Scenes From Village Life - Amos Oz [33]
So I walked to The Ruin to talk right away to the widow, Batya Rubin, and perhaps also to Rosa Rubin, the old mother. After all, they had finally contacted me at the office to say that it was time for us to talk.
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AS I WALKED, I thought that it was rather a pity to demolish The Ruin. It was, after all, one of the last of the original houses built by the founders more than a hundred years ago. The writer Eldad Rubin's grandfather was a well-off farmer named Gedalya Rubin, who was among the first settlers in Tel Ilan. He built himself a house with his own hands, and he planted a fruit orchard and also a successful vineyard. He was known in the village as a tightfisted, short-tempered farmer. His wife, Martha, was known in her youth as the prettiest girl in the Manasseh District. But The Ruin was so decrepit and rundown that there was no point in spending money restoring and renovating it. I was still contemplating purchasing it from the mother and the widow and selling the site for the building of a new villa. It might be possible to arrange for a commemorative plaque to be fixed to the façade of the new building, saying that on this spot once stood the home of the writer Eldad Rubin, and it was here that he wrote all his books about the horrors of the Holocaust. When I was a little boy I used to think that these horrors were still going on somehow inside the writer's house, in the cellar or in one of the back rooms.
In the little square by the bus stop I bumped into Benny Avni, the village mayor. He was standing there with the chief engineer and a paving contractor from Netanya, talking to them about replacing the old paving stones. I was surprised to see them confabulating at this twilight hour. Benny Avni slapped me on the shoulder and said:
"How are you doing, Mister Real Estate Agent?"
Then he said: "You look a bit worried, Yossi." And he added: "Pop into my office when you have a moment, maybe on Friday afternoon. You and I need to have a word."
But when I put out feelers about what we needed to have a word about, I couldn't extract the slightest hint from him.
"Come," he said, "we'll talk, coffee's on me."
This exchange heightened my sense of disquiet. Something that I ought to be doing, or to refrain from doing, weighed on me and clouded my thoughts, but what that thing was I could not think. So I set off for The Ruin. But I didn't go straight there. I made a slight detour, via the school and the avenue of pine trees next to it. It suddenly struck me that the strange woman who had appeared to me in that out-of-the-way garden behind the Village Hall had been trying to give me some sort of a clue, maybe a vitally important hint, which I had refused to take heed of. What was it that had scared me so? Why had I run away from her? But had I really run away? After all, when I turned back to look, she wasn't there. It was as though she had faded into the evening twilight. A thin, erect figure dressed in strange traveling gear, with a walking stick in one hand and a folded raincoat draped over her other arm. As though it were not June. She had looked to me like a hiker in the Alps. Maybe Austrian. Or Swiss. What had she been trying to say to me, and why had I felt the need to get away from her? I could find no answer to these questions, nor could I imagine what it was that Benny Avni wanted to talk to me about, or why he couldn't simply raise the matter when we had met in the little square by the bus stop, but had invited me to call on him in his office at such an odd time, on Friday afternoon.
A smallish package wrapped in brown paper and tied with black cord was lying on a shady bench at