A Tale of Love and Darkness

by Amos Oz

  And once, in the early hours of a Sunday morning, before first light, when everyone else in the house was still in bed fast asleep, Colonel Zakrzewski decided to try out his pistol. First he fired into the garden through the closed window. By chance, or in some mysterious way, he managed in the dark to hit a pigeon, which was found wounded but still alive in the morning. Then, for some reason, he took a pot shot at the wine bottle on his table, shot himself in the thigh, fired twice at the chandelier but missed, and with his last bullet shattered his own forehead and died. He was a sentimental, garrulous man, who wore his heart on his sleeve; often he would suddenly burst out singing or weeping, sad as he was about the historic tragedy of his people, sad about the pretty piglet that the neighbor bludgeoned to death with a pole, sad about the bitter fate of songbirds when winter came, about the suffering of Jesus nailed to the cross, he was even sad about the Jews, who had been persecuted for fifty generations and had still not managed to see the light, he was sad about his own life, which was flowing on without rhyme or reason, and desperately sad about some girl, Vassilisa, whom he had once allowed to leave him, many years before, for which he would never cease to curse his stupidity and his empty, useless life. "My God, my God," he used to declaim in his Polish Latin, "why hast Thou forsaken me? And why hast Thou forsaken us all?"

  That morning they took the three girls out of the house by the back door, through the orchard, and past the stable gate, and when the girls returned, the front room was empty, clean and tidy and aired, and all the colonel's belongings had been bundled into sacks and taken away. Only the smell of wine, from the bottle that had been smashed, Aunt Haya remembered, lingered for a few days.

  And once the girl who was to be my mother found a note there tucked into a crack in the wardrobe, written in rather simple Polish, in a female hand, in which somebody wrote to her very precious little wolf cub to say that in all the days of her life she had never ever met a better or more generous man than he, and that she was not worthy to kiss the soles of his feet. Little Fania noticed two spelling mistakes in the Polish. The note was signed with the letter N, beneath which the writer had drawn a pair of full lips extended for a kiss. "Nobody," my mother said, "knows anything about anyone else. Not even about a close neighbor. Not even about the person you are married to. Or about your parent or your child. Nothing at all. Or even about ourselves. We know nothing. And if we sometimes imagine for an instant that we do know something after all, that's even worse, because it's better to live without knowing anything than to live in error. Although in fact, who knows? Maybe on second thought it's much easier to live in error than to live in the dark?"

  From her stuffy, gloomy, clean and tidy, overfurnished, always shuttered two-room apartment on Wessely Street in Tel Aviv (while a damp, oppressive September day gradually gathers outside), Aunt Sonia takes me to visit the mansion in the Wolja quarter in northwest Rovno. Kazarmowa Street, formerly Dubinska, crossed the main street of Rovno, which used to be called Shossejna, but after the arrival of the Poles was renamed Trzecziego Maya, Third of May Street, in honor of the Polish national day.

  When you approach the house from the road, Aunt Sonia describes to me, precisely and in detail, you first cross the small front garden, which is called a palisadnik, with its neat jasmine bushes ("and I can still remember a little shrub on the left that had a very strong and particularly pungent smell, which is why we called it 'love-struck'..."). And there were flowers called margaritki, that now you call daisies. And there were rose bushes, rozochki, we used to make a sort of konfitura from their petals, a jam that was so sweet and fragrant that you imagined it must lick itself when no one was looking. The roses grew in two circular beds surrounded by little stones or bricks that were laid diagonally and whitewashed, so that they looked like a row of snow white swans leaning on one another.

  Behind these bushes, she says, we had a small green bench, and next to it you turned left to the main entrance: there were four or five wide steps, and a big brown door with all kinds of ornaments and carvings, left over from Mayor Lebedevski's baroque taste. The main entrance led to a hall with mahogany furniture and a large window with curtains that reached the floor. The first door on the right was the door of the Kabinett where Polkovnik Pan Jan Zakrzewski lived. His manservant or denshchik, a peasant boy with a broad red face like a beet, covered with the kind of acne you get from thinking not nice thoughts, slept in front of his door at night on a mattress that was folded away in the daytime. When this denshchik looked at us girls, his eyes popped out as though he were going to die of hunger. I'm not talking about hunger for bread, actually bread we used to bring him all the time from the kitchen, as much as he wanted. The polovnik used to beat his denshchik mercilessly, and then he used to regret it and give him pocket money.

  You could enter the house through the wing on the right—there was a path paved with reddish stones that was very slippery in winter. Six trees grew along this path, in Russian they are called siren, I don't know what you call them, maybe they don't even exist here. These trees sometimes had little clusters of purple flowers with such an intoxicating scent, we used to stop there on purpose and breathe it in deeply until we sometimes felt light-headed, and we could see all kinds of bright dots in front of our eyes, in all kinds of colors that don't have names. In general, I think there are far more colors and smells than there are words. The path on this side of the house takes you to six steps that led up to a little open porch where there was a bench—the love bench, we all called it, because of something not very nice that they didn't want to tell us about but we knew it had to do with the servants. The servants' entrance opened off this porch; we called it chyorny khod, which means the black door.

  If you didn't come into the house through the front door or the chyorny khod, you could follow the path around the side of the house and reach the garden. Which was gigantic: at least as big as from here, from Wessely Street, to Dizengoff Street. Or even as far as Ben Yehudah Street. In the middle of the garden there was an avenue with a lot of fruit trees on either side, all sorts of plum trees and two cherry trees whose blossoms looked like a wedding dress, and they used to make vishniak and piroshki from the fruit. Reinette apples, popirovki, and grushi—huge juicy pears, pontovki pears, that the boys called by names that are not very nice to repeat. On the other side there were more fruit trees, succulent peaches, apples that resemble the ones we call Peerless, and little green pears that again the boys said something about that made us girls press our hands hard against our ears so we wouldn't hear. And long plums for making jam, and among the fruit trees there were raspberry canes and blackberries and black currant bushes. And we had special apples for winter, which we used to put under straw in the cherdak—the loft—to ripen slowly for the winter. They put pears there too, also wrapped in straw, to sleep for a few more weeks and only wake up in the winter, and that way we had good fruit right through the winter, when other people only had potatoes to eat, and not always potatoes even. Papa used to say that wealth is a sin and poverty is a punishment but that God apparently wants there to be no connection between the sin and the punishment. One man sins and another is punished. That's how the world is made.

  He was almost a Communist, Papa, your grandfather. He always used to leave his father, Grandpa Ephraim, eating with a knife and fork and a white napkin at the desk in the mill office, while he sat with his workers down by the wood-burning stove and ate with them, using his hands, rye bread and pickled herring, a slice of onion with some salt, and a potato in its jacket. On a piece of newspaper on the floor they used to eat, and they washed their food down with a swig of vodka. Every festival, the day before every festival, Papa used to give each worker a sack of flour, a bottle of wine, and a few rubles. He would point to the mill and say—Nu, all this isn't mine, it's ours! He was like Schiller's Wilhelm Tell, your grandfather, that socialist president who drank wine from the same goblet as the simplest soldiers.

  That must surely be the reason that in 1919, when the
Communists came into the town and immediately lined up all the capitalists and Fabrikanten—factory owners—against the wall, Papa's workers opened up the cover of the big engine, I can't remember what it was called, the main motor that gave power to the Walzen—the wheels—to grind the corn, and they hid him inside and locked him in, and they sent a delegation to the Red povodir and said to him, Listen to us real good, please, Comrade Governor, our Gerz Yefremovich Mussman, you're not to touch him, not even a hair on his head, right! Herz Mussman—on nash bachka (which is Ukrainian for "he's our father").

  And the Soviet authorities in Rovno really did make your grandfather the upravlayushi—the boss—of the mill, they didn't interfere with his authority, on the contrary, they came and said to him something like this: Dear Comrade Mussman, listen please, from now on, if you have any trouble with a lazy worker or a sabotazhnik—just point him out to us and we'll put him up against the wall. To be sure, your grandfather did just the opposite: he was very crafty at protecting his workers from this workers' government. And at the same time he supplied flour to the entire Red Army in our district.

  One time it so happened that the Soviet governor apparently took delivery of a huge consignment of totally moldy corn, and he was in a panic because for this they could put him up against the wall right away, What's this, why did you accept it without checking? So what did he do, the governor, to save his skin? Late at night he ordered the whole consignment to be unloaded near Papa's mill, and gave him an order to grind it into flour urgently by five in the morning.

  In the dark Papa and the workers didn't even notice that the corn was moldy, they set to work and ground the lot, they worked all through the night, and in the morning they had foul-smelling flour full of maggots. Papa understood at once that this flour was his responsibility now, and it was his choice whether to accept the responsibility or to blame without any proof the Soviet governor who sent him the moldy corn: either way it was the firing squad.

  What choice did he have? To put all the blame on his workers? So he simply threw away all the moldy flour with the maggots, and in its place he brought out from his stores a hundred and fifty sacks of best quality flour, not army flour but white flour, for baking cakes and cholla, and in the morning without saying a word he presented this flour to the governor. The governor didn't say a word either, even though in his heart he was maybe a bit ashamed that he tried to shift the blame onto your grandfather. But what could he do now? After all, Lenin and Stalin never accepted explanations or apologies from anyone: they just put them up against the wall and shot them.

  Of course the governor understood that what Papa was giving him was definitely not his filthy corn, and therefore that Papa had saved both their skins at his own expense. And his workers' too.

  This story has a sequel. Papa had a brother, Mikhail, Michael, who had the good fortune to be as deaf as God. I say good fortune, because Uncle Michael had a terrible wife, Rakhil, who was so nasty, she used to shout and curse at him all day and all night with her rough, hoarse voice, but he heard nothing: he lived in silent calm, like the moon in the sky.

  All those years Mikhail hung around Papa's mill and did nothing, drinking tea with Grandpa Ephraim in the office and scratching himself, and for this Papa paid him a fairly handsome monthly salary. One day, a few weeks after the moldy flour incident, the Soviets suddenly took Mikhail away and conscripted him into the Red Army. But the same night Mikhail saw his mother Haya in a dream, and she was saying to him in the dream, Hurry, my son, hurry and flee, because tomorrow they plan to kill you. So he got up early in the morning and ran away from the barracks as if they were on fire: a deserter, rastralki. But the Reds caught him at once and court-martialed him and sentenced him to be put up against the wall. Just the way his mother had warned him in the dream! Only in the dream she forgot to say that it was the opposite, that he should on no account run away and desert!

  Papa went to the square to take leave of his brother, there was nothing to be done, when all of a sudden, in the middle of the square, where the soldiers had already loaded their rifles for Mikhail—all of a sudden this governor of the moldy flour turns to the condemned man and shouts: Tell me please, ty brat of Gertz Yefremovich? Are you by any chance the brother of Hertz son of Ephraim? And Mikhail answers him: Da, Comrade General! And the governor turns to Papa and asks: Is he your brother? And Papa also answers, Yes, yes, Comrade General! He's my brother! Definitely my brother! So the general simply turns and says to Uncle Mikhail: Nu, idi domoy! Poshol! Go home! Off with you! And he leans toward Papa, so they can't hear, and this is what he says to him, quietly: "Nu, what, Gertz Yefremovich? Did you think you were the only one who knows how to turn shit into pure gold?"

  Your grandfather was a Communist in his heart, but he was not a red Bolshevik. He always considered Stalin to be another Ivan the Terrible. He himself was, how should I say, a kind of pacifist Communist, a nar-odnik, a Tolstoyshchik Communist who was opposed to bloodshed. He was very frightened of the evil that lurks in the soul, in men of all stations: he always used to say to us that there ought someday to be a popular regime common to all decent people in the world. But that first of all it will be necessary to eliminate gradually all the states and armies and secret polices, and only after that will it be possible to start gradually creating equality between rich and poor. To take tax from one lot and give to the other, only not all at once, because that makes bloodshed, but slowly and gradually. He used to say: Mit aroapfalendiker. Downhill. Even if it takes seven or eight generations, so the rich almost don't notice how slowly they're not so rich anymore. The main thing in his opinion was that we had to start to convince the world at last that injustice and exploitation are a disease of mankind and that justice is the only medicine: true, a bitter medicine, that's what he always used to say to us, a dangerous medicine, a strong medicine that you have to take drop by drop until the body becomes accustomed to it. Anyone who tries to swallow it all at one go only causes disaster, sheds rivers of blood. Just look what Lenin and Stalin did to Russia and to the whole world! It's true that Wall Street really is a vampire that sucks the world's blood, but you can never get rid of the vampire by shedding blood, on the contrary, you only strengthen it, you only feed it more and more fresh blood!

  The trouble with Trotsky and Lenin and Stalin and their friends, your grandfather thought, is that they tried to reorganize the whole of life, at a stroke, out of books, books by Marx and Engels and other great thinkers like them; they may have known the libraries very well, but they didn't have any idea about life, about malice or about jealousy, envy, rishes, or gloating at others' misfortunes. Never, never will it be possible to organize life according to a book! Not our Shulhan Arukh, not Jesus of Nazareth, and not Marx's Manifesto! Never! In general, Papa always used to say to us, better a little less to organize and reorganize and a little more to help one another and maybe to forgive, too. He believed in two things, your grandpa: compassion and justice, derbaremen un gerechtigkeit. But he was of the opinion that you always have to make the connection between them: justice without compassion isn't justice, it's an abattoir. On the other hand, compassion without justice may be all right for Jesus but not for simple mortals who have eaten the apple of evil. That was his view: a little less organizing, a little more pity.

  Opposite the chyorny khod there grew a beautiful kashtan, a magnificent old chestnut tree that looked a bit like King Lear, and underneath it Papa had a bench put up for the three of us—we called it the "sisters' bench" On fine days we used to sit there and dream aloud about what would happen to us when we grew up. Which of us would be an engineer, a poet, or a famous inventor like Marie Curie? That was the kind of thing we dreamed about. We didn't dream, like most girls of our age, about marrying a rich or famous husband, because we came from a rich family and we weren't at all attracted by the idea of marrying someone even richer than we were.

  If we ever talked about falling in love, it wasn't with some nobleman or famous actor but only with someone
with elevated feelings, like a great artist for example, even if he didn't have a kopek. Never mind. What did we know then? How could we possibly know what scoundrels, what beasts great artists are? (Not all of them—definitely not all of them!) Only today I really don't think that elevated feelings and suchlike are the main thing in life. Definitely not. Feelings are just a fire in a field of stubble: it burns for a moment, and then all that's left is soot and ashes. Do you know what the main thing is—the thing a woman should look for in her man? She should look for a quality that's not at all exciting but that's rarer than gold: decency. And maybe kindness too. Today, you should know this, I rate decency more highly than kindness. Decency is the bread, kindness is the butter. Or the honey.

  In the orchard, halfway down the avenue, there were two benches facing each other, and that was a good place to go when you felt like being alone with your thoughts in the silence between the birdsong and the whispering of the breeze in the branches.

  Beyond that, at the edge of the field, was a little building we called the ofitsina, where, in the first room, there was a black boiler for the laundry. We played at being prisoners of the wicked witch Baba Yaga who puts little girls in the boiler. Then there was a little back room where the gardener lived. Behind the ofitsina were the stables, where Papa's phaeton was kept, and a big chestnut horse lived there too. Next to the stable stood a sleigh with iron runners in which Philip, the coachman, or his son Anton, drove us to the hairdresser on icy or snowy days. Sometimes Hemi came with us—he was the son of Rucha and Arie Leib Pisiuk, who were very rich. The Pisiuks owned a brewery and supplied the whole district with beer and yeast. The brewery was enormous, and it was managed by Hertz Meir Pisiuk, Hemi's grandfather. The famous men who visited Rovno always stayed with the Pisiuks: Bialik, Jabotinsky, Tchernikhowsky. I think that boy, Hemi Pisiuk, was your mother's first love. Fania must have been about thirteen or fifteen, and she always wanted to ride in the carriage or the sleigh with Hemi but without me, and I always deliberately came between them; I was nine or ten, I didn't let them be alone, I was a silly little girl. That's what I was called at that time. When I wanted to irritate Fania, I called her, in front of everybody, Hemuchka, which comes from Hemi. Nehemiah. Hemi Pisiuk went to study in Paris, and that's where they killed him. The Germans.