To Know a Woman (Harvest in Translation)

by Amos Oz

  Slowly, with didactic patience, the man stated: "You want to know what you've done." Then he continued as though dictating an official summary for the record: "By all means. You'll have your answer. An answer that you know already. You and I, comrade, are both refugees. Holocaust kids. They risked their lives to save us from the Nazis. They smuggled us here. And on top of that they fought and were maimed and killed to make a state for us. They handed it to us on a tray. They picked us up out of the shit. And after that they also did us an enormous honor. They let us work in the inner sanctum. In the heart of hearts. That puts an obligation on us, doesn't it? But you, comrade, when you were needed, when you were sent for, you wriggled out of it and got someone else sent in your place. One of them. And he was sent. So now just you go home and live with that. And don't call us three times a day to know when the funeral is. It'll be in the papers."

  Yoel limped outside to the parking lot, because of the injury to his knee that morning when it collided with the stool. For some reason he was tempted, like a punished child, to exaggerate the limp, as though he had a serious injury. So he limped up and down for twenty or twenty-five minutes, passing every car three or four times, looking in vain for his own. At least four times he returned to the spot where he had parked. He could not imagine what had happened. Until he had a minor brainstorm and realized that he did not bring his own car, but Krantz's blue Audi, which was parked precisely where he had left it. With a kindly winter sun splitting into a thousand dazzling flashes on its rear window. And so he came to terms, more or less, with the realization that this chapter was now closed. That he would never again set foot in this old, unimposing building, surrounded by a high wall and hidden by thick cypress trees, shut in by many modern buildings of glass and concrete, all much taller. At that moment he felt a little pang of regret for something he could never do now: often during his twenty-three years here he had felt an urge to reach out and check once and for all whether anybody occasionally dropped a coin through the slit of the blue National Fund collection box in Le Patron's office. Now this question too would have to remain open. As he drove Yoel thought about the Acrobat, Yokneam Ostashinsky, who could not have been less like an acrobat. If anything, he had resembled an old Labor Party apparatchik, a quarry worker who in the course of time had become a regional boss in the construction cooperative. A man in his sixties with a tight drumlike belly. Once, seven or eight years ago, he had made an embarrassing mistake. Yoel had come to his rescue, and succeeded in extricating him from the consequences of his error without having to resort to a lie. Unfortunately, it subsequently transpired that, as often happens with the beneficiary of a favor that cannot ever be repaid, Ostashinsky nurtured petty spite against Yoel, and spread the word that he was a condescending prig. Yet, thought Yoel as he crawled along in the heavy traffic, if it is possible to use the word "friend" in my case, he was my friend. When Ivria died and Yoel was summoned back from Helsinki and arrived in Jerusalem only a few hours before the funeral, he discovered that all the arrangements had been made. Nakdimon Lublin drawled that he had had nothing to do with it. After a couple of days Yoel went in to clear up how much he owed and to whom, painstakingly checking the receipted bills for the funeral expenses and the announcement in the newspaper, and everywhere he found the name Sasha Schein. So he called the Acrobat to ask how much he had spent, and Ostashinsky, in an offended tone, swore at him in Russian and told him to fuck off. Once or twice, after a fight, late at night, Ivria had whispered to him: I understand you. What did she mean? What did she understand? What was the extent of the resemblance or difference between people's secrets? Yoel knew that there was no way to know. Even though the question of what people really know about each other, especially people who are close to one another, had always been an important one for him and had now become an urgent one. She almost always wore a white blouse and white linen pants. In winter she also wore a white sweater: a sailor whose fleet had set sail without her. She had worn no jewelry apart from the wedding ring on the little finger of her right hand. It was impossible to get it off, although her thin, childlike fingers were always cold. Again Yoel longed for their cool touch on his bare back. Just once, the previous autumn, on the kitchen balcony in Jerusalem, she had said to him: Listen. I'm not well. When he has asked what sort of pain she had, she had replied, No, you're wrong; it's not something physical. I'm just not well. And Yoel, who was waiting for a phone call from El Al, had answered, to evade the issue, to free himself, to cut short what was likely to develop into a long saga, It'll pass, Ivria. It'll be all right; you'll see. If he had responded to the call and gone to Bangkok, Le Patron and Ostashinsky would have taken on the task of looking after his mother, his daughter, and his mother-in-law. Every betrayal he had ever committed would have been forgiven and forgotten if he had gone and not come back. A cripple born without arms and legs was almost incapable of doing evil. And who could do evil to him? One who had lost his arms and legs could never be crucified. Would he never get to know what really happened in Bangkok? Maybe it was just a trivial accident at a pedestrian crossing or in an elevator? And would the members of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra be informed one day that it was the man who at this moment was lying in a sealed lead coffin in the hold of a Lufthansa jumbo jet flying in the darkness over Pakistan who a few years ago, by his wisdom and courage, and with his gun, had saved them from massacre in the middle of their concert in Melbourne? At that moment Yoel felt an upsurge of rage at the secret joy that had been coursing through his chest all day: So what? I got rid of them. They wanted me dead and now they're dead themselves. He died? It shows he failed. She died? So she lost. Too bad. I'm alive. It proves I was right.

  Or perhaps not. Maybe it's just the wages of treachery, he said to himself as he left the city and charged wildly past a line of four or five cars on his left, tore up the empty right-hand lane and cut in four inches in front of the nose of the front car in the line at the very split second the lights changed. Instead of going straight home, he turned off in the direction of Ramat Gan, pulled up outside the shopping center, and entered a large store selling women's clothing. After an hour and a half of reflection, comparison, examination, and fine reasoning he left, carrying an elegant package containing a daring, almost naughty dress for his daughter for saving his life. He was never wrong about sizes or about the fashions or about the quality of material or about colors and cut. In his other hand he held a bag containing, in separate packages, a shawl for his mother, a belt for his mother-in-law, a cute scarf for Odelia Krantz, a nightdress for Annemarie, and half a dozen expensive silk handkerchiefs for Ralph. There was also a package done up with a bow and containing a handsome, conservative sweater as a parting present for Tsippy: one could not simply disappear without a trace after all those years. Although, on second thought, why not just slink away without leaving any mark behind him?

  40

  Netta said: "Are you crazy? I wouldn't wear that to save my life. Why don't you try giving it to the cleaner; she's my size. Or let me give it to her."

  Yoel said:

  "OK. Whatever you like. Only, try it on first."

  Netta went out of the room and came back wearing the new dress, which had magically eliminated her skinniness and made her look erect and lithe.

  "Tell me something," she said: "is that what you've always wanted me to wear, but never dared to ask?"

  "What do you mean never dared?" Yoel smiled. "After all, I chose it myself."

  "What's wrong with your knee?"

  "Nothing. I bumped it."

  "Let me have a look."

  "What for?"

  "I could put a bandage on it for you."

  "It's nothing. Forget it. It'll go away."

  She disappeared and returned to the living room five minutes later wearing her old clothes. She did not put the sexy dress on again in the weeks that followed. But she did not give it away to the cleaner either, as she had said she would. Yoel sometimes sneaked into the master bedroom when she was ou
t and checked that it was still hanging in the closet, waiting. He saw this as a limited success. One evening Netta put a book in his hands, Anx-ions Relations by Yair Hurvitz. On page 47 he came upon a poem called "Responsibility," and he said to his daughter:

  "I like that one. Though how do I know if what I think I understand is what the poet meant?"

  He did not go back into Tel Aviv. Not even once, up to the end of that winter. Sometimes at night he stood facing the fence around the citrus grove at the end of the street, with its smell of moist earth and trees heavy with foliage, and stared for a while at the glare that seemed from the distance to be hanging over the city. Its color was sometimes a brilliant blue and sometimes gold or pale yellow or even reddish-purple, and at times it reminded him of the poisoned sickly color of a chemical flame.

  Meanwhile he had abandoned his nocturnal drives to the Carmel range, the Trappist monastery at Latrun, the limit of the coastal plain, and the hill country near Rosh Hacayin. He no longer whiled away the small hours in conversation with the night-shift Arabs at gas stations, or crawled slowly past the highway whores. Nor did he visit the garden shed in the deepest darkness. But he did find himself every four or five evenings standing before the neighbors' front door, and recently he had taken to bearing a bottle of whisky or a well-known liqueur. He was always careful to get home before dawn. Occasionally he came across the old Bulgarian who delivered the newspapers; so he took the paper from his hand though the window of the battered Susita and spared him the trouble of getting out and putting it in the mailbox. Several times Ralph said, We're not rushing you. Take your time, Yoel. Who shrugged and said nothing.

  Once, Annemarie suddenly asked:

  "Tell me, what's the matter with your daughter?"

  Yoel reflected for almost a full minute before replying:

  "I'm not sure I understand the question."

  Annemarie said:

  "Well. I always see you together but I've never seen you touching one another."

  Yoel said:

  "Yes. Maybe."

  "Won't you ever tell me anything? What am I to you, some kind of kitten?"

  "It'll be all right," he said absentmindedly, and poured himself a drink. What could he tell her? I murdered my wife because she was trying to murder our daughter who was trying to do away with her parents? Even though there was more love among the three of us than was permissible. Like the verse that says, From thee to thee I flee. So he said:

  "Let's talk about it some other time." And he drank and closed his eyes.

  A delicate, precise carnal kinship gradually deepened between him and Annemarie. Like a long-standing experienced pair of tennis partners. Lately Yoel renounced his habit of making love with her as though he were bestowing favors on her and denying his own flesh. Slowly he began to trust her and hint at his weaknesses. He began to make secretive physical demands on her which all those years he had been too embarrassed to reveal to his wife and too delicate to impose on passing women. Annemarie would concentrate with her eyes closed, straining to catch the faintest note. She would bend over and play tunes for him that he himself did not know how much he was longing for her to play. Sometimes she seemed to be not so much making love to him as conceiving and bearing him. And the moment they finished, Ralph would burst in, bearlike, overflowing with joy and kindness, like a coach whose team has just won a victory, serving his sister and Yoel glasses of hot punch spiced with fragrant cinnamon, holding out a towel, changing the Brahms for a quiet country-music record, turning down the sound and the green submarine light, whispering good night and fading away.

  Yoel bought gladiolus corms and dahlia tubers and gerbera bulbs at Bardugo's Nurseries, and planted them for spring. He also bought four dormant vine shoots, as well as half a dozen large pots and three sacks of enriched compost. He did not go as far as Qalqilya. He set the pots in the corners of the garden and planted different-colored geraniums in them, so that in the summer they would pour in a blaze over the sides. At the beginning of February he went to the local shopping center with Arik Krantz and his son Duby, and bought wooden beams and long bolts and metal catches and angle irons at a builders' supply store. In ten days, with the enthusiastic support of Arik and Duby but also, to his surprise, with Netta's help, he had dismantled the old carport with its corrugated-iron roof and replaced it with a beautiful wooden pergola, which he painted with two coats of weatherproof brown varnish. He planted the four vine shoots so that he could train the vine over the pergola. When he came across an announcement in the paper of his friend's funeral in Pardes Hanna, Yoel decided not to go. He stayed at home. Whereas for the memorial service in Jerusalem on the sixteenth of February, the anniversary of Ivria's death, he went with his mother and his mother-in-law, and it was Netta who once again decided not to go, but to stay behind and look after the house.

  When Nakdimon intoned his faulty version of the kaddish in his nasal drawl, Yoel leaned toward his mother and whispered to her, The best thing is the way his glasses make him look like an educated horse. A religious horse. Lisa hissed in an angry whisper: Shame on you! And at the graveside too! You've all forgotten her! Avigail, stiff and aristocratic-looking in the black scarf that covered her head and shoulders, signaled to them, Stop it. And Yoel and his mother did instantly stop whispering.

  Later that day all of them, including Nakdimon and two of his four sons, went to the house in Ramat Lotan. They found that Netta, with the help of Ralph and Annemarie, had extended the Spanish dining table for the first time since they had moved in and had spent the day preparing a meal for ten people. With a red tablecloth and candles, and spicy turkey scallops, boiled vegetables, steamed rice and mushrooms, and piquant tomato soup served cold in tall glasses with a slice of lemon riding astride the rim of each one. It was the soup that her mother had been in the habit of surprising visitors with, on the rare occasions when they had visitors. Netta had even devised a carefully thought-out seating plan, putting Annemarie next to Krantz, Nakdimon's sons between Lisa and Ralph, Avigail next to Duby Krantz, and Yoel and Nakdimon at the ends of the table.

  41

  The next day, the seventeenth of February, was a gray day and the air seemed to be congealed. But it was not raining and there was no wind. After taking Netta to school and his mother to the foreign-language lending library, he drove on to the gas station; he filled the tank and went on pressing until the pump cut out automatically, then he checked the oil and water and the battery and the tire pressures. When he got home he went into the garden and pruned the rosebushes, as he had planned. He spread manure over the lawns, which were yellowing owing to the winter rain and the cold. He also mulched the fruit trees in readiness for the approaching spring, mixing the manure in with the leaves that were moldering under the trees, then spreading the mixture with a fork and a rake. He repaired the irrigation basins and weeded the flower beds a little, with his fingers, bending over as though prostrating himself, and removing the first shoots of couch grass, wood sorrel, and bindweed. It was from this deep crouching position that he saw her blue flannel dressing gown coming out of the kitchen door; he could not see her face, and he shrank back as though he had received a well-aimed punch in the solar plexus or as though some kind of collapse had occurred in his stomach. Instantly his fingers stiffened. Then he gained control of himself, stifled his anger, and said: "What's happened, Avigail?" She burst out laughing and replied: "What's the matter, did I startle you? Just look at your face. You look as though you're about to kill somebody. Nothing's happened. I just came out to ask you if you'd like your coffee out here or if you're coming in soon." He said: "No. I'm just coming," and then he changed his mind and said: "Or, rather, bring it out here, so it doesn't get cold." Then he changed his mind again and said in a different voice: "Never, do you hear me, don't you ever put her clothes on again." What Avigail heard in his voice made her broad, bright, placid Slavic peasant's face turn a deep red: "It's not her clothes. This is a dressing gown she gave me five years ago when you bought her
a new one in London."

  Yoel knew he ought to apologize. Only a couple of days earlier he had pleaded with Netta to wear the nice raincoat he had bought for Ivria in Stockholm. But his rage, or perhaps his anger at the appearance of this rage, made him not apologize, but hiss grimly, almost menacingly: "It makes no difference. This is my house and I won't put up with it."

  "Your house?" Avigail inquired in her pedagogic tone of voice, like a tolerant headmistress of a liberal school.

  "My house," Yoel repeated quietly, wiping the damp soil off his fingers on the seat of his jeans. "And here in my house you're not to wear her things."

  "Yoel," she said, after a moment, in a tone of sadness tinged with affection, "would you mind my saying something to you? I'm beginning to think that your condition may be as bad as your mother's. Or Netta's. Except that of course you're better at concealing your problems, and that makes your condition even worse. In my opinion, what you really need is—"

  "OK," Yoel cut in, "that'll do for today. Is there some coffee or isn't there? I ought to have gone inside and made it myself instead of relying on favors. It won't be long before we have to send in the antiterrorist troops."

  "And speaking of your mother," Avigail said, "you know very well that we have a meaningful relationship, the two of us, but when I see—"

  "Avigail," he said, "the coffee."

  "I understand," she said, going indoors and returning with a mug of coffee and a grapefruit on a plate, carefully peeled and opened out like a chrysanthemum. "I see. Talking hurts you, Yoel. I should have sensed it myself. Seemingly everybody has to bear his affliction in his own way. I want to say I'm sorry if I hurt you."