Between Friends by Amos Oz Read Free Book Online Page B

girls’ laps as they lay on the big lawn in the evening and sang work songs and patriotic tunes. Until the age of twelve, so he was told, girls and boys had showered naked together. Chills of excitement and fear had run down his back when he heard that. Day after day, Tamir and Dror and the other boys had seen Carmela Nevo naked, and they grew inured to what they saw, while for him, even the thought of the curve of her neck and the soft down on the nape made him tremble with longing and shame. Would he become one of them someday? He yearned for that day, but was afraid of it too, and he also knew in his heart of hearts that it would never come.
     
    The bus had already left Tel Aviv and was driving jerkily from town to town, pulling up at every stop, letting passengers on and off, hard-working people who spoke Romanian, Arabic, Yiddish, Hungarian, some carrying live chickens or large bundles wrapped in tattered blankets or old suitcases tied with ropes. When shouting and pushing occasionally broke out on the bus, the driver rebuked the passengers and they cursed him. At one point, the driver stopped on the side of the road between two small villages, got off, stood with his back to the bus, and urinated in a field. When he boarded again and started the engine, a murky cloud of stinking diesel fuel filled the air. It was hot and humid, and the passengers were bathed in sweat. The trip was very long, even longer than the ride from Kibbutz Yekhat to Tel Aviv, because the bus circled through the small towns and an immigrant camp. Citrus groves and fields of thorns filled the unpopulated areas. Dusty cypress or eucalyptus trees with peeling bark lined the sides of the road. Finally, when day began to soften into evening, Moshe stood up, pulled the cord to stop the bus, and stepped off onto the fork in the dirt road that led to the hospital.
    The moment he got off the bus, Moshe saw a small mongrel puppy, gray-brown with white patches on its head. It was running diagonally through the bushes toward the road, which it crossed just as the bus began to move. The front tire missed it, but the back one crushed the creature before it even had a chance to bark. There was only a light thump and the bus continued on its way. The little dog’s body lay on the cracked road, still twitching violently, raising its head again and again and banging it on the hard asphalt each time it fell back. Its legs flailed in the air and a stream of dark blood spurted from the open jaw past the small, shiny teeth, and another trickle of blood oozed from its hindquarters. Moshe ran over, kneeled on the road, and held the dog’s head gently until it stopped twitching and its eyes glazed over. Then he picked up the small, still-warm body so that no other cars would run over it and carried it in his arms to the foot of a eucalyptus tree with a whitewashed trunk near the bus stop and laid it down. He cleaned his hands with some dirt but couldn’t wipe the bloodstains off his trousers and white Sabbath shirt. He knew his father was not likely to notice them. There were very few things his father still noticed. Moshe stood there for a moment, took out a handkerchief, and wiped the moisture off his glasses; then, since night was falling, he began to walk quickly, almost running along the dirt road.
    The hospital, a twenty-minute walk from the road, was surrounded by a wall of untreated cinder blocks topped with barbed wire. By the time he reached it, the blood on his clothes had congealed into rust-colored stains.
    A fat, sweaty guard wearing a yarmulke stood at the hospital gate, blocking the entrance with his thick body. He told Moshe that visiting hours were over a long time ago and he should “go and come back tomorrow.” Moshe, his eyes still filled with tears for the dead dog, tried to explain that he’d come all the way from Kibbutz Yekhat to see his father, and he had to be back at school on the kibbutz by seven o’clock tomorrow morning. The fat