Scenes from Village Life Read Online Free PDF

sure, though."
    "Take it," the driver said magnanimously. "Take it home with you. After all, if another passenger comes along tomorrow asking for it, I know where you live. Can I give you a lift home, Dr. Steiner? It's going to start raining again soon."
    Gili thanked him and said there was no need, she would walk home, she had already bothered him more than enough on his time off. She got off the bus and the driver followed, lighting the steps for her with his flashlight. As she got off she put the coat on, and felt absolutely certain that it was Gideon's. She could remember it from the previous winter. A short, brown, shaggy coat. She enjoyed wearing it, and for an instant she had the impression that it held the young man's smell, not his smell now but when he was little, a faint smell of almond soap and porridge. The coat was only a little too big for her, and it was soft and pleasant to the touch.
    She thanked Mirkin again, and he repeated his offer to drive her home, but she assured him there was really no need, and left. The almost full moon emerged once more from the clouds to shed its pale, silvery light on the tips of the cypresses in the nearby cemetery. A wide, deep silence descended on the village, broken only by the lowing of a cow somewhere near the water tower, answered by distant dogs whose long, dim barking subsided into a howl.

5
    BUT PERHAPS IT wasn't Gideon's coat after all. It was quite possible that he had canceled his trip and forgotten to let her know. Or maybe his illness had got worse and he had been rushed back to the hospital. She knew from her sister that he had contracted a kidney infection in the middle of one of his courses at the Armored Corps training school, and had spent ten days in the nephrology department of the hospital. Her sister had forbidden her to visit him. The two sisters had been on bad terms for a very long time. It was because she had no information about the details of his illness, and was very anxious, that she had asked him on the phone to bring his medical records with him for her to take a look at. When it came to a diagnosis, she definitely did not trust any other doctor.
    Or perhaps he wasn't ill, but had boarded the wrong bus and fallen asleep, and woken up at the final stop in the dark in some strange village and was now wondering how on earth he would get to Tel Ilan. She must hurry home. What if at this very moment he was trying to phone her? Or perhaps he had managed to make his own way here and was sitting waiting for her on her front steps. Once, when he was eight, his mother had brought him here to stay during the winter holidays. She would bring him to stay with her sister during the holidays despite the long-standing rift between them. The first night he had nightmares. He groped his way in the dark to her room and crawled into bed with her, trembling with fear, his eyes wide open: there was a chuckling devil in his room that was reaching out to him with ten long arms and black gloves on its hands. She stroked his head and pressed him to her thin chest, but the child refused to be comforted and kept on making loud gasping sounds. So Gili Steiner decided to get rid of the cause of his fear, and forcibly dragged him, silent and paralyzed with terror, back to his bedroom. The child kicked and struggled, but, undeterred, she held him firmly by the shoulders and pushed and pulled him into the room. Switching on the light, she showed him that the source of his fear was merely a coat stand with some shirts and a sweater hanging from it. He did not believe her and struggled to get free, and when he bit her, she slapped him twice, once on each cheek, to put an end to his hysterics. At once, regretting what she had done, she hugged him and pressed his cheek to hers, and then let him sleep in her bed with his battered kangaroo.
    The next morning he seemed absorbed in his thoughts, but he did not ask to go home. Gili told him that he could sleep in her bed for the two