Scenes from Village Life (11 page)

When Yardena returned I noticed that she had removed her sandals and socks and was now barefoot. She was holding a black glass tray on which were a single glass, a bottle of cold water and a plate of dates, plums and cherries. The bottle was beaded with icy perspiration, and the glass had a thin blue line running round it. She put the tray down in front of me, leaned over and filled the glass with water up to the blue line. As she bent over I caught a glimpse of the mounds of her breasts and the cleft between them. Her breasts were small and firm, and for a moment I thought they looked like the fruit she had served me. I took five or six sips and touched the fruit with my fingers but I didn't take any, though the plums were also covered in condensation, or droplets of water from washing, and looked tasty and tempting. I told Yardena that I could remember her father and that I recalled this room from my childhood, and almost nothing in it had changed. She said that her father had loved this house, where he had been born and raised and where he had written all his books, but that her mother wanted to leave and live in the city. She found the silence oppressive. Apparently her grandmother would be put into a home and the house would be sold. It was her mother's business. If she was asked for her opinion, she might say that the sale should be postponed so long as her grandmother was alive. But on the other hand, you could understand her mother's point of view: why should she stay on here, now that she had retired from her job as a biology teacher in the school? She was alone here all the time with the old lady, who was getting hard of hearing.

"Would you like to see the house? Shall I give you a tour? There are so many rooms. This house was built without any rhyme or reason," Yardena said. "As if the architect got carried away, and built whatever rooms and passages he had a mind to. In fact he wasn't an architect at all: my great-grandfather built the main part of the house and every few years he added a new wing, and then my grandfather came along and built more extensions and more rooms."

I got up and followed her through one of the doors that led into the dark, and found myself in a stone-paved passageway lined with old photographs of hills and streams. My eyes were fixed on her bare feet, which moved nimbly over the flagstones as if she were dancing in front of me. Several doors opened off this passageway, and Yardena said that even though she had grown up in the house she still had a feeling that she was in a maze, and there were corners she had not been in since she was small. She opened one of the doors and we went down five steps into a dark, winding passage lit only by a single feeble bulb. Here, there were glass-fronted cabinets filled with old books, interspersed with a collection of fossils and seashells. Yardena said, "My father loved to sit here in the early evening. He was attracted to enclosed spaces with no windows." I replied that I, too, was drawn to enclosed spaces, which retained a hint of winter even in midsummer. "In that case," said Yardena, "I've brought you to the right place."

FROM THE PASSAGE
a creaking door gave access to a little room, simply furnished with a threadbare sofa, a brown armchair and a brown coffee table with curved legs. On the wall hung a large gray photograph of Tel Ilan, apparently taken many years ago from the top of the water tower in the middle of the village. Beside it I could see a framed certificate, but the light was too poor for me to read what it said. Yardena suggested we sit here for a bit, and I did not refuse. I sat down on the shabby sofa and Yardena sat facing me in the armchair. She crossed her legs and pulled her dress down, but it was too short to cover her knees. She said that we hadn't seen more than a small part of the house so far. The door on the left, she added, would take us back to the sitting room from which we had started our tour, while the one on the right led to the kitchen, from which we could go either to the pantry or to a corridor that led to a number of bedrooms. There were more bedrooms in another wing. There were bedrooms that no one had slept in for upward of fifty years. Her great-grandfather sometimes used to put up visitors from remote settlements who came to look at his orchards and gardens. Her grandfather used to put up visiting lecturers and performers. I eyed her round knees that just peeped out from under her dress. Yardena looked at her knees too.

I hastened to divert my gaze and looked up at her face, which wore a faint, vague smile.

I asked her why she had taken me on this tour of the house. With an air of surprise she replied, "I thought you wanted to buy it." I was on the point of answering that I wanted to buy the house in order to demolish it, so there was no point in a lengthy visit, but on second thought I held my tongue. I said, "It's such a big house for two women to live in alone." Yardena said that her mother and grandmother lived in another part of the house that looked out onto the garden at the rear, and that she also had a little room there, where she slept when she came to stay. "Are you ready to press on now? You're not too tired? There are lots more rooms, and since you're here I'd like to take the opportunity to look at them myself. I'd be scared to go on my own, but the two of us together won't be scared, will we?"

There was a hint of defiance, almost of sarcasm, in her voice as she asked if I was tired and if the two of us together would be scared. We went through the door on the right into a large, old-fashioned kitchen. A collection of different-sized pans hung from one wall, and an entire corner was taken up with an old kitchen range and a red-brick chimney. Bunches of garlic and strings of dried fruit were suspended from the ceiling. On a dark, rough-hewn table were scattered various utensils, notebooks, jars of ground spices, sardine tins, a dusty bottle of oil, a large knife, some old nuts and various spreads and condiments. An illustrated calendar hanging on the wall was clearly many years old.

"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."

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. But 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?"