Scenes from Village Life (8 page)

"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?"

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 the 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.

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.

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?"

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.

On Saturdays the narrow lanes of the village filled with visitors' cars, which were parked between fences and blocked the entrances. Crowds of bargain hunters thronged around the homemade cheese stalls, the spice shops and boutique wineries, the farmyards selling Indian furniture and ornaments from Burma and Bangladesh, the stores selling oriental rugs and carpets, the art galleries—all those activities the village had turned to as agriculture was gradually abandoned, though some farms still fattened calves, hatched chicks or grew houseplants in hothouses, and vines and fruit trees still covered the slopes of the hills.

As Rachel walked briskly down the road on her way to school and back again, people looked at her and wondered about her strange life, between her elderly parliamentarian and her Arab youth. Other farms, too, had hired workers—Thais, Romanians, Arabs and Chinese—but at Rachel Franco's nothing grew and no ornaments or art works were made. So why did she need this workman? And an intellectual, too. From the university. Micky the vet, who played checkers with the Arab worker, had said that he was some kind of student. Or bookworm.

Some said one thing, others another. Micky the vet himself stated that he had seen this Arab boy with his own eyes ironing and folding her underwear, and that he didn't only hang around the yard but actually had the freedom of the house, like a family member. The old man talked to him about the splits in the labor movement, and the Arab chatted with all the cats, repaired the roof and gave recitals on the harmonica every evening.

People in the village had fond memories of Danny Franco, dead of heart failure on his fiftieth birthday. Thickset, broad-shouldered, with his matchstick legs, he was a warm-hearted man who behaved affectionately toward other people, and was not embarrassed about it. He wept on the morning of the day he died because a calf was dying on the farm. Or because one of the cats had given birth to two stillborn kittens. At midday his heart failed and he collapsed on his back outside the fertilizer shed. Rachel found him there, with an expression of surprise on his face, as though he had been thrown off some course in the army for no reason. At first Rachel couldn't understand why he was taking a nap in the middle of the day, lying on the ground on his back next to the shed, and she shouted at him: Danny, what's the matter with you, get up now, stop behaving like a child. It was only when she took hold of his hands to help him up that she realized they were cold. She bent over him and tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation; she even slapped his cheeks. Then she ran into the house to ring the village clinic, to summon Dr. Gili Steiner. Her voice barely shook and her eyes were dry. She regretted slapping his face for no reason.