Soumchi (4 page)

In an instant, Keeper's lovemaking came to an abrupt halt. His manner changed completely. He sat himself down, folding his tail neatly about him, expression thoughtful, even smug. He held his back, his head, his muzzle, as tense and still as if he were balancing a shilling on the end of his black nose. His furry ears were pricked. He was wrapped in such total gravity and humility, and he looked so like a newly-arrived immigrant boy, a particularly clean and tidy boy, trying his hardest to please, that it was almost impossible not to burst out laughing.

"Die," roared Goel, huskily.

Instantly Keeper prostrated himself at his feet and threw his head on his paws in eternal submission. His grief was as delicate as a poet's. His tail lay motionless, his ears were limp and totally despairing; he appeared to have ceased to breathe. Still, when Goel broke a small branch from a mulberry tree behind the fence, Keeper did not move; did not even blink an eye. And only the faintest of tremblings flowed along his back and made his grey-brown fur quiver.

But when, suddenly, Goel threw the stick into the distance and yelled "Fetch!" in a stern voice, the dog sprang, instantly—no, did not spring, erupted—like a shower of sparks out of a bonfire, parting the air, describing four or five wide arcs on it, as if he might in his fury have sprouted invisible wings. His wolfs jaw opened—1 caught one brief glimpse of a red-black gullet, of white teeth sharpened for the kill—the next minute Keeper was back from his errand and laying the stick at his master's feet. Then he too lay down in mute, even slavish submission, as if confessing that he was fit for nothing, so demanded nothing, except to fulfil his obligations, naturally, for what's one caress between you and me in the end?

"Well, that's it," said Goel.

While the dog lifted his head and looked up at him with eyes full of longing and barely concealed love, that asked:

"Am I a good dog then?"

"Yes," said Goel. "Yes, a very good dog. But you're going to change masters now. And if he doesn't treat Keeper well"—though Goel was addressing me now he still did not look at me—"if he doesn't treat Keeper well, I'll kill him on the spot, I'll kill him; get that, Soumchi?"

He spoke these last words in a menacing whisper, his face thrust close up to mine.

"Me?" I asked, hardly daring to believe my ears.

"Yes, him," said Goel. "He's getting Keeper, as from now. And then I'll know for sure he's not an informer."

The dog was still only a puppy, though no longer helpless and no longer little. He'll obey my voice, I thought. And how. And I'll turn him back into a proper wolf, a real fierce proper wolf.

"Has he ever read
The Hound of the Baskervilles
?" asked Goel.

"Of course I have," I said "At least twice, if not three times."

"Good. Then he'd better know this dog's been trained to tear throats out too. British cops' and spies' throats. At a word of command. And that word's the name of the King of England—I won't say it now or he'll start attacking someone here."

"Of course," I said.

"And on top of that, he'll take messages anywhere he's sent. And track down a suspect just from sniffing at one of his socks," added Goel. And after a short silence, as if he was having to take a difficult and painful decision, muttered: "Right. O.K. He gets Keeper. In exchange, that is. As a swap. Not for free. For the railway."

"But..."

"And if he won't, I'll show the whole class the love poem he wrote Esthie Inbar in the black notebook Aldo stole from the pocket of his windbreaker in the Tel Arza wood."

"Bastards," I hissed, between gritted teeth. "Contemptible bastards." (Contemptible was a word I'd learned from Uncle Zemach.)

Goel found it expedient to ignore these epithets and preserve his good humor. "If he'll let me finish; before he starts swearing at me. Whatever that was all about. If he'll just let someone else say something. If he'll just keep his cool. He'll not only get Keeper in exchange, he'll get back his black notebook, and as well as that, he can join the Avengers, and as well as that I'll make peace with him. He only has to think a bit and he'll know what's good for him."

At that very moment a delicious haze spread through my body. Excitement gently stroked my back; there was a melting in my throat and my knees were trembling with delight.

"Hang on," I protested, at the sight of Goel beginning to untie the blue ribbon from the railway box to improvise a lead for Keeper. "Hang on, hang on a minute."

"There you are, Soumchi." Goel actually addressed me in the second person as if we were friends again, as if nothing had happened at Purim in the battle with the Bokarim quarter, as if suddenly I was just like anybody else.

"There you are. Grab him. Only you've got to be firm with him. He might try and escape at first, until he gets used to you. Until he does, don't let him off the lead. In a few days he'll do just what you tell him. Just do me a personal favour, though, treat him properly. And tomorrow, at three o'clock, come to the secret place on Tarzan Bamberger's roof. On the stairs you'll have to tell Bar-Kochba the password, 'Lily of the Valley,' and wait for him to answer 'Rose of Sharon,' then you'll say 'Rivers of Egypt' and he'll let you past. Because those are the Avengers' passwords. And then you'll be sworn in and then you'll get your notebook back with those poems in I was talking about; I forget what they were about. Right. That's the lot. Just come tomorrow at three o'clock, or else. Go on, Keeper. Go with Soumchi. Go on, pull him, Soumchi. Pull him hard, like that. So long."

"So long, Goel," I answered, as if I really was just like anybody else, though actually, inside my head, my soul went on singing over and over like some demented songbird, "I've got a wolf, I've got a wolf, I've got a young wolf to tear out throats." But it took all my strength to drag my reluctant wolf-cub after me. He dug his paws into the cracks in the pavement, protesting his wretchedness meanwhile with pathetic little whines that were beneath him altogether. So I ignored them. I just kept pulling him along. I pulled and walked and walked and pulled, while my spirit was borne far, far away, to the tangled forests and impenetrable jungles, where, surrounded, I made a brave and hopeless stand against a mob of shrieking cannibals, covered in war-paint and brandishing javelins and spears. Alone and weaponless, I struck out on all sides, but for every one of them I felled with my bare hands, a host of others swarmed yelling from their lair to take his place. Already my strength was beginning to fail. But then, as my enemies closed in on me with cries of joy, their white teeth gleaming, I gave one short, shrill whistle. From out of the thicket leaped my own private wolf, menacing, merciless, rending their throats with his cruel fangs until my enemies had scattered in all directions, bellowing with fear. Then he flung himself down at my feet and lay there panting, fawning on me and looking up at me with hidden love and longing, as if to say:

"Am I a good dog?"

"Yes, a very good dog," I said. But deep in my heart I thought: This is happiness; and that's life. Here is love and here am I.

And, afterwards, darkness fell and we continued on our way through the gloom of the jungle to the source of the River Zambezi in the land of Obangi-Shari, where no white man had ever set foot, and to which my heart goes out.

 

In which King Saul loses his father's asses and then finds a kingdom; and in which we too lose and find: and in which evening descends on Jerusalem and a fateful decision is reached.

 

The street was already darkening and it was growing late. Somehow I managed to drag the young wolf I got from Goel Germanski in exchange for an electric railway as far as the junction of Zephania and Malachi Streets. But there, just by the mailbox, set into the concrete wall, painted bright red, with a crown raised on it and underneath the initials, in English, of King George, the dog decided he had had enough. He pulled so hard, perhaps at the sound of some whistle I could not hear, he tore off the lead that Goel Germanski had made him out of the blue gift ribbon, so freeing himself. Then he crossed the road at a crouching run, his tail between his legs and his muzzle close to the ground, very furtive-looking, almost reptilian. Thereafter, he crept along, keeping his distance from me, as if admitting that such behaviour was disgraceful. Yet, claiming too, in his own defense:

"That's how it is, mate. That's life, I'm afraid."

And then he was gone from my sight altogether, vanished into the darkness of one of the courtyards.

Night fell.

And so that bad dog had returned quite certainly to his real master. And what was I left with? Just one small length of the blue ribbon that Aldo Castelnuovo had tied round the box that held the railway that Goel Germanski had convened into a lead for his dog. Otherwise, I was empty-handed, and also quite alone. But that was life.

By now, I had reached the courtyard of the Faithful Remnant Synagogue (which happened to be my short cut home, via the Bambergers' butcher shop). I did not hurry, I had no reason to hurry any more. On the contrary. I sat down on a box and listened to the sounds about me and began to set myself to thinking. Around and around flowed the warmth and peace of early evening, I heard the sound of radios from open windows, the sound of voices, laughing or scolding. Since it no longer mattered to anyone what would happen to me—not now or all the rest of my life—it did not matter much to me what would happen to anybody else. Yet, in spite of that, I felt sorry, at that moment, because everything in the world kept changing and nothing ever stayed the same, and sorry even that this evening would never come again, though I had no reason to love this evening. On the contrary, in fact. Yet I still felt sorry for what was and would not be a second time. And I wondered if there was some faraway place somewhere in the world, in Obangi-Shari perhaps, or among the Himalayan mountains, where it might be possible to order time not to keep on passing and light not to keep on changing, just as they had been ordered by Joshua, son of Nun in the Book of Joshua. At which, someone on one of the balconies called her neighbor a crazy fool and the neighbor answered for her part, "Just look who's talking. Mrs. Rotloi. Mrs.
Rotloi
." And afterwards followed some gabbled, incomprehensible sentences, in Polish maybe. And suddenly a fearful shriek rose from Zachariah Street—for a moment I hoped that Red Indians had started to attack the neighborhood and were mercilessly scalping the inhabitants. But it was only a cat that cried and he only cried for love.

And among all the sounds of evening came the smells of evening; the smell of sauerkraut and tar and cooking oil, of souring garbage in garbage cans, and the smell of warm, wet washing hung out to catch the evening breeze. Because it was evening, in Jerusalem.

While I, for my part, sat on an empty box in the courtyard of the Faithful Remnant Synagogue, wondering why I should keep trying to deny it all, about Esthie.

Esthie; who is, at this moment, quite certainly sitting in her room, which I'd never seen, nor was ever likely to. And equally certainly will have drawn her two blue curtains (with which, on the other hand, I was extremely well acquainted, having looked at them from the outside a thousand times and more). And is most probably doing the homework that I have forgotten to touch, answering in her round hand the simple questions set by Mr. Shitrit, the geography teacher. Or maybe untying her plaits, or rearranging them, or maybe, very patiently, cutting out decorations for the end-of-term party; her skirt stretched tightly across her lap; her nails clean and rounded, not black and split like mine. She is breathing very quietly—just as in class her lips will not quite be closed and every now and then she'll be trying to reach some imaginary speck on her upper lip with the tip of her tongue. I cannot tell what she is thinking about; except that certainly she is not thinking about me. And if something does happen to remind her of me, it is most likely as "that disgusting Soumchi"; or "that crazy boy." Better, therefore, she does not think of me at all.

And, anyway, that was quite enough of that. Better for me too to stop thinking about Esthie and instead start considering, very carefully, a much more urgent question.

I began to collect up my thoughts, just as my father had taught me to do at some moment of decision. He had taught me to set down on paper all possible courses of action, together with their pros and cons, erasing one by one the least promising of them, then grading the rest according to a point system. However, a pencil would be no use now, with daylight already gone. Instead, I listed the various alternatives in my head, as follows:

A. I could get up and go straight home, explaining my being late and empty-handed on the grounds that my bicycle had been stolen or else confiscated by some drunken British soldier, and I had not resisted him because my mother had ordered me not to argue with the soldiers, ever.

B. I could go back to Aldo's. Louisa, the Armenian nanny, would open the door to me and tell me to wait one moment. Then she would go by herself to announce that the young gentleman had returned and wanted a word with our young gentleman, and afterwards, very politely, she would usher me to the room where the magnificent lady in the muslin dress was presenting the beggar with a golden coin. And then I would have to confess to Aldo's mother that I had let Aldo have a bicycle, had even signed a contract for it. At which Aldo's mother would certainly punish him severely, because, under no circumstances, was he supposed to have a bicycle. And I would have behaved like a dirty low informer and not even got my bicycle back for my pains, since I no longer had the railway. Out of the question.