Amos Oz - The Same Sea

Sit down Albert Take off your coat.

Let's draw the curtain. Light the light.

I was asleep. What never mind,

don't worry. It was time I woke.

I'll put some water on for coffee

and throw a bedspread over the mess.

I'll make us both some cheese on toast.

Thanks for the heater. And the nightie.

Your wife's. And what a pretty blue.

It may suit me some years from now.

Just wait there while I have a shower.

Or come with me. Take off your shoes.

And take that off, while I undress.

Now come with me. No, don't be shy.

There is a custom in Ladakh,

perhaps an ancient marriage law:

they marry three or four brothers

together to a single bride.

Three brothers. And a single bride.

Stop shivering, and touch me here.

Touch, it's not me, it's only cloth.

Its only cotton: touch me here.

Think that its happening in a dream

high in the hills of Chandartal.

My fingers are like alleyways,

my palm's a square. You cross it, then

you stop. My arm is like a curving road,

my shoulder is a river bed and then

the neck's a bridge. Then you can choose

to go this way, or that To wait. To wait.

In a dream in a cloud in passion

and wonder. Just listen to the thunder.

When he left, the rain had stopped. The boulevard was a girl

stripped naked and beaten up by a gang, and left lying there on her back

ripped and drenched. Now she hears trees,

promising her a kind of second silence, which belongs

at the end of shame and degradation, a still, small silence,

a kind of birth: I shall no longer raise my eyes to the hills

but lie quietly now in a puddle

of muddy still waters. Here is the breeze. Here are rumors

of birds' wings, stitching the damp air, unstitching,

restitching, unstitching again. Everything now is grey

and tender. Rest. In peace. Smelling sweetly

of good rain and earth. Everything is past.

Eyes. Eyes. Eyes in the water eyes in the branches eyes in the curtains eyes in the jug and eyes in the pillow. Nadia remembers Nadia as a little girl in an organdie frock or a pleated skirt, with ribbons in her plaits, Sabbath eve silver candlesticks warm hallah raisin wine blessings and table songs sit up straight please and stop squinting. She remembers gleaming white lace-trimmed napkins, porcelain bowls the color of the sea, a woven wall rug, little baskets, sauce boats, the smell of basil, lavender and ginger, and candied fruit Eyes, eyes, and Nadia remembers squirrels in the branches of the deserted garden milky-white mist in the hills snow blossoming on a darkening meadow the poignant tolling of a bell at dusk, dark woods that whispered rumors when the wind blew, the howl of a wolf on a winters night beyond the garden fence, the dovecote and the cockerel and the billy goat that frightened her in the dusk when she was sent out to fetch wood from the shed in the yard. Eyes in the water eyes in the night eyes eyes in my back, in my breasts, Nadia remembers old secrets, aged ten and a half in the morning, her father stripped to the waist up a ladder retiling the roof, and herself handing him up tiles one by one, inhaling the scent of his sweat and the sight of his nipples concealed in the steelwork of his chest bringing a secret trickle to her own ungrown nipples, she remembers the sudden flutter in her tummy and how the sun shone on his bare stooping back, as her father laid tile after tile and his muscles eyes eyes seemed to burrow between his shoulderblades. And once she watched her brother Michael hiding crouched in the back of the woodshed milking the dogs erection a blood-red butchers-shop udder protruding horribly from the covering fur and the two of them, Michael and the dog, thirstily panting and lolling and then soft thunder rolled in her tummy and turning she ran from die woodshed and that same night the first blood appeared on her nightdress with her terrified tears and the pain as though a maggot had wriggled inside her. In a whisper her mother taught her how to and how not to and when, and how women hide their impurity from menfolk's eyes and how to smother the smell, and she also said that this was the curse of Eve: every woman is punished and sullied with blood, recompense for the serpent and apple, in sorrow shalt thou bring forth thy children and there is no way back and only in pregnancy and in old age do we get some relief Eyes in the back eyes on the roof eyes on disgrace eyes on the festivals, Nadia remembers her handkerchiefs lace-edged brassieres satin ribbons suspender belts translucent silk embroidered blouses corsets and headscarves, schemes and intrigues of virtuous women a cesspit concealed under layers of velvet, muffled laughter and sneers of old women leering aunts winking caressing deriding and gradually covering her with a silky cobweb of the spidery order of women, catching and trussing her in a network of transparent threads, initiating her by degrees into the mysteries of the sect, labyrinthine lies filigrees of guile a subversive sisterhood in the face of the male sex intrigues of ancient stratagems delicate perfumes, jewellery, cosmetics, eyes, eyes, evil eye. Nadia remembers a baby imprisoned in the underground lair of the priestesses of an all-female cult, rules of modesty, rules of menstrual impurity, rules of prudence, qualities of innocent cunning, powders and creams, eyeblack and rouge, the masculine nature you have to learn to arouse and to repel, grace is false and beauty is vain, but without them beware that you do not end up unwanted and dusty on the shelf) heaven forbid. Give them an inch and they take a mile, give them two inches and they 11 cast you aside like an empty vessel, a woman is a pot filled to the brim with honey and shame, a locked garden and a reserved spring, a delight concealed until her redeemer cometh, no male stranger may approach, but neither should he be kept far off, keep him hungry and thirsty but occasionally feed him a crumb, cautiously always as if unawares lest you become a byword and a disgrace. Eyes, eyes, evil eye, amulets, giggles, whispers, intrigues, feminine plots and laws of womanhood, how to arouse love while preserving your modesty, dizzying incense, enchanting repulsion, she wanted to flee and she wanted to die, she wanted to run to the world of the squirrels to be for all time neither woman nor man but a tiny timorous creature which is all eyes and almost no body.

But there, on the road to Patna, in the night train coming down from

the mountains, winding at a snails pace into the valley, a shabby old train,

ancient carriages, wooden benches, and the engine fed on

sliced tree trunks, sparks flying by the window, swallowed up in

the depth of the darkness, faint lights in the distance, wretched villages,

mud huts, he thinks of writing a postcard to his father, and another

to Dita Inbar, to say to them both never mind. Tomorrow in Patna station

he will buy cards and stamps and post them. Never mind,

he wanted to say. Never mind that you took my father, such a thin,

childlike man, into the shower to see your body. Let him see it. Never

mind. I like the idea. And you took his hand and placed it here and there

to feel. Never mind that he saw you, never mind that he touched. After all,

he recoiled at once and fled to wander dazed on the boulevard among tattered

papers in the rain. No harm done. Never mind. After all, when I was a baby

his wife suckled me and changed my diaper, and lulled me to sleep on her