Amos Oz - Touch the Water, Touch the Wind

The mouth organ, naturally, had long since rusted away.

A stem gravity reigns in these parts. No snow, no lunatic spires of village churches, no white steppes and black ravens, no howling wolves at night, no fir forests. The nights are quiet. Silence accumulates slowly. This is the Jordan Valley. And the lake at night is huddled and blind.

And so, like a man waking up in a panic and dashing for his life, Mieczyslaw the First suddenly started taking an interest in other people. Checking his longitude and latitude. Clinging. Getting to know. He ordered a daily newspaper. He bought a map of the roads and settlements. Made the acquaintance of his neighbors. Began to pat the dogs and children. Met a woman.

When Stefa recalled her former life, her youth, the intelligentsia of the town of M — straining their fingertips to touch her with their ideas, when she recalled in the soft Russian sunshine how in a fit of caprice she had once suddenly given herself to the dreamy son of a mere watchmaker and how the town had buzzed with gossip and Emanuel Zaicek had whispered to her, In God's name, Stefa, you're throwing yourself away, when Stefa recalled how she used to touch the watchmaker's son on the forehead with her fingertip and touch their love and how her fingertip had lit up, when Stefa recalled all this she was seized by a mood of wild restlessness. Her heart yearned for savage sun-drenched places, feverishly she dispatched coded cables to Timbuktu, Barcelona, Pago Pago, Newfoundland, and New Caledonia, Mikhail Andreitch at her command would flash a short signal in cypher and at once an officers' conspiracy would get under way in Brazzaville or a strike of armed workers in Caracas.

Everybody, Stefa felt, every town and nation, we are all in need of urgent salvation, now, at once, how much more can we stand, the heart is ready to burst.

She would suddenly touch with her toe the flattened head of Mikhail Andreitch, who lay on the rug at her feet:

"Andreitch. Pay attention. Listen."

(Moscow. Melting snow. Soft sunlight at the barred window.)

"I am listening, Comrade Fedoseyeva. I'm all ears."

"Listening maybe, Andreitch, but you still can't hear. You don't hear a thing. The air is full and you — nothing. Delicate, amazing things are about to happen. Starting to stir. Turning over. So wake up, Andreitch, if you don't mind, stand on your own two feet, wake up. Stop listening and start hearing at long last."

The office of the Chairman of the Sixth Bureau was a low-ceilinged but spacious room, furnished in an eccentric style. There was no desk. No shelves or chairs. Comrade Fedoseyeva was in the habit of working while lying on her back, with her knees drawn up, or else propping herself up on her side with her elbow. The principal item of furniture in her office was therefore a low divan in Central Asian style.

Next to the divan was a camel-hair rug, and it was on this that flat-headed Mikhail Andreitch crouched on guard. Two telephones without dials to his left, two flexible microphones to his right, and in front of him on a stool an ashtray, lighter, three or four packages of Sobranie cigarettes, and some small brightly colored notebooks. On the wall hung a picture of the Bear in marshal's uniform, wearing a sleepy, satisfied smile.

There was also a samovar and two glasses. And an electric fire.

At first sight it was not easy to believe that from here invisible wires, nervous quivering piano wires, extended to four continents, with large numbers of men at the other end, different kinds of men, some of them remarkably sensitive and all of them, like all men, in need of urgent salvation. Could Comrade Fedoseyeva, with all her taut wires, her overpowering smile, bring about any illumination? Could she touch with her fingertip and see her fingertip light up?

She knew not where he was, she had no tears; and her hair was ruthlessly cropped.

From her window she could see amazing Slavic domes, potbellied domes, reaching up to heaven in a desperate effort to be freed from their bodies, to be touched by a north wind, to be wounded by the wind, to belong to the wind.

Pomeranz shaved off his thin, lovingly cultivated mustache, and for a time contemplated taking a Hebrew name: Miron Primor. Nonsense.

While round about him things closed in, even took a turn for the worse. Sometimes when he came home from work it happened that a long, curvaceous motorcar was parked on the corner of the street with some men inside it with their hats pulled down.

They made no effort to disguise their purpose.

As if they were certain that he had no possibility, no chance, no inclination to elude them and suddenly vanish. As if they knew the secrets of his own heart.

A kind of cheap comedy was closing in around him, and in addition to fear and sorrow he also felt disgust.

At night, as he sat at his desk working at his mathematical researches by the light of a small table lamp, he would suddenly be compelled to turn his head, and he would see shadow upon shadow. The newspaper, too, warned the watchful public to be on the alert against all sorts of dangers: keep an eye open, report anything suspicious at once.

And rest, if rest indeed it had been, was no longer to be had.

Even the stone-built house, with its low-vaulted ceiling and its window boxes aflame with geraniums, suddenly began to exude different smells. The arching movement of the ceiling could be sensed at night with ever-increasing force. A solitary tough stem sprouted through a crack in the flagstones near the kitchen alcove, and stood erect and stiff, holding up its lonely gray head. And a woman also appeared.

Petite, confused, American, a kind of free artist, liberation of style or of line. One Saturday morning she suddenly knocked at Pomeranz's door. Slender, straight as a twig, she smiled, she asked if she might sketch the arches, she was embarrassed yet bold, as she spoke she almost accidentally touched his arm, his shoulder, his cheek, she laughed, looked grave, she thought the walls were so old and expressive, such a simple harmony in the vaulting, and, oh, what an enchanting devil's head carved on the stone lintel, and the view of the palm trees through the arched window, those psychedelic flickers of light on the lake, contrasting with the grimness of the mountains, she wanted to sketch it all, and she promised not to make a mess or a noise, could she, please?

Yes, of course.

Audrey. All pink, blooming, full of zeal, full of ideas, touchingly slender, detached from her body, not too clean, perhaps, even — Pomeranz was overcome by an ardent desire to forgive her, forgive her anything. She wore a kind of American Indian dress, and Rosa Luxemburg glasses. Her hair was dusty, unruly, at odds with itself. She was outrageously young. Barefoot. Her resdess toes ceaselessly dug into the stone floor as if trying to burrow through and touch the earth beneath, a movement of curiosity or of orphaned frenzy.

For four days and five nights Audrey stayed with Pomeranz: he for the flavor of her body and she for the meaning of life. He would writhe, gurgle, struggle, death throes pierced the marrow of his bones every few hours, shimmering delusive spasms, ax blow, virgin birth. In between, Audrey barefoot roamed from window to window, glowing, adapting to captivity, like Adam in Paradise calling everything by a new name, taking up stands, formulating, pointing everything its way to renewal and salvation, expounding, connecting, legislating. All with her fingertips. As if she were dreaming.

In midstream, somewhere in a sentence that had begun with the death of God and would have led on to existential guilt, the man would pounce and seize her stemlike neck in his dark heavy-veined hands and contemplate for a moment its fragility, desperately inhaling all her odors, his hands two heavy slow cascades running down her back, her waist, he would sink into her hair, clasp her breasts, his preying hands full of spreading mercy.