A Tale of Love and Darkness

by Amos Oz

  Some fixed an empty olive can to a pole, set it up as a dovecote, and waited for the doves to come—until they gave up hope. Here and there somebody tried to keep a few hens, someone else tended a little vegetable patch, with radishes, onions, cauliflower, parsley. Most of them longed to get out of here and move somewhere more cultured, like Re-havia, Kiryat Shmuel, Talpiot, or Beit Hakerem. All of them tried hard to believe that the bad days would soon be over, the Hebrew state would be established, and everything would change for the better: surely their cup of sorrow was full to overflowing? Shneour Zalman Rubashov, who later changed his name to Zalman Shazar and was elected President of Israel, wrote something like this in a newspaper at that time: "When the free Hebrew state finally arises, nothing will be the same as it was! Even love will not be what it was before!"

  Meanwhile the first children were born in Kerem Avraham, and it was almost impossible to explain to them where their parents had come from, or why they had come, or what it was that they were all waiting for. The people who lived in Kerem Avraham were minor bureaucrats in the Jewish Agency, or teachers, nurses, writers, drivers, shorthand typists, world reformers, translators, shop assistants, theorists, librarians, bank tellers or cinema ticket sellers, ideologues, small shopkeepers, lonely old bachelors who lived on their meager savings. By eight o'clock in the evening the grilles on the balconies were closed, the apartments were locked, shutters were barred, and only the streetlamp cast a gloomy yellow puddle on the corner of the empty street. At night you could hear the piercing shrieks of night birds, the barking of distant dogs, stray shots, the wind in the trees of the orchard: for at nightfall Kerem Avra-ham went back to being a vineyard. Fig trees, mulberries and olives, apple trees, vines and pomegranates rustled their leaves in every garden. The stone walls reflected the moonlight back up into the branches in a pale, skeletal glow.

  Amos Street, in one or two pictures in my father's photograph album, looks like an unfinished sketch for a street. Square stone buildings with iron shutters and iron grilles on the verandas. Here and there on the windowsills pale geraniums bloom in pots between the sealed jars of cu-cumbers or peppers pickling in garlic and dill. In the center between the buildings there is no road yet but only a temporary building site, a dusty track scattered with building materials, gravel, piles of half-finished stones, sacks of cement, metal drums, floor tiles, heaps of sand, coils of wire for fencing, a mound of wooden scaffolding. Some spiny prosopis still sprout among the mess of building materials, covered with whitish dust. Stonemasons sit on the ground in the middle of the track, barefoot, naked from the waist up, with cloths draped around their heads, in baggy trousers, the sound of their hammers striking the chisels and cutting grooves in the stones filling the air with the drumbeats of some strange, stubborn atonal music. Hoarse shouts ring out from time to time from the end of the street, "Ba-rud! Ba-rud" (explosion), followed by the thunderous haul of shattered stones.

  In another, formal picture, as though taken before a party, there stands right in the center of Amos Street, in the midst of all this commotion, a rectangular black hearse-like automobile. A taxi or a hired car? Impossible to tell from the photo. It is a gleaming, polished car of the 1920s, with thin tires like a motorcycle, and metal spokes, and a strip of chrome running along the edge of the hood. The hood has louvers on the side to let in the air, and on the tip of its nose the shiny chrome radiator cap protrudes like a pimple. In front, two round headlights hang from a sort of silvery bar, and the headlights too are silvery and gleam in the sun.

  By the side of this magnificent automobile the camera has caught Alexander Klausner, General Agent, resplendent in a cream-colored tropical suit and a tie, with a panama hat on his head, looking rather like Errol Flynn in a film about European aristocrats in equatorial Africa or in Burma. At his side, stronger, taller, and wider than he, stands the imposing figure of his elegant wife Shlomit, his cousin and mistress, a grande dame, stately as a battleship, in a short-sleeved summer frock, wearing a necklace and a splendid fedora hat with muslin veil set at a precise angle on her perfectly coiffed hairdo, and clutching a parasol. Their son Lonia, Lionichka, is standing at their side like a nervous bridegroom on his wedding day. He looks faintly comical, with his mouth slightly open, his round spectacles slipping down his nose, his shoulders drooping, confined, and almost mummified in a tight suit, and a stiff black hat that looks as though it has been forced onto his head: it comes halfway down his forehead like an upturned pudding basin, and gives the impression that only his overlarge ears prevent it from slipping down to his chin and swallowing up the rest of his head.

  What was the solemn event for which the three of them had dressed up in their finery and ordered a special limousine? There is no way of knowing. The date, to judge by other photographs on the same page of the album, is 1934, the year after they arrived in the country, when they all still lived in the Zarchis' apartment on Amos Street. I can make out the number of the automobile without difficulty, M 1651. My father would have been twenty-four, but in the picture he looks like a fifteen-year-old disguised as a respectable middle-aged gentleman.

  When they first arrived from Vilna, all three Klausners lived for a year or so in the two-and-a-half-room apartment in Amos Street. Then Grandma and Grandpa found themselves a little place to rent, with a single room plus a tiny room that served as Grandpa's "den," his safe haven from his wife's fits of rage and from the hygienic scourge of her war on germs. The new apartment was the one in Prague Lane, between Isaiah Street and Chancellor Street, now renamed Strauss Street.

  The front room in the old apartment on Amos Street now became my father's student sitting room. Here he installed his first bookcase, containing the books he had brought with him from his student days in Vilna; here stood the old, spindly-legged plywood table that served as his desk, here he hung his clothes behind a curtain that concealed the packing case that did duty as his wardrobe. Here he invited his friends for intellectual conversations about the meaning of life, literature, the world, and local politics.

  In one photograph, my father sits comfortably behind his desk, thin, young, and stern, his hair combed back, wearing those serious, black-framed spectacles and a long-sleeved white shirt. He is sitting in a relaxed pose, at an angle to the desk, with his legs crossed. Behind him is a double window, one half of which is open inward, but the shutters are still closed so that only thin fingers of light penetrate between the slats. In the picture my father is deeply engrossed in a big book that he is holding up in front of him. On the desk in front of him another book lies open, and there is something else that looks like an alarm clock with its back to the camera, a round tin clock with little slanting legs. To Father's left stands a small bookcase laden with books, one shelf bowing under the weight of the thick tomes it is carrying, foreign books apparently that have come from Vilna and are clearly feeling rather cramped, warm, and uncomfortable here.

  On the wall above the bookcase hangs a framed photograph of Uncle Joseph, looking authoritative and magnificent, almost prophetic with his white goatee and thinning hair, as though he were peering down from a great height on my father and fixing him with a watchful eye, to make sure he does not neglect his studies, or let himself be distracted by the dubious delights of student life, or that he doesn't forget the historic condition of the Jewish nation or the hopes of generations, or—heaven forbid!—underestimate those little details out of which, after all, the big picture is made up.

  Hanging on a nail underneath Uncle Joseph is the collecting box of the Jewish National Fund, painted with a thick Star of David. My father looks relaxed and pleased with himself, but as serious and resolute as a monk: he is taking the weight of the open book on his left hand, while his right hand rests on the pages to the right, the pages he has already read, from which we may deduce that it is a Hebrew book, read from right to left. At the place where his hand emerges from the sleeve of his white shirt I can see the thick black hair that covered his arms from elbow to knuckles.


  My father looks like a young man who knows what his duty is and intends to do it come what may. He is determined to follow in the footsteps of his famous uncle and his elder brother. Out there, beyond the closed shutters, workmen are digging a trench under the dusty roadway to lay pipes. Somewhere in the cellar of some old Jewish building in the winding alleyways of Sha'arei Hesed or Nahalat Shiv'a the youths of the Jerusalem Hagganah are training in secret, dismantling and reassembling an ancient illicit Parabellum pistol. On the hilly roads that wind among menacing Arab villages, Egged bus drivers and Tnuva van drivers are steering their vehicles, their hands strong and suntanned on the wheel. In the wadis that go down to the Judaean desert, young Hebrew scouts in khaki shorts and khaki socks, with military belts and white kaffiyehs, learn to recognize with their feet the secret pathways of the Fatherland. In Galilee and the Plains, in the Beth Shean Valley and the Valley of Jezreel, in the Sharon and the Hefer Valley, in the Judaean lowlands, the Negev and the wilderness around the Dead Sea, pioneers are tilling the land, muscular, silent, brave, and bronzed. And meanwhile he, the earnest student from Vilna, plows his own furrow here.

  One fine day he too would be a professor on Mount Scopus, he would help push back the frontiers of knowledge and drain the swamps of exile in the people's hearts. Just as the pioneers in Galilee and the Valleys made the desert places bloom, so he too would labor with all his strength, with enthusiasm and dedication, to plow the furrows of the national spirit and make the new Hebrew culture bloom. The picture says it all.

  19

  EVERY MORNING Yehuda Arieh Klausner took the No. 9 bus from the stop in Geula Street via the Bukharian Quarter, Prophet Samuel Street, Simeon the Righteous Street, the American Colony, and the Sheikh Jarrah district to the university buildings on Mount Scopus, where he diligently pursued his MA studies. He attended lectures on history by Professor Richard Michael Kobner, who never succeeded in learning Hebrew; Semitic linguistics by Professor Hans Jacob Polotsky; Biblical studies from Professor Umberto Moshe David Cassuto; and Hebrew literature from Uncle Joseph, alias Professor Dr. Joseph Klausner, the author of Judaism and Humanism.

  While Uncle Joseph definitely encouraged my father, who was one of his star pupils, he never chose him, when the time came, as a teaching assistant, so as not give malicious tongues anything to wag about. So important was it for Professor Klausner to avoid aspersions on his good name that he may have behaved unfairly to his brother's son, his own flesh and blood.

  On the front page of one of his books the childless uncle inscribed the following words: "To my beloved Yehuda Arieh, my nephew who is as dear to me as a son, from his uncle Joseph who loves him like his own soul." Father once quipped bitterly: "If only we had not been related, if only he loved me a little less, who knows, I might have been a lecturer in the literature department by now instead of a librarian."

  All those years it was like a running sore in my father's soul, because he really deserved to be a professor like his uncle and his brother David, the one who had taught literature in Vilna and died of it. My father was amazingly knowledgeable, an excellent student with a prodigious memory, an expert in world literature as well as Hebrew literature, who was at home in many languages, utterly familiar with the Tosefta, the Midrashic literature, the religious poetry of the Jews of Spain, as well as Homer, Ovid, Babylonian poetry, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Adam Mickiewicz, as hard-working as a honey bee, as straight as a die, a gifted teacher who could give a simple and accurate explanation of the barbarian invasions, Crime and Punishment, the workings of a submarine, or the solar system. Yet he never earned the chance to stand up before a class or to have pupils of his own, but ended his days as a librarian and bibliographer who wrote three or four scholarly books and contributed a few entries to the Hebrew Encyclopedia, mainly on comparative and Polish literature.

  In 1936 he was found a modest post in the newspaper department of the National Library, where he worked for twenty years or so, first on Mount Scopus and after 1948 in the Terra Sancta Building, beginning as a simple librarian and eventually rising to deputy to the head of the department, Dr. Pfeffermann. In a Jerusalem that was full of immigrants from Poland and Russia and refugees from Hitler, among them distinguished luminaries from famous universities, there were more lecturers and scholars than students.

  In the late 1950s, after receiving his doctorate from London University, my father tried unsuccessfully to secure a foothold in the literature department in Jerusalem as an outside lecturer. Professor Klausner, in his day, had been afraid of what people would say if he employed his own nephew. Klausner was succeeded as professor by the poet Shimon Halkin, who attempted to make a fresh start by eliminating the heritage, the methods, and the very smell of Klausner and certainly did not want to take on Klausner's nephew. In the early 1960s Father tried his luck at the newly opened Tel Aviv University, but he was not welcome there either.

  In the last year of his life he negotiated for a literature post in the academic institute that was being set up in Beer Sheva and was eventually to become Ben Gurion University. Sixteen years after my father's death I myself became an adjunct professor of literature at Ben Gurion University; a year or two later I was made a full professor, and eventually I was appointed to the Agnon Chair. In time I received generous invitations from both Jerusalem and Tel Aviv Universities to be a full professor of literature, I, who am neither an expert nor a scholar nor a mover of mountains, who have never had any talent for research and whose mind always turns cloudy at the sight of a footnote.* My father's little finger was more professorial than a dozen "parachuted in" professors like me.

  The Zarchis' apartment had two and a half small rooms, and was on the ground floor of a three-story building. The rear part of the apartment was occupied by Israel Zarchi, his wife Esther, and his two aged parents. The front room, where my father lived, first with his parents, then on his own, and eventually with my mother, had its own door, leading onto the veranda, then down a few steps into the narrow front garden, and out into Amos Street, which was still no more than a dusty track, with no roadway or pavements, still scattered with heaps of building materials and dismantled scaffolding among which hunger-weary cats roamed and a few doves pecked. Three or four times a day a cart drawn by a donkey or mule came down the road, a cart bearing long iron rods for building, or the paraffin seller's cart, the iceman's cart, the milkman's cart, the cart of the rag-and-bone man, whose hoarse cry "alte sachen"always made my blood freeze: all the years of my childhood I imagined that I was being warned against illness, old age, and death, which though still distant from me were gradually and inexorably approaching, creeping secretly like a viper through the tangle of dark vegetation, ready to strike me from behind. The Yiddish cry alte sachen sounded to me just like the Hebrew words al-tezaken, "do not age." To this day, the cry sends a cold shiver up my spine.

  *My father's books are rich in footnotes. As for me, I have only used them freely in one book, The Silence of Heaven: Agnons Tear of God (Jerusalem: Keter, 1993; Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 2000). I introduced my father into note 92 on page 192 of the Hebrew edtion of that book. That is to say, I referred the reader to his book The Novella in Hebrew Literature. In writing that note, some twenty years after his death, I hoped to afford him a small pleasure yet at the same time feared that instead of being pleased he might be waving an admonishing finger at me.

  Swallows nested in the fruit trees in the gardens, while lizards, geckos, and scorpions crept in and out of the clefts of the rocks. Occasionally we even saw a tortoise. The children burrowed under the fences, creating a network of shortcuts that spread through the backyards of the neighborhood, or climbed up on the flat rooftops to watch the British soldiers in the Schneller Barracks or to look out at the distant Arab villages on the surrounding hillsides: Isawiya, Shuafat, Beit Iksa, Lifta, Nebi Samwil.

  Today the name of Israel Zarchi is almost forgotten, but in those days he was a prolific young writer whose books sold many copies. He was abou
t my father's age, but by 1937, when he was twenty-eight, he had published no fewer than three books. I revered him because I was told that he was not like other writers: the whole of Jerusalem wrote scholarly books, put together from notes, from other books, from booklists, dictionaries, weighty foreign tomes, and ink-stained index cards, but Mr. Zarchi wrote books "out of his own head." (My father used to say: "If you steal from one book, you are condemned as a plagiarist, but if you steal from ten books, you are considered a scholar, and if you steal from thirty or forty books, a distinguished scholar.")

  On winter evenings a few members of my parents' circle used to get together sometimes at our place or at the Zarchis' in the building across the road: Hayim and Hannah Toren, Shmuel Werses, the Breimans, flamboyant Mr. Sharon-Shvadron, who was a great talker, Mr. Haim Schwarzbaum the red-headed folklorist, Israel Hanani, who worked at the Jewish Agency, and his wife Esther Hananit. They arrived after supper, at seven or half past, and left at half past nine, which was considered a late hour. In between, they drank scalding tea, nibbled honey cake or fresh fruit, discussed with well-bred anger all kinds of topics that I could not understand; but I knew that when the time came, I would understand them, I would participate in the discussions and would produce decisive arguments that they had not thought of. I might even manage to surprise them, I might end up writing books out of my own head like Mr. Zarchi, or collections of poems like Bialik and Grandpa Alexander and Levin Kipnis and Dr. Saul Tchernikhowsky, the doctor whose smell I shall never forget.