Black Box

by Amos Oz

  Eventually the street was empty and I went back indoors and found that in Hawaii in the meantime everything had come to a happy ending. Perhaps I should take my little girl and go and live in Hawaii?

  I sat in the kitchen facing her apron on the hook, counting the footsteps of the neighbors next door and also upstairs, leafing aimlessly through the Book of Psalms for comfort. Even though it would be more appropriate for me to be reading the Book of Job instead. Why had my heart been proud? Why had I married a woman of superior birth? Why had I aimed so high? With dimming eyes I studied the text, “May those who seek my soul be ashamed and disgraced, may those who plot my evil turn backwards, may their way be dark and slippery, for they have set a snare for me in vain, they have spread their net in vain for my soul, thy justice is like the mighty hills, thy judgments the great deep” and so on. What profit is there for me in such texts when my heart is dead within me? What is done is done and the crooked cannot be made straight. The shame is mine, not of those who seek my soul. Abandoned like a tamarisk in the wilderness. My path is strewn with darkness and slippery places and thou seest thy world in thy life. And why? A deep abyss. What sin have I committed against you, sir? What good was it to Uriah the Hittite if in the end the king was punished somewhat? Even now after the passage of three thousand years we read and revere the psalms of David son of Jesse, whereas the lamentations of Uriah never existed. Or else they did exist but they have been forgotten and even the memory of them has perished. The Lord preferred Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering He had no respect. What good was it to Abel? Abel is dead and Cain lives on and the mark on his brow gives him immunity and nothing stops him from becoming rich and famous and enjoying every pleasure.

  I got up and walked around the room, I opened a closet and there were her dresses. I went to the bathroom to wash my face and there were her cosmetics. I passed the girl’s bedroom and there was a bear looking at me. It was the bear that your son brought after Passover as a present for my daughter. Will you return her, sir?

  Why should I plead with you? The land has been given over to the wicked. You are the salt of the earth, you have the property and the power, you have the wisdom and the judgment and we are dust under your feet. You are the priests and Levites and we are the drawers of water. You are the glory of Israel and we are the mixed multitude. He chose you and sanctified you as sons of the All-Present, while we are stepsons. To you he gave the splendor and the grace and the tall stature—all the world is astonished at you—to us lowly spirit and low stature and barely a hair’s-breadth divides us from the Arab. Perhaps we should offer thanks for the privilege that has fallen to our lot of hewing your wood and shamefacedly eating the leftovers of your meals and living in the houses that you have grown tired of and doing all the work that you have grown to despise including the building of the Land and occasionally to marry your castoff wives when you deign to permit us to drink from the well that you have spat in and to try to acquire your ways and so perhaps to please you. Be it known to you that one like myself, a simple ordinary Jew, is prepared to pardon and forgive. But not now, sir—only after the cup has passed over you all and you have received your just desserts. When you have beaten your breasts and confessed your sins. When you return from your evil ways and come back to serving the country instead of destroying it and caring only about enlarging your own private property, and even slandering the country before the wider world. I don’t give a fig for your world fame or for the cheap praise: you brought Israel into disrepute in the book you wrote for the gentiles and which I have not read, nor would I dream of reading it; it was enough for me to read what was written about it in the evening paper: “the Zionist obsession”! How could you? How did your hand not tremble? And in English too? A festival for our enemies?

  When I was a young man I worked as a waiter and there were some customers, including Jews, who mistook me for a little Arab. They would call me Ahmed—and after everything the Arabs had done to us. That is why I came to live here, full of faith that in Israel we would all be brothers and the Messiah would come to rule over us. And how did this country receive an idealistic young man who came, for your information, from the Sorbonne? Builder. Night watchman. Cinema ticket seller. Regimental policeman. In a word, the tail of the fox. A perfect ass all my life and now thanks to you, Mister Professor, an ass with horns on his forehead if you can imagine such a creature. Or a dog who has been deprived of the bone he found under the table.

  But I said, in my haste, why not? On the contrary, I shall spread my wings over his son as well. He cast out and I shall gather in. He trampled down and I shall raise up. I shall be as a father and teacher to your son, and so I shall repay evil with good and also save a soul of Israel, perhaps even two. I was simple. Or foolish. It is true that it is written “Happy are they of the simple way” and it is also written “God guards the foolish,” but it seems that these verses are not to be taken literally. Whoever wrote them was not thinking of Sommo but of someone better. “The way of the unjust prospers,” “the land has been given over to the wicked”—these are the verses that actually prevail. And I accept the verdict. Only let me have the girl back. You have no rights over her.

  And what are your rights, anyway? That you were a war hero? The violent sons of Zeruiah and the wicked Ahab were also great heroes. And between wars, what did you do to the state? Defile it? Sell it for a mess of pottage? Feast on it?

  That is why your time is up. Your bells are tolling. It is after midnight now, early Friday morning, and here in South Jerusalem you can hear the bells. The kingship has passed, sir. Soon it will be given over to your neighbor, who is better than you.

  I never said I was spotless. Perhaps I sinned in offering my hand to a woman who was destined for someone superior to myself. She is taller than I, and beautiful, and who am I anyway? All the years that I was married to her your impure shadow never left us. However hard I tried to ignore it, I could hear you laughing at me out of the darkness. And now apparently Heaven has decided to punish me. Or else, Heaven forbid, there is no G-d in this place? He has moved to Hawaii? The truth is that this letter is mixed with a quarter of a bottle of brandy that my brother left and also two tranquilizers that I found in a drawer. Hers. Where there was also an old photograph from the newspaper showing you wearing your uniform with all sorts of badges of rank and decorations and as good-looking as a heavenly being.

  Better I should stop now. I have already written too much. In the morning my brother-in-law will come with his Peugeot truck to collect this letter and take it to you in Zikhron. I shall walk instead to the Western Wall to say midnight prayers, although who knows if prayers that come from someone like me make any impression up there. Probably only a bad impression. But there is no bad without good: “the left hand wounds and the right hand heals,” as it is written. Now that I have nothing left in this world, I shall dedicate myself from now on to the great task of redeeming the Land, and let me be avenged in this: that despite you and the likes of you it still will be redeemed. Until Sommo’s meed of suffering is complete and he is called to ascend on high to rest from all his labors and be done with it. Perhaps even in the world to come they need cooks and RPs, so that you may still see me saluting you at the barrier, though I don’t suppose you’ll notice me. One more thing: would you try at least this time to behave considerately toward her? with some compassion? Do not abuse her further, for she cannot take any more suffering.

  And you will return my daughter to me without causing any trouble. I shall sign with cold contempt,

  M. S.

  ***

  Mr. Sommo

  Tarnaz 7

  Jerusalem

  Gideon House

  Zikhron Yaakov

  Saturday, 4.9.76

  Dear Mr. Sommo,

  I. Yesterday your brother-in-law brought me your disturbed letter. Your suspicions are groundless. Nobody has deceived you. However, I understand your sensitivity well, and in a sense it is not alien to me eithe
r. As a matter of fact, it was your wife who decided of her own free will to stay here for a few more days and look after me until I go into the hospital (soon) for radiotherapy, when she will naturally return to you at once. I should hope that you, Mr. Sommo, would not be harsh with her on her return. At the conclusion of your letter you indicated that she “cannot take any more suffering,” and I agree with you. I therefore have no alternative but to return your own request: treat her kindly.

  II. It seems I shall not be leaving Hadassah Hospital. A year ago I contracted a cancer of the kidneys and I have had two operations. The growth has now spread in the abdomen. The doctors in New York saw no sense in a further operation. My condition is fairly miserable, and from this you may deduce that there is no foundation for your jealous fantasies and no point in going as far as Uriah the Hittite. Or Hawaii. It is sufficient to go back a few years. As you know, I married Ilana in September 1959, more by her choice than mine. After a few months she became pregnant and had Boaz by her own decision: I did not see myself as cut out to be a father, and I told her so from the start. Then our life together became complicated. It became clear beyond any doubt that I was causing her suffering. Which is perhaps what she wanted (I am not an expert in this subject). Out of weakness of character I delayed our separation until September 1968. The divorce was vicious on both sides, and on mine even petty: my behavior was dictated by hatred and vindictiveness. Then I left the country. I severed all contacts. I learned of your marriage in a roundabout way. And at the beginning of this year I received a request for help from her, or perhaps from both of you. For reasons not clear to me, but that sprang perhaps from the development of my illness, I saw fit to comply. Now with the termination of my life there are one or two things that I have begun to regret. That is why I came back to Israel last week (without advance notice) to see Boaz and to stay in the house in which I grew up. I found Ilana here, and she chose to treat me more or less in the role of nurse. I did not invite her to stay here, but I did not see any reason to send her away again. Moreover the house really belongs to Boaz, even if officially it is still registered in my name. The relations between us, Mr. Sommo, are not the relations between man and wife in any conventional sense. If you require it, I shall draw up an affidavit for your rabbi testifying to your wife’s innocence.

  III. I have given instruction in my revised will to take good care of the future of both Boaz and your family. If you do not waste the money on messianic investments, etc., your daughter will therefore be sheltered from the poverty and want with which you yourself were afflicted, and of which you gave such a highly colored description in your letter. By the way, the little girl seems to me to be both gentle and generous: early this morning, for instance, while the whole commune here was still asleep, she came and sat on the edge of my bed, invented a kind of medicine for me (kerosene and mulberry leaves, apparently), and made me a present of a dead grasshopper in a plastic bag. In exchange she demanded (and received) three paper boats. We had a short philosophical conversation about the nature of water.

  IV. As for the rest of your complaints, both those addressed to me in the second person singular and those you chose to frame in the second person plural, and of an ideological or political tendency, I can only plead guilty to the majority of the accusations. On condition that I am first given an opportunity to remove certain emotional exaggerations, which I am inclined to ascribe to your anger or your accumulated bitterness. In simple language, Mr. Sommo, not only do I consider you a better man than I am—there would be nothing particularly remarkable about that—but I consider you a good man. Full stop. I have been discovering your excellent qualities during the past year, and especially the past few days, both from Ilana and from Boaz, and also, indirectly, from a concentrated study of your daughter (she has just come into my room again, tapped out her name on my Baby Hermes, and this time gave me half a dozen ants in a cup and invited me to a dance. I was obliged to decline, both because of my illness and because I have never managed to learn to dance).

  V. Even though you feel, to quote your words, “cold contempt” for me, I feel a certain esteem for you, leaving aside our differences of opinion. And I hereby apologize for the trouble that my existence causes you.

  VI. You are right to accuse me of arrogance. Unlike you, Mr. Sommo, I have always tended to look down on people, either because stupidity was so widespread wherever I have been or because for some reason ever since I was a child people have looked up to me. Now that I hardly manage to achieve real sleep, nor am I completely awake, it seems to me that this was a mistake. Attentiveness and hesitancy characterize my present relationship with those around me here (even though I am not certain that they are aware of it). If only there were more time left, I might suggest that you and I should try to meet someday and see each other from roughly the same height. We might not find it boring. Only, as you pointed out in your letter with a penetrating intuition, my time has indeed run out, Mr. Sommo. The bell really is tolling for me.

  And I am not talking about metaphoric bells but real ones. Boaz has fixed up in an upstairs room a kind of chime made of bottles suspended from the ceiling. Every gust of wind from the sea produces a desolate, repetitive tune. Sometimes it drives me out of my bed of planks. Last night, with the help of a walking stick that Boaz made for me, I managed to get up and make my way downstairs to the darkening garden. The eight young people who are staying here have pulled up the thistles and couch grass, scattered goat dung (whose piercing smell brings me back something of the smells of my childhood), and dug the ground up. In place of the exotic strains of roses that my father used to cultivate here there are now beds of vegetables. Ilana has volunteered to make scarecrows (it seems to me that the birds are not particularly impressed). While your daughter waters them twice a day with a watering can that I sent someone to buy for her in the town.

  Among the flower beds, beside the restored marble pool now restocked (with carp instead of goldfish), I found two wicker chairs. Ilana brought out coffee for herself and an infusion of mint for me. If you are interested in the details, we sat together with our backs to the house and our faces toward the sea until it got dark. We exchanged only necessary words. Ilana may have been shocked by the pallor of my sunken cheeks. And I no longer find anything to say to her, except that her dress is pretty and her long hair suits her. I cannot deny that during our marriage it never occurred to me to speak to her like that. Why should I? Do you, Mr. Sommo, compliment her on her dress? Do you expect her to praise your trousers?

  She covered my knees with a blanket. And when the wind got up I spread it over her knees too. I noticed again how her hands have aged, even though her face is young. But I didn’t say a word. We sat in silence for about an hour and a half. Far away, near the goat shed, your daughter was laughing and shrieking because Boaz was hoisting her up on his shoulders, his head, and then onto the donkey. Ilana said to me, Look. And I said, Yes. Ilana said, Don’t worry. And I said, No. With this we returned to our silence. I had nothing to say to her. Do you know, sir, this is how she and I use language now: No, Yes, It’s cold, The tea’s good, I like the dress, Thank you. Like two small children who can’t speak. Or like the shell-shocked soldiers I saw after the war in a rehabilitation center. I am lingering over this detail so as to stress once more that your suspicions are absurd. Between her and me there is not even a real bond of words. On the other hand, I had an urge to write you these pages. Even though I have no idea what the reason is. Your letter, which may have been intended to hurt me, did not. On the contrary, it pleased me. Why should that be? I have no idea.

  At seven o’clock the sun set and a slow twilight set in. The sound of a mouth organ came from the kitchen. And a guitar. And smells of baking. (They bake their own bread here.) And at eight o’clock or a little later a barefoot girl brought us a kerosene lamp, pita still warm from the oven, olives, tomatoes, and yogurt (also homemade). I forced myself to eat a little so that Ilana would eat too. And she nibbled without enthusiasm so
as to encourage me. At a quarter past nine I said, It’s getting chilly. Ilana said, Yes. And she said, Let’s go in. And I said, All right.

  She helped me up to my room, out of my clothes (jeans and a sweatshirt with a picture of Popeye the Sailor-man), and onto my bed of planks. As she left the room she extracted a promise to call her if I had any pain in the night. (Boaz has rigged up a rope by my bedside. If I pull the end it rings the tin mugs he has tied at the head of her bed on the ground floor.) But I did not keep this promise. Instead I got up and dragged a chair and sat on it for several hours by the darkened window, whose panes have been mended with bandage tape. I was trying to absorb the night and to check what the moon was doing to the Hills of Menasseh to the east. This was how my mother used to sit during her last summer. Can you imagine to yourself what it is like to toss three hand grenades into a bunker full of Egyptians? And then burst in with submachine gun spraying, amid shrieks, howls, and groans? To get splashes of blood and brains on your clothes, your hair, your face? And have your shoe sink into a burst stomach, which emits a viscous bubbling?

  I sat at the window until two o’clock in the morning and heard the sound of Boaz’s commune. Around the glowing embers of their bonfire in the garden they were singing songs which were unfamiliar to me. A girl was playing the guitar. Boaz himself I did not notice, nor did I hear his voice. Perhaps he had climbed on the roof to be alone with his telescope. Perhaps he had gone down to the sea. (He has a little raft, made without a single nail, which he carries on his back to the coast three miles away. When he was a child I taught him to make a Kon-Tiki from balsa tied with string. It appears that he has not forgotten.)