Black Box

by Amos Oz

  Meanwhile the Hebrew edition of your book is all the rage here now. Your picture stares out at me from every newspaper. Except that the picture is ten years old at least. It shows your face as lean and concentrated, with your military sternness stretched the width of your lips, as if you are about to give the order to fire. Was it taken when you left the regular army and went back to the university to finish your doctorate? As I look at it the arctic brilliance flashes opposite me out of the grey cloud. Like a spark trapped in an iceberg.

  Ten years ago. Even before you finished building the house that looks like a castle in Yefe Nof, from the money that Zakheim managed to extract for you from your father, who was already disappearing into the distance toward the steppes of his melancholy, like an old Indian heading for the happy hunting ground.

  We were still living in our old flat in Abu Tor, with that rocky yard and its pine trees. And I remember particularly the rainy winter weekends. We would stay in bed till ten o’clock, battered and exhausted from the cruelty of our night, almost tolerating each other, like a pair of boxers between rounds. Almost leaning on each other. Punch-drunk. When we emerged from the bedroom we would find Boaz already awake. He had dressed himself two hours earlier (with his shirt buttoned up wrongly and with odd socks) and would be sitting in academic earnestness at your desk, with your lamp lit in front of him, your pipe in his mouth, drawing instrument panels of spaceships on one sheet of paper after another. Or an airplane crashing in flames. Sometimes cutting out for you a pile of wonderfully neat rectangular little cards, his contribution to your doctorate. Or for the Armored Corps. It was before the period of the balsa airplanes.

  Outside it was raining gloomily, persistently. The wind dashed the rain against the tops of the pine trees and the rusty iron shutters. Through the streaming window the yard seemed to have been drawn with a Japanese brush: pine needles trembling in the mist with droplets of water trapped at their tips. In the distance, between blocks of cloud, domes and minarets floated as though also joining the caravan that was rolling with the thunder eastward toward the desert.

  When I went to the kitchen to get breakfast ready I discovered that Boaz had already laid the table for three. Red-eyed you and I would avoid looking at each other. Sometimes I would fix you with my eyes as though I were hypnotizing you, only so you would not be able to look at me. And the child, like a social worker, would act as intermediary for us, asking me to pour you more coffee, you to pass me the cream cheese.

  After breakfast I would put on that blue woolen dress, comb my hair and make my face up, and sit down with a book in the armchair. Except that the book would almost always stay open upside down on my lap: I could not take my eyes off you and your son. You would sit together at the desk, cutting out, sorting, and pasting pictures from your Geographical Magazine. You worked in almost total silence, the child skillfully guessing your wishes; passing you just at the right moment scissors, paste, penknife, even before you could ask for them. As though you were practicing some ritual together. And all in deep seriousness. Apart from the hum of the kerosene heater, there was no sound to be heard in the flat. And occasionally you would unconsciously lay your strong hand on his fair hair, and dirty it with glue. How different was that purposeful masculine silence from the desperate silence that came down on you and me the moment the last spasm of desire left us. How I trembled to see the touch of your fingers on his head, and compared it with the nocturnal rage they had bestowed on me a few hours earlier. When did we see Death winning at chess in The Seventh Seal? Where were the frozen tundras that gave you the vicious strength to disown that child? Where do you draw the frozen power from to compel your fingers to write the words “your son”?

  And at the end of those Saturdays, at the close of the Sabbath in the twilight between rain showers, even before we had put Boaz to bed, you would suddenly stand up, angrily pour yourself a quick brandy, down it in one gulp without screwing up your face, deliver a couple of violent pats on your son’s back, as if he were a horse, roughly shrug on your coat, and hurl at me from the doorway: “I’ll be back on Tuesday evening. Try to evacuate the zone before then if you can.” Then you would go out, closing the door with a sort of desperate self-control beyond all slamming. Through the window I would see your back disappearing into the gathering darkness. You have not forgotten that winter. In you it goes on and on, but growing ever greyer, moss-covered, sinking into the ground, like an old tombstone.

  If you can, try to believe me when I say that Michel does not read your letters. Even though I have mentioned to him that we are corresponding through Zakheim. Don’t worry. Or perhaps I should write: Don’t hope?

  Despite your denial, I still see you sitting at your window with a vista of snowfields, brilliant plains without tree, hill, or bird, stretching away until they merge with masses of grey fog, all as in a woodcut. All in the heart of the winter.

  Whereas here, meanwhile, the summer has arrived. The nights are short and cool. The days are blazing, dazzling like molten steel. Through the window of my room I can see the three Arab laborers that Michel has hired digging trenches for the foundations of the extension that Michel is building with your money. Michel himself works with these laborers every day when he gets home from school. He doesn’t need a contractor, since he was once a builder himself, the first year after he came to Israel. Every couple of hours he takes some coffee out to them and exchanges jokes and sayings with them. His brother-in-law’s nephew, who is an official in the City Council, got us our building permit early. A cousin of his friend Janine has promised to do the electrical wiring for us, and to charge us only for the materials.

  On the other side of the fence are two fig trees and an olive. Beyond them begin the steep slopes of the wadi. And you can see on the other side of the wadi the Arab quarter, half suburb and half village, a flock of little stone houses clustering around a minaret. Before dawn the cocks call to me from there insistently, as though trying to seduce me. At sunrise goats bleat, and sometimes I manage to hear the bells of the herd going off to nibble on the edge of the desert. A whole battalion of dogs bursts at times into a barking that is dulled by the distance. Like the ashes of old passions. At night their barking descends to a strangled howling. The muezzin responds with his own wailing, guttural, unbridled, consumed with veiled longings. It is summer in Jerusalem, Alec. Summer has come and you have not.

  But Boaz has turned up—the day before yesterday. As if nothing had happened. And his manner was almost joking: “Hi, Michel. Ilana. I’ve come to eat up your Yifat. But first of all, here, little one, eat these sweets so that you’ll be sweeter for me to eat.” A Bedouin Viking, sun-scorched, smelling of sea and dust, his shoulder-length hair white-hot, like burnished gold. He already has to stoop when he comes through the doorway. He turns and addresses Michel with a deep bow, as though of reverence, as though performing deliberately and consciously a ritual gesture of respect. Whereas for Yifat he went down on all fours, and she, a dark-skinned monkey, climbed up and clung to his limbs until she could touch the ceiling. And dribbled a sticky mess from the candy he had given her into his hair.

  Boaz brought with him a skinny, silent girl, who was neither pretty nor ugly. A math student from France, a good four years older than he is. Michel, after investigating her background and discovering that she came from a Jewish family, calmed down and suggested that they stay the night on the carpet in front of the television. For greater security he left the light on in the shower and the door between us and them wide open, so as to insure “that Boaz doesn’t get up to any nonsense in my house.”

  What brings Boaz here? It appears that he turned to Zakheim and asked for a sum of money for purposes you know. For some reason Zakheim decided to tell him about the hundred thousand you gave Michel, but refused to give Boaz so much as pocket money. Some sort of sly scheme which I can’t decipher is apparently brewing inside his devilish shaven skull, and that’s why he suggested to Boaz that he come and see Michel “and claim what is rightf
ully yours.”

  Perhaps you are also a party to this plot? Perhaps it’s your very own? Is it just obtuseness that always prevents me from anticipating your next blow, even when it is just about to hit me? Surely Zakheim is merely a kind of exuberant operetta puppet in which you sometimes choose to conceal your grim fist.

  Boaz came to suggest nothing less than to take Michel into partnership in some business to do with tourist boats in the Red Sea. That was why he came up to Jerusalem. He needs, as he puts it, a preliminary investment, which, he is sure, he will recover in a few months. While he was talking, he dismantled a matchbox and made Yifat a sort of camel on chicken’s legs. This child is you: enthralled, I watched his fingers recklessly squandering rivers of strength just to refrain from breaking a matchstick. Such a dazzling waste, at the sight of which I was nearly filled instantly with an overwhelming physical envy of his French dropout.

  On hearing the offer of a partnership Michel stood up and, as usual, did the right and fitting thing at the most appropriate moment. That is to say, he suddenly climbed onto the window sill and opened up the box of the roller blind to dismantle and reassemble the screw and so release the blind, which was stuck. Then he remained standing on the window sill, and thus was able to talk to your son de haut en bas, as though from the bridge of a ship. Michel explained to Boaz dispassionately, without either losing his temper or in any way softening the blow, that there was nothing to talk about, neither loans nor investments, and that even if Boaz was “the epitome of wisdom, like King Solomon in his day, still the Sommo family will not finance either the harem or the ships of Tarshish.” And he also nailed Boaz with the verse “in the sweat of your brow you shall eat your bread.”

  But immediately afterward he got down from his launching pad and went to the kitchen and made Boaz and his friend regal hamburgers, fried potatoes, and a virtuoso salad. And in the evening he asked the neighbors’ boy to baby-sit Yifat again and took the two of them and me out to the cinema and afterward for ice cream. It was only when we returned home, close to midnight, that Boaz summoned up enough courage to ask Michel whose “that money from America” was. Michel, who symbolically had not got down for an instant from his pedestal, replied calmly: “The money is your mother’s, your sister’s, and yours in three equal parts. But for the time being you and Yifat are still minors as far as the law is concerned, and naturally as far as I am too. Meanwhile your mother is responsible for the two of you and I am responsible for her, so go and tell that to Mr. Zakheim, and tell him to stop boring us all. As for you, Boaz, even if you grow to be taller than the Eiffel Tower, for me you will still have the status of a minor Eiffel Tower. If you want to study, that’s another matter altogether: just say so, and the money’s yours. But to waste money that you didn’t earn on fishes and tourists and girls? That I won’t finance, even if it is happening in the liberated Sinai. That money is intended to make you into a human being. Now if by any chance you have an urge to hit me over the head with a vegetable crate, go ahead, Boaz; there’s one under Yifat’s bed.”

  Boaz listened and said nothing, merely spread that thoughtful smile of his on his mouth, and his regal, tragic beauty filled the room like an aroma. He did not stop smiling even when Michel changed over to French and plunged into a lengthy conversation with the girl student. I am fascinated by the way my husband and your son, out of the depths of contempt and humiliation, are silently fond of each other. Be careful, sir: your victims are only too likely to make common cause against you. And I get a thrill out of your jealousy, which no doubt has just made you purse your lips like wire. And close by an inch or two the space between your spectacles and your pen on your desk. But don’t touch the whisky again: your illness is outside the rules of the game.

  This morning some friends of Michel’s, skullcapped Russians and Americans, came in a van and took Michel and Boaz and his friend for a trip around Bethlehem. So I am here by myself, writing to you on pages torn out of an exercise book. Yifat is at the nursery. She looks like Michel but with a sort of comical exaggeration, as though she had been specially made to be a parody of him: she is thin, curly-haired, has a slight squint, and is obedient, even though she is given to occasional tantrums. But most of the time she radiates shy friendliness, which she lavishes indiscriminately on objects, animals, and people, as though the world were waiting to receive grace and favor from her tiny self. Almost since the day she was born Michel has addressed her as “Mademoiselle Sommo.” He pronounces it “Mamzelle,” and she responds by innocently calling him mamzer, “bastard.”

  Did you know, Alec, that Michel has decided to leave his job as a French teacher at the end of the year? To leave the school and also give up his private lessons? He has dreams of dealing in real estate in the territories, of a political career, following in the footsteps of a brother he hero-worships. Not that he tells me much about it. Your money has changed his life. It may not be what you had in mind, but it happens sometimes that even a dragon produces some noble result, fertilizes a plot of land that will one day yield crops.

  At eleven o’clock I have to go to the Café Savyon, to give this letter to Zakheim at a secret rendezvous. As you have instructed. Even though Michel knows. And Zakheim? He is thrilled. He comes to these meetings arrogant, stylish, and deadly. Wearing a sporty jacket with a bohemian silk scarf around his neck, his Tatar shaven head gleaming and perfumed, his fingernails carefully manicured, the effect spoiled only by the clumps of black hairs sprouting from his nostrils and ears. Time after time he manages to break down my resistance and force a coffee and cake on me. And then he starts to ooze extravagant compliments, double entendres; sometimes he even touches me accidentally, and hastens to apologize with veiled eyes. By our last meeting he had advanced as far as the flower stage. Not a whole bunch, of course, just a single carnation. I forced myself to smile and to sniff the bloom, which smelled of Zakheim’s scent rather than its own. As if it had been soaked in it.

  You ask what I saw in Michel. And I have to admit it: I was lying again. And I am taking back that tale about Michel the virtuoso lover. So meanwhile you can relax. Michel is all right in bed, and he’s trying hard to go on improving. I even found a handbook in French that he had hidden from me in his toolbox. I’m sorry if I’ve taken away one of your instruments of mortification. I’ll let you have others, even sharper ones. Michel and I met a year or so after the divorce. He used to come to the bookshop where I was working, and he used to wait for me, browsing among the magazines until the shop closed. Then he used to take me to a cheap restaurant, to the cinema, to public discussion groups. After the film we sometimes walked mile after mile through the empty night streets of south Jerusalem—he did not dare to invite me up to his room. Perhaps he was ashamed of his lodgings in the laundry room on the roof of a house belonging to one of his relatives. And he would shyly describe his views and plans to me. Can you imagine a bashful ego trip? Even to put his arm through mine was beyond his courage.

  I waited patiently for nearly three months, until I had had enough of the sidelong hungry-but-well-trained-dog looks he kept giving me. Finally one night I grabbed his head and kissed him in a back street. So we began to kiss occasionally. But he was still apprehensive about my meeting his family and about my reaction to his partial piety. I liked his timidity. I tried not to put pressure on him. When several more months had passed, and the winter chill had turned our strolls to martyrdom, I took him to my room, undressed him like a child, and folded his limbs around me. Nearly an hour passed before he managed to relax a little. And after that I still had quite a struggle before he showed signs of life. It transpired that the little he knew he had learned as a youth in Paris from girls who were apparently as frightened as he was. And perhaps, despite his denials, in some paupers’ brothel. When I let out a little sigh, he was terrified and began to murmur: Pardon. And then he got dressed, went down solemnly on his knees, and desperately asked for my hand in marriage.

  I became pregnant after our wedding. Another year pa
ssed after the baby was born before I managed to teach him how to wait for me. How to wean himself from behaving like a bicycle thief whenever he made love. When he finally succeeded in wringing from me for the first time the sound that you can draw out of me even by mail, Michel resembled the first astronaut to land on the moon: his modest, ecstatic pride made my heart tremble with love. The next day, in a transport of enthusiasm, he did not go to school but borrowed some money from his brother to buy me a summer dress. He even bought me a little electric mixer. And in the evening he cooked me a regal four-course meal, complete with a bottle of wine. He did not stop plying me with little treats and favors. Since then he has slowly improved and sometimes manages to get a clear sound.