Rhyming Life and Death by Amos Oz Read Free Book Online Page B

conversation, you proceed from there. How, for example, do you get close to a girl who clutches a jealous cat to her breast, a growling bundle of fur that will surely scratch anyone who attempts to usurp its place?
    *
    And so the Author takes his leave on a note of controlled warmth. He promises to phone her, yes, definitely, very soon. By the light of the street lamp he hurriedly strokes her plait, and tries to look her straight in the eyes, but her eyes are once more lowered in the direction of the tips of her shoes or the cracked pavement. Rochele Reznik, a hunted squirrel with an expression of panic on her smallface, also looks as though she may bite, perhaps because of the way her front teeth protrude. She suddenly proffers a tiny, cold hand for a hasty handshake; the other hand still presses his new book, wrapped in brown paper secured with two rubber bands, to her chest. While she withdraws her hand from his with an almost imperceptible movement that suggests a day-old chick, she suddenly smiles sadly and says: Goodnight, and thank you for everything. Thank you very much, really. And there’s something else I wanted to say, I don’t know how to put it, I just wanted to tell you that I don’t think I’ll ever forget this evening. I’ll never forget the pharmacy and the back room with the poisons, or your uncle who slapped the member of the Knesset and then they both became ill.
    *
    The Author roams the streets for an hour or an hour and a half. His feet lead him away from the well-lit avenue to side streets, and unfamiliar alleyways, where all the shutters are barred and only an occasional anaemic street lamp sleepily casts a murky glow. As he walks he smokes two more cigarettesand does the sum in his head: seven or eight since the start of the evening.
    Two couples, their arms round one another, cross his path on their way to bed from a night out, and one of the girls lets out a shriek of horror, as though someone has whispered some outrageous possibility to her. The Author tries to imagine this possibility in detail, turning it round and round, looking for some kind of juicy excitement in it, but the incubus of the airless dungeon where Arnold Bartok and his mother Ophelia are shut away on their bed that is damp with sweat kills his nascent desire even before it can start up: the elderly mother and her middle-aged son are both stewing in their sweat on a single shapeless mattress, a skinny, veiny body straining to lift a massive heap of flabby flesh, and to push the chamber pot underneath – like a pair of wrestlers in the dark, the son grunting and the mother groaning, while a mosquito hums in the darkness like a tiny drill, there, or here, or both here and there.
    Uncle Osya, the anarchist, the piano tuner, lived all alone in a small back room in the basement of an old building on Brenner Street, he was generally out of work, sometimes he took an odd job as a removalman or a house painter, and even when he was in his thirties – a podgy albino – everyone always called him ‘Oska-nu-kak’, meaning ‘Well, Oska, how’s it going?’, and they jokingly said of him that in the recesses of his subterranean hideout he concealed the beautiful niece of the ousted Soviet leader Leon Trotsky from the British authorities and from the party.
    Even as a child the Author knew that this was only a joke, that there were no beauties hidden in his eccentric uncle’s basement, but now, for an instant, he is suddenly sorry that he never had the courage to peep behind the mouldy greenish oilcloth that hung from wall to wall, concealing the innermost sanctum of the basement.
    And he regrets his cowardice: why didn’t you invite yourself up to Rochele Reznik’s room? Behind that shy pallor of hers there probably lurks a feverish thirst, a blend of childlike innocence, unfulfilled desire, and a kind of silent, passionate submissive devotion flowing from her admiration and