Shmuel left Jerusalem heading south

Shmuel Ash’s departure from Jerusalem turns an uncertain life into a literal journey south, but not into a settled new beginning. After leaving the house on Rabbi Elbaz Alley, he travels by bus toward Beersheba with the intention of continuing to the new settlement at Mitzpe Ramon, where he hopes to find work and a place to stay. The road briefly feels like release from a long confinement; the journey’s first night, however, leaves him stranded in an unfamiliar city, still unsure what he is looking for.

Leaving the house

At the end of his stay, Shmuel steps out of the house on Rabbi Elbaz Alley with the frail wooden step in mind, then shuts the iron door and remains there looking at it. Its two green metal leaves, blind lion’s-head knocker, and raised inscription naming the House of Joaquim Abravanel make the threshold a particular object of memory. He recalls arriving and hesitating before it, unsure whether to knock or turn back. Now he wonders briefly whether he might ever return. The answer is not a firm refusal: perhaps someday, perhaps in years, perhaps after he has managed to write the Gospel according to Judas Iscariot.

He waits two or three minutes beside the door, although he knows no one will call him back. No call comes. Only distant dogs bark from the ruins of Sheikh Badr. Shmuel turns away, crosses the stone-paved courtyard, and leaves through the rusty gate without trying to close it; it has long stood ajar, damaged and unrepaired. Above it, an iron arch bears an inscription welcoming the redeemer of Jerusalem, dated 1914. The gate’s persistent failure seems to confirm to Shmuel that he has been right about something, though he cannot say what. The departure thus carries both the pull of return and the absence of any clear conclusion.

The road out of Jerusalem

Shmuel makes his way to the central bus station carrying a heavy pack and a cane, walking slowly and limping a little because of his foot. On the way he passes his teacher, Professor Gustav Yom-Tov Eisenschloss, who is walking with a briefcase and a net bag of oranges while talking with a familiar older woman. Shmuel recognizes his teacher too late to greet him. Even if the professor had recognized him beneath the pack, Shmuel cannot imagine what they could now say to one another: their shared subject had been how generations of Jews saw Jesus of Nazareth and how Judas saw him, but he doubts what use that subject can be to anyone.

At the station, Shmuel sits with the pack between his legs among armed soldiers moving between the platforms. He considers composing a few lines to himself, then mentally drafts and abandons a letter to Ben-Gurion, Israel’s prime minister and defense minister. Unable to find a notebook or pen, he asks a young female soldier to watch his belongings, returns to the kiosk for another soda, and buys two doughnuts, one for the road and one for the soldier. These small actions place his departure amid the ordinary, improvised business of travel, even as the armed crowds and his own unspoken letter keep the political world close.

At three in the afternoon, Shmuel boards an Egged bus for Beersheba. His destination is not yet the end of the journey. He has heard that a new town is being built on the desert’s edge beside the Mitzpe Ramon crater, and imagines finding a corner there to leave his pack and cane while looking for work: as a night watchman at the construction site, a caretaker at the public school, or perhaps a librarian or library assistant. Surely, he thinks, a settlement will have a small library, or at least a cultural center. Once he has somewhere to sleep, he plans to write to his parents and sister to explain where life has taken him; perhaps he will also write to Yardena and to the house on Rabbi Elbaz Alley. He does not know what he would say. He hopes the new place may eventually show him what he has gone in search of.

A release that does not last

Shmuel sits alone at the back of the bus, holding the heavy pack between his knees because he cannot fit it in the overhead rack. He manages to put the fox-headed cane up there, along with his coat and shapka hat, already aware that he will forget them when he gets off. His belongings register the precariousness of the departure: he is carrying what he needs, but even the things he has set aside for the ride risk being left behind.

As the bus leaves Jerusalem, passes the last gloomy stone houses on Jaffa Street and the filling station at the city’s edge, then turns toward the mountains, Shmuel is suddenly overcome by warm joy. The bare mountains, young woods, and wide sky make him feel as if he has awakened from a dream that lasted too long, or emerged from solitary confinement into freedom. The image gathers up more than one winter or one house. It releases him, in imagination, from years of university study and the campus, library, café, and classrooms; from his former room in Tel Arza; from his research on Jesus as seen by Jews and by Judas; and from the failed relationship with Yardena, who had treated him like an amusing but ridiculous pet that made a mess around her. Nesher Shereshevski, the diligent hydrologist Yardena chose, belongs to the same Jerusalem-bound past.

The city he leaves is recalled as a place that seems always to contract in anticipation of a blow: stone vaults, blind beggars, devout old women sitting for hours in the sun outside dark cellars, and prayer-shawled men hurrying like bent shadows toward synagogues. In the low-ceilinged cafés, students in thick high-necked sweaters smoke and interrupt one another while trying to put the world right. The passage sets this crowded, enclosed Jerusalem against the open landscape beyond it. The road does not erase his old attachments or answer his questions, but for a moment its mountains and sky let him experience departure as freedom.

Beersheba and the interrupted arrival

In the country, orchards extend toward the mountains, and eucalyptus trees line the road to conceal traffic from enemy aircraft. Farther south, the newer settlements thin out; broad fields give way to low bare hills, temporarily green from winter rain. Shmuel knows the green will soon disappear, leaving thorn scrub clinging to the hills against the desert wind. The landscape offers openness without promising permanence, a fitting counterpart to his plans for a new life that are hopeful but provisional.

The bus reaches Beersheba at dusk. Shmuel leaves an unread newspaper on his seat, retrieves his coat, cane, and hat, buys a soda, and asks when the next bus will leave for Mitzpe Ramon. The last bus has already gone; the next departs at six the following morning. He knows he ought to ask something more, but cannot think what. Limping slightly with the pack on his left shoulder and coat and cane in his right hand, he walks away from the station and wanders through a town he barely knows.

At the ends of the new streets, the desert opens into low, flat sandy hills dotted with black Bedouin shepherds’ tents. Within the town, however, he finds rows of identical, shabby three- and four-storey apartment blocks, peeling plaster, and courtyards piled with metal rubbish and broken furniture. Beside one building stands a sickly fig tree. Shmuel likes figs and searches it for a few early fruits, then recognizes that it is too early in spring, before Passover, for any fig tree to bear fruit. He pulls off a leaf and continues down the street. Children chase an orange cat that disappears beneath the heavy concrete pillars supporting the housing blocks; thistles, weeds, twisted scrap, uncovered garbage bins, closed shutters, old bicycles, and chained baby carriages fill out the streetscape. His projected settlement of libraries and cultural life remains out of reach, while the immediate place offers no welcome or direction.

The unanswered question

From a second-floor window, a young, pretty woman in a colorful summer dress leans out to hang a wet shirt. Shmuel looks up and finds her pleasant, delicate, kind, and likable. He decides to address her, apologize, and ask for advice: where could he go, and what should he do? Before he can find the right words, she finishes hanging the shirt, closes the window, and disappears.

Shmuel remains motionless in the empty street. He removes the pack from his shoulder and places it on the dusty asphalt, then carefully lays his coat, cane, and hat on top. The gesture pauses the journey at the point where his plans have run out: Mitzpe Ramon is inaccessible until morning, the stranger who might have offered guidance is gone, and the hoped-for letters remain unwritten. The episode ends as Shmuel asks himself a question without supplying its answer. His departure has freed him, for a moment, from Jerusalem’s enclosed world, but the open road has not yet given him a destination in any deeper sense.