by Amos Oz
she would be better? Did she whisper That's enough, stop
pretending? Or did she feel sufficiently sorry for them to pretend right to
the end that she believed the lie that was tacitly contradicted by her mother's
weeping? And as she died convulsed by the light of a hurricane lamp
in the tent at four in the morning, who wiped the last beads of sweat from
her forehead? Who went outside first and who stayed with her a little longer
in the half-darkness of the tent? When morning came did Major Homer
force himself to shave? And did someone hand her mother a handkerchief
soaked in valerian? Because of the heat did they bury her that very morning
or did they wait till evening? And where and how did they travel on
from here? Did they leave at once? Or the next day? And how did the jungle
stand around the grave the first night after they left? A hundred years
have passed, so the pain has been stilled. Who is there to grieve? I wonder
whether somewhere in the world there is still an old comb or nail file
or mother-of-pearl brooch that belonged to that Irene. Perhaps in some
drawer in an unused walnut dressing table, or a mouldy attic somewhere
in Wiltshire? And who will want to keep her things, if any have survived?
And what for? Only I, who have no photograph and no image of her, felt sad
yesterday for that Irene. Just for a moment. Then it passed. I ate a grilled
fish with some rice and fell asleep. Today everything is fine. Don't worry.
Albert blames
Haven't I told you a thousand times Nadia I beg you stop filling his head with such nonsense once and for all, he's still young and easily frightened, don't stuff him full of wolves and witches and snow, ghosts in the cellar and goblins in the forest. There aren't any forests or goblins here. We came to this country to put all that behind us, to live on yoghurt and salad with an omelette, to settle down, to change, to defend ourselves when we have no alternative, to banish the old troubles, to be cured of the ancient horror, to sit under the vine in the garden, to recover gradually from everything that happened before, and to begin to distinguish here at last between what is possible and what is sheer lunacy. Haven't I told you a thousand times that my son has to grow up to be a useful member of society, a decent, sensible man with no nonsense in his head in the clouds but with both feet planted firmly on the ground in this land where there are no cottages in the forest but only warm sand and housing schemes. That is what we have, I told you, and what we haven't got we must simply learn to do without. To draw a line. Now look what's happened because of you. You've filled his head with fairies and fog and you yourself have grown feathers and a beak and flown off into the cold. You've left me all these lace doilies and embroidered place mats, who needs them? We could have had a grandson by now. Or a granddaughter.
Like a well where you wait to hear
Toward evening the boy, who still called him Yourr Honorr, would whistle to drag him out of the dungeon of sweaty sleep, and the two of them would climb the hill to catch crickets, or go to the seashore to pick up seashells to sell. They saw Superman together twice at the Globe Cinema and when they came out they wrestled panting on the grass. He went to the store run by the man from Taiwan and from his meager savings he bought the child a pair of khaki shorts, some vests, sandals with soles made from tires, he ended up looking like a young scamp from Israel in the old days. Each evening he bought him a Coke, some dates, bubble gum, occasionally a sticky brown sweet made locally from coconut and honey. He taught him to play a game of marbles from Tel Aviv, and they also made a kite. At night, on duty, you used to grill him a fish over the fire and talk, and the boy would listen, and sometimes a sly look flickered across his face which showed for an instant that he was not always as angelic as he looked. In the mornings, for instance, when you were asleep would he curl up in a heap of rags in the disused refrigeration unit, or on a battered mattress in some shed, or would he go off somewhere else to collect what was due to him? One day you bought him a bubble pipe from the Taiwanese, and that is how you were seen, an angular, tousled young man in jeans and a T-shirt with a Hebrew slogan ("Let the animals live"), with a dark-skinned, rather feminine little boy, in a pair of new sandals and a kibbutz-style vest which had once been white, the two of you blowing bubbles. So what if some people were beginning to gossip, at the hostel, at the refrigeration plant. The philandering Austrian engineer slapped you in various places and leered, neighing Ach so! At the kiosk, when you had finished blowing bubbles, the boy learned from you the latest Tel Aviv slang. Then you bought two sticks of chewing gum and you sat chewing together on the stone opposite the petrol pump. Perhaps you should ask some passing tourist to take a Polaroid photo. And send it In a letter. So they'd know. This child, listen, looks at you like a little abandoned monkey, not exactly looking you in the eye, more in the mouth, as though through your mouth he can see what's inside you. Besides which, he taught me a trick with a coin, the Devil only knows who taught it to him and what other things he knows without anyone knowing. He's like one of those lizards where if you pull off their tail they grow a new one, or more precisely like a well where you throw a stone in and wait to hear but you don't hear anything.
A negative answer
Question in a dream: and what was the fate of that well-mannered man, the draper who always knew what to say and what to pass over in silence? The man who was Nadia Danon's first husband? A scrubbed and scented, cheerful man, inclined to fixed habits, who sang Sabbath songs delightfully in a rich, resonant tenor voice. He may be living to this day in a suburb of Marseilles or Nice, pink-cheeked, flourishing, surrounded by charming widows. Or perhaps he is here in Israel, living in Kiryat Ono, a widower and pensioner, the treasurer of the House Committee, still hoping that one day his only daughter Rachel, a twice-divorced doctor of forty, will return from San Antonio or Toronto, marry a moderately observant Jew, open her own private clinic, and invite him to live with them, let's say in a modest little cabin at the end of their garden. To his question in a dream he receives a negative answer. She is there and you are here, totally on your own since the day Rex was run over. You have to get over your grief, put on a jacket and tie, pick up your carved cane, and go to the Animal Protection Society to choose yourself a new puppy despite everything, and start all over again. But it will be difficult to relate to a new puppy now: if you call him Rex he will remind you every day that Rex no longer exists, and if you call him Chief he won't help you forget anything. Better to give up dream questions and get on at last with finding a replacement for that refrigerator that rumbles like a heavy smoker and interrupts your sleep.
Abishag
It's cold tonight. And rainy.
His hands are so thin.
He's not really old
and I'm not in his arms.
His hands are so tender
clasped in my palms,
I'm changing a baby
born to me from his son.
He's really not old. Restless,
the sea outside in the dark
exhales. Thrashes. Gropes
the sandy beach with its waves.
As though changing his grandson
my hands encircle his.
For a moment he was a baby,
but now he's a father again.
He closes his eyes to keep watch
A small surprise party: the people who work at the Property Tax Board are
saying goodbye tonight to an old colleague who has reached retirement age.
So from eight to midnight Albert has offered to look after Bettine's
grandchildren who are sleeping in her bed. On a shelf in her bedroom is
a photo of her husband Avram, a distant relation of Nadia's, with a precisely
trimmed grey moustache, and a beret on his head. A smell of talc and
shampoo enfolds Bettine's habitual fa
int perfume. The little girl is fast asleep,
clutching a sheep with a missing ear, from time to time in her sleep she takes
a single deep breath. The boy is tossing and turning, he's worried, he fears
the worst, he thinks there's a bear lurking in the corridor. In vain Albert
carries him outside to see for himself that there's nothing there. He is
frightened. He wants his mummy. He wants Granny 'Tine. He wants
the light on. He asks Albert to turn off the dark, quick. In vain Albert sings
a Serbian lullaby from his childhood in Sarajevo and another haunting song
in Bulgarian with which Nadia used to lull Rico and herself to sleep. In vain.
A faint light comes from the kitchen and a glimmer from a street lamp enters through the window, trembling slightly because of
the sea breeze stirring in the chinaberry tree. Albert goes to the kitchen
to warm a bottle that Nadia has prepared before she went out. Bettine,
he corrects himself. But Nadia won't let go. He returns to the bedroom
and finds the boy asleep. Now he goes down on his knees on the matting
to pick up the animals, bricks, books, a xylophone missing two of its bars,
stoops to lay a teddy bear by the boy's shoulder, covers both children with
a blanket, sits down in Bettine's armchair, and closes his eyes to keep watch.
Xanadu
—till one evening he does not come to whistle, Wake up Yourr Honorr, let's
go get a Coke, and then let's go shrimping in the shallow rock pools in
the bay. First you scan the sky for the dragon kite you made him. Not there.
That night he does not pop out as usual from the shadows behind the pipes
and the smell of grilled fish.
Nor the next day.
He has disappeared.
In vain you go looking for him at the plant, in the cellars, on the shore, in
his disused refrigerator, to no avail you quiz the soft-drink seller
in the square or the Taiwanese storekeeper: vest khaki shorts a pair of
suspenders like an H? Always lugging a bag full of snails and Coca-Cola tops?
No use. So many children are abandoned here, cocksuckers, beggars,
pickpockets, who can tell them apart? The fishermen you question
this morning snicker, wink, what's the problem, find another one instead,
there's no shortage of his sort here. Has he been kidnapped? Got lost?
Drowned? Or found another uncle on the side? Only yesterday you washed
his hair; the boy bit, struggled, but came back in the evening with a gift for
you: a live jellyfish in a can of seawater. And the grief like a creeping stone:
the boy isn't here. He's gone. The boy who was here has gone. The boy
has gone. Lost. With his blue bag of snails and his sandals made from tires,
tied with a frayed string. A dustboy, so velvety, he found you rather odd,
what's the matter with you, a corrupt angel's smile, innocently seductive, pure
and smart, but suddenly a startled little monkey would cling and cuddle
in your arms, huddling and burrowing with a take-good-care-of-me.
You didn't. The boy has gone. The boy who was yours has gone. This
evening in the square three neon signs in Sinhalese and one in English:
Xanadu dance bar, first and last drink free on the house. Order a gin. Talk
for a while to one of those easy girls who by the way is also called Xanadu.
A boy. Lost. Not mine. Vanished. Don't know his name. He always calls me
Your Honor and I call him Come-Here. Eight. Or six. Who can tell?
So many children abandoned here. Maybe he needs help. He may be
screaming to me in the dark. Or no longer screaming. On the barbed wire
opposite is a torn scrap of kite. Another kite. Not ours. And warm rain
has been hanging for hours in the air. Sit and mourn. There's plenty of time.
Xanadu stays open till daylight.
If only thy let her
At six in the evening Bettine is walking along the shadier sidewalk to Viterbo's pharmacy, a woman with attractive hips, wearing a skirt made of an Indian material, and earrings, with her hair bobbed, her handbag swinging from her shoulder. Two days ago she won six hundred shekels in the lottery, and she is going to spend the money on Albert as well as herself. Besides acamol and calcium tablets, she is going to buy essence of propolis and echinacea, ginseng, and capsules of garlic and zinc. On second thought she will also get some brewers yeast and a jar of royal jelly for Dita who is looking washed-out, and two little toothbrushes and some vanilla-flavored toothpaste for her grandchildren on Friday evening. There's something cheap about that Dita, she's so caught up in herself, always preening, but she's rather touching too. The truth is it wouldn't hurt that bulldog Dubi Dombrov if someone took care of him. (Bettine casts a fleeting glance on his behalf toward a display of health care products but warns herself, Don't overdo it) As she leaves the pharmacy at twenty past six, Mr. Viterbo follows her with a smile that has no ostensible cause yet is not groundless. Instead of heading straight for Albert's she walks, clutching her plastic bag, to the seaside esplanade from which one can see the sun moving fairly fast toward the sea which, for its part, receives its sharp stabs of simple color and responds with its own complex colors. If you stop talking sometimes, my teacher Zelda said to me when I was about seven, maybe things will sometimes be able to speak to you. Long afterward I found in a poem of hers "a very faint quivering that moves the leaves when they meet the light of the dawn." Bettine is a far less thin-skinned mortal than my teacher Zelda, but something sometimes reminds me of her, for instance the way Bettine says, Listen, here's what I saw, or, Now don't you repeat that. A few days ago she said to me, Try to visualize what is implied in the bureaucratic expression "expired" that we use ten times a day without hearing what it is actually saying, but if you stop to think about it there is good reason to be startled. In my dream I am still in the pharmacy where I've been sent to return something embarrassing, like a bra or a garter belt from her clothesline that has somehow ended up at our place by mistake, and I try to give it back but she argues with me, Take a boy like Giggy, take someone like Dombrov even, and I say to her, I have taken them, and she smiles, not at me but at the pharmacist Viterbo, who smiles with her against me as he wraps a mouth organ for me which I haven't bought. Dear Bettine (I say to her in the dream as though I am greeting her at some formal occasion), why don't you bring your grandchildren over to our place this weekend, to play with our grandchildren? It wont fuse together, she says, and I am amazed in my dream and suddenly I'm not at the pharmacy but running across a plot of wasteland as the sirens howl. Little boy don't believe. Or do. Believe. What then. An invisible presence, she says, a terrible mute presence, and everything, from a stone to an urge, brings us not its sound, or an echo of its sound, but only a shadow of a shadow of a shadow or maybe not even that, but only a trembling, only a longing for shadow. Such is Bettine's creed, such is her faith. One evening in the summer she called me in Arad to chat about some book she was reading, and she told me she thought it was all quite hopeless really but at the same time quite amusing, because it turns out that something that never was and never will be is all that we have and that is what she wants to fuse together. Dear Bettine. If only they would let you.
The winter is ending
In south Bat Yam they're building a new mall, they've closed a grocery shop
and opened a fashion boutique or a bank, dedicated a garden to Yitzhak
Rabin, with a fountain and benches. In Bangladesh there has been more
flooding: the monsoon has washed away bridges, villages and crops. Not here.
Here we are expecting primaries, scuds or devaluation, whichever comes first.
Ben-Gal & Partners have purchased a n
ew plot to build luxury apartments
and duplexes and commissioned a ninety-second promotional film from
Dubi Dombrov: your dream home, penthouse with sea view. Dita Inbar
wrote the script. Apart from that, she's been to the hairdresser's, and bought
a spring dress and sandals. She is writing another screenplay
about the eccentric Greek in Jaffa who brought the dead back for
a short while, before he died himself. Then his heirs quarrelled about his flat.
Instead of a lawsuit, for a modest fee, Albert Danon has worked out a
compromise. On Tuesday Bettine is giving him supper, on Thursday night
she is coming round for tea and cakes on the veranda. The winter is ending.
The birds are at work. This light is pleasant and the nights are quiet.
A sound
Now everything is closed in Bat Yam except the duty pharmacy, where
a cool neon light is flickering. Behind the counter, in a white coat, sits
an Italian Jew, no longer young, who for three hours has been reading
line by line everything written in the daily paper, which while he reads
has become yesterday's paper. He wonders aloud but he knows that
there will be no answer. From the pocket of his white coat he takes
a pen and taps the side of his empty cup four or five times. It is not the
sound that startles him but the renewed silence: now it is really pure.
He's gone
For ever. He's gone. And from now on
it will hurt. Get up. Go. To bed. Or
not. Sit down. Have another gin
or don't Go out. Come back. He's
not Only there, on the rumpled canvas,
a cigarette-butt of his smell is left
among the brew of fish smells.
All there
