A Tale of Love and Darkness

by Amos Oz

  In the center of his library, like a large dark destroyer that had dropped anchor in the waters of a mountain-girt bay, stood Professor Klausner's desk, entirely covered with piles and piles of reference works, notebooks, an assortment of different pens, blue, black, green, and red, pencils, erasers, inkwells, containers full of paper clips, rubber bands, and staples, manila envelopes, white envelopes, and envelopes with attractive colorful stamps on them, sheets of paper, leaflets, notes, and index cards, foreign volumes piled open on top of open Hebrew volumes, interleaved here and there with sheets torn from a spiral-bound pad, inscribed with the cobwebs of my uncle's spidery handwriting, full of crossings out and corrections, like corpses of bloated flies, full of little slips of paper, and Uncle Joseph's gold-rimmed spectacles lay on top of the pile as though hovering over the void, while a second, black-framed, pair lay on top of another pile of books, on a little trolley beside his chair, and a third pair peered out from among the pages of an open booklet on a small chest that stood beside the dark sofa.

  On this sofa, curled up in the fetal position, covered to his shoulders in a green and red tartan rug, like a Scottish soldier's kilt, his face bare and childlike without his glasses, lay Uncle Joseph himself, thin and small, his elongated brown eyes looking both happy and a little lost. He gave us a feeble wave of his translucent white hand, smiled a pink smile between his white mustache and his goatee, and said something like this:

  "Come in, my dears, come in, come in" (even though we were already in the room, standing right in front of him, though still close to the door, huddled together—my mother, my father, and myself—like a tiny flock that had strayed into a strange pasture) "and please forgive me for not standing up to greet you, do not judge me too harshly, for two nights and three days now I have not stirred from my desk or closed my eyes, ask Mrs. Klausner and she will testify on my behalf, I am neither eating nor sleeping, I do not even glance at the newspaper while I finish this article, which, when it is published, will cause a great stir in this land of ours, and not only here, the whole cultural world is following this debate with bated breath, and this time I believe I have succeeded in silencing the obscurantists once and for all! This time they will be forced to concur and say Amen, or at least to admit that they have nothing more to say, they have lost their case, their game is up. And how about you? Fania my dear? My dear Lonia? And dear little Amos? How are you? What is new in your world? Have you read a few pages from my When a Nation Fights for Its Freedom to dear little Amos yet? I believe, my dears, that of all that I have written there is nothing that is more suitable than When a Nation Fights for Its Freedom to serve as spiritual sustenance to dear Amos in particular and the whole of our wonderful Hebrew youth in general, apart perhaps from the descriptions of heroism and rebellion that are scattered through the pages of my History of the Second Temple.

  "And how about you, my dears? You must have walked here. And such a long way. From your home in Kerem Avraham? I recall how, when we were still young, thirty years ago, when we still lived in the picturesque and so authentic Bukharian Quarter, we used to set out on Saturdays and walk from Jerusalem to Bethel or Anatot and sometimes as far as the tomb of the Prophet Samuel. Dear Mrs. Klausner will give you something to eat and drink now if you will kindly follow her to her realm, and I shall join you as soon as I have finished this difficult paragraph. We are expecting the Voyslavskys today, and the poet Uri Zvi, and Even-Zahav. And dear Netanyahu and his charming wife visit us almost every Sabbath. Now come closer, my dears, come closer and see with your own eyes, you too my dear little Amos, take a look at the draft on my desk: after my death they should bring groups of students here, generation after generation, so that they may see with their own eyes the torments that writers endure in the service of their art, the struggles I have had and the lengths I have gone to to ensure that my style is simple and fluent and crystal clear, see how many words I have crossed out in each line, how many drafts I have torn up, sometimes more than half a dozen different drafts, before I was happy with what I had written. Success flows from perspiration, and inspiration from diligence and effort. As the good book saith, blessings of heaven up above, and blessings of the deep on the bottom. Only my little joke, naturally, please forgive me, ladies. Now, my dears, follow in Mrs. Klausner's footsteps and slake your thirst, and I shall not tarry."

  From the far side of the library you could go out into a long narrow corridor that was the bowels of the house, and from this corridor the bathroom and a storeroom led off to the right, while straight ahead was the kitchen and pantry and the maid's room, which opened off the kitchen (although there was never any maid), or you could turn left right away into the living room or keep going toward the end of the corridor to the door of my uncle and aunt's white, flowery bedroom, which contained a large mirror in a bronze frame on either side of which was an ornamental candle sconce.

  So you could reach the living room by any one of three routes: you could turn left from the entrance hall as you came into the house, or go straight ahead into the study, leave it by the corridor, turn left at once, as Uncle Joseph used to do on Sabbaths, and find yourself directly at the seat of honor at the head of the long black dining table that extended for almost the entire length of the living room. In addition, there was a low, arched doorway in a corner of the living room that led into a drawing room that was rounded on one side like a turret, with windows that looked out on the front garden, the Washingtonias, the quiet little street, and Mr. Agnon's house, which stood directly opposite, on the other side of the road.

  This drawing room was also known as the smoking room. (Smoking was forbidden in Professor Klausner's house during the Sabbath, although the Sabbath did not always prevent Uncle Joseph from working at his articles.) There were several heavy, soft armchairs, sofas covered with cushions embroidered in oriental style, a wide, soft rug and a big oil painting (by Maurycy Gottlieb?) of an old Jew wearing phylacteries and a prayer shawl, holding a prayer book, which he was not reading because his eyes were closed, his mouth open, and his face expressed tortured religiosity and spiritual exaltation. I always had the feeling that this pious Jew knew all my shameful secrets, but instead of reproving me, he silently pleaded with me to mend my ways.

  At that time, when the whole of Jerusalem was cramped into one-and-a-half- or two-bedroom apartments partitioned between two rival families, Professor Klausner's mansion seemed to me like a model for a sultan's palace or that of the Roman emperors, and often before I went to sleep, I would lie in bed imagining the restoration of the Davidic kingdom, with Hebrew troops standing guard over the palace in Talpiot. In 1949, when Menahem Begin, the leader of the opposition in the Knesset, put Uncle Joseph's name forward in the name of the Herut movement as a rival candidate to Chaim Weizmann for the presidency of Israel, I conjured up an image of my uncle's presidential residence in Talpiot surrounded on every side by Hebrew troops with two gleaming sentries standing on either side of the entrance under the brass plate promising all those who approached that Jewish and humanist values would be united and never come into conflict with each other.

  "That crazy child is running around the house again," they said; "just look at him, running to and fro, all out of breath, flushed and perspiring, as though he's swallowed quicksilver." And they scolded me: "What's the matter? Have you been eating hot peppers? Or are you simply chasing your own tail? Do you think you are a dreidel? Or a moth? Or a fan? Have you lost your beautiful bride? Have your ships sunk at sea? You're giving us all a headache. And you're getting in Aunt Zippora's way. Why don't you sit down calmly for a change? Why don't you find a nice book and read it? Or shall we find you some pencils and paper so you can sit quietly and draw us a pretty picture? Well?"

  But I was already on my way, galloping excitedly from the hall to the corridor and the maid's room, out into the garden, and back, full of fantasies, feeling the walls and knocking on them to discover hidden chambers, invisible spaces, secret passages, catacombs, tunnels, burrows, secret c
ompartments, or camouflaged doors. I haven't given up to this day.

  9

  IN THE DARK glass-fronted sideboard in the living room were displayed a floral dinner service, long-necked glass jugs, prized items of china and crystal, a collection of old Hanukkah menorahs, and special dishes for Passover. On top of a display cabinet stood two bronze busts: a sullen Beethoven facing a calm, pinch-lipped Vladimir Jabotinsky, who stood carefully polished, resplendent in uniform, with an officer's peaked cap and an authoritative leather strap across his chest.

  Uncle Joseph sat at the head of the table talking in his reedy, feminine voice, pleading, wheedling, at times almost sobbing. He would speak about the state of the nation, the status of writers and scholars, the responsibilities of cultural figures, or about his colleagues and their lack of respect for his research, his discoveries, his international standing, while he himself was none too impressed with them, in fact he despised their provincial pettiness and their pedestrian, self-serving ideas.

  Sometimes he would turn to the wider world of international politics, expressing anxiety at the subversiveness of Stalin's agents everywhere, contempt for the hypocrisy of the sanctimonious British, fear of the intrigues of the Vatican, who had never accepted, and never would accept, Jewish control of Jerusalem in particular and the Land of Israel in general, cautious optimism about the scruples of the enlightened democracies, and admiration, not without reservations, for America, which stood in our times at the head of all democracies even though it was infected by vulgarity and materialism and lacked cultural and spiritual depth. In general, the heroic figures of the nineteenth century, men like Giuseppe Garibaldi, Abraham Lincoln, William Gladstone, were great national liberators and outstanding exponents of civilized and enlightened values, whereas this new century was under the jackboot of those two butchers, the Georgian shoemaker's son in the Kremlin and the crazed ragamuffin who had seized control of the land of Goethe, Schiller, and Kant...

  His guests listened in respectful silence or expressed agreement in a few quiet words so as not to interrupt the flow of his lecture. Uncle Joseph's table talk consisted of emotive monologues: from his seat at the head of the table, Professor Klausner would censure and denounce, reminisce or share his opinions, ideas, and feelings about such matters as the plebeian wretchedness of the leadership of the Jewish Agency, forever fawning on the Gentiles, the status of the Hebrew language, under constant threat from the Scylla and Charybdis of Yiddish on the one hand and the European languages on the other, the petty jealousy of some of his professorial colleagues, the shallowness of the younger writers and poets, particularly those born in the land, who not only failed to master a single language of European culture but limped even in Hebrew, or the Jews of Europe who had failed to understand Jabotinsky's prophetic warnings, and the American Jews, who even now, after Hitler, still clung to their fleshpots instead of settling in the Homeland.

  Occasionally one of the male guests would venture a question or comment, like someone throwing a twig on a bonfire. But very rarely would one of them dare to take issue with some detail or other in their host's discourse; most of the time they all sat respectfully, uttering polite cries of agreement and contentment, or laughed when Uncle Joseph adopted a sarcastic or humorous tone, in which case he invariably explained: I was only joking when I said what I said a moment ago.

  As for the ladies, their role in the conversation was limited to that of nodding listeners, who were expected to smile in the appropriate places and convey by their facial expressions delight at the pearls of wisdom that Uncle Joseph scattered before them so generously. I do not recall Aunt Zippora herself ever sitting at the table: she was forever scurrying back and forth between the kitchen or the larder and the living room, topping up the biscuit dish or the fruit bowl, adding hot water to the tea from the large silver-plated samovar, always hurrying, with a little apron around her waist, and when she had no tea to pour and there was no need for fresh supplies of cakes, biscuits, fruit, or the sweet concoction known as varinye, she would stand near the door between the living room and the corridor, to Uncle Joseph's right and a couple of paces behind him, with her hands joined on her stomach, waiting to see if anything was needed or if any of the guests wanted something, from a damp napkin to a toothpick, or if Uncle Joseph indicated to her politely that she should fetch from the far right-hand corner of the desk in his library the latest number of the periodical Leshonenu or the new volume of poems by Yitzhak Lamdan from which he wanted to quote a passage to support his argument.

  Such was the invariable order of things in those days: Uncle Joseph sitting at the head of the table, pouring forth words of wisdom, polemic, and wit, and Aunt Zippora standing in her white apron, serving or waiting till she was needed. And yet, my uncle and aunt were utterly devoted to each other and lavished signs of affection on each other, an elderly, chronically ill, childless couple, he treating his wife like a baby and behaving toward her with extreme sweetness and affection, she treating her husband like a pampered only child, swaddling him in scarves and coats in case he caught cold and beating an egg in milk and honey to soothe his throat.

  Once I happened to catch sight of them sitting side by side on their bed, his translucent hand in hers, while she carefully trimmed his fingernails, whispering all sorts of endearments to him in Russian.

  Uncle Joseph had a penchant for putting emotional inscriptions in books: each year, from the time I was nine or ten, he gave me a volume of the Children's Encyclopedia, in one of which he wrote, in letters that slanted slightly backward, as though recoiling:

  To my clever and hard-working little Amos

  with heartfelt hopes

  that he will grow up to be a credit to his people from

  Uncle Joseph

  Jerusalem-Talpiot, Lag Ba-Omer, 5710

  As I stare at this inscription now, more than fifty years later, I wonder what he really knew about me, my Uncle Joseph, who used to lay his cold little hand on my cheek and question me, with a gentle smile beneath his white mustache, about what I had been reading lately, and which of his books I had read, and what Jewish children were being taught at school these days, which poems by Bialik and Tchernikhowsky I had learned by heart, and who was my favorite biblical hero, and without listening to my answers he told me that I ought to familiarize myself with what he had written about the Maccabees in his History of the Second Temple, while on the future of the state I should read his strongly worded article in yesterday's Hamashkif, or in the interview he gave to Haboker this week. In the inscription itself he had taken care to add the vowel points where there was any risk of ambiguity, while the last letter of his name fluttered like a flag in the wind.

  In another inscription, on the title page of a volume of David Frischmann's translations, he wished me, in the third person:

  May he succeed in the path of life

  and learn from the words of the great translated in this book

  that one must follow one's conscience

  and not the human herd—the mass that rule at this time,

  from his affectionate

  Uncle Joseph

  Jerusalem-Talpiot, Lag Ba-Omer, 5714

  On one of those occasions Uncle Joseph said something like this:

  "I am a childless man, after all, ladies and gentlemen, and my books are my children, I have invested the blood of my soul in them, and after my death it is they and they alone that will carry my spirit and my dreams to future generations."

  To which Aunt Zippora responded:

  "Nu, Osia, that's enough now. Sha. Osinka. That's quite enough of that. You know the doctors have told you not to get excited. And now you've let your tea get cold. It's stone cold. No, no, my dear, don't drink it, I'll go and get you a fresh glass."

  Uncle Joseph's anger at the hypocrisy and baseness of his rivals sometimes led him to raise his voice, but his voice was never a roar, rather a high-pitched bleat, more like a sobbing woman than a scoffing, denouncing prophet. Sometimes he struck the top
of the table with his frail hand, but when he did so, it seemed less like a blow than a caress. Once, while he was in the midst of a tirade against Bolschewismus or the Bund or the proponents of Judeo-German "jargon" (as he termed Yiddish), he knocked over a jug of lemonade, which spilled into his lap, and Aunt Zippora, who was standing in her apron by the door just behind him, hurried over and mopped at his trousers with her apron, apologized, helped him to his feet, and led him off to the bedroom. Ten minutes later she brought him back, changed and dry and gleaming, to his friends who had been waiting politely around the table, talking quietly about their hosts, who lived just like a pair of doves: he treated her like a daughter of his old age, and he was her darling baby and the apple of her eye. Sometimes she would lace her plump fingers in his translucent ones and for a moment the two of them would exchange a look, and then lower their eyes and smile at each other coyly.

  And sometimes she gently undid his tie, helped him to take off his shoes, laid him down to rest for a while, his sad head resting on her bosom and his slight form clinging to the fullness of her body. Or else she would be standing in the kitchen washing up and weeping soundlessly, and he would come up behind her, place his pink hands on her shoulders, and utter a string of chirrups, chuckles, and twitters, as though he were trying to soothe a baby, or perhaps volunteering to be her baby.