Amos Oz - Where the Jackals Howl

Jephthah wallowed in wine, women, and court life. Despite all this luxury, his visage appeared as if scorched by fire. On his couch at night he was caressed by the fairest women of the city; they sipped his wintry powers like dazed birds. Their lips fluttered among the hair of his chest and they whispered to him: You stranger. He said nothing, but his eyes turned inward because nowhere around could they find.

In the course of time jealousy began to swell in the city. The notables of Ammon were jealous because of their wives and daughters, and also on account of the king. The elders said in their council: Ammon serves King Gatel, and King Gatel is like a woman in the hands of Jephthah the Gileadite, and this Jephthah is not one of us but belongs only to himself.

These words even reached the ears of the king, who already despised himself for his love of Jephthah. Sometimes at night he would say to himself, Why do I not have this fair-haired man killed.

But he hesitated, because he could see both sides of the question.

When the words of the elders reached his ears, and rumor whispered that the king was like a harlot before the stranger, his eyes brimmed with tears. All the days of his youth he had dreamed of waging great wars like one of the mighty kings of old, but he did not know how to make war, and whenever he so much as set foot outside his palace the sunlight made his head reel and the very smell of a horse always made his teeth chatter. Therefore he summoned Jephthah one day and said to him: Take men, chariots, and lances, take horses and horsemen, take priests and magicians, and go to the land of Gilead to conquer the land into which your mother was carried to servitude. If you refuse to go that will prove that the elders are right, that you are not one of us but a stranger. I am the king and I have spoken. Fetch me a glass of water.

That night Jephthah dreamed of the desert. In his dream he was climbing a crag in the desert and was trapped halfway up the rock face, because it was as smooth as Sidonian glass and he could neither climb up nor go down but only close his eyes, because beneath his feet there was a sheer drop onto the sharp white rocks far below. The wind howled all around him like a wild beast. Just then he felt a woman’s hand caress his back, and her touch weakened his grip on the rock face, and he yearned to give up and to go to where she was calling him. In the depth of the cave there was a damp wind and the light was grim and lurid, but the woman was there at his side and there was stillness, cool water, and rest.

When he woke up in the morning he knew that his stay in the land of Ammon was at an end and that the time had come for him to leave. Outside the city reached up toward heaven with all its palm trees and gold-domed towers. When the morning light touched the gold the whole city began to blaze. This was a sadness Jephthah had not expected. He had innocently supposed that a man could simply get up and go without looking back. He almost changed his mind. It was as if the city were clutching at his robe with sharp claws of longing and would not let him go.

But King Gatel sent urgent word: Where is my war, I have waited a whole day now and there is no war or anything, what are you waiting for, Jephthah.

Jephthah delayed no longer.

He rose and fled to the desert.

He did not go alone, but took with him the daughter whom one of the women had borne to him.

Pitdah was seven years old when she was taken out of the city into the desert on the back of her father’s horse. She was an Ammonite, like her mother. She had passed her childhood among maidservants, eunuchs, and silks. Jephthah had lived in Abel-Keramim for ten years.

When they left the city by the Dung Gate Pitdah laughed for joy, for she loved riding; she fondly imagined that she was being taken out into the desert for a day’s ride and that at evening she would be brought back to her mother and the cat. But when the first night broke on her in the wilderness, she was alarmed and began to scream and stamp her feet, and she cursed her father and even kicked the horse with her strong little legs. Her mouth, pursed with rage, was a pitiful spectacle.

She did not stop screaming until the sounds of the desert soothed her to sleep.

In the morning Jephthah gave her a little pipe he had made from a reed. Pitdah could play the songs of Abel-Keramim which the harlots and concubines sang in the squares of the city at night. Some of them were the same songs his mother Pitdah had sung to him. As she played Jephthah could hear the water running in the channels in the orchards on Gilead’s farm. His heart went out to her whenever she said the word Father. And he rode very slowly, and to take her mind off the heat and the discomfort of the journey he told her story after story, about the barehanded slaying of the wolf and about his brother Azur who could understand the language of dogs. That day Jephthah used more words than on any other day in his whole life.

After a few days Pitdah stopped asking for her mother and her home. He revealed to her that their goal was the sea. When she asked what that might be, he replied that the sea was a vast hilly land where the hills were made not of sand but of water. When she asked him what was there he replied that perhaps there was peace. And when she wanted to know why the earth did not soak up the sea in an instant as it soaks up all water, he did not know what to answer and only said:

“Now cover your head from the sun.”

Pitdah said:

“When will we reach the sea like you said.”

Jephthah said:

“I don’t know. I’ve never been there. Look, Pitdah, a lizard; now it’s gone.”

Sometimes when she looked up at her father there was a tired light in her eyes. She might have been sick from the sands and the sun, or perhaps she was merely alarmed. At night he would enfold her in his cloak to protect her against the biting cold.

When the moon began to wane, Jephthah and his daughter arrived at a cave in the mountains in a place called the Land of Tob. There was a spring there, and several oak trees which cast a deep, soft shade. Beside the spring there were some mossy stone troughs, where desert nomads gathered to water their mangy flocks. They pitched their black goat-hair tents on the slope of the hill. That was where Pitdah learned to collect sticks and to make a fire at the entrance to the cave. Jephthah would go hunting and bring back a roebuck or a tortoise, which he would roast in the fire.

At night they saw a hollow moon rolling gently along the line of mountain peaks as though cautiously testing the surface of the desert before flooding it with silvery pallor. In the moonlight the jagged mountains looked like thirsty jaws.

Early in the morning Pitdah would go down to the troughs to fetch water, and, returning barefoot to her father, she would wake him up by splashing handfuls of cold water in his face. After he was up she played on her pipe, while Jephthah sat silently absorbing the music as though it were wine.

The desert nomads who roamed the Land of Tob were all malcontents or outcasts. Jephthah joined them. Cadaverous women hugged the girl and fussed over her all day long, because in the Land of Tob no child was ever born. Its inhabitants wandered restlessly between the desert plains and the mountain ravines. Sometimes the Land of Tob was raided, either by Ammonite troops or by bands of Israelites bent on killing the nomads. These nomads were desperate men: some were killers and some were fleeing from killers; some were haters whose hatred the settled lands could not contain, others were hated men with hounds on their heels; there were also soothsayers, and dreamers who lived on roots and herbs so as not to increase suffering in the world.

Above the land there stretched a sky of molten iron; the earth was copper-colored, parched and cracked. But the nights in the Land of Tob were powerful and heady like black wine. A blessed coolness descended calmly over all each night, bringing relief to the outcasts, to the mangy flocks, and to the desperate wasteland itself.