Scenes From Village Life - Amos Oz [54]
5
HIS OUTSTRETCHED ARMS felt for her and found her where she stood motionless behind the desk. He held her in the darkness, not face to face but with his face against the side of hers and his hips pressed against her waist, in a T shape. The darkness lent him courage and he kissed her ear and her temple, but he didn't dare to turn her toward him and seek her lips with his. She stood with her arms and hands hanging down at her sides, neither resisting him nor joining in. Her thoughts wandered to the stillborn child, born at five months after complications. The doctor had told her she could never have another child. During the gloomy months that followed she had blamed her husband for the baby's death, without any justification, except perhaps that he had slept with her on one of the nights before the stillbirth. She had not wanted him to but had let him have his way because ever since she was a child she had generally yielded before anyone with strong willpower, especially if it was a man, not because she was naturally submissive, but because strong male willpower gave her a feeling of safety and trust, together with acceptance and a desire to give in. Now she accepted the boy's sideways embrace without encouraging him or stopping him. She stood motionless, her arms dangling and her head hanging. But she sighed faintly, which Kobi could not interpret.
Was it a groan of pleasure such as he had heard in films, or was it a faint protest? But the powerful desire of an imaginative and sexually frustrated seventeen-year-old youth made him rub himself against her hip. And because he was a full head taller than she was, he drew her head to his chest and his lips gently hovered over her hair and lightly touched one of her earrings as though trying to distract her from what his loins were doing to her. His desire was not curbed by shame but if anything intensified: he knew that now he was destroying, trampling underfoot forever, whatever might have developed between him and his beloved. This destruction made his head swirl, and his hand felt for her breast but he panicked and put his arm around her shoulders instead, while his loins went on rubbing against her hip until his spine and his knees were so flooded and shaken with pleasure that he had to hold on to her so as not to fall over. Feeling a wetness on his abdomen he hurriedly pulled away, so as not to soil her too. He stood panting and shaking in the darkness, very close to her but not touching her, his face burning and his teeth chattering. Ada broke the silence by saying gently:
"I'm turning the light on."
"Yes," said Kobi.
But she was in no hurry to turn on the light. She said:
"You can go over there and clean up."
"Yes," said Kobi.
Suddenly he murmured in the darkness:
"I'm sorry."
He felt for her hand and held it and, nuzzling her with his lips, he apologized again, and felt his way to the door and fled from the thick darkness in the library into the luminous darkness of the summer night. A half moon had risen above the water tower and was spreading a pale half light over the rooftops, the treetops and the shadowy hills to the east.
She switched on the dazzling neon lights and straightened her blouse with one hand and her hair with the other. She thought for a moment that he had just gone to the toilet, but the door of the library was wide open and she followed him out and stood on the doorstep, filling her lungs with the sharp night air that smelled vaguely of mown grass, cow pats and some sweet flower she could not put a name to. Why did you run away, she said to herself, why did you go, child, why were you so startled?
She returned to the library, shut down the computer, switched off the air conditioning and the dazzling neon lights, then locked up and went home. She was accompanied by the singing of frogs and crickets and by a gentle breeze that carried a smell of thistles and dust. Maybe that child was lying in wait for her again behind some tree, maybe he would offer to walk her home again, maybe this time he would have the courage