Atalia

Atalia is a guarded woman whose history of abandonment has left her wary of attachment, yet whose actions toward Shmuel Ash disclose a quiet, practical tenderness. She predicts that he, like the young men who lodged before him, will eventually leave; when his injured foot delays his departure, she offers him a few more days and helps pack his belongings herself.

A lonely household and an expected departure

Atalia describes the house as a monotonous life in an old, dark place shared with an elderly talker and a bitter woman. Shmuel is young and full of ideas, she tells him, and this life cannot hold him indefinitely: he may write a book, resume his studies, or return to his parents in Haifa. Her forecast comes from experience. Other predecessors who lived in the attic had begun by telling her their dreams and then left, each in time; she is already treating Shmuel’s eventual departure as part of the household’s established pattern.

Shmuel answers that before coming to the house he had considered going to the new desert city being built near the crater at Mitzpe Ramon, where he hoped for work as a night watchman or store assistant. Instead, he says, he will stay until they throw him out. He has lost his will and no longer plans to go anywhere. His refusal of the future Atalia imagines for him does not erase her expectation that he will leave, but it gives their exchange its tension: she reads his arrival through the departures that preceded it, while he presents staying as the only decision he can still make.

Care after Shmuel’s injury

The morning after Shmuel is taken to hospital, Atalia arrives at seven. She pauses at the doorway of the ward, where eight beds stand in two rows and two are empty, and looks at him before approaching. When their eyes meet, she seems to see something unfamiliar in him. His timid, submissive gaze moves her; she comes to his bed, gently covers him with the sheet, strokes his bearded cheeks, touches the bandage around his forehead, and runs her fingers through his curls.

Shmuel closes his eyes as she approaches, then opens them and cautiously strokes the hand caressing him. He notices that it seems much older than her face and body. His attempt to smile becomes an expression at once pained and pleased. The scene makes care a reciprocal, if awkward, encounter: Atalia tends his injured body, while Shmuel responds to the age and vulnerability he senses in her hand.

The attic and the memory of her mother

Atalia’s offer to let Shmuel remain until his foot heals leads into a memory of the house and her childhood. She says the room associated with Abravanel feels right only when it is empty, dark, and closed, with his photograph apparently speaking to the walls. Since childhood, she has thought of it as an hermit’s dark cell or a prison. The attic is therefore not simply a spare room: it holds the memory of a household shaped by privacy, absence, and things left unsaid.

When Atalia was ten, her mother left for Alexandria with a Greek merchant who often visited the house. He recited poetry in five or six languages, spoke with Abravanel for hours, and sometimes sat with him in the attic reading poetry and talking in Greek. Atalia had believed the visitor was interested only in Abravanel. Yet she had also seen her mother’s hand resting on his shoulder, received the occasional sight of them speaking French in the kitchen, and watched him bring her mother perfume and herself dolls made of bakelite, with muslin dresses and buttons that made them cry or laugh.

The mother eventually left while Abravanel was in Beirut and Atalia was away on a school excursion. She packed early, went to Alexandria to find the merchant, and left a letter saying she had no choice and that people were always at the mercy of forces acting on them. Atalia recalls that the letter contained feelings she no longer remembers and does not want to remember. Her recollection preserves the tangible details of the departure while holding its emotional contents at a distance, echoing the way she presents leaving as an unavoidable force in other people’s lives.

A departure postponed

When Shmuel’s foot is nearly healed, Atalia states that he may stay a few more days, until he is ready to leave. She asks him to leave a note on the kitchen table when the time comes so she can help him pack his things from upstairs and downstairs. The offer is bounded and practical, but it reverses the earlier certainty of her prediction: rather than simply wait for him to disappear, she makes herself responsible for helping him through the departure.

Atalia does not wait for Shmuel to ask. Though his foot is almost recovered and he can carry his belongings downstairs, she goes up to the attic twice and brings down his clothes and books. When he asks why she is doing what he could do himself, she explains that she wanted him to rest a little longer. The small excess of care matters precisely because it exceeds necessity. For Atalia, who expects lodgers to leave and remembers her mother’s departure as something governed by forces beyond choice, helping Shmuel pack becomes a way to soften an ending she has anticipated but does not hurry.