Scenes From Village Life - Amos Oz [8]
Though she had made up her mind that she should definitely go straight home, Dr. Steiner continued walking with small, firm steps up Founders Street toward the Village Hall, turning off to take a shortcut through the Memorial Garden. The damp winter air made her glasses mist up. She took them off, rubbed them hard with the end of her scarf and thrust them back on her nose. For an instant, without the glasses, her face had looked less severe, taking on a gentle, offended look, like a little girl who had been scolded unfairly. But there was no one around in the Memorial Garden to see her. We all knew Dr. Steiner only through the cold sheen of her square, rimless glasses.
The garden lay peaceful, silent and empty. Beyond the lawn and the bougainvillea bushes a clump of pines formed a dense, dark mass. Gili Steiner breathed deeply and quickened her pace. Her shoes grated on the gravel path as though they had picked up some tiny creature that was letting out truncated shrieks. When Gideon was four or five years old his mother had brought him to stay with his aunt, who had recently started working as a family doctor in Tel Ilan. He was a dozy, dreamy child who could entertain himself for hours on end with a game that he played with three or four simple objects: a cup, an ashtray, a pair of shoelaces. Sometimes he would sit on the steps in front of the house, in his shorts and grubby shirt, staring into space, motionless except for his lips, which moved as if they were telling him a story. Aunt Gili was worried by his solitude and tried to find playmates for him, but the neighbors' children found him boring and after a quarter of an hour he would be on his own again. He made no attempt to make friends with them, but sprawled on the swing chair on the veranda, staring into space. Or lining up nails. She bought him some games and toys but the child did not play with them for long before returning to his regular pastime: two cups, an ashtray, a vase, a few paper clips and spoons that he arranged on the rug according to some logic that only he knew, then shuffled and rearranged them, his lips moving the whole time as though telling himself the stories that he never shared with his aunt. At night he fell asleep clutching a faded toy kangaroo.
Occasionally she attempted to break through the child's solitude by suggesting a walk in the countryside, a visit to Victor Ezra's shop to buy sweets or a climb up the water tower that stood on three concrete legs, but he simply shrugged his shoulders, as though surprised at her sudden and inexplicable access of activity.
On another occasion, when Gideon was five or six and his mother brought him to stay with his aunt, Gili had taken a few days off work. But when she was called out urgently to visit a patient on the outskirts of the village, the child insisted on staying in alone, to play on the rug with a toothbrush, a hairbrush and some empty matchboxes. She refused to let him stay at home alone, and insisted that he should either go with her or wait at the clinic under the supervision of the receptionist, Cilla. But he stood his ground: he wanted to stay at home. He was not afraid of being alone. His kangaroo would look after him. He promised not to open the door to strangers. Gili Steiner suddenly flew into a rage, not only at the child's stubborn insistence on staying on his own and playing his lonely games on the rug, but at his constant strangeness, his phlegmatic manner, his kangaroo and his detachment from the world. "You're coming with me right now," she shouted, "and that's that." "No, Aunt Gili, I'm staying," the child replied,