by Amos Oz
After ten days or so, since no one had said anything about the picture of Ivria that she had put up, Lisa placed next to it a photograph of Shealtiel Lublin, with his bushy walrus mustache and British policeman's uniform. It was the picture that had always stood on the desk of Ivria's study in Jerusalem.
Avigail knocked at Yoel's door. She entered and found him hunched over Mr. Kramer's desk. His priest's glasses lent him a scholarly or monkish air. He was copying key passages from the book about the Chief of Staff onto his grid.
"Sorry to intrude, but we must have a little talk about your mother's condition."
"I'm listening," said Yoel, putting his pen down on the sheet of paper and leaning back in his chair.
"We can't brush it aside. It would be quite wrong to pretend that she's entirely normal."
"Go on," he said.
"Haven't you got eyes, Yoel? Can't you see that she's getting more and more scatterbrained by the day? Yesterday she swept the garden path, and then she just went on and started sweeping the street. She was twenty yards from the gate before I stopped her and brought her back. If it hadn't been for me, she would have gone on sweeping all the way to the city center."
"Is it the pictures in the living room that are bothering you, Avigail?"
"It's not the pictures. It's everything. All sorts of things that you, Yoel, insist on not noticing. You insist on pretending that everything's entirely normal. Just remember that you've already made that mistake once before. And we all paid a heavy price for that."
"Go on," he said.
"Have you noticed what's been happening to Netta these last few days, Yoel?"
Yoel replied in the negative.
"I knew you hadn't. Since when have you noticed anybody aside from yourself? It saddens me to have to say that I am not in the least surprised."
"Avigail. What's the matter? Please."
"Ever since Lisa started, Netta hasn't set foot in the living room. I'm telling you that she's starting to go downhill again. And I'm not blaming your mother; she's not responsible for what she does; no, the person who's responsible, apparently, is you. At least that's what the whole world thinks. Only she didn't think so.
"All right," said Yoel, "we'll look into the matter. We'll appoint a commission of inquiry. But the best thing would be if you and Lisa simply patched up your differences and that's that."
"Everything is so simple with you," Avigail said in her headmistress's voice. Yoel interrupted her:
"Can't you see, Avigail, I'm trying to get on with some work."
"I'm so sorry," she said icily. "Don't mind me with my little nonsense." She left, closing the door gently behind her.
Sometimes, after a fierce argument, late at night, Ivria used to whisper to him: "But just remember that I understand you." What had she been trying to communicate to him with those words? What had she understood? Yoel knew very well that there was no way of knowing. Even though right now the question was more important to him than ever, was almost urgent. He was smitten with a sharp longing for the cool touch of her fingers across his naked back and he also yearned to enfold those fingers in his clumsy hands and try to warm them, like reviving a frozen chick. Was it really only an accident? He almost jumped into the car and rushed straight to Jerusalem, to the block of apartments in Talbiyeh to inspect the electric wiring inside and outside, in order to decipher each minute, each second, each movement of that morning. But in his thoughts the block of apartments seemed to be floating among the notes of the melancholy guitar of that Itamar or Eviatar, and Yoel knew that the sadness would be more than he could bear. Instead of driving to Jerusalem he went to the truffle- and mushroom-laden forest next door, to Annemarie and Ralph's, and after supper and a Dubonnet and a country-music tape, Ralph escorted him to his sister's bed and Yoel didn't care whether Ralph stayed or left and he slept with her that evening not for pleasure but for warmth and pity, like a father stroking away his daughter's tears.
When he got back after midnight the house was dark and quiet. For an instant he was alarmed by the silence, as though sensing the closeness of a calamity. All the doors were closed inside except the living room's. He went in and, switching on the light, discovered that the photographs had disappeared and so had the Hanukkah menorah. And he was alarmed, because for an instant he thought that the figurine was gone too. But no, it had merely been moved slightly. It was standing at the end of the shelf. Yoel, fearing its fall, replaced it gently in the middle of the shelf. He knew he ought to find out which of the three had removed the pictures. And he knew that that investigation would not take place. Next morning at breakfast not a word was said about the disappearance of the photographs. Nor during the following days. Lisa and Avigail had made their peace again and went out together to the local keep-fit class and to meetings of the macramé circle. Sometimes they remarked sarcastically and in unison on Yoel's absentmindedness or on his never doing anything from morning to evening. Netta went out in the evenings to the Cinémathèque or the Tel Aviv Museum. Sometimes she went window-shopping to pass the time between two films. As for Yoel, he was compelled to drop his little investigation into the affair of the condemnation of Chief of Staff Elazar, even though he now had a strong suspicion that something had gone wrong with the proceedings at the time and that there had been a serious miscarriage of justice. But he recognized that without access to the actual evidence and the classified sources it would be impossible for him to discover how the blunder had occurred.
Meanwhile the winter rains had started up again, and one morning, as he went out to pick up the newspaper from the garden path, he found the cats on the kitchen veranda playing with the stiff corpse of a small bird which had died, apparently, of the cold.
33
One day in the middle of December, at three o'clock in the afternoon, Nakdimon Lublin arrived, wearing an army anorak and with his face red and chafed from the cold winds. He brought a present of a can of olive oil that he had produced himself in his improvised press at the north end of Metullah. He had also brought three or four late-summer thistles in a battered black case that had once housed a violin. He did not know that Netta had lost interest in collecting them.
He strode down the hall, peered suspiciously into each of the bedrooms in turn, located the living room, and entered it with firm steps, as though treading thick clods of earth. His thistles in their violin case and the can of olive oil wrapped in sacking he set down unhesitatingly in the center of the coffee table and discarded his anorak on the floor beside the armchair in which he sat down expansively, with legs outspread. As usual, he addressed the women as "girls" and Yoel as "Captain." He asked the monthly rent that Yoel paid for this "chocolate box." And now that they were on the subject of business, he drew a fat wad of crumpled fifty-shekel notes secured with a rubber band out of the back pocket of his pants and placed it wearily on the table. This was Avigail's and Yoel's semi-yearly share of income from the orchard and the guesthouse in Metullah, in accordance with Shealtiel Lublin's will. On the top note of the pile the sums involved were written out in thick figures, as though in a carpenter's pencil.
"And now," he drawled nasally, "yallah; wake up, girls. The man's starving to death."
In an instant the three of them were full of bustling activity, like ants whose entrance to their anthill has been blocked up. They began to rush around, barely managing to avoid bumping into one another in their haste, between the kitchen and the living room. The instant that Nakdimon deigned to remove his legs from the coffee table, a tablecloth was spread, and on it were laid, in a flash, plates, glasses, bottles, napkins, condiments, warm pita and pickles and knives and forks. Though lunch had been cleared away in the kitchen less than an hour earlier. Yoel watched in amazement, dumbstruck at the commanding power of this rough, red-faced, stocky man over these usually unsubmissive women. And he had to stifle his vague anger by saying to himself, Fool, surely you're not jealous.
"Bring out whatever you've got," the guest ordered in his slow, nas
al voice, "only don't start confusing me with decisions. 'Muhammad said, Make no mistake: When my belly's empty I'll swallow a snake.' You sit down here, Captain; leave the serving to the girls. You and I have to talk."
Yoel obediently sat down on the sofa facing his brother-in-law. "It's like this," said Nakdimon; then he changed his mind and said, "Hold it a minute." He stopped talking and concentrated for ten minutes with silent expertise on the roast chicken legs, potatoes baked in their jackets, salad and cooked vegetables that were placed before him, washing the whole down with beer, and between beers he downed two glasses of orange seltzer, the pita in his left hand doing duty by turns as spoon, fork, and background chewable, and he let out occasional belches of satisfaction with little sighs of pleasure in an abdominal bass.
Yoel watched him eat with thoughtful concentration, as though seeking in the guest's appearance some hidden detail that would confirm or disprove an old suspicion. There was something in this Lublin's jaws, or in his neck and shoulders, perhaps in his furrowed peasant hands, or in all together, that worked on Yoel like the recollection of an elusive tune that vaguely resembled another, older tune that had faded away. There was no resemblance between this stocky, red-faced man and his dead wife, who had been a slim, pale woman with delicate features and slow, introverted movements. Yoel was almost filled with rage, and at once he felt angry with himself for this rage, because over the years he had trained himself always to be cool. While he waited for Nakdimon to finish his meal, the women sat around the dining table as though in the dress circle, at a slight distance from the two men, who were sitting on opposite sides of the coffee table. Until the visitor had finished munching on his last bone and wiped his plate with pita and turned to demolish the apple compote, hardly a word was spoken in the room. Yoel sat facing his brother-in-law with his knees bent at right angles to the floor and his ugly hands lying open upon them. He looked like a retired fighter from an elite reconnaissance troop, with his strong suntanned face, his curly mop of metallic, prematurely gray hair standing out like a horn over his forehead without falling onto it, those wrinkles around his eyes suggesting a faint irony, the shadow of a smile that his lips did not participate in. In the course of the years he had acquired the ability to sit like that for a considerable length of time, as though in tragic repose, with his knees at right angles and on each of them an open hand lying motionless, with trunk erect but not tense, with shoulders relaxed, and with nothing moving in his face. Until Lublin dried his mouth on his sleeve and his sleeve with a paper napkin, on which he proceeded to blow his nose, then crumpled it up and threw it to drown slowly in a half-full glass of orange seltzer. Feeling sated he let out a sharp fart, like a door slamming, and then opened with almost the same words he had started with before beginning his meal: "OK. You see. It's like this."
It turned out that Avigail Lublin and Lisa Rabinovich, each without the other's knowledge, had written to Metullah at the beginning of the month about the question of erecting a tombstone on Ivria's grave in Jerusalem for the first anniversary of her death, the sixteenth of February. He would never do anything behind Yoel's back, and anyway, if it was up to him, he'd rather leave it to Yoel to deal with the whole business. Though he was willing to pay half. Or even the whole of it. It was all the same to him. She, his sister, when she went away, everything was all the same to her too. Otherwise she might have stayed. But what was the point of trying to get inside her head now. Anyway, with her, even when she was still alive, it was always No Entry from every direction. And because he had some business in Tel Aviv today—selling out his share in a trucking partnership, organizing some mattresses for the guesthouse, getting a permit for a small stone quarry—he had decided to look in on them to have a meal and sort out what needed to be done. That's the picture. So, what do you say, Captain?
"All right. A tombstone. Why not," Yoel replied calmly.
"Will you see to it, or shall I?"
"As you wish."
"Look. I've got a sound slab of stone from Kafr Ajer in my yard. Sort of black with flecks. About so high."
"OK. It'll do."
"Shouldn't we inscribe something on it?"
Avigail interposed:
"And we'd better decide on the wording quickly, before the end of the week; otherwise it won't be ready for the anniversary."
"It's wrong!" Lisa suddenly shouted harshly from her corner.
"What's wrong?"
"It's wrong to speak ill of the dead."
"And who's speaking ill of the dead?"
"The truth of the matter," Lisa replied defiantly, like an obstreperous schoolgirl who has made up her mind to embarrass the grown-ups, "the truth of the matter is that she never liked anybody much. It's not nice to say so, but it's even worse to tell lies. That's how it was. Maybe the only one she loved was her father. And nobody here thought about her a little. It would maybe be nicer for her to lie in a grave in Metullah next to her father than in Jerusalem with all sorts of simple people. But everybody here is only thinking about themselves."
"Girls," Nakdimon drawled drowsily, "would you mind letting us talk it over quietly for a couple of minutes. After that you can jabber away for all you're worth."
"All right," Yoel replied belatedly to an earlier question. "Netta, you're the literary department here, you compose something suitable and I'll have it inscribed on the stone that Lublin will bring. And that's the end of that. Tomorrow is another day."
"Don't touch that, girls," Nakdimon warned the women who were beginning to clear away the remains of the meal. He laid his hand on a small honey pot with a kind of canvas hat on it. "That's full of natural snake juice. I catch them in the winter when they're sleeping among the sacks in the shed, I milk a viper here, a viper there, and then I bring it to town and sell it. By the way, Captain, can you explain to me, why are you all squashed up together here?"
Yoel hesitated. He glanced at his watch and saw the angle between the two main hands, and even followed the little leaps of the second hand, but he didn't grasp what the time was. Then he replied that he didn't understand the question.
"The whole clan in the same hole. What is this? One on top of the other. Like a load of Ay-rabs. The grannies and the kids and the goats and the chickens and the whole darned lot. What's the point of it?"
Lisa interjected stridently:
"Who wants instant coffee and who wants Turkish? Hands up."
And Avigail:
"What's that mole you've got on your cheek, Nakdi. You always had a brown spot there and now it's turned into a mole. You ought to show it to the doctor. Only this week they were talking about moles like that on the radio, saying that they were on no account to be ignored. Go and see Pouchatchewsky, let him examine it for you."
"He died," said Nakdimon. "Way back."
Yoel said:
"OK, Lublin. You bring your black stone and we'll get them to put just the name and dates on it. That'll do. I'll even do without the ceremony on the anniversary. At least that way I won't have to bother with all those cantors and beggars."
"Shame on you!" croaked Lisa.
"Would you like to stay the night, Nakdi?" Avigail asked. "Do stay. Look out the window, see for yourself what a storm is brewing. We've had a little disagreement here lately; dear Lisa has taken it into her head that Ivria was secretly a little pious, and that the rest of us persecuted her like the Spanish Inquisition. Did you ever notice any religious tendencies in her, Nakdi?"
Yoel, who did not catch the question but for some reason thought it was addressed to him, answered pensively:
"She loved peace and quiet. That was what she really loved."
"Listen to this piece I've found," Netta called out, coming back in her baggy pants and a checked shirt as wide as a tent, carrying a large book entitled Verses on Stone: Epitaphs from the Days of the Pioneers. "What a gem:
Here lies a most beloved youth
A grievous loss to all, in truth:
JEREMIAH son of AARON, he went to Heaven
On the New Moon of Iyyar 5661, aged 27.
Aloft his tragic soul has flown,
As he could not bear to live alone.
He was so youthful and so pure,
And so his memory shall endure."
Avigail rounded on her grandchild in a fury, her eyes sparkling with anger: "That's not funny, Netta. It's disgusting, your mockery. Your cynicism. Your scorn. Your arrogance. As though life were a farce and death were a joke and suffering just an anecdote. Take a good look, Yoel, think about it, apply your mind to it just for once, because she gets it all straight from you. That apathy. That contempt. That shoulder-shrugging. That funereal sneer. Netta gets it all from you. Can't you see that she's a copy of you? You've already caused one disaster with your cold cynicism, and heaven forbid you should cause another one. I'd better close my mouth now so as not to tempt the devil."
"What do you want from him, Avigail?" Lisa exclaimed sadly, with a sort of elegiac tenderness. "Haven't you got eyes? Can't you see that he suffers for all of us?"
And Yoel, as usual replying belatedly to a question that had been put a few minutes earlier, said:
"You can see for yourself, Lublin. We're living together here so that we can always be here to lend each other a hand. Why don't you join us? Bring your sons down from Metullah."