Call me narrow-minded and petty, but I'm a liar if each of you doesn't have a book from one of the libraries at home. 'Children of Shai'' Wrapped in dirty plastic, or Shmuel Argaman from 1981, on the shelves of your parents' house.
In general, the process that occurs with these books is worthy of psychological research.
In the first month of being late, the reader assures himself that 'a month late is a reasonable amount of time.' Only then three months pass, and a small voice inside his heart reminds him that returning the book at this stage constitutes a kind of 'trick'.
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""I'll return it through someone else," the liars promise themselves, and the book sits at home for another three months.
Six months later, the book is lent to friends with a sly remark: "Don't forget to return it, it belongs to the library, I don't like them.".
Another year passes, and the book passes into the possession of the borrower, who thus becomes its official owner. At this point, he is allowed to remove the white sticker with the number, erasing from his mind any memory that the book ever belonged to a public institution.
When he gets married, the book goes through the reverse process, inherited by his parents. He buys a new apartment, but the book remains in his parents' house, who, as the owners of the house, do not allow it to be taken out of the house, so that the grandchildren will have something to read.
In any case, like everyone else, I returned the book a month late, and since I wanted to appear like an interested reader, I told the librarian that I wanted to 'extend' the book, since I didn't have time to finish it.
She looked at me with a frown, although I'm not sure about it because of the thickness of the lenses in her glasses, and said: "You don't extend it, you take it back and take it again, that's an important point.".
""But I wasn't late at all," I tried to maintain my dignity.
But our librarian had a wonderful power of persuasion: "Well, I'll fine you ten shekels, and you can see that I'm late for a month." Usually, this explanation would suddenly sound logical, and I hastened to apologize for being late.
•
In any case, I didn't come to write about books, but about a certain librarian.
Like many young people, I would find myself sitting for long hours in the halls of the library, browsing through various books. Nonfiction, prose, poetry, health, encyclopedias, children, younger children, and toddlers.
People from different sectors and communities would sit in the library. A dark-skinned young man with a motorcycle helmet that he never took off his head, an old man with a huge mole on his nose who loved economics books, a yeshiva student in cotton pants who was for some reason interested in sports, a young man who smelled of strong perfume, who flipped through the pages while wetting his finger with a large, repulsive tongue as he moved from page to page, and a strange guy who just sat and stared at photo albums.
And yet something united us all: the fear of the librarian. The best moments for all of us were when a new character would arrive at the library, who didn't yet know the rules.
He would sit down, sigh loudly, and mutter something to himself about a 'country of leftists.' Like schoolchildren, we would look at the librarian who would fulfill our expectations and severely reprimand any stranger who dared to disturb the sacred silence. Her hearing, it turns out, was absolute. When Little Red Riding Hood asked the Big Bad Wolf why his ears were so big, she apparently didn't meet the librarian.
It was much more enjoyable to see the man's phone ringing with a cheerful melody. The old woman would get up and roar in a hoarse voice, "Out." The man would leave with his legs shaking, and you could feel the tension in the air waiting for the poor man's return.
The unfortunate man would finish his business and open the library door. "Don't you think you should turn off your phone before you enter the library," the librarian would scold the man, who might have been a Supreme Court justice or a respected head of a collective.
The man was nodding his head, embarrassed, but the librarian didn't finish: "You don't think, and that's exactly the problem. I ask that it doesn't happen again.".
""Yes, the librarian," the head of the kollel promised, and lost interest in reading for the rest of his life.
As the months passed, we, the disjointed group of readers, developed a strange wounded brotherhood. We felt like we had been through things together. A cold peace reigned between us and the librarian, and we all knew what the boundaries were that we were not allowed to cross.
We would revel together in the naive strangers who stumbled into our cabin and managed to anger the witch.
She always won.
Every attempt by a revolutionary on duty to answer a woman, to our delight, entailed an impressive repertoire of ethics and morality, accompanied by warnings and threats, at the end of which the man would realize that he had been defeated by a 65-year-old woman.
In a final step, we developed a kind of makeshift gambling mechanism that wondered how long it would take for the man to be thrown out. And he always was.
But like all fairy tales, our big day has arrived.
•
It was a Wednesday [I will never forget it for the rest of my life], just a normal Wednesday, and nothing in the air foretold what was about to happen. We were all busy with our own affairs.
The silence had a presence that we, the people in the hall, had grown accustomed to, when a phone ringing shattered the magical atmosphere. As always, a shiver ran down my spine, and I quickly reached for my phone.
I calmed down a little when I discovered that, as always, I had disconnected it from the battery before entering the building, and I had placed the SIM card in my shirt pocket.
So what phone is ringing anyway?
It was the librarian's phone. The first time we met him.
It turns out that the librarian knew Graham Bell and bought her first telephone from him. A large, cumbersome device with a proven ability to develop arm muscles.
The librarian, apparently as surprised as we were, answered the phone and said loudly: "Hello, who is it?"
There was a long second of silence, and then suddenly, without anyone asking us to do so, we stood up and started shouting:
Shhhhhhhh.
There was the old man with the mole, the strange young man who finally raised his head from the photo album, the old man with the perfume and the tongue, the dark-skinned guy whose head was born with a helmet, and the yeshiva guy who arrived this time wearing elegant brown-black pants and a collarless shirt.
Everyone jumped out of their seats and kept shouting "quiet," "shhh," and so on.
I had never felt much of a closeness to the old man with the mole, whose name I had never heard before, and the strong-smelling, slobbering man suddenly didn't seem so unusual to me. I couldn't help but think that yeshiva boys are a wonderful people, and yet they are accused of various strange accusations.
Only after 5 minutes of shouting for silence did the security guard appear and ask if we needed help.
""No need for help," the old man said with the slyness of a third-grade child, his mole bouncing like a toddler with a flag on Simchat Torah, "but there needs to be quiet in the library, it's not a market here.".
right.
