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

remember, even though he tries very hard. He must ask Noa tonight.
    Under his window a woman in a headscarf passes carrying in each hand a chicken freshly killed for the Sabbath. As the woman is short and the square is dusty, the dead combs leave a trail behind them on the sidewalk. Theo smiles for a moment under his moustache and almost winks shrewdly, like an avaricious peasant who, vaguely suspecting that the man he is bargaining with has adopted a cunning ruse, starts to plot a way of eluding the trap. The woman has already vanished.
    In front of the Sephardi synagogue an improvised table has been erected, a wooden door resting on two barrels. It is covered in open books, presumably sacred books that have been brought out of the closets on account of the damp and the worm to take the air in the sunshine. Half past ten and Natalia still isn't here: she won't come today. Has her husband locked her up again? Does he beat her with his belt? He must find their address right away, this morning. Go round, see if he can help, break down the door if necessary, to prevent a disaster. There's still time: Noa won't be here for another two hours. But here is the tax{i from Beersheba with the weekend papers. Limor Gilboa, Giltboa's pretty daughter, arranges them adeptly, inserting into the outer pages that have just arrived the supplements that were sent on yesterday's taxi. Gilboa himself, a tubby teddy bear of a mail full of energy, reminiscent of a trade-union hack, with his wavy grey hair, his protruding paunch, always looking as if he is about to embark on a speech, has already started selling
Yediot
and
Ma'ariv
to the crowds of people elbowing their way towards him and extending their hands. Theo jots down a little list of things that are needed for the office and decides to go down to Gilboa's to buy them when the crowd has thinned out, and perhaps also the weekend
Ma'ariv
before they have all been snatched up. As for the sketch he has been asked to do for Mizpe Ramon, it's not urgent, in the course of next week he may have a brainstorm. Let them wait. They certainly won't build their leisure complex over the weekend, in fact they never will. If only everything that had been done there so far could be wiped out and a fresh start made, without the hideous housing schemes, but in a low-key architectural rhythm, in a relation of proper humility to the silence of the crater and the lines of the mountain ranges. He locks the office and goes downstairs.
    Pini Bozo has adorned the walls of his shoe shop with a display of portraits: Maimonides, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, the Holy Rabbi Baba Baruch. It may not help, but it can't do any harm. Even though he is not a practising Jew, he has some fear of God in his heart, and also some respect for the religion that has protected us from all manner of evil for two thousand years. Besides these rabbis Bozo has hung up a photograph of the previous President of Israel, Navon, who is popular because he was a man of the people. On either side of him he has stuck up Shamir and Peres, who in his opinion ought to make their peace for the public good and work together again, against internecine strife: we have enough to do combating the external enemies who want to destroy us, the whole nation ought to unite against them and march forward together. Bozo's wife and baby son were killed in a tragic event here four years ago, when a young love-crossed soldier barricaded himself in the shoe shop, started shooting with a submachine gun and hit nine people. Bozo himself was saved only because he happened to go to the Social Security that morning to appeal against his assessment. To commemorate his wife and child he has donated an ark made of Scandinavian wood to the synagogue, and he is about to give an air conditioner in their memory to the changing room at the soccer field, so that the players can get some air at half-time.
    At the end of the sidewalk next to Bozo Shoes there are some municipal benches, and a