Panther in the Basement

by Amos Oz

  five

  Ben Hur was a foxlike boy; he was sharp and fair and skinny, with eyes that were almost khaki. I didn't like him. In fact, we weren't even friends. There was something else, something much closer than friendship. If Ben Hur had ordered me, say, to remove all the water in the Dead Sea to the Upper Galilee, bucket by bucket, I would have obeyed, so that when I had finished I might have a chance of hearing him say, out of the corner of his mouth, in that lazy drawl of his, the words "You're OK, Proffy." Ben Hur used words like someone throwing gravel at a streetlamp. He hardly parted his teeth when he spoke, as though he could not be bothered. Sometimes he pronounced the first P of Proffy with a kind of contemptuous little explosion: Proffy.

  Ben Hur's sister, Yardena, played the clarinet. Once, she cleaned up a cut on my knee and put a bandage on it, and I regretted not having a cut on my other knee, too. When I thanked her, she burst into tinkling laughter and turned to a nonexistent audience: Look, a clam-boy. I didn't know what Yardena meant by calling me a clam-boy, but I already knew that one day I would know and that when I did it would turn out that I had always known. It's a complicated thing and I must try to find a simpler way to explain it. Maybe like this. I had a kind of shadow knowledge that sometimes comes long before knowledge itself. And it was precisely because of this shadow knowledge that I had a feeling that I was a low-down traitor that evening on the roof, when I accidentally saw her changing her clothes, and what I almost didn't see came back to me on many occasions: over and over again I almost didn't see it. I was so embarrassed that every time this happened I felt a shudder like you do when chalk scrapes on the blackboard, or like the sour taste of soap between my teeth, which is the taste a traitor has in his mouth at the moment of betrayal or soon afterward. I wanted to write her a letter, to explain that I had had no intention whatever of spying on her, and to apologize. But how could IP Especially because from then on, every time I went back to my lookout on the roof, I was unable not to remember that the window was there, opposite, and that I mustn't look in that direction, even by accident, even against my will, even in passing, as I scanned the horizon from Mount Nebi Samwil toward Mount Scopus.

  Ben Hur and I were joined by Chita Reznik, the boy with two fathers. (The first one was always away on trips and the second one would disappear from the house a few hours before the first got back. We all made fun of Chita, calling him Revolving Door and so on, and Chita used to join in the fun, laughing at his mother and his two fathers, playing the fool, giving a series of monkey imitations, making faces and uttering chimpanzee barks that somehow came out more like whimpers.) Chita Reznik was a slave-boy. He was always the one who ran to fetch balls that flew over the fence into the wadi. He always carried the piles of supplies when we set off for Tibet to hunt for the abominable snowman. He would fish matches, springs, shoelaces, a corkscrew, a penknife out of his pockets, anything you asked him for or that anyone needed. At the end of the great tank battles on the rug, Chita always stayed behind to pick up the dominoes and checkers and put them all away in their boxes.

  We staged these tank battles nearly every morning, after my parents had left for work. We conducted extensive maneuvers in readiness for the day when the British would leave and we would have to repel a coordinated attack by all the Arab armies. My father had a whole shelf of books on military history. With the help of these books and the big maps on the wall in the hallway we reenacted on the rug the toughest engagements at Dunkirk, Stalingrad, El-Alamein, Kursk, and the Ardennes, learning vital lessons for our own imminent war.

  At eight o'clock in the morning, as soon as the door closed behind my mother and father, I would quickly tidy the kitchen, close the windows and shutters to keep the apartment cool and deter snoopers, and deploy the pieces on the rug in the opening positions of a crucial battle. I used buttons, matchsticks, dominoes, checkers and chessmen, pins with flags, and colored threads to mark borders and battle lines. I placed all the combat units of the various powers at their starting points. And I waited. Shortly before nine Ben Hur and Chita would knock at the door, first two quick, firm knocks and then, after a pause, a softer one. I identified them through the spyhole, and we exchanged passwords. Chita, outside, would ask "Freedom?" and I, on the inside, would answer "Or Death."

  Sometimes, in the middle of a battle, Ben Hur would declare a break and then he would lead us in a raid on the icebox. I liked those mornings, especially those rare moments when Ben Hur uttered through pursed lips the words "You're OK, Proffy."

  I did not know yet that these words are only worth anything when you say them to yourself. And in honesty.

  By the time a quarter of the holiday had passed, we had made certain deductions about where Rommel and Zhukov, Montgomery and George Patton had gone wrong, and how we ourselves would avoid making the same mistakes when the moment came. We would take the big map of Palestine and its surroundings down off the wall, lay it on the rug, and practice driving the British out and repelling the combined Arab armies. Ben Hur was the commanding officer and I was the grey matter. Incidentally, even now as I write I have a wall in my home that is covered with maps. Sometimes I stand in front of them, put on my glasses (which are nothing like my father's round ones), and follow the course of the war in Bosnia or Azerbaijan as described in the news on the radio or in the papers. There is always a war going on somewhere in the world. Sometimes I suspect, from looking at the map, that one of the sides has made a mistake, has failed to notice an opportunity to pull off a surprise outflanking movement.

  By the middle of the summer I was preparing plans for a Hebrew Armada, with destroyers, submarines, frigates, and aircraft carriers. I was planning to investigate the possibility of a coordinated lightning strike on the British naval bases all around the shores of the Mediterranean, in Port Said, Famagusta, Malta, Mersa Matruh, Gibraltar. Only not here, in Haifa, because they would obviously be expecting something here. Were there any other British bases in the Mediterranean basin? I was planning to put this question to Sergeant Dunlop at our next meeting in the Orient Palace Café. I could ask him with apparently innocent curiosity the sort of question you might expect to hear from a child who was interested in geography. But on second thought I dropped the idea, afraid that simply putting the question might arouse suspicion, and thus jeopardize the element of surprise that was vital to the success of our plan.

  Better to ask Father.

  But in fact there was no need to ask anyone. I could check it for myself. I could correlate information freely available in the encyclopedia with other information freely available on the maps in the atlas. The correlation of freely available sources can sometimes yield valuable secret information. (I still believe this. Sometimes I put an ostensibly innocent question to somebody, such as, What is your favorite view? And later on in the conversation, after half an hour or so, I casually ask what he or she wanted to be when they grew up. I compare the two answers in my mind, and I know.)

  The Hebrew Armada never put to sea, and now it never would. Instead, I was to face a court martial on a charge of low-down treason and passing secrets to the enemy.

  I thought to myself: You could even call Robin Hood a traitor. However, only a petty person would concern himself with that aspect of Robin Hood. Even though it did exist. It's a fact.

  But what is treachery really?

  I sat in my father's chair. I switched on the desk lamp. I took an oblong card from the pile. I wrote on it something like this: "Check whether there is any connection between the word boged, 'traitor,' and the word beged, 'clothing.' Cf. 'a wolf in sheep's clothing.' " A traitor covers things up, just as clothes do. And clothes get torn just when you least expect it. Also, if you put warm clothes on, there's a heat wave, and if you dress for the hot weather, suddenly it's freezing cold. (Though in point of fact the treachery here is due to the weather, not to the clothes.) In Bible class with Mr. Zerubbabel Gihon, we studied a verse from Job: "My brethren have dealt treacherously as a river." Not the peaceful rivers of the Ukra
ine that Mother talks about so wistfully, but the rivers here in the Land of Israel: treacherous rivers. In the heat of summer, when you are thirsty, they give you burning gravel instead of water, whereas in winter when you are walking along the riverbed, they suddenly flood. The Prophet Jeremiah laments: "For the house of Israel and the house of Judah have dealt very treacherously against me, said the Lord." And Jeremiah, too, was called a traitor: they tried him and found him guilty and threw him in a pit.

  Whereas the expression "low-down," I noted on another card, means vile or base. Low can mean low-spirited, gloomy, or depressed. It is related to lowly, meaning pitiful or humble. Or mean. So is low the opposite of proud or arrogant? Ben Hur Tykocinski is arrogant, but he is also mean. (And how about me? I didn't have the courage to write to Yardena and apologize for spying on her.) I must ask Sergeant Dunlop how you say "low-down traitor" in English and whether English also has a connection between treachery and clothing and between baseness and humility.

  Will I ever see him again?

  Asking myself this question made me miss him. Naturally I never forgot for a moment that he belonged to the opposite side, to the enemy. But he was not a private enemy, although he was a private. He was mine.

  I can't put it off any longer. I must talk now about Sergeant Dunlop and about our relationship. Even though it's hard for me to do so.

  six

  We used to meet secretly three or four times a week in the back room of the Orient Palace Café. Despite its name, this was actually a run-down tin shack covered with a dense jungle of passionflower, in a little alley to the west of the army camp. In the front room there was a billiard table covered in green baize, which was always surrounded by a perspiring group of English soldiers and policemen and a few young Jerusalem men with smart shirts and ties, Jews, Arabs, Greeks, Armenians, with gold rings and greased-down hair, as well as two or three girls floating on clouds of perfume. I never lingered in this front room: I reminded myself that I was there on a mission. I never peeped in the direction of the barmaid. Everybody who spoke to her tried to make her laugh, and nearly everybody succeeded. She had a habit of leaning forward as if she was bowing whenever she pushed a glass of frothy beer to the front of the bar, and as she did so a deep cavern opened up in the top of her dress, and some people might have found it hard not to look, but I never so much as glanced at her.

  I would hurriedly cross this front room, which was full of laughter and smoke, and go on into the inner room, which was quieter and had only four or five tables, covered with oilcloth printed with flowers and Greek ruins. Young men sometimes sat there playing backgammon, sometimes a couple or two sat close together, but unlike the outer room, people there spoke in whispers. Sergeant Dunlop and I used to sit for an hour or an hour and a half at the table in the corner, with several books open in front of us: a Hebrew Bible, a pocket dictionary, a first English reader. Now that more than forty-five years have gone by, and Britain is no longer an enemy, and the Hebrew State exists, now that Ben Hur Tykocinski is called Mr. Benny Takin and owns a chain of hotels, and Chita Reznik earns his living repairing solar water heaters, and I still chase words and put them in their proper places, I may as well write this: I betrayed no secrets to Stephen Dunlop. Not a single one, not even a little one. I didn't even tell him my name. Right to the end. All I did was to read the Bible with him in Hebrew and teach him some modern words that are not in the Bible, and in exchange he helped me to learn the rudiments of English. He was a perplexed and, by his own account, lonely man. He was a large, broad man, pink-faced, spongelike, a bit of a gossip, and he blushed a lot. His legs below his shorts seemed pudgy and hairless, with little wrinkles like those you see on the limbs of a baby who has not yet learned to walk.

  Sergeant Dunlop had brought with him from Canterbury, his hometown, a kind of Hebrew that he had learned from his uncle, the vicar. (His brother, Jeremy Dunlop, was also in the church: he was a missionary in Malaya.) His Hebrew was soft, like cartilage, as though it had no bones. He had no friends, he claimed. ("Neither have I enemies or foes," he added without my asking.) He was serving in the British Police in Jerusalem as an accountant and pay clerk. Occasionally, when there was an emergency, he would be sent to guard a government office for half a night or to check identity cards at a roadblock. I recorded all these details in my memory the moment they came out of his mouth. In the evening, when I was at home, I wrote it all down in a notebook to swell the information stored at the FOD Organization headquarters. Sergeant Dunlop was fond of retailing little items of gossip about his friends and superiors: which one was a miser, a dandy, a sycophant, who had recently changed his aftershave, which high-ranking CID officer had to use a special antidandruff shampoo. All these details made him giggle, which embarrassed him, but he still found it hard to stop. Major Bentley had bought a silver bracelet for Colonel Parker's secretary. Lady Nolan had a new cook. Mrs. Sherwood left the room in disgust every time Captain Bolder came in.

  I tut-tutted politely and imprinted it all in my memory. And my heart slunk barefoot, on tiptoe, a beggar among dukes and earls, my eyes gaping in amazement, through high-ceilinged, mahogany-paneled rooms lit by chandeliers, watching Captain Bolder entering proudly and the beautiful Mrs. Sherwood immediately turning on her heel and flouncing out.

  Apart from the language of the Prophets, Sergeant Dunlop also knew Latin and some Greek, and in his spare time he was teaching himself literary Arabic ("that the three sons of Noah—Shem, Ham, and Japheth—may dwell together in my heart, as it was before the division of tongues"). He pronounced the name Ham like the English word ham, instead of with the Hebrew guttural H sound, and noticing me stifling my amusement, he said, "I speak as I may speak." I could not stop myself confiding in him that my father also knew Latin and Greek, and other languages besides. Then I felt sorry and ashamed of myself, because we must under no circumstances communicate even innocent information like that to them: it is impossible to know what use they might make of it. After all, the British, too, can collate one freely available fact with another, and come up with a secret that they can exploit to our disadvantage.

  Now I must explain how Sergeant Dunlop and I became acquainted. We met as enemies. Pursuer and pursued. Policeman and Underground fighter.

  seven

  Late afternoon at the beginning of the summer holidays I set out by myself to investigate possible hiding places in the caves behind Sanhedriya. In one of the caves my search revealed a small chamber almost entirely blocked up with a heap of stones and dust. A superficial exploration brought to light four cartridge cases from rifle bullets, and I made up my mind that it was my duty to continue searching. When it grew dark and a coldness like the touch of a corpse wafted toward me out of the depth of the cave, I went out. Night had fallen. The curfew had emptied the streets. My heart thumped, panic-stricken, in my chest as though it were trying to punch out a little space behind itself that it could hide in.

  I decided to creep home through the backyards. Starting in early spring, the FOD had devised a network of crossings from one yard to the next. Following a directive I had received from Ben Hur and transmitted, after working on it and improving it, as an order to Chita Reznik, Chita had laid out pathways of planks, stones, crates, and ropes linking strategic points. So we could get over fences and walls and sally forth or retreat through the maze of backyards and gardens.

  Suddenly a single shot rang out not far away. A real shot: sharp, savage, and terrifying.

  My shirt stuck to my skin with fear. The blood throbbed in my temples and my neck like a tom-tom. Panting and terrified I started running monkeylike, bent double, over fences and through bushes, grazing my knees, hitting my shoulder against a stone wall, catching the cuff of my shorts on a wire fence but not stopping to loosen it: like a lizard shedding its tail, I dragged myself free, leaving a tatter of cloth and a shred of torn skin in the fence's grip.

  I had just left the shelter of the back steps of the post office, whose dark windows were protected by
grilles, and was on the point of slipping diagonally across Zephaniah Street, when a dazzling beam of light suddenly hit me in the eyes and in the same instant something cold and soft and moist, like the touch of a frog, made contact with my back and groped its way up my spine and into my hair. I froze, like a hare in the split second before the predator's claws strike. The hand that was clutching my hair was not strong, but big and soft, like a jellyfish. So was the voice behind the blinding light: not the usual British bark, but a single porridgelike syllable: "Halt!" Then at once, in classroom Hebrew but with a rounded English accent: "Whither dost thou hasten?"

  It was a clumsy, rather feeble British policeman. A metal badge bearing his identification number shone on each shoulder. His cap was askew. We were both panting hoarsely. Our faces were dripping sweat. He was wearing khaki shorts that reached down to his knees and khaki socks that reached up to his knees. Between the two his knees gleamed faintly in the dark; they looked plump and soft.

  "Please, sir," I said in the language of the enemy. "Please, kindly sir, let me go home."

  He answered, again in Hebrew. Not in our kind of Hebrew, though. He said:

  "Let not the lad go astray in the darkness."

  Then he said he would take me to my front door, and that I must show him the way.

  I should not really have done it, because our policy was to disobey all their orders and so to impede the motion of their repressive machinery. But what alternative did I have? His hand was on my shoulder. Up to that evening, I had never laid hands on an Englishman and no Englishman had laid hands on me. I had often read in the papers about the hand of the British. For instance: "Hands off our survivors." Or: "May the arrogant hand raised against the last of our hope be lopped off!" Or: "Cursed be the hand that shakes hands with our oppressors."