Where the Jackals Howl (11 page)

Another fragment of plaster fell from the ceiling, larger than the first. Tiny flakes of whitewash were scattered over the bedspread that resembled the intimate clothing of a loose woman. The footsteps on the staircase ceased. Perhaps the stranger was now on the first floor. There was silence, no sound of a key turning in a lock, or of a bell ringing. He must be standing motionless, examining the peeling doors and perhaps taking in the names of the residents on the mailboxes. Dov clenched his teeth. His jaws tensed like a fist. He stood up, hid his plan of the port of Jerusalem in the antique chest of drawers, and returned to the writing desk. He ripped out a fresh sheet of graph paper, sat down, and started to draw a picture-map of a mountainous land.

H
E WAS
a gray man: gray eyes, face, and hair. But he almost invariably chose to wear a blue shirt of the kind favored by young athletes, and sandals of biblical style. Hidden beneath his shirt was a strong and hairy torso, crisscrossed with sinews. At first sight he seemed still in his prime, and he had the build of a stevedore. Only his heart was weak, but this was not evident to the eye. In the autumn he would be sixty years old.

He sketched the map of a mountainous land. A green police patrol car raced down the street, ripping the silence apart, and then silence returned and sewed up the breach with a cool, dreamy hand. The patrol car receded southward, toward the steep alleyways at the approaches to the railway station. On three sides the truce line encircled the city of Jerusalem. To the north and east of this line a different Jerusalem brooded. And to the south lay Bethlehem and, farther still, the godforsaken hills of Hebron, and at their feet, forever, the desert.

 

Dov drew a land of black basalt hills. To these hills he gave sharp snow-capped peaks tall enough to pierce the embroidered-silk screen of the stars. He drew monsters of rock, sharp daggers of stone, summits like drawn swords. And wild ravines cleaving the vaulted ranges. Here and there were ominous overhangs, threatening at any moment to hurl primeval cataracts of smashed rock down into the abyss. Canyons and gorges carved out in drunkenness. Brooding labyrinths and volcanic caves, the menace of a different silence.

At last he stopped drawing and stared at the page. His jaws were gray. He took a red crayon and began to write in the altitudes of his peaks. The foothills of these mountains could have laughed the summits of the Alps to scorn.

D
RIVEN BY
hunger and cold, perhaps by regret, one of the jackals of Bethlehem began to weep bitterly. At once he was answered by jackal packs from the heights of Bet Zafafa, from Zur Bahar, from the hill of Mar Elias, in an outburst of perverted laughter and malice. The wind stopped blowing, as if listening with rapt attention.

The stairs creaked again. A thrill passed through his body. His fingers turned pale. Heavily the stranger climbed another step, then another, and a third, coughed, and then paused. And again the stillness of death descended on the house, on the street, and on the city. This time Dov ran into the kitchen. Close the window. Seal the lattice. Keep the light on.

Until a few years before he had been teaching geography to a junior class of the national secondary school. Hundreds of pupils had passed through his hands over the years. They used to respect his grayness and obey his gray voice. Rumors proliferated among them and passed from generation to generation, rumors concerning the elderly schoolmaster who was once a leading figure in the underground and one of the founding fathers of the kibbutz movement. As they gripped the chalk his fingers looked strong and decisive. With one firm sweep of his hand he was capable of drawing a thin, straight line that no ruler in the world could have improved upon. Sometimes he would try to entertain his class: his jokes were thin, gray. Occasionally he would suddenly become animated by a sort of restrained pathos, and something would come alive in his eyes. This would be interpreted by his pupils as anger; it would fade and disappear as suddenly as it had arisen.

Two or three times a year he used to put on khaki clothes, take a bundle of maps and a smart army knapsack that always aroused envy in the hearts of his pupils, and lead a party of schoolchildren on a hiking tour. He cut a strange and almost eccentric figure in his hiking gear: tattered windbreaker with many pockets and buckles, tall walking boots, a rather antiquated firearm that he called a Tommy gun. With his pupils from the intermediate classes he would often climb to the heights of the hills of Naphtali, and with his senior students he used to cross over Little Crater to the Scorpion's Path and beyond, to the Meshar.

 

Once, during one of these trips, Dov's party was held up in Beersheba. A representative of the Military Authority told them to change their route and not to pass through the Desert of Paran. For security reasons. In a general sense; he did not go into details. The officer was thin and tall, curly-haired, barefoot and taciturn, his uniform disgracefully casual. It was four years since Dov had seen this young man. Four years before the young man had come to Jerusalem for some congress or other and had spent two nights in Dov's apartment. The first night he arrived with a girl whom he did not even bother to introduce to his father, and the second night there were two girls with him. Dov remembered the beauty of these girls, the softness of their voices, the muffled laughter from the sleeping bags in the early morning. Now he did not know what words he could use, or if the proper words even existed. His pupils pressed around him and the thin officer, and he found nothing to say.

“Anyway,” said Ehud casually, drawling as if too lethargic to move his lips and speak intelligibly, “anyway, as far as I'm concerned the best thing you can do is turn around and go home. We've got enough problems as it is. We don't need schoolkids and teachers here. Still, seeing as you've got this far, you may as well go on a little farther. Head straight for Eilat, sing your “Southward Ho!” songs there, and go home. Don't waste any time on the way.”

The teacher let his shoulders droop. He was taller and more powerfully built than the arrogant officer. In the days of the War of Independence he had been a staff officer in the Negev, with the rank of lieutenant colonel. But at that moment he could not speak of these things to his pupils or to the drowsy youth who stood before him chewing something, perhaps gum, perhaps his tongue.

“I know,” he murmured, “you don't need to tell me. I know.” The Beersheba sun drew sweat from every pore of his body. “I know this terrain much better than you do. I was fighting here in the Negev when you were so high.”

“OK,” said the curly-haired officer, “fine, OK, just don't start giving me your memoirs now. If you know the terrain, you can stop wasting my time. I've got too many tourists making nuisances of themselves. Good-bye.”

“Just a moment,” said Dov angrily, “one moment, please. Listen. In my day they would have cleared the area of terrorists within twenty-four hours. What's the matter with you people? You let infiltrators stroll around the Negev as if it were the Baghdad bazaar. What have you got to be so arrogant about? Why don't you do something, instead of chasing girls?”

The schoolchildren were stunned. Even Ehud was taken aback. He turned. The ghost of a smile passed over his lips and disappeared.

“Pardon?”

“It's just . . . what I meant was, perhaps we could talk about this, just the two of us. Not now. Why don't you drop in some time? Why not, really?”

“Why not? Some night in the summer,” he said. “I'm taking these miserable clods of mine out for some training in the Adullam hills. Making tigers out of alley cats. That would be a real shock for you, wouldn't it, if I turned up some time in the middle of the night to take a shower at your place and sleep for a couple of hours.”

Later, when the summer was over, Dov's request was granted, and he was allowed to take a last look at the lean and tousled officer. Something about him had changed. The pride of those casual lips had disappeared. Little night predators had eaten half his face.

 

In the course of every one of these trips Dov Sirkin would raise his voice—only slightly—and give a brief and fluent lecture on terrace cultivation in Galilee, or on the export of minerals and merchandise to Africa and Asia through the Red Sea Straits. His eyes were as sharp as the needle of a compass. At times he would suddenly halt the bored and weary party, point to a silent ruin, and tell a story. Or he would show the hikers an innocent-looking mound and say: There is a mystery hidden here. Sometimes in the desert he would sniff out the skeleton of a camel, a hyena, or a jackal. Or a spring that an inexperienced traveler would be unable to find even if he was dying of thirst twenty paces from it.

After such trips Dov Sirkin used to ask the Hebrew teacher to lend him the notebooks in which the pupils had described their expedition—a thousand versions of a thousand trifling details. Even in the most mundane account Dov would find something of interest. Sometimes he even took the trouble to copy items from his pupils' essays into his own journal, before returning the notebooks to the Hebrew teacher and the journal to the bottom drawer of the brown Berlin-style chest of drawers.

Geula used to come once a year, on the eve of Independence Day. After the festival she would always return to the kibbutz. Throughout the night and the morning after, she would sit by herself on Dov's little balcony, watching with trembling lips the fireworks erupting in the Jerusalem sky and in the sky above the mountains and the desert, listening to the loudspeakers blasting out their message far away in the main thoroughfares of the city, chain-smoking as she watched the young people singing their festive songs. She called her father Dov. She never talked to him about herself, or about her mother and brother. She spoke sometimes about Ben-Gurion, about the politics of moderation and restraint as opposed to the politics of revenge and summary retaliation. Altermann she considered a very Polish poet, incorrigibly in love with the tools of power, in love with death. Dov tried hard to engage her in conversation, to understand, to influence, but Geula asked him not to disturb her as she listened to the dance music from Terra Sancta Square and imagined the distant revelry. At the funeral Dov said to her, “You must, you must believe me when I say that I had no idea. How could I have known?”

She did not answer but moved away from him. Her eyes were dry. Her teeth were clenched. And her mouth was like a curved Arabian sword.

After that she stopped visiting him and never again appeared in Dov's apartment in Jerusalem.

D
OV COMPLETED
his sketch of the mountainous country and began to draw a raging river unlike any other river on the face of the earth. He carved out a huge canal, added a series of tributary waterways, and laid out a complicated network of gradients, slopes, dams, reservoirs, and lakes, complete with measurements. He also drew up an intricate scheme for calculating angles of incline, tolerance of road surfaces, pressure of water against the stress capacity of the dam, strength of rock, stability of the subsoil beneath lakewater, pressure of currents and winds, accumulations of eroded sand. About an hour earlier the sound of footsteps on the staircase had stopped. Now it returned. Somebody was treading the stairs, slowly, very heavily, leaning on the creaking old banister. The heart attack had come near the end of the school year. Between the first attack and the second there had been solid months of extreme discomfort and horrific nightmares: he was alone in the desert, alone on a raft in the middle of the ocean, alone in an airplane without any idea of how to handle the controls or how to land or avoid crashing into the mountains that drew closer by the second. Dov decided to give in. He retired from teaching and shut himself away in his room. There was nobody to interfere with his daily and nightly routine: light meals, a slow and pensive walk, the evening paper, music, working at his desk until daybreak, morning sleep, and at midday, yogurt, bread, and a cup of lemon tea.

He lived on a pension. In addition to this, he sometimes took original and perhaps artistic landscape photographs, which he would send to one of the weekly magazines. But these pictures were almost invariably printed on inferior paper and appeared at the bottom of page sixteen, between the recipes and crossword solutions. All that was left of their beauty was a smudgelike stain and a caption such as, “Monastery in the village of Ein-Kerem at evening, photographed by Sirkin.”

All these photographs find their way eventually into Zeshka's massive old album. Week by week, one by one, she cuts the smudged pictures out of the magazine, sticking them with thick homemade paste to the black pages of her album. As she works her eyes sparkle with a kind of delight. And wrinkles of cold cunning converge around her sunken eyes. Behind her back we call her by the unkind nickname Owl.

Every morning, after finishing his night's work and before going to bed, Dov Sirkin would stand at the window and gaze out eastward, watching the sun climb up from beyond the mountains of Moab, casting white flames on the surface of the Dead Sea, thrusting its rays like spears into the flanks of the bare mountains, striking down without mercy on the walls of shaded monasteries, heavy with bells. The day would begin.

At midday, after waking up, after tea, bread, yogurt, and olives, he would sit on his little balcony among potted cacti and dead houseplants, watching the street. The street was curved, with stone walls, gardens, rusty iron latticework at every window. And a long line of garbage cans along the sidewalk. Toward evening he used to go out for a walk, and in the course of his stroll he would sometimes photograph some unexpected scene. The charm of the approaching night, the distant cries of children, a radio blaring in a neighboring house, all of these contributed to a sense of peace. He ate supper at a small cooperative cafe: eggplant salad, fried egg with pickled cucumber, yogurt, and cafe au lait.