Amos Oz - Don't Call It Night

IT will cost me six thousand shekels to repair the fence. And it would be worth having a gate put in, to prevent people wandering around there at night. I still think that there won't be a drug treatment centre here, and yet I'm forever trying to devise some sort of compromise. What am I after? I don't know. Batsheva Dinur has called twice to ask where the detailed paper I promised her is. At night I sit and read the pamphlets and books that Noa leaves scattered around, open face-downwards, on the kitchen table, in the passage, on the settee, on the armchair on the balcony, in the toilet. I have already learned a thing or two, but the heart of the matter still eludes me. And meantime I have to protect the property against neglect and against the dubious characters who apparently bivouac there at night. I am starting to like the derelict building itself. I spend half an hour or so there every day with a sketchbook and pencil. Noting possibilities: the north window could be either here or there, and it could be made three times bigger. In the centre of the building, in the hall, if the plaster ceiling were demolished, the distance from floor into roof space would be almost twenty feet and it would be possible, for example, to suspend a gallery with a platform all around, with a spiral staircase and a wooden balustrade.

To Noa I said: Just give me a few more days.

It's not long ago that she begged me, Don't take everything away from me, Theo, yet now she has stopped interfering. As if she's lost interest. When I suggested she come with me to Jerusalem she said, I've got a bit of a temperature, and my head… you go and sort it out by yourself. When I got home in the evening and began to explain to her what I had achieved she said: Skip the details, Theo, I really don't care who else still remembers you from the days when you were the gleam in their eye, or what the Palmach got wrong in the War of Independence. Now that there seems to be at least a chance, she has lost that radiant joy that always seemed to well straight up from the core of life. She has lost that sparkle she had in her eye whenever she declared my judgment to be hot or cold, good or bad, or phony, or entrenched, as though she were grading the whole world. Instead of that flash of excitement there's a sort of abstraction that I've never seen in her before: she leaves home in the morning, comes back at midday, grabs something to eat standing up in front of the open refrigerator, leaves me the washing up and goes out again. Where does she have to go to now that the school is closed for the summer holidays and the staff have all vanished to their refresher courses and conferences? I take care not to ask. Or the opposite: she sits the whole morning watching children's programmes on TV, then vanishes in the evening till eleven o'clock. I might have suspected that she's got herself a lover at last, but it's just on these nights that she appears in my bedroom, smelling sweetly of honeysuckle, floating towards me barefoot and silent, in her demure nightdress that makes her look like a girl from a religious boarding school. I stand and kiss the brown birthmark beneath her hairline. My whole body strains to listen to her, like a doctor making a diagnosis, or as if she were my daughter who had suffered an unknown misfortune. I take hold of her hands that have aged ahead of her, and I am filled with a desire that is not made of desire but of a tender affection. I cup her breasts and run my fingers down the front of her thighs like a healer gently seeking to locate the pain. After the love, she falls asleep immediately, with her head in the hollow of my shoulder; the sleep of a babe, while I lie awake half the night, carefully attentive, breathing evenly so as not to disturb her. Though she sleeps deeply.

Sometimes I have found her sitting in the kitchen, or on the balcony, or once even in the California Café, with a dark-haired girl called Tali or Tal, apparently a pupil or ex-pupil of hers. She is a slim, finely sculpted girl, who looks like a little red Indian in her patched and faded jeans. I would have dressed her in a flame-red skirt. From a distance they seem to be immersed in a lively conversation, but as I get closer they stop talking as though they are waiting for me to go away and leave them alone. But in fact I have no desire to go away and leave them. I find there is something spellbinding about that Tali, perhaps precisely because she seems a little afraid of me, retreating to the edge of her chair, looking me up and down apprehensively, like a threatened animal. This has the effect of making me insist on joining them. Their conversation instantly dries up. An unwilling silence descends. A brief interrogation elicited the information that Tal was due to be called up for military service in November. She still had to face the matriculation exam in math, and that bitch Gusta Ludmir was giving her private tuition, but what a drag, logarithms, she wouldn't be able to pass that bit in a million years. I also discovered that she is the daughter of Paula Orlev from Desert Chic, where 1 almost bought Noa a folksy dress recently. What brought her here? Nothing special. And what did she think about the situation in the Occupied Territories? Or about the future of Israel? Or about life in Tel Kedar? About permissiveness? About life in general? Her replies were wishy-washy, lukewarm. Nothing that sticks in my memory. Except that her cat has had kittens and she wants to give us one. Can I get you a cold drink? No thanks, we've just had one. Some grapes? No thanks. Then I suppose you'd like me to leave you alone? You've left your keys on the table. And take your paper. 'Bye.

But I was in no hurry to leave them. On the contrary. What was the rush? I settled back in my chair and asked what people were saying in town about, say, the new string quartet. Or about the expansion of the parking lot in the square? And what plans did Tal have for the summer? From now till she was called up? Didn't she feel like getting away from the logarithms, getting to see something of the wide world, like the rest of them? Why not? What was wrong with the wide world? Would she be interested in some information about Latin America?

Noa intervened: Batsheva Dinur was trying to get you on the phone.

I caught the hint, and replied: So she was looking for me. Fine. In that case I'll just sit here with you till she calls again. Don't let me disturb you. Carry on. I'll just read my paper.

Once, jokingly, I asked Noa over our morning coffee what exactly she was scheming about for all those hours with her Indian princess. Does she bring you her love problems? Is there another story with drugs? Is there another memorial project in the offing? Noa flushed and said: Theo. That's enough. This is going to end badly. And when she saw that I wasn't letting go, she stood up and started ironing. Even though normally the ironing is my department.

So I decided to retreat, to effect a temporary withdrawal. I might have a chance some time to have a t£te-£-t£te with Tal. Or I might go to her mother's boutique by myself and buy Noa a surprise present of a light skirt in a colourful geometric print.

Meanwhile I have had worries of my own. Natalia, the young Russian woman who has been cleaning the office on Fridays, sent me the keys and said she couldn't go on. This time I made up my mind not to give in. A little detective work brought me the phone number of the grocer in the prefab complex and they agreed, not without coaxing, to go and call her to the telephone. After a determined struggle against shyness, politeness, apprehension and language difficulties, it turned out that apparently her unemployed husband, in another fit of jealousy, had forbidden her to go on working for me. So I got into the Chevrolet and spent a good half-hour wandering around the prefabs trying to find where exactly the husband hung out. I planned to talk him round, but it transpired from what the neighbours said that Natalia had run away from him and was staying with his father, who lived in a rented room near the square, less than two minutes from my office. A couple of days later the husband also moved into the old man's miserable room. By the time I found the place, Natalia had pulled out and moved back to the prefab. The father and the husband shouted suspicious questions through the locked door for five minutes before they consented to slide the chain and let me in. It turned out I had interrupted them in the middle of a game of cards, two strong, slightly balding men, who resembled each other like brothers, both of them round-headed and big-boned, with hefty weight-lifter's arms, baring rows of sharp teeth when they smiled, both with stubble-covered faces and wearing black T-shirts. For some reason, when I tried to talk to them about Natalia they burst into wet, noisy laughter as though I had been caught in the act, slapped my back, explained something in Russian and in another language I did not recognize, and in Russian again, then they had another good laugh, revealing their predatory teeth, and begged me with enthusiastic gestures and almost violent heartiness to join them in a game of poker. I stayed an hour or so, in the course of which I drank two vodkas and lost forty shekels.