My Michael

by Amos Oz

  In the morning my landlady, Mrs. Tarnopoler, came into my room to tell me that I had cried out in my sleep. If Miss Green-baum cries out in her sleep two nights before her marriage, that is surely a sign of some great trouble. In our dreams we are shown what we must do and what we are forbidden to do. In our dreams we are made to pay the price of all our misdeeds, Mrs. Tarnopoler said. If she were my mother—she had to say it even if it made me angry with her—she would not permit me suddenly to marry some man I happened to have met in the street. I might have chanced to meet someone entirely different, or no one at all! Where would it all lead? To disaster. "You people get married at the spin of a bottle, like in the Purim game. I was married by a shadchan who knew how to bring about what is written in heaven because he knew both the families well and he had examined carefully what the bridegroom was made of and what the bride was made of. After all, your family is what you are. Parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters. Just as the well is the water. Tonight, before you go to bed, I'll make you a glass of mint tea. It's a good remedy for a troubled soul. Your worst enemies should have such dreams before their wedding night. All this has come upon you, Miss Greenbaum, because you people get married just like the idolators in the Bible: A maiden meets a strange man without knowing what he is made of and arranges the terms with him and sets the date for her own wedding as if people were alone in the world."

  As Mrs. Tarnopoler said the word "maiden" she smiled a worn-out smile. I did not speak.

  9

  MICHAEL AND I were married in the middle of March. The ceremony took place on the roof terrace of the old Rabbinate building in Jaffa Road, opposite Steimatsky's foreign bookshop, under a cloudy sky of dark gray shapes massed against a bright gray background.

  Michael and his father both wore dark gray suits, and each had a white handkerchief in his top pocket. They looked so alike that twice I mistook one for the other. I addressed my husband Michael as Yehezkel.

  Michael crushed the traditional glass with a hard stamp. As it broke the glass made a dry sound. A low rustle went through the congregation. Aunt Leah wept. My mother also wept.

  My brother Emanuel had forgotten to bring a head covering. He spread a checkered handkerchief over his unruly hair. My sister-in-law Rina held me firmly, as though I were likely to faint suddenly. I have not forgotten a thing.

  In the evening there was a party in one of the lecture rooms in the Ratisbone Building. Ten years ago, at the time of our wedding, most of the university departments were housed in wings of Christian convents. The university buildings on Mount Scopus had been cut off from the city as a result of the War of Independence. Long-established Jerusalemites still believed that this was a temporary measure. Political speculation was rife. There was still a great deal of uncertainty.

  The room in the Ratisbone Convent in which the party was held was tall and cold, and the ceiling was sooty. The ceiling was covered with faded designs in peeling paint. With difficulty I could make out various scenes in the life of Christ, from the Nativity to the Crucifixion. I turned my gaze away from the ceiling.

  My mother wore a black dress. It was the dress she had made herself after my father's death in 1943. On this occasion she had pinned a copper brooch on the dress, to mark the distinction between grief and joy. The heavy necklace she was wearing glittered in the light of the ancient lamps.

  There were some thirty or forty students at the party. Most of them were geologists, but a few were first-year literature students. My best friend Hadassah came with her young husband, and gave me a reproduction of a popular painting of an old Yemenite woman as a present. Some of my father's old friends joined together to give us a check. My brother Emanuel brought seven young friends from his kibbutz. Their gift was a gilt vase. Emanuel and his friends tried hard to be the life and soul of the party, but the presence of the students disconcerted them.

  Two of the young geologists stood up and read out a very long and tiresome duologue based on the sexual connotations of geological strata. The piece was full of bawdy insinuations and double entendres. They were trying to amuse us.

  Sarah Zeldin from the kindergarten, looking ancient and wrinkled, brought us a tea set. Every piece had a picture of a pair of lovers dressed in blue, and a gold line round the rim. She embraced my mother and they kissed each other. They conversed in Yiddish and their heads nodded up and down continuously.

  Michael's four aunts, his father's sisters, stood round a table laden with sandwiches and chatted busily about me. They did not trouble to lower their voices. They did not like me. All these years Micha had been a responsible and well-organized boy, and now he was getting married with a haste which was bound to cause vulgar gossip. Six years Aunt Jenia had been engaged in Kovno, six years before she had finally married her first husband. The details of the vulgar gossip which our haste would cause, the four aunts discussed in Polish.

  My brother and his friends from the kibbutz drank too much. They were noisy. They sang rowdy variations on a well-known drinking song. They amused the girls until their laughter lapsed into shrieks and giggles. A girl from the Geology Department, Yardena by name, with bright blond hair and sequins all over her dress, kicked off her shoes and started dancing a furious Spanish dance on her own. The other guests accompanied her with a rhythmic handclap. My brother Emanuel smashed a bottle of orange juice in her honor. Then Yardena got up on a chair and, holding a full liqueur glass, sang a popular American song about disappointed love.

  There is another incident I must record: At the end of the party my husband tried to deliver a surprise kiss on the back of my neck. He crept up on me from behind. Perhaps his fellow students had put the idea into his head. At that moment I happened to be holding a glass of wine which my brother had thrust into my hand. When Michael's lips touched my neck I jumped, and the wine was spilled on my white wedding dress. Some also fell on Aunt Jenia's brown suit. What is so important about this detail? Ever since the morning when my landlady, Mrs. Tarnopoler, had spoken to me after I cried out in my sleep I had been beset by hints and signs. Just like my father. My father was an attentive man. He went through life as if it were a preliminary course in which one learns a lesson and stores up experience.

  10

  AT THE END of the week my professor came up to me to congratulate me. It was in the lobby of Terra Sancta College, during the break in the middle of his weekly Mapu lecture. "Mrs....ah yes, Mrs. Gonen, I have just heard the good news and I must hasten to congratulate you on your, ah, nuptials. I sincerely hope that your home will be at once thoroughly Jewish and thoroughly, ah, enlightened. Having said which, I believe I have wished you every possible happiness. May I inquire as to the discipline of your thrice-fortunate bridegroom? Ah, geology! What a very symbolic conjunction of subjects. Both geology, on the one hand, and the study of literature, on the other, delve down into the depths, as it were, in quest of buried treasures. May I ask, Mrs. Gonen, whether you intend to continue with your present studies? Good, I am delighted. As you know, I take an almost paternal interest in the fortunes of my pupils."

  My husband bought a large bookcase. He had few books as yet, some twenty or thirty volumes, but in time they would multiply. Michael envisaged a whole wall lined with books. In the meantime the bookcase was almost empty. I brought home from the kindergarten a few figures I had made from twisted wire and colored raffia, to make the empty shelves seem less bare. For the time being.

  The hot water system broke down. Michael tried to mend it himself. When he was young, he said, he often used to mend taps for his father or his aunts. This time he failed. He may even have made the damage worse. The plumber was sent for. He was a good-looking North African boy, who managed to put the trouble right easily. Michael was ashamed of his failure. He stood sulking like a child. I enjoyed his discomfiture.

  "What a charming young couple," said the plumber. "I won't charge you very much."

  The first nights I could only get to sleep with the help of sleeping pills.
When I was eight my brother had been given a bedroom of his own, and ever since then I had always slept alone. It seemed odd to me for Michael to close his eyes and go to sleep. I had never seen him asleep till we were married. He would pull the covers over his head and vanish. At times I had to remind myself that the rhythmic hissing sound was simply his breathing, and that from now on there was no man on earth closer to me than he. I tossed and turned till dawn in the second-hand double bed which we had bought for next to nothing from the previous occupants of the flat. The bed was heavily decorated with arabesque carvings, stained shiny brown. It was quite unnecessarily wide, like most old furniture. It was so wide that once I awoke and thought that Michael had got up and left. He was far away, wrapped in his cocoon. Almost tangibly they came to me at dawn. Came sensuous and violent. They appeared, dark and lithe and silent.

  I had never wanted a wild man. What had I done to deserve this disappointment? When I was a girl I always thought deep down that I would marry a young scholar who was destined to become world-famous. On tiptoe I would creep into his severely furnished study, put a glass of tea down on one of the heavy German tomes scattered on his desk, empty the ashtray and close the shutters silently, then without his noticing me creep out on tiptoe. If my husband had attacked me like a man dying of thirst I should have been ashamed of myself. If Michael approached me as if I were a delicate instrument, or like a scientist handling a test tube, why was I upset? At night I recalled the warm, rough overcoat he had worn that night when we walked from Tirat Yaar to the bus stop on the Jerusalem road. And the spoon his fingers had toyed with in the Terra Sancta cafeteria came back to me on those first nights.

  The coffee cup shook in my hands as I asked my husband one of those mornings, my eyes fixed on a cracked tile in the floor, if I was a good woman. He thought for a moment, then answered, in a rather scholarly way, that he could not judge because he had never known another woman. His answer was frank; why did my hands still shake, so that the coffee spilled on the new tablecloth?

  Each morning I would fry a double omelette. Make coffee for us both. Michael sliced the bread.

  I enjoyed putting on a blue apron and arranging each vessel and utensil in its new place in my kitchen. The days were quiet. At eight o'clock Michael would leave for his lectures, carrying a new briefcase, a large black briefcase which his father had bought him as a wedding present. I said goodbye to him on the corner of the street and turned toward Sarah Zeldin's kindergarten. I had bought myself a new spring dress, a light cotton print with yellow flowers. But spring held back and the winter continued. The winter was long and hard in Jerusalem in 1950.

  Thanks to the sleeping pills I dreamed all day. Old Sarah Zeldin eyed me knowingly through her gold-rimmed spectacles. Perhaps she was imagining wild nights. I wanted to put her right, but I was lost for words. Our nights were quiet. Sometimes I thought I felt a vague expectancy creeping up my spine. As if a decisive event had not yet taken place. As if it were all a preface, a rehearsal, a preliminary. I was learning a complicated part which I should soon have to play. An important event would soon take place.

  I should like to record a curious fact about Peretz Smolenskin.

  The professor had completed his series of lectures on Abraham Mapu, and had moved on to a discussion of Smolenskin's The Wanderer in Life's Paths. He spoke in detail of the author's travels and his emotional difficulties. At that time scholars still believed that the writer himself is bound up in his book.

  I remember moments when I was overcome by a strong feeling that I knew Peretz Smolenskin personally. Possibly the portrait printed in his books reminded me of someone I knew. But I do not think that was the real reason. I felt that I had heard from him as a child things which affected my life, and that I should soon meet him again. I must, must formulate in my mind the right questions, so that I would know what to ask Peretz Smolenskin. All I had to do, in fact, was to consider the influence of Dickens on Smolenskin's stories.

  Every afternoon I sat at my usual desk in the reading room in Terra Sancta and read David Copperfield in an old English edition. Dickens' orphan, David, resembled Joseph, the orphan from the town of Madmena in Smolenskin's story. They both suffered various kinds of hardship. Both writers, since they felt pity for the orphans, had no pity on society. I would sit peacefully for two or three hours, reading about suffering and cruelty as if I were reading about long-extinct dinosaurs. Or as if I were confronted with meaningless fables of which the moral was unimportant. It was a detached acquaintance.

  At that time there worked in the basement of Terra Sancta a short, elderly librarian who wore a skullcap, and who knew me by my maiden as well as my married name. He is certainly no longer alive. I felt glad when he said to me: "Mrs. Hannah Greenbaum-Gonen: Your initials spell the Hebrew for 'festival'; I pray that all your days may be festive."

  March ended. Half of April passed. The winter was long and hard in Jerusalem in 1950. At dusk I would stand at the window and wait for my husband's return. I would breathe on the glass and draw a heart pierced by an arrow, clasped hands, the letters HG and MG and HM. Sometimes other shapes, too. As Michael's form appeared at the end of the street I hurriedly wiped them all off with my hand. From the distance Michael thought I was waving to him, and he waved back. When he came in my hand would be wet and frozen from wiping the windowpane. Michael liked to say: "Cold hands, warm heart."

  From Kibbutz Nof Harim a parcel arrived containing two sweaters knitted by my mother. A white one for Michael, and one for me in blue-gray wool like the color of his calm eyes.

  11

  ONE BLUE SATURDAY, a sudden spring struck the hills, and we set out to walk from Jerusalem to Tirat Yaar. We left the house at seven o'clock and walked down the road to Kfar Lifta. Our fingers were intertwined. It was a blue-steeped morning. The outline of the hills against the blue sky was painted with a fine brush. In the clefts of the rocks wild cyclamens nestled. Anemones blazed on the hillside. The earth was moist. Rainwater still lay in the hollows of the rocks, and the pines were washed clean. A solitary cypress stood breathing ecstatically below the ruins of the abandoned Arab village of Colonia.

  Several times Michael paused to point out geological features and to mention their names. Did I know that the sea had once covered these hills, hundreds of thousands of years ago?

  "At the end of time the sea will cover Jerusalem again," I stated with conviction.

  Michael laughed.

  "Is Hannah also among the prophets?"

  He was lively and cheerful. From time to time he picked up a stone and addressed it sternly, reprovingly. As we climbed up to Castel a large bird, an eagle or a vulture, came and circled high above our heads.

  "We're not dead yet," I exclaimed happily.

  The rocks were still slippery. I slipped deliberately, in memory of the stairs at Terra Sancta. I told Michael, too, what Mrs. Tarnopoler had said to me the day before the wedding, that people like us get married like the idolators in the Bible, like in a Purim game. A maiden fixes her eye on some man she has met by chance, when she might have happened to meet someone entirely different.

  Then I picked a cyclamen and laced it through Michael's buttonhole. He took my hand. My hand was cold between his warm fingers.

  "I'm thinking of a trite saying," Michael said with a laugh. I have not forgotten a thing. To forget means to die. I do not want to die.

  Liora, my husband's friend, had Saturday duties and could not be free to entertain us. She merely asked if we were well and returned to the kitchen. We had lunch in the dining hall. Afterwards we sprawled on the lawn, my husband's head in my lap. I was on the verge of telling Michael about my pain, about the twins. A gnawing fear restrained me. I kept quiet.

  Later we walked to the spring of Aqua Bella. Near us, at the edge of the small wood, sat a party of boys and girls who had bicycled from Jerusalem. One of them was mending a puncture. Snatches of conversation reached us.

  "Honesty is the best policy," the boy with the puncture s
aid. "Yesterday I told my father I was going to the club, and instead I went to see Samson and Delilah at the Zion Cinema. Who do you think was sitting behind me? My father in person!"

  A few moments later we overheard a conversation between two girls.

  "My sister Esther married for money. I shall only marry for love. Life isn't a game."

  "As a matter of fact, I don't mind telling you I'm not entirely opposed to a little free love. Otherwise how can you know at twenty whether your love will last till you're thirty? I heard one of the youth leaders giving a talk once, and he said that love between modern people ought to be something completely simple and natural, like drinking a glass of water. Still, I don't think one should wallow in it. Moderation in all things. Not like Rivkele, who changes boys every week. But then not like Dalia, either. If a man so much as goes up to her to ask her the time, she blushes and runs away as if they all wanted to rape her. In life one ought to follow the middle path, and avoid both extremes. Anyone who lives without restraint will die young—that's what Stefan Zweig says in one of his books."

  We went back to Jerusalem on the first bus after the end of the Sabbath. That evening a strong northwesterly wind arose. The sky clouded over. The morning's spring had been a false alarm. It was still winter in Jerusalem. We abandoned our plan of going into town to see Samson and Delilah at the Zion Cinema. We went to bed early, instead. Michael read the weekend supplement of the newspaper. I read Peretz Smolenskin's A Donkey's Burial for the next day's seminar. Our house was very quiet. The shutters were closed. The bedside lamp cast shadows that I did not like to look at. I could hear water dripping from the tap into the kitchen sink. I absorbed the rhythm.