Scenes From Village Life - Amos Oz [51]
"From now on you're the assistant librarian," she said, adding, "Tell me, aren't you expected at home? For supper? They might be worried about you." The squint in her left eye winked affectionately.
"You haven't had supper either."
"But I always eat after I've closed the library. I grab something from the fridge and eat it in front of the TV."
"I'll walk you home when you've finished. So you don't have to walk alone in the dark."
She smiled at him and laid her warm hand on his.
"There's no need, Kobi. I only live five minutes away."
At the touch of her hand a sweet shiver ran from the back of his neck to the base of his spine. But he inferred from her words that her boyfriend, the one who drove a diesel tanker, must be waiting for her at home. And if he wasn't there already, she might be expecting him later in the evening. That was why she had said there was no need for him to walk her home. But he would follow her anyway, like a dog, to the doorstep of her house, and when she closed the door he'd stay, sitting on the steps. This time he would also shake her hand to say good night, and when her hand was inside his, he'd squeeze it lightly twice, so she'd understand. There was something wrong, twisted and despicable about a world where a diesel tanker driver has more advantages than you just because he's older. He could see the tanker driver in his mind's eye, with his thick eyebrows joined in the middle, inserting his fat fingers into the front of her blouse. This apparition made him feel lust and shame together with a desperate anger and a desire to do something to hurt her.
Ada looked at him out of the corner of her eye and noticed something. She suggested they take a look around the shelves; she could show him all sorts of minor treasures, such as the writings of Eldad Rubin with corrections in his own handwriting in the margins. But before he could answer, two older women came in, one small and square-shaped, in baggy three-quarter-length shorts and hair dyed red, the other with short gray hair and protruding eyes behind thick glasses. They had brought their books back and wanted to borrow some new ones. They chatted to each other and to Ada about a new Israeli novel that the whole country was talking about. Kobi escaped down one of the aisles where, on a low shelf, he came across Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. He stood and read a couple of pages so as not to have to listen to the conversation. But the women's voices broke in on him, and he found himself overhearing what they were saying.
"If you want to know what I think," one of them was saying, "he keeps repeating himself. He writes the same book over and over again with small changes."
"Dostoyevsky and Kafka also repeat themselves," her friend said. "So what?"
Ada remarked with a smile, "There are some subjects and motifs that a writer comes back to again and again because apparently they come from the root of his being."
When Ada said the words "the root of his being" Kobi felt something squeezing at his heart. At that moment it was clear to him that she had meant him to overhear the phrase, that she had been talking to him rather than to the women, and that she had been trying to say that both their innermost souls shared a single root. In his imagination he approached her and put his arm around her shoulders, and she rested her head on his shoulder because he was a full head taller than she. He could feel her