Amos Oz - A Perfect Peace

Yonatan walked off and stood among some olive trees, urinating. His head was cocked to one side and his mouth slightly open as if working on a chess problem. His eyes fell on the easternmost mountains, which seemed in this flowing, honeyed light to be within shouting distance. A dim, steely blue the color of an autumn sea, they loomed like steep breakers that seemed so imminently about to tumble westward that Yonatan felt an urge to run at them at once and plunge in head first. Indeed, he suddenly began to sprint, followed by Tia, saliva dripping from her jowls, panting heavily like a sick wolf. He kept it up for about three hundred paces, until his boots began to sink deep into the mud, and water gurgled into his socks. He began climbing from rock to rock, collecting great globs of mud on his shoes, hobbling like an elephant until he was once more on dry ground, the words of that old poem "But Their Hearts Were Not True" running mockingly through his mind.

"Take this knife," said Rimona, "and scrape the mud off your boots. If you're through running."

He looked at her for a moment with a weary grin. Seeing only placid innocence in her eyes, he obeyed and sat down on a rock to clean himself off while the women struggled to carve the chicken and the new mechanic in his striped shirt and best pants bent over the fire that no one had believed he could light.

"I ran like an idiot," said Yonatan. "I'm talking to you, Azariah. I wanted to see if the winter had made me forget how to run. What about you?"

"I have run quite enough in my life," said Azariah, taken aback but with some semblance of self-respect. "I came here to stop running."

"Come on, let's race," said Yonatan, surprised by his own challenge. "Let's see if you're as good at it as you are at chess."

"Azariah," taunted Udi, "only likes to run at the mouth."

"I hate to run," said Azariah. "I'm through running. And now you'd better leave me alone if you want to have a fire and your potatoes."

Expertly rolling the potatoes in the pockets of hot ash formed by the twigs, he kept his eyes facing Udi and Anat in order to avoid Rimona's, which he had felt resting on him from the moment of Yonatan's challenge. His flesh burned, for Rimona was looking at him not like a woman looking at a man, or even like a person looking at another person, but rather like a woman looking at a thing, or perhaps like a thing that is suddenly looking at you.

Rimona's corduroy pants clung to her trim, nubile body snugly but unobtrusively, and she had neatly knotted her shirt somewhere above the navel, baring a bit of flat stomach and slim waist. It's just her way of lying, though Yonatan. Only who cares?

"You can relax," said Anat. "The food is almost ready."

Butterflies frolicked around the pine trees and in the swatches of light between the umbrae of the olives. One, white like the others, hovered motionlessly in place, like a snowflake or an orange blossom. A sickly-looking gibbous moon hung caught in the boughs of an olive tree, like Absalom in his oak. Ringed by craggy branches, it could have been a pale Jewish fiddler trapped by a band of peasants in some distant land of exile.

"Dogs keep barking throughout the night, the moon keeps quiet but shines on bright" was Azariah's comment, even though Tia was not barking but resting peacefully on her side.

"We'll eat in just a minute," said Anat.

Yonatan squatted by Rimona's side on his haunches like an old Bedouin and helped slice the onions. When Anat once again let her dress play peekaboo with her solid thighs, Azariah was moved to remark, "I keep feeling that somebody's watching us. Maybe we should post a lookout."

"I am dying of hunger," said Udi.

"There's lemonade in Azariah's canteen," said Anat. "Someone can start to pour it. Let's eat."

They drank from the canteen cap, which went round from hand to hand, and plunged into the chicken, diced salad, baked potatoes, egg-and-cheese sandwiches, and peeled oranges for dessert. The conversation drifted to the village of Sheikh Dahr as it had been before the '48 war. They talked about the cunning of the old hajj, about what the Arabs would have done to us had they won, and about what Udi proposed doing to them in the next war. Yonatan took no part in an argument that soon broke out between Udi and Azariah. He was thinking of a picture in Rimona's album that showed a group of picnickers in the dappled light of a clearing in a thick oak forest. All the men in it were fully dressed, and among them was one woman, naked as the day she was born, to whom he had given the private name of Azuva, daughter of Shilhi. That joker, the old-timers said, he couldn't hit it from three feet away. And a bull isn't a matchbox! It's a huge target!

Yonatan imagined receiving a midnight phone call from his other father, the owner of the Florida hotel chain, that would suddenly open up all sorts of possibilities and places where anything might happen — terrible tragedies, sensational successes, unexpected romances, extraordinary encounters — and all of them far from here and from the evil ruins of this village and its antediluvian goat dung. Your passport, your ticket, and a handsome sum of cash will be waiting for you at the airport manager's office. Just tell them, Jonathan, that you're Benjamin's boy and leave the rest to them. You'll find your instructions in the inside right pocket of the custom-made suit they'll hand over to you.

On the ridge facing them a palm tree stood beside a leafless, twisted wild pear that looked like a blind old man who has stumbled by mistake into an enemy camp. Why all this sadness here unless it's a coded message from the dead who once lived upon this muddy ground? If you don't pick up and go right now, you'll never be on time for whatever is waiting for you and won't wait forever if you're late.

"Forget about the Bible and those Ay-rabs of yours for a second," said Yonatan, rousing himself from his trance. "Do you remember, Udi, how when we were little, the wind from Sheikh Dahr used to bring the smell of the smoke from their outdoor ovens at night? We'd lie beneath our blankets after lights-out in the children's house when all the grown-ups had gone, too scared to admit how scared we were of that smoky wind blowing through the east windows with that smell of kindling and dried goat shit that the Arabs burned for fuel. You know that Arab smoke smell. And their dogs barking and sometimes the muezzin wailing away at the top of the mosque."

"Now too," said Rimona hesitantly.

"Now too what?"

"She's right," said Azariah. "You can hear a sort of faraway wailing now too. And we don't even have a gun."

"It's the Red Indians," whooped Anat.

"It's the wind," said Rimona. "And I'm almost sure that the smoke is from your fire, Azariah."

"There's still some chicken left," said Anat. "Does anybody want it? And two more oranges. Yoni? Udi? Azariah? Whoever's still hungry can have more. There's plenty of time."

Udi managed not to return empty-handed from his ramble on the hillside, bringing back a rusty wagon pole found among the rocks, some remnants of a leather harness, and the skull of a horse grimacing with hideous yellow teeth. All three finds were intended to give his front yard what he called "character." He was even considering digging up the skeleton of some greaseball from the village cemetery, wiring it together, and standing it in his garden to serve as a scarecrow and shock the entire kibbutz.

"If you don't watch it, Udi," said Azariah, "one of the birds it scares may be the soul of a dead Arab and peck your eyes out."

They rested for another half hour or so. Udi and then Azariah took off his shirt and undershirt to bask in the sun. When a mild dispute broke out whether the three jets screaming southward overhead were French Mystères or Supermystères, Yonatan remarked that his father had once voted in the cabinet against the Franco-Israeli honeymoon of the fifties, or perhaps had merely abstained. Now, though, Yolek admitted that he had been wrong and that Ben-Gurion had been right.