Scenes From Village Life - Amos Oz [19]
"Shall I vaccinate that Arab student who lives in your kennel, too?" the vet suggested.
Despite this offer, he stayed on for a while with the student when he had finished his work, and even beat him at checkers.
All kinds of rumors buzzed around the village about the Arab boy who lived at Rachel Franco's, and Micky the vet hoped to take advantage of the opportunity and the game of checkers to sniff out any hint of what was really going on. And though he did not discover anything, he was able to tell people in the village that the Arab was twenty or twenty-five years younger than Rachel, easily young enough to be her son, and that he lived in a shed in the back garden, which she had fitted out with a desk and a bookcase—so he was an intellectual. The vet could also report that Rachel and the boy were, how to put it, not exactly indifferent to each other. No, he hadn't caught them holding hands or anything like that, but he had seen the boy hanging out her wash on the line behind the house. Even her underwear.
6
WEARING AN UNDERSHIRT and baggy underpants, the old man stood in the bathroom with his legs spread wide apart. He had forgotten to lock the door again. Again he had forgotten to lift the seat before using the toilet. Now he was leaning over the basin, frenziedly scrubbing his face, his shoulders, his neck, splashing water in every direction like a wet dog, snorting and gurgling under the jet of water, squeezing his left nostril so as to empty the contents of the right nostril into the basin, then pressing the right one so as to empty the other, clearing his throat, expectorating four or five times until the sputum was freed from his chest and projected against the side of the basin, and finally pummeling himself dry with a thick towel, as though he were scouring a frying pan.
When he was dry he put on a shirt, buttoning it up wrongly, and his shabby black beret and stood hesitantly in the corridor for a while, his head thrust forward almost at a right angle, silently chewing his tongue. Then he wandered from room to room and went down into the cellar, looking for telltale signs of the nocturnal digging, cursing the workmen who had managed to erase every trace of their activity, unless perhaps it was deeper, under the floor of the cellar, in the foundation, under the heavy earth. From the cellar he went up to the kitchen, and out through the kitchen door into the yard, among the abandoned sheds, striding angrily to the far end. On his return he found Rachel sitting at the table on the veranda, bent over some marking. From the steps he said to her:
"But on the other hand, I am pretty repulsive myself. As you must admit. So what do you need with that vet of yours? Isn't one repulsive man enough for you?"
Then he added sadly, referring to Rachel in the third person, as though she were not present:
"I need a piece of chocolate every now and then, to bring some sweetness into my dark life, but she hides it from me as though I were a burglar. She doesn't understand anything. She thinks I need the chocolate because I'm greedy. Wrong! I need it because my body has stopped producing sweetness of its own. I haven't got enough sugar in my blood and my tissues. She understands nothing! She's so cruel! So cruel!" And on reaching the door of his bedroom, he stopped, turned and shouted to her: "And all these cats only bring diseases! Fleas! Germs!"
7
THE ARAB STUDENT was the son of an old friend of Danny Franco, Rachel's husband, who went and died on his fiftieth birthday. What was the nature of the friendship between Danny Franco and Adel's father? Rachel didn't know, and Adel didn't talk about it. Maybe he didn't know either.
He had appeared one morning the previous summer, introduced