Amos Oz - A Perfect Peace

"What are you doing? Philosophizing on me in broad daylight?"

"Nonsense," said Yonatan. "I was thinking of a dirty little book I once read in English about what the seven dwarfs really did to Snow White while she was sleeping off the poisoned apple. It was all a fraud, Udi. That, and Hansel and Gretel, and Little Red Riding Hood, and The Emperor's New Clothes, and all those sweet stories where everybody lived happily ever after. It was all a fraud."

"Talking about fraud, take my matches out of your pocket and give them back. Come on, let's unload the rest of this fertilizer before Etan R. comes along. Only thirty more to go. Take a deep breath."

Yonatan took a deep breath and calmed down.

It was almost a surprise how easy the decision was. The obstacles turned out to be minor. Shaving in front of the mirror, he would whisper:

"He just picked up and left."

The preceding summer, several months before Yonatan made up his mind to leave, a sad thing happened to his wife. Not that Yonatan saw it as a cause for his decision. Words like "cause" or "effect" meant nothing to him. Like those bird migrations Rimona loved to watch every autumn and spring, Yonatan saw his leaving as time running out.

Two years before, Rimona had lost a baby. Then, when she became pregnant again, she was delivered at the end of the summer of a stillborn girl. The doctors advised against her trying again, at least for the time being. But Yonatan no longer wanted to try anyway. All he wanted was to pick up and go.

Now, some three months later, she was borrowing books about Africa from the kibbutz library. Every evening she sat by the table lamp, in the soft, warm brown light cast by its straw shade, copying the details of various tribal rites onto little index cards: hunting rites, rain rites, ghost rites, fertility rites. In her placid hand she entered notations of drumbeats in the villages of Namibia, sketches of Kikuyu witchdoctors' masks, descriptions of Zulu ceremonies for the appeasement of dead ancestors, of medical amulets and incantations from the land of Ubangi-Shari. One day she bought herself a new record in Haifa, on the jacket of which a naked black warrior was spearing an antelope. In English letters designed to look like campfires, it advertised The Magic of Chad.

Meanwhile, the hay was being baled in the fields and brought into the haylofts. The soil was being turned by heavy plows hitched to caterpillar tractors. The white-and-blue flames of summer gave way to a low, gray light. Autumn came and went. The days grew short and bleary-eyed, and the nights grew ever deeper. Yonatan supervised the orange picking, while his friend Udi took care of shipping the harvest.

One evening Udi proposed that over a cup of coffee the two of them review the bills of lading so they could prepare an interim statement.

"What's the rush? The season has just begun." Yonatan was in no mood to budge.

"If you don't have the patience to do the accounting," Udi suggested, "perhaps I should do it myself."

"All right. Fine."

"Don't worry, Yoni. I'll keep you filled in."

"You don't have to."

"What do you mean I don't have to?"

"Listen, Udi. If you'd like to be the boss around here, be the boss." And he left it at that.

He didn't like words and didn't trust them. And so he prepared for the talk with Rimona slowly, deliberately, seeking to anticipate tears, arguments, pleas, accusations. But the more he thought about it, the fewer justifications he could find. Until he was left with none. Not even one.

He had to give Rimona the bold truth. The bold truth might even be expressed in a single sentence. "I can't give in any more," or perhaps just "I'm late."

But Rimona was sure to ask, "Giving in to whom?" or, "Late for what?" What was he going to say then? She might even burst into tears or gasp, "Yoni, you're out of your mind!" To which he knew he could only mumble, "Sorry," or, "Well, that's that," only to have her turn his parents and the whole kibbutz against him.

Look, Rimona, it's not something that can be said in words. Maybe it's like your Magic of Chad. Not the magic of Chad. There's no magic there. Or anywhere. What I mean is, I don't have a choice, and my back's against the wall, as they say. So, I'm going.

Yonatan picked an evening several days off. If she started accusing or pleading, he would simply clam up.

All the while, like a member of an underground on the eve of an uprising, he was careful to go about his usual business. At the crack of dawn, he would be out on the porch in his underwear, climbing into his work clothes, conducting a sleepy battle with the laces of his boots — hating the laughing one — wrapping himself in his shabby old battle jacket and heading for the tractor shed. When it rained, he would cover his head and shoulders with a sack and run cursing all the way to the shed. For a couple of minutes he would do push-ups on the filthy concrete floor before checking the oil, fuel, and water in the old gray Ferguson, and try to get its coughing, reluctant engine to turn over so he could take Udi and their crew of teenage girls out to the groves. Gathered around the tin shed to receive their clippers, the girls had dimly brought to Yonatan's mind some half-forgotten tale of reprobate nuns who had run away from their cloister to consort with a woodsman living in a hut.

Yonatan rarely spoke while working. Once, though, handing the sports section to Udi during a break, he remarked, "All right, if that's what you want: the bills of lading are yours this year, but keep me in the picture all the same."

At the end of the day Yonatan would return home, shower, and dress in warm, clean clothes, light the kerosene heater, and sit down with the paper. By four or four-fifteen the winter light would start to dim, but it was twilight by the time Rimona arrived from the laundry and put coffee and cake on the table. Sometimes he would wash the mugs and plates as soon as they finished their coffee. Occasionally, while changing a burned-out light bulb or fixing a leaky shower tap, he might answer a question she asked or listen wearily as she answered one of his.

One evening, on the radio news, a certain Rabbi Nachtigall talked about religious revival. He used the phrase "a desert wasteland and a wilderness." For the rest of that night, and, indeed, through the next day, Yonatan absentmindedly recited these words as if they were a mantra: The magic of wilderness. The wasteland of Chad. The desert of Chad. The magic of wasteland. Breathe deep, friend, he told himself, and calm down. You've got all the time in the world between now and Wednesday.

Tia, his brownish-gray German shepherd, spent the winter days sprawled on the floor by the heater. No longer young, she seemed to suffer from rheumatism in cold weather. In a couple of places her coat had grown threadbare, like a worn-out rug. Sometimes she would open her eyes abruptly and look at him so tenderly that it made him blink. Then she would sink her teeth into her thigh or into her paws to get rid of some invisible pest, and rise with a shake of her coat, which seemed at least a size too large for her. Her ears flattened, she would cross the room and collapse again by the heater, sighing and shutting one eye, although her tail would go on twitching for a moment before it, too, fell silent. Then her other eye would shut, and she would look for all the world as if she were asleep.

Tia developed sores behind her ears, which soon filled with pus, and the veterinarian, who visited the kibbutz twice a month to check its cows and sheep, had to be consulted. He prescribed a salve and also a white powder that was to be mixed with milk and given her to drink. It was hard to get her to swallow it. He had to postpone it again. From time to time he would go over the words he had prepared for Rimona. But what words? The wasteland of Chad? Picks up and goes?