Amos Oz - A Perfect Peace

"Oh, don't you go thanking me, Hava. I only wish I could have come as a bearer of good news instead of like someone paying a condolence call. Now, my friends, perhaps you should give me a blow-by-blow account. Do you mean to say the boy just got up and left without so much as a by-your-leave? Na. A shayne mayse. In Yiddish you say, small children, small tsuris, big children, big ones. Hava, please, no tea for me, or anything else. And you've heard nothing from him since? Na. A fine young upstart! And if Yolek will forgive my saying so, or even if he won't, the son of an upstart too. God only knows what must have driven him to do a crazy thing like that. Why not tell me what happened right from the word go."

"My son has disappeared," said Yolek, gritting his teeth like a man trying to bend an iron bar with his bare hands, "and I'm to blame."

"Yolek, please," Srulik intervened warily. "Why cause yourself even more pain with such talk?"

"The man is right," said Eshkol. "Let's have no foolishness. And none of your Dostoyevskyizing either, Yolek. It won't do us any good. I'm sure you've already taken all the necessary measures. Let's wait a few more days and see what happens. I myself have already been in touch with one or two people in the right places and told them in no uncertain terms to treat the matter as if the boy were my own son. Or theirs. And I also went down on my knees before those hooligans from the press and begged them to control themselves and not splash this all over the front page. Maybe they'll have enough heart to lay off until the boy — what did you say his name was? — comes safely home and all ends happily."

"Thank you," said Yolek.

"His name is Yonatan," Hava was quick to chime in. "You were always a good person. Not like some people I've known."

"That," joked Eshkol, "is something I wouldn't mind having from you in writing."

Hava carried in the tray, and Rimona helped her arrange the refreshments on the plain, square table. With a housewifely fussiness that made Srulik suppress an incipient smile, Hava inquired whether the guests wanted tea or coffee? Sugar or saccharine? Milk or lemon? Cookies, tangerines, orange-and-grapefruit salad, or homemade cream cake? All the while, a large green fly kept banging against the window pane, outside of which a bottle-green day lay drenched in sunshine.

Yolek's eyes, looking away, fell upon the ancient, bulky brown radio that stood on a low shelf within arm's reach. He suggested that they listen to the hourly news. By the time the set had warmed up, however, the news was almost at an end. In a speech at Aswan, President Nasser of Egypt had scoffed at the delusions of the Zionist dwarf-state. Opposition leader Menachem Begin had once again accused the government of appeasement and turning the other cheek to the Arabs and called for its replacement by a strongly patriotic government. The weather: continued clearing with possible light rain in the Galilee.

"Business as usual," sighed Eshkol. "The Arabs curse all of us, while the Jews curse only me. Ah, well, let them enjoy it. They can sound off as much as they like. Between you and me, though, you're looking at a very tired old man."

"Then rest," said Rimona. As if heeding her own advice, she laid her head on the shoulder of Azariah, who was sitting beside her on the couch.

"Enough of this!" said Hava. "Turn off the radio."

Azariah's eyes fell upon Yolek's books, which stood in long rows on their shelves, with photographs tucked here and there among them. Of Yonatan and Amos. Of Yolek with various socialist leaders from all over the world. Of five thistly strawflowers blossoming eternally in a porcelain vase. He felt that there was an unforgettably tormented, Ozymandian majesty about these two old men who never looked each other in the eye, who sat facing each other like two fallen Prometheans, like the ruins of two ancient castles in whose darkest keeps secret life lingered on with all its old battles, its exquisitely refined tortures, its witchcraft and foul play, its nightjars, owls, and bats. Like moss growing over a crack in a wall, an illusory peace stretched its tentacles between these ravaged citadels. Sunk in slumber, their remaining might still filled the room with an aura of palpable grandeur. A secretive, intricate, elusive current ran between them when they talked or even kept silent. The rancor of some old love, the last weary vestiges — like distant, receding thunder — of a great potency that Azariah craved with all his being to touch and be touched by. There must be a way, he thought, of penetrating this fatally charmed circle and rousing them from their repose.

He narrowed his green eyes and fixed them on the Prime Minister in a long, piercing stare of the kind that had the power (so he had once read in some book of Hindu lore) to make a person feel another's eyes upon him. How desperately he wanted to cast his spell on Eshkol in just this kind of way, to make him look up at him or even speak to him, if only to ask the most banal question — to which his own reply would be so astoundingly momentous that the Prime Minister would want to hear more and still more.

The air of weary authority, the spellbinding ugliness of this man whom Azariah had known until now only from flattering photographs or from unkind cartoons in newspapers — the ham-like, liver-spotted hands resting limply on the arms of a chair, one of them loosely dangling a large, yellowish wristwatch from a frayed band — the swollen, cadaverish fingers — the leathery, lizardlike skin — all of this aroused in him a febrile excitement that was almost carnal.

"Now look here, Eshkol," said Yolek after a long silence, "this may not be the time or place for it—"

"What's that? Who? What did you say?" Eshkol, having dozed off, opened his eyes.

"I was saying that this may not be the time or place for it, but I've been wanting to tell you for quite a while now that I owe you an apology. For what I said about you at the last meeting. And for other things too. I was too hard on you."

"As usual," noted Hava dryly.

Srulik smiled ever so faintly to himself, that secret, slightly melancholy, inscrutably Buddhalike smile arrived at so long ago.

" Azoy, " said Eshkol, the sharp, humorous look in his eyes belying the catnap he had just taken. "Of course you should feel sorry, Reb Yolek. And how you should! And I, quite honestly, should have whipped you to within an inch of your life long ago. So come on now, you bandit, how about the two of us cutting a deal? Suppose you cut out feeling so sorry for yourself and I cut out wanting to punch you in the nose, eh? Gemacht, Yolek? Can we shake on that?" In a different tone of voice, he added, "Stop being such a damn fool."

Everyone laughed. In the ensuing silence, Srulik put on his suavest smile and suggested politely, "But why not? Azariah and I will move all the furniture aside and you two gentlemen can square off once and for all. Go to it! And take as long as you like!"

"Don't listen to him," Rimona said softly. "He was only joking."

"You sweet girl!" roared Eshkol, pointing a pale, fat finger at her. "Don't be afraid, krasavitsa. The two of us, I'm sorry to say, are just a pair of old con men who do all our fighting with our mouths. The days are long gone when I could deliver a decent uppercut. And, whatever he says, our friend Yolek here wouldn't know how to apologize if his life depended on it. In this regard, by the way, he's just like Ben-Gurion — that is, in excellent company. Thank you, I don't take sugar. I drink mine plain."

Don't be afraid. Now is the time to speak up. About everything. They've fallen asleep on their feet. In a burning house, these horrid old godfathers frump around as pleased as punch with themselves, cracking their inspid jokes, so bourgeois you could puke. Burned-out souls, both of them. They'd have been the death of Yoni too if he hadn't got away just in time to save the bright first principles of his soul. Totally rotten they are from all their wheeling and dealing with shabby little intrigues, the flabby syphilitic old bastards, all bloated and gassy from their own dyspeptic hatreds, lost, creaky-souled Jews who can't even smell the sea any more, who haven't seen a star or a sunrise or a sunset or a summer night or a cypress tree swaying in the moonlight for a thousand years, dead Molochs devouring their children, insatiate schemers swamped by stale affections, weaving their hideous spider webs around us, deader than dead. One a big blob who looks like a putrescent dinosaur, the other a stoop-shouldered gorilla with the head of a mangy lion and arms as hairy as a caveman's. Not even a mad dog would expect any love from these two, would even wag his tail for them. I'll bang on the table! I'll make the walls blanch with fright! I'll flabbergast them down to their bootsoles! I'll tell them that all is lost, that Yonatan, and they'd better believe it, ran for dear life because he saw the ship going down. How I wish I had a cigarette. Good God, he's fallen asleep again.