by Amos Oz
Soon
At the beginning of this autumn, like every year, I planted some
chrysanthemums next to the bench in the garden. And like every year
I had my hair cut at Chez Gilbert for Hanukkah and then I went shopping to
fill the gaps and replace some worn-out items on my shelf of flannel nighties,
and got home in time to light the first candle with Albert, because Dita
had rung to say sorry but she and Rico couldn't make it. It seems likely I
won't live to see the end of this winter. Dr. Pinto is optimistic, the situation
seems stable, if anything the left one is a little less good, but the right one
is clear and there are no secondaries. They even see some improvement there.
So the story moves on with intervals that are getting longer every time,
because I tire easily. Meanwhile I continue embroidering a place mat
that I'd like to finish. I rest every ten minutes, my fingers are turning white
and my eyes see things that aren't there. Sometimes I'm so terrified of it
like a pack of wolves and sometimes I just wonder how exactly it will come.
Is it like falling asleep? Like being burnt? Sometimes I regret we didn't take a
second trip last summer to Crete, where night fell so slowly and the salt smell
mingled with the tang of the pines and we drank wine with ewes' milk cheese
while the shadow of the mountains spread right across the plain but the
mountains themselves were still illuminated in the distance by a light that
promised that peace would come and the water in the stream was icy
even though it was August. Sometimes there's a pain and I lie down at once,
take a pill, I don't even wait the ten minutes I promised Dr. Pinto. He surely
won't be angry. And I sometimes feel something I can't remember the
word for, tmno, is it "dark"? My Hebrew is abandoning me, and making room
for more and more Bulgarian. Which is coming back to me now. Rico will
come back too, even though its past two o'clock, and Albert is waiting on
the veranda, fuming, now he has come back inside and is holding my feet.
He is holding me firmly and warmly and it really is soothing even though
I was calm already. Maybe this death is a Japanese? A sort of samurai.
Mannered. Hiding behind a childish ritual mask, a smooth shiny mask.
The unwrinkled cheeks are not even snowy-white but china-white, the cheeks
look powdered and the brow seems polished. The mouth turns downward
at the corners and there are long narrow empty cracks for eyes. Its really
a baby. If so it is rather terrifying, precisely because this china-white mask is
so smooth and expressionless. If it is a woman, it's strange that she hasn't
noticed there's a fried fish in the frying pan in the kitchen, cold and hard
from this morning. If it really is a baby, there's a diaper here; they put it
between my head and the pillow to soak up the perspiration. And if behind
the china mask there is a wrestler, a sumo wrestler, a Japanese weight-lifter,
what he will find at his feet is a body wrapped in a sheet Albert turned up
the heater for me and now it's too hot, I'm soaking, and he's gone outside
again, waiting on the veranda to tell Rico off the moment he gets back.
Should I take a nap? Not yet. It's a pity to miss details
and soon the bird.
Rico shouts
But dont you let it Mother bite and scratch
youre so submissive and obedient dont you let
so cold and evil crouching over you undoing and ripping
your pale skin your breasts
youre blind youre not in Crete youre not
among the streams and mountains dont you let
it Mother dont be gentle with it it will tear
your flesh and chew you to the bone
ripping and sucking the marrow of your spine so shout
so cold and evil crouching over you tearing and preying
forcibly planting in your womb a monster a bloated baby
shout out dont let it Mother bite kick and scratch
gouge its eyeballs out so obedient cotton wool
bite and scratch dont lie down so submissively dont let it
feast on your flesh relishing you all bit by bit
yes rip it gouge it yes tear its eyes out so shout
its crouching to dismember you liver pancreas and kidney
seeping into your spleen tearing you creeping from ovary
to gut sucking and chewing at your diaphragm
planting venomous fangs into lung and palate fight it
my chewed mother get it by the throat dont let it
Mother slain lamb shout.
A hand
It's a little less hot today which is why I asked him to come and sit with me on the veranda from where we can see the garden and breathe the nearby sea. This summer is already trailing signs of tiredness but it is still cruel and changeable, a capricious old tyrant. I put two liter bottles of mineral water on the table, remembering from last time how insatiably thirsty he is. The tax file he brought with him seems, at first glance, not entirely above board, it is sloppy and may have cut a few corners. Dombrov is a small company producing mainly advertisements and short public information films, the risk of fires in summer, the importance of wearing a seat belt. I'll go over it for him. Put it straight. It's a matter of two or three hours' work. And in the meantime the sea breeze comes and goes. On the garden seat below us a black cat lay dozing. Once again he talked about chance and guiding hands, like the first morning. It was not chance, in his view, that brought Dita and him together. Would it seem absurd if he confided in me that her script exactly describes his life and even his most intimate fantasy? A quiet house in a village, adjacent to a cemetery, with a tiled roof and thirty or forty fruit trees, a dovecote and a beehive, all surrounded with a stone wall and shaded by tall cypresses, and a young woman, Nirit, who because of a moment of compassion or some other fleeting emotion comes to stay for a few days, despite the fact that women usually find him repulsive. That is her script in a nutshell and it exactly represents the fantasy that has haunted him for many years, and that he has never told to another man or woman. It's a fact. Is it really possible, Mr. Danon, that it's just coincidence? How on earth did she manage to write a stranger's innermost dream? And another mysterious thing, how do you explain that she brought this script to me of all people? Half the inhabitants of Tel Aviv are producers. Or think they are. Do you really believe, Mr. Danon, that it's all just coincidence?
To this, naturally, I neither had nor could have an answer one way or the other—who can say—however I was surprised that this time, unlike his previous visit, he did not touch the glass of water I had poured him, which fountained bubbles excitedly till it grew tired, and subsided. As though in the meantime he had undergone a thorough detox. Instead, while he was expounding his views on probability, he attacked the fruit I had put in front of him, pears, grapes, apples, and devoured it without noticing what he was doing, munching, dripping, unaware that he was staining his clothes, what is just chance, Mr. Danon, and what is the result of the guiding hand of fate? I was astonished that he attributed some kind of decisive authority to me of all people. If we had lived lets say a couple of hundred years ago you might have imagined that he had come to me to ask for her hand in marriage and meanwhile here he was beating about the bush.
It's not easy to know, I said, whether there is such a thing as a guiding hand, and it's even harder to explain towards what and to what purpose this hand, if it exists, is or is not guiding what appears to us as chance. I sometimes wonder myself. To be sure what I said did not contain any answer, but somehow he seemed satisfied, even happy: on hearing the wor
ds "I sometimes wonder myself" his greedy mole's face suddenly lit up, and for an instant through this expression I caught a glimpse of a sad, unloved child, whose father has suddenly given him an unexplained pat on the back, that he has interpreted as a caress. Before I had any notion where or why, my hand reached out, touched him lightly on the shoulder as I saw him to the door, and "Don't worry," I said, but why did I say it, "we'll check through your tax papers and maybe straighten them out a bit, get in touch next week and don't even mention money."
Chandartal
It drips. It stops. It trickles.
The water tastes like wine.
A sluggish little fountain
in the courtyard of the shrine.
We've reached Ladakh, the "country
of the children of the moon,"
along the River Chandar,
and a lake named Chandartal.
The village is called Tiksa,
Tiksa Gumpa is the shrine,
the woman's name, Maria: you're
the one that she recalls.
The one who kissed her feet.
Yes, I mean you: come here.
Did you know there is a custom
in the region of Ladakh
to give one bride in marriage
to two or three young men,
to two or three young brothers.
It's you that she recalls.
The fountain flows and falters,
it stops and starts again
in the courtyard of the shrine.
The stone here is not chiselled,
but plastered white and red.
The shrine is Tiksa Gumpa,
the woman Maria. Come
to me. Fear not. I'm talking
to you. Tonight my lips
you shall open. Tonight
I'll be with you. Tiksa Gumpa
is the shrine and the lake is
Chandartal.
What never was and has gone
Maria too is lost, she roams from shrine to shrine,
sleeps, rises, packs her bag, sometimes in the company
of wayfaring men. Her beauty is wearing thin. Her face
is wrinkled by wind, sun and frost. The promised land
has gone or was it just a mirage? Whatever she has given
has been taken, and whatever is left will perish.
Promised lands are a lie. There is
no wondrous snowman in the mountain ravines. Only
in the sea there awaits her what never was
and has gone. Tonight the boy is with her.
Tomorrow alone. Chandartal.
Get out
Voices he hears, Tatars. What Tatars. Which Tatars.
Tatars in his head. Come back tomorrow, preferably
in a different frame of mind. Come back without the voices.
Without the Tatars. Without the torture. He is dead,
Elimelech the carpenter. On the windowsill a candle burns,
for the end of Sabbath or for remembrance. Who is crying
shouting Tatars to distinguish between weekday and
disaster? Elimelech the carpenter is dead hanged in the shed in the yard
looking like a practical joke, it was Rajeb who found him. Nine years on
and tomorrow his daughter is to be wed, I am invited to the wedding
and preferably in a different frame of mind. She is marrying
a land dealer around Nablus and they are settling
in Elon Moreh. Where are these omens coming from?
Tatars. Candle in the window. Elimelech the carpenter taught Rajeb
to sing duets with him, basso profundo and tenor, both
out of tune. Four armed settlers will support the posts
of her bridal canopy and you will stand with Albert
who is coming from Bat Yam. Palely the carpenter's daughter
smiles. The bridal veil is very fine. A bunch of roses
and a well-fed bridegroom. Sabbath end? Remembrance? And the rabbi
leaps and dances Tatars. Get out. What Tatars. Where
are the omens coming from and who is calling me where?
The carpenter hanged himself and Rajeb returned to Hebron.
He has not been seen since. Some say he ran away to Sudan
others that he was caught or killed constructing an explosive device,
and others are Tatars. Thick darkness and a candle outside the hired hall.
A car park. Silence. Dogs barking in the distance at a moon
that does not answer. Get out. Cut your roots and go.
Only the lonely
Evening and she has not come. Next door a child is crying, tiredly,
monotonously, knowing that nothing will help. In the one-room flat
I have rented for her in Mazeh Street there is no phone yet And even
if there were I wouldn't. This evening she won't come. On my own eating
black bread, cheese and olives. It's a long evening. Everyone is on his own
this evening and I too am on my own. I am wondering whether the money I
sent has reached you. Anxious about avalanches, landslides on those slopes.
Or awake, reading by candlelight in the cold in an abandoned temple. The
evening is still. The child who was crying before is quiet now. Here at my
kitchen window the sea is talking about autumn already. Another glass of tea
and I'll sit down to check a balance sheet that doesn't balance. Many send in
their accounts. Only the lonely know how to be accurate.
Rico feels
Yes the night is really cold and the snow reminds him of his father.
It creeps like a tiny furry creature
slinking across the valley.
Quiet and even, it gropes at the roof and the walls.
In the dark the sleepwrapped snow on tiptoe,
silent and anxious, spreads a blanket over him.
And the same evening Dita too
In a foam-filled bath
she pities their loneliness:
one wanted me to mother him
the other looks to me as a daughter.
To be a woman to both of them
is something I can only do in the bath.
A wish stirs
Evening. Rain falls on the empty desert hills. Chalk and flint and the smell
of dust being wetted after an arid summer. A wish stirs: to be
what I would have been had I not known what is known. To be before
knowledge. Like the hills. Like a rock on the surface of the moon.
Simply there, motionless, and trusting
in the length of its shelf life.
I think
Night. In the garden ploughs a breeze. A cat,
I think a cat, pads among bushes, a shadow
flitting among the shadows. It sniffs or guesses
something hidden from me. What is not mine to sense
is taking shape there now without me. Cypresses
tremble slightly, black, in a motion of mourning,
I think beside the wall. Something there is touching
some other thing. Something is expiring. Ostensibly
all this is taking shape right before my eyes
as I watch the garden from this window. So I think.
In fact all this has always happened and always will
but only ever behind my back.
A web
Waking tired at twenty to five. Lights. A pee. A wash. Then standing
with a coffee at the window. Chilly mist still in the bushes. The garden
light continues signalling to itself. The lawn is still damp.
Empty. Chairs, with legs in the air, upside down on the garden table.
There is a milky light
toward dawn, lest we forget that we are in
the Milky Way, a remote galaxy flickering until it fades out.
Until it fades out five-o'clock-in-the-morning things are happen
ing. A
startled bird calls out in surprise, as though this were the very first morning.
Or the very last. Between two branches of a ficus an early spider is at work.
From the humors of its body it spins a tight net in which it hunts
twenty or thirty dewdrops that do not sit idle either but catch splinters
of light and multiply each one sevenfold. Every captive splinter, for its part,
translates itself to lightning. Until the paper arrives I'll sit down and write too.
Rico thinks about the mysterious snowman
Man that is born of woman bears his parents on his shoulders. No, not on
his shoulders. Within him. All his life he is bound to bear them,
together with all their host, their parents, their parents' parents,
a Russian doll heavy with child back to the first generation:
wherever he walks he bears his forebears, when he lies down he bears
his forebears and when he rises up he bears them, or if he wanders far or
stays in his place. Night after night he shares his cot with his father
and his couch with his mother until his day comes.
But that snowman is not born of woman. Weightless and naked
it roams alone on the barren mountains. Neither born nor begetting
neither loving nor thirsty for love. It has never mourned
nor lost a living soul. Ageless it floats over the snows,
fatherless, motherless, homeless, timeless and deathless. Alone.
One by one
He rolls down the woman Maria's stockings, one by one, his eyes
digging into her flesh. These are the eyes of the flesh. The eyes
of his spirit are closed. Were they not closed he would see Maria not
