by Amos Oz
Once, he had dragged Yoel into the bedroom in Metullah and lectured him in a low, smoke-wrecked voice: "Listen. A man spends three-quarters of his life running wherever the tip of his prick happens to be pointing. As though you're a new recruit and he's the sergeant. Attention! Run! Jump! Attack! If only our pricks would release us from this compulsory service at the end of two, three, five years, then each of us would have enough time left to write the poems of Pushkin or to invent electricity. However hard you try for him, he's never satisfied. He'll never leave you in peace. Give him steak, he'll want schnitzel. Give him schnitzel, he'll want caviar. It's lucky for us that God took pity on us and only gave us one of them. Imagine what it would be like if you had to spend fifty years of your life feeding and clothing and heating and entertaining five of them." Having spoken, he began to gurgle and choke, and at once swathed himself in the smoke of a new cigar. Until he finally died at half past four one summer's morning sitting on the toilet, with his trousers down and a lighted cigar between his fingers. Yoel almost knew the joke that Lublin would have remembered and then burst out coughing if the same thing had happened to somebody else—to Yoel, for instance. Perhaps he had managed to see the funny side of his death and gone off laughing. His son Nakdimon was a clumsy, taciturn youth who had always had a talent for catching venomous snakes. He could milk their venom, which he sold for making serum. Though he apparently held extreme political views, most of his acquaintances were Arabs. When sitting among Arabs he would be seized suddenly by a frenetic urge to speak, which vanished as soon as he changed back to Hebrew. His relations with Yoel and even with his sister, Ivria, were those of a tightfisted, suspicious peasant. On the rare occasions when he came to Jerusalem, he used to bring them a present of a can of his own olive oil or a dried Galilee thistle for Netta's collection. It was almost impossible to make him say anything beyond his fixed two- or three-word answers such as "Yes, sort of" or "Never mind" or "Yes, thank God," and even these came out of his mouth with a sort of truculent whine, as though he instantly regretted having let himself be lured into replying at all. He addressed his mother, sister, and niece, if at all, as "girls." Yoel, for his part, was in the habit of addressing Nakdimon the same way he had addressed his late father: he called them both Lublin, because he found their forenames ridiculous. Ever since Ivria's funeral, Nakdimon had not been to see them once. Although Avigail and Netta sometimes used to visit him and his sons in Metullah, and come back in a state of faint infatuation. On Passover Eve, Lisa also joined them, and she said on her return: "One has to know how to live." Yoel was secretly glad he had refused to succumb and had chosen to spend the holiday alone at home. He had watched television and gone to sleep at half past eight and slept deeply until nine o'clock the next morning, as he had not slept for ages.
He had still not entirely accepted the view that when it comes to it, we all have the same secrets. But it no longer made him feel angry. Now, as he stood in his garden with the empty street bathed in white summer sunlight, he sensed, like a pang of longing, the following thought: Maybe we do, maybe we don't, but either way we'll never know. When she used to whisper compassionately to him at night "I understand you," what had she meant by it? What had she understood? He had never asked her. Now it was too late. Perhaps the time had really come to sit down and write the poems of Pushkin or invent electricity? Unconsciously, as he moved the hose in gentle circular motions from plant to plant, he suddenly let out of his chest a strange low sound, not unlike the gurgling of Lublin senior. He was remembering the deceptive patterns that had appeared, disappeared, and transformed themselves as though playing hide-and-seek with him on the wallpaper that night in the hotel room in Frankfurt.
A girl passed along the street in front of him carrying a heavy shopping basket and clutching two large bags to her breast with her other hand. An Asian girl, a maid who had been imported by some wealthy neighbors to live in a small self-contained apartment and look after their home. She was petite and slightly built, yet she carried the shopping basket and the bulging bags without visible effort. She glided past as though the laws of gravity had given her a discount. Why not turn off the water, catch up, and offer to help her carry her shopping? Or else behave like a father with his daughter: bar her way, take the bags out of her hands, and walk her home while striking up a light conversation on the way? For a moment Yoel could feel on his chest the pain of the bags pressed against her breast. But she would be startled, she wouldn't understand, she might think he was a thief, or a pervert; the neighbors would get to hear and tongues would wag. Not that he cared: in any case, the other residents of the little street had probably already started gossiping about him and his ways. But with his sharp, well-honed senses, and thanks to his professional training, he accurately estimated the distance and time and realized that before he could catch her she would already have slipped indoors. Unless he were to run. And he had always disliked running.
She was very young, beautifully shaped, with a wasp waist, her profuse black hair almost concealing her face, her torso squeezed into a flowery cotton dress with a long zipper down the back. By the time he had finished inspecting the curve of her legs and her thighs she had disappeared from view. His eyes suddenly burned. Yoel closed them and imagined an Asian shantytown, in Rangoon or Seoul or Manila, masses of little homes built of corrugated iron and plywood and cardboard, stacked and huddled one against the other, half-sinking in the thick tropical mud. A filthy, stifling alley with an open drain running down the middle. Mangy dogs and cats being chased by sickly, barefoot, dark-skinned toddlers dressed in rags, paddling in the stagnant sewage. A broad, docile old ox standing harnessed with rough ropes to a miserable cart, its wooden wheels sinking into the sludge. And everything drenched in pungent, suffocating odors, with a sort of warm tropical rain pouring down ceaselessly over everything. Drumming on the carcass of a rusting jeep like a muffled salvo of gunfire. And there, propped up on the slashed driver's seat of the jeep, is the limbless cripple from Helsinki, as white as an angel and smiling as if he knows.
13
Just then a vague banging noise came from the direction of Netta's window, along with coughing sounds. Yoel opened his eyes. He played the hose on his bare feet, washed off the mud, turned off the water, and took large strides. By the time he was indoors the gurglings and spasms had stopped, and he knew that the problem was a minor one. The girl was lying on the rug in the fetal position. The fainting fit had softened her features, so that for a moment she looked almost pretty. He placed two pillows under her head and shoulders to ensure that she could breathe freely. He went out and came back and put a glass of water on the table with two pills that he would give her when she came around. Then, unnecessarily, he spread a white sheet over her body and sat by her head, on the floor, clasping his knees with his arms. He had not touched her.
The girl's eyes were shut but not tightly, her lips were half-open, her body was frail and calm under the sheet. He realized now how she had sprouted up over these past months. He noticed the long eyelashes that she had inherited from her mother and the high smooth brow that she had inherited from his own mother. For an instant he felt like taking advantage of her sleep and the solitude to kiss her earlobes as he used to do when she was little. As he had done to her mother. Because she looked now like that child with the knowing eyes who had sprawled quietly on a mat in a corner of the room fixing grown-ups with an almost ironic look, as though she understood everything, including things that could not be expressed in words, and as though it was only her tact and sensitivity that prevented her from speaking. The baby he had always taken with him on all his travels in a little picture-wallet in his inside jacket pocket.
For six months now Yoel had been hoping that the trouble had vanished. That the disaster had brought about a change. That Ivria had been right and he had been wrong. He vaguely recalled that such a possibility was indeed mentioned here and there in the medical literature he had read. One of the doctors had talked to him once, not in the pr
esence of Ivria, and with many reservations, about a certain possibility that adolescence would bring about a recovery. Or at least a considerable improvement. And indeed, since Ivria's death there had been no incident.
Incident? At that moment he was overwhelmed with bitterness. She wasn't here any more. From now on we can stop saying "problem" and "incident." From now on we can say "attack." He almost spoke the word aloud. The censorship was lifted. Finished. The sea doesn't run away. From now on we'll use the proper word. And at once, with mounting rage, with a violent, angry gesture, he bent over to dislodge a fly that was traveling over the pallid cheek.
The first time it had happened was when Netta was four. One day she had been standing at the washbasin in the bathroom bathing a plastic doll when she had suddenly fallen backward. Yoel remembered the horror of the open, upturned eyes, showing only the blood-flecked whites. The bubbling foam at the corners of the mouth. The paralysis that had taken hold of him even though he realized that he ought to run and call for help. Despite everything he had been taught in his years of training and work, he had not managed to uproot his feet or remove his eyes from the little girl, because he had the impression that a shadow of a smile appeared and reappeared on her face, as though she were straining not to laugh. It was Ivria, not he, who had managed to pull herself together first and rush to the telephone. He had unfrozen only when he heard the ambulance siren. Then he had snatched his daughter from Ivria's arms and run down the steps and stumbled and bumped his head on the railing and everything had gone misty. By the time he had waked up in the emergency ward Netta had recovered consciousness.
Ivria had said to him quietly: "I'm surprised at you." And left it at that.
The next day he had had to go to Milan for five days. By the time he returned the doctors had already reached a provisional diagnosis and the girl had been sent home. Ivria had refused to accept the diagnosis, had refused to administer the drugs that had been prescribed, had clung stubbornly to what seemed to her a hint of a certain disagreement between the doctors, or an impression that one of them had doubts about his colleagues' opinion. She threw the medicines he bought straight into the trash. Yoel said: You're out of your mind. And she, with a calm smile, had replied: Look who's talking.
When he was away she had dragged Netta from one private specialist to the next, had consulted famous professors, then psychologists of various schools, therapists, and finally, despite his opposition, all kinds of witch doctors who advised various diets, exercises, cold showers, vitamins, mineral baths, mantras, and herbal infusions.
Every time he came back from one of his trips he used to go and buy the medicines all over again, and administer them to the child. But whenever he was away Ivria would get rid of them all. One day, in a fit of tearful rage, she forbade him ever to use the words "illness" and "attack." You're stigmatizing her. You're shutting her off from the world. You're signaling to her that you approve of the performance. You'll destroy her. There is a problem, so Ivria used to formulate it, but in fact it's not Netta's problem; it's our problem. In the end he yielded to her and got into the habit of using the word "problem" himself. He saw no sense in quarreling with his wife over a word. And as a matter of fact, Ivria would say, the problem isn't with her or even with us, but with you, Yoel. Because the moment you go away, it disappears. No audience—no performance. It's a fact.
Was it really a fact? Yoel was filled with doubts. For some reason that was unclear to him he refrained from clarifying it. Was he afraid that it would become clear that Ivria was right? Or, on the contrary, that she was wrong?
The arguments initiated by Ivria arose every time the problem occurred. And also between occurrences. When she finally despaired, after a few months, of her witch doctors and quacks, she nonetheless proceeded with a sort of lunatic logic to blame him and him alone. She demanded that he stop his traveling, or, on the contrary, that he go away forever. Make up your mind, she said, what really matters to you. Such a hero against women and children, sticking the knife in and running away.
Once, in his presence, during a fit, she started to beat the motionless child on her face, her back, her head. He was shocked. He begged, he pleaded, he asked her to stop. Finally he was compelled for the only time in his life to use force to stop her. He grabbed her arms, bent them up behind her back, and dragged her into the kitchen. When she stopped resisting and dropped onto a stool as limp as a rag doll, he raised his hand unnecessarily and hit her hard across the face. It was only then that he noticed that the child was awake and was leaning against the kitchen doorjamb, watching the two of them with a sort of cool scientific curiosity. Ivria, panting, pointed to the girl and spat at him: "There. Now look." He hissed through his teeth: "Tell me, are you totally insane?" And Ivria replied: "No. I'm clean off my rocker—for agreeing to live with a murderer. You ought to know that, Netta. A murderer, that's his profession."
14
Next winter, in his absence, she made up her mind, packed a couple of suitcases, took Netta, and went to live with her mother, Avigail, and her brother, Nakdimon, in the house where she was born in Metullah. When he got back from Bucharest on the last day of Hanukkah he found the apartment empty. On the clean kitchen table there were two notes waiting for him, side by side, one under the salt and the other under the matching pepper shaker. One was an opinion from some Russian immigrant, according to his letterhead a world expert in bioenergetic therapy and a telekinetic counselor, who certified in broken Hebrew that "Miss Niuta Raviv is free from illness epilepsia and suffers only deprivation, signed Dr. Nikodim Shaliapin." The other note was from Ivria, and declared, in firm round writing: "We are in Metullah. You can call but don't come."
He obediently stayed away all that winter. Perhaps he was hoping that when the problem reared its head there, in Metullah, without his presence, Ivria would be forced to come to her senses. Or perhaps, on the contrary, he was hoping that the problem would not appear, and that Ivria, as usual, would turn out to be right after all.
Then at the beginning of the spring they both came back to Jerusalem, laden with flowers in pots and other presents from Galilee. A good period ensued. His wife and daughter almost competed with each other to pamper him each time he came home from a trip. The little one used to leap on him as soon as he sat down, pull off his shoes, and put his slippers on his feet. Ivria revealed hidden culinary skills, and amazed him with inspired dinners. He, not to be outdone, insisted on doing things around the house between trips, just as he had done through the winter while they were away. He made sure the refrigerator was stocked. He combed the delicatessens of Jerusalem in search of peppery salami and unusual ewes' milk cheeses. Once or twice he broke his own rules and brought a cheese or a sausage home from Paris. One day, without saying a word to Ivria, he replaced their black-and-white television with a color set. Ivria retorted by changing the curtains. For their wedding anniversary she bought him a stereo player of his own, in addition to the one in the living room. And they often took his car and went away for the weekend.
The girl had grown in Metullah. And filled out a little. In the set of her jaw he thought he identified a Lublin family trait that had skipped Ivria and reappeared in Netta. Her hair was longer. He brought her a magnificent cashmere sweater from London, and for Ivria he brought a knitted suit. His discerning eye and good taste in selecting women's clothes had caused Ivria to say, more than once, You could have gone a long way as a fashion designer. Or as a set designer.
What had happened in Metullah that winter he neither knew nor attempted to discover. His wife seemed to be undergoing a late flowering. Had she found a lover? Or had the fruit of Lublin's land refreshed her inner juices, made her sap rise? She had changed her hairstyle: she had a fetching ponytail now. She had learned to make up her face for the first time, and did it tastefully and with restraint. She had bought a spring dress with a daringly low neckline, and underneath it she sometimes wore a style of underwear that had not suited her before. Sometimes, as they sat at the kit
chen table late in the evening and she peeled a peach and put each slice to her mouth and seemed to test it carefully with her lips before starting to chew, Yoel could not take his eyes off her. She had also started using a new perfume. So began their Indian summer.
Several times he entertained a suspicion that she was passing on to him what she had learned from another man. To atone for this suspicion, he took her for a four-day holiday to a hotel on the Ashkelon coast. All the years so far they had always made love earnestly, in a concentrated silence; from now on they sometimes did it convulsed with laughter.
But Netta's problem did not go away, although it may have decreased.
Nevertheless, the arguments ceased.
Yoel was not certain if he should believe what his wife told him—that throughout that winter in Metullah there had been no sign of the problem. He could easily have found out, without Ivria or the Lublins knowing that he was looking into the matter; his profession had taught him to crack more complicated cases than this one without leaving a trace. But he preferred not to investigate. To himself he merely said: Why shouldn't I believe her?
Nevertheless he did ask her, on one of those good nights, in a whisper: Who did you learn this from? Your lover? Ivria laughed in the dark and said: What would you do if you knew? Go and murder him without leaving a trace? Yoel said: On the contrary, he deserves a bottle of brandy and a bunch of flowers for teaching you so well. Who's the lucky winner? Ivria let out one of her crystal laughs before answering: With your sharp eyes you'll go far. He hesitated for a moment before getting the point and joining guardedly in the laughter.
And so, without explanations or heart-to-heart talks, as though of their own accord, the new rules were fixed. A new consideration prevailed. Neither of them broke it, not even by mistake, not even in a moment of abstraction. No more witch doctors, et cetera. No more complaints and recriminations. On condition that the problem must not be mentioned. Not even obliquely. If it happened—it happened. And that's that. Not a word must be said.