Free Don't Call It Night by Amos Oz Page A

Natalia, even though she has her own key. Until she arrives he has decided to go over one or two letters. He switches on the air conditioning and the powerful light over the drawing board. Then, changing his mind, he switches off the light and waits at the window instead. At the counter of Gilboa's, Books and Stationery, he notices a small crowd: they are waiting for the newspapers that normally arrive at nine o'clock in the morning. This morning they are late. They say the police have set up roadblocks on all the roads out of Beersheba because there has been a bank raid. Near the monument, two gardeners wearing broad-brimmed straw hats are stooping to plant new rosemary bushes in place of the old ones that have died. Theo asks himself why he should not do a bit of work this morning. At least until Natalia arrives. He might try to jot down a few preliminary thoughts about the Mizpe Ramon project: at present all that is needed is a schematic outline, perhaps a few simple drawings without any detail and not even to scale. They haven't even got a budget yet, there's been no final decision, and they still haven't asked him to send in detailed plans. He thinks for a while but cannot find within himself that spark of acuity that is essential if an idea is to emerge. What's happened to Natalia today? Perhaps he ought to try to call her, find out if anything's wrong, though he has the impression they're living in the prefabs and it's doubtful if they have a phone, and anyway she once explained to him in broken English mixed with a few Hebrew words that her husband is madly jealous and is suspicious of the faintest hint of a man, even his own old father. He thinks about her, hardly more than a child, barely seventeen and already married and downtrodden, a submissive, timid girl, between smiles her mouth seems pursed as if to weep, if you put a simple question to her she trembles all over and goes white, her waist and breasts are those of a woman but she still has the face of a schoolgirl. Desire suddenly surges up inside him, violently, like a fist clenching.
    Friday. Noa is at school till twelve thirty. Then they've agreed to meet here and go to the shops together to try to choose her a skirt. He skipped his shower this morning, to hang on to the odour of her love that he can smell now, not with his nostrils but with his pores. Her laughter, her spontaneity, her body, the speck of light that capers rapidly in the pupils of her eyes—even her wrinkled hands, dappled with patches of brown pigment, so many years older than the rest of her, as though the forces of withering are patiently assembling there, waiting for a sign of vulnerability so as to spread all over her body—all seem to him to be joined to the very core of life itself. Like an electrical current she conducts life to him, too. Even if it was thinking of Natalia that aroused his desire, the flicker came from Noa and returns to her. There is no way of explaining this to her. Instead he will buy her a skirt and maybe a dress as well. And since Natalia has not come to clean the office and may not come today, there is time to stand at the window and watch the square by the traffic lights. What was the mistake that the male world made about Alma Mahler? What was Alma Mahler really like? Both questions are empty. Once, in Mexico City, during a festival of modern music, he happened to hear on successive evenings two performances of the
Kindertotenlieder,
one sung by a baritone with piano accompaniment, the other by a woman with a deep voice, perhaps a contralto, full of longing and yet pure and calm as though in resignation. Theo remembers that the latter was so poignantly sad that he had to get up and leave the auditorium. The second song in the cycle is called "Ah, now I know why oft I caught you gazing", and the fourth, "I think oft they've only gone a journey". These names cause him a dull ache like a single low note on the cello. The names of the other songs he cannot