Dogs

Dogs recur as strays at the edges of human suffering, most notably as the injured brown dog that follows Judas Iscariot away from the crucifixion. Hungry and accustomed to abandonment, it becomes his temporary companion: he gives it cheese and tries to send it away, but it returns to rest at his feet. The animal’s persistence offers a small, concrete counterpoint to the mercy Judas believes has been destroyed.

Strays and the Crucifixion

During the crucifixion, a small dog that has attached itself to Judas on the road lies beneath the table in the remote tavern where he sits afterward. It is thin, pale brown, bald in patches, and has an open, suppurating wound on its back. Its condition is described through hunger, loneliness, and the kicks of strangers: the dog is accustomed to deprivation rather than protected from it.

The dog’s presence accompanies Judas as he trembles and hears the cries of the crucified in memory. The scene does not make the animal a witness with access to the event’s meaning; instead, its injured body remains beside a man overwhelmed by the suffering he has witnessed. The dog under the table makes abandonment visible on a smaller scale, without diminishing the horror of the crucifixion.

Food, Refusal, and Return

After the last crucified man dies, Judas leaves before the bodies are taken down. He circles the city walls, exhausted, hungry, and emptied of thought and longing, yet walks quickly, as if a great weight has at last been lifted. The brown dog follows him, running around him in supplication. Judas takes a piece of cheese from his bag, bends down, and leaves it for the dog; it devours the food, gives two hoarse barks, and continues after him.

At the entrance to an old roadside tavern on the route to Judas’s hometown, Kariot, he bends over the dog again. He strokes its head twice and quietly tells it to go. The dog turns away with its head lowered and tail between its legs, but a few minutes later changes course, enters the tavern, and crawls beneath his table. It lies there silently, resting its head cautiously on the dusty sandal of the man who fed it.

Narrative Significance

The encounter is made of modest gestures: a piece of cheese, two strokes, a dismissal, and a return. Judas cannot undo the death he has witnessed, and the narrative gives him no human comfort in the tavern; the dog’s company is instead tentative and chosen anew after he has tried to refuse it. Its return does not resolve his guilt, but places a living, vulnerable creature beside him as he bears it.

The dog also complicates Judas’s thought that the world has become empty of mercy. He believes charity and mercy have been murdered in Jerusalem, while the animal’s need elicits food and care from him, and its quiet return answers that care with proximity. The exchange is not a grand reconciliation: the dog remains injured and dependent, and Judas remains bereaved and burdened. Its significance lies in the small persistence of contact amid abandonment.

Dogs in the Departure Scene

Later, dogs bark in the distance from the ruins of Sheikh Badr as Shmuel leaves the house on Rabbi Elbaz Alley. These dogs are heard, not described or approached; the scene does not identify them as the same animal that accompanied Judas. Their distant barking belongs to Shmuel’s departure, set against the silent gate and the absence of anyone calling him back. Across the narrative, dogs thus appear both as vulnerable, close companions and as a remote sound in a landscape of parting.