Scenes From Village Life - Amos Oz [14]
He had never forgiven his Party for falling apart and disappearing twenty-five years earlier. He was pitiless in his criticism of his opponents and enemies, all of them long since deceased. The younger generation, electronics and modern literature all earned his disgust. The newspapers published nothing but filth. Even the man who presented the weather forecast on television seemed to him like an arrogant matinee idol who mumbled nonsense and had no idea what he was talking about.
He deliberately confused or "forgot" the names of present-day political leaders, just as the world had forgotten him. He, however, had forgotten nothing: he remembered the tiniest details of every insult, resented every wrong that had been done to him two and a half generations earlier, kept a mental note of every weakness shown by his opponents, every opportunistic vote in the Knesset, every glib lie ever uttered in committee, every disgrace brought on themselves by his comrades of forty years ago (whom he tended to refer to as false comrades, and, in the case of two junior ministers of his day, Comrade Hopeless and Comrade Useless).
One evening, as he was sitting with his daughter Rachel at the veranda table, he suddenly waved a pot of hot tea in the air and roared:
"A fine figure they cut, the whole lot of 'em, when Ben-Gurion took off for London to flirt with Jabotinsky behind their backs!"
"Pesach," his daughter said, "put that teapot down, if you don't mind. Yesterday you splashed me with yogurt, and any minute now you're going to scald both of us."
The old man even bore a grudge against his beloved daughter. True, she looked after him irreproachably every day, but she showed him no respect. Every morning she banished him from his bed at seven-thirty so that she could air or change the sheets, because he always smelled like overripe cheese. She never hesitated to comment on his body odor, and in the summer she would make him shower twice a day. Twice a week she would wash and brush his hair and launder his black beret. She was always throwing him out of the kitchen, because he would rummage in the drawers, searching for the chocolate that she hid from him; she never allowed him more than a square or two a day. Reproachfully she would remind him to flush the toilet and zip up his fly. Three times a day she laid out a line of little bottles containing the pills and capsules he had to take. All this Rachel did firmly, with economical, angular movements and pursed lips, as though it were her job to reeducate her aging father, to correct his bad habits and finally wean him off a long life of selfishness and self-indulgence.
To cap it all, the old man had begun to complain in the morning of workmen who were digging under the house during the night and disturbing his sleep, as though they couldn't dig in the daytime, when decent, law-abiding people were not asleep.
"Digging? Who's digging?"
"That's what I'm asking you, Rachel. Who is it that's digging here at night?"
"Nobody's digging, during the day or at night, except perhaps in your dreams."
"They are digging, I tell you! It starts an hour or two after midnight, all sorts of tapping and scraping sounds. You must be sleeping the sleep of the just if you don't hear it. You always were a heavy sleeper. What are they digging for, in the cellar or under the foundation? Oil? Gold? Buried treasure?"
Rachel changed the old man's sleeping pills, but it was no good. He went on complaining of knocking and digging sounds right under the floor of his bedroom.
2
RACHEL FRANCO, A GOOD-LOOKING, well-groomed widow in her mid-forties, taught literature in the village school. She was always tastefully dressed in full skirts in attractive pastel colors, with a matching scarf, delicate earrings