Between Friends

by Amos Oz

  Moshe crossed a small, neglected garden with two benches badly in need of fresh paint and walked through the iron-barred door that opened when he rang a raspy bell. In the entrance hall, some ten men and women were sitting on metal chairs that lined the walls, which were painted a sort of khaki color to halfway up. The men and women were all wearing striped hospital gowns and flat slippers. Some were speaking to each other in hesitant voices. The supervisor, a strapping fellow wearing a loud flowered shirt and army-issue trousers and boots, was standing in a corner of the room chewing gum. An older woman was knitting furiously, though she had neither needles nor wool. Her lips moved in a low mutter. A spindly, stoop-shouldered man stood with his back to the room, clutching the bars of the window and speaking to the now-darkening world outside. An old woman was sitting alone near the door, sucking hard on her thumb and mumbling prayers of supplication. His father was out on the balcony, which was covered from top to bottom with netting. He was sitting on a gray metal chair next to a small metal table, also gray, with a tin mug of tea cooling on it. Moshe sat down in a metal chair beside him and said, “Hello, Father.” He sat hunched over so that his father wouldn’t see the bloodstains on his clothes.

  The father said hello without looking at his son.

  “I’ve come to see you.”

  The father nodded and said nothing.

  “I’ve come by bus.”

  The father asked, “Where did he go?”

  “Who?”

  “Moshe.”

  “I’m Moshe.”

  “You’re Moshe.”

  “I’m Moshe. I’ve come to visit you.”

  “You’re Moshe.”

  “How are you, Father?”

  The father asked again, with concern and profound sadness, in a voice trembling with pain, “Where did he go? Where?”

  Moshe took his wrinkled, veiny hand, worn out by hard work building roads and planting crops, and said, “I’ve come from the kibbutz, Father. I’ve come from Kibbutz Yekhat. I’ve come to visit you. Everything is fine with me. It’s going very well.”

  “You’re Moshe.”

  So Moshe began to tell his father about his school. About his teacher, David Dagan. About the library. About working in the chicken coop. About the girls who sing beautiful, nostalgic songs. Then he opened his shoulder bag and took out The Plague, with its green cover, and read the first two paragraphs to his father. His father, a yarmulke on his slightly tilted head, listened attentively, weary eyes half closed, then suddenly picked up the tin mug, looked at the now-cool tea, shook his head sadly, put the mug down again, and asked, “Where did he go?”

  Moshe said, “I’ll go to the kitchen and get you a fresh cup of tea. Hot tea.”

  His father wiped his forehead with his hand and, as if awakening from sleep, said again, “You’re Moshe.”

  Moshe held his father’s hand and didn’t hug him, but kept pressing the limp, brown hand. He told his father about the basketball court, the books he’d read, the debates in the current events group, and his participation in the discussions in the art club, about Joseph K. from Kafka’s book, and about David Dagan, who’d already had several wives and lovers and now lived with a seventeen-year-old girl, but always gave his full attention to his students and had defended him fiercely when the others teased and mocked him during his first few weeks on the kibbutz. David Dagan, he has a habit of saying to people, “Just give me a minute so we can set things straight.” Moshe spoke to his father for about ten minutes, and his father closed his eyes, then opened them and said sorrowfully, “All right. You can go now. You’re Moshe?”

  Moshe said, “Yes, Father,” and added, “Don’t worry, Father. I’ll come to see you again in two weeks. They let me come. David Dagan lets me come.”

  The father nodded and dropped his chin to his chest, as if in mourning.

  Moshe said, “Goodbye, Father.” Then he said, “I’ll see you soon. Don’t worry.”

  From the door, he gave a last look at his father, who was sitting utterly still, staring at the tin mug. On the way out, Moshe asked the supervisor in the army trousers, “How is he?”

  The supervisor said, “He’s fine. Quiet.” Then he said, “I wish they were all like him,” and finally added, “You’re a very good son. Bless you.”

  When he left, it was almost dark outside. Moshe was suddenly filled with that familiar sense of self-loathing. He took his black beret off and put it in his bag. He rolled his sleeves up to his biceps again and undid his top button. Only thorns and couch grass grew in the small front garden of the hospital. But someone had forgotten a dishtowel on the bench and someone had lost the belt to his robe among the thorns. Moshe noticed those details because he was drawn to details. He thought about Cheska Honig, who had taught him to keep an eye out for sick hens and isolate them before they infected the whole coop. And he thought about his classmates lying on one of the lawns now, the boys’ heads resting on the girls’ laps as they sang nostalgic songs. One of them, Tamir or Dror or Gideon or Arnon, was now putting his blond head on Carmela Nevo’s lap, its heat caressing his cheek. Moshe would give everything he had to be there now. Once and for all to be one of them. And yet he knew very well that it would never happen. As he walked through the gate, the jovial guard asked, “What’s this, you go in with a hat on and come out without it?”

  Moshe said only good night and turned onto the dirt path that led from the hospital to the road. It was dark and empty. Not a single car drove past. Pinpoints of light shone in the distance and he could hear the braying of a donkey. The faint voices of children also came from the direction of the lights. He kneeled on the ground and sat back on his legs at the foot of the whitewashed eucalyptus tree, close to where he had laid the run-over dog, and waited. He waited for a long time. He thought he could hear sounds of jagged weeping coming from the hospital, but he wasn’t sure. He sat there motionless, and listened.

  Little Boy

  LEAH, HIS WIFE, had gone off to attend a ten-day course at the Kibbutzim College of Education that would train her to be a caregiver in the children’s house. Roni Shindlin was happy to have a few days without her. He showered after his shift in the metalwork shop and at four in the afternoon went to the children’s house to pick up his five-year-old son, Oded. On the days it wasn’t raining, he held Oded’s small hand and they went for a stroll around the kibbutz. Oded wore green boots, flannel trousers, a sweater, and a jacket. Roni always tied the strings of the boy’s hat under his chin because his ears were sensitive to the cold. Then he picked him up, hugged him, and took him to see the cows and the sheep. Oded was afraid of the cows, which wallowed in wet dung and mooed faintly from time to time. His father recited for him: “‘I never saw a purple cow/I never hope to see one/But I can tell you anyhow/I’d rather see than be one.’”

  Oded asked, “Why is it roaring?”

  Roni explained, “Cows don’t roar. Cows moo. Lions roar.”

  “Why do lions roar?”

  “They’re calling their friends.”

  “Their friends are mean.”

  “Their friends play with them.”

  “They’re mean.”

  Oded was a short little boy, slow and always frightened. He was often sick: he had diarrhea almost every week, and in winter he had ear infections. The children in his kindergarten tormented him constantly. He spent most of the day sitting alone on a mat in a corner, his thumb in his mouth, his back to the room, and his face to the wall, playing with wooden blocks or a rubber duck that squealed mournfully when you squeezed it, and he squeezed it all the time. He’d had it since he was a year old. The children called him Oded-pees-his-bed and when the caregiver turned her back, they pulled his hair. He cried softly for hours, snot running down to his mouth and chin. The caregivers didn’t like him either because he didn’t know how to stand up for himself, or because he wouldn’t play with the others and he cried so much. At the breakfast table, he would pick at his porridge and leave most of it in the bowl. When they
scolded him, he cried. When they tried to coax him into eating, he withdrew into himself and was silent. Five years old, and he still wet his bed every night, so the caregivers had to spread a rubber sheet under the regular one. He got up wet every morning and the children made fun of him. He would sit barefoot in his wet pajamas on his wet bed, his thumb in his mouth, and instead of trying to change into dry clothes, he’d cry quietly, the snot mingling with his tears and smearing his cheeks, until the caregiver arrived and scolded him, “Oh, really, get dressed, Oded. Wipe your nose. Enough crying. Stop being such a baby.”

  The Committee for Preschoolers instructed Leah, his mother, to be firm with him in order to wean him off this self-indulgent behavior. And so, during the afternoons he spent at his parents’ house, Leah saw to it that he sat with his back straight, always finished everything on his plate, and never sucked his thumb. If he cried, she punished him for being a crybaby. She was against hugging and kissing, believing that the children of our new society had to be strong and resilient. She thought Oded’s problems stemmed from the fact that his teachers and caregivers let him get away with things and forgave him his oddities. Roni, for his part, hugged and kissed Oded only when Leah wasn’t around. When she was gone, he’d take a bar of chocolate out of his pocket and break off two or three squares for Oded. Father and son kept those squares of chocolate a secret from Leah and everyone else. More than once, Roni had intended to take issue with Leah about how she treated their son, but he feared her angry outbursts, which drove Oded to crawl under the bed with his duck and cry soundlessly until his mother’s anger subsided—and even then, the boy was in no hurry to leave his hiding place.

  On the kibbutz, Roni Shindlin was considered a gossip and a comedian, but in his own home, he hardly ever joked because Leah couldn’t stand his wisecracks, which she found coarse and tasteless. Both Leah and Roni chain-smoked the cheap Silon cigarettes the kibbutz distributed to its members, and their small apartment was always full of smoke. The smell persisted even at night because it had been absorbed by the furniture and the walls and hovered under the ceiling. Leah didn’t like unnecessary touching and talking. She believed in solid principles. She adhered to all the kibbutz tenets with a zealot’s fervor. In her view, a couple on the kibbutz should live a simple life.

  Their apartment was furnished with a plywood bookcase and a sofa with a foam rubber mattress that opened into a double bed at night and was closed again every morning. There were also a coffee table, two wicker armchairs, an upholstered armchair, and a rough floor mat. A painting of a field of sunflowers glowing in the sun hung on the wall, and a mortar shell casing that served as a vase for a bouquet of dry thorns stood in the corner of the room. And, of course, the air reeked of cigarettes.

  In the evening, after the work schedule for the next day had been hung on the bulletin board, Roni liked to sit with his friends and acquaintances at his regular table at the far end of the dining hall, smoking and talking about the goings-on in the kibbutz members’ lives. Nothing escaped his notice. Other people’s lives aroused his unflagging curiosity and unleashed a torrent of witticisms. He thought that the higher our ideals, the more absurd our weaknesses and contradictions. Sometimes, with a smile, he quoted Levi Eshkol, who said that a person is only human, and even that, only rarely. He would light himself a fresh cigarette and say to his cronies in a slightly nasal voice, “Some people play musical chairs, but here, we play musical mates. First Boaz ups and leaves Osnat for Ariella Barash, and now Ariella ups and leaves Boaz for her cat and tomorrow some newly abandoned woman will come and collect the newly abandoned Boaz. In the words of the Bible: ‘I have not seen the righteous forsaken or his children begging for . . . a warm bed.’” Or he’d say, “Anyone on Kibbutz Yekhat who needs a wife can just stand in line at the bottom of David Dagan’s steps and wait for a little while. Women are flicked out of there like cigarette butts.”

  Roni Shindlin and his tablemates sometimes laughed raucously, and the kibbutz members did their best not to become the butt of their jokes.

  At ten at night, Roni and his gang dispersed to their apartments, and he would stop in at the children’s house to check on Oded and tuck him in. Then he’d trudge home, sit down on the steps to take off his shoes so as not to track in the mud, and tiptoe inside in his stocking feet. Leah would be sitting there, chain-smoking, listening to the radio. She listened to the radio every night. Roni would also light up, his last cigarette of the day, and sit down across from her without speaking. At ten thirty, they put out their cigarettes, turned off the light, and went to sleep, he wrapped in his blanket and she in hers, because they had to get up before six in the morning for work.

  In the metalwork shop, Roni was known to be a hard worker devoted to his job, and he also never missed a meeting of the Farm Management Committee, where he was always on the side of those who supported careful, balanced management of the agricultural divisions and opposed potentially reckless initiatives. He voted for a limited expansion of the chicken coop but against taking bank loans.

  He had a stamp collection that he pored over with Oded every day after work: they would sit with their heads bent, almost touching, over the coffee table, the room warmed by a kerosene heater that burned with a blue flame. With water from a small bowl, Oded would wet the pieces of envelopes that bore the stamps in order to melt the glue and separate them from the paper. Then, under his father’s supervision, he’d place the stamps face-down on a piece of blotting paper to dry. As Roni arranged the stamps in an album, following the English catalog, he would explain to Oded about Japan, the land of the rising sun, about the freezing country called Iceland, about Aden and the ancient Hazarmaveth, the Courtyard of Death, near the Strait of Tears, about Panama and the large canal that had been dug through it.

  Leah squeezed fresh orange juice for them, admonishing Oded to drink it all, then she sat down in her corner and read an education journal. Every now and then they heard a faint burbling from the pipes of the kerosene heater, and the flame behind the iron grate flared up momentarily. Outside, the rain and wind pounded the closed shutters, and the branch of a ficus tree brushed against the outer wall again and again as if begging for mercy. Roni stood up, emptied the ashtray, and rinsed it under the tap. Oded sucked his thumb and clung to his father. Leah scolded him, “Stop sucking. And, you, stop spoiling him. He’s spoiled enough as it is.” Then she added, “He’s better off eating an orange instead, and he should get rid of that pathetic duck of his. Boys don’t play with dolls.”

  Now that Leah had gone away for ten days, Roni went to the children’s house every afternoon at four o’clock to pick up Oded and his squealing duck. With the boy astride his shoulders, he’d stroll around the cow barns and chicken coops. The acrid smell of rotting orange peel rose from the compost pile, mingling with the heavy stench of animal feed and wet manure from the barn. A damp wind blew in from the west, and an early twilight fell on the storerooms and sheds and enveloped our small, red-roofed houses. Now and then a bird chirped piercingly in a treetop and the sheep in their pen replied with a heartbreaking bleat. Sometimes it began to drizzle, and father and son hunched over and hurried home.

  At home after their stroll, Roni coaxed Oded into eating a slice of bread and jam and drinking a cup of cocoa. Oded reluctantly nibbled two or three bites of bread, took a sip of the cocoa, and said, “No more, Daddy. Now stamps.”

  After Roni had cleared the table and put the dishes in the sink, he took down the green album and the two of them bent over it, heads almost touching. Roni lit a cigarette and explained to Oded that stamps are small visitors from distant countries, and each visitor is here to tell us a story about its homeland, its countryside and famous people, its holidays and beautiful buildings. Oded asked if there were countries where children are allowed to sleep with their parents at night and where children aren’t mean and don’t hit. Roni didn’t know how to answer, so he just said that there are good people and cruel people everywhere, and explained the word cruel t
o Oded. In his heart, Roni believed that, here, cruelty is sometimes disguised as self-righteousness or dedication to principles, and he knew that no one was completely free of it. Not even he himself.

  Oded grew anxious as seven thirty approached, the hour he had to go back to the children’s house and leave his father for the night. He didn’t plead to stay at home, but instead went to the toilet to pee, and when he didn’t come out, Roni had to go in after him and found him sitting on the closed toilet, sucking his thumb and hugging his rubber duck, its once-red bill now faded and one of its eyes slightly sunken into its head.

  Roni said, “Dedi. We have to go. It’s late.”

  Oded said, “We can’t, we just can’t. There’s a big wolf in the woods.”

  Finally they both put on their coats. Roni helped Oded into his green boots and tied the strings of his hat under his chin. He took a large, thick stick from behind the steps for chasing away the wolf, held Oded in his arms, and walked to the children’s house. The boy hugged his father’s head with one hand, and in the other he held the duck so tightly that it emitted a constant stream of faint squeals. When they passed the grove behind the dining hall, Roni waved his stick, striking the wet air every which way until the wolf ran off. Oded thought about that for a moment, then said sadly that the wolf would come back late at night when the parents were asleep. Roni promised that the night guard would chase away the wolf, but the boy was inconsolable because he knew very well that the wolf would devour the night guard.