A Tale of Love and Darkness

by Amos Oz

  But a few years later Hayim Toren said to me: "Your father used to run from room to room in the National Library, beaming, and showing us what Gershom Shaked had written about your book Where the Jackals Howl and how Avraham Shaanan had praised Elsewhere, Perhaps. Once he explained to me angrily how blind Professor Kurzweil had been to cast aspersions on My Michael. I believe he even called Agnon especially to complain to him about Kurzweil's review. Your father was proud of you in his own way, even though of course he was too shy to tell you, and he may also have been afraid of making you big-headed."

  In the last year of his life his shoulders slumped. He had grim fits of rage, when he would hurl rebukes and accusations at anyone around, and shut himself away in his study, slamming the door behind him. But after five or ten minutes he would come out and apologize for his outburst, blaming it on his poor health, his tiredness, his nerves, and sheepishly asking us to forgive him for saying things that were so unjust and unfair.

  He often used the words "just and fair," just as he often said "definitely," "indeed," "undoubtedly," "decidedly," and "from several points of view."

  At this time, when my father was unwell, Grandpa Alexander, in his nineties now, was still at the height of his physical blossoming and in full romantic bloom. As pink-faced as a baby, as full of sap as a young bridegroom, he would come and go all day erupting and exclaiming, "Nu, shto!" or "Such paskudniaks! Such scoundrels! Zhuliks! Crooks!" or "Nu, davai, forward march! Khorosho! Enough, already!" Women flocked to him. Frequently, even in the morning, he would sip a "teeny-weeny brandy," and at once his pink face turned as red as the dawn. If my father and grandfather stood in the garden talking, or paced up and down on the pavement in front of the house, arguing, at least by their body language Grandpa Alexander seemed much younger than his younger son. He was to outlive his older son David and his first grandson Daniel Klausner, who were killed by Germans in Vilna, by four decades, his wife by two, and his remaining son by seven years.

  One day, on October 11,1970, some four months after his sixtieth birthday, my father got up early as usual, long before the rest of the household, shaved, splashed on some toilet water, wetted his hair before brushing it back, ate a roll and butter, drank two glasses of tea, read the newspaper, sighed a few times, glanced at the diary that always lay open on his desk so that he could cross things out when he had done them, put on a jacket and tie, made himself a little shopping list, and drove down the street to Denmark Square, where Beit Hakerem Road meets Herzl Avenue, to buy some items of stationery from the little basement shop where he used to purchase whatever he needed for his desk. He parked and locked the car, went down the half-dozen steps, got in line and even gave up his place politely to an elderly woman, bought everything on his list, joked with the woman who owned the shop about the fact that the word "clip" can be both a noun and a verb, said something to her about the negligence of the city council, paid, counted his change, picked up his bag of shopping, thanked the shopkeeper with a smile, asked her not to forget to pass on his greetings to her dear husband, wished her a good and successful day, greeted two strangers who were in line behind him, turned and walked to the door, and dropped dead of a heart attack. He left his body to science, and I inherited his desk. These pages are being written on it, not tearfully, because my father was fundamentally opposed to tears, particularly in men.

  This is what I found written in his desk diary: "Stationery: l. Writing pad. 2. Spiral-bound notebook. 3. Envelopes. 4. Paper clips. 5. Ask about cardboard folders." All these items, including the folders, were in the shopping bag that his fingers were still clutching. So when I reached my father's home in Jerusalem, after an hour or an hour and a half, I picked up my father's pencil and crossed off the list, just as Father always used to cross things off as soon as he had done them.

  57

  WHEN I LEFT home and went to live in the kibbutz, at the age of fifteen, I wrote down some resolutions that I set for myself as a test that I absolutely must not fail. If I was really to start a brand-new life, I must start by getting a tan within a fortnight so that I looked just like one of them; I must stop daydreaming once and for all; I must change my last name; I must take two or three cold showers every day; I must absolutely force myself to give up doing that filthy stuff at nights; I must not write any more poems; I must stop chattering; and I must not tell stories: I must appear in my new home as a silent man.

  Then I tore up the list. For the first four or five days I actually managed not to do the filthy stuff and not to chatter. When I was asked a question like, Will one blanket be enough? or Do you mind sitting in the corner of the classroom near the window?, I replied with a movement of the head, without any sound. To the questions Was I interested in politics? and Would I consider joining a newspaper-reading circle? I answered Ahem. If I was asked about my previous life in Jerusalem, I answered in fewer than ten words, which I held back for a few seconds on purpose, as though I was deep in thought: let them know that I'm a reserved, secretive kind of man, with an inner life. I even succeeded in the matter of the cold showers, although it took an act of heroism to force myself to strip naked in the boys' showers. It even looked as though for the first weeks I could manage to stop writing.

  But not reading.

  Every day after work and school the kibbutz children went to their parents' homes, while the outside boarders relaxed in the clubroom or played basketball. In the evenings there were various activities—dancing, for instance, or sing-alongs—which I avoided so as not to appear ridiculous. When everyone else had disappeared, I would lie down half naked on the grass in front of our dormitory sunbathing and reading till it was dark. (I was very careful to avoid lying on my bed in the empty room, because there my filthy mind lay in wait for me, swarming with Scheherazade-like fantasies.)

  Once or twice a week toward evening I would check the progress of my tan in the mirror before putting on my shirt, then pluck up my courage and go to the veterans' block to drink a glass of fruit juice and eat a slice of cake with my kibbutz "parents" Hanka and Oizer Huldai. This pair of teachers, both originally from Lodz, in Poland, presided year after year over the cultural and educational life of the kibbutz. Hanka, who taught in the primary school, was a buxom, energetic woman, always as taut as a spring, and surrounded by a powerful aura of dedication and cigarette smoke. She shouldered the whole burden of organizing the Jewish festivals, weddings, anniversaries, putting on productions and shaping the local tradition of rustic proletarian life. This tradition, as Hanka envisaged it, was supposed to blend the flavor of the Song of Songs with the olives-and-carobs Hebraic taste of the new biblical tillers of the soil, Ha-sidic melodies from Eastern Europe with the rough and ready ways of Polish peasants and other children of nature who drew their purity of mind and mystical joie de vivre straight from the Knut Hamsun-like Growth of the Soil under their bare feet.

  As for Oizer Huldai, the director of the "continuation classes" or secondary school, he was a hard, wiry man whose Jewish wrinkles were plowed with suffering and ironic sagacity. Occasionally a mischievous sparkle of anarchic playfulness flickered for an instant among these tortured lines. He was lean and angular, short of stature but with devastating steely eyes and a hypnotic presence. He had the gift of the gab and a radioactive sarcasm. He could emanate a warmth of affection that melted anyone who was exposed to it to the point of total submission, but he was also capable of volcanic fits of rage that could put the fear of doomsday into those around him.

  Oizer combined the intellectual acumen of a Lithuanian Talmud scholar with a dithyrambic Hasidic ecstasy that could make him suddenly screw up his eyes and burst forth in a rapturous song straining to break free from the trammels of the corporeal world. In a different time or place he might have become a revered Hasidic rebbe, a charismatic wonder-worker surrounded by a packed court of entranced admirers. He could have gone a long way if he had chosen to be a politician, a Tribune of the Plebs, leaving behind him a foaming wake of visceral admiration in some and
no less visceral hatred in others. But Oizer Huldai had chosen to live as a kibbutz schoolmaster. He was a hard man of uncompromising principles who enjoyed a fight and could be domineering and even tyrannical. He taught, with an equal degree of detailed proficiency and almost erotic zeal, like a wandering preacher of the shtetl, Bible, biology, Baroque music, Renaissance art, rabbinic thought, principles of socialist ideology, ornithology, taxonomy, the recorder, and subjects like "the historic Napoleon and his representation in nineteenth-century European literature and art."

  My heart pounded as I entered the one-and-a-half-room bungalow with a little front porch in the northern block at the edge of the veterans' quarters, opposite the alley of cypresses. The walls were adorned with reproductions of pictures by Modigliani and Paul Klee and a precise, almost Japanese, drawing of almond blossoms. Between two plain armchairs a small coffee table bore a tall vase that almost always contained not flowers but a tasteful arrangement of sprigs. The bright, rustic-style curtains were hand-embroidered in a faintly orientalizing pattern, reminiscent of the modified and adapted orientalism of the Hebraic folk songs written by German-Jewish composers seeking to incorporate the captivating Arab or biblical spirit of the Middle East.

  Oizer, if he was not pacing briskly up and down the path in front of his house with his hands behind his back and his jutting chin slicing the air in front of him, would be sitting in his corner, smoking, humming to himself, and reading. Or inspecting some flowering plant through his magnifying glass while leafing through his botanical handbook. Hanka, meanwhile, would be striding vigorously around the room with a military gait, straightening a mat, emptying and rinsing an ashtray, her lips pursed, adjusting the bedspread, or cutting ornamental shapes out of colored paper. Dolly would welcome me with a couple of barks before Oizer startled her with a thunderous rebuke: "Shame on you, Dolly! Look who you're barking at! Look who you're daring to raise your voice at!" Or sometimes: "Really! Dolly! I'm shocked! I'm truly shocked at you! How could you?! How come your voice didn't tremble?! You're only letting yourself down with this shameful performance!"

  The dog, at the sound of these torrents of prophetic rage, shrank like a deflated balloon, looked around desperately for somewhere to hide her shame, and ended up crawling under the bed.

  Hanka Huldai beamed at me and addressed an invisible audience: "Look! Just look who's here! Cup of coffee? Cake? Or some fruit?" No sooner had these options left her lips than, as if a magic wand had been waved, the coffee, cake, and fruit landed on the table. Meekly but with a warm glow inside I politely drank the coffee, ate some fruit, in moderation, and chatted with Hanka and Oizer for a quarter of an hour about such pressing matters as the death penalty, whether human nature was truly good from birth and only corrupted by society, or whether our instincts were innately wicked and only education could improve them to some degree and in certain conditions. The words "decadence," "refinement," "character," "values," and "improvement" often filled that refined room with its white bookshelves, so different from the shelves in my parents' home in Jerusalem, because here the books were divided up by pictures, figurines, a collection of fossils, collages of pressed wildflowers, well-tended potted plants, and in one corner a gramophone with masses of records.

  Sometimes the conversation about refinement, corruption, values, liberation, and oppression was accompanied by the mournful sound of a violin or the quiet bleating of a recorder: curly-headed Shai would be standing there playing, his back to us. Or Ron would be whispering to his violin, skinny Ronny who was always called "the little one" by his mother, and whom it was better not to try to talk to, even how-are-you-what's-new, because he was always entrenched in his smiling shyness and only rarely treated you to a short sentence like "Fine" or a longer sentence like "No problem." Almost like the dog Dolly who hid under the bed until her master's rage had subsided.*

  Sometimes I found all three Huldai boys, Oizer, Shai, and Ronny, sitting on the grass or on the steps of the front porch, like a klezmer group from the shtetl, stirring the evening air with long-drawn-out, haunting notes on the recorder that gave me a pleasant sense of longing tinged with a pang of sadness for my worthlessness, my otherness, for the fact that no suntan in the world could make me really one of them, I would always be just a beggar at their table, an outsider, a restless little runt from Jerusalem, if not simply a wretched impostor. (I endowed Azaria Gitlin in my book A Perfect Peace with some of this feeling.)

  At sunset I took my book to Herzl House, the cultural center at the edge of the kibbutz. There was a newspaper room here where on any evening you could find a few of the older bachelors of the kibbutz, gnawing their way through the daily papers and the weeklies, engaging each other in fierce political debates that reminded me a little of the arguments in Kerem Avraham, with Staszek Rudnicki, Mr. Abramski, Mr. Krochmal, Mr. Bar-Yizhar, and Mr. Lemberg. (The "older bachelors of the kibbutz" when I arrived were in their early to mid-forties.)

  Behind the newspaper room there was another, almost deserted, room called the study room, which was sometimes used for committee meetings or for various group activities but was mostly unoccupied. In a glass-fronted cabinet stood row upon dreary row of tired, dusty copies of Young Worker, Working Woman's Monthly, Field, The Clock, and Davar Yearbook.

  *Ron Huldai has been mayor of Tel Aviv since 1998.

  This is where I went every evening to read my book until nearly midnight, until my eyelids were stuck together. And this is also where I took up writing again, when no one was looking, feeling ashamed of myself, feeling base and worthless, full of self-loathing: surely I hadn't left Jerusalem for the kibbutz to write poems and stories but to be reborn, to turn my back on the piles of words, to be suntanned to the bone and become an agricultural worker, a tiller of the soil.

  But it soon dawned on me in Hulda that even the most agricultural of agricultural workers here read books at night and discussed them all day long. While they picked olives, they debated furiously about Tolstoy, Plekhanov, and Bakunin, about permanent revolution versus revolution in one country, about Gustav Landauer's social democracy and the eternal tension between the values of equality and freedom and between both these and the quest for the brotherhood of man. While they sorted eggs in the hen house, they argued about how to revive the old Jewish holidays for celebration in a rural setting. While they pruned the rows of vines, they disagreed about modern art.

  Some of them even wrote modest articles, notwithstanding their dedication to agriculture and their total devotion to manual labor. They wrote mostly about the same topics they debated with each other all day long, but in the pieces they published every fortnight in the local newsletter they occasionally allowed themselves to wax lyrical between one crushing argument and an even more crushing counterargument.

  Just as at home.

  I had tried to turn my back once and for all on the world of scholarship and debate from which I had come, and I had jumped out of the frying pan into the fire, or "as when a man flees from a lion and meets a bear." Admittedly, here the debaters were more suntanned than those who sat around Uncle Joseph and Aunt Zippora's table, they wore cloth caps, workaday garb, and heavy boots, and instead of bombastic Hebrew with a Russian accent they spoke humorous Hebrew with a juicy flavor of Galician or Bessarabian Yiddish.

  Sheftel the librarian, just like Mr. Marcus, the proprietor of the bookshop and lending library on Jonah Street, took pity on my unquenchable thirst for books. He allowed me to borrow as many books as I wanted, far in excess of the library rules that he himself had compiled and typed in eye-catching letters on the kibbutz typewriter and pinned up at various prominent points in his fiefdom, whose vague dusty smell of old glue and seaweed attracted me to it like a wasp to jam.

  What did I not read in Hulda in those days? I devoured Kafka, Yigal Mossensohn, Camus, Tolstoy, Moshe Shamir, Chekhov, Natan Shaham, Brenner, Faulkner, Pablo Neruda, Hayyim Guri, Alterman, Amir Gilboa, Leah Goldberg, Shlonsky, O. Hillel, Yizhar, Turgenev, Thomas Mann, Jakob Wassermann, H
emingway, I, Claudius, all the volumes of Winston Churchill's The Second World War, Bernard Lewis on the Arabs and Islam, Isaac Deutscher on the Soviet Union, Pearl Buck, The Nuremberg Trials, The Life of Trotsky, Stefan Zweig, the history of Zionist settlement in the Land of Israel, the origins of the Norse saga, Mark Twain, Knut Hamsun, Greek mythology, Memoirs of Hadrian, and Uri Avneri. Everything. Apart from those books that Sheftel did not allow me to read, despite all my entreaties, The Naked and the Dead, for example (I think that even after I was married, Sheftel hesitated to let me read Norman Mailer and Henry Miller).

  Arch of Triumph, a pacifist novel by Erich Maria Remarque set in the 1930s, opens with a description of a lonely woman leaning on the parapet of a bridge at nighttime, about to end her life by jumping into the river. At the last minute a strange man stops and speaks to her, seizes her arm, saves her life, and spends a torrid night with her. That was my fantasy: that was how I, too, would encounter love. She would be standing alone on a deserted bridge one stormy night, and I would turn up at the last moment to save her from herself, and slay the dragon—not a dragon of flesh and blood like the ones I used to slay by the dozen when I was little, but the inner dragon of despair.

  I would slay this inner dragon for the woman I loved and receive my reward from her, and so the fantasy developed in directions that were too sweet and awesome for me to contemplate. It did not occur to me at the time that the desperate woman on the bridge was, again and again, my dead mother. With her despair. Her own dragon.

  Or take Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, a book I read four or five times in those years, populated by femmes fatales and tough-looking men who concealed a poetic soul behind their rough exterior. I dreamed that one day I would be like them: a gruff, virile man with the body of a bullfighter and a face full of contempt and sorrow, perhaps a little like the photograph of Hemingway himself. And if I did not manage to be like them someday, at least I would learn to write about such men: courageous men who knew how to scoff and to loathe, or how to punch some bully on the chin if the need arose, who knew precisely the right thing to order in a bar, and what to say to a woman, a rival or a comrade in arms, how to use a gun and how to make love superbly. And also about noble women, vulnerable yet unattainable temptresses, enigmatic, mysterious women, who lavished their favors generously but only on selected men who knew how to mock and despise, drink whisky, punch hard, etc.