Scenes from Village Life Read online

  "At two o'clock in the morning, when the digging sounds started again," the old man said, "I got up and went to check if the little Arab's light was still on. There was no light. He may have turned it off and gone to sleep, but it's just as likely he turned it off and went to dig in our foundation."

  Adel made his own meals: brown bread with slices of tomato, olives, cucumber, onion and green pepper, with pieces of salty cheese or sardines, a hard-boiled egg, zucchini or eggplant cooked with garlic and tomato sauce, washed down with his favorite drink, which he brewed in a soot-stained tin kettle: hot water and honey, flavored with sage leaves and cloves or with rose petals.

  Rachel sometimes watched him from the veranda as he sat on his usual step, with his back against the side of the shed, his notebook on his knees, writing, pausing, thinking, writing a few more words, then pausing again, thinking, writing another line or two, getting up and walking slowly around the yard, turning off a sprinkler, feeding the cats or scattering a handful of durra for the pigeons.(He had also installed a dovecote at the bottom of the yard.)Then he would sit down again on his step, play his five or six tunes one after the other, eliciting heart-rendingly plaintive, long-drawn-out notes from his harmonica, then wipe the instrument carefully on his shirt tail and tuck it into his breast pocket. Then he would bend over his notebook again.

  Rachel Franco, too, wrote in the evenings. Three or four times a week, almost every day during that summer, she and her old father sat facing each other on the veranda, on either side of the table that was covered in a flowered oilcloth. The old man talked and talked, while Rachel, frequently pursing her lips, wrote down his memories.

  11

  "YITZHAK TABENKIN," Pesach Kedem said, "better you shouldn't ask me anything about Tabenkin." (She didn't.) "When he was an old man Tabenkin decided to disguise himself as a Hasidic rabbi: he grew his beard down to his knees and started issuing rabbinic rulings. But I don't want to say a single word about him. For good or ill. He was a considerable fanatic, believe me, and he was a dogmatist, too. A cruel, tyrannical man. He maltreated even his wife and his children all those years. But what is he to me? I have nothing to say about him. You can torture me if you like, you won't get me to say a bad word about Tabenkin. Or a good one either. Kindly note down: Pesach Kedem chooses to maintain a total silence over the whole incident of the great split between him and Tabenkin in 1952. Did you write that down? Word for word? Then kindly add this, too: From an ethical viewpoint, Poalei Zion stood at least two or three rungs below Hapoel Hatza'ir. No. That you should please cross out. Instead you should write: Pesach Kedem no longer sees any reason to become involved in the controversy between Poalei Zion and Hapoel Hatza'ir. It's all over and done with. History has proved both of them wrong, and proved to anyone who is not a fanatic or a dogmatist how wrong they were and how right I was in that controversy. I state this with all due modesty, and with total objectivity: I was right where they both erred. No, cross out ‘erred' and write ‘transgressed.' And they added iniquity to transgression when they hurled groundless accusations and all sorts of stuff and nonsense at me. But history itself, objective reality, came along and proved in black on white how they had wronged me. And the worst offenders were Comrade Hopeless and Comrade Useless, Tabenkin's cat's-paws. Full stop. Yet there was a time, when we were young, that I liked them both. I even liked Tabenkin sometimes, before he became a rabbi. And they liked me up to a point, too. We dreamed of improving ourselves, of improving the whole world. We loved the hills and the valleys, and the wilderness up to a point. Where were we, Rachel? How did we get here? Where were we before?"

  "Tabenkin's beard, I think."

  She filled his glass with Coca-Cola, a drink that he had lately come to be so fond of that it had taken the place for him of both tea and lemonade. Only he insisted on calling it "Coca-Coca," and nothing his daughter said would make him change. (He also pronounced the names of the two political parties Poalei Zion and Hapoel Hatza'ir, and even his own name, with a marked Yiddish accent.) He insisted on letting the Coca-Cola stand for a while until the bubbles had all subsided before he raised the glass to his cracked lips.

  "How about that student of yours," the old man said suddenly. "What do you think? He's an anti-Semite, isn't he?"

  "What makes you say that? What has he done to you?"

  "He hasn't done anything. He just doesn't like us. That's all. And why should he?"

  After a moment he added:

  "I don't like us much myself. There's no reason."

  "Pesach, calm down. Adel lives here and works for us. That's all. He works to pay for his lodging."

  "Wrong!" the old man roared. "He doesn't work for us, he works instead of us! That's why he digs under the house at night, in the foundation or in the cellar."

  Then he added:

  "Cross that out, please. Don't write any of this. Neither what I said against the Arab nor what I said against Tabenkin. At the end of his life Tabenkin was totally senile. Incidentally," he added, "even his name was false. The fool was so smitten with the name Tabenkin, Ta-ben-kin—three proletarian hammer blows! Like Cha-lya-pin! Like Marshal Bul-ga-nin! But in fact his original name was simply Toybenkind, Itchele Toybenkind, Itchele Pigeonson! But that little son of a pigeon wanted to be a Molotov! A Stalin! A Hebrew Lenin he wanted to be! Na, I don't give a damn about him. I won't say a word about him, for good or ill. Not a word. Abigail, make a note: Pesach Kedem is totally silent on the subject of Tabenkin. A nod is as good as a wink."

  Midges, moths, mosquitoes and daddy longlegs congregated around the light on the veranda. In the distance, from the direction of the hills, orchards and vineyards, a desperate jackal howled. And opposite, in front of his hut that was lit by a feeble yellow light, Adel got up slowly from his step, stretched, wiped his mouth organ with a cloth, took a few deep breaths, as though trying to draw all the expanse of the night into his narrow chest, and went indoors. Crickets, frogs and sprinklers chirped as if in response to the distant jackal, now joined by a whole choir of jackals somewhere nearby, in the darkened wadi.

  "It's getting late," Rachel said. "Maybe it's time for us to stop, too, and go indoors."

  "He burrows under our house," her father said, "because he simply doesn't like us. Why should he? What for? Because of all our villainy, our cruelty, our arrogance? And our hypocrisy?"

  "Who doesn't like us?"

  "Him. The goy."

  "Daddy, that's enough now. He's got a name. Please use it. When you talk about him you sound like the last of the anti-Semites yourself."

  "The last of the anti-Semites hasn't been born yet. And never will be."

  "Come to bed, Pesach."

  "I don't like him either. Not one bit. I don't like all they've done to us, and to themselves. And I certainly don't like what they want to do to us. And I don't like the way he looks at us, in that hungry, mocking way. He looks at you hungrily, and he looks at me contemptuously."

  "Good night. I'm going to bed."

  "So what if I don't like him? Nobody likes anybody, anyway."

  "Good night. Don't forget to take your pills before you go to sleep."

  "Once, a long time ago, before all this, maybe here and there some people liked each other a bit. Not everyone. Not much. Not always. Just here and there, a little bit. But now? These days? Now all the hearts are dead. It's finished."

  "There are mosquitoes, Daddy. Would you mind closing the door."

  "Why are all the hearts dead? Maybe you know. Do you?"

  12

  IN THE NIGHT, at two or two-thirty, woken again by tapping, scraping and digging sounds, the old man got out of bed (he always slept in his long johns) and felt for the flashlight he had put out specially and the iron bar he had found in one of the sheds, his feet groping in the dark like blind beggars for his slippers. Giving these up in despair, he padded barefoot into the corridor, feeling the walls and furniture with a trembling hand, his head thrust forward at its characteristic right angle. He finally found th
e cellar door and pulled it toward him, but the door was made to be pushed open, not pulled, and the iron bar slipped out of his grasp and fell on his foot and to the floor with a dull metallic clang that failed to wake Rachel but did silence the digging sounds.

  The old man switched on his flashlight, bent over with a groan and picked up the iron bar. His bent body cast three or four distorted shadows on the walls of the corridor, on the floor and on the kitchen door.

  He stood there for a few minutes, with the bar under his arm, one hand holding the flashlight and the other tugging on the cellar door, and strained to hear, but since the silence was deep and complete, punctuated only by the sounds of cicadas and frogs, he reconsidered and decided to go back to bed and try again the following night.

  He woke again before dawn and sat up in bed, but he did not reach for the flashlight and the bar because this time total silence filled the night. Pesach Kedem sat in bed for a while, listening attentively to the deep silence. Even the cicadas had stopped. There was only a very fine breeze stirring the tops of the cypress trees bordering the cemetery, but it was too faint for him to hear, and he curled up and fell asleep.

  13

  NEXT MORNING, BEFORE going off to school, Rachel went outside to take the old man's trousers off the clothesline. Adel was waiting for her by the dovecote, with his glasses that were too small for him, his shy smile that put a dimple in his cheek, and his Van Gogh–style straw hat.

  "Rachel. Excuse me. It won't take a moment."

  "Good morning, Adel. Don't forget to straighten that crooked paving stone at the end of the path. Somebody could trip over it."

  "OK, Rachel. But I wanted to ask you what happened in the night."

  "In the night? What happened in the night?"

  "I thought maybe you knew. Do you have men working in the yard at night?"

  "Working? In the night?"

  "Didn't you hear anything? At two o'clock in the morning? Noises? Digging? You must be a very sound sleeper."

  "What sort of noises?"

  "Noises down below, Rachel."

  "You were just dreaming, Adel. Who would come and dig underneath your room in the middle of the night?"

  "I don't know. I thought maybe you would know."

  "You were dreaming. Remember to fix that paving stone today, before Pesach trips over it and has a fall."

  "I was thinking, maybe your dad walks around at night. Maybe he has trouble sleeping. Maybe he gets up, picks up a shovel, and starts digging."

  "Don't talk nonsense, Adel. No one's digging. You were dreaming."

  She walked back toward the house, carrying the laundry she had taken off the line, but the student went on standing there for a while, watching her walk away. He took off his glasses and polished them on his shirt tail. Then he walked toward the cypresses in his clumsy big shoes, and coming across one of Rachel's cats, he bent down and spoke a few sentences to it, in Arabic, respectfully, as though the two of them now had to shoulder a new, serious responsibility.

  14

  THE SCHOOL YEAR was coming to an end. The summer was getting hotter. The pale blue light turned at midday to a dazzling white glare that hung over the houses and oppressed the gardens and orchards, the red-hot tin huts and closed wooden shutters. A hot, dry wind blew from the hills. The inhabitants of the village stayed indoors during the day and only came out onto their verandas and terraces at dusk. The evenings were warm and humid. Rachel and her father slept with their windows and shutters open. Distant barking in the night stirred bands of jackals to bitter wailing from the direction of the wadi. Sounds of far-off shooting came from beyond the hills. Choirs of cicadas and frogs loaded the night air with a dull, monotonous weight. At midnight Adel went and turned off the sprinklers. Because the heat stopped him sleeping, he sat on his step and smoked a few more cigarettes in the dark.

  Sometimes Rachel was full of anger and impatience, at her father, at the house and yard, at the depressing village, at the way her life was being wasted here among yawning schoolchildren and her demanding father. How much longer would she be stuck here? She could simply get up and go someday, hire a caretaker to look after her father and leave the student to look after the yard and the house. She could go back to university and finally finish her thesis on moments of illumination and revelation in the writings of Yizhar and Kahana-Carmon, she could renew old friendships, travel, go and see Osnat in Brussels, Yifat in America, she could give her life a makeover. There were moments when she was startled because she caught herself daydreaming of the old man falling victim to some domestic tragedy: a fall, electrocution, gas.

  Every evening Rachel Franco and ex-MK Pesach Kedem sat on the veranda, where they had installed an electric fan with an extension cord. Rachel would be busy with marking, while the old man leafed through some magazine or pamphlet, turning the pages backward and forward, grumbling and growling, swearing and cursing at the hotheads and imbeciles. Or alternatively full of self-loathing, calling himself a cruel tyrant, making up his mind to ask for forgiveness from Micky the vet: Why did I mock him, why did I nearly throw him out of the house last week? After all, he does his job conscientiously at least. I could have become a vet myself, instead of becoming an apparatchik, and then I could have brought some good into the world, I could have managed occasionally to reduce the amount of pain around here.

  Sometimes the old man dozed with his mouth open, wheezing, his white mustache stirring as though endowed with a secret life of its own. When Rachel got through her marking, she might pick up the brown notebook and take down her father's account of the tragic rift between the majority faction and Group B, or his description of his own position during the Great Split, how right he had been and how wrong were the various false prophets and how differently things might have turned out if only both sides had listened to him.

  They did not discuss the nocturnal digging sounds. The old man had made up his mind to catch the miscreants red-handed, while Rachel had developed an explanation of her own of her father's and Adel's disturbed nights: the former was half deaf and heard noises inside his head, and the latter was a nervous and perhaps slightly neurotic young man with a highly developed imagination. It was possible, Rachel thought, that some distant sounds came in the early hours of the morning from one of the neighboring properties: perhaps they were milking the cows, and the noise of the milking machine, coupled with the sound of the metal gate opening and closing as the cows went through, might have sounded, on these oppressive summer nights, like the noise of digging. Or they might both have heard in their sleep the sound of the old, worn-out drains that ran under the house.

  One morning, while Adel was doing the ironing in Rachel's bedroom, the old man suddenly pounced on him, with his head thrust forward like a charging bull, and began to interrogate him:

  "So, you're a student, eh? What sort of student are you then?"

  "I'm an arts student."

  "Arts, huh? What art exactly? The art of talking nonsense? The art of deception? The dark arts? And if you are indeed an arts student, then tell me this if you don't mind: what are you doing here, why aren't you at university?"

  "I'm taking a break from university. I'm trying to write a book about you."

  "About us?"

  "About you, and about us. A comparison."

  "A comparison. What sort of a comparison? A comparison to show that we are the robbers and you are the robbed? To reveal our ugly face?"

  "Not ugly, exactly. More like unhappy."

  "And how about your face? Isn't it unhappy? Are you so pretty? Beyond reproach? Saintly and pure?"

  "We're unhappy too."

  "So there's no difference between us? If that's the case, why are you sitting here writing a comparison?"

  "There are some differences."

  "Like what, for example?"

  Adel skillfully folded the blouse he was ironing, carefully laid it on the bed, placed another one on the ironing board and sprinkled some water on it from a bottle before starting to
iron.

  "Our unhappiness is partly our fault and partly your fault. But your unhappiness comes from your soul."

  "Our soul?"

  "Or from your heart. It's hard to know. It comes from you. From inside. The unhappiness. It comes from deep inside you."

  "Tell me, please, Comrade Adel, since when do Arabs play the harmonica?"

  "A friend of mine taught me. A Russian friend. And a girl gave it to me as a present."

  "And why are you always playing sad tunes? Are you miserable here?"

  "It's like this: whatever one plays on the harmonica, from a distance it always sounds sad. It's like you, from a distance you seem to be sad."

  "And from close up?"

  "From close up you seem to me more like an angry man. And now, please excuse me, I've finished the ironing and now I need to feed the pigeons."

  "Mister Adel."

  "Yes?"

  "Please tell me, why are you digging under the cellar at night? It is you, isn't it? What are you hoping to find there?"

  "What, do you hear noises at night too? How come Rachel doesn't hear them? She doesn't hear them and she doesn't believe they exist. Doesn't she believe you either?"

  15

  RACHEL DID NOT believe in her father's nocturnal imaginings or in Adel's dreams. Both of them probably heard the sounds of milking from one of the neighboring farms, or the army on night maneuvers in the farmland on the slopes of the hills, and translated these sounds in their imaginations into sounds of digging. Nevertheless, she decided to stay awake one night into the early hours so as to hear with her own ears.

  Meanwhile, the last days of the term arrived. The older pupils were busy feverishly studying for exams, while in the middle grades discipline was deteriorating: students were late for class and some were absent, offering various excuses. The classes seemed poorly attended and restless, and Rachel taught her last lessons wearily. Several times she let a class off the last quarter of an hour and sent the pupils out into the playground early. Once or twice, by special request, she agreed to devote class time to a free discussion on a subject suggested by her pupils.