Black Box

by Amos Oz

  Sometimes you got in at one o’clock in the morning from maneuvers, from a brigade-level field exercise, from a night vigil of taming some new tank (what were you getting in those days? British Centurions? American Pattons?), with eyes red from the desert dust, powdered bristles on your face, gritty sand in your hair and the soles of your shoes, your salt sweat stiffening the shirt on your back, and yet as brisk and lively as a burglar inside a safe. You would wake me up, demand some supper, take a shower without closing the door and emerge dripping wet because you hated drying yourself. You would sit down in an undershirt and tennis shorts at the kitchen table and devour the bread and salad and the double omelette that I had prepared for you in the meantime. Far from sleep you would put some Vivaldi or Albinoni on the record player. You would pour yourself some cognac or a whisky-on-the-rocks, sit me down in my nightie in an armchair and sink into the chair opposite, put your bare feet up on the coffee table, and start lecturing me with a kind of repressed, derisive rage: denouncing the idiocy of your commanding officers; tearing to pieces the “mentality of the Palmach mob”; sketching the appearance of the theater of war toward the end of the century; thinking aloud about “the universal common denominator” of armed conflicts as such. And suddenly you would change the subject and tell me about some little woman soldier who had tried to seduce you earlier that evening. Interested to know if I was jealous. Asking jokingly what I would say if you had allowed yourself to be seduced into “opening a quick packet of field rations.” Interrogating me offhandedly about the men I had had before you. Demanding that I grade them “on a scale from one to ten.” Curious to learn if it happened that some stranger occasionally caught my fancy. Asking me to give a “stimulation rating” to your superior officers and comrades, our Friday evening guests, the plumber and the greengrocer and the postman. Eventually, at three o’clock in the morning, we would clamber into bed or collapse onto the rug, emitting sparks, my hand on your lips to prevent the neighbors from hearing your roars, your hand on my mouth to muffle my shrieks.

  Limp, drowned in pleasure, aching, dizzy with exhaustion, I would sleep next day till one or two in the afternoon. In my sleep I could hear your alarm clock going off at six-thirty. You would get up, shave, take another shower—this time in cold water. Even in the winter. You would get into a clean uniform that I had starched and pressed for you. Swallow some bread and sardines. Gulp down some coffee without even sitting down. And then: the slamming of the door. Your leaping down the steps two by two. The sound of the jeep starting. That’s how the game began. The shadow of a third person in our bed. We would conjure up some man who happened to have caught my fancy. And you impersonated him. Sometimes you impersonated both of you, yourself and the stranger. My role was to give myself to you both alternately or simultaneously. The presence of the strange shadows pierced us both with a searing jungle thrill that wrenched from my belly and your chest screams, oaths, pleas, spasms the like of which I have never encountered elsewhere except in childbirth. Or in death.

  By the time Boaz was two our hellfire was already burning with a black flame. Our love had filled with hate. Which consumed everything yet continued to masquerade as love. When you discovered that snowy January evening, coming back from the university library with a raging fever, that lighter on the bathroom stool, you were overwhelmed by a lunatic glee. You roared with laughter, like hiccoughs; you punched me until by a battering cross-examination you dragged out of me every detail, every jot and shudder, and without undressing me you fucked me standing up as though knifing me, and during and after you didn’t stop interrogating me more and more and again you mounted me on the kitchen table and your teeth dug into my shoulder and you slapped me with the back of your hand, like punishing an unruly horse. So our life began to flicker with the glimmer of a will-o’-the-wisp. Your demented fury, whether I was obedient or not, whether I seemed to you sick with desire or whether I seemed indifferent, whether I described what had been done to me or stayed stubbornly silent. You would disappear from home for days and nights on end, shut yourself up in that hole in the wall you rented near the Russian Compound, conquering your doctorate as though taking enemy fortifications by storm, and without warning you used to descend on me at eight o’clock in the morning or three in the afternoon, lock Boaz in his room, extract a detailed confession from me, and exhaust in me the torrent of your lust. Then began the suicides, with tablets and with gas. And your alliance with Zakheim and your savage war against your father and the accursed house in Yefe Nof. Our tropical hell. A parade of dirty towels. Stinking socks of grinning belching men. The reek of garlic and radishes and shish kebab. Hiccoughs from Coca-Cola or beer. Choking on cheap cigarettes. Sourness of sticky lustful male sweat. Their trousers lowered to their ankles, not troubling to take off their shirts; some were even too slovenly to remove their shoes. Their dribble on my shoulders. In my hair. Spunk stains on my sheets. Murmured obscenities and hoarse lascivious whispers. Their lecherous, meaningless endearments. And afterward, the ludicrous search for their underwear, lost in the bedding. The jocular arrogance that descended upon them once their desire was satisfied. The absent-minded yawns. The invariable glance at their watches. Crushing me as though in me they were vanquishing the whole female sex. Like avengers. Or as though they were scoring points on some masculine league table. Or clocking engine hours. Only very rarely there came a stranger who tried to listen to my body and produce a tune. Or a youth who managed to make me feel a fleeting compassion beyond my lasting disgust. And you with your tide of desperate hatred. Until I became repugnant to myself and to you and you divorced me. At the bottom of my make-up drawer I keep a note in your handwriting. Zakheim handed it to me the day of our decree, when the court declared that henceforth we have no claims on each other. You had written down four lines for me from a poem by Alterman: “You are the sadness of my balding head, / The melancholy of my aging claws: / You’ll hear me in the plaster of your walls, / And in the nightly creaking of your floors.”

  That is what you wrote in the courthouse and sent to me via Zakheim. You did not add a word of your own. For seven whole years. Why have you returned now like a phantom to the window of my new life? Go away to your own hunting grounds. Go away to the frost of the stars in your black-and-white spacecraft. Go away and never come back. Not even in dreams. Not even in my body’s longings. Not even in the plaster of the walls and the creaking of the floors. Go away from the woodcut and the cowl. Why not cross the snowbound wilderness, knock at the door of the first hut, and ask for light and warmth? Marry your bespectacled secretary. Or any of your admirers. Take a wife and make a home. Make sure there’s a real log fire in winter. A little garden. Roses. A dovecote. Perhaps you will have another son, and when you get home from work in the evening you can sit down with him at your black desk, cut out pictures for him from the Geographical Magazine, touch his hair and mess it up with gum. Your wife will run her hand over your tired brow. Massage at night your neck muscles, strained from writing and loneliness. You can put a record on. Not Vivaldi or Albinoni—perhaps some pensive jazz. There will be a rainstorm outside. Water rushing in the gutter. From the next room you will catch scents of talcum powder and shampoo, bedtime smells of the child. You will both lie there in your bed, listening to the roar of the wind through the tight-closed window. Each reading a book. Or else you will talk to her, in a whisper, about Napoleon’s campaigns. Soon the light will go out and her fingers will start wandering among the curls on your chest. You will close your eyes. Then I shall come too and slip between you like a rustling. And in the darkness you and I will laugh together without making a sound. My genie and my bottle.

  It is now almost six o’clock in the morning. I have been writing to you all night. I will have a shower, dress, and make breakfast for my little girl and my husband. There is happiness in the world, Alec, and suffering is not the opposite of it, it is the thorny path along which we have to creep on our bellies to that forest clearing, bathed in a fine lunar silver, which is cal
ling to us and waiting. Don’t forget.

  Ilana

  ***

  GIDEON MIDWEST UNIV CHICAGO

  FOR YOUR ATTENTION ALEX LEGALLY BOAZ IS A MINOR AND UNDER HIS MOTHERS CUSTODY YOUR ACTION COULD BE INTERPRETED AS KIDNAPPING SOMMO IS CONSIDERING CRIMINAL PROCEEDINGS AGAINST YOU PERHAPS HE WILL RECONSIDER IF YOU AGREE TO SELL THE PROPERTY SUGGEST YOU CLIMB DOWN ZAKHEIM

  ***

  GIDEON MIDWEST UNIV CHICAGO

  MY PARTNER IS EXERTING PRESSURE IN VARIOUS DIRECTIONS SITUATION DELICATE FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION ROBERTO DIMODENA

  PERSONAL DIMODENA JERUSALEM ISRAEL

  OFFER THE SOMMOS AND ZAKHEIM ANOTHER FIFTY THOUSAND IN MY NAME IN RETURN FOR AN UNDERTAKING TO LEAVE BOAZ IN PEACE IF YOU WANT ILL RELEASE YOU ALEX

  ***

  GIDEON MIDWEST UNIV CHICAGO

  LET ME SELL THE PROPERTY AND ILL GUARANTEE BOAZ CAN STAY IF YOU REFUSE HE IS LIKELY TO GO TO JAIL DONT FORGET HES ALREADY GOT A SUSPENDED SENTENCE ROBERTO IS LEAVING YOU STOP PLAYING THE FOOL AND ACCEPT HELP DONT REFUSE YOUR ONLY FRIEND OTHERS ARE ONLY WAITING FOR YOUR DEATH AND THE INHERITANCE DONT BE CRAZY USE YOUR FAMOUS BRAINS FOR ONCE IF I DIE OF AN ULCER ITLL BE YOUR FAULT MANFRED

  ***

  PERSONAL ZAKHEIM JERUSALEM ISRAEL

  FORGIVE YOU ON CONDITION YOU STOP NAGGING INSTEAD OF THE ZIKHRON PROPERTY AUTHORIZE YOU TO SELL YOUR CLIENT THE HOUSE AND PLOT IN MAGDIEL ILL KNOCK THE BREATH OUT OF YOU IF YOU TRY ANY MORE CLEVER TRICKS FINAL WARNING ALEX

  ***

  GIDEON MIDWEST UNIV CHICAGO

  I HAVE RETURNED YOUR FILES TO MY PARTNER NO HARD FEELINGS ROBERTO DIMODENA

  ***

  GIDEON MIDWEST UNIV CHICAGO

  EVERYTHING ARRANGED BOAZ IN MY DEVOTED CARE AM KEEPING SOMMO FED BUT ON A TIGHT REIN TAKE CARE OF YOUR HEALTH MANFRED

  ***

  SOMMO TARNAZ 7 JERUSALEM

  HAVE DECIDED TO CHANGE MY WILL YOU RECEIVE ONE QUARTER AND THE REST GOES TO BOAZ ON CONDITION YOU AGREE TO LEGAL TRANSFER OF CUSTODY TO ME UNTIL HE COMES OF AGE YOUR DECISION SOONEST PLEASE ALEXANDER GIDEON

  ***

  MR. GIDEON MIDWEST UNIVERSITY CHICAGO

  WITH ALL DUE RESPECT SIR BOAZ IS NOT FOR SALE HIS MOTHER IS RESPONSIBLE FOR HIM AND I AM RESPONSIBLE FOR HER IF YOU DESIRE HIS WELLBEING AND ALSO PARTIAL ATONEMENT FOR YOUR TERRIBLE SINS THEN PLEASE BE KIND ENOUGH TO SEND ME A DONATION FOR THE REDEMPTION OF THE LAND AND RETURN THE BOY TO OUR SUPERVISION MICHAEL SOMMO

  ***

  GIDEON MIDWEST UNIV CHICAGO

  HAVE SOLD MAGDIEL TO SOMMO REPRESENTING HIS PATRON MILLIONAIRE FANATIC FROM PARIS TO EXCHANGE WITH FRENCH MONASTERY AGAINST LAND IN WEST BANK MY SONINLAW IS IN ON DEAL TOO THEY ADVISE INVESTING YOUR READY CASH WITH THEM FOR PURCHASES IN TERRITORIES THATS WHERE THE FUTURE LIES YOU SHOULD LEARN A LESSON FROM YOUR FATHER IN HIS GREAT DAYS AWAITING INSTRUCTIONS MANFRED

  ***

  To Ilana Sommo

  Tarnaz 7

  Jerusalem

  Beit Avraham

  17.8.76

  Dear Ilana,

  Your letter saddened and hurt me. Who does not dream occasionally of taking off, flying away, and getting singed on some faraway flame? There’s no point in your making fun of me: I didn’t invent the fixed choice between fire and ashes—I have my own closed circle. Maybe I’ll tell you something. About half a year ago I was taking my turn at cleaning the clubroom. It was morning, and raining, and a young boy I didn’t know, a volunteer from Iceland or Finland, with glasses, dark skin, wet hair, wrapped up in his thoughts and floating on a cloud of cigarette smoke, was sitting by himself in a corner writing an airmail letter. Apart from “Good morning” and “Excuse me” we didn’t exchange a word. It was totally silent, with grey rain at the windows. I washed and rinsed and dried the floor even underneath his feet and emptied and wiped and gave him back his ashtray, and for an instant he smiled at me wistfully, sardonically, compassionately, as though he knew the whole truth. If he had said, Sit down, if he had waved his hand, nothing would have stopped me. I could have forgotten everything. But I couldn’t. On every side there lurked the giggles, the petty humiliations, the remorse, anxiety about smelly armpits, fear of the buckles, the embarrassment, the zip fastener, the wet floor, the buttons, the coarse string bra, the morning light, the open door, the cold, the curtains that had gone to the laundry, the smell of chlorine, the shame. Like a fortified wall. I haven’t told a soul apart from you and in fact I haven’t even told you and in fact there’s nothing to tell. And Yoash was away on reserve duty in the Golan Heights and at quarter to ten I had to take Yiftah to his appointment with the dentist. There was nothing at all except the pain of realization: like a fortified wall. Like an irrecoverable loss. That evening I painted the veranda furniture white, to surprise Yoash when he got back. And I made the children some homemade chocolate ice cream. And in the night I ironed and ironed, until the broadcasting shut down and the radio went on whistling and the night watchman went past my open window laughing and said, It’s late, Rahel. There’s nothing to tell, Ilana. Go and work part time in your bookshop, while Yifat’s at nursery school. Enroll in a correspondence course. Buy yourself some new clothes instead of the brown dress that I realize from your letter you really hate. Call me a hedgehog if you like. Don’t answer if you like. Yoash is working nights in the cowsheds and I’m tired and the sink’s still full of dirty dishes. I’ll stop here. Your sister,

  Rahel

  Actually I meant to write to you for another reason: to tell you that Yoash was in Zikhron yesterday for a couple of hours; he helped to fix wire netting in the chicken run, gave some agricultural advice, and came away with the impression that Boaz is doing very well in the commune he is setting up. Next time we’ll book a car in advance and take the children. There’s no reason why you and Michel and Yifat shouldn’t visit him sometimes.

  Notes made by Prof. A. A. Gideon on little cards.

  258. And all of them, each in his own way, begin by destroying the institution of the family. Plato. Jesus. The early communists. The Nazis. The militarists and also the militant pacifists. The ascetics and also the orgiastic sects (both ancient and modern). First step to redemption: elimination of the family. Severance of all the intimate connections between people in favor of total integration in the “Revolutionary Family.”

  261. The self—the focus of suffering. Redemption—annihilation of the self. Complete absorption in the masses.

  266. Crime—guilt feeling—need for absolution—dedication to an ideal—more guilt—another crime committed in the pursuit of the ideal—more need for absolution—redoubled attachment to the ideal—and so on and so forth. A vicious circle.

  270. And so, suddenly or gradually, life is worn down, flattened, emptied. Esteem takes the place of friendship. Self-negation replaces respect. Obedience instead of participation. Subjection instead of brotherhood. Enthusiasm takes the place of emotion. Shouts and whispers substitute for speech. Suspicion instead of doubt. Torture instead of joy. Repression instead of longing. Mortification instead of meditation. Betrayal instead of leavetaking. The bullet instead of an argument. Slaughter instead of dissension. Death instead of change. Purging crusades instead of death. “Immortality” instead of life.

  283. “Let the dead bury the dead”—the living will bury the living.

  284. “Those who live by the sword shall die by the sword”—until the Messiah arrives with a whirling sword of fire in his hand.

  285. “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself”—at once, or we’ll fill you full of lead.

  286. “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself”—but if self-hatred has already eaten into you, this commandment is loaded with deadly irony.

  288. And what of the promised resurrection? It is always without the body.

  290. As for your soul, it will merge totally with the other souls. Be soothingly reabsorbed in the general reservoir. “Be gathered into the bosom of the nation.” Or into the heart of the departed forefathers. Or into the cauldrons of the Race. Or into the treasure chamb
ers of the Movement. Where it will serve as the raw material of a new, purified casting. Anaximander’s apeiron. The Jewish “bundle of life.” The Christian melting pot. Peer Gynt’s button molder.

  291. And the body? It is nothing more than a transient nuisance. A vessel full of fetid humors. A source of depression and infection. A cross we have to bear. A trial we have to undergo. A punishment we are doomed to suffer so as to be released from it in the “world which is all-good.” A block of present pollution interposed between the abstract purity of the past and the abstract brilliance of the future.