Scenes from Village Life Page 4

  Digging

  1

  AS THE END of his life approached, Pesach Kedem, the former Member of the Knesset, lived with his daughter, Rachel, on the edge of the village of Tel Ilan in the Manasseh Hills. He was a tall, vituperative man with a hunched back. On account of kyphosis, his head was thrust forward almost at a right angle. At eighty-six years of age, he was gnarled and sinewy, his skin reminded you of the bark of an olive tree, and his tempestuous temperament made him seem to be boiling over with strongly held ideals and opinions. All day long he pottered around the house in his slippers, wearing an undershirt and a pair of khaki trousers that were too loose on him and were held up by braces. He invariably wore a shabby black beret that came halfway down his forehead, which made him look like a tank commander put out to grass. And he never stopped grumbling: he swore at a drawer that refused to open, cursed the newscaster who muddled Slovakia and Slovenia, railed at the westerly wind that whipped up suddenly and scattered his papers on the veranda table, and shouted at himself because when he bent down to pick them up, he bumped into the corner of the table as he stood up.

  He had never forgiven his Party for falling apart and disappearing twenty-five years earlier. He was pitiless in his criticism of his opponents and enemies, all of them long since deceased. The younger generation, electronics and modern literature all earned his disgust. The newspapers published nothing but filth. Even the man who presented the weather forecast on television seemed to him like an arrogant matinee idol who mumbled nonsense and had no idea what he was talking about.

  He deliberately confused or "forgot" the names of present-day political leaders, just as the world had forgotten him. He, however, had forgotten nothing: he remembered the tiniest details of every insult, resented every wrong that had been done to him two and a half generations earlier, kept a mental note of every weakness shown by his opponents, every opportunistic vote in the Knesset, every glib lie ever uttered in committee, every disgrace brought on themselves by his comrades of forty years ago (whom he tended to refer to as false comrades, and, in the case of two junior ministers of his day, Comrade Hopeless and Comrade Useless).

  One evening, as he was sitting with his daughter Rachel at the veranda table, he suddenly waved a pot of hot tea in the air and roared:

  "A fine figure they cut, the whole lot of 'em, when Ben-Gurion took off for London to flirt with Jabotinsky behind their backs!"

  "Pesach," his daughter said, "put that teapot down, if you don't mind. Yesterday you splashed me with yogurt, and any minute now you're going to scald both of us."

  The old man even bore a grudge against his beloved daughter. True, she looked after him irreproachably every day, but she showed him no respect. Every morning she banished him from his bed at seven-thirty so that she could air or change the sheets, because he always smelled like overripe cheese. She never hesitated to comment on his body odor, and in the summer she would make him shower twice a day. Twice a week she would wash and brush his hair and launder his black beret. She was always throwing him out of the kitchen, because he would rummage in the drawers, searching for the chocolate that she hid from him; she never allowed him more than a square or two a day. Reproachfully she would remind him to flush the toilet and zip up his fly. Three times a day she laid out a line of little bottles containing the pills and capsules he had to take. All this Rachel did firmly, with economical, angular movements and pursed lips, as though it were her job to reeducate her aging father, to correct his bad habits and finally wean him off a long life of selfishness and self-indulgence.

  To cap it all, the old man had begun to complain in the morning of workmen who were digging under the house during the night and disturbing his sleep, as though they couldn't dig in the daytime, when decent, law-abiding people were not asleep.

  "Digging? Who's digging?"

  "That's what I'm asking you, Rachel. Who is it that's digging here at night?"

  "Nobody's digging, during the day or at night, except perhaps in your dreams."

  "They are digging, I tell you! It starts an hour or two after midnight, all sorts of tapping and scraping sounds. You must be sleeping the sleep of the just if you don't hear it. You always were a heavy sleeper. What are they digging for, in the cellar or under the foundation? Oil? Gold? Buried treasure?"

  Rachel changed the old man's sleeping pills, but it was no good. He went on complaining of knocking and digging sounds right under the floor of his bedroom.

  2

  RACHEL FRANCO, A GOOD-LOOKING, well-groomed widow in her mid-forties, taught literature in the village school. She was always tastefully dressed in full skirts in attractive pastel colors, with a matching scarf, delicate earrings and occasionally a silver necklace, and she wore high-heeled shoes even for work. Some people in the village looked askance at her girlish figure and her ponytail. (A woman of her age! And her a teacher, too! And a widow! Who is she sprucing herself up for? Micky the vet? Her little Arab, perhaps? Who is she trying to impress?)

  The village was old and sleepy, a hundred years old or more, with leafy trees and red roofs and agricultural smallholdings, many of which had been transformed into shops selling wines from boutique wineries, spicy olives, farmhouse cheeses, exotic flavorings and rare fruits, or macramé. The former farm buildings had been transformed into small galleries showing imported art works, decorative toys from Africa or items of furniture from India, which were sold to the visitors who streamed in from the towns in convoys every weekend, on the lookout for that original, exquisite find.

  Rachel and her father lived in a secluded little house on the edge of the village, whose large garden abutted the cypress hedge of the local cemetery. Both of them had been widowed. Abigail, the wife of Pesach Kedem, MK, had died of blood poisoning many years previously. Their elder son, Eliaz, had died accidentally (he was the first Israeli to drown in the Red Sea, in 1949). As for Rachel's husband, Danny Franco, he had died of cardiac arrest on his fiftieth birthday.

  Danny and Rachel Franco's younger daughter, Yifat, was married to a prosperous dentist in Los Angeles. Yifat's older sister, Osnat, was a diamond dealer in Brussels. Both daughters had distanced themselves from their mother, as though they held her responsible for their father's death, and they both disliked their grandfather, whom they considered spoiled, selfish and cantankerous.

  Sometimes the old man, in a fit of rage, would call Rachel by her mother's name:

  "No, seriously, Abigail, that was really beneath you. Shame on you!"

  More rarely, when he was ill he confused Rachel with his own mother, Hinde, who had been killed by the Germans in a small village near Riga. When Rachel corrected him, he would angrily deny that he had made the mistake.

  Rachel, however, never made a mistake where her father was concerned. She bore his apocalyptic rants and reproofs stoically, but she reacted ruthlessly to every display of sloppiness or self-indulgence. If he forgot to lift the seat when he went to the toilet, she would thrust a damp cloth in his hand and unceremoniously send him back to do what any civilized person should do. If he spilled soup on his trousers, she made him get up from the table at once and go to his room and change. She would not let him get away with buttoning up his shirt wrongly or walking around with his trouser leg caught in his sock. Whenever she told him off for sitting on the toilet for forty-five minutes or forgetting to lock the door, she called him by his name, Pesach. If she was exceptionally angry, she would address him as Comrade Kedem. But sometimes, very rarely, his loneliness or sadness stirred a fleeting pang of motherly tenderness in her. If, for instance, he turned up at the kitchen door with a hangdog air and pleaded like a child for another piece of chocolate, she might grant his request and even call him Daddy.

  "They're boring underneath the house again. In the early hours of the morning I heard the sound of picks and shovels. Didn't you hear anything?"

  "No, and you didn't either. You were imagining it."

  "What are they looking for underneath the house, Rachel? Who are th
ese workmen?"

  "Maybe they're digging a tunnel for the underground railway."

  "You're just making fun of me. But I'm not imagining things, Rachel. There is someone digging under the house. Tonight I'll wake you up so that you can hear it too."

  "There's nothing to hear, Pesach. There's no one burrowing down there, except perhaps your bad conscience."

  3

  THE OLD MAN spent most of the day sprawled on a deck chair on the paved area in front of the house. If he felt restless, he would get up and flit like an evil spirit from room to room, go down to the cellar to set traps for the mice, wrestle with the screen door to the veranda, pulling at it furiously even though it opened outward, or curse his daughter's cats, which fled at the sound of his slippered feet. He would go down into the old farmyard, his head thrust forward almost at a right angle, which gave him the look of an inverted hoe, frantically searching for some pamphlet or letter in the abandoned incubator, the fertilizer store, the toolshed, then forgetting what he had come for, picking up a discarded hoe with both hands and starting to dig out an unnecessary channel between two beds, cursing himself for his own stupidity, cursing the Arab student who hadn't cleared the piles of dead leaves, dropping the hoe and reentering the house by the kitchen door. In the kitchen he opened the refrigerator, peered inside at the pallid light, slammed the door shut with a force that rattled the bottles, crossed the corridor, muttering something to himself, perhaps denouncing the dead Socialist icons Yitzhak Tabenkin and Meir Ya'ari, looked into the bathroom, cursing the Socialist International, marched into his bedroom, then, drawn irresistibly back into the kitchen, his beret-clad head thrust forward like a charging bull, searched in the larder and the cupboards for a piece of chocolate, groaning, slamming the cupboard doors, his white mustache bristling, staring out of the kitchen window and suddenly shaking a bony fist at a stray goat near the hedge or at an olive tree on the hillside, then once more padding with amazing agility from room to room, from cupboard to cupboard, where he had to find some vital document immediately, urgently, his little gray eyes darting hither and thither, exploring every shelf or bookcase, all the time expounding his complaints to an invisible audience, with long strings of arguments, objections, insults and rebuttals. He was firmly resolved tonight to get out of bed and make his way down to the cellar with a bright flashlight to catch those diggers, whoever they might be.

  4

  EVER SINCE DANNY FRANCO died and Osnat and Yifat left home and went abroad, father and daughter had no close relatives or friends. Their neighbors rarely sought their company, and they hardly ever visited the neighbors. Pesach Kedem's contemporaries had died off or were fading, but even before, he had not had friends or disciples. It was Tabenkin himself who had gradually ousted him from the inner circle of the Party leadership. Rachel's schoolwork stayed at school. The boy from Victor Ezra's grocery delivered whatever Rachel ordered by phone and carried it into the house by the kitchen door. Strangers only rarely crossed the threshold of the last house, by the cypress hedge of the cemetery. Occasionally someone from the village council came and asked Rachel to prune her hedge, which was getting overgrown and blocking the road, or a traveling salesman came to offer them a dishwasher or tumble dryer on easy payment terms. (The old man exploded: An electric dryer? What's that for? Has the sun retired? Have the washing lines all converted to Islam?) Once in a while a neighbor, a tight-lipped farm worker in blue overalls, knocked on the door to ask if they hadn't seen his lost dog in their garden. (A dog? In our garden? Rachel's cats would tear it to pieces!)

  Ever since the student had taken up residence in the little building that had once served Danny Franco as his toolshed and housed the incubator for his chicks, the villagers sometimes paused near the hedge as though sniffing the air, then hurried on their way.

  Sometimes Rachel, the literature teacher, and her father, the former MK, were invited to the home of one of the other teachers for a drink, to celebrate the end of the school year or to come and listen to a visiting speaker address a group at the house of one of the veteran residents of the village. Rachel would accept the invitation with thanks, but it usually turned out that a few hours before the party or the meeting the old man had an attack of emphysema or mislaid his dentures, so Rachel would ring and offer apologies on behalf of both of them. Occasionally Rachel would go on her own to a communal singing evening at the home of Dalia and Avraham Levin, a pair of teachers who had lost their child, and who lived farther up the hill.

  The old man particularly detested the three or four teachers from outside the village, who lived in rented rooms and returned to their families in the city on weekends. To relieve their loneliness, one or other of them would sometimes pop in to see Rachel, to borrow or return a book, to ask her advice on some question of teaching or discipline, or to woo her furtively. Pesach Kedem loathed these uninvited guests: he firmly believed that he and his daughter were enough company for each other, and they had no desire for unnecessary visits from strangers, whose motives were dubious and the devil only knew what they were really after. He was of the opinion that these days everybody's intentions were self-centered, not to say shady. The time was long past when some people at least could like or love one another without making all kinds of calculations. Nowadays, he repeatedly preached to his daughter, everyone, without exception, had ulterior motives; they were only interested in seeing how they could garner a few crumbs from someone else's table. A long life full of disillusionment had taught him that no one knocked at your door except in the hope of deriving some profit, advantage or benefit. Everything was calculated these days, and the calculations were generally disreputable. I tell you, Abigail, as far as I'm concerned they can all do us a favor and stay in their own homes. What do they think this is, the town square? A public saloon? A schoolroom? And while we're on the subject, just answer me this: what do we need with that Arab of yours?

  Rachel corrected him:

  "I'm not Abigail, I'm Rachel."

  The old man shut up at once, ashamed of his mistake and perhaps also regretting some of the things he had said. But after five or ten minutes he would start wheedling, like a child tugging at her sleeve:

  "Rachel, I've got a pain."

  "Where?"

  "In my neck. Or my head. My shoulders. No, not there, slightly lower down. Yes, there. You have a wonderful touch, Rachel."

  And then he would add shyly:

  "I do love you, child. Really. I love you lots and lots."

  And a moment later:

  "I'm very sorry I worried you. We won't let the digging in the night frighten us. Next time I'll go down to the cellar with an iron bar, come what may. I won't wake you. I've bothered you enough already. Even in the old days there were some comrades who called me a nuisance behind my back. Only about your Arab, I just want to say—"

  "Shut up, Pesach."

  The old man would blink and do as she said, his white mustache quivering. And so the two of them sat at the veranda table in the evening breeze, she in jeans and a short-sleeved blouse, he in his baggy khaki trousers held up by braces, a hunchbacked man in a shabby black beret, with a fine, slightly aquiline nose, and with sunken lips, but with white, youthful, perfect false teeth, which on the rare occasions when he smiled gleamed like those of a fashion model. His mustache, when it was not bristling with rage, looked white and fluffy, as though made of cotton wool. But if the newscaster on the radio irritated him, he would thump angrily on the table with his bony fist and declare:

  "What an imbecile that woman is!"

  5

  ON THE RARE OCCASIONS when Rachel had visitors—colleagues from school, workmen, Benny Avni the mayor or Micky the vet—the old man flew into a rage like a swarm of bees, his thin lips tightened into the expression of an elderly inquisitor, and he would flee the sitting room and hole up in his regular lookout post behind the partly opened kitchen door. Here, barely suppressing a sigh, he would sit on a stool painted green and wait for the visitor to disappear. Meanwhi
le, he would strain to hear what was said between Rachel and the vet, say, thrusting his wrinkled neck forward like a tortoise trying to reach a lettuce leaf, extending his head at an angle so as to get his good ear closer to the crack in the door.

  "Where on earth did you get an idea like that from?" Rachel asked the vet.

  "Well, you started it."

  Rachel's laugh tinkled lightly, like clinking glasses.

  "Micky, honestly. Don't play with words. You know very well what I mean."

  "You're even more wonderful when you're angry."

  The old man, from his hiding place, wished them both an attack of foot-and-mouth disease.

  "Look at this kitten, Micky," Rachel said. "He's barely three weeks old, sometimes he can hardly put one foot in front of the other, he tries to go down the steps and ends up rolling down like a little ball of wool, and then he makes such an endearing face, like a tiny suffering saint, but he has already learned how to hide behind a cushion and peer out at me like a tiger in the jungle, his little body flattened and swaying from side to side, ready to pounce, and then he pounces, but he misjudges the distance and does a belly flop on the floor. In a year's time no female cat in the village will be able to resist his charms."

  "I'll have neutered him before then," answered the vet. "Before he can charm you, too."

  "I'll do the same to you," murmurs the old man from behind the kitchen door.