Don't Call It Night Read Online Free PDF

complaint against these friends and acquaintances. If one of the other teachers suddenly started agitating to set up, let's say, a laboratory for infectious diseases here, I suspect I'd be bewildered or angry myself. Meanwhile, the Mayor shrugs her shoulders, the Workers' Council is noncommittal, the parents are hostile, Muki Peleg keeps trying to distract me with his stories about what women give him or the things only he knows how to give a woman, and Ludmir coaxes me to join the campaign to close the quarries as well. In the public library the librarian has collected all the literature on treating addiction on a special shelf for me. Somebody has stuck a label on the shelf: Reserved for Noa the Addict.
    Theo keeps his mouth shut because I've asked him to.
    As for me: I'm learning.

 
     
     
     
    I T is a small, new town with eight or nine thousand inhabitants. The first thing to be built were rectangular quarters to house the families of servicemen from the military bases. In the seventies there were some encouraging drillings in the vicinity, and the decision was taken to create a town. These drillings subsequently turned out to be disappointing, and the plans were put on hold. The principal thoroughfare, Herzl Boulevard, is ambitiously laid out: six lanes extending along the barren ridge of a rocky desert plateau, separated by flower beds containing red earth brought from far away, planted with palm trees that are shaken by the strong winds. On either side of the boulevard, inside iron cages wrapped with sackcloth for protection against the sandstorms, poinciana saplings fed by a drip system look as though they are still uncertain whether there is any point in their existence. From this main boulevard some fifteen identical streets, named after presidents and prime ministers, branch off to east and to west. Each street contains a row of green street lamps and matching green municipal benches set out at regular intervals. There are mailboxes and a bus station and signs indicating pedestrian crossings, even though the traffic is sparse.
    The ornamental gardens are forlorn on account of the wind that comes gusting in from the desert, lashing them with dust, despite which meagre lawns subsist in front of some buildings, along with a few oleanders and rose bushes. The buildings themselves are eroded by the heat and the wind. Four- and six-storey apartment blocks stand in rows, with front balconies closed in with cement blocks or aluminum-framed sliding windows. They were originally coated with white plaster, but their colour now is a murky grey: year by year the plaster grows closer to the colours of the desert, as though by assimilating to those colours it can assuage the fury of the light and dust. Solar panels gleam on every roof, as if the town were trying to appease the sun's blaze in its own language.
    There are wide gaps between the apartment blocks. Perhaps years ago a heat-dazed planner laid out a garden suburb, with spaces left for parks and garden plots, with patches of fruit trees intended to blossom between the buildings. Meanwhile, these empty plots are strips of desert dotted with heaps of junk and a few bushes straddling the line between plants and inanimate objects. There are also a few eucalyptus trees and tamarisks, blighted by droughts and salty wind, hunched towards the east like fugitives turned to stone in mid-flight.
    On the north-west of the town stretches the chic residential district, containing a hundred individual houses. Most of them exploit the slope so as to enjoy several levels. There are no flat, tar-coated roofs here, but red tiles turning grey summer by summer. There are some wooden houses built in Swiss-chalet style, interspersed with others in Italian or Spanish idiom, in a reddish stone brought from the mountains of Galilee, with projections, surrounds and arches, rounded windows and even weathercocks on the gables, sighing for forests and meadows in this desert. This is where the