Between Friends by Amos Oz

Author:Amos Oz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (www.hmhco.com)

At Night

IN FEBRUARY, IT WAS Yoav Carni’s turn to be night guard for a week, from Saturday to Friday. He had been Kibbutz Yekhat’s first baby, and the founders, including his parents, were very proud when, years later, he was elected to be secretary, the first person to hold that post who was actually born on the kibbutz. Most of his friends were tanned, muscular, and sturdy, while Yoav was gangly and slightly stooped, pale and big-eared, carelessly shaved, absent-minded, and contemplative. He looked like a Talmudic scholar. His head always jutted forward as if he were examining the path before him, his gaze usually fixed beyond the shoulder of the person he was speaking to. He managed kibbutz matters with delicacy and tact. He never raised his voice or banged on the table, but the members knew that he was honest, quietly persistent, and good-natured. He, for his part, was almost ashamed of his good nature and always tried to appear scrupulous, strict, and zealously adherent to kibbutz principles. If you asked him for an easier job or fewer work hours, he would answer gravely that such things were absolutely out of the question here and that we must always abide by our principles. But he would immediately begin a discreet search for a loophole, a way around the rules, in order to help you.

A few minutes before eleven at night, Yoav pulled on his boots and dressed warmly in his heavy, worn-out army jacket and a wool hat that covered his ears; then he went to the duty night guard, Zvi Provizor, to take over the rifle. Zvi, the gardener, said sadly to the secretary, “Did you hear, Yoav? Minnesota is having its worst snowstorm in forty years. Eighteen dead and ten missing so far.”

Yoav said, “I’m sorry to hear it.”

Zvi added, “There are floods in Bangladesh, too. And Rabbi Coopermintz died suddenly an hour or two ago in Jerusalem. They just announced it on the radio.”

Yoav reached out to pat Zvi on the shoulder but withdrew his hand when he recalled that Zvi didn’t like to be touched. So he smiled at him, instead, and said affectionately, “If you should happen to hear one piece of good news, come and tell me right away. Even in the middle of the night.”

Yoav left, and when he passed the fountain that Zvi Provizor had installed in the square in front of the dining hall, he thought that a lonely, aging bachelor had a harder time here than he would in other places because kibbutz society offered no remedies for loneliness. In fact, the very idea of a kibbutz denied the concept of loneliness.

Now that he had taken the gun from Zvi, Yoav made his first round of the kibbutz grounds. As he walked past the old-timers’ houses, he switched off lights that were burning needlessly here and there and turned off a sprinkler someone had forgotten before going to bed. He picked up an empty sack that had been tossed near the barber’s shed, folded it carefully, and left it at the door of the produce barn.

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