A Tale of Love and Darkness

by Amos Oz

  For days on end the old man used to sit in the office staring out the window, contentedly watching his son's mill at work. Perhaps because he looked "just like God," he actually saw himself in his later years as a kind of deity. He was humble yet arrogant, perhaps a little feebleminded in his old age. He sometimes offered his son all kinds of advice and suggestions for improving and expanding the business, but most of the time he forgot what he had said after an hour or so and proffered new advice instead. He drank one glass of tea after another, glanced absentmindedly at the accounts, and if strangers mistook him for the boss, he did not correct them but chatted to them pleasantly about the wealth of the Rothschilds or the terrible hardships of the coolies in China (which he called Kitai). His conversations normally lasted for seven or eight hours.

  His son indulged him. Wisely, cautiously, and patiently Naphtali Hertz expanded the business, opening branches here and there, making a little money. He married off one sister, Sarah, took in another sister, Jenny, and finally managed to marry her off too. ("To a carpenter, Yasha! A nice boy, even if he was very simple! But what other choice was there for Jenny? After all, she was nearly forty!") He employed his nephew Shimshon at a decent wage, and Jenny's Yasha the carpenter too, he spread his largesse over all his brothers and sisters and kinsfolk; his business prospered, and his Ukrainian and Russian customers bowed to him respectfully, with their hats pressed to their chests, and addressed him as Gertz Yefremovich (Hertz son of Ephraim). He even had a Russian assistant, an impoverished young aristocrat who suffered from ulcers. With his help my grandfather extended his business even further, and opened branches as far away as Kiev, Moscow, and St. Petersburg.

  In 1909 or 1910, at the age of twenty-one, Naphtali Hertz Mussman married Itta Gedalyevna Schuster, the capricious daughter of Gedaliah Schuster and his wife Pearl (née Gibor). Of my great-grandmother Pearl, I was informed by Aunt Haya that she was a tough woman, "as shrewd as seven traders," with a sixth sense for village intrigues, sharp-tongued, fond of money and power, and desperately mean. ("The story goes that she always collected every lock of hair that was cut off at the hairdresser's for stuffing cushions. She cut every lump of sugar into four precise little cubes with a knife.") As for great-grandfather Gedaliah, his granddaughter Sonia remembered him as a grumpy, thickset man, overflowing with appetites. His beard was black and unkempt, and his manner was noisy and domineering. It was said of him that he could belch loud enough to rattle the windowpanes, and that his roar was like the sound of rolling barrels. (But he was scared to death of animals, including dogs, cats, and even kids and calves.)

  Their daughter Itta, my grandmother, always behaved like a woman whom life had not treated as gently as she deserved. She was pretty when she was young, and had many suitors, and it seems she was pampered. She ruled her own three daughters with an iron hand, and yet behaved as though she wanted them to treat her like a younger sister or a sweet little child. Even in her old age she continued to treat her grandchildren to all sorts of little bribes and coquettish gestures, as though begging us to make a fuss of her, to be captivated by her charms, to pay court to her. At the same time, she was capable of behaving with polite ruthlessness.

  The marriage of Itta and Hertz Mussman endured, with gritted teeth, through sixty-five years of insults, wrongs, humiliations, truces, shame, restraint, and pursed-lipped mutual politeness. My maternal grandparents were desperately different and remote from each other, yet this desperation was always kept under lock and key. Nobody in my family talked about it, and if I ever managed to sense it in my childhood, it was like a faint whiff of flesh being singed on the other side of a wall.

  Their three daughters, Haya, Fania, and Sonia, sought ways to relieve the misery of their parents' married life. All three unhesitatingly took their father's side against their mother. All three loathed and feared their mother; they were ashamed of her and considered her a depress-ingly vulgar and domineering mischief maker. When they quarreled, they would say to each other accusingly: "Just look at yourself! You're becoming exactly like Maman!"

  Only when her parents were old and when she was getting old herself did Aunt Haya manage finally to separate her parents, putting her father in a home for the elderly in Givatayim and her mother in a nursing home near Nes Tsiyona. She did this despite the protests of Aunt Sonia, who thought such enforced separation was totally wrong. But by then the schism between my two aunts was at its height. They did not speak a single word to each other for nearly thirty years, from the late 1950s until Aunt Haya's death in 1989. Aunt Sonia did attend her sister's funeral, where she remarked to us sadly: "I forgive her for everything. And I pray in my heart that God too will forgive her—and it won't be easy for Him, because he will have an awful lot to forgive her for." Aunt Haya, a year before her death, had said the very same thing to me about her sister Sonia.

  The fact is that all three Mussman sisters, in their different ways, were in love with their father. My grandfather, Naphtali Hertz (whom we all, his daughters, sons-in-law, and grandchildren, called Papa), was a warmhearted, paternal, kindly, fascinating man. He had a swarthy complexion and a warm voice, and he had inherited his father's clear blue eyes, those piercing sharp eyes that concealed a smile. Whenever he spoke to you, you had the impression that he could plumb the depth of your feelings, guessing between the lines, grasping instantly what you had said and why you had said it, and at the same time discerning whatever it was you were trying unsuccessfully to conceal from him. He would sometimes shoot you an unexpected, mischievous smile, almost accompanied by a wink, as though to embarrass you slightly while being embarrassed on your behalf, but forgiving you because after all, when it comes down to it, a human being is only human.

  He considered all human beings to be reckless children who brought great disappointment and suffering upon themselves and each other, all of us trapped in an unending, unsubtle comedy that would generally end badly. All roads led to suffering. Consequently virtually everyone, in Papa's view, deserved compassion, and most of their deeds were worthy of forgiveness, including all sorts of machinations, pranks, deceptions, pretensions, manipulations, false claims, and pretenses. From all these he would absolve you with his faint, mischievous smile, as though saying (in Yiddish): Nu, what.

  The only thing that tested Papa's amused tolerance were acts of cruelty. These he abhorred. His merry blue eyes clouded over at the news of wicked deeds. "An evil beast? What does the expression mean?" he would reflect in Yiddish. "No beast is evil. No beast is capable of evil. The beasts have yet to invent evil. That is our monopoly, the lords of creation. So maybe we ate the wrong apple in the Garden of Eden after all? Maybe between the tree of life and the tree of knowledge there was another tree growing there in the Garden of Eden, a poisonous tree that is not mentioned in scripture, the tree of evil" (the tree of rishes, he called it in Yiddish) "and that was the one we accidentally ate from? That scoundrel of a serpent deceived Eve, he promised her that this was definitely the tree of knowledge, but it was really the tree of rishes he led her to. Perhaps if we had stuck to the trees of life and knowledge, we would never have been thrown out of the garden?"

  And then, with his eyes restored to their merry sparkling blue, he went on to explain clearly, in his slow, warm voice and his picturesque, orotund Yiddish, what Jean-Paul Sartre was to discover only years later: "But what is hell? What is paradise? Surely it is all inside. In our homes. You can find hell and paradise in every room. Behind every door. Under every double blanket. It's like this. A little wickedness, and people are hell to each other. A little compassion, a little generosity, and people find paradise in each other.

  "I said a little compassion and generosity, but I didn't say love: I'm not such a believer in universal love. Love of everybody for everybody—we should maybe leave that to Jesus. Love is another thing altogether. It is nothing whatever like generosity and nothing whatever like compassion. On the contrary. Love is a curious mixture of opposites, a blend of extreme selfishness and total
devotion. A paradox! Besides which, love, everybody is always talking about love, love, but love isn't something you choose, you catch it, like a disease, you get trapped in it, like a disaster. So what is it that we do choose? What do human beings have to choose between every minute of the day? Generosity or meanness. Every little child knows that, and yet wickedness still doesn't come to an end. How can you explain that? It seems we got it all from the apple that we ate back then: we ate a poisoned apple."

  21

  THE CITY of Rovno (Polish Rowne, German Rowno), an important railway junction, grew up around the palaces and moated parks of the princely family of Lubomirsky. The River Uste crossed the city from south to north. Between the river and the marsh stood the citadel, and in the days of the Russians there was still a beautiful lake with swans. The skyline of Rovno was formed by the citadel, the Lubomirsky palace, and a number of Catholic and Orthodox churches, one adorned with twin towers. The city boasted some sixty thousand inhabitants before the Second World War, of whom Jews constituted the majority, and the rest were Ukrainians, Poles, Russians, and a handful of Czechs and Germans. Several thousand more Jews lived in the nearby towns and villages. The villages were surrounded by orchards and vegetable gardens, pastures and fields of wheat and rye that sometimes shuddered or rippled in the breeze. The silence of the fields was broken from time to time by the howl of a locomotive. Occasionally you could hear Ukrainian peasant girls singing in the gardens. From a distance it sounded like wailing.

  Wide, flat plains extended as far as the eye could see, here and there arching up in gentle hills, crisscrossed by rivers and pools, dappled with marshes and forests. In the city itself there were three or four "European" streets with a handful of official buildings in neoclassical style and an almost unbroken facade of two-story apartment buildings with wrought-iron balconies, where the middle class lived. A row of small shops occupied the ground floor of these merchants' homes. But most of the side roads were unpaved tracks; they were muddy in winter and dusty in summer. Here and there they were edged with rickety wooden walkways. No sooner had you turned into one of these side roads than you were surrounded by low, broad-shouldered Slavic houses, with thick walls and deep eaves, surrounded by allotments and innumerable ramshackle wooden huts, some of which had sunk up to their windows in the earth and had grass growing on their roofs.

  In 1919 a Hebrew secondary school was opened in Rovno by Tar-buth, a Jewish educational organization, together with a primary school and several kindergartens. My mother and her sisters were educated in Tarbuth schools. Hebrew and Yiddish newspapers were published in Rovno in the 1920s and 1930s, ten or twelve Jewish political parties contended frantically with each other, and Hebrew clubs for literature, Judaism, science, and adult education flourished. The more anti-Semitism increased in Poland in the 1920s and 1930s, the stronger Zionism and Hebrew education grew, and at the same time (with no contradiction) the stronger became the pull of secularism and of non-Jewish culture.*

  Every evening, at ten o'clock precisely, the night express pulled out of Rovno Station, bound for Zdolbunowo, Lvov, Lublin, and Warsaw. On Sundays and Christian holidays all the church bells rang out. The winters were dark and snowy, and in summer warm rain fell. The cinema in Rovno was owned by a German named Brandt. One of the pharmacists was a Czech by the name of Mahacek. The chief surgeon at the hospital was a Jew called Dr. Segal, whose rivals nicknamed him Mad Segal. A colleague of his at the hospital was the orthopedic surgeon Dr. Joseph Kopejka, who was a keen Revisionist Zionist. Moshe Rotenberg and Simcha-Hertz Majafit were the town's rabbis. Jews dealt in timber and grain, milled flour, worked in textiles and household goods, gold and silver work, hides, printing, clothing, grocery, haberdashery, trade, and banking. Some young Jews were driven by their social conscience to join the proletariat as print workers, apprentices, and day laborers. The Pisiuk family had a brewery. The Twischor family were well-known craftsmen. The Strauch family made soap. The Gendelberg family leased forests. The Steinberg family owned a match factory. In June 1941 the Germans captured Rovno from the Soviet Army, which had taken over the city two years earlier. In two days, November 7 and 8,1941, Germans and their collaborators murdered more than twenty-three thousand of the city's Jews. Five thousand of those who survived were murdered later, on July 13, 1942.

  *Menahem Gelehrter, The Tarbuth Hebrew Gymnasium in Rovno (in Hebrew) (Jerusalem, 1973). The Tarbuth schools were Zionist and secular.

  My mother sometimes talked to me nostalgically, in her quiet voice that lingered on the ends of the words, about the Rovno she had left behind. In six or seven sentences she could paint me a picture. I repeatedly put off going to Rovno, so that the pictures my mother gave me do not have to make way for others.

  The eccentric mayor of Rovno in the second decade of the twentieth century, Lebedevski, never had any children; he lived in a large house surrounded by more than an acre of land, with a garden, a kitchen garden, and an orchard, at 14 Dubinska Street. He lived there with a single servant and her little daughter, who was rumored to be his own daughter. There was also a distant relation of his, Lyubov Nikitichna, a penniless Russian aristocrat who claimed also to be somehow distantly related to the ruling Romanov family. She lived in Lebedevski's house with her two daughters by two different husbands, Anastasia Sergeyevna, or Tasia, and Antonina Boleslavovna, or Nina. The three of them lived crowded into a tiny room that was actually the end of a corridor, curtained off. The three noblewomen shared this tiny space with a huge, magnificent eighteenth-century piece of furniture made of mahogany and carved with flowers and ornaments. Inside it and behind its glazed doors were crammed masses of antiques, silver, porcelain, and crystal. They also had a wide bed adorned with colorful embroidered cushions, where apparently the three of them slept together.

  The house had a single, spacious story, but underneath it there was a vast cellar that served as workshop, larder, storage room, wine cellar, and repository of thick smells: a strange, slightly scary but also fascinating mixture of smells of dried fruit, butter, sausages, beer, cereals, honey, different kinds of jams, varinnye, povidlo, barrels of pickled cabbage and cucumbers and all sorts of spices, and strings of dried fruits hung across the cellar, and there were several kinds of dried pulses in sacks and wooden tubs, and smells of tar, paraffin, pitch, coal, and firewood, and also faint odors of mold and decay. A small opening close to the ceiling let in a slanting, dusty ray of light, which seemed to intensify rather than dispel the darkness. I came to know this cellar so well from my mother's stories that even now as I write this, when I close my eyes, I can go down there and inhale its dizzying blend of smells.

  In 1920, shortly before Marshal Pilsudski's Polish troops captured Rovno and all of western Ukraine from the Russians, Mayor Lebedevski fell from grace and was expelled from office. His successor was a crass hoodlum and drunkard named Bojarski, who on top of everything else was a ferocious anti-Semite. Lebedevski's house in Dubinska Street was bought at a bargain price by my grandfather, the mill owner Naphtali Hertz Mussman. He moved in with his wife Itta and his three daughters, Haya, or Nyusya, the eldest, who had been born in 1911, Rivka-Feiga, or Fania, who was born two years later, and the daughter of his old age, Sarah, or Sonia, who was born in 1916. The house, I was told recently, is still standing.

  On one side of Dubinska Street, whose name was changed by the Poles to Kazarmowa (Barracks) Street, stood the mansions of the wealthier inhabitants of the city, while the other side was occupied by the army barracks (the kazarmy). The fragrance of gardens and orchards filled the street in springtime, mingled sometimes with smells of washing or of baking, of fresh bread, cakes, biscuits, and pies, and scents of strongly seasoned dishes that wafted from the kitchens of the houses.

  In that spacious house with its many rooms various lodgers whom the Mussmans had "inherited" from Lebedevski continued to dwell. Papa did not have the heart to turn them out. So the old servant, Xenia Demitrievna, Xenietchka, continued to live behind the kitchen, with her daught
er Dora, who may or may not have been sired by Lebedevski himself; everyone called her simply Dora, with no patronymic. At the end of the corridor, behind the heavy curtain, the impoverished aristocrat Lyubov Nikitichna, Lyuba, still claiming to be somehow related to the imperial family, remained in undisturbed possession of her tiny space, together with her daughters Tasia and Nina; all three were very thin, erect, and proud, and always elaborately got up, "like a muster of peacocks."

  In a light, spacious room at the front of the house that he rented on a monthly basis and that was known as the Kabinett lived a Polish colonel (polkovnik) by the name of Jan Zakrzewski. He was a boastful, lazy, and sentimental man in his fifties, solidly built, manly, broad-shouldered, and not bad looking. The girls addressed him as "Panie Polkovnik." Every Friday, Itta Mussman would send one of her daughters with a tray of fragrant poppy cakes straight from the oven; she had to tap politely on Panie Polkovnik's door, curtsey, and wish him a good Sabbath on behalf of all the family. The colonel would lean forward and stroke the little girl's hair or sometimes her back or shoulder; he called them all cyganka (Gypsy) and promised each of them that he would wait for her faithfully, and marry no one but her when she was old enough.

  Bojarski, the anti-Semitic mayor who had replaced Lebedevski, would sometimes come to play cards with Retired Colonel Zakrzewski. They drank together and smoked "until the air was black." As the hours passed, their voices became thick and hoarse, and their loud laughter filled with grunts and wheezes. Whenever the mayor came to the house, the girls were sent to the back or out into the garden, to prevent their ears picking up remarks that were unsuitable for well-brought-up girls to hear. From time to time the servant would bring the men hot tea, sausages, herring, or a tray of fruit compote, biscuits, and nuts. Each time she would respectfully convey the request of the lady of the house that they should lower their voices as she had a "blinding headache." What the gentlemen replied to the old servant we shall never know, as the servant was "as deaf as ten walls" (or sometimes they said "as deaf as God Almighty"). She would cross herself piously, curtsey, and leave the room dragging her tired, painful feet.