Scenes from Village Life (16 page)

HIS OUTSTRETCHED ARMS
felt for her and found her where she stood motionless behind the desk. He held her in the darkness, not face to face but with his face against the side of hers and his hips pressed against her waist, in a T shape. The darkness lent him courage and he kissed her ear and her temple, but he didn't dare to turn her toward him and seek her lips with his. She stood with her arms and hands hanging down at her sides, neither resisting him nor joining in. Her thoughts wandered to the stillborn child, born at five months after complications. The doctor had told her she could never have another child. During the gloomy months that followed she had blamed her husband for the baby's death, without any justification, except perhaps that he had slept with her on one of the nights before the stillbirth. She had not wanted him to but had let him have his way because ever since she was a child she had generally yielded before anyone with strong willpower, especially if it was a man, not because she was naturally submissive, but because strong male willpower gave her a feeling of safety and trust, together with acceptance and a desire to give in. Now she accepted the boy's sideways embrace without encouraging him or stopping him. She stood motionless, her arms dangling and her head hanging. But she sighed faintly, which Kobi could not interpret.

Was it a groan of pleasure such as he had heard in films, or was it a faint protest? But the powerful desire of an imaginative and sexually frustrated seventeen-year-old youth made him rub himself against her hip. And because he was a full head taller than she was, he drew her head to his chest and his lips gently hovered over her hair and lightly touched one of her earrings as though trying to distract her from what his loins were doing to her. His desire was not curbed by shame but if anything intensified: he knew that now he was destroying, trampling underfoot forever, whatever might have developed between him and his beloved. This destruction made his head swirl, and his hand felt for her breast but he panicked and put his arm around her shoulders instead, while his loins went on rubbing against her hip until his spine and his knees were so flooded and shaken with pleasure that he had to hold on to her so as not to fall over. Feeling a wetness on his abdomen he hurriedly pulled away, so as not to soil her too. He stood panting and shaking in the darkness, very close to her but not touching her, his face burning and his teeth chattering. Ada broke the silence by saying gently:

"I'm turning the light on."

"Yes," said Kobi.

But she was in no hurry to turn on the light. She said:

"You can go over there and clean up."

"Yes," said Kobi.

Suddenly he murmured in the darkness:

"I'm sorry."

He felt for her hand and held it and, nuzzling her with his lips, he apologized again, and felt his way to the door and fled from the thick darkness in the library into the luminous darkness of the summer night. A half moon had risen above the water tower and was spreading a pale half light over the rooftops, the treetops and the shadowy hills to the east.

She switched on the dazzling neon lights and straightened her blouse with one hand and her hair with the other. She thought for a moment that he had just gone to the toilet, but the door of the library was wide open and she followed him out and stood on the doorstep, filling her lungs with the sharp night air that smelled vaguely of mown grass, cow pats and some sweet flower she could not put a name to.
Why did you run away,
she said to herself,
why did you go, child, why were you so startled?

She returned to the library, shut down the computer, switched off the air conditioning and the dazzling neon lights, then locked up and went home. She was accompanied by the singing of frogs and crickets and by a gentle breeze that carried a smell of thistles and dust. Maybe that child was lying in wait for her again behind some tree, maybe he would offer to walk her home again, maybe this time he would have the courage to hold her hand or put his arm around her waist. She felt that his smell, a smell of black bread, soap and sweat, was accompanying her. She knew that he would not come back to her, either this evening or probably on any of the following evenings. She felt sorry for his loneliness, his regret and his pointless shame. Yet she also felt some kind of inner joy and spiritual exaltation, almost pride, that she had let him get carried away. How little he had wanted from her. And if he had wanted more, she might not have stopped him. She took a deep breath. She was sad she had not said the simple words, "Never mind, Kobi, don't be scared, you're fine, everything's fine now."

The diesel tanker was not waiting for her outside her house, and she knew she would be alone tonight. At home she was greeted by two hungry cats that got under her feet and rubbed themselves against her legs. She spoke to them aloud, scolded them, lavished affection on them, gave them food and put water in their drinking bowls. Then she went to the toilet, and washed her face and neck and combed her hair. She switched on the TV in the middle of a program about the melting of the polar ice cap and the destruction of the Arctic ecosystem. She buttered a slice of bread, spread cream cheese on it, sliced a tomato, cooked an omelet and made herself a cup of tea. Then she settled in the armchair in front of the destruction of the Arctic ecosystem on the TV, sipped her tea and hardly noticed that her cheeks were covered in tears. And when she did become aware of it, she went on eating and drinking and staring at the TV, and merely wiped her cheeks a few times. The tears did not stop but she felt better, and she said to herself the words she had meant to say to Kobi: "Never mind, don't be scared, you're fine, everything's fine now." She got up, still in tears, picked up one of the cats and sat down again. At a quarter to eleven she stood up, closed the shutters and switched off most of the lights.

KOBI EZRA WANDERED
around the streets of the village. Twice he passed the Village Hall and the grocer's shop from which his family made a living. He entered the Memorial Garden and sat down on a bench that was already damp with dew. He wondered what she thought of him now and why she hadn't slapped his cheeks as he deserved. Suddenly he waved his arm and slapped his own face so hard that his teeth hurt, his ears rang and his left eye was bloodshot. Shame filled his body like some revolting viscous matter.

Two boys his own age, Elad and Shahar, passed his bench without noticing him. He curled up and hid his head between his knees. "They soon saw she was lying," Shahar was saying. "Nobody believed her for a second." "But it was a white lie," Elad replied; "I mean it was a justifiable lie." They moved on, their shoes crunching on the gravel. What he had done tonight would never be wiped out, Kobi thought. Even when many years had passed and his life had taken him to places that he could not imagine. Even if he went to the big city to look for a prostitute, as he had often imagined doing. Nothing would eradicate the shame of what he had done tonight. He could have gone on chatting with her in the library and not turned out the lights. And even if he had lost his senses and turned out the lights, he could have used the cover of darkness to express his feelings. Everybody said that words were his strong point. He could have used words. He could have quoted some lines from a love poem by Bialik or Yehuda Amichai. He could have confessed that he wrote poems himself. He could have recited one that he had written about her. On the other hand, he thought, she was also partly to blame, because she had behaved toward him the whole evening like an older woman with a child, or a teacher with a pupil. She pretended that I wait for her opposite the post office and walk her to the library just like that, for no particular reason. The fact is that she knew the truth and just pretended to spare my feelings. If only she hadn't, if only she had asked me about my feelings, however embarrassing it might be. If only I had had the guts to tell her to her face that someone like her had no reason to go running after tanker drivers.
You and I are twin souls and you know it. I can't help it if I was born fifteen years after you. Everything is lost now, after what happened. Lost forever. And in fact what I did changed nothing, because it was doomed from the start. We never had a chance, either of us. There was never a shadow of hope. Maybe,
he thought,
when I've finished with the army I'll get myself a license to drive a diesel tanker.

He got up from the bench and walked across the Memorial Garden. The gravel path crunched under his sandals. A night bird made a ragged sound, and far away at the edge of the village a dog barked insistently. He had eaten nothing since lunchtime, and he felt hungry and thirsty, but the thought of the house where his parents and his sisters were probably glued to the blaring television put him off. True, if he went home nobody would say anything to him or ask him anything; he could grab something to eat from the refrigerator and shut himself up in his room. But what would he do in his room, with his abandoned aquarium where a dead fish had been floating for a week, and his stained mattress? Better to stay out and maybe spend the whole night roaming the empty streets. Maybe the best thing would be to go back to that bench and lie down on it, and sleep dreamlessly till morning.

Suddenly he got the idea of going to her house: if the diesel tanker was parked outside, he would climb onto it and throw a lighted match inside so everything would explode, forever. He felt in his pockets for matches, but he knew he didn't have any. Then his feet took him to the water tower that stood on its three concrete legs. He decided to climb the tower, to be closer to the half moon that was floating now over the eastern hills. The rungs of the iron ladder were cold and damp; he climbed quickly and soon found himself at the top of the tower. Here there was an old concrete lookout post from the War of Independence, with broken sandbags and loopholes. He went inside and looked out through one of the holes. The place smelled of stale urine. The night stretched out before him in a wide, empty expanse. The sky was bright and the stars sparkled, strangers to each other and to themselves. From the depth of the darkness two shots rang out in swift succession. From here they sounded hollow. There were still lights on in the windows of the houses. Here and there he could see the bluish flicker of a TV screen through an open window. Two cars passed beneath him along Vine Street, their headlights illuminating for a moment the avenue of dark cypresses. Kobi looked for the windows of her house, and because he couldn't be sure, he chose to concentrate on one that was more or less in the right direction and decided that it was hers. A yellow light was shining there, through the drawn curtain. From now on, he knew, he and she would pass each other in the street like two strangers. He would never dare say a single word to her. She would probably avoid him, too. If someday he had to go to the post office for something, she would look up from the counter behind the grill and say in a flat tone of voice:

"Yes? What can I do for you?"

THE FRONT DOOR
was open and cold, damp winter air blew into the hall. When I arrived, between twenty and twenty-five people were already there, some of whom were still helping each other off with their coats. I was greeted by a buzz of conversation and a smell of burning logs, wet wool and hot food. Almoslino, a big man wearing glasses attached by a cord, was bending over Dr. Gili Steiner and kissing her on both cheeks. Slipping his hand around her waist, he said:

"You're looking splendid tonight, Gili."

"Look who's talking," she replied.

Plump Kormann, who had one shoulder higher than the other, gave Gili Steiner a big hug, then he hugged Almoslino and me. "It's good to see you all," he said. "Raining hard out there?" By the coat hooks I bumped into Edna and Yoel Rieback, a pair of dentists in their mid-fifties who had grown so alike over the years they seemed like twins; they both had short gray hair, wrinkled necks and pursed lips. Edna Rieback was saying:

"Some people won't come today because of the rain. We nearly stayed at home ourselves."

Her husband Yoel added: "What is there to do at home? The winter dampens your soul."

It was a wintry Friday evening in the village of Tel Ilan. The tall cypresses were shrouded in mist. Visitors were gathering at Dalia and Avraham Levin's for an evening of communal singing. Their house stood on a hill in a narrow lane called Pumphouse Rise. It had a tile roof and a chimney, two stories and a cellar. In the garden, which was lit by electric lights, stood some soggy fruit trees, olive and almond trees. In front of the house was a lawn bordered with beds of cyclamen. There was also a little rockery from which an artificial waterfall gurgled into an ornamental pond, where some lethargic goldfish swam to and fro, lit by a light fixed in the bottom of the pool. The rain ruffled the surface of the water.

I left my coat on top of a heap of others on a sofa in a side room and made my way into the living room. Every month or so about thirty people, mostly over fifty, gathered at the Levins'. Every couple brought a quiche or a salad or a hot dish, and they sat in the spacious living room, filling the air with old Hebrew and Russian songs that had a melancholy, sentimental air. Yohai Blum would accompany the singing on his accordion, while three middle-aged women sat around him playing recorders.

Above the hubbub that filled the room rose the voice of Gili Steiner, the doctor, who announced:

"Sit down, everybody, please, we want to begin."

But the guests were in no hurry to sit down; they were busy chatting, laughing and slapping each other on the shoulder. Tall, bearded Yossi Sasson cornered me by the bookcase.

"How are you, what's up, what's new?"

"No news," I said. "How about you?"

"Same as usual," he replied, adding, "Not great."

"Where's Etty?" I asked.

"That's it," he said. "She's not too good. The thing is, they found some kind of nasty tumor this week. But she doesn't want anyone to talk about it. And apart from that ..." He stopped.