A Tale of Love and Darkness

by Amos Oz

  In the context of her constant war against germs Grandma used to boil fruit and vegetables uncompromisingly. She would wipe the bread twice over with a cloth soaked in a pinkish disinfectant solution called Cali. After each meal she did not wash the dishes but gave them the treatment normally reserved for Passover Eve, boiling them for a long time. Grandma Shlomit boiled her own person, too, three times a day: summer and winter alike she took three baths in nearly boiling water, to eradicate the germs. She lived to a ripe old age, the bugs and viruses crossing to the other side of the street when they saw her approaching in the distance, and when she was over eighty, after a couple of heart attacks, Dr. Kromholtz warned her: Dear lady, unless you desist from these fervid ablutions of yours, I am unable to take responsibility for any possible untoward and regrettable consequences.

  But Grandma could not give up her baths. Her fear of germs was too strong for her. She died in the bath.

  Her heart attack is a fact, but the truth is that she died from an excess of hygiene. Facts have a tendency to obscure the truth. It was cleanliness that killed her. Although the motto of her life in Jerusalem, "The Levant is full of germs," may testify to an earlier, deeper truth than the demon of hygiene, a truth that was repressed and invisible. After all, Grandma Shlomit came from northeastern Europe, where there were just as many germs as there were in Jerusalem, not to mention all sorts of other noxious things.

  Here then is a peephole that may afford us a glimpse of the effect of the sights of the orient, its colors and smells, on my grandmother and perhaps on other immigrants and refugees who like her came from gloomy shtetls in Eastern Europe and were so disturbed by the pervasive sensuality of the Levant that they resolved to defend themselves from its menace by constructing their own ghetto.

  Menace? Or perhaps the truth is that it was not the menace of the Levant that made my grandmother mortify and purify her body with those boiling-hot ablutions morning, noon, and night every day that she lived in Jerusalem but rather its seductive sensual charms, and her own body, and the powerful attraction of those teeming markets that made her breathing tight and her knees weak with that abundance of un-familiar vegetables, fruit, spicy cheeses, pungent odors, and guttural foods that so tormented and excited her, and those lustful hands that groped and burrowed into the most intimate recesses of fruit and vegetables, the chilis and spicy olives and the nudity of all that ripe, bare red meat, dripping blood, hanging shamelessly naked from the butchers' hooks, and the dizzying array of spices, herbs, and powders, all the multicolored lascivious lures of that pungent, highly seasoned world, not to mention the penetrating aromas of freshly roasted, cardamom-flavored coffee, and the glass containers full of colorful drinks with lumps of ice or slices of lemon in them, and those powerfully built, deeply tanned, hirsute market porters, naked to the waist, the muscles of their backs rippling with effort under their hot skin that gleamed as rivulets of perspiration ran down it in the sun. Perhaps Grandma's cult of cleanliness was nothing more or less than a hermetic, sterile spacesuit. An antiseptic chastity belt that she had voluntarily buckled on, since her first day here, and secured with seven locks, destroying all the keys?

  Or maybe it was neither the hygiene nor her desires nor the fear of her desires that killed her but her constant secret anger at this fear, a suppressed, malignant anger, like an unlanced boil, anger at her own body, at her own longings, and also a deeper anger, at the very revulsion these longings gave rise to, a murky, poisonous anger directed both at the prisoner and at her jailer, years and years of secret mourning for the ceaseless passage of desolate time and the shriveling of her body and the desires of that body, the desires, laundered and cleansed and scraped and disinfected and boiled a thousand times, for that Levant, filthy, sweaty, bestial, exciting to the point of swooning, but swarming with germs.

  6

  ALMOST SIXTY years have gone by, yet I can still remember his smell. I summon it, and it returns to me, a slightly coarse, dusty, but strong and pleasant smell, reminiscent of touching rough sackcloth, and it borders on the memory of the feel of his skin, his flowing locks, his thick mustache that rubbed against the skin of my cheek and gave me a pleasant feeling, like being in a warm, dark old kitchen on a winter day. The poet Saul Tchernikhowsky died in the autumn of 1943, when I was little more than four years old, so that this sensual recollection can only have survived by passing through several stages of transmission and amplification. My mother and father often reminded me of those moments, because they enjoyed boasting to acquaintances that their child sat on Tchernikhowsky's lap and played with his mustache. They always turned to me for confirmation of their story: "Isn't it true that you can still remember that Saturday afternoon when Uncle Saul sat you on his lap and called you 'little devil'? It's true, isn't it?"

  My task was to recite for them the refrain: "Yes, it's true. I remember it very well."

  I never told them that the picture I remembered was a little different from their version. I did not want to spoil it for them.

  My parents' habit of repeating this story and turning to me for confirmation did indeed strengthen and preserve the memory of those moments for me, which had it not been for their pride might well have faded and vanished. But the difference between their story and the picture in my memory, the fact that the memory I retained was not merely a reflection of my parents' story but had a life of its own, that the image of the great poet and the little child according to my parents' staging was somewhat different from my own, is proof that my story is not merely inherited from theirs. In my parents' version the curtain opens on a blond child in shorts sitting on the lap of the giant of Hebrew poetry, stroking and tugging at his mustache, while the poet bestows on the youngster the accolade of "little devil" and the child—oh, sweet innocence!—repays him with his own coin by saying, "No, you're a devil!" to which, in my father's version, the author of "Facing the Statue of Apollo" replied with the words "Maybe we're both right" and even kissed me on my head, which my parents interpreted as a sign of things to come, a sort of anointing, as if, let us say, it had been Pushkin bending over and kissing the head of the little Tolstoy.

  But in the picture in my mind, which my parents' recurrent searchlight beams may have helped me preserve but definitely did not imprint in me, in my scenario, which is less sweet than theirs, I never sat on the poet's lap, nor did I tug at his famous mustache, but I tripped and fell over at Uncle Joseph's home, and as I fell, I bit my tongue, and it bled a little, and I cried, and the poet, being also a doctor, a pediatrician, reached me before my parents, helped me up with his big hands, I even remember now that he picked me up with my back to him and my shouting face to the room, then he swung me around in his arms and said something, and then something else, certainly not about handing on the crown of Pushkin to Tolstoy, and while I was still struggling in his arms, he forced my mouth open and called for someone to fetch some ice, then inspected my injury and declared:

  "It's nothing, just a scratch, and as we are now weeping, so we shall soon be laughing."

  Whether because the poet's words included both of us, or because of the rough touch of his cheek on mine, like the roughness of a thick warm towel, or whether indeed because of his strong, homely smell, which to this day I can conjure up (not a smell of shaving lotion or soap, nor a smell of tobacco, but a full, dense body smell, like the taste of chicken soup on a winter day), I soon calmed down, and it transpired that, as so often happens, I was more in shock than in pain. And the bushy Nietzsche mustache scratched and tickled me a little, and then, as far as I can remember, Dr. Saul Tchernikhowsky laid me down carefully but without any fuss on my back on Uncle Joseph's couch (that is Professor Joseph Klausner), and the poet-doctor or my mother put on my tongue some ice that Auntie Zippora had hurriedly brought.

  So far as I can remember, no witty aphorism worthy of immortalization was exchanged on that occasion between the giant among the poets of the formative Generation of National Revival and the sobbing little representative of th
e later so-called Generation of the State of Israel.

  It was only two or three years after this incident that I managed to pronounce the name Tchernikhowsky. I was not surprised when I was told that he was a poet: almost everyone in Jerusalem in those days was either a poet or a writer or a researcher or a thinker or a scholar or a world reformer. Nor was I impressed by the title Doctor: in Uncle Joseph and Auntie Zippora's home, all the male guests were called Professor or Doctor.

  But he was not just any old doctor or poet. He was a pediatrician, a man with a disheveled mop of hair, with laughing eyes, big warm hands, a thicket of a mustache, a felt cheek, and a unique, strong, soft smell.

  To this day, whenever I see a photograph or drawing of the poet Saul or his carved head that stands in the entrance of the Tchernikhowsky Writers' House, I am immediately enveloped, like the embrace of a winter blanket, by his comforting smell.

  Like so many Zionist Jews of our time, my father was a bit of a closet Canaanite. He was embarrassed by the shtetl and everything in it, and by its representatives in modern writing, Bialik and Agnon. He wanted us all to be born anew, as blond-haired, muscular, suntanned Hebrew Europeans instead of Jewish Eastern Europeans. He always loathed the Yiddish language, which he termed "jargon." He saw Bialik as the poet of victimhood, of "eternal death pangs," while Tchernikhowsky was the harbinger of the new dawn that was about to break, the dawn of "The Conquerors of Canaan by Storm." He would reel off "Facing the Statue of Apollo" by heart, with tremendous gusto, without even noticing that the poet, while still bowing down to Apollo, unwittingly bursts into a hymn to Dionysus.

  He knew more of Tchernikhowsky's poems by heart than anyone else I have met, probably more than Tchernikhowsky himself did, and he recited them with pathos and gusto, such a muse-inspired, and therefore musical, poet, without the complexes and complexities so typical of the shtetl, writing shamelessly about love and even about sensual pleasures. Father said: Tchernikhowsky never wallows in all sorts of tsores or krechtzen.

  At such moments my mother would look at him skeptically, as though surprised by the crude nature of his pleasures but refraining from comment.

  He had a distinctly "Lithuanian" temperament, my father, and he was very fond of using the word "distinctly" (the Klausners came from odessa, but before that they came from Lithuania, and before that apparently from Mattersdorf, now Mattersburg in eastern Austria, near the Hungarian border). He was a sentimental, enthusiastic man, but for most of his life he loathed all forms of mysticism and magic. He considered the supernatural to be the domain of charlatans and tricksters. He thought the tales of the Hasidim to be mere folklore, a word that he always pronounced with the same grimace of loathing that accompanied his use of such words as "jargon," "ecstasy," "hashish," and "intuition."

  My mother used to listen to him speak, and instead of replying she would offer us her sad smile, and sometimes she said to me: "Your father is a wise and rational man; he is even rational in his sleep."

  Years later, after her death, when his optimistic cheerfulness had faded somewhat, along with his volubility, his taste also changed and may have moved closer to that of my mother. In a basement in the National Library he discovered a previously unknown manuscript of I. L. Peretz, an exercise book from the writer's youth, which contained, in addition to all sorts of sketches and scribbles and attempts at poetry, an unknown story titled "Revenge." My father went off for several years to London, where he wrote a doctoral dissertation on this discovery, and with this encounter with the mystically inclined Peretz he moved away from his earlier penchant for the Sturm und Drang of early Tchernikhowsky. He began to study the myths and sagas of faraway peoples, glanced at Yiddish literature, and gradually succumbed, like someone finally relaxing his grip on a handrail, to the mysterious charm of Peretz's stories in particular and Hasidic tales in general.

  However, in the years when we used to walk to his Uncle Joseph's in Talpiot on Saturday afternoons, my father was still trying to educate us all to be as enlightened as he was. My parents often used to argue about literature. My father liked Shakespeare, Balzac, Tolstoy, Ibsen, and Tchernikhowsky. My mother preferred Schiller, Turgenev, Chekhov, Strindberg, Gnessin, Bialik, and also Mr. Agnon, who lived across the road from Uncle Joseph in Talpiot, although I have the impression there was not much love lost between the two men.

  A polite but arctic chill fell momentarily on the little road if the two of them ever happened to meet, Professor Joseph Klausner and Mr. S. Y. Agnon; they would raise their hats an inch or so, give a slight bow, and probably each wished the other from the depth of his heart to be consigned for all eternity to the deepest hell of oblivion.

  Uncle Joseph did not think much of Agnon, whose writing he considered prolix, provincial, and adorned with all sorts of over-clever cantorial grace notes. As for Mr. Agnon, he nursed his grudge and had his revenge eventually when he speared Uncle Joseph on one of his spits of irony, in the ludicrous figure of Professor Bachlam in his novel Shirah. Fortunately for Uncle Joseph, he died before Shirah was published, thus sparing himself considerable distress. Mr. Agnon, on the other hand, lived on for many a year, won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and earned a worldwide reputation for himself, although he was condemned to the bitter tribulation of seeing the little cul-de-sac in Talpiot in which they had both lived renamed Klausner Street. From that day until the day he died, he had to suffer the indignity of being the famous writer S. Y. Agnon of Klausner Street.

  And so to this day a perverse fate has willed that Agnon's house should stand in Klausner Street, while a no less perverse fate has willed that Klausner's house should be demolished and replaced by a very ordinary square building that houses very average apartments, overlooking the hordes of visitors who pass through Agnon's house.

  7

  EVERY SECOND or third Saturday we would make the pilgrimage to Talpiot, to Uncle Joseph and Auntie Zippora's little villa. Our house in Kerem Avraham was some six or seven kilometers distant from Talpiot, a remote and somewhat dangerous Hebrew suburb. South of Rehavia and Kiriat Shmuel, south of Montefiore's Windmill, stretched an expanse of alien Jerusalem: the suburbs of Talbiyeh, Abu Tor, and Kata-mon, the German Colony, the Greek Colony, and Bakaa. (Abu Tor, our teacher Mr. Avisar once explained to us, was named after an old warrior whose name meant "father of the bull," Talbiyeh was once the estate of a man named Taleb, Bakaa means a "plain or valley, the biblical valley of the Giants," while the name Katamon is an Arabic corruption of the Greek kata monēs, meaning "beside the monastery.") Farther still to the south, beyond all these foreign worlds, over the hills and far away, at the end of the world, glimmered isolated Jewish dots, Mekor Hayyim, Talpiot, Arnona, and Kibbutz Ramat Rahel, which almost abutted on the extremities of Bethlehem. From our Jerusalem, Talpiot could be seen only as a tiny gray mass of dusty trees on a distant hilltop. From the roof of our house one night our neighbor Mr. Friedmann, an engineer, pointed out a cluster of shimmering pale lights on the far horizon, suspended between heaven and earth, and said: "That's Allenby Barracks, and over there you may be able to see the lights of Talpiot or Arnona. If there is more violence," he said, "I wouldn't like to be them. Not to mention if there's all-out war."

  We would set out after lunch, when the city had shut itself off behind barred shutters and sunk into a Sabbath afternoon slumber. Total silence ruled in the streets and yards among the stone-built houses with their corrugated iron lean-tos. As though the whole of Jerusalem had been enclosed in a transparent glass ball.

  We crossed Geulah Street, entered the warren-like alleys of the shabby ultra-Orthodox quarter at the top of Ahva, passed underneath washing lines heavy with black, yellow, and white clothes, among rusty iron railings of neglected verandas and outside staircases, climbed up through Zikhron Moshe, which was always swathed in poor Ashkenazi cooking smells, of chollent, borscht, garlic and onion and sauerkraut, and continued across the Street of the Prophets. There was not a living soul to be seen in the streets of Jerusalem at two o'clock on
a Saturday afternoon. From the Street of the Prophets we walked down Strauss Street, which was perpetually bathed in shadow from the ancient pine trees in the shade of two walls, on the one side the moss-grown gray wall of the Protestant Hospital run by the Deaconesses, and on the other the grim wall of the Jewish hospital, Bikkur Holim, with the symbols of the twelve tribes of Israel embossed on its splendid bronze gates. A pungent odor of medicines, old age, and Lysol escaped from these two hospitals. Then we crossed Jaffa Road by the famous clothes shop, Maayan Shtub, and lingered for a moment in front of Ahiasaf Brothers bookshop, to allow my father to feast his hungry eyes on the abundance of new Hebrew books in the window. From there we walked the whole length of King George V Avenue, past splendid shops, cafés with high chandeliers, and rich stores, all empty and locked for the Sabbath, but with their windows beckoning to us through barred iron grilles, winking with the seductive charm of other worlds, whiffs of wealth from distant continents, scents of brightly lit, bustling cities dwelling securely on the banks of wide rivers, where there were elegant ladies and prosperous gentlemen who did not live their lives between one attack or government decree and the next, knowing no hardship, relieved of the need to count every penny, free from the oppressive rules of pioneering and self-sacrifice, exempt from the burdens of Community Chest and Medical Fund contributions and rationing coupons, comfortably installed in beautiful houses with chimney stacks rising from their roofs or in spacious apartments in modern blocks, with carpets on the floor, with a doorman in a blue uniform guarding the entrance and a boy in a red uniform manning the elevator, and servants and cooks and butlers and factotums at their beck and call. Ladies and gentlemen who enjoyed a comfortable life, unlike ours.