A Tale of Love and Darkness

by Amos Oz

  I made the pilgrimage to Talpiot two or three more times during the two years I studied at the university in Jerusalem. My first stories were being published then in the weekend supplement of Davar and in the quarterly Keshet, and I planned to leave them with Mr. Agnon to hear what he thought of them; but Mr. Agnon apologized, saying "I regret that I do not feel up to reading these days," and asked me to bring them back another day. Another day, then, I returned, empty-handed but carrying on my belly, like an embarrassing pregnancy, the number of Keshet containing my story. In the end I lacked the courage to give birth there, I was afraid of making a nuisance of myself, and I left his house as I had arrived, with a big belly. Or a bulging sweater. It was only some years later, when the stories were collected in a book (Where the Jackals Howl in 1965), that I summoned up the courage to send it to him. For three days and three nights I danced around the kibbutz, drunk with joy, silently singing and roaring aloud with happiness, inwardly roaring and weeping, after receiving Mr. Agnon's nice letter, in which he wrote, inter alia, "...and when we meet, I shall tell you viva voce more than I have written here. During Passover I shall read the rest of the stories, God willing, because I enjoy stories like yours where the heroes appear in the full reality of their being."

  Once, when I was at the university, an article appeared in a foreign journal by one of the leading lights in comparative literature (perhaps it was by the Swiss Emil Steiger?), who gave it as his opinion that the three most important Central European writers of the first half of the twentieth century were Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, and S. Y. Agnon. The article was written several years before Agnon won the Nobel Prize, and I was so excited that I stole the journal from the reading room (there were no photocopiers at the university in those days) and hurried with it to Talpiot to give Agnon the pleasure of reading it. And he was indeed pleased, so much so that he wolfed down the whole article as he stood on the doorstep of his house, in a single breath, before so much as asking me in; after reading it, rereading it, and perhaps even licking his lips, he gave me that look he sometimes gave me and asked innocently: "Do you also think Thomas Mann is such an important writer?"

  One night, years later, I missed the last bus back from Rehovot to the kibbutz at Hulda and had to take a taxi. All day long the radio had been talking about the Nobel Prize that had been shared between Agnon and the poet Nellie Sachs, and the taxi driver asked me if I'd ever heard of a writer called, what was it, Egnon. "Think about it," he said in amazement. "We've never heard of him before, and suddenly he gets us into the world finals. Problem is, he ends up tying with some woman."

  For several years I endeavored to free myself from Agnon's shadow. I struggled to distance my writing from his influence, his dense, ornamented, sometimes Philistine language, his measured rhythms, a certain midrashic self-satisfaction, a beat of Yiddish tunes, juicy ripples of Hasidic tales. I had to liberate myself from the influence of his sarcasm and wit, his baroque symbolism, his enigmatic labyrinthine games, his double meanings, and his complicated, erudite literary games.

  Despite all my efforts to free myself from him, what I have learned from Agnon no doubt still resonates in my writing.

  What is it, in fact, that I learned from him?

  Perhaps this. To cast more than one shadow. Not to pick the raisins from the cake. To rein in and polish pain. And one other thing, that my grandmother used to say in a sharper way than I have found it expressed by Agnon: "If you have no more tears left to weep, then don't weep. Laugh."

  12

  SOMETIMES I was left with my grandparents for the night. My grandmother used to point suddenly at a piece of furniture or an item of clothing or a person and say to me:

  "It's so ugly, it's almost beautiful."

  Sometimes she said:

  "He's become so clever, he can't understand anything anymore."

  Or:

  "It hurts so much, it almost makes me laugh."

  All day long she hummed tunes to herself that she had brought with her from places where she lived apparently without fear of germs and without the rudeness that she complained also infected everything here.

  "Like animals," she would suddenly hiss disgustedly, for no visible reason, with no provocation or connection, without bothering to explain whom she was comparing to animals. Even when I sat next to her on a park bench in the evening, and there was no one in the park, and a slight breeze gently touched the tips of the leaves or perhaps made them tremble without really touching them with its invisible fingertips, Grandma could suddenly erupt, quivering with shocked loathing:

  "Really! How could they! Worse than animals!"

  A moment later she was humming to herself gentle tunes that were unfamiliar to me.

  She was always humming, in the kitchen, in front of the mirror, on her deck chair on the veranda, even in the night.

  Sometimes, after I had had my bath and brushed my teeth and cleaned out my ears with an orange stick with its tip wrapped in cotton wool, I was put to bed next to her, in her wide bed (the double bed that Grandpa had abandoned, or been evicted from, before I was born). Grandma read me a story or two, stroked my cheek, kissed my forehead, and immediately rubbed it with a little handkerchief moistened with perfume, which she always kept in her left sleeve and which she used to wipe away or squash germs, and then she turned out the light. Even then she went on humming in the dark, or rather she expelled from inside her a distant, dreamy voice, a chestnut-colored voice, a pleasant, dark voice that was gradually refined into an echo, a color, a scent, a gentle roughness, a brown warmth, lukewarm amniotic fluid. All night long.

  But all these nocturnal delights she made you scrub off furiously first thing in the morning, even before your cup of cocoa without the skin. I would wake up in her bed to the sound of Grandpa's carpet beater as he fought his regular dawn battle with the bedding.

  Before you even opened your eyes, there was a steaming hot bath waiting for you, smelling like a medical clinic because of the antiseptic solution that had been added to the water. On the edge of the bath a toothbrush was laid out, with a curly white worm of Ivory toothpaste already lying along the bristles. Your duty was to immerse yourself, soap yourself all over and rub yourself with the loofah, and rinse yourself, and then Grandma came, got you up on your knees in the bathtub, held you firmly by the arm, and scrubbed you all over, from head to toe and back again, with the dreaded brush, reminiscent of the iron combs that the wicked Romans used to tear the flesh of Rabbi Akiva and the other martyrs of the Bar Kochba Revolt, until your skin was pink like raw flesh, and then Grandma told you to close your eyes tight as tight, while she shampooed and pummeled your head and scratched your scalp with her sharp nails like Job scraping himself with a potsherd, and all the while she explained to you in her brown, pleasant voice about the filth and mire that the body's glands secrete while you sleep, such as sticky sweat and all sorts of fatty discharges and flakes of skin and fallen hairs and millions of dead cells and various kinds of slimy secretions you'd better not know about, and while you were fast asleep all this refuse and effluent smeared itself all over your body and mixed itself up together and invited, yes, positively invited, bacteria and bacilli and viruses too to come and swarm all over you, not to mention all the things that science has not yet discovered, things that cannot be seen even with the most powerful microscope, but even if they can't be seen, they crawl all over your body all night with trillions of horrible hairy little legs, just like a cockroach's but so tiny you can't see them, even scientists can't see them yet, and on these legs that are covered with disgusting bristles they creep back inside our bodies through the nose and the mouth and through I don't need to tell you where else they crawl in through, especially when people never wash themselves there in those not nice places they just wipe, but wiping isn't cleaning, on the contrary, it just spreads the filthy secretions into the millions of tiny holes we have all over our skin, and it all gets more and more filthy and disgusting, especially when the internal filth that the body i
s constantly excreting, day and night, gets mixed up with the external filth that comes from touching unhygienic things that have been handled by who knows whom before you, like coins or newspapers or handrails or doorknobs or even bought food, after all who can tell who has sneezed over what you're touching, or even, excuse me, wiped their nose or even dripped from their nose precisely on those sweet wrappers that you pick up in the street and put straight on the bed where people sleep, not to mention those corks you pick straight out of the garbage cans, and that corn on the cob your mother, God preserve her, buys straight from the hand of that man who may not even have washed and dried his hands after he has excuse me, and how can we be so sure that he's a healthy man? That he hasn't got TB or cholera, or typhus or jaundice or dysentery? Or an abscess or enteritis or eczema or psoriasis or impetigo or a boil? He might not even be Jewish. Have you any idea how many diseases there are here? How many Levantine plagues? And I'm only talking about known diseases, not the ones that are not known yet and that medical science doesn't recognize yet, not a day goes by after all here in the Levant that people don't die like flies from some parasite or bacillus or microbe, or from all kinds of microscopic worms that the doctors can't even identify especially here in this country where it's so hot and full of flies, mosquitoes, moths, ants, cockroaches, midges, and who knows what else, and people here perspire all the time and they are always touching and rubbing each other's inflammations and discharges and sweat and all their bodily fluids, better at your age you shouldn't know from all these foul fluids, and anyone can easily wet someone else so the other one doesn't even feel what's stuck to him in all the crush there is here, a handshake is enough to transmit all sorts of plagues, and even without touching, just by breathing the air that someone else has breathed into his lungs before you with all the germs and bacilli of ringworm and trachoma and bilharzia. And the sanitation here is not at all European, and, as for hygiene, half the people here have never even heard of it, and the air is full of all kinds of Asiatic insects and revolting winged reptiles that come here straight from the Arab villages or even from Africa, and who knows what strange diseases and inflammations and discharges they bring with them all the time, the Levant here is full of germs. Now you dry yourself very well all on your own like a big boy, don't leave anywhere damp, and then put some talcum powder all by yourself in your you-know-where, and in your other you-know-where, and all around about, and I want you to rub some Velveta cream from this tube all over your neck, and then get dressed in the clothes I'm putting out for you here, which are the clothes that your mother, God preserve her, has prepared for you only I've gone over them with a hot iron that disinfects and kills anything that might be breeding there better than the laundering does, and then come to me in the kitchen, with your hair nicely combed, and you'll get a nice cup of cocoa from me and then you'll have your breakfast.

  As she left the bathroom, she would mutter to herself, not angrily but with a kind of deep sadness:

  "Like animals. Or worse."

  A door with a pane of frosted glass decorated with geometrical flower shapes separated Grandma's bedroom from the little cubicle that was known as "Grandpa Alexander's study." From here Grandpa had his own private way out into the veranda and from there into the garden and finally outside, to the city, to freedom.

  In one corner of this tiny room stood the sofa from Odessa, as narrow and hard as a plank, on which Grandpa slept at night. Underneath this sofa, like recruits on parade, seven or eight pairs of shoes stood in a neat row, all black and shiny; just like Grandma Shlomit's collection of hats, in green and brown and maroon, that she guarded as her prize possession in a round hatbox, so Grandpa Alexander liked to be in command of a whole fleet of shoes that he polished until they shone like crystal, some hard and thick-soled, some round-toed or pointed, some brogued, some fastened with laces, some with straps, and others with buckles.

  Opposite the sofa stood his small desk, always neat and tidy, with an inkwell and an olivewood blotter. The blotter always looked to me like a tank or a thick-funneled boat sailing toward a jetty formed by a trio of bright silvery containers, one full of paper clips, the next of thumbtacks, while in the third, like a nest of vipers, the rubber bands coiled and swarmed. There was a rectangular metal nest of trays on the desk, one for incoming mail, one for outgoing mail, a third for newspaper cuttings, another for documents from the municipality and the bank, and yet another for correspondence with the Herut Movement, Jerusalem Branch. There was also an olivewood box full of stamps of different values, with separate compartments for express, registered, and airmail stickers. And there was a container for envelopes and another for postcards, and behind them a revolving silvery stand in the form of the Eiffel Tower that contained an assortment of pens and pencils in different colors, including a wonderful pencil with a point at either end, one red and the other blue.

  In one corner of Grandpa's desk, next to the files of documents, there stood a tall dark bottle of foreign liqueur and three or four green goblets that looked like narrow-waisted women. Grandpa loved beauty and hated everything ugly, and he liked to fortify his passionate, lonely heart occasionally with a little sip of cherry brandy, on his own. The world did not understand him. His wife did not understand him. Nobody really understood him. His heart always longed for what was noble, but everyone conspired to clip his wings: his wife, his friends, his business partners, they were all part of a plot to force him to plunge into two score and nine different kinds of breadwinning, hygiene, tidying up, business dealings, and a thousand petty nuisances and obligations. He was an even-tempered man, irascible but easily calmed. Whenever he saw some duty on the ground, whether a family or public or moral duty, he always bent down, picked it up, and shouldered it. But then he would sigh and complain about the weight of his burden and say that everyone, especially Grandma, took advantage of his good nature and loaded him with a thousand and one tasks that stifled his poetic spark and used him like an errand boy.

  During the day, Grandpa Alexander worked as a commercial representative and salesman of garments, being the Jerusalem agent of the Lodzia textile factory and a number of other well-respected firms. In a large number of cases piled up on shelves that ran the full height of the wall of his study, he kept a colorful collection of samples of cloths, shirts, and trousers in tricot and gabardine, socks, and all kinds of towels, napkins, and curtains. I was allowed to use these sample cases, provided I did not open them, to construct towers, forts, and defensive walls. Grandpa sat on his chair with his back to the desk, his legs stuck out in front of him, and his pink face, generally beaming with kindness and contentment, smiling happily at me as though the tower of cases and boxes that was growing under my hands would soon put the pyramids, the hanging gardens of Babylon, and the great wall of China in the shade. It was Grandpa Alexander who told me about the great wall, the pyramids, the hanging gardens, and the other wonders of the human spirit, such as the Parthenon and the Coliseum, the Suez and Panama Canals, the Empire State Building, the churches of the Kremlin, the Venetian canals, the Arc de Triomphe, and the Eiffel Tower.

  At night, in the solitude of his study, at his desk, over a goblet of cherry brandy, Grandpa Alexander was a sentimental poet who cast over an alien world poems of love, delight, enthusiasm, and longing, all in Russian. His good friend Joseph Kohen-Tsedek translated them into Hebrew. Here is an example:

  After many years of slumber

  Gracious lord my corpse upraise;

  Lovingly my eyelids open,

  Let me live for three more days.

  From northern Dan down to Beersheva

  Let me tour my fatherland,

  Let me roam each hill and valley

  And in beauty see it stand:

  Every man shall dwell in safety

  Each beneath his fig and vine,

  As the earth bestows its bounty,

  Full of joy this land of mine...

  He wrote poems of praise, celebrating such figures as Vladimir Jabotinsky,
Menachem Begin, and his famous brother, my great-uncle Joseph, and also poems of wrath against the Germans, the Arabs, the British, and all the other Jew haters. Among all these I also found three or four poems of loneliness and sorrow with lines like: "Such gloomy thoughts surround me / In the evening of my days: / Farewell to youthful vigor / And to sunshine's hopeful rays—/ Now icy winter stays..."

  But usually it was not icy winter that beset him: he was a nationalist, a patriot, a lover of armies, victories, and conquests, a passionate, innocent-minded hawk who believed that if only we Jews girded ourselves with courage, boldness, iron resolve, etc., if only we finally rose up and stopped worrying about the Gentiles, we could defeat all our foes and establish the Kingdom of David from the Nile to the great river, the Euphrates, and the whole cruel, wicked Gentile world would come and bow down before us. He had a weakness for everything grand, powerful, and gleaming—military uniforms, brass bugles, banners and lances glinting in the sun, royal palaces and coats of arms. He was a child of the nineteenth century, even if he did live long enough to see three-quarters of the twentieth.

  I remember him dressed in a light-cream flannel suit, or a sharply creased pinstripe suit under which he sometimes sported a piqué vest with a fine silver chain that hugged him and led into a pocket of the said vest. On his head he wore a loosely woven straw hat in summer, and in winter a Borsalino with a dark silk band. He was terribly irascible, liable to erupt suddenly in billows of resounding thunder, but he would very quickly brighten up, forgive, apologize, be contrite, as though his anger was just a sort of bad coughing fit. You could always tell the state of his temper from a distance, because his face changed color like a traffic light: pink-white-red and back to pink. Most of the time his cheeks were a contented pink, but when he was offended they would turn white, and when he was angry they went red, but after a short time they resumed their pink hue that informed the whole world that the thunderstorm had ended, the winter was over, the flowers had appeared on the earth, and Grandpa's habitual cheeriness was beaming and radiating from him again after a short interruption; and in an instant he would have forgotten who or what it was that had angered him, and what all the commotion had been about, like a child who cries for a moment and at once calms down, smiles, and goes back to playing happily.