Scenes From Village Life - Amos Oz [65]
Nothing has happened since.
Some say that over there, beyond the river, beyond the forests and mountains, a succession of governors has taken his place: one was ousted, one was defeated, another fell from grace, a fourth was assassinated, a fifth was imprisoned, a sixth became a turncoat, a seventh fled or fell asleep. Here everything has remained as it always was: the old folks and babies continue to die and the young grow old before their time. The population of the village, if my cautious statistics can be trusted, is in terminal decline. According to the graph I have drawn up and hung over my bed, not a single person will be left alive here by midcentury. Just the insects and creepy-crawlies.
In fact, large numbers of children are born here, but most of them die in infancy and are hardly missed. The young men escape to the north. The girls grow beetroot and potatoes in the thick mud, they have their first child at twelve, and by twenty they seem worn out. Sometimes in an excess of mad lust the whole village is swept up in a night of debauchery by the light of bonfires of damp wood. They all commit outrageous acts: old men with children, girls with cripples, humans with beasts. I cannot communicate the details, as on such nights I barricade myself inside the dispensary, where I live, and go to sleep with a loaded pistol under my pillow, in case they get any bright ideas.
But such nights occur infrequently. The next day they wake at midday, heavy-headed, bleary-eyed, and go back to squelching submissively in their muddy fields from dawn to dusk. The days are ferociously hot. Insolent fleas, as big as a coin, swoop down on us, and as they bite they emit a nauseating, piercing squeak. The work in the fields seems backbreaking. The beetroot and potatoes that are extracted from the spongy mud are nearly all rotten, yet they are eaten either raw or cooked in a foul, putrid liquid. The gravedigger's two elder sons ran away to the mountains and joined a gang of smugglers. Both their wives, with the children, moved into the hut of their younger brother, a boy of barely fourteen.
As for the gravedigger himself, a taciturn, solidly built hunchback, he decided not to pass over this in silence. But the weeks and months went by in total silence, and the years went by. Then one day the gravedigger, too, moved in with his youngest son. More and more children were born there, and nobody knew which of them were the offspring of the runaway brothers, who sometimes spent a nocturnal hour or two in the village, and which were from the loins of the youngster, or indeed the gravedigger or his elderly father. Whatever the truth, most of the babies died within a few weeks of being born. Other men came and went there at night, and simple-minded women, too, in search of a roof or a man, or shelter or a child or food. The present governor has not replied to the three urgent memoranda, each more serious than the last, sent at short intervals to warn of the deterioration of the moral climate and demand his immediate intervention. I was the outraged author of these memoranda.
The years pass in silence. My replacement has still not come. The policeman has been ousted in favor of his brother-in-law. Rumor has it that the original policeman has joined the smugglers in the mountains. I am still doing my duty, but I am becoming increasingly weary. They no longer address me in the third person, nor do they bother to doff their threadbare caps to me. There is no disinfectant left. The women are gradually emptying the dispensary of its drugs, without giving me anything in exchange. My intellect is waning along with my desires. I can no longer find enough light within myself. The thinking reed is becoming empty of thoughts. Or maybe it is my eyes that