Amos Oz - The Same Sea

frightening all the village. All this happened long ago

and has long since been forgotten. Soon you too.

Good evening, this is Bettine speaking, I'm a friend of Albert Danon. We met a couple of times while you were staying with him but we didn't talk much: we didn't get the chance, or perhaps we felt awkward. I hesitated for a long time before calling you. I hope I'm not disturbing you. And you're perfectly entitled to say, Look, it's none of your business. Or even to hang up. I'll understand. The thing is this: you moved into his flat as his son's girlfriend, or ex-girlfriend, I'm not asking and you don't have to answer. Either way, he took you in and got you out of trouble and apparently he even ended up finding you or helping you to find a place of your own. I don't know the details and I don't want to. He is a generous and efficient man in his quiet way. But you, whether deliberately or not, are doing something bad to him. I use the present tense because even now that you've moved to wherever you've moved to, he's still unsettled because of you or else not because of you but, let's say, in your wake. Wait. Don't interrupt me. This conversation is not exactly easy for me as it is. I'm very concerned that you don't misunderstand me. I don't want to be judgmental and I'm certainly not trying to tell you off but merely to advise you, not even advise you really but simply to ask you to give it some thought. You're a good-looking young woman and you belong to a generation where certain things have become quite simple, perhaps too simple. I'm not passing judgment, I'm merely voicing an impression that may be groundless. I'm older than you, possibly older than your mother, so it's not a matter of jealousy or competition. Surely you too — but no, I don't want to get into that, and please consider what I have just said unsaid, because even a denial of jealousy is liable to arouse suspicion. Let me try putting it this way: He is grieving for his wife, and on top of that, as you know, he is upset that his son has gone away. Even though he's by no means a weak man, you will surely agree with me that it is not necessary to add to his pain. When you were staying in his flat he was almost looking for somewhere to run away to, whereas now that you've left it's all he can do to stop himself from going to look for you, because you promised to visit him and you forgot No, don't apologize, you're busy, of course I understand, a girl your age and so on. I'm sorry. Just give me another minute or two and I'll stop. What I wanted to say, or rather ask, is that you shouldn't leave him hanging in mid-air. He doesn't sleep at night and he looks as though he may be getting ill. You have caused a misunderstanding, and you are the only person who can clear it up. Apart from which, you may not have thought about what will happen when Rico comes back. What sort of relationship will you have with the two of them, and what sort of relationship will they have with each other? Forgive me for raising these questions, I have been a civil servant for thirty-eight years, and I may have picked up a rather bureaucratic tone. I'm not asking you to break off relations or disappear but rather — how should I put it — to observe some boundaries. Perhaps I have not succeeded in explaining myself. I feel the need to say to you, Look, Dita, you arouse something in him that makes him very sad, depressed, you may not even have noticed, but if you want to put it right you'll have to draw some lines. No. That wasn't quite what I wanted to say to you, and it may have sounded petty. It's hard for me to find the words. One weekend, many years ago, my husband Avram and I took Albert and Nadia for a day trip to Upper Galilee. At dusk we saw, all four of us, a furry creature scurry down a slope and vanish among some trees. We tried to keep it in sight but it had vanished. The sun went down and for a long time afterwards it seemed as though the whole world was shimmering and would go on shimmering for ever. Albert said it was definitely a stray dog, and Nadia said it was a wolf. It was a pointless argument, because look what has happened since: Avram died long ago, and now Nadia has died, and the wolf or dog is dead too. Only Albert and I are still alive. By my reckoning you may not even have been born the evening that I've remembered all these years, with no pain now but with a clarity that gets sharper and sharper with the passage of time. A wolf or a stray dog? The wood was in darkness and there were Albert and I confronting Avram and Nadia in an argument that had no ending and could not have any, the creature had vanished into the dark and around us everything was empty and silent and shimmering. You must understand, I've told you this story not to make you feel uncomfortable but only to make a request, or rather to convey to you what I am asking myself and that is why I am asking you too. You don't have to answer. Naturally, all this will remain just between you and me. Or rather, between you and yourself.

She says she's not jealous. Like hell she's not. Not angry.

Like hell she's not. She's right as rain but in fact

when all's said and done, she only wants him for herself. She wants me

to get out of his sight this minute, draw a line as she puts it,

or else she'll gouge my eyes out. It's my fault

he doesn't sleep. So what if he doesn't sleep. Being awake is being alive.

If I weren't around, by now he'd probably be dozing

for hours on end in an armchair or sitting on his veranda staring ahead

for a month, a winter, a year, gradually the sea would come up

to his head. Hers too. Instead of bugging me

she should actually say thank you nicely:

it's only because of me that it came back to her, that stray dog in Galilee

or that shimmering wolf, or whatever it was.

It's only because of me that what was almost blacked out is shimmering again

for her as well as for him. I'm quite fond of him. But not of her.

Not at all.

As for the Narrator, on these late September days he gets up each morning

before five and writes for an hour or so until the paper arrives. Then

he goes outside to check if there is anything new in the desert. To date

there is nothing. The mountains to the east are stamped out

against the sky. Every slope in its proper place. Like yesterday. And

the day before. That lizard, a pocket dinosaur, has not improved

his position. The Narrator is interested in registering all this, in trying

to clarify and record here what has been and what is. Things must be

called by their proper names or by another name that sheds a fresh light

or casts, here and there, some shadow. Fifty years have passed:

in Jerusalem, on Zechariah Street, in a two-room flat, a private

school belonging to Mrs. Yonina. My teacher was Mrs. Zelda, Zelda

who some years later wrote the poems in The Spectacular Difference and The

Invisible Carmel. Once, on a winter day, she chose to say

to me softly: If you stop talking sometimes

maybe things will sometimes be able to talk to you. Years later

I found it promised in one of her poems that trees and stones

will respond Amen. A spectacular difference she promised,

between stones and trees, to anyone who is prepared to listen.

I can still remember her room.

Zephaniah Street. A back entrance.

A frenetic boy, seven and a quarter.

A word-child. A suitor.

My room does not ask, she wrote,