Scenes From Village Life - Amos Oz [0]
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
Heirs
1
2
3
4
5
Relations
1
2
3
4
5
6
Digging
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
Lost
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Waiting
1
2
3
4
5
6
Strangers
1
2
3
4
5
6
Singing
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
In a faraway place at another time
First U.S. edition
Copyright © 2011 by Amos Oz
Translation copyright © 2011 by Nicholas de Lange
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
First published in Hebrew as Tmunot Mihayei Hakfar
First published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus, 2011
www.hmhbooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Oz, Amos.
[Temunot me-haye ha-kefar. English]
Scenes from village life / Amos Oz ; translated from the Hebrew by
Nicholas de Lange.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
"First published in Hebrew as Tmunot mihayei hakfar. First published in
Great Britain by Chatto & Windus, 2011"—T.p. verso.
ISBN 978-0-547-48336-8
1. Oz, Amos—Translations into English. I. De Lange, N. R. M. (Nicholas
Robert Michael), date. II. Title.
PJ5054.O9T4613 2011
892.4'36–dc22 2011016055
Book design by Brian Moore
Printed in the United States of America
DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Heirs
1
THE STRANGER WAS not quite a stranger. Something in his appearance repelled and yet fascinated Arieh Zelnik from first glance, if it really was the first glance: he felt he remembered that face, the arms that came down nearly to the knees, but vaguely, as though from a lifetime ago.
The man parked his car right in front of the gate. It was a dusty, beige car, with a motley patchwork of stickers on the rear window and even on the side windows: a varied collection of declarations, warnings, slogans and exclamation marks. He locked the car, rattling each door vigorously to make sure they were all properly shut. Then he patted the hood lightly once or twice, as though the car were an old horse that you tethered to the gatepost and patted affectionately to let him know he wouldn't have long to wait. Then the man pushed the gate open and strode toward the vine-shaded front veranda. He moved in a jerky, almost painful way, as if walking on hot sand.
From his swing seat in a corner of the veranda Arieh Zelnik could watch without being seen. He observed the uninvited guest from the moment he parked his car. But try as he might, he could not remember where or when he had come across him before. Was it on a foreign trip? In the army? At work? At university? Or even at school? The man's face had a sly, jubilant expression, as if he had just pulled off a practical joke at someone else's expense. Somewhere behind or beneath the stranger's features there lurked the elusive suggestion of a familiar, disturbing face: was it someone who once harmed you, or someone to whom you yourself once did some forgotten wrong?
Like a dream of which nine-tenths had vanished and only the tail was still visible.
Arieh Zelnik decided not to get up to greet the newcomer but to wait for him here, on his swing seat on the front veranda.
As the stranger hurriedly bounced and wound his way along the path that led from the gate to the veranda steps, his little eyes darted this way and that as though he were afraid of being discovered too soon, or of being attacked by some ferocious dog that might suddenly leap out at him from the spiny bougainvillea bushes growing on either side of the path.
The thinning flaxen hair, the turkey-wattle neck, the watery, inquisitively darting eyes, the dangling chimpanzee arms, all evoked a certain vague unease.
From his concealed vantage point in the shade of a creeping vine, Arieh Zelnik noted that the man was large-framed but slightly flabby, as if he had just recovered from a serious illness, suggesting that he had been heavily built until quite recently, when he had begun to collapse inward and shrink inside his skin. Even his grubby beige