The Employment and Confidentiality Agreement of the Abraha Venner Residence

The hiring and secrecy rules at the Abravanel house turn Shmuel Ash’s search for work into a carefully bounded place in a private household: he is to keep Gershom Wald company, perform a modest set of practical tasks, and say nothing about the arrangement. The offer promises free lodging and a small monthly wage, but its rules govern not only his hours and duties; they also separate him from visitors, acquaintances, and the ordinary explanations by which a young man might account for his life.

The offer and its terms

The arrangement first appears as a notice seeking an unmarried humanities student: a sensitive conversationalist with an interest in history who will spend about five hours each afternoon with a seventy-year-old disabled man described as cultured and generally able to manage for himself. The notice emphasizes that Wald chiefly needs conversation rather than care. In return, the student will receive free accommodation and a modest salary. Applicants are directed to come for a personal interview at Rabbi Elbaz Alley 17 in the Shaarei Hesed neighborhood, Sunday through Thursday between four and six in the afternoon, and warned that special circumstances require signing a confidentiality document in advance.

That combination of ordinary employment and guarded secrecy defines the post from the outset. The duties are presented as limited companionship, not nursing, yet the candidate must agree to conceal even the basic fact of where he works. When Shmuel turns back toward the notice after walking away, the gesture catches the offer’s pull: he rereads the advertisement he had just hidden from himself, at a moment when paid work and a room of his own have become consequential possibilities.

A schedule of work and care

After moving into the house, Shmuel receives a precise account of the daily routine from Atalia Abravanel. His principal task is to converse with Wald in the library from five until ten or, at the latest, eleven. At four-thirty he must fill the kerosene and light the stove, feed the aquarium fish, and be ready to talk. At seven he is to heat the porridge left on the electric hotplate and place it before Wald; if Wald has eaten enough or refuses it, Shmuel must not press him, but ask whether the tray can be taken away. Wald can get to the bathroom himself with his crutches. At ten Shmuel is to remind him to take his medicine, and before leaving, to set a thermos of hot tea on the desk for the night.

The routine extends into the kitchen after the conversation ends: Shmuel is to wash the plate and cup and leave them on the draining rack. He is also told where food and household supplies are kept, and that Sara de Toledo brings Wald a vegetarian lunch at midday and leaves the evening porridge, for which the arrangement is paid. Bella, the cleaner who comes on Tuesdays, may wash Shmuel’s clothes and clean his room without charge. These details make the job materially supportive as well as tightly organized: it provides a room, food, and an allowance, while assigning the newcomer a dependable place in the household’s daily maintenance.

Atalia frames conversation itself as part of the work. Wald stays awake late and sleeps until noon; he talks because he cannot tolerate silence, and disagreement is welcome because contradiction brings him to life. Shmuel is not expected to invent topics. Tea, sugar, and biscuits are available in the library, but the real provision is time and attention: the job asks him to be present for an older man who wants an interlocutor, not simply someone to perform chores.

Confidentiality and the household boundary

The rules reach beyond the working hours. Shmuel must sign that he will not speak about the household or give anyone details, including his relatives. If he must explain his accommodation, Atalia suggests that he can say he is the house’s caretaker. He receives keys to the house and his room and may come and go outside his shift, but he is expressly forbidden to bring guests—women as well as men. The arrangement therefore grants private space and freedom of movement only within a boundary that excludes the people Shmuel might otherwise invite into it.

The boundary is especially firm around Atalia herself. She instructs him never to come looking for her; if he needs something or a problem arises, he must leave a note on the kitchen table, and she will meet his needs in time. He is not to seek her out because of loneliness. She says the house seems to produce loneliness, but declines to offer companionship of that kind. His work is specifically limited to five in the afternoon through eleven at night, and Wald’s nocturnal cries—when he calls to people who are no longer there, and may call Shmuel too—are not included in the wage. Nor is Shmuel to involve himself in other things that may happen in the house: when something is none of his business, he is to keep away.

The contract’s secrecy is thus not merely a prohibition on gossip. It formalizes distance: Shmuel may serve Wald, inhabit the attic, and use the house’s keys, but he is not to convert that access into friendship with Atalia, invite others inside, or investigate whatever the household keeps private. Atalia even asks whether he cries out at night or walks in his sleep, then tells him to forget the question. The terms make clear that the house’s privacy includes its occupants’ vulnerabilities as well as its history.

Secrecy, solitude, and the story’s later disclosures

Shmuel experiences the rules as a practical obstacle to ordinary life. When he imagines that Yardena might leave her rainwater tank and join him, he remembers that Atalia has made him promise both not to bring guests and not to tell anyone what he does in the house. Later, walking around Jerusalem in winter, he worries that acquaintances may ask why he disappeared from student life and what he is doing now. He has no explanation to give, and the signed paper prevents him from supplying one. He questions what Wald and Atalia could have to hide, but Wald’s contained sorrow and Atalia’s reserve silence the questions before he asks them.

The rules acquire a different weight as the family history emerges. Wald tells Shmuel that Mija was an orphan whose mother died when he was six, that Wald raised him alone, and that he led him to his death at Bab al-Wad on April 2, 1948. Atalia later recounts that after Mija’s death she, Wald, and her father, Shaltiel Abravanel, lived together in a near-total silence; Abravanel died alone in the house, and his Arab friends had been left beyond the new borders or expelled from their homes. What first appeared as a peculiar employment condition belongs to a household shaped by bereavement, political estrangement, and memories that are not readily shared.

Atalia’s account of her childhood gives the rule against intimacy another resonance. After her mother left for Alexandria, Abravanel made Atalia sit opposite him for speeches, but never asked about her studies, friends, absences, or feelings. When Shmuel is nearing his departure, Atalia predicts that the attic room will be locked again and its shutters closed; she remarks that he, too, hardly asks her questions. Her instructions have kept him from pressing into her private life even as the house gradually discloses the losses and silences that surround it. The contract therefore functions both as a real employment rule and as a narrative boundary: it regulates Shmuel’s access, while the story slowly reveals why this household makes privacy feel inseparable from loneliness and farewell.