Amos Oz - Don't Call It Night

Linda served coffee in little decorated Greek cups. A regular glass menagerie filled three shelves: delicate tigers, transparent giraffes, shiny blue elephants, elegant lions that caught and reflected the light of the lamps, a tiny illuminated aquarium containing a single goldfish and a collection of miniature vases in whose glass little droplets of air are trapped forever like tears. Four years ago her husband the insurance agent left her because he had fallen in love with her sister. For years she has worked part-time as secretary in the little washing-machine factory here. She plays the piano at the rehearsals of the local choir. She signs up for every trip organized by the Workers' Council, takes part in voluntary activities for the Immigration Absorption Committee, art and craft groups, the panel for promoting the art gallery, the support group for the day centre for the elderly. A shy, asthmatic woman in her forties, with an old-fashioned plait coiled round her head, a whispery voice, and the thin, angular body of an adolescent. At our meetings she serves drinks and nuts, and then curls up quietly in a corner of the settee as though her forehead is being drawn towards her knees.

At the beginning of the meeting we asked Ludmir to take the minutes. Ludmir is a tall, suntanned man of seventy, long and thin and slightly stooped; reminiscent of an oddly proportioned ornamental camel made of wire and raffia, he gives the impression that his long, veiny tanned legs in their threadbare khaki shorts and battered flip-flops are attached directly to his chest. He has a prophetic mane of grey hair. Armed only with bitterness and angry pathos, he has been jousting year after year with one dragon or another. And still he never forgets his catch phrase: "Noa smoke without a fire". Ever since they moved to Tel Kedar in the days of the pioneer camp he and his wife Gusta have lived in a small, immaculate shack, overgrown with passiflora, behind Founders' House. Gusta Ludmir, a tall, severe, bespectacled woman with grey plaits wound round her head like rope, gives private math lessons. In her old-fashioned dresses, secured at the neck with a gloomy silver beetle, she sometimes reminds me of an aristocratic English widow from times gone by. Once, four or five years ago, a short while after he retired from the electricity company, Ludmir told me that his only grandchild, a girl of sixteen, whom he and his wife were bringing up, suddenly determined to leave home and go and live on her own in a rented room in Tel Aviv so she could study in a special school of dancing. Ludmir insisted that I speak to her "and prevent her throwing away her young life in the maelstrom of the big city, where all that lies in wait for a youngster like herself is ugliness and degeneracy disguised under the blandishments of a glittering career". So I invited Lailach Ludmir, a nervous, suspicious girl with the eyes of a hunted gazelle, her head sunk in her shoulders as though it had been hammered in forever, for a cup of hot chocolate at the California Café. And I tried to understand her dreams. But when I laid my hand for an instant on her tense shoulder she started, turned white and ran away. That was how I learned to take care not to touch children. Ludmir stopped talking to me, having come to the conclusion that I had ruined everything and that it was all my fault that he would die lonely. Two years later he forgave me, having come to a different conclusion, that in the last analysis we are all condemned to loneliness. "Noa smoke without a fire" were the words with which he first removed the interdict. But every now and then he shoots me a long wounded glare from those blue, childlike eyes of his that suddenly fill with pain.

Linda went to her kitchen to make another round of coffee and to prepare some fruit and shop-bought crackers. She told us to start the meeting without her, with the door open she could hear everything from the kitchen. I went out too to give her a hand and by the time we returned Ludmir had already erupted and was shouting furiously at Muki — how had we dared to purchase that filthy ruin, on our own initiative, without convening the committee, that whorehouse, that vipers' nest of drug-crazed criminals, without taking the trouble to ask ourselves what the public implications might be: "Not for me redemption's message if it issues from a leper," he quoted, attributing the line to Lea Goldberg. When I pointed out it was actually by Rahel, the molten lava changed course from Muki Peleg to me — such condescension, such arrogant pedantry, what are we here for, an operation to rescue young lives or an academic seminar? Are we a lifesaving team, or mere puppets in the provincial drama of a bored lady who is laying yet another trap to catch herself a new father in the form of a shady arms-dealer whom she will reduce in his turn to a baby for her own amusement?

So saying he threw the minute book down on the table and walked out, slamming the door behind him. He was resigning. Leaving in disgust. Abandoning Sodom and Gomorrah to their fate. A couple of minutes later he rang the bell and returned. He picked up the minute book in resentful silence and sat for the rest of the evening with his back to us in the corner near the aquarium. It turned out later that he nevertheless made a faithful and accurate record of the whole proceedings, confining himself to adding at certain points in the minutes" sic " in square brackets, accompanied by an exclamation point.

Spreading out the notes I had previously prepared before me on the table, I put on my glasses and proceeded from one point to the next. There were various possible ways of calming the suspicions that were brewing in the town. For example, we could offer to treat, at no cost, local youngsters who became addicted. We could agree to give the Education Committee, the managers of the school and the teachers permanent representation on the Board of Governors of the clinic. Or, rather not so much a clinic as a therapeutic community. It was worth stressing the intention of offering fellowships to some prominent specialists in the areas of drugs and young people, so that Tel Kedar would gradually become a prestigious research centre, attracting up-and-coming scholars and scientists from all over the country. It would make sense to harp on the pioneering theme and on the idea of community involvement. We should try to emphasize the creation of employment for teams of educators, psychologists, social workers, people who would be able to make a contribution to the life of the town. Scientific opinion on the treatment of addiction was divided between a biological and a psychological approach, and here we would be able to combine the two. And why shouldn't we try to involve the local police chief, who could issue a statement recommending that we grapple openly with the problem of addiction among the young instead of sweeping it under the carpet? It would be to our advantage if it was the police who explained to the public that the creation of a closed institute would reduce rather than increase the crime rate in the town. Above all, we must stress the motifs of communal responsibility, civic pride, an initiative that would make Tel Kedar into a model and example for other towns.

Ludmir broke his offended silence to hiss: Stress the motifs, did you hear that?

And when he looked at me, the repressed pain welled up in his eyes again.

Meanwhile, Muki Peleg was dozing on the settee, his artistically tousled head burrowing into an embarrassed Linda's bony lap; he had removed his shoes and put his feet on my knees, as though forming a bridge between her body and mine. He muttered something in his sleep about the need for a personal approach. Ludmir erupted, again, his cracked voice rattling the glass menagerie and the collection of dewdrop vases:

Hypocrisy shall not prevail!

I realized it was time to bring the meeting to an end. I proposed that we should reconvene in a week's time, after I had had a meeting with the chief of police. As we were getting up to go, Linda shyly asked if we would stay for a few minutes longer, she had a little piece she'd like to play for us, it wasn't anything special, we shouldn't expect too much, it was really very short. She sat down at the piano with her head bent, as though trying to touch the keys with her forehead. In the middle of her piece she had an attack of asthma and coughed so badly that she could not breathe and had to stop playing. Muki Peleg fetched her little Ventolin inhaler from her bedroom; then, before our eyes, he put a teaspoon in the pocket of his pink shirt and a moment later produced it laughingly from Ludmir's hair. He was the only one to laugh; apologizing, he stroked the gasping Linda with one hand and me with the other.