Amos Oz - A Perfect Peace

"Take your time," Yonatan said calmly. "These two goof-offs are in a hurry because they haven't earned the salt in their salad yet, but we've already done a damn good job on that Caterpillar. Now we have all day." Outside, the gray rain continued to fall, stubbornly and insensibly, like a frozen madness.

That evening Azariah Gitlin, carrying his guitar, knocked on the Lifshitzes' door. Freshly shaved and washed, his curly locks dripping wet from the rain, he begged pardon for having come uninvited. Nevertheless, he had read somewhere that the kibbutzim had — and rightly so — done away with the rules of formal etiquette. Moreover, Yolek had suggested last night that he drop in on Yonatan and Rimona to get acquainted. Besides which, the room to which he had been assigned — the electric bulb was so weak he couldn't read a paper or book, much less write. And so he had decided to try his luck and drop by for a visit.

Yes, thank you, he would love a cup of coffee. There was an old Russian proverb that went, "The man who has no other friend will be the Devil's in the end." Not an exact translation, but at least he had preserved the rhyme. Were they sure he wasn't intruding? With their kind permission, he promised not to overstay his welcome. He had brought his guitar because it had occurred to him that Yonatan and his friend might like music, in which case he would gladly play a few simple tunes. Indeed, the three of them might even sing a bit. He had said "friend" rather than "wife" because that was the word, so right-sounding for a kibbutz, that he had heard Comrade Yolek use last night. How nice it was here.

Yes, their furniture was simple and comfortable, nothing fancy about it, and everything in the best of taste. Such coziness was just what his weary soul needed. He had no friends. Not one. For which he blamed only himself. Until now he hadn't known how to make friends and hadn't tried to find out. But from now on he would, so to speak, put his cards on the table and turn over a new leaf. And please excuse him for talking so much. Though the two of them might think him garrulous, they couldn't be more wrong. Yet the moment he set foot in the kibbutz he had felt himself among kindred souls, and this had made him open up. Everywhere in the world people were light-years away from one another, whereas here he felt such warmth, such togetherness…. Look, he wanted to show them his identity pass, not to prove who he was, but because of a pressed cyclamen between its pages that he had picked a year ago. He wanted to give this cyclamen to his friend Yonatan's friend. Please. It was, after all, only a token.

Rimona put the kettle on to boil. Yonatan set out a plate of small cakes and the Bokhara creamer. Tia shuffled over to the guest, pressed her nose against his knees, sniffed, sighed, and crawled off to lie beneath the couch, from where only her tail protruded; it thumped several times on the rectangular gray rug spread on the floor by the coffee table. Four carefully arranged rows of books stood on the shelves. Heavy brown curtains covered the window and the door leading out to the porch.

The whole room seemed to be at peace, even the picture on the wall, in which a dark bird perched on a red brick fence. Shamelessly piercing the surrounding murk like a golden spear was a diagonal shaft of sunlight. Lancing a brick at the bottom of the picture, it caused it to blossom into a nimbus of blinding light. The bird looked weary; its bill was slightly, thirstily agape, its eyes closed.

The electric kettle whistled. Rimona brought the coffee to the table. "You must like your new job," she said. "Yonatan tells me you're very good at it."

Careful to avoid her eyes, Azariah told her how happy it made him to have Yonatan as his first friend on the kibbutz. And of course, though two men stood no more chance of meeting than two mountain peaks if it wasn't predestined, he hardly need say that one's first encounters in a new place could be fateful. Incidentally, he once had read a fascinating article about the place of women in a kibbutz, but he did not agree with it. That is, he reserved his views on the subject. What did Rimona think? He himself suspected that the problem had yet to be solved.

"It's too bad," said Rimona, "that you came in the middle of winter instead of the beginning of summer. In winter everything is so sad and closed in. In summer the flowers are all in bloom, the lawns are green, the nights are much shorter and not so dark, and the days are very, very long. They're so long that sometimes a single one can seem like a week. And from our porch you can see the sunset."

"Except that by summer," said Yonatan, "we would have found someone else to work with the tractors and we might not have had room for you. The fact is that you came in the nick of time. To think that for three days I stood there like an idiot, staring at a simple gas block without realizing what the trouble was!"

"If you'll permit me to express a very different opinion," said Azariah, "I personally do not believe in chance. Everything that happens does so for a precise if unknowable reason. 'If the carriage is meant to break down, all the czar's coachmen can't get it to town.' Think, for instance, of an ordinary citizen named Yehoshafat Cantor, an arithmetic teacher, bachelor, stamp collector, and member of his building's tenants' committee. He steps out one evening for ten minutes of fresh air and gets in the way of a bullet fired accidentally, let us say, by a private detective cleaning his handgun on his back porch. The blast blows Cantor's head off. I say to you without the slightest hesitation that all the natural, social, and psychological sciences cannot begin to reconstruct the myriad events that conspired with uncanny precision to bring about this tragic death. Why, we're talking about the most incredible chain of circumstances, one involving infinitesimal fractions of seconds and millimeters, one composed of countless variables of time and space and weather, of optics and ballistics, of human wills and obstructions to those wills, of genetics, personal habits, education, of major and minor decisions, mishaps, errors, customs, the length of a news broadcast, the leap of a cat from a garbage pail, a child annoying its mother in a nearby alleyway, etcetera ad infinitum. And each single one of these circumstances has its own chain of causes going back to still other causes. All it takes is for one of these countless variables to be off, so to speak, by a hair's breadth to change the whole outcome. The bullet now flies in front of Cantor's nose, or passes through his sleeve, or parts the hair on his head. It may even blow out the brains of someone else — me, for example, or, perish the thought, one of you. Any one of these or other possibilities would in turn take its place in a new chain of circumstances leading to still other events beyond human ken, and so on and so forth.

"And what do we so cleverly do about it? In our ignorance, bewilderment, and fear — and perhaps, I should add, in our laziness and arrogance — we say that an unfortunate accident took place. And with this lie, this vulgar, ignorant falsehood we write the matter off.

"I can't remember when I last had such strong, good coffee. That may be one reason I'm talking too much. I've hardly said a word to a living soul for ages because I haven't had a soul to say one to. Even though the Bible teacher around whom I just constructed my little hypothesis may never actually exist, one grieves all the same for the death of a decent, dedicated man who may not have set the world on fire in the classroom, so to speak, but who never did the slightest harm to his country or his fellow man. These are delicious. Did you bake them yourself, Rimona?"

"They come from a box," said Rimona.

"I noticed this morning," said Yonatan, "that every little thing excites him."