Between Friends by Amos Oz Read Free Book Online Page A

on the recorder, but he never dared to approach her, not with words, and almost never with looks. From where he sat in class, two rows behind her, he could see the curve of her slender neck as she bent over her notebook and the soft down of the hair on her nape. Once, when Carmela was standing between the light and the wall talking to one of the girls, he walked past and stroked her shadow. Afterward, he lay awake half the night, unable to sleep.
    Cheska said, “After you’ve set the thermostat in the brooder house and checked that there’s water in the trough and fed the chicks and put all the egg cartons in the refrigerator, you can go. I’ll write down the daily summary for you today. And I’ll let you go fifteen minutes early so you have time to shower and change and catch the four o’clock bus.”
    Moshe, who was collecting the dead chickens he had left on the walkway to drop them outside in the barrel to be burned, said, “Thank you.” And added, “I’ll be back tomorrow morning and I’ll come to work fifteen minutes early in the afternoon.”
    Cheska said, “The main thing is that you show them you are a total kibbutznik now.”
    Alone in the shower, he scrubbed off the smells of the coop with soap and water, dried himself, and put on long, ironed trousers and a white Sabbath shirt, rolling the sleeves up past his elbows. He went to his room, took the bag he had packed during the ten o’clock break, and left quickly, cutting across the lawn and past the flower beds. Zvi Provizor, the gardener, was kneeling at one of them, pulling up weeds. He looked up and asked Moshe where he was off to. Moshe was going to say that he was on his way to visit his father in the hospital but, instead, he said only, “Town.”
    Zvi Provizor asked, “Why? What do they have there that we don’t have here?”
    Moshe said nothing, but thought about replying: Strangers.
     
    At the central bus station, when he got off the Kibbutz Yekhat bus and boarded the one to the hospital, Moshe chose to sit in the last row of seats. He took his threadbare black beret out of his bag and put it on his head, pulling it down so that it hid half his forehead. He buttoned his shirt all the way up and rolled his sleeves all the way down to his wrists. And instantly looked as he had on the day the welfare worker brought him to Kibbutz Yekhat. He was still wearing the summer sandals they’d given him on the kibbutz, but he was almost sure his father wouldn’t notice them. There were very few things his father still noticed. The bus wove through the alleyways near the central bus station, and the smell of heavily fried food and combusted gasoline drifted in through the open windows. Moshe thought about the girls in his class who had begun to call him Moshik. Now that the teasing and mocking had passed, Moshe found that he was enjoying kibbutz social life. He liked school, where he could sit in class barefoot on summer days and argue freely with his teachers without having to show any of the usual subservience. He liked the basketball court. He also liked the art club and the current events group meetings in the evenings where they discussed adult matters, and Israeli life was usually represented by two camps: the progressive and the old-world. Moshe was well aware that part of him still belonged to the old world because he didn’t always accept progressive ideas, but rather than argue, he simply listened. He spent his free time reading the books by Dostoevsky, Camus, and Kafka that he borrowed from the library, finding himself deeply touched by the enigmas contained in their pages. He was drawn more to unsolved questions than to glib solutions. But he told himself that perhaps this was still part of the adjustment process and in a few months, he’d learn to see the world the way David Dagan and the other teachers wanted their students to see it. How good it was to be one of them. Moshe envied the boys who rested their heads so easily on the