Black Box

by Amos Oz

  Boaz B.

  ***

  To Boaz Gideon (Brandstetter)

  c/o the Schulvass Family

  10 Ancestral Homeland Street

  Kiryat Arba, Israel

  Chicago

  23.7.76

  Dear Boaz,

  I got your short letter. I won’t be long either. You want to be on your own and not be told what you should or shouldn’t do. I accept that. As a matter of fact, I wanted exactly the same thing but I wasn’t strong enough. I suggest we forget for the time being about the money that is presently with Sommo. I have two possibilities for you, one in America and one in Israel. Would you like to come to America? Make up your mind and you’ll get a ticket. I’ll fix you up with somewhere to stay and a job. Maybe even in optics. Eventually you can also study whatever interests you. If you want to repay me the cost out of your pay here, you can. It’s not urgent and it’s not compulsory. But take into account that in America you’ll have a problem with the language. At least to start with. Also that here nobody has cousins in the police.

  The alternative is that you can have at your disposal a large empty house near Zikhron Yaakov. At present it’s in poor condition, but you have an excellent pair of hands. If you gradually make a start on restoring the house, I’ll pay you a fair monthly wage and I’ll cover all the expenditure on building materials, etc. You can invite anyone you like to live with you in the building, which is standing abandoned at the moment. There’s a lot to be done there. There’s scope for some agriculture. And it’s not far from the seaside. But you’ll be free to do only what you want.

  Whether you decide to come to America or to go to the house in Zikhron, all you have to do is to see a lawyer by the name of Roberto di Modena. He is in Jerusalem, in the same office as Mr. Zakheim, whom you know and visited once. Pay attention: Don’t go to Zakheim. Go straight to di Modena and tell him what you have decided. He has already had instructions to implement your decision at once, either way. You don’t have to reply to me. Be free and strong, and if you can, try to judge me fairly too.

  Your Dad

  ***

  A GIDEON MIDWEST UNIV CHICAGO

  HAVE MADE THE REQUISITE ARRANGEMENTS FOR BOAZS INSTALLATION IN THE PROPERTY THERE WERE SOME FORMAL DIFFICULTIES WHICH IM SEEING TO I GAVE HIM THE SUM YOU FIXED FOR PRELIMINARY ARRANGEMENTS IN FUTURE SHALL PAY HIM MONTHLY AS PER YOUR INSTRUCTIONS HE HAS BEEN IN ZIKHRON SINCE YESTERDAY MY PARTNER IS BOILING WITH RAGE ROBERTO DIMODENA

  ***

  GIDEON MIDWEST UNIV CHICAGO

  MACHIAVELLI DONT FORCE ME TO FIGHT YOU THE PURCHASER IS NOW PREPARED TO PAY ELEVEN FOR ZIKHRON PROPERTY UNDERTAKES TO EMPLOY BOAZ THERE ON MONTHLY WAGE YOUR AGREEMENT REQUIRED INSTANTER CONTINUE TO CONSIDER MYSELF YOUR FRIEND THE ONLY ONE YOUVE GOT DESPITE BITTER HUMILIATION MANFRED

  ***

  PERSONAL ZAKHEIM JERUSALEM ISRAEL

  ZIKHRON PROPERTY NOT REPEAT NOT FOR SALE ROBERTO REPEAT ROBERTO HANDLES ALL MY AFFAIRS KINDLY HAND OVER ALL PAPERS TO HIM GO ON TRYING YOUR LUCK WITH SOMMO YOU POOR MANS IAGO WILL YOU TRY TO HAVE ME PUT AWAY ON MOUNT CARMEL YOUR GRANDCHILDREN ARE STILL IN MY WILL WATCH OUT ALEX

  ***

  Ilana Sommo

  Tarnaz 7

  Jerusalem

  1.8.76

  Ilana,

  You say I don’t understand anything. It’s always been the same story: Nobody can understand you. So be it. I am writing this time only because of Boaz and because of Michel and Yifat. Michel phoned me last night and told me that Boaz is leaving Kiryat Arba and going to live by himself in the ruined house in Zikhron. So Alex had decreed. I begged Michel not to try to interfere. I promised that Yoash would go to Zikhron at the weekend to see what’s going on and how we can help. Maybe you’ll admit now, if only to yourself, that you made a mistake when you got in touch with Alex again.

  I’m wasting my words. You’ve got the urge once again to play the tragic heroine. To star all over again in a new performance. Even though Alex is stealing the show this time too. If you can’t manage any other way, the two of you, why don’t you get up and go and look for him in America? Michel will rise to the occasion and make an excellent job of bringing Yifat up by himself. In time he’ll find himself a woman from his own circle. Boaz will have an easier time too. And we’ll do the best we can to help from here. You’ll finally be completely redundant, if that’s your secret wish. Because what’s the point in going on with this reversal of the old refrain “My heart’s in the east, and I’m in the furthermost west”?

  It goes without saying that I’m not trying to persuade you to go. On the contrary. I’m writing to beg you to try to think again. To take yourself in hand. Try to tell yourself that Boaz doesn’t need you. As a matter of fact, there’s not one of us he really needs. Just try to understand that if you don’t stop yourself now, Yifat will grow up exactly the same. Not needing anybody. What is it that drives you to throw away everything you have for the sake of something that doesn’t and can’t exist?

  Of course you can reply sarcastically. Tell me not to stick my nose in. Or not reply at all. I only wrote because it is my duty to try to stop you, even if there’s not much chance. So that you won’t cause even more suffering to those you are still dear to.

  I suggest you bring Yifat here to Beit Avraham for a week or two’s rest. You can work in the storerooms for four hours a day. Or spend the mornings at the pool. You could help Yoash in the garden. After lunch we can take the children for a walk to the fish ponds or to the pine woods. Yifat can be fitted into the crèche. In the evenings we can sit on the lawn with neighbors and drink coffee. Michel is also invited, at least for the weekends. And I promise not to tinker with what according to you I can’t understand. If you like, I’ll listen and say nothing. If you like, we’ll go to the macramé class or the classical-music group. From here everything will look a little different. And I also suggest that at this stage Yoash and I take charge of contacts with Boaz. What say you?

  Rahel

  ***

  Professor A. Gideon

  Political Science Department

  Midwest University

  Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.

  Jerusalem

  2.8.76

  Dear Alec, genie and bottle both,

  Don’t go on writing to me via Zakheim. Your baldheaded troll no longer amuses me. Just write to me by mail. Or come out and show yourself. Or call for me to come to you—I’m still waiting for an invitation to your wedding with air ticket enclosed. Just say the word and I’ll come—I’ll even bring you a faded bouquet of flowers from Jerusalem. It’s nearly a month now since you were planning to take some little secretary by storm, and I still haven’t heard the wedding march. Or have you lost your charms? Your masculine battle scent? The fortune you inherited from your father? Your dazzling world fame? Your hypnotic aura of death? Has all that really rusted like tin armor? Did the beauty turn you down? Or perhaps you still haven’t learned how to propose to a woman without your father’s help?

  I only got around to reading your letter at one o’clock this morning. It lay waiting for me all day, hidden in my handbag, like a viper, between my handkerchief and my lipstick. In the evening Michel fell asleep in front of the television as usual. During “Sermon for the Day” I woke him up, so he could watch the midnight news. Yitzhak Rabin, in his opinion, is not a Jewish prime minister at all but an American general who just happens to speak a little broken Hebrew and is selling the state to Uncle Sam. Once again the non-Jews are ruling us and we are kowtowing to them. Whereas he considers me to be the most beautiful woman in the whole world. So saying he kissed me on the forehead, stretching on tiptoe. I bent down before him to undo the childish bows in his shoelaces. He was tired and half-asleep. His voice was cracked from smoking. When I put him to bed and tucked him in he said that the most mysterious psalm in the book is the one that begins “To the Chief Musician, on a remote, mute dove.” He delivered a sort of sermon on the words remote, mute. He called me his “mute dove.” And while he was
still talking he fell asleep, lying on his back, like a baby. Only then did I sit down to read your catalogue of woes, to the sound of his peaceful breathing mingled with the chorus of crickets in the wadi that divides us from the Arab village. I translated word for word your darts of vicious wit into agonized cries of pain. But when I got to the sword of Goliath and your dying dragon I wept inside. I couldn’t go on reading. I hid your letter under the evening paper and went out to the kitchen to make myself lemon tea. Then I returned to you, and at the window there was a sharp Muslim moon cloaked in seven veils of mist.

  I read and reread your concentrated seminar, the carnivorous plants, Bernanos and Ecclesiastes and Jesus, those who live by the sword shall die by the sword, and here a shivering chill took hold of me too. Just like you on the night of the sirens in Chicago. Even though here in Jerusalem it is a clammy, slightly milky summer’s night, with no lightning, no storms on lakes, only distant barking on the shores of the desert.

  I am not up to taking issue with you. Your razor-sharp brain always works on me like the barking of a machine gun: a deadly accurate burst of facts, inferences, and explanations from which there is no recovery. But nevertheless, this time I will answer back. Jesus and Bernanos were right, while you and Ecclesiastes may perhaps deserve only pity. There is happiness in the world, Alec, and suffering is not its opposite but the narrow passage through which stooping, crawling among nettles, we reach the silent clearing in the forest bathed in lunar silver.

  You probably recall the famous statement at the beginning of Anna Karenina, in which Tolstoy, donning there the cloak of a calm village deity and hovering over the void full of benign toleration and loving kindness, declares from on high that all happy families resemble one another, while unhappy families are all unhappy in their own way. With all due respect to Tolstoy I’m telling you that the opposite is true: Unhappy people are mainly plunged in conventional suffering, living out in sterile routine one of five or six threadbare clichés of misery. Whereas happiness is a rare, fine vessel, a sort of Chinese vase, and the few people who have reached it have shaped and formed it line by line over the course of years, each in his own image and likeness, each in his own character, so that no two happinesses are alike. And in the molding of their happiness they have instilled their own suffering and humiliation. Like refining gold from ore. There is happiness in the world, Alec, even if it is more ephemeral than a dream. Indeed in your case it is beyond your reach. As a star is beyond the reach of a mole. Not “the satisfaction of approval,” not praise and advancement and conquest and domination, not submission and surrender, but the thrill of fusion. The merging of the I with another. As an oyster enfolds a foreign body and is wounded and turns it into its pearl while the warm water still surrounds and encompasses everything. You have never tasted this fusion, not once in your whole life. When the body is a musical instrument in the hands of the soul. When Other and I strike root in each other and become a single coral. And when the drip of the stalactite slowly feeds the stalagmite until the two of them become one.

  Think for example what it is like at precisely ten past seven on a summer evening in Jerusalem. The ridges of the mountains touched by jets of sunset. The last light starting to dissolve the stone-lined side streets as though stripping them of their stoniness. The sound of Arab pipes rising from the wadi with a prolonged moan, beyond joy or sorrow, as though the soul of the mountains were straining to lull their body to sleep and depart on its night journey. Or a couple of hours later, when stars come out over the Judaean desert and the silhouette of the minaret stands erect among the shadowy mud huts. When your fingers feel the rough weave of the upholstery, and outside the window an olive tree shines silver as it receives a gift of light from the table lamp inside your room, and for a moment the boundary between your fingertip and the material fades and the toucher is the touched and also the touch. The bread in your hand, the teaspoon, the glass of tea, the simple, speechless things are suddenly ringed with a fine primordial radiation. Lit up from within your soul and lighting it up in return. The joy of being and its simplicity descends and covers everything with the mystery of things that were here even before the creation of knowledge. The original things that you have been banished from eternally, exiled to the steppes of darkness over which you wander howling at a dead moon, roaming from whiteness to whiteness, searching to the edges of the tundra for something lost long since, even though you have forgotten what it was you lost or when or why: “His life is his prison while his death is limned to him as a prospect of paradoxical resurrection, a promise of miraculous redemption from his vale of tears.” The quotation comes from your book. The wolf howling in the darkness at the moon on the steppe is my own contribution.

  The love was also my contribution. Which you rebuffed. Have you ever loved anybody? Me? Perhaps your son?

  Lies, Alec. You have never loved anyone. You conquered me. And then you abandoned me, like an objective that has lost its value. Now you have decided to launch an offensive against Michel to wrest Boaz from him. All these years you saw your son as nothing more than a sort of meaningless sandhill, until you received information from me that the enemy had suddenly seen some value in that sandhill and was trying to hold onto it. And then you summoned your forces for a lightning assault. And won again, almost as an afterthought. Love is alien to you. You don’t even know the meaning of the word. To destroy, to smash, to shatter, to flatten, to wipe out, to mop up, to screw, to terminate, to annihilate, to expunge, to incinerate—these are the measures of your world and the moonscapes among which you roam, with Zakheim as your Sancho Panza. And that is where you are now trying to banish our son as well.

  Now I’ll reveal something that is bound to cause you pleasure: Your money has already begun to corrupt my life with Michel. For six years Michel and I have been struggling, like two survivors of a shipwreck, to build a rough hut for shelter in some corner of a desert island. To make it warm and light. I used to get up early in the morning to make him his sandwiches, fill his blue plastic thermos bottle with coffee, fetch his morning paper, pack it all in his worn briefcase and send him off to work. Then I would get Yifat dressed and feed her. Do the housework to the sound of music on the radio. Take care of the garden and the potted plants on the veranda (various kinds of herbs that Michel grows in old crates). Between ten and twelve, while the child was still at the crèche, I would go out to shop. Find the time occasionally to read a book. One of my neighbors would come in for a chat in the kitchen. At one o’clock I would feed Yifat and warm up Michel’s meal. When he got in I would serve him cold mineral water in summer or hot chocolate on a cold day. During his private lessons I would retreat to the kitchen to peel vegetables for the next day, bake a cake, wash the dishes, read a little more. Serve him Turkish coffee. Listen to a concert on the radio while doing the ironing, until the child woke up. After his private lessons, when he settled down to his marking, I would send her out to play in the yard with the neighbors’ children and stand at the window watching the mountains and the olive trees. On sunny Saturdays in winter, when Michel had finished reading his way through two newspapers, we would go for a walk, the three of us, in the Talpiyyot woods, on the hill of the High Commissioner’s Residence, or to the foot of Mar Elias Monastery. Michel was good at inventing amusing games. He did not stand on his dignity. He would mimic a furious billy goat, a frog, a speaker at a party meeting, and the two of us would laugh till the tears ran. When we got back, he would fall asleep surrounded by the weekend supplements in his threadbare armchair, the child would sleep on the rug at his feet, and I would read one of the novels that Michel always remembered to borrow for me at the city library. Even though he used to tease me for my “frivolous reading,” he never forgot to bring one or two home for me each week on his way back from work. Nor did he ever omit to buy me a small bunch of flowers every Sabbath eve. Which he would hand to me with a funny little French bow. Sometimes he would surprise me with a handkerchief, a bottle of scent, some picture magazine he
thought I might find interesting, which he himself would inevitably end up consuming from cover to cover, reading passages aloud to me.

  At the end of the Sabbath it was our custom to go out on the veranda, sit on deck chairs, and eat peanuts while watching the sunset. Sometimes Michel would start to tell me, in his warm, scorched voice, about his time in Paris. He would describe his wanderings among the museums “tasting the delights of Europe,” depicting the bridges and boulevards in pseudo-modest terms, as though he himself had designed them, joking about his poverty and his degradation. Sometimes he would amuse Yifat with animal fables and tall stories. Occasionally, when the sun went down, we would decide not to turn on the light on the veranda, and my daughter and I in the dark would learn from him his strange family songs, tunes in which guttural joy almost verged upon wailing. Before bedtime, pillow fights would break out among us, until the time came to put Yifat to sleep with a fairy tale. Then we would sit on the settee, holding hands like children, and he would lecture me on his views, analyze the political situation, let me share his visions, which he would quickly dismiss with a wave of the hand, as though he had merely been joking.