Shu Mu Er and Atalia pursued the debt in the café

Shmuel Ash and Atalia Abravanel’s visit to the Atara Café begins as an attempt to recover a loan and becomes a public collision between debt, memory, and exclusion. Atalia brings Shmuel as a witness while she confronts Hiram Nehoshtan, a former Lehi member who denies owing Iliya Schvartzbaum money; Nehoshtan’s angry departure leaves the debt unsettled but turns the encounter into an unexpectedly intimate warning to Shmuel about his feelings for Atalia.

The request and the disputed loan

Atalia asks Shmuel to accompany her to a three o’clock meeting at the Atara Café on Ben Yehuda Street. She says the man they will meet is unstable and often drunk by midday, and that she would prefer not to face him alone. When she explains that she wants a man beside her, both she and Shmuel smile. His presence is not meant to make him a negotiator: she says he need only sit there, have tea or coffee, and serve as a witness. Shmuel agrees without hesitation.

The man is Hiram Nehoshtan, an obscure poet who once belonged to Lehi and, like many former members, has struggled to find his place since the State was established about ten years earlier. Atalia describes him as a guide, translator, and writer of self-published booklets. Two years before the meeting, he borrowed money from Iliya Schvartzbaum, a construction contractor who had been his comrade in the resistance. Atalia says the loan was made without collateral or a signed agreement, sealed instead by a friendly handshake between former comrades. Her agency has spent weeks trying both polite and less polite approaches to persuade Nehoshtan to repay it.

Shmuel raises the weakness in the claim: without a contract or other document, perhaps the loan never happened and the contractor invented it. Atalia is certain that it did happen. She says a young accountant, Ester Levi, was present in the café when Schvartzbaum handed Nehoshtan the cash. According to Atalia, Nehoshtan has forgotten Ester, while Ester remembers conversations precisely, word for word, even after ten years or more. Her extraordinary memory, Atalia remarks, could be a terrible curse. She adds that people in Lehi used to say Ester sometimes hid hand grenades in her bra. Shmuel jokes about the possibility that she might arrive armed, then confirms that he will be at the café.

The meeting at Atara

Before leaving, Shmuel eats goulash and fruit salad at his usual Hungarian restaurant, takes a short nap, changes his shirt, and puts on an old earth-colored sweater, a duffel coat with wooden buttons and rope loops, and a shapka. He powders his beard, neck, and forehead with baby powder and checks that his inhaler is in his pocket. At the house’s makeshift wooden step, his weight tips the unstable board like a seesaw; he nearly falls but catches himself against the wall. He nevertheless makes it to the meeting.

Nehoshtan is small and thin, with sticky hair, long sideburns, a broken boxer’s nose, and one greasy curl falling over his broad forehead. He does not rise from his chair. Instead, he recognizes Shmuel from the socialist-renewal circle and recalls seeing him at the Roth Café in the Yegia Kapaim neighborhood. He mocks the group’s socialism as half Bolshevik and half Cuban, then describes himself as a Hebrew socialist and revolutionary, distinguishing Hebrew from Jewish and declaring that he wants no connection with Jews, whom he calls walking dead. He asks Shmuel whether he has come on behalf of the bridegroom or bride. Shmuel falters over how to define himself, settling on friend, then acquaintance, then neighbor of Atalia.

Atalia makes clear that she invited him because she wanted a witness. The three wait briefly for Ester, but she does not appear. They sit upstairs in the café’s discreet, windowless gallery, where smoke mingles with the smells of coffee, pastries, wet wool coats, and winter bodies. Other Jerusalem figures occupy nearby tables, including a history professor who does not recognize Shmuel, and a government-party member and a journalist from Davar. The crowded, smoke-laden public room gives Nehoshtan’s outburst an audience beyond the people directly involved.

Denial, evidence, and threat of court

When Nehoshtan asks why they have gathered, Atalia names Schvartzbaum. Nehoshtan carefully puts out a partly smoked cigarette, lights another without offering one to either visitor, and laughs so hostilely that people at neighboring tables look over. He denies ever asking Schvartzbaum for money or owing him anything, and dismisses him as a repulsive Jewish middleman who trades in plots and warehouses. In the same breath, Nehoshtan says he has told Atalia at least twice that he will repay the money if he ever has any. He then asks her to use her influence to secure a new loan of five thousand pounds, repayable in three months with even exorbitant interest.

Atalia refuses to let the new request displace the old debt. She says Ester will testify that she was in the café two years earlier when Schvartzbaum handed Nehoshtan the money, and warns that they will take the matter to court. Nehoshtan turns to Shmuel, asking whether he too is to be a witness against him and challenging the justice of making a poor poet pay a wealthy contractor. His appeal tries to recast the dispute as a moral contest between the impoverished writer and a rich, repulsive creditor; Atalia’s answer returns it to the claimed loan and the witness who can confirm it.

The waiter brings Nehoshtan cognac and brings Atalia and Shmuel black coffee, setting down a small jug of milk. He politely offers them apple cake with cream, chocolate cake with cream, or sweet crumb cake; Atalia declines all three. She then adds that Ester has told them Nehoshtan inherited a windowless basement apartment in a lane behind the Edison cinema. It is the room he calls his lair, and Atalia asks whether he wants the court to take it from him and leave him with nowhere to go. The question makes the threatened legal consequences concrete: the claim is not merely for repayment but may put his sole described shelter at risk.

Nehoshtan’s departure and the warning to Shmuel

Nehoshtan leaves a lit cigarette on the ashtray’s edge, lights another, and mutters that if he loses his room he will go to hell, though he has nearly reached it already. Then he stands and turns the debt dispute into a denunciation of cruelty. He rejects the idea that humanity was expelled from paradise because of an apple, insisting instead that people are repeatedly driven from one place to another through cruelty. The speech connects his threatened displacement to a much wider grievance, even as his own refusal to acknowledge the loan remains unresolved.

He promises that Schvartzbaum’s money will be returned with good interest, multiplied a thousandfold and delivered in sacks or a rain of cash—but not by him. It will be returned soon by the rich, not by someone empty-handed. Nehoshtan calls himself cruel, insignificant, grandiose, and perpetually expelled, while complaining that he cannot afford even three pounds for the dreadful cognac. His speech veers between self-condemnation and accusation: he describes himself as unnecessary, yet insists on the injustice of being made to pay. He finally declares that a sensitive person should not stay another minute among people of bad heart.

Before leaving, Nehoshtan tells Shmuel to be careful with Atalia if he has already fallen a little in love with her, asking God to have mercy on his soul. The warning abruptly shifts the encounter from debt collection to the emotional danger between the two people who brought him there. Nehoshtan asks everyone to forget him, turns without saying goodbye, and staggers down the stairs. From above, Atalia and Shmuel watch him search through the coats on the entrance rack before finding a shabby raincoat that once belonged to an English soldier. He puts it on, salutes a portrait of President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, and stumbles out into the cold, wet street.

The encounter’s significance

The scene keeps its central factual question open: Atalia says the loan happened and identifies an eyewitness, while Nehoshtan denies the original debt even as he speaks of repaying it if he can. His proposed five-thousand-pound loan and his changing claims do not resolve the contradiction; instead, they expose how insistently he recasts a demand for repayment as an accusation against wealth and power. Atalia’s mention of Ester and the threatened loss of the basement room makes the conflict both evidentiary and material, while Nehoshtan’s language of expulsion enlarges it into a lament about cruelty and belonging.

Shmuel enters at Atalia’s request as a witness who is explicitly told he need not speak. Nehoshtan nevertheless recognizes his past in the socialist circle, draws him into the argument about justice, and ends by naming what Shmuel has not openly stated: his possible love for Atalia. Thus the visit has two outcomes that do not neatly coincide. The debt remains a matter for a threatened court case, but Nehoshtan’s last words make the meeting a warning about the personal cost of attachment.