Scenes From Village Life - Amos Oz [6]
Arieh Zelnik hesitated for a moment or two, and looked out of the open window at a tumbledown farm shed and a dusty cypress tree up which an orange bougainvillea climbed with flaming fingers. Walking around the double bed, he closed the shutters and the window and drew the curtains, and as he did so he unbuttoned his shirt, then undid his belt, removed his shoes, undressed and got into bed next to his old mother. And so the three of them lay, the woman whose house it was, her silent son and the stranger who kept stroking and kissing her while he murmured softly, "Everything is going to be all right, dear lady. It's all going to be lovely. We'll take care of everything."
Relations
1
THE VILLAGE WAS swathed in the premature darkness of a February evening. Apart from Gili Steiner, there was no one else at the bus stop, which was lit by a pale streetlamp. The council offices were closed and shuttered. Sounds of television came through the shutters of the nearby houses. A stray cat padded on velvet paws past the trash cans, tail erect, belly slightly rounded. Slowly it crossed the road and vanished in the shade of the cypress trees.
The last bus from Tel Aviv reached Tel Ilan every evening at seven o'clock. Dr. Gili Steiner had come to the bus stop in front of the council offices at twenty to seven. She worked as a family doctor at the Medical Fund clinic in the village. She was waiting for her nephew, Gideon Gat, her sister's son, who was in the army. He had been studying at the Armored Corps training school when he was discovered to have a kidney problem that required hospitalization. Now that he was out of the hospital, his mother had sent him to convalesce for a few days with her sister in the country.
Dr. Steiner was a thin, desiccated, angular-looking woman with short gray hair, severe features and square rimless glasses. She was energetic yet looked older than her forty-five years. In Tel Ilan she was considered an excellent diagnostician—hardly ever wrong in her diagnoses—but people said she had a dry, abrasive manner and showed no sympathy for her patients; she was simply an attentive listener. She had never married, but people her age in the village remembered that when she was young she had had a love affair with a married man who was killed in the Lebanon War.
She sat on her own on the bench at the bus stop, waiting for her nephew and peering at her watch from time to time. In the faint glow of the streetlight it was hard to make out the hands, and she could not tell how much time she had left to wait. She hoped the bus would not be late and that Gideon would be on board. He was an absent-minded young man who was perfectly capable of getting on the wrong bus. Presumably, now that he was recovering from a serious illness, he was more absent-minded than ever.
Meanwhile, Dr. Steiner inhaled the cool night air at the end of this cold, dry winter's day. Dogs were barking, and above the roof of the council offices hung an almost full moon that shed a skeletal white light on the street, the cypresses and the hedges. The tops of the bare trees were wrapped in mist. In recent years Gili Steiner had joined a couple of classes run by Dalia Levin at the Village Hall, but she had not found what she was looking for. What she was looking for she didn't really know. Perhaps her nephew's visit would help her to make some sense of things. For a few days the two of them would be alone together, sitting by the electric heater. She would look after him as she used to do when he was small. A conversation might start up, and she might be able to help this boy, whom she had loved all these years as though he were her own son, to recover his strength. She had filled the fridge with goodies and made his bed, and she had spread a throw rug at the foot of the bed, in the room that had always been his, next to her own bedroom. On the bedside table she had placed some newspapers and magazines, and three or four books that she liked and that she hoped Gideon would like too. She had switched the boiler on so that there would be