To Know a Woman (Harvest in Translation)

by Amos Oz

  When he was not away on a trip he used to get up sometimes at one o'clock in the morning or so, avoiding the strip of light filtering underneath Netta's door, knock gently on the study door, and bring his wife a tray of sandwiches and iced fruit squash. Because Ivria had taken to working late. Occasionally he was invited to lock the study door. Sometimes she would ask his advice on some technical matter such as how to divide the work into chapters or different ways of typing the footnotes. Just you wait, he said to himself; on our wedding anniversary, the first of March, you'll have a little surprise. He had decided to buy her a word processor.

  On his recent trips he had been reading books by the Brontë sisters. He never got around to telling Ivria. Charlotte's writing struck him as facile, and in Wuthering Heights he found a puzzle, not in Catherine or Heathcliff, but in the downtrodden Edgar Linton, who even appeared on one occasion in his dream in a hotel in Marseilles, a short time before the disaster, with a pair of spectacles pushed up on his high, pale brow that looked like Ivria's reading glasses: square, frameless, giving her the appearance of a gentle family doctor of an earlier generation.

  Whenever he had to leave for the airport in the early hours of the morning, he would silently enter his daughter's room. Tiptoeing among the vases sprouting forests of thistles he would kiss her eyes without letting his lips touch her and smooth the pillow near her hair with his hand. Then he would go to the study, wake Ivria, and take his leave. All these years he had always awakened his wife in the early morning to say good-bye when he was leaving on a trip. It was Ivria who insisted on it. Even when they were fighting. Even when they were not on speaking terms. Perhaps their common hatred of the hairy kibbutznik with the thick arms forged a bond between them. As though beyond despair. Or perhaps it was a remembrance of the kindness of youth. A short time before the disaster he could almost smile when he remembered the favorite saying of policeman Lublin, that when it comes to it, we all have the same secrets.

  18

  When Netta regained consciousness he took her to the kitchen. He made her some strong percolated coffee, and decided to help himself to an early brandy. The electric clock on the wall over the refrigerator said ten to five. Outside, the summer-afternoon sunlight was still strong. With her cropped hair, her baggy pants, and her large yellow shirt draped over her angular body, his daughter reminded him of a consumptive young nobleman from an earlier century putting in an appearance at a ball he found boring. Her fingers were clasped around the coffee cup as though they were warming themselves on a winter's night. Yoel noticed a slight redness of her knuckles that contrasted with the whiteness of her flat fingernails. Was she feeling better now? She looked up at him sideways, her chin fixed to her chest, with a faint smile, as though disappointed by his question: No, she was not feeling better, because she hadn't felt bad. What had she felt? Nothing special. Didn't she remember fainting? Only the beginning. What was the beginning like? Nothing special. But look at yourself. So gray. And tough. As if you were ready to kill. What's the matter with you? Drink your brandy; it'll make you feel a bit better, and stop staring at me as though you've never seen anybody drinking a cup of coffee in a kitchen before. Have your headaches come back? Do you feel ill? Shall I massage your neck for you?

  He shook his head. Obeyed her. He stretched his neck backward and swallowed his brandy in one long gulp. Then, hesitantly, suggested that she shouldn't go out this evening. Had he only imagined that she was planning to go into town? To the Cinémathèque? To a concert?

  "Do you want me at home?"

  "Me? I wasn't thinking about myself. I was thinking that perhaps for your own good you ought to stay in this evening."

  "Are you frightened of staying alone?"

  He almost said, Why on earth. But he changed his mind. He picked up the saltcellar, stopped its hole with his finger, turned it over, and examined its underside. Then he suggested sheepishly:

  "There's a wildlife film on TV tonight. Tropical life in the Amazon. Something like that."

  "So what's your problem?"

  Again he stopped himself. Shrugged. And said nothing.

  "If you don't feel like staying by yourself, why don't you go next door tonight? That knockout and her funny brother. They're always asking you. Or call your buddy Krantz. He'll be here in ten minutes. Like a shot."

  "Netta."

  "What?"

  "Stay in tonight."

  He had the impression that his daughter was concealing a sneer behind her raised coffee cup, over which he could see only her green eyes flashing at him, indifferently or slyly, and the outline of her ruthlessly cropped hair. Her shoulders were hunched, her head sunk between them, as though she were preparing herself for him to get up and beat her.

  "Listen. The fact is I wasn't even thinking of going out this evening. But now that you've started your routine, I've remembered that I really do have to go out. I've got a date."

  "A date?"

  "You'll probably insist on a full report."

  "Not at all. Just tell me who with."

  "Your boss."

  "What on earth for? Has he been converted to modern poetry?"

  "Why don't you ask him? Why don't you two cross-examine each other? All right. I'll spare you the trouble. He called two days ago, and when I said I'd call you, he said not to bother. It was me he was calling. He wanted to make a date with me."

  "What for, the national checkers championship?"

  "Why are you so tense? What's got into you? Maybe it's just that he also has problems with spending the evening at home alone."

  "Netta. Look here. I haven't got a problem with being alone. Why should I? It's just that I'd be happier if you didn't go out after your ... after not feeling very well."

  "It's all right; you can say the word 'attack.' Don't be scared. The censorship's been lifted. Maybe that's why you're trying to pick a quarrel with me."

  "What does he want from you?"

  "There's the phone. Call him. Ask him."

  "Netta."

  "How should I know? Perhaps they've started to recruit flat-chested girls. Mata Hari style."

  "Let's get this straight. I'm not interfering in your affairs, and I'm not trying to pick a quarrel with you, but—"

  "But if you weren't always such a coward, you'd simply say that you forbid me to go out, and if I don't do as you say, you'll beat the daylights out of me. Full stop. And that you especially forbid me to meet Le Patron. The trouble with you is that you're a coward."

  "Look here," said Yoel. But he did not continue. Absently he put the empty brandy glass to his lips. Then put it gently on the table, as though taking care not to make a sound or hurt the table. The grayish evening light was in the kitchen but neither of them got up to turn the light on. Every movement of the breeze in the branches of the plum tree at the window sent complex shadows trembling on the ceiling and the walls. Netta reached out, shook the bottle, and refilled Yoel's glass. The small hand of the clock over the refrigerator hopped rhythmically from second to second. Yoel suddenly saw in his mind's eye a little pharmacy in Copenhagen where he had finally identified a well-known Irish terrorist and photographed him with a miniature camera concealed in a cigarette pack. For a moment the motor of the refrigerator found new strength, gave out a dull rumble, making the glasses tremble on the shelf, then changed its mind and fell silent.

  "The sea won't run away," he said.

  "What?"

  "Nothing. I just remembered something."

  "If you weren't such a coward, you'd simply say to me, Please don't leave me alone at home tonight. You'd say you find it hard. And I'd say, All right, with pleasure, why not. Tell me something: what are you afraid of ?"

  "Where are you supposed to meet him?"

  "In the forest. In the Seven Dwarfs' house."

  "Seriously."

  "Café Oslo. Top of Ibn Gabirol Street."

  "I'll give you a lift."

  "Suit yourself."

  "On one condition: that we eat something firs
t. You've eaten nothing all day. And how will you get home?"

  "In a carriage drawn by white horses. Why?"

  "I'll come and get you. Just tell me what time. Or give me a call from there. But I want you to know that I'd rather you stayed in tonight. Tomorrow is another day."

  "Are you forbidding me to go out this evening?"

  "I didn't say that."

  "Are you asking me nicely not to leave you alone in the dark?"

  "I didn't say that either."

  "So what are you saying? Could you try to make your mind up?"

  "Nothing. Let's have something to eat, you get dressed, and we'll be off. I need to get some gas on the way. You go and get dressed and I'll make an omelette."

  "Like she used to beg you not to go away? Not to leave her alone with me?"

  "That's not true. It wasn't like that."

  "Do you know what he wants from me? You must have some idea. Or some suspicion."

  "No."

  "Do you want to know?"

  "Not especially."

  "Are you sure?"

  "Not especially. Actually, yes: what does he want from you?"

  "He wants to talk to me about you. He thinks you're in a bad way. He has a hunch. That's what he said to me on the phone. Seems he's looking for some way to get you back to work. He says that we're living on a desert island here, and he and I have got to try to work out some solution together. Why are you against my seeing him?"

  "I'm not against it. Get dressed and we'll go. While you get dressed I'll make an omelette. A salad. Something quick but good. Just a quarter of an hour, and we're off. Go and get dressed."

  "Have you noticed that you've said 'get dressed' ten times? Do I look as if I'm not wearing anything? Sit down. What are you jumping around for?"

  "So you won't be late for your date."

  "Of course I'm not going to be late. You know that very well. You've already won the game. In three easy moves. I don't understand why you're still carrying on with this charade. After all, you're a hundred and twenty percent sure."

  "Sure? Of what?"

  "That I'm not going out. Shall we make an omelette and a salad? There's some cold meat left over from yesterday, the kind you like. There's some fruit yogurt too."

  "Netta. Let's get this straight—"

  "Everything's perfectly straight."

  "Not to me it isn't. I'm sorry."

  "You're not sorry. What's the matter, have you had enough of wildlife films? Were you wanting to run across to the woman next door? Or did you want to ask Krantz over to wag his tail at you? Or go to bed early?"

  "No, but—"

  "Listen. It's like this. I'm dying for tropical life in the Amazon or something like that. And stop saying you're sorry, when you've got exactly what you wanted. As usual. And you've got it without even using violence or exerting authority. The enemy didn't just give in; the enemy melted away. Now drink that brandy to celebrate the triumph of the Jewish brain. Just do me one favor: I haven't got the phone number. You call Le Patron and tell him yourself."

  "Tell him what?"

  "That it'll have to be some other time. That tomorrow is another day."

  "Netta. Run and get dressed and I'll take you to the Café Oslo."

  "Tell him I had an attack. Tell him you're out of gas. Tell him the house burned down."

  "An omelette? Some salad? How about some chips? Would you like some yogurt?"

  "Suit yourself."

  19

  Quarter after six in the morning. Blue-gray light and flashes of sunrise among the eastern clouds. A light morning breeze brings a smell of burning thistles from far away. And there are two pear trees and two apple trees whose leaves have started to turn brown with the tiredness of summer's end. Yoel is standing behind the house, in a white undershirt and running shorts, barefoot, holding the newspaper still rolled up in its wrapper. Once again he has failed to catch the delivery boy. His neck is stretched backward, his head toward the sky. He is watching flocks of birds migrating southward in arrowhead formation. Storks? Cranes? They are flying now over the tiled roofs of neat houses, over gardens and woods and citrus groves, absorbed eventually among the feathery clouds brightening in the southeast. After the orchards and fields will come rocky slopes and stone villages, valleys and ravines, and then at last the silence of deserts and the gloom of the eastern mountain ranges veiled in dull mist and, beyond more desert, plains of shifting sands, and beyond them the last mountains. In fact, he was intending to go to the garden shed to feed the cat and her kittens and to find a wrench to mend or change the dripping faucet beside the carport. He was only waiting for a moment for the newspaper boy to finish the street and turn around, and then he'd catch him on his way back. But how do they find their way? And how do they know that the time has come? Suppose that at some remote spot in the heart of the African jungle there is a sort of base, a sort of hidden control tower, which day and night transmits a regular, fine, high-pitched sound, too high for any human ear to catch, too sharp to be intercepted by even the most delicate, sensitive, and sophisticated sensors. The sound extends like an invisible beam from the equator to the far north, and the birds fly along it toward light and warmth. Yoel, like a man who has almost experienced a small illumination, alone in the garden whose branches had begun to turn gold in the glow of sunrise, instantly imagined that he could receive—not receive, sense—between two vertebrae in the base of his spine, the birds' African orientation sound. If only he had wings he would respond and go. The feeling that a woman's warm finger was touching or almost touching him a little above the coccyx was almost like a physical thrill. At that moment, for the space of a breath or two, the choice between living and dying seemed to be an insignificant one. A deep calm surrounded and filled him, as though his skin had ceased to divide the inner calm and the calm of the outside world, as though they had become a single calm. During the twenty-three years he had been in the service, he had perfected the art of small talk with strangers, chatting about the exchange rate or the advantages of Swissair or about French versus Italian women, while simultaneously studying the other party. Figuring out how he could crack the safe where the other kept his secrets. Like starting to solve a crossword puzzle with the easiest clues so as to get a purchase here and there on the harder parts. Now, at half past six in the morning in his own garden, a widower, unattached in almost every sense of the word, he felt the stirrings of a suspicion that nothing at all could be understood. That the obvious, simple, everyday things—the chill of dawn, the smell of burned thistles, a small bird among the apple leaves rusting from the touch of autumn, the feverish touch of the breeze on his bare shoulders, the scent of watered soil, and the taste of the light, the yellowing of the lawn, the tiredness of his eyes, the thrill he had briefly felt in the small of his back, the shame in the attic, the kittens and their mother in the shed, the guitar that had started to sound like a cello at night, a new pile of round pebbles on the other side of the hedge at the end of the Vermonts' porch, the yellow sprayer he had borrowed and ought to return to Krantz, his mother's and daughter's underwear hanging on the clothesline at the other end of the garden and billowing in the morning breeze, the sky that was clear now of migrating birds—everything held a secret.

  And everything you have deciphered you have only deciphered for an instant. As though you were forcing your way through thick ferns in a tropical forest that closes in behind you as soon as you have passed, leaving no trace of your passage. As soon as you have managed to define something in words, it has already slipped—crawled—away into blurred shadowy twilight. Yoel recalled what his neighbor Itamar Vitkin had said to him once on the stairs that the Hebrew word shebeshiflenu in Psalm 136 could easily be a Polish word, whereas the word namogu at the end of chapter 2 of the Book of Joshua has an indubitably Russian sound to it. Yoel compared in his memory the neighbor's voice as he had pronounced namogu with a Russian accent and shebeshiflenu in mock-Polish. Was he really trying to be funny? Perhaps he was trying to say
something to me, something that existed only in the space between the two words he was using? And I missed it because I wasn't paying attention? Yoel pondered for a moment the word "indubitably" that, to his surprise, he had suddenly whispered to himself.

  In the meantime he had yet again missed the paper boy, who had apparently turned around at the end of the street and passed the house on his way back. To Yoel's astonishment and contrary to what he had imagined, it transpired that the boy, or the man, did not ride a bicycle but drove a shabby old Susita car, and threw the papers through the window into the garden paths as he went past. Perhaps he never even saw the note that Yoel had attached to the mailbox, and now it was too late to chase after him. A faint anger stirred within him at the thought that everything held a secret. But in fact secret was not the right word. It was not like a sealed book, but, rather, like an open book in which one could freely read clear, everyday things, indubitable things, morning, garden, bird, newspaper, but where one could also read in other ways. Combining, for example, every seventh word in reverse order. Or the fourth word of every other sentence. Or substituting certain letters. Or circling every letter that is preceded by a c. There is no limit to the number of possibilities, and each of them may indicate a different interpretation. An alternative meaning. Not necessarily a deeper, or more fascinating, or more obscure interpretation: just a totally different one. Without any resemblance to the obvious explanation. Or perhaps not? Yoel felt angry at the faint rage that stirred within him at these thoughts, because he always wanted to see himself as a calm, self-controlled man. How can you know which is the right access code? How can you discover, among the infinite combinations, the correct prefix? The key to the inner order of things? Moreover, how could you tell whether the code was universal, or whether it was personal, like a credit card, or unique, like a lottery ticket? How could you be sure that it didn't change every seven years, for example? Or every morning? Or every time somebody died? Especially when your eyes are tired and almost weeping from the effort, especially when the sky has cleared: the storks have flown away. Unless they were cranes.