Black Box

by Amos Oz

  Boaz tells me, with a twist of the lips somewhere between boredom and contempt, that one of his mistresses here once used to pour water on the hands of an old guru in Wisconsin who was able, she claims, to heal malignant diseases by means of bee stings. And I, to my surprise, amused myself this morning by thrusting a stick into the beehive. But Boaz’s bees, being as distracted and worn out as I am or as peace-loving as he is, buzzed all around me but refused to sting. Maybe the odor of death that clings to me repelled them. Or else perhaps they do not deign to cure those of little faith?

  So here we are again, inadvertently, with my old obsession: turning every stray bee into the bearer of a theological question, only to attack it with gritted teeth and squash it, together with its question. To derive a new question from its hollow death. And hurry to shatter the new question with a direct shot. For nine years I have been wrestling with Machiavelli, taking Hobbes and Locke limb from limb, unstitching Marx at the seams, burning with desire to prove once and for all that it is neither the selfishness nor the baseness nor the cruelty in our nature that turns us into a species that destroys itself. We annihilate ourselves (and shall soon wipe out our entire species) precisely because of our “higher longings,” because of the theological disease. Because of the burning need to be “saved.” Because of an obsession with redemption. What is the obsession with redemption? Only a mask for a complete absence of the basic talent for life. This is the talent that every cat is endowed with. Whereas we, like the whales that dash themselves against the shore in an impulse to mass suicide, suffer from an advanced degeneration of the talent for life. Hence the popular urge to destroy and annihilate what we have so as to hack a path to regions of redemption that have never existed and are not even possible. To sacrifice our lives cheerfully, to eradicate other people ecstatically, for the benefit of some vague false magic that seems to us to be a “Promised Land.” Some kind of mirage that is considered “superior to life itself.” And what on earth has not been considered superior to life itself? In Uppsala in the fourteenth century two monks slew ninety-eight orphans in a single night and then did away with themselves, all because a blue fox had appeared at a window of their monastery as a sign that the Virgin was waiting for them. Therefore: to cover the ground over and over again “with a carpet of our split brains / like white roses”? a carpet destined for the pure footsteps of some unlikely savior (according to the poem by a local fanatic, who certainly succeeded in fixing himself a fine brain-spill from twenty pistol bullets that the British landed in his skull). Or in a different local variation: “For peace is but mud / so renounce soul and blood / for the sake of the glory concealed.” What concealed glory, Mr. Sommo? Are you out of your mind? Take a look at your daughter sometime: that is the only hidden glory. There is none other. It’s a shame to waste words on you. You will murder her. You will murder everything that moves all around. And you will call it “birth pangs of the Messiah” and acceptance of divine judgment. You may even outdo me, and manage to commit murder without shedding a drop of blood. You will boil in olive oil and mutter thrice “Holy.”

  I have just had a short lunch break. A girl by the name of Sandra came up to my room barefoot and, smiling as though moonstruck, set before me an aluminum teapot full of a fragrant infusion of herbs and a plate covered with another plate. A hard-boiled egg cut in half. Some olives. Slices of tomato and cucumber. Onion rings. Two slices of homemade bread spread with goat cheese flavored with garlic. And honey in a miniature bottle. I nibbled and sipped and poured myself some more. This Sandra went on standing there in her djellaba, watching me with unconcealed curiosity. Perhaps she had instructions to count my bites. And yet, as though afraid of me, she stayed near the door. Which she had not closed behind her.

  I decided to try to hold a simple conversation with her. Even though as a general rule I haven’t the slightest idea of casual conversation with strangers. Where was she from, if she didn’t mind my asking?

  Omaha, Nebraska.

  Were her parents aware of where she was and what manner of life she was leading?

  It was like this: her parents were not exactly her parents.

  Meaning?

  Her father’s second wife and her mother’s new husband had given her some money to go off and see the world, on condition that she promised to come back at the end of a year and go to college.

  And what was she contemplating studying?

  She didn’t know yet. In any case, she was learning a lot here.

  What, for instance? Introduction to primitive farming?

  To understand herself. A little. And also to get some idea about the Meaning of Life.

  Would she be kind enough to enlighten me? What was this Meaning?

  But this, in her opinion, “should not be put into words.”

  Then perhaps she would give me just a general idea? A hint?

  “That’s something you have to do for yourself? Isn’t it?”

  She has a bizarre habit of ending every sentence with a question mark. Not as though it were a question but as though she were surprised by her own words. I stood by my request to be given at least a slight hint of the meaning of life.

  Embarrassed. Blinking. And smiling as though pleading with me to give up. Very pretty. And shy. Unbelievably childlike. Blushing and shrugging her shoulders when I suggested she sit down for a moment. And she stayed there, my son’s mistress, or one of my son’s mistresses, standing in the doorway, like a deer which can sniff pursuit. Flight makes her skin quiver. One more word and she’ll be gone. But I persist:

  “Where should one begin, Sandra?”

  “I think: just at the beginning?”

  “I think: maybe as far back as your memory can reach?”

  “As far as my circumcision, is that far enough? Or do I have to think back even further?” (I was tired of these banalities.)

  “To where they first humiliated you, right?”

  “Humiliated me? Wait a minute. Sit down. I happen to be one of the humiliators. Not one of the humiliated.”

  But she refused to sit. They were waiting for her downstairs. Boaz. And the friends. Today they were looking for volunteers to open up the choked well. The water hole.

  “So maybe we can talk later? And by the way, maybe you could do with some money? Don’t get me wrong. Well? Can we talk a bit this evening?”

  “Possibly,” she said in surprise, avoiding the financial approach. And after another dreamy reflection she asked cautiously: “What is there to talk about?”

  And she picked up the dishes, my almost untouched meal, and minced out of the room (still, she kindly left me the teapot and the honey). Outside, from the dark passage, she added in English: “Never mind. Be at peace? Can’t you?”

  A half-wit. Or maybe drugged. A few more years and the Russians will come and eat them for breakfast.

  But in any case: where is the beginning?

  My first childhood memory is an image of a scorching summer’s day, bathed in the bitter smoke of eucalyptus shoots being burned farther down the yard. Touched with the haze of a khamsin. A thick cloud of flying ants—or perhaps it was locusts?—land on the child’s head, shoulders, knees, in his shorts, on his bare feet and fingers busy demolishing molehills. Or, with a sliver of glass that he had found in the garden and used to focus the sun’s rays, setting fire to pieces of paper from a cigarette pack (Simon Arzdt?). A dense shadow fell upon him and blotted out the world. His father. Who stamped out the fire. And flashing rage like the Biblical Jehovah hit him over the head.

  And the garden: what did not grow in it? Squill and wood sorrel in their season. Cyclamen and lupins and groundsel at the end of the winter. White daisies. And poppies. Cassidony. All these were despised by the father, who purged them all in favor of his rose beds, the exotic rare strains that he ordered from the Far East and perhaps from the Andes. And there were insects and creeping things and lizards and upside-down cathedrals of spiders’ webs, and tortoises and snakes, which the child caught and impris
oned in cans and jars in the cellar. Occasionally they would escape and hide in cracks in the stone or make off to nest in the house. And the silkworms that he collected in the thick of the mulberry tree, hoping to make butterflies, and invariably all that ever came out were some malodorous rotten stains. The samovar in the dining room was a shaggy, panting devil. The china dinner service in the glass-fronted cabinet was like motley soldiers in battle array. The bats in the roof were rockets guided from some far-off place. In the library stood a squat brown radio, in which in the dark a devilish green eye glowed on Vienna, Belgrade, Cairo, and Cyrenaica on the glass wave-band indicator. And there was a gramophone with a handle and a horn that would sometimes erupt into ecstatic opera accompanied by his father’s bellowing. Barefoot, bent double like a burglar, the child used to creep into corners of the house and the garden. Build himself from mud, under some rusty tap, cities and villages and bridges, forts, towers, palaces, which he took pleasure in destroying by aerial bombardment with pine cones. Faraway wars raged in Spain, Abyssinia, Finland.

  Once he fell ill with diphtheria. Between sleeping and waking with a high fever he half saw his father coming into the room naked to the waist, with unruly grey curls on his broad brown chest, and stooping over the nurse. Then there was moaning and pleading and desperate whispering before his fevered slumber once more drowned the memory between fragments of dream.

  On late summer mornings, like this Saturday morning, Arab peasants used to arrive from the village on the coast. With their docile donkeys, with their dark robes, with a hubbub of guttural entreaties, with whiskers aquiver, they would undo their wicker baskets. Bunches of dark muscatel grapes. Dates. Animal manure. Greenish-purple figs. A faint female smell used to pervade the house and linger after they had gone. The father would chuckle: These fellahin are better than the Russian mujiks; they don’t drink, they don’t swear, they’re only filthy, and they steal a little, children of mother nature, but if we let them forget their place they’re liable to cut throats.

  Sometimes the child would wake up early in the morning to the sound of camels braying. A caravan from Galilee or the desert bringing building stones. Or sometimes just watermelons. From his window he could see the softness of their necks. Their expression of contemptuous sadness. The delicate line of their legs.

  At night from his room at the end of the second floor he could catch sounds of hilarity when his father gave a party. British officers, Greek and Egyptian merchants, real-estate agents from Lebanon (apart from Zakheim, hardly a Jew ever set foot here), they would gather in the salon to spend a male evening together, drinking, joking, playing cards, sometimes erupting into drunken sobs. The room was paved with fine marble tiles (which were all stolen during the years of desolation. Boaz is laying floors of grey concrete instead). And there were soft, low Oriental sofas covered with embroidered cushions. Strangers used to shower the child with costly, complicated toys. Which did not last long. Or bonbonnieres. Which he had always detested (but two days ago he sent for a couple from the shop in the town to spoil your daughter). A wily, inquisitive, elusive boy, peeping and vanishing like a shadow, always devising little schemes, bitter and proud, wandering around by himself summer after summer on the empty paths of the estate. Without mother, brother, or friend, apart from his rhesus monkey, which his father killed and on whose grave the child erected a sort of hysterical mausoleum. Which is also a ruin now, where your daughter is keeping a tortoise. It was Boaz who found it for her.

  And in the nights: the silence of the nights. Which was no silence at all.

  The house stood alone. Some two miles separated its northern window from the last building in the town. On the edges of the orchard stood five or six workmen’s huts that his father had built from corrugated iron and cement blocks to house the Circassian laborers that he brought from Lebanon or Galilee. Dim and dull in the night their voices rose in a song that had only two notes. In the darkness foxes barked. The jackal poured out his heart in lamentation in the stony wilderness of thistles bristling with mastic trees that extended all around the house. Once a hyena appeared beside the toolshed in the light of the full moon. His father fired at it and killed it. In the morning its corpse was burned at the bottom of the slope. Four empty rooms, a corridor, and six steps separated the child’s room from his father’s bedroom. Even so, he could sometimes catch the sound of a woman groaning. Or soft wet laughter. Each morning he was awakened by the sound of crows and pigeons. An uncompromising cuckoo used to repeat each morning a fixed insistent slogan. And it is still here: repeating. The very same slogan. Or perhaps its great-grandchildren have returned to teach Boaz what his father has forgotten. Occasionally wild ducks flew past in arrowhead formation. The storks camped and moved on. Are you able, Mr. Sommo, to tell the difference between a stork and a wild duck? Between a jackal and a fox? Between a poppy and a cassidony? Or only between sacred and profane, or between two evening papers? No matter. Possibly your daughter will.

  Until the age of four or so the child did not learn to speak. Perhaps he did not make a particular effort. But by the age of four he could kill a pigeon with a stone and suffocate moles with smoke. And he could also harness a two-wheeled cart to the donkey (tomorrow I shall teach your daughter, if Boaz has not anticipated me).

  Hours upon hours, all alone, he used to fly overseas (Atlantis, Shangri-la, El Dorado) on a swing that the Armenian servant fixed up for him in the garden. At the age of seven he erected a lookout post with a rope ladder in the top of a eucalyptus tree. There he used to climb with his rhesus monkey, peep over the Great Wall of China, and check on the travels of Kublai Khan. (Its remains are still visible from my window now, while I am writing. One of Boaz’s oddlings is lying there, naked, shaven-headed, playing a mouth organ. A fragmented, wistful tune reaches me intermittently.)

  Ten barren years that child, the tallest of the lot but skinny and bony like a Bedouin, served in Monsieur Markovich’s class in Zikhron. Always on the last bench. Punctiliously fulfilling his obligations but nevertheless separated from them all by a ring of persistent loneliness. Reading alone in silence. Reading even in the breaks. Memorizing the pages of the atlas. And once, in a fit of rage, he picked up a chair and broke Monsieur’s nose. Such outbursts of fury, rare but bloodily violent, earned him a kind of aura of danger. Which never left him all his life. And inside which he always seemed to be fortifying himself against the general stupidity.

  As soon as he was nine he began, on his father’s orders, to travel to Haifa twice a week for private boxing lessons. When he was ten his father taught him to dismantle and assemble a handgun. Very soon they were having shooting contests in the lower extremities of the farmyard. His father also decided to initiate him into the mysteries of the use of the dagger; a collection of curved daggers—Bedouin, Druze, Damascene, Persian—occupied half a wall in the library. Do you know, Mr. Sommo, how to use a dagger? Perhaps we should have a little duel?

  And the wide, coarse house, built like a drunkard’s wager, like a wild, extravagant gesture. Of local stone. Almost black. Edged with a different stone brought from Mount Hebron or the Shouf Mountains. With high walls and raging illogicality. Twisting passages, spiral staircases transferred from Jerusalem convents, storerooms, secret hiding places, entrances that only led to other entrances. And a secret tunnel through which you could pass, stooping, from the cellar underneath the wing and emerge in the pavilion in the garden (now it is blocked with earth).

  When you come and visit one day, after I am gone, I expect Boaz will treat you to a guided tour. You will be able to see it with your own eyes and pronounce the appropriate benedictions. Perhaps by then they will have unblocked the tunnel, just as they are now clearing out the water hole, which was erroneously considered a well. By the way, my father bought Boaz a mountain in Tibet, which is officially called Boaz Gideon Peak. Perhaps I shall get in touch with that firm of Italian crooks and buy your daughter a mountain too.

  How shall we explain the urge that took hold of me to
write my childhood memoirs for you? Can you find me a verse for that? Or a fitting little homily? A tale of old-time rabbis? Perhaps I was moved by what you wrote of your own childhood. Or by the contempt you nurse for me. Or perhaps again I was motivated by my instinct for tidiness, the need to leave some sort of report in reliable hands? Has Ilana told you about my passion for tidiness? Which always amused her? Has she shared with you, Mr. Sommo—or may I call you by your personal name, Marcel, I believe? Michel?—other amusements from the time of her first marriage?

  Ever since my childhood I have always insisted on putting everything in its proper place. My work tools, screwdrivers, saws, files were all arranged on a cork board in my room, like a little museum. My toys were sorted and stored according to their type and country of manufacture. To this day my desk in Chicago is permanently set out ready for the CO’s inspection. My books are arranged in order of height like a guard of honor. My papers are perfectly filed. In the Yom Kippur War, in the bitter fighting over the seam between the two Egyptian armies, I was the only Israeli officer who went on the assault shaved and with a freshly starched shirt. In my bachelor apartment, before and after Ilana, the sheets were arranged in a wardrobe as though in the cross of a gunsight, and the records were in alphabetical order. Behind my back in the army they used to call me “Right Angle.” Ilana used to laugh aloud every time she saw my shoes lined up on the shelf. Has she told you about it? Has she told you about our nights? About my war wound? About the destruction of Khirbet Wahadneh? How do you see me, Marcel—as a villain, or as a ridiculous villain?