Panther In The Basement

Amos Oz

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 1998
• Print ISBN:
  9780156006309
• eBook ISBN:
  9780547705262
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historical Fiction
• Index: Literature

From “a great and true voice of our time” (Washington Post Book World), comes this story of Proffy, a twelve-year-old living in Palestine in 1947. When Proffy befriends a member of the occupying British forces who shares his love of language and the Bible, he is accused of treason by his friends and learns the true nature of loyalty and betrayal. Translated by Nicholas de Lange.

twenty

I have already explained about the locked medicine drawer and my mother's role in the Underground. During the night curfew, when I was awakened by shooting or the rumble of an explosion, I would sometimes try not to fall asleep again even when silence returned. Tensely I lay there hoping to catch the sound of hurried footfalls on the sidewalk outside my window, a scratching at the door, whispered voices in the hallway, groans of pain stifled by clenched teeth. It was my duty not to know who had been injured. Not to see, not to hear a thing, not even to try to imagine the spare mattress being spread out on the kitchen floor in the night, only to disappear before day dawned.

All that summer I waited. No wounded fighter ever came.

Four days before the end of the summer holidays, before I started the seventh grade, my parents went to Tel Aviv to take part in a memorial evening for the town they had come from.

My mother said:

"Listen carefully. Yardena has offered to spend the night here to look after you because we are sleeping over in Tel Aviv. Be as good as gold. Don't be a nuisance. Help Yardena. Eat what's put on your plate; don't forget there are dead children in the world who would have lived for another week if they had only had the food you leave on your plate."

There's a pit inside the stomach that science hasn't discovered yet, and all the blood drained into that pit from my head, my heart, my knees, and turned into an ocean and roared like the ocean.

I summoned up what was left of my voice and answered, folding the newspaper that was lying on the table into two, four, eight:

"It'll be fine. You go."

And I tried to fold it in half again but I couldn't.

The question I was asking myself as I folded the paper was whether science had discovered, and if not whether I myself could discover within the next couple of hours, a way of making someone disappear without trace for twenty-four hours or so. Vanish completely. Not exist. Not just to be vacant, like, say, the spaces between the stars, but to vanish and yet to go on being here, to see and hear everything. To be me and also a shadow. Be present without being present.

Because what was I going to do alone with Yardena? What could I do about my shame? And in our home, too? Should I ask her to forgive me? Before or after finding out (how can you find out, fool?) whether or not she looked out and noticed somebody watching her from the roof on the opposite side of the street? And if she did, whether she noticed who it was? Did I really have to confess? And if so, how could I convince her that it was just an accident? That I really didn't see anything. That I definitely wasn't the notorious peeping torn who had been seen on the roofs in our neighborhood and people talked about in whispers and had been trying to catch without success for several months now. And that when I saw her (only once! only for about ten seconds!) I wasn't thinking about her body but the schemes of the British occupier? That it was just an accident? (What was? What did I see? Nothing. A dark patch, a bright patch, another dark patch.) Perhaps I should tell her a lie? What lie? How? And what about the thoughts I'd had about her since then?

I'd do better to keep my mouth shut.

We'd both do better to try to pretend that what happened didn't happen. Just as my parents said nothing about the package that was hidden here during the search. Just as they said nothing about lots of things, those silences that were like bites.

My parents set off at three, not before extracting a whole string of promises from me: Remember, be careful, don't forget, make sure, on no account, take special care, heaven forbid. As they left they said:

"The icebox is full of food and don't forget to show her where everything is and be nice and helpful and don't be a nuisance. And remember specially to tell her that the sofa in our room is made up as a bed for her and tell her there's a note for her in the kitchen and that the icebox is full, and you're to be in bed by ten and remember to lock the front door with both keys and remind her to turn the lights out."

I was alone. I waited. A hundred times I went around each room making sure it was neat and nothing was out of place. I was afraid and yet somehow hoping that she might have forgotten she had promised to come. Or that she wouldn't make it before the curfew started and I'd be alone all night. Then I got my mother's sewing basket out of the wardrobe and sewed a button on my shirt, not because it had come off but because it was loose and I didn't want it to fall off just when Yardena was here. Then I cleared away the spent matches that we kept in a separate box next to the new ones to reuse, as an economy measure, for lighting the kerosene cooker from the stove or vice versa. I hid them right at the back, behind the spices, because I was afraid that Yardena would see them and think we were poor or mean or not very neat. Then I stood in front of the full-length mirror on the back of the wardrobe door, breathing the faint scent of mothballs that always clung to the wardrobe and made me think of winter. I looked at the mirror for a while and tried to decide once and for all, objectively, as Father demanded, what I looked like.

I looked like a pale, thin, angular child, with a face that was always changing and with very restless eyes.

Is that the look of a traitor?

Or of a panther in the basement?

I felt a sad pain at the thought that Yardena was already almost grown up.

If only she could really know me, she might realize that I am simply trapped inside the shell of a talkative child, but that inside, peeping out—

No: better stop there. The word peeping hurt like a slap around the face. Which I well deserved. If it somehow came out that Yardena felt like giving me my slap this evening, I might actually feel better. I hope she's forgotten, I hope she'll never come, I thought, and I ran to peep—no, not peep—take a look, from the corner of the bathroom window, because from there you could see almost as far as the Sinopsky Brothers grocery shop on the corner. Since I was in the bathroom, I decided to wash my face and neck, not with the ordinary soap that Father and I used, but with my mother's scented soap. Next I wet my hair with water and combed it and straightened my part, then I fanned my head with the paper, to dry my hair quickly, because what would happen if Yardena arrived at this very moment and realized I had wet my hair just for her. I cut my fingernails a bit, too, even though I'd already cut them on Friday, just to be on the safe side, but I was sorry I'd done it, because now my fingernails looked as if I'd been chewing them.

I waited till nine minutes to seven. The curfew was about to begin. Several times since then I've found myself waiting for a woman and wondering whether or not she would come, and if she did, what we would do, and what I looked like, and what I should say to her, but no wait was ever as tense and cruel as that time when Yardena almost didn't turn up.

I have just written the words "waiting for a woman," because Yardena was then almost twenty, whereas I was twelve and a quarter, which was barely sixty-two percent of her age; in other words, we were separated by thirty-eight percent of her age, as I calculated with a pencil on one of the blank cards from Father's desk as the clock approached seven and the beginning of curfew, and I had convinced myself that that was that, there was no hope, Yardena had forgotten me, and with good reason.

I worked it out like this: In another ten years, when I reached the age of twenty-two and a quarter, and Yardena was thirty, I would still be only seventy-four percent of her age, which was definitely better than the current sixty-two percent but still pretty grim. As the years went on the distance between us would gradually decrease (in percentages), but the depressing part was that this decreasing gap would decrease more and more slowly. Like an exhausted marathon runner. I went over the calculation three times, and each time the gap decreased more and more slowly. It seemed to me completely unfair and illogical that in the years immediately ahead I would go leaping toward her in tens of percent and then, in our years of middle age and old age, the percentage gap between us would decrease at a snail's pace. Why? And was it impossible for the decreasing gap to be closed completely? Ever? (Laws of nature. OK. I know. But when my mother told me her story about the blue shutter, she said that in the old days the laws of nature were completely different. There was a time when the earth was flat and the sun and the stars revolved around it. Now all we had left revolving around us was our own moon, and who knew if that law, too, wouldn't be revoked some day in the future? It followed that change in general was always change for the worse.)

When Yardena was a hundred, I worked out, I would be ninety-two and a quarter, and the percentage gap between us would be reduced to less than eight (which was not bad, compared to the thirty-eight of this evening). But what good would the decreasing gap between our ages be to a decrepit old couple?

I switched off this thought and the desk lamp, tore up the calculations and threw them in the toilet, then pulled the chain, and since I was in the bathroom anyway I decided to brush my teeth. While I was brushing them I made up my mind to be different: from now on I would be a quiet, straightforward, logical, and above all brave man. In other words: if a last-minute miracle happened and Yardena really did turn up after all, even though the curfew had almost begun, I would say to her straight out, simply and succinctly, that I was sorry about what happened on the roof and it wouldn't happen again. Ever.

But how could I?

She arrived at five to seven. She had brought us fresh-baked rolls from Angel's Bakery, where she worked as a clerk. She was wearing a light sleeveless summer dress, with a pattern of cyclamens and a row of big buttons all the way down the front, like polished river pebbles arranged in a row by a child. She said:

"Ben Hur didn't want to come. He wouldn't say what's happened. What's up between you, Proffy? Have you had another row?"

All the blood that had drained into the pit under my stomach gushed up and flushed hotly into my face and ears. Even my own blood was betraying me, and embarrassing me in front of Yardena. What is closer to a man than his own blood? And now even my blood had turned traitor.

"It wasn't a personal row; it was a rift."

Yardena said:

"Ah. A rift. Proffy, whenever you use words like that you sound just like Voice of Fighting Zion. And where are your own words? Haven't you got any words of your own? Didn't you ever have any?"

"Look," I said very seriously.

And a few moments later I repeated:

"Look."

"There's nothing much to look at."

"What I wanted you to know, and this doesn't concern only your brother, but questions of principle—"

"OK, fine. Questions of principle. If you like, we'll have a discussion later about the extent of the rift in the Underground and the questions of principle. But not now, Proffy." (Underground! How much did she know about us? And who had dared to tell her? Or was she just guessing?) "Later. Right now I'm famished. Let's fix ourselves a wild supper. Not just a salad and yogurt. Something much more exciting." She scrutinized the kitchen thoroughly, peering into closets and drawers, casting an eye over the pots and pans, investigating the icebox, checking the spices and condiments, examining the two kerosene burners. Then she pondered for a while, making all sorts of vague sounds to herself, mmm and ouf and ahh, and then, still sunk in thought like a general devising battle plans, she instructed me to start preparing some vegetables—no, not there, over here—tomatoes, green peppers, onions, about this much. Then she put the chopping board down on the counter, took the big butcher's knife out of the drawer, and discovering the pot of chicken soup that my mother had left for us in the icebox she took a cupful of it. Then she cut the chicken in pieces, and heated some oil in a frying pan. She laid the vegetables I prepared for her on a corner of the drainboard. When the oil began to bubble, she fried some cloves of garlic in it and browned the chicken pieces on both sides, until the mingled smells of chicken, garlic, and hot oil made my mouth water and sent urgent spasms through my palate, throat, and stomach. Yardena said:

"Why haven't you got any olives? I don't mean those olives from a jar, silly, those vegetarian olives. Why haven't you got any decadent olives, the sort that make you a bit tipsy? When you find some real olives, bring me some. You can even wake me up in the middle of the night." (I did find some. Years later. But I was too shy to take her olives in the middle of the night.)

When she decided the chicken pieces were brown enough, she took them out of the frying pan and laid them on a serving dish, then she washed and dried the frying pan.

"Wait a minute, Proffy," she said. "Hang on. This is only the curtain-raiser. Meanwhile, why don't you set the table?"

Then she heated some more oil in the pan and, leaving the fragrant garlic-scented chicken pieces to wait, she fried the finely-chopped onion, and while the onion turned golden and then brown in front of my staring eyes, she added the little pieces of tomato and pepper that were waiting for her on the drainboard, sprinkled some chopped parsley over it all, and mixed the ingredients together well, as she fried them. Soon my soul was in an agony of anticipation at the delightful smells, and I thought I couldn't endure another minute, another second, another breath, but Yardena laughed and told me not to touch the rolls or anything; it would be a pity to spoil your appetite, what's the matter with you, what's your hurry, contain yourself. And she put the chicken pieces back in the frying pan and rolled them around in the oil until it soaked right through to the bone, and only then did she pour the cupful of soup over them. She waited for it to boil.

Seventy-seven years of agony went past, as slow as torture, to the limit of endurance and beyond, and, further, to the point of despair, and further still till the heart sobbed, before the stock began to bubble and boil, and the oil began to splutter and spit. Yardena turned the heat down and sprinkled on some salt and a pinch of ground black pepper. Then she put the lid on the pan, leaving a small space for the tantalizing vapors to escape. While the broth was boiling she added some little cubes of potato and some even smaller cubes of hot red pepper. She waited ruthlessly until the broth evaporated, leaving behind a heavenly thick sauce enfolding the pieces of fried chicken that seemed to have grown wings and become a psalm and a dream. The whole apartment was astonished at the bevy of powerful smells wafting from the kitchen and invading every corner like frantic rioters. Such odors had not been smelled here since the building was built.

Meanwhile, aflame with desire and anticipation and pangs of hunger, swallowing back the surging saliva, I laid the table for the two of us, facing each other like Mother and Father. I decided to leave my usual place empty. As I laid the table I could see Yardena out of the corner of my eye tossing the chicken pieces in the frying pan, to remind them who they were, tasting the sauce, adjusting the seasoning, spooning it over the food, which had taken on a wonderful hue of burnished brass or old gold, and her arms, her shoulders, and her hips came alive in a kind of dance inside her dress, protected by my mother's apron, as though the chicken pieces were shaking her while she shook them.

When we had eaten our fill, we sat facing each other picking at a bunch of sweet grapes; then we devoured half a watermelon and drank coffee together even though I told Yardena honestly and bravely that I wasn't allowed coffee, especially in the evening before going to bed.

Yardena said:

"They're not here."

And she also said:

"Now for a cigarette. Just me. Not you. Find me an ashtray." But there was no ashtray, and there couldn't be one, because smoking was forbidden in our apartment. Always. Under all circumstances. Even visitors were forbidden to smoke. Father was fundamentally opposed to the very idea of smoking. He also held firmly to the view that visitors should observe the rules of the house, like a traveler in a foreign land. He supported this view with a proverb that he was fond of citing, about how to behave when in Rome. (Years later, when I visited Rome for the first time, I was astonished to discover that it was full of smokers. But when Father said Rome, he generally meant ancient Rome, not the Rome of today.)

Yardena smoked two cigarettes and drank two cups of coffee (I was given only one). While she smoked she stuck her legs out in front of her and rested her feet on my chair, which was empty this evening. I decided it was my duty to get up at once, clear the table, put the leftover food away in the icebox, and wash up. The only thing I couldn't do was to take the garbage outside, because of the curfew.

Who has ever spent a whole night alone in an apartment with a girl while outside there is a night curfew and all the streets are deserted and the whole city is bolted and barred? When you know that nobody in the world can disturb you? And a deep, wide silence hangs over the night like mist?

I stood over the kitchen sink, scouring the bottom of the frying pan with steel wool, with my back to Yardena and my soul the exact opposite (its back to the sink and the frying pan and all its being facing toward Yardena). Suddenly I said quickly, with my eyes tight closed, as if I were swallowing a pill:

"Anyway I'm sorry about what happened that time. On the roof. It won't ever happen again."

Yardena said to my back:

"Of course it will. And how! Only at least try to make it a bit less stupid than the way it was that time."

A single fly was sitting on the edge of a cup. I wished I could change places with it.

Then, still in the kitchen (Yardena used her saucer as an ashtray), she asked me to explain to her, in a nutshell, what my row with her brother was all about. Sorry, not row, rift.

My duty was to say nothing. To maintain the cloak of secrecy, even under torture. I had seen in lots of films how women extract secrets even from very strong men, like Gary Cooper, or even Douglas Fairbanks. And in Bible class Mr. Gihon said, at his wife's expense: "Samson was destroyed because he fell into the clutches of a wicked woman." You might have thought that a...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Editor's Note
• Dedication
• one
• two
• three
• four
• five
• six
• seven
• eight
• nine
• ten
• eleven
• twelve
• thirteen
• fourteen
• fifteen
• sixteen
• seventeen
• eighteen
• nineteen
• twenty
• twenty-one
• twenty-two
• twenty-three
• twenty-four
• twenty-five
• About the Author