by Amos Oz
How would I like to write?
Like an old Greek who calls up the dead and shakes up the living. Or like
a snowman passing alone and barefoot. To record the mountain to note
the sea with a fine tip, like sketching out a pattern for embroidery.
To write like a Russian travelling merchant making his way from here
to China. He finds a shack. And sketches it. In the evening he looks,
in the night he draws, and he finishes before dawn. Then he pays and
goes on his way with the break of day.
With or without
Like an open fracture like a broken bone sticking out of the torn flesh, my
mother rises in the night from the shadow on the ceiling, saying to me Amek
its two o'clock why aren't you asleep and why are you smoking again. Go
to the kitchen child drink some warm milk then get back into bed and sleep.
Don't think about me in the night I am insomnia think instead about foggy
rain in the forest and a fox seeking shelter among fir trees in the dark and it
will lull you to sleep. In the dark among the fir trees Old Somnia walks
with a wet headscarf sodden dress soaked to the skin a crooked stick in her
shrivelled hand a weary witch named Somnia roams in the dark in the rain
lost in the foggy trees shuffling from shadow to shadow wandering away
from me out there yet passing through me on her way, backwards and
forwards, criss-crossing me like a valley that she has turned from a valley
into a vale of tears with her sleepless wandering. Maybe all this is just because
I have left some door flapping.
Dita offers
Give me five minutes to try to sort out this screwed-up business. People are
constantly being ditched. Here in Greater Tel Aviv for example I bet
the daily total of ditchings is not far short of the figure for burglaries.
In New York the statistics must be even higher. Your mother killed herself
and left you quite shattered. And haven't you yourself ditched any number
of women? Who in turn had ditched whomever they ditched in favor of you,
and those ditched guys had certainly left some wounded Ditchinka lying
on the battlefield. It's all a chain reaction. OK, I'm not saying, I admit
being ditched by your own parents is different, it bleeds longer.
Specially a mother. And you an only son. But for how long? Your whole life?
The way I see it being in mourning for your mother for forty-five years is
pretty ridiculous. It's more than ridiculous: it's insulting to other women.
Your wife, for instance. Or your daughters. I find it a turn-off myself.
Why don't you try and see it my way for a moment: I'm twenty-six and you'll
soon be sixty, a middle-aged orphan who goes knocking on women's doors
and guess what he's come to beg for. The fact that before my parents
were even born your mother called you Amek isn't a life sentence. It's
high time you gave her the push. Just the way she chucked you. Let her
wander round her forests at night without you. Let her find herself
some other sucker. It's true it's not easy to ditch your own mother, so why
don't you stick her in some other scene, not in a forest, let's say in a lake:
cast her as the Loch Ness monster, which as everyone knows may be
down there or may not exist, but one thing is certain, whatever you see or
think you see on the surface isn't the monster, it's just a hoax or an illusion.
But how
Ditch her, you say, it's easy for you to say it,
bail out like a fighter pilot ditching a plane
that's in a spin or on fire. But how can you jump from a plane
that's already crashed and rusted or sunk under the waves?
From out there, from one of the islands
This morning outside her window Bettine Carmel sees
grey rain, shutters, washtubs, puddles in a deserted backyard.
Between kitchen balconies bare clotheslines are strung.
Ugliness and beauty, Bettine reflects, both attest, or at least point,
to the existence of some invisible presence, a silent, awesome
presence of which they bring us neither the voice nor the echo
but only a shadow of a shadow. Where is the boat, Bettine?
Where are those islands you mentioned? Here there is only
a peeling back wall. Rusty shutters. Tin roofs. And rain
pouring down not in torrents but splat, splat: like pus. A bus
bursts puddles and throws up mud like a whale's spout.
Where are those islands, Bettine? When do we sail?
And where to? Avram's old toilet things have been standing
next to the basin in your bathroom for twenty-one years,
a stiffened shaving brush, a dried shaving stick and a blunt
razor, and out there among the garbage cans in the yard in all that rain
a wet cat writhes, wailing hoarsely with tormented desire.
Those islands you mentioned, Bettine, when you asked me
if I believed in them, the Invisible Carmel, a silent awesome
presence, instead of replying yes or no I cracked a joke. I
tossed you some vapid witticism because then, when you asked me,
I was simply not all there. There was no me at home in my head.
Now that I'm back in residence there is no need to ask me
if I believe or disbelieve in those islands because as of this moment
those islands are me and from out there, from one of the islands,
I am calling to you through the rain, You come too, Bettine.
There is definitely every reason to hope
Bettine, you come too. There's a meeting at Amirim Street about Nirit's Love,
tea and coffee are being sipped, savory sticks nibbled. Dombrov is full of
words and Giggy Ben-Gal is picking his teeth. In a brass lamp in the shape of
a pomegranate all four bulbs are lit because the day is gloomy. The new
contract looks fair, but still Bettine rewords a clause, for the sake of clarity,
and Albert raises three questions and suggests a couple of minor changes.
Absalom in his head, Absalom, my son my son. In Bengal now it's five o'clock;
on the radio they said the Brahmaputra has flooded. Stay clear of the water,
my son. Keep away from low-lying areas. As for the Narrator, he is having
a whispered conversation with Dita at one end of the sofa, the script lying
across their laps. (Albert phoned him in Arad and asked him to read it, to
give his opinion, to come, if he could, to the meeting.) Two hundred yards
from here, the sea is having a whispered conversation with the sea, not
cracking jokes but trying on silver baubles, taking them off, putting them on,
polishing them, replacing emerald with lead. On the chair where Nadia used
to sit is a pile of coats, scarves, we were all afraid it would rain, so far it has
held off but it still looks threatening. Seemingly lit from within, clouds
are swept eastward to the mountains and on toward Bengal. There, in the
center of Dacca, in a corner of Cafe Mondial, Rico is waiting for two of the
Dutchmen whom he arranged to meet up with here when he last saw them
in Tibet. How is he to know that they've been in the Hague since the day
before yesterday? This coffee table, the chairs, the armchair, the sideboard,
were all made by Elimelech the carpenter some twenty years ago for a song
because he and Albert both came from Sarajevo, they were vaguely related
an
d had been school friends. Albert checked the carpenter's accounts
every year and filled out his tax return. That is an old story, long since over.
Giggy Ben-Gal now makes a suggestion: What this story needs, apart from
Nirit and her hermit who lives on the edge of a village, is another twist, like
a one-night stand with an Arab farmhand, or lets say a little lesbian scene
with a neighbor. Bettine suggests finishing with the bit where Nirit and
the man are feeding the pigeons, because what comes afterward,
the traveller, the dead fox, seems too morbid to her and overly
symbolic. Dubi considers that the traveller definitely adds a deep mystical
element to the ending. As for the Narrator, he recommends deleting several
of the long silences which he regards as a bit of an affectation. Dita says
nothing. Albert hesitantly apologizes and remarks that silences can actually
sometimes express what words cannot. Meanwhile Bettine stands up, clears
away the cups and plates, and stops on her way to the kitchen to open
the curtains wide. The sight of the wintry sea which is now a virulent green
makes her think that maybe this whole argument is unnecessary. Wrapped
in the silence of empty spaces the brightly-lit earth floats from darkness to
darkness. More tea? Or some coffee? No thanks—everyone has got
things to do, promises to keep, business to see to, chores that can't be put off.
Thank you. Must say goodbye and be off. It was nice, and as for the project,
the script, it's in excellent hands. There is every reason to hope it
will enjoy enormous success. Were off to a flying start.
Who cares
After that, in the car, the news. A soldier in the South Lebanon Army
has been fatally wounded and two Israelis slightly injured. In
Hazor in Galilee another small business has closed, its nine employees
are on hunger strike. A math teacher in Netanya has been
abusing his daughters for the past six years. A car went off the road
near Betar and ended up in a ravine: a father and mother and
their two sons; a daughter who survived is in a critical condition.
Epidemic and famine in Burundi. A woman in Holon has jumped.
The rain will continue. There is a warning of flooding
in low-lying areas. And a hurricane in the United States.
Who cares about Nirit's Love.
Little boy don't believe
In the summer of 1946 my mother and father rented a holiday room
in the flat of a tailor in Bat Yam. One night I was woken by a
coughing sound that was not coughing, and that was the first time in my life
that I heard a grown-up stranger crying through the wall. All
the darkness long he cried, and awake and frightened I lay still not to
disturb my parents until when the darkness was weaker I crept out and
saw him on the balcony his shoulders were shaking a bird flew up in the
silence of the dawn and the man pointed to it and said to me Little boy,
don't believe. Fifty years have gone by and the bird is no longer
or the man. Or my parents. Only the sea is still there
and even it has changed from deep blue
to grey. Little boy don't believe. Or do. Believe. Who cares.
Nadia hears
The bird wakes her. Lying on her back with her eyes shut, thinking
What's left apart from the place mat she's started and may still finish.
What's left is a wish that the pain will go away
that it will all go away and stop bending over her.
She lies as though she has left her launching pad and is now
moving along the Milky Way and already the planet
from which she was launched is far off, has shrunk till it can no longer be
distinguished from tens of thousands of other stars.
A bird on a branch calls to her and Nadia is lying
wiping away the good and the bad, like a woman who has nearly
finished washing the floor, walking backward toward the door, drawing
the mop toward her, all she has left to do is to wipe away the traces on
the wet floor of her own footprints. The pain is still sleeping: her hostile
body has not woken with her at the sound of the bird, with all its knives.
Even shame, her lifetime companion, has gone. It has ceased to gnaw at her.
Everything is letting go of her and Nadia is letting go of everything,
like a pear from a branch: the pear is not picked but a ripened pear drops.
Right now at four in the morning Nadia is the most alone she has ever been,
not alone like a sick woman hearing a bird in a garden but alone like a bird
with no garden no branch no wing. She lays her shrivelled hand on her
withered breast because suddenly for a moment the sound of the bird is
confused with a cry from a cradle at night, the baby's lips are open wide
to tickle her breast, or perhaps it is not her baby but a man covering it
with his palm, stroking it squeezing and soothing, slipping the nipple
between his lips describing with his tongue on her flesh
shivers that descend to the roots of her spine
and thus the needles of pain awake from their sleep and like
a small child in the dark she puts a finger in her mouth. Narimi narimi
has gone and now she needs an injection.
Half a letter to Albert
After the funeral I wrote a letter to Albert, half of it personal, which I do not
want to quote here, and the other half a kind of meditation, which I
shall reconstruct in other words. The desert and the sea, like you, insist on
balancing a joint bank account, evaporation, clouds, floods, the wind whirls
continually, rivers run into the sea, but there is no comfort in this:
from now on you are on your own without her among the heavy
brown furniture with embroidered mats lace curtains bellied for a moment by
the sea breeze which the next moment lets them hang slack. Whenever
I'm in town I'll try to drop in for a glass of tea. Try to be strong, Albert,
and phone me whenever you like. As for the assessments I sent you to check,
there's no hurry, it's not at all urgent.
The Narrator drops in for a glass of tea and Albert says to him
I read an article of yours, fire and brimstone, in yesterdays Yediot. Rico
showed it to me, he said, Read this, Dad, and don't get worked up,
just try to grasp where we are living and where all this lunacy is leading us.
That's what he said, more or less. I think he's even further to the left
than you, this repressive state and so on. I'm not so moral a person
as either of you, but I don't like the present situation much either.
Mostly I say nothing, from a deep-seated fear that in responding to
this or that wrong even I may come out with things that are not exactly
right. Anger sends out secondaries. Naturally I have every respect
for the brave child who shouts that the emperor is naked when the
crowd is cheering Long live the emperor. But the situation today is that the
crowd is yelling that the emperor is naked and maybe for that reason
the child ought to find something new to shout, or else he should
say what he has to say without shouting. As it is, there is so much
noise, even here, the whole country is full of screaming, incantations,
amulets, trumpets, fifes and drums. Or else the opposite, biting sarcasm:
everyone denouncing everyone else. Personally I'm of the opinion
that any criticism of public affairs ought to contain shall we say up to
twenty percent sarcasm, twenty percent pain, and sixty percent
clinical seriousness, otherwise everyone is mocking and jeering at each other,
everyone starts making false noises and everything is filled with malice.
Help yourself, have some of the other one, Nadia's sister-in-law baked them
for me so I'd have something to offer people who come to pay
their condolences. Try the cheesecake, whichever you like, they're both
very good. When you write for the papers, of course you must write
whatever you wish, even harsh things, but don't forget that the human
voice may have been created to express both protest and ridicule, but
essentially it contains a considerable percentage of quiet, precise speech
which is meant to come out in measured words. It may seem
that amid all the hubbub such a voice has no chance,
but nevertheless its worth using it, even in a small room among three
or four listeners. There are still some people in this country who maintain
that the emperor is usually neither naked nor fully dressed, but, for example,
wearing clothes that do not suit him. He may even be excellently
dressed, but every bit as foolish as the cheering crowd, or the other
crowd that is no longer cheering, but jeering, or shouting that
the emperor is dead, or deserves to be. And anyway, who says that
a naked emperor is such a bad thing? After all, aren't the crowd also naked,
and the tailor and the little boy? Perhaps the best thing for you is to
steer clear of the procession altogether. Stay put in your house in Arad
and try to write in a quiet way if you can. At times like these, quiet
is the most precious commodity in the country. And let there be no
misunderstanding, I'm talking about quiet, definitely not about silence.