Rhyming Life and Death (12 page)

PS You are not quite right in your harsh criticism of the lecturer, Bar-Orian. True, he is apparently not a very nice man, and I was sorry to learn that at
the end of the evening he dismissed you rather rudely, but it is not correct to say of him that ‘he is a stranger to life': for some years he has been living alone in a ground-floor flat in Adam Ha-Cohen Street, he has been widowed twice, he teaches in the Kibbutz College, you probably didn't know that his only daughter Aya walked out on him when she was only sixteen and a half, changed her name to Jocelyn, hung around in New York for two years, posed nude for magazines, then got religion and married a settler from Elon Moreh, and now, for the past two to three weeks, Mr Bar-Orian has been torturing himself to decide whether to keep to his boycott or whether to close his eyes to his conscience and his principles and agree, just this once, and certainly not to create a precedent, to cross the Green Line into the Occupied Territories to visit his settler daughter and hold his baby settler grandson in his arms for the first time.

*

Or take Ovadya Hazzam, for example, Hazzam from Isratex, the man who won the lottery, got divorced, had a wild time, lent money left and right
to all comers, cruised around town in a blue Buick, contributed to collections for new Torah scrolls, financed a pirate religious radio station out of his own pocket, spent money like water on good causes and also on divorcees from Russia, bought land in the Territories, rushed into politics, moved house six times in two years, married his elder son to Lucy, runner-up in the Queen of the Waves contest, Yitzhak Shamir and Shimon Peres both attended the glittering wedding, the hundreds of guests kissed him and he, in a blue silk suit with a triangle of white handkerchief in his breast pocket, kissed and hugged every one of them, men and women, members of the Knesset, land dealers, artists, journalists, he hugged and kissed the lot of them, with tears of emotion, joked and laughed, made them all taste – just
taste
– another piece of cake, have another drink, and now he is lying on a sweaty bed in the damp darkness of the hospital ward, between two other dying men, his bedclothes soaked in urine, with bits of dried blood clinging to his nostrils and the corners of his mouth, with a painful wheezing sound he breathes through an oxygen mask that covers his nose and mouth, and as his chest rises
and falls he half remembers in his morphine-induced haze lots of hands stroking his head, shoulders and chest, a woman or women weeping, and closing his eyes he can suddenly see the Sources of the Jordan: a sunbathed landscape with choirs of birds and a shady eucalyptus grove between two streams. The trees are massive, and almost belong to the realm of the inanimate. The place is far away and peaceful. Apart from the twittering of the birds and the occasional sound of the breeze high up in the trees, the silence is intense. An unseen bee is buzzing in the heart of the sunlight. And two birds reply. Some time ago there was heavy rain all over Galilee with thunder and high winds. Now all is calm. The air is brilliant, polished, and all the view as far as the mountain slopes is bathed in limpid light. There are ripples on the surface of the two streams. Every now and again a curl of foam dances on the water, or a shoal of fish stirs under the surface like a silent caress. The slowly falling leaves rustle constantly in the twilight under the oxygen mask, and there is an occasional grunting sound or a stifled guttural scraping like a car slithering on thick gravel, that now pierces the sleep of Ricky the waitress and
causes her to utter a couple of frightened sobs and chase away with a sleepy hand some evil shadow that bends over her and presses down on her sheet in the dark. Crafty, patient and kindly, Berl Katznelson, still looking down from his picture at the cultural centre, knew how to pull off a discreet coup by rather devious means: this is a bad business, all of it here, ridiculous and terrible.

*

It is still warm and humid inside, and thick darkness outside. The Author lights a last cigarette and soon he will lie down to sleep. Sounds of four o'clock in the morning come to him through the window: the swish of a sprinkler on the lawn, broken cries of alarm from a parked car that can no longer bear its loneliness, the low weeping of a man in the next-door flat, on the other side of the wall, the shriek of a nightbird nearby that can perhaps already see what is hidden from you and me. Tell me, have you ever heard the name of Tsefania Beit-Halachmi?
Rhyming Life and Death
? No? He was a minor poet whose verses were once quite well known here but over the years they have been forgotten. The poet
who was wrong about that groom and bride, side by side. And now, the nightbird has stopped its shrieking, and in the evening paper that was waiting for me by my bed I read that in the early hours of yesterday morning, in Raanana, at the age of ninety-seven, the poet died in his sleep of heart failure. Once in a while it is worth turning on the light to clarify what is going on. Tomorrow will be warm and humid, too. And, in fact, tomorrow is today.

The Author

Ricky
: A waitress. Once she was in love with Charlie, the reserve goalkeeper of Bnei-Yehuda football team, who affectionately referred to her as Gogog.

Charlie
: the reserve goalkeeper of Bnei-Yehuda football team. Had a good time in Eilat with both Ricky and Lucy. Now owns a factory that manufactures solar water heaters in Holon and even exports them to Cyprus.

Lucy
: runner-up in the Queen of the Waves contest. She also had a good time in Eilat with Charlie. In the end she had a glittering wedding to the son of Ovadya Hazzam from Isratex.

Mr Leon
: gangster's henchman. Thickset and bossy.

Shlomo Hougi
: Mr Leon's assistant. Understands less and less.

Ovadya Hazzam
: used to work for Isratex. Had a blue Buick. Used to drive around with various close friends, immigrants from Russia. Now he is in hospital with cancer, and no one comes to empty his catheter bag.

Ovadya Hazzam's son
: married Lucy, runner-up in the Queen of the Waves contest. Yitzhak Shamir and Shimon Peres came to the wedding.

Shunia Shor and the Seven Victims of the Quarry Attack
: Shunia Shor was a mechanic, ideologue and composer of folk songs. Was killed in 1937, with seven other workers at the Tel Hazon quarry, by Arab youths who had decided to drive the Jews out of the country. The community centre where the Author meets his readers was named after Shunia Shor and the seven victims of the quarry attack.

Yerucham Shdemati
: cultural administrator. Runs the Shunia Shor and the Seven Victims of the Quarry Attack Cultural Centre. Likes to lick the gummed side of postage stamps with the whole of his tongue. Not a well man.

Rabbi Alter Druyanov
: author of
The Book of Jokes and Witticisms
.

Rochele Reznik
: professional reader, who reads aloud the words of famous writers. Collects matchboxes from famous hotels round the world.

Yakir Bar-Orian (Zhitomirski)
: literary critic. Widower. His only daughter is married to a famous settler in Elon Moreh settlement.

Tsefania Beit-Halachmi
: poet. His real name, so far as I know, is Avraham (Bumek) Schuldenfrei. Author of
Rhyming Life and Death
. Wrong about one thing.

Berl Katznelson
: in the picture hanging on the wall at the cultural centre he looks crafty and kindly.

Miriam Nehorait
: culture lover. Makes sticky fruit compote. Children on her estate call her Mira the Horror behind her back.

Yechiel Nehorai
: husband of Miriam Nehorait. Was run over nine years ago when he was a Zionist emissary in Montevideo.

Yuval Dahan/Dotan
: very young poet. Not happy.

Dr Pessach Yikhat
: veteran teacher or deputy head
of a regional educational department. Takes a dim view of current trends in literature.

Joselito
: Rochele Reznik's cat. Jealous. Can tell the time. And makes her feel guilty.

Uncle Osya
: piano tuner. House painter. Once, many years ago, forgot the Author (who was still a child at the time) at the Pogrebinsky Brothers' pharmacy. Some say that for a year or two he hid the niece of Leon Trotsky in his basement flat on Brenner Street.

Shmuel Mikunis
: Member of the Knesset (Israel Communist Party). Once Uncle Osya nearly hit him, but later, when they both fell ill of the same disease in the same year, they became friends and even took care of each other.

Madame Pogrebinskaya (from the Pogrebinsky Brothers' pharmacy)
: dragged the Author, who was still a child at the time, into a dark back room and showed him something and even explained in a whisper.

Short woman with glasses and a green-and-white-striped trouser suit
: mother of Sagiv, who has never seen a real live writer close up, which is why it is very important for him to see the Author
close up. Once spoke to Mrs Lea Goldberg at the grocer's.

Sagiv
: almost nine. Does not speak. Has no wish at all to see a writer, only wants to break free and run away, but his mother holds him very tightly by the arm, just above the elbow.

Lisaveta Kunitsin
: neighbour. Optician. Once happened to peep and see something.

Lisaveta Shuminer
: mother of Yerucham Shdemati. Died in Kharkov sixty-six years ago. Dreamed of being a famous singer. Her seventy-two-year-old son still sometimes dreams of her.

Aya (Jocelyn)
: daughter of Yakir Bar-Orian. Was once photographed in the nude in New York and is now married to a famous settler in Elon Moreh settlement.

Baby
: son of the settler and Aya, grandson of Yakir Bar-Orian.

Arnold Bartok
: petty party hack, gaunt and bespectacled. Sacked from the local branch and later fired from his part-time job sorting parcels in a private courier company. Interested in eternal life. Apparently only came to the literary event to mock the Author.

Ophelia
: invalid mother of Arnold Bartok. Eighty-six. Paralysed from the waist down. Dependent on a chamber pot. Sleeps on the same mattress as her sixty-year-old son and insists on calling him Araleh, to annoy him, even though his name is Arnold and he's already told her so a thousand times.

Thickset nightwatchman
: stands and pisses.

Photographer from the days of sepia photographs
: arranges everybody and tells them when to smile and when not to move please.

Miriam Nehorait's cat
: refused to listen to the photographer and moved when the picture was being taken, so came out with three or four tails.

Miriam Nehorait's two married sons
: gynaecologists in New York. One of them is married to Lisaveta Kunitsin's daughter.

Yerucham Shdemati's brother's granddaughter
: fourteen and a half years old, and they still ask her childish riddles.

Yerucham Shdemati's doctor brother
: told Yerucham Shdemati that his chances of recovery from the blood disease he is suffering from are remote.

Wives of Mr Leon and Shlomo Hougi, respectively
: relegated to the kitchen because the film on TV is not for them.

Arad, 2006

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Epub ISBN: 9781409075417

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Copyright © Amos Oz 2007

Translation copyright © Nicholas de Lange 2009

Amos Oz has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

First published in Hebrew as
Haruzei
Hahayim
Vehamavet
by

Keter Publishing House Ltd, POB 7145, Jerusalem, Israel

First published in Great Britain in 2009 by

Chatto and Windus

Vintage

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ISBN 9780099521020