Scenes From Village Life - Amos Oz [23]
Adel made his own meals: brown bread with slices of tomato, olives, cucumber, onion and green pepper, with pieces of salty cheese or sardines, a hard-boiled egg, zucchini or eggplant cooked with garlic and tomato sauce, washed down with his favorite drink, which he brewed in a soot-stained tin kettle: hot water and honey, flavored with sage leaves and cloves or with rose petals.
Rachel sometimes watched him from the veranda as he sat on his usual step, with his back against the side of the shed, his notebook on his knees, writing, pausing, thinking, writing a few more words, then pausing again, thinking, writing another line or two, getting up and walking slowly around the yard, turning off a sprinkler, feeding the cats or scattering a handful of durra for the pigeons.(He had also installed a dovecote at the bottom of the yard.)Then he would sit down again on his step, play his five or six tunes one after the other, eliciting heart-rendingly plaintive, long-drawn-out notes from his harmonica, then wipe the instrument carefully on his shirt tail and tuck it into his breast pocket. Then he would bend over his notebook again.
Rachel Franco, too, wrote in the evenings. Three or four times a week, almost every day during that summer, she and her old father sat facing each other on the veranda, on either side of the table that was covered in a flowered oilcloth. The old man talked and talked, while Rachel, frequently pursing her lips, wrote down his memories.
11
"YITZHAK TABENKIN," Pesach Kedem said, "better you shouldn't ask me anything about Tabenkin." (She didn't.) "When he was an old man Tabenkin decided to disguise himself as a Hasidic rabbi: he grew his beard down to his knees and started issuing rabbinic rulings. But I don't want to say a single word about him. For good or ill. He was a considerable fanatic, believe me, and he was a dogmatist, too. A cruel, tyrannical man. He maltreated even his wife and his children all those years. But what is he to me? I have nothing to say about him. You can torture me if you like, you won't get me to say a bad word about Tabenkin. Or a good one either. Kindly note down: Pesach Kedem chooses to maintain a total silence over the whole incident of the great split between him and Tabenkin in 1952. Did you write that down? Word for word? Then kindly add this, too: From an ethical viewpoint, Poalei Zion stood at least two or three rungs below Hapoel Hatza'ir. No. That you should please cross out. Instead you should write: Pesach Kedem no longer sees any reason to become involved in the controversy between Poalei Zion and Hapoel Hatza'ir. It's all over and done with. History has proved both of them wrong, and proved to anyone who is not a fanatic or a dogmatist how wrong they were and how right I was in that controversy. I state this with all due modesty, and with total objectivity: I was right where they both erred. No, cross out ‘erred' and write ‘transgressed.' And they added iniquity to transgression when they hurled groundless accusations and all sorts of stuff and nonsense at me. But history itself, objective reality, came along and proved in black on white how they had wronged me. And the worst offenders were Comrade Hopeless and Comrade Useless, Tabenkin's cat's-paws. Full stop. Yet there was a time, when we were young, that I liked them both. I even liked Tabenkin sometimes, before he became a rabbi. And they liked me up to a point, too. We dreamed of improving ourselves, of improving the whole world. We loved the hills and the valleys, and the wilderness up to a point. Where were we, Rachel? How did we get here? Where were we before?"
"Tabenkin's beard, I think."
She filled his glass with Coca-Cola, a drink that he had lately come to be so fond of that it had taken the place for him of both tea and lemonade. Only he insisted