Shattered Vessels: Memory, Identity, and Creation in the Work of David Shahar

Chapter 1. Flirting with the Uncanny

Chapter 1 Flirting with the Uncanny Somewhere near the middle of the first volume of David Shahar’s novel sequence The Palace of Shattered Vessels, the narrator describes a scene he witnessed many years before. He was a ten-year-old boy sitting on the verandah reading a book (Bialik’s adaptation of Don Quixote) when judge Dan Gutkin, a Jewish magistrate under the British Mandate administration, came to pay a visit to the landlady, Mrs. Gentilla Luria, the widow of Yehuda Prosper Bey: The Officer of the British Empire climbed the steps to the home of his old friend the Officer of the Ottoman Empire, who had departed this world only a few weeks before, reaching the verandah just as the Jerusalem widow of the departed was shutting herself in her room and her sister, Pnina, was drawing up the three-legged iron table standing in the middle of the flagged floor to the red plush armchair which had been kept up till then for the exclusive use of Yehuda Prosper Bey. As soon as he had seated himself in the armchair with his face toward the setting sun, Pnina hurried off to bring him some biscuits and a cold drink. (Summer, 101; 84) This description, quite typical of Shahar’s style, is replete with precise spatiotemporal notations and correlations. First, the immediate scene itself: Judge Gutkin reached the verandah “just as” Mrs. Luria “was shutting herself in her room”; “As soon as he had seated himself,” her sister, Pnina, “hurried off” for refreshments. Then, the recent past of the individuals involved: the decease, several weeks earlier, of Yehuda Prosper Bey, which, among other 1 consequences, brought to an end his “exclusive use” of that particular armchair. The long-standing relationships among the characters, too, have an implicit temporal dimension: the judge had once been the Bey’s protégé, and Pnina had once been her sister’s rival for his affections. The reference to the two men as officers of two different empires enriches the passage with the notion of historical change, the British having displaced the Ottoman Empire in Palestine some eighteen years before the time of the scene (of course, both the publication of the book and the narrator’s recollection take place after a further change, with the State of Israel replacing the British Mandate). There is perhaps a touch of irony in that the officer of an empire on which the sun never sets should take a seat “facing the setting sun.” This particular detail evokes even more readily a symbolic sense of the waning of life toward decrepitude and death. Returning to the logic of the scene itself, the failure of Mrs. Luria to welcome her visitor in person is due to her reluctance to show the ravages that time and neglect brought on her physical appearance. Taking this analysis one step farther, we might note that spatiotemporality here is profoundly linked to notions of identity and potential rivalry. In a reality understood by empirical and rational principles, time is irreversible, and two entities cannot occupy the same place at the same time.Thus the Ottoman Empire had to give way to the British one, and unless Yehuda Prosper Bey had disappeared, Judge Dan Gutkin might not have been seated in his armchair. This latter image, however, produces in the narrator at first a different, powerful reaction: Meanwhile I was flooded with a sense of uncomprehending wonder, delightful and frightening at the same time, as if I had suddenly stepped into a magic palace, at the sight of the judge with his mane of white hair combed severely back from his forehead on both sides of the middle parting above the square-jawed assertiveness of his lean face, lowering his strong limbs into the armchair of the old Bey, who used to sit up excitedly and call out “Of course, of course” as he drew a large red handkerchief over his smoothly shaven, shining head to wipe away the beads of sweat sparkling like fireworks in the setting sun. The picture of the old Bey, as I had last seen him before his death, sitting on this red armchair with the checked scarf his Jerusalem wife had wrapped around his neck, his hoarse old voice shouting in impotent rage “Our master Moses, our master Moses,” superimposed itself on the picture of the judge sitting on the same old verandah in the same armchair without either picture blotting the other out, blurring or erasing...