AMOSOZ
Panther in the Basement
At
night, after lights-out, I used to lie in the dark listening. Outside, on the
other side of the wall, was an empty, sinister world. Even our familiar gar–
den, with the pomegranate tree and the village I had built out of
match-boxes underneath it, was not ours at night: it belonged to the curfew
and to evil. From garden to garden groups of fighters advanced in the dark–
ness on desperate missions. British patrols armed with searchlights and
tracker dogs roamed the empty streets. Spies, detectives, and traitors were
pitted in a war of brains. Casting their nets. Planning cunning ambushes.
The empty streets were lit by a ghostly light from streetlamps wreathed
in
summer mist. Beyond our street, beyond the confines of our neighborhood,
lay more deserted streets, lanes, alleys, steps, arches, all pervaded by the dark–
ness that was full of eyes, pierced by the barking of dogs. Even the row of
buildings on the other side of our street seemed on those nights of curfew
to be cut off from us by a river of deep darkness.
fu
though the Dorzions,
Mrs. Ostrowska, Dr. Gryphius, Ben Hur and his sister Yardena were all on
the other side of mountains of darkness. Beyond the same dark mountain
were the Shibboleth newsstand and the Sinopsky Brothers grocery, pro–
tected by iron shutters and two padlocks. I felt that the phrase "beyond the
same dark mountain" could be felt with your fingertips like thick black
baize. Above our heads
Mr.
Lazarus's roof was swathed in darkness and the
hens were pressed close together. On those nights all the hills that sur–
rounded Jerusalem were mountains of darkness. And what was there
beyond the hills? Stone-built villages, clustering around minarets. Empty
valleys where foxes and jackals roamed and even the occasional hyena.
Bloodthirsty gangs. And angry ghosts from bygone days.
I lay huddled, wide awake, until the silence became more heavily
charged than it could bear, and then it began to be pierced by shots.
Sometimes it was a distant stray burst of fire from the direction ofWadiJoz
or Isawiya. At others a sharp, knifelike salvo maybe from Sheikh Jarrah or
staccato machine-gun fire from Sanhedriya. Was it us? The real
Editor's Note: From
Panther in the Basement
by Amos Oz. Translated from the
Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange. Copyright © 1995 by Amos Oz. English transla–
tion copyright
©
1997 by Nicholas de Lange. Published by Harcourt Brace
&
Company.
