My Michael

by Amos Oz

  That autumn, too, I went back to working five hours a day at old Sarah Zeldin's kindergarten. We began to repay the money we had borrowed after our wedding. We even paid back some of the money we had had from Michael's aunts. But we could not begin to save up for a deposit on a new apartment because on Passover Eve I went out without consulting Michael and bought an expensive modern sofa and three matching armchairs at Zuzovsky's.

  As soon as Michael received planning permission from the municipality we bricked up the balcony. We called the new room the study. Here Michael put his desk, and his bookshelves were also moved in. I bought Michael the first volume of the Encyclopaedia Hebraica as a present on our fourth wedding anniversary. Michael bought me an Israeli-made radio.

  Michael sat up late at night working. A glass door separated the new study from my bedroom. Through the glass door the reading lamp threw giant shadows on the wall opposite my bed. At night Michael's shadow intruded on my dreams. If he opened a drawer or moved a book, put on his glasses or lit his pipe, dark shadows lapped the wall facing me. The shadows fell in total silence. At times they took on shapes. I closed my eyes hard, but still the shapes would not relax their grip. When I opened my eyes the whole room seemed to tumble with every movement of my husband at his desk at night.

  I was sorry that Michael was a geologist and not an architect. If only he could be poring at night over plans of buildings, roads, strong fortresses, or a naval harbor in which the British destroyer Dragon might anchor.

  Michael's hand was delicate and steady. What neat diagrams he drew. He drew a geological plan on thin tracing paper, and his lips as he worked were tightly pressed together. He seemed to me like a general or a statesman, taking a fateful decision with icy calm. If Michael had been an architect perhaps I could have come to accept the shadow he cast on my bedroom wall at night. Strange and terrifying at night was the thought that Michael was exploring unknown layers in the depths of the earth. As if he were desecrating and provoking at night an unforgiving world.

  Eventually I got up and made myself a glass of mint tea, as I had learned to do from Mrs. Tarnopoler, who was my landlady before I was married. Or else I turned on the light and read until midnight or one o'clock, when my husband would silently lie down beside me, say good night, kiss me on the lips, and pull the bedclothes over his head.

  The books I read at night gave no indication that I had once been a student of literature: Somerset Maugham or Daphne du Maurier in English, in paperbacks with glossy covers; Stefan Zweig, Romain Rolland. My taste had become sentimental. I cried when I read André Maurois' Women Without Love in a cheap translation. I cried like a schoolgirl. I had not lived up to my professor's expectations. I had never fulfilled the hopes he had expressed for me shortly after my wedding.

  When I stood by the kitchen sink I could see down into the garden below. Our garden was neglected, full of mud in the winter and dust and thistles in the summer. Broken dishes rolled around in the garden. Yoram Kamnitzer and his friends had built stone forts whose ruins remained. At the end of the garden stood a broken tap. There is a Russian steppe, there is Newfoundland, there are the isles of the archipelago, and I am exiled here. But at times my eyes are opened and I can see Time. Time is like a police van patrolling the streets at night, a red light flashing rapidly, the wheels moving slowly by comparison. The wheels swish softly. Cautiously moving. Slowly. Menacing. Prowling.

  I wanted to imagine that inanimate objects obey a different rhythm because they have no thoughts.

  For example, on a branch of the fig tree which sprouted in our garden a rusty bowl had hung suspended for years. Perhaps a long-dead neighbor had once thrown it from the window of the flat above and it had caught in the branches. It was already hanging covered in rust outside our kitchen window when we first arrived. Four, five years. Even the fierce winds of winter had not brought it to the ground. On New Year's Day, however, I stood at the kitchen sink and saw with my own eyes how the bowl dropped from the tree. No breeze stirred the air, no cat or bird moved the branches. But strong forces came to fruition at that moment. The rusty metal crumbled and the bowl clattered to the ground. What I mean to say is this: All those years I had observed complete repose in an object in which a hidden process was taking place, all those years.

  22

  MOST OF OUR neighbors are Orthodox, with a lot of children. At the age of four Yair sometimes comes out with questions which I cannot answer. I send him with his questions to his father. And Michael, who sometimes speaks to me as if I were an unruly little girl, converses with his son as man to man. The sounds of their conversation reach me in the kitchen. They never interrupt each other. Michael has taught Yair to end whatever he has to say with the words "I have finished." Michael himself sometimes uses this expression when he comes to the end of one of his answers. This was the method my husband chose to teach his son that people should not interrupt one another.

  Yair might ask, for instance, "Why does everyone think something different?" Michael would reply, "People are different." Yair would then ask, "Why aren't there two men or two children the same?" Michael would admit that he didn't know the answer. The child would pause for a moment, consider carefully, then say perhaps:

  "I think Mummy knows everything, because Mummy never says, 'I don't know.' Mummy says, 'I know but I can't explain.' I think if you can't explain how can you say you know? I've finished."

  Michael, perhaps with a restrained smile, would try to explain to his son the difference between thinking something and saying it.

  Whenever I overheard a conversation like this I could not help remembering my late father, who was an attentive man who always scrutinized every utterance he heard, even from a child, for signs or hints of some truth which was denied him, at whose threshold he must prostrate himself all his life.

  At the age of four and five Yair was a strong, silent child. Sometimes he displayed a tendency towards extraordinary violence. Perhaps he had discovered how timid the neighbors' children were. His drowsy gestures could even inspire awe in older children. He occasionally came home beaten and bruised by other children's parents. Usually, however, he refused to tell us who was responsible for his wounds. If Michael pressed him, the reply often was:

  "I deserved it because I started it. I started fighting first and then they fought me back. I've finished."

  "Why did you start it?"

  "They made me."

  "How did they make you?"

  "All sorts of ways."

  "Such as?"

  "Can't tell. Not saying things—doing things."

  "What things?"

  "Things."

  I noticed a sullen insolence in my son. A concentrated interest in food. In objects. Electrical instruments. The clock. Long silences, as if he was continuously absorbed in some complicated mental process.

  Michael never raised his hand against the child, both as a matter of principle and because he himself had been brought up with understanding and had never been beaten as a child. I cannot say as much for myself. I beat Yair whenever he displayed this sullen insolence. I would thrash him, without looking into calm gray eyes, until, panting, I succeeded in wringing the sobs from his throat. His willpower was so strong that it sometimes made me shudder, and when his pride was finally broken he would throw me a grotesque whimper which sounded more like an imitation of a crying child.

  Upstairs from us, on the second floor, across the landing from the Kamnitzers, lived an elderly couple with no children. Their name was Glick. He was a pious little haberdasher and she suffered from fits of hysteria. I would be awakened at night by a prolonged low sobbing like that of a young puppy. Sometimes a harsh scream sounded before dawn, to be followed after a pause by a second, muffled as if under water. I would leap out of bed and run in my nightdress to the child's bedroom. Time and again I thought that Yair was screaming, that something terrible was happening to my son.

  I hated the nights.

  The quarter of Mekor Baruch is built of stone
and iron. Iron handrails on flights of steps climbing the outer walls of ancient houses. Dirty iron gates inscribed with the date of erection and the names of the donor and his parents. Battered fences frozen in contorted poses. Rusty shutters hanging on a single hinge, threatening to hurl themselves down into the street. And painted in red on a peeling plaster wall near our house, the slogan "Judaea fell in blood and fire, in blood and fire will Judaea rise." It is not the idea in this slogan which appeals to me, but a certain symmetry. A kind of disciplined balance which I cannot explain, but which is also present with me at night, when the street lights print the shadow of the window-bars on the wall opposite and everything seems to be doubled.

  When the wind blows it rattles the corrugated iron structures which people erect on their balconies and roofs. This sound, too, contributes to the depression which continually returns. Silently the pair of them float over the neighborhood at the end of the night. Naked to the waist, barefoot and light they glide outside. Lean fists hammer on the corrugated iron, because they have been ordered to scare the dogs into a frenzy. Towards dawn the dogs' barking dies down to a confused howl. Outside the twins are streaming on. I can sense them. I can hear the padding of their bare feet. They laugh to each other without a sound. They are standing on one another's shoulders and climbing to me up the fig tree which grows in the garden. They have instructions to seize a branch and tap my shutter with it. Not hard. Softly. Once I heard fingernails clawing at the shutters. Once they chose to throw pine cones. They have been sent to wake me. Someone imagines I am asleep. When I was young I was full of the strength to love, and now my strength to love is dying. I do not want to die.

  In the course of these years I occasionally asked myself similar questions to those which had passed through my mind as we returned on foot that night from Tirat Yaar three weeks before our wedding. What do you find in this man and what do you know about him? Suppose another man had caught hold of your arm when you slipped on the stairs at Terra Sancta? Are there forces at work, forces perhaps which there is no possibility of identifying, or was Mrs. Tarnopoler right in what she said two days before the wedding?

  What my husband thinks I make no attempt to guess. On his face I see repose, as if his wish has been granted and now he stands, vacant and contented, waiting for the bus which will take him home after an enjoyable visit to the zoo, to eat, get undressed, and go to bed. At primary school when we were describing an outing we used to summarize our feelings at the end with the words "tired but happy." That is precisely the expression that Michael has on his face most days.

  Michael takes two buses every morning to get to the University. The briefcase which his father had bought him as a wedding present wore out, being a relic of the years of austerity and made of some synthetic material; but he would not let me buy him a new one. He was sentimentally attached, he said, to the old one.

  With firm, unerring fingers Time wears down inanimate objects. All things are at his mercy.

  In his briefcase Michael carries his lecture notes, which he numbers in roman numerals instead of the usual arabic ones. He also keeps in his briefcase, winter and summer alike, a woolen scarf knitted for him by my mother. And also some tablets to relieve heartburn. Recently Michael has begun to suffer from slight heartburn, especially just before lunch.

  In winter my husband wears a bluish-gray raincoat which matches the color of his eyes. And he wears a plastic cover over his hat. In summer he wears a loose mesh shirt, with no tie. His body half-shows through the shirt, lean and hairy. He still insists on wearing his hair cropped short, so that he looks like a sportsman or an army officer. Has Michael ever longed to be a sportsman or an army officer? How little one is permitted to know about another person. Even if one is very attentive. Even if one never forgets a thing.

  We do not talk much on an ordinary afternoon: could you pass me, will you hold, hurry up, don't make a mess, where's Yair, supper's ready, would you mind turning out the light in the hall.

  In the evening, after the nine o'clock news, we peel and eat fruit, facing each other in our armchairs. Khrushchev will smash Gomulka; Eisenhower won't dare. Does the Government really intend to keep. The King of Iraq is a puppet in the hands of young officers. The elections will not produce many changes.

  Then Michael sits down at his desk and puts on his reading glasses. I put the radio on softly and listen to music. Not a concert, but dance music from some far-off foreign station. At eleven I go to bed. There is a water pipe in one of the walls. The sounds of hidden pouring. The coughing. The wind.

  Every Tuesday, on his way back from the University, Michael goes through the center of town and buys two movie tickets at Kahana's Agency. We start dressing at eight o'clock and at a quarter past we leave the house. The pale youth Yoram Kamnitzer keeps an eye on Yair while Michael and I are out at the show. In return I help him prepare for his Hebrew literature examinations. It is thanks to him that I have not forgotten everything I learned as a student. We sit and read the essays of Ahad Haam together, and compare Priest and Prophet, Flesh and Spirit, Slavery and Freedom. All the ideas are expressed in symmetrically contrasted pairs. I like this kind of system. Yoram, too, thinks that prophecy, freedom, and the spirit call on us to liberate ourselves from the bonds of slavery and the flesh. Whenever I admire one of his poems a green flicker passes through Yoram's eyes. Yoram's poems are written with passion. He uses unusual words and phrases. Once I asked him the meaning of the expression "ascetic love" which appeared in one of his poems. Yoram explained that there are some loves which give us no cause for rejoicing. I repeated a remark I had heard a long time before from my husband, that when people are contented and have nothing to do, emotion spreads like a malignant tumor.

  Yoram said "Mrs. Gonen," and his voice suddenly broke so that the last syllable sounded like a screech, because he was at the age when boys have difficulty in controlling their voices.

  Whenever Michael came into the room when I was sitting with Yoram the boy seemed to experience an inner contraction. He hunched his back and stared at the floor in an uncomfortable sort of way, as if he had spilled something on the rug or knocked over a vase. Yoram Kamnitzer would finish at high school, go to the university, and then teach Hebrew and Bible in Jerusalem. Every New Year he would send us a pretty greeting card, and we would send one back to him. Time would still be there, a tall, transparent presence, hostile to Yoram, hostile to me, boding no good.

  One evening in the autumn of 1954 Michael came home carrying a grayish-white kitten in his arms. He had found it in David Yelin Street, by the wall of the Orthodox girls' school.

  "Isn't he sweet? Touch him. Look how he lifts up his tiny paw to threaten us, as if he were a leopard or a panther at least. Where's Yair's animal book? Get the book, please, Mummy, and let's show Yair how cats and leopards are cousins."

  As Michael took my son's hand and made him stroke the kitten, I noticed a tremor at the corner of the child's mouth, as if the kitten was fragile or as if it was dangerous to stroke it.

  "Look, Mummy, he's looking right at me. What does he want?"

  "He wants to eat, dear. And to sleep. Go and make him a place to sleep on the kitchen floor. No, stupid, cats don't need blankets."

  "Why not?"

  "Because they're not like humans. They're different."

  "Why are they different?"

  "That's the way they're made. I can't explain."

  "Daddy, why don't cats use blankets like us?"

  "Because cats have warm fur coats, so they can keep warm without blankets."

  Michael and Yair played with the kitten all evening. They called him "Snowy." He was only a few weeks old, and still displayed a touching lack of coordination in his movements. He tried hard to catch a moth which was fluttering just below the kitchen ceiling. His leaps were ridiculous because he lacked any sense of height or distance; he would jump a few inches off the floor, opening and closing his little jaws as if he had already reached the moth. We all burst out laughing. The kit
ten bridled when we laughed and uttered a hiss which was intended to be bloodcurdling.

  "Snowy will grow big," Yair said, "and be the strongest cat in the neighborhood. We will teach him to guard the house and catch thieves and infiltrators. Snowy will be our watchcat."

  "He needs to be fed," Michael said, "and he also needs to be petted. Every creature needs to be loved. So we will love Snowy and Snowy will love us. There's no need to kiss him, though, Yair. Mummy will be cross with you."

  I contributed a green plastic bowl, milk, and cheese. Michael had to rub Snowy's nose in the milk, as the kitten had not yet learned to drink from a bowl. The animal was startled; it spat and shook its wet face vigorously, scattering white droplets. Finally it turned a soggy, pathetic, defeated face towards us. Snowy's color was not snowy, but grayish white. An ordinary cat.

  In the night the kitten discovered a narrow opening in the kitchen window. He slipped across the balcony into the bedroom and found our bed. He chose to curl up at my feet, even though it was Michael who had adopted him and played with him all evening. He was an ungrateful kitten. He ignored the person who had been kind to him, and fawned instead on the person who had treated him coldly. Some years before Michael Gonen had said to me, "A cat will never make friends with the wrong sort of person." Now I realized that this had simply been a metaphor and not literally true, and that Michael had said it merely to appear original. The kitten lay curled up at my feet, uttering a low gurgling sound which was both calm and calming. Towards dawn the kitten scratched at the door. I got up and let him out. No sooner had he gone out than he started mewing through the door to be let in again. As soon as he was in he stalked over to the balcony door, yawned, stretched, growled, mewed, and pleaded to be let out. Snowy was a capricious kitten, or else perhaps just very indecisive.