Where the Jackals Howl by Amos Oz Page A

a purpose. There was a parsimonious look on his features, a pure, concentrated parsimony, without any element of avarice or enjoyment. Only his eyebrows were on a lavish scale, as if mocking the square forehead in whose folds they grew. His pencil squeaked on a page torn from a mathematics notebook.
    And silence, the silence of a desolate suburb of Jerusalem at a desolate hour of the early morning, roaming the streets outside and plucking needles from the tops of the pine trees in the gardens. The plucked needles rustled softly, the sound penetrating the sealed shutters, penetrating bones. Cats bristled with fear on the balcony rails in the darkness. Dov turned his head to look at the door:
    All right. Closed. Locked.
    Then a faraway jackal let out a short bark, like the leader of an orchestra who is the first to tune his strings. Many years had passed since Ehud’s one and only visit to this place: there was some youth congress in Jerusalem, or it may have been a camp for archeology enthusiasts, and the young man found out the address for himself and came and stayed for two days. That is, he appeared after midnight with a girl, smiled at his father wearily, and said that he would explain everything in the morning; then they both immediately fell asleep in their clothes. When Dov woke up at six o’clock the next morning, they had gone, and there was just a note saying, “Thanks a lot. Be seeing you. P.S.: everything’s OK.” The next night he arrived with two girls. He also brought some ancient pieces of pottery. Until three o’clock in the morning he worked at repairing a leaking hot-water pipe in the bathroom, and then he went out to join the girls, who were in their sleeping bags on the balcony. In the morning he was gone, leaving no trace besides the pipe that he had repaired.
    Four years later they met briefly and by chance in Beersheba, and Ehud half-promised to come again to visit him. “Some night in the summer,” he said. “I’m taking these miserable clods out for training in the Adullam hills, trying to turn alley cats into tigers. And I’m sure you’ll be surprised if I turn up some time in the middle of the night to visit you and take a shower.” Dov did not believe this promise and hardly expected to hear footsteps at night during the next summer. At the end of that summer Dov Sirkin received a personal letter of condolence from the commander of the paratroopers, and among other expressions of eulogy appeared the words “Happy is the father.” He shook his head and decided to concentrate on his drawing and dispel these random thoughts. He was tired, but steeped in self-discipline. The churches behind the walls of the Old City, across the border in the Kingdom of Jordan, began to converse, in the language of bells, with the churches of Bethlehem, also on the alien side of the truce line. The bells of Bethlehem chimed in reply: Yes, here, yes, here He was born. And the bells of East Jerusalem sang: And here He died and here He arose.
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    D OV PUT down the black and red pencils. With the aid of his compass he drew a neat semicircle. Then he picked up the blue pencil and sketched for about a quarter of an hour without a break.
    On the paper a gigantic port took shape. Its blue water flowed from his gray eyes to his fingers and through them to the pencil, which swallowed up the squares on the paper until almost the whole of the page was covered with blue. The jetties of Dov’s harbor were broader than the broadest jetties, the piers longer than any ever built by human hands, and the cranes more massive than the greatest cranes in the world. And the warehouses were as tall as the silence poking its dark fingers through the cracks in Dov Sirkin’s shutters. A complex of highways, connecting roads, bridges, tunnels, and approach routes writhed like a nest of snakes. Yellow machines spewed out giant sparks. Steel platforms and rubber conveyor belts were