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Shmuel, a young, idealistic student, is drawn to a mysterious handwritten note on a campus noticeboard. This takes him to a strange house, where an elderly invalid man requires a paid companion, to argue with and read to him. But there is someone else in the house, too … A woman, who is trailed by ghosts from her past. Shmuel is captivated by her, a sexual obsession which evolves into gentle love and devotion; and he is fascinated by the old man, an intellectual obsession which also evolves into gentle love and devotion.

Shmuel begins to uncover the house’s tangled history and, in doing so, reaches an understanding that harks back not only to the beginning of the Jewish–Arab conflict, but also to ancient Jerusalem itself – to Christianity, to Judaism, to Judas.

Set in the still-divided Jerusalem of 1959–60, Judas is an exquisite love story and coming-of-age tale, and a radical rethinking of the concept of treason. It is a novel steeped in desire and curiosity from a towering figure of contemporary world literature.

About the Author

Born in Jerusalem in 1939, Amos Oz is the internationally acclaimed author of many novels and essay collections, translated into over forty languages, including his brilliant semi-autobiographical work, A Tale of Love and Darkness. He has received several international awards, including the Prix Femina, the Israel Prize, the Goethe Prize, the Frankfurt Peace Prize and the 2013 Franz Kafka Prize. He lives in Israel and is considered a towering figure in world literature.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

To Deborah Owen

See the traitor run in the field alone.

Let the dead not the living now cast the first stone.

Nathan Alterman, ‘The Traitor’, from The Joy of the Poor

Here is a story from the winter days of the end of 1959 and the beginning of 1960. It is a story of error and desire, of unrequited love, and of a religious question that remains unresolved. Some of the buildings still bore the marks of the war that had divided the city a decade earlier. In the background you could hear the distant strains of an accordion, or the plaintive sound of a harmonica from behind closed shutters.

In many flats in Jerusalem you might find van Gogh’s starry whirlpool skies or his shimmering cypresses on the living room wall, rush mats on the floors of the small rooms, and Doctor Zhivago or Yizhar’s Days of Ziklag lying open, face down, on a foam sofa-bed that was covered with a length of Middle-Eastern cloth and piled with embroidered cushions. A paraffin heater burned all evening long with a blue flame. In a corner of the room a tasteful bunch of thorn twigs sprouted from a mortar shell casing.

At the beginning of December, Shmuel Ash abandoned his studies at the university and decided to leave Jerusalem, because his relationship had broken down, because his research had stalled, and especially because his father’s finances had collapsed and Shmuel had to look for work.

Shmuel was a stocky, bearded young man of around twenty-five, shy, emotional, socialist, asthmatic, liable to veer from wild enthusiasm to disappointment and back again. His shoulders were broad, his neck was short and thick, and his fingers too were thick and short, as if they each lacked a knuckle. From every pore of Shmuel Ash’s face and neck curled wiry hairs like steel wool: this beard continued upwards till it merged with the tousled hair of his head and downwards to the curling thicket of his chest. From a distance he always seemed, summer and winter alike, to be agitated and pouring with sweat. But, close up, it was a pleasant surprise to discover that instead of a sour smell of sweat his skin somehow exuded a delicate odour of talcum powder. He would be instantly intoxicated by new ideas, provided they were wittily dressed up and involved some paradox. But he also tended to tire quickly, possibly on account of an enlarged heart and his asthma.

His eyes filled easily with tears, which caused him embarrassment and even shame. A kitten mewling by a wall on a winter’s night, having lost its mother perhaps, and darting heartrending glances at Shmuel while rubbing itself against his leg, would make his eyes well up. Or if, at the end of some mediocre film about loneliness and despair at the Edison cinema, it turned out that the bad guy had a heart of gold, he could be choked with tears. And if he spotted a thin woman with a child, total strangers, coming out of the Shaare Zedek Hospital, hugging each other and sobbing, he would start weeping, too.

In those days, it was usual to see crying as something that women did. A weeping male aroused revulsion, and even faint disgust, rather like a woman with a beard. Shmuel was ashamed of this weakness of his, and made an effort to control it, but in vain. Deep down he shared the ridicule that his sensitivity aroused, and was even reconciled to the thought that there was some flaw in his virility, and that therefore it was likely that his life would be sterile and that he would achieve nothing much.

But what do you do, he sometimes asked himself with disgust, beyond feeling pity? For instance, you could have picked that kitten up, sheltered it inside your coat, and brought it back to your room. Who would have stopped you? And as for the sobbing woman with the child, you could simply have gone up to them and asked if there was anything you could do to help. You could have sat the child down on the balcony with a book and some biscuits, while you and the woman sat side by side on your bed discussing what had happened to her and what you might try to do for her.

A few days before she left him, Yardena said: ‘Either you’re like an excited puppy, rushing around noisily – even when you’re sitting on a chair you’re somehow chasing your own tail – or else you’re the opposite, lying on your bed for days on end like an unaired quilt.’

She was alluding, on the one hand, to his perpetual tiredness and, on the other, to a certain choppy quality in his gait, as if he were always about to break into a run. He would leap up steps two at a time. He rushed across busy roads at an angle, risking his life, not looking to right or left, hurling himself into the heart of a skirmish, his bushy, bearded head thrust forward, his body leaning with it, as if eager for the fray. His legs always seemed to be chasing after his body, which in turn was pursuing his head, as if they were afraid of being left behind when he disappeared round the next corner. He ran all day long, frantically, out of breath, not because he was afraid of being late for a class or a political meeting but because at every moment, morning or evening, he was struggling to do everything he had to do, to cross off all the items on his daily list, and to return at last to the peace and quiet of his room. Each day of his life seemed to him like a laborious circular obstacle course, from the moment he was wrenched from sleep in the morning until he was back under his quilt again.

He loved to lecture anyone who would listen, particularly his comrades from the Socialist Renewal Group: he loved to clarify, to state the facts, to contradict, to refute and to reinvent. He spoke at length, with enjoyment, wit and brio. But when the reply came, when it was his turn to listen to others’ ideas, Shmuel was suddenly impatient, distracted, tired, until his eyes closed and his tousled head sank down onto his shaggy chest.

He enjoyed haranguing Yardena too, sweeping away received ideas, drawing conclusions from assumptions and vice versa. But when she spoke to him his eyelids drooped after a minute or two. She accused him of not listening to a word she was saying, he denied it, she asked him to repeat what she had just said, and he changed the subject and told her about some blunder committed by Ben-Gurion. He was kindhearted, generous, brimming with goodwill and as soft as a woollen glove, going out of his way to make himself useful, but at the same time he was muddled and impatient. He never knew where he had put his other sock, what exactly his landlord wanted from him, or who he had lent his lecture notes to. On the other hand, he was never muddled when he stood up to quote with devastating accuracy what Kropotkin had said about Nechayev after their first meeting, and what he had said two years later. Or which of Jesus’ apostles was less talkative than the rest.

Even though Yardena liked his bouncy spirit, his helplessness, and the exuberance that made her think of a friendly, high-spirited dog, always nuzzling you, demanding to be petted, and drooling in your lap, she had decided to leave him and accept a proposal of marriage from her previous boyfriend, a hard-working, taciturn hydrologist by the name of Nesher Sharshevsky, a specialist in rainwater collection, who nearly always managed to anticipate whatever she might want next. He had bought her a pretty scarf for her secular birthday, and two days later, on her religious birthday, he had given her a small, green oriental rug. He even remembered her parents’ birthdays.

Some three weeks before Yardena’s marriage Shmuel finally abandoned his Master’s thesis on ‘Jewish Views of Jesus’, a project he had embarked on with immense enthusiasm, galvanised by the daring insight that had flashed into his mind when he chose the topic. But once he began to check details and explore sources, he soon discovered that there was nothing novel about his brilliant idea, which had appeared in print before he was born, in the early Thirties, in a footnote to a short article by his eminent teacher, Professor Gustav Yomtov Eisenschloss.

The Socialist Renewal Group also underwent a crisis. The Group met regularly every Wednesday evening at eight o’clock in a soot-stained, low-ceilinged café in a back alley in the district known as Yegia Kapayim. Artisans, plumbers, electricians, painters and printers met occasionally to play backgammon in this café, which to the members of the Group made it seem a more or less proletarian location. The plasterers and radio repairers, however, did not join the members of the Group, though sometimes one of them asked a question or made a remark from a couple of tables away, or else one of the members of the Group would fearlessly approach the backgammon-players’ table and ask a representative of the Working Class for a light.

After protracted argument, nearly all the participants in the Group were reconciled to the revelations of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union regarding Stalin’s reign of terror, but there was a resolute faction that demanded of the comrades that they reconsider not only their allegiance to Stalin but also their attitude to the very principles of the dictatorship of the proletariat as formulated by Lenin. A couple of the comrades went so far as to use the ideas of the young Marx to challenge the iron-clad teachings of the later Marx. When Shmuel Ash attempted to contain the erosion, four of the six members of the Group declared a split and announced that they were setting up a separate cell. Among the four who split off were the two girls in the Group, without whom there was no longer any point.

That very same month, Shmuel’s father lost his final appeal in a series of lawsuits lasting several years against his old partner in a small company in Haifa (Shahaf Ltd, Drawing, Mapping and Aerial Photography). Shmuel’s parents had no choice but to discontinue the monthly allowance that had maintained him throughout his student days. So he went downstairs to the yard and located behind the dustbin shed some used cardboard boxes which he took up to his rented room in Tel Arza, and every day he randomly crammed more of his books and clothes and possessions into them. He still had no idea where he would move to.

Some evenings he would roam the rainy streets, like a bewildered bear roused from hibernation. With his lumbering gait he ploughed the streets of the city centre, which were almost deserted of human life because of the cold and the wind. Several times after nightfall he stood stock still in the rain in one of the narrow streets of Nahalat Shiva, staring at the iron gate of the building where Yardena no longer lived. Sometimes his feet led him wandering through remote wintry parts of the town that he did not know, the Nahlaot, Beit Israel, Ahva or Musrara, splashing though puddles and avoiding dustbins overturned by the wind. Once or twice he nearly hit his head, thrust forward like a charging bull’s, against the concrete wall that divided Israeli from Jordanian Jerusalem.

He paused, absentmindedly, to peer at bent signs warning him through the coils of rusting barbed wire: STOP! BORDER AHEAD! BEWARE, MINES! DANGER – NO MAN’S LAND! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED – YOU ARE ABOUT TO CROSS AN AREA EXPOSED TO ENEMY SNIPERS! Shmuel hesitated between these signs as if they were offering him a varied menu from which he had to make a choice.

Most evenings, he wandered like this in the rain, soaked to the bone, shivering with cold and despair, his unruly beard dripping, until at last he crept wearily back to his bed and curled up in it till the next evening: he got tired easily, perhaps because of his enlarged heart. In the twilight he heaved himself out of bed, put on his clothes and his coat that was still damp from the previous evening’s excursion, and wandered again to the edge of the town, as far as Talpiyot or Arnona. Only when he was stopped by the gate of Kibbutz Ramat Rahel and a suspicious night watchman flashed a torch in his face did he turn on his heel and head for home with nervous, hurried steps. After hastily consuming two slices of bread and some yoghurt, he took off his wet clothes and burrowed under his quilt again, trying in vain to get warm. Eventually, he would fall asleep, and sleep till the following evening.

Once he met Stalin in a dream. The meeting took place in a low back room in the grimy café where the Socialist Renewal Group convened. Stalin told Professor Gustav Eisenschloss to relieve Shmuel’s father of all his troubles and his losses, while Shmuel, for some reason, showed Stalin, from the roof of the Dormition Abbey on Mount Zion, a distant view of a corner of the Wailing Wall beyond the border, in the Jordanian sector. He failed to explain to Stalin, who was smiling under his moustache, why the Jews rejected Jesus and why they still stubbornly continued to turn their backs on him. Stalin called Shmuel Judas. At the end of the dream the flickering skinny figure of Nesher Sharshevsky offered Stalin a whimpering puppy in a metal box. At the sound of the puppy’s whimpering Shmuel woke up, with a vague feeling that his rambling explanations had only made matters worse, because they aroused in Stalin not only suspicion but also contempt.

The wind and the rain battered the window of his room. Towards dawn, as the storm grew stronger, a metal laundry tub attached to the balcony railings banged with a hollow sound against the balustrade. Two dogs, far away from his room and possibly far from each other, did not stop barking all night long, and sometimes the barking turned into a howl.

So it occurred to him to leave Jerusalem and find some easy work somewhere a long way off, perhaps as a night watchman in the Ramon Hills, where he had heard that a new desert town was being built. But, in the meantime, he received the invitation to Yardena’s wedding: apparently she and Nesher Sharshevsky, her compliant hydrologist, the expert on rainwater collection, were in a great hurry to get married. They couldn’t even manage to hold on until the end of the winter. Shmuel made up his mind to surprise them, to surprise the whole gang, by accepting the invitation: breaking with convention, he would simply turn up, loud and cheery, wreathed in smiles, patting shoulders; the unexpected guest, he would walk into the wedding ceremony, where only family and close friends were supposed to be present, and then he would throw himself wholeheartedly into the party afterwards, contributing to the merriment and the programme his famous imitation of Professor Eisenschloss.

But, on the morning of Yardena’s wedding, Shmuel Ash suffered a severe attack of asthma and dragged himself to the clinic, where they tried in vain to help him with an inhaler and various allergy pills. When his condition worsened, he was taken from the clinic to Bikur Cholim Hospital.

Shmuel spent the hours of Yardena’s marriage in the emergency ward. Then, for the whole of her wedding night, he was breathing through an oxygen mask. The next day he decided to leave Jerusalem without delay.

At the beginning of December, on a day when sleet was beginning to fall in Jerusalem, Shmuel Ash announced to Professor Gustav Yomtov Eisenschloss and his other lecturers (in the Departments of History and Religious Studies) that he was abandoning his studies. Outside in the wadi patches of fog drifted like dirty cotton wool.

Professor Eisenschloss was a small, compact man with thick beer-bottle lenses in his spectacles, and movements that reminded you of a cuckoo darting busily out of a clock. He exploded on hearing Shmuel’s news.

‘But how can this be! What nonsense is this! What has come over us suddenly? Jewish views of Jesus, indeed! Obviously, a fruitful field without parallel opens up before us! In the Talmud! The Tosefta! The Midrash! In our folklore! In the Middle Ages! We must surely be about to make an important breakthrough here! Well? But supposing we continue our researches one step at a time? Without a doubt we shall very soon find ourselves reconsidering this negative idea – to defect in mid-course!’

Having said which, he breathed on the lenses of his spectacles and polished them vigorously with a crumpled handkerchief. Abruptly extending his hand, he said in a different, slightly embarrassed, voice:

‘If, however, we have encountered – Heaven forbid! – some difficulty of a financial nature, there might be some discreet manner of mobilising, one step at a time, some modest assistance.’ He pressed Shmuel’s hand again, so hard that the bones made a faint cracking sound, and declared fiercely:

‘We shall not give in so quickly! Neither over Jesus, nor over the Jews, nor over you! We shall bring you back to your inner sense of duty!’

In the corridor, after leaving Professor Eisenschloss’s office, Shmuel was smiling at the recollection of those student parties where he himself had starred in the role of Professor Gustav Yomtov Eisenschloss, popping out suddenly like a cuckoo from a clock, and always speaking so pedantically and pontificating in the first person plural, even to his wife in their bedroom.

That evening Shmuel Ash typed out a notice offering for sale cheaply, on account of ‘unexpected departure’, a small Philips wireless set (made of Bakelite), a Hermes Baby typewriter and a gramophone with a couple of dozen records: classical music, jazz and French chansons. He pinned the notice to the cork board next to the stairs to the cafeteria in the basement of the Kaplun Building at the University. Because of the accumulation of announcements, advertisements and posters, he had to put it up in such a way that it completely covered an earlier, smaller notice of five or six lines on blue paper, written – Shmuel managed to observe while he was burying it – in delicate, precise female handwriting.

Then he cantered, with his dishevelled ram’s head thrust forward as if trying to break free of the thick neck it sprouted from, towards the bus stops outside the campus gate. But he had taken only forty or fifty steps, and was passing the Henry Moore sculpture of a heavy greenish bronze woman lying draped in a shroud of rough cloth, when suddenly he turned and rushed back to the Kaplun Building, to the notice board next to the stairs leading down to the cafeteria. His short, thick fingers hurriedly rolled up his own note so he could read and reread what he himself had hidden from his own eyes just a couple of minutes earlier:

COMPANION SOUGHT

Offered to a single humanities student with conversational skills and an interest in history, free accommodation and a modest monthly sum, in return for spending five hours per evening with a seventy-year-old invalid, an educated, widely cultured man. He is able to take care of himself and seeks company, not assistance. For initial interview please present yourself Sunday to Thursday between 4 and 6 p.m. at 17 Rabbi Elbaz Lane, Sha’arei Hesed. (Please ask for Atalia.) Owing to special circumstances the successful candidate will be required to commit himself in writing to complete confidentiality.

Rabbi Elbaz Lane led down the slope of Sha’arei Hesed, towards the Valley of the Cross. Number 17 was the last house, at the bottom of the lane, at the spot where in those days the neighbourhood and the city ended, and the boulder-strewn fields that extended to the ruins of the Arab village of Sheikh Badr began. Immediately after the last house the potholed roadway turned into a rocky path that slithered hesitantly towards the valley, veering this way and that as if it regretted continuing onto this wasteland and was attempting to turn back towards the inhabited regions. In the meantime, the rain had stopped. Above the western hills there was a whisper of twilight, a gentle gleam, beguiling as a scent. In the distance, among the rocks on the opposite hillside, a small flock of sheep appeared; their shepherd, wrapped in a dark cloak, sat upright between rain showers in the cloudy evening light, staring immobile from the desolate hillside towards these last houses on the western fringe of Jerusalem.

The house itself seemed to Shmuel Ash basement-like, lower than street level, sunk almost to its windows in the heavy earth of the slope. At a glance, from the street it resembled a squat, broad-shouldered man wearing a dark hat, who had gone down on his knees to search for something in the mud.

Both the rusty iron gates had long ago buckled their hinges and sunk in the soil under their own weight, as if they had struck root. So the gates stood ajar, neither open nor closed. The space between was just wide enough to squeeze through without scraping one’s shoulders. Above was a rusted iron arch with a star of David engraved at its top, and these words hammered out within it in square letters:

From the gate Shmuel went down six cracked, uneven stone steps, into a small courtyard that enchanted him from the first glance and stirred a pang of yearning for somewhere that he could not recall. A vague shadowy memory flitted through his mind, a hidden reflection of other, inner courtyards, many years before, and he had no idea where they were or when he saw them but he knew indistinctly that they were not wintry courtyards like this one but, on the contrary, flooded with summer light. This memory brought him a fleeting feeling between sadness and delight, like a single note played on a cello at night from the depth of the darkness.

The courtyard was surrounded by a stone wall about the height of a man and was paved with stone slabs polished by the years to a brilliant red with grey veins. Here and there, spots of light flashed. An old fig tree and an arbour of vines shaded the courtyard. So dense and intertwined were their branches that even now, their leaves shed, only a handful of capering gold coins managed to filter through the canopy and flicker on the flagstones. It seemed not so much a stone courtyard as a secret pool, its surface ruffled by myriad rippling wavelets.

All along the wall and the front of the house and on the window sills blazed little beacons of geranium in red, white, pink and purple. The geranium plants sprouted from a mass of rusty pots and disused pans, paraffin stoves, buckets, basins, tin cans and even a cracked lavatory bowl, all filled with soil and promoted to the rank of flowerpot. The windows were protected with iron grilles and shaded with green metal shutters. The walls of the house were made of Jerusalem stone that turned its untamed, undressed face towards you. And beyond the house and the wall of the courtyard was a dense screen of cypresses, their colour in this evening light closer to black than green.

Over all this lay the silence of a cold winter’s evening. Not the kind of limpid silence that invites you in, but rather an indifferent, age-old silence that turns its back on you.

The roof of the house was tiled, and in the middle of the façade there was a small attic gable, a triangular structure that reminded Shmuel of a truncated tent. The gable, too, was roofed with faded tiles. He suddenly wanted very much to live in that attic, to curl up inside it with a pile of books, a bottle of red wine, a stove, a quilt, a gramophone and some records, and not go outside, for lectures, debates or love affairs. To stay there and never leave, at least while it was cold outside.

The front of the house was covered with a tangle of passion flower that clung to the roughness of the stone with fierce tendrils. Shmuel crossed the courtyard, paused to take in the dots of light trembling on the paving stones and the network of grey veins on the reddish stone. Then he was standing in front of a double iron door painted green, adorned with a knocker in the form of a blind lion’s head. The lion’s teeth were fastened on a large iron ring. In the centre of the right-hand leaf of the door was the following legend:

RESIDENCE OF JEHOIACHIN ABRAVANEL WHOM G-D PROTECT, TO SHEW THAT THE LORD IS UPRIGHT

Beneath this inscription there was a small, practical note stuck to the door with two delicate strips of sticky paper, on which Shmuel recognised the same handwriting he had seen on the notice in the Kaplun Building, a meticulous and pleasing feminine hand. There was no ‘and’ between the two names, which were separated by a large space:

ATALIA ABRAVANELGERSHOM WALD CAUTION—BROKEN STEP IMMEDIATELY BEHIND THE DOOR

‘Kindly walk straight ahead. Then turn to your right. Please advance towards the source of the light. Then you will find me,’ said the voice of an elderly man from the depths of the house. It was a low, slightly amused voice, as if the man had been expecting this guest, and none other, at this time and no other, and was now celebrating his foresight and taking pleasure in having his expectations realised. The front door was not locked.

Shmuel Ash stumbled as he entered the house, because he expected a step up, not a step down. And in fact it was not even a real step, but a makeshift, a low, rickety wooden bench. The moment a visitor trod on one edge, the other end rose up like a lever and almost overturned whoever had put his weight on it. It was Shmuel’s haste that saved him from a bad fall – while the bench was tipping up and rising into the air, he had already reached the stone floor with a big leap, his curly head surging forward, drawing him along into the passage, which was almost completely dark.

The further Shmuel penetrated into the house, his forehead forcing a way like the head of a foetus advancing along the neck of the womb, the stronger grew the feeling that the floor of the passage was not level, but sloped downhill, as if it were a riverbed rather than a dark corridor. Meanwhile, his nostrils caught a pleasant smell, a smell of fresh laundry, of cleanness, of starch and ironing.

Another corridor branched off from the end of this passage. It was shorter, and from its end came the light that the voice had promised him. The light brought Shmuel Ash to a warm, high-ceilinged library. Its iron shutters were tightly closed and a paraffin heater burned with a pleasant blue glow. The single electric light was a gooseneck desk lamp that stooped over a heap of books and papers, focusing on them to the exclusion of all the rest of the library.

Beyond this ring of warm light, between two metal trolleys laden with books, files, folders and notebooks, an elderly man sat talking on the telephone. A plaid was draped round his shoulders like a prayer shawl. He was an ugly man, broad, crooked and hunchbacked. His nose was as sharp as the beak of a thirsty bird, and the curve of his chin suggested a sickle. His fine, almost feminine, grey hair cascaded down the back of his head and covered the nape of his neck. His eyes were deep-set beneath thick craggy white eyebrows that looked like woolly frost. His bushy Einstein moustache was a mound of snow. Without interrupting his telephone call, he eyed his visitor with a penetrating, quizzical glance. His sharp chin was inclined towards his left shoulder. His left eye was screwed up while the right one was open wide, round, blue and unnaturally large. The man’s face wore a sly, amused expression as if he were winking or making a sarcastic denunciation: he seemed instantly to have understood the young man before him, as if reading his mind and understanding what he was after. A moment later he switched off the searchlight beam of his gaze, acknowledged the visitor’s presence with a nod of the head and looked away, continuing his telephonic debate all the while:

‘Someone who is always suspicious, someone who always assumes that everyone is lying to him, someone whose whole life is nothing but an unending procession of traps to be avoided – excuse me a moment, an emissary has suddenly appeared, or maybe it’s a workman I never sent for.’ At this, he covered the mouthpiece with one hand, its pink fingers looking almost transparent, ghostly, in the light of the desk lamp. Suddenly his gnarled features, that resembled the trunk of an olive tree, lit up in a fleeting mischievous smile under his bushy white moustache, as if he had succeeded in trapping his visitor before the victim even realised what had happened.

He removed his hand from the mouthpiece and continued, his head still tilted towards his left shoulder:

‘A persecuted man, whether he is persecuted because he himself has turned everyone into persecutors or whether he is persecuted because his wretched imagination swarms with throngs of scheming enemies, one way or another such a man has, besides his wretchedness, a moral flaw: surely there is a fundamental dishonesty in the enjoyment of persecution as such. Incidentally, such a man is dogged by suffering, loneliness, accidents and ill-health more than others, that is, more than the rest of us. By his nature, the suspicious person is destined for disaster. Suspicion, like an acid, corrodes the vessel in which it is put, and eats away at the suspicious man himself: guarding oneself day and night from the entire human race, constantly devising ways of avoiding evil schemes and conspiracies, and sniffing out snares laid for you – these are what the Talmud calls “primary categories of damages”. And these are the things that, as the rabbis say, take a man out of the world. Please excuse me for one moment—’

Again he covered the mouthpiece with his corpse-like fingers, and addressed Shmuel Ash in a soft, ironic, almost charred voice:

‘Kindly wait for a few more minutes. Meanwhile, feel free to listen to what I am saying. Though a young man like you no doubt inhabits a totally different planet.’

Without waiting for a response the old man removed his hand from the telephone and resumed his homily:

‘. . . Although, fundamentally, suspicion, enjoyment of persecution and even hatred of the entire human race are all much less lethal than love of humanity, which reeks of ancient rivers of blood. In my view gratuitous hatred is less bad than gratuitous love: those who love mankind, the world-reforming knight errants, those who rise up against us in each generation to save us, with none to rescue us from their power, surely, in fact, they – alright. Alright. You are right. Let us not embark on that subject now. While you and I are elucidating all kinds of salvations and consolations, a corpulent young man with a caveman beard has appeared before me, in a military greatcoat and probably military boots. Maybe he has come to enlist me in the army? So let us pause at this point. We shall speak more of this subject, you and I, tomorrow and the day after. Yes, my friend, we shall definitely speak more. Inevitably. What should men like us do if not speak? Hunt whales? Seduce the Queen of Sheba? And by the way, à propos the Queen of Sheba, I have my own personal, anti-romantic, rather transgressive, in fact, interpretation of the verse “Love covereth all sins”. Whereas the verse “Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it” always puts me in mind of the ominous wailing of a fire engine’s siren. Please give my regards to dear Zhenia, embrace and kiss her for me, embrace and kiss her in my fashion, not in your bureaucratic way. Tell her I miss her radiant face very much. No, not your radiant face, my heart’s desire, your face is “as the face of the generation”. Like a dog’s. Yes. I look forward to seeing you one of these days. I do not know when Atalia will return. She minds her own business and she minds mine as well. Yes. Good bye. Thank you. Amen, just as you say, so be it.’

And, with that, he turned to Shmuel, who had seated himself in the meantime, after some hesitation, very cautiously, on a frail-looking wicker chair that seemed to rock under the weight of his body. Suddenly the man roared:

‘Wald! Wald! My name is Wald! And what are you? A pioneer? From a kibbutz? Have you favoured us with a visit from the heights of Galilee? Or on the contrary, have you come up from the plains of the Negev?’

‘I’m from here. From Jerusalem. That is, I’m from Haifa, but I’m studying here. Or rather, I’ve been studying here.’

‘Now, now, my young friend, let’s get this straight. Are you studying or aren’t you? Are you from Haifa or Jerusalem? Out of the barnfloor or out of the winepress?’

‘And what is more, I assume you are a positive character? An enlightened, progressive person? A world reformer? A proponent of morality and justice? What I call an ideophile, an idealist like the rest of you? Am I right? Speak up and let us hear what you have to say for yourself.’

Having said which, he waited meekly for an answer, his head tilted towards his left shoulder, one eye closed and the other open wide, like someone waiting patiently for the curtain to rise on a performance of which he has no high expectations and all he can do is resign himself to whatever the characters may be about to do to one another: how they will plunge each other down into the depth of misery, if such a place exists, and by what means they will all arrive at their own disastrous self-inflicted destiny.

And so Shmuel began again, this time with great care: he announced his first name and his surname, no, to the best of his knowledge he was not related to the well-known writer Sholem Asch, his family were functionaries and land surveyors, from Haifa, he studied, or rather he used to study, here in Jerusalem, history and religious studies, even though he himself was not at all religious, definitely not, quite the contrary in fact, one might say, but somehow the figure of Jesus of Nazareth . . . and Judas Iscariot . . . and the spiritual world of the Chief Priests and Pharisees who rejected Jesus, and how quickly the Nazarene, in Jewish eyes, went from being a persecuted figure to a symbol of persecution and oppression . . . and how this was somehow connected in his view with the fate of social reformers in modern times . . . well, it was rather a long story, he hoped he was not intruding here, he had come in response to their notice, the one about a companion, that he discovered by accident on the notice board in the Kaplun Building. At the entrance to the student cafeteria . . .

At this, the invalid stiffened, letting his tartan plaid fall to the ground, raised his long, distorted frame from the chair, twisted the upper part of his body in a series of complicated movements, gripped the arms of the chair with both hands, and stood up at a strange angle, though it was clear that it was not his legs but his strong arms grasping the chair frame that bore his weight. He chose not to touch the crutches that leant against the edge of his desk. He was strong and bent, hunchbacked, yet so tall that his head nearly hit the low light fixture that hung from the ceiling, and when he stood he seemed twisted like the trunk of an old olive tree. He was big-boned and stiff, with large ears, and yet almost regal with that grey mane flowing down the back of his head, the snowy mounds of those eyebrows and the striking whiteness of that thick moustache. When Shmuel’s eyes met the old man’s, he was surprised to observe that, in contrast to his amused voice and ironic tone, the blue eyes were clouded and mournful.

Then the man placed both hands on top of the desk and, again resting his whole weight on the muscles of his forearms, advanced slowly along the edge of the desk, with a mighty effort, like a large octopus thrown up on the dry land and struggling to crawl down the seashore to the water. So the man moved, dragging himself with the strength of his arms from his chair along the whole length of his desk until he reached an upholstered wicker couch, a sort of chaise longue that awaited him beside the desk, beneath the window. Here, outside the ring of light cast by his reading lamp, he began to execute a series of bends and twists, shifting his weight from hand to hand, until he managed to lay his large body down on this cradle of his. And at once he declared in the same derisive voice:

‘Aha! The notice! So there is a notice! And I said in my haste – well, but in fact, all that is between you and her. I have nothing to do with her mysteries. And meanwhile, please feel free to sit there and wait to your heart’s content. And what hidden treasure are you concealing there? Under your beard? No. I was only joking. Forgive me now if, with your permission, I take a little nap. As you can see, I have a degenerative disease. I am degenerating. And you, young man, please sit, sit, fear not, no ill will befall you here, in my home, you may even select a book or two to read until she returns, unless you too prefer to take a nap. Sit. Sit.’

Then he fell silent. And perhaps he really did close his eyes, stretched out on his couch, wrapped like a huge silkworm cocoon in another tartan blanket, identical to the first and waiting for him in his new place. And at once he was transformed into a vague, silent range of hills.

Shmuel was surprised by Mr Wald’s repeated exhortations to him to sit, even though he had only to glance at his visitor to realise that he had remained sitting all the time and had not got up or stirred even once. A valley, hills, olive trees, a ruin and a winding mountain path appeared in a drawing by the artist Rubin on a calendar that hung, slightly askew, on the wall facing the desk, between the bookcases. Shmuel was gripped by an irresistible urge to get up and straighten the picture. Then he returned to his place and sat down again. Gershom Wald said nothing: perhaps he had dozed off and not seen. Or perhaps his eyes were not yet entirely closed under the thick white brows and he saw the adjustment, but accepted it in silence.

She appeared through another door, one which Shmuel had not noticed. It was actually not a door, but a concealed entrance hiding behind a bead curtain, in a corner of the room. As soon as she entered, she reached out and switched on the ceiling lamp. At once the whole library was flooded with bright light. The shadows were banished behind the rows of books.

A woman of around forty-five, she held herself erect and moved around the room as if well aware of her feminine power. She was wearing a plain light-coloured dress that reached her ankles and a simple red sweater. Her long dark hair flowed softly down on one side of her neck to land on the mound of her left breast. Beneath the hair nodded a pair of large wooden earrings. Her clothes hugged her body. Her high heels enhanced the lightness of her step as she glided from the entrance towards Mr Wald’s wicker cradle. There she stood, with one hand on her hip, waiting. When she raised her elongated brown eyes to Shmuel, she was not smiling, but her face wore an expression of curious sympathy with a faint hint of challenge. As if to ask: So? How about you? What can I do for you? What little surprise have you brought us today? And also as if trying to tell him that even though she was not smiling, a smile was definitely possible and should not be ruled out.

She brought with her into the room a faint scent of violets, but also a whiff of the pleasant smell of laundry and starch and ironing that his nostrils had caught, as he was advancing between the closed doors along the passage.

She turned those eyes on him again, so sure of their power, and scanned his appearance with interest and possibly pleasure. She did not turn her gaze away until he was compelled to lower his eyes. She contemplated his unkempt beard, as one takes an unhurried look at a crouching animal. And she nodded, not to him but to Mr Wald, as if confirming her initial conclusion. Shmuel Ash, meanwhile, peeped at her once or twice then hastily looked down again, though he managed to notice the well-defined furrow that descended firmly from her nose to the middle of her upper lip. It seemed unusually deep, yet fetching and delicate. Removing a pile of books from a chair, she sat down, crossed her legs, and straightened the hem of her dress.

She seemed in no hurry to reply to his question as to whether he had come at an inconvenient time, appearing to consider it from every angle until she was in a position to deliver a responsible and authoritative answer. Finally she said:

‘You’ve been waiting a long time. You must have been talking, the two of you.’

Shmuel was surprised by her voice. It was resonant and languorous, yet practical at the same time. Self-confident. She did not seem to be asking a question so much as summing up the results of various calculations.

‘Your husband told me to wait for you,’ Shmuel said. ‘I gathered from the notice that—’

‘But I am not the lady’s husband. I do not have that honour and pleasure. Atalia is, in fact, my mistress.’

He allowed a little time for Shmuel to wallow in his astonishment before deigning to explain:

‘I am not using the word in the vulgar sense of course, but rather as in the famous saying of the first Queen Elizabeth of England: “I will have here but one mistress and no master.”’

‘Well just you carry on with this as long as you like, the two of you. You seem to be enjoying it.’

She uttered this without a smile, but in a voice that seemed to promise Shmuel that all options were open so long as he did not overdo it or make a fool of himself. She put four or five short questions to him, repeating one with emphasis and in simpler language because she was not satisfied with his answer. She paused for a moment, then added that she still had a few questions left.

‘Our guest must surely be feeling pangs of hunger and thirst! He has come straight from the heights of the Carmel! A couple of oranges, a slice of cake, a glass of tea could work wonders!’

‘I’ll leave the two of you to work wonders. I’ll go and put the kettle on.’

She turned and left the way she had come in. But this time, as she went out, her hips stirred the bead curtain. Even after she disappeared, it did not settle at once, but continued to make waves for a moment, and even to produce a trickling, rustling sound that Shmuel hoped would not die away too soon.

There are times when the pace of life slows down, stuttering like water running from a gutter, cutting itself a narrow channel in the earth of the garden. The stream encounters a heap of soil, is checked, forms a small puddle, hesitates, and reaches out to nibble at the mound blocking its way, or tries to tunnel underneath. Because of the obstacle, the water sometimes shudderingly splits, groping its way along three or four fine threads. Or it gives up, and soaks away into the dust. Shmuel Ash, whose parents had lost their entire life savings in an instant, whose own research had stalled, who had dropped out of university and whose girlfriend had suddenly married her former boyfriend, decided to accept the position he had been offered in the house in Rabbi Elbaz Lane. Including the conditions of ‘board and lodging’, and including the monthly salary, which was modest: for a few hours each day he would keep the invalid company, and the rest of his time would be his own. And there was also the presence of Atalia, who was nearly twice his age, yet he felt a pang of disappointment every time she left the room. Shmuel fancied he noticed a certain distance, or disparity, between her words and her voice. Her words were few and sometimes sarcastic, her voice was warm.

A couple of days later he moved out of his room in Tel Arza and into the house surrounded by a paved yard shaded by fig and vine, the house that had attracted him from the first glance. In a couple of cardboard boxes and an old kitbag he transported his clothes, his books, his typewriter and two rolled-up posters, one showing the Pietà and the other the heroes of the People’s Revolution in Cuba. He carried his small gramophone under one arm, and in his hand his collection of records. This time he did not stumble over the loose plank inside the front door, but carefully stepped across it.

Atalia Abravanel explained to him in detail the scope of his duties and the rules of the house. She showed him the spiral iron staircase that led up from the kitchen to the attic. Standing at the foot of the staircase, she instructed Shmuel in the details of his work and the routine of the kitchen and the laundry, one hand resting with fingers outspread on her hip while the other fluttered for a moment on his sweater, pulling from his sleeve a wisp of straw or a dead leaf caught in the wool. She spoke precisely, practically, yet in a voice that conjured up a warm, dark room:

‘Look. It’s like this. Wald is a nocturnal creature. He sleeps till midday because he stays awake every night until the early hours of the morning. Every evening from five o’clock until ten or eleven you will sit and talk to him in the library. And that, more or less, is the sum total of your duties. Every afternoon at half past four you will fill and light the paraffin heater. You will feed the fish in the aquarium. There’s no need for you to make any special effort to prepare subjects for conversation – he will have already equipped himself with an abundance of topics, though it certainly won’t take you long to discover that he’s one of those people who talk mainly because they can’t abide a moment’s silence. Don’t be afraid to argue with him. On the contrary, he really comes to life when people disagree with him. Like an old dog who still needs a stranger to appear every now and then to give him a reason to bark, and occasionally to give a little nip. Though only a playful one. On the other hand, you can both drink as much tea as you wish: here’s the kettle, and here’s the essence and the sugar, and over there is a box of biscuits. Every

Contents

About the Book

About the Author

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

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COMPANION SOUGHT

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