Scenes From Village Life - Amos Oz [57]
"Some people won't come today because of the rain. We nearly stayed at home ourselves."
Her husband Yoel added: "What is there to do at home? The winter dampens your soul."
It was a wintry Friday evening in the village of Tel Ilan. The tall cypresses were shrouded in mist. Visitors were gathering at Dalia and Avraham Levin's for an evening of communal singing. Their house stood on a hill in a narrow lane called Pumphouse Rise. It had a tile roof and a chimney, two stories and a cellar. In the garden, which was lit by electric lights, stood some soggy fruit trees, olive and almond trees. In front of the house was a lawn bordered with beds of cyclamen. There was also a little rockery from which an artificial waterfall gurgled into an ornamental pond, where some lethargic goldfish swam to and fro, lit by a light fixed in the bottom of the pool. The rain ruffled the surface of the water.
I left my coat on top of a heap of others on a sofa in a side room and made my way into the living room. Every month or so about thirty people, mostly over fifty, gathered at the Levins'. Every couple brought a quiche or a salad or a hot dish, and they sat in the spacious living room, filling the air with old Hebrew and Russian songs that had a melancholy, sentimental air. Yohai Blum would accompany the singing on his accordion, while three middle-aged women sat around him playing recorders.
Above the hubbub that filled the room rose the voice of Gili Steiner, the doctor, who announced:
"Sit down, everybody, please, we want to begin."
But the guests were in no hurry to sit down; they were busy chatting, laughing and slapping each other on the shoulder. Tall, bearded Yossi Sasson cornered me by the bookcase.
"How are you, what's up, what's new?"
"No news," I said. "How about you?"
"Same as usual," he replied, adding, "Not great."
"Where's Etty?" I asked.
"That's it," he said. "She's not too good. The thing is, they found some kind of nasty tumor this week. But she doesn't want anyone to talk about it. And apart from that ..." He stopped.
"Apart from that, what?"
"Nothing," he said. "It's not important. Did you see how it's raining? Real winter weather."
Dalia went around the room and handed each of her guests a photocopied songbook. Her husband Avraham had his back to the room: he was putting more wood in the wood-burning stove. Many years ago Avraham Levin was my commanding officer in the army. Dalia studied history with me at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Avraham was a withdrawn, silent man, while Dalia was the gushing type. I was friends with them separately before they knew each other. Our friendship continued after they married. It was a quiet, steady friendship that did not need constant proof of affection, nor did it depend on how often we met. Sometimes a year or more would go by between meetings, yet they still greeted me warmly. But for some reason I had never stayed the night in their house.
Some twenty years ago Dalia and Avraham had an only son, Yaniv. He was a somewhat solitary child, and as he grew older he became the kind of teenager who is always shut up in his room. When he was little, and I came to visit, he liked to press his head against my stomach and make himself a little lair under my pullover. Once I brought him a tortoise as a present. Four years ago, when he was sixteen or so, the boy went into his parents' bedroom, crawled under their bed and blew his brains out with his father's pistol. They searched for him all over the village for a day and a half, not realizing that he was lying under his parents' bed. Dalia and Avraham even slept in the bed without realizing that their son's body was right underneath them. The next day, when the cleaner came in to do the room, she found him there, curled up as if he were asleep. He did not leave a note, so various theories circulated among their friends.