Scenes From Village Life - Amos Oz [41]
Adel, short and skinny with glasses, remained standing facing the mayor's desk, a couple of paces away from it. He bowed his head respectfully and apologized for disturbing him outside working hours.
"Never mind, sit down," said Benny Avni.
Adel hesitated, then sat down on the edge of the chair.
"It's like this," he said. "Your wife saw me walking toward the village center and asked me to look in here and give you this—a letter, in fact."
Benny Avni reached out and took the note.
"Where did you meet her?"
"Near the Memorial Garden."
"Which way was she going?"
"She wasn't going anywhere. She was sitting on a bench."
Adel stood up hesitantly and asked if there was anything else the mayor needed him for. Benny Avni smiled and shrugged, and said there was nothing he needed. Adel thanked him and left. Not till he had gone did Benny Avni open up the folded note and find, in Nava's unhurried round handwriting, on a page torn from the notepad in the kitchen, the four words:
Don't worry about me.
He found these words puzzling. Every day Nava waited for him at home for lunch. He came home at one, whereas she finished working at the primary school at twelve. After seventeen years of marriage Nava and Benny still loved each other, but their everyday relations were marked most of the time by a measure of mutual indifference tinged with a certain contained impatience. She resented his political activities and his council work, which followed him home, and she could not stand the democratic affability that he lavished indiscriminately on everyone and anyone. For his part, he disliked her passion for art, and the statuettes that she modeled in clay and fired in a special kiln. He hated the smell of burnt clay that sometimes clung to her clothes.
Benny Avni called home and let the phone ring eight or nine times before admitting to himself that Nava was not there. He found it odd that she should go out at lunchtime, and even odder that she should send him a note, without bothering to say where she had gone or when she would be back. He found the note implausible and her choice of messenger surprising. But he was not anxious. Nava and he always left each other notes under the vase in the living room if they went out unexpectedly.
So he finished off his last two letters, to Ada Dvash about relocating the post office and to the council treasurer about the pension rights of an employee, filed the contents of his in-tray, placed all his letters in the out-tray, checked the windows and shutters, put on his three-quarter-length suede coat and double-locked the door. He planned to walk past the Memorial Garden, collect his wife from the bench where she was probably still sitting and go home with her for lunch. He turned around, though, and went back to his office, because he had a feeling he might have forgotten to shut down the computer, or left a light on in the toilet. But the computer was shut down and the lights were all switched off, so Benny Avni double-locked his door again and went off to look for his wife.
2
NAVA WAS NOT SITTING on the bench by the Memorial Garden. In fact she was nowhere to be seen. But Adel, the skinny student, was sitting there, on his own, with an open book lying face-down on his lap. He was staring at the street while sparrows chirruped overhead in the trees. Benny Avni laid his hand on Adel's shoulder.
"Has my wife been here?" he inquired gently, as if he feared he might hurt the boy. Adel replied that she had been there, but that she wasn't