Gershom Wald's physical disability

Gershom Wald’s physical disability is a degenerative condition that progressively restricts his movement, turning ordinary passage through the house into arduous physical work. Yet the novel presents it not simply as incapacity: Wald uses the strength of his arms and shoulders to move without assistance, resists being helped, and only gradually allows Shmuel to support him. The disability is both a practical condition of daily life and a changing boundary between independence and care.

The condition and its daily demands

Wald describes his illness with the sardonic precision that marks his speech: it is degenerative, he says, and he is moving toward total degeneration—though he corrects the joke by noting that he no longer walks. His mobility is severely limited, but the limits are specific rather than absolute. In his bedroom he keeps a pair of wooden crutches beside the bed, using them to get from room to room or to reach the adjoining lavatory. His movement therefore depends on the setting and the task, as well as on his own physical effort.

In the library, Wald refuses the crutches. He propels himself from desk to wicker divan and back by pressing his hands against surfaces and bearing his weight through his arms and shoulders. When Shmuel first sees him cross the room, the effort is compared to a great octopus stranded on land, struggling to drag itself across the sand toward water. The image conveys the labor and vulnerability of the movement, but Wald’s comic voice prevents the scene from reducing him to a passive object of pity.

Independence, effort, and the house

The house’s arrangement makes disability part of its ordinary geography. Wald’s library is his workplace and the setting in which he insists on moving under his own power; the bedroom, by contrast, contains the crutches he uses for other journeys. His ability to cross a room unaided should not be mistaken for an absence of need: it is an exertion he chooses and sustains through his upper body. Shmuel initially observes that Wald never permits him to help as he makes the difficult passage between desk and divan.

This insistence is also a matter of interpersonal conduct. Wald tells Shmuel that he will not run away anywhere, turning immobility into a wry response to Shmuel’s lateness. The remark makes his condition part of their conversational rhythm without making it his only subject. He remains a host who gives instructions, teases his visitor, and directs him to sit and read, even as the physical act of reaching his own divan requires considerable exertion.

Illness and the work of care

When Wald develops a severe winter flu, the disability intersects with a temporary illness that makes him more dependent. Atalia tells Shmuel to change his employer’s sweat-soaked pajamas, bring him tea with honey and lemon, wash his hands, wipe his forehead, and use a bedpan when necessary. The doctor diagnoses a serious flu with a risk of pulmonary infection, prescribes penicillin and other medicines, and orders Wald to remain in bed propped on cushions. Shmuel is warned that Wald’s age and already poor health make complications a concern.

The illness also changes the boundaries of the house. For more than two months, Shmuel has lived in the attic without entering Wald’s bedroom, Atalia’s room, or the closed room he assumes belonged to the deceased Shaltiel Abravanel. His permitted sphere has been the library, the shared kitchen, and his attic. Caring for Wald takes him into the private bedroom for the first time, where he reads chapters from Jeremiah until the older man falls asleep, pats his back during coughing fits, and gives him spoonfuls of hot tea mixed with honey, lemon, and a little cognac.

Touch initially requires an effort from Shmuel, who expects Wald’s twisted, sinewy body to repel him. Instead, he finds the older man’s back warm and firm, with muscular shoulders. While changing Wald’s pajama shirt, Shmuel rests his hands on a bare shoulder and may leave his fingertips there longer than necessary. Care becomes an embodied encounter: the disability that had been visible across the library now brings the two men into close physical contact.

A changing relationship to assistance

After Wald recovers from the flu, he begins to accept limited help. In the library he allows Shmuel to steady him by the shoulders and arrange the cushions behind his back; when he lies on the divan, Shmuel covers him with a wool tartan blanket. Wald still does much for himself, but the change matters precisely because he had previously refused assistance altogether. His dependence is neither a sudden surrender nor a simple reversal: it develops through repeated acts of practical care.

Their relationship also acquires a quieter intimacy through that routine. Shmuel continues to make tea with lemon juice, honey, and a dash of cognac even after Wald’s flu has passed, and makes a honey-sweetened cup for himself. The two sit in the library, exchange pages of the newspaper Davar, and listen to the evening news. Their shared silence and small services complement Wald’s familiar passion for talking, which he says is beginning to leave him. Disability does not explain their bond, but it gives its development a concrete form in the shoulders steadied, cushions adjusted, and blanket drawn over him.

Disability as lived experience

The novel holds Wald’s physical vulnerability alongside his wit, stubbornness, conversation, and intellectual life. His condition affects where and how he moves, what assistance he needs, and the limits he sets around receiving it; it does not replace those other dimensions of his character. The distinction between his crutches in the bedroom and his self-propelled route across the library is especially telling: the same man can rely on mobility aids in one context while refusing them in another.

The disability also unsettles any simple division between independence and dependence. Wald’s effort to move himself is real, as is the physical cost of that effort; Shmuel’s care does not cancel Wald’s agency, and Wald’s agency does not mean he needs no care. The gradual shift from refusal to permission gives the condition a relational dimension without turning it into a moral lesson. It is part of the material texture of their life together, registered in rooms, furniture, movement, touch, and the changing terms on which help is offered and accepted.