Shumuer and Atalaya's journey to Mount Zion at dawn

Shmuel Ash and Atalia Abravanel’s pre-dawn journey to Mount Zion is at once a clandestine outing, a failed stakeout, and a rare moment of intimacy between two people who cannot say plainly what they want from each other. Atalia frames the excursion as a chance to photograph a married man and woman meeting secretly, but the supposed assignment carries them through the winter night to a conversation about whether their own relationship might become something more. The dawn arrives without the expected couple or a clear answer; Atalia offers only the possibility that things may change, or may not.

The invitation and its cover story

Atalia proposes an outing after Shmuel asks why she has twice suggested that they go out together. She first agrees that they might go that evening, then revises the plan: they will set out before dawn to see the moon above Mount Zion and the Old City walls. The moon will no longer be full, she observes, adding that almost everything in the world is incomplete and damaged, and that people damage nearly everything they touch. The remark makes the excursion’s imperfect moon an image for a world—and a relationship—without easy completeness.

The practical purpose she gives for the trip is surveillance. Atalia says she knows of a cultured, well-known man and woman, each married to someone else, who intend to meet that night to watch the sunrise from Mount Zion. She wants to photograph them together without their knowledge, ideally in an embrace, and says Shmuel can serve as her pretext. She does not explain how she learned of the meeting. The assignment offers a plausible reason for taking Shmuel along while keeping her own intentions uncertain: she invites him into an intimate adventure but defines it as a task directed at another couple.

Atalia instructs him to be ready in the kitchen at three in the morning and to dress warmly against Jerusalem’s winter cold. Shmuel admits he cannot hide himself. His uncertainty about the hour is literal as well as emotional: he later wonders whether she meant he should be in the kitchen at three, knock at her door, or already be on their way. By the time he hurries downstairs, it is three twenty.

Leaving the house

In his haste, Shmuel dusts his forehead, face, and beard with baby powder, pulls on his worn coat, puts on his shapka, and wraps himself in an old, itchy wool scarf. He leaves behind the silver fox-headed cane and runs down without closing his bedroom door. Atalia emerges in a winter coat, a black wool shawl over her head, and tells him to see Gershom Wald, who has called him from the library. She warns him not to linger because they are already late.

Wald is awake in the library, lying on a wicker divan with a tartan wool blanket over his legs. He holds one open book while another lies open, face down, across his lap. Their brief exchange ends with Wald telling Shmuel to go because Atalia is waiting; he adds that he has lost Shmuel too. The remark places the outing within the household’s existing emotional losses, though the scene does not explain further what Wald means by it.

Shmuel and Atalia leave after half past three. The sky is clear, the paving stones in the courtyard remain wet from evening rain, and the cypresses move in a wind blowing westward toward the Arab village of Sheikh Badr. The cold air burns Shmuel’s lungs and sharpens his alertness. He usually tries to walk half a pace behind Atalia so he can watch her tall figure, but she takes his arm and urges him to walk faster, teasing him for dragging his feet when he should be quick. Even before their conversation turns personal, the night sets their different paces against each other: Shmuel follows, while Atalia leads and pulls him along.

Across the sleeping city

They cross Keren Kayemet Street, pass the amphitheatre-shaped Jewish Agency building, continue along King George Street, and turn onto George Washington Street. After going behind the YMCA tower, they cross toward the King David Hotel, where a uniformed doorman stamps his feet against the cold. They descend toward the Montefiore windmill and Mishkenot Shaananim, then reach the stairs of Yemin Moshe. A mixed-breed stray dog sniffs the hem of Atalia’s dress. Shmuel stops to stroke it, and the dog licks his hand before following them with its head lowered and tail wagging.

Yemin Moshe is still a poor neighborhood in this late-1950s-to-early-1960s setting. Its low stone houses have tiled roofs or flat terraces; the small courtyards contain old, iron-covered Turkish wells, and rusty brass pots hold geraniums, edible herbs, and aromatic plants. The houses are shut and dark behind barred windows. A single pale streetlamp scatters yellowish patches across the pavement. The stray dog is almost the only other presence in the lanes as Shmuel and Atalia descend toward the road around the Hinnom Valley.

Their route draws them toward the edge of the divided city. Atalia climbs quickly in flat shoes, while Shmuel struggles to keep up on the narrow, steep path. The distance between them grows in the darkness until he fears losing her and becoming lost near the no-man’s-land, exposed to enemy machine-gun positions. The landscape makes their private excursion inseparable from the city’s political geography: they are walking toward a viewpoint across a boundary that is also a military danger.

The night is full of sounds that heighten Shmuel’s physical strain. A cricket sings; frogs answer from pools collected in cracks in the stone; a nocturnal bird, perhaps an owl, startles past their heads. The Old City walls cast a dark, oppressive shadow along the path. A jackal howls from the abandoned valley, and others answer from several directions; dogs bark in Abu Tor and receive replies from farther away. Shmuel is exhausted and short of breath, and worries that he might suffer an asthma attack, though none comes. His thick scarf itches against his neck and nape as he continues uphill.

The closed tomb and the conversation

At the summit, a reservist blocks their way into the building called David’s Tomb, where an ancient coffin covered by a curtain is believed by worshippers to contain the bones of King David. The short, heavy soldier, about forty-five, stands in a thick military coat and wool cap, leaning on an old Czech rifle and smoking a cigar. He tells them the place is closed. When Atalia asks why, he says the rules are simply what they are. She asks how long he has left on guard; he answers that another half-hour remains, then abruptly remarks that nobody understands anything.

Atalia turns away without replying and walks to the iron railing facing east, toward no-man’s-land. Shmuel stays briefly with the soldier, who flicks his cigar butt away in a wide arc. A firefly rises to the soldier’s head height, curves downward, and falls still flashing, as if refusing to die. Shmuel then follows Atalia. She inspects the area and slips into deep shadow beneath a stone arch, where the arch hides both the starry sky and the thin band of mist covering the mountain. The couple they came to watch has not appeared; the soldiers, the boundary, and the tomb instead shape the scene.

Shmuel hesitates, then puts an arm around Atalia’s shoulders. She does not push him away. She tells him they have between half an hour and an hour, and permits him to talk if he truly needs to, provided he speaks quietly. He begins by pointing out that they have lived under the same roof for more than two months, almost. The question is not simply whether they share a house: he is trying to understand what their closeness means and whether he can hope for more.

Atalia asks what he is trying to say. Shmuel replies that he is not trying to say anything, only asking. Her answer is neither acceptance nor a complete refusal: not yet, perhaps with time, or perhaps never. She adds that he can be endearing at times and irritating at others. The physical permission she gives him to hold her sits beside this verbal limit. Their exchange leaves intimacy present but unsettled, with no promise that it will develop into a relationship.

The incomplete dawn

Around six, the first light begins to glitter over the Moab mountains. Their outlines grow clearer, the sky pales, and the stars disappear. The promised couple will not watch the sunrise from the place after all—or perhaps no such couple existed. The narrative preserves both possibilities, leaving Atalia’s cover story unresolved rather than confirming it as fact. The veteran soldier has also left his post, after finishing his shift and smoking one last cigarette.

A sharp east wind comes and goes. Atalia asks Shmuel to wait a few more minutes, then tells him to go home. When he asks what she will do, she says she will stay alone for a while and then go to work. She takes his frozen fingers, puts two of them in her mouth for a moment, and suddenly says they will see. This small gesture and indefinite phrase do not cancel her earlier qualification; they intensify the uncertainty. She lets bodily tenderness speak where a firm answer is withheld.

Shmuel reaches the house at the end of Rabbi Elbaz Lane at seven thirty, hungry, thirsty, and frozen. He eats four thick slices of bread with cheese and drinks two glasses of hot tea, then goes upstairs, pours himself vodka, drinks it in one gulp, and sleeps until noon. Later he showers and goes to his Hungarian restaurant, this time taking his fox-headed cane, whose bared teeth seem to threaten all of Jerusalem. The journey therefore ends not with a shared sunrise or a resolved romance, but with Shmuel alone, recovering from the cold and returning to his ordinary routine.

The outing turns its ostensible act of watching another couple into a test of what Shmuel and Atalia are to one another. Its course repeatedly frustrates certainty: the moon is incomplete, the tomb is closed, the expected couple may be imaginary, and Atalia’s answer remains suspended between possibility and refusal. The city’s dividing line and the dawn’s gradual arrival provide the scene’s outer frame, while the brief contact of an arm around shoulders and fingers held in a mouth supplies its clearest, if still equivocal, intimacy.