds of them born every hour.’
Fima went on his way, thinking over what he had heard. For a moment his nostrils could almost catch the smell of rotting cheese. Then he lingered in the doorway of a greengrocer’s. Crates of aubergines, onions, lettuces, tangerines and oranges were laid out on the pavement. Around them hovered flies and one or two wasps. It would be good to go for a walk down these lanes with Dimi someday. He could feel the warmth of the boy’s fingers in his empty hand. And he tried to imagine what sort of intelligent remarks he would hear from the pensive Challenger when they strolled here together, in what new light he would be made to see all these sights. Dimi would certainly notice aspects that were hidden from him, because he lacked the boy’s powers of observation. Who did Dimi get them from? Teddy and Yael were always concentrating on the tasks in front of them, whereas Baruch was absorbed in his anecdotes and morals. Maybe the best plan of action would be to move in with them. He could begin, for instance, with a temporary invasion, a bridgehead, using the decorators as an excuse, assuring the family at first that it was only for a day or two, a week at the most, he wouldn’t be a nuisance, he’d gladly sleep on a mattress in the utility room off the kitchen balcony. As soon as he arrived, he’d start cooking for them, washing up, ironing, looking after Dimi while they were out, helping him with his homework, washing Yael’s underwear, cleaning Teddy’s pipe for him; after all, they were out a good deal, whereas he was a man of leisure. After a few days they’d get used to the arrangement. They would appreciate its advantages. They would come to be dependent on Fima’s domestic services. They wouldn’t be able to manage without him. It might well be Ted, a broad-minded, unprejudiced individual, a clear-thinking scientist, who would see the all-round benefits. Dimi would no longer be left to roam around alone outside all day, relying on the kindness of the neighbours, at the mercy of their bullying children, or condemned to solitary confinement in front of the computer screen. Ted himself would be relieved of the burden of living constantly tête-à-tête with Yael, and so he too would be liberated a bit. As for Yael, it was hard to predict: she might accept the new arrangement with an indifferent shrug of the shoulders, she might just give one of her occasional silent laughs, or she might walk out and go back to Pasadena, leaving Dimi to Ted and me. This last possibility bathed Fima’s mind in a supernal glow of light. It seemed really exciting: a commune, an urban kibbutz, three male friends, devoted to one another, full of consideration, tied to each other by bonds of affection and mutual attentiveness.
The whole neighbourhood was pullulating with feverish preparations for the Sabbath. Housewives carried overflowing shopping baskets, traders hoarsely cried their wares, a battered pick-up with one rear light shattered like a black eye manoeuvred backwards and forwards four or five times until miraculously it managed to squeeze into a parking spot on the pavement between two equally battered trucks. Fima rejoiced at this success, as though it held a hint of an opportunity that lay in store for him too.
A pale East European with sloping shoulders and protruding eyes, who looked as though he suffered from ulcers if not a malignant illness, panted heavily as he pushed a squeaking pram laden with provisions in paper or plastic bags and a whole platoon of soft drinks up the hill. On top of the pile was an evening paper whose pages fluttered in the breeze. Fima squinted at the headlines as he reached out and carefully tucked the paper in among the bottles, so it wouldn’t blow away.
The old man merely said in Yiddish:
‘Nu. Shoin.’
A tawny dog sidled up obsequiously with its tail between its legs, timidly sniffed an apprehensive Fima’s trouser-bottoms, found nothing special, and moved away with lowered snout. Was it possible, Fima mused, that this dog was a son of a son of a daughter of a daughter of the notorious Balak, that went mad here eighty years ago and terrorised these very streets before dying in agony?
In a front yard he saw the remains of a castle built by children out of crates and broken packing cases. Then, on the wall of a synagogue named Redemption of Zion, Lesser Sanctuary of the Meshed Community were several graffiti that Fima stopped to inspect. ‘Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.’ Fima thought he detected a minor mistake in the Hebrew, although he was alarmed to find he was not entirely certain. ‘Kahana’s the master – Labur’s a disaster.’ ‘For slanderers be there no hope.’ Be there? May there be? Let there be? Again, he was not certain, and decided to check later, when he got home. ‘Shulamit Allony scrues with Arafat.’ ‘Remember thou art but dust.’ Fima agreed with this last motto and even nodded his head. ‘Rachel Babaioff is a scruber.’ To the left of this inscription Fima was pained to read: ‘Peace Now – pay later.’ But, then, he had always known that it was essential to plough deep. And then: ‘An eye for an eye for an’, which made Fima smile and wonder what the poet had meant. A different hand had written: ‘Traitor Malmilian – souled his mother!’ Fima, while realising th
at the author had meant to write ‘sold’, nonetheless found the error rather charming. As though a poetic inspiration had guided the writer’s hand to produce something he could not have been aware of.
Across the street from the Redemption of Zion stood a small shop, hardly more than a hole in the wall, selling stationery. The shop window was dotted with dead flies and still marked with the traces of crisscrossed tape put up against explosions, a souvenir of one of our vainly won wars. In the small window were displayed various types of dusty notebooks, exercise books whose covers were curling with age, a faded photograph of Moshe Dayan in lieutenant general’s uniform in front of the Wailing Wall which had also not been spared by the flies, plus compasses, rulers, and cheap plastic pencil cases, some of which bore pictures of wrinkled Ashkenazi rabbis or Sephardi Torah sages in ornate robes. In the midst of all this Fima’s eye tracked down a thick exercise book in a grey cardboard binding, containing several hundred pages, the sort that writers and thinkers of earlier generations must have used. He felt a sudden longing for his own desk, and a profound resentment towards the painters who were threatening his routine.
In three or four hours from now the siren would be wailing here to herald the advent of the Sabbath. The bustle of the streets would subside. A beautiful, gentle stillness, the silence of pines and stones and iron shutters, would spill down from the slopes of the hills surrounding the city and settle on the whole of Jerusalem. Men and boys in seemly festive attire, carrying embroidered tallit bags, would walk calmly to evening prayers at the innumerable little synagogues dotted around these narrow streets. The housewives would light candles, and fathers would chant the blessings in a pleasant Oriental tune. Families would gather together around the dinner table: poor, hard-worked people who placed their trust in the observance of the commandments and did not delve into things too deep for them, people who hoped for the best, who knew what they must do, and who were ever-confident that the powers that be also knew what to do for the best and acted wisely. Greengrocers, shopkeepers, hawkers and peddlers, apprentices, lowly clerks in the municipality and the civil service, petty traders, post office workers, salesmen, craftsmen. Fima tried to picture the weekday routine of a district like this and the enchantment of Sabbaths and festivals. Even though he did not forget that the residents here no doubt earned their meagre crusts with the sweat of their brow and were burdened with debts, worries about making ends meet, and mortgages, nevertheless he felt that they lived decent, truthful, restful lives, with a quiet joy that he had never known and never would, to his dying day. He suddenly longed to be sitting in his own room, or perhaps in the elegant salon in his father’s flat in Rehavia, surrounded by the lacquered furniture, the oriental rugs, the Central European candelabra, and books and fine china and glass, concentrating at last on what really mattered. But what was it that really mattered? In God’s name, what was it?