Nahlaot is a Jerusalem neighborhood that gives a nocturnal walk by Shmuel Ash and Atalia Abravanel its distinctive emotional and historical landscape. Moving through its narrow lanes, the two share a closeness shaped as much by silence and hesitation as by speech; later, Shmuel retraces part of the route alone, measuring his isolation against the memory of that walk.

Streets and landmarks

During their walk, Atalia guides Shmuel through Nahlaot while he follows half a step behind. She has let go of his sleeve, but occasionally touches his shoulder to steer him through the lanes. A young couple passes them, absorbed in one another, briefly setting their own intimacy alongside the guarded closeness of the two walkers.

The route carries them across Agripas Street and past the closed, deserted Mahane Yehuda Market. Its dark stalls leave behind a mingled smell of fruit, rubbish, overripe vegetables, meat, spices, and decay. They emerge onto Jaffa Street by the square opposite an old sundial, high on a building since the period of Ottoman rule. Atalia pauses there before answering a question Shmuel had asked earlier about her father, Shaltiel Abravanel: she says he belonged to another time, whether ahead of or behind his own.

The moonlit walk

At the end of Rabbi Elbaz Lane, the moon suddenly rises above the rooftops, red and enormous. Shmuel resents it as the moon that had made Atalia tell him to be quiet. She stops, still holding his elbow as if concerned he might stumble, and looks up at the moon and its pale halo washing the stone walls with a ghostly light. She remarks on the contradiction between the Hebrew name for the moon, White, and its blood-soaked appearance.

The walk lasts about forty or fifty minutes. Near the market, the pair encounter a silence Atalia seems to value: Shmuel starts to answer her observation about how deeply quiet the streets are, then decides not to break it. He keeps pace behind her. When he reaches to touch the nape of her neck and the silver chain beneath her hair, the gesture exposes the desire he has been holding back. His eyes fill with tears as he senses that the two of them have no chance together. He berates himself for not drawing her close and kissing her, but fear of making himself ridiculous checks the impulse.

On the way home, their exchanges dwindle to practical warnings about a step in the lane and laundry dripping overhead. Atalia favors the silence, and Shmuel does not challenge it, though his desire leaves him inwardly agitated. The moon loses its red color, rises above the wall of the Bezalel Museum, and casts its uncanny light across the city. Back at the house, Atalia removes her coat and helps Shmuel with his; his arm becomes caught in the torn lining.

A route remembered

Several weeks later, after midnight, Shmuel leaves the house during a fine drizzle and walks from Rabbi Elbaz Lane toward Ussishkin Street, then into Nahlaot by a route resembling the one he had taken with Atalia. The quiet streets recall the earlier walk and the things she told him there about Mija Wald’s death and her father, whom she called Abravanel rather than Dad.

The neighborhood becomes a measure of Shmuel’s chosen withdrawal. He recalls deciding to isolate himself after Yardena married Nesher Shereshevski and he left his studies, and recognizes that he has spent the winter in a house shadowed by death, with Gershom Wald’s ceaseless talk and Atalia’s hostility toward men. Yet the solitary walk unsettles his claim to be isolated: even when he is shut in his attic, his heart remains below, in the kitchen or at Atalia’s closed door. Nahlaot thus links his physical wandering to a more difficult recognition—that withdrawal has not freed him from attachment.