To Know a Woman (Harvest in Translation)

by Amos Oz

  "Stop exaggerating, Arye. Come home now," Odelia said. And they vanished gratefully, almost reconciled.

  That evening when Netta got back from town and they were drinking herbal tea in the kitchen, Yoel asked his daughter if she thought there was any sense in what her grandfather the policeman used to say, that everybody has more or less the same secrets. Netta asked why he wanted to know that all of a sudden. And Yoel told her briefly about the task of arbitration that Odelia and Arik Krantz occasionally imposed on him. Instead of answering his question Netta replied in a voice in which Yoel felt he detected a hint of affection:

  "Admit you quite enjoy playing God like that. Look how burned you are. Shall I rub some cream in, so you won't peel?"

  Yoel said:

  "Suit yourself."

  And after a moment's thought he added:

  "In fact, there's no need. Look, I've saved you some of the chicken livers and onions they brought me, and there's some rice and vegetables. Eat something, Netta, and then let's watch the news."

  35

  On the television news there was a detailed report on a national strike in the hospitals. Old people and chronic invalids were shown lying on urine-soaked beds, and the camera dwelt on signs of filth and neglect all around. One old woman was moaning continuously in a shrill monotonous voice, like a wounded puppy. A feeble, bloated old man, who looked as though he would burst from the pressure of the fluids building up inside him, lay motionless, staring vacantly. There was also a shriveled old person, his skull and face covered with stiff bristles, looking exceedingly filthy, yet constantly grinning and giggling and brandishing at the camera a teddy bear whose belly was ripped open, its floppy innards of grubby cotton wool pouring out. Yoel said:

  "Don't you think this country is going to the dogs, Netta?"

  "Look who's talking," she said, pouring him a brandy. And went back to folding paper napkins into careful triangles and arranging them in an olivewood holder.

  "Tell me," he said after taking a couple of sips, "if it was up to you, would you prefer to be exempted or to do your service?"

  "But it is up to me. It's a question of telling them my story or not. Nothing will show up in the physical."

  "So what will you do? Will you tell them or won't you? And what'll you say if I tell them? Just wait a minute, Netta, before you say 'Suit yourself.' The time has come to find out for once what suits you. You know I could fix the whole business up for you with a couple of phone calls, either way. So let's find out what you want. Though I'm not saying that what you want is necessarily what I'll do."

  "You remember what you said to me when Le Patron was putting pressure on you to go away for a few days to save the Homeland?"

  "I said something. Yes. I believe I said I'd lost the ability to concentrate. Or something like that. But what's that got to do with it?"

  "Tell me something, Yoel. What's biting you? Why are you beating around the bush? What difference does it make to you whether I do my military service or not?"

  "Just a moment," he said quietly. "Sorry. But let's hear the weather forecast."

  The announcer said that tonight would see the end of the letup in the winter rains. A new trough of low pressure would reach the coastal plain before dawn. The rain and wind would resume. In the inland valleys and on the highlands there was a risk of frost. And now two final news items: An Israeli businessman has lost his life in an accident in Taiwan. His next of kin have been informed. And in Barcelona a young monk has burned himself to death to protest the increasing violence in the world. And that's all for tonight.

  Netta said:

  "Listen. I can be out of the house by the summer even without going into the army. Or even earlier."

  "Why? Are we short of rooms?"

  "So long as I'm in the house, could be you've got some problem about bringing the woman next door here? Or her brother?"

  "Why should I have a problem?"

  "How should I know? Thin walls. It's the same with the wall between us and them—this wall, here—it's as thin as paper. My last exam is on the twentieth of June. After that, if you like, I can rent a room in town. And if you're in a hurry I can do it sooner."

  "That's out of the question," said Yoel, in the tone of cool, tender cruelty he had used at times in his work to nip in the bud any spark of malice in his interlocutor. "Full stop." But as he spoke the words he had to struggle to release the sudden grip of rage in his chest, a feeling such as he had not experienced since Ivria went away.

  "Why not?"

  "No rented room. Forget it. That's that."

  "You mean you won't give me the money?"

  "Netta. Let's be logical. First, because of your condition. Second, when you start at the university we're just around the corner from the campus here, so why should you drag yourself all the way from the center of town?"

  "I can pay for a room myself. You wouldn't have to finance me."

  "How?"

  "Le Patron is nice to me. He's offered me a job in your office."

  "I wouldn't count on it."

  "And anyway, Nakdimon is holding lots of money for me until I'm twenty-one, and he's told me he couldn't care less about starting to let me have it right away."

  "I wouldn't bank on that either, Netta, if I were you. Anyway, who said you could talk to Lublin about money?"

  "Hey, why are you staring at me like that? Take a look at yourself. You look like a killer. After all, I'm only trying to clear out for you. So you can start living."

  "Look here, Netta," Yoel said, attempting to inject into his voice a measure of intimacy he was not feeling, "about the woman next door. Annemarie. Let's say—"

  "Let's say nothing. The most pathetic thing to do is have it off over there and then come running home to explain. Like your friend Krantz."

  "OK. All there is to it really is—"

  "All there is to it really is, just let me know when you need the room with the double bed. That's all. Who on earth bought these napkins? Must have been Lisa. Look, how kitsch. Why don't you lie down for a while, take your shoes off; there's a new British series starting in a few minutes. Something about the origins of the universe. Shall we give it a chance? When she moved into that study of hers in Jerusalem and all that, I got the idea it was because of me. But I was too young to move out on my own then. There's a girl in my class, Adva. At the beginning of July she's moving into a two-room apartment she inherited from her grannie. It's on a roof on Karl Netter Street. For a hundred and twenty dollars a month she'll rent me a room with a view of the sea. But if you're anxious for me to push off sooner than that, there's no problem. Just say, and I'll make myself scarce. I've switched on the TV. Don't get up. Two minutes till it starts. I feel like some cheese on toast with tomatoes and black olives. Shall I do some for you? One? Or two? Do you want some hot milk? Or an herbal tea? You got so sunburned today, you ought to drink plenty of liquids."

  After the late news, when Netta had taken a bottle of orange juice and a glass and gone to her room, Yoel decided to arm himself with a large flashlight and check what was going on in the shed in the garden. For some reason he had a feeling the cats had moved in there again. But on the way, on second thought, he reasoned that it would be more logical to suppose that the mother had had another litter. The air outside was very cold and dry. In her bedroom, Netta was getting undressed, and Yoel could not banish from his mind the image of her angular body, which always looked hunched, strained, even neglected and unloved. Although there might well be a contradiction there. It was almost certain that no man, no ravenous youth, had ever set eyes on that pitiful body. Perhaps they never would. Even though Yoel reckoned that in another month or two, a year at most, that transmutation into a woman of which the doctors had spoken once to Ivria would take place. And then everything would change, and some broad hairy chest and muscular arms would come and take possession of her and that penthouse in Karl Netter Street, which Yoel that instant decided to go and check out for himself one of these days. Alon
e. Before he made up his mind.

  So dry and crisp was the cold night air that it seemed it could be crumbled between the fingers with a faint, brittle sound. Which Yoel so longed for that for a moment he could somehow almost hear it. But apart from bugs that fled from his light, he discovered no signs of life in the shed. Just some vague sense that everything was not really awake. That he was walking around, thinking, sleeping, eating, "having it off" with Annemarie, watching television, working in the garden, putting up new shelves in his mother-in-law's bedroom, all in his sleep. That if he had any hope left of deciphering something, or at any rate of formulating a searching question, he must wake up at all costs. Even at the cost of a disaster. An injury. An illness. A complication. Something must come and shake him until he woke up. Thump and smash the soft, greasy jelly that had closed around him like a womb. Blind panic seized him and he almost leaped out of the shed into the darkness. Because the flashlight got left behind. On a shelf. Switched on. And Yoel was totally unable to force himself to go back inside and pick it up.

  For a quarter of an hour or so he walked around the garden, around the house, feeling the fruit trees, treading down the soil in the flower beds, trying in vain the hinges of the gate in the hope that they would squeak and he would be able to oil them. There was no squeaking, so he resumed his wandering. Eventually he was struck by a decision: tomorrow, the day after, or maybe at the weekend, he would go into Bardugo's Nurseries at Ramat Lotan junction and buy some gladiolus and dahlia tubers and some sweet pea and snapdragon seeds and some chrysanthemum plants, so that when springtime came everything would flower again. He might erect a pretty wooden pergola over the place where the car stood, and train vines over it, instead of the ugly corrugated-iron roof supported on iron columns that had rusted and would go on rusting however much he repainted them. Perhaps he would take a trip to Qalqilya or Kafr Kassem, buy half a dozen huge pots and fill them with a mixture of red soil and compost and plant them with different varieties of geranium that would spill over and trail around them and blaze in a riot of brilliant color. The word "brilliant" once more afforded him a sort of vague thrill; he felt like someone who has despaired of some endlessly protracted dispute when suddenly his vindication arrives unshakably from some totally unexpected quarter. When the light finally went out behind Netta's shutter he drove to the seashore and sat at the wheel very close to the edge of the cliff to wait for the trough of low pressure that was creeping in off the sea and was due to hit the coastal plain tonight.

  36

  He sat at the wheel of the car until almost two o'clock in the morning, with the doors locked, the windows rolled right up, the lights out, the radiator grille almost projecting over the edge of the cliff into the void. His eyes, once they were accustomed to the dark, were spellbound by the breathing of the pelt of the sea, swelling and sinking again and again with the expansive yet restless respiration of a giant whose slumbers are periodically punctured by nightmares. At times a sound escaped like an angry gust. At times it sounded like feverish panting. And again there rose the sound of breakers in the night, gnawing at the coastline and retreating with their booty to the deep. Here and there ripples of foam glistened on the dark pelt. Occasionally a pale milky beam passed high above among the stars, perhaps the quivering of a distant coast guard searchlight. As the hours passed Yoel had difficulty distinguishing between the murmur of the waves and the throbbing of the blood inside his skull. How thin was the crust that divided inside from outside. At moments of deep tension he experienced a sensation of having the sea inside his brain. Like that stormy day in Athens, when he had to draw a gun to frighten off an idiot who was trying to scare him with a knife in a corner of the bus terminal. And in Copenhagen, the day he finally managed to photograph the notorious Irish terrorist at the pharmacy counter with a miniature camera concealed in a cigarette pack. That night, asleep in his room at the Viking Pension, he heard several shots fired nearby and he lay down under his bed; even though all was quiet he preferred not to come out until daylight showed through the cracks of the shutters. Only then did he go out on the balcony and check it inch by inch, until he discovered two tiny holes in the plaster of the outside wall, which might have been caused by bullets. He ought to have continued the investigation until he found the answer, but because he had concluded his business in Copenhagen he did not bother, but packed in haste and left the hotel and the city. From some impulse that he still did not understand, before checking out he carefully filled the two holes in the wall outside his room with toothpaste, without knowing if they really were bullet holes and if so whether they had any connection with the sounds of shooting he had imagined he heard in the night, or if shots were fired, whether they had any connection with him. Once he had filled them in it was almost impossible to spot anything. What is there? he asked himself, and he looked out to sea but saw nothing. What was it that made me rush around for twenty-three years from square to square from hotel to hotel from terminal to terminal in night trains howling through forests and tunnels, the yellow headlight raking the fields of darkness? What made me run? And why did I fill the little holes in that wall and why didn't I make the slightest report? Once, she came into the bathroom at five o'clock in the morning when I was in the middle of shaving and she asked me, Where are you running to, Yoel? Why did I answer with just four words: It's the job, Ivria, immediately adding that there was no hot water again? And she, in her white clothes but barefoot, with her fair hair falling mainly over her right shoulder, nodded her head pensively four or five times, called me a poor fool, and left.

  If a man in the middle of the forest wants to find out once and for all what is going on and what has happened and what might have been and what is a mirage, he has to stand still and listen. What is it, for instance, that makes a dead man's guitar produce soft cello music through the wall? What is the dividing line between longing and lunar-astral illness? Why was it that his blood froze the moment Le Patron uttered the word "Bangkok"? What had Ivria meant when she said several times, always in the dark, always in her quietest and most abstract voice, I do understand you? What really happened all those years ago among the taps at Metullah? And what was the point of her death in the arms of that neighbor in a shallow puddle in the yard? Is there a problem with Netta or isn't there? And if there is, which of us did she get it from? And how and when did my betrayal really begin, if the word has any real meaning in this particular case? Surely all this is meaningless unless we accept the supposition that there exists a precise, profound evil constantly at work in everything, an unselfish, impersonal evil that has no motive or purpose other than the cold thrill of death, and this evil is gradually dismantling everything with its watchmaker's fingers. It has already taken one of us to pieces and killed her, and which of us will be its next victim there is no way of knowing. And is there some way of protecting oneself, not to mention a chance of mercy or pity? Or possibly not protecting oneself but getting up and running away. But even if a miracle were to occur and the tormented predator were to free itself from the invisible nail, the question still remains of how and where an eyeless creature can leap. Above the water a little reconnaissance plane with a hoarse piston engine buzzed its way slowly northward, flying fairly low, with green and red lights flashing alternately at its wing tips. But it was quickly lost to sight, and there was only the silence of the water blowing against the windshield. Which had misted up, on either the inside or the outside.

  Can't see anything. And it's getting colder. Soon the promised rain will be here. Let's get out and wipe the windows, run the engine and the heater for a while, put the defroster on, turn around and drive to Jerusalem. Just to be on the safe side, we'll park around the corner. Under the cloak of mist and darkness we'll penetrate as far as the second floor. Without switching on the light on the stairs. With the help of a bent wire and this little screwdriver we'll get the lock to give without making the slightest sound, and so, barefoot and silent, we'll creep into his bachelor apartment and materialize be
fore them, quiet, sudden, and controlled, with a screwdriver in one hand and a bent wire in the other. Sorry, don't let me disturb you, I haven't come to make a scene, my wars are all over, just to ask you to let me have the lost woolen scarf and also the copy of Mrs. Dalloway. And I'll mend my ways. I've already begun to improve a little. As for Mr. Eviatar, hello there, Mr. Eviatar, if you wouldn't mind, would you play us an old Russian song we used to love when we were little, "We've lost forever that which was most dear / And it will never reappear." Thank you. That's all we wanted. And sorry for bursting in, we're already on our way. Adieu. Proshchai.

  It was a little after two o'clock when he parked his car again, in the dead center of the carport, reversing it in as usual so the nose was pointing toward the street, ready to make a quick getaway. Then he conducted a final reconnaissance patrol around the front and back gardens, checking to make sure there was nothing on the clothesline. For a moment he was terrified because he thought he saw a faint flickering light under the door of the garden shed. But then he remembered that he had left his flashlight there, still on, and apparently the battery was not dead yet. Instead of putting his key into the keyhole of his own front door, as he had intended to do, he inserted it by mistake into his neighbors'. For several minutes he tried to open it, alternating gentleness with cunning and with force. Until he realized his mistake and started to retreat. But at that moment the door opened and Ralph roared in a bearish voice, drowsily, Come in, please, come in, come in, just look at yourself, first thing—drink, you look frozen right through and as pale as death.

  37

  After pouring him a drink in the kitchen, and then another one, straight whisky this time instead of Dubonnet, the large pink man who resembled a Dutch farmer in an advertisement for classy cigars insisted on not giving Yoel a chance to apologize or to explain. Never mind. I don't care what brings you here like this in the middle of the night. After all, everybody has enemies and everybody has worries. We've never asked you what you do—and by the way, you haven't asked me either. But maybe one day you and I will have a nice job together. I've got a suggestion. Not now in the middle of the night, of course. We'll talk about it when you're ready for it. You'll find that I can do anything you can, dear friend. Now, what can I offer you? Some supper? A hot shower? Very well then, now it's bedtime even for big boys.