To Know a Woman (Harvest in Translation)

by Amos Oz

  "Ma'alesh, never mind," the guest muttered in a catarrhal, hostile tone, pushing back the table, swathing himself in his anorak, and thumping Yoel's shoulder. "It's the other way around, Captain. Better that you should leave all the girls here to amuse each other and you come up to us. First thing in the morning we'll set you to work in the fields, maybe in the beehives, and we'll clean your brains out before you drive each other completely crazy here. How come it doesn't fall over?" he asked, as his glance fell suddenly on the figurine of the predator of the cat family that looked as though it was about to leap off its base at the end of the shelf.

  "Aha," said Yoel, "that's what I'd like to know."

  Nakdimon Lublin weighed the beast in his hand. He turned it over, base upward, scratched it with his fingernail, turned it this way and that, held the blind eyes close to his nose and sniffed. At that moment the dim-witted, suspicious, tight-clenched peasant look intensified on his face until Yoel could not refrain from uttering to himself the catchphrase: Like a bull in a china shop. Let's hope he doesn't break it.

  Finally the visitor said:

  "Bullshit. Listen, Captain: there's something screwed up here."

  But delicately, in surprising contrast to his words, with what looked like a gesture of deep respect, he replaced the figurine and stroked the tense, curved back gently, slowly with his fingertip. Then he took his leave:

  "Well, girls. Be seeing you. Don't nag each other."

  And as he stowed the pot of venom in the inside pocket of his anorak he added:

  "Come and see me out, Captain."

  Yoel accompanied him to his long, wide Chevrolet. As they parted, the stocky mar let out, in a tone of voice Yoel was not expecting:

  "There's something screwed up with you too, Captain. Don't get me wrong. I don't mind giving you some of the money from Metullah. No problem. And even though it says in the will that you stop getting it if you remarry, as far as I'm concerned you can get married tomorrow and still go on getting the money. No problem. I'm talking about something else. There's an Ay-rab in Kafr Ajer, a good pal of mine; he's a loony, he's a thief, and they do say that he even screws his own daughters, but when his old mum was dying he went off to Haifa and bought her a Frigidaire, a washing machine, a VCR, whatever, everything she'd always wanted to have, so's at least she'd die happy. That's what they call having pity, Captain. You're a very clever man, shrewd even, you're also a decent man. No question about that. Straight as a die. You're a really OK fellow. Trouble is, there's three serious things missing with you: A. desire, B. joy, and C. pity. If you ask me, Captain, those three things come together in a package. If you haven't got number two, then you haven't got numbers one and three either. And so forth. The state you're in, you're in a terrible way. Now you'd better go indoors. Look at this rain. Be seeing you. Whenever I look at you I feel almost like crying."

  34

  Surprisingly there followed several sunny days, a weekend flooded with brilliant wintry blue. A warm, honey-colored light suddenly strolled among the bare gardens and over lawns bleached by the frost, lightly touching the heaps of dead leaves and raising here and there a molten copper glow. On all the tiled roofs along the street the solar heating panels sparkled with flashes of scorching brilliance. Parked cars, gutters, puddles, broken glass near the edge of the asphalt, mailboxes, and windowpanes, everything shimmered and blazed. A capering spark flew over bushes and lawns, leaping from wall to fence, lighting up the mailbox, darting like lightning across the street and igniting a dazzling bubble on the gate of the house opposite. Yoel suddenly had a suspicion that this restless spark was somehow connected to himself: if he froze and stood without moving, the light too stood still. Eventually he deciphered the connection between the sparkle and the light reflected from his wristwatch.

  The air was gradually filled with the hum of insects. A breeze off the sea brought a taste of salt and sounds of people playing farther down the street. Here and there a neighbor came out to weed his muddy flower beds, to make room to plant bulbs of winter flowers. Here and there women brought their bedding outdoors to air it. And a boy was washing his parents' car, no doubt for money. Raising his eyes Yoel saw a bird that had escaped the frost and was now, as though out of its mind at this sudden brilliance, standing on the tip of a bare branch singing with all its might, over and over again, without variation or pause, ecstatically, a single three-note phrase. Which was swallowed up in the flow of light, which was slow and thick like spilled honey. In vain did Yoel try to reach it and touch it with the flash of light from his watch. And far away on the eastern horizon, beyond the tops of the trees in the citrus grove, the mountains were wrapped in a fine vapor, dissolved in it, and turned blue, as though they were casting off their mass and becoming mere shadows of mountains, light pastel strokes on a bright canvas.

  And since Avigail and Lisa were away, at the Winter Festival on Mount Carmel, Yoel decided to have a great washday. Briskly, efficiently, methodically, he went from room to room stripping off pillowcases, quilt and cushion covers. He even collected the bedspreads. He gathered all the dirty towels, including the tea towels in the kitchen, and emptied the laundry basket in the bathroom. Then he went around the bedrooms again, looking into closets and on the backs of chairs, picking up blouses, underwear, nightdresses, combinations, skirts, housecoats, undershirts, and stockings. When he had finished he took off all his clothes and, standing naked in the bathroom, piled them on the mound of washing. Then he started sorting the laundry. He devoted some twenty minutes, standing there naked, to a meticulous, precise classification, peering sometimes through his intellectual glasses at the washing instructions printed on the labels, carefully making separate piles for hot wash, warm wash, cold wash, and hand wash, reminding himself what could or could not be wrung, what could go in the tumble dryer, and what would have to be hung out on the revolving clothesline he had put up at the end of the back garden with the help of Krantz and his son Duby. Only after the sorting and planning stages did he get dressed and put the washing machine on, wash after wash, from hot to cold and from resistant to delicate. Half the morning went by, but he was too busy to notice. He was determined to have it all finished before Netta got back from the theater club. He visualized the pure and innocent young man Jeremiah son of Aaron, from the book of epitaphs, confined to a wheelchair. Perhaps that was why he was so pure: there's not much scope for sin in a wheelchair. As for the Agranat Commission of Inquiry and the injustice that might have been done to Lieutenant General Elazar, Yoel took account of what Teacher had always instilled in his subordinates: absolute truth may or may not exist—that is a matter for the philosophers—but any idiot or son of a bitch knows what a lie is.

  And what should he do now that all the washing was dried and neatly folded on the shelves in the various closets, apart from those items that were still drying on the line in the garden? He would iron whatever needed to be ironed. And then? He had put the garden shed in order the previous weekend. A fortnight ago he had gone around to all the windows and treated the hinges against rust. He knew he must kick the habit of the electric drill at last. The kitchen was gleaming and there was not so much as a teaspoon visible on the drainboard: everything had been put away. Perhaps he should merge all the half-finished bags of sugar? Or go down to Bardugo's Nurseries at Ramat Lotan junction and buy some bulbs of winter flowers? You'll be ill, he said to himself in his mother's words, you'll be ill if you don't start doing something. He checked this possibility for a moment and found no error in it. He recalled that his mother had hinted to him several times about a considerable sum of money that she was keeping for him to help him get started in business. And he remembered that a former colleague had offered him the moon if he would join him as partner in a private detective agency. And Le Patron's entreaties. Ralph Vermont had also talked to him once about a discreet channel for investments, something linked to a giant Canadian consortium, by means of which Ralph promised to double Yoel's investment within eighteen months. Whereas Ar
ik Krantz never stopped pleading with him to share his latest adventure: twice a week he put on a white coat and worked as a paramedic auxiliary in a hospital, dazzled by the charms of a volunteer nurse named Greta. Arik Krantz had vowed not to give up till he had "cracked her across and down, and diagonally too." He claimed he had already marked out and reserved for Yoel two other volunteers, Christina and Iris: Yoel could take his pick. Or take them both.

  Carrying the pile of equipment necessary for setting up his colony—reading glasses, sunglasses, bottle of soda water, glass of brandy, the book about the Chief of Staff, a tube of suntan cream, sun visor, and transistor radio—Yoel went out into the garden to sunbathe on the glider until Netta got back from her Saturday matinee at the theater club, when they could have a late lunch. In fact, why shouldn't he accept his brother-in-law's invitation? He could go up to Metullah alone. Stay there a few days. Perhaps even for a week or two. Why not even several months? He would work half-naked from morn to evening in the fields, the beehives, the orchard, among whose tree trunks he had slept with Ivria for the first time, when she had gone out to turn off the irrigation taps, and he, a soldier who had lost his way on an orienteering exercise during a section commander's training course, was there among the taps filling his water bottle. He noticed her when she was five or six steps away from him and froze with fear; he almost stopped breathing. She would not have noticed him at all if her legs had not collided with his crouched body; just when he was certain she was going to scream, she whispered to him, Don't kill me. They were both stunned, and they hardly spoke more than ten words before their bodies suddenly clung together, clumsily groping, fully dressed, rolling in the mud, panting and burrowing into each other like a pair of blind puppies, and they hurt each other and finished almost before they'd begun and immediately rushed off in opposite directions. And it was there among the fruit trees too that he lay with her the second time, several months later, when he returned to Metullah as though under a spell and waited for her two nights running by the same taps, and on the third night they met and again fell on each other like people dying of thirst and afterward he asked for her hand and she said, Are you out of your mind. And then they started to meet at night; it was only some time later that they first saw each other by daylight, and they promised each other that they were not disappointed by what they saw.

  And perhaps in the course of time he could learn a thing or two from Nakdimon. For instance, he could try to master the art of milking venomous snakes. He could study and decipher once and for all the true value of the old man's bequest. He could sort out, very belatedly, what really happened in Metullah that faraway winter when Ivria and Netta ran away from him and Ivria maintained insistently that Netta's problem disappeared because she forbade him to visit them. And between investigations he could toughen and indulge his body in the sunshine, working outdoors, with the birds and the wind, like the time when he was a young trainee on the kibbutz, before he married Ivria and was transferred to the army advocate general's department, from which he was sent on the special-jobs training course.

  But thinking about the extent of the property in Metullah and days of physical labor failed to fire him with enthusiasm. Here in Ramat Lotan he did not have heavy outlays. The money Nakdimon gave him every six months, the old women's National Security money, his own pension, and the difference between the rent he received from the two apartments in Jerusalem and the rent he paid for the house combined to buy him enough leisure and reflective repose to spend all his time with the birds and the lawn. Even so he was still not near to inventing electricity or writing the poems of Pushkin. Surely if he went to Metullah he would also succumb to an addiction to the electric drill or its equivalent. Suddenly he almost laughed aloud at the memory of Nakdimon Lublin's comically ignorant pronunciation of the Aramaic memorial prayer at the funeral. The commune or collective that Ralph's ex-wives and Annemarie's ex-husbands had set up in Boston with their children seemed to him logical and almost touching, because in his heart he agreed with the Biblical allusion in the epitaph that Netta had discovered: it is not good for a man to live alone. When all was said and done, it was not a question of shame, of attics, of lunatic-astral illnesses or Byzantine crucifixion scenes that contradict common sense. It was a question more or less like the subject of disagreement between Shamir and Peres: the danger involved in concessions likely to entail more and more concessions as against the need to be realistic and to compromise. There's that cat, a really big boy now, apparently one of the litter born in the garden shed during the summer. And already he's eying the bird on the tree with a hungry look.

  Yoel picked up the weekend newspaper, leafed through it, and dropped off to sleep. When Netta got back between three and four she went straight to the kitchen and ate something from the refrigerator, without bothering to sit down; then she took a shower and said to him as he slept: I'm going back into town. It was very nice of you to wash the bedclothes and change the towels, but there was no need. What do we pay a cleaner for? Yoel muttered something, heard her departing footsteps, got up, and moved the white glider toward the center of the lawn, because the sun was beginning to set. Then he lay down again and went back to sleep.

  Krantz and his wife, Odelia, approached on tiptoe, sat down at the white garden table and waited, glancing in the meantime at Yoel's newspaper and book. His working years and his travels had accustomed him to wake like a cat, a sort of inner leap straight from sleep to a state of alertness without any transitional stage of drowsiness. While he was still opening his eyes he had dropped his bare feet to the ground and sat up on the glider, taken one look, and come to the conclusion that Krantz and his wife were fighting again, that they had come to ask him to mediate between them, and that it was Krantz again who had violated a previous agreement reached by means of Yoel's mediation.

  Odelia Krantz said:

  "Admit it: you haven't had any lunch. If you'll let me go into your kitchen for a minute I'll get some plates and things: we've brought you some chicken livers with fried onions and various extra tidbits."

  "You see," said Krantz, "the first thing she does is bribe you. So you'll be on her side."

  "And that," said Odelia, "is the way his mind always works. There's nothing to be done about it."

  Yoel put his sunglasses on, because the setting sun hurt his red, aching eyes. And while he devoured the chicken livers with fried onions and steamed rice he asked after the two sons, who, he remembered, were barely a year and a half apart.

  "They're both against me," Krantz declared. "They're both lefties, and at home they're always taking their mother's side. And that's after I've just spent in the past two months thirteen hundred dollars on a computer for Duby and eleven hundred on a motorbike for Gilly. And by way of thanks all they do is bash me over the head."

  Yoel steered delicately toward the contaminated zone. From Arik he drew only the usual grumbles: she neglects the house, she neglects herself; the fact she bothered to cook those chicken livers today, that was just because it was for you, not for me; she wastes fantastic sums of money but she's a miser in bed, and her sarcasm—first thing in the morning she starts in on me, and last thing at night she makes fun of my paunch or something else. A thousand times I've said to her, Odelia, let's split up, at least for a trial period, and every time she starts threatening me that if I'm not careful she'll burn the house down. Or kill herself. Or talk to the newspapers. Not that I'm afraid of her. On the contrary, she's the one who'd better watch it.

  Odelia, in her turn, said with dry eyes that she had nothing to add. You could tell just from listening to him that he was a beast. But she had one request, and nothing would make her drop it: that at least he should mount his cows somewhere else. Not on her living-room carpet. Under the children's noses. Is that too much to ask? Please: let Mr. Ravid—Yoel—judge for himself if she was making unreasonable demands.

  Yoel heard them both out very seriously, with a concentrated look on his face, as though a madrigal were being pla
yed to him from a long way away, and among all the voices his task was to isolate the one that was singing false. He did not interfere or make any comment, even when Krantz said, All right, if that's the way it is, just let me take my bits and pieces, a couple of bags full, and I'll clear out and not come back. You can keep everything. I don't care. Even when Odelia said, It's true I've got a bottle of acid, but he has a handgun hidden in his car.

  Finally, when the sun had set and in an instant the cold set in and the stray bird that had survived the winter, or perhaps another one, suddenly started to sing sweetly, Yoel said:

  "Well. I've heard it all. Now let's go inside because it's turned chilly."

  The Krantzes helped him carry the plates and glasses and the newspaper and the book and the suntan cream and the visor and the transistor radio into the kitchen. There, barefoot and stripped to the waist for sunbathing, and standing, Yoel delivered his judgment:

  "Listen, Arik, since you've given a thousand dollars to Duby and a thousand dollars to Gilly, I suggest you give two thousand to Odelia. Do it first thing tomorrow morning, as soon as the bank opens. If you haven't got it, take out a loan. Ask for an overdraft. Or else I'll lend you the money."

  "But why?"

  "So that I can take a three-week package tour to Europe," said Odelia. "For three weeks you won't see me."

  Arik Krantz chuckled, sighed, muttered something, thought better of it, seemed to redden slightly, and finally said:

  "All right. I'll buy it."

  Then they had a cup of coffee together, and the Krantzes, as they left, clutching a plastic bag containing the dishes in which they had brought the late lunch, invited him insistently to come and have a meal with them one Friday evening, with his whole harem, "now that Odelia's shown you what a terrific cook she is. And that's nothing. She can do ten times better when she's really in the mood."