Scenes From Village Life - Amos Oz [15]
The village was old and sleepy, a hundred years old or more, with leafy trees and red roofs and agricultural smallholdings, many of which had been transformed into shops selling wines from boutique wineries, spicy olives, farmhouse cheeses, exotic flavorings and rare fruits, or macramé. The former farm buildings had been transformed into small galleries showing imported art works, decorative toys from Africa or items of furniture from India, which were sold to the visitors who streamed in from the towns in convoys every weekend, on the lookout for that original, exquisite find.
Rachel and her father lived in a secluded little house on the edge of the village, whose large garden abutted the cypress hedge of the local cemetery. Both of them had been widowed. Abigail, the wife of Pesach Kedem, MK, had died of blood poisoning many years previously. Their elder son, Eliaz, had died accidentally (he was the first Israeli to drown in the Red Sea, in 1949). As for Rachel's husband, Danny Franco, he had died of cardiac arrest on his fiftieth birthday.
Danny and Rachel Franco's younger daughter, Yifat, was married to a prosperous dentist in Los Angeles. Yifat's older sister, Osnat, was a diamond dealer in Brussels. Both daughters had distanced themselves from their mother, as though they held her responsible for their father's death, and they both disliked their grandfather, whom they considered spoiled, selfish and cantankerous.
Sometimes the old man, in a fit of rage, would call Rachel by her mother's name:
"No, seriously, Abigail, that was really beneath you. Shame on you!"
More rarely, when he was ill he confused Rachel with his own mother, Hinde, who had been killed by the Germans in a small village near Riga. When Rachel corrected him, he would angrily deny that he had made the mistake.
Rachel, however, never made a mistake where her father was concerned. She bore his apocalyptic rants and reproofs stoically, but she reacted ruthlessly to every display of sloppiness or self-indulgence. If he forgot to lift the seat when he went to the toilet, she would thrust a damp cloth in his hand and unceremoniously send him back to do what any civilized person should do. If he spilled soup on his trousers, she made him get up from the table at once and go to his room and change. She would not let him get away with buttoning up his shirt wrongly or walking around with his trouser leg caught in his sock. Whenever she told him off for sitting on the toilet for forty-five minutes or forgetting to lock the door, she called him by his name, Pesach. If she was exceptionally angry, she would address him as Comrade Kedem. But sometimes, very rarely, his loneliness or sadness stirred a fleeting pang of motherly tenderness in her. If, for instance, he turned up at the kitchen door with a hangdog air and pleaded like a child for another piece of chocolate, she might grant his request and even call him Daddy.
"They're boring underneath the house again. In the early hours of the morning I heard the sound of picks and shovels. Didn't you hear anything?"
"No, and you didn't either. You were imagining it."
"What are they looking for underneath the house, Rachel? Who are these workmen?"
"Maybe they're digging a tunnel for the underground railway."
"You're just making fun of me. But I'm not imagining things, Rachel. There is someone digging under the house. Tonight I'll wake you up so that you can hear it too."
"There's nothing to hear, Pesach. There's no one burrowing down there, except perhaps your bad conscience."
3
THE OLD MAN spent most of the day sprawled on a deck chair on the paved area in front of the house. If he felt restless, he would get up and flit like an evil spirit from room to room, go down to