Scenes From Village Life - Amos Oz [26]
Every evening Rachel Franco and ex-MK Pesach Kedem sat on the veranda, where they had installed an electric fan with an extension cord. Rachel would be busy with marking, while the old man leafed through some magazine or pamphlet, turning the pages backward and forward, grumbling and growling, swearing and cursing at the hotheads and imbeciles. Or alternatively full of self-loathing, calling himself a cruel tyrant, making up his mind to ask for forgiveness from Micky the vet: Why did I mock him, why did I nearly throw him out of the house last week? After all, he does his job conscientiously at least. I could have become a vet myself, instead of becoming an apparatchik, and then I could have brought some good into the world, I could have managed occasionally to reduce the amount of pain around here.
Sometimes the old man dozed with his mouth open, wheezing, his white mustache stirring as though endowed with a secret life of its own. When Rachel got through her marking, she might pick up the brown notebook and take down her father's account of the tragic rift between the majority faction and Group B, or his description of his own position during the Great Split, how right he had been and how wrong were the various false prophets and how differently things might have turned out if only both sides had listened to him.
They did not discuss the nocturnal digging sounds. The old man had made up his mind to catch the miscreants red-handed, while Rachel had developed an explanation of her own of her father's and Adel's disturbed nights: the former was half deaf and heard noises inside his head, and the latter was a nervous and perhaps slightly neurotic young man with a highly developed imagination. It was possible, Rachel thought, that some distant sounds came in the early hours of the morning from one of the neighboring properties: perhaps they were milking the cows, and the noise of the milking machine, coupled with the sound of the metal gate opening and closing as the cows went through, might have sounded, on these oppressive summer nights, like the noise of digging. Or they might both have heard in their sleep the sound of the old, worn-out drains that ran under the house.
One morning, while Adel was doing the ironing in Rachel's bedroom, the old man suddenly pounced on him, with his head thrust forward like a charging bull, and began to interrogate him:
"So, you're a student, eh? What sort of student are you then?"
"I'm an arts student."
"Arts, huh? What art exactly? The art of talking nonsense? The art of deception? The dark arts? And if you are indeed an arts student, then tell me this if you don't mind: what are you doing here, why aren't you at university?"
"I'm taking a break from university. I'm trying to write a book about you."
"About us?"
"About you, and about us. A comparison."
"A comparison. What sort of a comparison? A comparison to show that we are the robbers and you are the robbed? To reveal our ugly face?"
"Not ugly, exactly. More like unhappy."
"And how about your face? Isn't it unhappy? Are you so pretty? Beyond reproach? Saintly and pure?"
"We're unhappy too."
"So there's no difference between us? If that's the case, why are you sitting here writing a comparison?"
"There are some