Scenes From Village Life - Amos Oz [27]
"Like what, for example?"
Adel skillfully folded the blouse he was ironing, carefully laid it on the bed, placed another one on the ironing board and sprinkled some water on it from a bottle before starting to iron.
"Our unhappiness is partly our fault and partly your fault. But your unhappiness comes from your soul."
"Our soul?"
"Or from your heart. It's hard to know. It comes from you. From inside. The unhappiness. It comes from deep inside you."
"Tell me, please, Comrade Adel, since when do Arabs play the harmonica?"
"A friend of mine taught me. A Russian friend. And a girl gave it to me as a present."
"And why are you always playing sad tunes? Are you miserable here?"
"It's like this: whatever one plays on the harmonica, from a distance it always sounds sad. It's like you, from a distance you seem to be sad."
"And from close up?"
"From close up you seem to me more like an angry man. And now, please excuse me, I've finished the ironing and now I need to feed the pigeons."
"Mister Adel."
"Yes?"
"Please tell me, why are you digging under the cellar at night? It is you, isn't it? What are you hoping to find there?"
"What, do you hear noises at night too? How come Rachel doesn't hear them? She doesn't hear them and she doesn't believe they exist. Doesn't she believe you either?"
15
RACHEL DID NOT believe in her father's nocturnal imaginings or in Adel's dreams. Both of them probably heard the sounds of milking from one of the neighboring farms, or the army on night maneuvers in the farmland on the slopes of the hills, and translated these sounds in their imaginations into sounds of digging. Nevertheless, she decided to stay awake one night into the early hours so as to hear with her own ears.
Meanwhile, the last days of the term arrived. The older pupils were busy feverishly studying for exams, while in the middle grades discipline was deteriorating: students were late for class and some were absent, offering various excuses. The classes seemed poorly attended and restless, and Rachel taught her last lessons wearily. Several times she let a class off the last quarter of an hour and sent the pupils out into the playground early. Once or twice, by special request, she agreed to devote class time to a free discussion on a subject suggested by her pupils.
On Saturdays the narrow lanes of the village filled with visitors' cars, which were parked between fences and blocked the entrances. Crowds of bargain hunters thronged around the homemade cheese stalls, the spice shops and boutique wineries, the farmyards selling Indian furniture and ornaments from Burma and Bangladesh, the stores selling oriental rugs and carpets, the art galleries—all those activities the village had turned to as agriculture was gradually abandoned, though some farms still fattened calves, hatched chicks or grew houseplants in hothouses, and vines and fruit trees still covered the slopes of the hills.
As Rachel walked briskly down the road on her way to school and back again, people looked at her and wondered about her strange life, between her elderly parliamentarian and her Arab youth. Other farms, too, had hired workers—Thais, Romanians, Arabs and Chinese—but at Rachel Franco's nothing grew and no ornaments or art works were made. So why did she need this workman? And an intellectual, too. From the university. Micky the vet, who played checkers with the Arab worker, had said that he was some kind of student. Or bookworm.
Some said one thing, others another. Micky the vet himself stated that he had seen this Arab boy with his own eyes ironing and folding her underwear, and that he didn't only hang around the yard but actually had the freedom of the house, like a family member. The old man talked to him about the splits in the labor movement, and the Arab chatted with all the cats, repaired the roof and gave recitals on the harmonica every evening.
People in the village had fond memories of Danny Franco, dead of heart failure on his fiftieth birthday. Thickset, broad-shouldered, with his matchstick legs, he was a