A Tale of Love and Darkness

by Amos Oz

  It was an initiation rite, a coming of age: anyone whose books are standing upright is no longer a child, he is a man. I was like my father now. My books were standing to attention.

  I had made one terrible mistake. When Father went off to work, I was free to do whatever I wanted with my corner of the bookcase, but I had a wholly childish view about how these things were done. So it was that I arranged my books in order of height. The tallest books were the ones that by now were beneath my dignity, children's books, in rhyme, with pictures, the books that had been read to me when I was a toddler. I did it because I wanted to fill the whole length of shelf that had been allotted to me. I wanted my section to be packed full, crowded, overflowing, like my father's shelves. I was still in a state of euphoria when Father came home from work, cast a shocked glance toward my bookshelf, and then, in total silence, gave me a long hard look that I shall never forget: it was a look of contempt, of bitter disappointment beyond anything that could be expressed in words, almost a look of utter genetic despair. Finally he hissed at me with pursed lips: "Have you gone completely crazy? Arranging them by height? Have you mistaken your books for soldiers? Do you think they are some kind of honor guard? The firemen's band on parade?"

  Then he stopped talking. There came a long, awesome silence from my father, a sort of Gregor Samsa silence, as though I had turned into a cockroach before his eyes. From my side too there was a guilty silence, as though I really had been some kind of wretched insect all along, and now my secret was out and everything was lost.

  At the end of the silence Father began talking, and in the space of twenty minutes he revealed to me the facts of life. He held nothing back. He initiated me into the deepest secrets of the librarian's lore: he laid bare the main highway as well as the forest tracks, dizzying prospects of variations, nuances, fantasies, exotic avenues, daring schemes, and even eccentric whims. Books can be arranged by subject, by alphabetical order of authors' names, by series or publishers, in chronological order, by languages, by topics, by areas and fields, or even by place of publication. There are so many different ways.

  And so I learned the secret of diversity. Life is made up of different avenues. Everything can happen in one of several ways, according to different musical scores and parallel logics. Each of these parallel logics is consistent and coherent on its own terms, perfect in itself, indifferent to all the others.

  In the days that followed I spent hours on end arranging my little library, twenty or thirty books that I dealt and shuffled like a pack of cards, rearranging them in all sorts of different ways.

  So I learned from books the art of composition, not from what was in them but from the books themselves, from their physical being. They taught me about that dizzying no-man's-land or twilight zone between the permitted and the forbidden, between the legitimate and the eccentric, between the normative and the bizarre. This lesson has remained with me ever since. By the time I discovered love, I was no greenhorn. I knew that there were different menus. I knew that there was a motorway and a scenic route, and also unfrequented byways where the foot of man had barely trodden. There were permitted things that were almost forbidden and forbidden things that were almost permitted. There were so many different ways.

  Occasionally my parents allowed me to take books from my father's shelves outside into the yard to shake off the dust. No more than three books at a time, so as not to get them out of order, so that each one would get back to its proper place. It was a heavy but delicious responsibility, because I found the smell of book dust so intoxicating that I sometimes forgot my task, my duty, my responsibilities, and stayed outside until my mother became anxious and dispatched my father on a rescue mission to make sure I was not suffering from heatstroke, that I had not been bitten by a dog, and he always discovered me curled up in a corner of the yard, deep in a book, with my knees tucked under me, my head on one side, my mouth half open. When Father asked me, half angrily, half affectionately, what was the matter with me this time, it took a while for me to come back to this world, like someone who has drowned or fainted, and returns slowly, reluctantly, from unimaginable distant parts to this vale of tears of everyday chores.

  All through my childhood I loved to arrange and rearrange things, each time slightly differently. Three or four empty egg cups could become a series of fortifications, or a group of submarines, or a meeting of the leaders of the great powers at Yalta. I made occasional brief sorties into the realm of unbridled disorder. There was something very bold and exciting about this: I loved emptying a box of matches on the floor and trying to find all the infinite possible combinations.

  Throughout the years of the World War there hung on the wall in the passage a large map of the theaters of war in Europe, with pins and different-colored flags. Every day or two Father moved them in accordance with the news on the wireless. And I constructed a private, parallel reality: I spread out on the rush mat my own theater of war, my virtual reality, and I moved armies around, executed pincer movements and distractions, captured bridgeheads, outflanked the enemy, resigned myself to tactical withdrawals that I later turned into strategic breakthroughs.

  I was a child fascinated by history. I attempted to rectify the errors of the commanders of the past. I refought the great Jewish revolt against the Romans, rescued Jerusalem from destruction at the hands of Titus's army, pushed the campaign onto the enemy's ground, brought Bar Kochba's troops to the walls of Rome, took the Coliseum by storm, and planted the Hebrew flag on top of the Capitol. To this end I transported the British army's Jewish Brigade to the first century ad and the days of the Second Temple, and reveled in the devastation that a couple of machine guns could inflict on the splendid legions of the accursed Hadrian and Titus. A light aircraft, a single Piper, brought the proud Roman Empire to its knees. I turned the doomed struggle of the defenders of Masada into a decisive Jewish victory with the aid of a single mortar and a few hand grenades.

  And in fact that selfsame strange urge I had when I was small—the desire to grant a second chance to something that could never have one—is still one of the urges that set me going today whenever I sit down to write a story.

  Many things have happened in Jerusalem. The city has been destroyed, rebuilt, destroyed, and rebuilt again. Conqueror after conqueror has come, ruled for a while, left behind a few walls and towers, some cracks in the stone, a handful of potsherds and documents, and disappeared. Vanished like the morning mist down the hilly slopes. Jerusalem is an old nymphomaniac who squeezes lover after lover to death before shrugging him off her with a yawn, a black widow who devours her mates while they are still in her.

  Meanwhile, far away on the other side of the world, new continents and islands were being discovered. My mother used to say, You're too late, child, forget it, Magellan and Columbus have already discovered even the most far-flung islands. I argued with her. I said, How can you be so sure? After all, before Columbus came along, people thought all the world was known and there was nothing left to discover.

  Between the rush mat, the legs of the furniture, and the space under my bed I sometimes discovered not only unknown islands but new stars, solar systems, entire galaxies. If I'm ever put in prison, no doubt I'll miss my freedom and one or two other things, but I'll never suffer from boredom so long as I'm allowed to have a box of dominoes, a pack of cards, a couple of boxes of matches or a handful of buttons. I'll spend my days arranging and rearranging them, moving them apart and together, forming little compositions. It may be because I was an only child: I had no brothers and sisters, and very few friends, who soon tired of me because they wanted action and couldn't adjust to the epic pace of my games.

  Sometimes I would start a new game on Monday, then spend the whole of Tuesday morning at school thinking out the next move, make one or two moves that afternoon, and leave the rest for Wednesday or Thursday. My friends hated it, they went outside and played at chasing one another around the backyards, while I went on pursuing my own game of history on the floor day
after day, moving troops, besieging a castle or a city, routing, taking by storm, starting a resistance movement in the mountains, attacking fortresses and defense works, liberating and then reconquering, extending or contracting frontiers marked out by matchsticks. If a grown-up accidentally trod on my little world, I would declare a hunger strike or a moratorium on teeth brushing. But eventually doomsday would come, and my mother, unable to stand the accumulation of dust, would sweep everything away, ships, armies, cities, mountains, coasts, entire continents, like a nuclear holocaust.

  Once, when I was about nine, an elderly uncle by the name of Nehemia taught me a French proverb: "In love as in war." I knew nothing at that time about love, except for the obscure connection in the Edison Cinema between love and dead Indians. But from what Uncle Nehemia had said I drew the inference that it was best not to hurry. In later years I realized that I had been totally mistaken, at least so far as warfare was concerned: on the battlefield, speed is of the essence. Perhaps my mistake came from the fact that Uncle Nehemiah himself was a slow-moving man who hated change. When he was standing up, it was almost impossible to make him sit down, and once he was seated, he could not be induced to stand up. Get up, Nehemiah, they would say to him, for goodness sake, make a move, what's the matter with you, it's very late, how long are you going to go on sitting there, till tomorrow morning, till next year, till kingdom come?

  And he would answer: At least.

  Then he would reflect, scratch himself, smile slyly to himself as though he had fathomed our ruse, and add: Where's the fire?

  His body, like all bodies, had a natural disposition to remain where it was.

  I am not like him. I'm very fond of change, encounters, travel. But I was fond of Uncle Nehemiah too. Not long ago I looked for him, without success, in Givat Shaul Cemetery. The cemetery has grown; soon it'll reach the edge of Lake Beit Neqofa or the outskirts of Motsa. I sat on a bench for half an hour or so; in the cypress trees a stubborn wasp hummed and a bird repeated the same phrase five or six times, but all I could see were gravestones, trees, hills, and clouds.

  A thin woman dressed in black with a black headscarf walked past me, with a five- or six-year-old child holding on to her. The child's little fingers were gripping the side of her dress, and both of them were crying.

  4

  ALONE AT home one late winter afternoon. It was five or half past, and outside it was cold and dark, windswept rain lashed the closed iron shutters, my parents had gone to have tea with Mala and Staszek Rudnicki in Chancellor Street, on the corner of the Street of the Prophets, and would be back, they had promised me, just before eight, or at a quarter past or twenty past eight at the latest. And even if they were late, there was nothing to worry about, after all they were only at the Rudnickis', it wasn't more than a quarter of an hour away.

  Instead of children Mala and Staszek Rudnicki had two Persian cats, Chopin and Schopenhauer. There was also a cage in a corner of the salon containing an old, half-blind bird. So the bird wouldn't feel lonely they had put another bird into its cage, made by Mala Rudnicki from a painted pinecone on stick legs, with multicolored paper wings embellished with a few real feathers. Loneliness, Mother said, is like a hammer blow that shatters glass but hardens steel. Father treated us to a learned discourse on the etymology of the word "hammer," with all its ramifications in various languages.

  My father was fond of explaining to me all sorts of connections between words. Origins, relationships, as though words were yet another complicated family from Eastern Europe, with a multitude of second and third cousins, aunts by marriage, great-nieces, in-laws, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Even words like "aunt" or "cousin" had their own family history, their own network of relationships. Did we know, for example, that "aunt" came from the Latin amita, which properly denotes a father's sister, while "uncle" came from the Latin avunculus, which means specifically a mother's brother? The Hebrew word for uncle, dod, also means a lover, although I am not convinced that it was really the same word originally. You must remind me some time, Father said, to have a look in the big dictionary and check precisely where these words came from and how their use has changed over the generations. Or rather, don't remind me, go and fetch the dictionary right away and let's educate ourselves here and now, you and I, and while you're at it, take your dirty cup to the kitchen.

  In the yards and in the street the silence is so black and wide that you can hear the sound of the clouds flying low among the roofs, stroking the tops of the cypresses. A dripping faucet in the bath and a rustling or scratching sound so faint that it is barely audible, you sense it at the tips of the hairs on the back of your neck, coming from the space between the wardrobe and the wall.

  I switch on the light in my parents' room, and from my father's desk I take eight or nine paper clips, a pencil sharpener, a couple of small notebooks, a long-necked inkwell full of black ink, an eraser, and a packet of thumbtacks, and use all these to construct a new frontier kibbutz. A wall and a tower in the depth of the desert on the rug; arrange the paper clips in a semicircle, stand the pencil sharpener and eraser on either side of the tall inkwell that is my water tower, and surround the whole with a fence made of pencils and pens and fortified with thumbtacks.

  Soon there will be a raid: a gang of bloodthirsty marauders (a couple of dozen buttons) will attack the settlement from the east and south, but we will play a trick on them. We'll open the gate, let them advance into the farmyard where the blood bath will take place, the gate will be barred behind them so that they cannot escape, then I shall give the order to fire, and at that instant, from every rooftop and the top of the inkwell that serves as the water tower, the pioneers, represented by my white chessmen, will open fire, and with a few furious salvos they will wipe out the trapped enemy force, "chanting hymns of glory, singing loud the story of the slaughter gory, then I'll raise a song of praise" and promote the rush mat to serve as the Mediterranean Sea, with the bookcase standing for the coast of Europe, the sofa as Africa, the Straits of Gibraltar passing between the legs of the chair, a scattering of playing cards representing Cyprus, Sicily, and Malta, the notebooks can be aircraft carriers, the eraser and pencil sharpeners destroyers, the thumbtacks mines, and the paper clips will be submarines.

  It was cold in the apartment. Instead of putting on another pullover, as I was told to do, to save electricity, I would put on the electric heater, just for ten minutes or so. The heater had two elements, but there was an economy switch that was always set to light only one of them. The lower one. I stared at it and watched the coil begin to glow. It lit up gradually: at first you couldn't see anything, you just heard a series of crackling sounds, as when you walk on grains of sugar, and after that a pale purplish gleam appeared at either end of the element and a hint of pink began to spread toward the center, like a faint blush on a shy cheek, which turned into a deep blush, which soon ran riot in a shameless display of naked yellow and lecherous lime green, until the glow reached the middle of the coil and glowed unstoppably, a red-hot fire like a savage sun in the shiny metal dish of the reflector that you couldn't look at without squinting, and the element now was incandescent, dazzling, unable to contain itself; any moment now it would melt and pour down on my Mediterranean Sea like an erupting volcano raining cascades of molten lava to destroy my flotilla of destroyers and submarines.

  All this time its partner, the upper element, slumbered cold and indifferent. The brighter the other one glowed, the more indifferent this one appeared. Shrugging its shoulders, watching everything from a ringside seat but totally unmoved. I suddenly shuddered, as though I could sense on my skin all the pent-up tension between the two coils, and realized that I had a simple, quick way to ensure that the indifferent coil too would have no choice but to glow, so that it too would quiver fit to burst with overflowing fire—but that was forbidden. It was forbidden not only because of the crying waste but also because of the danger of overloading the circuit, of blowing a fuse and plunging the house in darkness,
and who would go out in the middle of the night to fetch Baruch Goldfingers for me?

  The second coil was only if I was crazy, completely crazy, and to hell with the consequences. But what if my parents came back before I had managed to switch it off? Or if I managed to switch it off in time but the coil didn't have time to cool down and play possum, then what could I say in my defense? So I must resist the temptation. Hold myself back. And I might as well start clearing up the mess I made and put everything away in its place.

  5

  SOMETIMES THE facts threaten the truth. I once wrote about the real reason for my grandmother's death. My grandmother Shlomit arrived in Jerusalem straight from Vilna one hot summer's day in 1933, took one startled look at the sweaty markets, the colorful stalls, the swarming side streets full of the cries of hawkers, the braying of donkeys, the bleating of goats, the squawks of pullets hung up with their legs tied together, and blood dripping from the necks of slaughtered chickens, she saw the shoulders and arms of Middle Eastern men and the strident colors of the fruit and vegetables, she saw the hills all around and the rocky slopes, and immediately pronounced her final verdict: "The Levant is full of germs."

  My grandmother lived in Jerusalem for some twenty-five years, she knew hard times and a few good ones, but to her last day she found no reason to modify her verdict. They say that the day after they arrived, she ordered my grandfather, as she would every single day they lived in Jerusalem, winter and summer alike, to get up at six or six thirty every morning and to spray Flit in every corner of the apartment to drive away the germs, to spray under the bed, behind the wardrobe, and even into the storage space and between the legs of the sideboard, and then to beat all the mattresses and the bedclothes and eiderdowns. From my childhood I remember Grandpa Alexander standing on the balcony in the early morning in his vest and bedroom slippers, beating the pillows like Don Quixote attacking the wineskins, bringing the carpet beater down on them repeatedly with all the force of his wretchedness or despair. Grandma Shlomit would stand a few steps behind him, taller than he, dressed in a flowery silk dressing gown buttoned all the way up, her hair tied with a green butterfly-like bow, as stiff and upright as the headmistress of a boarding school for young ladies, commanding the field of battle until the daily victory was won.