by Amos Oz
45
Yotam and Audrey, meanwhile, had decided that words were not enough. They resolved that it was their duty to set out that very night on foot for the mountains over the border. There they would try with all their might and main to meet, to talk, to explain, to persuade, to extinguish with the right words the Same of blind hatred. Not that they had any confidence in the success of their experiment, but they both shared a feeling that there was nothing else in the world to compare to it, even if it failed, and that the almost certain defeat they faced would be far more glorious than all the magnificent victories of which the history books are full. The night was cold, and Yotam remembered to take a sweater each for Audrey and himself, so that they would not freeze to death on the way. How beautiful Audrey looked, with a man's sweater tied round her neck, bewitchingly long and slender, such a fragile body and such a firm resolve, she was gentle but determined, radiating love and fury, with a tiny gap between her two front teeth, and her perfect, innocent breasts sharing freely in her every movement One of her sandal straps was broken and she had secured it with hairpins and a bit of yellow string. She was all aflame and heaving, and the orphan would have followed her to the ends of the earth, down the slopes, through the thistles in the wadi, with desperate devotion and steep longing, gasping, led on a halter, fighting back the song surging in his blood, repressing the mad urge to throw away his shoes and run barefoot after her, run singing, run healing and saving.
The fair-haired young men who had orders to remain until further notice observed the pair of them slipping away into the wadi. They whispered a brief question into the mouthpiece of their radio and received from far away an unexpected answer. They remained motionless, sniffing the cold dark air.
Over all, as always, the bear's glass eyes looked down.
Ernst's lips twisted in the darkness into an expression of faint disgust, as if a voice had suddenly said: Ernst, come forth.
46
At nine o'clock in the evening hundreds of Syrian guns began firing shells at the kibbutz, at Galilee, and at all the valleys among the hills and below them. Arcs of honor flashed across the sky, rolls of thunder chased one another, the Sea of Galilee was lit up, and from time to time a column of wounded water rose fruitlessly in a demented spasm and was shattered into foamy droplets that also surrendered and fell back into the lake. They stood side by side leaning on the window ledge of his room in the dark, and he was able to tell her how far off down the forest slopes, where the undergrowth lapped at the river, the German engineers had dynamited all the railway bridges, while he had watched from his hiding-place in the woodcutter's hut. And how because of the murky distance and the thickness of the air there had been a delay, a hesitation almost, between the flash of each explosion and the low rumble of thunder, and how this delay, momentary though it was, had given an almost comical appearance to the whole spectacle, so that he in his hideout had been assailed by doubts. And how, indeed, a few days later, the German engineers had reappeared, on receipt of fresh orders, and begun hastily and furiously to rebuild everything as it had been before, and how unreal all events and places were. And since he had begun and she had not interrupted him, he made an effort and told her more, and she too disclosed one or two memories, and later when the shelling became more savage, and aged firefighters appeared outside in the light of the blaze and tried to stave off disaster, they managed perhaps to reach a measure of agreement, a certain tentative conclusion, before they too went outside. Beautiful, proud Stefa, whom from her youth on literary men had longed to touch with ideas, and the dreamy son of a watchmaker, whom she had chosen and preferred and believed in, and whose cheek she had yearned from a distance to touch with her hand and to see what would happen to her hand and whether the touch would alter the lines of his face. His natural powers of loneliness, which she longed to touch and be touched by, even at the cost of her life. At the cost of ascending in flames. Even death, if she might not bear his son.
They went out and passed among the shadows and the reflected flames and strolled beyond the deserted avenue, and their shoulders met and touched.
(As for the story of the war, the full story in all its details, it still remains to be sung and loudly proclaimed; Gershon Kumin, the mighty old poet, has yet to celebrate all its marvels, in the manner of the hymns of the New Kingdom of Poland in the Aegean Islands. And there will be no shortage of drums and bugles, no lack of exultant bliss.) Furious shells continued to burst blindly on the kibbutz, like backward pupils who had rebelled against mathematics and hidden music and now vented their pent-up rage on the beleaguered island of orderliness. Preying talons caressed red-died roofs to smithereens, decapitated trees, pulverized outhouses, ripped the bull to shreds. It was all loud and hoarse and coarse without any rhythm or style, with loud howls and strident shrieks and blasts of fiery breath. Jets of dust and savage eddies. Violent bestial lust, salvo upon salvo upon salvo.
The whole mad orgy, which may have echoed dim and menacing in the distance, was merely clumsy and banal. A noisy performance, tedious, familiar, overplayed, exaggerated, excessive: saturated with pork fat.
47
And so it came about that, an hour or so after midnight, Elisha and Stefa Pomeranz arrived at the big lawn in front of the recreation hall.
They stood at the edge of the lawn and watched the arcs of shells and flames all around. There was fire reflected in the darkened windows of the recreation hall. And Ernst's coffin lay long and dark on its four wooden chairs. A coil of rope lay in the corner.
Meanwhile, among the mountain ravines, Yotam and Audrey were groping their way under the shrieking dome of fire They wound their way safely past fences, minefields, and trip wires. Had they been given the power of levitation, or was there no power, no levitation, but the following wind of their own enthusiasm clearing the way ahead?
On the edge of the lawn they stood side by side in the darkness, while overhead the shells flashed and above the shells the night with its crickets and farther still were the stars in their regular nightly stations.
A man and a woman, both of them thin, neither of them young, almost insubstantial in the flickering darkness which shone that night over Galilee, the mouth organ in her white hand, then in his hand as he played.
The man played. The music mingled with the darkness. A small crack began to show at their feet, like the cracks that appear in heavy earth at the end of summer. A narrow, dry, serpentine chink, then more music, and it was no longer dry, now a warm moist slit, and still more music. The darkness was all-pervading. The topmost crust of earth yielded in the moist blindness with rippling spasms at the wetness of the warm virginal lips and they were slowly drawn inside. For a moment longer the slit quivered, then relaxed and enfolded them in a silent embrace of unbelievable tenderness. The melody died away. The lawn healed over. The stars shone unaltered. Toward dawn the artillery fire was resumed. But, as is well known, the mountain plateau was swiftly stormed and all its guns were silenced. This war was a short one.
Many refuse to believe. They neither saw nor heard. Others believe it all. Some even attribute to that patch of lawn powers of healing or powers of atonement and purification.
Summer after summer a savage sun blazes. In the winter the rain beats down and the wind lashes the pine trees. Yotam and Audrey roam from town to town and from land to land, testing the power of words, always supposing that they are not exporting canned beef. There is no possible end to the unfathomable soughing of the evening breeze in the pines in the late autumn. Occasionally six or seven men and women gather at the spot at dusk and celebrate a ritual; they produce a low, long-drawn-out melody.
But by that hour of the evening the bright lights are on in the recreation hall. And from inside die brightly lit hall comes the cheerful blare of a different music.
1972
About the Author
Born in Jerusalem in 1939, AMOS OZ is the author of numerous works of fiction and essays. His international awards include the Prix Femina,
the Israel Prize, and the Frankfurt Peace Prize, and his books have been translated into more than thirty languages. He lives in Israel.
