FICTION
AmosOz
Don't Call
It
Night
Was she really always correct in her lightning judgments? Or more times
than not? Sometimes? I couldn't check any more, because with time I
began to see people through her eyes: icy, warm, tepid, generous, villain–
ous, compassionate. How about me? Am I hot or cold, Noa? Or would I
be better off not asking? To which she replied instantly, unhesitatingly:
You're warm but getting colder. Never mind, I'll warm you up. And she
added: Not bad. A bit domineering. You drive the Jeep brilliantly - it's
not so much driving, more like a rodeo.
And sometimes she looked to me again just the way she looked the
first time we met, at the Embassy, an energetic, well-meaning, judg–
mental Israeli schoolteacher. Her beauty was written all over in capital
letters. Wafting all around her a faint but unmistakable scent of honey–
suckle. But I found nothing repellent in all of this. On the contrary, there
were times when her presence filled me with childlike excitement, like a
creature that has been indoors and from now on is going to be well
looked after. I gradually discovered how fine and how effortless was her
emotional range, maternal one moment, girlish the next, seductive, and
most of the time sisterly. What's more, she revealed to me a childlike
sense of humor; "the horse is the main protagonist in the history of the
Latin peoples," a humor that gave me a strange urge to cover her shoul–
ders carefully. Even when it was not cold. Indeed the first present I
bought her was a Caribbean woollen scarf When I first laid it round her
shoulders, so white and delicate with a tiny brown birthmark near the
nape, there was a moment of mystery and joy: as though it were not me
covering her shoulders, but her suddenly covering all of me.
Once when we were visiting the ruins of a gloomy church from the
time of the first settlers and as usual I delivered a historical precis, she in–
terrupted me with the words, See for yourself, Theo, how light you are
now.
At these words I trembled like a boy to whom an experienced
woman, from the heights of her expertise, perhaps as a joke, has revealed
that he is apparently blessed with what in due course will make women
Excerpt from
Don't Call It Night
by Amos Oz, translated by Nicholas de Lange. Copyright
©
1994 by Amos Oz and Keter Publishing House Limited. English translation copyright
©
1995 by Nicholas de Lange. To be published by Harcourt Brace
&
Company.
