A. Yehoshua - A Woman in Jerusalem

“Then why not something more intimate … a small commando force of your own, for example?”

“What for? To be the dead hero of one of your articles?”

“We’re back to my articles! I beg you to believe that I have other things in life.”

“So I’ve heard. I’m told you’ve been working forever on a doctorate.”

“Ah!” The weasel blushed. “I see you do come out of your shell sometimes.”

“Apparently. But what’s your subject? Why has it taken you so long?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“Do we have anything better to talk about?”

“I’m writing on Plato.”

“What’s left to say about him?”

“With such a complex philosopher, anyone with a little patience and common sense can always find a new angle,” the journalist said, and added dourly, “not that that’s why my dissertation is stuck. Our wretched reality simply keeps distracting me from it.”

“Reality is only an excuse.”

“You’re right.”

“What is it about?”

“You’re sure you want to know? Or are you just trying to pass the time?”

“That too. But I’m curious to know how your mind works. I don’t want to be surprised by you again.”

The journalist let out a lively laugh. “It’s you who are surprising. Like yesterday, for instance, when you suggested this trip, or just now, when you agreed to a detour.”

“Well, I suppose I can be unpredictable, too.” The human resources manager liked the idea. “But you’re avoiding my question. What is your dissertation about? A specific Platonic dialogue or something more general?”

“A specific dialogue.”

“Which?”

“You wouldn’t recognize the name. It’s one you’ve never heard of and never will.”

“Is it one of those we discussed in our course?”

“It’s Phaedo.”

“ Phaedo ? No, I don’t remember it … unless …”

“It’s on the immortality of the soul.”

“No, that’s not the one I’m thinking of. There was another … you know the one. The famous one, the one about love …”

“If you’re thinking of The Symposium, alias The Banquet — no, there really are no angles left there. Platonic love has been mined to exhaustion.”

But the resource manager persisted. A friendly intellectual conversation, he thought, if not too personal, would help keep the journalist on his best behaviour. He himself remembered little of the famous Platonic dialogue, only that he had been favourably impressed that love could be discussed so candidly in a philosophy course. All that remained with him of the text itself was a story or parable about a man (but who? Adam? Everyman?) who was cut or divided in two (mistakenly? accidentally? deliberately?). Hence the human desire to reunite with one’s missing half, also known as love …

The consul, listening from the front seat, doffed his red woollen cap and remarked:

“Even a peasant like myself knows that story. Whenever I slice an apple I feel its halves wanting to reunite. That’s why I keep slicing them into smaller and smaller pieces …”

The human resources manager guffawed. His inner tension easing, he listened affably to the weasel’s rebuke:

“That’s the most superficial and obvious aspect of The Symposium. It’s no wonder that people like you always remember it. But for such a simplistic metaphor there was no need for Socrates and his friends to gather in Agathon’s house. Nor would their conversation have gone on enchanting us for thousands of years. Its real point is more profound.”

“Tell us.” Both the consul and the emissary were eager to know.

“Are you really in the mood now, in the middle of the night?”

“We have nothing better to do.”

And so, while they sat in the dark cavern of the armoured vehicle with the two drivers in front bathed in the luminous green glow of its haphazardly working dials, the journalist strove to expound the essence of love, his voice rising above the roar of the engine as the vehicle laboured up a steep winding road. Had I known that this detour would involve such precipitous climbs, the human resources manager thought, I would never have agreed to it.

“Love,” declared the weasel in high Platonic style, “bears witness to our finiteness, but also to our ability to transcend it.”

Human desire ascends by rungs like those of a ladder from love’s lowest manifestations to its highest, from its most concrete to its most abstract, from its most physical to its most spiritual. To have the world of true form revealed to one is the reward of the wise lover — who, freed of the physical object of his desire, realizes that his pursuit is of something more essential. The more he searches for it, the more he realizes that the ultimate beauty lies not in the body but in the soul …

“The soul …” The consul, perhaps reminded of his soulful wife, roused himself.

“That’s love’s secret,” the weasel continued as the vehicle slowed to take the hairpin bends. “There is no formula. Each person has to find the secret for himself. That’s why Eros is neither god nor man. He’s a daimon, thick-skinned, unwashed, barefoot, homeless, and poor — yet he links the human to the divine, the temporal to the eternal …”

The vehicle came to a halt on the steep gradient. Worried that the trailer might break free on the long climb, the elder brother went to check the tow-bar. The sudden stop woke the boy who turned from his place amid the luggage to glance quickly back at the trailer, now awash in the beam of a torch held by the resourceful technician. Soft snowflakes danced in the bright light as he circled the coffin worriedly, examining its ropes and knots. Even this did not put his mind to rest; re-entering the vehicle, he took the wheel from his brother, trusting only in his own sure touch.

“That’s also why Socrates, though he did not reject the young Alcibiades’ love, also did not agree to its consummation.”

“How’s that?”

“True love requires separation. Plato specifies that the desired union of the two halves that so appeals to your imaginations must never take place. The love of beauty must remain open-ended. Therefore, it’s always in a state of disequilibrium. Its extremes can drive a man to the most shameless acts.”

3

From the first officer of the night watch to the second officer:

You’re punctual, sergeant. It’s time for the changing of the guard. But I’m not going to bed. I’ll stay up to keep you company. Half an hour ago I would have said things seemed quiet and peaceful; the hours of sentry duty had gone by in their usual drowsy haze. But suddenly I saw something new. I won’t waste words describing it. Here, take these binoculars and look out, into the darkness. Do you see that large, glowing body descending towards us through the fog? What is it? An old spacecraft re-entering the atmosphere? A UFO from a distant planet? Or am I just seeing things, as my troops always claimed? Use your fresh, young eyes, sergeant, and tell me what’s out there. Should we wake the CO or wait to get a closer look? I don’t want to end up a laughingstock.

I’ve been serving this country for over fifty years. The best years of my life have been spent right here. But the wild swings from military to civilian existence have left me depressed. I don’t know what I am any more. Who can believe that a huge, state-of-the-art installation, dug into the ground in top secrecy, one of the most closely guarded bases in our vast and powerful land, is now a tourist site run by a small, undisciplined garrison?

Do you have any idea, my young friend, just how deep the nuclear shelter beneath us is? Would you believe that once upon a time an infernal elevator burrowed ten floors into the ground before it hit a false bottom? Do you realize that underneath the command rooms and storerooms are comfortable apartments, equipped for our politicians and generals to stay in with their families? That at a depth of dozens of metres are double beds for lovers, tables set for banquets, an ultramodern kitchen with an enormous freezer filled with every delicacy — all to addvariety and spice to long months of hiding from radioactive poisons? Has anyone told you about the library of great books, the playrooms and games for children? There’s even a hospital with maternity wards and operating theatres.