Shmuel placed his fingers on Gershom Wald’s brown, veiny hand, and left them there as he said:
“Thirty or so years ago, Aaron Abraham Kabak wrote a sort of novel about Jesus called The Narrow Path. It’s tiresome, too sentimental. Jesus as described by Kabak is a delicate, vulnerable Jew who tries to bring love and compassion to the world. But the relationship between Jesus and his disciple Judas is described as a complicated one, of love and resentment, attraction and revulsion. Kabak’s Judas is a pretty repulsive character. Kabak is as blind as the rest of them. He too failed to see that Judas was the most fervent of believers.”
“The eyes,” Gershom Wald said, “will never open. Almost everyone traverses their lifespan, from birth to death, with eyes closed. Even you and I, my dear Shmuel. With eyes closed. If we open our eyes for just a moment, a great and terrible cry will burst forth from us and we shall scream and never stop. And if we don’t cry out day and night, that’s a sign that our eyes are closed. Now will you kindly read your book and let’s sit in silence. We have talked enough for this evening.”
40
* * *
AT HALF PAST ELEVEN the next morning, before he went out to his usual Hungarian restaurant, Atalia knocked at his door. She was wearing a full-length black skirt, a tight red pullover that accentuated the curve of her breasts, and narrow high-heeled shoes. She had a white knitted scarf around her neck which went well with the sweater. Her blank, high-browed face, her warm brown-green eyes, her thin, arched eyebrows, the fascinating deep furrow from her nostrils to her upper lip, and the long dark hair flowing down over her shoulder all struck Shmuel as beautiful but inaccessible. The bitterness was concealed particularly in the corner of her pursed lips, which smiled only rarely. Her violet scent with its hint of starch and steam ironing entered Shmuel’s ascetic room with her, and he inhaled it deep into his lungs. For a moment or two she stood tall in the doorway without coming into the room, looking at the bearded, armed images of the Cuban revolutionaries with which Shmuel had adorned the walls of his attic, as well as at the Pietà.
She had come to ask a favor. As part of her work for the investigation bureau, she had a meeting at three o’clock that afternoon, at Café Atara on Ben Yehuda Street, with a man who was somewhat unbalanced and was often drunk even in the afternoon. It had occurred to her that it might be better for her to turn up for the meeting accompanied by a man. They both smiled when she said the word “man.”
Might Shmuel be free for half an hour, at three o’clock, to come and meet her and the poet Hiram Nehushtan at Café Atara? He would not have to join in the conversation, and in fact he would not have to do anything except be there and have a tea or a coffee. If he said no, if he was busy or not interested in taking part in the meeting, she would naturally understand and respect that. But he would surely not say no.
“Tell me something about Mr. Nehushtan,” Shmuel asked. “If it’s not top secret. Like everything about you.”
“Hiram is a bit of a poet, not a well-known poet but somewhat esoteric. He was once a member of the Stern Gang. For the past ten years or so, since the state came into being, he has not found a place for himself. Like many people from the underground. He does all kinds of jobs: he’s a tourist guide, a literary translator, he writes all kinds of booklets that he publishes himself. Two years ago he borrowed some money from a building contractor by the name of Ilya Schwarzbaum, who had been his friend in the underground, and now he is refusing to repay the loan and even claims that it never existed. Since the loan was made with no surety and no signed contract, on the basis of a friendly handshake between two comrades-in-arms, it won’t be straightforward to get the money out of him. My bureau has been trying for several weeks now, in gentle and not so gentle terms, to get the poet-warrior to repay the money to Schwarzbaum. Today you and I are going to make another attempt.”
“Why are you standing in the doorway?” Shmuel said. “Sit down.” And he pointed to the only chair. He himself was sitting on the edge of his bed, still inhaling her subtle fragrance. “If there’s no contract and no other document, maybe the poet is right after all. Maybe there never was a loan and your contractor has invented it.”
“There was a loan. Definitely,” Atalia said. “We even have a witness. An accountant called Esther Levi, who was present in Café Atara when the contractor handed over the money in cash. Nehushtan has forgotten all about her, and I’m hoping to bring her to our meeting today. She’s a bit eccentric too, but her eccentricity lies in the fact that she never forgets a thing. She remembers precisely, word for word, who said what and to whom ten years ago. It must be a terrible curse. Actually, you may find she and you have a common language. They said about her in the underground that she used to hide hand grenades in her bra.”
“I hope she won’t bring any hand grenades in her bra to the meeting today,” Shmuel said. “Okay, then, three o’clock at Café Atara. I’ll be there. Maybe your rich contractor will make me a small loan too.”
Then he added:
“You already know. I’ll always do whatever you ask of me.”
“Why is that?”
To this question Shmuel found no answer. He felt that his eyes were about to fill with tears and turned away. Shmuel usually wept, either from sorrow for others or from self-pity. But this time he had no idea whom he was feeling sorry for. Suddenly emboldened, he said, his eyes still turned to the wall:
“I’d like to suggest that you and I could try to be friends. I mean . . . not friends. The word ‘friends’ suggests something that’s impossible between us. Pals.”
At once, covered in shame and confusion, he hastened to correct himself:
“Not to be strangers. Not entirely strangers. After all, we’ve lived here all this winter, just the three of us under one roof. It would be nice if you and I —”
But he couldn’t think how to finish this sentence. He blushed under his shaggy beard, lowered his eyes, and fell silent.
“Feelings,” Atalia said. “Two of your predecessors who stayed here to keep the old man company were full of feelings. I’m getting rather tired of people with feelings. It seems to me that all feelings are unnecessary and end badly. Life could be so much simpler if feelings could be abolished. But I don’t need to lecture you, Shmuel. Could you perhaps make do with the fact that I can more or less put up with you most of the time, and now and again a little more so.”
It was the first time she had called him by his first name.
At half past two, after the goulash soup and apple compote in the Hungarian restaurant and following a short siesta, Shmuel Ash got up, dusted his beard, neck, and forehead with baby talc, changed his shirt and put on his worn ash-gray pullover, donned his duffel coat and his shapka, checked that he had his inhaler in his pocket, and set out to walk to Café Atara. When he stepped with all his weight on the improvised wooden step inside the front door, it seesawed up at one end and he almost lost his footing. He managed to recover his balance at the last moment, however, by leaning both arms against the wall.
The poet Hiram Nehushtan was a small thin man with sticky hair, long sideburns, a boxer’s broken nose, and a high smooth brow with a single oily curl glued to it. Without getting up, he said:
“You’ve probably forgotten me, but I remember you very well. You’re Shmuel Ash. You used to go to the meetings of the Socialist Renewal Group. I came to one of your meetings at Café Roth in Yegia Kapayim. There wasn’t much renewal, and your socialism was half Bolshevik and half Cuban. I’m also a socialist and even a bit of a revolutionary, but unlike you lot I’m definitely a Hebrew socialist. Hebrew, not Jewish. I don’t want to have anything to do with the Jews. The Jews are the walking dead. So what brings you here today? Are you on the bride’s side or the groom’s?”
He had a sour smell, and was missing an incisor.
“I’m a friend of Atalia Abravanel’s,” Shmuel stammered. “Well, not a friend. An acquaintance. A neighbor.”
“I invited him,” Atalia
said. “I wanted us to have a witness. We’ll wait another five minutes, and if Esther Levi doesn’t turn up, we’ll get down to business.”
They were sitting on the upper, discreet floor of Café Atara, a kind of gallery, shrouded in mist. It was redolent of coffee and cakes and cigarette smoke mixed with the smell of wet woolen overcoats and winter body odors. The gallery was windowless, and the air was thick and smoky. At the neighboring tables sat various well-known Jerusalem figures. There was a middle-aged history lecturer, who did not recognize Shmuel despite the fact that he had attended one of his seminars the previous year. And there were two women, one an overweight Knesset member of the governing party and the other a journalist at Davar. They were drinking tea with milk and eating apple cake with cream.
“It’s out of the question,” the politician said. “You can’t keep silent about something like that.”
The journalist replied:
“But I’m not trying to justify them, not at all, don’t get me wrong, there’s no way I could justify them. Nevertheless, I feel sorry for them. People here have forgotten that there’s room in the world for pity, as well as principles and ideals.”
“You can’t have pity at the expense of principles and ideals, Sylvia.”
At a third table sat a well-known painter, no longer young, with a pockmarked face and bushy eyebrows, wearing a red silk scarf, reading a newspaper attached to a wooden stick, as was the custom in cafés in prewar Europe. A waiter in a white jacket was going around the tables, and at a sign from Atalia he hurried across to their table, a white napkin over his arm, bowed, and said in a Viennese accent:
“Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. What is your pleasure today? We have all sorts of lovely cakes. I particularly recommend the chocolate torte.”
Atalia ordered strong black coffee for Shmuel and herself, while the poet, with a sigh that suggested he was making a special exception, through gritted teeth, ordered a tiny glass, really just a thimbleful, of brandy. But it must be real brandy, imported brandy, not the piss they make here. Then he lit a cigarette, took three or four deep puffs, stubbed it out in the ashtray, sniffed his fingertips, lit another, and said:
“I’d still like to know why we’ve met here today. To draw up a new manifesto? To sign another declaration? To organize a mass rally with six or seven participants?”
“You know why we’re here,” Atalia said. “Ilya Schwarzbaum.”
The poet stared at her. He carefully stubbed out the cigarette of which he had smoked less than a third, took a new one from the pack without offering one to Atalia or Shmuel, blew streams of smoke out through his nostrils, and burst into gurgling, resentful laughter, so that the people sitting at the nearby tables turned and looked at him in surprise through the cloud of smoke.
“Firstly,” he said, “I’ve never borrowed a cent from Ilya Schwarzbaum. And I never would. He’s a loathsome individual. A miserable Jewish go-between for all sorts of building sites and depots. Secondly, as I’ve already told you at least twice, I’ll repay him when I’ve got money. If I get money. And why should I have money? Whereas that Ilya has more money than he has hairs in his nose. Actually, the reason I came here today was to ask him, through you, for a small loan, five thousand liras, for three months. Tell him I’m willing to pay interest. Compound interest even.”
“Let’s go back to the previous loan,” Atalia said. “We have a witness. Esther Levi. You don’t remember her, but she was with you here in Café Atara two years ago when Ilya gave you the money in cash. Esther Levi will testify against you if we take you to court. And we will.”
“Hey, you,” the poet suddenly turned to Shmuel, “why are you sitting there saying nothing? It looks like you’re going to be the second witness against me? Without two witnesses you haven’t got a case. You’re a socialist. Or maybe not anymore. Once you were a socialist, a follower of Fidel Castro. So please explain to me, where’s the justice in this? How and why should a poor poet like me finance a filthy bloodsucker like Ilya Schwarzbaum?”
The waiter returned with a brandy for Hiram Nehushtan and a black coffee each for Atalia and Shmuel. He put a little milk jug down next to the coffee cups. Then he inquired politely if he could suggest an apple cake with whipped cream? Or the chocolate torte, also with whipped cream? Or some crumble?
Atalia refused all three suggestions politely, thanked the waiter, and said:
“Esther Levi hasn’t turned up. But we’ll definitely take her to the court hearing. She also told us that your parents left you a windowless one-room basement flat in an alley behind the Edison Theater. The place you call your den. You wouldn’t want the court to take that flat away from you. Where would you go?”
Hiram Nehushtan balanced his lit cigarette on the edge of the ashtray, forgot it there, lit another one, and moaned:
“Where would I go? Where would I go? I’d go to hell. Anyway, I’ve been on the road to hell for ages. I’ve gone most of the way. I’m nearly there.”
Suddenly he stood up and said:
“That’s it. I’ve had enough. I’m leaving. This very minute. I don’t want to sit with you anymore. I don’t want to go on talking to you. You’re cruel people. Cruelty, ladies and gentlemen, is the curse of mankind. We weren’t driven out of Paradise because of that apple, to hell with the apple, who cares about one apple more or less. We weren’t driven out because of any silly apple, we were driven out of Paradise because of cruelty. To this day we are driven from place to place only because of cruelty. Tell your revolting contractor he’ll get his money back with compound interest, he’ll get it back several times over, he’ll get it back in sacks stuffed with coins and banknotes, he’ll get it back in a shower of cash, only not from me. He’ll get it back from the rich and not from someone who’s got nothing. And by the way, I’m cruel too. I won’t deny it. I’m a cruel man, a petty man, a man eager for respect, driven from place to place all these years. A totally redundant individual. But three thousand liras! Ilya Schwarzbaum! That reptile could easily give three thousand liras as a tip to some shoeshine boy. I haven’t even got three liras to pay for this piss brandy. Anyway, I’m leaving, because a sensitive man shouldn’t spend a minute more than necessary in the company of evil-minded people. As for you”—he turned toward Shmuel and laughed that wet, dishonest laugh of his—“you’d better watch out for her. If you happen to have fallen for her already, heaven help you. Yes, yes, I’m going. There’s nothing for me here. Anyway, everyone’s forgotten me. Why don’t you all forget me too? Forget me once and for all. And that’ll be that.”
He turned and stumbled down the steps. Atalia and Shmuel, looking down from the gallery, could see him fumble among the coats on the coat stand at the entrance, eventually pull out of the heap a torn raincoat that looked as if it had once belonged to a British soldier, put it on, wave to the photograph of President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, and stagger uncertainly into the cold, damp street.
41
* * *
AFTER THE POET LEFT, Shmuel and Atalia remained facing each other with their empty coffee cups in front of them, talking about Mount Scopus and the university, which had been cut off from its buildings because of the war. Shmuel remembered that in less than an hour he had to be back on duty with Gershom Wald. He ought to tell Atalia. He ought to tell her now, without delay. But what should he tell her? He smiled absent-mindedly, his gaze fixed on her veiny hands on the table before her, her skin dappled with brown spots, as if the hands really were much older than she. He said softly:
“Maybe we could meet this evening? We could go to the cinema and then eat at your restaurant? Wald will surely agree to let me go a few hours before the end of my time with him.”
“Tell me,” Atalia said, “aren’t there any girls your age left in Jerusalem?”
Shmuel protested. He too was quite an old young man, in fact. “So what?” he asked, and, after a moment’s hesitation, added, “After all, we are both on our own.”
“You wanted to be on your own.
Isn’t that why you came to us, to be on your own?”
“I came because my girlfriend left me and married her ex-boyfriend. I came because my father lost a lawsuit and declared bankruptcy and couldn’t afford to pay for me to study anymore. And also because I’d been at a standstill with my thesis for several months. Although I still haven’t stopped wondering how the world and the Jews would look if they hadn’t rejected Jesus. I can’t stop thinking about the man who betrayed Jesus to his enemies—for what, thirty pieces of silver? Tell me, does this seem logical to you? Thirty pieces of silver! A wealthy man like Judas, who apparently owned land in the town of Kerioth. Do you happen to know roughly how much thirty pieces of silver was worth at that time? Not much. The price of an average slave. Maybe you’d like to hear some of my thoughts about Jesus and the Jews. I could read you something from my drafts this evening.”
She ignored his offer. She waved a hand to disperse the smoke that still hung between them. The waiter came over, and she paid for the coffee and the brandy and asked for a receipt. Shmuel had pulled his wallet out, but too late. She told him not to bother, to save his money, this small expense would be covered by the investigation bureau where she worked.
“I pay you so little for your work with us. A pittance. Tell me, do you get some enjoyment from the hours you spend with Wald? Maybe in the midst of his outpourings there’s a minute or two that makes sense? You must forgive him. Since his son died he’s got nothing left except words. And in fact you’re fond of words yourself. The work you do for us suits you through and through.”
Atalia folded the receipt and they both stood. They went down from the Café Atara gallery, found their coats on the rotating coat stand at the entrance, and Shmuel tried to help Atalia on with hers. But he was so clumsy that she pulled her coat away from him, put it on, buttoned it, and then turned to help Shmuel, who, instead of sliding his arm into the sleeve, had thrust it into the torn lining. As they stood at the entrance, while he was putting on his shapka, her finger touched his cheek lightly, quickly, as if brushing a crumb off his beard, and she said: