Perros

Perros appear throughout the novel less as a single animal or fixed symbol than as a recurring presence through which human attachment becomes visible. At times they are actual, distant animals whose barking enters a sleepless night; elsewhere, their lively, needy, or defensive behavior offers characters a way to describe one another. The images bring affection close to dependence, and companionship close to the desire to be left alone.

An image of Shmuel’s temperament

Yardena describes Shmuel Ash as a little dog whose energy swings between restless activity and complete stillness. Even when seated, he seems to be chasing his own tail; at other times he remains in bed for days, like an unventilated winter blanket. The comparison gives shape to a temperament that is difficult to reconcile with itself: Shmuel is at once animated and exhausted, eager to move and drawn back toward the shelter of his room.

The dog image is not merely a joke about his mannerisms. Yardena’s description corresponds to the pace of his daily life: he takes stairs two at a time, rushes across busy streets, and hurries through tasks so he can return to silence under his blanket. His motion has no clear destination; it is a race to finish the day and withdraw from it. The animal metaphor catches that bodily contradiction more vividly than a simple label such as nervous or lazy could.

Shmuel’s way of speaking adds another dimension to the comparison. He enjoys giving impassioned speeches, correcting assumptions and arguing over politics, but loses patience when others speak. Yardena experiences the same pattern in their conversations: while he talks, she has his attention; when she answers, his eyelids close, and when challenged to repeat what she said, he changes the subject. His generosity and wish to be useful coexist with distraction and impatience. The image of the excitable dog thus conveys not just his energy but the unevenness of his attention: he seeks company, yet does not reliably meet another person in conversation.

Affection, separation, and unequal attentiveness

Yardena’s dog comparison carries real tenderness. She likes Shmuel’s nervous spirit, helplessness, and friendly, exuberant nature, imagining a large dog constantly beside its person, rubbing against them and slobbering on their legs. Its closeness is affectionate but also demanding: the dog’s attachment is hard to ignore, just as Shmuel’s restless presence can fill the space around him.

Yet affection does not determine Yardena’s choice. She leaves Shmuel and accepts the marriage proposal of Nesher Shereshevski, her former boyfriend, a quiet and diligent hydrologist who studies rainwater collection. In contrast to Shmuel’s lapses of attention, Nesher often anticipates what she will want. He remembers both of her birthdays, observing the Gregorian-calendar date with a neckerchief and the Hebrew-calendar date two days later with a greenish Oriental rug; he also remembers her parents’ birthdays. The contrast makes the dog image bittersweet: Shmuel’s warmth is genuine, but it does not supply the attentive constancy Yardena chooses in a partner.

Later, Gershom Wald recognizes that Yardena has left Shmuel and remarks that Atalia can attract strangers without effort, then drive them away after a few weeks, sometimes after only one. He links this pattern to her preference for men while they remain strangers: once the stranger becomes familiar, he begins to feel oppressive. Wald explains the verb for attraction through an image of binding or immobilizing someone with restraints. In this conversation, the animal comparisons around Shmuel belong to a wider account of closeness as something that can comfort one person and burden another; the text does not claim that Shmuel and Atalia behave identically, but places their different forms of approach and withdrawal in the same discussion.

Wald’s guard-dog figure

When Atalia explains Shmuel’s new duties in the house, she describes Gershom Wald as a nocturnal man whose nights are spent awake and whose days begin around midday. Shmuel is to speak with him in the library each evening, where Wald will supply the topics and, Atalia predicts, come alive when contradicted. She compares him to an old dog still hoping a stranger will arrive: the visitor gives him a reason to stand guard, bark, and, very occasionally, nip—only in play.

This figure makes opposition part of Wald’s sociability. His argumentativeness is not presented simply as hostility; a visitor who disagrees gives him a reason to engage. The dog is old and guarded, but still responsive to the arrival of someone new. Atalia’s practical instructions about the work—heating Wald’s food, reminding him to take his medicine, and leaving hot tea for the night—sit alongside her account of conversation as a kind of provocation he needs. Companionship in the house is both care and contest.

Wald also uses dogs as a point of entry into his arguments. In one extended attack on Darwinian explanations, he challenges the idea that natural selection can explain why a cat instinctively buries its waste, asking why a dog, cow, or horse did not acquire the same habit. The dog here is not a companion or a portrait of a person, but one member of a comparison through which Wald questions how complex inherited behaviors arise. His example shows how readily animals recur in the household’s talk, carrying both intimate associations and abstract arguments.

Barking in the storm and in Shmuel’s dream

Dogs also enter the narrative as animals heard from a distance. During a night of wind and rain, a metal basin hanging outside Shmuel’s balcony strikes the railing as the storm strengthens near dawn. Two dogs, far from his house and perhaps far from one another, bark throughout the night; now and then their calls weaken into a whimper. They are not given names or individual histories. Their sound belongs to the exposed world beyond the room, while Shmuel lies within it, unable to find rest.

The next day, he considers leaving Jerusalem for a simple job in a remote place, perhaps as a night watchman in the Ramon mountains, where he has heard a new desert town is being built. The storm and the dogs’ intermittent whimpering precede this wish to leave, giving his desire for distance an immediate setting without reducing it to a single cause. The image of a remote watcher also echoes the night sounds: Shmuel imagines exchanging his present life for solitude in a place apart.

A dog’s cry returns in his dream of Stalin. In that confused scene, Stalin orders Professor Gustav Yom-Tov Eisenschloss to relieve Shmuel’s father’s financial troubles, while Shmuel tries to explain why the Jews rejected Jesus, pointing out that the Wailing Wall lies beyond the border, in Jordanian Jerusalem. Stalin laughs beneath his mustache and calls Shmuel Judas. Near the dream’s end, Nesher appears, handing Stalin a crying puppy in a metal box. Shmuel wakes with the uneasy sense that his convoluted explanations have only worsened matters, provoking Stalin’s ridicule and suspicion. The puppy’s cry gathers the novel’s recurring dog imagery into the dream’s emotional logic: the vulnerable, noisy creature is offered amid an exchange shaped by judgment, misunderstanding, and exposure.

Recurrence and significance

Across these appearances, dogs occupy several distinct positions. Shmuel is compared to a companionable, overexcited dog whose desire for closeness coexists with inattention; Wald is likened to a guarded old dog who needs an arrival to provoke him into speech; actual dogs bark and whimper beyond Shmuel’s room; and a crying puppy appears in a dream of accusation and failed explanation. The recurrence does not settle into a single allegorical meaning. Its force comes from the shifts between affection, irritation, watchfulness, distance, and vulnerability.

Nor do the animals become independent agents in the human relationships described. They are heard, remembered, and made into comparisons, but their distinct lives remain largely outside the narrative’s view. That limit matters: the images tell the reader as much about the people doing the comparing as they do about dogs. Shmuel’s longing for company, Yardena’s affection and departure, Wald’s appetite for argument, and the dreamer’s fear of being misunderstood all meet in an animal vocabulary that makes attachment vivid without making it simple.