Amos Oz - A Perfect Peace

I found Yolek sleeping soundly on his living-room couch, though his breathing was heavy and broken intermittently by snores. Rachel Stutchnik was sitting in the armchair by his side, embroidering. Just as I had instructed. She told me that the doctor had been by twice during the night, given Yolek an injection, and found him slightly improved. In spite of this I decided then and there that I would have him sent to the hospital in the morning whether he agreed or not. I'd had enough of his whims.

On the path outside, Etan R. was sound asleep at the wheel of the pickup truck, just where I had told him to be. No, I see no mistakes in the arrangements I made today.

I did not, however, enter the last shack. Some inner discomfort held me back. Through the curtainless window, by the light of a bare yellow bulb, I did see Bolognesi, however, his head wrapped in a cloth that hid his rotten ear, a woolen blanket around him, sitting erect on his bed, his knitting needles clicking away, rocking rhythmically back and forth, his lips moving.

We stood there for a few minutes, the dog and I, sniffing the night breeze. Had not Rimona promised that winter was over and spring was on its way?

Some day, when all this is only a memory, I'll ask Hava to have Bolognesi over to my place for tea. No good can come of such total solitude. No good has come from my thousands of lonely nights of flute playing and journal keeping. Twenty-five years of them. How old would my oldest child be now if I had fought for P.? How old might my grandchildren be?

I purposely took a roundabout route to pass by her home. Darkness. The privet-and-myrtle hedge. Her underwear hanging on the laundry line. Shush, whispered the horsetail tree. Why haven't I given her so much as a single hint that I love her? Supposing I wrote her a letter? Supposing I brought her, one by one and without any warning, all forty-eight volumes of this journal? Should I? What better time than now, when Hava is installed in my apartment and I am the new secretary of the kibbutz?

Just then I saw the headlights of a car in the square in front of the dining hall. I hurried, almost ran, there, Tia loping in front of me. An army vehicle. The slam of a door. A rifle. A uniform. My heart skipped a beat. But no, it wasn't Yonatan; it was his younger brother Amos, sweaty and frazzled-looking. I sat him down on a bench beneath a light at one end of the square. Amos had been on a routine patrol along the Syrian border when a special car manned by the brigadier's driver picked him up and brought him straight home without explanation. Did I have any idea, he demanded to know, what exactly was going on and what all the fuss was about?

I explained it all to him as succinctly as I could. About his brother, his father, his mother. After asking him if he wanted anything to eat or drink, I considered for a moment bringing him back with me and waking Hava, but in the end decided against it. It could wait, and I'd already had enough melodrama for one day. If he wasn't hungry or thirsty, then, I wished him a good night's sleep.

And so I went home, giving Tia a long goodbye pat at the door and smiling at myself in sheer amazement. Since when have I become a dog-petter?

I'm writing these last lines standing up, without taking off my coat, hat, or scarf. I'm wide awake. In fact, I have an urge to go back out and stroll some more, perhaps even join Stutchnik and help him with the night milking as I used to do twenty years ago. We could harmonize our baritones again to some old poem of Bialik's or Tshernichovsky's set to music. Anything to avoid talking, because we have talked more than enough.

Yes, that's exactly what I'm going to do. I'm going to make the rounds once more. It's been a long, complicated day, and who knows what's in store for me tomorrow. Tonight's report is done. And so I'll say to myself, good night, Secretary Srulik.

His rifle dangled from his shoulder, his day-old beard was powdered with gray dust; his bloodshot eyes squinted in the harsh light. It took almost a quarter of an hour of wandering among the shacks and tents of Ein-Husub before Yonatan finally found the kitchen, where he wolfed down four thick slices of bread spread with jam and margarine, three hard-boiled eggs, and two cups of what passed for coffee. Surreptitiously making off with a can of sardines and half a loaf of bread for the trip ahead, he returned to Michal's room, lay down on her rumpled bed, and, drenched in sweat, slept for over an hour. In the end, the flies and the suffocating heat roused him. He got up, stepped outside, stripped to the waist, stuck his head and shoulders beneath a faucet, and let its warm, rusty water run over him. Then, his rifle and knapsack at his feet, he sat down behind an empty corrugated lean-to. He spread two maps side by side on the sand in the shade of its asbestos wall, weighted their corners with stones against the desert wind, and began to study them. He also leafed through the booklet entitled Sites in the Arava and the Desert that he had taken from Michal's shelf.

The route seemed simple enough. He would hitch to a spot just before Bir-Meliha. From there, in the twilight, it would be two-and-a-half kilometers by foot to the unmarked border running along the bed of Wadi Araba. He'd follow this bed in a northeasterly direction until he reached the mouth of Wadi Musa. Then a brisk walk up the wadi through the night.

Some five kilometers east of the border the Jordanian road runs south to Aqaba. I'll have to cross it carefully. Then, if I cover twenty kilometers during the night, I can reach the junction of Wadi Musa and Wadi Sil-el-Ba'a, where the ravine narrows to a deep gorge, by daybreak. I'll have to hole up there among the rocks, or in some cave if I can find one, and kill the day. Then, Friday night, I'll work my way up the gorge. After about two kilometers it swings almost ninety degrees to the south, and from there it's a pretty steep climb of some eight more kilometers to the outskirts of Petra. On Saturday morning I'll catch the sunrise there and maybe find out what this is all about. I wonder if Michal would have come with me. No. Don't kid yourself.

What's to see in Petra? According to Azariah Alon in this booklet, Petra is not, as was previously thought, the biblical Rock of Edom against which the prophets Jeremiah and Obadiah vented their wrath. I suppose Alon knows what he's talking about, but personally I don't give a damn. It could be the Rock of Chad for all I care. Petra means "rock" in Latin. And it happened to be the capital of the same Nabateans who lived in the Negev in the cities of Shivta and Ovda. A tribe of merchants, warriors, builders, farmers, and highwaymen. In short, a tribe just like us. Their king was called Haritat. They built Petra at the junction of the ancient road from Damascus to Arabia and the Darb-es-Sultan, the trade route from the desert to Gaza, Sinai, and Egypt. It was carved from the rock of a deep crater at the upper end of the wadi. Whole temples, palaces, royal tombs, and the great sanctuary called ed-Deir by the Arabs. All of this, it says here, has been standing unmarked by the tooth of time for two millennia. I like that: "the tooth of time." Desolate and without a human presence. Like my life. Save for the generations of grave robbers who ransacked its red palaces. And looted only to die. For the past fourteen hundred years Petra has been uninhabited. Except for the prowling fox and the night bird and the Bedouin of the Atallah tribe, who roam the area and make a living from herding and brigandage.

As he read still further, Yonatan's eye was caught by a line of English poetry that cast a strange spell over him:

A rose-red city, half as old as time.

He repeated the words over and over to himself, moving his lips silently, only to have his wife Rimona appear, lying cold and naked on the snowy sheets of their bed in the pale light of a summer moon that was turning corpse-white in the window. With a sad shake of his head, he went on reading.