Panther in the Basement by Amos Oz

Author:Amos Oz [Oz, Amos]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 1998-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

sixteen

I have already mentioned how fascinated I am by people like Ben Hur, people who are always thirsty, whose unquenchable thirst gives them the drowsy cruelty of a wild cat—cool authority with half-closed eyes. And like the heroes of King David we studied in Bible class, I always feel a strange urge to put everything I have on the line for them. To risk my life fetching them water from enemy wells. All in the vague hope of hearing afterward from the corner of the leopard's mouth the magical words: "You're OK, Proffy."

There is another kind of people who enthralls me, apart from those thirsty leopards. On the face of it these people are the diametrical opposite of the leopards, but actually they do have something in common that is impossible to define but not hard to spot. I mean people who are always lost. Like Sergeant Dunlop, for instance. Both at the time I am writing about and now as I write, I have always found something poignantly endearing about lost people, who go through life as though the world is a bus station in a strange city, where they have got off by mistake and now have no idea where they went wrong or how to get away, or where to.

He was fairly broad and tall, a large pudgy man, but he was gentle. Rather cartilaginous. Despite his uniform and his gun, the sergeant's stripes on his sleeve, the glint of the silvery numbers on his shoulders, the black peaked cap, he looked like a man who has just come out of the light into the dark, or out of darkness into bright light.

He looked like a man who once lost something very precious, and now he can't remember what it was he lost, what it looks like, or what he would do with it if he found it. So there he was wandering in his own inner chambers, in the corridors, in the basement, in the storerooms, and even if he stumbled on whatever it was he had lost, how would he recognize it? He would walk wearily past and keep on searching. He would plod onward in his big boots, getting ever farther away and more lost. I did not forget that he represented the enemy, and yet I had a kind of urge to hold out a hand to him. Not to shake hands, but to support him. Like a baby, or a blind man.

Almost every evening I used to slink into the Orient Palace, with a copies of English for Overseas Students and Our Language for Immigrant and Pioneer under my arm. I no longer cared if the leopard and his sidekick were still trailing me along the alleys.

What more did I have to lose?

I quickly crossed the decadent front room, with its cigarette smoke and its stench of beer, ignoring the ribald laughter, restraining the urge of my fingertips to stroke the green baize of the billiard table, not seeing the barmaid's cleavage;

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