Amos Oz - Don't Call It Night

In the course of four months we may have seen each other only seven or eight times, we went to art exhibitions and concerts, to restaurants that, after her slip-up the first night, we agreed between us she should not be the one to choose, and sometimes on a Sunday we went off for a few hours in the Jeep to the high mountains of the Cordillera del Litoral. She knew only a few hundred words of Spanish, but nevertheless, directly after listening to a short conversation I had had with a gas pump attendant or a technician from the administration, she would declare without the slightest hesitation that this man was a liar while the other, the fat one, actually liked people but was rather ashamed of it and that was why he was so gruff. What have you swallowed, Noa? A seismograph? A lie detector? She didn't hurry to answer these questions. When she did finally reply, I couldn't see the connection: I grew up, she said, with a paralysed father and an aunt who was demented by her own idealism, I had to keep my eyes open.

At the end of the evening I would accompany her to the apartment that the Embassy had taken for her, on the ground floor of a house belonging to some wealthy Jews. We parted at the gate with a goodnight kiss on the cheek or the hair, she had to stand on tiptoe while I almost bowed to her, breathing my fill of that scent of honeysuckle. Gradually I noticed that my trips were tending to bring me to Caracas more and more often. I bought her a pair of woollen socks and a llama wool scarf. She bought me a pot of honey. Then one night, in the spring, there was a thunderstorm and a long power cut and she decided that this time I could stay the night: she had a sofa-bed. She sat me on her bed, the rain was beating on the windows like stones, she lighted a kerosene heater; poured me a glass of my own brandy, brought some fruit, paper napkins; then all at once she changed her mind, blew out the candle, sat herself down next to me and said, The courting's over, let's make love. And she started unbuttoning my shirt. At that moment I felt a warm flood not just of desire but of protectiveness. Her sensuality turned out to be dead straight, open, and yet — curious, with a strong determination to study me at once and in depth, to skip the niceties, make my acquaintance thoroughly and quickly, establish a foothold in me that very night.

Straight after the love, she fell asleep lying on her stomach like a baby, her face in the hollow of my shoulder.

In the morning she said: You enjoyed that a hell of a lot. Like a stallion. Me too.

After the night of the storm and after the following nights, I was still certain that there was no permanent relationship. I still saw myself ending my days alone. But she and I could not have an agreement of the sort I had had all those years with transient women in hotels, villages, hammocks, Development Agency hostels, the two-clause agreement: fair pleasure and farewell. On the contrary: our friendship became open and playful after the night of the storm. We both felt easier and better. It was a strange experience, because up to then I didn't really believe in friendship, certainly not friendship between a man and a woman. Intimacy, yes, and passion, and fair play, and passing affection, and pleasure for pleasure, give and take, all these I had known over the years, and always in the shadow of the inescapable combination of desire and embarrassment. With the limits marked out in advance. But open-handed friendship, an unembarrassed relationship, no limits, I didn't think that was possible between me and a woman. In fact I didn't think it was possible between any two people. Then along came Noa, in her colourful summer dresses that whirled round her legs, with rows of large buttons fastened with loops down the front, the whole length of her lithe body, teasing me, slapping my shoulder sometimes in a gesture of relaxed comradeship, her deep simple sexuality like warm brown bread, the way she loved to strip us both naked in broad daylight, on the bank of a stream or in a clearing in the forest, free from all embarrassment, of flesh, or cash, or feelings, and the way she seemed to have made up her mind to untie me too and set me free.

Once I stayed with her for three days and three nights. When it was time to leave for the airport I said, Look, no arguments, I'm leaving you four hundred dollars on the shelf here. It's what I'd have spent on a hotel. And you're living such a hand-to-mouth existence. Noa said: Fine. That's okay. Thanks. A moment later she changed her mind, she'd worked out that the three days I'd stayed with her hadn't set her back more than a hundred. So what, I said, you've earned the rest from me honestly, you can use it to buy a television, call it a present from me, if you start watching a bit in the evenings you might learn some Spanish at last. Noa said, I'm all for a television, but they start at six hundred here and I can't make up the difference. I liked that. And I liked the way she could turn her back on me for a couple of hours, immune to all pleas and blandishments, concentrating on marking some tests that she'd promised to hand back the next morning. Even when we only had one evening together. Once she looked up suddenly from her marking and said in a concentrated way, without a smile: You're a man who likes summing up. Don't sum me up just yet.

In April we both fell sick, me first, with relapsing fever. We must have picked up a tick or a louse on one of our Sunday outings. She put me to bed in a sort of flannel prison nightshirt, with a blue wollen turban on my head like an Indian baby's that covered my forehead and my ears, covered me with four blankets, half-drowned me with a boiling-hot infusion of cactuses that her mad aunt had taught her to make, took several days off work in the Israeli class and the Embassy to nurse me and, wrapping herself in a thick brown grandmotherly dressing gown, she sat next to me and told me in a soft, soporific voice all about her father the paralyzed boxer and her Tolstoyan aunt and Yoshku the born-again Jew and some clown of a Peeping Tom by the name of Golovoy or Gorovoy. The story got more and more complicated and more and more misty until I fell asleep, and I slept for three days and woke cured and cancelled my flight to Veracruz because Noa herself fell sick. She was a demanding invalid. She wrapped her two fists in my hands and wouldn't let me open them for several hours, it was the only way she could keep warm, despite the four blankets and my leather jacket that I wrapped tightly round her legs and zipped up. By the time we had recovered there was such a deep intimacy between us that Noa commissioned me to buy her some German cream for a vaginal inflammation in a pharmacy in Mexico City. At Easter I took her for a weekend to see the place where they were building a new town with a ring of six modern villages round it, all according to my plans, all in the first phases of construction in the south of the state of Tabasco. Noa said: It's spectacular; no it's not, it's human — if only they'd realize back home that it's possible to build like this before it's too late. I said: Maybe in Israel they don't need to build like this, they certainly don't need to build the kind of barracks they build there. In Israel the horizon is different. At least, it used to be. Incidentally, what makes you think that spectacular is the, opposite of human?

Noa said, with no obvious connection: Look at us, a pair of teachers with no children, correcting each other all day long. It won't be easy, but at least it won't be boring.

In June, at the end of the school year, she suddenly said: I'm through here. I'm going back to Tel Aviv. Are you coming?

Look, I said, it doesn't work like that. I've got a contract till December and unfinished projects in Tabasco and Veracruz, and there's nothing waiting for me in Israel at all. Noa said: Me neither. Are you coming or staying?