Amos Oz - A Perfect Peace

It would be late at night before he finally emerged from the Prime Minister's office. Shapely secretaries would exchange whispers as he passed, his shoulders slightly stooped, his face exhibiting neither pride nor triumph, but responsibility tempered by sadness.

And one day Yolek Lifshitz, the secretary of Kibbutz Granot, would say to his friend Hava, "Well? Who was it who discovered our Azariah, eh? It was me, that's who, although I was nearly dumb enough to chuck him down the stairs. I'll never forget how he turned up here that winter night, a shady-looking character if ever there was one, and wetter than a drowned cat. Just look what's become of him now!"

The one thing Azariah did not think about was the work awaiting him in the tractor shed the next day. Since he had failed, after a desultory search, to find the light switch, the dusty, naked bulb still shone feebly from the ceiling. A haze settled over his mind. Unable to get warm beneath the thin woolen blanket, he lay shivering from the cold. Sometime after midnight he heard a monotonous chant from the other side of the plywood partition, a kind of shrill prayer or incantation in a language that was neither Hebrew nor anything else, its accents guttural like the desert's and as though risen from the depths of some evil slumber:

"Why do the heath'm rage 'n' people imag'm vain things 'bout God 'n' 'bout His Messiah… He was lowly 'n we 'steemed 'm not… He was more hon'lable than thirty but he 'tained not to Thee… And King David 'pointed 'm over his guard… Asael brother of Yo-o-av…'n' his cousin Elha-a-nan…'n' Helez the Paltite…'n' Ira son of Ikesh Tekoo-o-ite…'n' Zalmon A-hoooo-hite… He was Ioath'en'd, he had'a no form nor come-leeee-ness…."

Azariah Gitlin got out of bed and tiptoed barefoot to the partition. Through a crack in the plywood he glimpsed a tall, thin man sitting on a low stool, wrapped in a blanket reaching over his head, a needle in each hand and on his knees a ball of red yarn. He was knitting.

Azariah returned to bed and tried cuddling up beneath the blanket. The wind howling outside knifed into the shack through the chinks between the planks, and the rough woolen blanket scratched his skin. Desperately trying to reanimate the magical power of his thoughts he lay there half-awake and half-asleep until nearly morning, longing for the women who would come to love him, comfort him, and wait on him body and soul. Two of them, young and full-bodied, who would be utterly shameless about having him in their power, lying as he was on his back with his eyes shut tight and his heart pounding madly away.

The morning was vile. Misty vapors swirled among the houses. It was biting cold.

At half-past-six, as requested by a note slipped under his door, Yonatan Lifshitz arrived to take the new mechanic to work. He found him fully awake and engaged in light calisthenics. Over greasy coffee in a corner of the dining hall, whose fluorescent lights were already on because of the dimness of the morning, the newcomer talked a blue streak and Yonatan understood hardly a word. It struck him as comical that his charge had dressed for work in clean clothes and a pair of ordinary walking shoes. The questions he put to Yonatan were queer too. When and how had Kibbutz Granot been founded? Why had it been built on the slope of the hill instead of on the hilltop or in the valley below? Was there archival material available from its pioneering days? Was there any point in trying to get the founders of the kibbutz to talk about those times for the record? Would they tell the truth, or would they simply glorify their own works? And the price they paid: Did many of them really lose their lives to Arab marauders, malaria, heat stroke, killing work?

Most of these queries the young man answered himself, and with considerable astuteness, perhaps even some knowledge. Now and then he let drop some bon mot about the eternal, tragic conflict between high ideals and gray realities, or between the social vision of the revolutionary and the passions of the human heart. At one point Yonatan thought he caught the phrase "the clear, certain premises of our mental life," and he began to feel a weary longing for some clear, bright faraway meadow bathed in sunlight by the banks of a broad river, perhaps in Africa. Once that image faded, he had a faint desire to know what might be eating this young man so early in the morning. Yet this desire too faded rapidly. The rawness of the weather and his own fatigue made Yonatan bunch up inside his clothes. Water leaking through his torn boot was freezing the tips of his toes. What was there to keep him from proclaiming himself sick like his father and half the kibbutz and going back to his room this very minute? No. On a day that should have been declared an official bed day, he had to show this yackety mechanic the rounds.

"Let's go," he said, disgruntled, pushing away his mug. "Come on, let's head for the tractor shed. Have you finished your coffee?"

Azariah jumped up from his seat. "A long while ago. I'm one-hundred-percent at your service."

To this remark he added his full name, volunteered the information that the secretary of the kibbutz had told him that Yonatan's name was Yonatan and that he and Hava were his parents. He concluded by quoting some little proverb.

"This way," said Yonatan. "Watch out. These steps are slippery."

"The laws of nature are such," said Azariah, "that there are no accidents. Whatever happens is necessary and predestined, even slipping on these steps."

Yonatan did not reply. He neither liked nor trusted words. Yet he was well aware that most people were in need of more love than they ever received and that this sometimes made them try to make friends with total strangers in the most ludicrous ways, including talking too much. He's like a lost wet puppy, thought Yonatan, wagging not only his tail but his whole rear end to get me to like him and pet him. Fat chance! You're barking up the wrong tree, pal.

While the two of them passed farm sheds, navigated puddles, and sloshed through mud, the young man kept up his steady stream of talk. Yonatan withdrew from his silence only twice — once to ask the newcomer if he had been born in Israel, and again to inquire if he had ever worked on, or at least had a good look at, a D-6 Caterpillar engine.

Azariah answered no to both questions. He had been born in the Diaspora (it struck Yonatan as odd that he didn't say "abroad" or simply name the country he had come from) and knew nothing about Caterpillar tractors. Not that it mattered. In his opinion, backed by experience, engines everywhere, whatever their differences, were close relatives. Once you had doped out one, you understood them all. Anyway, he would do his best. The worm and the man both do what they can. Yonatan wondered where his father had ever managed to dig up such a creep.

The corrugated tin walls of the tractor shed only made the cold day worse. The slightest contact with anything metal froze one's fingers at once. Congealed oil, dust, mildew, and filth were everywhere. In the joints of the rafters, among the tool chests and crates of spare parts, even on the tractors, tribes of spiders had spun upside-down cathedrals. Tools were scattered, as if in anger, about an abandoned-looking yellow machine smeared with mud and black oil, its innards exposed. On the treads, on the tattered driver's seat, in the folds of the hood that had been thrown to the floor were wrenches, pliers, screwdrivers, bolts, and iron rods. A beer bottle half filled with some slimy liquid, rubber belts, torn sacks, and rusted gears lay all over. And the whole derelict place was pervaded by the acrid chemical smell of lubricants, burned rubber, and kerosene and diesel fumes.

Yonatan, whose mood blackened every time he entered the shed, glanced about with a sullen, defiant look. The new mechanic began hopping around the tractor engine in his spotless clothes like some sort of vainglorious grasshopper. Finally he came to a halt at the front of the engine, struck a pose as if for an official photograph, and joyously launched into a manifesto.