The bells are tolling

“The bells are tolling” is a recurring expression in the correspondence between Michel Sommo and Alexander Gideon, where it turns a declaration that someone’s time has ended into a literal sound close to the dying man. Its force comes from that change of scale: first the bells announce a symbolic transfer of power; then they ring in the garden above Gideon, whose illness makes the image impossible to keep metaphorical.

A verdict announced in a letter

In a letter written in haste, Michel Sommo tells his addressee that his time is up. The message places the declaration after midnight on an early Friday morning in South Jerusalem, where, Michel says, the bells can be heard. He makes their tolling part of a political and biblical judgment: kingship has passed, and is soon to be given to a neighbor he calls better. The sound gives the accusation the shape of an announcement, as though a private struggle over family and authority had reached its appointed hour.

Michel’s letter also complicates its own certainty. He admits that brandy and tranquilizers have entered the pages, recalls a newspaper photograph of the addressee in uniform and decorations, and wonders whether Heaven has abandoned him. The bells belong to this unstable mixture of grievance, religious language, and self-reproach: they sound like confirmation of his verdict, but the letter’s wavering voice makes the judgment personal rather than secure.

Gideon makes the bells literal

In his reply, Gideon takes Michel’s image out of metaphor. He explains that Boaz has made an upstairs chime from bottles suspended from the ceiling; each gust from the sea sets it playing a desolate, repetitive tune. Gideon says that the sound sometimes drives him from his bed of planks. With a walking stick Boaz made for him, he has managed to get downstairs into the darkening garden, where the young people staying at the house have cleared weeds and dug vegetable beds.

The object is makeshift and domestic, not a grand bell announcing public events. Its sound depends on the weather, and its repetition intrudes on Gideon’s rest. Yet the chime answers Michel’s image with unusual precision: the bells really are there, in the house where Gideon is ill, while the labor of Boaz and the others continues below them in the garden. The contrast joins mortality to ordinary work without making either disappear.

Death brought above the bed

Gideon explicitly acknowledges that Michel’s prediction has touched reality. He says his time has run out and that the bell really is tolling for him, then insists that he means actual bells, not a figure of speech. In a later passage, he returns to the correspondence’s image: Michel can hear bells, he writes, but they are right there above his head. He can hardly stand, and the chime is no longer merely a rebuke to another man; it accompanies Gideon’s own failing body.

That shift also changes the emotional balance between the correspondents. Michel had used the tolling to declare another person’s authority exhausted. Gideon accepts the language of an ending but grounds it in his illness and the chime in Boaz’s house. The expression thus holds accusation and recognition together: a bell can announce that power has passed, but here its repeated sound also marks the intimate fact of a life nearing its end.