Panther in the Basement

by Amos Oz

  eighteen

  Next morning, the instant the door closed behind them, I approached the shelf and stood a breath's space away, without touching. I tried to make out whether the package was exhaling a faint chemical smell, at least a hint of a smell. But only the smells of the library, civilian smells of glue dust and bygone days, surrounded me. I went back to the kitchen to clear away the remains of breakfast. I washed the dishes and laid them out to drain. I went from room to room closing the shutters and windows against the incursions of summer. Then I started to patrol the route between the front door and the hiding place, backward and forward, a panther in a basement. I was utterly unable to return to the plans for the attack on Government House that I had been busy with until yesterday. That brown package, disguised as a literary gem in Polish, slumbering innocently on the shelf, fascinated me like a kind of Pandora's box.

  At first the temptations were weak and coy, hardly daring to hint to me what I really wanted. But gradually they became bolder, more explicit, licking at the toes of my sandals, tickling the palms of my hands, calling out to me brazenly, pulling me shamelessly by the sleeve.

  Temptations are like sneezes, which start from nothing at all, a faint pinching sensation at the base of your nose, and then gradually take over so that there's no stopping them. Temptations generally start from a little patrol to check the terrain, tiny ripples of vague, undefined excitement, and, before you know what it wants of you, you start to feel a gradual glow inside, as you do when you switch on an electric fire and the element is still grey but it starts to make little popping noises and then it blushes very faintly and then more deeply and soon it is glowing angrily and you are full of reckless lightheadedness; so what, what the hell, why not, what harm can it do, like a very vague but wild, uninhibited sound deep inside you, coaxing and pleading with you: Come on, why not, just put the tip of your finger very close to the wrapping paper on the secret package, just feel it without touching, just sense with the pores of your skin near the fingernail what invisible emanation may be coming from inside. Is it warm? Is it cold? Does it vibrate slightly, like electricity? In fact, why not, what the hell, what harm can it do just to touch it lightly, just once? Very quickly. After all, this is only the outer wrapping, neutral, like any other wrapper, hard (or soft?), smooth (or just a tiny bit rough, like the green baize on that billiard table?) and flat (or are there perhaps invisible protuberances that might give your finger some unimagined hints?). What harm can touching do? Just very lightly, hardly touching at all. As if you were feeling a bench or a fence that says "wet paint."

  In fact, why not something more than a touch: a cautious prod? Gently. Like a doctor's hand carefully feeling the stomach to find out where it hurts, whether it is soft or tense. Or like a finger carefully feeling a pear: is it ripe? Hard? Almost ripe? In fact, what's wrong with taking it off theshelf for a moment? Just for ten seconds, or less, just to weigh it in your hand. To check if it's light or heavy. Is it dense? Or stiff? Is it like a lexicon? Or like a paperbound periodical? Or is it like a fragile glass object that is wrapped in straw or cotton wool or sawdust, so that you can feel the softness of the wrapping material and the hardness of the object itself through the soft wrapping? Or is it full of dull heaviness pulling downward, like a casket full of lead? Or will it turn out to be something furlike, responding and yielding to your fingers through the brown wrapping paper, pliant between your hands, like a cushion, a teddy bear, a cat? What on earth can it be? Just a hint of a touch, there, a kiss with the fingertip, just a touch like mist, like lips, and just a little stroke, hardly a stroke at all, so, yes, then a tiny prod, very quickly, and pull it out very slightly, so that you can feel both sides of the package and finger the sticky paper, and what the hell, why not, take it right out of the bookcase and hold it in your arms for a moment, like a fighter carrying a comrade wounded in battle, only for heaven's sake be careful not to bump into the furniture, not to hit it, not to let it slip out of your grasp. And for god's sake don't forget which side was on top. And remember to use your handkerchief, so as not to leave fingerprints, and then change the handkerchief in case it has absorbed some emanation.

  It turned out that the package was cool and quite hard, oblong, exactly like a book wrapped in paper, smooth but not slippery. Its weight, too, seemed like that of a thick book: lighter than the concordance but a little heavier than the gazetteer.

  And that, I hoped, was the end of that. I was freed. The temptations had had their prey and now they could go away, satisfied, and I could get on with my work at last.

  I was mistaken.

  It was the exact opposite.

  Like a pack of hounds that have smelled bloody flesh, have had a taste of it, and turned into wolves, ten minutes after I put the package back in its place, the temptations attacked me unexpectedly on an exposed flank:

  To summon Ben Hur. Let him come here.

  To let him into the secret of what we were hiding here. If he didn't believe me, then I'd show him the package and stun him so that at last, just for once, I'd see with my own eyes the outward indifference of the leopard turning to stunned amazement. Those tyrannical thin lips, normally too lazy to open, would gape wide with astonishment. At once, like morning mist that dissolves with the heat of the sun, the Orient Palace affair would melt away. I would force him to swear that he would never reveal what he had seen. Not even to Chita. And, in any case, he would only be allowed to take one look at the package, and then he must immediately forget what he had seen.

  But he wouldn't forget. Ever. And so, in the shadow of the threat of imprisonment that would henceforth hang over the two of us, we would be bound together once more by a strong, openhearted friendship. Like David and Jonathan. Together we would spy and collect secrets. We would even learn English together from Sergeant Dunlop, because a man who controls the enemy's language also controls his ways of thinking.

  I suddenly had a strange, almost unbearable feeling that here, alone in this apartment all morning and all afternoon, I was the only ruler of a ferocious typhoon that was slumbering inside an outwardly innocent package, quite well camouflaged among the gems of literature on that shelf.

  No. There was no question of bringing in Ben Hur. I would do it on my own. Without him.

  Toward midday new, crazy temptations broke out like a thunderstorm in my chest and stomach. Everything is in your power now. From now on, if you really want it, everything is possible. Everything depends on your wish. Take this unique package. You can put another package just like it, a book wrapped in identical paper, in its place on the shelf among the gems of literature, and no one will be the wiser. Not even Father.

  As for you, son of man, pick up this destructive device, put it in your schoolbag, and take it straight to Government House. Fix it with wire underneath the High Commissioner's car in the parking lot. Or stand waiting for him by the gate, and when he comes out throw it at his feet.

  Or else: Hebrew youth from Jerusalem blows himself up to rouse the conscience of the world and to protest the rape of his homeland.

  Or maybe innocently ask Sergeant Dunlop to place the present in the CID commander's office. No: he might get blown up or implicated himself.

  Or fit it to the tip of our rocket and threaten to blow London off the map if Jerusalem is not liberated.

  Or eliminate Ben Hur and Chita. That would show them.

  And so on and so forth, until one o'clock, when a new and terrifying temptation raised its venomous head. And started to burrow and gnaw blindly inside me like a mole. (I found in the dictionary the proper word for this sucking, suckling temptation to cast off restraint and yield to the call of sin: it is "seduction." Like a cross between "sedition" and suction. )

  This seductive urge clung to me relentlessly, pulling at my heart and my diaphragm through my ribs, penetrating my deepest recesses, insisting hideously, pleading and winking ingratiatingly, whispering febrile promises, sweetness of corrupt delights, secret joys that I had never tasted or only tast
ed in my dreams:

  To leave the package where it was among the gems of world literature, after all. Not to lay a finger on it.

  To go out. Lock the apartment. Go straight to the Orient Palace.

  If he wasn't there, then drop it. It would be a sign. But if he was there, it would be sign that I had to go ahead with it. It would be a sign that it had to be, that come what might this cloying sweetness had to overflow and take shape.

  Tell him what was hidden in our apartment.

  Ask him what to do about it.

  And do whatever he told me.

  Seduction.

  Just before four o'clock there was a moment when I almost—

  But I managed to resist. Instead of going to the Orient Palace, I ate a meatball and some beans from the icebox, as well as a couple of potatoes, all cold: I didn't have the patience to heat them up. Then I closed my parents' door from the outside and my own bedroom door from the inside and lay down, not on my bed, but on the cold floor in the cell like space between my bed and my wardrobe, and there, by the striped light that filtered like a ladder of shadows through the slats of the shutter, I read for an hour and a half. I knew the book already: it was about Magellan and Vasco da Gama, about islands and bays and volcanoes and thickly forested heights.

  nineteen

  I shall never forget the pangs of fear: like a ring of cold steel tightening around my fluttering heart. Very early, after the newspaper boy but before the milkman, in the middle of the dawn chorus, a British armored car drove down our street with a loudspeaker and woke me up. Woke us all up. They announced in English and Hebrew a curfew from half past six until further notice. Anyone found outside would be risking his life.

  Barefoot, with gummed eyes, I crawled into my parents' bed. I felt frozen, not with cold, but with the python's grip of foreboding: They'll find it. At once. What a ridiculous hiding place! It's not a hiding place at all, just a light-brown package stuck into a row of books with slightly less light-brown jackets. It stands out among the books because it's thicker and wider and taller, like a bandit who has wrapped himself in sackcloth and thrust himself into a procession of nuns. Father and Mother would be locked up in the Russian Compound, or taken to Acre jail. They might even be deported in handcuffs to Cyprus or Mauritius or Eritrea, or possibly to the Seychelles. The word "banishment" pierced my chest like a stiletto.

  And what would I do all alone in this apartment, knowing as well as I did how quickly it could change from being small and pleasant to being huge and sinister, in the nights, weeks, and years to come, alone at home, alone in Jerusalem, and alone altogether, since my grandparents (both sets), aunts, and uncles were all murdered by Hitler, and they would murder me, too, when they got here and dragged me out of my wretched hiding place in the broom closet. Anti-semitic drunken British soldiers, or bloodthirsty Arab gangs. Because we are the few and we are in the right and we always were in the right but we were always few, surrounded on all sides and without a friend in the world. (Apart from Sergeant Dunlop? And you go spying on him and stealing secrets from him. Traitor traitor. You're doomed.)

  For a few moments we lay there in bed, the three of us. We did not speak. Then Father's quiet voice came, a voice that seemed to paint in the darkness of the room a ring of common sense:

  "The paper. We still have another thirty-two minutes. I definitely have time to go and get the paper."

  My mother said:

  "Please stay. Don't go."

  I backed her up, trying to make my voice more like his than like hers:

  "Yes, really, Dad, don't go. It's definitely not rational to take risks for a newspaper."

  He came back a moment later, still in his blue pajamas and his black open-backed sandals, smiling self-deprecatingly, as if he had returned from hunting a lion in the jungle for us. And he handed the paper to my mother.

  I helped them to fold away their bed, which as soon as it was closed pretended to be an honest sofa: Nothing suspicious about me, don't even imagine that I have a totally private inner side, hidden mattresses, pillows, sheets, and a nightie. Never heard of them.

  I placed the five cushions on the sofa, spacing them out precisely. I made my own bed, too. We managed to wash and dress and put everything away and straighten the tablecloth and even to hide my mother's slippers under the sofa, all the time, by some unspoken agreement, taking care to avoid looking in the direction of the package, which for some reason had decided in the night to make itself conspicuous. It stood out among the gems of world literature in Polish like a clumsy soldier at morning roll call in a high school. Just at the moment when my mother was about to straighten the flowers in the vase and Father was changing the paper in the blotter on his desk and I had been sent to the kitchen to set the table, the knock on the door came. An English voice asked if there was anyone in, please. Father replied at once, also in English, and also politely:

  "Just a minute, please."

  And he opened the door.

  I was surprised to see that there were only three of them: two ordinary soldiers (one of them had a burn mark that made half his face red, like butcher's meat), and a young officer with a narrow chest and a long narrow face. All three were wearing long shorts and khaki socks that almost met the shorts in the region of the knee. The two soldiers were armed with tommy guns whose barrels were pointing at the ground, as though lowering their eyes, and rightly, in shame. The officer was holding a pistol, also pointing downward; it looked just like Sergeant Dunlop's. (Maybe they were acquaintances or friends of his? What if I told them right away that I was a friend of the sergeant's? Would they abandon the search, and even join us for breakfast? So that we could talk to them, and finally open their eyes to the injustice they were inflicting on us.)

  Father pronounced the words "Please come in" with particular and emphatic courtesy. The thin officer was startled for an instant, as if Father's courtesy converted the search of this apartment into an act of extreme rudeness. He begged our pardon for disturbing us so early in the morning, explained that unfortunately it was his duty to have a quick look around and make sure everything was as it should be, and without thinking he put his pistol back into its holster and buttoned it up.

  There was a moment's hesitation, on their side and on ours: it was not clear how we should proceed. Was there anything else that needed to be said, on our side or on theirs, before the inspection could go on?

  Whenever young Doctor Gryphius at the clinic in Obadiah Street examined me, she always had difficulty finding the right words to ask me to strip down to my underpants. My mother and I would stand waiting patiently while she summoned up the courage to say, in gravelly German Hebrew: "Take off please all the clothes only there is no need to take off the unterwear." As she spoke the word "unterwear," it was plain that she was extremely uneasy. As if she felt that there ought to be another, less ugly, less incisive word (and in fact I believe she was right). A short while after the setting up of the State, Doctor Gryphius fell in love with a blind Armenian poet and followed him to Cyprus; three years later she returned alone and reappeared in our clinic. She had acquired a new look: there was something bitter and thin about her. Although in fact she had not got thinner; she had shrunk, shriveled. But, as I said earlier, I cannot live or even get to sleep without order. Hence Doctor Magda Gryphius and her blind Armenian poet and the flute she brought back from Famagusta and the strange tunes she sometimes played at two or three in the morning, and also her second husband, who was an importer of confectionery and inventor of a potion against forgetfulness, and also the whole question of suitable and unsuitable words for private parts of the body and intimate items of clothing will all have to wait for another story.

  The officer turned respectfully toward Father, like a polite schoolboy addressing a teacher:

  "Excuse me. We'll make a special effort to be brief, but in the meantime I'm afraid I must ask you all not to leave this spot."

  My mother said:

  "Can I make you a cup of tea?"
<
br />   The officer replied apologetically:

  "No, thank you. I'm on duty."

  And Father, in Hebrew, in his steady, correct voice, protested:

  "You're overdoing it. That was unnecessary."

  The search itself did not win my approbation, from a professional point of view. (I had surreptitiously inched forward another four or five feet, to the corner of the hallway, which gave me a vantage point that commanded most of the apartment.)

  The soldiers peered under my bed, opened the wardrobe in my bedroom, pushed the clothes' hangers aside, prodded around in the shelves of shirts and underwear, glanced into the kitchen and very cursorily into the bathroom, concentrated for some reason on the icebox, examined the area above, underneath, and behind it, tapped the walls in two places, and in the meantime the officer inspected Father's wall maps. The soldier with the burned face discovered a loose coat hook in the hallway, and tested to see how loose it was, until the officer growled that if he wasn't careful he'd break it. The soldier obediently left it alone. When they all entered my parents' bedroom, we followed them. Apparently the officer had forgotten that we were supposed to stay in a corner of the hallway. The extent of the library clearly startled him, and he hesitantly asked Father: "Excuse me, is this a school? Or is it a place of worship?"