To Know a Woman (Harvest in Translation)

by Amos Oz

  That evening, at Ben-Gurion airport, Le Patron was waiting for him in person. Without preamble he told him that Ivria had been accidentally electrocuted the previous day. To Yoel's two questions he replied precisely and without embellishment. He took Yoel's small suitcase out of his hand, led him through a side entrance to the car, and announced that he would drive Yoel to Jerusalem personally. Apart from a few words about the Tunisian engineer they drove the whole way in silence. The rain had not stopped since the previous day; it had merely changed into a fine, penetrating drizzle. In the headlights of the oncoming cars the rain seemed to be not falling but rising from the ground. An overturned truck, lying with its wheels still spinning by the roadside at the beginning of the winding ascent to Jerusalem, reminded him again of the cripple in Helsinki, and he still felt the nagging worry that there was some discrepancy, some implausibility, some irregularity. What it was, he could not tell. As they were driving up Mount Castel he took a small battery-powered shaver out of his briefcase and shaved by heart in the dark. As he always did. He did not want to appear at home unshaven.

  At ten o'clock the next morning the two funeral corteges set out. Ivria was buried at Sanhedriya, while the neighbor was taken to a different cemetery. Ivria's older brother, a stocky farmer from Metullah named Nakdimon Lublin, mumbled the memorial prayer, stumbling over the unfamiliar Aramaic words. Then he and his four sons took turns supporting Avigail, who was feeling faint.

  As they left the cemetery Yoel walked next to his mother. They walked very close together but they did not touch, except once, as they went through the gateway and they were pressed together and two black umbrellas tangled in the wind. Suddenly he recalled that he had left Mrs. Dalloway in his hotel room in Helsinki and the woolen scarf that his wife had bought him in the departure lounge at Vienna. And he reconciled himself to their loss. But how had he never noticed how much his mother-in-law and his mother were growing to resemble each other since they had been living together? Would he start looking like his daughter from now on? His eyes burned. He remembered that he had promised the Tunisian engineer to call him today and he had not kept his promise, nor would he be able to. He still could not see the connection between this promise and the cripple, although he sensed there was one. It troubled him.

  6

  Netta did not go to the funeral. Nor did Le Patron. Not because he was busy somewhere else but because, as usual, he had changed his mind at the last minute and decided to stay behind in the apartment and wait with Netta for them to come back from the cemetery. When the family returned with a few acquaintances and neighbors who had joined them, they found the man and Netta sitting facing each other in the living room, playing checkers. Nakdimon Lublin and the rest of them did not approve, but they took Netta's condition into account and chose to be indulgent. Or at least to say nothing. Yoel could not have cared less. While they were away, the man had taught Netta to make strong black coffee laced with brandy, which she served to all of them. He stayed till early evening. Then he got up and left. The acquaintances and relations dispersed. Nakdimon Lublin and his sons went to stay somewhere else in Jerusalem, promising to return in the morning. Yoel was left alone with the women. When it grew dark outside Avigail began to sob in the kitchen, a loud, broken noise that sounded like an attack of hiccoughs. Lisa calmed her with valerian drops, an old-fashioned remedy that nevertheless brought her some relief after a while. The two old women sat in the kitchen, with Lisa's arm around Avigail's shoulders and the two of them wrapped in a gray woolen shawl that Lisa must have found in a closet. Every now and again it slipped off, and Lisa bent down to pick it up, then raised it like a bat spreading its wings to wrap them in it again. After the valerian drops Avigail's crying became quieter and more even. Like a child crying in its sleep. But outside there suddenly rose the wailing of cats in heat, a strange, evil, piercing sound at times like barking. He and his daughter sat in the living room on either side of the low table that Ivria had bought in Jaffa ten years before. On the table was the game board, surrounded by checkers and a few empty coffee cups. Netta asked if she should make him an omelette and a salad; Yoel said "I'm not hungry" and she replied "Neither am I." At 8:30 the phone rang, but when he lifted the receiver he heard nothing. Out of professional habit he asked himself who would be interested in simply knowing if he was at home. But he could make no guess. Then Netta got up and closed the shutters and the windows and drew the curtains. At nine o'clock she said, "If you want to watch the news, suit yourself." Yoel said, "Fine." But they remained sitting; neither of them approached the television. And again by dint of professional habit he remembered the phone number in Helsinki and it occurred to him to call the Tunisian engineer now, from here. He decided not to because he did not know what to say to him. Soon after ten he got up and made them all open sandwiches with some cheese and sausage he found in the refrigerator; the sausage was the spicy kind coated with black pepper that was Ivria's favorite. Then the kettle boiled and he made four glasses of lemon tea. His mother said: "Leave all that to me." He said: "Never mind. It's all right." They drank the tea but nobody touched the sandwiches. It was nearly one o'clock in the morning before Lisa managed to persuade Avigail to take a couple of Valium tablets and put her to bed fully dressed in the double bed in Netta's room. She lay down next to her without switching off the bedside lamp. At 2:15 Yoel peeped in and found them both asleep. Avigail woke up three times and cried, then stopped, and all was quiet again. At three Netta suggested a game of. checkers to help pass the time. Yoel agreed, but tiredness suddenly overcame him, his eyes were burning, and he went off to have a doze in his nursery. Netta went with him as far as his bedroom door, and there, as he stood and unbuttoned his shirt, he told her that he had decided to exercise his right to take early retirement. He would write a letter of resignation that same week, and would not wait for them to appoint his successor. At the end of the school year they'd leave Jerusalem.

  Netta said: "Suit yourself." And left it at that.

  Without closing the door he lay down on the bed, with his hands under his head and his burning eyes on the ceiling. Ivria Lublin had been his only love, but that had been a long time ago. Sharply, in every detail, he recalled a time they had made love many years before. After a violent argument. From the first caress to the final shudder they had both been weeping, and afterward they had lain huddled for several hours, less like a man and a woman than like two people freezing in the snow at night. And he had stayed inside her body even when there was no more desire left and almost for the whole of that night. Now with the recollection there stirred in him a desire for her body. He placed his broad, ugly hand on his organ, as though to calm it, careful not to move either his hand or his organ. Because the door was open, he put out the light with his other hand. When he had put the light out he realized that the body he desired was encased in earth and would always remain so. Including the childlike knees, including the left breast that was slightly fuller and more attractive than the right one, including the brown birthmark that was sometimes visible and sometimes hidden in the pubic hair. And then he saw himself imprisoned in her cell in total darkness and saw her laid naked beneath the slabs of concrete beneath the little mound of earth in the rain that fell in the dark and he remembered her claustrophobia and reminded himself that the dead are not buried naked and reached out again and switched on the light in alarm. His desire had vanished. He closed his eyes and lay motionless on his back and waited for the tears. But the tears would not come, nor would sleep, and his hand groped on the bedside table for his book. Which had been left behind in Helsinki.

  Through his open door, to the accompaniment of the wind and the rain, he saw far away his daughter, plain, spare, stooped, picking up the empty coffee cups and glasses and putting them on a tray. She took them all out to the kitchen and washed them unhurriedly. The dish of cheese and sausage sandwiches she covered with plastic wrap and carefully put away in the refrigerator. She turned most of the lights out and made sure the apartment
was locked. Then she knocked twice on the door of her mother's study before opening and entering. On the desk lay Ivria's dip-pen and the inkwell, which had been left open. Netta closed the inkwell and put the top on the pen. She picked up from the desk the square frameless glasses that suggested a stern family doctor of an earlier generation. She picked them up from the desk as though intending to try them on. But she restrained herself, polished them lightly with the bottom of her blouse, folded them, and put them away in their case, which she found under the papers. She picked up the coffee cup that Ivria had left on the desk when she went out to fetch the flashlight, turned the light out, left the study, and closed the door behind her. Having washed this last cup she returned to the living room and sat alone in front of the checkerboard. On the other side of the wall Avigail was crying again and Lisa comforted her in a whisper. So deep was the silence that even through the closed and shuttered windows there could be heard the sound of cocks crowing in the distance and dogs barking; then the long-drawn-out sound of a muezzin's call to morning prayer insinuated itself indistinctly. And now what? Yoel asked himself. How ridiculous, how irritating, how unnecessary to have shaved in Le Patron's car on the way home from the airport. The cripple in the wheelchair in Helsinki had been young, very pale, and Yoel seemed to remember that he had had delicate, feminine features. He had no arms or legs. From birth? An accident? It rained in Jerusalem all through the night. The electricity had been restored less than an hour after the disaster.

  7

  In the late afternoon of a summer day, Yoel was standing barefoot in a corner of the lawn, trimming the hedge. In the little street in Ramat Lotan there were agricultural smells, mown lawns, manured flower beds, and a light soil that soaked up the water from the sprinklers. There were many sprinklers revolving in the little front and back gardens. It was quarter past five. Occasionally a neighbor would come home from work, park his car, get out unhurriedly, stretch his arms, and loosen his tie even before reaching his paved garden path.

  Through the garden doors of the houses opposite could be heard the voice of the man reading the news on television. Here and there neighbors were sitting on the lawn staring indoors at the television in their living room. With a small effort Yoel could catch the man's words. But his thoughts were distracted. At times he would stop clipping and watch three little girls playing on the street with an Alsatian they called Ironside, perhaps after the detective in a wheelchair in a television series a few years back, which Yoel had happened to watch by himself in hotel rooms in various cities. Once he had watched an episode dubbed into Portuguese, and had still managed to follow the plot. Which was a simple one.

  All around, birds were singing in the treetops, hopping along the walls, flitting from one garden to the next as though they were intoxicated with joy. Even though Yoel knew that birds do not flit for joy but for other reasons. Far away like the sighing of the sea sounded the din of heavy traffic on the highway that ran below Ramat Lotan. In a hammock behind him lay his mother, wearing a housecoat, reading the evening paper. Once, years before, she had told him how when he was three years old she had trundled him, in a squeaking carriage, completely buried and hidden under packages and bundles hastily thrown together, for hundreds of miles from Bucharest to the port of Varna. Most of the way she had fled along remote side roads. Nothing remained in his memory, but he had a faded image of a dark dormitory in the bowels of a ship, packed with tier upon tier of iron beds crammed with men and women groaning, spitting, perhaps vomiting over each other, or over him. And a vague picture of a fight, scratching and biting till the blood ran, between his shrieking mother and a bald, unshaven man on that same terrible voyage. His father he could not remember at all, even though he knew what he looked like from the two sepia pictures in his mother's old photograph album and he knew, or had inferred, that his father was not a Jew, but a Christian Romanian who had walked out of his life and his mother's even before the Germans arrived. But in his thoughts the father took on the appearance of the bald, unkempt man in the ship who had hit his mother.

  On the other side of the hedge, which he was trimming slowly and precisely, his neighbors, the American brother and sister who occupied the other half of the double house, were sitting on white garden chairs drinking iced coffee. Several times during the weeks since their arrival the Vermonts had invited him to drop in with the ladies one afternoon for iced coffee or else to watch a comedy on their VCR one evening after the nine o'clock news. Yoel had said: "We'd like that." Meanwhile he had not done so. Vermont was a fresh-looking, pink, heavy man, with the rough manner of a farmer. He looked like a healthy, wealthy Dutchman in an advertisement for expensive cigars. He was jovial and loud. Loud perhaps because he was hard of hearing. His sister was at least ten years younger than he, Annemarie or Rosemarie; Yoel could not remember which. A petite, attractive woman, with childlike laughing blue eyes and pointed breasts. "Hi," she said cheerily when she noticed Yoel eyeing her body over the hedge. Her brother repeated the same syllable, a split-second later and a touch less cheerily. Yoel wished them good afternoon. The woman came over to the hedge, her nipples visible under a light cotton blouse. When she got close to him, delightedly intercepting the look that was fixed on her, she added in English, speaking quickly in a low voice: "Tough life, huh?" Louder, in Hebrew, she asked if she could borrow his shears later so that she could trim the ligustrum hedge on their side too. Yoel said: "Why not?" And after a slight hesitation he offered to do it himself. "Careful." She laughed. "I might say yes."

  The late-afternoon light was gentle, honeyed, casting a strange golden glow on a few semitransparent clouds that were passing overhead on their way from the sea to the mountains. For a slight breeze had blown up from the sea, bringing a salty tang and a faint shade of melancholy. Which Yoel did not reject. The breeze rustled in the foliage of the ornamental and fruit trees, caressed the well-kept lawns, and splashed his bare chest with tiny droplets from a sprinkler in another garden.

  Instead of finishing his side of the hedge and going next door, as he had promised, to trim the other side, Yoel put the shears down on the edge of the lawn and went for a little stroll, as far as the point where the street was blocked by a fenced citrus grove. He stood there for a few minutes, staring at the dense foliage, vainly straining to decipher a silent movement that he imagined he could discern in the depths of the grove. Until his eyes ached again. Then he turned around and walked home. It was a tender evening. From a window of one of the other houses he heard a woman saying, "So what; tomorrow is another day." Yoel checked this sentence in his mind and found no error in it. At the entrances to the gardens were stylish, occasionally even ostentatious, mailboxes. Some of the parked cars still gave off residual heat from the engine and a faint smell of burned gasoline. Even the street, made of precast squares of concrete, radiated a warmth, which was pleasing under his bare feet. Each square bore a stamp in the form of two arrows flanking the inscription SCHARFSTEIN LTD RAMAT GAN.

  Some time after six o'clock Avigail and Netta returned in the car from the hairdresser's. Avigail, despite her mourning, struck him as healthy and applelike: her round face and sturdy body suggested a prosperous Slavic peasant woman. She was so unlike Ivria that for a moment he had difficulty remembering what his connection was with this woman. His daughter had had her hair cut boyishly short, bristly like a hedgehog, as though to defy him. She did not ask what he thought, and Yoel decided not to say a word this time either. When they were both indoors, Yoel went over to the car, which Avigail had parked sloppily, started it, reversed out of the drive, turned around at the bottom of the street, and backed into the drive so that the car now stood precisely in the center of the carport, facing the street, ready to go. He stood for a few minutes at the gate of his house as though waiting to see who else would turn up. Softly he whistled an old tune. He could not remember precisely where it came from but he vaguely remembered that it was from a well-known musical, and he turned to go indoors to ask but recalled that Ivria was n
ot here and that was why they were here. Because for a moment it had not been clear to him what he was actually doing in this strange place.

  By now it was seven o'clock. Time for a brandy. Tomorrow, he reminded himself, was another day. Enough.

  He went inside and had a leisurely shower. Meanwhile his mother-in-law and his mother prepared the supper. Netta was reading in her room and did not join them. Through her closed door she answered that she would eat something later.

  By half past seven the dusk was beginning to spread. Shortly before eight he went outside to lie on the glider, clutching a transistor radio and a book and the new reading glasses that he had been using for a few weeks now. He had chosen a pair of ridiculous round black-framed glasses that made him look like an elderly French priest. In the sky strange reflections were still flickering, the last remnant of the day that was ending, while a cruel red moon suddenly rose beyond the citrus grove. Opposite, behind the cypress trees and tiled roofs, the sky reflected the glare of the lights of Tel Aviv and for a moment Yoel felt that he must get up and go there now, right away, to bring his daughter back. But she was in her room. The light of her bedside lamp shining through her window into the garden cast a shape onto the lawn, which Yoel, contemplating it for several minutes, attempted in vain to define. Perhaps because it was not a geometric shape.