by Amos Oz
Avraham Levin got up wearily from his stool and put another log in the stove, which warmed the room with a pleasant, gentle flame. Then he sat down on the stool and closed his eyes, as though once more he had been given the task of spotting anyone who was singing out of tune. Outside, the rolls of thunder may have been rumbling on, or it may have been the air force planes flying low overhead on their way back from bombing enemy targets, but because of the singing and the music we could hardly hear them inside the room.
5
AT TEN O'CLOCK Dalia Levin announced the break for the buffet, and we all got up and started moving toward the corner of the room nearest the kitchen. Gili Steiner and Rachel Franco helped Dalia to get the pies and quiches out of the oven and to take the pots of soup off the stove, and people crowded around the table and helped themselves to cups and paper plates. The conversations and arguments resumed. Somebody said that the council workers were right to strike, and someone replied that with all these justifiable strikes we would end up with the government printing more money again and we'd be back to the merry old days of galloping inflation. Yohai Blum, the accordionist, commented that it was wrong to blame the government for everything—ordinary citizens must also share the blame, and he didn't exclude himself.
Almoslino was holding a bowl of steaming soup and eating it standing up. The steam was misting up his glasses on their black cord. He declared that the press and the television always painted a gloomy picture. The general picture, he said, was much less dark than it was painted by the media. You would think, he added bitterly, that we were all thieves and all corrupt.
Almoslino's words seemed to carry authority because they were delivered in his resonant bass voice. Plump Kormann had heaped his plate with potato quiche, baked potato, a meatball and vegetables and was balancing it in one hand, and having trouble maneuvering his knife and fork with the other. At that moment Gili Steiner offered him a glass of red wine. "I haven't got enough hands," he chuckled, so she stood on tiptoe and held the glass to his lips.
"Don't you think it's a bit too facile to blame the media for everything?" Yossi Sasson said to Almoslino.
"You have to see things in perspective," I interposed, but Kormann, with one shoulder higher than the other, interrupted me and denounced one of the ministers in the government in outspoken terms.
"In any decent government," Kormann said, "someone like that would have had his marching orders long ago."
"Just a moment, just a moment," said Almoslino. "Maybe you could start by giving us your definition of a decent government."
"Anyone would think all our problems started and ended with one person," said Gili Steiner. "If only they did. Yossi, you haven't tried the vegetable quiche. Why not?"
And Yossi Sasson, the real estate agent, replied with a smile:
"Let me deal with what I've already got on my plate, and then I'll see where to go next."
"You're all wrong," said Dafna Katz, but what she was going to say was submerged in the general hubbub, with everyone talking at once and some people raising their voices. Inside everyone, I thought, there is the child they once were. In some you can see that it's still a living child; others carry around a dead child inside them.
I left the group in the middle of its argument and went over to talk to Avraham Levin, my plate in my hand. He was standing by the window, holding the curtain up and peering outside at the rain and the storm. I touched his shoulder lightly and he turned to me without saying anything. He tried to smile, but merely managed to make his lips tremble.
"Avraham," I said, "why are you standing here on your own?"
He thought for a moment and then said:
"I find it difficult with so many people, all talking at once. It's hard to hear and hard to follow."
"It's really winter out there," I said.
"Yes, it is."
I told him I had come on my own because two women had wanted to come with me and I hadn't wanted to choose between them.
"Right," Avraham said.
"Listen," I said, "Yossi Sasson told me in confidence that they've found some sort of a tumor in his wife. A nasty tumor, that's what he said."
Avraham nodded a few times, as if agreeing with himself, or as if I had confirmed something that he had already guessed.
"If necessary, we'll help," he said.
We pushed our way through the people who were standing eating from disposable plates, crossing the buzz of voices chatting and arguing, and went out on the veranda. The air was cold and piercing and a fine drizzle was now falling. Lightning flickered indistinctly, far away over the hills to the east, but there was no accompanying thunder. A deep, wide silence lay on the garden, on the fruit trees and the dark cypresses, on the lawn and on the fields and orchards that breathed in the darkness beyond the garden hedge. At our feet pale lights shone from the rocky bottom of the fish pond. A solitary jackal wailed in the depths of the darkness. And several angry dogs replied from the yards of the village.
"Look," Avraham said.
I said nothing. I waited for him to tell me what I should look at, what he was talking about. But Avraham fell silent. Finally I broke the silence:
"Do you remember, Avraham, when we were in the army, in seventy-nine, the raid on Deir an-Nashaf? When I got a bullet in my shoulder and you evacuated me?"
Avraham thought for a minute and then said, "Yes, I remember."
I asked him if he ever thought about those days, and Avraham rested his hands on the cold, wet railing of the veranda and said, with his face to the darkness and his back to me:
"Look, it's like this, for a long time now I haven't thought about anything. At all. Just about the boy. I might have been able to save him, but I had a theory and I stuck to it, and Dalia followed me with her eyes closed. Let's go indoors. The break is over, they're starting to sing again."
6
IN THE SECOND HALF of the evening we started with some pioneer songs of the Palmach and songs from the War of Independence, like "Dudu" and "The Song of Friendship," and then we sang some songs by Naomi Shemer. Wait another hour and a half, announced Dalia; on the stroke of midnight we'll have another break and we'll serve wine and cheese. I sat in my place between the bookcase and the aquarium, and Dafna Katz was sitting next to me again. She held on to her songbook with both hands, with all ten fingers, as though she were afraid that somebody might snatch it from her grasp. I leaned over and asked her in a whisper where she lived, and if she had a lift home afterward, because if not, I'd be happy to take her. Dafna whispered that Gili Steiner had brought her and was going to take her home afterward, thank you very much.
"Is this your first time here?" I asked.
Dafna whispered that it was her first time, but that from now on she was planning to make a point of coming every time, every six weeks.
Dalia Levin signaled to us, with a finger on her lips, that we should stop whispering. I took the songbook from Dafna's thin fingers and turned the page for her. We exchanged a swift smile and joined in the singing of "In the night the wind is blowing." Again I had the feeling that I ought to go and get something from the pocket of my overcoat, on the heap of coats in the other room, but what it was I could not fathom. On the one hand I had a sense of panic, as though there were some urgent responsibility that I was ignoring, but on the other hand I knew the panic was false.
Dalia Levin signaled to Yohai Blum the accordionist and the three women who were accompanying him on the recorder, but they couldn't understand what she wanted. She stood up, went over to them, bent down and explained something, then she crossed the room and whispered to Almoslino, who shrugged his shoulders and seemed to refuse, but she insisted and pleaded, and finally he nodded. Then she spoke up, asked us all to be quiet for a moment, and announced that now we would sing a canon. We would sing "Everything on this earth is transient," followed by "I look up to the heavens and ask the stars above, Why does your light not reach me?" She asked her husband Avraham to dim the lights.
What was it that I had to check in the pocket of my overcoat? My wallet with my papers, I verified by touch, was with me in my trouser pocket. My driving glasses were in their case in my shirt pocket. Everything was here. Nevertheless, as soon as the canon was over I got up, whispered an apology to my neighbor Dafna Katz, crossed the circle of guests and went out into the corridor. My feet took me into the hall and to the front door, which for some reason I opened a crack, but there was no one outside, only the drizzle. I retraced my steps along the corridor as far as the door of the living room. Now everyone was singing some of Natan Yonatan's plaintive songs, such as "Banks are sometimes yearning for a river" and "Again the song is going forth, again our days are weeping."
At the end of the corridor I turned to a side passage leading to the small room where I had left my overcoat on the pile of coats. I excavated for a while, pushing other people's coats away to the left and right until I found my own. I checked the pockets slowly and methodically. In one there was a folded woolen scarf; in another I found some papers, a packet of sweets and a little flashlight. Because I didn't know what I was looking for, I went on searching in the inside pockets, where there were some more bits of paper and a pair of sunglasses in a case. I certainly didn't need sunglasses on this winter's night. So what was I looking for? I could find no answer, apart from a gnawing anger, at myself and at the heap of coats that I had scattered. I rebuilt the heap to the best of my ability and took the pocket flashlight with me as I turned to go. I meant to return to my place between the bookcase and the aquarium, next to bony Dafna Katz with her thin arms, but something stopped me. It may have been the fear that my entrance in the middle of a song would attract unwelcome attention, or it may have been a vague feeling that there was still something I ought to do in this house. But what it was I didn't know. I held on to the flashlight.
In the living room they were singing "Would that I were a bird, a tiny little bird, eternally wandering, with a tormented soul." The three recorders were playing without Yohai Blum's accordion. One of the recorders gave another little shriek but immediately corrected itself. Because I'd lost my place, I went to the toilet, even though I didn't need to, but it was occupied, so I climbed upstairs, where there must be another one. From the top of the stairs the singing sounded fainter, more wintry, so to speak, and though Yohai Blum's accordion had started up again there seemed to be something muted about it. Now everyone except me was singing a song by Rahel, "Why did you lie to me, faraway lights," and I stood on, enchanted and motionless, at the top of the stairs.
7
I STOOD THERE for a few minutes, unable to decide where I was headed. At the end of the upstairs hallway a single bulb gave out a weak light, just enough to cast some shapeless shadows. A few pictures hung on the walls, but in the half light they looked like vague gray patches. Several doors opened off the hallway, but they were all closed. I went back and forth a couple of times, wondering which of them to try. But I couldn't decide because I didn't know what I was looking for and I had completely forgotten why I had come upstairs. I could hear the wind outside. The rain was stronger now and was beating on the windows. Or it may have been hail. I stood in the hallway for a while longer, considering the closed doors, like a burglar wondering where the safe was hidden.
Then I cautiously opened the third door on the right. I was greeted by cold, distress and darkness. The air smelled as though the room had not been opened for a long time. I shone the flashlight inside and saw shadows of furniture that swayed and merged as my hand holding the flashlight shook. The wind and the hail battered the closed shutters. The feeble light was reflected back at me from a large mirror on the door of the wardrobe, as if someone were trying to blind me. The stale odor in the room was a smell of dust and unchanged bedclothes. It was evidently a long time since anyone had opened a door or window here. There must be cobwebs in the corners of the ceiling, although I couldn't make them out. I could distinguish some pieces of furniture: a small chest of drawers, a chair, another chair. As I stood in the entrance I felt an urge to close the door behind me and lock it from the inside. My feet drew me inward, into the depths of the room. The sound of singing downstairs was fainter now, no more than a soft murmur that was lost in the roar of the wind and the clawing of the hail on the bedroom shutters. Outside, the garden must be wrapped in mist that blurred the outlines of the cypresses. There would be no living soul on Pumphouse Rise. Only the goldfish would be swimming, indifferent to the hail and the rain, in the pond that was lit from beneath by an electric beam. And the artificial waterfall would be trickling down the rockery and disturbing the surface of the water.
A big bed stood under the window, with a small bookcase on either side. There was a carpet on the floor and I took off my shoes and socks. The carpet was thick and deep, and felt soft and strange under my bare feet. I directed the beam of the flashlight at the bed and saw that it was covered with a bedspread on which were scattered some cushions. I had an impression that far away on the floor below me they were singing "Can you hear my voice, my distant one?" But I could not be sure what my ears were hearing, or of what my eyes could see in the trembling light. There was a constant slow movement in the room, as if someone big and heavy were stirring sleepily in a corner, or crawling on all fours, or clumsily tumbling over and over between the chest of drawers and the closed window. It must have been the quivering of the flashlight that produced this illusion, but I felt that behind my back, too, where the darkness was total, something was slowly creeping. I had no idea where from or where to.
What was I doing here? I had no answer to the question. And yet I knew that this abandoned bedroom was where I'd been wanting to come since the beginning of the evening and maybe for a long time before. I suddenly heard the sound of my own breathing and felt sorry that my breath punctured the damp silence that filled the room, since the rain had stopped, the wind had died down, and the singers downstairs had abruptly stopped singing. Maybe it was finally time for wine and cheese. I had no desire for wine or cheese. I had no further reason to turn my back on despair. So I got down on my hands and knees at the foot of the double bed and, rolling back the bedspread, tried to grope with the pale beam of my flashlight into the dark space underneath.
In a faraway place at another time
ALL NIGHT LONG, poisonous vapors blow in from the green swamp. A sweetish smell of decay spreads among our huts. Iron tools rust here overnight, fences rot with a damp mold, mildew eats at the walls, straw and hay turn black with moisture as though burnt in fire, mosquitoes swarm everywhere, our homes are full of flying and crawling insects. The very soil bubbles. Woodworm, moths and silverfish eat away the furniture, the wooden palings and the wooden roofs. The children are sick all summer with boils, eczema and gangrene. The old folks die from atrophy of the airways. The stench of putrefaction comes even from the living. There are many people who are crippled, who suffer from goiter, from mental deficiency, twisted limbs, facial tics, drooling, because they all interbreed: brothers and sisters, sons and mothers, fathers and daughters.
I was sent here twenty or twenty-five years ago by the Office for Underdeveloped Regions, and I still go out every evening at twilight to spray the swamp with disinfectant; I administer quinine, carbolic acid, sulfur, skin ointments and antiparasitic drugs to the suspicious locals; I encourage a hygienic and abstinent lifestyle and distribute chlorine and DDT. I'm holding the fort until a replacement arrives, perhaps someone younger with a stronger character than mine.
In the meantime I am the pharmacist, teacher, notary, arbitrator, nurse, archivist, go-between and mediator. They still doff their shabby caps to me and clasp them to their chest as a mark of honor, bow and scrape with sly, toothless smiles and address me in the third person. But increasingly I have to curry favor with them, turn a blind eye, accommodate their vain beliefs, ignore their impudent grimaces, put up with their body odor and bad breath, overlook the outrageous obscenity that is spreading through the village. I have to admit to myself that I have
no power left. My authority is dwindling. I only have left some tattered shreds of influence that I exercise by means of subterfuges, honeyed words, necessary lies, veiled threats and little bribes. All that I have left to do is to hang on a bit longer, until my replacement arrives. Then I shall leave this place forever, or I might take over an empty hut, get myself a lusty peasant wench and settle down.
Before I came here, a quarter of a century ago or more, the district governor once came on a visit, surrounded by a large retinue. He stayed for an hour or two, and gave orders for the course of the river to be diverted so as to put an end to the malignant marsh. The governor was accompanied by officers and secretaries, surveyors, holy men, a legal expert, a singer, an official historian, one or two intellectuals, an astrologer and representatives of the sixteen secret services. The governor dictated his orders: dig, divert, dry out, dig up, cleanse, inject, remove, upgrade and turn over a new leaf.