Amos Oz - A Perfect Peace

It took no small effort to find and light the kerosene lamp without waking his wife. He sat down at his desk, hating the sootiness of the wick as he adjusted it and the need to refrain from smoking lest it disturb Hava's sleep. Finally he put on his glasses and, in the next two hours, passionately composed a letter to Levi Eshkol, Prime Minister and Minister of Defense.

My Dear Eshkol,

Just receiving this letter will no doubt astound you, to say nothing of what's in it. You may even be angered with me. Well, I beg you not to be. In more than one debate between us, having run out of other arguments, I've heard you defend yourself with the old rabbinic saw "Judge not your friend until you have been in his place." This time, with your permission, it is I who will resort to this argumentum in extremis against you. So please bear with me.

Writing these lines is a painful business for me. Yet I am confident that you, who have always had the time for a comrade in distress, will not be put off even if you are surprised. Only a few days ago, at our party meeting in Tel Aviv, you took advantage of an empty seat in the sixth or seventh row to sit down beside me and whisper more or less these words: "Listen here, Yolek, you old turncoat, I sure as hell do miss you right now." To which I, incorrigible sinner that I am, answered something like "I'll bet you do — like a hole in the head." Followed in low tones by "Just between the two of us, Eshkol, if I were back in the saddle these days, the first thing I'd do would be to take a stick to those rednecks who are swarming all over you and making your life so miserable." " Nu? " you asked jokingly. After which you sighed and added, more to yourself than to me, " Nu, nu. "

Which is still the tone between the two of us after more than thirty years, thirty-six to be exact — in feet, closer to thirty-seven. And by the way, don't think I've forgotten the first time we met that October, or was it November, of 1928, when I came to you in despair. You were treasurer of the League of Kibbutzim, and I begged you, quite literally, for a small handout for one of our communes that had just arrived from Poland and was stranded up in the Galilee without a penny to its name. "You won't get a red cent from me!" you roared, then explained apologetically that charity began at home and sent me to Hartzfeld. Ah, well! Hartzfeld, of course, sent me right back to you. At which point you relented and agreed to make us a loan of what you humorously called "hush money." I haven't forgotten. And neither — please be so kind as not to play the innocent — have you.

In a word, that's been the tone between us all these years. Thirty-seven of them. And, by the way, we haven't many more left. We've almost reached the bottom line. Not that you and I don't still have a mutual reckoning to make for a long list of sins and transgressions committed against each other. Ah, well! I trust that you'll forgive me for all of mine. Believe me, I have already forgiven you for yours (except, that is, for the Pardes-Hanna affair, for which there can be no forgiveness this side of the Pearly Gates). But the ledger is nearly full and I feel a great weight on my heart. Our time is up, Eshkol, and — forgive me for talking this way — we're simply so much dead wood now. It can't be helped. If only what promises to come after us didn't give me gooseflesh, no, worse yet, the blackest of nightmares.

Wherever you look, in the party, in the government, in the army, in the kibbutz movement, everywhere, there's nothing but Scyths, Huns, and Tatars closing in from all sides. Not to mention the plain ordinary scoundrels who have begun cropping up all around in alarming numbers. In a nutshell, no one knows better than you what an ill wind is loose in this land. Only what have you done about it? Stayed in harness, gritted your teeth, and said nothing, or at most sighed into your sleeve. And yet, if we were to use the last of our strength, we could perhaps still wield some influence, could perhaps still, ancient as we are, stem the tide. Well, I don't mean to write a polemic. We're old men, my dear friend and rival. We're living off the capital now. Pardon me for saying so, but we're on our way out. And 1 need take only one look at you to see how the state of things haunts and torments you. Believe me, it makes me shudder too. And by the way, forgive me for saying so, but you've also, as the Bible says, waxed fat and grown thick quite alarmingly. Physically, I mean. Why can't you take better care of yourself? Why can't you realize that après nous, as the French have it, the deluge?

Na. I'm getting carried away. Listen to me then. I'll try to make it as short as I can. It's time I got to the point. Only what, in God's name, is the point? It's precisely over this question that I agonize. It's a winter night, long past midnight, and a torrential rain out there is ruining the crops that are already rotting from a surfeit of heavenly bounty. And just to make things worse, the electric power is off too, so that I'm writing you by the light of a smoking kerosene lamp, which, whether I like it or not, brings back old memories that, I am not ashamed to admit, make me feel very close to you. You do know, don't you, that I quite literally loved you. Not that this made me anyone special. Who didn't love you in those days? You were once, if I may be forgiven for saying so, a gorgeous young fellow, tall, dark, handsome — in fact, the only tall member of our whole short, squat crowd — a gypsy at heart, half Ukrainian peasant, half Don Juan, with a glorious tenor voice to boot. Just between the two of us, I may as well admit that we were all madly jealous of you. The girls said you were Eros incarnate and swooned when they spoke of you. Hartzfeld, behind your back, used to call you "that Cossack."

I myself, I must confess, was never much of a Valentino. Even then I must have had my nasty intellectual face. Oh, how I loathed it!

All said and done, though, I must say that time has been a great equalizer. You, if you'll pardon my saying so, have lived to become a fat, bald old buzzard, and so have I. What a pair of respectable old fogies we two are, both of us with glasses! We may still be a bit suntanned, but from the inside out our bodies are cankered by disease. There's hardly a sound bone left in them. We're on our last legs and the Scyths are already lining up to pounce. By the way, "a nasty intellectual face" is my friend Hava's phrase. A difficult, very peppery lady, although idealistic beyond all words. Once, in her salad days — I can't recall if we ever discussed this — she conceived a passion for a criminally insane lad but had enough presence of mind to extricate herself from his clutches and enough ambition to attach herself to me. I, as is my custom, forgot and forgave long ago. The problem is that to this day she can't forgive me for having forgiven her.

I won't deny that I'm a wicked man, as wicked as they come, yes, wicked to the very marrow of my old bones. In fact, I may even be one of the thirty-six perfectly wicked men on whom our world depends. I mean one of those wicked enough to have sold their own souls on behalf of the cause we held sacred from the time we were young, one of those whose wickedness alone enabled them to preach and practice the faith and all its many commandments. Nevertheless, my dear Eshkol, wicked as we were, we did do a bit of good along the way that the Devil himself cannot deny us. It's just that we were wicked even then, and cunning too, even if it's only lately that the fools and our enemies have begun to realize what deceitful old men we really are. All our plotting, all our conspiracies — why, it was never for our own pleasure or profit, but only to do good. Not, if truth be told, that we shunned the public limelight then any more than we do now.