Suddenly in the Depths of the Forest by Amos Oz Read Free Book Online

moment. Then a moment later, it moved away into the distance without a sound. As if for a while, a heavy black blanket had covered everything. And for a moment, their hearts filled with fear at a huge magic trick, fear of a day that wasn't day and a night that wasn't night. But neither Maya nor Matti said a word about it. They were silent and kept climbing, till they reached a place on the mountainside where they could rest and make plans. Maya went alone to see what lay ahead because she thought she heard the whisper of the river in the distance.
    There, on the mountainside, between two rocks, Matti bent to examine a small stone, a curled stone that reminded him of a picture of a snail, or maybe this was a fossilized snail. Meanwhile, Maya climbed farther up the mountainside toward what seemed to be the murmur of the river. Suddenly, Matti couldn't see her anymore, couldn't even hear the sound of her steps, but he was afraid to raise his voice and call her. And when Maya turned to look, she didn't see Matti either. He had vanished among the trees, and she too was afraid to call him because they both had the feeling that they mustn't shout here because they weren't really alone; someone was waiting for them in the depths of the forest. Or hovering above them. Or perhaps just standing silently, unmoving, among the shadows of the dense forest, never taking his eyes off them. Within the deep silence that lay heavily on everything, Matti suddenly thought that he wasn't the only one listening to the pounding of his heart, but whatever was standing in the shadows and watching him could hear it as well. And when he put the curled, snail-like stone down on the flat rock and looked for Maya but couldn't see her, another snail, not a fossilized one, crawled near his shoe. But by the time Matti looked back at it, the snail had vanished as if it had never been. Swallowed up in a crack.

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    After some hesitation, Matti decided that he should stay and wait for Maya there, at the foot of the rock that looked a bit like a large ax, because what would happen if he went to look for her? She might come back on a different path while he was gone. And if she didn't find him there, she might start wandering around the forest looking for him and get lost among the hills, and they'd be looking for each other like that until darkness fell. So he sat leaning against the ax-rock and waited, trying to listen as hard as he could to pick up every rustle and murmur.
    From so high up, the expanse of forest looked like a large, dark screen dotted with illuminated spots that were green: mottled green and gray-green and yellow-green and a green so dark that it was almost black.
    Matti's eyes searched the distance, far below him, for the tiled roofs of the village, but the village had disappeared. Matti conjured up a picture of Almon the Fisherman's fruit trees. In his imagination, he saw the vegetable garden clearly and even the scarecrow standing in its beds. And he could describe to himself how the old fisherman walked slowly past, sighing, limping his way among the beds toward his wooden table, missing his dog Zito, and the finches and the fish and even the woodworms that used to gnaw away at the innards of his furniture every night. He was probably scolding the scarecrow now or arguing with himself as he walked. He always had the last word, muttering some unanswerable response from under his thick gray mustache. And there, not far from the ruins, Emanuella the Teacher was standing alone hanging laundry on the line in the backyard of her small house. Matti knew from the gossip—the whole village knew—that Emanuella the Teacher, not a young woman, had been trying for years to win the hearts of the men of the village, single and married,
young and not so young, but not one of them gave her a second glance. Sometimes, Matti would join those who made fun of her and called her Emanu-no-fella. But now he regretted that: her loneliness and desperation