Don't Call It Night

by Amos Oz

  It was a British film, ironic and too clever, about an intellectual woman publisher who gets worked up about a Ghanaian immigrant. After giving herself to him once out of curiosity she falls for him so passionately that she becomes his slave, physically and financially, and then she becomes enslaved to his two violent brothers as well. The comical side was mainly in the relations between her family, who are radical Third-World-lovers and supporters of downtrodden races, and the boyfriend and his brothers: under a thin layer of broadminded tolerance the most ordinary, base prejudices kept bubbling up. There were some telling visual cuts from elegant modern bohemian drawing rooms to run-down kitchens in the slums, and back to book-lined rooms with displays of African art. Halfway through I whispered to Theo, Love will win, you'll see. A quarter of an hour must have elapsed before he whispered back: There isn't any love here. It's just Frantz Fanon and the downtrodden rebelling and getting their sexual revenge.

  When we got home he went to the kitchen and came back ten minutes later with a jug of mulled wine and glasses. We drank almost without talking. Something in his eye made me cross my knees. Theo, I said, there's something you ought to learn. You don't put honey in mulled wine, you put it in tea. In mulled wine you put a little lemon. And why did you bring these glasses? They're for cold drinks. We've got different glasses for mulled wine, the smaller ones. You don't care any more. It's all so insignificant.

  In bed we didn't speak. I put on my demure white nightie, like a girl from a religious boarding school, he said once, and he came to my room naked apart from an elastic bandage round one knee because of an old injury. I imagined I could feel with my fingertips the progressive lightening of the hair on his arms and chest, from dark black to grey to ash to silver; his body was tough and compact but his desire tonight seemed almost separate from him, as if what he really wanted was to enfold or encircle all of me, as if he longed to comprehend or include me, to have me in his debt, and he was so intent on reaching all of my skin that he hardly cared what his own body would receive, if anything, as long as I was curled up in the fetal position and wrapped in his body like a chick under a wing. I wanted and yet didn't want to surrender to him, to obey him, to give him the power to give and give and give, and yet I slid out of his embrace, from his delicious pampering, and I made him lie on his back and not interfere in what was being done to him, until the point when we were quits, and from then on to the end we were both for each other, like a duet for four hands, we may even for a moment have resembled two devoted parents bending over a cot, intently, heads touching, playing with a baby who returns love for love. Afterwards I covered him with a sheet and ran a finger across his strong peasant brow and his greying military haircut until he fell asleep and I stood up and walked with bare feet to the kitchen and cleared away the supper things and washed and dried the dishes and the mulled-wine glasses that were really cold-drink glasses and where did he get the idea of putting honey in, strange, old Gleam in Your Eye, what did he mean when he said it's not love, it's the downtrodden rebelling? I put everything away and changed the tablecloth. Theo did not wake up. As if tonight I had passed him all my own powers of sleep. Then I went out and took over his place on the balcony facing the desert. I remembered Benizri saying that at first it was all sand and fantasies here and I remembered the religious typist, Tikki or Rikki, the one who had a baby by a basketball player who didn't want to know now, and the baby turned out to be a mongol, or as the crimson woman said a Mongolian. And I thought about the lovesick chimpanzee, and the can of sugar lumps, and the boy who was once a child with blinking eyelids and who seemed to live inside a bubble of winter even in summer, perhaps because I dimly remembered him in a green sweater and brown corduroy trousers in a class where everyone else wore shorts. Although I was not entirely sure now about the corduroy trousers. Whatever the poet did or didn't want to say gets in the way of the poem? I should have tried to initiate a conversation. I should have invited him here, home. I should have got him talking. All I did was flit across his loneliness without stopping. Another time he said he thought words were a trap. I don't understand now why I didn't realize what he was saying was virtually a cry for help: "And over all there hangs a smile, fading and faint and painful", as Ezra Zussman wrote in a poem about autumn evenings.

  Above the hills rose a saracen crescent moon that bathed in pallor the waste plots and apartment blocks. There was not a single lighted window. The street lamps still shone unnecessarily and one of them kept flickering: insignificant. A cat passed beneath my balcony and vanished among the bushes. Beyond the hills there was a faint salvo of shots, followed by an echoing rumble, and again a cold silence, which touched my skin. I also remembered the aunt who worked in the bank and died just two days after they found the boy. A plain, desiccated woman with short coppery hair secured with a kind of plastic bow. And she had a funny habit, when you sat down facing her in the bank and talked to her, of covering her mouth and nostrils with her freckled hand, as though she was always anxious that she might have bad breath, or more likely that you did. She used to end every conversation by saying, "That's one hundred percent okay", which she always uttered in a monotone. A rustling passed through the darkened garden as though my thoughts about the dead had left me and gone down there to crouch among the oleanders. As though the twisted remains of a dog were crawling down there. For a moment I thought the old bench under the bougainvillaea bower was broken: the moonlight had altered the angles, the shadows of the struts of the bench had got jumbled up with the struts themselves, and the bench now looked like the broken reflection of a bench in rippling water. What did Avraham Orvieto mean when he said in the staff room, as though referring to a fact known to everyone except me, that I was the only one the boy liked? Maybe I should have asked him to show me his son's letters, especially the one where he mentioned the pencil that never existed.

  I was awakened at a quarter to seven by Theo, brisk, freshly shaved, stocky, wearing a smartly pressed blue shirt with epaulettes, looking like a retired colonial soldier with his broad shoulders and his short grey hair, with the morning paper under his arm, bringing me some very hot strong black coffee that he had ground himself as usual by hand and percolated, as though he were trying to conjure up a scene in that cruel British film. Apparently in the middle of the night, instead of going to bed, I had fallen asleep on the white couch in the living room. I took the coffee from him and said, Listen, don't be angry, I promised you yesterday I'd fill the Chevrolet up on the way back from Beersheba but in the end I clean forgot. Never mind, Theo said, I'll do it myself, later, on my way to the office after I've taken you to school. It's not time I'm short of, Noa.

  THEO'S office, Planning Ltd., is situated on the top floor of the building by the traffic lights. It has an outer and an inner office, a drawing board, a desk, various wall-maps, a colour photograph of David Ben Gurion staring resolutely into Nahal Zin in the desert, two metal cabinets, some shelves containing different-coloured folders, and in a corner of the outer office a couple of simple chairs and a coffee table.

  Friday. Quarter past ten. On Fridays the office is always closed, but this morning Theo has come in to wait for the cleaning woman, Natalia, even though she has her own key. Until she arrives he has decided to go over one or two letters. He switches on the air conditioning and the powerful light over the drawing board. Then, changing his mind, he switches off the light and waits at the window instead. At the counter of Gilboa's, Books and Stationery, he notices a small crowd: they are waiting for the newspapers that normally arrive at nine o'clock in the morning. This morning they are late. They say the police have set up roadblocks on all the roads out of Beersheba because there has been a bank raid. Near the monument, two gardeners wearing broad-brimmed straw hats are stooping to plant new rosemary bushes in place of the old ones that have died. Theo asks himself why he should not do a bit of work this morning. At least until Natalia arrives. He might try to jot down a few preliminary thoughts about the Mizpe Ramon project: at present all
that is needed is a schematic outline, perhaps a few simple drawings without any detail and not even to scale. They haven't even got a budget yet, there's been no final decision, and they still haven't asked him to send in detailed plans. He thinks for a while but cannot find within himself that spark of acuity that is essential if an idea is to emerge. What's happened to Natalia today? Perhaps he ought to try to call her, find out if anything's wrong, though he has the impression they're living in the prefabs and it's doubtful if they have a phone, and anyway she once explained to him in broken English mixed with a few Hebrew words that her husband is madly jealous and is suspicious of the faintest hint of a man, even his own old father. He thinks about her, hardly more than a child, barely seventeen and already married and downtrodden, a submissive, timid girl, between smiles her mouth seems pursed as if to weep, if you put a simple question to her she trembles all over and goes white, her waist and breasts are those of a woman but she still has the face of a schoolgirl. Desire suddenly surges up inside him, violently, like a fist clenching.

  Friday. Noa is at school till twelve thirty. Then they've agreed to meet here and go to the shops together to try to choose her a skirt. He skipped his shower this morning, to hang on to the odour of her love that he can smell now, not with his nostrils but with his pores. Her laughter, her spontaneity, her body, the speck of light that capers rapidly in the pupils of her eyes—even her wrinkled hands, dappled with patches of brown pigment, so many years older than the rest of her, as though the forces of withering are patiently assembling there, waiting for a sign of vulnerability so as to spread all over her body—all seem to him to be joined to the very core of life itself. Like an electrical current she conducts life to him, too. Even if it was thinking of Natalia that aroused his desire, the flicker came from Noa and returns to her. There is no way of explaining this to her. Instead he will buy her a skirt and maybe a dress as well. And since Natalia has not come to clean the office and may not come today, there is time to stand at the window and watch the square by the traffic lights. What was the mistake that the male world made about Alma Mahler? What was Alma Mahler really like? Both questions are empty. Once, in Mexico City, during a festival of modern music, he happened to hear on successive evenings two performances of the Kindertotenlieder, one sung by a baritone with piano accompaniment, the other by a woman with a deep voice, perhaps a contralto, full of longing and yet pure and calm as though in resignation. Theo remembers that the latter was so poignantly sad that he had to get up and leave the auditorium. The second song in the cycle is called "Ah, now I know why oft I caught you gazing", and the fourth, "I think oft they've only gone a journey". These names cause him a dull ache like a single low note on the cello. The names of the other songs he cannot remember, even though he tries very hard. He must ask Noa tonight.

  Under his window a woman in a headscarf passes carrying in each hand a chicken freshly killed for the Sabbath. As the woman is short and the square is dusty, the dead combs leave a trail behind them on the sidewalk. Theo smiles for a moment under his moustache and almost winks shrewdly, like an avaricious peasant who, vaguely suspecting that the man he is bargaining with has adopted a cunning ruse, starts to plot a way of eluding the trap. The woman has already vanished.

  In front of the Sephardi synagogue an improvised table has been erected, a wooden door resting on two barrels. It is covered in open books, presumably sacred books that have been brought out of the closets on account of the damp and the worm to take the air in the sunshine. Half past ten and Natalia still isn't here: she won't come today. Has her husband locked her up again? Does he beat her with his belt? He must find their address right away, this morning. Go round, see if he can help, break down the door if necessary, to prevent a disaster. There's still time: Noa won't be here for another two hours. But here is the tax{i from Beersheba with the weekend papers. Limor Gilboa, Giltboa's pretty daughter, arranges them adeptly, inserting into the outer pages that have just arrived the supplements that were sent on yesterday's taxi. Gilboa himself, a tubby teddy bear of a mail full of energy, reminiscent of a trade-union hack, with his wavy grey hair, his protruding paunch, always looking as if he is about to embark on a speech, has already started selling Yediot and Ma'ariv to the crowds of people elbowing their way towards him and extending their hands. Theo jots down a little list of things that are needed for the office and decides to go down to Gilboa's to buy them when the crowd has thinned out, and perhaps also the weekend Ma'ariv before they have all been snatched up. As for the sketch he has been asked to do for Mizpe Ramon, it's not urgent, in the course of next week he may have a brainstorm. Let them wait. They certainly won't build their leisure complex over the weekend, in fact they never will. If only everything that had been done there so far could be wiped out and a fresh start made, without the hideous housing schemes, but in a low-key architectural rhythm, in a relation of proper humility to the silence of the crater and the lines of the mountain ranges. He locks the office and goes downstairs.

  Pini Bozo has adorned the walls of his shoe shop with a display of portraits: Maimonides, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, the Holy Rabbi Baba Baruch. It may not help, but it can't do any harm. Even though he is not a practising Jew, he has some fear of God in his heart, and also some respect for the religion that has protected us from all manner of evil for two thousand years. Besides these rabbis Bozo has hung up a photograph of the previous President of Israel, Navon, who is popular because he was a man of the people. On either side of him he has stuck up Shamir and Peres, who in his opinion ought to make their peace for the public good and work together again, against internecine strife: we have enough to do combating the external enemies who want to destroy us, the whole nation ought to unite against them and march forward together. Bozo's wife and baby son were killed in a tragic event here four years ago, when a young love-crossed soldier barricaded himself in the shoe shop, started shooting with a submachine gun and hit nine people. Bozo himself was saved only because he happened to go to the Social Security that morning to appeal against his assessment. To commemorate his wife and child he has donated an ark made of Scandinavian wood to the synagogue, and he is about to give an air conditioner in their memory to the changing room at the soccer field, so that the players can get some air at half-time.

  At the end of the sidewalk next to Bozo Shoes there are some municipal benches, and a plastic slide with a sandbox at the bottom. In stylish concrete containers among the Indian beech trees a few petunias struggle to survive. Blind Lupo is resting on one of the benches, his face to the strong sun. He is surrounded by pigeons, some of which are perching on his shoulders. His pointed stick is secured like an anchor in a crack between two paving stones. Back in Bulgaria, they say, he had a high-ranking post in the secret service. Here in Tel Kedar he works nights in the telephone exchange, seeing the keys and switches with his fingertips. Every morning he sits in this little park, harnessed to his grey dog, staring straight at the sun and scattering maize for the pigeons that flock around him even before he reaches the bench. Sometimes one of them trusts him enough to settle on his knees and let him stroke its feathers. When he stands up he occasionally bumps into his dog and mumbles politely, Sorry.

  An engaged couple, Anat and Ohad, are standing in Mr. Bialkin's furniture shop. They are looking for an upholstery fabric that will suit the three-piece suite and co-exist with the curtains, but their tastes differ: whatever he likes she finds repulsive, and whatever she likes reminds him of a whorehouse for Polish officers. She asks venomously where he has acquired his experience, and he beats a hasty retreat, Look what a state we're in, quarrelling over nothing. Anat replies that it is not a quarrel but a difference of opinion, and that's perfectly normal. Ohad suggests a compromise: Let's go to Beersheba after the weekend, there's a much better choice there. But that's exactly what I said in the first place, she crows triumphantly, and you wouldn't hear of it. Mr. Bialkin intervenes gently: Maybe the lady would like to take a look through the catalogue, and if there is anything
that meets with her favour I shall fetch it on Tuesday from Tel Aviv, God willing. Ohad, for his part, corrects her: I don't deny that you suggested it, but you were the one who said let's try Bialkin first, and if we don't find it there ... His fiancée cuts in: I don't deny that I said it, but don't you deny that you agreed. The young man concedes her point, but asks her to remember that he had certain reservations. Reservations, she says, have you become a lawyer all of a sudden? Next thing you'll be filing an appeal.

  When they have left the shop Bialkin says: That's how it is these days. They eat their hearts out and they die. And what can I do for you, Mr. Théo? A rocking chair? A wooden one? No, I haven't got anything like that. I've got a TV chair that can rock. Nobody makes the old rocking chairs any more. Theo thanks him and leaves. He had an idea the opening song of the Kindertotenlieder was called "Once More the Sun", but he is not certain. Might as well ask Noa to check it in the school library, she spends such hours there.

  At the Entebbe falafel stand a Bedouin in his fifties is buying shawarma in pitta. The shawarma is a new venture, and Avram is happily explaining to the Bedouin that it's still trying out. If it goes well, in a couple of weeks' time we'll try grilled shish kebab. Meanwhile a haughty white cat with tail erect prances past Kushner's bitch, who had a litter of pups a couple of days ago. The bitch chooses to feign sleep, but opens one eye a slit to observe the extent of the insolence. Cat and bitch alike behave as though the whole situation were beneath their dignity. Old Kushner says to Theo: What's up, we never see you these days. Theo's left eye shrinks as though peering through a microscope and he replies that nothing's changed. If you'd like to have one of the puppies, Kushner says, but Theo interrupts him sharply from under his authoritative moustache: No thanks. Quite unnecessary.