To Know a Woman (Harvest in Translation)

by Amos Oz

  Then he had said to her:

  "That's not easy."

  And also:

  "We'll see. I don't think I'll go." That night, when he woke up and padded toward the kitchen, he saw clearly before his eyes, in his mind, with all the details of the colors, an English country gentleman of a century earlier, slim, pensive, tramping in boots along a winding muddy path, holding a double-barreled shotgun, walking slowly, as though deep in thought, and running in front of him a flecked gundog, which suddenly stopped and looked up at its master with its doggy eyes so full of devotion, wonder, and love that Yoel was filled with pain, longing, the grief of eternal loss, because he realized that both the pensive man and his dog were now enclosed in earth and would remain so forever, and only the muddy path still wound to this day, empty of people, between gray poplars under a gray sky with a cold wind and a drizzle so fine it could not be seen, only felt. And in a moment the whole scene vanished.

  48

  His mother said:

  "In your blue shirt with the checks, you lost a button."

  Yoel said:

  "OK. I'll sew it on this evening. Can't you see I'm busy now?"

  "You won't sew it on this evening, because I've already done it for you. I'm your mother, Yoel. Even if you've forgotten that a long time ago."

  "That's enough."

  "The same like you forgot her. Like you forget that a healthy young man needs to work every day."

  "All right. Look. I've got to go now. Shall I bring your medicine out for you?"

  "No, bring me some poison instead. Come. Sit next to me. Tell me something: where are you going to put me? Outside in the garden shed? Or in an old people's home?"

  So he carefully put the pliers and the screwdriver down on the table, wiped his hands on the seat of his jeans, and after a moment's hesitation sat down on the end of the glider, next to her feet.

  "Don't get worked up," he said. "It doesn't help you to get better. What's happened? Have you had another fight with Avigail?"

  "What did you bring me here for, Yoel? What do you need me for at all?"

  He looked at her and saw her silent tears. It was a mute, babylike weeping that took place only between her open eyes and her cheeks, without her making any sound, without her covering her face, without contorting her face into a crying expression.

  "That's enough," he said. "Stop it. No one's going to put you anywhere. No one is abandoning you. Who on earth put that ridiculous idea in your head?"

  "Anyway, you can't be so cruel as to do it."

  "Do what?"

  "Abandon your mother. Already you abandoned her when you were so big. When you started to run away."

  "I don't know what you're talking about. I've never run away from you."

  "All the time, Yoel. All the time running away. If I didn't grab first thing this morning your blue check shirt, even a button you wouldn't let your poor mother sew on for you. There's this story about little Yigor, who has a hunch growing on his back. Coconut. Don't interrupt me in the middle. Silly little Yigor starts to run to escape from his hunch what is growing on his back, and so he is running around all the time. Soon I will die, Yoel, and then afterward you'll want to ask me all sorts of questions. Wouldn't it be better you should start asking now already? Things what I know about you, nobody else knows."

  So Yoel, by a concentrated effort of willpower, laid a broad, ugly hand on the skinny, birdlike shoulder. Just as in his childhood, disgust was mingled with compassion and other feelings, which he did not know and did not want to, and after a moment, in an invisible panic, he withdrew his hand and wiped it on his jeans. Then he stood up and said:

  "Questions. What questions? Good. All right. I'll ask questions. But some other time, Mother. I haven't got time now."

  Lisa said, with her voice and face suddenly old and shriveled, as though she were his grandmother or great-grandmother rather than his mother:

  "All right then. Never mind. You go."

  When he had gone a little way in the direction of the back garden, with a kind of internal wringing of hands, she added, with only her lips moving:

  "Lord have mercy on him."

  Toward the end of August it emerged that he could buy Kramer's house right away, but that he would have to add nine thousand dollars to the price Krantz would get for him for the apartment in Talbiyeh, which the heirs of their old neighbor Itamar Vitkin were interested in buying. He therefore made up his mind to go to Metullah and ask Nakdimon for this amount, either as an advance on his and Netta's share of the income from the property that Lublin had left them, or through some other arrangement. After breakfast he took his travel bag, which he had not used for a year and a half, down from the top shelf in the closet. He packed shirts and underwear and shaving things, because he thought that he might have to stay over in the old stone house at the northern end of the town if Nakdimon raised difficulties or placed obstacles in his way. Indeed, he almost discovered a desire to spend a night or two there. When he unzipped the side pocket of the bag, he found an oblong object and was startled for a moment; was it an old box of chocolates that he had absentmindedly left to rot there? Cautiously he pulled it out and found it was wrapped in yellowing newspaper. When he placed it gently on the table, he saw that it was a Finnish newspaper. After a moment's hesitation he decided to open it by a special method he had been taught during a course he had taken. But it turned out to be nothing more than Mrs. Dalloway. Yoel placed it on the bookshelf next to its double, which he had purchased in the shopping center in Ramat Lotan the previous August, erroneously supposing that this copy had been left behind in his hotel room in Helsinki. So it happened that he abandoned his intention of going to Metullah that day and contented himself with a telephone conversation with Nakdimon Lublin, who, after a moment, grasped the sum he was talking about and the purpose for which he required it and at once interrupted Yoel with the words: "No problem, Captain. It'll be in your bank account in three days' time. I know the account number already."

  49

  This time he followed the guide through the tangle of narrow alleys without hesitation and without the slightest suspicion. The guide was a slim, delicate man with a perpetual smile on his face and rounded gestures, who was constantly bowing politely. The damp sticky heat spawned a cloud of flying insects out of the misty swamp. They crossed and recrossed fetid canals, treading on rickety bridges whose planks were eaten away by the moisture. The thick water in the canals stood almost motionless, steaming. And in the crowded streets throngs of quiet people moved unhurriedly in a cloud of decomposition and incense from household shrines. The odors mingled with the smoke of damp wood. It was amazing to him that he did not lose his guide in the dense crowd, in which almost all the men looked like his man, the women did too, and in fact it was hard to tell the difference here between the sexes. Because of a religious prohibition on taking life, there were leprous dogs sprawling in yards, in streets, and in the dust of the rough alleys, rats as big as cats crossing the road unconcernedly and unhurriedly in convoys, mangy, boil-ridden cats, gray mice that flashed sharp red eyes at him. Again and again there was a dry crunch under his shoes as he trod on cockroaches, some of which were as big as hamburgers. They were so lazy or indifferent that they made barely any effort to escape their fate, or perhaps they were afflicted with some kind of orthopteran plague. As they were crushed, a jet of fatty murky-brown juice squirted underfoot. From the water rose the stench of open sewers and dead fish and frying and rotting seafood, a ferocious blend of the odors of reproduction and death. The heady rotting effervescence of the hot damp city, which always attracted him from a distance and yet when he arrived always made him want to leave and never return. But he clung to his guide. Or perhaps it was not his first guide, but a second or a third, a casual passerby out of the crowd of comely, womanish men, or perhaps it really was a girl in boy's clothing, a slender, elusive creature among thousands of identical creatures moving like fish in the tropical rain that poured down from a height here
as though tubs of used water were being simultaneously emptied from all the upper stories, water that had been used for washing or cooking fish. The whole city stood on a marshy delta whose water frequently, with or without the river rising, flooded whole quarters, whose residents could be seen standing up to their knees in water inside their own hovels, bending over as though in deep prostration, fishing with tin cans in their own bedrooms for the fish that had come in with the floodwater. In the streets there was a perpetual roaring and a stench of burned engine fuel because the masses of ancient cars had no exhaust pipes. Among disintegrating taxicabs moved rickshaws drawn by young boys or old men, and pedicabs. Skeletal, half-naked men passed carrying buckets at either end of a flexed yoke. The hot, filthy river traversed the city bearing on its murky water a slow-moving, congested traffic of cargo boats, barges, dinghies, and rafts laden with bleeding raw meat, vegetables, and heaps of silvery fish. Among these craft bobbed wooden flotsam and bloated corpses of drowned beasts both great and small, buffalo, dogs, and monkeys. On the skyline, in the few places where there was a gap between the dilapidated hovels, rose palaces, towers, and pagodas sparkling with delusive gold turrets set alight by the sun. On the street corners shaven-headed monks in saffron robes held empty brass bowls, waiting wordlessly for offerings of rice. In the yards and by the doors of the hovels stood tiny spirit houses, like dolls' houses, with miniature furniture and gilt ornaments, where the spirits of the dead dwelt near their living dear ones, watching over all their doings and receiving daily offerings of a few grains of rice and a thimbleful of rice beer. Small, apathetic twelve-year-old prostitutes, whose bodies fetched ten dollars here, sat on walls and sidewalks, playing with rag dolls. But nowhere in the whole city had he ever seen a couple embracing or linking arms in the street. And here they were outside the city, with the warm rain falling relentlessly over everything and the guide, treading as daintily as a dancer even though he was not dancing, seemingly levitating; no longer bowing politely, no longer smiling or even troubling to look back to make sure his customer had not got lost; and the warm rair falling relentlessly on the buffalo drawing a cartload of bamboo, on the elephant laden with crates of vegetables, on the square paddy fields flooded with murky water, and on the coconut palms looking like monstrous women with dozens of soft heavy breasts growing all over their chests and backs and thighs. Warm rain on thatched roofs of houses constructed on widely spaced wooden piles planted astride the water. Here and there a village woman dressed in layers of clothes, washing almost up to her neck in a filthy canal, or laying fish traps. And the suffocating blast. And silence within the miserable rustic temple, and then a minor miracle: the warm rain did not cease, but fell relentlessly, somehow, even inside the chambers of the temple, which were partitioned by mirrors in order to mislead unclean spirits, which are able to move only in straight lines, which is why everything made of circles, curves, and arches is beautiful and good, whereas the opposite invites tribulation. The guide had vanished and the pockmarked monk, who might have been a eunuch, rose and declared in curious Hebrew: Not yet ready. Not yet enough. The warm rain did not cease until Yoel was forced to get up and take off his clothes, in which he had fallen asleep on the living-room sofa; naked he turned off the flickering television, switched on the air-conditioning in the bedroom, took a cold shower, and went outside to turn off the sprinklers, then went indoors again and lay down to sleep.

  50

  On the twenty-third of August, at half past nine in the evening, he inserted his car carefully and precisely between two Subarus in the visitors' parking lot, ready to go, with its nose pointing toward the exit, checked that the doors were locked, entered the reception area which was lit by a gloomy, flickering neon light, and asked how to get to Orthopedic Ward C. Before he entered the elevator, he checked, as had been his habit all these years, the faces of the people already inside with a rapid but severe and detailed glance. And found that everything was correct.

  In Orthopedic Ward C, by the desk at the nurses' station, he found his way barred by a middle-aged nurse with thick lips and misanthropic eyes who hissed at him that visiting was totally out of the question at such an hour. Yoel, hurt and embarrassed, nearly retreated, but managed to mumble meekly, Excuse me, sister, but I think there must be some misunderstanding. My name is Sasha Schein, and I haven't come to visit a patient, I've come to see Mr. Arye Krantz, who was supposed to be waiting for me now at this desk.

  Immediately the cannibal's face lit up, her thick lips parted in a warm smile, and she said, Oh, Arik, of course, what a dunce I am, you're Arik's friend, the new volunteer. Welcome. Wonderful. First of all, can I make you a cup of coffee? No? All right then. Take a seat. Arik left word that he'll be free shortly. He's just gone downstairs to get an oxygen tank. Arik is our ministering angel. The most devoted and wonderful and humane volunteer I've ever had. One of the Thirty-six Righteous Men. Meanwhile I can give you a quick guided tour of our little kingdom. By the way, I'm Maxine. How about you? Sasha? Mr. Schein? Sasha Schein? Is that some kind of joke? What kind of a name have you been saddled with? Yet you look like a native—this is the special unit for seriously ill patients—like a battalion commander or a managing director. Just a minute. Don't say anything. Let me guess. Let's see: you're a police officer? Is that right? You've committed some disciplinary offense, and the hearing or whatever it's called sentenced you to a period of voluntary public service? No? You don't have to answer. Let it be Sasha Schein. Why not? As far as I'm concerned, any friend of Arik's is a guest of honor here. Anyone who didn't know him, judging just by his style, might get the impression that Arik is just another little fart. But anyone with eyes in his head can tell that it's nothing but a façade. He just puts on a performance so that people won't see what a treasure he is really. Well, this is where you wash your hands. Use that blue soap and scrub them well, please. Paper towels over here. That's right. Now put on a gown—take one of those hanging over there. At least you could tell me if my guess was hot or cold or lukewarm. These door lead to the toilets for walking patients and visitors. The staff toilets are at the far end of the corridor. Ah, here's Arik. Arik, show your friend where the linen stores are, so he can start loading a cart with clean sheets and bedspreads. The Yemeni woman in number three has asked to have her bottle emptied. Don't rush, Arik; it's not that urgent; she asks every five minutes and as often as not there's nothing in it. Sasha? OK. As far as I'm concerned, you can be Sasha. Though if his real name is Sasha then I'm Jane Fonda. Good. Anything else? I must fly now. I forgot to tell you, Arik, that Greta called while you were downstairs to say she wouldn't be coming in tonight. She's coming tomorrow instead.

  So Yoel began to work two half-nights a week as a volunteer auxiliary. As Krantz had been begging him to do for ages. And he soon discovered how the real-estate agent had lied to him. It was true he had a fellow volunteer named Greta. It was true that they would disappear together for a quarter of an hour or so at one o'clock in the morning. And Yoel did also notice a couple of student nurses named Christina and Iris, though at the end of two months he still could not tell them apart. Nor did he particularly try to. But it was not true that Krantz spent his nights in lovemaking. The truth was, the agent took his work as an auxiliary in deadly earnest. Devotedly. And with a cheerful glow that sometimes made Yoel stop and eye him covertly for a few seconds. There were times when he felt strange pangs of shame and an urge to apologize. Although he never managed to clarify what, precisely, he ought to apologize for. He just tried very hard not to lag behind Krantz.

  The first few times he was mainly set to work on the laundry. The hospital laundry apparently functioned even during the night shifts. Two Arab laborers would arrive at two o'clock to collect the dirty linen from the ward. Yoel's job was to sort out what had to be boiled and what needed a delicate wash. To empty the pockets of the dirty pajamas. And to enter on the appropriate form how many sheets, how many pillowcases, and so forth. Bloodstains and filth, the acid smell of urine, the stench of sweat
and other body fluids, traces of excrement on the sheets and pajamas, patches of dried vomit, medicine stains, the intense whiff of tormented bodies—all these aroused in him neither disgust nor loathing, but a powerful, if secretive, triumphant joy, which Yoel was no longer ashamed of and did not even attempt, in his usual fashion, to decipher. He yielded himself to it with silent elation: I am alive. Therefore I take part. Unlike the dead.

  Sometimes he had an opportunity to see how Krantz, pushing a bed along with one hand and holding an IV bottle aloft with the other, helped the team from the Emergency Ward to bring in a wounded soldier who had been flown down from South Lebanon by helicopter and operated on earlier in the evening. Or a woman who had lost her legs in a road accident at night. Sometimes Maxine and Arik would ask him to help them move a man with a fractured skull from a stretcher to a bed. Gradually, as the weeks went past, they learned to trust his skill. He rediscovered in himself the powers of concentration and precision that not long before he had tried to persuade Netta he had lost. He was able, if the regular nursing staff was under particular pressure and requests for help came simultaneously from several quarters, to adjust an IV or change a catheter bag. But his main discovery in himself was unexpected powers to soothe and pacify. He was capable of approaching the bed of a badly injured patient who had suddenly started screaming, and, laying one hand on his forehead and another on his shoulder, silencing the screams, not because his fingers had somehow pumped away the pain, but because even from a distance he had identified the screams as being caused not by pain but by fear. And this fear he was capable of allaying with a touch and with a simple word or two. Even the doctors recognized this power, and sometimes a doctor on night duty would call him over or send for him when he was sorting piles of filthy linen, to come and calm someone whom not even an injection could quiet. Yoel would say, for instance: