Black Box

by Amos Oz

  But what do I care. Since when do I bother about what the Regimental Police think of me.

  And in any case, Mr. Sommo, Michel, you ought to take care. Even an old sick snake can still bite for a finale. I may still have a drop left in my poison gland. Why not reveal to you that your beautiful wife climbs upstairs to visit me at night? That she sneaks into my bedroom in her nightdress when the rest of them are asleep. Boaz’s scout torch trembles in her hand and makes pale blisters tremble on my plaster-peeling wall. She removes the blanket from me. Slides her palm over my belly. Her lips in the darkness plow the thinning hair of my chest. Perhaps she is trying to extract a drowsy coitus from me. Perhaps she succeeds. I cannot report with certainty: my waking resembles a dream, and my sleep is a holding defense. Perhaps all this only takes place in my fantasies. In hers. And in yours, Marcel.

  Why not set Zakheim on you? I can still manage to alter my will. Divide the whole lot between the Protection of Animals and the Council for Reconciliation with the Palestinians. I’ll smash you, my friend, if the spirit takes me.

  But there isn’t any spirit. My evil powers are abandoning me together with my thinning hair and my sunken cheeks and my lips which are withdrawing into my mouth leaving only a vicious slit.

  Now that the viciousness has gone.

  Why should I trample you?

  You have suffered enough. Now it is my turn to pay and yours to receive compensation. You won’t refuse, will you? I shall undertake to be your messiah. To bring you out of slavery to freedom and from poverty to great wealth. As it is written in your holy books, Thy seed shall rise up and inherit the gate of his enemies.

  Set your mind at rest, Marcel: your wife is faithful to you. No nocturnal sorties and no deathbed coitus. Except in the imaginations of the three of us. Where neither tanks nor Sparks of Redemption can penetrate. Even your little daughter does not forget you: she has just come into my room and decided to promote my electric shaver to the rank of telephone (which we don’t have here) and uses it to report to you in half-hour calls to Jerusalem on the development of her relationship with the goats, the geese, and the peacock. Have I already mentioned that Boaz has found her a tortoise?

  I shall conclude, dear sir. Never fear. Cain is dying and Abel will inherit. It is not only in Hawaii that right wins out in the end. Your old theological question, how long will the wicked rejoice, receives in the case before us a simple concrete answer: until September or October. At the very latest—December.

  And then, as it is written in your scriptures, “Man and beast shall be saved, and thou shalt make them drink of the stream of thy delights.”

  I have no telephone in this house, and therefore, to make sure you do not get up in the meantime and run off to Hawaii, I have asked Boaz to jump on his bicycle and call a taxi from Zikhron. For forty or fifty dollars (how much is that nowadays in Israeli pounds?) the driver will surely agree to take this letter straight to your home in Jerusalem and hand it to you the moment the Sabbath ends. I am a little tired, Michel. And there is some pain. So I shall conclude here. Enough. The taxi driver will have instructions to wait until you have written me a reply and bring it straight back to me tonight. What I am asking of you is this: Do you still insist on your right to have the two of them back at once? If so, I shall send them tomorrow morning and that’s that.

  On the other hand, if you agree to leave them here a little longer, you receive half my inheritance. And you also receive the bonus of a first-rate good deed. Think fast and decide. I shall be waiting for your reply via the taxi driver tonight.

  Take good care of yourself, chum. Don’t learn anything from me.

  A. G.

  ***

  Mr. A. Gideon

  Gideon House

  Zikhron Yaakov

  By the Grace of G-d

  Jerusalem

  Conclusion of the Holy Sabbath

  9th of Elul, 5736 (4.9.76)

  To be delivered personally by special messenger

  Mr. Gideon,

  By the driver you sent, who is kindly waiting here in my home drinking a cup of coffee, I am returning to you a few lines in reply to your letter of this morning. First of all I must ask you to pardon and forgive me for the harsh and unnecessary insults I cast at you in my letter of two days ago, not knowing you were unfortunately desperately ill and in fact on your deathbed. It is written in our texts, “A man should not be blamed for words spoken in grief,” and when I wrote to you I was in the grip of a very great grief.

  And now we are on the threshold of the Days of Awe during which the gates of repentance and compassion are opened wide. Therefore I suggest that Ilana and Yifat should come back home tomorrow morning and you too should come at once and without delay to receive the appropriate treatment at Hadassah Hospital. And I suggest that you stay with us as our guest, Alexander. And that Boaz should come too of course, because his sacred duty now is to stay close to his father and tend him on his sickbed. By virtue of your remorse and your suffering and your heroism in the sanctification of the Name on our battlefields, and with the help of the divine Mercy, I believe you will be healed. Until then you must stay here with us. Not with Zakheim, not in a hotel, and I don’t care a fig what all sorts of people of uncircumcised heart say behind our backs. Tomorrow morning I am going to explain the whole affair to the Rev. Rabbi Bouskila, whose eyes will doubtless see to the heart of the matter. And I shall ask him to receive you for a meeting as soon as possible and he will not withhold his blessing, which has already done many wonders for the seriously ill. Apart from that I’ve also phoned a cousin of my sister-in-law who works in Hadassah in Oncology and I’ve fixed it up so you’ll get special treatment there and they’ll do everything possible for you, over and above.

  One other thing, Alexander. As soon as the driver finishes his coffee and goes back to you with this letter, I’m going to the Western Wall to pray for you there and put a note between the stones that you should recover. It’s the days of mercy now. Please be kind enough to tell Ilana and also Boaz this very evening that we’ve forgiven each other and that I forgive Ilana and I’m sure that Heaven will forgive all of us.

  With best wishes for the New Year, and for a perfect recovery, and without a thought for any anger there may have been in the past,

  Michael (Michel Sommo)

  ***

  To Michel Sommo

  Tarnaz 7

  Jerusalem

  Thursday, the 21st of October ’76

  My dear Michel,

  It’s been raining since the night. There was a grey light in the windows this morning. And on the horizon out to sea sharp lightning is capering silently, without any thunder. The doves that were cooing until yesterday are silent today as though stunned. The only sound that crosses the falling water is the occasional barking of the dogs. The big house stands once again deserted and extinguished, its entrances, its rooms, its cellars, and its attic, all handed over again to the old ghosts. Life has retreated to the kitchen: Boaz lit a nice big wood fire there this morning. Around this fire they are sitting or lying on their mattresses, inactive, drowsy; for hours on end they have been saddening the empty house with the guitar and their low drawn-out songs.

  Boaz dominates them almost without words. Wrapped in a cape he has made himself from a lambskin he is sitting in a corner of the kitchen, cross-legged, silently stitching sacks. No task is beneath his dignity. Last week, as though sensing the early arrival of the rain, he swept the chimney and filled the cracks with cement. And today, all through the morning, I was also among them. While they were playing the guitar and singing I peeled the potatoes, churned the butter, and pickled some gherkins in vinegar with garlic and parsley. Dressed in a wide black embroidered Bedouin dress that I borrowed from a girl called Amy, with a checked kerchief around my head, like a Polish peasant woman from my childhood. And with my feet bare like theirs.

  It is two o’clock in the afternoon now. I finished my work in the kitchen and went to the abandoned room where Yifat a
nd I were staying at the beginning, before you sent and took her away from me. I lighted the kerosene heater and sat down to write you these pages. I hope that with all this rain you and Yifat have put a straw mat down. That you’ve remembered to put some plastic pants on her under her flannel trousers. That you’ve made fried eggs for the two of you and removed the skin from the cocoa. And that you and she are constructing a model airplane for her doll that really cries or sailing in the ottoman where we keep the bedclothes in search of the winged dragon. Then you will run her bath, blow bubbles with her, comb each other’s hair, dress her in warm pajamas, and sing her “The Sabbath Bride.” She will mumble into her fingers and you will kiss her and say Little Miss Empty-Vessels-Make-Most-Noise, no getting out of bed now. And turn the television on and with the evening paper on your lap watch the news in Arabic and then a comedy and the news in Hebrew and a nature film and a drama and “Today’s Scripture Reading” and perhaps fall asleep in your stocking feet in front of the set. Without me. I am the sinner and you have to serve the sentence. Haven’t you handed her over to your sister-in-law? To your cousin and her husband? Haven’t you ruled a line under her and started a new life? Or perhaps your astonishing family has already found you a partner, a pious dumpy docile creature with a covered head and thick woolen stockings? A widow? Or a divorcee? Have you sold our apartment and gone to live in that Kiryat Arba of yours? Silence. Not for me to know. Cruel Michel. Poor Michel. Your dark hairy hands grope at night between the folds of the sheets for my body that is not there. Your lips seek my breasts in a dream. You will not forget me.

  A dim, sensual smell filters in from outside. It is the smell of raindrops touching the heavy earth that has been roasted by the sun all summer long. A whisper passes through the leaves of the trees in the garden. There is cloud on the forested hills to the east. This letter is pointless: you will not read it. And if you do you will not answer me. Or you will answer through your brother, who will demand again, insistently, that I stop tormenting you and remove myself once and for all from your life, which I have made into a hell. And he will write that by my bad deeds I have forfeited all my rights to the child and there is divine justice and a Judge and the world is not a moral no man’s land.

  Soon a girl will pass my window stooping in the rain, with a sheet of canvas covering her head and shoulders. Sandra or Amy or Cindy, on her way to feed the animals. The dogs will follow her. Meanwhile there is nothing but the sheets of rain at the window. No sound penetrates from outside except the conspiratorial whispering of the pine trees and the palms at the touch of the sodden wind. No sound from within either, since the singing and music have stopped in the kitchen. A little stream is running down the slide that Boaz built for Yifat. And from upstairs there reaches me the echo of his rhythmic footsteps. The tapping of the walking stick that his son made for him. With strange strides he measures over and over again the three empty yards between the wall and the door in his new place in the attic. Three weeks ago he told Boaz suddenly to take away the bottle chimes and to move all his things to his mother’s old bedroom. In the bare wall, with its plaster peeling, he found a rusty nail on which he hung the remains of her sandals, which he had dug out from underneath a loose floorboard in the wing. In a chest in the cellar he discovered her sepia photograph, blotched with damp stains. And he set it up on his table. Although without the candlesticks and everlasting flowers with which his father used to surround this same photograph in the old library.

  And now she looks at us with her dreamy Russian eyes, with her braid wound like a garland around her sad face, and a shadow of a faint smile hovering perhaps around her lips. Alec speaks to her in a grumpy childish voice, like a spoiled boy who is not content even for a moment. And I am unable to calm him. What I am trying to say is that I have moved in there too. Only to take care of him at night: he often wakes up in a panic. He sits up in bed and starts to mumble vague orders, as though continuing his nightmare. And I hurry to get up from the mattress I have put at the foot of his bed, give him an herbal infusion to drink from the thermos bottle, thrust a couple of pills between his lips, and hold his hand until he drops off to sleep again and settles into a painful, interrupted snoring.

  Is your face glowering with jealousy? Is hatred darkening your eyes? Do not cast a stone at me. It must be written somewhere in one of your holy books that I am fulfilling a commandment? Performing an act of mercy? Will you not open for me those gates of repentance? Each morning I shave him with his battery-operated shaver. I comb what’s left of his hair. I dress him, put on his shoes and tie the laces, and then gently help him to sit down at his table. I put a bib on him and feed him a soft-boiled egg and yogurt with a spoon. Or a mush of cornflakes. I wipe his chin and his mouth. At the time of day when you are finishing your coffee, folding up your morning paper, and going to lower the side of the cot, make a perfect imitation of a cock crowing, and say, “Bonjour, Mademoiselle Sommo, arise, renew your youth like a lion for the service of the Creator.” And if she asks about me? Have I gone a long way away? And if she wants to know when I’ll return? When shall I return, Michel?

  On days when it’s not too cold I generally sit him in the easy chair that Boaz has fixed up for him on the veranda for half an hour, put his dark glasses on him and watch over him while he dozes in the sun. Sometimes he asks for a story. I recite from memory chapters from the novels you used to bring me from the lending library. He now has a faint, absent-minded curiosity to hear about other folks’ lives. Tales that he, like you, always used to regard with utter contempt: Le Père Goriot, Dickens, Galsworthy, Somerset Maugham. Maybe I’ll ask Boaz to buy a TV. We are on the electricity grid now.

  Boaz looks after him with a sort of submissive attentiveness: he has fitted shutters on the window, replaced a windowpane, put a lambskin rug down for him in the toilet; he takes care of buying the medicines for him at the pharmacy in Zikhron, fetches a fresh bunch of mint every day to drive away the sick smells, all in tense silence. He stubbornly avoids all conversation, beyond Good morning, Good night. Like Friday with Robinson Crusoe.

  Sometimes we spend the best part of the morning, he and I, playing endless games of checkers. Or cards: bridge, rummy, canasta. When he wins he beams with childish glee, like a pampered child. And if I win he starts to stamp his foot and complain to his mother that I cheated. I manipulate our games so that he is nearly always the one who wins. If he tries to fool me, to put back on the board a piece I have already taken, or deal himself an extra card, I slap his hand and stand up as if to leave the room. I let him plead and promise that from now on he’ll be good. Twice he fixed me with a strange look, smiled with silent madness, and asked me to take my clothes off. Once he asked me to send Boaz to the public telephone in Zikhron to call the minister of Defense and the chief of staff, both of them old acquaintances of his, and tell them to come urgently on a matter I must not know about but which brooked no delay. And another time he surprised me in a different way: he delivered a well-organized, terrifying, brilliant, and totally lucid lecture on the way in which the Arab armies would defeat Israel in the nineties.

  But for the most part he says nothing. He breaks his silence only to ask me to take him to the toilet. This is a complicated and painful business, and I have to help him with everything, like changing a baby.

  Toward midday he generally feels a little better. He gets up and walks around the room obsessively putting everything in its right place. He folds up my clothes, which are draped over the back of a chair. Puts the cards away in their box. Pounces on a piece of paper. Removes the empty glasses from the room and leaves them on the bench in the hallway. Takes great pains to get the blanket perfectly straight, as though this were a base for new recruits. Scolds me for leaving my comb lying on the table.

  At midday I feed him mashed potatoes or rice pudding. I make him drink a glass of carrot juice. Then I go down and work for an hour or two in the kitchen or one of the storerooms, taking down with me the dirty dishes from the bench in the hall
way and the accumulated dirty laundry. And he starts on his daily walk between the wall and the door, tapping with his stick, always following the same route, like a caged animal. Until four or five o’clock, the beginning of twilight, when he gropes his way with his stick downstairs to the kitchen. Boaz has made a kind of day bed for him, a sort of cat’s cradle on a framework of eucalyptus branches. He huddles in this, close to the fire, wrapped in three blankets, silently watching the girls preparing dinner. Or Boaz studying grammar. Sometimes he dozes off in his cradle and sleeps painlessly on his back with his thumb in his mouth, his face at peace, his breathing slow and regular. This is the easiest time for him. When he wakes up it is pitch dark outside and the kitchen is lit by yellow electricity and the log fire in the grate. I feed him. I give him his pills with a glass of water. Then he sits in his cradle, resting on a heap of cushions that Boaz has made from sacks stuffed with seaweed, listening to the guitar until close to midnight. One by one, or in pairs, they get up, say good night to him politely from a distance, and leave the room. Boaz bends over him, picks him up carefully in his arms, and carries him silently upstairs to our attic room. Softly he lays him down on the bed and goes out and closes the door.