Rhyming Life and Death by Amos Oz Page A

emotional Russian singer with a deep contralto voice and a generous but not indecent décolleté. After his reading and the musical interludes, he would enjoy chatting with his audience, debating good-naturedly, pinching the cheeks of the children and sometimes of grown women, he would sign copies of his books and revel in the affection of his public, many of whom in those days could recite entire poems of his by heart.
    And then what happened? Perhaps, for example, his wife died one morning in an accident with an electric iron. And the poet waited a year and a half before marrying his big-bosomed accompanist. Who abandoned him a fortnight after the wedding andran away to America with her sister’s brother-in-law, a cosmetics manufacturer with a pleasing tenor voice.
    Or perhaps he is still alive, the poet Tsefania Beit-Halachmi? Totally forgotten, he drags out the remainder of his days somewhere, let’s say in a remote private old folks’ home in a workers’ village at the edge of the Hefer Valley. Or in some godforsaken nursing home on the outskirts of Yokneam. His toothless mouth chews a piece of white bread to a pulp. He spends hours on end sitting in a brown armchair with an upholstered footstool on the veranda of the home where he lives; his mind is still as clear as ever but it is many years since he saw any point in writing poems or publishing them in the paper, now he is happy with a glass of tea and the quiet of the garden, the changing shapes of the clouds, and he still enjoys, in fact he enjoys more and more, observing the colours of the trees in the garden and inhaling the smell of freshly mown grass:
    It’s green and peaceful here, a crow
    stands on a pillar, all alone,
    a pair of cypress trees together
    and another on its own.
    All day long he sits in his armchair on the veranda, reading with curiosity a novel by a young writer who grew up in a religious community but abandoned the commandments, or the memoirs of the founder of a charitable organisation. His eyesight is still good and he does not need glasses to read. Suddenly he comes across his own name mentioned in passing in the book, together with a couple of his old rhymes, which suddenly afford the old poet a childish pleasure, and he smiles and moves his lips as he reads the lines of verse: he himself has almost forgotten them, and he supposed, without rancour, that everyone else has forgotten them too, but here they are in the book by this young woman, and he finds them not bad at all.
    His innocent, round eyes are blue and clear under his white eyebrows, like twin mountain pools surmounted by snowy crags, his body that used to be rotund is now as skinny as a child’s, smooth and hairless, wrapped in a white flannel dressing gown printed with the logo of the old folks’ home and the motto ‘Young at heart!’. A small bubble of saliva appears in the corner of the poet’s mouth, on the left side. Every two or three hours the nurse, Nadia, brings him a glass of lemon tea and a sugar lump, and aslice of white bread with the crust removed. He sits peacefully for hours on end without moving, placidly breathing the country air and smelling the smells, with faint snorts, chewing his bread pulp, dozing, or wide awake, with the book by the young woman from the religious neighbourhood lying open face down on his lap, thinking about her and wondering whether death can be entirely, unrecognisably different from life. Surely there must be some resemblance, at least a hint of a resemblance, between the time before and after death, because there is after all a hint of a resemblance between any two times or situations in the world. Maybe that is how the poet sits all day staring with his thoughtful blue eyes at the swaying of the treetops and the movement of the clouds.
    But a simple calculation shows that it is hardly possible that this poet is still alive. His weekly column, ‘Rhyming Life and Death’, ceased to