by Amos Oz
Suddenly, as though translating her revulsion into fury, Yael snatched the soapy sponge and the frying pan he was holding.
‘That’s it. I’ve had enough of this farce. I’m fed up with the lot of you. Coming in here, washing the dishes, trying to make me feel sorry for you all the time. I can’t feel sorry for you. I don’t want to be a mother to you all. That child, he’s always scheming for something, though I really don’t know what he’s missing in life, what we haven’t bought him, a video, an Atari, a compact disc player, a trip to America every year, and next week he’s even getting his own private TV in his room. You’d think we’re bringing up a prince here. And then you come round all the time, driving him crazy and making me feel guilty, asking what sort of parents we are, and filling Dimi’s head with the same sick birds that are fluttering around inside yours. I’ve had it up to here. Don’t come here any more, Fima. You pretend you’re living alone, but you’re always clinging to other people. And I’m just the opposite; everybody clings to me, when the only thing I want really is to be alone at last. Go away now, Efraim. I’ve got nothing to give to you or to anyone. And I wouldn’t even if I did. Why should I? I don’t feel I owe anyone anything. And I’ve got no claims on anyone. Teddy is always a hundred per cent OK. Never just ninety-nine. He’s like a year-planner that tells you what you’ve got to do, and when you’ve done it, you wipe it out and write more things to do. This morning he offered to rewire the flat to a three-phase system as a birthday present for me. Have you ever heard of a husband giving his wife a three-phase system for her birthday? And Dimi waters the houseplants morning and evening, morning and evening till they die, and Teddy buys new ones, and they get drowned too. Dimi can even handle the vacuum cleaner, once Teddy showed him how. He sucks at everything, even the pictures and mirrors. Even our feet. There’s no stopping him. You remember my father, dear devoted comrade Naftali Tsvi Levin, founding member of the historic settlement of Yavne’el? He’s an old pioneer now, he’s eighty-three and completely gaga. He sits in his old people’s home in Afula staring at the wall all day, and if ever you ask him a question, like how are you feeling, what’s new, what do you need, who are you, who am I, where does it hurt, he invariably replies with the same three-word question: “In what sense?” He says it with a Yiddish lilt. Those three words are all he has left from the Bible, the Talmud, the Midrash, the Hasidic tales, the Haskalah, Bialik, and Buber, and all the other Jewish sources he knew by heart once. I’m telling you, Efraim, soon I’ll only have three words left too. Not “In what sense?” but “Leave me alone.” Leave me alone, Efraim. I’m not your mother. I’ve got a project that’s been dragging on for years now because a whole bunch of toddlers have been tugging at my sleeves to wipe their noses. Once, when I was little, my father the pioneer told me to remember that men are really the weaker sex. It was a joke of his. Well, shall I tell you something, now that I’ve missed my hairdresser’s appointment because of you? If I’d realised then what I know now, I’d have joined a nunnery. Or married a jet engine. I’d have given the weaker sex a miss, with great pleasure. Give them a finger, they want your whole hand. Give them your whole hand, they don’t even want the finger any more. Just sit quietly over there, make the coffee, and don’t interrupt. Don’t draw attention to yourself. Do the washing and the ironing, get laid, and shut up. Give them a rest from you, and within a fortnight they’re crawling back on all fours. What exactly did you want from me today, Efraim? A little early-morning screw in memory of the good old days? The fact is you don’t even want that, any of you. Ten per cent lust and ninety per cent playacting. You turn up here when you imagine Teddy’s out, loaded with flowers and fine phrases, an expert at comforting orphans and widows, hoping that this time I’ll finally take pity on you and go to bed with you for a quarter of an hour. As a bribe to make you go away. I slept with you for five years, and all you ever wanted, ninety per cent of the time, was to get it over with, empty yourself, wipe up, turn on the light, and carry on reading your newspaper. Go now, Efraim. I’m a woman of forty-nine, and you’re no spring chicken yourself. That story’s over. There’s no resit. I got a child by you and you didn’t want it. So, like a good girl, I murdered it so as not to mess up your poetic destiny. Why do you keep coming back to mess me up, and everyone else too? What more do you want from me? Is it my fault you squandered everything you had, and everything you might have had, and what you found in Greece? Is it my fault that life goes by and time gnaws at everything? Is it my fault that we all die a little every day? What more do you want from me?’
Fima stood up, chastened and humble, muttered an apology, started to look for his coat, and suddenly said shyly:
‘It’s February, Yael: it’ll be your birthday soon. I’ve forgotten. Perhaps you’ve already had it? I don’t remember the date. I haven’t even got a three-phase system to give you.’
‘It’s Friday, February 16th, 1989. The time is 11:10 a.m. So what?’
‘You said we all want something from you and you’ve got nothing more to give.’
‘Surprise, surprise: so you’ve managed to take in half a sentence after all.’
‘But the fact is, I don’t want anything from you, Yael. On the contrary, I want to find something that will give you a little pleasure.’
‘You’ve got nothing to give. Your hands are empty. In any case, don’t you worry about my pleasure. It so happens I have a real feast every day, or nearly every day. At work, at my drawing board, or in the wind tunnel. That’s my life. That’s the only place where I really exist a little. Maybe you ought to start doing something, Efraim. That’s the whole of your problem: you don’t do anything. You just read the papers and get worked up. Why don’t you give private lessons, volunteer for civil defence, do some translating, give lectures to soldiers about the meaning of Jewish ethics.’
‘Somebody, I think it was Schopenhauer, wrote that the intellect divides everything up, whereas the intuition unites and restores the lost wholeness. But I’m telling you, Yael, that our farce doesn’t divide into two but, as Rabin always says, into three. Schopenhauer and the rest of them ignore the Third State. Wait, don’t interrupt. Just give me two minutes to explain it to you.’
But then he fell silent, even though this time Yael had not interrupted him.
At last he said:
‘I’ll give you everything I’ve got. I know it’s not much.’
‘You’ve got nothing, Effy. Just the scraps you shnorr from the rest of us.’
‘Will you come back to me? You and Dimi? We can go to Greece.’
‘And live on nectar and ambrosia?’
‘I’ll get a job. I’ll work as a salesman for my father’s firm. A night watchman. A waiter even.’
‘Sure, a waiter. You’ll drop everything.’
‘Or else we could go and live in Yavne’el, the three of us. On your parents’ old farm. We can grow flowers in hothouses, like your sister and her husband. And we’ll get the fruit orchard going again. Baruch will give us some money, and little by little we’ll bring the ruins back to life. We’ll have a model farm. During the day Dimi and I will look after the livestock. We’ll build a study for you with computers, a drawing board. And a wind tunnel, if you’ll explain what that is. In the evening, towards sunset, we’ll go and see the orchard together. The three of us. As it begins to get dark, we’ll collect honey from the beehives. If you really want to take Teddy with you, I won’t object. We’ll have a little commune. We’ll live without lies, and without the faintest shadow of spite. You’ll see: Dimi will develop and really start to flourish. And you and I …’
‘Yes, and of course you’ll get up at half past four every morning, with your boots and your mattock and your hoe, a song in your heart and a plant in your hand, to drain the swamps and conquer the wasteland single-handed.’
‘Don’t poke fun, Yael. I admit I have to learn from scratch how to love you. So OK, little by little I’ll learn. You’ll see.’
‘Of course you will. You’ll take
a correspondence course. Or study at the Open University.’
‘You’ll teach me.’
With a sudden outburst of timid courage he added:
‘You know very well that what you said earlier isn’t the whole truth. You didn’t want the baby either. You didn’t even want Dimi. I’m sorry I said that. I didn’t mean it. It just slipped out. But I want Dimi. I love him more than my own life.’
She stood over Fima as he huddled on his bench, in her worn corduroy trousers and slightly threadbare red sweater, as though she were straining with all her might not to hit his plump face. Her eyes were dry and flashing, and her face was wrinkled and old, as if it were not Yael but her elderly mother who was bending over him, smelling of black bread and olives and plain toilet soap. And she said with wonderment, with a strange taut smile, speaking not to him and not to herself but into space:
‘It was also in the winter. It was February then too. Two days after my birthday. In 1963. When you and Uri were completely absorbed in the Lavon affair. The almond tree behind our kitchen in Kiryat Yovel had started to flower. And the sky was just like today, perfectly clear and blue. That morning there was a programme of Shoshana Damari songs on the radio. And I went in a rattling old taxi to that Russian gynaecologist in the Street of the Prophets, who said I reminded him of Giulietta Masina. Two and a half hours later I went home, as fate would have it in the same taxi with the little photograph of Princess Grace of Monaco over the driver’s head, and it was all over. I remember I closed the shutters and drew the curtains and lay down in bed listening to a Schubert impromptu on the radio, followed by a lecture about Tibet and the Dalai Lama, and I didn’t get up till evening, and by then it had started raining again. You had gone off early in the morning with Tsvi to a one-day history conference at Tel Aviv University. It’s true you offered to skip it and come with me. And it’s true I said, For Heaven’s sake, it’s no worse than having a wisdom tooth out. And in the evening you came home all glowing with excitement, because you had managed to catch Professor Talmon out in some minor contradiction. We murdered it, and we shut up. To this day I don’t want to know what they do with them. Tinier than a day-old chick. Do they flush them down the lavatory? We both murdered it. Only you didn’t want to hear when or where or how. All you wanted to hear from me was that it was all over and done with. What you really wanted to tell me was about how you’d made the great Talmon stand there on the daïs in confusion like a first-year student flunking an oral. And that same evening you rushed round to Tsvika’s, because the two of you hadn’t had time on the bus back to Jerusalem to finish your argument about the implications of the Lavon affair. He could have been a boy of twenty-six by now. He could be a father himself, with a child or two of his own. The eldest might be about Dimi’s age. And you and I would go into town to buy an aquarium and some tropical fish for the grandchildren. Where do you think the drains of Jerusalem empty out? Into the Mediterranean, via Nahal Shorek? And the sea joins up with Greece, and there the king of Ithaca’s daughter might have picked him up out of the waves. Now he’s a curly-haired youth sitting playing the lyre in the moonlight on the water’s edge in Ithaca. I believe Talmon died a few years ago. Or was that Prawer? And didn’t Giulietta Masina also die some time ago? I’ll make some more coffee. I’ve missed the hairdresser now. It wouldn’t do you any harm to have a haircut. Not that it would do you much good either. Do you still remember Shoshana Damari, at least? A star shines in the sky, / And in the wadi jackals cry? She’s completely forgotten now, too.’
Fima had closed his eyes. He tensed himself, not like someone who is afraid of being hit but like someone who is hoping for it to the very tips of his nerves. As though it were not Yael, not even Yael’s mother, but his own mother bending over him and demanding that he give back at once the blue bonnet that he had hidden. But what makes her think that he hid it? And why does Yael assume it was a boy? What if it was actually a girl? A little Yael with long soft hair and a face like Giulietta Masina? He laid his arms on the table and without opening his eyes hid his weary head on them. He could almost hear Professor Talmon’s scholarly nasal voice declaring that Karl Marx’s understanding of human nature was naïve and dogmatic, not to say primitive, and in any case one-dimensional. Fima responded mentally with Yael’s old father’s perpetual question:
In what sense?
The more he thought about this, the less he could find an answer. Yet on the other side of the wall, in the next flat, a young woman was singing a forgotten song which had been on everyone’s lips years ago, about a man called Johnny: There was never a man like my Johnny, / Like the man they called Johnny Guitar. The melody was feeble, childish, almost laughable, and the woman on the other side of the kitchen wall was no singer. Fima suddenly recalled making love to Yael, half his lifetime ago, one afternoon in a small boarding-house on Mount Carmel, when he was accompanying her to a conference at the Technion. She conceived the fantasy that he should pretend to be a stranger and she a young girl who had never been touched before, innocent, shy, nervous. His task was to seduce her, taking his time. And he managed to give her pleasure that was close to pain. He drew forth cries for help, pleas, tender exclamations of surprise. The more he played the stranger, the more the pleasure intensified and deepened, until a mysterious sense of hearing developed in his fingertips, in every cell of his body, enabling him to know precisely what would feel good to her, as if he had planted a spy inside the dark network of nerves of her spinal column. Or as if he had become one flesh with her. Until they ceased to touch and be touched like a man and woman, and became a single being quenching its thirst. That afternoon he felt not like a man having intercourse with a young woman but as if he had always lived inside her womb, that her womb was now not hers but theirs, his penis not his but theirs, his skin enveloping not his body but theirs.
In the early evening they dressed and went for a walk in one of the verdant valleys on the side of Mount Carmel. They strolled until nightfall among the luxuriant vegetation without talking or touching, until a night bird repeated to them a short, poignant phrase which Fima imitated to perfection, and Yael, with a warm low laugh, said, Do you have any plausible explanation, good sir, why it should be that I suddenly love you, even though we’re not blood relations or anything like that?
He opened his eyes and saw his ex-wife, shrunken, almost shrivelled, an ageing Giulietta Masina, in grey cords and a dark red sweater, still standing with her back to him folding teatowels. It’s not possible, he thought, that she’s got so many teatowels that she can go on folding them forever. Unless she’s refolding them because she wasn’t satisfied with the way she did it the first time. So he stood up like a man who knows exactly what to do, and embraced her from behind, putting one hand over her mouth and the other over her eyes, and kissed the nape of her neck, the roots of her hair, her back. An odour of plain toilet soap mixed with a hint of tobacco from Ted’s pipe reached his nostrils, dizzying him with a vague desire, along with a sadness that snuffed it out. He picked up her thin little girl’s body in his arms, and just as he had carried her son two nights before, he carried Yael now and laid her on the same bed in her bedroom, and just as he had stroked Dimi, he now stroked her cheek. But he did not attempt to remove the counterpane, nor did he try to take off his clothes or hers, but he pressed himself against her along the whole length of their bodies and buried her head in the hollow of his shoulder. Instead of saying I’ve missed you, he was so tired that he whispered I’ve messed you. They lay side by side, close but not embracing, motionless, speechless, his body’s warmth radiating into hers and hers into his. Until she whispered to him: Right. Now be good and go.
Fima silently obeyed. He got up and found his coat, drank the remains of his second coffee, which had gone cold like its predecessor. She told me to go into town and buy an aquarium and some tropical fish for Dimi, he thought to himself, so that’s what I’ll do. On his way out he managed to close the door behind him so carefully that it did not make the slightest so
und. Then, as he walked northwards, the same silence continued in the street and in his thoughts. He walked slowly the whole length of Hehalutz Street, to his own surprise trying to whistle the tune of the old song about the man they called Johnny Guitar. There, he said to himself, you could say that everything’s lost or you could say that nothing’s lost, and the two things are definitely not mutually exclusive. The situation seemed strange yet wonderful: he had not slept with his wife, yet he felt no lack in his body but rather the opposite, an exhilaration, an elation, a fulfilment, as though in some mysterious way there really had been a deep and accurate intercourse between them. And as if in that intercourse with her he had finally begotten his son, his only son.
But in what sense?
The question seemed meaningless. In a senseless sense. So what.
When he reached Herzl Street, the fine rain reminded him that he had left his cap behind at Yael’s, on the edge of the kitchen table. But he was not anxious, because he knew he would return. He still had to explain to her and to Dimi, and why not to Ted too, the secret of the Third State. But not now. Not today. There was no hurry. Even when he thought of Yoezer and the other reasonable, sane people who would live in Jerusalem instead of us a hundred years from now, he felt no anguish, but, on the contrary, a sort of shy inner smile. What’s the matter? What’s the hurry? Let them wait. Let them wait quietly for their turn. We definitely haven’t concluded bur business here yet. It’s a slow business, a rotten business, there’s no denying it, but one way or another we still haven’t said our last word.