Amos Oz - A Perfect Peace

"A brand-new time, a brand-new place, and I'm brand-new too. Every beginning is a birth, and every ending, no matter what is ended, brings with it the taint of death. All things should be accepted calmly and with a light heart, because fate in its many disguises always stems from the same eternal decree, just as it must forever be the essence of a triangle that the sum of its three angles always equals one-hundred-and-eighty degrees. If you were to think about this fact for a minute, Yonatan, you would be surprised to realize that not only is it true, it can also give us the most wonderful peace of mind. To accept all things, to understand all things, and to respond to all things with perfect inner tranquillity! Mind you, I don't deny that a part of what I say comes from the philosopher Spinoza, who, by the way, was a diamond polisher by profession. Well, I've told you in a nutshell what I believe in. And you, Yonatan, what do you believe in?"

"I," said Yonatan distractedly, unintentionally kicking over an empty can of engine oil, "am freezing my ass off and getting sick. If you ask me, we should pour a little gasoline beneath that barrel of diesel oil over there, put a match to it, make a great big bonfire, and burn down this whole fucking tractor shed with all its fucking tractors once and for all. Just to get warm. Look, this is the patient. With a little good will you can get it to turn over, but after two or three minutes it conks out. Don't ask me why. I don't know why. All I know is that a note slipped under my door last night told me to take the new mechanic living next to Bolognesi to the tractor shed in the morning. If you really are one, why don't you see what's wrong with this damn thing while I sit down and rest my legs."

Azariah Gitlin complied with enthusiasm. Having rolled up his pants cuffs with his fingertips in a way that reminded Yonatan of a fashion model fingering the hem of her dress in a newsreel, the young man climbed gingerly onto one of the tractor treads to study the engine. From this vantage point, without turning around to face Yonatan, he posed two or three simple questions that the latter was able to answer. When he asked yet another, Yonatan replied from his seat on an overturned crate, "If I knew the answer to that, I wouldn't need you here in the first place."

Azariah Gitlin did not take offense. He nodded several times, as if understanding Yonatan's dilemma only too well, made some vague remark about the importance of creative intuition even in purely technical matters, and patiently blew a puff of warm breath across his musicianly fingers.

"Well, what do you say?" asked Yonatan indifferently, noting at the same time, much to his surprise, a glow of affection on the newcomer's face. For whom or what that affection was meant, however, he had not the slightest inkling.

"I have a big favor to ask of you," Azariah sang out.

"Yes?"

"If it's not too much trouble, could you please try starting it up? I want to listen to it. And, of course, to look too. Then we'll see what conclusions we can come to."

Yonatan's reservations, which had been growing steadily, now turned to outright distrust. Nevertheless, he climbed into the driver's seat and switched on the ignition. It took four or five tries before the staccato retching of the starter yielded to the hoarse, steady, ear-splitting roar of the engine. As though repressing some unconscionable desire, the ponderous engine began to shake and shudder.

Meticulously, taking care not to dirty his clean clothes, Azariah stepped down from the tread and backed away from the engine. Like an artist who retreats to the opposite end of his studio to get a better view of his canvas, he chose to stand at the maximum distance, in the far corner of the shed, beside the oil and fuel drums, flanked by some filthy straw brooms and a pile of old, used springs. Shutting his eyes in a gesture of supreme concentration, he listened to the raucous growl of the engine as if it were a madrigal sung by a distant choir, among whose myriad voices it was his job to pick out the only one that was flat.

As absurd as this performance seemed to Yonatan, watching from his seat on the crate, it was also somehow touching. Was it because the young stranger was so very strange?

A sharp, high whistle rose above the din. Like a public speaker suffering from throat strain, the tractor broke into a series of hoarse coughs. These were progressively stifled until brief stretches of silence could be heard. Finally, after five or six sharp backfires, the engine fell silent. From outside the shed, shrill, bitter, and piercing, came the caws of birds screaming in the wind. Azariah Gitlin opened his eyes.

"That's it?" he asked with a smile.

"That's it," said Yonatan. "It's the same every time."

"Did you ever try putting it into gear as soon as it starts?"

"What do you think?" said Yonatan.

"And what happened?"

"What do you think?"

"Listen," concluded Azariah. "It's all very strange."

"You're telling me." Yonatan said dryly. He no longer had the slightest doubt that the newcomer was not just another queer fish but an out-and-out imposter.

"What I'm telling you," said Azariah Gitlin gently, "is that curiosity may have killed the cat, but it's haste that killed the bear."

Yonatan did not reply.

"And now," said Azariah Gitlin, "I need some time to think. If you don't mind, I'll take a few minutes to do it."

"To think?" snickered Yonatan. "Why not? Be my guest." He rose, picked up a ripped, greasy sack, sat down again on the crate, wrapped the tattered burlap around his torn boot, and lit himself a cigarette. "Fine. You go ahead and think. When you're done, raise your right hand."

He had not yet finished the cigarette when, to his utter amazement, the young man declared, "I'm done."

"You're done what?"

"I'm done thinking."

"And what, may I ask, did you think of?"

"I thought," said Azariah hesitantly, "that maybe, when you finish your cigarette, we might start working on this tractor."

The entire repair job was performed by Yonatan himself and took no more than twenty minutes. Clean, pale, and alert, Azariah Gitlin stood looking on, telling him exactly what to do as if reading instructions from a manual, presiding over the operation from afar like one of those grandmasters Yonatan had read about who play blind chess without pieces or a board. Only once in the course of the proceedings did the young man bother to step onto a tread and peer into the bowels of the engine. Using the tip of a screwdriver, he adjusted a contact with a watchmaker's precision and then climbed down again, taking great pains to avoid the grime.

As soon as the tractor was started up, it began to gurgle steadily and softly like a purring animal. The gears were successfully tested. The engine ran for ten minutes without a hitch. At last Yonatan switched it off and said in a voice that sounded too loud in the sudden silence, "Yup. That's it."

He couldn't decide whether the newcomer was a magician or a mechanical genius, or whether the whole problem had been so simple to begin with that he could have easily solved it himself had he not been so tired, cold, and preoccupied during the last few days.

Azariah Gitlin, on the other hand, celebrated his little triumph with a delirious outbreak, slapping his companion repeatedly on the back and singing his own praises until Yonatan was thoroughly revolted. He reveled in recounting the times he had miraculously confounded his enemies, among whom were an evil major called Zlotshin, or Zlotshnikov, a beautiful female officer in an army garage with deeply ambivalent feelings about him, and that Ph.D. idiot in engineering from the Haifa Technion who failed to come up with some mechanical solution that he, Azariah, had hit upon at once. He talked about his brainstorms, about the human brain in general, about Major Zlotkin or Zlotnik, who had been driven mad by envy, about her seductive advances, about some revolutionary technical device developed by him but cunningly pirated away by Major Zlotshkin's brother-in-law, who made a mint with it, and bought some nice little island in the eastern Aegean, from which he bombarded Azariah with letters full of threats, expressions of admiration, and offers of joint ventures.