by Amos Oz
In the course of four months we may have seen each other only seven or eight times, we went to art exhibitions and concerts, to restaurants that, after her slip-up the first night, we agreed between us she should not be the one to choose, and sometimes on a Sunday we went off for a few hours in the Jeep to the high mountains of the Cordillera del Litoral. She knew only a few hundred words of Spanish, but nevertheless, directly after listening to a short conversation I had had with a gas pump attendant or a technician from the administration, she would declare without the slightest hesitation that this man was a liar while the other, the fat one, actually liked people but was rather ashamed of it and that was why he was so gruff. What have you swallowed, Noa? A seismograph? A lie detector? She didn't hurry to answer these questions. When she did finally reply, I couldn't see the connection: I grew up, she said, with a paralysed father and an aunt who was demented by her own idealism, I had to keep my eyes open.
At the end of the evening I would accompany her to the apartment that the Embassy had taken for her, on the ground floor of a house belonging to some wealthy Jews. We parted at the gate with a goodnight kiss on the cheek or the hair, she had to stand on tiptoe while I almost bowed to her, breathing my fill of that scent of honeysuckle. Gradually I noticed that my trips were tending to bring me to Caracas more and more often. I bought her a pair of woollen socks and a llama wool scarf. She bought me a pot of honey. Then one night, in the spring, there was a thunderstorm and a long power cut and she decided that this time I could stay the night: she had a sofa-bed. She sat me on her bed, the rain was beating on the windows like stones, she lighted a kerosene heater; poured me a glass of my own brandy, brought some fruit, paper napkins; then all at once she changed her mind, blew out the candle, sat herself down next to me and said, The courting's over, let's make love. And she started unbuttoning my shirt. At that moment I felt a warm flood not just of desire but of protectiveness. Her sensuality turned out to be dead straight, open, and yet—curious, with a strong determination to study me at once and in depth, to skip the niceties, make my acquaintance thoroughly and quickly, establish a foothold in me that very night.
Straight after the love, she fell asleep lying on her stomach like a baby, her face in the hollow of my shoulder.
In the morning she said: You enjoyed that a hell of a lot. Like a stallion. Me too.
After the night of the storm and after the following nights, I was still certain that there was no permanent relationship. I still saw myself ending my days alone. But she and I could not have an agreement of the sort I had had all those years with transient women in hotels, villages, hammocks, Development Agency hostels, the two-clause agreement: fair pleasure and farewell. On the contrary: our friendship became open and playful after the night of the storm. We both felt easier and better. It was a strange experience, because up to then I didn't really believe in friendship, certainly not friendship between a man and a woman. Intimacy, yes, and passion, and fair play, and passing affection, and pleasure for pleasure, give and take, all these I had known over the years, and always in the shadow of the inescapable combination of desire and embarrassment. With the limits marked out in advance. But open-handed friendship, an unembarrassed relationship, no limits, I didn't think that was possible between me and a woman. In fact I didn't think it was possible between any two people. Then along came Noa, in her colourful summer dresses that whirled round her legs, with rows of large buttons fastened with loops down the front, the whole length of her lithe body, teasing me, slapping my shoulder sometimes in a gesture of relaxed comradeship, her deep simple sexuality like warm brown bread, the way she loved to strip us both naked in broad daylight, on the bank of a stream or in a clearing in the forest, free from all embarrassment, of flesh, or cash, or feelings, and the way she seemed to have made up her mind to untie me too and set me free.
Once I stayed with her for three days and three nights. When it was time to leave for the airport I said, Look, no arguments, I'm leaving you four hundred dollars on the shelf here. It's what I'd have spent on a hotel. And you're living such a hand-to-mouth existence. Noa said: Fine. That's okay. Thanks. A moment later she changed her mind, she'd worked out that the three days I'd stayed with her hadn't set her back more than a hundred. So what, I said, you've earned the rest from me honestly, you can use it to buy a television, call it a present from me, if you start watching a bit in the evenings you might learn some Spanish at last. Noa said, I'm all for a television, but they start at six hundred here and I can't make up the difference. I liked that. And I liked the way she could turn her back on me for a couple of hours, immune to all pleas and blandishments, concentrating on marking some tests that she'd promised to hand back the next morning. Even when we only had one evening together. Once she looked up suddenly from her marking and said in a concentrated way, without a smile: You're a man who likes summing up. Don't sum me up just yet.
In April we both fell sick, me first, with relapsing fever. We must have picked up a tick or a louse on one of our Sunday outings. She put me to bed in a sort of flannel prison nightshirt, with a blue wollen turban on my head like an Indian baby's that covered my forehead and my ears, covered me with four blankets, half-drowned me with a boiling-hot infusion of cactuses that her mad aunt had taught her to make, took several days off work in the Israeli class and the Embassy to nurse me and, wrapping herself in a thick brown grandmotherly dressing gown, she sat next to me and told me in a soft, soporific voice all about her father the paralyzed boxer and her Tolstoyan aunt and Yoshku the born-again Jew and some clown of a Peeping Tom by the name of Golovoy or Gorovoy. The story got more and more complicated and more and more misty until I fell asleep, and I slept for three days and woke cured and cancelled my flight to Veracruz because Noa herself fell sick. She was a demanding invalid. She wrapped her two fists in my hands and wouldn't let me open them for several hours, it was the only way she could keep warm, despite the four blankets and my leather jacket that I wrapped tightly round her legs and zipped up. By the time we had recovered there was such a deep intimacy between us that Noa commissioned me to buy her some German cream for a vaginal inflammation in a pharmacy in Mexico City. At Easter I took her for a weekend to see the place where they were building a new town with a ring of six modern villages round it, all according to my plans, all in the first phases of construction in the south of the state of Tabasco. Noa said: It's spectacular; no it's not, it's human—if only they'd realize back home that it's possible to build like this before it's too late. I said: Maybe in Israel they don't need to build like this, they certainly don't need to build the kind of barracks they build there. In Israel the horizon is different. At least, it used to be. Incidentally, what makes you think that spectacular is the, opposite of human?
Noa said, with no obvious connection: Look at us, a pair of teachers with no children, correcting each other all day long. It won't be easy, but at least it won't be boring.
In June, at the end of the school year, she suddenly said: I'm through here. I'm going back to Tel Aviv. Are you coming?
Look, I said, it doesn't work like that. I've got a contract till December and unfinished projects in Tabasco and Veracruz, and there's nothing waiting for me in Israel at all. Noa said: Me neither. Are you coming or staying?
We got to Tel Aviv in July, during a suffocating week-long heat wave. The steamy city repelled me at first glance. After ten years away it looked more ugly than ever: a mess of grimy suburbs with no centre. Wars, rhetoric, greed, punctuated by raucous fun and the same sweaty mixture of destiny, arrogance and despair. We rented a furnished two-room apartment on Prague Street, behind the central bus garage, and began to settle in. In the late afternoons we went out for long walks along the seashore. In the evenings we tried out restaurants. Then in August she went on a one-day tour of the Negev for teachers and when she got back that evening she said, Let's go and live in Tel Kedar, it's the end of the world, the desert is like an ocean and everything's wide open. Are you coming?
; I hesitated for the best part of a week. I remembered Tel Kedar from before the town existed. I'd worked there for a few weeks in the late sixties, in a barbed-wire encampment of tents that was visited once a day by an army tanker that brought us water and the newspapers from Beersheba. For three weeks I roamed all over that bare plateau roasting in the sun at the foot of the cliff from before dawn to after dusk. At night by the light of a pressure lamp I sat in the administration tent sketching rough preliminary ideas for a master plan that was intended to get away from the usual Israeli approach and create a compact desert town, sheltering itself in its own shade, inspired by photographs of Saharan townships in North Africa. Nimrod Finkel looked at the sketches and shrugged his shoulders, Same old Theo, carried away by his fantasies, it's brilliant, it's original, creative, the trouble is, as usual you've left one factor out of account: when all's said and done, Israelis want to live in the Israeli style. Desert or no desert. Just you tell me, Theo, who do you imagine suddenly wants to be transported back to North Africa? The Poles? The Romanians? Or the Moroccans? The Moroccans least of all. And just remember this, chum: this isn't going to be an artists' colony.
That was more or less the end of my contribution to the construction of the desert town of Tel Kedar. I had never experienced the slightest urge to go back and see how it had turned out. I imagined they had built row upon row of identical prefabs with a first floor held up by bare concrete pillars and with sliding shutters on the balconies. They'd have fixed all sorts of notices to the concrete pillars, and mailboxes, and receptacles for collecting old newspapers for the Soldiers' Support Committee. And rows of trash cans in rectilinear containers in front of each building.
By the end of the week I said to Noa, All right, why not, let's give it a try. Something inside me responded and wanted to follow her to the desert. Or anywhere. I transferred half my savings from the bank in Toronto, put part of it in index-linked government bonds and part of it in shares and pension plans, bought this apartment, and purchased the property in Herzliyya that brings in a thousand dollars a month. Noa immediately got a job teaching literature in the secondary school. I opened a small planning office. Seven years have passed and we're still here, like a couple that's come through the child-rearing wars and is living in a quiet routine, looking after the houseplants to pass the time between visits from the grandchildren. We've furnished the living room with a white three-piece suite and matching rug. Noa usually invites a few people over on Friday nights, some teachers with their professional army-officer husbands, the local choirmaster, a couple my age from Holland who are both doctors, a hydraulic engineer, a neo-cubist vegan artist who objects to leather shoes, a drama instructor. We talk about national security and the Occupied Territories. Joke about government ministers. Deplore the way the town has stopped growing, the better residents are leaving and are being replaced by people who are only so-so. Perhaps the immigration from Russia will give us a bit of a boost. Though in point of fact, what will they do here? They'll dry out in the sun like us. Noa serves fruit and biscuits and South American coffee that makes your head spin, concocted with spells and brandy. If one of the speakers pauses, hesitating, searching for the right word, Noa has a habit of jumping straight into the gap, volunteering to finish his interrupted sentence, produce the missing word or free an idea that had got stuck. Not as though she is dominating the conversation but like an usherette whose job is to stand at a particular spot and gently take any latecomers by the elbow to make sure they do not stumble in the dark on some unseen step.
As the evening wears on the conversation breaks up into groups: the men discuss the issue of the deterioration of standards in public life, while the women exchange their impressions of a new play or novel that is causing controversy in the newspapers. Occasionally they come together again around scandals in artistic circles in Tel Aviv or a recent television broadcast, and there may even be a few local affairs, generally thanks to Muki Peleg. The artist may say, for instance: A couple of days ago I went to see an exhibition of young minimalists in Rishon Le-Zion, followed by a display of contemporary multimedia. Art is galloping ahead, culture is booming, and all we do is sit here slowly evaporating in the sun. There's a charming pedestrianized street now in Rishon Le-Zion with galleries, artists' clubs, restaurants, and the other streets are brightly lighted and full of life, people come back at midnight from a night out in Tel Aviv and fill the cafés and talk about new directions in the theatre, here all we can do is have a game of backgammon, watch TV and go to bed with the birds. The aerobics teacher says: If only they'd link us up to the cable television, like everyone else. And her husband, the lieutenant-colonel, adds bitterly: You can be sure of one thing, darling, that those settlers in the territories will get cable TV long before us, we're at the back of the queue as far as they're concerned, if we're in it at all. Noa says: We could bring that display here too. We could rig up some spotlights and turn the corridor of Founders' House into an art gallery. And why shouldn't we invite an art historian from Beersheba occasionally to give a lecture?
As for me, I go round the room serving the drinks in a gesture of democratic politeness, emptying the ashtrays, offering the occasional anecdote from the Caribbean islands or an example of Indian humour. Most of the time I just sit and listen. Trying to guess what sort of judgment Noa will pronounce after the guests have left: good or bad, hot or cold, desperate. And it's she who says to me, You're such a summer-up. Don't sum up, just watch.
At midnight or twelve thirty the guests disperse, promising that we'll meet again next Friday. Noa and I clear away and wash up and then sit down for another half an hour or so over a glass of mulled wine in winter or iced coffee in the summer. Her blonde hair masks half her face from me, but her printed dress leaves her shoulders bare and they are delicate and fragile like leaves turning brown in the autumn, in places where they have autumn. At moments like these, when we are exchanging views about the acquaintances who have left, I still have an urge to take a shawl and cover her shoulders that are punctuated with a tiny brown birthmark near her soft nape. I start to woo her in my usual way, that enjoys waiting. Drawn by the scent of honeysuckle. Sometimes we go on talking till half past two at the kitchen table about the wonderful sights we used to go and see at weekends in the Cordillera del litoral. Until Noa interrupts me in mid-sentence and says, That's enough talking, let's make love, and then she undoes my belt and undresses us both and lays her head in the hollow of my shoulder and puts my fingers to her lips. Our life is quiet and steady. The sitting-room rug is white and the armchairs are light-coloured too. Between them is a black metal standard lamp. There are houseplants in the corner. We have separate bedrooms because it turned out that we sleep differently.
On fine Saturdays I sometimes wake her at half past six in the morning, we get dressed and have coffee, then put on walkers and set off to find out what's new in the desert, walking down one wadi for a couple of hours and coming back up by another one. Once home we munch something from the refrigerator without bothering to sit down, then go back to sleep till the afternoon, when she likes to sit at the kitchen table, remote, bent forward, concentrating, planning a lesson or marking, while I sit and watch the red pen trembling between her fingers that have áged prematurely as though betraying her youthful body. One day I'll surprise her and buy her a little desk that can stand in the corner of her bedroom. Meanwhile I put it off so as to be able to watch her sitting at the kitchen table. While she finishes her marking I get some food together for us and switch on the TV, and we sit and watch the Saturday afternoon French film. On Saturday evenings we sometimes go out to a café or to the Paris. We stroll in the evening air for another half an hour in the square. Then we go home and listen to some quiet music sitting at the kitchen table. The next day another week begins here. Seven years have gone by like this, carefully avoiding the troupe of strolling players repeating, as if they were accursed, their old passion play: wandering, suffering, perdition. Until a weird pupil of hers died, in an acci
dent when he was drugged, or it may have been suicide, there's no way of telling, and instead of editing a memorial volume, she agreed to help set up a rehabilitation clinic in his memory. The father of the boy has promised a financial donation, and for some reason I can't fathom decided to pick on her to run a sort of board of trustees. What does Noa know of committees and trusteeship, it's bound to lead to disappointment and embarrassment that I'd have liked to spare her, only I've no idea how. At first I tried to warn her off gently, and she responded with a sarcastic anger that 1 didn't know she had in her. Then I tried to help with various simple suggestions and was met with her cutting resentment. She did agree in an absentminded way to accept a loan from me, without seeing that as a shackle or a trap.
