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Amos Oz

Panther in the Basement

Editor's Note

The films mentioned in the text are fictional. Their titles, plots, and casts were invented by the author to conjure up the popular Hollywood films which were showing in Jerusalem in the late 1940s, and which he himself watched there as a child in the local cinema.

Panther in the Basement

one

I have been called a traitor many times in my life. The first time was when I was twelve and a quarter and I lived in a neighborhood at the edge of Jerusalem. It was during the summer holidays, less than a year before the British left the country and the State of Israel was born out of the midst of war.

One morning these words appeared on the wall of our house, painted in thick black letters, just under the kitchen window: PROFI BOGED SHAFEL, "Proffy is a low-down traitor. " The word shafel, "low-down," raised a question that still interests me now, as I sit and write this story: Is it possible for a traitor not to be low-down? If not, why did Chita Reznik (I recognized his writing) bother to add the word "low-down"? And if it is, under what circumstances is treachery not low-down?

I had had the nickname Proffy attached to me ever since I was so high. It was short for Professor, which they called me because of my obsession with checking words. (I still love words: I like collecting, arranging, shuffling, reversing, combining them. Rather the way people who love money do with coins and banknotes and people who love cards do with cards. )

My father saw the writing under the kitchen window when he went out to get the newspaper at half past six that morning. Over breakfast, while he was spreading raspberry jam on a slice of black bread, he suddenly plunged the knife into the jam jar almost up to the handle and said in his deliberate way:

"What a pleasant surprise! And what has his Lordship been up to now, that we should deserve this honor?"

My mother said:

"Don't nag him first thing in the morning. It's bad enough that he gets nagged by other children.

Father was dressed in khaki, like most men in our neighborhood in those days. He had the gestures and voice of a man who is definitely in the right. Dredging up a sticky mass of raspberry from the bottom of the jar and spreading an equal amount on both halves of his slice of bread, he said:

"The fact is that almost everyone nowadays uses the word 'traitor' too freely. But what is a traitor? Yes indeed. A man without honor. A man who secretly, behind your back, for the sake of some questionable advantage, helps the enemy to work against his people. Or to harm his family and friends. He is more despicable than a murderer. Finish your egg, please. I read in the paper that people are dying of hunger in Asia. "

My mother pulled my plate toward her and finished my egg and the rest of my bread and jam, not because she was hungry, but for the sake of peace. She said: