by Amos Oz
Fascinating creatures, fish: they are both cold and alive. A striking paradox. This, surely, is the longed-for bliss: to be cold and alive.
Over the years Batya Pinski had developed an amazing ability. She was capable of counting the fish in her aquarium, up to forty or fifty, despite their perpetual motion. At times she could even guess in advance what course an individual fish or a shoal would take. Circles, spirals, zigzags, sudden totally capricious swerves, swoops, and plunges, fluid lines that drew delicate, complicated arabesques in the water of the tank.
The water in the tank was clear. Even clearer were the bodies of the fish. Transparency within transparency. The movement of fins was the slightest movement possible, hardly a movement at all. The quivering of the gills was unbelievably fine. There were black fish and striped fish, blood-red fish and fish purple like the plague, pale-green fish like stagnant water in fresh water. All of them free. None of them subject to the law of gravity. Theirs was a different law, which Batya did not know. Abrasha would have been able to discern it over the years, but he had chosen instead to lay down his life on a faraway battlefield.
4
THE ILLUSION of depth is produced by aquatic plants and scattered stones. The green silence of the underwater jungle. Fragments of rock on the bottom. Columns of coral up which plants twine. And on top of a hill of sand at the back of the tank is a stone with a hole.
Unlike the fish, the plants and stones in the aquarium are subject to the law of gravity. The fish continually swoop down on the stones and shrubs, now and then rubbing themselves against them or pecking at them. According to Batya Pinski, this is a display of malicious gloating.
As a procession of blood-red fish approaches the hollow stone, Batya Pinski rests her burning forehead against the cool glass. The passage of the live fish through the dead stone stirs a vague power deep inside her, and she trembles. That is when she has to fight back the tears. She feels for the letter in the pocket of her old dressing gown. The letter is crumpled and almost faded, but the words are still full of tenderness and compassion.
“I feel,” writes Abramek Bart, one of the directors of the kibbutz-movement publishing house, “that if we have been unfair to the beloved memory of Abrasha, we have been even more unfair to the minds of our children. The younger generation needs, and deserves, to discover the pearls of wisdom contained in the essays and letters of our dear Abrasha. I shall come and see you one of these days to rummage, in quotation marks of course, through your old papers. I am certain that you can be of great assistance to us in sorting through his literary remains and in preparing the work for publication. With fraternal good wishes, yours,” signed by some Ruth Bardor for Abramek Bart.
The old woman held the envelope to her nose. She sniffed it for a moment with her eyes closed. Her mouth hung open, revealing gaps in her teeth. A small drop hung between her nose and upper lip, where a slight mustache had begun to grow during these bad years. Then she put the letter back in the envelope, and the envelope in her pocket. Now she was exhausted and must rest in the armchair. She did not need to rest for long. It was enough for her to doze for a minute or two. A stray surviving fly began to buzz, and already she was up and ready for the chase.
Years before, Abrasha would come and bite. Love and hate. He would burst and collapse on her, and at once he would be distracted, not here, not with her.
For months before his departure the tune was always on his lips, sung in a Russian bass, shamelessly out of tune. She recalled the tune, the anthem of the Spanish freedom-fighters, full of longing, wildness, and revolt. It had swept their bare room up into the maelstrom of teeming forces as he enumerated the bleeding Spanish towns that had fallen to the enemies of mankind, counting them off one by one on his fingers. Their outlandish names conveyed to Batya a resonance of unbridled lechery. In her heart of hearts she disliked Spain and wished it no good; after all, that was where our ancestors had been burned at the stake and banished. But she held her peace. Abrasha enlarged on the implications of the struggle, expounding its dialectical significance and its place in the final battle that was being engaged all over Europe. He considered all wars as a snare and a delusion; civil wars were the only ones worth dying in. She liked to listen to all this, even though she could not and did not want to understand. It was only when he reached the climax of his speech—describing the iron laws of history and averring that the collapse of reaction would come like a thunderbolt from the blue—that she suddenly grasped what he was talking about, because she could see the thunderbolt itself in his eyes.
And suddenly he was tired of her. Perhaps he had seen the tortured look on her face, perhaps he had had a momentary glimpse of her own desires. Then he would sit down at the table, propping up his large square head with his massive elbows, and immerse himself in the newspaper, abstractedly eating one olive after another and arranging the pits in a neat pile.
5
THE KETTLE whistles fiercely as it passes boiling point. Batya Pinski gets up and makes herself some tea. Since the storm died down, at about four o’clock in the morning, she has been drinking glass after glass of tea. She has still not been out to inspect the damage. She has not even tried to open the shutters. She sits behind her drawn curtains and imagines the damage in all its details. What is there to see? It is all there before her eyes: shattered roofs, trampled flower beds, torn trees, dead cows, Felix, plumbers, electricians, experts, and talkers. All boring. Today will be devoted to the fish, until the premonition is confirmed and Abramek Bart arrives. She always relies unhesitatingly on her premonitions. One can always know things in advance, if only one really and truly tries and is not afraid of what may emerge. Abramek will come today to see the havoc. He will come because he won’t be able to contain his curiosity. But he won’t want to come just like that, like the other good-for-nothings who collect wherever there’s been a disaster. He will find some excuse. And then he’ll suddenly remember his promise to Batya, to come and rummage in and sort through Abrasha’s papers. It’s half past eight now. He will be here by two or three. There is still time. Still plenty of time to get dressed, do my hair, and get the room tidy. And to make something nice to serve him. Plenty of time now to sit down in the armchair and drink my tea quietly.
She sat down in the armchair opposite the sideboard, under the chandelier. On the floor was a thick Persian carpet, and by her side an ebony card table. All these beautiful objects would shock Abrasha if he were to come back. On the other hand, if he had come back twenty years before, he would have risen high up the ladder of the party and the movement; he would have left all those Felixes and Abrameks behind, and by now he’d be an ambassador or a minister, and she would be surrounded by even nicer furnishings. But he made up his mind to go and die for the Spaniards, and the furnishings were bought for her by Martin Zlotkin, her son-in-law. After he married Ditza he brought all the presents, then took his young bride away with him to Zurich, where he now managed a division of his father’s bank, with branches on three continents. Ditza ran a Zen study group, and every month she sent a letter with a mimeographed leaflet in German preaching humility and peace of mind. Grandchildren were out of the question, because Martin hated children and Ditza herself called him “our big baby.” Once a year they came to visit and contributed handsomely to various charities. Here in the kibbutz they had donated a library of books on socialist theory in memory of Abrasha Pinski. Martin himself, however, regarded socialism the same way he regarded horse-drawn carriages: very pretty and diverting, but out of place in this day and age, when there were other, more urgent problems.
6
ON THE eve of Abrasha’s departure Ditza was taken ill with pneumonia. She was two at the time; blonde, temperamental, and sickly. Her illness distracted Batya from Abrasha’s departure. She spent the whole day arguing with the nurses and pedagogues and by evening they had given in and allowed the sick child to be transferred in her cot from the nursery to her parents’ room in one of the shabby huts. The doctor arri
ved from the neighboring settlement in a mule cart, prescribed various medicines, and instructed her to keep the temperature of the room high. Meanwhile Abrasha packed some khaki shirts, a pair of shoes, some underwear, and a few Russian and Hebrew books into a knapsack and added some cans of sardines. In the evening, fired with the spirit, he stood by his daughter’s cot and sang her two songs, his voice trembling with emotional fervor. He even showed Batya the latest lines dividing the workers from their oppressors on a wall map of Spain. He enumerated the towns: Barcelona, Madrid, Malaga, Granada, Valencia, Valladolid, Seville. Batya half-heard him; she wanted to shout, What’s the matter with you, madman, don’t go away, stay, live; and she also wanted to shout, I hope you die. But she said nothing. She pursed her lips like an old witch. And she had never since lost that expression. She recalled that last evening as if it had been re-enacted every night for twenty-three years. Sometimes the fish moved across the picture, but they did not obscure it: their paths wound in and out of its lines, bestowing upon it an air of strange, desolate enchantment, as though the widow were confronted not by things that had happened a long time previously, but by things that were about to happen but could still be prevented. She must concentrate hard and not make a single mistake. This very day Abramek Bart will step into this room, all unawares, and then I shall have him in my power.
The cheap alarm clock started ringing at three o’clock. He got out of bed and lit the kerosene lamp. She followed him, slender and barefoot, and said, “It’s not morning yet.” Abrasha put his finger to his lips and whispered, “Sssh. The child.” Secretly she prayed that the child would wake up and scream its head off. He discovered a cobweb in the corner of the shack and stood on tiptoe to wipe it away. The spider managed to escape and hide between the boards of the low ceiling. Abrasha whispered to her: “In a month or two, when we’ve won, I’ll come back and bring you a souvenir from Spain. I’ll bring something for Ditza, too. Now, don’t make me late; the van’s leaving for Haifa at half past three.”
He went out to wash in the icy water of the faucet that stood twenty yards downhill from the shack. An alarmed night watchman hurried over to see what was going on. “Don’t worry, Felix,” Abrasha said. “It’s only the revolution leaving you for a while.” They exchanged some more banter in earnest tones, and then, in a more lighthearted voice, some serious remarks. At a quarter past, Abrasha went back to the shack, and Batya, who had followed him out in her nightdress, went inside with him again. Standing there shivering, she saw by the light of the kerosene lamp how carelessly he had shaved in his haste and the dark: he had cut himself in some places and left dark bristles in others. She stroked his cheeks and tried to wipe away the blood and dew. He was a big, warm boy, and when he began to hum the proud, sad song of the Spanish freedom-fighters deep in his chest, it suddenly occurred to Batya that he was very dear and that she must not stand in his way, because he knew where he was going and she knew nothing at all. Felix said, “Be seeing you,” and added in Yiddish, “Be well, Abrasha.” Then he vanished. She kissed Abrasha on his chest and neck, and he drew her to him and said, “There, there.” Then the child woke up and started to cry in a voice that was almost effaced by the illness. Batya picked her up, and Abrasha touched them both with his large hands and said, “There, there, what’s the trouble.”
The van honked, and Abrasha said cheerfully, “Here goes. I’m off.”
From the doorway he added, “Don’t worry about me. Good-bye.”
She soothed the child and put her back in the cot. Then she put out the lamp and stood alone at the window, watching the night paling and the mountaintops beginning to show in the east. Suddenly she was glad that Abrasha had cleared the cobweb from the corner of the shack but had not managed to kill the spider. She went back to bed and lay trembling, because she knew that Abrasha would never come back, and that the forces of reaction would win the war.
7
THE FISH in the aquarium had eaten all the flies and were floating in the clear space. Perhaps they were hankering after more tidbits. They explored the dense weeds and pecked at the arch of the hollow stone, darting suspiciously toward one another to see if one of them had managed to snatch a morsel and if there was anything left of it.
Only when the last crumbs were finished did the fish begin to sink toward the bottom of the tank. Slowly, with deliberate unconcern, they rubbed their silver bellies on the sand, raising tiny mushroom clouds. Fish are not subject to the laws of contradiction: they are cold and alive. Their movements are dreamy, like drowsy savagery.
Just before midnight, when the storm had begun to blow up, the widow had awakened and shuffled to the bathroom in her worn bedroom slippers. Then she made herself some tea and said in a loud, cracked voice, “I told you not to be crazy.” Clutching the glass of tea, she wandered around the room and finally settled in the armchair facing the aquarium, after switching on the light in the water. Then, as the storm gathered strength and battered the shutters and the trees, she watched the fish waking up.
As usual, the silverfish were the first to respond to the light. They rose gently from their haunts in the thick weeds and propelled themselves up toward the surface with short sharp thrusts of their fins. A single black molly made the rounds of its shoal, as if rousing them all for a journey. In no time at all the whole army was drawn up in formation and setting out.
At one o’clock an old shack next to the cobbler’s hut collapsed. The storm banged the tin roof against the walls, and the air howled and whistled. At the same moment the red swordfish woke up and ranged themselves behind their leader, a giant with a sharp black sword. It was not the collapse of the shack that had awakened the swordfish. Their cousins the green swordfish had weighed anchor and gently set sail into the forest, as if bent on capturing the clearing abandoned by the silverfish. Only the solitary fighting-fish, the lord of the tank, still slept in his home among the corals. He had responded to the sudden light with a shudder of disgust. The zebra fish played a childish game of tag around the sleeping monarch.
The last to come back to life were the guppies, the dregs of the aquarium, an inflamed rabble roaming restlessly hither and thither in search of crumbs. Slow snails crawled on the plants and on the glass walls of the tank, helping to keep them clean. The widow sat all night watching the aquarium, holding the empty glass, conjuring the fish to move from place to place, calling them after the Spanish towns: Malaga, Valencia, Barcelona, Madrid, Cordova. While outside the clashing winds sliced the crowns off the stately palm trees and broke the spines of the cypresses.
She put her feet up on the ebony card table, a present from Martin and Ditza Zlotkin. She thought about Zen Buddhism, humility, civil war, the final battle where there would be nothing to lose, a thunderbolt from the blue. She fought back exhaustion and despair and rehearsed the unanswerable arguments she would use when the time came. All the while her eyes strayed to another world, and her lips whispered: There, there, quiet now.
Toward dawn, when the wind had died away and we were going out to assess the damage, the old woman fell into a half-sleep full of curses and aching joints. Then she got up, made a fresh glass of tea, and began to chase flies all over the room with an agility that belied her years. In her heart she knew that Abramek Bart would definitely come today, and that he would use his promise as an excuse. She saw the plaster fall from the ceiling as the pole fell and broke some of the roof tiles. The real movement was completely noiseless. Without a sound the monarch arose and began to steer himself toward the hollow stone. As he reached the arched tunnel he stopped and froze. He took on a total stillness. The stillness of the water. The immobility of the light. The silence of the hollow stone.
8
HAD IT not been for Ditza, Batya Pinski would have married Felix in the early nineteen-forties.
It was about two years after the awful news had come from Madrid. Once again a final war was being waged in Europe, and on the wall of the dining hall there hung a map covered with arrows, and a collecti
on of heartening slogans and news clippings. Ditza must have been four or five. Batya had got over the disaster and had taken on a new bloom, which was having a disturbing effect on certain people’s emotions. She always dressed in black, like a Spanish widow. And when she spoke to men, their nostrils flared as if they had caught a whiff of wine. Every morning, on her way to the sewing room, she walked, erect and slender, past the men working in the farmyard. Occasionally one of those tunes came back to her, and she would sing with a bitter sadness that made the other sewing women exchange glances and whisper, “Uh-huh, there she goes again.”
Felix was biding his time. He helped Batya over her minor difficulties and even concerned himself with the development of Ditza’s personality. Later, when he had submitted to the desires of the party and exchanged the cowsheds for political office, he made a habit of bringing Ditza little surprises from the big city. He also treated the widow with extreme respect, as if she were suffering from an incurable illness and it was his task to ease somewhat her last days. He would let himself into her room in the middle of the morning and wash the floor, secreting chocolates in unlikely places for her to discover later. Or put up metal coat hooks, bought out of his expense allowance, to replace the broken wooden ones. And he would supply her with carefully selected books: pleasant books, with never a hint of loss or loneliness, Russian novels about the development of Siberia, the five-year plan, change of heart achieved through education.
“You’re spoiling the child,” Batya would sometimes say. And Felix would word his answer thoughtfully and with tact:
