Scenes from Village Life (10 page)

AT SIX O'CLOCK
in the evening I got up from my desk and went out for a walk in the village. I was tired and my eyes were aching from a long day at the office, a day given over to preparing the annual tax return. I meant to walk for half an hour or an hour, have something light to eat at Chaimowicz's restaurant, then go back to my work, which had to be finished by that night. I was so tired that the evening light didn't seem totally clear, but somehow cloudy or dusty. It was a hot, humid summer's day in Tel Ilan. At the end of Well Street there is a wall of cypress trees behind which is a pear orchard. The sun was beginning to sink behind the cypresses on its course toward the western horizon. The sun looked tarnished at the close of this torrid June day, a grayish veil between us and it. I was walking at an average pace, neither slowly nor fast. Now and again I paused and gazed distractedly into a front yard. There were only a few people in the streets, hurrying home. At this time of day most of the village folk generally sit indoors or on their rear verandas facing their gardens, dressed in undershirts and shorts, sipping iced lemonade and leafing through the evening paper.

A few passersby crossed my path. Avraham Levin nodded a greeting, and one or two others stopped to exchange a few words. Here in the village we almost all know one another. Some people resent my buying up the houses in the village and selling them to outsiders, who build themselves weekend homes or holiday villas. Soon the village won't be a village anymore; it'll turn into a sort of summer resort. The older inhabitants are unhappy about this change, even though the newcomers have made the village rich and turned it from a forgotten backwater into a place bustling with life, at least on weekends. Every Saturday, lines of cars arrive in the village, and their passengers visit the boutique wineries, the art galleries, the stores selling Far Eastern furnishings, and the cheese, honey and olive stalls.

In the hot evening twilight I reached the open square in front of the Village Hall on Founders Street, and my feet led me behind the building, to a dismal empty space where a garden had been planted, pointlessly, since no one ever comes to this forsaken spot. I stood there for a few minutes, waiting, though I had no idea whom or what I was waiting for. A dusty little statue stood there too, surrounded by yellow grass and a bed of thirsty roses, in memory of five of the founders of the village killed in an attack a hundred years ago. By the back door of the hall was a notice board advertising an unforgettable evening with three musicians the following weekend. Underneath that poster was another, from some religious missionaries, declaring that this world is merely a gloomy antechamber in which we must prepare ourselves to enter the Sanctuary. I stared at it, reflecting that I knew nothing of the Sanctuary but that I quite enjoyed the antechamber.

While I was looking at the notice board, a woman, who a moment ago had not been there, appeared next to the statue. She looked odd and even faintly bizarre in the evening light. Had she come out of the rear entrance of the hall? Or had she come through the narrow passageway between the adjacent buildings? It seemed uncanny to me that a moment ago I was all alone here and suddenly this strange woman had materialized out of nowhere. She was not from here. She was slim and erect, with an aquiline nose and a short, solid neck, and on her head she wore a weird yellow hat covered in buckles and brooches. She was dressed in khaki like a hiker, with a red haversack over one shoulder, a water bottle attached to her belt, heavy walking shoes. She was holding a stick in one hand, and over the other arm was draped a raincoat that was definitely out of place in June. She looked as if she had stepped out of a foreign advertisement for nature walks. Not here, but in some cooler country. I couldn't tear my eyes away from her.

The strange woman looked back at me sharply, with an almost hostile air. She stood haughtily, as if she despised me wholeheartedly or as if she were trying to say that there was no hope for me and we were both well aware of it. So piercing was her gaze that I had no choice but to look away and move off quickly in the direction of Founders Street and the front of the Village Hall. After ten or so paces I couldn't stop myself turning around. She wasn't there. The ground seemed to have opened up and swallowed her. But my mind wouldn't settle. I walked around the Village Hall and continued up Founders Street with a persistent feeling that something was wrong, that there was something I had to do, something serious and important, that it was my duty to do but that I was avoiding it.

So I walked to The Ruin to talk right away to the widow, Batya Rubin, and perhaps also to Rosa Rubin, the old mother. After all, they had finally contacted me at the office to say that it was time for us to talk.

AS I WALKED
, I thought that it was rather a pity to demolish The Ruin. It was, after all, one of the last of the original houses built by the founders more than a hundred years ago. The writer Eldad Rubin's grandfather was a well-off farmer named Gedalya Rubin, who was among the first settlers in Tel Ilan. He built himself a house with his own hands, and he planted a fruit orchard and also a successful vineyard. He was known in the village as a tightfisted, short-tempered farmer. His wife, Martha, was known in her youth as the prettiest girl in the Manasseh District. But The Ruin was so decrepit and rundown that there was no point in spending money restoring and renovating it. I was still contemplating purchasing it from the mother and the widow and selling the site for the building of a new villa. It might be possible to arrange for a commemorative plaque to be fixed to the façade of the new building, saying that on this spot once stood the home of the writer Eldad Rubin, and it was here that he wrote all his books about the horrors of the Holocaust. When I was a little boy I used to think that these horrors were still going on somehow inside the writer's house, in the cellar or in one of the back rooms.

In the little square by the bus stop I bumped into Benny Avni, the village mayor. He was standing there with the chief engineer and a paving contractor from Netanya, talking to them about replacing the old paving stones. I was surprised to see them confabulating at this twilight hour. Benny Avni slapped me on the shoulder and said:

"How are you doing, Mister Real Estate Agent?"

Then he said: "You look a bit worried, Yossi." And he added: "Pop into my office when you have a moment, maybe on Friday afternoon. You and I need to have a word."

But when I put out feelers about what we needed to have a word about, I couldn't extract the slightest hint from him.

"Come," he said, "we'll talk, coffee's on me."

This exchange heightened my sense of disquiet. Something that I ought to be doing, or to refrain from doing, weighed on me and clouded my thoughts, but what that thing was I could not think. So I set off for The Ruin. But I didn't go straight there. I made a slight detour, via the school and the avenue of pine trees next to it. It suddenly struck me that the strange woman who had appeared to me in that out-of-the-way garden behind the Village Hall had been trying to give me some sort of a clue, maybe a vitally important hint, which I had refused to take heed of. What was it that had scared me so? Why had I run away from her? But had I really run away? After all, when I turned back to look, she wasn't there. It was as though she had faded into the evening twilight. A thin, erect figure dressed in strange traveling gear, with a walking stick in one hand and a folded raincoat draped over her other arm. As though it were not June. She had looked to me like a hiker in the Alps. Maybe Austrian. Or Swiss. What had she been trying to say to me, and why had I felt the need to get away from her? I could find no answer to these questions, nor could I imagine what it was that Benny Avni wanted to talk to me about, or why he couldn't simply raise the matter when we had met in the little square by the bus stop, but had invited me to call on him in his office at such an odd time, on Friday afternoon.

A smallish package wrapped in brown paper and tied with black cord was lying on a shady bench at the end of Tarpat Street. I paused and bent over to see what was written on it. There was nothing written on it. I picked it up cautiously and turned it over, but the brown paper was smooth and unmarked. After a moment's hesitation I decided not to open the package, but felt I ought to let someone know I had found it. I didn't know whom I should tell. I held it in both my hands and it seemed heavier than its size would have suggested, heavier than a package of books, as if it contained stones or metal. Now the object aroused my suspicion, and so I replaced it gently on the bench. I ought to have reported the discovery of a suspicious package to the police, but my cell phone was on my desk at the office, because I had only gone out for a short walk and didn't want to be interrupted by office business.

Meanwhile, the last light was slowly fading, and only the afterglow of the sunset shimmered at the bottom of the road, beckoning to me, or warning me to keep away. The street was filling with deeper shadows, from the tall cypress trees and the fences surrounding the front gardens of the properties. The shadows did not stand still, but moved to and fro, as though bending down to look for something that was lost. After a few moments the streetlights came on; the shadows did not retreat, but mingled with the light breeze that was moving the treetops as if an unseen hand were stirring and blending them.

I stopped at the broken iron gate of The Ruin and stood there for a few minutes, inhaling the scent of the oleanders and the bitter smell of the geraniums. The house seemed to be empty, as there was no light in any of the windows or in the garden, just the sound of crickets among the thistles and frogs in the neighboring garden and the persistent barking of dogs from farther down the street. Why had I come here without phoning first to make an appointment? If I knocked on the door now, after dark, the two women would be bound to be alarmed. They might not even open the door. But perhaps they were both out—there was no light in the windows. So I decided to leave and come back another day. But while I was making up my mind, I opened the gate, which creaked ominously, crossed the dark front garden and knocked twice on the front door.

THE DOOR WAS OPENED
by Yardena, the daughter of the late Eldad Rubin, a young woman of about twenty-five. Her mother and grandmother had gone to Jerusalem, and she had come from Haifa to be on her own for a few days and get on with her seminar paper on the founders of Tel Ilan. I remembered Yardena from her childhood, because once, when she was about twelve, she came to my office, sent by her father, to ask for a plan of the village. She was a bashful, fair-haired girl, with a beanstalk body and long, thin neck and delicate features that seemed full of wonderment, as though everything that happened surprised her and afforded her shy puzzlement. I had tried to engage her in a little conversation about her father, his books, the visitors who came to them from all over the country, but she would only answer yes and no, and at one point she said, "How would I know?" And so our conversation was over before it had begun. I handed her the plan of the village that her father had requested, and she thanked me and went out, leaving behind a trail of shyness and surprise, as if she had found me or my office amazing. Since then I'd bumped into her a few times at Victor Ezra's grocery store, at the council offices or at the health clinic, and each time she had smiled at me like an old friend but said little. She always left me with a sense of frustration, as though there were some conversation between us that hadn't yet taken place. Six or seven years ago she had been called up for military service, and after that, people said, she had gone off to study in Haifa.

Now she was standing in front of me at the entrance to this shuttered house, a graceful, fragile-looking young woman in a plain cotton frock, with loose, flowing hair, wearing white socks with her sandals like a schoolgirl. I lowered my eyes and looked only at her sandals. "Your mother called me," I said, "and asked me to come by to talk about the future of the house."

That was when Yardena told me that her mother and grandmother had gone to Jerusalem for a few days and she was alone in the house, but she invited me in, though it was no good talking to her about the future of the house. I made up my mind to thank her, take my leave and come back another day, but my feet followed her into the house of their own accord. I entered the large room I remembered from my childhood, that high-ceilinged room from which various doors opened onto side rooms and steps led down to the cellar. The room was lit by a faint golden light filtered by metal lampshades fixed close to the ceiling. Two of the walls were lined with shelves laden with books, while the east wall still carried a large map of the Mediterranean lands. The map had begun to turn yellow and its edges were tattered. There was something old and dense in the room, a faint smell of things that had not been aired, or maybe it wasn't a smell but the golden light catching tiny specks of dust that shimmered in a diagonal column above the dark dining table flanked by eight straight-backed dining chairs.

Yardena sat me down in an old mauve-colored armchair and asked me what I would like to eat.

"Please don't go to any trouble," I said, "I don't want to disturb you. I'll just sit and rest for a few minutes and I'll come back another time, when your mother and your grandmother are at home."

Yardena insisted that I ought to have something to drink. "It's so hot today, and you walked here," she said. As she left the room I looked at her long legs with their little-girl sandals and white socks. Her dark blue dress just skimmed her knees. There was a deep silence in the house, as though it had already been sold and vacated forever. An old-fashioned wall clock ticked above the sofa, and outside a dog was barking in the distance, but no breeze stirred the tops of the cypresses that surrounded the house on all sides. A full moon was visible in the east window. The dark patches on the surface of the moon looked darker than usual.