Amos Oz - A Perfect Peace

Here and there his squinting eyes made out some dismal signs of life. A few goatskin tents that suggested a dark stain sprayed against a gleaming canvas of sand. A slowly disintegrating tire abandoned between nowhere and nowhere. A bullet-pocked fuel can rusting away in a downpour of winter light. Sometimes the clear purity of the desert air was violated by the stench of a dead camel or donkey, or by the mingled smells of smoke, gasoline, and engine oil. Yet time and again, it reasserted itself.

Here and there, too, were signs of a military presence. A lone antenna protruding from a distant hilltop. The chassis of a small truck by the road. Three, no four, jeeps passing on their way from the far south, their machine guns cradled on rests welded to the engine hoods. His lips were dry, his throat was parched, his eyes kept watering, but Yonatan had never felt better. As the sun dropped lower in the sky, the earth developed fissures where the desert began to fall away to the great rift valley below. The wheat had thinned out until there were only a few haggard-looking strands of it, and an occasional field of barley, to dapple the treeless stretches of scattered shrub. The gray-brown slopes of gravelly flint on the hillsides broke sharply eastward. From a high curve in the road, Yonatan caught sight of the peaks of the mountains of Edom shrouded in a veil of blue haze. A band of titans from some distant star who had lost their way and sunk down at last in this place, flashing blindingly from the sun-drunk surface of the Dead Sea. Were they able to rise at night from their lassitude and, stretching themselves to their full height, touch the farthest galaxies in the skies? Yonatan almost winked at them. He let them have the barest of waves. Hey, you, wait for me.

He recalled how his father loathed the desert. The very word made Yolek grimace, as if it were a dirty word. It often catapulted him into one of his taming-the-wilderness spiels. Deserts were a badge of shame, a mark of inequity, a disgrace to the map of Israel, an evil presence, an ancient enemy that must be subdued by armies bringing tractors, irrigation pipes, and fertilizer sacks until the last of its surly acres had been compelled to bear. And the desert shall rejoice and blossom like a rose. For in the wilderness shall waters break out and streams in barren places. Jewish water engineers would turn the parched ground into fountains and the thirsty land into springs. Come, comrades, let us set the earth ablaze with a bright green flame.

From deep down in his blanket, the soldier at the wheel called out, "Hey, buddy, where to?"

"Down south."

"How about as far as Ein-Husub?"

"Sounds fine."

Then silence again, and wind.

Hello there, desert! I happen to know all about you. I know your red cliffs and your black cliffs. I know the mouths of your wadis and their gravel beds, your rock ledges and the secret pools of rainwater in your crannies. Since I was a child I've been told how good I am. And all my life that's what I've been embarrassed to be — good. But from now on, all that changes. From now on, I really will be good. To begin with, I've given my wife away to an immigrant kid. I wish him lots of happiness with her and an end to all his troubles. And I've solved a twenty-year-old problem for my parents, because when they got out of bed this morning, the problem was gone. The best of luck to them. And I've handed Rimona a brand-new husband on a platter. He'll be the perfect little boy for her to baby and bring up. And left them Tia too. And my bed. And the chess table I carved out of olive wood. That's how good I am. And always have been. Because it's our duty to be as good as we can until the suffering stops. Srulik once said to me that there's enough pain in this world as it is and our duty is not to cause any more. And I said to him, hey, why don't you cut out that Jewish bullshit. A dumbass thing to say, because it was bullshit straight from the heart.

Eshkol and my father and Srulik and Ben-Gurion, the whole bunch of them are the most wonderful Jews who ever lived. You won't find any better in the Bible. Even the prophets, with all due respect to them, talked a nice line but never did a damn thing about it. But these old men suddenly figured out fifty years ago that the end was in sight and the Jews were up against the wall, and so they took their lives in their hands and ran with them together straight at that wall, do or die, and came busting out the other side and made us a country, for which I take off my hat to them. And cheer at the top of my voice.

Now hear this, you desert, hear this, you mountains and you wadis, hear it once and for all, hats off to Yolek Lifshitz and to Stutchnik and to Srulik. Hurrah for Ben-Gurion and Eshkol. Three cheers for the state of Israel. Berl Katznelson's little pinky is worth more than me and that asshole Udi and Etan and Chupka and Moshe Dayan all put together, because they're the Saviors of Israel and we're the Scum of the Earth. There's no one like them in the whole world. Not even in America. Take a kid like Zaro, for example, a miserable little fink, from the day he was born the whole world ran after him with a hatchet to kill him and almost did — the Germans, the Russians, the Arabs, the Poles, the Rumanians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Pharaohs — falling on him like a pack of wolves. Imagine slaughtering a sensitive kid like that who plays the guitar and has all those beautiful, poetic thoughts. If it hadn't been for my father, and Berl, and Srulik, and Gordon, and all the rest of them, where could he have run to? Where in this whole fucking world would he have been taken in with no questions asked and given work and warmth and a room and self-respect and a lovely woman and a brand-new life? Hurray for Ben-Gurion and Eshkol. Hurray for the kibbutz. Hip, hip, hurray for the state of Israel.

If only I were the man I should have been and not just a spoiled turd of a Scyth or a Tatar, I'd have gone to my father tonight instead of taking off and said to him, I'm at your command, sir, send me wherever you like, sir. Say the tractor shed, and the tractor shed it is. Say the army, or a new kibbutz right smack in the middle of these salt flats, or a secret mission to Damascus to knock off the gynecologist and the ophthalmologist together, and it's as good as done. But what I'm afraid I'll have to do after that, sir, once I've given you my all, is to go tonight or tomorrow night to Petra and die there for the good of the cause. Just like that shitass son of King Saul in the Bible who wasn't good enough to be king or good enough for anything except to get himself killed in a war so the torch could be passed to the better man who could be of service to his country and even make a distinguished contribution to the Bible. Hats off to you, Little John, slain upon the high places, and hats off to you, David, for writing such a terrific eulogy straight from the heart and being the Savior of Israel. And please excuse me, Professor Spinoza, for being a little slow to get what you meant when you so wisely said that everyone has a role in this life and that the only choice we have is to understand what our role is and to accept it gracefully. Why, the smell of this wind alone is enough to make you grow up to be a man, to honor the darkening sky, the towering wilderness, to honor thy father and thy mother, to be good at last, as Azariah says, as Spinoza says, as you wanted to be and were too embarrassed to be because of your longing. Because longing of any kind is a poison.

The last light was fading when they reached Ein-Husub. Yonatan thanked the two reservists and shouldered his gear. The lights of the perimeter fence were already lit. The place seemed to be half army camp, half tumbledown frontier settlement. Yonatan knew that a Druse unit belonging to the army or the border patrol used it as a base for its patrols. Visible as well were an odd smattering of reservists, miners traveling to and from the copper works in Timna, a few hikers and nature lovers, Bedouin working for the military, and a tall bushranger of a civilian with bright blue eyes, skin dark as an Arab's, and a long Tolstoyan beard hanging down to the white hair of his naked chest. "I arranged to meet some pals of mine here" was going to be his alibi should anyone ask, but nobody did.