Suddenly in the Depths of the Forest by Amos Oz

Author:Amos Oz [Oz, Amos]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

17

After some hesitation, Matti decided that he should stay and wait for Maya there, at the foot of the rock that looked a bit like a large ax, because what would happen if he went to look for her? She might come back on a different path while he was gone. And if she didn't find him there, she might start wandering around the forest looking for him and get lost among the hills, and they'd be looking for each other like that until darkness fell. So he sat leaning against the ax-rock and waited, trying to listen as hard as he could to pick up every rustle and murmur.

From so high up, the expanse of forest looked like a large, dark screen dotted with illuminated spots that were green: mottled green and gray-green and yellow-green and a green so dark that it was almost black.

Matti's eyes searched the distance, far below him, for the tiled roofs of the village, but the village had disappeared. Matti conjured up a picture of Almon the Fisherman's fruit trees. In his imagination, he saw the vegetable garden clearly and even the scarecrow standing in its beds. And he could describe to himself how the old fisherman walked slowly past, sighing, limping his way among the beds toward his wooden table, missing his dog Zito, and the finches and the fish and even the woodworms that used to gnaw away at the innards of his furniture every night. He was probably scolding the scarecrow now or arguing with himself as he walked. He always had the last word, muttering some unanswerable response from under his thick gray mustache. And there, not far from the ruins, Emanuella the Teacher was standing alone hanging laundry on the line in the backyard of her small house. Matti knew from the gossip—the whole village knew—that Emanuella the Teacher, not a young woman, had been trying for years to win the hearts of the men of the village, single and married, young and not so young, but not one of them gave her a second glance. Sometimes, Matti would join those who made fun of her and called her Emanu-no-fella. But now he regretted that: her loneliness and desperation seemed almost painfully sad to him now. When he thought about the narrow street under his parents' house, Matti pictured Danir the Roofer and his two young helpers sitting astride the beam of a tiled roof, hammering away and laughing because they'd managed to match the beats of their three hammers to the rhythm of a jolly marching song.

And he pictured Solina the Seamstress stopping in the middle of her walk and bending over her invalid husband's pram, maybe to straighten his blanket or change a wet diaper, or maybe just to stroke his head covered with its sparse gray hair, while from the depths of his lost memory, Ginome bleated thinly, heartbreakingly, because he thought he was a kid and his wife was a surrogate mother sheep.

And maybe at

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