A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [179]
But here in the square at the center of Arad the desert light banishes ghosts and dispels any memory of fir forests and misty autumns. The musician, with his shock of gray hair and his thick white mustache, reminds me a little of Albert Einstein, and a little too of Professor Samuel Hugo Bergman, who taught my mother philosophy on Mount Scopus; in fact I attended some unforgettable lectures of his myself at the Givat Ram Campus in 1961, on the history of dialogical philosophy from Kierkegaard to Martin Buber.
There are two young women, possibly of North African extraction, one of them very thin and wearing a semitransparent top and a red skirt, the other in a trouser suit replete with belts and buckles. They stop in front of the musician and listen to his playing for a minute or two. He is playing with his eyes closed and doesn't open them. The women exchange whispers, open their handbags, and each puts a shekel in the case.
The thin woman, whose upper lip is slightly drawn up toward her nose, says:
"But how can you tell they're real Jews? Half the Russians who come here, I've heard they're simply goyim who just take advantage of us to get the hell out of Russia and come here for the free handouts."
Her friend says:
"What do we care, let them all come, let him play in the street, Jew, Russian, Druze, Georgian, what difference is it to you? Their children will be Israelis, they'll go in the army, eat meatballs in pita with pickles, take out a mortgage, and moan all day long."
The red skirt remarks:
"What's the matter with you, Sarit? If they let in anyone who wants to come for free, including foreign workers and Arabs from Gaza and the territories, who's going to—"
But the rest of the discussion drifts away from me toward the parking lot of the shopping mall. I remind myself that I have not made any progress yet today and the morning is no longer young. Back in my study. The heat is beginning to be too much, and a dusty wind brings the desert indoors. I close the windows and shutters and draw the curtain, block every crack, just as Greta Gat, my child sitter, who was also a piano teacher, always used to seal her apartment and turn it into a submarine.
This study was built by Arab workers not many years ago. They laid the floor and checked it with a spirit level. They erected the door and window frames. They concealed the plumbing and electrical wiring in the walls and put in an outlet for the telephone. A large-bodied carpenter, an opera lover, made the cupboards and put up the bookshelves. A contractor who emigrated from Romania in the late 1950s sent for a truckload of rich topsoil from somewhere for the garden and laid it over the lime, chalk, flint, and salt that have always lain on these hills, like putting a plaster on a wound. In this good topsoil the previous occupant planted shrubs and trees and a lawn, which I do my best to look after but without overdoing the love, so that this garden doesn't suffer the same fate as the one my father and I planted with such good intentions.
A few dozen pioneers, including loners who loved the desert or were searching for solitude and also a few young couples, came and settled here in the early 1960s: miners, quarry workers, regular army officers, and industrial workers. Lova Eliav, with a handful of other town planners seized by Zionist enthusiasm, planned, sketched out, and immediately constructed this town, with its streets, squares, avenues, and gardens, not far from the Dead Sea, in an out-of-the-way place that at that time, in the early 1960s, was not served by any main road, water pipeline, or power supply, where there were no trees, no paths, no buildings, no tents, no signs of life. Even the local Bedouin settlements mostly came into being after