Panther in the Basement Read online

  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

  Copyright © 1995 by Amos Oz

  Translation copyright © Nicholas de Lange 1997

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  This is a translation of Panter Ba'martef, originally published in Hebrew by Keter Publishing House.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Oz, Amos.

  [Panter ba-martef. English]

  Panther in the basement/Amos Oz; translated from the

  Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-15-100287-0

  ISBN 978-0-15-600630-9 (pbk.)

  1. Oz, Amos—Childhood and youth. 2. Authors, Israeli—Biography.

  I. De Lange, N. R. M. (Nicholas Robert Michael), 1944

  II. Title.

  892.4'36—dc21 97-20577

  eISBN 978-0-547-70526-2

  v2.1213

  Editor's Note

  The films mentioned in the text are fictional. Their titles, plots, and casts were invented by the author to conjure up the popular Hollywood films which were showing in Jerusalem in the late 1940s, and which he himself watched there as a child in the local cinema.

  For Din, Nadav, and Alon

  one

  I have been called a traitor many times in my life. The first time was when I was twelve and a quarter and I lived in a neighborhood at the edge of Jerusalem. It was during the summer holidays, less than a year before the British left the country and the State of Israel was born out of the midst of war.

  One morning these words appeared on the wall of our house, painted in thick black letters, just under the kitchen window: PROFI BOGED SHAFEL, "Proffy is a low-down traitor." The word shafel, "low-down," raised a question that still interests me now, as I sit and write this story: Is it possible for a traitor not to be low-down? If not, why did Chita Reznik (I recognized his writing) bother to add the word "low-down"? And if it is, under what circumstances is treachery not low-down?

  I had had the nickname Proffy attached to me ever since I was so high. It was short for Professor, which they called me because of my obsession with checking words. (I still love words: I like collecting, arranging, shuffling, reversing, combining them. Rather the way people who love money do with coins and banknotes and people who love cards do with cards.)

  My father saw the writing under the kitchen window when he went out to get the newspaper at half past six that morning. Over breakfast, while he was spreading raspberry jam on a slice of black bread, he suddenly plunged the knife into the jam jar almost up to the handle and said in his deliberate way:

  "What a pleasant surprise! And what has his Lordship been up to now, that we should deserve this honor?"

  My mother said:

  "Don't nag him first thing in the morning. It's bad enough that he gets nagged by other children."

  Father was dressed in khaki, like most men in our neighborhood in those days. He had the gestures and voice of a man who is definitely in the right. Dredging up a sticky mass of raspberry from the bottom of the jar and spreading an equal amount on both halves of his slice of bread, he said:

  "The fact is that almost everyone nowadays uses the word 'traitor' too freely. But what is a traitor? Yes indeed. A man without honor. A man who secretly, behind your back, for the sake of some questionable advantage, helps the enemy to work against his people. Or to harm his family and friends. He is more despicable than a murderer. Finish your egg, please. I read in the paper that people are dying of hunger in Asia."

  My mother pulled my plate toward her and finished my egg and the rest of my bread and jam, not because she was hungry, but for the sake of peace. She said:

  "Anyone who loves isn't a traitor."

  My mother addressed these words neither to me nor to Father: to judge by the direction she was looking, she was talking to a nail that was stuck in our kitchen wall just above the icebox and served no particular purpose.

  two

  After breakfast my parents hurried off to catch their bus to go to work. I was free, with oceans of time ahead of me till the evening, because it was the summer holidays. First of all I cleared the table and put everything away in its proper place, in the icebox, the cupboards, or the sink, because I loved being at home on my own all day without anything to do. I washed the dishes and left them upside down to drain dry. Then I went around the apartment closing the windows and shutters, so as to have a shady den till evening. The sun and the dust from the desert were liable to damage my father's books that lined the walls, some of which were rare volumes. I read the morning paper, then I folded it and put it on the kitchen table, and I put my mother's brooch away in its case. I did all this not like a repentant low-down traitor but from love of tidiness. To this day I make a habit of going around the house every morning and evening putting everything in its right place. Five minutes ago, as I was writing about closing the windows and shutters, I stopped writing because I remembered to get up and close the bathroom door; though it might have preferred to stay open, to judge by the groan it made as I closed it.

  All that summer my mother and father went out at eight o'clock in the morning and came home at six in the evening. My lunch was waiting for me in the icebox and my days were clear as far as the horizon. For instance, I could start the game with a small group of five or ten soldiers on the rug, or pioneers, surveyors, road makers, and fort builders, and step by step we could tame the forces of nature, defeat enemies, conquer wide-open spaces, build towns and villages, and lay out roads connecting them.

  My father was a proofreader and sort of editorial assistant in a small publishing house. At night he used to sit up till two or three o'clock in the morning, surrounded by the shadows of his bookshelves, with his body immersed in darkness and only his grey head floating in a ring of light from his desk lamp, as though he was laboriously climbing the gulley between the mountains of books piled up on his desk, filling slips and cards with notes in preparation for his great book on the history of the Jews in Poland. He was a principled, intense man, who was deeply committed to the concept of justice.

  My mother, on the other hand, liked to raise her half-empty glass of tea and stare through it at the blue light in the window. And sometimes she would press it to her cheek, as though drawing warmth from the contact. She was a teacher in an institution for immigrant orphans who had managed to hide from the Nazis in monasteries or remote villages and had now reached us, as my mother said, "straight from the darkness of the valley of the shadow of death." At once she would correct
herself: "They come from a place where men behave like wolves to each other. Even refugees. Even children." In my mind I would associate the remote villages with horrifying images of wolf-men and the darkness of the valley of the shadow of death. I loved the words "darkness" and "valley" because they immediately conjured up a valley shrouded in darkness, with monasteries and cellars. And I loved the shadow of death because I didn't understand it. If I whispered "shadow of death," I could almost hear a kind of deep, ghostly sound like the note that comes from the lowest key on the piano, a sound that draws after it a trail of dim echoes, as though a disaster has happened and now there is no going back.

  I returned to the kitchen. I had read in the paper that we were living in a fateful period and therefore we must engage all our moral resources. And it also said that the actions of the British were casting a deep shadow, and that the Hebrew nation was called upon to withstand the test.

  I left the house, looking all around me, as in the movies, to make sure no one was watching me: a strange man in sunglasses, for instance, who might be concealed behind a newspaper, lurking in the doorway of one of the buildings on the other side of the road. But the street seemed absorbed in its own preoccupations. The greengrocer was building a wall of empty crates. The boy who worked at the Sinopsky Brothers grocery was dragging a squeaking handcart. Childless old Pani Ostrowska was sweeping away at the walk in front of her door, probably for the third time that morning. Doctor Gryphius was sitting on her balcony filling out filing cards: she was a spinster, and Father was helping her to gather material for her memoirs of Jewish life in her native town of Rosenheim, in Bavaria. And the kerosene seller went by slowly in his cart, the reins lying slack on his knees, ringing a handbell and singing a plaintive Yiddish song to his horse. So I stood there and scrutinized intently the black words "PROFI BOGED SHAFEL," "Proffy is a low-down traitor," in case there was some tiny detail that could shed a new light. From haste or fear the last letter of the word "BOGED," "traitor," had turned out more like an R than a D, making me not a lowdowntraitor, BOGED, but a lowdownadult, BOGER. That morning I would gladly have given everything I had to be an adult.

  So Chita Reznik had "done a Balaam."

  Mr. Zerubbabel Gihon, our Bible and Judaism teacher, had explained to us in class:

  "Doing a Balaam. When a curse comes out as a blessing. For instance, when the British minister Ernest Bevin said in Parliament in London that the Jews are a stubborn race, he did a Balaam."

  Mr. Gihon had a habit of seasoning his lessons with witticisms that were not funny. He often used his wife as the butt of his jokes. For instance, when he wanted to illustrate the passage from the Book of Kings about whips and scorpions, he said: "Scorpions are a hundred times worse than whips. I afflict you with whips and my wife afflicts me with scorpions." Or: "There is a text that says, 'As the crackling of thorns under a pot.' Ecclesiastes, chapter seven. Like Mrs. Gihon trying to sing."

  Once I said during supper:

  "You know my teacher Gihon, hardly a day goes by when he isn't unfaithful to his wife in class."

  My father looked at my mother and said:

  "Your son has definitely taken leave of his senses." (My father was fond of the word "definitely." And also of the words "indubitably," "evidently," "yes indeed.")

  My mother said:

  "Instead of insulting him, why don't you try to find out what he's trying to say? You never really listen to him. Or to me. Or to anybody. All you ever listen to is the news on the radio."

  "Everything in the world," Father replied calmly, refusing as usual to be drawn into an argument, "has at least two sides. As is well known to all but a few frenetic souls."

  I didn't know what "frenetic souls" meant, but I did know that this was not the right moment to ask. So I let them sit facing each other in silence for nearly a full minute—they sometimes had silences that resembled arm wrestling—and only then did I say:

  "Except a shadow."

  My father shot me one of his suspicious glances, with his glasses halfway down his nose, nodding his head up and down, one of those looks that conjure up what we learned in Bible class, "he looked that it should bring forth grapes, and it brought forth wild grapes," and his blue eyes above his glasses shone at me in naked disappointment, with me and with young people in general and with the failure of the educational system that had been entrusted with a butterfly and had sent back a chrysalis:

  "What do you mean 'shadow'? It's your brain that's the shadow."

  My mother said:

  "Instead of silencing him, why don't you find out what he's trying to say? He must be trying to say something."

  And Father:

  "Right. Yes indeed. Well then, what is Your Lordship getting at this evening? What mysterious shadow are you deigning to report to us about this time? 'Thou seest the shadow of mountains as if they were men'? 'As a servant desireth the shadow'?"

  I got up to go to bed. I didn't owe him any explanation. Nevertheless, beyond the call of duty, I said:

  "Except a shadow, Dad. You said a moment ago that everything in the world has at least two sides. And you were almost right. But you were forgetting that a shadow, for instance, has only one side. Go and check, if you don't believe me. You could even do an experiment or two. Didn't you yourself teach me that it's the exception that proves the rule and that one shouldn't generalize? You've forgotten what you taught me."

  So saying, I cleared the table, then went to my room.

  three

  Sitting in my father's chair at his desk, I took down the big dictionary and the encyclopedia, and, just as I had learned to do from him, I started to compile a list of words on a blank card.

  Traitor: turncoat, defector, deserter, renegade, informer, sneak, collaborator, stool pigeon, saboteur, spy, fifth columnist, plant, mole, foreign agent, double agent, agent provocateur, Brutus (see Rome), Quisling (see Norway), Judas (Christian usage). Adj.: treacherous, disloyal, faithless, unfaithful, perfidious, two-faced. Vb: betray, deceive, break faith, deal treacherously, defect, play false, rat. Phr.: snake in the grass, wolf in sheep's clothing, stab in the back, do the dirty. Bibl.: Confidence in an unfaithful man in time of trouble is like a broken tooth (Prov. 25:19); they be all adulterers, an assembly of treacherous men (Jer. 9:2); wherefore lookest thou upon them that deal treacherously? (Hab. 1:13).

  I closed the dictionary. I felt dizzy. This list appeared to me like a thick forest with many bifurcating paths from which more and more tracks spread out, losing themselves in the thickets, winding tortuously, joining up for a while and diverging again, leading to hideaways, containing caverns, undergrowth, labyrinths, cells, crannies, forsaken valleys, wonder, and amazement. What connection is there between defect and desert, informer and adulterer, faithless and two-faced, saboteur and stabber, mole and rat? What dark deeds did Brutus and Quisling commit? And more: tracks and treks; tortuous and tortoise. (To this day I dare not open an encyclopedia or a dictionary when I am working. If I do, that's half a day lost.) I no longer cared what I was, a traitor, an argumentative child, a crazy child; all that morning I sailed on the wide seas of the encyclopedia, reaching savage war-painted tribes in Papua, strange craters on the surface of stars blazing with volcanic hellfire or, the opposite, frozen and wreathed in eternal darkness (is that where the shadow of death lurks?), landing on islands, wandering lost through primeval swamps, encountering cannibals and hermits, godforsaken black-skinned Jews from the days of the Queen of Sheba, and I read about the continents drifting away from each other at a rate of half a millimeter a year. (How long could they go on drifting apart? Surely in billions of years' time, because the earth is spherical, they would meet up again on the other side!) Then I looked up Brutus and Quisling and I was going to look for Judas, too, but on the way I stopped at light-years and they overwhelmed me with piercing pleasures.

  At midday hunger drove me from the origins of the universe to the kitchen. I bolted down the food my mother had left for me in the icebox: grits, a meat
ball, soup, along with "Don't forget to heat it all up for a few minutes on the stove and remember to turn it off afterward." But I didn't heat it up: I couldn't spare the time. I was in a hurry to finish and get back to the vanishing galaxies. Suddenly I noticed under the door a folded note in Ben Hur's handwriting:

  "To the low-down traitor take note. This evening at half past six present yourself without delay at the place you know in Tel Arza to face a Court Marshal for serious treachery, namely frattenizing with the British persecutor. Signed: FOD Organization, General Command, Department of Internal Security and Interrogation. NB: bring sweater, water bottle, and proper shoes because the questioning may last all night."

  First of all I corrected with a pencil: fraternizing not frattenizing; Martial not Marshal. Then I committed the message to memory in accordance with standing orders and burned the note in the kitchen, and I flushed the ashes down the toilet so as not to leave any clues, in case the British mounted a house-to-house search. Then I returned to the desk and tried to get back to the galaxies and light-years. But the galaxies had dispersed and the light-years had faded out. So I took another blank card from my father's little pile and noted: The situation is serious and gives rise to anxiety. And I wrote: But our heads we'll hold up high. Then I tore up the card and put the dictionary and the encyclopedia away. There was fear.

  Which I must overcome at once.

  But how?

  I decided to look at some stamps. Barbados and New Caledonia were each represented in my collection by a single stamp. I managed to locate both places in the big German atlas. I looked for some chocolate but there wasn't any. In the end I went back to the kitchen and licked two spoonfuls of Father's raspberry jam.

  Nothing helped. Things were bad.