Don't Call It Night

by Amos Oz

  Spreading out the notes I had previously prepared before me on the table, I put on my glasses and proceeded from one point to the next. There were various possible ways of calming the suspicions that were brewing in the town. For example, we could offer to treat, at no cost, local youngsters who became addicted. We could agree to give the Education Committee, the managers of the school and the teachers permanent representation on the Board of Governors of the clinic. Or, rather not so much a clinic as a therapeutic community. It was worth stressing the intention of offering fellowships to some prominent specialists in the areas of drugs and young people, so that Tel Kedar would gradually become a prestigious research centre, attracting up-and-coming scholars and scientists from all over the country. It would make sense to harp on the pioneering theme and on the idea of community involvement. We should try to emphasize the creation of employment for teams of educators, psychologists, social workers, people who would be able to make a contribution to the life of the town. Scientific opinion on the treatment of addiction was divided between a biological and a psychological approach, and here we would be able to combine the two. And why shouldn't we try to involve the local police chief, who could issue a statement recommending that we grapple openly with the problem of addiction among the young instead of sweeping it under the carpet? It would be to our advantage if it was the police who explained to the public that the creation of a closed institute would reduce rather than increase the crime rate in the town. Above all, we must stress the motifs of communal responsibility, civic pride, an initiative that would make Tel Kedar into a model and example for other towns.

  Ludmir broke his offended silence to hiss: Stress the motifs, did you hear that?

  And when he looked at me, the repressed pain welled up in his eyes again.

  Meanwhile, Muki Peleg was dozing on the settee, his artistically tousled head burrowing into an embarrassed Linda's bony lap; he had removed his shoes and put his feet on my knees, as though forming a bridge between her body and mine. He muttered something in his sleep about the need for a personal approach. Ludmir erupted, again, his cracked voice rattling the glass menagerie and the collection of dewdrop vases:

  Hypocrisy shall not prevail!

  I realized it was time to bring the meeting to an end. I proposed that we should reconvene in a week's time, after I had had a meeting with the chief of police. As we were getting up to go, Linda shyly asked if we would stay for a few minutes longer, she had a little piece she'd like to play for us, it wasn't anything special, we shouldn't expect too much, it was really very short. She sat down at the piano with her head bent, as though trying to touch the keys with her forehead. In the middle of her piece she had an attack of asthma and coughed so badly that she could not breathe and had to stop playing. Muki Peleg fetched her little Ventolin inhaler from her bedroom; then, before our eyes, he put a teaspoon in the pocket of his pink shirt and a moment later produced it laughingly from Ludmir's hair. He was the only one to laugh; apologizing, he stroked the gasping Linda with one hand and me with the other.

  Linda said, almost in a whisper: We didn't make much progress today.

  And Ludmir: Out of the frying pan into the fire.

  Tomorrow night I'll go and talk to the police chief at his home. If I can manage to bring him round to our side, I'll try to get him to come to a special meeting with the parents' committee and the members of the Education Committee and I'll ask Batsheva too. And one weekend soon we'll have an open study day with professors, public figures, artists, we'll invite a panel of personalities from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The promise of a weekend at the Kedar Hotel will entice them to come, and the promise of well-known guests will entice the Kedar Hotel into making a nominal charge for their stay. I'll type out a concentrated fact sheet for the study day. If the public mood changes, we may be able at least to—At least to what? What's got into you, Noa?

  Should I ask Theo to have a word with Batsheva privately?

  In actual fact there's nobody in Tel Kedar better qualified than Theo to spearhead this initiative, to allay apprehensions, to influence public opinion. After all, over the years in Latin America he managed to plan and build vast settlement areas, industrial zones, housing schemes, new towns several times larger than Tel Kedar. Two and a half years ago he politely turned down a deputation of teachers, engineers and doctors who came one winter weekend to beg him to agree to stand for the local elections at the head of an independent slate: his qualifications, his record, his confidence-inspiring appearance, his professional expertise, his image. But Theo cut them short with the words: It's not what I want. And he closed his left eye even more, as though he were winking at me above their heads, Thank you, he said, getting to his feet, it was nice of you to ask.

  Bitter and hard. Gleam in a blind eye. Or is he simply confined to an invisible wheelchair?

  What about me? A bored schoolteacher starting a new chapter? Putting herself to the test? Or am I just provoking him, making a fuss to force him to wake up, if you can say that about a man who suffers from insomnia.

  As we left, Muki Peleg made it clear that Linda, apparently, had virtually insisted he stay the night. Perhaps he was hoping I would be jealous. I walked Ludmir back to his immaculate shack overgrown with passiflora, behind Founders' House. On the way the old man said: That Muki is nothing more than an ill-mannered buffoon, and that Linda of his is a sentimental fool. There was once a godforsaken village at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains, a village with thirty hovels and only two clocks. One belonged to the Starosta, who was the headman of the village, and the other belonged to the deacon. One day one of the clocks stopped and the other got lost. Or it may have been the other way around. The whole village was left without the time. So they sent a boy—he was nimble, literate too, beyond the mountain, to the town of Nadvornaya, to bring them back the time and reset the clock that had stopped. Well, the boy rode for half a day or more, he reached Nadvornaya, he found the clock in the railway station, he made a careful note of the right time on a piece of paper, folded the precious piece of paper, hid it in his belt and rode back to his village. Forgive me if I offended you, Noa. I'm sorry. I couldn't stay silent back there and restrain my anger at our futile prattle.

  At once he embarked on a muddled apology for using the adjective "futile": he had tried to put things right and he had only made them worse, he had wanted to make peace and he had rubbed salt in the wound. Fire and brimstone is raining down on us all the time, Noa, because compassion itself is tainted with arrogance. There is Noa smoke without a fire. If you can, please forgive me. I cannot forgive myself, but you are still young. Good night to you. Pity on us all.

  I got home at ten. I found Theo lying on the white rug in the living room, in undershirt and tracksuit bottoms as usual, barefoot, not reading, no television, he may have been dozing with his eyes open. He kissed me on the cheek and asked how it went and I kissed him on his bristly grey hair with its military cut and said: It was terrible. Ludmir is mad and Muki is a baby and that Linda is pathetic. So am I probably. There's nobody to work with. Insignificant. Nothing'll come of it all.

  By the time I'd had a cold shower he had made us some supper, a geometric salad with radishes cut like rosebuds, cheeses and freshly sliced wholemeal bread on a wooden board, the frying pan with a cube of butter in it was waiting on the gas, and there were two eggs and a knife beside it, at the ready for the omelette-making. This is a ritual with its own invariable rules. I poured us both some mineral water. We sat down to eat opposite each other. His heavy, bare shoulders leaned against the side of the refrigerator. I was facing him and the window behind him that was full of desert stars. Theo told me that he'd been out too this evening, he'd been to see Batsheva, he just had a feeling I was going to ask him to talk to her.

  I haven't asked anything of you yet. Least of all that you should go opening doors for me.

  That's quite true, still, you ought to listen to me: I have the impression that, granted certain conditions, we might have
a chance of getting this thing through.

  We?

  All right. You. I'm sorry. Even so, I think you ought to listen.

  I got up in the middle of supper and shut myself in my bedroom. After a moment he knocked on the door. Noa, I'm very sorry, I only thought—

  I forgave him. I went back to the table. The omelette was cold, so Theo got up, put a tea towel round his waist as an apron, and started to make me a fresh one. I told him to stop, there was no need, I wasn't hungry, we could drink some herbal tea and see if there was anything tolerable on the television tonight. We switched on, and turned off almost at once because they were broadcasting an interview with the Minister for Energy, who managed to say, Surely it is unthinkable ... before we silenced him. Theo put a record on and we sat in the armchairs for a while without talking. Maybe at that moment we really did resemble each other as Muki once said about childless couples after years together. Suddenly I got up and went over to Theo, snuggled on his lap, buried my head in his shoulder and whispered, Don't talk. I remembered Tikki, the religious typist from Beersheba that I'd never seen, the one who fell in love with a basketball player and had a "Mongolian" baby by him that he refused to recognize. A live baby, I thought, so what if it's handicapped, it's alive, and just because it's handicapped it needs and deserves much more love. What was Immanuel doing all alone in the dark nurse's room on that grey winter's morning? How and why had he got there? Was he ill? Or had he slunk in to help himself to something from the medicine cabinet that he couldn't do without? How little I knew. Even now I didn't know anything. If I bumped into an addict right now, how would I be able to tell from a distance of four or five feet whether he was drugged or sleepy or simply had the flu? When Immanuel suddenly spoke and asked me, with his shy voice crossing the valley of silence in that room, whether I happened to have anything to write with, what had he really wanted? What was he after? To write something? Or was he just adrift, trying to communicate? And I pushed him away. I barricaded myself in. I failed to grasp that it was a plea for help.

  Theo. Listen to me. Kushner the bookbinder wants to give us a two-week-old puppy. Don't worry. I've told him you're not interested in pets. Wait. Don't answer yet. Listen to something else, listen to this farce, Linda is in love with Muki Peleg and apparently he's already sleeping with her but he's still quite keen on me and I still love you. How about you?

  Me, Theo said, well, it's like this, and instead of continuing he suddenly raised his undershirt and drew my head inside and enfolded me in the dark hairy cave of his chest as if he were pregnant with me.

  WHILE the six o'clock news was on I made a fruit salad. I sniffed the carton of milk in the refrigerator, suspicious as usual both of the milk and of my own sense of smell. Then I started to tidy the kitchen cabinets, from right to left. I hoped she would come back early. Just before seven I went out on the balcony to see how the day was receding. A strange grey dog slowly crossed the garden and disappeared behind the bougainvillaea bower, swaying as though it had been knocked out. There is the dark stone wall between the garden and the desert. And behind the wall and the two cypresses turning black with the evening come the barren hills—not so much hills as notes from a muffled tune. In fact the muffled tune was someone playing a recorder in a neighbouring apartment, not a whole tune but simple scales repeated apparently without any variation. Six times the elevator passed our floor without stopping. I remembered she had a meeting at Muki's Linda's apartment this evening. I decided to go out. To go down and see what there is in the wadi, or perhaps, instead, to go down to the square and take a look at the Alsatian puppy that Kushner the bookbinder wants to give us.

  The end of June. The days are very long. The nights are dry and chilly. Outside the front door some youngsters were sitting on a low wall, and they whispered together as I went past as if they had noticed something funny. The one and only police patrol car in Tel Kedar went past me and slowed down without its flashing light. The policeman waved to me and smiled: Evening, Sombrero, why don't we ever see you? And a sudden breeze blew from the end of the street making a low whistling sound. I started the Chevrolet and drove straight to the place the sound came from. There are only nine apartment blocks on the street and straight after the last one the road turns into a rutted dirt track which you can follow, if you like, southwards, then south-eastwards as far as the entrance to the quarries. Once I was out on the plateau I realized that the wind was actually much stronger than it had seemed among the buildings: it was not a gentle breeze but sharp gusts whose roar I could hear above the sound of the tires on the gravel. It was hard to make out the track through the dust that was caught in the headlights and whirled around me, like driving in a snowstorm. Too late I remembered to close the windows of the car. I continued groping my way forward, at a snail's pace, trying to guess from the billows of dust where the slope of Hyena Hill was and where, on my right, was the edge of the wadi. Grains of fine sand whirled across my entire field of vision in their millions until even the sharp horizon dividing the desert from the sky was obliterated. It was like crossing a virgin forest in the middle of the night. I supposed that the dark smudge on my left was the lower slopes of the mountain range and I advanced slowly parallel to it while the westerly wind, from my right, lashed the windows with sand. The headlight beams were broken up by the dust and reflected back dazzlingly into my eyes, as if I were driving in thick fog. The car lurched and bounced about and I realized that it had left the dirt track to the quarries and that from now on I would have to try at least to stay on a parallel course to it on the flat scree at the foot of the cliff. The darkness deepened. I tried driving with full beam, dipped headlights, sidelights, but still the dust continued to break up the light and reflect it back to me beaten, soaked in murky sand.

  I decided it was best not to go on. I stopped the engine, got out, and stood waiting for the cloud raised by the tires to settle, but after a while I was still surrounded by thick, soup-like air. I had lost my way. Nevertheless I thought I could vaguely identify the line of cliffs to the left. I started the engine and decided to get a little closer to it and drive along it until it brought me to the electronic fence that the army had put up along the mouth of the forbidden valley, and that would certainly guide me to the curve of the quarries. A low cloud or a tall pillar of dust barred the sky from my eyes. I was struck by a strange feeling, as though I were moving not forward but up and down, swinging in a sealed box deep under the ocean. I enjoyed this feeling until my eyes almost closed, in fact they may have closed altogether as I could see nothing anyway except the convulsive dancing of the dazzling wall of dust in front of my headlights. I considered for a moment whether I was not better off stopping here, lying down on the ground and waiting. On second thoughts I could not see what change might be worth waiting for. I took account of the danger involved in proceeding, as there were some fairly deep gullies that bisected the plain, but I answered myself, Never mind, I can still press on slowly and steadily. So I drove on gently in bottom gear, at 5 miles an hour or less. Stone chips and gravel groaned and grumbled under the weight of the moving wheels. Could I have unwittingly passed the quarries already? Or could I have drifted into the forbidden valley? There was nothing to stop me turning round and trying to drive back. But there was no point in turning round and nowhere to go, because the car's tracks were immediately obliterated by the eddies of windswept sand. Better keep moving southwards, if it really was southwards, until my tires splashed into the Indian Ocean or until at least I managed to fall asleep, and sink down into the depths of that sleep that had abandoned me but still went on calling to me like a will-o'-the-wisp.

  Then I made out beyond the murky screen a pale flickering light, the barrier at the entrance to the quarries. I flashed my headlights to the guard, so as not to alarm him, but after a moment I realized that it wasn't the gate to the quarries: what I had done was to drive right round the south side of the town and now I was entering it again from the west, on Ben Zvi Street, in the chic residential
neighbourhood. Now there was a paved road surface under my tires, a row of streetlights, and the wall of dust dissolved. I could see tiled roofs, and darkened trees in the gardens. The eerie sound of muffled woodwind music had faded too. The dim silvery expanse and the carpet of ashes had vanished. I felt a momentary urge to turn round and drive back into the fog from which I had come. But what for? So I drove past four identical houses that looked as though they were inspired by an illustration in an old-fashioned children's book: simple, square houses with chimneys, built of red bricks and with symmetrical windows on each side of the door. I parked the Chevrolet outside the fourth house, behind Batsheva's battered Subaru; I got out and, without bothering to lock the cat, rang the doorbell. I rang three times, at intervals, but answer came there none, even though there was a friendly little light in the window on the left and I fancied I could hear a faint sound of music coming from somewhere inside the house.

  Undeterred, I made my way round the side of the house along a dark paved path almost canopied with wild oleanders. At last I came upon Batsheva in the garden at the back. She and her old mother were sitting enjoying their evening peace by the yellowish glow of a light bulb suspended in the branches of a fig tree. The old woman sat motionless on a stool, erect and ascetic-looking, with a green kerchief on her head and her shrivelled arms held stiffly in front of her on her knees. Batsheva was playing a mouth organ, and this was the melancholy tune I had heard when I pressed the doorbell. She was sitting sprawled in an old claret-coloured armchair with splayed legs that had no doubt once adorned an oriental-style drawing room. Now that the upholstery was worn thin and the stuffing was spilling out in several places, the chair had been consigned to the garden like a magnificent pleasure cruiser grounded on a sandbank. Both their heads were ringed about with brightly lighted moths, and I knew that if I lingered here my head too would be surrounded with a similar shimmering halo.