Scenes from Village Life Read online

  "My father used to love sitting here on winter days next to the hot kitchen range, writing in his notebooks," Yardena said. "Now my mother and my grandmother use a little kitchenette in their wing. This one is not really used." She asked me if I was hungry and offered to put together a snack for me. I did actually feel a bit hungry, and would happily have eaten, say, a slice of bread spread with avocado, with some onion and salt on top, but the kitchen seemed so bleak, and my curiosity spurred me onward, deeper into the house, to the heart of the labyrinth. "No, thanks, maybe some other time," I said. "Why don't we press on and see what else there is."

  Again I caught a hint of mockery in her eyes, as though she had plumbed the depths of my mind and discovered something that was not to my credit. "Come on, this way," she said. We took a narrow passage that led diagonally to the left into another, curved, passageway, where Yardena lit a pale light. My head was foggy and I wasn't certain I could find my own way back. Yardena seemed to enjoy leading me deeper and deeper into the bowels of the house, her bare feet moving nimbly over the cold flagstones, her long, thin body dancing as she floated along. In this passageway various items of camping equipment were stowed away: a folded tent, poles, rubber mats, ropes and a pair of sooty paraffin lamps. As if someone had been making preparations to go off and live alone in the mountains. An odor of dampness and dust hung between the thick walls. Once when I was eight or nine my father shut me up in the toolshed in the garden for an hour or two because I broke a thermometer. I can still remember the fingers of cold and darkness groping at me as I huddled like a fetus in a corner of the shed.

  The curved passageway had three closed doors apart from the one we had come through. Indicating one of them, Yar­dena said that it led to the cellar and asked me if I wanted to go down and see it.

  "You're not scared of cellars, are you?"

  "No, I'm not, but if you don't mind, maybe we'll skip the cellar this time."

  At once I had second thoughts, and said, "Actually, why not? I ought to take a look at the cellar, too."

  Yardena reached for a flashlight hanging on the wall of the passage and pushed the door open with her bare foot. I followed, and in the semidarkness, amid capering shadows, I counted fourteen steps. The air in the cellar was chilly and damp, and Yardena's flashlight cast heavy shadows on the dark walls. "This is our cellar," said Yardena. "This is where we keep everything that there's no room for in the house. My father used to come down here sometimes on hot days like today to cool off. My grandfather used to sleep here, surrounded by barrels and packing cases, when the weather was really hot. You're not claustrophobic, are you? Are you scared of the dark? I'm not. On the contrary. Ever since I was a small girl, I have always found enclosed, dark hiding places for myself. If you do buy the house, try to persuade your clients not to make any drastic changes. At least while my grandmother is alive."

  "Changes? The new owners may not want to change the house, they may want to knock it down and build a modern villa in its place." (Something stopped me saying that I was planning to demolish it myself.)

  "If only I had the money," Yardena said, "I'd buy it myself. Then I'd shut it up. I certainly wouldn't come and live here. I'd buy it and shut it up and let it stay this way. That's what I'd do."

  As my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, I could see that the walls of the cellar were lined with shelves full of tins and jars, of pickled gherkins, olives, jams, various sorts of preserves and other comestibles that I couldn't identify. It was as if the house were planning to withstand a lengthy siege. The floor was covered in heaps of sacks and boxes. To my right there were three or four sealed barrels that may have contained wine; I had no means of knowing. In one corner, books were piled one on top of another from the floor almost to the ceiling. According to Yardena, it was her great-grandfather, Gedalya Rubin, who had dug out and made this cellar, before he built the house. The cellar was part of the foundation, and in the early years the family had lived here until the house itself was built above it. And as she'd told me earlier, the house wasn't built all at once; it had taken many years, with each generation adding its wings and extensions, which might be why it looked as though it had no plan. It was this muddle, Yardena said, that was for her one of the secret charms of the house: you could get lost, you could hide, and in moments of despair you could always find a quiet corner to be alone. "Do you like being alone?" she asked.

  I was surprised, because I couldn't imagine how anyone would need a quiet corner to be alone in such a huge, rambling house, which was inhabited just by two old women, or sometimes by two old women and a barefoot student. Still, I felt good in the cellar. Its cool darkness was connected in my mind with the strange figure of that woman traveler who had appeared and promptly disappeared in the dusty little garden behind the Village Hall, and with Benny Avni's odd invitation, and the heavy parcel I had found on a bench and had neglected to report to someone as I should have done.

  I asked Yardena if there was a direct way of going from the cellar out to the garden, but she told me there were only two ways out, the way we had come in or by some steps that led straight up to the living room. Did I want to go back? I said yes, but instantly regretted it, and said that, actually, no, I didn't. Yardena took my hand and sat me down on a packing case, then sat down opposite me, smoothing her dress over her crossed legs. "Now," she said, "you and I aren't in a hurry to go anywhere, are we? Why don't you tell me what's really going to happen to our house once you've bought it."

  6

  SHE PUT THE FLASHLIGHT down with its beam pointing up. A circle of light appeared on the ceiling, and the rest of the cellar was in darkness. Yardena became a silhouette among the shadows. "If I wanted to," she said, "I could switch off the flashlight and slip away in the darkness. I could lock you in the cellar and you'd stay here forever, eating olives and sauerkraut and drinking wine and groping at the walls till the battery runs out." I wanted to reply that in my dreams I'd always seen myself locked in a dark cellar, but I chose to say nothing. After a silence Yardena asked me whom I would sell the house to. Who would buy an old warren like this?

  "Let's see," I said. "Maybe I won't sell it. Maybe I'll move in here. I like the house. And the tenant, too. Maybe I'll buy the house with a resident tenant."

  "I sometimes like to undress slowly in front of the mirror," she said, "imagining I'm a voracious man watching me undress. Games like that excite me." The flashlight flickered for a moment as though the battery were low, but then the circle of bright light on the ceiling came back. In the silence I thought I could hear a vague sound of running water, water flowing slowly, quietly in some lower cellar underneath this one. When I was five or six my parents took me on a trip, to Galilee I suppose, and I dimly remember a building made of heavy, moss-covered stones, perhaps an ancient ruin, where you could also hear a distant sigh of water flowing in the darkness. I stood up and asked Yardena if there were other parts of the house that she wanted to show me. She aimed the beam of light at my face, which dazzled me, and asked mockingly why I was in such a hurry.

  "The thing is," I said, "I don't want to take up your whole evening. And I've got to finish my income tax return this evening too. And I've left my cell phone on my desk, and Etty may be trying to get hold of me. And I'm going to have to come back anyway to talk to your mother and maybe your grandmother. But no, you're right, I'm not really in a hurry."

  She stopped dazzling me and pointed the flashlight at the floor between us. "I'm not in a hurry either," she said. "We've got the whole evening ahead of us, and the night is still young. Tell me a bit about yourself. No, don't, actually. I already know what I need to know, and whatever I don't know, I don't need to know. My father used to lock me in this cellar for an hour or two when I was little whenever I annoyed him. For instance, once when I was eight or nine I was standing by his desk and saw his manuscript full of heavy deletions, so I picked up a pencil and drew a little cat smiling or a little monkey pulling faces on every page. I wanted to make him happy. B
ut my father was furious and locked me in the cellar in the dark to teach me that I mustn't touch his papers, that I mustn't even look at them. I stayed here for a thousand years, until he sent my grandmother to let me out. And it worked: I have never read any of his books, and when he died, my grandmother, my mother and I sent all his notebooks and index cards and slips of paper to the archive of the Writers' Union. We didn't want to have to deal with his literary estate, Grandma because she couldn't bear to read about the Holocaust, it gave her nightmares, my mother because she was angry with my father, and me for no particular reason. I simply don't like his sort of books and I can't stand the style. Once, in the sixth grade, they made us learn a chapter from one of his novels by heart, and I felt, how can I put it, like he was imprisoning and stifling me under his heavy winter blanket with his body smells, without any light or air. Since then I have never read or even tried to read anything he has written. How about you?"

  I told her that I once tried to read one of Eldad Rubin's novels—after all, he was from here, from our village, and the entire village was proud of him—but I couldn't finish it; I read thrillers, agricultural supplements in the papers and occasionally books about politics, or biographies of political leaders.

  Yardena said, "It's nice that you came tonight, Yossi." I reached out hesitantly and touched her shoulder, and when she didn't say anything I held her hand, and after a moment I took her other hand too, and so we sat for a few minutes, face to face on two packing cases in the cellar, her hands clasped in mine, as though the fact that neither of us had read any of Eldad Rubin's books forged a bond between us. Or maybe it wasn't that but the emptiness of the house and the silence of the cellar with its thick smells.

  After a while Yardena stood up. So did I. She withdrew her hands and held me tight, with all the warmth of her body, and I plunged my face into her long brown hair and inhaled her smell, a smell of lemon-scented shampoo with a faint tinge of soap. And I kissed her twice, in the corners of her eyes. We stood there without moving, and I felt a strange mixture of desire and brotherly affection. "Let's go to the kitchen and get something to eat," she said, but she went on hugging me as though her body couldn't hear what her lips were saying to me. My hands stroked her back and her hands held my back tight and I could feel her breasts pressed to my chest and the feeling of brotherliness was still stronger than the desire. So I stroked her hair long and slow and I kissed the corners of her eyes again, but I avoided her lips, fearing to give up something irreplaceable. She buried her head in the hollow of my neck and the warmth of her skin radiated into my skin and stirred a silent joy that overcame the desire and reined in my body. Nor was her embrace one of desire but rather of wanting to hold on to me so that we shouldn't stumble.

  7

  AND THEN IN A CORNER of the cellar we discovered her father's old wheelchair, padded with worn-out cushions and equipped with two big wheels, each with a rubber hoop attached to it. Yardena sat me in the chair and pushed me to and fro across the cellar, from the steps to the heaps of sacks and from the shelves of preserved vegetables to the piled-up books. As she pushed me, she laughed and said, "Now I can do anything I feel like to you." I laughed too, and asked what she felt like doing. She said she felt like putting me to sleep, into a sweet cellar sleep. "Go to sleep," she said, "sleep sweetly." There was something bittersweet in her voice as she pronounced those words. Then she began to sing an old lullaby that I hadn't heard since my childhood, a strange, absurd song about shooting in the night, about a father who is being shot at and a mother who is soon going to take her turn on guard duty: The barn in Tel Yosef is burning, close your eyes and do not weep. And from Beit Alfa smoke is rising, close your eyes and go to sleep.

  The song somehow suited the house we were in, and it specially suited the cellar and Yardena, who kept pushing me gently around the cellar, occasionally stroking my head and my face and softly touching my lips till I really did begin to feel a pleasant tiredness spreading through my body and I nearly closed my eyes, except that some sense of danger pierced the drowsiness and stopped me falling asleep. My chin fell onto my chest and my mind wandered to that strange woman who had appeared to me beside the statue in the out-of-the-way Memorial Garden behind the Village Hall, with her Alpine hiking outfit and her hat with its buckles and brooches, and I recalled how she had fixed me with a scornful gaze and then, as I had walked away and turned my head, suddenly faded as if she had never existed. I would buy this house whatever the price, I decided, swathed in sweet sleepiness, and I would raze it to the ground though I had grown fond of it. Somehow I felt a certainty that the house had to be demolished, even if it was virtually the last one, and soon there would be no building left standing in Tel Ilan from the days of the first settlers. Barefoot Yardena kissed me on the head and left me in the wheelchair as she tiptoed away like a dancer and went up the steps with the flashlight and closed the door behind her, leaving me in the wheelchair, sunk in a deep repose. And I knew that everything was all right and there was no hurry.

  Waiting

  1

  TEL ILAN, A PIONEER village, already a century old, was surrounded by fields and orchards. Vineyards sprawled down the east-facing slopes. Almond trees lined the approach road. Tile roofs bathed in the thick greenery of ancient trees. Many of the inhabitants still farmed, with the help of foreign laborers who lived in huts in the farmyards. But some had leased out their land and made a living by letting rooms, by running art galleries or fashion boutiques or by working outside the village. Two gourmet restaurants had opened in the middle of the village, and there was also the winery and a shop selling tropical fish. One local entrepreneur had started manufacturing reproduction antique furniture. On weekends, of course, the village filled with visitors who came to eat or to hunt for a bargain. But every Friday afternoon its streets emptied as the residents rested behind closed shutters.

  Benny Avni, the village mayor, was a tall, thin, sloppily dressed man with drooping shoulders. His habit of wearing a pullover that was too big for him lent him an oafish air. He had a determined way of walking, his body bent forward as though he were walking into a wind. His face was pleasant, with a high brow, delicate lips and an attentive, curious look in his brown eyes, as if to say, "I like you, and I wish you'd tell me more about yourself." Yet he also had the knack of refusing a request without appearing to do so.

  At one o'clock on a Friday afternoon in February, Benny Avni was sitting alone in his office, replying to letters from local residents. All the council workers had already gone home, because on Fridays the offices closed at twelve. It was Benny Avni's custom to stay late on Fridays to write personal replies to letters he had received. He had only a few more letters to write, and then he planned to go home, have his lunch, shower and take a siesta. Later, he and his wife, Nava, were invited to a communal singing evening at the home of Dalia and Avraham Levin at the end of Pumphouse Rise.

  He was still writing when he heard a timid knock at the door. He was occupying a temporary office, furnished only with a desk, two chairs and a filing cabinet, while the council offices were undergoing refurbishment. "Come in," he said, looking up from his papers. A young Arab by the name of Adel entered. He was a student, or an ex-student, who worked for Rachel Franco and lived in a shed at the bottom of her garden, at the edge of the village, near the row of cypress trees that marked the boundary of the cemetery. Benny knew him. He gave him a warm smile and told him to sit down.

  Adel, short and skinny with glasses, remained standing facing the mayor's desk, a couple of paces away from it. He bowed his head respectfully and apologized for disturbing him outside working hours.

  "Never mind, sit down," said Benny Avni.

  Adel hesitated, then sat down on the edge of the chair.

  "It's like this," he said. "Your wife saw me walking toward the village center and asked me to look in here and give you this—a letter, in fact."

  Benny Avni reached out and took the note.

  "Where did you meet her?"


  "Near the Memorial Garden."

  "Which way was she going?"

  "She wasn't going anywhere. She was sitting on a bench."

  Adel stood up hesitantly and asked if there was anything else the mayor needed him for. Benny Avni smiled and shrugged, and said there was nothing he needed. Adel thanked him and left. Not till he had gone did Benny Avni open up the folded note and find, in Nava's unhurried round handwriting, on a page torn from the notepad in the kitchen, the four words:

  Don't worry about me.

  He found these words puzzling. Every day Nava waited for him at home for lunch. He came home at one, whereas she finished working at the primary school at twelve. After seventeen years of marriage Nava and Benny still loved each other, but their everyday relations were marked most of the time by a measure of mutual indifference tinged with a certain contained impatience. She resented his political activities and his council work, which followed him home, and she could not stand the democratic affability that he lavished indiscriminately on everyone and anyone. For his part, he disliked her passion for art, and the statuettes that she modeled in clay and fired in a special kiln. He hated the smell of burnt clay that sometimes clung to her clothes.

  Benny Avni called home and let the phone ring eight or nine times before admitting to himself that Nava was not there. He found it odd that she should go out at lunchtime, and even odder that she should send him a note, without bothering to say where she had gone or when she would be back. He found the note implausible and her choice of messenger surprising. But he was not anxious. Nava and he always left each other notes under the vase in the living room if they went out unexpectedly.