At first, all is deceptively peaceful, even Edenic. The little village of Tel Ilan is sweetly attractive: “The village was old and sleepy, a hundred years old or more, with leafy trees and red roofs and agricultural small holdings, many of which had been transformed into shops selling wines from boutique wineries, spicy olives, farmhouse cheeses, exotic flavorings and rare fruits, or macramé. The former farm buildings had been transformed into small galleries showing imported art works, decorative toys from Africa or items of furniture from India, which were sold to the visitors who streamed in from the towns in convoys every weekend, on the lookout for that original, exquisite find.”
There are still orchards and vineyards from times past, and enough old houses with neatly tiled roofs and snug shutters to convey a sense of how things used to be, but Tel Ilan has evolved into a bit of a movie set, an idea of its own past. And this is ancient land; for a village to be a century old is to have lasted just a twinkling in time. Before that 100 years began, the land may have belonged to Palestinians, or at least somebody else. Which accounts for the fact that beneath the soporific daily life, the very ground seems to be shifting. Something, or somebody else, wants back in.
The thrust of each little scene shows plans gone awry, expectations not met. In “Heirs,” a man living alone with his elderly mother and still feeling blue over the departure of his wife, is mystified by a stranger who appears from nowhere and makes himself at home, crawling in bed with the man’s mother. There’s no arguing with him. He says he’s the owner of the place, and he very well may be. In “Relations,” the village doctor, a grim, rather cruel woman, waits for her nephew to come in on the bus from Tel Aviv, but of course he never shows.
In “Digging,” an attractive widow lives with her awful father who spent a lifetime in the Knesset arguing so much that he’s literally tied himself in knots: “He was gnarled and sinewy, his skin reminded you of the bark of an olive tree, and his tempestuous temperament made him seem to be boiling over.” He smells of “overripe cheese” and hates everyone, convinced that everyone hates him — the villagers in particular, the Jews in general — and perhaps with reason. After all, they’ve displaced other people to be here, and now, in the night, the sound of mysterious digging suggests that other people are tunneling up to get their own back.
It goes on like that. The mayor comes home for lunch, but his wife is missing and won’t be coming back. A real estate agent plans to buy an old mansion and tear it down, but he ends up locked in the bowels of the building and may indeed never get out. In truth, the hopes of this place may be fading; the dreams of the precarious “civilization” have been ruined. This is shown most strikingly by the fact that someone’s beloved son has shot himself under his parents’ marriage bed.
And yet. And yet, while it’s true that Tel Ilan eludes perfection in so many ways, Oz ends this collection with another scene from another village, at another stage in its evolution. It’s a vision of unparalleled squalor, chaos, lust. Perhaps he’s encouraging us to consider that every bed that’s made, every bus that runs on time (even if our nephew isn’t on it), every shower taken is a heroic gesture against the disorder from which we all came.
See reviews books regularly for The Post.
Amos Oz will be at the Politics and Prose bookstore at 5 p.m. Sunday. For details, call 202-364-1919.
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