Amos Oz - A Perfect Peace

From a purely technical point of view, Yolek Lifshitz is still secretary of this kibbutz. Officially I won't assume office until after the vote at the general meeting scheduled for Saturday night. Practically speaking, though, for the past several days I've been acting as secretary. I feel I have no choice. When it comes to emotions, my own or anyone else's, I'm at a total loss. They're a closed book to me, an enigma within a mystery. And though I've done my share of reading in my solitary years, whatever I've found there, whether fact or fiction, has only made the enigma more enigmatic and the mystery more mysterious. First Freud comes along and says one thing. Good enough. Only then along comes Jung and says something else and no less plausible. And Dostoyevsky was no slouch either at showing us other abysses of the soul. Well, more power to them all. Yet I am not convinced. I have my doubts.

Not one of them can enlighten me on where young Yonatan Lifshitz might be right now. Is he sleeping in some abandoned house or shack? Outdoors? In a city? On an old mattress in a deserted watchman's hut? In a tent in an army camp? Or is he wide-awake and desperate, still on the move? Is he in a car? A plane? A halftrack? Is he looking for a streetwalker in the alleys of south Tel Aviv? Or is he navigating by the stars in the wilderness of Judea or the Negev? Is he serious, or just playing a practical joke on somebody? Is he taking revenge, acting the desperado, or simply being a spoiled child? Is he looking for something or running away from it?

The responsibility is now mine. It's up to me to decide what must be done. Call in the police? Sit tight and wait it out? Make discreet inquiries in the neighboring villages? Treat the matter as urgent? Or try to take it in stride?

Just who are these youngsters anyway? What is going on in their heads? They're first-rate farmers, no doubt about it. What we ourselves did with enormous effort, they toss off without any sweat. Presumably they're brave and proficient soldiers. Yet always with an air of melancholy about them. As if they stemmed from another race, an entirely different tribe. Neither Asiatics nor Europeans. Neither Gentiles nor Jews. Neither idealists nor on the make. What can their lives mean to them, raised in this whirlwind of history, this place-in-progress, this experiment-under-construction, this merest blueprint of a country, with no grandparents, no ancestral homes, no religion, no rebellion, no Wanderjahre of their own? With not a single heirloom — not a chest of drawers, not a gold watch, not even a single old book. Growing in a place that was hardly a hamlet, in tents and shacks, amid pale young saplings. Just a fence and searchlights, howling jackals and distant shots. What got into you, Yonatan?

How little good I was able to do today. And even that just by groping in the dark. Perhaps I managed to soothe a soul or two. And take a few steps I thought were called for. And all on my own because there's no one here to consult with. Stutchnik is a nice fellow. More or less a friend. Warmhearted, demonstrative, but unruly. Just the way he was when I first met him in the youth movement forty years ago. He is stubborn and opinionated, incapable of listening. I have never heard him admit to being wrong. Not once. Even in the most picayune matter. One time he wouldn't speak to me for half a year because I proved to him with a map that Denmark isn't a Benelux country. Six months later he sent a note to inform me my atlas was "badly out-of-date." And yet in the end he decided to make up and brought me a lambskin rug for the foot of my bed.

As for my good friend Yolek, far be it from me to judge his contribution to the nation or to the kibbutz movement. Who am I to say? His enemies accuse him of talking like a prophet but carrying on like a small-time politician. To which his supporters reply, "Oh, he's cagey, all right, but the man has imagination and vision!"

(In passing, let me remark that I personally can do without either imagination or vision. I have lived my life here to the music of a marching band, as if death had already been abolished, old age eradicated, suffering and loneliness ridden out on a rail, and the whole universe nothing but a giant arena for political and ideological quarrels. In short, imagination and vision are not my cup of tea. Long ago I gave up on ever getting Yolek and his fellow travelers to show a little compassion. Not uncritical compassion, to be sure. There has to be a limit. But compassion nonetheless. Because we all need it. And because without it, vision and imagination begin to turn cannibalistic. Which is why I'm determined to try to be compassionate as secretary of this kibbutz. And not cause unnecessary pain. Indeed, if I may insert another theological aside, of all the commandments in the Bible, of all our latter-day commandments — kibbutz-movement, national, socialist — the only one that still matters to me is the one against pain. No rubbing salt into wounds. Thou shalt not cause pain. Not to oneself either.) So much for that.

And now back to the events of the day. It was a clear morning. A cold blue sky. Not even as a boy in Europe have I seen such a glorious sight. It makes one feel slightly intoxicated and happy to be alive. Reading the headlines this morning about troop concentrations in the north, I had the childish fantasy of setting out for Damascus and convincing the Syrians to chuck this futile nonsense, to sit down with us in the sunshine to settle our problems once and for all.

Instead, of course, I went to the office and pored over the slipshod bills of lading that Udi Shneour stuck into my mailbox last night. From seven to nine I tried making some sense out of the bills and the chaos that's overtaken the citrus groves. After which I had intended to answer some of the mail that had been mounting on Yolek's desk. The more urgent letters, because I'm always perfectly content to put off till tomorrow what needn't be done today in the hope it will either take care of itself or go away. Officially, of course, since I'm not even in office yet, there's no need to rush.

At nine or nine-fifteen, a grim-faced Hava Lifshitz burst into the office. In a hostile, schoolmarmish voice she exclaimed, "Have you no sense of shame?"

I put down my pencil, pushed up my reading glasses, wished her good morning, and invited her to sit in my chair. (A few days ago someone walked off with the only other chair and never bothered to return it.)

No, she would not sit down. She simply could not grasp, she said, how anyone could be so insensitive, although nothing surprised her any more. She had come to demand that I do something, or, as she put it, that "you make this your business right now!

"Excuse me," I said, "but exactly what is it that I'm supposed to make my business right now?"

"Srulik," she snapped, as if my name were a dirty word, "would you tell me whether you're a complete numbskull or just pretending to be one? Or is this simply your sick sense of humor?"

"That could be," I said. "Anything is possible. But I can't give you an answer until I know what the question is. And I suggest that you consider sitting down after all."

"Do you really mean to tell me you know nothing about what's happened? That you've seen no evil and heard no evil? That while the whole kibbutz has been talking about nothing else, Your Royal Highness has been spending his morning on the dark side of the moon?"

The two of us were staring at each other across the desk. I couldn't suppress a slight smile.

"Something terrible has happened," said Hava.

I apologized at once. I explained to her that I truly had no idea what she was talking about. The fact is that for the past several years I've been skipping breakfast in the dining hall and getting by until lunch with tea, crackers, and yogurt in my office. Was anything, God forbid, wrong with Yolek?