Amos Oz - Touch the Water, Touch the Wind

Far out on the lake, as the clear blue sky shone down on Baden-Baden, Fedoseyeva suddenly donned one of her most precise smiles. The man was enchanted. He forgot his opening line, at once recovered himself. But Stefa anticipated him:

"It is a great pleasure for me finally to make your acquaintance after all these years. I am full of respect, full of admiration. Were it not that our profession deprives us of the right to compromising keepsakes I should ask you for your autograph here and now. What I mean to say is that I am one of your most devoted admirers. Now to come to the point. I cannot understand what your calculations show you. Which is your credit column and which is your debit column. I am making you a simple, straightforward offer: I am giving and it is up to you to take, with supreme caution. Why should you not take? I am not charging anything. And don't tell me you suspect a trick or a trap. Such a suspicion, as you must understand, greatly damages our mutual self-respect. Help yourself. I am all yours. Grads and for nothing. Call it an emotional need. Call it a Zionistic impulse. I shan't change my mind and I shan't make any conditions, apart from the insistence that you receive me with enormous caution. But, after all, in the art of caution you are the great maestro. Let us decide on the necessary arrangements. Do not weary me with questions about the considerations and motives which make me suddenly choose to unbosom myself to a man like you. Then we'll say farewell and adieu. Do you accept or not?"

The little man did not answer at once. He mused for a while, and as he did so he closed one eye almost completely, as if to economize on his eyesight.

Suddenly he leapt up as if stung, almost upsetting the boat; quick as a flash he put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a lighter as Stefa fished her cigarettes out of her handbag.

Then he smiled, and when his companion did not smile back he closed his other eye too. And he started to speak, at length, with unfathomable patience and in a Talmudic singsong:

'Yes, yes, Madame. Yes indeed. You can't have a baby through the mails, if you will forgive the expression. Da, I apologize, I apologize from the bottom of my heart for my choice of words. Excitement is my undoing, Madame. It was the excitement that made me adopt a vulgar and suspicious tone.

"I am sure you can understand my feelings, Madame. Here am I, here are you, there is no one else about, we are alone, floating on the water, and water — so I believe with all my heart — is a very important element, one of the mainstays of life. And so, Madame — permit me — Madame Pomeranz, so we meet in a strange town and row out to the middle of a lake in such extraordinary circumstances, and moreover we have, as you so rightly say, for many years had connections with one another, well, how should I put it, we have felt strongly drawn toward each other, we have spent long hours contemplating each other from a distance, there has been an emotional bond between us, and I am sure you will agree with me when I say that emotional bonds are the essence of the social structure. And what amusing games we have played with each other all these years. What naughty pranks we have got up to. I was about to compare our long-standing relationship to a flirtation conducted through intermediaries. But this time I held my tongue and said nothing. So, now we have met. It is still hard to believe. We were like dreamers, dear lady, if you will permit me to employ Biblical language. Da, language is an inestimable gift; who can exhaust its praises? But at once I pinch myself, Madame — so — and bang go all the excited dreams. Now, as you request, for the realia. I am wide awake and ready for anything. Command, Madame: the worm Jacob and the hind Israel hearken as one to the voice of Mother Russia. Eh bien. How blue the sky is; despite oneself one thinks of the poems of Goethe, or the visions of the romantic philosophers. And by the way, is Madame Fedoseyeva in earnest? Or does she mean to make fun of a lonely man who is no longer young, and make a laughingstock of hiM — of me, that is-once and for all? Madame must try to understand me: I am a wounded man, I have already been badly hurt by young ladies — two or three of them. That was all a whole generation ago, however. Nevertheless, Madame, unworthy apprehensions, an incurable suspiciousness, a constitutional insecurity, a fear of the fair sext certain prejudices — all these compel me to put your intentions to the test before giving free reign, as they say, to my emotions. I must have some token, some slight evidence of the seriousness of your intentions. For instance, a teeny-weeny droplet of the fuel which Engineer Kumin, Osip Grigorich, has been clever enough to manufacture. A tiny drop, enough perhaps to fill the lighter in my pocket, or else perhaps not a drop, no fuel at all, but the good Engineer himself might be induced to take advantage of this opportunity and join you on your journey. Moreover, when you come to us, as soon as the first joyful moments are over, I shall have to restrain our joy and connect certain plugs and disconnect others, to make certain alterations in the points of contact, a matter of elementary legerdemain whose purpose I shall not attempt for a moment to conceal from you, Madame: it is to block the escape routes, however fantastic they may seem. To burn all your bridges. And the purpose of this is to remove any feelings of regret, because regret is, in my humble opinion, a constant source of mental anguish. Let us give vent to words which our beloved Elisha Pomeranz would not use, but which we, being lovers of poetry, may legitimately employ: we shall remove you from the clutches of Mother Russia, and carefully and lovingly plant you, once and for all time, in the soil of Israel, in the hope and certain conviction that in the land of our fathers you will blossom and bloom sevenfold."

Stefa:

"We understand each other, more or less. That is good. I must only repeat and emphasize that Palestine will have to take very good care of me and of him. My people will be furious, they have a long arm, the risk is grave. Incidentally, while you were mentioning Kumin and talking about solid fuel or something of the sort, songbirds began to sing among the trees and I could not hear that part of what you were saying. It is twenty past three."

The little man:

"But of course, dear lady. Rest assured, as the apple of our eye we shall protect you, and the man who is so dear to you. With all due respect, between lovers such things should be understood even without words. We shall take perfectly good care of you both. Permit me, Madame, forgive me, I am a trite man and I am about to make a trite observation. To what end did we go through blood and fire to establish a free Jewish state? Why, first and foremost surely to provide a safe refuge for every persecuted Jew. And by the way, dear lady, surely you know something about us by now: we may bark at a shark — but we're kind to a hind. And here we have concrete illustration of the abstract idea of family reunion, of the notion of repentance… tears well up in our eyes, dear lady, and who would be fool enough to deny that tears are a sure sign of emotion?"

Fedoseyeva:

"Silence. Now listen with both ears. Any day between the second and the sixteenth of February, between six o'clock and ten o'clock in the evening, at the Albergo Ambassadore in Milan, have two women waiting for me. Women, not men. Two of them. And no one else. No hidden strangers, such as you saw fit to lay on for our meeting here today. A sign, by the way, of extraordinarily bad manners on your part. These two women who will wait for me, if they see me smoking a cigarette, they will know that I am not alone, that I have company. In that case they must run for their lives, because they will be in great danger. If I am not smoking when they see me, I am in their hands and everything will depend on their dexterity. Now we must part. Give no hint or clue for the time being to the man I am going to in Palestine. Only protect him from harm. If anything should happen to him, I shall be of no use to you and you will not see me alive again. Now make for the shore. Naturally you are free to tell me anything else if you so wish, I do not of course forbid you to speak to me, your manners are so evidently good, please say whatever you like. But you must forgive me if from now on I do not listen. Those birds are singing again. And I am suffering from migraine. Farewell. Remember to drive carefully."