Amos Oz - The Same Sea

his hair; the boy bit, struggled, but came back in the evening with a gift for

you: a live jellyfish in a can of seawater. And the grief like a creeping stone:

the boy isn't here. He's gone. The boy who was here has gone. The boy

has gone. Lost. With his blue bag of snails and his sandals made from tires,

tied with a frayed string. A dustboy, so velvety, he found you rather odd,

what's the matter with you, a corrupt angel's smile, innocently seductive, pure

and smart, but suddenly a startled little monkey would cling and cuddle

in your arms, huddling and burrowing with a take-good-care-of-me.

You didn't. The boy has gone. The boy who was yours has gone. This

evening in the square three neon signs in Sinhalese and one in English:

Xanadu dance bar, first and last drink free on the house. Order a gin. Talk

for a while to one of those easy girls who by the way is also called Xanadu.

A boy. Lost. Not mine. Vanished. Don't know his name. He always calls me

Your Honor and I call him Come-Here. Eight. Or six. Who can tell?

So many children abandoned here. Maybe he needs help. He may be

screaming to me in the dark. Or no longer screaming. On the barbed wire

opposite is a torn scrap of kite. Another kite. Not ours. And warm rain

has been hanging for hours in the air. Sit and mourn. There's plenty of time.

Xanadu stays open till daylight.

At six in the evening Bettine is walking along the shadier sidewalk to Viterbo's pharmacy, a woman with attractive hips, wearing a skirt made of an Indian material, and earrings, with her hair bobbed, her handbag swinging from her shoulder. Two days ago she won six hundred shekels in the lottery, and she is going to spend the money on Albert as well as herself. Besides acamol and calcium tablets, she is going to buy essence of propolis and echinacea, ginseng, and capsules of garlic and zinc. On second thought she will also get some brewers yeast and a jar of royal jelly for Dita who is looking washed-out, and two little toothbrushes and some vanilla-flavored toothpaste for her grandchildren on Friday evening. There's something cheap about that Dita, she's so caught up in herself, always preening, but she's rather touching too. The truth is it wouldn't hurt that bulldog Dubi Dombrov if someone took care of him. (Bettine casts a fleeting glance on his behalf toward a display of health care products but warns herself, Don't overdo it) As she leaves the pharmacy at twenty past six, Mr. Viterbo follows her with a smile that has no ostensible cause yet is not groundless. Instead of heading straight for Albert's she walks, clutching her plastic bag, to the seaside esplanade from which one can see the sun moving fairly fast toward the sea which, for its part, receives its sharp stabs of simple color and responds with its own complex colors. If you stop talking sometimes, my teacher Zelda said to me when I was about seven, maybe things will sometimes be able to speak to you. Long afterward I found in a poem of hers " a very faint quivering that moves the leaves when they meet the light of the dawn. " Bettine is a far less thin-skinned mortal than my teacher Zelda, but something sometimes reminds me of her, for instance the way Bettine says, Listen, here's what I saw, or, Now don't you repeat that. A few days ago she said to me, Try to visualize what is implied in the bureaucratic expression "expired" that we use ten times a day without hearing what it is actually saying, but if you stop to think about it there is good reason to be startled. In my dream I am still in the pharmacy where I've been sent to return something embarrassing, like a bra or a garter belt from her clothesline that has somehow ended up at our place by mistake, and I try to give it back but she argues with me, Take a boy like Giggy, take someone like Dombrov even, and I say to her, I have taken them, and she smiles, not at me but at the pharmacist Viterbo, who smiles with her against me as he wraps a mouth organ for me which I haven't bought. Dear Bettine (I say to her in the dream as though I am greeting her at some formal occasion), why don't you bring your grandchildren over to our place this weekend, to play with our grandchildren? It wont fuse together, she says, and I am amazed in my dream and suddenly I'm not at the pharmacy but running across a plot of wasteland as the sirens howl. Little boy don't believe. Or do. Believe. What then. An invisible presence, she says, a terrible mute presence, and everything, from a stone to an urge, brings us not its sound, or an echo of its sound, but only a shadow of a shadow of a shadow or maybe not even that, but only a trembling, only a longing for shadow. Such is Bettine's creed, such is her faith. One evening in the summer she called me in Arad to chat about some book she was reading, and she told me she thought it was all quite hopeless really but at the same time quite amusing, because it turns out that something that never was and never will be is all that we have and that is what she wants to fuse together. Dear Bettine. If only they would let you.

In south Bat Yam they're building a new mall, they've closed a grocery shop

and opened a fashion boutique or a bank, dedicated a garden to Yitzhak

Rabin, with a fountain and benches. In Bangladesh there has been more

flooding: the monsoon has washed away bridges, villages and crops. Not here.

Here we are expecting primaries, scuds or devaluation, whichever comes first.

Ben-Gal & Partners have purchased a new plot to build luxury apartments

and duplexes and commissioned a ninety-second promotional film from

Dubi Dombrov: your dream home, penthouse with sea view. Dita Inbar

wrote the script. Apart from that, she's been to the hairdresser's, and bought

a spring dress and sandals. She is writing another screenplay

about the eccentric Greek in Jaffa who brought the dead back for

a short while, before he died himself. Then his heirs quarrelled about his flat.

Instead of a lawsuit, for a modest fee, Albert Danon has worked out a

compromise. On Tuesday Bettine is giving him supper, on Thursday night

she is coming round for tea and cakes on the veranda. The winter is ending.

The birds are at work. This light is pleasant and the nights are quiet.

Now everything is closed in Bat Yam except the duty pharmacy, where

a cool neon light is flickering. Behind the counter, in a white coat, sits

an Italian Jew, no longer young, who for three hours has been reading

line by line everything written in the daily paper, which while he reads

has become yesterday's paper. He wonders aloud but he knows that

there will be no answer. From the pocket of his white coat he takes

a pen and taps the side of his empty cup four or five times. It is not the

sound that startles him but the renewed silence: now it is really pure.

For ever. He's gone. And from now on

it will hurt. Get up. Go. To bed. Or

not. Sit down. Have another gin

or don't Go out. Come back. He's

not Only there, on the rumpled canvas,

a cigarette-butt of his smell is left

among the brew of fish smells.

The sky is dark and empty. A mist flows through a mist.

It has not rained this evening. It seems it will not rain.

Its grey and calm here. Getting darker. A still bird on a post.

Two cypresses grow almost joined. A third one grows apart.

I'm curious to know why there is this smell of smoke

although there is no fire. A piece of an old kite