Scenes from Village Life by Amos Oz Read Free Book Online Page B

kitchen door. Here, barely suppressing a sigh, he would sit on a stool painted green and wait for the visitor to disappear. Meanwhile, he would strain to hear what was said between Rachel and the vet, say, thrusting his wrinkled neck forward like a tortoise trying to reach a lettuce leaf, extending his head at an angle so as to get his good ear closer to the crack in the door.
    "Where on earth did you get an idea like that from?" Rachel asked the vet.
    "Well, you started it."
    Rachel's laugh tinkled lightly, like clinking glasses.
    "Micky, honestly. Don't play with words. You know very well what I mean."
    "You're even more wonderful when you're angry."
    The old man, from his hiding place, wished them both an attack of foot-and-mouth disease.
    "Look at this kitten, Micky," Rachel said. "He's barely three weeks old, sometimes he can hardly put one foot in front of the other, he tries to go down the steps and ends up rolling down like a little ball of wool, and then he makes such an endearing face, like a tiny suffering saint, but he has already learned how to hide behind a cushion and peer out at me like a tiger in the jungle, his little body flattened and swaying from side to side, ready to pounce, and then he pounces, but he misjudges the distance and does a belly flop on the floor. In a year's time no female cat in the village will be able to resist his charms."
    "I'll have neutered him before then," answered the vet. "Before he can charm you, too."
    "I'll do the same to you," murmurs the old man from behind the kitchen door.
    Rachel pours the vet a glass of cold water and offers him some fruit and biscuits while he is still joking with her in his easygoing way. Then she helps him to catch three or four cats that have to have their shots. He puts one cat in a cage: he'll take her away with him and bring her back with her wound dressed and sterilized, and in a couple of days she'll be as good as new. On one condition: that Rachel speaks at least one kind word to him. Kind words matter more to him than money.
    "What a scoundrel!" whispers the old man in his hiding place. "A wolf in vet's clothing."
    Micky the vet has a little Peugeot truck, which the old man insists on calling a Fiji, like the islands. His greasy hair is tied up in a ponytail, and he wears an earring in his right ear. Both of these make the former MK's blood boil: "If I've warned you once against that villain, I've warned you a thousand times—"
    Rachel, as always, cuts him short:
    "That's enough, Pesach. After all, he's a member of your Party."
    These words rouse the old man to a renewed outburst of rage:
    "My Party? My Party died years ago, Abigail! First they prostituted my Party and then they buried it ignominiously! As it deserved!"
    Then he launched into a tirade against his dead comrades, his false comrades, his comrades in double inverted commas, Comrade Hopeless and Comrade Useless, those two traitors who became his enemies and persecutors just because he clung to the bitter end to the principles that they sold for a mess of pottage on every high hill and under every green tree. All that was left of those false friends now, and of the entire Party, was just worminess and decay. The last phrase was borrowed from Bialik, although he had a grudge against Bialik: in the evening of his days, Bialik had turned from being the national prophet of rage into a sort of provincial gentleman, who accepted the post of commissar for culture, if not worse, under Meir Dizengoff.
    "But let's get back to your disgusting hooligan. That fattened calf! A calf with a ring in his ear! A gold ring in a pig's nose! That braggart! That windbag! That prattler! Even your little Arab student is a hundred times more cultured than that beast!"
    "Pesach," said Rachel.
    The old man shut up, but his heart was bursting with loathing for
that
Micky—with his big behind and his T-shirt with
Come on, baby, let's have fun!
written on it in English—and with sorrow for these terrible