Amos Oz - A Perfect Peace

The words "biblical cruelty" struck Yonatan with a frothlike fury, as if he had been spat on in disgust. He shrank back, murmuring, okay, okay, dad, just don't be annoyed, you know I'm doing my best. The prostrate Yolek ignored this plea. His voice rang out like a gong. You evil seed! You generation of vipers! You degenerate race of Tatars! You will counterattack and retake Sheikh Dahr this very hour regardless of losses. You've got to get it through your thick skulls that this is a life-and-death battle. If we lose, not only you but the entire Jewish people will die like dogs. But if they do, you boys must see to it that this time we take the whole wicked world down with us. Remember, we're counting on you. I'm sorry to have to say this, dad, said Yonatan, but aren't you dead? At that, the bloody, faceless corpse leaped from the stretcher and advanced on Yonatan with arms open to embrace him.

Dressed in his undershorts and a gray T-shirt, Yonatan rose with a start from the living-room couch he had been sleeping on. His head weighed a ton. He gasped for breath from all the cigarettes he had smoked. Once, in a movie, he had seen condemned men led from their cells to the scaffold in the middle of the night. Now, frozen and only half-awake, he felt almost without regret that his time too had come.

He went to the bathroom barefoot to pee and missed the bowl, wetting not only the seat but the floor around it. Idiot! he thought, what got into you to drink all that whisky and blab your head off? And how the hell did you end up sleeping like a stiff on the couch?

Through the open bedroom door, by the bathroom light, he could see Rimona asleep on her back and their young guest on the rug at her feet, curled in a fetal position, his head buried deep under a pillow. You son-of-a-bitch, you! What a fucking whorehouse! Yonatan struggled into his khaki army pants and shirt, began to fight his way into his patched work sweater, confused the sleeves, and had to fight his way out of the tangle and start all over again. He stepped out on the porch to breathe the clean night air. Tia followed him. In the wet, black hush Yonatan lit a cigarette.

Downhill, around each of the perimeter lights, shimmering circles of mist gave off a strange, sickly glow. A frog croaked in a puddle and then broke off. A barren sea breeze blew through the shadowy branches of the pine trees. Yonatan Lifshitz silently began to drink it all in. The vastness of the waiting night. The terrifying spaces that stretched darkly away, devoid of a human presence. The emptiness of the bunkers, the trenches, the fortified positions, the mine fields, the burned-out armor, the no-man's-land, the border posts left unguarded. And the earth itself conspiring slowly upward in the soft swell of its hillocks, in the humps of its hills, in its jagged faults that thrust skyward until it suddenly writhes in a spasm of mountains, range after range, chains of wild peaks, cliffs, canyons, ravines, tunneled gorges flooded by darkness — and beyond these the first desert plunging down to the long Jordan Rift, with yet more mountains on its other side, the high peaks of Edom, of Moab, of Gilead, of the Golan, the Hauran, and the Bashan, and fast upon them great tablelands of desert again, wilderness upon wilderness of sand and stone, a huge, dark stillness over all — here and there a lone rock, and another, and yet another, and on and on and on, for no purpose, for no person, untouched by human hand since the beginning of time and to be touched by none until its end, an illimitable wasteland consigned to howling winds. And after that still more mountains, their snow-capped summits eternally lashed by storms, with slopes where no foot has ever trod, gullies where no man has ever gone, gulches ripped by cascades, beneath monstrous outcroppings of basalt and pillars of granite. And beyond these the endless uninhabited prairies; the huge rivers coursing stilly in the darkness, tearing out their banks as if with fangs; the age-old rain forests, their ferny mosses twining up the tangled boughs of massive trees; the broad, unpopulated valleys; the empty brushland; the steppe after steppe stretching forever in the breathless wind; and finally the enormity of ocean, the cold, befogged, writhing seas and all their dark, indifferent waters. Behold the whole wide world — upon whose fullness a molten biblical wrath once upon a primeval time spilled like a geyser of lava.

And now all is over but the silence, brooding, as if in the presence of an unspoken illness, over a planet that bristles like a crouching beast to which nothing matters any more, not ourselves, not our homes, not our women, not our children, not our thoughts, not our words, not our never-ending wars of life-and-death. All is the same to the immense indifferent earth beast, the sleeping soundless earth corpse, devoid of hate, devoid of love, forever estranged from human suffering and from man's own estrangement. And over it a sky that is just as indifferent, without one living, sensate thing as far as the farthest galaxy in the lockers of space. One would have to be worse than a fool to go looking in all this cold nothingness for some sign of intimacy or warmth, much less for the magic of Chad. It will all be in vain. For even if there are other worlds, how will they differ from the one that starts at this porch? In them, too, death will skulk, like a sleeping mastiff.

"Well, that's the end of this one, Tia. Let's go inside. It's time to hit the road." Yonatan threw the burning butt into the bushes, muttered an Arabic curse, spun wildly around as if caught in a crossfire, and stepped back into the house.

Carefully climbing on a stool so as not to wake the sleepers, he took down a pair of battered paratrooper boots with thick rubber soles from the closet above the shower, then clumsily began stuffing his army knapsack with underwear, handkerchiefs, socks, and a leather folder with 1:20,000 maps. Two army shirts, a large flashlight, his army dogtag, and a compass were next. And last, a sealed, sterile army bandage left over from a stint of reserve duty.

He went to the bathroom and gathered up his toilet articles and allergy pills, taking care not to disturb Azariah's shaving gear or Rimona's almond soap and lemon shampoo. The face that stared out at him from the mirror gave him a start — a thin, dark, unshaven visage with gray bags beneath squinty red eyes, in which flickered a glint of pent-up violence, above them a wild shock of hair springing forward like the horn of a charging animal.

He left the bathroom to rummage through the closet, gritting his teeth until he found the old windbreaker that was coming apart at the sleeves and tore it savagely from its hanger. Into its pockets he stuffed a pair of leather gloves, an odd-looking woolen hat, a switchblade, a roll of flannel strips for cleaning his rifle, and a wad of toilet paper. From a small drawer he took an imitation-leather wallet that Rimona had given him the year before and took it to the bathroom to check its contents by the light. His identity pass, its pages slipping from their tattered binding. His reserve officer's passbook. A photograph of himself and his brother Amos as small boys, their hair slicked back, and dressed in their day-in-the-big-city outfits of pressed white shirts and shorts with suspenders. A faded snapshot of himself in army uniform, clipped from a yellowing page of the army magazine. In the money pocket he found some small change and sixty-odd pounds. He jammed the wallet into his back pocket.

His last foray was to open a locked metal chest at the bottom of the closet. From this he took a captured Russian Kalashnikov rifle, three bullet clips, and a bayonet and stacked them on his knapsack. Feeling tired and out-of-breath, he stirred some raspberry squash into a glass of water, gulped it down, and wiped his lips with the back of his sleeve.