Free Don't Call It Night by Amos Oz

eyelids and who seemed to live inside a bubble of winter even in summer, perhaps because I dimly remembered him in a green sweater and brown corduroy trousers in a class where everyone else wore shorts. Although I was not entirely sure now about the corduroy trousers. Whatever the poet did or didn't want to say gets in the way of the poem? I should have tried to initiate a conversation. I should have invited him here, home. I should have got him talking. All I did was flit across his loneliness without stopping. Another time he said he thought words were a trap. I don't understand now why I didn't realize what he was saying was virtually a cry for help: "And over all there hangs a smile, fading and faint and painful", as Ezra Zussman wrote in a poem about autumn evenings.
    Above the hills rose a saracen crescent moon that bathed in pallor the waste plots and apartment blocks. There was not a single lighted window. The street lamps still shone unnecessarily and one of them kept flickering: insignificant. A cat passed beneath my balcony and vanished among the bushes. Beyond the hills there was a faint salvo of shots, followed by an echoing rumble, and again a cold silence, which touched my skin. I also remembered the aunt who worked in the bank and died just two days after they found the boy. A plain, desiccated woman with short coppery hair secured with a kind of plastic bow. And she had a funny habit, when you sat down facing her in the bank and talked to her, of covering her mouth and nostrils with her freckled hand, as though she was always anxious that she might have bad breath, or more likely that you did. She used to end every conversation by saying, "That's one hundred percent okay", which she always uttered in a monotone. A rustling passed through the darkened garden as though my thoughts about the dead had left me and gone down there to crouch among the oleanders. As though the twisted remains of a dog were crawling down there. For a moment I thought the old bench under the bougainvillaea bower was broken: the moonlight had altered the angles, the shadows of the struts of the bench had got jumbled up with the struts themselves, and the bench now looked like the broken reflection of a bench in rippling water. What did Avraham Orvieto mean when he said in the staff room, as though referring to a fact known to everyone except me, that I was the only one the boy liked? Maybe I should have asked him to show me his son's letters, especially the one where he mentioned the pencil that never existed.
    I was awakened at a quarter to seven by Theo, brisk, freshly shaved, stocky, wearing a smartly pressed blue shirt with epaulettes, looking like a retired colonial soldier with his broad shoulders and his short grey hair, with the morning paper under his arm, bringing me some very hot strong black coffee that he had ground himself as usual by hand and percolated, as though he were trying to conjure up a scene in that cruel British film. Apparently in the middle of the night, instead of going to bed, I had fallen asleep on the white couch in the living room. I took the coffee from him and said, Listen, don't be angry, I promised you yesterday I'd fill the Chevrolet up on the way back from Beersheba but in the end I clean forgot. Never mind, Theo said, I'll do it myself, later, on my way to the office after I've taken you to school. It's not time I'm short of, Noa.

 
     
     
     
    T HEO'S office, Planning Ltd., is situated on the top floor of the building by the traffic lights. It has an outer and an inner office, a drawing board, a desk, various wall-maps, a colour photograph of David Ben Gurion staring resolutely into Nahal Zin in the desert, two metal cabinets, some shelves containing different-coloured folders, and in a corner of the outer office a couple of simple chairs and a coffee table.
    Friday. Quarter past ten. On Fridays the office is always closed, but this morning Theo has come in to wait for the cleaning woman,