Amos Oz - A Perfect Peace

Yonatan half listened to all this in ponderous silence. At last Azariah fell silent too, only to wipe off a bluish oil stain that had spattered on the tip of his shoe.

"All right," said Yonatan. "It's a quarter-past-eight. Let's go have breakfast in the dining hall. Then we'll come back and see what else needs to be done around here."

On their way to the dining hall, still compulsively talking, Azariah told two different jokes about passengers on Polish trains, one involving an anti-Semitic priest and the other a big fat general, both of whom, the first despite his great malice and the second despite his great strength, were outwitted by the Jews. He alone laughed at the punch lines, which caused him nervously to joke some more about all the old canards that no one laughed at but their tellers.

Yonatan noticed for the first time that the newcomer had a faint accent. It was so well concealed as to be barely identifiable. The "IV were a bit too soft, the "r's" slightly prolonged, and the "k's" sometimes expelled from the palate as if he had swallowed something distasteful. Obvious effort had gone into overcoming this accent. Perhaps this effort, or the speed with which he spoke, was why Azariah so often tripped over his own words, nearly choking on some of them. At such times he would break off in mid-sentence, only to fling himself back into the breach at once.

No two lonelinesses are ever alike, thought Yonatan. If two people could really have anything in common, it might be possible for them to become truly close. Just look at this poor bastard trying so hard to cheer me up and make me laugh when he's so unhappy himself. You can see he's all twisted inside — too sensitive, too cocksure, too obsequious, and all at the same time. We get all kinds of strange types here, and they go on being strange to the end. Some of them go all out to make friends with us and fit in, but after a couple of weeks or months, they can't take it any more and they split. Either we forget all about them or remember them only because of something funny, like that middle-aged divorcée two years ago who decided to make a play for old Stutchnik of all people. Rachel Stutchnik caught them one night listening to Brahms in the music room, him in her lap. Easy come, easy go. Maybe he thinks that being the secretary's son, I've been appointed to look him over and report back. Why else would he be freaking out like this to make me love him at first sight? But who could love a weirdo like him? I'd be the last one to. Especially now, when 1 can't even stand my own self. Maybe some other time I might have tried to like him or get him to calm down. He'll climb the walls here, and when he's had it, he'll clear out. Relax, pal. Take it easy.

A light, pinpointy rain was falling. The wind sharpened the pins and sent them flying in every direction. The electric wires were pricked by them too and hummed an odd tune.

"After breakfast," said Yonatan, "you should go to the storeroom and ask for a pair of work clothes. You'll find Peiko's old boots in that crate behind the diesel oil. Peiko's the man who ran this place for years."

When the two of them stopped to wash up at the stand outside the dining hall, Azariah's long, wistful, delicate fingers caught Yonatan's eye. The sight of them made him think of Rimona. And at that very moment he saw her sitting with some friends at the far end of the hall, grasping a mug of tea with both hands. He knew that it was still full and that she was holding it, as usual, to warm her fingers. For a second he wondered what she might be thinking about this morning, but he scolded himself at once. What do I care what she's thinking? All I want is to be far away from them all.

Through breakfast Azariah Gitlin kept coming on strong, both to Yonatan and to the two other people who joined their table, Yashek and little Shimon from the sheep pen. Having introduced himself, he asked if he might have their names as well. Then, with a peculiar sort of merriment, he told them about his sleepless night in the barber's room, where, as if in some horror movie, a cracked voice on the other side of the wall began speaking at the stroke of midnight. He saw — waking or dreaming, he still couldn't say — a ghost mumbling all sorts of Biblical abracadabra in a dead tongue, Chaldean perhaps or Hittite.

He then related the tale of the tractor, fishing for compliments from Yonatan so that the other two men might be suitably impressed. Indeed, though less than a day had passed since his arrival in the kibbutz, and he had been urged to rest up for a few days before beginning work, a sixth sense had told him that there was no time to waste, which was why he rose early this morning and ran to the tractor shed, thus proving — or rather, demonstrating — no, the right word was justifying — yes, justifying the faith placed in him and the high hopes pinned on him. Of course, whatever praise he deserved was due to his intuition more than his knowledge or skill, since the minute he heard the sound of the engine he had had a brainstorm. As the saying went, "If his wagon is stuck in the mud, tell Ivan not to push but to put on his thinking cap."

Whenever one of his tablemates reacted to all this exuberance with a vague smile, Azariah guffawed loudly and redoubled his efforts. And when Yonatan poured two mugs of coffee and handed him one, he couldn't find enough words to thank him.

"A guiding hand brought Comrade Yonatan and me together from the start. You should have seen his warmth, his patience, his… when he broke me in on my new job. Such refinement, such tact! Why, he never says a word about himself."

"Knock it off," said Yonatan.

"What's the matter?" asked Yashek. "Why don't you let someone say a good word about you for a change?"

Little Shimon took a crumpled newspaper out of his pocket and turned to the sports section. The front-page headlines told of a brief, bitter battle between Israeli and Syrian armored forces along the northern border. At least three enemy tanks had been hit and gone up in flames. Syrian earthmoving equipment engaged in the Jordan diversion project had also been destroyed. A photograph showed the grinning general of the northern command surrounded by grinning soldiers in full battle gear.

Seeing this, Yashek remarked that he saw no end in sight.

Little Shimon, hiding behind the sports section, declared gruffly that if it weren't for the Russians he would take care of the Arabs quickly enough with one or two healthy kicks in the rear.

"We like to think everything depends on us. But it doesn't. Eshkol isn't exactly Napoleon. Some things don't depend on anyone," Yonatan said, more to himself than to the others.

At this point Azariah burst back into the conversation. He warned of the dangers of shortsightedness, explained where BenGurion had been mistaken on the one hand and Eshkol wrong on the other, quickly sketched the sinister mentality of the Russians while appealing to Svidrigailov and Ivan Karamazov, argued that Slavs were constitutionally incapable of moral inhibitions, and sought to cast a new light on the subject of Jewish destiny. Raising his voice insistently to court Yashek's attention and paying no heed to the glances being cast at him from neighboring tables, he undertook to expound the dialectic distinction between strategic ends and political means, and between both of these and the "national idea" that every civilization was based on. He predicted an imminent war, deplored the blindness prevailing everywhere, sketched possible international complications, suggested ways out of them, and, in light of all these factors, posed two basic questions for which he immediately volunteered the answers.

There was in all this an irresistible passion and a nervous power of imagination that, despite its bizarreness, caused even Yashek to nod twice and say, "That's so, that really is so." Thus egged on, Azariah launched into a fresh harangue on the wisdom of looking for what Spinoza called the "Ratio," that is, for the permanent laws underlying the multifarious phenomena wrongly labeled coincidence. But he soon noticed that the others had finished their breakfast and were waiting for him to pause for breath so they could get up and go. This realization, at the very time he was desperately trying to extricate himself from a lengthy sentence, led him to break off completely and turn back to his food. He began gulping it down so as not to keep anyone waiting, only to have it go down the wrong pipe and trigger an outburst of coughing.