Don't Call It Night by Amos Oz Page B

and the mourners say Amen. Now they push Schatzberg the pharmacist forward and tell him to repeat word for word the phrases the cantor mumbles, Magnified and sanctified, in Aramaic with an Ashkenazi accent, speedily and in our own times. Every day he disappeared but they never worried about him because he always turned up on the dot of eight o'clock at the post office, with a shy smile shining in his childlike blue eyes, the smile of a shy man who has forgotten what it was that has made him happy. The cantor begs pardon and forgiveness from the dead man if any offence has inadvertently been committed against him in the course of the preparations for the burial or the burial itself, and formally releases him from membership of any association to which he may have belonged in his lifetime. He used to come up to you in the street sometimes and bow politely, his blue eyes glowing with warmth and feeling, and address you in that soft voice of his: Forgive me, sir, would you be so kind as to inform me when Elijah is coming? That is why he was known in the town as Elijah, or sometimes as Schatzberg-the-pharmacist's Elijah.
    Now the gravediggers tip the canvas, a task requiring the cooperative precision and dexterity of an operating theatre, and the sparsely bearded religious youth clasps the dead man's feet lightly and like a skilful midwife lets the wrapped body slide smoothly from the stretcher into the grave. They quickly draw away the tallit, like cutting an umbilical cord. Then they lay down five slabs of precast concrete, and set to work with spades raising a heap of earth that they mark with a rectangle made up of blocks of grey cement. On top of the mound, approximately over the deceased's noble brow, they set a metal plate inscribed not E LIJAH but G USTAV M ARMOREK RIP. The mourners wait for a couple of minutes in embarrassed silence, as if uncertain what to do next or expecting some necessary sign, then one of them stoops and lays a little stone, others follow suit, somebody makes for the gate, impatient for a smoke, and all the rest follow him, hurriedly again, it being midday on Friday, getting late. The gravedigger in charge locks the squat iron gates topped with a coil of rusty barbed wire. A few cars start up and wind their way out of sight behind the hill. Bozo the shoe-man's wife and child are buried here, in the upper section, four rows away from the soldier Albert Yeshua who, in a fit of unrequited love, killed them both with a submachine gun together with all the customers in the shop, and was killed himself ten minutes later by a single shot from a police marksman, in the middle of his forehead, between the eyes. Today's corpse has been laid to rest next to young Immanuel Orvieto from class 12C, and his aunt, who died two days after him of a cerebral hemorrhage. The boy's mother has lain for nine years now in Amsterdam. Everything is peaceful, Friday midday silence in the desert at the foot of the hill. "Wasps drone ceaselessly around a rusty, dripping faucet. And two or three birds may continue to sing there, concealed in the pine trees tested by an easterly breeze that carefully rustles them needle by needle. Immediately beyond the last graves is a steep fenced rock face that the army does not let you cross, they say behind it is a wide valley full of secret installations. Theo pays for his drink and heads back to his office. He will have another look for his Russian cleaner if her husband does not come at him with an axe. Noa will be here in a few minutes. Desert Chic Fashions, he ascertained by phone, is open till one o'clock on Fridays. In the little public gardens the blind man is still sitting with his dog, still surrounded by pigeons. Now he is pouring them some water from an army flask into a little plastic bowl. Theo has forgotten to buy the office supplies that he jotted down on a piece of paper. He'll get them next week. There's no hurry. And it also turns out that he's left his
Ma'ariv,
unread apart