To Know a Woman (Harvest in Translation)

by Amos Oz

  "All right, let's drop it," said Yoel, suddenly filled with loathing because of the way she said "see-eemingly." He wanted to think about something different, but there suddenly floated into his mind the image of Shealtiel Lublin, the policeman, with his walrus mustache, his rough kindness, his clumsy generosity, his jokes about sex and other bodily functions, and his habitual smoke-scorched sermons on the subject of the tyranny of the gonads or the community of secrets. He found that the loathing welling up inside him was directed against neither Lublin nor Avigail, but against the memory of his wife, against her icy silence and her white clothes. With difficulty he forced himself to take a few sips of coffee, like someone bending over sewage, and immediately handed the mug and the grapefruit-flower back to Avigail. Without another word he prostrated himself once more over the cleared flower bed, and resumed his hawk-eyed search for signs of sprouting weeds. He decided to put on his black-framed glasses to help him in his search. After twenty minutes, however, he went into the kitchen, and saw her frozen in a stiff sitting position, with her widow's scarf draped around her shoulders, looking the very picture of the unknown bereaved mother, staring unmovingly through the window at the precise spot in the garden where he had been working a moment before. Unthinkingly he followed her gaze with his eyes. But the spot was empty. He said:

  "All right. I've come to apologize. I didn't mean to upset you."

  Then he started the car and went back to Bardugo's Nurseries.

  Where else could he go during these days at the end of February, after Netta had already been twice to the recruiting center, at a week's interval, and they were waiting for the results of her physical. He took her to school every morning, always at the last minute. Or later. But on her visits to the recruiting center it was Duby, one of Arik Krantz's two sons, who accompanied her, a skinny, tousled lad who for some reason made Yoel think of a Yemeni newsboy from the early years of the state. It turned out that his father had sent him, and apparently also instructed him to wait outside on both occasions until she was finished and then drive her home in the little Fiat.

  "Tell me something. Do you happen to collect thistles and sheet music too, by any chance?" Yoel asked this Duby Krantz. And the young man, totally ignoring the irony or incapable of detecting it, replied softly: "Not yet."

  Besides driving Netta to school, Yoel also drove his mother, for regular checkups, to Dr. Litwin's private clinic not far from Ramat Lotan. On one of these trips she suddenly asked him, without any warning or connection, whether the business with the neighbor's sister was serious. And without thinking he answered her with the same words that Krantz's son had used to answer him. He often spent an hour or more at Bardugo's Nurseries in the middle of the morning. He bought various window boxes, large and small flowerpots of earthenware or synthetic material, two different types of enriched potting compost, a tool for loosening the soil, and two sprays, one for watering and another for pesticides. The whole house was filling up with plants. Especially ferns, which hung from the ceilings and doorframes. To put them up, he had to bring his electric drill with its extension cord back into service. Once, when he was on his way home from the nursery at half past eleven in the morning, with his car looking like a tropical jungle on wheels, he noticed the Filipino maid from the house down the street pushing her loaded shopping cart up the steep slope a quarter of an hour's walk from their street. Yoel stopped and made her accept a lift. Even though he was unable to engage her in conversation beyond the necessary expressions of politeness. After that he lay in wait for her on several occasions at the corner of the parking lot by the supermarket, alert behind the wheel and hidden behind his new sunglasses, and when she emerged with her cart he drove up sharply and managed to waylay her. It turned out that she knew a little Hebrew and a little English and made do for the most part with three- or four-word answers. Without being asked, Yoel volunteered to improve the shopping cart: he promised to fit rubber-rimmed wheels in place of the noisy metal ones. He did go into the builders' supply store in the shopping center and, among other things, bought some wheels with rubber rims. But he never managed to bring himself to the front door of the strangers the woman worked for, and on the occasions when he succeeded in waylaying her with her cart on the way out of the supermarket and taking her home in his car, he could hardly stop suddenly in the middle of the street in the middle of the neighborhood in full view and start emptying the shopping out of the heavily laden cart, turning it upside down, and changing its wheels. And so it was that Yoel did not keep his promise, and even pretended he had never made it. He hid the new wheels from himself in a dark corner of the garden shed. Even though in all his years in the service he had always been particular about keeping his word. Apart, perhaps, from his last day at work, when he had been summoned back in a hurry from Helsinki and had not managed to keep his promise to get in touch with the Tunisian engineer. When this occurred to him, he discovered to his amazement that even though the month of February had just ended, and so it was a year or more since the day he had seen the cripple in Helsinki, the telephone number that the engineer had given him was still engraved on his memory. He had memorized it at the time and never forgotten it.

  That evening, when the women had left him alone in the living room to watch the last news and the snowflakes that filled the screen afterward, he had to fight against the sudden temptation to dial the number. But how could someone with no limbs pick up the receiver? And what could he say? Or ask? As he got up to switch off the uselessly flickering television set, it dawned on him that the month of February had indeed ended the day before, and that consequently today was his wedding anniversary. He picked up the big flashlight and went outside into the dark garden to check the state of each and every sapling and seedling.

  One night, Yoel, after love, and over a glass of steaming punch, heard Ralph ask if he could offer him a loan. For some reason Yoel got the impression that Ralph was asking him for a loan and he had asked him how much, and Ralph had said "Up to twenty or thirty thousand" before Yoel figured out that he was being offered the money, not asked for it. He was surprised. Ralph said: "Whenever you like. Be my guest. We won't rush you." Suddenly Annemarie, clutching the red kimono to her slight body, intervened, saying: "I object to this. There'll be no business before we find ourselves."

  "Find ourselves?"

  "I mean: all of us straighten out our lives a little."

  Yoel looked at her and waited. Ralph did not speak either. Some dormant sense of survival stirred suddenly deep inside Yoel and warned him that it would be best to interrupt her at once. Change the subject. Look at his watch and say good night. Or at least join Ralph and make fun of what she had said and what she was about to say.

  "Musical chairs, for instance," she continued, and burst out laughing. "Who remembers how to play?"

  "That will do," Ralph urged, as though he sensed Yoel's anxiety and saw reasons to share it.

  "For instance," she said, "there's an old man living across the street. From Romania. He talks to your mother in Romanian for half an hour at a stretch over the fence. And he also lives by himself. Why shouldn't she move in with him?"

  "But what for?"

  "Why, then Ralphie can move into your house with the other mom and live with her. At least for a trial period. And you could move in here. What do you say?"

  Ralph said: "Like Noah's ark. She pairs everyone off. What's the matter? Is there a flood coming?"

  Yoel, taking care not to sound angry, but amused and good-natured, said: "You've forgotten about the child. Where do we put her in your Noah's ark? Can I have some more punch?"

  "Netta," said Annemarie, so softly that her voice was almost inaudible and Yoel almost missed the words and the tears that filled her eyes at that moment. "Netta is a young woman. Not a child. How long will you go on calling her a child? I think, Yoel, you've never known what a woman is. You don't even understand the word. Ralph, don't interrupt me. You've never known it either. How do you say 'role' in Hebrew? I wanted
to say that you always either make us play the role of a baby or act it out yourselves. Sometimes I think, What a sweet little, nice little baby, but we have to kill the baby. I'd like some more punch too."

  42

  During the days that followed, Yoel thought about Ralph's offer. Particularly once it became clear to him that the new lines of battle set him and his mother, the objectors, against his mother-in-law and Netta, who supported the idea of renting the penthouse apartment on Karl Netter Street. Even before the approaching examinations. On the tenth of March, Netta received a notification from the army computer saying that her call-up would be in seven months' time, on the twentieth of October. From this Yoel deduced that she had not informed the doctors at the recruiting center about her problem, or perhaps she had but the tests had revealed nothing. At times he asked himself if his silence was not irresponsible. Was it not his clear duty, as a single parent, to contact them on his own initiative and bring the facts to their attention? The findings of the doctors in Jerusalem. On the other hand, he thought, which of the divided opinions was it his duty to present to them? And would it not be wrong and irresponsible to initiate such a step behind her back? To stamp her for the rest of her life with the stigma of an illness that was the butt of all sorts of superstitions? Was it not a fact that Netta's problem had never manifested itself outside the home? Not once. Since Ivria's death there had been only one solitary occurrence even within the home, and that had been some time earlier, at the end of August, and since then there had been no further sign. In fact, what had happened in August had involved at the least a slight ambivalence. So why should he not go to Karl Netter Street in Tel Aviv, check out the room that allegedly had a view of the sea, investigate the neighbors, find out discreetly about the apartment mate, this classmate named Adva, and if it turned out that everything was aboveboard, she would receive a hundred and twenty dollars a month, or more, and in the evenings he could stop in for coffee and so make sure day by day that everything was OK. And what if it really turned out that Le Patron was seriously intending to offer her a minor clerical job in the office? Some sort of junior secretarial work? He could always decide to exercise his veto and frustrate Teacher's schemes. On second thought, why should he forbid her to work a little in the office? It would spare him the need to pull strings, to reactivate old contacts, to release her from her call-up without making use of the pretext of defective health and without branding her with the stigma of having been exempted on medical grounds. Le Patron could easily arrange to have her work in the office recognized as a substitute for military service. Moreover, it would be splendid if he, Yoel, with a few well-thought-out moves, could rescue Netta both from the army and from the stigma that Ivria had sometimes insanely accused him of trying to brand his daughter with. Moreover, shifting his ground on the question of the apartment in Karl Netter Street might bring about a change in the balance of power in the house. Though it was clear to him that the moment his daughter was on his side once more, the alliance between the two old women would be renewed. And vice versa: if he managed to recruit Avigail to his camp, his mother and his daughter would join ranks across the barricade. So what was the point of bothering? So he left the matter for the time being, without doing anything about either the call-up or the apartment. Once more he decided that there was no rush, tomorrow was another day, and the sea would not run away. In the meantime, he repaired the landlord, Mr. Kramer's, broken vacuum cleaner, and spent a day and a half helping the cleaner to remove every last speck of dust from the house, just as he had done every spring in their apartment in Jerusalem. So immersed was he in the operation that when the phone rang and Duby Krantz asked when Netta would be home, Yoel announced curtly that they were in the middle of spring-cleaning and could he please call back another time. As for Ralph's suggestion that he invest money in a discreet fund linked to a consortium in Canada that would double his investment in eighteen months, Yoel examined the proposition in relation to a number of other ideas that had been put to him. For instance, the hint his mother had dropped several times concerning the large sum of money she was keeping to start him off in the business world. And the fabulous rewards that his ex-colleague from the service promised him if he would only agree to go in with him in a private investigation agency. And Arik Krantz, who never stopped begging him to share his adventure: twice a week put on a white coat and spend four hours on a night shift as a volunteer auxiliary in the hospital where he had earned the devotion of Greta the volunteer; and where Krantz had earmarked two other volunteers, Christina and Iris, for Yoel, and he could choose between them or choose them both. But the fabulous rewards said nothing to him. Nor did the tempting investments or Krantz's volunteers. Nothing stirred in him, beyond a vague but constant feeling that he was not really awake: that he was walking about, brooding, looking after the house and the garden and the car, making love to Annemarie, driving backward and forward between the nursery, the house, and the shopping center, cleaning the windows for Passover; that he had nearly finished reading the biography of Chief of Staff Eleazar—all in his sleep. If he still retained a hope of deciphering something, of understanding, or at least of formulating the question clearly, he must get out of this thick fog. He must wake up at all costs from this slumber. Even if it needed a disaster. If only something would come and slice away the soft fatty jelly that was closing in around him from every direction and stifling him like a womb.

  Sometimes he would recall the sharp, vigilant moments of his career, when he would steal down the streets of a foreign city as though slipping through a narrow crack between two razors, physically and mentally acute, as when hunting or making love, when even simple, trivial, everyday things yielded hints to him of the secrets they enfolded. The evening lights reflected in a puddle. The folds of a passerby's sleeve. A glimpse of the daring cut of a woman's underwear under a summer dress. Sometimes he even managed to guess something several seconds before it actually happened. Like a breeze starting up, or which way a cat crouching on a wall would leap, or the certainty that a man coming toward him would stop, tap his forehead, turn around, and retrace his steps. His perceptional life had been so sharp in those years, and now everything was blunt. Slowed down. As though the glass were clouding over, and he had no way of discovering whether the mist was on the outside or the inside, or whether, worse than that, it was neither of these, but the glass itself was suddenly discharging the opaque, milky element into itself. And if he did not wake up and smash it now, it would go on clouding over, the somnolence would deepen, the memory of the moments of alertness would gradually fade, and he would die unaware, like a wayfarer falling asleep in the snow.

  At the optician's in the shopping center he purchased a powerful magnifying glass. When he was alone in the house one morning he finally inspected the strange spot by the entrance to one of the Romanesque abbeys in the photographs that had belonged to Ivria. He scrutinized it intensely for a long time, with the help of a focused beam of light and his glasses and Ivria's family doctor's glasses and the magnifying glass he had just bought, now from one angle and now from another. Until he began to feel inclined to accept the hypothesis that it was neither an abandoned object nor a stray bird but some sort of flaw in the photographic plate. Perhaps a tiny scratch that had occurred during the developing. The words of Jimmy Gal, the one-eared regimental commander, about the two points and the line connecting them, struck Yoel as correct beyond any doubt, but also trite, and evincing, ultimately, a measure of intellectual dullness that he deemed himself not free from, though he still hoped he might rid himself of it.

  43

  Suddenly spring exploded in the humming of swarms of wasps and flies, and eddies of scents and colors that struck Yoel as almost overdone. All of a sudden the garden seemed to be overflowing and discharging a mass of blossom and seething vegetation. The fruit trees came into flower and three days later they were aflame. Even the cactuses in their flowerpots on the porch erupted in scarlet and flaming orange-yellow, as though tryi
ng to talk to the sun in its own tongue. There was a kind of swell, which Yoel imagined he could hear foaming if he listened hard enough. As though the roots of the plants had turned into sharpened claws that were ripping at the earth in the blackness and drawing from it dark juices that were shooting upward in the tunnels of the trunks and stems and being proffered in the unfolding of the blossoms and foliage to the blinding light. Which tired his eyes again, despite the sunglasses he had bought himself at the beginning of the winter.

  Standing beside the hedge Yoel reached the conclusion that the apple and pear trees were not enough. But ligustrum and oleander and bougainvillea, and even hibiscus bushes, struck him as boring and vulgar. He therefore decided to do away with the stretch of lawn at the side of the house, under the windows of the two children's rooms where the old women slept, and plant figs and olives and perhaps pomegranates. In due course the vines that he had planted around the new pergola would also spread to this part, so that in ten or twenty years there would be a perfect miniature replica of a thick dark Biblical orchard such as he had always envied around the homes of Arab villagers. Yoel planned it down to the last detail: he shut himself away in his room and studied the relevant chapters of the agricultural handbook, drew up a table of the advantages and drawbacks of different varieties, and then went outside and measured the space there would be between the saplings, marked the positions with small pegs, telephoned Bardugo's every day to see if his order had arrived. And waited.

  On the morning of Passover Eve, when the three women had gone off to Metullah leaving him alone, he went into the garden and dug five nice square holes where the pegs were. He lined the bottom of each hole with a layer of fine sand mixed with chicken dung. Then he drove to Bardugo's Nurseries to collect his saplings, which had just arrived: a fig, a date palm, a pomegranate, and two olives. He drove back in second gear all the way so as not to upset the plants, and found Duby Krantz sitting on the front doorstep, looking thin, curly, and dreamy. Yoel knew that both the Krantz boys had finished their military service, yet this young boy looked as if he were no older than sixteen.