Rhyming Life and Death by Amos Oz Page A

paid a standard basic wage, with supplements according to the number of children, the state of health and the educational and cultural needs of each working family, according to the condition and the real needs of each. He believes that people are by nature generous and that it isonly social pressures that drive us all into the arms of selfishness, greed and exploitation. This evening, before you both went up onto the dais, he asked you to remind him later to tell you something about Rabbi Alter Druyanov’s
Book of Jokes and Witticisms
. You forgot to remind him, and now it’s too late. So now you will never know the key difference between a joke and a witticism. You are unlikely to meet Yerucham Shdemati again.
    You ought to pause here for a moment, to take the time to give this character some habits that will fix him in your readers’ memory, two or three significant eccentricities. For example, his habit of lustily licking the gummed strip on the back of an envelope with the whole width of his tongue, as though it were some kind of sweet. Yerucham Shdemati also licks stamps with a great abundance of saliva, with sensual greed, after which he likes to stick them on the envelope with a mighty thump of the fist, which makes Miriam Nehorait, who is fascinated by his ‘latent Tartar side’, jump out of her skin.
    He always answers the telephone at the first ring, with a broad, expansive gesture as though he were throwing a stone, and shouts into the receiver: Yes,Shdemati here, who is calling please? Bartok? No, I don’t know any Bartok, Arnold or not Arnold, no, my dear comrade, absolutely not, on no account, I’m sorry but I am not authorised to divulge the Author’s telephone number, I have not received the necessary permission, very sorry, comrade, why, if you don’t mind my asking, don’t you try to get it from the Writers’ Union, for example? Huh?
    Yerucham Shdemati almost always has bruises on his elbows or his forehead or his shoulder or his knee – a result of his fixed habit of ignoring inanimate objects and trying to walk straight through them as though they were made of air. Or maybe it is the opposite, and the inanimate objects bear a grudge and conspire against him. At any moment a chair back may butt him, the corner of the bathroom cabinet collide with his forehead, or a slice of bread spread with honey lies in wait for him on the bench just where he is about to sit down, the cat’s tail plants itself right underneath the sole of his shoe and a glass of boiling hot tea hankers after his trousers. He also still composes furious letters to the editor of the evening paper denouncing some injustice or pitilessly exposingthe ugliness, the arrogance, the ignominy and the lies that have infected politics in particular and society in general in this country of ours.
    In the morning he stands for a long time, sweaty and solidly built in his pyjama trousers and a yellowing singlet, at the basin in his bathroom, never closing the door as he performs his thorough, noisy ablutions, and with legs outspread he leans over the basin, washing and scrubbing his face, the back of his neck, his broad shoulders, his chest covered in white curls, snorting and gargling under the running tap, shaking his wet head from side to side like a dog that has been in water, squeezing each nostril in turn and emptying their contents into the basin, clearing his throat and hawking so noisily that Miriam Nehorait, who is on the other side of the wall in her own kitchen, is alarmed. Then he stands there for another three minutes towelling himself dry energetically, as though he were scrubbing a frying pan.
    If, however, somebody praises an omelette he has made, a picture on his wall, the achievements of the early pioneers, the dock strike in Haifa, or the beauty of the sunset outside his window, his eyes moisten in gratitude. Underneath his inflameddiscourse on every subject under the sun, from the