Shu Mu Er offered to be friends with Atalia

Shmuel Ash’s request that he and Atalia Abravanel try to be friends is a small but consequential negotiation over intimacy: he retreats from the more ambiguous word “companions,” while she rejects the language of feelings yet offers him a place beside her. The scene’s movement from his tearful hesitation to her touch on his cheek and her invitation to spend the evening together gives their connection a form that is practical, provisional, and unmistakably personal.

The Request and Its Hesitation

Shmuel cannot answer Atalia when she tells him she will always do whatever he asks. His eyes begin to fill with tears, and he turns away so she will not notice. He often cries from pity for other people or for himself; this time, he cannot tell whose suffering has moved him. The uncertainty matters: before he can make a request of her, he is already caught in an emotion he cannot neatly identify.

He gathers a courage that the narration calls unlike him and, facing the wall, begins by suggesting that the two of them try to be “companions.” He immediately corrects himself. The word, he thinks, may imply something impossible between them; what he means is that they should be friends. His revision reveals both his wish for closeness and his awareness that a label might overreach what Atalia is prepared to give.

Shmuel tries again, asking that they not remain complete strangers after living together under one roof all winter. He cannot finish the sentence. Beneath his beard he blushes, lowers his eyes, and falls silent. Rather than present the request as a confident declaration, the scene lets it falter: proximity has accumulated, but he still has to risk naming what he hopes it might become.

Atalia’s Terms

Atalia answers by making sentiment itself the issue. The two men who lodged in the house before Shmuel, she says, were full of feelings, and she is tired of sentimental people. In her view, feelings are unnecessary and end badly; life can be simpler without them. She adds that she has no obligation to educate him. He should be content that she can more or less tolerate him most of the time, and that at certain moments she may be a little more than tolerant.

Her reply is neither a simple acceptance nor a dismissal. She refuses the emotional vocabulary Shmuel has approached, but she does not order him away or deny that their relation sometimes exceeds mere endurance. The qualification preserves her guardedness even as it grants him a foothold. The narrator marks a small change in address: this is the first time Atalia calls him by his name. In a scene where she resists declarations, that direct naming registers recognition without turning it into a promise.

From Friendship to an Evening Together

Later, after they have been sitting face to face in a café, Shmuel asks Atalia to meet him that night. He proposes a film and dinner at her restaurant, adding that Gershom Wald will probably agree to let him finish his shift two hours early. His invitation carries the earlier request into a concrete plan: friendship is not left as an abstract word but tested through the prospect of spending time together outside the house.

Atalia challenges his choice of company, asking whether there are no girls his own age left in Jerusalem. Shmuel protests that he, too, is rather old. The exchange leaves their difference in age and his awkward self-consciousness in view, but it does not end the negotiation. Atalia folds the bill, and they prepare to leave the café together.

At the entrance, Shmuel tries to help her into her coat, but his movements are clumsy. She takes the coat from him and puts it on herself, then helps him with his own after he has pushed his arm into the torn lining instead of the sleeve. While he puts on his shapka, she quickly runs her fingers across his cheek as if removing a crumb from his beard. She tells him that sometimes he reaches her heart, despite her having no heart. The gesture and the remark answer his vulnerability in her own idiom: affection appears not as a confession but as a fleeting touch accompanied by a denial of emotional capacity. Shmuel regrets that his wild-looking beard covers his face.

The Invitation and Its Limits

Atalia stops by a telephone booth in Rabbi Elbaz Lane to make a call and tells Shmuel not to wait; he should go to Wald, who is expecting him. Shmuel stays. After five or six minutes, she comes out and gives him one of her rare smiles, beginning at the corners of her eyes before reaching her lips. She takes his arm, squeezes it lightly, and agrees to spend the evening with him.

The agreement revises his proposed outing rather than accepting it as offered. They will not go to a night ambush on Mount Zion, to her restaurant, or to the cinema. Instead, she will take him to Fink’s Bar, a place he probably does not know. She describes its mixed clientele: journalists and foreign correspondents, theater people, consuls, lawyers, United Nations army officers, married men and women who are not married to one another, and sometimes young poets with their girlfriends, there to see and be seen. She has to spend an hour or two watching an important person and insists that watching is all she intends to do. Shmuel may talk while she watches.

Her offer is deliberately bounded. She agrees to be with him, but the evening has another purpose and her attention will be partly occupied. Even so, she makes room for the subjects that matter to him: Jews, Jesus, and Judas Iscariot. She promises to listen at least some of the time, even while her eyes are busy. The arrangement grants Shmuel companionship without pretending that the two have reached a conventional understanding of what they are to each other.

Atalia then gives the arrangement a public shape: they will be a couple, she says, and his beard and thick hair make him look more or less ageless. People will think he is her escort, and, she adds, they will be right; that night, he will be her escort. Her phrasing turns the hesitant wish not to be strangers into a temporary, visible role. It offers closeness for the evening while leaving its larger meaning unsettled.

Significance in Their Relationship

The scene builds intimacy through a sequence of imperfect approaches and physical details rather than through a mutual declaration. Shmuel cries without knowing for whom, faces a wall to ask for friendship, blushes when he cannot complete his appeal, and later gets trapped in his coat’s torn lining. Atalia, meanwhile, rejects sentiment in words but recognizes him by name, touches his cheek, smiles, takes his arm, and chooses to bring him along. Their contrasting registers—his explicit but faltering appeal, her guarded speech and practical gestures—make the acceptance real without making it uncomplicated.

The evening’s terms also preserve the tension between companionship and emotional exposure. Atalia does not promise a romance, nor does Shmuel’s request establish one; she offers time together in a place where she has an independent task, and makes room for his conversation on his chosen subjects. The scene’s decisive change is therefore modest but clear: the man who feared remaining a stranger is accepted, for this night, as Atalia’s companion in public and as someone whose words she is willing to hear.