by Amos Oz
But he did not leave his captors alone.
Those Germans turned out to be coarse men.
In vain did he try to discern in them even a spark of dark demonic fire: hour after hour they played cards, swore, shot with their submachine guns at a bottle on the gutter of the roof, fried pork in pork fat all night long.
This prisoner, for his part, never stopped talking to all of them. He tried to entertain them and to win their sympathy; he tried to make them laugh, to play his mouth organ for them, even to start an argument. By means of conflicting ideas tending to circularity he attempted to establish some kind of fundamental agreement with his jailors. After all, both he and they were part of the same perpetual structure, and without either side the structure could never materialize.
They were delighted. The spate of high-flown, unintelligible words revived in some of them childhood memories which were vague but strangely sweet. First they gave him beer mixed with salt to drink. This amused them and gave rise to fresh witticisms. They had the idea of dusting him with sneezing powder so as to make him sneeze more and more until he could not stop. Then, slobbering and slurping as they gorged themselves on pork fried in pork fat, they threw crusts of bread at him and feigned innocence. There was great merriment.
There was a babyface among them, pure, pink, and pathetic, who coaxed and implored the guest to turn water into wine, wine into fire, fire into water. And another, a gloomy corporal, a diligent, dedicated schoolboy in a uniform too big for him, looking like Young Werther, stretched out on the filthy floor and pleaded with the sneezing stranger to stop leading them into temptation, for it was too great for them, they were but weak, base matter. There were also numerous drooling drunkards, running with brotherly tears, who tended Dziobak Przywolski continuously, giving him to drink, picking out his lice, and rolling him onto his back and over onto his stomach again. The air was thick with coarse tobacco, frying fat, and stale wine. Till early morning peals of laughter re-echoed, and tears too flowed freely.
The prisoner, however, did not relax his grip on ideas all night long. He addressed them all with devotion and didactic enthusiasm, in excellent, elevated German, speaking at length with both wit and warmth, sneezing frantically, making abundant use of paradox, introducing astounding hypothetical possibilities, arresting syntheses, mathematical speculations, dialectics and more savage sneezes, he conclusively proved that he was of a virgin truly born, they might test him with ax or gun, he was dead and risen again, and sent to bring salvation, vomit and beer were baptism and prayer, atishoo amen, and he wiped their spittle from his face as he groped with words for a synthesis and in desperation even performed a few small miracles, but all in vain.
In short, he with his Germanic thought, with signs and wonders, and they for their part with pork fat.
And yet beneath their uniforms these Germans were nothing but brutish peasants, lumps of clay of Silesia or Lower Saxony, endlessly guzzling beer and staring vacantly into space: cloudy glassy bear's eyes.
Even the lame major, a stuffed Viking with fake gold hair, was an elderly man convulsed with hiccups, who was carried away all that night with high-pitched weeping.
And the guard post itself, formerly a convent or a village seminary, was filthy enough to arouse disgust in a soul which appreciated Culture.
So it happened that Pomeranz suddenly grew tired of his captors.
With an inner shrug he completely abandoned the intellectual confrontation, the synthesis, and in his heart he took his final leave of the nauseating Germans.
Toward morning he began to belch and paw the ground. Far away in the Promised Land, All our hopes will he fulfilled. The mouth organ discharged a few sad notes and the man, dreamy and forlorn, rose into the air. Up through the chimney he floated and away into the forest: metaphysical wrong cannot be perceived, while perceptible wrong emits a powerful stench of pork fat.
5
Stefa took Professor Zaicek into her home.
Flaxen-haired Martha, his servant, had abandoned the scholar's house when the Germans had entered the town. And the Professor, who was adept at discovering hidden links between St. Augustine and Friedrich Nietzsche, had never managed to learn to tie his own tie.
He was a lonely, helpless old man. When he bent over the grate to light the fire he covered himself with coal dust, and when he put more coal on he singed the ends of his beard. The smoke blinded him and filled his eyes with tears which buried themselves in his bushy white beard. Despite everything his close friends told him, the Professor continued to maintain the belief that Martha had left him and his house for a man, and that she would be sure to return when her love cooled down. Was that not just what had happened with Martha's cat—she too had disappeared and come back when her time was past. Even his postal links with scattered friends all over Europe progressively deteriorated. Worst of all, the Goethe Society had ceased to function, and the Goetheans themselves seemed to have vanished into thin air.
Perhaps they had all fled to the cellars, to the forests, and only he was forgotten?
There, in their dark hideout, by candlelight, all the Goetheans would be meeting every night and holding whispered conferences. They would draw up a sensational document which would instantly bring the world back to its senses. Germany herself would open her eyes and be smitten with shame. And meanwhile Stefa came; the drunken gardener, Run-Jesus, piled several suitcases, bags, files of documents, photographs and woolen underwear on a small handcart, and that night the Professor was taken into Stefa's house. Times were not easy.
And so toward sunset, as evening came down, while Martha Pinch-me-not abandoned herself to the arms of clerks or mustached policemen, while the Goetheans in their candlelit cellar fitted word to word with supreme care, the Professor would stand alone at the window for half an hour or more, and contemplate the fading of day. He could see the damp gray wind howling across the town of M——, bursting out over wide wintry expanses, stirring the fir forests, screeching at cottage windows. Far away in the distance he could see huts and towers, and beyond them the lights of Warsaw gradually dying away, the swell of the turbid Baltic, night stooping over Berlin, steep ravines darkening in alpine valleys, he could sense the mighty rivers flowing through the dark, Volga, Rhine, darkness on the peaks of the Pyrenees and Apennines, darkness on the northern steppes and the mountains of the Balkans, and over all, bitter and piercing, the howling of steppe wolves at solitary towers. Then Stefa would gently touch his shoulder. Professor Zaicek would start, bow deeply to his watch, peering to make it out, and announce:
"It is dark outside."
Stefa would draw the heavy curtains, put on the lights, lead the scholar to an armchair, and offer them both a drink. The Karl Marx features, touched by wisdom and agony, would brighten slowly, painfully, as though by a powerful effort of the will, until they finally suggested the hint of a shy smile. Stefa would say:
"A pleasant evening."
And the Professor, dreamily, gently, somewhat distantly, would hasten to respond:
"A pleasant evening, Stefa, yes indeed."
How Stefa loved the flavor of those first mornings. She would bring him a hot cup of coffee in bed, and Professor Zaicek, however early she came, would always be waiting for her, his blue eyes wide open, and would remark in carefully chosen words on the beauty of the morning and the purity and purifying power of the birdsong coming from the garden. She would help him out of bed, brush and comb his thick beard, tie his tie, straighten his cuffs and pat a little Eau de Cologne into his prophetic mane. Then she would take his arm and lead to the breakfast table a magnificent, well-groomed old man, thoroughly prepared to face a new day.
At bedtime she would sit by his bedside, a cool intellectual beauty, and softly sing him, in a peasant-girl accent, some of the folk songs which flaxen-haired Martha used to sing him: only these songs could lull him into the arms of innocent slumber. Barefoot and erect in her nightgown she would slip into his bedroom around midnight to see that his night li
ght had not gone out. His regular childlike breathing instilled a sense of peace in Stefa.
Days and weeks passed, and from time to time at unforeseen moments there may suddenly have been a slight touch: her hand may have brushed against his, a melody touching a ruin.
All day long the old man sat silently in front of the fire, lost in thought. At his feet the two cats, Chopin and Schopenhauer, lay curled up together sleeping. Martha would soon come back. The winter would pass. In Jaroslaw Avenue the chestnut trees would blossom, log-laden rafts would drift once again down the river, and anglers would sit motionless on the bank. Meanwhile the wind howled outside, because it was winter and this was a wintry place.
Stefa would say:
"It is as if time were standing still, the days go by so slowly."
Professor Zaicek:
"And even though the room is so warm, my feet are frozen."
Stefa:
"How about some brandy. Or some tea."
Zaicek:
"Yes indeed, Stefa, that ink you bought yesterday was watered. And in the middle of the night there was a tinkling sound. Who is mending glass in the street at night?"
Sometimes toward evening the Professor would summon up hidden reserves of strength; he would rise from his chair and pace to and fro with porcelain footsteps on the rug, a little woolen skullcap secured to his mane with a hairpin, dictating a thought or two to Stefa. Afterward Stefa was requested to play the piano, and he, huddled and racked with agony, looking like a wizened embryo curled up in a jar, would suddenly challenge Nietzsche's view of the birth of tragedy from the spirit of music. His words were joined together with a hushed pathos, and when he stopped talking and turned his back on the room to stare out of the darkening window, Stefa felt that the air was charged. All that winter he was carving out in his mind the materials for a future work on the painful relationships between people. All the various relationships: Man and woman. Father and son. Brothers. Casual tennis partners. Master and slave. Teacher and pupil. Persecutor and victim. Lover and beloved. Pair of strangers.
As Professor Zaicek spoke, Stefa was sometimes certain that a special smell emanated together with his words and filled the room, a rough brown smell, like the smell of dying chestnut leaves in autumn.
Darkness came, feeling its way with long fingers of twilight, spreading like black death over all Europe, over streams and birch trees, over shuttered cities and desolate tundras, over Poland and its forests, and into the room, creeping under the armchairs, round the cats, the shelves, the ornaments, the pink Matisse girl, the African warrior threatening her, the gleam in the eye of the stuffed bear, darkness in Professor Zaicek's low sad voice, affirming in unambiguous syntax the circularity of all laws, unraveling the tangled ties between death and madness, love and mercy. Mystical reasoning. Take this very evening, he would say, both here and everywhere.
And night like a heavy cloak settled on the town of M——, enfolding the wounded belfry of St. Stephen's Church, subduing the dockyards and charging them with resdess massivity, pressing heavily on the shattered fountain in Magdalen Lane, clasping into its desperate embrace Jaroslaw Avenue, the Concert Hall, the wooden shacks in the outskirts, the guards in their menacing greatcoats, the river, blackening the snow-covered fields, weaving a forest spell over the town, and turning the town to forest.
6
Furthermore.
Stefa was so surprised she could scarcely believe her eyes: an antique Gothic clock without hands adorned the corner of the drawing room, and now suddenly Professor Zaicek with his own brittle fingers had succeeded in making it utter a few dim chimes from its depths.
Just like Pomeranz, then, who had fled to the forests, Professor Zaicek, too, was the son of a watchmaker. Who of them isn't, Stefa asked herself. There was once a little song current in some of the villages, which bore popular testimony to the connection between Jews and watches:
Good morning, fine morning, my dear Mr. Jew,
Let me propose a small deal to you:
You have a watch, I have a hatchet–
Throw me your watch and see if I catch it.
The Professor suddenly recalled the song, but he supposed that Stefa neither knew it nor wanted to; so he restrained himself and merely hummed the tune into his beard, and in his usual fashion, as if it involved an extraordinary physical effort, he summoned up the ghost of a smile. While outside snow-covered fields, weaving a forest spell over the town, and turning the town to forest. in the dark in the snow a heavily wrapped German patrol went by.
Conditions deteriorated week by week and almost day by day. Occasionally Stefa fought back a sob. A loaf of rye bread cost four zlotys. The drunken gardener Run-Jesus chopped down the apple trees in the garden to keep the fire burning for a few days longer. And he exacted the price of his silence with ever more menacing cheerfulness. At dawn the sky glowed red from distant fires around the town. An elderly humanist complained that a German soldier had called him a name in one of the main streets of the town in broad daylight. A hundred and six shaven-headed orphans were taken from the orphanage and transported in a cattle truck to a holiday camp by the Black Sea, some said to Madagascar. The town was alive with wild speculations, rumors, black-marketeering, and primitive superstitions.
The military governor of the town, General Baron von Topf, instructed his staff to examine the town register carefully and draw up a complete and detailed list of individuals actively involved in music. On the basis of this list the General Baron formed a private orchestra of burghers, in addition to the circle of historians which was summoned to meet for brief discussions in the governor's office at extraordinarily early hours of the morning.
So it was that every Sunday an eager band performed in the square in front of St. Stephen's Church, and a German loudspeaker cheerfully invited the audience to take the floor. He also ordered the Mother Superior Felicitas to be stigmatized —in the old meaning of the word—at the ruins of the belfry. He wished to conduct an experiment: it had occurred to him to setde once and for all a thousand-year-old controversy, whether or not there was any truth in the common belief that the Virgin had bestowed a particular grace on the Polish cross. And if she had, whether the state of grace still obtained. And because a method cannot be based on a single case, von Topf continued to experiment in various different ways. He was passionately devoted to the twilight zone between theology and metaphysics. According to a rumor, he was learning, or trying to learn, Hebrew at night. Moreover, he had been attracted by nuns since his early youth.
Professor Zaicek said to Stefa:
"It is my duty to speak to him. The situation must be clarified. You must invite him here one day, Stefa my dear, for a talk, for tea, so that we can demand an explanation."
Stefa said:
"That would be a terrible risk. Even your papers are not your own."
The old man reflected, and admitted the fact For a while he absently stroked one of the Siamese cats, then he leaned back and continued gently stroking the arm of his chair. How he wanted not to sound melodramatic, yet to use words that Stefa would never be able to forget, even in her dreams. Finally he spoke:
"But Stefa. Surely. We didn't run away to the forest, did we? And why did we both refuse to run away? Surely, dearest Stefa, it was because the word danger has no external validity. We have taught time and again, and recently we have even committed it to print, that the real danger is always from within. And have we the right, my wonderful Stefa, to turn our backs on our own teaching? Surely there are moments in the life of an individual or of a people when silence is an abhorrent misuse of speech. No, Stefa, no, my dear, no, here we are and here we stand and we cannot be otherwise. In the face of evil, we must stand up and say: evil! Now it's time for tea."
Primly but eagerly, almost gaily, Stefa clapped her hands, only the corners of her mouth betraying a new determination.
'Yes, teatime, my dear Professor; I am sure you have been waiting for your tea. Won't you take your place at the head of
the table; here comes your napkin, and your teaspoon, and here's the samovar."
She tied the napkin round his neck to protect his brown jacket, put his teaspoon in his hand, deftly removed a silver hair from his shoulder, poured two cups of tea, and nodded to Professor Zaicek to give the sign.
The sage asked in vain for butter: times were not easy. So he gave the sign for them to start, took a hesitant sip, and said:
"Kindly put on the light. And in the study too. After tea I want to dictate a letter to Martin Heidegger. His position is a great mystery to me. I deliberately refrain from saying a disappointment. A Socratic letter. That is to say, I shall put a few questions to him. Questions and nothing more. Yes, Stefa, of course I shall lower my voice as you request, but I shall not stop talking. As for compromises, my dear, you and I could both get up tomorrow morning and leave for America or Palestine as if to say that evil disgusts us but is none of our business. But that is not what we have taught, that is not what we have written, that is not what we have determined. It is madness to think of evil as the private affair of the evil man, just as hunger is not the private affair of the starving man or disease that of the invalid, nor is death the problem of the dead, but of the living, and that means us, my one and only Stefa. The thermometer fell again today, and apparently therefore it is getting colder. You ought to devote a moment's thought to Martin Luther. Luther was vulgar and ignorant, and yet he offers us a surprisingly clever way out of the moral dilemma. But should we, my Stefa, casually take this cheap way out? No, Stefa, no, my dear, we shall hold fast to our course even in the midst of this great darkness. There's that glass tinkling again in the street—in the garden—as if all of a sudden there are pieces of glass hanging from the branches of the trees and the wind makes them tinkle. What is it, Stefa, what does the tinkling signify, if indeed it signifies anything at all?"
