Scenes From Village Life - Amos Oz [61]
Almoslino's words seemed to carry authority because they were delivered in his resonant bass voice. Plump Kormann had heaped his plate with potato quiche, baked potato, a meatball and vegetables and was balancing it in one hand, and having trouble maneuvering his knife and fork with the other. At that moment Gili Steiner offered him a glass of red wine. "I haven't got enough hands," he chuckled, so she stood on tiptoe and held the glass to his lips.
"Don't you think it's a bit too facile to blame the media for everything?" Yossi Sasson said to Almoslino.
"You have to see things in perspective," I interposed, but Kormann, with one shoulder higher than the other, interrupted me and denounced one of the ministers in the government in outspoken terms.
"In any decent government," Kormann said, "someone like that would have had his marching orders long ago."
"Just a moment, just a moment," said Almoslino. "Maybe you could start by giving us your definition of a decent government."
"Anyone would think all our problems started and ended with one person," said Gili Steiner. "If only they did. Yossi, you haven't tried the vegetable quiche. Why not?"
And Yossi Sasson, the real estate agent, replied with a smile:
"Let me deal with what I've already got on my plate, and then I'll see where to go next."
"You're all wrong," said Dafna Katz, but what she was going to say was submerged in the general hubbub, with everyone talking at once and some people raising their voices. Inside everyone, I thought, there is the child they once were. In some you can see that it's still a living child; others carry around a dead child inside them.
I left the group in the middle of its argument and went over to talk to Avraham Levin, my plate in my hand. He was standing by the window, holding the curtain up and peering outside at the rain and the storm. I touched his shoulder lightly and he turned to me without saying anything. He tried to smile, but merely managed to make his lips tremble.
"Avraham," I said, "why are you standing here on your own?"
He thought for a moment and then said:
"I find it difficult with so many people, all talking at once. It's hard to hear and hard to follow."
"It's really winter out there," I said.
"Yes, it is."
I told him I had come on my own because two women had wanted to come with me and I hadn't wanted to choose between them.
"Right," Avraham said.
"Listen," I said, "Yossi Sasson told me in confidence that they've found some sort of a tumor in his wife. A nasty tumor, that's what he said."
Avraham nodded a few times, as if agreeing with himself, or as if I had confirmed something that he had already guessed.
"If necessary, we'll help," he said.
We pushed our way through the people who were standing eating from disposable plates, crossing the buzz of voices chatting and arguing, and went out on the veranda. The air was cold and piercing and a fine drizzle was now falling. Lightning flickered indistinctly, far away over the hills to the east, but there was no accompanying thunder. A deep, wide silence lay on the garden, on the fruit trees and the dark cypresses, on the lawn and on the fields and orchards that breathed in the darkness beyond the garden hedge. At our feet pale lights shone from the rocky bottom of the fish pond. A solitary jackal wailed in the depths of the darkness. And several angry dogs replied from the yards of the village.
"Look," Avraham said.
I said nothing. I waited for him to tell me what I should look at, what he was talking about. But Avraham fell silent. Finally I broke the silence:
"Do you remember, Avraham, when we were in the army, in seventy-nine, the raid on Deir an-Nashaf? When I got a bullet in my shoulder and you evacuated me?"
Avraham thought for a minute and then said, "Yes, I remember."
I asked