A Tale of Love and Darkness

by Amos Oz

  Consequently my parents decided to postpone the frustrating choice between the darkness of the Middle Ages and the Stalinist trap for another two years and send me for the time being to Mrs. Isabella Nahlieli's Children's Realm. The great advantage of her cat-ridden school was that it was literally within hailing distance of our home. You went out of our yard and turned left, passed the entrance to the Lembergs' and Mr. Auster's grocery shop, carefully crossed Amos Street opposite the Zahavis' balcony, went down Zechariah Street for thirty yards, crossed it carefully, and there you were: a wall covered with passionflowers, and a gray-white cat, the sentry cat, announcing your arrival from the window. up twenty-two steps, and you were hanging up your water bottle on the hook in the entrance to the smallest school in Jerusalem: two classes, two teachers, a dozen pupils, and nine cats.

  37

  WHEN I FINISHED my year in the first grade, I passed from the volcanic realm of Teacher Isabella the cat herder into the cool, calm hands of Teacher Zelda in the second grade. She had no cats, but a sort of blue-gray aura surrounded her and at once beguiled and fascinated me.

  Teacher Zelda talked so softly that if we wanted to hear what she was saying, we not only had to stop talking, we had to lean forward on our desks. Consequently we spent the whole morning leaning forward, because we did not want to miss a word. Everything that Teacher Zelda said was enchanting and rather unexpected. It was as if we were learning another language from her, not very different from Hebrew and yet distinctive and touching. She would call stars the "stars of heaven," the abyss was "the mighty abyss," and she spoke of "turbid rivers" and "nocturnal deserts." If you said something in class that she liked, Teacher Zelda would point to you and say softly: "Look, all of you, there's a child who's flooded with light" If one of the girls was daydreaming, Teacher Zelda explained to us that just as nobody can be blamed for being unable to sleep, so you couldn't hold Noa responsible for being unable to stay awake at times.

  Any kind of mockery Teacher Zelda called "poison." A lie she called "a Fall." Laziness was "leaden," and gossip "the eyes of the flesh." She called arrogance "wing-scorching," and giving anything up, even little things like an eraser or your turn to hand out the drawing paper, she called "making sparks." A couple of weeks before the festival of Purim, which was our favorite festival in the whole year, she suddenly announced: There may not be a Purim this year. It may be put out before it gets here.

  Put out? A festival? We were all in a panic: we were not only afraid of missing Purim, but we felt a dark dread of these powerful, hidden forces, whose very existence we had not been told about before, that were capable, if they so wished, of lighting or putting out festivals as though they were so many matches.

  Teacher Zelda did not bother to go into details but just hinted to us that the decision of whether to extinguish the festival depended mainly on her: she herself was somehow connected to the invisible forces that distinguished between festival and nonfestival, between sacred and profane. So if we didn't want the festival to be put out, we said to each other, it would be best for us to make a special effort to do at least the little we could to make sure Teacher Zelda was in a good mood with us. There is no such thing as a little, Teacher Zelda used to say, to someone who has nothing.

  I remember her eyes: alert and brown, secretive, but not happy. Jewish eyes that had a slightly Tatar set to them.

  Sometimes she would cut the lesson short and send everyone out into the yard to play, but keep back a couple of us who were found worthy to continue. The exiles in the yard were not so much pleased at the free time as jealous of the elect.

  And sometimes when time was up, when Teacher Isabella's class had long been sent home, when the cats, set free, had spread all over the apartment, the staircase, and the yard, and only we seemed forgotten under the wings of Teacher Zelda's stories, leaning forward on our desks so as not to miss a word, an anxious mother, still wearing her apron, would come and stand in the doorway, hands on her hips, and wait at first impatiently, then with surprise that turned into curiosity, as though she too had become a little girl full of wonderment, reaching out, with the rest of us, to hear and not miss what would happen at the end of the story to the lost cloud, the unloved cloud whose cloak had got caught on the rays of the golden star.

  If you said in class that you had something to say to everyone, even in the middle of a lesson, Teacher Zelda would immediately seat you on her own desk, while she sat down on your little bench. So she would promote you in a single wonderful bound to the role of teacher, on condition that the story you told made sense, or that you had an interesting argument to put forward. So long as you managed to hold her interest, or the class's, you could go on sitting in the saddle. If, on the other hand, you said something stupid or were just trying to attract attention, if you did not really have anything to say, then Teacher Zelda would cut in, in her coldest, quietest voice, a voice that brooked no levity:

  "But that's very silly."

  Or:

  "That's enough of playing the fool."

  Or even:

  "Stop it: you're just lowering yourself in our estimation."

  So you went back to your place covered with shame and confusion.

  We quickly learned to be careful. Silence is golden. Best not to steal the show if you have nothing sensible to say. True, it was pleasant and could even go to your head, to be raised up above the others and sit on the teacher's desk, but the fall could be swift and painful. Poor taste or overcleverness could lead to humiliation. It was important to prepare before any public utterance. You should always think twice, and ask yourself if you would not be better off keeping quiet.

  She was my first love. An unmarried woman in her thirties, Teacher Zelda, Miss Schneersohn. I was not quite eight, and she swept me away, she set in motion some kind of inner metronome that had not stirred before and has not stopped since.

  When I woke up in the morning, I conjured up her image even before my eyes were open. I dressed and ate my breakfast in a flash, eager to finish, zip up, shut, pick up, run straight to her. My head melted with the effort to prepare something new and interesting for her every day so that I would get the light of her look and so that she would point to me and say, "Look, there's a boy among us this morning who's flooded with light."

  I sat in her class each morning dizzy with love. Or sooty with jealousy. I was constantly trying to discover what charms of mine would draw her favors to me. I was always plotting how to frustrate the charms of the others and get between them and her.

  At noon I would come home from school, lie down on my bed, and imagine how just she and I—

  I loved the color of her voice and the smell of her smile and the rustle of her dresses (long-sleeved and usually brown or navy or gray, with a simple string of ivory-colored beads or occasionally a discreet silk scarf). At the end of the day I would close my eyes, pull the blanket up over my head, and take her with me. In my dreams I hugged her, and she kissed me on my forehead. An aura of light surrounded her and illuminated me too, to make me a boy who's flooded with light.

  Of course, I already knew what love was. I had devoured so many books, books for children, books for teenagers, and even books that were considered unsuitable for me. Just as every child loves his mother and father, so everyone falls in love, when he is a little older, with someone from outside the family. Someone who was a stranger before, but suddenly, like finding a treasure in a cave in the Tel Arza woods, the lover's life is different. And I knew from the books that in love, as in sickness, you neither eat nor sleep. And I really did not eat much, although I slept very well at night, and during the day I waited for it to get dark so I could go to sleep. This sleep did not match the symptoms of love as described in the books, and I was not quite sure if I was in love the way grown-ups are, in which case I should have suffered from insomnia, or if my love was still a childish love.

  And I knew from the books and from the films I had seen at the Edison Cinema and simply out of the air that beyond
falling in love, like beyond the Mountains of Moab, which we could see from Mount Scopus, there was another, rather terrifying, landscape, not visible from here, and it was probably just as well that it wasn't. There was something lurking there, something furry, shameful, something that belonged in the darkness. Something that belonged to that picture I had tried so hard to forget (and yet also to remember some detail of it that I had not managed to get a good look at), the photo that the Italian prisoner showed me that time through the barbed-wire fence, and I ran away almost before I'd seen it. It also belonged to items of women's clothing that we boys didn't have and neither did the girls in our class yet. In the darkness there was something else living and moving, stirring, and it was moist and full of hair, something that on the one hand it was much better for me not to know anything about but on the other hand if I didn't know anything about it, it followed that my love was nothing more than that of a child.

  A child's love is something different, it doesn't hurt and it's not embarrassing, like Yoavi with Noa or Ben-Ammi with Noa or even like Noa with Avner's brother. But in my case it wasn't a girl in my class or someone from the neighborhood, a girl of my own age or just a little older, like Yoezer's big sister: I had fallen in love with a woman. And it was much worse, because she was a teacher. My class teacher. And there was no one in the whole world I could approach and ask about it without being made fun of. She called mockery poison. Lying she regarded as falling. She called disappointment sorrow, or dreamers' sorrow. And arrogance was certainly wing-scorching. And she actually called being ashamed the image of God.

  And what about me, whom she sometimes used to point to in class and call a boy flooded with light, and who now, because of her, was flooded with darkness?

  All of a sudden I didn't want to go to Children's Realm school anymore. I wanted to go to a real school, with classrooms and a bell and a playground, not in the Nahlielis' apartment with its swarms of cats everywhere, even in the toilet, that clung to your body under your clothes, and without the perpetual smell of old cats' pee that had dried under some piece of furniture. A real school, where the head teacher didn't suddenly come up and pull a booger out of your nose and wasn't married to a cashier in a cooperative store, and where I wouldn't be called flooded with light. A school without falling in love and that sort of thing.

  And indeed, after a row between my parents, a whispered row in Russian, a tichtikhchavoyniy kind of row, which Father apparently won, it was decided that at the end of the second grade, when I finished at Children's Realm, after the summer holiday, I would start in the third grade at Tachkemoni, and not at the House of Education for Workers' Children: of the two evils, the red was worse than the black.

  But between me and Tachkemoni there still stretched a whole summer of love.

  "What are you off to Teacher Zelda's house again for? At half past seven in the morning? Don't you have any friends of your own age?"

  "But she invited me. She said I could come whenever I liked. Even every morning."

  "That's very nice. But just you tell me, please, don't you think it's a little unnatural for an eight-year-old child to be tied to his teacher's apron strings? His ex-teacher, in fact? Every day? At seven o'clock in the morning? In the summer holidays? Don't you think that's overdoing it a bit? Isn't it a bit impolite? Think about it please. Rationally!"

  I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, impatiently, waiting for the sermon to be finished, and I blurted out: "Fine, all right! I'll think about it! Rationally!"

  I was already running as I spoke, borne on eagles' wings to the yard of her ground-floor apartment on Zephaniah Street, across the road from the No. 3 bus stop, opposite Mrs. Hassia's kindergarten, behind the milkman Mr. Langermann, with his big iron milk churns, which came to our gloomy little streets straight from the highlands of Galilee "from the sun-drenched plains, with the dew beneath us and the moon overhead." But the moon was here: Teacher Zelda was the moon. Up there in the Valleys and Sharon and Galilee there stretched the lands of the sun, the realm of those tough, tanned pioneers. Not here. Here in Zephaniah Street even on a summer morning there was still the shadow of a moonlit night.

  I was standing outside her window before eight every morning, with my hair plastered down with some water and my clean shirt tucked neatly into the top of my shorts. I had willingly volunteered to help her with her morning chores. I ran off to the shops for her, swept the yard, watered her geraniums, hung her little washing out on the line and brought in the clothes that had dried, fished a letter for her out of the letter box, whose lock was rusted up. She offered me a glass of water, which she called not simply water but limpid water. The gentle west wind she called the "westerly," and when it stirred the pine needles, it dabbled among them.

  When I had finished the few household chores, we would take two rush stools out into the backyard and sit under Teacher Zelda's window facing north toward the Police Training School and the Arab village of Shuafat. We traveled without moving. Being a map child, I knew that beyond the mosque of Nebi Samwil, which was on top of the farthest and highest hills on the horizon, was the valley of Beit Horon, and I knew that beyond it were the territories of Benjamin and Ephraim, Samaria, and then the Mountains of Gilboa, and after them the Valleys, Mount Tabor and Galilee. I had never been to those places: once or twice a year we went to Tel Aviv for one of the festivals; twice I had been to Grandma-Mama and Grandpa-Papa's tar-papered shack on the edge of Kiryat Motskin behind Haifa, once I went to Bat Yam, and apart from that I had not seen anything. Certainly not the wonderful places that Teacher Zelda described to me in words, the stream of Harod, the mountains of Safed, the shores of Kinneret.

  The summer after our summer, Jerusalem would be shelled from the tops of the hills facing which we sat all through the morning. Next to the village of Beit Iksa and by the hill of Nebi Samwil the guns of the British artillery battery, which was at the service of the Transjordanian Arab Legion, would be dug in and would rain thousands of shells on the besieged and starving city. And many years later all the hilltops we could see would be covered with densely packed housing, Ramot Eshkol, Ramot Alon, Ma'alot Dafna, Ammunition Hill, Giv'at Hamivtar, French Hill, "and all the hills shall melt." But in the summer of 1947 they were all still abandoned rocky hills, slopes dappled with patches of light rock and dark bushes. Here and there the eye lingered over a solitary, stubborn old pine tree, bent by the powerful winter winds that had bowed its back forever.

  She would read to me what she might have been intending to read anyway that morning: Hasidic tales, rabbinic legends, obscure stories about holy kabbalists who succeeded in combining the letters of the alphabet and working wonders and miracles. Sometimes, if they did not take all the necessary precautions, while these mystics were endeavoring to save their own souls or those of the poor and oppressed or even those of the entire Jewish people, they caused terrible disasters that always resulted from an error in the combinations or a single grain of impurity that got into the sacred formulae of mental direction.

  She replied to my questions with strange, unexpected answers. Sometimes they seemed quite wild, threatening to undermine in a terrifying way my father's firm rules of logic.

  Sometimes, however, she surprised me by giving me an answer that was predictable, simple yet as nutritious as black bread. Even the most expected things came out of her mouth in an unexpected way, though. And I loved her and was fascinated by her, because there was something strange and disturbing, almost frightening, in virtually everything she said and did. Like the "poor in spirit," of whom she said that they belong to Jesus of Nazareth but that there is a lot of poverty of spirit among us Jews here in Jerusalem too, and not necessarily in the sense that "That Man" intended. Or the "dumb of spirit" who appear in Bialik's poem "May My Lot Be with You," who are actually the thirty-six hidden just men who keep the universe in existence. Another time she read me Bialik's poem about his pure-spirited father whose life was mired in the squalor of the taverns but who was himself untouc
hed by squalor and impurity. It was only his son the poet who was touched by them, and how, as Bialik himself writes in the first two lines of "My Father," in which he talks only about himself and his impurity, even before he moves on to tell us about his father. She found it strange that scholars had not noticed that the poem about the pure life of the father actually opens with such a bitter confession about the impurity of the son's life.

  Or maybe she did not say all this; after all, I didn't sit there with a pencil and notebook writing down everything she said to me. And more than fifty years have passed since then. Much of what I heard from Zelda that summer was beyond my comprehension. But day by day she raised the crossbar of my comprehension. I remember, for example, that she told me about Bialik, about his childhood, his disappointments, and his unfulfilled yearnings. Even things that were beyond my years. Among other poems she certainly read "My Father" to me, and talked to me about cycles of purity and impurity.

  ***

  But what precisely did she say?

  Now in my study in Arad on a summer day at the end of June 2001 I am trying to reconstruct, or rather to guess, to conjure up, almost to create out of nothing: like those paleontologists in the natural history museum who can reconstruct a whole dinosaur on the basis of two or three bones.

  I loved the way Teacher Zelda placed one word next to another. Sometimes she would put an ordinary, everyday word next to another word that was also quite ordinary, and all of a sudden, simply because they were next to each other, two ordinary words that did not normally stand next to each other, a sort of electric spark jumped between them and took my breath away.