The Same Sea by Amos Oz Read Free Book Online Page B

known and never will. Right now
you're feeling thirsty too, so you order two more big frothy beers.

Stabat Mater
    But why do you keep worrying? Calm down. See for yourself
how well I'm looking after myself,
I'm eating, sleeping, wrapping up warm in my sleeping-bag,
protecting myself from the freezing
breath of the winds, I even drink fresh mountain goats' milk
for breakfast I won't get lost.
    It's no good. She's all around me. She's worried. She's found
a hole in the elbow of my sweater, the soles of my boots
are worn too thin, and what's that cut on my cheek? She lays
a cold hand on my forehead
and another on her own, compares, naturally I'm warmer.
She doesn't trust me.
    And why did you forget to send your father a postcard every week?
It's not so easy for him there,
looking after your girlfriend, well not exactly looking after her,
she's not exactly the one who's being looked after. In your place
I'd go back. You've checked out all these mountains one by one,
and it's nearly autumn,

    it's time to go home. The mountains will always be here,
but your life wont Instead of wandering around you could
be an architect for instance: what with your fathers way with a balance sheet,
my gift for embroidery, your grandfather who was a silversmith, and Uncle
Michael, the pharmacist, put it all together and you'll be a master architect
Take a rest, Mother, I say to her. Sit down for a bit You're tired.
    You've worried enough. Go back to sleep
curled up like a fetus in the hammock of the deep.
Master architect, doctor, they're
marketable professions. But every market closes in the end,
and everything perishes,
    dust to dust. Suppose your son puts Number One first,
so the whole of Bat Yam is full of his glory and all the substance
of his house, a name and legacy, a Mercedes and precious unguents,
surely with the passing of the years all will be covered in dust.
The name will fade, the unguents will dry up and only a powdery crust
will remain and it too in the end will fly
    to the four winds. A forgotten, invisible, imperceptible powder, Mother,
the dust of forsaken
collapsed buildings, shifting sands swept by the wind,
ashes returning to ashes,
from a handful of cosmic dust our planet was formed,
and to a black hole it shall return.
    A doctor an architect in a dream house with fancy carpets
in the best part of Bat Yam. Powder.
Rest in your peace, Mother, after the mountains I shall come
and you and I shall hide
beyond reach of the cloud that existed before anything was made
and that when all has passed away shall be alone.

Comfort
    Shortly before sunset Albert walks round to Bettine's to seek her advice
on a particular case involving double taxation. Bettine is pleased to see him
but hasn't got time to talk, she has her grandchildren with her, she is three,
he is one-and-a-bit, she is drawing a palace and he has crawled into
a cardboard box hideaway. Bettine offers some homemade lemonade
to Albert, who, carried away, is already down on all fours giving a recital
of animal and bird noises but the lion strikes the wrong note,
the tot in the box is scared, tears, and a bottle for comfort. Albert too seems
chastened and in need of comfort, so the little girl offers him a present,
the palace, on condition he don't cough scare no more. Later, in the empty
alley on his way back to Amirim Street a bird on a branch calls to him.
With no living soul to hear he replies and this time he hits the right note.

Subversion
    Bettine likes to sit indoors in the evening
in her pleasant room that faces the sea, half-submerged in potted plants,
wearing a summer kimono, her still-shapely legs
propped up on a footstool.
    She is deep in a novel about a divorce and an error.
The suffering of the fictional characters fills her
with a feeling of calm. As though their burden has fallen
from her own shoulders.
    Yes, she too is getting older, but without feeling
humiliated by it. A senior civil servant of sixty,
with her bobbed hair and those earrings, she