Amos Oz - Where the Jackals Howl

All these things inspired great fear in his servants. Whenever loud hoarse laughter burst from him in the fields at midday in midsummer, the slaves laughed with him out of fear. Or sometimes in the night Gilead was suddenly overcome by a cold hatred of the cold starlight, and he would shout aloud and assemble all the men and women in the courtyard. Before their eyes he would stoop and pick up a large stone, and his eyes shone white in the dark as though he meant to hurl the stone and fell a man. Then slowly and painfully, as though the breath were being squeezed out of him, he would bend and replace the stone in the dust of the courtyard, as gently as if he were placing glass on glass, taking great care not to hurt the stone or the dust or the silence of the night, for the nights in that place were quiet, and any sounds that passed through them were like dark shadows moving silently beneath the surface of the waters.

Gilead’s wife was the offspring of priests and merchants, and her name was Nehushtah daughter of Zebulun. She was white as chalk and timorous. In her youth in her father’s house, she had known dreams and darkness. She was passionately fond of small objects, little creatures, buttons and butterflies, earrings, morning dew, apple blossom, cat’s-paws, soft lamb’s wool, slivers of light shimmering in water.

Gilead took Nehushtah to wife because he thought he detected in her signs of an inner thirst which nothing in the world could ever quench or assuage. Whenever she said, “Look, a stone,” or “Look at that valley,” she seemed to be saying, “Come, come.” He yearned to touch this thirst the way a man may suddenly ache to feel some idea or desire with his very fingertips. And Nehushtah followed after Gilead because she saw in him sorrow and strength.

Nehushtah longed to dissolve his strength and penetrate his sorrow and at the same time submit to them. However, Gilead and Nehushtah were unable to do all these things to each other because, after all, body and soul are no more than body and soul, and living men and women are not able to plumb their depths. A few months after she arrived at Mizpeh of Gilead she was already in the habit of standing alone at the window pleading with her eyes, hoping that across the wilderness and the mountains she might descry the plains of black earth from which she had been brought here to the desert. In the evenings she said to him:

“When will you take me.”

And Gilead would answer:

“But I have already taken you.”

“When shall we ride away from here.”

“All places are the same.”

“But I cannot endure any more.”

“Who can. Bring me wine and apples and leave me, go to your room or sit at the window if you like; just stop staring into the darkness like that.”

After years went by, after she had given birth to Jamin, Jemuel, and Azur, Nehushtah fell ill and seemed to be in the grip of a sensuous decay. She was already white as chalk, and her skin grew ever finer. She hated the desert that blew in at the window of her room all day long and at night whispered to her, “Lost lost,” and she also hated the savage songs of the shepherds and the lowing of the beasts in the courtyard and in her dreams. Sometimes she called her husband a dead man and her children orphans. And sometimes she would say of herself, Surely I, too, have long been dead, and she would sit for three days at the window without tasting food or water. The place was very remote, and from the window she could see by day only sand dunes and mountains and at night stars and darkness.

Three sons did Nehushtah daughter of Zebulun bear to Gilead the Gileadite: Jamin, Jemuel, and Azur. She was white and her skin grew ever finer. She could not endure the man’s moods. If she complained and wept, Gilead would raise his voice and shout and dash the pitcher of wine to clattering smithereens. If she sat silently at the window stroking the cat or playing with earrings and brooches on her lap, Gilead would stand and watch and laugh hoarsely, exuding a shaggy smell. At times he would take pity on her and say:

“Perhaps the king will hear of your sorrow. Perhaps he will send chariots and horses to take you to him. Perhaps today or tomorrow torches will appear in the distance and the outrunners will arrive.”

And Nehushtah would say:

“There is no king. There are no outrunners. Why should anyone run. There is nothing.”

At these words Gilead would be filled with compassion for her and terrible anger at himself and at what he had done to her, and he would beat his chest with his fists and curse himself and his memory. In the midst of his compassion he would suddenly despise her, or himself and his compassion for her, and he would shut himself up and hide his face. For many days she would not see him, and then one night toward the dawn, when she had despaired of him, he would come and throw himself upon her in love. In his love-making he would purse his lips like a man straining to break an iron chain with his bare hands.

He was a moody and hopeless man. At night, if the torchlight fell on his face it looked like one of the masks with which the pagan priests covered their faces. It may happen that a man traverses all the days of his life like an exile in a strange land to which he did not choose to come and from which he cannot escape.

In the winter Gilead was filled with melancholy. He would lie on his back for a day or a week with his eyes fixed on the arched ceiling, staring blankly and seeing nothing. Then Nehushtah would sometimes enter his bedchamber and fondle him with her pale fingers as if he were one of her pet animals. Her lips were as white as a sickness, and he yielded his body to them as a weary traveler yields himself to a harlot in a wayside inn. And upon both of them there was silence.

But when mounting vigor roused his body against him, Nehushtah took refuge in her innermost chamber, and Gilead would storm into the women’s quarters to relieve on the maidservants the pressure of the boiling venom. All night long the quarters were alive with wet sounds and low tremulous moaning and the squeals of the maids, until the dawn, when Gilead would burst forth and rudely awaken the household priest. Cowering at his feet, he would sob: Unclean, unclean. Then, with the tears still wet on his face, he would knock the priest flat on his back with a punch, and out he would rush to saddle his horse and gallop away into the eastern hills.

In the women’s quarters there was a little Ammonite concubine named Pitdah daughter of Eitam, whom the Gileadites had snatched in the course of one of their raids on the Ammonite settlements beyond the desert. Pitdah was a strong, slender girl whose eyes were shaded by thick lashes. If she directed her green-eyed gaze at her lord’s lips or at his chest, if she stood facing him in the courtyard with her fingertips fluttering over her belly, he would tremble and curse the little servantgirl. Bellowing aloud, he would clasp both her hands in one of his and bite her lips until the two of them screamed together. Her hips were never still, and even when she came and stood at the stable door to inhale the smell of horses’ sweat, they seemed to be dancing to a secret inner rhythm. Fire and ice sparkled green in the pupils of her eyes. And she always walked barefoot.

In time it transpired that the Ammonite woman practiced sorcery. This was disclosed by her rivals, who had seen her at night brewing herbs in the night with a gleam in her eye. Pitdah called to the dead at night and summoned them to her, because she had been dedicated from her childhood as a priestess of Milcom the god of Ammon. The trees in the orchard rustled secretively in the darkness and the doors of the house shrieked in the wind. She worked her magic in the cellars at night and the brew bubbled and boiled and the woman’s shadow quivered and flickered over rotting saddles and casks of wine, on wooden threshing sledges and iron chains.