Scenes From Village Life - Amos Oz [31]
Two women live in The Ruin and so far they have refused to sell at any price: Rosa, the writer's ninety-five-year-old mother, and his widow, who must be in her sixties. I've tried phoning them a few times, and it's always the widow, Batya, who answers. I always begin by expressing my admiration for the late writer's books, which are a source of pride to the entire village, continue with some hints about the dilapidated condition of the property, suggesting that there's no point in patching it up, and end with a polite request to be invited for a brief discussion about the future. The conversation invariably ends with Batya Rubin thanking me for my interest but stating that as the matter is not currently on their agenda, there would be no point in my going round to see them.
Until yesterday, when she telephoned of her own accord and said, "It's time for us to talk." I made up my mind immediately not to start bringing clients to her but to buy The Ruin myself. Then I'd have it demolished, and I'd get more for the site than I'd paid for the house. I was inside the house once when I was little. My mother, who was a registered nurse, took me with her when she was called out to give an injection to the writer Eldad Rubin. I was nine or ten. I remember a spacious central room furnished in oriental style, from which a lot of doors opened off, as well as some stairs that appeared to go down to a cellar. The furniture looked heavy and dark. Two of the walls were lined with bookshelves from floor to ceiling, and another was covered with maps studded with multicolored thumbtacks. A vase on the table contained a bunch of thistles. And the ticking of a grandfather clock with gilded hands beat time.
The writer himself was sitting in his wheelchair, a tartan rug covering his knees and his big head framed by a mane of gray hair. I can remember a broad red face sunk between his shoulders, as though he had no neck, and his large ears, and bushy eyebrows that were also turning gray. There were gray hairs protruding from his ears and nostrils, too. There was something about him that reminded me of a hibernating bear. My mother and his mother hauled him from the wheelchair to the sofa, and he didn't make it any easier for them by grumbling and growling and struggling to escape, but his muscles were too weak and they got the better of him. His mother, Rosa, pulled down his trousers until his swollen buttocks were exposed, and my mother bent over and gave him the injection in the top of his white thigh. Afterward the writer joked with her. I can't remember what he said, but I do remember that it wasn't very funny. Then his wife, Batya, came in. She was a thin, nervous woman with her hair gathered in a little bun. She offered my mother a glass of tea and gave me some sweetish black-currant juice in a cup that seemed to me to be cracked. My mother and I sat for about a quarter of an hour in the sitting room of the house, which was already referred to in the village as The Ruin. And I remember there was something about the house that captured my imagination. Perhaps it was the fact that five or six doors opened off that central room, straight into the rooms surrounding it. That wasn't the way the houses in our village were built. I have only ever seen this style of building in Arab villages. The writer himself, though he wrote books about the Holocaust, didn't seem at all gloomy or mournful but radiated a sort of forced boyish gaiety. He tried hard to entertain us in his sleepy way, telling us anecdotes, amusing himself with plays on words, but I remember him from that single meeting not as a charming man but as someone who was making a huge effort to ensure everything went off as pleasantly as possible.
2
AT SIX O'CLOCK in the evening I got up from my desk and went out for a walk in the village. I was tired and my eyes were aching from a long day at the office, a day given over to preparing the annual tax return. I meant to walk for half an hour or an hour, have