In a novel, a house or person has his meaning, his existence, entirely through the writer. Here, a house or a person has only the most limited of his meanings through me: his true meaning is much huger. It is that he exists, in actual being, as you do and I do, and as no character of the imagination can possibly exist. His great weight, mystery, and dignity are in this fact.
James Agee
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
amram had been ill. one morning, on the eve of the Day of Atonement, a knock came at our door and I opened it to find him standing in the front hall, his T-shirt spattered with blood. His nose was dripping the red stuff and he looked scared, standing there, asking bluntly, “Is the health clinic open today?”
It was his heart again, and after a preposterous scene in which he had to stumble out of the clinic to flag down his own ambulance (the extremely inexperienced young driver had somehow gotten lost), he was taken to the hospital, where he stayed a few days and where Peter went to see him and bring him some clothes and a razor. Amram was deeply touched — “It’s like you’re my son” he told my husband, in a moment of uncharacteristic expressiveness — and when he returned home he seemed seriously slowed, but grateful for our attentions, and he kept thanking us, wishing us long lives, good health …
“How are you, Amram? Can I get you something at the shuk?” At first, I tapped on his door daily, to check up on him. Later, sensing he preferred not to be fussed over, I would wait until we happened to meet in the front hall, or in the street, to ask, “How do you feel?”
And instead of the usual I’m-okay-you’re-okay formula, he’d sigh in a low and total way and respond with the more honestly pessimistic: “Not so good. I’m sick. But what can I do? There’s nothing to be done.”
For a few weeks, we exchanged a similar, muted back-and-forth, which usually came around to the same helpless statement and ended with Amram painfully shuffling away … until one afternoon, a few days after the signing of the Wye River agreement, when Netanyahu, Arafat, Clinton, and the cancer-stricken King Hussein had gathered together for a televised ceremony at the White House. From a distance, I saw Amram walking down the street with a bit more spring in his step than usual, and when we met I asked him: How do you feel?
“Did you see —” he started in, without answering my question, “those pictures of King Hussein? What is that?”
“What?”
“That poor man … He has no hair. He has no beard. What is that? He is the king, he has palaces. How many palaces? Three? Four? And horses, and money, all the money he could want. But,” he paused for effect, and drew a wheezy breath, “but he has nothing. He doesn’t have his health. That’s all a man really needs. Without his health — he is poor, so poor he might as well be a beggar. The rest of that is worth nothing.”
“And how do you feel, Amram?” I asked again, now that we had returned to the subject.
“Me?” He looked almost confused by my question. “I’m fine. I have everything I need. I have a place to sleep, food, clothes — and my health, thank God. I’ve got nothing to complain about. I have all a man really needs.”
Now, once again, he turned to go, but this time he did not shuffle. He walked straighter, and held his head upright, as if to balance an invisible crown. The scene was almost comic — except that Amram genuinely meant what he said, as he meant the magisterial posture he had just adopted. So I did not laugh as I watched him walk away. Instead, I straightened my own backbone, lifted my head, and silently counted my blessings.