A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [176]
Yet she had always been a person of precision, earnestness, and inner seriousness. It's hard to explain.
I never saw her again after that morning. I heard that she finally moved to a new area. I heard that over the years she had a number of close women friends who were younger than herself and younger than me. I heard that she had cancer, and that one Friday night in 1984 she died in terrible pain. But I never went back to see her, I never wrote to her, I never sent her any of my books, and I never set eyes on her again except a couple of times in literary supplements and once more, on the day of her death, for less than half a minute, toward the end of the TV news (and I wrote about her, and her room, in The Same Sea).
When I stood up to go, it turned out that the ceiling had become lower over the years. It almost touched my head.
The years had not changed her much. She had not become ugly, or fat, or shriveled, the lightning of her eyes still flashed out occasionally while we talked, like a beam sent to search all my hidden recesses. Yet even so, something had changed. As though over the decades that I had not seen her, Teacher Zelda had grown to resemble her old-fashioned apartment.
She was like a silver candlestick, like a candlestick glowing dimly in a dark void. And I should like to be as precise here as it is possible to be: in that last meeting Zelda seemed to me like the candle, the candlestick, and the dark void.
39
EVERY MORNING, a little before or a little after sunrise, I am in the habit of going out to discover what is new in the desert. The desert begins here in Arad at the end of our road. An easterly morning breeze comes from the direction of the Mountains of Edom, stirring little eddies of sand here and there that try unsuccessfully to rise up from the ground. Each of them struggles, loses its whirlwind shape, and dies down. The hills themselves are still hidden by the mist that comes up from the Dead Sea and covers the rising sun and the highlands with a gray veil, as though it were autumn already instead of summer. But it is a false autumn: in another couple of hours it will be dry and hot again here. Like yesterday. Like the day before yesterday, like a week ago, like a month ago.
In the meantime the cool of the night is still holding its own. There is a pleasant smell of dust that has soaked up a lot of dew, blended with a faint smell of sulfur, goat droppings, thistles, and dead campfires. This is the smell of the Land of Israel from time immemorial. I go down into the wadi and advance along a winding path to the edge of the cliff from which I have a view of the Dead Sea, nearly three thousand feet below, fifteen and a half miles away. The shadow of the hills to the east falls on the water and gives it the color of old copper. Here and there a sharp needle of light manages to pierce the cloud for a moment and touch the sea. The sea responds with a dazzling shimmer, as though there is an electric storm raging under the surface.
From here to there stretch empty slopes of limestone dappled with black rocks. Among these rocks, exactly on the horizon at the top of the hill facing me, suddenly there are three black goats and with them a human figure standing motionlessly draped in black from head to foot. A Bedouin woman? And is that a dog next to her? And suddenly they've all disappeared beyond the line of the hills, the woman, the goats, and the dog. The gray light casts doubt on every movement. Meanwhile other dogs give voice in the distance. A little farther on, among the rocks by the side of the path, lies a rusty shell casing. How did it end up here? Maybe one night a camel caravan of smugglers passed here