Black Box

by Amos Oz

  At two o’clock the house was wrapped in darkness and deep silence. Only the frogs continued. And some faraway dogs. And the answer from the dogs in the farmyard. The fox and the jackal, with which the place was infested when I was a child, have disappeared without trace.

  I sat beside that window until the early hours, wrapped in a woolen blanket like a Jew at his prayer. I imagined I could hear the sea. Although probably it was nothing but the wind in the palm trees. I pondered on the complaints in your letter. If I had more time left I would take you out of your sentry box. Make a general of you. Give you the keys. And go and philosophize in the desert. Or perhaps take your job at the cinema. Would you like to change places with me, Mr. Sommo?

  And around me the little hippie commune carries on its routine, even in the daytime, as it were in whispers, on tiptoe. As if I were a ghost that had emerged from the cellar and nested in the rooms of the house. And rooms there are in plenty. Most of them are still abandoned. Fig and mulberry branches grow through their windows. I find it charming the way Boaz officiates here—no, not officiates; exists—in the role of first among equals. I enjoy their singing in the kitchen or when they work or around the bonfire in the farmyard into the middle of the night. The strains of the mouth organ. The smoke of their cooking. Even the peacock that marches around like a brainless, arrogant supreme commander among the troops of pigeons in the passages and staircases. And the telescope planted on the roof (I want to climb up there. I want to ask Boaz to invite me for a little star trek. Even though I have almost no understanding of the host of heaven, except as an aid to desert navigation at night). The principal difficulty is that the rope ladder is now beyond my strength. I get dizzy easily. Even during my attempts to move by myself between the bed and the window. Apart from that, Boaz avoids conversation with me, except for Good morning, How are you, What do you need from the shop in town. (This morning I asked for a table to place my Baby Hermes on so that I could write this letter. An hour and a half later he brought up a table he had made for me out of packing boxes and eucalyptus branches, with a slanting footrest. And he also bought me on his own initiative an electric fan.) Most of the time he works apparently in the jungle that covers what was once the gardens: hacking at roots, sawing branches, removing rocks, carrying baskets of stones on his bare shoulder like Atlas the Titan, digging, pushing wheelbarrows of manure. Or standing in the wing mixing cement and gravel and sand with shovel and hoe, pouring the concrete onto a network of iron rods that he has interlaced, to lay a new floor. Sometimes I spy him at the end of the day high up in one of the old eucalyptus trees that my father planted here fifty years ago, hanging in a hammock that he has fixed up for himself at a height of twenty-five feet, and to my surprise reading a book. Or counting the clouds from close up. Or speaking to the birds in their own language.

  Once I stopped him outside the toolshed. I asked him what he was reading. Boaz shrugged his shoulders and replied reluctantly: “A book. Why?”

  I asked what book.

  “A language book.”

  Namely?

  “Grammar Made Simple. To finish with spelling and all that.”

  Is it possible to read a “language book” as though it were reading matter to pass the time with?

  “Words and that”—he granted me his slow smile—“is like knowing people. Where they come from. Who’s related to who. How each one behaves in all sorts of situations. And in any case”—pauses; sends his right hand on a long journey around his large head to scratch his left temple, an illogical and yet almost regal gesture—“in any case, there’s no such thing as ‘passing the time.’ Time just doesn’t pass.”

  Doesn’t pass? What did he mean?

  “How do I know? Perhaps it’s the opposite: we pass in time. How do I know? Or else time passes people. Do you feel like sitting down and helping me sort some seeds? They’re in the shed. In the shade. Only if you want to do something. Or maybe you could fold up empty sacks?”

  That was how I was introduced, more or less, into their work roster (half an hour or so every morning, sitting down, if the pains are not especially bad. And sometimes I doze off there).

  The girls who live here: two or three Americans. One French. One who looks to me like an Israeli schoolgirl from a good home, perhaps on a romantic escape from her family, perhaps “fulfilling herself.” Or maybe as an alternative to suicide? All of them seem to be his mistresses. Maybe the boys too. What does a man like me understand of all this? (When I was his age I was still a masturbating virgin. I imagine you were too, Mr. Sommo. I was even a virgin when I married. Were you, too, sir?) Boaz, as far as I can estimate, is close to six feet five and must weigh at least two hundred pounds. Yet he is lithe and feline, walking around all day barefoot and naked aside from a sort of faded loincloth. His dull golden hair descends in waves to his shoulders. His soft blond beard, his half-closed eyes, his lips, which do not close but hang slightly open, all give him the look of Jesus in a Scandinavian icon.

  And yet he looks dreamy. Not quite here. And silent. Despite his physical size I do not find him at all reminiscent of my father, who was thick and bearlike. But, rather, somehow, of Ilana. Perhaps in the softness of his voice. Or his long, supple strides. Or his drowsy smiles, which strike me as childish and shrewd at the same time. “Are you going to restore the fountain, Boaz?” “Don’t know. Maybe. Why not?” “And the weather vane that used to be on the roof?” “Maybe. What’s a weather vane?”

  From the window of my room: rows of onion and green pepper. Hens wandering around and pecking, as in an Arab village. A few mongrel dogs that were attracted here from far away and found food and affection. Eucalyptus trees. Cypresses. Olives. Figs and mulberries. Then the overgrown fields. Red roofs on the hill opposite, five hundred yards away. The Hills of Menasseh. Woods. And a mist or slight haze on the eastern horizon. Even the bottle chimes in the upstairs room where, forty-one years ago, my mother died seem precise and on target. Even though the only target of their strange sounds is me. If you have conjured up the image of a robbers’ den in whose half-light your wife cavorts day and night in the arms of a cruel demon, the simple truth is that there is no half-light: there is either harsh summer light or darkness. As for the demon, he dozes most of the time under the influence of painkilling drugs he brought with him from America. (Apart from them, his Baby Hermes, pajamas, and pipe, everything is still packed in his suitcases, which are stacked in a corner of the room. Even the pipe serves for biting rather than smoking—smoking makes him feel sick.) And when he is not asleep? He lies on his bed of planks and stares. Sits at the window and stares. Sorts some seeds in the cool shed in the yard until his strength gives out. A deposed demon serving out his sentence. Fuzzy from pills. A polite, quiet demon, making an effort not to become a burden, and almost pleasant-mannered. Perhaps like his father, who changed from a bear to a lamb in his sanatorium on Mount Carmel.

  Or dragging himself around a little, leaning on his new walking stick, wearing the sandals his son has made him from strips of tire and string, faded jeans and a child’s shirt with Popeye on it, padding gaunt and threadbare from room to room. From entrance to hall. From the restored wing to the garden. Stopping to talk to your daughter. Trying to teach her to play five-stones. Strapping his wrist watch on her. And continuing on his way to count and catalogue to himself the shades of his childhood and his adolescence. Here he reared silkworms. Here he slaughtered and buried the parrot. There he ran (and subsequently blew up with gunpowder taken from cartridge cases) the electric train his father brought him from Italy. Here he hid once for two days and a night after his father kicked him. Here he used to come to masturbate. There he conquered with pins and arrows the map of western Europe. Here he burned a live mouse in a trap. And here he displayed his member and groped, half fainting, the crotch of the Armenian servant’s granddaughter. Here he helped the Martian invaders to land, and here he secretly tested the Israeli atomic bomb. There he cursed his father one day and received a fist in the n
ose and lay bleeding like a pig. And here he hid the fine sandals he found among his mother’s effects (and two days ago he actually discovered their rotten remains under a loose floorboard). There he shut himself up with Jules Verne and conquered desert islands. And here, in the low space under the back stairs, he huddled and wept unseen for the last time in his life: when his father killed his rhesus monkey. For this was the house where he grew up. And now he has come back to die here.

  Perhaps like this: At twenty to eight, after the setting of the sun and before the extinction of the flickering fire brands on the sea horizon. And, of all places, on the broken bench at the beginning of the slope, close to the edge of the cliff, facing the orchard, which has grown into a subtropical forest but which Boaz has begun to restore to its original state. There is a mound of stones at the spot where the well used to be. Not a well really, but a water hole, which his father dug here once to collect rain water. Ilana sitting beside him. Both his hands, growing cold, held between hers: for there are times when she and I, like two shy children, silently hold hands. You have a generous spirit and will not think any the worse of her for that.

  And so, while I am writing the pages that are before you, I am gradually becoming inclined to obey my son, who told me yesterday, in his even, indifferent voice, that instead of moldering in Hadassah Hospital, where they could probably do nothing to help me, I’d be better off staying here and catching (as he put it) some peace.

  Didn’t my presence bother them?

  “You pay.”

  Did they want me to try to be useful in some way? Could I give some sort of classes? or lectures?

  “But nobody here tells anyone else what to do.”

  Do? But I do virtually nothing here.

  “That’s the best thing for you: sit quietly.”

  I shall indeed stay. Quietly. Will you be generous and let them both stay a little longer? Day by day I shall entertain your daughter. I shall make her a shadow-monster theater with my fingers on the wall. (It was Zakheim who taught me. When I was six. Or seven.) I shall continue to exchange views with her about the nature of fire and water and what lizards dream about. She’ll make me medicines from mud, soapy water, and pine cones. And day by day, with the evening breeze, I shall sit with Ilana on the bench to listen to the rustling of the pine tree.

  It is a question of only a short time.

  And you are fully entitled to refuse and demand their instant return.

  By the way, Boaz suggests that you come and join us too. As he puts it, you can contribute the benefit of your experience as a construction worker, on condition you do not try to make everybody eat kosher food. That is what Boaz says. What do you think?

  If you demand it, I shall send them without delay to Jerusalem in a taxi and not grumble. (What right have I to grumble?) You know, sir, my death seems quite reasonable. Don’t mistake my meaning: I am not talking of a death wish or anything like that (there is no difficulty about that: I have an excellent handgun given to me once by a Pentagon general), but another kind of wish entirely: not to exist at all. To cancel my presence retroactively. To make it so that I am not born. To pass from the outset to some other mode: a eucalyptus, for example. Or a bare hill in Galilee. Or a stone on the surface of the moon.

  By the way, Boaz has allocated to Ilana and Yifat the best part of the house: he chose to put them on the ground floor, in the semicircular room that looks out through French windows at the roofs of the kibbutz below us, at the banana plantations, the coastal strip, and the sea. (Sea gulls before dawn. Deep brilliance at midday. Bluish clouds every evening.) Once this room housed my father’s grandiose library (I never saw him open a book). Now they have painted it a sort of penetrating psychedelic blue. An old fisherman’s net adorns its high ceiling. It contains, besides four beds covered with army blankets and a peeling, cracked chest of drawers, a pile of sacks of chemical fertilizer and several drums of gasoline. Some enamored girl has painted over an entire wall the image of Boaz, naked and radiant, striding with closed eyes over a calm patch of water.

  Instead of walking on the water, he is passing my window at this minute, sitting on the small tractor he has recently purchased (with my money). Trailing a disk harrow. And your daughter, like a little monkey, is sitting in his lap with her hands between his on the wheel. By the way, she has learned to ride the donkey almost by herself. It is a very young, docile donkey. (Last night, in the dark, I mistook it for a dog and almost stroked it. Since when do I stroke dogs? Or donkeys?) Once, near Bir Tamadeh in the Sinai, a stupid camel got into my firing zone. It walked slowly along a low ridge at a range of two thousand yards. Slightly above the barrel we were using as a target. The gunner fired two shots at it and missed. The loader asked to have a go and he missed too. Entering the spirit of competition, I got down into the gunner’s seat and fired, and I missed as well. The camel stopped and calmly assessed the spots where the shells had landed. With a fourth shot I took its head off. And I could see clearly through my binoculars the jet of blood that shot up to a height of a yard or two. The decapitated neck went on turning this way and that, as though looking for the severed head, when it turned backward and sprayed the hump with blood, like an elephant spraying himself with his trunk, and eventually with graceful slowness the camel folded its slender front legs, folded its hind legs, knelt down and lay on its belly, laid its gushing neck in the sand, and froze thus on the ridge like a strange statue, which I vainly tried to blow up with another three shells. Suddenly from the dead area there sprang a Bedouin waving his arms, and I gave orders to stop firing and clear out.

  There is the sea breeze stirring the chimes again. I stop and leave the Baby Hermes alone to ask myself whether I am out of my mind. Why am I pouring myself out before you? Why should I write a confession for you? Is it a sick desire to appear ridiculous to you? Or, on the contrary, to receive absolution? From you? And in general, Monsieur Sommo, what is the foundation for your blind confidence in the existence of a “supreme Providence”? atonement? rewards and punishments? or grace? Where did you scrape it from? Would you kindly offer some proof? Work a little miracle? Turn my walking stick into a snake? Or your wife into a pillar of salt, perhaps? Or else get up and admit that the whole thing is just foolishness, stupidity, narrow-mindedness, deception, abasement, and fear.

  Zakheim describes you as a cunning, ambitious fanatic, although not without Jesuitical talents and fine political instincts. According to Boaz you are nothing but a well-meaning nuisance, Ilana, in her customary style, attributes to you more or less the holiness of the Archangel Gabriel. Or at the very least the halo of a secret saint. Even though, in a different mood, she detects a Levantine side in you. You have even managed to arouse a certain curiosity in me.

  But what is holiness, Mr. Sommo? I have wasted some nine years of my life on a futile quest for a reasonable and more or less unemotional definition. Perhaps you will approve of me and agree to enlighten me? For I still have no idea. Even the dictionary definition of holiness strikes me as empty and shallow, if not essentially circular. And I still have a kind of need to succeed in deciphering something. Even though my time has run out. But even so: holiness? Or purpose? And grace? What does a wolf understand of the moon at which it howls with its neck extended? What does a moth understand of the flame into which it hurls itself? Or a camel-slayer of redemption? Can you help me?

  But no sanctimonious sermonizing, you hypocritical fart, who dares boast to me that you have never shed a drop of blood. That you have never touched a hair of an Arab’s head. That you are redeeming the Holy Land by licking it. Driving all the aliens out of it by means of charms and spells mixed with my money. Purging the patrimony of our forefathers with pure olive oil. Fucking my wife, inheriting my house, saving my son, investing my fortune, and then showering me with Biblical expostulations at my moral turpitude. You wear me out. You irritate like a mosquito. You have nothing new to offer me. I have long since finished with your sort and turned to more complex types. Take the money a
nd run well out of my range.

  As for me, what can I offer you except my dying soon? You hope in your letter that “the cup may pass”—well it really is “passing,” in fact it is nearly empty. You accuse me of stealing the “poor man’s ewe lamb” and the crumbs of your meal. But in reality I am the one who is now picking up crumbs from under your kosher table. You threaten me that soon I shall have to “stand and face my fate,” but the fact is that I can hardly stand at all. You can hear bells, but the bells are right here, above my head. What more do you demand, sir? To eat of the sacrifices of the dead?

  And apropos of sacrifices of the dead, dear Zakheim values me at roughly two million dollars. So that even after deducting Boaz’s half, your share is definitely not petty cash. You will be able to ride around in a limousine from your “first step of redemption” to the next one. Zakheim and his yellow-headed daughter are threatening to drop in this week: he has decided to take me “by force if necessary” to Jerusalem in his car for my radiotherapy at Hadassah, and on the same trip to return to you your lost sheep. I, however, while writing these pages, have finally decided to stay here. What do I need to look for in Jerusalem? To expire amid dribbling prophets and barking messianic lunatics? I am staying with my son. I shall fold sacks to the end. Sort radishes. Wind old lengths of string. Perhaps I shall send for the clown who was my father from Haifa: we can hold a family billiards marathon until I drop dead. Will you let her stay with me a little longer? Please? Maybe you will be given an extra coupon for your collection of good deeds?