by Amos Oz
The death of all the grown-ups concealed a mysterious, powerful spell. And so at the age of fourteen and a half, a couple of years after my mother's death, I killed my father and the whole of Jerusalem, changed my name, and went on my own to Kibbutz Hulda to live there over the ruins.
55
I KILLED HIM particularly by changing my name. For many years my father had lived under the wide shadow of his learned uncle with his "worldwide reputation" (a concept that my father would voice in piously hushed tones). For many years Yehuda Arieh Klausner had dreamed of following in the footsteps of Professor Joseph Gedalyahu Klausner, the author of Jesus of Nazareth, From Jesus to Paul, A History of the Second Temple, A History of Hebrew Literature, and When a Nation Fights for Its Freedom. In his heart of hearts my father even dreamed of succeeding the childless professor when the time came. That is why he learned no fewer foreign languages than his uncle had mastered. That is why he sat huddled over his desk at night while the little cards piled up around him. And when he began to despair of being a famous professor someday, he may have begun to pray in his heart of hearts that the torch would pass to me, and that he would be there to see it.
My father sometimes jokingly compared himself to the insignificant Mendelssohn, the banker Abraham Mendelssohn, whose fate it was to be the son of the famous philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and the father of the great composer Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. ("First I was my father's son, then I became my son's father," Abraham Mendelssohn once said jokingly.)
As though in jest, as though he was making fun of me out of stunted feelings of affection, my father insisted on addressing me, from an early age, as "Your Honor," "Your Highness." It was only many years later, the night of the day he died, that it suddenly occurred to me that behind this fixed, irritating joke there may have lurked his own disappointed ambitions, and the sad necessity to reconcile himself to his own mediocrity, as well as the concealed wish to entrust me with the mission to achieve in his name, when the time came, the goals that had eluded him.
My mother, in her loneliness and depression, told me stories ofwon-ders, horrors, and ghosts that were possibly not much different from those that the widow Ase told the young Peer Gynt on winter nights. My father, in his own way, was Jon Gynt, Peer's father, to my mother's Ase, hoping for "great things."
"The kibbutz," Father remarked sadly, "may be a not insignificant phenomenon, but it requires tough manual workers of average intelligence. You know by now that you are decidedly not average. I do not wish to cast aspersions on the kibbutz as such, kibbutzim have distinct merits in the life of the state, but you will not be able to develop there. Consequently I am afraid I cannot agree to this. In any way. And that's that. End of discussion."
After my mother's death, and his remarriage a year or so later, he and I talked almost only about the necessities of everyday life, politics, new scientific discoveries, or values and moral theories. (By now we were living in the new apartment, at 28 Ben Maimon Avenue, in Rehavia, the area of Jerusalem where he had longed to live for years.) The anxieties of my adolescent years, his remarriage, his feelings, my feelings, the last days of my mother's life, her death, her absence, these were topics about which we never spoke. We sometimes clashed, with a polite but very tense mutual hostility, about Bialik, Napoleon, and socialism, which had begun to fascinate me and which my father saw as the "red epidemic," and once we had a terrible row about Kafka. Most of the time, though, we behaved like two lodgers sharing a small apartment. The bathroom's free. We need margarine and toilet paper. Don't you think it's getting rather cold: shall I light the heater?
When I started to go away on weekends and during festivals to visit my mother's sisters, Haya and Sonia, in Tel Aviv, or to Grandpa Papa's house in Kiriat Motskin, my father gave me money for the fare and added a few pounds "So you won't have to ask anybody there for money." "And don't forget to tell somebody there that you mustn't eat anything fried." Or "Please remember to ask somebody there if they'd like me to put the things from her drawer in an envelope for the next time you go."
The word "her" covered my mother's memory like a slab of stone with no inscription. The words "anybody there" or "somebody there" signified the breaking of all ties between him and my mother's family, which had never been renewed. They blamed him. His relationships with other women, my mother's sisters in Tel Aviv believed, had cast a cloud over their sister's life. Plus all those nights when he had sat at his desk with his back to her and his mind on his research and his little cards. My father was shocked by this accusation and wounded to the quick. He viewed my trips to Tel Aviv and Haifa more or less the way the Arab states, in that time of boycott and denial, viewed visits to Israel by neutral individuals: we can't stop you going, go where you like, but please don't call that place by its name in our presence, and don't tell us anything about it when you get back. Anything good or bad. And don't tell them about us. We don't want to hear and we don't care to know. And make sure they don't put any unwanted stamps in your passport.
Some three months after my mother's suicide came the day of my bar mitzvah. There was no party. They made do with my being called up to the Torah on Saturday morning at Tachkemoni Synagogue and mumbling my way through the weekly reading. The whole Mussman family came, from Tel Aviv and Kiriat Motskin, but they found their own corner in the synagogue, as far as possible from the Klausners. Not a word was exchanged between the two camps. Zvi and Buma, my aunts' husbands, may have given a little, almost imperceptible nod. And I ran back and forth between the two cantons like a dizzy puppy dog, trying my best to look like a happy little boy, talking endlessly, in imitation of my father.
Only Grandpa Alexander unhesitatingly crossed the iron curtain, kissed my grandmother from Haifa and my mother's two sisters on both cheeks, three times, left right left, in the Russian manner, and pressed me to his side as he exclaimed delightedly: "Nu, what? A charming young man, is he not? A molodyets young man! And very talented, too! Very very talented! Very!"
Some time after my father's remarriage, my schoolwork went downhill so badly that there was a threat of expulsion from school (the year after my mother's death I had been moved from Tachkemoni to Rehavia High School). My father took it as a personal affront, and was outraged; he punished me in various ways. Gradually he came to suspect that this was my form of guerrilla warfare, which would not stop until I had forced him to let me go to the kibbutz. He fought back: every time I entered the kitchen, he would get up and leave without saying a word. But one Friday he went out of his way to accompany me to the old Egged bus station halfway down Jaffa Road. Before I boarded the bus to Tel Aviv, he suddenly said:
"If you wish, please ask them there what they think about this kibbutz idea of yours. Needless to say their opinion is not binding on us and does not interest us that much, but for once I do not object to hearing what they think of this possibility over there."
Long before my mother's death, from the beginning of her illness and perhaps even earlier, my aunts from Tel Aviv saw my father as a selfish and maybe slightly domineering man; they were convinced that since her death I had been groaning under the yoke of his oppression and that since his marriage my stepmother, too, was mistreating me. Over and over again I annoyed my aunts by saying nice things about my father and his wife, how devotedly they looked after me and tried their very best to make sure I didn't lack for anything. My aunts refused to listen: they were surprised at me, they were angry, they were offended, as though I were singing the praises of Abdel Nasser and his regime, or defending the fedayeen. Both of them silenced me whenever I began to sing my father's praises. Aunt Haya said:
"That's enough. Please stop. You're hurting me. They seem to be brainwashing you properly."
Aunt Sonia did not reproach me at such moments: she simply burst into tears.
To their inquisitive eyes, the truth spoke for itself: I looked as thin as a rake, pale, nervous, and not properly washed. They must be neglecting me over there. If not something worse. And what's that
wound on your cheek? Don't they send you to the doctor there? And that rag of a sweater—is that the only one you've got? And when was the last time they bought you any underwear? And how about money for the return fare? Did they forget to give you any? No? Why are you so obstinate? Why don't you let us put a few pounds in your pocket, to be on the safe side?
As soon as I arrived in Tel Aviv, my aunts pounced on the bag I'd packed for the weekend and took out the shirt, the pajamas, the socks, the underwear, and even the spare hankie, tut-tutting to themselves wordlessly and condemning the whole lot to be laundered, boiled, thoroughly aired for a couple of hours on the balcony, then there was violent ironing, and occasionally uncompromising destruction, as though they were eliminating the risk of plague or sending all my personal effects off for a course of reeducation. I was always sent off to the shower first thing, and secondly it was, Sit in the sun on the balcony for half an hour, you're as white as that wall, and won't you have a bunch ofgrapes? an apple? some raw carrot? Then we'll go and buy you some new underwear. Or a decent shirt. Or some socks. They both tried to feed me chicken liver, cod-liver oil, fruit juices, and masses of raw vegetables. As if I'd come straight from the ghetto.
On the question of my going to the kibbutz Aunt Haya immediately declared:
"Yes, definitely. You ought to get away from them for a bit. In a kibbutz you'll get bigger and stronger, and gradually you'll lead a healthier life."
Aunt Sonia suggested sadly, with her arm around my shoulder:
"Try the kibbutz, yes. And if, God forbid, you feel just as miserable there, simply move in with us here."
Towards the end of year nine (the fifth grade at Rehavia School) I suddenly gave up the scouts and almost stopped going to school. I lay on my back in my room all day in my underwear, devouring one book after another and piles of sweets, which were almost the only thing I ate at the time. I was already in love up to here, with stifled tears and without the ghost of a chance, with one of the princesses of my class: not bittersweet youthful love as in the books I was reading, where they described how the soul aches with love but is still uplifted and thrives, but as if I had been hit over the head with an iron rod. And to make matters worse, my body, at that time, didn't stop tormenting me at night and even during the day with its insatiable filth. I wanted to go free, to be liberated once and for all from these two enemies, the body and the soul. I wanted to be a cloud. To be a stone on the surface of the moon.
Every evening I got up, went out, and wandered the streets for two or three hours or walked to the empty fields outside the city. Sometimes I felt attracted to the barbed-wire fence and the minefields that divided the city, and once, in the dark, straying perhaps into one of the areas of no-man's-land, I accidentally trod on an empty can, which made a noise that sounded as loud as a landslide, and immediately two shots rang out from quite nearby in the dark and I ran away. Still, I went back the next evening and the following ones to the edge of no-man's-land as though I had had enough of it all. I even went down into the secluded wadis, till I couldn't see any lights, only the outline of the hills and a sprinkling of stars, the smell of fig and olive trees and thirsty summer earth. I got home at ten, eleven, or midnight, refusing to say where I'd been, ignoring my bedtime even though Father had extended it from nine o'clock to ten, ignoring all his complaints, not responding to his hesitant efforts to bridge the silence between us with his well-worn jokes:
"And where, if we may be permitted to ask, has Your Excellency spent the evening, until almost midnight? Did you have a rendezvous? With some beautiful young lady? Was Your Highness invited to an orgy in the Queen of Sheba's palace?"
My silence scared him even more than the burrs that clung to my clothes or the fact that I had stopped studying. When he realized that his anger and his punishments were having no effect, he replaced them with petty sarcasm. He muttered with a nod of the head: "If that's the way Your Highness wants it, that's the way it will be." Or: "When I was your age I had almost finished the gymnasium. Not the light entertainment of a school like yours! The classical gymnasium! With iron military discipline! With classical Greek and Latin lessons! I read Euripides, Ovid, and Seneca in the original! And what are you doing? Lying flat on your back for twelve hours on end reading rubbish! Comics! Dirty magazines! Dwarf and Stalag! Disgusting rags intended for the dregs of humanity! To think of the great-nephew of Professor Klausner ending up as a good-for-nothing! A hooligan!"
Eventually his sarcasm gave way to sorrow. At the breakfast table he would look at me for a moment with sad, warm, doglike eyes, and at once his gaze fled before mine and buried itself behind his paper. As though he were the one who had gone astray and should be ashamed of himself.
Finally, with a heavy heart, my feather suggested a compromise. Some friends in Kibbutz Sde Nehemia would be willing to have me stay for the summer months: I could try my hand at agricultural work and find out whether life with youngsters of my age sleeping in communal dormitories suited me. If it turned out that the experience of the summer was enough for me, I had to commit myself to coming back to school and tackle my studies with the seriousness they deserved. But if I still hadn't come to my senses by the end of the summer holidays, then the two of us would sit down together again and have a truly grown-up conversation and try to come up with a solution that was agreeable to both of us.
Uncle Joseph himself, the old professor whom the Herut Party put forward at that time as its candidate for the presidency of the State against Professor Chaim Weizmann, the candidate of the Center and the Left, heard about my distressing intention to join a kibbutz and was alarmed. He considered kibbutzim to be a threat to the national ethos, if not an extension of Stalinism. So he invited me to his house for a serious private conversation, a tête-à-tête, not on one of our Sabbath pilgrimages but, for the first time in my life, on a weekday. I prepared for this meeting with a pounding heart and even jotted down three or four notes. I would remind Uncle Joseph of what he himself always proclaimed: the need to swim against the tide. The determined individual must always stand up boldly for what he conscientiously believes in, even against strong resistance from those dearest to him. But Uncle Joseph was forced to withdraw his invitation at the last minute because of some urgent matter that had attracted his outrage.
And so it was without his blessing, and without this David and Goliath confrontation, that I got up at five o'clock on the first morning of the summer holidays to go to the Central Bus Station on Jaffa Road. My father had gotten up half an hour before me: by the time my alarm went off, he had already made me two thick cheese and tomato sandwiches, two egg and tomato sandwiches, some peeled cucumber, an apple, and a slice of sausage, and wrapped them in greaseproof paper, with a bottle of water with the top screwed on very tight so it wouldn't leak on the journey. He had cut his finger slicing the bread and was bleeding, so before I left, I bandaged it for him. At the door he gave me a hesitant hug, then a second, harder one, put his head to one side and said:
"If I have hurt you in any way lately, I apologize. I haven't had an easy time of it either."
Suddenly he changed his mind, hastily put on a jacket and tie, and walked me to the bus station. The two of us carried the bag that held all my worldly belongings through the streets of Jerusalem, which were deserted before dawn. All the way my father spouted old jokes and puns. He talked about the Hasidic origins of the term "kibbutz," which means "ingathering," and the interesting parallel between the kibbutz ideology and the Greek idea of koinonia, community, from koinos, meaning "common" He pointed out that koinonia was the origin of the Hebrew word kenounia, "collusion," and perhaps also of the musical term "canon." He got on the Haifa bus with me and argued about where I should sit, then he said good-bye again, and he must have forgotten that this was not one of my Saturday visits to the aunts in Tel Aviv because he wished me a good Sabbath, even though it was Monday. Before he got off the bus, he joked with the driver and asked him to drive with special care because he was carrying a great tr
easure. Then he ran off to buy a paper, stood on the platform, looked for me, and waved good-bye to the wrong bus.
56
AT THE END of that summer I changed my name and moved with my bag from Sde Nehemia to Hulda. To start with I was an external boarder at the local secondary school (which modestly called itself "continuation classes"). When I finished school, just before I started my military service, I became a member of the kibbutz. Kibbutz Hulda was to be my home from 1954 to 1985.
My father had remarried about a year after my mother's death, and then a year later, after I went to live in the kibbutz, he and his wife moved to London. He lived there for about five years. It was in London that my sister Marganita and brother David were born, that he finally—with immense difficulty—learned to drive, and that he gained a Ph.D. from London University for a dissertation on "an unknown manuscript by I. L. Peretz." Periodically we sent each other postcards. Occasionally he sent me copies of his articles. He sometimes sent me books and little objects intended as gentle reminders of my true destiny, such as pens and pen holders, handsome notebooks, and a decorative letter opener.
Every summer he used to come home on a visit, to see how I really was and if kibbutz life really suited me, and at the same time to check on the state of his apartment and how his library was feeling. In a detailed letter my father announced to me at the start of the summer of 1956:
On Wednesday of next week, provided it is not too much trouble for you, I plan to come and visit you in Hulda. I have made inquiries and ascertained that there is a local bus that leaves the Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv daily at 12 noon and arrives at Hulda at approximately 1:20. Now here are my questions: 1. Would you be able to come and meet me at the bus stop? (But if it is a problem for you, if you are busy for example, I can easily ask where you are and find you by myself.) 2. Should I eat something before I board the bus in Tel Aviv, or would it be possible for us to eat together when I reach the kibbutz? Only on condition that it is no trouble for you, naturally. 3. My inquiries show that in the afternoon there is only one bus from Hulda to Rehovot, from where I can take a second bus to Tel Aviv and then a third bus back to Jerusalem. But in that case we would only have some two and a half hours at our disposal. Would that be enough for us? 4.Or, alternatively, perhaps I could stay the night and leave Hulda on the 7 o'clock bus in the morning? That is, if three conditions are met: A. that you would have no difficulty finding me somewhere to stay (a very simple bed or even a mattress would suffice); B. that this would not be viewed askance in the kibbutz; and C. that you yourself feel comfortable with such a relatively long visit. Please let me know at once, either way. 5. What should I bring with me, apart from personal effects? (Towel? Sheets? I have never stayed on a kibbutz before!) Naturally I will give you all the news (there is not much) when we see each other. And I will tell you about my plans, if you are interested. And if you like you can tell me something of your plans. I hope you are in good health and spirits (there is a definite connection between the two!). As for the rest, we'll talk very soon. With love, yours, Dad.