Scenes from Village Life (6 page)

"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!"

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. Meanwhile, 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.

Rachel pours the vet a glass of cold water and offers him some fruit and biscuits while he is still joking with her in his easygoing way. Then she helps him to catch three or four cats that have to have their shots. He puts one cat in a cage: he'll take her away with him and bring her back with her wound dressed and sterilized, and in a couple of days she'll be as good as new. On one condition: that Rachel speaks at least one kind word to him. Kind words matter more to him than money.

"What a scoundrel!" whispers the old man in his hiding place. "A wolf in vet's clothing."

Micky the vet has a little Peugeot truck, which the old man insists on calling a Fiji, like the islands. His greasy hair is tied up in a ponytail, and he wears an earring in his right ear. Both of these make the former MK's blood boil: "If I've warned you once against that villain, I've warned you a thousand times—"

Rachel, as always, cuts him short:

"That's enough, Pesach. After all, he's a member of your Party."

These words rouse the old man to a renewed outburst of rage:

"My Party? My Party died years ago, Abigail! First they prostituted my Party and then they buried it ignominiously! As it deserved!"

Then he launched into a tirade against his dead comrades, his false comrades, his comrades in double inverted commas, Comrade Hopeless and Comrade Useless, those two traitors who became his enemies and persecutors just because he clung to the bitter end to the principles that they sold for a mess of pottage on every high hill and under every green tree. All that was left of those false friends now, and of the entire Party, was just worminess and decay. The last phrase was borrowed from Bialik, although he had a grudge against Bialik: in the evening of his days, Bialik had turned from being the national prophet of rage into a sort of provincial gentleman, who accepted the post of commissar for culture, if not worse, under Meir Dizengoff.

"But let's get back to your disgusting hooligan. That fattened calf! A calf with a ring in his ear! A gold ring in a pig's nose! That braggart! That windbag! That prattler! Even your little Arab student is a hundred times more cultured than that beast!"

"Pesach," said Rachel.

The old man shut up, but his heart was bursting with loathing for
that
Micky—with his big behind and his T-shirt with
Come on, baby, let's have fun!
written on it in English—and with sorrow for these terrible times, when there was no more room for affection between people, for forgiveness or compassion.

Micky the vet visited the house by the cemetery two or three times a year, to see to the new generation of cats. He was one of those people who like to speak of themselves in the third person, and use their nickname. "So I said to myself, It's time for Micky to take himself in hand. Otherwise it simply won't work." A broken incisor gave him the look of a dangerous brawler. His walk was lazy but springy, like that of a drowsy beast of prey. In his murky gray eyes there sometimes flashed a spark of suppressed licentiousness. While he talked he occasionally reached around to ease the seat of his trousers that had got caught in the cleft of his buttocks.

"Shall I vaccinate that Arab student who lives in your kennel, too?" the vet suggested.

Despite this offer, he stayed on for a while with the student when he had finished his work, and even beat him at checkers.

All kinds of rumors buzzed around the village about the Arab boy who lived at Rachel Franco's, and Micky the vet hoped to take advantage of the opportunity and the game of checkers to sniff out any hint of what was really going on. And though he did not discover anything, he was able to tell people in the village that the Arab was twenty or twenty-five years younger than Rachel, easily young enough to be her son, and that he lived in a shed in the back garden, which she had fitted out with a desk and a bookcase—so he was an intellectual. The vet could also report that Rachel and the boy were, how to put it, not exactly indifferent to each other. No, he hadn't caught them holding hands or anything like that, but he had seen the boy hanging out her wash on the line behind the house. Even her underwear.

WEARING AN UNDERSHIRT
and baggy underpants, the old man stood in the bathroom with his legs spread wide apart. He had forgotten to lock the door again. Again he had forgotten to lift the seat before using the toilet. Now he was leaning over the basin, frenziedly scrubbing his face, his shoulders, his neck, splashing water in every direction like a wet dog, snorting and gurgling under the jet of water, squeezing his left nostril so as to empty the contents of the right nostril into the basin, then pressing the right one so as to empty the other, clearing his throat, expectorating four or five times until the sputum was freed from his chest and projected against the side of the basin, and finally pummeling himself dry with a thick towel, as though he were scouring a frying pan.

When he was dry he put on a shirt, buttoning it up wrongly, and his shabby black beret and stood hesitantly in the corridor for a while, his head thrust forward almost at a right angle, silently chewing his tongue. Then he wandered from room to room and went down into the cellar, looking for telltale signs of the nocturnal digging, cursing the workmen who had managed to erase every trace of their activity, unless perhaps it was deeper, under the floor of the cellar, in the foundation, under the heavy earth. From the cellar he went up to the kitchen, and out through the kitchen door into the yard, among the abandoned sheds, striding angrily to the far end. On his return he found Rachel sitting at the table on the veranda, bent over some marking. From the steps he said to her:

"But on the other hand, I am pretty repulsive myself. As you must admit. So what do you need with that vet of yours? Isn't one repulsive man enough for you?"

Then he added sadly, referring to Rachel in the third person, as though she were not present:

"I need a piece of chocolate every now and then, to bring some sweetness into my dark life, but she hides it from me as though I were a burglar. She doesn't understand anything. She thinks I need the chocolate because I'm greedy. Wrong! I need it because my body has stopped producing sweetness of its own. I haven't got enough sugar in my blood and my tissues. She understands nothing! She's so cruel! So cruel!" And on reaching the door of his bedroom, he stopped, turned and shouted to her: "And all these cats only bring diseases! Fleas! Germs!"

THE ARAB STUDENT
was the son of an old friend of Danny Franco, Rachel's husband, who went and died on his fiftieth birthday. What was the nature of the friendship between Danny Franco and Adel's father? Rachel didn't know, and Adel didn't talk about it. Maybe he didn't know either.

He had appeared one morning the previous summer, introduced himself and asked shyly if he could rent a room. Well, not exactly rent. And not exactly a room. A couple of years ago, Danny of blessed memory, what a wonderful man he was, had offered Adel's father to put up his son in one of the farm outbuildings, because the farm was no longer a working one and the sheds and outhouses were all standing empty. He had come now to inquire if the offer made two years ago was still valid. That is, if there was still a shed free for him right now. In return he was willing, for example, to weed the yard or help with household chores. It was like this: he had taken a year off his course at university and was planning to write a book. Yes, something about life in a Jewish village compared to life in an Arab village, a scholarly study or a novel, he hadn't yet decided for sure, and so he needed—it would suit him well—to live on his own for a while on the edge of Tel Ilan. He remembered the village, with its vineyards and fruit orchards and the view of the Manasseh Hills, from a single visit he had paid, with his father and his sisters when he was a child, to Danny of blessed memory. Danny of blessed memory had invited them to come and spend a whole day here, maybe Rachel could remember that visit? No? Of course she didn't, there was no particular reason why she should. But he, Adel, had not forgotten it and never would. He had always hoped someday to return to the village of Tel Ilan. To return to this house next to the tall cypresses of the cemetery. "It's so peaceful here, much more peaceful than our village, which has grown so much it isn't a village anymore, it's a small town now, full of shops and garages and dusty parking lots." It was because it was so beautiful that he had dreamed of returning. And because of the peace and quiet. And because of something else that he couldn't define but that he might succeed in describing in the book he wanted to write. He would write about the differences between a Jewish village and an Arab village. "Your village was born out of a dream and a plan, and our village was not born, it's always been there, but still they do have something in common. We have dreams, too. No, comparisons are always false. But the thing that I love here, that isn't false. I can pickle cucumbers, too, and make jam. Only if there's a need for such things here, of course. And I have some experience of painting, and mending roofs. And keeping bees, too, if by any chance you feel like renewing your days as of old, as you Jews say, and having a few beehives. I won't make any noise or leave any mess. And in my spare time I'll prepare for my exams and start writing my book."

ADEL WALKED WITH
a stoop. He was a shy yet talkative young man, and wore glasses that were too small for him, as though he had taken them from some child or had kept them from his own childhood. They were secured by a string and had a tendency to mist up, so that he had to keep wiping them with the tail of the shirt that he always wore outside his threadbare jeans. He had a dimple in his left cheek that also gave him a shy, childlike look. He shaved only his chin and sideburns; the rest of his face was smooth and hairless. His shoes looked too big and too coarse for him, and they left strange, menacing footprints on the dusty courtyard. When he watered the fruit trees they made puddles in the mud. He bit his fingernails, and his hands were red and rough as if from the cold. He was fine-featured, apart from his thick lower lip. When he smoked he sucked so hard on the cigarette that his cheeks caved in and for a moment the outline of his skull seemed to be revealed beneath his skin.

Adel walked around the yard wearing a Van Gogh straw hat and an expression of wonderment and longing. His shoulders were always covered with a powdering of dandruff. He had an absent-minded way of smoking: he would light a cigarette, draw on it three or four times, sucking his cheeks right in, then put it down on the fence or the windowsill, forget the lit cigarette and light another one. A reserve cigarette was always tucked behind his ear. He smoked a lot, but with an air of disgust, as if he hated the smoke and the smell of tobacco, as if it were someone else who was smoking and puffing the smoke in his face. He also developed a special relationship with Rachel's cats: he had long, respectful conversations with them in Arabic, and in a low voice, as though letting them in on a secret.

Former MK Pesach Kedem did not like the student. "You can see right away," the old man said, "that he hates us but hides his hatred under a layer of sycophancy. They all hate us. How could they not? If I were them I'd hate us too. In fact, I'd hate us even without being them. Take it from me, Rachel, if you just look at us, you can see that we deserve nothing but hatred and contempt. And maybe a bit of pity. But that pity cannot come from the Arabs. They themselves need all the pity in the world.