Shumu'er and Atalial's moonlit walk

Shmuel Ash and Atalia Abravanel’s moonlit walk turns an ordinary evening in Jerusalem into an encounter defined by nearness without reciprocity. Atalia proposes a night outdoors instead of a film, leads Shmuel through the old lanes beneath a startling red moon, and tells him she likes his company best when he is silent. He reaches for her, then stops short of asking for the intimacy he wants; the walk ends with her gratitude and his desire still unresolved.

An evening redirected

Atalia appears in a close-fitting orange winter dress, her eyes discreetly made up and a fine silver chain at her neck. Her expression is not quite a smile, but seems to promise one. She teases Shmuel for having waited for her since that morning, or perhaps since the previous night. The small exchange gives way to an invitation: the sky is clear, the moon is full, and instead of going to a film they will put on their coats, wander the streets, and see what moonlight does to them.

Atalia says she does not know whether she likes Jerusalem or merely puts up with it. Yet when she is away for more than two or three weeks, the city begins appearing in her dreams, always bathed in moonlight. Her uncertainty makes the walk more than a sightseeing excursion: the city is at once something she can endure and something that returns to her inward life. Shmuel agrees immediately, while privately feeling the force of Atalia’s attraction as something his body recognizes even though he knows she is inaccessible to him.

Before they leave, Atalia drinks a glass of tap water in long, thirsty gulps. Then she says the moon is about to rise and that she likes watching it emerge over the mountains and slip between the rooftops. From the shadowed courtyard, where trees and tall cypresses obscure the light, she takes Shmuel by the elbow and guides him along the stone-paved path. His worn coat sleeve separates him from the warmth of her hand, but he can feel each of her five fingers. Short of breath, he takes his inhaler from his pocket, draws a deep breath, and puts it away again.

The moon and the silence

The Rabbi Elbaz alley is empty. A British Mandate-era streetlamp, set in small panes of glass, sways on a wire above the paving stones, throwing restless shadows like little waves. Atalia asks them not to talk, but to walk and listen to the sounds of the night. At the end of the alley, the moon suddenly rises over the roofs, enormous and red, seeming less like a gentle night light than a sun gone mad and returned in defiance of nature. Atalia stops, still holding Shmuel by the elbow as though he might stumble, and watches the moon and its pale halo whiten the stone walls.

She observes that Hebrew calls the moon white, though this one looks soaked in blood. The image gives the walk its unsettled undertone: moonlight makes the familiar city strange, and the word for whiteness is contradicted by what the two see. Atalia then guides Shmuel through the lanes of Nahlaot. She has let go of his sleeve, but sometimes touches his shoulder to steer him. A young couple passes them, embracing; the girl and boy speak in tones of disbelief and hurt that Shmuel and Atalia cannot fully make out. Atalia draws his attention instead to the silence, saying it is so deep the stones seem almost to breathe.

Shmuel opens his mouth to answer, then decides that she is asking him not to break the quiet. He walks half a step behind her, accepting the terms of the evening even as his desire grows harder to contain. The silence is not simply an absence of conversation: Atalia shapes it, and Shmuel follows. Her occasional touch is practical, steering him right or left; for him, that limited contact acquires an intimacy the walk itself does not promise.

Shmuel’s hesitation

At one point Shmuel reaches out and hurriedly strokes the nape of Atalia’s neck, his fingers slipping beneath her hair over the silver chain. Tears fill his eyes as he understands, in that instant, that there is no possibility for the two of them. Atalia cannot see him crying in the darkness; she only slows her pace a little. The gesture briefly crosses the distance between them, but it does not become an embrace or a kiss.

Shmuel condemns himself inwardly for being a coward and an idiot, imagining that he might have drawn her toward him, put his arms around her shoulders, and kissed her. An answering inner warning tells him not to try, lest he make himself ridiculous. The scene’s movement turns on that division: bodily longing carries him toward Atalia, while fear holds him back. His hesitation preserves the fragile arrangement she has chosen, but leaves him alone with the possibility he has declined to test.

The walk lasts roughly forty or fifty minutes. They cross Agripas Street and pass the Mahané Yehuda market, closed and deserted. Its dark stalls leave behind a mixture of smells—fruit, rubbish, overripe vegetables, a butcher’s shop, spices, and rot—while the two continue with the city largely emptied of people. At the plaza opposite the sundial, set high on a building since the Turkish period, Atalia suddenly answers Shmuel’s earlier question about her father: he did not belong to his time; perhaps he was ahead of it, perhaps behind it, but he belonged to another time. Her answer arrives after the silence and the walk, rather than as part of a sustained conversation, making the night a setting in which an unfinished question can return.

Return and aftermath

Atalia takes a different set of narrow lanes on the way home. They exchange few words, limited to warnings about a step or laundry hanging across the street and dripping above them. She likes the silence, and Shmuel, agitated and full of desire, does not dare contradict her. Above the Betzalel museum wall, the moon loses its bloody color and rises over the city, spreading a ghostly light. The changing moon echoes the walk’s shift from an alarming first appearance to a quieter illumination, without changing the limits between the two companions.

Back at the house, Atalia removes her coat and helps Shmuel with his. When he tries to take it off, his arm catches in the torn lining. She thanks him for the evening and says she enjoyed it; sometimes, she says, it is pleasant to be with him, especially when he does not talk. She declines food, tells him he can make something from the refrigerator and talk to himself as much as he likes, and goes to her room. Before leaving, she assures him the hours have not been wasted and reminds him to turn off the stair light. Her words acknowledge real pleasure in his company, but also define the kind of company she is offering: one in which his words and his desire need not be answered.

Atalia’s flat shoes carry her away, her hair falling over one shoulder. Her orange dress glows for a moment in the doorway and then disappears. A faint scent of violets remains; Shmuel inhales it deeply, his already enlarged heart pounding so hard that he begs it to calm down. The scene closes not on a declaration or a mutual advance but on the body left behind after Atalia has gone.

Shmuel initially plans to eat bread with butter and cheese, open yogurt, and perhaps fry an egg, but loses his appetite and feels a kind of anguish. He goes upstairs, lies in his underwear, and watches the moon in the window for about twenty minutes. Then his appetite returns: he goes down, opens a can of corn kernels and a can of preserved meat, and eats standing before the open refrigerator. The shift from desire to distress, and then to this abrupt, practical hunger, gives the night an unsettled ending. The walk has brought Shmuel close enough to touch Atalia’s neck, but not close enough to alter their relationship; its lasting consequence is the intensity with which he feels the distance.