Scenes From Village Life - Amos Oz [62]
"Look, it's like this, for a long time now I haven't thought about anything. At all. Just about the boy. I might have been able to save him, but I had a theory and I stuck to it, and Dalia followed me with her eyes closed. Let's go indoors. The break is over, they're starting to sing again."
6
IN THE SECOND HALF of the evening we started with some pioneer songs of the Palmach and songs from the War of Independence, like "Dudu" and "The Song of Friendship," and then we sang some songs by Naomi Shemer. Wait another hour and a half, announced Dalia; on the stroke of midnight we'll have another break and we'll serve wine and cheese. I sat in my place between the bookcase and the aquarium, and Dafna Katz was sitting next to me again. She held on to her songbook with both hands, with all ten fingers, as though she were afraid that somebody might snatch it from her grasp. I leaned over and asked her in a whisper where she lived, and if she had a lift home afterward, because if not, I'd be happy to take her. Dafna whispered that Gili Steiner had brought her and was going to take her home afterward, thank you very much.
"Is this your first time here?" I asked.
Dafna whispered that it was her first time, but that from now on she was planning to make a point of coming every time, every six weeks.
Dalia Levin signaled to us, with a finger on her lips, that we should stop whispering. I took the songbook from Dafna's thin fingers and turned the page for her. We exchanged a swift smile and joined in the singing of "In the night the wind is blowing." Again I had the feeling that I ought to go and get something from the pocket of my overcoat, on the heap of coats in the other room, but what it was I could not fathom. On the one hand I had a sense of panic, as though there were some urgent responsibility that I was ignoring, but on the other hand I knew the panic was false.
Dalia Levin signaled to Yohai Blum the accordionist and the three women who were accompanying him on the recorder, but they couldn't understand what she wanted. She stood up, went over to them, bent down and explained something, then she crossed the room and whispered to Almoslino, who shrugged his shoulders and seemed to refuse, but she insisted and pleaded, and finally he nodded. Then she spoke up, asked us all to be quiet for a moment, and announced that now we would sing a canon. We would sing "Everything on this earth is transient," followed by "I look up to the heavens and ask the stars above, Why does your light not reach me?" She asked her husband Avraham to dim the lights.
What was it that I had to check in the pocket of my overcoat? My wallet with my papers, I verified by touch, was with me in my trouser pocket. My driving glasses were in their case in my shirt pocket. Everything was here. Nevertheless, as soon as the canon was over I got up, whispered an apology to my neighbor Dafna Katz, crossed the circle of guests and went out into the corridor. My feet took me into the hall and to the front door, which for some reason I opened a crack, but there was no one outside, only the drizzle. I retraced my steps along the corridor as far as the door of the living room. Now everyone was singing some of Natan Yonatan's plaintive songs, such as "Banks are sometimes yearning for a river" and "Again the song is going forth, again our days are weeping."
At the end of the corridor I turned to a side passage leading to the small room where I had left my overcoat on the pile of coats. I excavated for a while, pushing other people's coats away to the left and right until I found my own. I checked the pockets slowly and methodically. In one there was a folded woolen scarf; in another I found some papers, a packet of sweets and a little flashlight. Because I didn't know what I was looking for, I went on searching in the inside pockets, where there were some more bits of paper and a pair of sunglasses