Amos Oz - The Same Sea

Giggy Ben-Gal now makes a suggestion: What this story needs, apart from

Nirit and her hermit who lives on the edge of a village, is another twist, like

a one-night stand with an Arab farmhand, or lets say a little lesbian scene

with a neighbor. Bettine suggests finishing with the bit where Nirit and

the man are feeding the pigeons, because what comes afterward,

the traveller, the dead fox, seems too morbid to her and overly

symbolic. Dubi considers that the traveller definitely adds a deep mystical

element to the ending. As for the Narrator, he recommends deleting several

of the long silences which he regards as a bit of an affectation. Dita says

nothing. Albert hesitantly apologizes and remarks that silences can actually

sometimes express what words cannot. Meanwhile Bettine stands up, clears

away the cups and plates, and stops on her way to the kitchen to open

the curtains wide. The sight of the wintry sea which is now a virulent green

makes her think that maybe this whole argument is unnecessary. Wrapped

in the silence of empty spaces the brightly-lit earth floats from darkness to

darkness. More tea? Or some coffee? No thanks — everyone has got

things to do, promises to keep, business to see to, chores that can't be put off.

Thank you. Must say goodbye and be off. It was nice, and as for the project,

the script, it's in excellent hands. There is every reason to hope it

will enjoy enormous success. Were off to a flying start.

After that, in the car, the news. A soldier in the South Lebanon Army

has been fatally wounded and two Israelis slightly injured. In

Hazor in Galilee another small business has closed, its nine employees

are on hunger strike. A math teacher in Netanya has been

abusing his daughters for the past six years. A car went off the road

near Betar and ended up in a ravine: a father and mother and

their two sons; a daughter who survived is in a critical condition.

Epidemic and famine in Burundi. A woman in Holon has jumped.

The rain will continue. There is a warning of flooding

in low-lying areas. And a hurricane in the United States.

Who cares about Nirit's Love.

In the summer of 1946 my mother and father rented a holiday room

in the flat of a tailor in Bat Yam. One night I was woken by a

coughing sound that was not coughing, and that was the first time in my life

that I heard a grown-up stranger crying through the wall. All

the darkness long he cried, and awake and frightened I lay still not to

disturb my parents until when the darkness was weaker I crept out and

saw him on the balcony his shoulders were shaking a bird flew up in the

silence of the dawn and the man pointed to it and said to me Little boy,

don't believe. Fifty years have gone by and the bird is no longer

or the man. Or my parents. Only the sea is still there

and even it has changed from deep blue

to grey. Little boy don't believe. Or do. Believe. Who cares.

The bird wakes her. Lying on her back with her eyes shut, thinking

What's left apart from the place mat she's started and may still finish.

What's left is a wish that the pain will go away

that it will all go away and stop bending over her.

She lies as though she has left her launching pad and is now

moving along the Milky Way and already the planet

from which she was launched is far off, has shrunk till it can no longer be

distinguished from tens of thousands of other stars.

A bird on a branch calls to her and Nadia is lying

wiping away the good and the bad, like a woman who has nearly

finished washing the floor, walking backward toward the door, drawing

the mop toward her, all she has left to do is to wipe away the traces on

the wet floor of her own footprints. The pain is still sleeping: her hostile

body has not woken with her at the sound of the bird, with all its knives.

Even shame, her lifetime companion, has gone. It has ceased to gnaw at her.

Everything is letting go of her and Nadia is letting go of everything,

like a pear from a branch: the pear is not picked but a ripened pear drops.

Right now at four in the morning Nadia is the most alone she has ever been,

not alone like a sick woman hearing a bird in a garden but alone like a bird

with no garden no branch no wing. She lays her shrivelled hand on her

withered breast because suddenly for a moment the sound of the bird is

confused with a cry from a cradle at night, the baby's lips are open wide

to tickle her breast, or perhaps it is not her baby but a man covering it

with his palm, stroking it squeezing and soothing, slipping the nipple

between his lips describing with his tongue on her flesh

shivers that descend to the roots of her spine

and thus the needles of pain awake from their sleep and like

a small child in the dark she puts a finger in her mouth. Narimi narimi

has gone and now she needs an injection.

After the funeral I wrote a letter to Albert, half of it personal, which I do not

want to quote here, and the other half a kind of meditation, which I

shall reconstruct in other words. The desert and the sea, like you, insist on

balancing a joint bank account, evaporation, clouds, floods, the wind whirls

continually, rivers run into the sea, but there is no comfort in this:

from now on you are on your own without her among the heavy

brown furniture with embroidered mats lace curtains bellied for a moment by

the sea breeze which the next moment lets them hang slack. Whenever

I'm in town I'll try to drop in for a glass of tea. Try to be strong, Albert,

and phone me whenever you like. As for the assessments I sent you to check,

there's no hurry, it's not at all urgent.

I read an article of yours, fire and brimstone, in yesterdays Yediot. Rico

showed it to me, he said, Read this, Dad, and don't get worked up,

just try to grasp where we are living and where all this lunacy is leading us.

That's what he said, more or less. I think he's even further to the left

than you, this repressive state and so on. I'm not so moral a person

as either of you, but I don't like the present situation much either.

Mostly I say nothing, from a deep-seated fear that in responding to

this or that wrong even I may come out with things that are not exactly

right. Anger sends out secondaries. Naturally I have every respect

for the brave child who shouts that the emperor is naked when the

crowd is cheering Long live the emperor. But the situation today is that the

crowd is yelling that the emperor is naked and maybe for that reason

the child ought to find something new to shout, or else he should

say what he has to say without shouting. As it is, there is so much

noise, even here, the whole country is full of screaming, incantations,

amulets, trumpets, fifes and drums. Or else the opposite, biting sarcasm:

everyone denouncing everyone else. Personally I'm of the opinion

that any criticism of public affairs ought to contain shall we say up to

twenty percent sarcasm, twenty percent pain, and sixty percent

clinical seriousness, otherwise everyone is mocking and jeering at each other,