by Amos Oz
Yoel therefore picked up the plate with Tsippy's cake on it from the coffee table, inspected it closely, seeing mountains, valleys, and craters, hesitated, and suddenly visualized the temple garden in Bangkok three years before. Her straw bag like a barrier on the stone seat between his body and hers. The cornices covered with brightly colored ceramic mosaics with twisted golden horns, the gigantic wall mosaics that went on for several meters displaying scenes from the life of the Buddha in childish hues that were at variance with the melancholy, calm features, the carved stone monsters contorting before his eyes in the scorching equatorial light, lions with dragons' bodies, dragons with tigers' heads, tigers with serpents' tails, something that looked like flying jellyfish, wild combinations of monstrous deities, gods with four identical faces looking to the four winds and with many limbs, columns standing on six elephants each, pagodas twirling heavenward like thirsty fingers, apes and gold, ivory, and peacocks, and at that instant he knew that he must not err this time, because he had made enough errors in the past and others had paid for them. That the heavy, shrewd man with cloudy eyes, who was sometimes code-named his brother, and the other man in the room, a man who had once frustrated the massacre of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra by a gang of terrorists, were both his mortal enemies and that he must not let himself be taken in by their smooth talk or fall into their traps. It was they who had taken Ivria from him, it was because of them that Netta—And now it was his turn. This Spartan room, this whole modest building surrounded by a high stone wall and hidden by a dense row of cypresses, penned in behind much taller new buildings, and even the National Fund collection box with the flyspecks on it, and the giant Larousse-Gallimard globe, and the single ancient telephone, a square black telephone from the 1950s made, perhaps, of Bakelite, its numbers yellowed and half-erased in their holes, and outside waited the corridor whose walls had at long last been lined with cheap sheeting made to look like wood over a layer of acoustic insulation, and even the cheap noisy air-conditioning in Tsippy's office and the promise of her undying love—everything was against him and everything here was set to trap him cunningly, with honeyed lips and perhaps also with veiled threats, and if he was not careful he would be left with nothing or there would be nothing left of him; until then they would not let him be; or perhaps it would be so anyhow, even if he was as careful as he possibly could be. Rest in peace, Yoel said to himself, moving his lips.
"Pardon?"
"Nothing. Just thinking."
Facing him, in the other wicker armchair, the middle-aged youth with the tight, drumlike paunch also sat saying nothing. They called him the Acrobat here, although his appearance did not in the least suggest the circus or the Olympic Games; he looked more like a Labor Party veteran, a former pioneer and road builder who had risen over the years to become manager of a cooperative store or a regional boss in a dairy collective.
Meanwhile Le Patron saw fit to allow the silence to continue up to the precise moment that he sensed to be the right one. Then he leaned forward and asked softly, almost without disturbing the silence:
"What do you say, Yoel?"
"If the tiny favor is that I come back to work, the answer's negative. That's final."
Again the Acrobat began to shake his head slowly from side to side, as though refusing to believe his own ears, and while he did so, with long pauses, he once again uttered four times the word "tsk."
Teacher said:
"Bon. We'll let it go for the time being. We'll come back to it later. We'll drop it on condition you go and meet your lady friend this week. If it turns out that she can offer, this time, even a quarter of what she granted you last time, then I can afford to send you for a romantic reunion with her even in a gold carriage drawn by white horses."
"Buffalo," said Yoel.
"Pardon?"
"Buffalo. I believe that's the correct plural. You don't see horses in Bangkok, white or otherwise. Everything that's drawn is drawn by buffalo. Or oxen. Or a similar beast called a banteng."
"And I have no particular objection, if you see a reasonable need, you can feel free to reveal to her even the maiden name of your step-great-grandmother on your in-laws' cousin's side. Silence, Ostashinsky. Don't interrupt."
"Just a minute," said Yoel, unconsciously running his finger, as he often did, between his shirt collar and his neck. "You haven't drawn me into anything, yet. I'll need to think it over."
"My dear Yoel," Le Patron began, as though embarking on a eulogy, "you are most mistaken if you have formed the impression that freedom of choice exists here. We do uphold such freedom, with certain reservations, but not in this particular instance. Because of the excitement that you apparently aroused last time in this lovely lady, the ex-wife of you-know-who, the goodies she heaped on you and indeed on us, there are a fair number of people who are alive today, and not merely alive but living it up, without suspecting even in their wildest dreams that were it not for those goodies they would be defunct. So we're not talking about a choice between a romantic cruise and a holiday in Bermuda. We're talking about a job of a hundred or a hundred and five hours from door to door."
"Just give me a moment," Yoel said wearily. He closed his eyes. For six and a half hours Ivria had waited for him in vain at Ben-Gurion Airport one winter's morning in '72 when they had arranged to meet at the inland terminal to catch a flight to Sharm-esh-Sheikh for a holiday together and he hadn't been able to find a safe way to let her know that he would be late coming back from Madrid because at the last moment he'd managed to pick up a lead, which had turned out after a couple of days to be a complete dead end, a waste of time. And after waiting for six and a half hours she had got up and gone home to relieve Lisa, who was looking after Netta, at that time eighteen months old. When Yoel got home at four o'clock the following morning she was waiting for him, sitting at the kitchen table in her white clothes, with a glass of long-cold tea in front of her, and without raising her eyes from the oilcloth she had said, Don't bother to explain; you're so tired and disappointed and I can understand you even without explanations. Many years later when the Asiatic woman had left him in the temple garden in Bangkok he had experienced exactly the same peculiar sensation: someone was waiting for him, but they wouldn't wait forever and if he was late it would be too late. But for the life of him he could not discover where in that miserable, ornamental city the woman had vanished to; she had simply been swallowed up in the crowd after imposing on him a decisive condition, to break off contact forever, which he had accepted and had promised; so how could he chase after her now even if he knew where?
"When do you need to have my answer by?" he asked.
"Now, Yoel," said Teacher with a sort of grimness Yoel had never seen in him before. "Now, there's nothing to soul-search about. We're sparing you all that. We're not giving you any choice."
"I need to think it over," he insisted.
"By all means," the man conceded at once. "Think it over. Why not? Think about it until you've finished Tsippy's cake. After that go along to Operations with the Acrobat, and they'll sit down with the two of you to work out the details. I forgot to mention that the Acrobat is going to be your launcher."
Yoel lowered his aching eyes toward his feet. As though, to his great confusion, they had suddenly started speaking to him in Urdu, that language in which, according to Vermont, the meaning of each word depends on whether it is read from right to left or vice versa. Unenthusiastically he took a single forkful of the cake. The sweetness and creaminess filled him with sudden rage, and without moving in his chair he began to struggle and writhe like a fish that has swallowed the bait, the hook catching in his flesh. He visualized the sticky lukewarm monsoon in a Bangkok swathed in warm mist. The slurping sound of the lush tropical vegetation swollen with poisonous sap. The buffalo sinking in the mud of the narrow street, and the elephant drawing a cart laden with bamboo and the parrots in the treetops and the little long-tailed monkeys leaping around and making faces. The wooden shacks in the slums and t
he stagnant sewage in the streets, the thick creepers, the flights of bats even before the last light of day dies away, the crocodile raising its snout from the water of the canal, the glow of the air rent by the humming of millions of insects, the giant ficus trees and maples, the magnolias and rhododendrons, the mangroves in the morning mist, the forests of mahogany trees, the undergrowth teeming with ravenous creatures, the plantations of bananas and rice and sugarcane rising from the shallow mud of fields flooded with foul water, and rising over everything dirty, glowing steam. There her cool fingers were waiting for him; if he allowed himself to be beguiled into going, he might never come back, and if he refused to obey, he might be too late. Slowly, with particular gentleness, he put the plate down on the arm of the wicker chair. And standing up he said: "Well. I've thought. The answer's negative."
"Exceptionally"—Le Patron pronounced the word with emphatic, measured politeness, and Yoel felt he noticed the French background lilt growing slightly, almost imperceptibly, stronger—"exceptionally, and against my better judgment"—he nodded his chin up and down as though lamenting over something that was irreparably broken—"I shall wait," and he shot a glance at his watch, "I shall wait another twenty-four hours for a rational answer. By the way, do you happen to have any idea what the problem is with you?"
"Personal," said Yoel, ripping out with a single inner motion the hook embedded in his flesh.
"Get over it. We'll help you. Now you go straight home without stopping on the way and tomorrow morning at eleven o'clock"—again he glanced at his watch—"at ten past eleven o'clock, I'll give you a call. And I'll send someone to fetch you for a meeting with Operations. You'll leave first thing Wednesday morning. The Acrobat will be your launcher. I'm sure you'll work splendidly together. As always. Ostashinsky, will you apologize nicely? And you can also finish the piece of cake that Yoel's left. Good-bye. Take care on the way. And don't forget to give Netta an old man's fondest love."
25
But the man decided not to wait till the following morning. The same day, in the late afternoon, his Renault appeared in the little street in Ramat Lotan. He walked around it twice, tried all the doors twice to make sure they were properly locked, and finally turned toward the garden path. Yoel was there, bare to the waist and perspiring, pushing the rumbling lawnmower. Over its roaring he made a sign to the visitor: Hang on. Nearly finished. The visitor in turn signaled: Switch off, and Yoel, by force of twenty-three years' habit, obediently switched off the mower. A sudden silence fell.
"I've come to solve the personal problem you were hinting at. If the problem is Netta—"
"I'm sorry," said Yoel, realizing at once from his experience that this was the precise moment of crisis and decision. "It's a pity to waste our time, because I'm not going, and that's final. I've told you already. And as for my private affairs, well, they happen to be just that—private. Full stop. On the other hand, if you've just come around for a game of checkers, why not go inside; I believe Netta has just come out of the shower and she's sitting in the living room. Sorry I'm not free."
With these words he tugged on the starter cord and at once the earsplitting roar of the lawnmower broke out again and silenced the visitor's reply. He turned and went into the house, and emerged a quarter of an hour later, by which time Yoel had moved over to the corner of lawn at the side of the house, under Lisa's and Avigail's windows. He mowed this little corner doggedly a second, a third, and a fourth time, until the Renault had disappeared. Only then did he switch off the motor, put the machine away in the garden shed, get out a rake, and start piling the grass cuttings into precisely equal little heaps; and he continued doing this even after Netta came out, barefoot, her eyes flashing, wearing a loose shirt over baggy pants, and asked him without preamble whether his refusal was in some way connected with her. Yoel said, What on earth, and after a moment he corrected himself and said, Well as a matter of fact perhaps yes, a little, but not in the narrow sense of course, that is, not because there's any problem about leaving you. There's no problem at all about that. And after all, you're not alone here.
"So what is your problem," Netta said, as a statement, delivered with a touch of scorn. "Isn't this meant to be a fateful journey to save the homeland or something?"
"Well. I've done my share," he said. He smiled at his daughter, although it was rare for a smile to pass between them. She replied with a bright expression that struck him as new and yet not new, including a very faint quiver at the corner of the lips that used to show on her mother's face when she was young, whenever she was straining to conceal emotion. "Look. It's like this. It's very simple. I'm through with that madness. Tell me, do you remember, Netta, what Vitkin used to say to you when he used to drop in to play his guitar of an evening? Do you remember his words? He used to say, I've come in search of signs of life. And that's where I've got to. That's what I'm in search of now. But there's no hurry. Tomorrow is another day. I feel like sitting at home and doing nothing for another few months. Or years. Or forever. Until I manage to discover what's going on. Or what it's all about. Or am convinced, from personal experience, that it's impossible to discover anything. So be it. We'll see."
"You're a funny character," she said earnestly, almost with a kind of suppressed enthusiasm. "But you might just happen to be right about this particular trip. Either way, you'll suffer. So suit yourself. Don't go. Stay here. I quite like it that you're around the house all day, or in the garden, or that sometimes you turn up in the kitchen in the middle of the night. You're rather nice sometimes. Only stop looking at me like that. No, don't go in yet. Just for a change I'll make supper for us all tonight. 'Us all'—that means you and me, because the grannies have walked out on us. They've got a party at the Sharon Hotel for Open Heart for Immigrants; they'll be back late."
26
The simple, open, habitual things—the morning chill, the scent of burned thistles wafted from the nearby citrus grove, the chirping of the swallows before sunrise on the branches of the apple tree now rusting from autumn's touch, the shudder from the chill on his bare shoulders, the scent of watered soil, the savor of the light at dawn, which soothed his aching eyes; the recollection of their overwhelming desire in the night in the orchard on the edge of Metullah and of the shame in the attic, the guitar of the dead Eviatar or Itamar that in the darkness seemingly continued to produce the sound of a cello; the thought that, seemingly, they died together in an accident with their arms around each other, if it really was an accident; the thought of the moment he drew his gun in the crowded bus terminal in Athens; forests of dimly lighted conifers in Annemarie and Ralph's home; miserable Bangkok swathed in thick steaming tropical mist; Krantz's wooing, the eagerness to be friends and to make himself helpful and indispensable—whatever he pondered or remembered seemed at times enigmatic. In everything, as Teacher put it, there could at times be discerned signs of things being beyond repair. "Retarded chick that she was," Shealtiel Lublin used to say about Eve; "where were her brains? She ought to have eaten an apple from the other tree. But the joke is, before she could have the brains to eat from the second tree she had to eat from the first one. And that's how we all got screwed up." Yoel pictured the image conjured up by the word "indubitably." And he also tried to envisage the meaning of the phrase "thunderbolt out of a clear sky." It seemed to him that by these efforts he was somehow fulfilling his allotted task. Yet he knew he lacked the power to find an answer to a question that in fact he had not managed to formulate. Or even to understand. And that was why so far he had not deciphered anything, and apparently never would. On the other hand, he found pleasure in preparing the garden for the approaching winter. At Bardugo's Nurseries at Ramat Lotan junction he bought saplings and seeds and pesticides and some sacks of fertilizer. He was leaving the pruning of the roses till January-February, but he already had a plan. Meanwhile he was turning over the flower beds with a fork he found near the cat and her kittens in the garden shed, and digging in the concentrated fertilizer, deriving a physical
thrill from inhaling its sharp, provocative smell. He planted a ring of assorted chrysanthemums. And also carnations, gladiolus, and snapdragons. He pruned the fruit trees. He sprayed the edges of the lawn with weed killer to make them as straight as a ruler. He returned the sprayer to Arik Krantz, who was delighted to come over to collect it and have coffee with Yoel. He trimmed the hedge both on his side and on the Vermonts', who were once again wrestling laughingly on their lawn, panting like a pair of puppies. In the meantime the days grew shorter, the evenings drew in earlier, the night chill intensified, and a sort of strange orange vapor encompassed the glow of lights that hung over Tel Aviv at night beyond the neighboring rooftops. He felt no urge to go into the city, which was, as Krantz had said, at his very fingertips. He had almost entirely given up his nocturnal expeditions too. Instead, he sowed sweet peas in the thin soil along the walls of the house. There was peace and calm again between Avigail and Lisa. In addition to their voluntary work five mornings a week in the institution for deaf-mutes on the edge of the suburb, they had started attending the local yoga class every Monday and Thursday evening. As for Netta, she remained faithful to the Cinémathèque, but she had also signed up for a lecture series on the history of Expressionism at the Tel Aviv Museum. Only her interest in thistles seemed to have disappeared forever. Even though just at the end of their street, in the strip of wasteland between the end of the asphalt and the wire fence around the citrus grove, the late-summer thistles were turning yellow and gray, and some of them as they expired produced a kind of savage death-blossom. Yoel wondered if there was any connection between the end of her passion for thistles and the little surprise she sprang on him one Friday afternoon, when the neighborhood was empty and quiet as the light turned gray and there was no sound to be heard apart from the faint, pleasant sound of recorder music through a closed window in another house. Clouds came down almost to the treetops and from seaward the thunder sounded dully, as though smothered by the clouds' cotton wool. On the concrete path, Yoel had laid out little black plastic bags, each containing a carnation plant, and started planting them one by one in holes he had prepared previously, advancing from the outside inward toward the door of the house, when suddenly there was his daughter planting from the inside outward. That night, around midnight, when Ralph had led him flabbily, joyfully home from Annemarie's bed, he found his daughter waiting for him in the entrance hall bearing a cup of herbal tea on a little tray. How she had known the precise moment of his return and that he would come back thirsty, and for herbal tea of all things, Yoel could not understand and it did not occur to him to ask. They sat down in the kitchen and chatted for a quarter of an hour about her examinations and about the intensification of the debate about the future of the occupied territories. When she went to her bedroom to sleep he accompanied her as far as her door and complained in a whisper, so as not to wake the old ladies, that he had nothing interesting to read. Netta thrust a book of poetry called Blues and Reds by Amir Gilboa into his hand, and Yoel, who was not a reader of poetry, leafed through it in bed until close to two o'clock, and among others he found on page 360 a poem that really said something to him, even though he did not entirely understand it. Later that night the first rains began to fall, and continued without interruption for most of Saturday.