Amos Oz - Panther in the Basement

What a long journey, how many bewildering secrets are contained within these tomes whose very names I can just about decipher. I cannot even imagine where to find the first link in the key chain attached to the key of the casket containing the key to the safe in which the key to the outermost court of all may perhaps be waiting for me.

First of all I must overcome the difficulty of the Roman alphabet. Mother said she could teach it to me in less than half an hour. After that, if I helped her with the washing up after supper, she promised to teach me the Cyrillic alphabet. She reckoned that could be done in an hour or an hour and a half. As for Father, he promised that the Greek alphabet was very similar to the Cyrillic.

After that I would learn Sanskrit, too.

And I would learn another dialect, that Father called Hochdeutsch, which he translated as "High German."

The name High German had a flavor of bygone times, of walled towns with wooden drawbridges guarded by twin turrets capped by conical roofs. Within the walls of these towns lived austere scholars with black robes and bare heads, who sat night after night reading and studying and writing by the light of a candle or oil lamp in a cell whose only window was barred. I would be like them: cell, lattice, candle at night, desk, pile of books, and silence.

The bookshelves reduced the size of the room considerably. And it was not a large room to start with. Here, below the ranks of books, was my parents' bed. At night they opened it up to sleep in, and in the morning they closed it like a book, with the mattress inside, thus turning it into a green-covered sofa. There were five embroidered cushions on it, which I used for the five hills of Rome when I led the forces of Bar Kochba to the foot of the Capitol and subdued the Empire. Another time they represented the hills commanding the road to the Negev, or white whales that I pursued across the Seven Seas to the shores of Antarctica.

Between the sofa bed and Father's desk, between the desk and the coffee table and the two wicker stools, and between them and Mother's rocking chair, there were canals or straits, all coming together at the little rug at the foot of the rocking chair. This arrangement of furniture afforded me fascinating opportunities to deploy columns of ships or land armies, enacting breakouts, outflanking movements, assaults, ambushes, and stubborn resistance in densely built-up areas.

Father put the package in a place that he had cleverly selected in the middle of a row of a uniform edition of gems of world literature in Polish translation. This series had a light-brown binding, so the parcel blended in and almost disappeared among the books. Like a real dragon in a dense tropical forest full of gigantic trees that all looked like dragons. He repeated his warning to me and Mother. Don't touch. Don't go near it. The whole library was henceforth out of bounds. If anyone needed a book, would they kindly address themselves to him. (I found this insulting. Admittedly Mother might make a mistake or forget what she was doing while dusting, but what about me? I knew the whole library by heart. I could locate every section, district, and cranny blindfold. I could find my way around almost as well as Father himself. (Like a young panther in the jungle he was born and raised in.) I decided not to remonstrate: by eight o'clock tomorrow morning they would both be out of the apartment and I would be the High Commissioner of this whole kingdom. Including the place of the "dragon." Including the dragon itself.

Next morning, the instant the door closed behind them, I approached the shelf and stood a breath's space away, without touching. I tried to make out whether the package was exhaling a faint chemical smell, at least a hint of a smell. But only the smells of the library, civilian smells of glue dust and bygone days, surrounded me. I went back to the kitchen to clear away the remains of breakfast. I washed the dishes and laid them out to drain. I went from room to room closing the shutters and windows against the incursions of summer. Then I started to patrol the route between the front door and the hiding place, backward and forward, a panther in a basement. I was utterly unable to return to the plans for the attack on Government House that I had been busy with until yesterday. That brown package, disguised as a literary gem in Polish, slumbering innocently on the shelf, fascinated me like a kind of Pandora's box.

At first the temptations were weak and coy, hardly daring to hint to me what I really wanted. But gradually they became bolder, more explicit, licking at the toes of my sandals, tickling the palms of my hands, calling out to me brazenly, pulling me shamelessly by the sleeve.

Temptations are like sneezes, which start from nothing at all, a faint pinching sensation at the base of your nose, and then gradually take over so that there's no stopping them. Temptations generally start from a little patrol to check the terrain, tiny ripples of vague, undefined excitement, and, before you know what it wants of you, you start to feel a gradual glow inside, as you do when you switch on an electric fire and the element is still grey but it starts to make little popping noises and then it blushes very faintly and then more deeply and soon it is glowing angrily and you are full of reckless lightheadedness; so what, what the hell, why not, what harm can it do, like a very vague but wild, uninhibited sound deep inside you, coaxing and pleading with you: Come on, why not, just put the tip of your finger very close to the wrapping paper on the secret package, just feel it without touching, just sense with the pores of your skin near the fingernail what invisible emanation may be coming from inside. Is it warm? Is it cold? Does it vibrate slightly, like electricity? In fact, why not, what the hell, what harm can it do just to touch it lightly, just once? Very quickly. After all, this is only the outer wrapping, neutral, like any other wrapper, hard (or soft?), smooth (or just a tiny bit rough, like the green baize on that billiard table?) and flat (or are there perhaps invisible protuberances that might give your finger some unimagined hints?). What harm can touching do? Just very lightly, hardly touching at all. As if you were feeling a bench or a fence that says "wet paint."

In fact, why not something more than a touch: a cautious prod? Gently. Like a doctor's hand carefully feeling the stomach to find out where it hurts, whether it is soft or tense. Or like a finger carefully feeling a pear: is it ripe? Hard? Almost ripe? In fact, what's wrong with taking it off theshelf for a moment? Just for ten seconds, or less, just to weigh it in your hand. To check if it's light or heavy. Is it dense? Or stiff? Is it like a lexicon? Or like a paperbound periodical? Or is it like a fragile glass object that is wrapped in straw or cotton wool or sawdust, so that you can feel the softness of the wrapping material and the hardness of the object itself through the soft wrapping? Or is it full of dull heaviness pulling downward, like a casket full of lead? Or will it turn out to be something furlike, responding and yielding to your fingers through the brown wrapping paper, pliant between your hands, like a cushion, a teddy bear, a cat? What on earth can it be? Just a hint of a touch, there, a kiss with the fingertip, just a touch like mist, like lips, and just a little stroke, hardly a stroke at all, so, yes, then a tiny prod, very quickly, and pull it out very slightly, so that you can feel both sides of the package and finger the sticky paper, and what the hell, why not, take it right out of the bookcase and hold it in your arms for a moment, like a fighter carrying a comrade wounded in battle, only for heaven's sake be careful not to bump into the furniture, not to hit it, not to let it slip out of your grasp. And for god's sake don't forget which side was on top. And remember to use your handkerchief, so as not to leave fingerprints, and then change the handkerchief in case it has absorbed some emanation.