Amos Oz - A Perfect Peace

"Once they talked of building a small dam here, you know," said Yonatan. "The idea was Yashek's, but my father laughed it off. He said this wasn't Switzerland and there wasn't any money to spend on fantasies of paddling swans serenaded by frauleins with mandolins. That was strictly for pictures on bonbon wrappers. But after thinking it over for a couple of days, as he usually does, he began to wonder if it didn't make some sense. He even asked me and Little Shimon to check into it, that is, to form an ad-hoc committee, as he called it. It turned out that there would be so much seepage that the water in the dam wouldn't hold out after late April or early May. Yashek himself admitted that the whole thing was a pipe dream. Then my father, of all people, began insisting it was possible and that there wasn't any reason why we couldn't cover a couple of acres of ground with plastic sheets to make a real little lake. Right now he's still corresponding with a professor from the Weizmann Institute, who says one thing, and a professor from the Hebrew University, who says another. But what I really wanted to say, Udi, is that two or three hundred meters from here the flagstone path starts, where Abu-Hani used to have his orchard. Do you remember it, where that tree was that looked like a rhinoceros? If we find it, we can cut straight across to Sheikh Dahr without getting bogged down in mud. The odds are you'll find some of your biblical relics there too. Maybe the stone that Cain killed Abel with, or the bones of some crucified prophet. Down! Tia, you dumb beast! Hey, you're getting me all dirty! Down!"

All day long, thought Azariah, it's been just the four of them. I'm the spare tire nobody needs except to get scratched in the bushes and stuck in the mud and wet as a dog just for some olive branches. She wiped off my face like a person touching a person, not like a woman touching a man, but he was still so jealous he threw the match away as if he were throwing a punch. And he's my best, my only friend in the whole kibbutz, in the whole world! It's just that I'm better at losing, better at taking it on the chin than any of them, readier to die to tell them about the long arm of justice because all of us are armed, the whole people is an army, the whole country is a front. I'm the only civilian around here, just me and Eshkol, which is why the two of us alone know how serious things are. He just doesn't know that I know and can help him. There are things that have to be talked through, not just gabbed about with dead words, like saying it's a damned nice day. What's so damned nice about it? Dead words about landslides in this or that wadi, who cares? What's one more landslide when our whole life is sliding away every moment? Time is a landslide in itself.

After Udi and Yonatan go off to look for their biblical bric-a-brac, I'll be left alone with these two women. I swear to God that for once in my life I'll try not to tell any lies.

On the hilltop, against the sky, backed by blue clouds, stood the ruins of Sheikh Dahr, light slashing through the gaping windows like an eviscerating sword, the out-of-doors just as bright on one side of the smashed, charred, homeless walls as on the other. Rubble from fallen roofs lay in heaps. Here and there an unsubmitting grape vine had run wild, clinging with bared claws to a remnant of a standing stone wall. Above the ravaged village rose its shattered minaret. Across the way, a fiery bougainvillea climbed in crimson up the remains of the sheikh's house, as if still smoldering with the flames that had been put to this "murderers' den" that, as Yolek Lifshitz once put it, had exacted such a "cruel blood price."

"A cruel blood price," thought Yonatan. But from the ruins of Sheikh Dahr came not a sound of protest, not even the bark of a dog. Nothing but the silence of the earth and another, more subtle silence that seemed to blow down from the mountains, the silence of deeds that cannot be undone and of wrongs that no one can right. Also words he had heard from his father — or had he read them somewhere?

The other hikers fell silent too. Even Azariah said nothing. They listened to their steps echo from the sunken stone path and watched Tia nose through the muddy fields, where she seemed to be looking for some secret sign of life. The dripping olive and carob trees kept up a steady pitterpatter, as if the last word, one for which they were still groping, had yet to be said. Three crows waited on a branch. Far off, a hawk, falcon, or buzzard — Yonatan could not say — hung on the wind. No one spoke until Udi's sharp eyes made out an edible mushroom beneath a pine tree. Then Anat cried out, "And here's another! And over there lots more!"

"All right, then," said Udi, as though giving himself an order, "here we are. This is it!"

Without asking if anyone agreed, he proceeded to spread out a red-checked, captured Arab Legion kaffiyeh between two gleaming gray stones. The girls took the picnic basket from Azariah. At Rimona's beck, he ran to gather kindling for a fire to bake the potatoes. "Down!" shouted Yonatan at Tia.

Anat had already borrowed Azariah's pocket knife to cut up the vegetables for a salad. She was a plump, solid young woman with a bold chest and eyes that seemed always to be laughing at some salty joke she had just heard — a joke she could easily top at once if she hadn't preferred to leave an edge of anticipation to that pleasure. A sea breeze ruffled her brown curls and strove to whip up her flowery skirt. She took her time pressing it back against her thighs despite Azariah's stare. But to her husband Udi she said, "Why don't you come scratch my back like a good boy? Right here. And here too. It's itching like crazy."

The damp kept them from getting a fire started. First Yonatan erected a little wigwam of the twigs collected by Azariah and built a tripod of matches within. Although he shielded it with his body from the wind while he lit it, it didn't catch. "Come on," said Udi, coming to the rescue, "quit playing boy scout." He crumpled and then lit a piece of newspaper, but it immediately went out too. After a second fruitless try, he started cursing in Arabic and kept it up until all the matches were gone. Then, he turned savagely on Azariah, who all this while had been looking on with spiteful glee and declaiming yet another of his asinine Russian proverbs about someone called Ivan and a thinking cap.

"Why don't you shut the hell up, Chimpanoza! So we won't have a fire! Everything's wet as snot around here. Who needs those shitty potatoes anyway?"

Azariah jumped to his feet and broke a soda bottle over a rock. But he did not run at Udi with it. Rather, he turned his back to the group, leaned over the feckless fire, and thoughtfully experimented for a few moments with a thin sliver of glass until it caught the sun's rays. These he focused on a shred of newspaper until fine smoke began to rise, followed by tongues of flame.

"You owe me an apology," he said.

"We're sorry," said Rimona softly.

"Forget it," said Azariah.

When I was a kid of six or seven, the village sheikh once came to visit. His name was Hajj Abu-Zuheir, and he came with three other notables. I remember his white robe and their striped gray ones as they sat in the white wooden chairs in father's room around the white table on which chrysanthemums were growing in a yogurt cup. " Hada ibnak? " asked the sheikh, his teeth as big and yellow as corncobs. And father replied, " Hada waladi wa'illi ka-man wahad, zeghir. " The sheikh touched my cheek with a hand that was furrowed like the earth, and I could feel his mustache and his tobacco breath on my face. Father told me to introduce myself, and Abu-Zuheir ran his weary old eyes from me to the bookshelf and back to father, who was the headman of the kibbutz, saying to him gently, as if playing a modest role in some solemn ceremony, " Allah karim, ya Abu-Yoni. " Then they sent me out of the room and began some long negotiation that little Shimon had to translate back and forth as father knew hardly any Arabic. It must have been Passover week, because someone brought matzos from the kitchen and a big jug of coffee. And now there's not a dog left in Sheikh Dahr and all of the fields, those that we quarreled about and those that we didn't, and all their sorghum and barley and alfalfa, are ours. Nothing is left now but those blackened walls on the hill and maybe their curse hanging over us.