by Amos Oz
Me. And we'll agree on the price.
When I got home in the evening Theo said, It's odd I said that to him. I don't know what I was thinking of. We're attracted by the house but what'll we do with it? Can you understand it, Noa? Because I haven't got the faintest where I got the idea from.
I said: Wait. We'll see.
On Saturday, at seven o'clock in the evening, as the light was softening and turning blue, we felt like going there. The groaning Chevrolet wouldn't start again. So we walked. Not through the square by the lights but the roundabout way, along the dirt track, along the foot of the cliff that shuts off the forbidden valley. A few dark, windswept bushes were stirring on the hilltops, because a fierce southerly wind blew up every now and again and filled the world with millions of sharp specks. As if it was about to pour with rain. Violent gusts periodically shook the bushes at the top of the line of hills, forcing them to bend, wriggle and stoop in a contorted dance. The piercing sand penetrated to our skin under our clothes, filling our hair, grating between our teeth, hitting us straight in the eyes as if it was trying to blind us. From time to time a low howl crossed the empty plains. And stopped. And started whipping and tormenting the long-suffering bushes again. We progressed slowly southwards, as though fighting a way upstream. We made our way round the cemetery. The wail of pine trees shaken by the wind rose from the direction of the graves. It is a small, new town, and the dead are still few, a few dozen, perhaps a hundred, and apart from Bozo's baby none of them was born here or buried with their parents. My father and Aunt Chuma, his sister, are buried among the nettles under dark cypresses in the neglected cemetery at the edge of the village where I was born. My mother is presumably in New Zealand, where it's winter when it's summer here and night when it's day here, and maybe the drizzle drips on her grave in the dark, and trees I do not know the name of whisper to each other and stop. One Saturday, when we went for a walk in a wadi on the northern side of town, we came across a Bedouin burial ground, heaps of grey stones that the sand was gradually covering. They may have been the remains of ancient nomads who lived and died here exposed between the mountains and the sun long before the Bedouin came.
When we reached the turning for the quarries we took the path to the west among the rocks. The wind, which had been blowing in our faces, now struck us from the left, pushing us towards the edge of the ravine whose bottom was already dark. The light faded and grew murky; curtains of dust obscured the sun and painted it with a strange grey redness tinged with purple flares; it sank until we could look at it without being dazzled. A glimmering, lethal mantle was spreading across the west, looking like burning chemicals. Then it sank and was swallowed up beyond the edge of the plain.
We reached the ruin as the remains of the light were still flickering. There was a sour, damp smell, even though the building was open to the four winds. We groped our way from room to room, stepping over heaps of rubbish until we imagined we could see shadows flitting in front of us: the reflection of the wind-lashed treetops in the garden on the walls in the remains of the light. But no: this time we really did seem to have disturbed a pair of uninvited guests, a girl and a boy, blurred, slow, we had apparently woken them from a deep sleep; they stared at us for a moment as if we were ghosts, then they slipped out through a window frame on the eastern wall and disappeared silently among the trees in the darkened wood.
Theo touched my back with outstretched fingers: Look here, Noa, you must understand, that boy is dead. I answered in a whisper, I know. Know? Then say it. But why? Say it, Noa, so that it is in your own voice.
And we stood there waiting for it to get cold.
We got home at ten o'clock. We went back through the town, crossing the square that was completely empty by now and lashed by the wind with tattered newspapers and salvos of sharp sand. I put my arm round his wide belt and sensed the smell of old leather and sweat. We hurriedly closed all the blinds and windows against the dust storm. Theo made a fine salad with a radish cut in the form of a rosebud. He made an omelette and put out sliced bread and various cheeses on a wooden board. I made two glasses of herbal tea. We put a record on, Schubert's Mass in B Flat Major, and we sat in the kitchen till late. We did not speak. Maybe we'll hire a car and go for a trip to Galilee. We'll stay in village inns and go and see the sun rise through the dense tangle of vegetation near the sources of the Jordan. When we come home Tal can bring us the little kitten she has promised us. Theo will give her a part-time job filing in his office, until she joins the army, and meanwhile he will prepare her for her math exam. We'll buy her a pretty blouse and skirt instead of the worn jeans with the rips at the knees. I thought about the shadows we had disturbed this evening in the ruin. They might have gone down into the wadi under the cover of thick darkness, and by now they'd have got as far as the flank of Hyena Hill. Or they might have taken shelter in the wood. Or they might have sneaked back inside after we'd gone and now they'd be lying in the gloom under the crumbling wall, head on thigh, drowsing in the peace of a silent dream, far from themselves, far from pain and sorrow, listening to the gusts of the southerly wind that blows and fades and rustles again through the tops of the twisted pine trees in the garden of the ruin from where it carries on to sweep the whole of the town and gropes at the outside of the shutters we have closed. If you like, you can hear it whistle through the low bushes. If you don't, you don't have to listen. In another two and a half weeks the summer holiday will be over. Whoever has some goodwill can find goodwill everywhere. Maybe this year I'll agree to be a form teacher. Meanwhile, tonight, I'll make him give up London because I'll have a shower and go to him in the darkness.
The Cast
Theo (of Planning Ltd.)
Noa Dubnow (teacher)
Malachi (Muki) Peleg (estate agent and investment consultant)
Avraham Orvieto (defence adviser or perhaps arms-dealer)
Erella Orvieto (his wife)
Immanuel Orvieto (their son, former secondary school pupil)
The Orvieto family's chimpanzee
Immanuel Orvieto's dog
Elazara Orvieto (aunt and former bank clerk)
Ron Arbel (lawyer)
Ludmir (retired employee of the electricity company, member of many committees)
Gusta Ludmir (his wife, gives private math coaching)
Larlach Ludmir (his granddaughter)
Linda Danino (clerk, divorced)
Nehemia Dubnow (retired employee of the water company)
Chuma Zamosc Bat-Am (militant vegetarian and pacifist)
Yoshiahu (Yoshku) Zamosc (born-again Jew)
Peeping Gorovoy (former champion weight-lifter of Lodz)
Ezra Zussman (poet) and his wife
Batsheva Dinur (the Mayor)
Didi Dinur (her husband, killed in the Six Day War; apparently a musician)
Batsheva's elderly mother (retired teacher)
Etam (Batsheva's grandson)
Nawwaf (who has brought olives from Galilee)
Julia and Dr. Leo Dresdner, and Dr. Nir (the last two are dentists)
Dubi Weitzman (notary and accountant)
Yehuda and Jakki (Hollywood Photos)
Kushner (bookbinder)
Schatzberg (pharmacist)
Avram (falafel seller lately also shawarma in pitta)
Shlomo Benizri (from the Department in Beersheba)
Doris (Benizri's secretary)
Tikki (a typist)
Pudgy policeman (from the road accident at Ashkelon junction)
Martha (from Elat, apparently a drug user)
'Aatef (a Bedouin tracker)
Alharizi (formerly a house owner in Tel Kedar, now an importer of televisions in Netanya)
Natalia (immigrant, a cleaner)
Her husband and his father (immigrants, mechanics)
Gilboa (newsagent and stationer)
Limor Gilboa (assists her father; cellist)
Pini Bozo (sells shoes)
His wife and baby (killed)
Alb
ert Yeshua (the soldier who killed them)
Blind Lupo (from the telephone exchange)
Anat and Ohad (a young couple)
Bialkin (sells furniture)
Gustav Marmorek (alias old Elijah)
Violette and Madeleine (hairdressers, sisters-in-law)
Hungarian cantor
Paula Orlev (Desert Chic Fashions)
Tal Orlev (her daughter; between school and military service)
Jacques Ben Loulou (Ben Elul's Garage)
Bargeloni Bros (estate agents)
Pini Finkel (killed in the War of Independence)
Nimrod Finkel (his son, head of the Planning Agency)
Cherniak, Refidim and Arbel, Lawyers (90 Rothschild Boulevard, Tel Aviv)
A professor and piano tuner (writing a book entitled The Essence of Judaism)
Amalia (ailing librarian)
Young man from Galway (travelling around Galilee, looking for a girl named Daphne)
String quartet (immigrants from Kiev)
Man crying in Jeep
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.
