Scenes from Village Life

by Amos Oz

  Rachel pours the vet a glass of cold water and offers him some fruit and biscuits while he is still joking with her in his easygoing way. Then she helps him to catch three or four cats that have to have their shots. He puts one cat in a cage: he'll take her away with him and bring her back with her wound dressed and sterilized, and in a couple of days she'll be as good as new. On one condition: that Rachel speaks at least one kind word to him. Kind words matter more to him than money.

  "What a scoundrel!" whispers the old man in his hiding place. "A wolf in vet's clothing."

  Micky the vet has a little Peugeot truck, which the old man insists on calling a Fiji, like the islands. His greasy hair is tied up in a ponytail, and he wears an earring in his right ear. Both of these make the former MK's blood boil: "If I've warned you once against that villain, I've warned you a thousand times—"

  Rachel, as always, cuts him short:

  "That's enough, Pesach. After all, he's a member of your Party."

  These words rouse the old man to a renewed outburst of rage:

  "My Party? My Party died years ago, Abigail! First they prostituted my Party and then they buried it ignominiously! As it deserved!"

  Then he launched into a tirade against his dead comrades, his false comrades, his comrades in double inverted commas, Comrade Hopeless and Comrade Useless, those two traitors who became his enemies and persecutors just because he clung to the bitter end to the principles that they sold for a mess of pottage on every high hill and under every green tree. All that was left of those false friends now, and of the entire Party, was just worminess and decay. The last phrase was borrowed from Bialik, although he had a grudge against Bialik: in the evening of his days, Bialik had turned from being the national prophet of rage into a sort of provincial gentleman, who accepted the post of commissar for culture, if not worse, under Meir Dizengoff.

  "But let's get back to your disgusting hooligan. That fattened calf! A calf with a ring in his ear! A gold ring in a pig's nose! That braggart! That windbag! That prattler! Even your little Arab student is a hundred times more cultured than that beast!"

  "Pesach," said Rachel.

  The old man shut up, but his heart was bursting with loathing for that Micky—with his big behind and his T-shirt with Come on, baby, let's have fun! written on it in English—and with sorrow for these terrible times, when there was no more room for affection between people, for forgiveness or compassion.

  Micky the vet visited the house by the cemetery two or three times a year, to see to the new generation of cats. He was one of those people who like to speak of themselves in the third person, and use their nickname. "So I said to myself, It's time for Micky to take himself in hand. Otherwise it simply won't work." A broken incisor gave him the look of a dangerous brawler. His walk was lazy but springy, like that of a drowsy beast of prey. In his murky gray eyes there sometimes flashed a spark of suppressed licentiousness. While he talked he occasionally reached around to ease the seat of his trousers that had got caught in the cleft of his buttocks.

  "Shall I vaccinate that Arab student who lives in your kennel, too?" the vet suggested.

  Despite this offer, he stayed on for a while with the student when he had finished his work, and even beat him at checkers.

  All kinds of rumors buzzed around the village about the Arab boy who lived at Rachel Franco's, and Micky the vet hoped to take advantage of the opportunity and the game of checkers to sniff out any hint of what was really going on. And though he did not discover anything, he was able to tell people in the village that the Arab was twenty or twenty-five years younger than Rachel, easily young enough to be her son, and that he lived in a shed in the back garden, which she had fitted out with a desk and a bookcase—so he was an intellectual. The vet could also report that Rachel and the boy were, how to put it, not exactly indifferent to each other. No, he hadn't caught them holding hands or anything like that, but he had seen the boy hanging out her wash on the line behind the house. Even her underwear.

  6

  WEARING AN UNDERSHIRT and baggy underpants, the old man stood in the bathroom with his legs spread wide apart. He had forgotten to lock the door again. Again he had forgotten to lift the seat before using the toilet. Now he was leaning over the basin, frenziedly scrubbing his face, his shoulders, his neck, splashing water in every direction like a wet dog, snorting and gurgling under the jet of water, squeezing his left nostril so as to empty the contents of the right nostril into the basin, then pressing the right one so as to empty the other, clearing his throat, expectorating four or five times until the sputum was freed from his chest and projected against the side of the basin, and finally pummeling himself dry with a thick towel, as though he were scouring a frying pan.

  When he was dry he put on a shirt, buttoning it up wrongly, and his shabby black beret and stood hesitantly in the corridor for a while, his head thrust forward almost at a right angle, silently chewing his tongue. Then he wandered from room to room and went down into the cellar, looking for telltale signs of the nocturnal digging, cursing the workmen who had managed to erase every trace of their activity, unless perhaps it was deeper, under the floor of the cellar, in the foundation, under the heavy earth. From the cellar he went up to the kitchen, and out through the kitchen door into the yard, among the abandoned sheds, striding angrily to the far end. On his return he found Rachel sitting at the table on the veranda, bent over some marking. From the steps he said to her:

  "But on the other hand, I am pretty repulsive myself. As you must admit. So what do you need with that vet of yours? Isn't one repulsive man enough for you?"

  Then he added sadly, referring to Rachel in the third person, as though she were not present:

  "I need a piece of chocolate every now and then, to bring some sweetness into my dark life, but she hides it from me as though I were a burglar. She doesn't understand anything. She thinks I need the chocolate because I'm greedy. Wrong! I need it because my body has stopped producing sweetness of its own. I haven't got enough sugar in my blood and my tissues. She understands nothing! She's so cruel! So cruel!" And on reaching the door of his bedroom, he stopped, turned and shouted to her: "And all these cats only bring diseases! Fleas! Germs!"

  7

  THE ARAB STUDENT was the son of an old friend of Danny Franco, Rachel's husband, who went and died on his fiftieth birthday. What was the nature of the friendship between Danny Franco and Adel's father? Rachel didn't know, and Adel didn't talk about it. Maybe he didn't know either.

  He had appeared one morning the previous summer, introduced himself and asked shyly if he could rent a room. Well, not exactly rent. And not exactly a room. A couple of years ago, Danny of blessed memory, what a wonderful man he was, had offered Adel's father to put up his son in one of the farm outbuildings, because the farm was no longer a working one and the sheds and outhouses were all standing empty. He had come now to inquire if the offer made two years ago was still valid. That is, if there was still a shed free for him right now. In return he was willing, for example, to weed the yard or help with household chores. It was like this: he had taken a year off his course at university and was planning to write a book. Yes, something about life in a Jewish village compared to life in an Arab village, a scholarly study or a novel, he hadn't yet decided for sure, and so he needed—it would suit him well—to live on his own for a while on the edge of Tel Ilan. He remembered the village, with its vineyards and fruit orchards and the view of the Manasseh Hills, from a single visit he had paid, with his father and his sisters when he was a child, to Danny of blessed memory. Danny of blessed memory had invited them to come and spend a whole day here, maybe Rachel could remember that visit? No? Of course she didn't, there was no particular reason why she should. But he, Adel, had not forgotten it and never would. He had always hoped someday to return to the village of Tel Ilan. To return to this house next to the tall cypresses of the cemetery. "It's so peaceful here, much more peaceful than our village, which has grown so much it isn't a villa
ge anymore, it's a small town now, full of shops and garages and dusty parking lots." It was because it was so beautiful that he had dreamed of returning. And because of the peace and quiet. And because of something else that he couldn't define but that he might succeed in describing in the book he wanted to write. He would write about the differences between a Jewish village and an Arab village. "Your village was born out of a dream and a plan, and our village was not born, it's always been there, but still they do have something in common. We have dreams, too. No, comparisons are always false. But the thing that I love here, that isn't false. I can pickle cucumbers, too, and make jam. Only if there's a need for such things here, of course. And I have some experience of painting, and mending roofs. And keeping bees, too, if by any chance you feel like renewing your days as of old, as you Jews say, and having a few beehives. I won't make any noise or leave any mess. And in my spare time I'll prepare for my exams and start writing my book."

  8

  ADEL WALKED WITH a stoop. He was a shy yet talkative young man, and wore glasses that were too small for him, as though he had taken them from some child or had kept them from his own childhood. They were secured by a string and had a tendency to mist up, so that he had to keep wiping them with the tail of the shirt that he always wore outside his threadbare jeans. He had a dimple in his left cheek that also gave him a shy, childlike look. He shaved only his chin and sideburns; the rest of his face was smooth and hairless. His shoes looked too big and too coarse for him, and they left strange, menacing footprints on the dusty courtyard. When he watered the fruit trees they made puddles in the mud. He bit his fingernails, and his hands were red and rough as if from the cold. He was fine-featured, apart from his thick lower lip. When he smoked he sucked so hard on the cigarette that his cheeks caved in and for a moment the outline of his skull seemed to be revealed beneath his skin.

  Adel walked around the yard wearing a Van Gogh straw hat and an expression of wonderment and longing. His shoulders were always covered with a powdering of dandruff. He had an absent-minded way of smoking: he would light a cigarette, draw on it three or four times, sucking his cheeks right in, then put it down on the fence or the windowsill, forget the lit cigarette and light another one. A reserve cigarette was always tucked behind his ear. He smoked a lot, but with an air of disgust, as if he hated the smoke and the smell of tobacco, as if it were someone else who was smoking and puffing the smoke in his face. He also developed a special relationship with Rachel's cats: he had long, respectful conversations with them in Arabic, and in a low voice, as though letting them in on a secret.

  Former MK Pesach Kedem did not like the student. "You can see right away," the old man said, "that he hates us but hides his hatred under a layer of sycophancy. They all hate us. How could they not? If I were them I'd hate us too. In fact, I'd hate us even without being them. Take it from me, Rachel, if you just look at us, you can see that we deserve nothing but hatred and contempt. And maybe a bit of pity. But that pity cannot come from the Arabs. They themselves need all the pity in the world.

  "The devil only knows," said Pesach Kedem, "what brought this student who's not really a student here to us. How do we know that he's a student at all? Did you check his certificates before you adopted him? Did you read any of his essays? Did you examine him, in writing or orally? And who says that he's not the one digging underneath the house night after night, searching for something, some document or ancient proof that this property once belonged to his forebears? Maybe the reason he came here was that he is scheming to claim some kind of right of return, to establish a claim on the land and the house in the name of some grandfather or great-grandfather who may have lived here in the days of the Ottoman Empire. Or the crusaders. First he moves in here as an uninvited guest, something between a lodger and a servant, he digs under the foundation till the walls start shaking, and then he demands some right, a share in the property, an ancestral claim. And you and I, Rachel, will suddenly find ourselves out in the street. There are flies again on the veranda, there are flies in my room, too. It's those cats of yours, Abigail, that attract the flies. In any case, your cats have taken over the whole house. Your cats, and your Arab, and your beastly vet. And what about us, Rachel? What are we, would you mind telling me that? No? Well, let me tell you then, my dear: we are a passing shadow, like yesterday when it is past."

  Rachel silenced him.

  But a moment later she took pity on him and reached for a couple of chocolates wrapped in silver paper from her apron pocket.

  "Here, Daddy. Take these. Eat them. Only give me a break."

  9

  DANNY FRANCO, DEAD on his fiftieth birthday, was a sentimental man who was easily moved to tears. He wept at weddings and sobbed in the films that were shown in the Village Hall. The skin of his neck hung in folds, like a turkey's. He had a soft, guttural way of pronouncing his r's that gave his speech a hint of a French accent, though he hardly knew any French. He was a stocky, broad-shouldered man, but his legs were spindly: he looked like a wardrobe set on stick legs. He had a habit of hugging people he was talking to, even strangers, patting them on the shoulder, on the chest, between the ribs, on the back of the neck. He often slapped his own thighs, too, or gave you an affectionate punch in the belly.

  If somebody praised the way his calves were coming along, or an omelet he had made, or the beauty of the sunset from the window of his house, his eyes immediately filled with moisture in gratitude for the compliment.

  Beneath the stream of words on any subject whatever—the future of calf-fattening, government policy, a woman's heart, a tractor engine—there gushed a stream of joy that had no need of any pretext or connection. Even on the last day of his life, ten minutes or so before he dropped dead of heart failure, he was standing at the fence chatting to Yossi Sasson and Arieh Zelnik. Most of the time there was between him and Rachel that ceasefire so common between couples after long years of marriage, when conflicts, insults and temporary separations have taught both partners to tread warily and to give the marked minefields a wide berth. From the outside this cautious routine resembled a mutual resignation, which still left room for a calm comradeship, of the type that sometimes develops between soldiers of opposing armies facing each other, a few yards apart, in the course of long-drawn-out trench warfare.

  This is how Danny Franco ate an apple: for a while he would turn it around in his hand, inspecting it closely until he found the precise point at which to sink his teeth into it, then he would stare at the wounded apple once more before attacking it again, this time at another point on its circumference.

  After his death, Rachel let the farm go. The henhouses were closed, the calves were sold, and the incubator became a storeroom. Rachel continued to water the fruit trees that Danny Franco had planted at the end of the yard, apples and almonds, a couple of dusty fig trees, two pomegranates and an olive. But she gave up pruning the old creepers that clung to the walls of the house, covered the roof and gave shade to the veranda.

  The abandoned sheds and outbuildings filled up with junk and dust. Rachel sold the lease on the land farther down the slope, and the water ration of the now inoperative farm. She also sold her parental home in Kiryat Tivon, and took in her cantankerous father. With the proceeds of all these sales she bought herself a portfolio of shares and the status of silent partner in a small company manufacturing pharmaceutical products and health foods. The company paid her a monthly salary, on top of her pay as a literature teacher at Green Meadows High School in Tel Ilan.

  10

  DESPITE HIS WEAK BODY and thin shoulders, Adel took it on himself to weed the former farmyard, which had become overgrown since Danny's death. He also, on his own initiative, tended a small vegetable patch beside the front path, trimmed and watered the unruly hedge, looked after the oleanders, roses and geraniums that grew in front of the house, cleaned and tidied the cellar, and did most of the housework, scrubbing floors, hanging out the wash, ironing, and washing the dishes. He even reactivated Danny Fra
nco's little carpentry workshop: he managed to oil and sharpen the electric saw and get it working again. Rachel bought him a new vise to replace the old one that was rusted up, some timber, nails, screws and carpenter's glue. In his spare time he made her some shelves and stools, gradually replaced the fence posts, and removed the old, broken gate and fitted a new one, which he painted green. It was a lightweight double gate fitted with springs, so that the two flaps swung to and fro behind you several times before closing gently of their own accord, without slamming.

  The student spent the long summer evenings sitting on his own on the steps of his hut, which was formerly the hatchery, smoking and writing in a notebook placed on top of a closed book on his knees. Inside the hut Rachel had set him up with an iron bedstead and an old mattress, a school desk and a chair, an electric hotplate and a small refrigerator where Adel kept some vegetables, cheese, eggs and milk. He stayed sitting on the step until ten or ten-thirty, with a golden cloud of sawdust floating around his dark head in the yellow electric light, his smell of young male sweat mingling with a sharp, heady odor of carpenter's glue.

  Sometimes he sat there after sunset, playing to himself on a mouth organ in the twilight or the moonlight.

  "There he is again, pouring out his soul with his oriental wailing," the old man would grumble from the veranda. "It's probably some song of yearning for our land, which they'll never give up."

  Adel knew only five or six tunes, but he never tired of repeating them. Sometimes he would stop playing and sit motionless on the top step with his back leaning against the side of the shed, deep in thought, or dozing. Around eleven o'clock he would stand up and go inside. The light above his bed would still be on after Rachel and her father had turned out their own bedside lamps and gone to sleep.