A Tale of Love and Darkness

by Amos Oz

  They've all gone off without me and my parents are out too. I'm lying on my back on the concrete at the end of the yard behind the washing lines and watching the remains of the day. The concrete is cold and hard under your body in a vest. Thinking, but not right to the end, that everything that's hard and everything that's cold will stay hard and cold forever and everything that's soft and everything that's warm is only soft and warm for the time being. In the end everything has to pass over to the cold, hard side. Over there you don't move, you don't think, you don't feel, you don't warm anything. Forever.

  You're lying on your back, and your fingers find a small stone and put it inside your mouth, which can taste dust and plaster and something else that's kind of salty but not exactly salty. The tongue explores all sorts of little projections and depressions as though the stone is a world like ours and it has mountains and valleys. And what if it turns out that our earth, or even our whole universe, is just a little stone on the concrete in the yard of some giants? What will happen if, in the next moment, some huge child, it's impossible to imagine how big he is, and his friends have made fun of him and gone off without him and that child simply picks up our whole universe between two of his fingers and puts it all in his mouth and also starts exploring us with his tongue? And he also thinks that maybe this stone that's inside his mouth is really a whole universe with Milky Ways and suns and comets and children and cats and washing hanging on the line? And who knows, maybe that huge boy's universe, the boy in whose mouth we are just a tiny stone, is actually nothing more than a little stone on the ground in the yard of an even bigger boy, and he and his universe, and so on and so forth, like Russian dolls, a whole universe inside a tiny stone inside a universe inside a stone, and it's just the same when it gets smaller as when it gets bigger? Every universe is a stone, and every stone is a universe. Until it begins to make your head spin, and meanwhile your tongue explores the stone as though it were a sweet, and now your tongue itself has a chalky taste. Danush, Alik, Uri, Lulik, Eitan, and Ammi and the rest of the Black Hand, in another sixty years they'll be dead and then everyone who remembers them will die and then everyone who remembers everyone who remembers everyone who remembers them. Their bones will turn to stone like this stone that's in my mouth. Maybe the stone in my mouth was children who died trillions of years ago? Maybe they went to look for those things in the woods too and there was someone they made fun of because he didn't have the guts to blow it up and put it on? And they left him alone in his yard too, and he also lay on his back and put a stone in his mouth, and the stone was also a boy once and the boy was once a stone. Dizzy. And meanwhile this stone is getting a bit of life and it's not quite so cold and hard anymore, it's become wet and warm, it's even beginning to stir in your mouth and gently return the tickles it's getting from the tip of your tongue.

  Behind the cypress trees behind the fence at the Lembergs' someone's put the electric light on, but lying here you can't see who's there, Mrs. Lemberg or Shula or Eva, who put the light on, but you can see the yellow electricity pouring out like glue that's so thick it's hard to spill, it can hardly move, it can barely make its heavy way, the way viscous liquids do; dull and yellow and slow, it advances like heavy motor oil across the evening, which is a little gray-blue now, and the breeze stirs and licks it for a moment. And fifty-five years later, as I sit and write that evening in an exercise book at the garden table in Arad, that very same evening breeze stirs and from the neighbors' window again this evening too there flows a thick, slow, yellow electric light like heavy motor oil—we know each other, we've known each other for a long time, it's as if there are no more surprises. But there are. That evening of the stone in the mouth in the yard in Jerusalem didn't come here to Arad to remind you of what you've forgotten or to revive old longings, but the opposite: it's come to assault this evening. It's like a woman you've known for a long time, you no longer find her attractive or unattractive, whenever you bump into each other, she always says more or less the same few worn-out words, always offers you a smile, always taps you on the chest in a familiar way, only now, only this time, she doesn't, she suddenly reaches out and grabs your shirt, not casually but with her all, her claws, lustfully, desperately, eyes tight shut, her face twisted as though in pain, determined to have her way, determined not to let go, she doesn't care anymore about you, about what you are feeling, whether or not you want to, what does she care, now she's got to, she can't help herself, she reaches out now and strikes you like a harpoon and starts pulling and tearing you, but actually she's not the one who's pulling, she just digs her claws in and you're the one who's pulling and writing, pulling and writing, like a dolphin with the barb of the harpoon caught in his flesh, and he pulls as hard as he can, pulls the harpoon and the line attached to it and the harpoon gun that's attached to the line and the hunters' boat that the harpoon gun is fixed to, he pulls and struggles, pulls to escape, pulls and turns over and over in the sea, pulls and dives down into the dark depths, pulls and writes and pulls more; if he pulls one more time with all his desperate strength, he may manage to free himself from the thing that is stuck in his flesh, the thing that is biting and digging into you and not letting go, you pull and you pull and it just bites into your flesh, the more you pull, the deeper it digs in, and you can never inflict a pain in return for this loss that is digging deeper and deeper, wounding you more and more because it is the catcher and you are the prey, it is the hunter and you are the harpooned dolphin, it gives and you have taken, it is that evening in Jerusalem and you are in this evening here in Arad, it is your dead parents, and you just pull and go on writing.

  ***

  The others have all gone to the Tel Arza woods without me, and because I didn't have the guts to blow, I'm lying here on my back on the concrete at the end of the yard behind the washing lines. Watching the light of day gradually surrendering. Soon it will be night.

  Once I watched from the Ali Baba's cave I had in the space between the wardrobe and the wall when Grandma, my mother's mother, who had come to Jerusalem from the tar-papered shack on the edge of Kiriat Motskin, lost her temper with my mother, gesticulating at her with the iron, her eyes flashing, and spat terrible words at her in Russian or Polish mixed with Yiddish. Neither of them imagined that I was squeezed into that space holding my breath, peering out, seeing and hearing everything. My mother didn't reply to her mother's thunderous curses but just sat on the hard chair that had lost its back, which stood in the corner, she sat up straight with her knees pressed together and her hands motionless on her knees and her eyes also fixed on her knees, as though everything depended on her knees. My mother sat there like a scolded child, and as her mother shot one venomous question at her after another, all of them soaked and sizzling with sibilants, she said nothing in reply, but her eyes focused even more fixedly on her knees. Her continued silence only redoubled Grandma's fury, she seemed to have gone right out of her mind: her eyes flashing, her face wolflike with rage, flecks of foam whitening the corners of her open lips, and her sharp teeth showing, she hurled the hot iron she was holding, as though to smash it against the wall, then kicked the ironing board over and stormed out of the room, slamming the door so hard that the windowpanes, the vase, and the cups all rattled.

  My mother, unaware that I was watching, suddenly stood up and began punishing herself, she slapped her cheeks and tore her hair, she grabbed a clothes hanger and hit her head and back with it until she wept, and I too in my space between the wardrobe and the wall began to cry silently and to bite both my hands so hard that painful marks appeared. That evening we all ate sweetened gefilte fish that Grandma had brought with her from the tar-papered shack on the edge of Kiriat Mot-skin, in a sweet sauce with sweet boiled carrot, and they all talked to each other about speculators and the black market, about the state construction company and free enterprise and the Ata textile factory near Haifa, and they finished the meal with a cooked fruit salad that we called compote, which was also made by my mother's mother and which h
ad also turned out sweet and sticky like a syrup. My other grandma, the one from Odessa, Grandma Shlomit, politely finished her compote, wiped her lips on a white paper napkin, took a lipstick and pocket mirror out of her leather handbag, and redrew the line of her lips, and then, while she carefully retracted her red dog's erection of a lipstick into its sheath, she observed:

  "What can I say to you? I have never tasted sweeter food in my whole life. The Almighty must be very fond of Vohlynia, to have soaked it so in honey. Even your sugar is much sweeter than ours, and your salt is sweet, and your pepper, and even the mustard in Vohlynia has a taste of jam, and your horseradish, your vinegar, your garlic, they're all so sweet you could sweeten the Angelofdeath himself with them."

  As soon as she had spoken these words, she fell silent, as though in fear of the wrath of the angel whose name she had dared to take so lightly.

  At which my other grandma, my mother's mother, adopted a pleasant smile, not at all vindictive or gloating, but a well-meaning smile as pure and innocent as the singing of the cherubs, and to the charge that her cooking was sweet enough to sweeten vinegar or horseradish and even the angel of death Grandma Ita replied to Grandma Shlomit with a sing-song lilt:

  "But not you, dear mother-in-law of my daughter!"

  The others are not back yet from the Tel Arza woods and I am still on my back on the concrete, which seems to have become a little less cold and hard. The evening light is growing cooler and grayer above the points of the cypresses. As though someone is surrendering there, on the awesome heights above the treetops, the rooftops, and everything that is stirring here in the street, the backyards and kitchens, high above the smells of dust, cabbage, and rubbish, high above the twittering of the birds, as high as the sky is above the earth, above the wailing sounds of prayer coming in ragged tatters from the synagogue down the road.

  Lofty, clear, and indifferent it is unfolding now above the water heaters and the washing hung out on every roof here and above the abandoned junk and the alley cats and above all sorts of longings and above all the corrugated iron lean-tos in the yards and above the schemes, the omelettes, the lies, the washtubs, the slogans pasted up by the Underground, the borscht, the desolation of ruined gardens and remains of fruit trees from the times when there was an orchard here, and now, right now, it is spreading and creating the calm of a clear, even evening, making peace in the high heavens above the garbage cans and above the hesitant, heartrending piano notes repeatedly attempted by a plain girl, Menuchele Schtich, whom we nicknamed Nemucheleh, Shortie, trying over and over again to play a simple ascending scale, stumbling over and over again, always in the same place, and each time trying again. While a bird replies to her, over and over again, with the first five notes of Beethoven's Für Elise. A wide, empty sky from horizon to horizon at the end of a hot summer day. There are three cirrus clouds and two dark birds. The sun has set beyond the walls of the Schneller Barracks, though the firmament has not let go of the sun but has seized it in its claws and managed to tear the train of its many-colored cloak and now is trying on its booty, using the cirrus clouds as a dressmaker's dummy, putting on light like a garment, removing it, checking how well necklaces of greenish radiance suit it, or the coat of many colors with its golden glow and its halo of bluish purple, or how some fragile strips of silver curl along their length, shivering like the broken lines sketched underwater by a fast-moving school of fish. And there are some flashes of purple-tinged pink and lime green, and now it strips quickly and dresses in a reddish mantle from which trail rivers of dull crimson light and after a moment or two puts on a different robe, the color of bare flesh that is suddenly stabbed and stained by several strong hemorrhages while its dark train is being gathered up beneath folds of black velvet, and all at once it is no longer height upon height but depth upon depth upon depth, like the valley of death opening up and expanding in the firmament, as if it were not overhead and the one lying on his back underneath, but the opposite, all the firmament an abyss and the one lying on his back no longer lying but floating, being sucked, plunging rapidly, falling like a stone toward the velvety depth. You will never forget this evening: you are only six or at most six and a half, but for the first time in your little life something enormous and very terrible has opened up for you, something serious and grave, something that extends from infinity to infinity, and it takes you, and like a mute giant it enters you and opens you, so that you too for a moment seem wider and deeper than yourself, and in a voice that is not your voice but may be your voice in thirty or forty years' time, in a voice that allows no laughter or levity, it commands you never to forget a single detail of this evening: remember and keep its smells, remember its body and light, remember its birds, the notes of the piano, the cries of the crows and all the strangeness of the sky running riot from one horizon to the other before your eyes, and all of this is for you, all strictly for the attention of the addressee alone. Never forget Danush, Ammi, and Lulik, or the girls with the soldiers in the woods, or what your grandma said to your other grandma, or the sweet fish floating, dead and seasoned, in a sauce of carrots. Never forget the roughness of the wet stone that was in your mouth more than half a century ago, an echo of whose grayish taste of chalk, plaster, and salt still seduces the tip of your tongue. And all the thoughts that stone conjured up you are never to forget, a universe inside a universe inside a universe. Remember the vertiginous sense of time within time within time, and the whole host of heaven trying on, blending, and hurting the innumerable hues of light just after the sun has set, purple lilac lime orange gold mauve crimson scarlet blue and dull red with gushing blood, and slowly there descends over all a deep dim blue-gray color like the color of silence with a smell like that of the repeated notes on the piano, climbing and stumbling over and over again up a broken scale, while a single bird answers with the five opening notes of Für Elise: Ti-da-di-da-di.

  33

  MY FATHER had a weakness for the momentous, whereas my mother was fascinated by yearning and surrender. My father was an enthusiastic admirer of Abraham Lincoln, Louis Pasteur, and the speeches of Churchill, "blood, sweat, and tears," "never have so many owed so much," "we shall fight them on the beaches." My mother, with a gentle smile, identified with the poetry of Rahel, "I have not sung to you, my land, or praised your name with deeds of heroism, only a path have my feet trodden down..." My father, at the kitchen sink, would suddenly erupt into a spirited recital, with no prior warning, of Tchernikhowsky: "...and in this Land will rise a brood / that breaks its iron chains / looking the light straight in the eye!" Or sometimes Jabotinsky: "...Jotapata, Masada / and captured Beitar / shall rise again in might and splendor! O Hebrew—whether pauper, / slave, or wanderer / you were born a prince / crowned with David's royal diadem."When the spirit descended upon him, Father would roar out, with a tunelessness that would startle the dead, Tchernikhowsky's "My country, oh my land, bare rock-covered highland!" Until Mother had to remind him that the Lembergs next door and probably the other neighbors, the Buchovskis and the Rosendorffs, must be listening to his recital and laughing, whereupon father would stop sheepishly, with an embarrassed smile, as though he had been caught stealing sweets.

  As for my mother, she liked to spend the evening sitting on the bed that was disguised as a sofa, with her bare feet folded underneath her, bent over a book on her knees, wandering for hours on end along the paths of autumnal gardens in the stories of Turgenev, Chekhov, Iwaszkewicz, André Maurois, and U. N. Gnessin.

  Both my parents had come to Jerusalem straight from the nineteenth century. My father had grown up on a concentrated diet of operatic, nationalistic, battle-thirsty romanticism (the Springtime of Nations, Sturm und Drang), whose marzipan peaks were sprinkled, like a splash of champagne, with the virile frenzy of Nietzsche. My mother, on the other hand, lived by the other Romantic canon, the introspective, melancholy menu of loneliness in a minor key, soaked in the suffering of broken-hearted, soulful outcasts, infused with vague autumnal scents of fin de siècle
decadence.

  Kerem Avraham, our suburb, with its street hawkers, shopkeepers and little middlemen, its fancy-goods sellers and Yiddishists, its pietists with their wailing chants, its displaced petite bourgeoisie and its eccentric world reformers, suited neither of them. There was always a hesitant dream hovering over our home of moving to a more cultured neighborhood, such as Beit Hakerem or Kiryat Shemuel, if not to Tal-piot or Rehavia, not right away but someday, in the future, when it was a possibility, when we'd put something by, when the child was a bit older, when Father had managed to get his foot on the academic ladder, when Mother had a regular teaching position, when the situation improved, when the country was more developed, when the English left, when the Hebrew State came into being, when it was clearer what was going to happen here, when things finally got a little easier for us.

  "There, in the land our fathers loved," my parents used to sing when they were young, she in Rovno and he in Odessa and Vilna, like thousands of other young Zionists in Eastern Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century, "all our hopes will be fulfilled. There to live in liberty, there to flourish, pure and free."