A Tale of Love and Darkness

by Amos Oz

  I said sorry nicely and got up to go. I was terrified for a moment that when she locked the door, she might have hidden the key in her pocket and I wouldn't be allowed to leave until I had answered all her questions one by one. But the key was still in the keyhole. As I left, I could still hear her concerned voice behind me:

  "Perhaps it is still a little too soon for you to have this conversation. Just remember that the moment you decide you are ready for it, don't hesitate for a moment, come and see me, and we'll talk. I believe that Fania, your poor mother, very much wanted a deep bond to continue between you and me."

  I fled.

  Three or four well-known figures of the Herut party in Jerusalem were sitting with my father; they and their wives had met in a café beforehand and come together, like a small deputation, to offer us their condolences. They had previously decided to try to distract my father with political talk: at that time the Knesset was about to debate the reparations agreement that Prime Minister Ben-Gurion had signed with Chancellor Adenauer of West Germany, an agreement that the Herut party saw as a disgrace and an abomination, a slur on the memory of the victims of Nazism and an ineradicable blot on the conscience of the young state. Some of our comforters maintained the view that it was our duty to thwart this agreement at any cost, even if it meant bloodshed.

  My father hardly participated in the conversation, he merely nodded a couple of times, but I was fired with the courage to say a few sentences to these Jerusalem grandees, as a way of washing away some of the distress I felt after the conversation in the bathroom: Aunt Lilia's words grated on me like chalk on a blackboard. For several years afterward my face used to twitch involuntarily whenever I remembered that conversation in the bathroom. To this day when I recall it, it feels like biting into rotten fruit.

  Then the Herut leaders went to the other room to bring comfort to Grandpa Alexander with their indignation over the reparations agreement. I went with them because I wanted to go on taking part in the discussion of plans for the coup aimed at foiling the abominable agreement with our murderers and finally toppling Ben-Gurion's red regime. And there was another reason that I accompanied them: Aunt Lilia had arrived from the bathroom and was advising my father to take some excellent sedative pill that she had brought with her, it would make him feel much better. Father made a face and refused. For once he even forgot to thank her.

  The Torens came, and the Lembergs and the Rosendorffs and the Bar-Yizhars, Getsel and Isabella Nahlieli from Children's Realm came, and other acquaintances and neighbors from Kerem Avraham, Uncle Dudek, the chief of police, came with his pleasant wife Tosia, Dr. Pfeffermann came with the staff of the newspaper department, and other librarians came from all the departments of the National Library. Staszek and Mala Rudnicki came, and various scholars and booksellers, and Mr. Joshua Czeczik, Father's publisher from Tel Aviv. Even Uncle Joseph, Professor Klausner, appeared one evening, very upset and emotional; he silently shed an old man's tear on Father's shoulder and murmured some formal words of condolence. Our acquaintances from the cafés came, and the Jerusalem writers, Yehuda Yaari, Shraga Kadari, Dov Kimche and Yitzhak Shenhar, and Professor and Mrs. Halkin, and Professor Bennet, the expert on Islamic history, and Professor Yitzhak (Fritz) Baer, the expert on the history of the Jews in Christian Spain. Three or four younger lecturers, rising stars in the firmament of the university, also came. Two of my teachers from Tachkemoni School came, and some of my classmates, and the Krochmals, Tosia and Gustav Krochmal, the broken toy and doll repairers, whose little shop had been renamed the Dolls' Hospital. Zerta and Yakov-David Abramski came: the one whose eldest son Yonatan had been killed at the end of the War of Independence by a Jordanian sniper. The sniper's bullet hit twelve-year-old Yoni in the forehead when he was playing in his yard that Saturday morning years ago, at the very moment his parents were sitting with us, sipping tea and eating cake. And the ambulance went down our street hooting on its way to pick him up and again a few minutes later as it drove past with its siren wailing on its way to the hospital, and when my mother heard the siren she said, We spend all our time making plans, yet there's someone out there in the dark laughing at us and all our plans. And Zerta Abramski said, That's right, life is like that, and yet people will always go on making plans because otherwise despair would take over. It was ten minutes later that a neighbor came and gently called the Abram skis over and told them less than the truth, and they were in such a hurry to run after him that Aunt Zerta left her handbag behind with her wallet and her papers inside. When we went to see them the next day to offer condolences, Father silently handed her the handbag after embracing her and Mr. Abramski. Now they tearfully embraced my father and me but they didn't bring us a handbag.

  My father suppressed his tears. In any case, he never wept in my presence. He firmly believed that tears were fitting for women but not for men. He sat all day long in Mother's old chair, his face growing darker day by day since as a mark of mourning he did not shave, greeting his visitors with a nod and nodding to them again when they left. He barely spoke during those days, as though my mother's death had cured him of his habit of breaking any silence. Now he sat silently for days on end, letting others do the talking, about my mother, about books and book reviews, about the twists and turns of politics. I tried to sit opposite him: I hardly took my eyes off him all day long. And whenever I passed close to his chair, he patted me wearily once or twice on the arm or back. But we did not speak to each other.

  My mother's parents and her sisters did not come to Jerusalem during the mourning period and the days that followed: they sat and mourned separately, in Auntie Haya's apartment in Tel Aviv, because they blamed my father for what had happened and couldn't bring themselves to see him. Even at the funeral, I was told, my father walked with his parents while my mother's sisters walked with their parents and not a word was exchanged between the two camps.

  I was not present at my mother's funeral: Aunt Lilia, Leah Kalish-Bar-Kamcha, who was considered our expert on feelings in general and children's upbringing in particular, feared the burial might have an adverse effect on the child's psyche. And from then on the Mussmans never set foot in our home in Jerusalem, and Father, for his part, did not go and see them or make any contact, because he was very hurt by their suspicions. For years I was the go-between. During the first week I even carried oblique messages concerning my mother's personal effects, and a couple of times I conveyed the effects themselves. In the years that followed, the aunts used to interrogate me cautiously about daily life at home, about my father's and grandparents' health, about my father's new wife and even about our material circumstances, but they insisted on cutting my answers short with: I'm not interested in knowing. Or: That'll do; what we've already heard is more than enough.

  My father, too, sometimes asked me for a hint or two about the aunts, their families or my grandparents in Kiriat Motskin, but two minutes after I began to reply, his face turned yellow with pain and he gestured to me to stop and not go into further details. When my Grandma Shlomit died, in 1958, my aunts and my grandparents on my mother's side asked me to convey their condolences to Grandpa Alexander, whom the Mussmans considered the only member of the Klausner family who had a really warm heart. And fifteen years later, when I told Grandpa Alexander about the death of my other grandfather, he wrung his hands and then covered his ears with his hands and raised his voice, more in anger than in sorrow, and said: "Bozhe moi! He was such a young man still! A simple man, but an interesting one! Deep! You now, tell them all that my heart weeps for him! Make sure you tell them with these very words: Alexander Klausner's heart weeps at the untimely death of dear Mr. Hertz Mussman!"

  Even after the mourning period was over, when the apartment was finally empty and my father and I locked the door and were alone together, we hardly talked. Except about the most essential things. The kitchen door is jammed. There was no mail today. The bathroom's free but there's no toilet paper. We also avoided meeting each other's eyes, as though we were
ashamed of something we had both done that it would have been better if we hadn't, and at the very least it would have been better if we could have been ashamed quietly without a partner who knew everything about you that you knew about him.

  We never talked about my mother. Not a single word. Or about ourselves. Or about anything that had the least thing to do with emotions. We talked about the Cold War. We talked about the assassination of King Abdullah and the threat of a second round of fighting. My father explained to me the difference between a symbol, a parable, and an allegory, and the difference between a saga and a legend. He also gave me a clear and accurate account of the difference between liberalism and social democracy. And every morning, even on these gray, damp, misty January mornings, at first light there always came from the soggy bare branches outside the pitiful chirping of the frozen bird, Elise: "Ti-da-di-da-di—," but in the depth of this winter it did not repeat the song several times as it had done in the summer, but said what it had to say once, and fell silent. I have hardly ever spoken about my mother till now, till I came to write these pages. Not with my father, or my wife, or my children or with anybody else. After my father died, I hardly spoke about him either. As if I were a foundling.

  During the first weeks after the disaster the house went to the dogs. Neither my father nor I cleared away the leftover food from the oilcloth-covered kitchen table, we did not touch the dishes that we submerged in the murky water in the sink, until there were no clean ones left and we had to fish out a couple of plates, forks, and knives, and rinse them under the faucet, and after we had used them, we put them back on the pile of dishes that was beginning to stink. The garbage can overflowed and smelled because neither of us wanted to empty it. We threw our clothes over the nearest chair, and if we needed a chair, we simply threw anything that was on it to the floor, which was thick with books and papers and fruit peel and dirty handkerchiefs and yellowing newspapers. Gray coils of dust drifted around the floors. Even when the toilet was getting blocked, neither of us lifted a finger. Piles of dirty laundry overflowed from the bathroom into the corridor, where it met a jumble of empty bottles, cardboard boxes, used envelopes, and wrapping paper. (This was more or less how I described Fima's apartment in Fima.)

  And yet, in all the chaos, a deep mutual consideration prevailed in our silent home. My father finally gave up insisting on my bedtime and left me to decide when to turn my light out. As for me, when I came home from school to the empty, neglected apartment, I made myself something simple to eat: a hard-boiled egg, cheese, bread, vegetables, and some sardines or tuna from a can. And I made a couple of slices of bread with egg and tomato for my father too, even though he had generally had something to eat earlier in the canteen at Terra Sancta.

  Despite the silence and the shame, Father and I were close at that time, as we had been the previous winter, a year and a month before, when Mother's condition took a turn for the worse and he and I were like a pair of stretcher bearers carrying an injured person up a steep slope.

  This time we were carrying each other.

  All through that winter we never opened a window. As though we were afraid to lose the special smell of the apartment. As though we were comfortable with each other's smells. Even when they got very thick and concentrated. Dark half moons appeared under Father's eyes like those my mother had when she couldn't sleep. I would wake up in the night in a panic and peep into his room to see if he was sitting up like her, staring sadly at the window. But my father did not sit at the window staring at the clouds or the moon. He bought himself a little Phillips wireless set with a green eye and put it by his bed, and he lay in the dark listening to everything. At midnight, when the Voice of Israel stopped broadcasting, to be replaced by a monotonous buzz, he reached out and tuned to the BBC World Service from London.

  Late one afternoon Grandma Shlomit suddenly appeared, carrying two dishes of food she had cooked for us. The moment I opened the door she was appalled at what met her eyes and by the stench that assailed her nostrils. Almost without a word she turned tail and ran. But by seven o'clock next morning she was back, armed this time with two cleaning women and a whole arsenal of cleaning materials and disinfectants. She set up her tactical command HQ on a bench in the yard opposite the front door, from where she directed the mopping-up operations, which lasted for three days.

  So the apartment was put to rights, and my father and I stopped neglecting the household chores. One of the cleaners was hired to come in twice a week. The apartment was thoroughly aired and cleaned, and a couple of months later we even decided to have it painted.

  But ever since those weeks of chaos I have been subject to a compulsive desire for tidiness that makes the lives of those around me a misery. Any scrap of paper that is not in its right place, any unfolded newspaper or unwashed cup threatens my peace of mind, if not my sanity. To this day, like some kind of secret policeman or like Frankenstein's monster, or with something of my Grandma Shlomit's obsession with cleanliness and tidiness, I scour the house every few hours, ruthlessly banishing to the depths of Siberia any poor object that has the misfortune to find itself on a surface, or hiding away in some godforsaken drawer any letter or leaflet that someone has left on the table because he or she was called to the phone, and emptying out, rinsing, and putting facedown in the dishwasher a cup of coffee that one of my victims has left to cool down a bit, mercilessly clearing away keys, spectacles, notes, medicines, a piece of cake that someone has unwisely taken his eyes off for a moment: everything falls into the jaws of this greedy monster so that there will be some order at last in this topsy-turvy house. So that it doesn't so much as hint at the way my father and I lived at that time when we tacitly agreed that we should sit down among the ashes and scrape ourselves with a potsherd, just so she should know.

  Then one day my father made a furious assault on Mother's drawers and her side of their closet: the only things that survived his wrath were a few items that her sisters and parents had requested as keepsakes, via me, and in fact on one of my trips to Tel Aviv I took them with me in a cardboard box tied up with a stout length of cord. All the rest—dresses, skirts, shoes, underwear, notebooks, stockings, head scarves, neckerchiefs, and even envelopes full of photographs from her childhood—he stuffed into waterproof sacks that he had brought from the National Library. I accompanied him like a puppy from room to room and watched his frenzy of activity; I neither helped nor hindered him. Soundlessly I watched my father furiously pull out the drawer of her bedside table and empty all the contents, cheap jewelry, notebooks, pill boxes, a book, a handkerchief, an eyeshade, and some loose change, into one of his sacks. I did not say a word. And my mother's powder compact and hairbrush and her toilet things and her toothbrush. Everything. I stood hushed and terrified, leaning on the doorpost and watching my father tear her blue dressing gown off the hook in the bathroom with a ripping sound and cram it into one of the sacks. Was this the way Christian neighbors stood and stared, aghast, not knowing their own hearts because of the conflicting emotions, as their Jewish neighbors were taken away by force and crammed into cattle trucks? Where he took the sacks, whether he gave it all away to the poor people in the transit camps or the victims of that winter's floods, he never told me. By evening not a trace of her was left. But a year later, when my father's new wife was settling in, a packet of six plain hairpins appeared that had somehow managed to survive hidden for a whole year in the narrow gap between the bedside table and the side of the closet. My father pursed his lips and threw this away too.

  A few weeks after the cleaners came in and the apartment was purged, my father and I gradually went back to holding a sort of daily staff meeting in the kitchen each evening. I began, telling him briefly about my day at school. He told me about an interesting conversation he had had that day, standing between the bookshelves, with Professor Goitein or Doctor Rotenstreich. We exchanged views about the political situation, about Begin and Ben-Gurion or about General Neguib's military coup in Egypt. We hung up a card in the
kitchen again and wrote down, in our handwriting that was no longer similar, what we had to buy at the grocer's or the greengrocer's, and that we both had to go to have our hair cut on Monday evening, or to buy a little present for Aunt Lilenka for her new diploma or for Grandma Shlomit, whose age was a closely guarded secret, for her birthday.

  After a few more months my father resumed his habit of polishing his shoes till they shone when the electric light hit them, shaving at seven o'clock in the evening, putting on a starched shirt and a silk tie, dampening his hair before he brushed it back, splashing himself with aftershave, and going out "to chat with his friends" or "for a discussion about work."

  I was left alone at home, to read, dream, write and rewrite. Or I would go out and roam the wadis, checking the state of the fences around the no-man's-land and minefields along the ceasefire line that divided Jerusalem between Israel and Jordan. As I walked in the dark, I hummed to myself, Ti-da-di-da-di. I no longer aspired "to die or to conquer the mountain." I wanted everything to stop. Or at least I wanted to leave home and leave Jerusalem for good and go and live in a kibbutz: to leave all the books and feelings behind me and live a simple village life, a life of brotherhood and manual labor.