Amos Oz - A Perfect Peace

"And apart from everything else, you're also a young poet? No? A philosophist? Never mind. The only thing that matters is whether you're an honest man. I don't give a hoot for the rest. Here, bless their souls, we have all types. Once, when I was a girl, I read somewhere in Dostoyevsky that if a man wants to stay really honest, he'd better die before he turns forty. From forty on they're all scoundrels. On the other hand, they say that Dostoyevsky was a scoundrel himself, a drunken swine and a petty egotist.

"You can wash your hands over here. There's no hot water. The faucet isn't working. As usual. Here are the trays and over there the dishes and silverware and cups. Would you like an egg? Yes, I'm glad you think so, but that's not what I asked. I asked if you wanted a hard-boiled or a soft-boiled egg. Now sit yourself here and eat, and don't let anyone make you self-conscious. No one here is any better than you are. I'll be back in a few minutes. Don't wait for me. Just start eating.

"By the way, whatever Yolek told you is fine and dandy, but personally I'd advise you not to get too excited about it. Yolek has lots of ideas at night, but he always makes his decisions in the morning. Are you absolutely sure you don't have a fever? I've never believed in aspirin, but I'll bring you one and you can do what you want with it. Take your time eating. No need to rush. You're not going anywhere tonight."

She remembered the sobs and pleas of the young man who had loved her when she was young. On the threshing floor on summer nights the kibbutzniks got together to sing beneath the stars while the jackals wailed in the distance. "Her eyes outshone the morning star," they sang, "and her heart raged like a desert wind." In the darkness the young man who loved her put her hand to his cheek to let her know it was wet with his tears. I shouldn't have run down Dostoyevsky in front of a young man I don't even know.

Yolek didn't resettle himself in his chair until he heard the steps outside grow faint. He could feel the pain creeping up his back and along his shoulders and neck like a patrol sent out in advance of a full-scale attack.

Although he tried to concentrate on the news coming over the radio — something about troop concentrations along the northern border that had already been broadcast several times that evening — he found it difficult to grasp what this might portend. He felt sorry for Prime Minister Eshkol, undoubtedly sitting at this very moment in a closed, crowded, smoke-filled room, struggling to fight off sorrow and fatigue while trying to assess battalions of nebulous rumors and unconfirmed facts. He felt sorry for himself as well, ground down as he was on the kibbutz by endless trivialities, not to mention his aches and pains, when he should have been at Eshkol's side in that closed room, helping him to steer a moderate course. These hot-headed Huns, Scyths, Tatars surrounded him on all sides, pressuring him to do something melodramatic. Perhaps these aren't just ordinary back pains, thought Yolek. Perhaps they're a warning signal.

Quite apart from his physical woes, some obscure worry was gnawing away inside him. He felt he had forgotten some terribly important, even urgent, matter, one that was imperative to remember lest some great harm be done. Yet what it was, and why it was so urgent, he could not for the life of him recall. Could it be that he had left a door open or forgotten to unplug the electric kettle? But the kettle was unplugged, the doors were all shut, and so were the windows. Outside, the rain began to come down harder.

Yonatan thought of the words "beyond the call of duty." That was how the army magazine had described his conduct on the night of the raid on Hirbet Tawfik. In the hasty retreat from the enemy's position on those terraced, shell-blasted hills, lit by the hideous glare of Syrian artillery flares, he had carried on his back a bleeding soldier he didn't know, a squat man who kept gasping, I'm done for, I'm done for, I'm done for, the last word drawing out into a thin wail.

And you, you suddenly decided that you'd had it. I can't carry him another foot. Everyone else is already home safe except for the two of us lost in these hills with the Syrians breathing down our necks. If I just put the dying son-of-a-bitch down and let him die in peace among the rocks instead of on my back I may save my life, and no one will ever know, because there's no one to rat, and I'll be alive and not dead.

How the thought of that scared me. You're crazy, I said, you're out of your fucking mind, and I began to run like hell with that dying bastard on my back, and bullets and tracers and mortar shells exploding all over from that other Tawfik, the upper one, the one we never took, the one the Syrians held, and that fucker kept bleeding into my ear like a torn garden hose, screaming I'm done fo-o-or until he had no breath any more, and neither did I. My lungs were full of burned smells, burned fuel, burned rubber, burned weeds, burned blood. If I'd had a free hand, I'd have cut his throat with my hunting knife just to make him shut up, but I kept on running, bawling like a boy.

How we got through that mine field before Kibbutz Tel Katzir I'll never know. By then I was howling too, oh God save me, God come save me, I don't want to die, oh God I'm done fo-o-or. If only the bastard would die but not on my back before we reach Tel Katzir — he'd better not leave me alone here. And then this one crazy shell landed twenty meters off just to teach me not to run like a lunatic, to run more slowly. Oh God is he heavy, I can't go on any more!

But we'd reached Tel Katzir, we were in the middle of all this barbed wire, being shot at. Don't shoot, I began to scream, hey, don't shoot, can't you see we're dying, hey, can't you see we're dying, until they heard me and brought us to a field hospital in a bomb shelter. That's when they took him off my back at last. We were all glued together with blood and saliva and sweat and piss and all the fluids in our bodies like two newborn puppies, one blind filthy lump. We'd been soldered to each other, his nails stuck into my chest and back like staples. When they unpeeled him, there were pieces of my skin on him, and so soon as he was off me, I collapsed like an empty sack on the floor.

Suddenly in the badly lit bunker it turned out that I was really out of my skull, that it was all a mistake, that the blood which soaked through my clothes and my underwear and into my crotch and even my socks wasn't his at all. He wasn't even wounded, just in shock. All that blood was my own, from a piece of shrapnel in my shoulder, barely two inches from my heart.

They bandaged me up and gave me a shot and said as you'd say to a child, "Take it easy, Yoni, take it easy, Yoni," but I couldn't take it easy because I couldn't stop laughing. Someone said, "This man's in shock too. Give him ten cc.'s to calm him down." But even in the ambulance on the way to hospital as they kept asking me to calm down, to get a grip on myself, to tell them where it hurt, I lay on the stretcher and roared with laughter so hard that I began to choke. "Look at him, " I gasped, " he's done for! Just look at him! He's done for!" all the way to the hospital. Then they put me to sleep for the operation and after that they published a story in the army magazine; I remember the title exactly: "Wounded Soldier Saves Comrade's Life."

That joker, the old-timers say when they talk about him, from three feet away he managed to miss a bull. And a bull, mind you, isn't a matchbox. But he managed to miss it, and, believe it or not, today he's the owner and president of the Esplanada Hotel chain in Miami Beach, Florida, where he lives like a lord.

After supper, Yonatan and Rimona returned home from the dining room. He couldn't remember what his mother Hava had asked him when she came over to their table at the end of their meal. He could only recall saying that tonight was out of the question.