Scenes From Village Life - Amos Oz [48]
Kobi Ezra, an unhappy seventeen-year-old, stood waiting behind a eucalyptus tree whose trunk was painted white. He was thin and frail-looking, with skinny legs, swarthy skin and a perpetual expression of sad wonderment, as if he had just had an unpleasant surprise. He was wearing dusty jeans and a T-shirt bearing the legend Three Giants Festival. He was desperately in love and confused: the woman he loved was almost twice his age, she already had a lover, and he suspected that all she felt for him was polite pity. He hoped that she would guess how he felt, but feared that if she did, she would reject him. This evening, if her boyfriend didn't come in his diesel tanker, he would offer to walk her from the post office, where she worked in the daytime, to the library, where she worked in the evenings. Maybe this time he would finally try to say something that would make her understand his feelings.
The postmistress, Ada Dvash, who was also the librarian, was a thirty-year-old divorcée. She was short, jolly, plump and smiley. Her shoulder-length fair hair fell more on her left shoulder than on the right. Her large wooden earrings swayed as she walked. Her eyes were warm and brown, and a slight squint enhanced her charm, as though she squinted on purpose, mischievously. She enjoyed her work at the post office and at the library, which she carried out painstakingly and precisely. She loved summer fruit and was fond of light music. At seven-thirty every morning she sorted the incoming mail and put the letters and packets in the residents' boxes. At half past eight she opened the post office for business. At one o'clock she closed and went home to eat and rest, then opened again from five to seven. At seven she closed the post office and, twice a week, on Mondays and Wednesdays, went straight off to open the library. She worked alone, handling packets, parcels, telegrams and registered letters, and offered a warm welcome to customers who came to buy stamps or aerograms, to pay their bills or fines, or to register the purchase or sale of a car. Everyone liked her easy manner, and if there was no line at the single counter, they lingered for a chat.
The village was small, so not many people came into the post office. Most simply checked their mail in the boxes that were fixed to the outside wall and went on their way. Sometimes an hour or an hour and a half went by without anyone coming inside. Ada Dvash sat at her counter sorting mail, filling in forms or arranging packets in a precise rectangular pile. Sometimes, people said in the village, she was visited by a man in his forties with bushy eyebrows joined in the middle, not from our village, a tall, heavily built man who always wore blue overalls and work boots. He parked his diesel tanker opposite the post office and sat waiting for her on the bench in the entrance, amusing himself by throwing his bunch of keys in the air and catching it in one hand. Whenever his tanker was parked opposite the post office or in front of her house, people in the village said, "Ada Dvash's boyfriend has come for another honeymoon." This was not said maliciously but almost affectionately, because Ada Dvash was popular in the village. When her husband left her four years previously, most of the village sided with her rather than with him.
2
BY THE LAST LIGHT of day the boy found a stick at the foot of the eucalyptus tree and used it to scratch shapes of people in the dust while he waited for Ada Dvash to finish work at the post office. The figures came out distorted, as if they were drawn out of loathing. But the light was fading, so no one could see them; in fact he could hardly see them himself. Then he scuffed them all out with his sandal, raising a cloud of dust. He tried to find suitable words to speak to Ada Dvash as he walked her from the post office to the library. On the two previous occasions when he had accompanied her, he spoke with such fervor of his love of books and music that he did not manage to communicate any real emotion. Maybe