Wald was ill and Schmuel took care of him

Wald’s winter illness and Shmuel’s care of him mark a turning point in their relationship: the employer who had kept his young lodger at the edges of the house becomes a vulnerable patient, and practical nursing opens a passage into the grief he has scarcely been able to voice. Through fever, medicine, reading, and touch, Shmuel enters both Wald’s private room and the history of Mija’s death—the loss that binds the household’s silences and makes its arguments about war painfully personal.

Illness and the household’s boundaries

At ten one winter morning, Atalia told Shmuel that Wald had fallen ill during the night and that she had spent most of it caring for him. She had to leave the house, so Shmuel was to go to Wald’s bedroom, change his sweat-soaked pajamas every few hours, give him tea with honey and lemon by the spoonful, wash his hands, wipe his forehead, and bring him a bedpan if he could not get out of bed. Atalia warned that caring for him would require touching his body, which might feel awkward or unpleasant, but reminded Shmuel that he had been brought there to talk with Wald and, when necessary, to look after him. Because Wald’s throat was sore, she also told Shmuel to do most of the talking.

The illness was a severe winter flu. Wald’s fever climbed toward forty degrees; his eyes watered, his voice grew hoarse, phlegm thickened, and a harsh cough seized him from time to time. Cotton Atalia had put in his ears did not prevent them from aching, particularly the left one. At first Wald tried to joke that the Inuit were right to abandon old people in the snow. Then, remembering verses, he called himself a wreck and a sick, worn-out man. As the fever rose, the humor stopped: his gaze dimmed into darkness and silence.

A doctor examined Wald’s chest and back, gave him penicillin, and ordered bed rest, propped up on several pillows so the lung infection would not worsen. He prescribed codeine capsules, cough syrup, ear drops, and plenty of hot tea with honey and lemon; a little brandy could be added. Shmuel was told to keep the bedroom warm. The doctor warned that Wald was no longer young and was in poor health even when he seemed well, making complications a serious concern.

Until then, Shmuel had lived for more than two months in the attic without entering Wald’s bedroom, Atalia’s room, or the closed room at the end of the ground-floor hall that he supposed had belonged to the late Shaltiel Abravanel. His permitted territory was the library where he worked, the kitchen he shared with Atalia, and his attic. The house at the end of Rabbi Elbaz Lane was meticulously divided into separate domains. Wald’s illness, rather than any formal change in Shmuel’s position, opened the bedroom door.

Care, reading, and touch

For the first time, Shmuel remained for hours beside Wald’s bed and read chapters from Jeremiah until the old man fell asleep. When Wald woke coughing, Shmuel patted his back and brought tea to his lips by the spoonful. He helped with the practical work of care: warming the room, changing Wald’s shirt, and giving him the prescribed drink and medicine. These small repeated actions replaced the conversational arrangement Atalia had asked him to suspend. Rather than keep Wald talking, Shmuel became the one who read aloud and attended to the patient’s body.

Shmuel initially had to make himself touch Wald, expecting his twisted, sinewy body to repel him. What he found surprised him: beneath Wald’s disability, the older man’s body felt warm and firm, with a muscular back and strong shoulders. When changing his pajama shirt, Shmuel rested his hands on Wald’s bare shoulder and may have left his fingertips there longer than the task required. Touch, first presented as an uncomfortable obligation, became a source of warmth and closeness. It also altered the balance between them: the young lodger was not merely the listener in Wald’s library but a caregiver admitted to the bedroom and trusted with the sick man’s body.

Once Wald was asleep, Shmuel looked around the narrow bedroom. Two walls were covered from floor to ceiling with books, as in the library, but the collections differed. The library held works in Hebrew, Arabic, and several other languages, with subjects ranging across social science, Judaism, the Middle East, history, mathematics, philosophy, Kabbalah, and astronomy. The bedroom shelves held novels, mostly in German, Polish, and English, spanning the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. This private room, previously outside Shmuel’s reach, disclosed a quieter dimension of Wald’s life even before the old man spoke more openly about his past.

Mija’s death and Wald’s confession

During the illness, Wald spoke of Mija as the father of the grandson he would never have. Mija had been an orphan, raised by Wald after his mother died when the boy was six. Wald said he himself had led his son to sacrifice. He named the date and place: April 2, 1948, in the fighting at Bab al-Wad on the Tel Aviv–Jerusalem road. The confession connects Wald’s present dependence on Shmuel with the older burden he carries as a father who survived the son he had helped prepare for war.

Wald recounted that Mija had lost a kidney to illness at the age of nine. At the end of 1947, he deceived the recruitment committee, during the disorder that preceded the war. Atalia had urged him not to go, mocking him as a boy running out to play cowboys and Indians; Shaltiel, too, had made him promise not to fight. Shaltiel opposed the war as the madness of Ben-Gurion and of both peoples, and argued that the young on both sides should lay down their weapons. Even after bloodshed, roadblocks, and sniper fire began in the autumn of 1947, he continued visiting Arab friends to argue for another path. Some neighbors called him a friend of the Arabs, the Muezzin, or the Devout Muslim; others called him a traitor. He nevertheless considered himself a Zionist, and believed that he belonged to a small company of Zionists not intoxicated by nationalism.

Wald set Shaltiel’s opposition against his own part in the public call to fight. He had argued that the war was sacred and had taught Mija to remember the defenders of Tel Hai, Wingate’s night squads, the Jewish police special units, and the Maccabees. The exhortation to answer a calling, he admitted, had come not only from the country and from Mija’s teachers, peers, and community, but from Wald himself. Mija went; Wald remained. As Wald spoke, a coughing fit twisted his disabled body and left him struggling with phlegm, striking his head against the wall. Shmuel stopped him, patted his back, and tried to give him more tea. Behind the coughing, he heard Wald’s suppressed, broken sobs.

Wald then asked Shmuel’s forgiveness. It was the first time since Shmuel had arrived, about two months earlier, that Wald had called him by name, and the first time he had apologized to him. Shmuel urged him to rest and not to speak. The change in address and the apology make the nursing scene more than a reversal of roles: Wald’s confession has brought him into direct, vulnerable relation with the young man who had previously occupied the house’s margins.

Grief, intimacy, and the meaning of sacrifice

As Wald’s hand rested on the blanket, Shmuel placed his own over it, tentatively. Wald’s large fingers were warm and closed around Shmuel’s cold hand in an embrace that lasted two or three minutes. Shmuel wanted not to divert Wald from his pain—there was no way to divert him—but to take some of it into himself. The exchange gives physical form to an impossible question raised by Wald’s story: grief cannot simply be shared away, yet Shmuel can remain present, listen, and offer the contact that the old man has not asked for in words.

Wald turned to the familiar consolation that those who fell in the 1948 war had not died in vain. He had said it himself, as everyone did, repeating Natan Alterman’s thought that perhaps, once in a thousand years, their deaths might have meaning. But he found the words increasingly difficult to repeat. Shaltiel’s spirit, Wald said, caught in his throat: Shaltiel believed that every death was entirely in vain, whether in war, accident, illness, or old age, from the first dead person to the last. Wald’s illness does not resolve that conflict. It makes the comforting formula harder to sustain by placing it beside the particular loss of Mija, and beside Wald’s admission that his own words and example helped send his son to the battlefield.

The scene also changes how Shmuel sees Wald. His lumpy, unfinished-looking face, pointed chin, and neglected gray mustache, which had once belonged to an employer’s eccentric appearance, become dear to him. Wald’s ugliness seems compelling, nearly beautiful, and Shmuel feels a strong desire to console him by absorbing some of his grief. Wald, meanwhile, tells Shmuel that he may be beginning, despite himself, to feel affection for him, comparing him to a tortoise that has lost its shell. The illness thus brings closeness without curing either man’s solitude: Wald remains a bereaved father who doubts the meaning of sacrifice, while Shmuel becomes a witness and caregiver whose tenderness is expressed through reading, medicine, and the warmth of a hand held in silence.