Amos Oz - A Perfect Peace

Lulled by the steady, monotonous drip of the rain in the drainpipe, Yonatan soon dozed off and let the paper drop. It was a light, troubled sleep of groggy reveries that turned into nightmares. Dr. Schillinger from Haifa, the gynecologist with the stammer who had treated Rimona and advised her against trying again, became a cunning Syrian agent. On behalf of the secret service, Yolek urged Udi, Yonatan, and Etan R. to undertake a dangerous journey to some northern land and lay the serpent low in its lair with an ax stroke from behind. Unfortunately, since they were all made of wet absorbent cotton, none of the six bullets in Yonatan's revolver was able to penetrate his target's skin. The man simply grinned with rotten teeth and hissed, " Ty zboju! " Yonatan opened his eyes and before him stood Rimona. "It's a quarter after four," she said, "and getting dark. Why don't you sleep a little more while I shower and make us coffee?"

"I wasn't sleeping," he replied, "I was just thinking. Did you know that the dictator of Syria is also a gynecologist?"

"You were sleeping when I came in," said Rimona. "And I woke you. But we'll have coffee soon."

She showered and changed clothes while the water boiled in the electric kettle. Slim, shapely, and clean in a red sweater and blue corduroy pants, she served the coffee and cake. She looked like a shy schoolgirl with her long, light, freshly washed hair, enveloped in a bitter scent of almond soap and shampoo. They sat in the twin armchairs, facing each other, letting the music from the radio fill the silence. After that came music from a record, the throbbing, sensual beat of the African bush.

Even at the best of times Rimona and Yonatan spoke sparingly to each other, and then only when they had to. Quarreling had long since become pointless. Rimona was gathered in her own thoughts, her feet tucked under her, her hands pulled back into the sleeves of her sweater. She looked like a lonely little girl freezing on a park bench in winter.

"When the rain stops, I'll go out for more kerosene. The tank's nearly empty," she offered, breaking the silence.

Yonatan stubbed out his cigarette on the side of a copper ashtray.

"Don't. I'll get it. I have to talk to Shimon anyway."

"Why don't you give me your jacket so I can tighten the buttons while you're out?"

"But you spent a whole evening tightening the buttons just a week ago."

"That was your new jacket. I want to fix the old one, your brown one."

"Do me a favor, Rimona. Leave that old rag alone. It's falling apart. Either throw the goddamn thing out or give it to the Italian. He makes coffee for me every morning and even thanks me for it."

"Yoni, you're not going to give that jacket to anybody. I can fix it, just take it out a bit in the shoulders, and you can still wear it to work to keep you warm."

Yonatan said nothing. He emptied a matchbox onto the table, tried making a simple geometric pattern, swept it away, made another, more complicated pattern, and swept that one away too. He gathered up the matches and returned them neatly to their box. A cracked old, bone-dry, mocking voice rasped within him: That joker, he couldn't even hit the side of a bull from three feet away. "But Their Hearts Were Not True." Yonatan recalled the only possible answer.

"I'll mend it," Rimona persisted. "You can wear it to work."

"Oh, great!" said Yonatan. "It'll be a sensation. I'll show up for work one morning in a sport jacket. Maybe I'll wear a tie too, put a white handkerchief in my breast pocket like a secret agent, cut my hair short as my father has been nagging me to do. Can you hear, Rimona, how strong that wind is!"

"The wind may be strong, but the rain has stopped."

"I'd better go out then. Talk to Shimon. Get the kerosene. And I really ought to sit down with Udi too, and go over the accounts. What's that?"

"Nothing. I didn't say anything, Yoni."

"All right. See you."

"Wait a minute. Don't wear your new jacket. Wear the old one. I'll mend it when you get back."

"Oh, no, you won't, because it'll be soaking wet."

"We said that the rain had stopped, Yoni."

"We said! A lot of good that does. What if we did? By the time I get back, it will be raining again. In fact, there it goes. Just listen to it come down. It's a flood!"

"Don't go out, Yoni. Sit down a while. I'll pour some more coffee. And if you're looking for something to give your Italian, why don't you give him that can of instant we never use? I like to brew us real coffee, good and strong."

"Listen, Rimona. That Italian! You know how he says, I'll pour you a cup? 'I'll pour'a you a cup.' You know how he says, It's raining cats and dogs? 'It's rain'm catch'm dog.' But you're not listening. Why is it that every time I say something to you, you never listen, you never answer, you're never there. Why?"

"Don't get mad, Yoni."

"Now you too. What's the matter with all of you today? Since I got up this morning everyone's been telling me not to get mad when I haven't been mad at all. Suppose I feel like getting mad, then what? I have no right to? Everyone wants to argue with me all day long. You, Udi, that Italian, my father, Etan R. Everyone! It could drive you mad. Every day that crazy Italian wants to fix my boot. Every evening it's you with that rag of a jacket, and every night it's my father with some new job he's cooked up. Do me a favor, will you? Take a look at this newspaper, at those Syrians my father wants peace and brotherhood with, those Syrians he'd like to take to his bed, look how they talk about us. The only thing they want is to slaughter us all and drink our blood. Hey, you're dreaming again. You're not listening to one word I say."

"I am, Yoni. What's wrong with you? I'm not your father."

"I don't care who you are, I just want you to listen to the rain instead of telling me that it's stopped and sending me out for your kerosene. Do me a favor. Go to the window, you're not blind, are you, and have a good look at what's happening out there."

Rimona and Yonatan continued to sit opposite each other in silence, the darkness deepening all around them. Treetops stirred noisily as though raided by an ax. A frightened lowing of cows could be heard through the shriek of the wind. Yonatan suddenly thought of the abandoned Arab village of Sheikh Dahr. This very night, the downpour might be crumbling the last of its earthen hovels, dust to dust, the ruins of its low stone walls might be surrendering at last, a loose stone toppling down, earthward in the darkness, after twenty years of clinging to its mates. There couldn't be a soul on the hills of Sheikh Dahr on a night like this, not one stray dog, not a single bird. What a perfect hideout for a murderer like Bolognesi or Benyamin Trotsky. Or me. No one there. Only stillness and the dark and winter winds. Only the smashed minaret of the mosque, twisted like the trunk of a felled tree. A nest of killers, they told us in our childhood. A den of bloody bandits. And once it was leveled, they told us we could sleep in peace at night. The minaret from which they sniped right into the kibbutz had been sliced in two halfway up by a direct mortar hit, a hit, so they say, that was aimed by the commander-in-chief of the Jewish forces himself.

Once, when I was a boy, I went by myself to Sheikh Dahr to look for the buried treasure of gold coins that was supposed to be under the floor of the sheikh's house. I began to pull up the painted green tiles to look beneath them for the secret steps that led to the hiding place. Shaking with fear, because of the owls, the bats, the ghosts lurking there at night to choke you from behind with their thin fingers, I kept on digging but all I found was strange gray dust like the ashes of an ancient fire and a wide rotten board. I pulled it to one side, and beneath were old harnesses, a threshing sled, some bits of an old wooden plow, and still more dust. I dug on until evening came and some ghastly bird screeched. Then I took off. I ran down the hill but made a wrong turn at the fork in the wadi and had to run back through all those crumbling houses and out into those fields full of thorns, past the hoary old olive trees — and I ran and ran till I reached the old quarry. Far-off jackals were howling. Close by I was only a boy and those dead old villagers were thirsty for blood, for a bloodbath like those Syrian doctors, I was Out of breath, and all I had to show from Sheikh Dahr in the end was a stitch in my chest and that terrible fear and sadness that keeps eating you, that keeps nibbling and gnawing at your soul to get up right away and go look for some sign of life in the wasteland, that endless rain that keeps falling outside in the dark and won't stop all night long or tomorrow or ever after. That's been my whole life. I don't have any other. The one I have keeps rushing by, and right now I'm being paged to get up and go because who will give me back the time that I've lost and what if I arrive too late?