Black Box (10 page)

Authors: Amos Oz

BOOK: Black Box

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And while we are on the subject of money, write and tell me how much more you need. Do you really want me to give him a donation for the redemption of Hebron? I don’t care. I’ll buy him Hebron. And then I’ll buy him Nablus. When is his birthday? In exchange I shall ask you to reveal to me the secret of this paragon. How did he manage to win and hold you? I have authoritative assurances from two private investigators that you have apparently never betrayed him (if we leave out of account the love ticket you sent me with a price tag of a hundred thousand dollars on it, which is enough to put us both into the
Guinness Book of World Records
for the highest price ever paid for a screw that never happened). Incidentally, in his latest (for the time being) demand for payment, your Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz hints that I it was who “reduced you to sin.” Such stories are apparently common currency in the background from which he comes. It is not difficult for me to imagine what you have told him about our life together. Stories of Beauty and the Beast.

What do you see in him? What does Boaz see in him?

“A bitter, wild boy,” you wrote to me, whose hatred has given him “astonishing physical strength.” I remember the way he used to sleep at night: all huddled up in a heavy blanket pulled up over his fair hair like a cub dug into a hole. I remember the candy bed in the garden. The graveyard for butterflies. The maze and the amusement park he made for the tortoise. His tiny hands on the steering wheel of my car. The tank battles we fought on the rug, and how he washed my pipe out once with soap and water. How he ran away into the wadi after one of your suicides. And how I came home one night and found a green lighter, not mine, on the kitchen table and started to punch you and suddenly he appeared in the kitchen in his spaceman pajamas and asked me quietly to stop because you were weaker. When I said to him, “Get into bed,” and went on hitting you, he picked up a little potted cactus and threw it at me, and it hit me on the cheek and I let go of you and grabbed hold of him in a frenzy and beat his golden head over and over again against the wall. I had my pistol in my pocket and I could have fired at the two of you that night and then put a bullet in myself. In fact I did, and, ever since, the three of us have been a dream.

I want you to know that in all these years not a month has gone by without my receiving a report on you and Boaz from Zakheim and the detectives. And everything I know, including his violence, I like a lot: this tree is growing a long way from the rotten apples. We don’t deserve him, either of us. Neither of us deserves anything, apart from a bullet in the brain. Perhaps it’s only your black devil who deserves something. To be buried in the Patriarchs’ Tomb in his Hebron. And the sooner the better.

What did you see in him, Ilana? What does Boaz see in him?

If you give me a convincing answer, you’ll get the promised check.

Your sudden concern for my health (or your eagerness for an inheritance) is, as usual, touching. But please don’t exaggerate: I’m still on the map. Despite those operations. But without the whisky and the pipe, so that from your poetic arsenal only the pen and the spectacles remain, and it is true that I sometimes move them an inch to the left or two inches to the right on my desk. Just as you described in your letter. Although I do not smash glasses or throw things on the fire. Instead of your snow and the empty glass and the empty bottle, you can use the weeping willow outside my window. The black and white are fine, as long as you employ the idea with restraint and not in your usual overexuberant style.

I will nevertheless pour myself a tot of whisky now, before I sample the cure you prescribed for me, to bang my head against the corner of the desk until the pain stops.

Your

Dragon

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GIDEON NICFOR LONDON

BOAZ HAS TURNED UP HERE REQUESTS FROM YOU FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS FOR PURCHASE OF GLASSBOTTOMED BOAT TO SET UP OWN BUSINESS SHARM ALSHEIKH PLUS ONE THOUSAND TO BUILD TELESCOPE THERE FOR TOURISTS HAVE REPLIED NEGATIVE FOR YOUR INFORMATION MANFRED

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