To Know a Woman (Harvest in Translation)

by Amos Oz

  Netta also kept these rules. Although no one had told her. As though she had made up her mind to compensate her father because she felt that the new arrangement was based mainly on his renunciation and tolerance, she often climbed into his arms that summer and snuggled up to him, purring contentedly. She sharpened the pencils on his desk. She folded his newspaper neatly and left it beside his bed when he was away. She would give him a glass of fruit squash from the refrigerator even if he forgot to ask for one. She arranged her drawings from school and her work from the pottery class like a display on his desk, to wait for him on his return. Wherever he went in the apartment, even in the bathroom, even among his shaving things, she left delicate drawings of cyclamens, which were his favorite flowers. He might even have named his daughter Rakefet, meaning "cyclamen," if Ivria had not put her foot down.

  Ivria, for her part, showered him in bed with surprises he could not have imagined, even in the early days of their marriage. He was sometimes alarmed by the force of her hunger mingled with tenderness, generosity, a kind of musical preparedness to guess his every wish. What have I done? he asked in a whisper once. How have I earned all this from you? It's simple, whispered Ivria. My lovers don't satisfy me. Only you do.

  And he really did excel himself. He gave her a scorching pleasure and when her body was seized with shuddering spasms and her teeth chattered as though with cold he got much more of a thrill out of her pleasure than he got from his own. Sometimes Yoel had the feeling that it was not his sexual organ but his whole being that was penetrating and luxuriating inside her womb. That he was entirely wrapped up and quivering inside her. Until with each caress the difference between caresser and caressed vanished, as though they had ceased being a man and a woman making love and had become one flesh.

  15

  One of his friends at work, a rough, sharp man who was known as Cockney or sometimes as the Acrobat, told Yoel one of those days to watch out, it stuck out a mile that he was having a bit on the side. When Yoel protested his innocence, the Acrobat, bewildered by the conflict between the evidence of his own eyes and his confidence in Yoel's habitual veracity, hissed mockingly: "Forget it. After all, you're supposed to be our resident righteous man. So enjoy yourself. As the Good Book says, I have not seen the righteous man forsaken, nor his seed begging for ... bed."

  Sometimes in hotel bedrooms, by the fluorescent light that he always left on in the bathroom, he would wake up in the middle of the night aching with desire for his wife and say to himself, Come here. Until once, for the first time in all his years of traveling and in flat contradiction to the rules, he could not stop himself from phoning her at four o'clock in the morning from Nairobi, and there she was, waiting for him. She picked up the receiver at the first ring, and before he could make a sound said: Yoel. Where are you? And he said things to her that by morning he had forgotten and that four days later, when he was home and she tried to remind him, he adamantly refused to listen to.

  If he got home while it was still light, they used to deposit the child in front of the new television and lock themselves in the bedroom. When they emerged after an hour Netta would nestle in his arms like a kitten and he would tell her stories about bears, in which there was always one stupid but endearing bear called Zambi.

  Three times, during the school holidays, they left the child with the Lublins in Metullah or with Lisa in Rehavia and went off for a week by themselves, to the Red Sea, to Greece, and to Paris. They had not done this since the problem first appeared. But Yoel knew that everything hung by a thread, and indeed at the beginning of the following autumn, when she was in the third grade, she passed out on the kitchen floor one Saturday morning and only came around the following afternoon in the hospital after extensive treatment. Ivria broke the rules ten days or so later by remarking with a smile that that girl could make a successful career as an actress. Yoel decided to let it pass.

  After this long fit, Ivria forbade Yoel to touch Netta even casually. When he ignored the prohibition, she fetched the sleeping bag from the trunk of the car, which was parked in the open basement of the block of apartments, and took to sleeping in the child's bedroom. Until he took the hint and suggested that they swap: she and Netta could sleep in the double bed in the main bedroom and he would move into the nursery. That way they would all be more comfortable.

  That winter Ivria went on a strict diet and lost a lot of weight. A tough, bitter line was blended into her beauty. Her hair started to go gray. Then she decided to resume studying in the English Literature Department, and to get a second degree. To write an MA thesis. Meanwhile Yoel several times saw himself going away and not coming back. Settling down under an assumed name somewhere far away like Vancouver or Brisbane and starting a new life. Opening a driving school, an investment business, or purchasing a log cabin cheaply and living alone by hunting or fishing. These were the kind of dreams he had dreamed as a child, and now here he was dreaming them again. Sometimes in his imagination he would introduce into the log cabin an Eskimo slave-woman, silent and submissive, like a dog. He imagined nights of wild lovemaking in front of the fire in the cabin. But very soon he began to betray this Eskimo mistress with his own wife.

  Whenever Netta regained consciousness after a fit Yoel managed to be there before Ivria. The special training he had received years before had given him sharp reflexes and a number of stratagems. He would dash like a runner at the sound of the starter's pistol, pick the child up, shut himself with her in her room that was his room now, and lock the door. He would tell her stories about Zambi the bear. Play hunter-and-rabbit with her. Cut funny shapes out of paper for her, and volunteer to be a father to all her dolls. Or build towers out of dominoes. Until after an hour or so Ivria would give in and knock at the door. Then he would immediately stop, open the door, and invite her to join them on a tour of the palace of bricks or a cruise in the chest where the bedclothes were normally kept. But something changed the moment Ivria came in. As though the palace were abandoned. As though the river they were sailing on had suddenly frozen.

  16

  When she was older, Yoel started to take his daughter with him on long journeys over the detailed world map he had bought in London and hung on the wall above her former bed. When they reached Amsterdam, for example, he had an excellent street plan that he opened out on the bed so as to take Netta to the museums, to sail down the canals, and to visit the other attractions. From there they went on to Brussels or Zurich or sometimes as far afield as Latin America.

  So it was until one day, after a short attack in the hall on the evening of Independence Day, Ivria managed to beat him to it; she darted up to the girl almost before she opened her eyes. For an instant Yoel was terrified that she would hit her again. But Ivria, calmly and solemnly, merely picked the girl up in her arms and carried her to the bath. Which she filled with water. And the two of them locked themselves in and had a bath together for nearly an hour. Maybe Ivria had read something of the sort in the medical literature. Throughout those long years of silence Ivria and Yoel had never stopped reading medical material on subjects related to Netta's problem. Without talking about it. They would silently deposit clippings from the medical pages of the newspapers, articles that Ivria had photocopied in the university library, medical journals that Yoel bought on his trips, on each other's bedside tables. They always left these documents in sealed brown envelopes.

  From then on, after each attack Ivria and Netta shut themselves away in the bathroom. The bath became a sort of heated swimming pool for them. Through the locked door Yoel could hear giggles and sounds of splashing. That was the end of the cruises in the bed-linen chest and the flights over the world map. Yoel did not want any quarrels. All he wanted in his home was peace and quiet. He began to buy her dolls of all the nations in traditional costume in airport souvenir shops. For some time he and his daughter were partners in this collection, and Ivria was forbidden to so much as dust the shelves. So the years went by. From about the fourth grade Netta began to rea
d a lot. Dolls and towers of dominoes no longer interested her. She excelled in her schoolwork, especially in arithmetic and Hebrew, and later in literature and mathematics. And she collected sheet music, which her father bought for her on his trips abroad and her mother at shops in Jerusalem. She also collected dried thistles as she wandered in the wadis in summer, and she arranged them in vases in the double bedroom, which continued to be her room even after Ivria left it and migrated to the living-room sofa. Netta had hardly any girlfriends, either because she did not want any or because of rumors about her condition. Even though the problem never occurred at school, or in the street, or in other people's homes, but only within their own four walls.

  Every day, after doing her homework, she would lie down on her bed and read until supper, which she was in the habit of eating alone whenever she felt like it. Then she would return to her room and lie down and read on the double bed. For a time Ivria tried to wage a campaign about the time she turned her lights out. Eventually she gave up. Sometimes Yoel would wake up at some indeterminate hour of the night, grope his way to the refrigerator or the bathroom, and be drawn half-asleep toward the strip of light that filtered under Netta's door, but he chose not to approach. He would patter to the living room and sit for a few minutes in an armchair facing the sofa where Ivria was sleeping.

  When Netta reached the age of puberty her doctor asked them to send her to a therapist. Who after a while requested to see both parents together and then each of them separately. Under her guidance both Ivria and Yoel were compelled to give up spoiling the girl after her attacks. That was the end of the ceremony of cocoa-without-the-skin and there were no more joint mother-daughter bathing sessions. Netta started to help sometimes, unenthusiastically, with the housework. She no longer welcomed Yoel with his slippers in her hand, and she stopped making her mother up before they went out to the cinema. Instead they began to have weekly staff meetings in the kitchen. At the same period Netta began spending long hours at her grandmother's apartment in Rehavia. For some time she persuaded Lisa to dictate her memories to her: she bought a special notebook and used a little tape recorder that Yoel had brought back from New York for her. Then she lost interest and dropped the project. Life calmed down. In the meantime Avigail too moved to Jerusalem. For forty-four years, ever since she left her birthplace, Safed, to marry Shealtiel Lublin, Avigail had lived in Metullah. There she had brought up her children and taught arithmetic in the primary school, lending a hand with the chickens and the fruit and vegetables, and reading nineteenth-century travel books in the evenings. After she was widowed she had volunteered to look after the four sons of her elder child, Nakdimon, who was widowed himself a year after she was.

  Now her grandsons had grown up and Avigail had decided to start a new life. She rented a small apartment in Jerusalem, not far from her daughter, and enrolled for a BA in Jewish Studies at the university. It was the same month that Ivria resumed her studies and began her MA thesis on the Shame in the Attic. Sometimes they would meet for a light lunch at the cafeteria in the Kaplan Building. Sometimes the three of them, Ivria, Avigail, and Netta, would go out together to a literary evening. If they went to the theater, Lisa joined them too. Eventually Avigail decided to leave her rented studio and move in with Lisa in her two-room apartment in Rehavia, about a quarter of an hour's walk from their children's home in Talbiyeh.

  17

  And between Ivria and Yoel hibernation reigned once more. Ivria found a part-time job as an editor with the Ministry of Tourism. Most of her time she devoted to her thesis on the novels of the Brontë sisters. Yoel was promoted again. Le Patron hinted to him in a tête-à-tête that this was not the last word and that he ought to start thinking of higher things. In a casual conversation on the stairs one weekend the truck-driver neighbor, Itamar Vitkin, explained that, now that his sons were grown up and his wife had left him and Jerusalem, his apartment was too big for him. He offered to sell Mr. Raviv a room. A building contractor appeared early in the summer, a pious Jew accompanied by a single workman, a middle-aged man so gaunt he looked consumptive. A hole was knocked through the wall and a new door was fitted. The old door was sealed up and plastered over with several layers, but one could still make out its outline on the wall. The work took some four months because the workman fell ill. Then Ivria moved into her new study. The living room was evacuated. Yoel remained in the nursery, and Netta in the double bedroom. Yoel put up some extra shelves for her there, to contain her library and her collection of sheet music. On the walls she hung pictures of her favorite Hebrew poets: Steinberg, Alterman, Lea Goldberg, and Amir Gilboa. Gradually the problems decreased. The incidents became rarer, not more than three or four a year. And they were generally light. One of the doctors even saw fit to offer them limited grounds for hope: The whole saga of your young lady is not exactly unambiguous. It is a slightly unclear case. There is scope for different interpretations. Perhaps in time she will manage to grow out of it completely. Provided that she really wants to. And that you do too. It can happen. He was personally aware of two precedents at least. It was naturally a matter of a prospect, not a prognosis, and in the meantime it was very important to encourage the girl to cultivate a little more of a social life. Staying shut up at home never helped anybody's health. In a word: expeditions, fresh air, boys, Mother Nature, kibbutz, work, dancing, swimming, healthy pleasures.

  From Netta, and also from Ivria, Yoel learned of the new friendship with the middle-aged neighbor, the refrigerated-truck driver, who had begun to visit them at times for a glass of tea in the kitchen at the end of the day when Yoel was away. Or to invite them to his apartment. Sometimes he played tunes for them on his guitar. Netta commented that they would have sounded better on a balalaika. And Ivria said that they reminded her of her childhood, when Russianness was widespread in the country, especially in Upper Galilee. Sometimes Ivria called on him alone in the late afternoon. Even Yoel was invited once, twice, a third time, but he found no opportunity to accept, because during that last winter he had to travel more than usual. In Madrid he had managed to pick up a lead that excited him, and his instinct told him that there might be a specially valuable prize waiting at the end of the line. But he would have to deploy various stratagems that demanded patience, cunning, and feigned indifference. Consequently he adopted an indifferent manner that winter. He saw no harm in the friendship between his wife and the older neighbor. He too had a certain weakness for Russian tunes. And he even detected the first signs of a thaw in Ivria: something in the way she let her graying blond hair fall down over her shoulders now. Something in the way she made fruit compote. The style of shoes she had taken to wearing.

  Ivria said to him: You look lovely. So brown. Is something nice happening to you?

  Yoel said: Sure. I've got an Eskimo mistress.

  Ivria said: When Netta goes to Metullah, bring your mistress here. We'll have a ball.

  And Yoel: Seriously, though, isn't it time we had a holiday, just the two of us?

  He didn't mind what the reason was for the change that was visibly taking place, whether it was her success in the ministry (she also had been promoted), her enthusiasm for her thesis, her friendship with the neighbor, or maybe her pleasure at having her new room that she liked to lock herself into when she was working and also at night when she was asleep. He started to plan a little summer holiday for the two of them, after a period of six years when they had not traveled together. Except for one time when they went to Metullah for a week, but on the third night the phone rang and Yoel was summoned back to Tel Aviv at once. Netta could stay with the grannies in Rehavia. Or else the grannies could come and stay in Talbiyeh while they were away. This time they could go to London. His plan was to surprise her with a British holiday, including a special tour of her own territory, Yorkshire. She had a map of the county hanging on her study wall, and from professional habit Yoel had memorized the layout of the road system and various points of interest.

  Sometimes he used to stare hard at
his daughter. He found her neither pretty nor feminine. She almost seemed to take pride in it. Clothes that he bought her in Europe for her birthday she occasionally deigned to put on, as though to please him, but she managed to wear them with a sloppy air. Yoel made a note to himself: sloppy, not careless. She dressed in gray and black, or black and brown. Most of the time she went around in a pair of baggy pants that seemed to Yoel as unfeminine as a circus clown's.

  One day a young man called, and in a diffident, polite, almost embarrassed voice asked to speak to Netta. Ivria and Yoel exchanged glances and ceremonially left the living room and shut themselves in the kitchen until Netta had put the receiver down, and even then they did not hurry back. Ivria suddenly chose to invite Yoel to her study for a cup of coffee. But when they finally emerged, it transpired that after all the boy had only called to ask Netta for the telephone number of another girl in her class.

  Yoel preferred to attribute it all to a somewhat delayed puberty. Once her breasts grow, he thought, the telephone will never stop ringing. Ivria said to him: That's the fourth time you've thrown that stupid joke at me, just to spare yourself the trouble of looking in the mirror for once to see who the girl's jailer is. Yoel said: Don't start all that again, Ivria. And she replied: All right. Anyway it's hopeless.

  Yoel could not see what was hopeless. In his heart he was confident that Netta would soon find herself a boyfriend, and stop accompanying her mother when she visited the guitar-playing neighbor or her grandmothers when they went out to concerts and plays. For some reason he imagined this boyfriend as a large, hairy kibbutznik with thick arms, the loins of a bull, heavy legs in shorts, and sun-bleached eyelashes. He would take her away to his kibbutz, and Ivria and he would be left by themselves.