by Amos Oz
27
It sometimes happened on these autumn nights that the smell of the cold sea infiltrating through the closed windows, the sound of the rain drumming on the roof of the garden shed behind the house, the whispering of the wind in the darkness, kindled within him suddenly a sort of quiet, powerful joy that he had not imagined he was still capable of feeling. He was almost ashamed of this strange joy: he found it almost ugly that he should feel that the fact he was alive was a great achievement, whereas Ivria's death indicated her failure. He knew well that people's acts, all people, all acts, acts of passion and ambition, acts of fraud, seduction, accumulation, evasion, acts of malice and defection, competition and flattery and generosity, acts meant to impress, to attract attention, to be engraved on the memory of the family or the gang or the country or the human race, petty acts and grandiose ones, calculated or uncontrollable or vicious acts, almost all of them almost always take you somewhere you had not the slightest intention of ending up. This general and constant deflection or diversion of people's various actions Yoel tried to call in his heart the universal practical joke, or the black humor of the universe. But he changed his mind: the definition struck him as too high-flown. The words "universe," "life," "essence" were too grandiose for him; they seemed ridiculous. So he contented himself in his thoughts with what Arik Krantz had told him about his one-eared regimental commander in the artillery, Jimmy Gal by name, you must have heard of him, he used to say that between any two points there was only one straight line, and that line was always full of imbeciles.
And since he had remembered the one-eared regimental commander, he thought more and more frequently about the order that Netta had received to report to the recruiting center in a few weeks' time. By summer she would have finished school and the exams would be over. What would come to light during her physicals at the recruiting center? Was he hoping that they would take Netta in the army? Or was he apprehensive? What would Ivria have demanded that he do when the order to report arrived? At times he imagined the strong kibbutznik with the thick arms and the hairy chest, and he said to himself in English and almost aloud: Take it easy, buddy.
Avigail said: "If you ask me, that girl is healthier than the lot of us."
Lisa said: "All the doctors, they should be healthy, don't know from their life. A man which lives from other people's illnesses, what good would it do for him if they all got better suddenly?"
Netta said: "I'm not intending to ask for a deferment."
And Arik Krantz: "Listen carefully, Yoel. Just give me the green light, and I'll fix the whole business up for you in a flash."
While outside, between showers, drenched half-frozen birds sometimes appeared at the window, standing immobile at the tip of a dripping branch as though they were a wonderful winter fruit that had grown, despite the fallen leaves and hibernation, on the gray fruit trees.
28
Two more times Teacher tried to change Yoel's mind and persuade him to take on the undercover mission to Bangkok. Once he telephoned at quarter of six in the morning, and so ruined the ambush for the newspaper man again. Without wasting words on apologies for the early hour he began to share with Yoel his thoughts concerning the alternation of prime ministers under the rotation agreement between the coalition parties. As usual he indicated with few words and in sharp, clear lines the advantages, sketched the disadvantages in a few trenchant sentences, depicted simply and precisely three possible scenarios for the immediate future, and skillfully linked each foreseeable development to the consequences that would inevitably flow from it. Although, naturally, he resisted the temptation to prophesy—even by so much as a hint—which of the developments he described would be more likely to materialize. When Teacher used the words "system malfunctioning," Yoel, who was, as always, the passive party in conversation with him, tried to visualize the malfunctioning system as a kind of frenzied electronic device that had gone wrong and started to run amok, chirping and wailing and flashing colored lights and electric sparks shooting from its contacts and a smell of burning rubber. Meanwhile he lost the thread. Until Le Patron addressed him in an imploring, didactic tone, with the hint of a French lilt in his pronunciation of the words: "And if we miss Bangkok and as a result somebody dies someday whose death could have been prevented, you, Yoel, will have to live with that."
Yoel said quietly:
"Look. You may or may not have noticed. I am living with it, even without Bangkok. I mean with exactly what you just said. And now I'm sorry but I've got to hang up, so that I can try to catch the newspaper man; if you like I'll call you back later at the office."
The man said:
"Think, Yoel."
And so saying he hung up and cut the conversation short.
Next day the man invited Netta to meet him at eight o'clock in the evening at the Café Oslo at the top of Ibn Gabirol Street. Yoel gave her a lift and let her out on the other side of the street. "Cross carefully," he said to her. "Not here—use the crossing." Then he drove home and took his mother to Dr. Litwin for an urgent examination, and an hour and a half later he went back to pick Netta up, not at the Café Oslo but, as before, across the street. He waited, sitting at the wheel of the car, for her to come out, because he could not find a parking space and in fact he did not even look for one. There came into his mind his mother's stories about their journey, in the carriage and on foot, from Bucharest to Varna and the dark space in the belly of the ship with rows and rows of beds full of men and women spitting, perhaps throwing up over each other, and the fierce fight that broke out between his mother and his bald, rough, unshaven father, with scratching, shrieking, belly kicks, and bites. And he had to remind himself that the stubbly murderer was not his father but, apparently, more or less a stranger. His father in the Romanian photograph was a thin, sallow man in a brown striped suit, whose face conveyed embarrassment or humiliation. And perhaps even cowardice. He was a Roman Catholic, who had walked out of his mother's life and his own when Yoel was a year old.
"Suit yourself," said Netta after a few traffic lights on their way home, "but as far as I'm concerned you can go. Why not? Maybe you really ought to."
There was a long silence. His driving, between the interchange and the complicated traffic lights, through the stream of lights and crossings and dazzling headlights, in the middle lane between strained nerves on either side, was precise and relaxed.
"Look," he said, "as it stands now—" and he stopped to search for words and she neither interrupted nor helped. Again they were silent. Netta noticed a resemblance between his driving and his way of shaving in the morning, the cool, controlled way he ran the razor over his cheeks and his precision in the cleft of his chin. Ever since she was a child she had always enjoyed sitting near him on the marble edge of the bathroom basin and watching him shaving, even though Ivria used to scold them both for it.
"What was it you were going to say," she said. It was not a question.
"The way it looks now, I wanted to say, I'm just no good at that kind of thing any more. It's like, say, a pianist who has rheumatism in his fingers. Better to give up in time."
"Bullshit," said Netta.
"Just a minute. Let me explain better. These ... these trips, the jobs, it works, if at all, only if you concentrate a hundred percent. Not ninety-nine. Like a man who juggles with plates in an amusement park. And I can't concentrate any more."
"Suit yourself. Stay or go. It's just a pity you can't see yourself, let's say, shutting off the empty gas tank and opening up a full one by the kitchen door: as concentrated as can be."
"Netta," he said suddenly, swallowing his saliva, hurriedly changing into fourth gear as he was released for a moment from the crush of the traffic. "You still haven't grasped what it's all about. It's either us or them. Never mind. Let's drop it."
"Suit yourself," she said. They had reached the Ramat Lotan junction, Bardugo's Nurseries were closed by now, or maybe they were still open despite the late hour. Half the lights were on. Out of profe
ssional habit he made a mental note that the door was closed and there were two cars there with their side lights on. They exchanged no further words until they were home. When they had arrived Netta said:
"One thing though: I can't stand the way your friend drenches himself with perfume. Like an old ballerina."
And Yoel said;
"Too bad. We've missed the news."
29
And so autumn faded into winter almost without any noticeable change. Even though Yoel was on the alert, watching for any sign, however faint, that would enable him to pinpoint the moment of transition. The sea breezes stripped the last brown leaves off the fruit trees. At night the reflection of the lights of Tel Aviv shimmered on the low winter clouds with an almost radioactive glare. The garden shed was clear of the cat and her kittens, though Yoel occasionally observed one or another of them among the garbage cans. He no longer brought them leftovers of chicken. In the late afternoon the street stood empty and desolate, lashed by wet gusts. In every garden the tables and chairs were folded up and put away. Or covered with plastic sheets, the chairs placed upside down on the tables. At night the even, unexpressive rain beat at the shutters and drummed drearily on the asbestos awning over the kitchen door. In two separate places in the house signs of leaks appeared; Yoel did not attempt to treat them superficially, but chose to climb up to the roof on a ladder and change six roof tiles. Which stopped both the leaks. He took advantage of the opportunity to adjust the angle of the television aerial slightly, and the reception did indeed improve.
At the beginning of November, thanks to Dr. Litwin's contacts, his mother was admitted to Tel Hashomer Hospital for tests. And it was decided that she should have an urgent operation, to remove something small but superfluous. The senior consultant in the department explained to Yoel that there was no immediate danger, although, of course, at her age, who could tell? In fact they did not issue guarantees at any age. Yoel preferred to note the words in his memory without further inquiry. He almost envied his mother a day or two after the operation, seeing her with gleaming white bedclothes, surrounded by boxes of chocolates, books and magazines, and vases of flowers, in a special room with only one other bed. Which was empty.
Avigail barely stirred from Lisa's bedside for the first couple of days, except when Netta came to relieve her after school. Yoel placed the car at Avigail's disposal, and she would deliver all sorts of instructions and warnings to Netta and drive home to shower, change her clothes, sleep for an hour or two, and then return and release Netta and stay by Lisa's side until four o'clock in the morning. Then she drove home again for three hours' rest, and at half past seven she reappeared at the hospital.
For most of the day the room was filled by their fellow volunteers from the Committee for Retarded Children and from Open Heart for Immigrants. Even the Romanian neighbor across the street, the gentleman with the ample posterior who reminded Yoel of an overripe avocado, arrived with a bunch of flowers, bent over and kissed Lisa's hand, and talked to her in their own language.
After the operation his mother's face beamed like that of a village saint in a church mural. Lying on her back with her head on a pile of clean white pillows, draped in a sheet as though in snow she looked compassionate and flowing with human kindness. She interested herself tirelessly in the details of her guests' health, and their children's, and their neighbors', dispensing reassurance and good advice to one and all, behaving toward her visitors like a guru distributing amulets and blessings to pilgrims. Several times Yoel sat facing her on the empty bed, next to his daughter or his mother-in-law or between the two of them. When he asked how she was, if she still had any pain, if she needed anything, she replied with a beaming smile, as though in the grip of a profound inspiration:
"Why do you do nothing? Catching flies all day long. Better you should get into some business. Mr. Krantz wants you so much with him. I give you a little money. So buy something. Sell. See people. If you go on like this, you'll go mad soon or you'll start to get religious."
Yoel said:
"It'll be all right. The important thing is for you to get well soon."
And Lisa:
"All right it won't be. Just look what a sight you are. Sitting and eating your heart out."
For some reason her last words aroused apprehension in him and he forced himself to go back to the doctors' room. What he had learned by experience in his work enabled him to extract from them without any difficulty everything he wanted to know, except for the thing he wanted to know most of all, namely, how long in this business the intervals between one episode and the next were likely to last. The senior consultant and the junior doctors all insisted that there was no way of knowing. He tried to decipher their thoughts in one manner or another but he finally came to believe or almost to believe that they were not conspiring to withhold the truth from him, so that here too there was no way of knowing.
30
As for the pale cripple he might have seen twice in the street in Helsinki on the sixteenth of February, the day of Ivria's death, either he was born without limbs or it was in an accident that he lost his arms at the shoulder and his legs at the groin.
At quarter past eight in the morning, after taking Netta to school and Lisa to the physiotherapy center, and driving home and handing the car over to Avigail, Yoel shut himself in Mr. Kramer's study that served as his bedroom. He examined the question of the cripple again under a magnifying glass, under a focused beam of light; he carefully studied the plan of Helsinki, scrutinized his route from the hotel to his meeting with the Tunisian engineer at the railroad station, and he found no error. It was true that the cripple looked familiar to him. And it was true that during an operation it is your duty to stop everything while you discover the meaning of any familiar face you have seen, even if it is only vaguely familiar. But now, with careful hindsight, Yoel agreed with himself almost beyond any doubt that he saw the invalid in the street that day in Helsinki not twice but once only. His imagination had deluded him. Once again he broke his memory of that day into its smallest details, reconstructing the segments of time on a large sheet of squared paper that he ruled off into units of a quarter of an hour. He concentrated on this work until half past three in the afternoon, internalizing the plan of the city, working calmly and stubbornly, bent over the desk, straining to rescue one crumb after another from oblivion, to piece together the sequence of events and places. The smells of the city almost came back to him. Every couple of hours he made himself a cup of coffee. By midday the tiredness of his eyes had begun to impede his work, and he made use alternately of his Catholic priest's intellectual glasses and the pair that suggested a family doctor. Finally there began to emerge a working hypothesis that he could live with: at five past four, by the electric wall clock over the counter of a branch of the Nordic Investment Bank, he had changed eighty dollars and walked out onto the esplanade. Consequently the crucial time was limited to between four-fifteen and five-thirty. The place was, apparently, the corner of Marikatu and Kapitaninkatu, outside a large ochre building in the Russian style. He could visualize almost with certainty a newsstand nearby. That was where he had seen the poor wretch in the wheelchair. Who seemed familiar because he may have reminded him of a figure he had seen once in a museum; it might have been the one in Madrid, a portrait that had also seemed familiar to him at the time because it reminded him of a face he knew.
Whose face? Here there was a danger of slipping into a vicious circle. Best to concentrate. To return to Helsinki on the sixteenth of February and to hope that the logical conclusion was that it was apparently a case of a reflection of a reflection. Nothing more. Let us suppose a crescent moon is reflected on a patch of water. And let us say that the water projects the reflection of the moon onto a darkened window in a hut on the edge of the village. So it happens that the glass, even though the moon rises in the south and the window faces north, suddenly reflects something that is apparently impossible. But in reality it is reflecting not the moon-in-the-clou
ds but only the moon-in the-water.
