A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [177]
Now you can hear the full depths of the desert silence. It isn't the quiet before the storm, or the silence of the end of the world, but a silence that only covers another, even deeper, silence. I stand there for three or four minutes inhaling silence like a smell. Then I turn back. I walk back up from the wadi to the end of my road, arguing with an angry chorus of dogs that start barking at me from every garden. Perhaps they imagine that I'm threatening to help the desert invade the town.
In the branches of the first tree in the garden of the first house a whole parliament of sparrows are deep in a noisy argument, all interrupting each other with deafening shrieks: they seem to be roaring rather than chirping. As though the departure of the night and the breaking of the day are unprecedented developments that justify an emergency meeting.
Along the road an old car is starting up with a hoarse coughing fit, like a heavy smoker. The newspaper boy vainly tries to make friends with an uncompromising dog. A thickset, tanned neighbor, with a thicket of gray hair on his bare chest, a retired colonel, whose foursquare body reminds me of a tin trunk, is standing half naked in blue running shorts, watering the bed of roses in front of his house.
"Your roses are looking wonderful. Good morning, Mr. Shmuelevich."
"What's so good about it?" he assails me. "Has Shimon Peres finally stopped selling out the whole country to Arafat?"
And when I remark that some people see it differently, he adds bitterly:
"It seems one holocaust wasn't enough to teach us a lesson. Do you really call this disaster peace? Have you ever heard of the Sudetenland? Or Munich? Or Chamberlain? Well?"
I do indeed have a detailed, reasoned reply to this, but thanks to the reserves of calm I have built up earlier, in the wadi, I bring up the words:
"Somebody was playing the Moonlight Sonata in your house about eight o'clock last night. I was walking past and I even stopped to listen for a few minutes. Was it your daughter? She played beautifully. Tell her."
He moved the hose to the next bed and smiled at me like a shy schoolboy who has suddenly been chosen as class monitor by secret ballot. "That wasn't my daughter," he says, "she's gone off to Prague. That was her daughter. My granddaughter, Daniella. She came third out of the whole Southern Region in the Young Talent Competition. Though everyone without exception says she should have been second. She writes beautiful poems too. So sensitive. Would you have time to take a look at them? Maybe you could give her some encouragement. Or even send them to a newspaper, for publication. They'd be bound to publish them if you sent them."
I promise Mr. Shmuelevich that I'll read Daniella's poems when I have a chance. Gladly. Certainly. Why not. Don't mention it.
In my heart I enter this promise as my contribution to the advancement of peace. Back in my study, with a mug of coffee in my hand and the morning paper spread out on the sofa, I stand at the window for another ten minutes. I hear on the news about a seventeen-year-old Arab girl who has been seriously injured by a round of bullets after she tried to stab an Israeli soldier with a knife at a roadblock outside Bethlehem. The early morning light, which was blended with a gray mist, has begun to glow and turned to a harsh, uncompromising blue.
***
At my window there is a little garden, a few shrubs, a vine, and a sickly lemon tree: I don't know yet if it will live or die, its foliage is pale, its trunk is bent like an arm that someone is forcing backward. The Hebrew word for "bent," which happens to begin with the letters AK, reminds me of what my father used to say, that every word that begins with AK signifies something bad. "And you must have noticed yourself, Your Highness, that your own initials, whether by chance or not, are also AK."
Maybe I should write an article today for Yediot