A Tale of Love and Darkness

by Amos Oz

  Papa, your grandfather, was fond of Philip, the coachman, and he was very fond of the horses, he even liked the smith who used to come and grease the carriage, but the one thing he really hated was to ride in the carriage, wearing a fur coat with a fox-fur collar, like a squire, behind his Ukrainian coachman. He preferred to walk. Somehow he didn't enjoy being a wealthy man. In his carriage, or in his fauteuil, surrounded by buffets and crystal chandeliers, he felt a bit like a komediant.

  Many years later, when he had lost all his possessions, when he came to Israel almost empty-handed, he actually didn't think it was too terrible. He didn't miss his possessions at all. On the contrary: he felt lightened. He didn't mind sweating in the sun, with a gray vest on, with a thirty-kilo sack of flour on his back. Only Mama suffered terribly, she cursed, she shouted at him and insulted him, why had he come down in the world? Where were the fauteuils, the crystal and the chandeliers? Did she deserve at her age to live like a mujik, like a hoholka, without a cook or a hairdresser or a seamstress? When would he finally pull himself together and build a new flour mill in Haifa, so that we could recover our lost position? Like the fisherman's wife in the story, that's what Mama was like. But I forgave her for everything. May God forgive her too. And he will have plenty to forgive! May God forgive me too for talking about her like this, may she rest in peace. May she rest in peace the way she never gave Papa a moment's peace in his life. For forty years they lived in this country, and every day, morning to night, she did nothing but poison his life. They found themselves a sort of tumbledown hut in a field of thistles behind Kiriat Motskin, a one-room hut with no water and no toilet, roofed with tar paper—do you remember Papa and Mama's hut? Yes? The only faucet was outside among the thistles, the water was full of rust, and the toilet was a hole in the ground in a makeshift shelter at the back that Papa built himself out of bits of wood.

  Maybe it's not entirely Mama's fault that she poisoned his life so. After all, she was very unhappy there. Desperately! She was an unhappy woman altogether. She was born unhappy. Even the chandeliers and the crystal did not make her happy. But she was the kind of unhappy person who has to make other people miserable too; that was your grandfather's bad luck.

  As soon as he came to Israel, Papa found work in Haifa, in a bakery. He used to go around Haifa Bay with a horse and cart: they saw that he knew something about corn, flour, and bread, so instead of giving him a job milling or baking they made him carry sacks of flour and deliver bread with his horse and cart. After that he worked for many years with the Vulcan iron foundry, transporting all sorts of round and long bits of iron for building.

  Sometimes he used to take you with him in his cart around Haifa Bay. Do you still remember? Yes? When he was old, your grandpa made a living carrying around wide planks for scaffolding or sand from the seashore for new buildings.

  I can remember you sitting next to him, a skinny little kid, as taut as a rubber band; Papa used to give you the reins to hold. I can still see the picture clearly in front of my eyes: you were a white child, as pale as a piece of paper, and your grandpa was always very suntanned, a strong man, even when he was seventy he was strong, as dark as an Indian, some kind of Indian prince, a maharajah with blue eyes that sparkled with laughter. And you sat on the plank that served as the driver's seat in a little white vest, and he sat next to you in a sweaty gray workman's vest. He was actually happy, content with his lot, he loved the sunshine and the physical labor. He rather enjoyed being a carter, he had always had proletarian leanings, and in Haifa he felt good being a proletarian again, as at the beginning of his journey, when he was just an apprentice on the Vilkhov estate. Perhaps he enjoyed life much more as a carter than he had as a rich mill owner and man of property in Rovno. And you were such a serious little boy, a boy who couldn't stand the sunshine, too serious, seven or eight years old, all stiff on the driver's seat next to him, anxious about the reins, suffering from the flies and heat, afraid of being lashed by the horse's tail. But you behaved bravely and didn't complain. I remember it as if it were today. The big gray vest and the little white one. I thought then that you would surely be much more of a Klausner than a Mussman. Today I'm not so sure...

  22

  I REMEMBER we used to argue a lot, Aunt Sonia says with our girlfriends, with the boys, with teachers at school, and at home too, among ourselves, about questions like what is justice, what is fate, what is beauty, what is God? Of course we also argued about Palestine, assimilation, political parties, literature, socialism, or the ills of the Jewish people. Haya and Fania and their friends were especially argumentative. I argued less, because I was the little sister, and they would always say to me: You just listen. Haya was big in the Zionist youth movement. Your mother was in Hashomer Hatsair, and I joined Hashomer Hatsair too, three years later. In your family, the Klausners, it was best not to mention Hashomer Hatsair. It was too far left for them. The Klausners didn't even want the name mentioned because they were scared stiff you might get a sprinkling of red just from hearing it.

  Once, it may have been in the winter, at Hannukah, we had a huge argument that lasted off and on for several weeks, about heredity versus free will. I remember as if it were yesterday how your mother suddenly came out with this strange sentence, that if you open up someone's head and take out the brains, you see at once that our brains are nothing but cauliflower. Even Chopin or Shakespeare: their brains were nothing but cauliflower.

  I don't even remember in what connection Fania said this, but I remember that we couldn't stop laughing, I laughed so much I cried, but she didn't even smile. Fania had this habit of saying in deadly earnest things that would make everyone laugh, and she knew they would, but she didn't join in the laughter. Fania would laugh only when it suited her, not together with everyone else, just when nobody thought there was anything funny in what we were talking about—that's when your mother would suddenly burst out laughing.

  Nothing but cauliflower, she said, and she showed us the size of the cauliflower with her hands, and what a miracle it is, she said—into this cauliflower you can get heaven and earth, the sun and all the stars, the ideas of Plato, the music of Beethoven, the French Revolution, Tolstoy's novels, Dante's Inferno, all the deserts and oceans, there's room in there for the dinosaurs and the whales, everything can get into that cauliflower, and all the hopes, desires, and errors and fantasies of mankind, there's room for everything there, even that puffy wart with the black hairs in it that grows on Bashka Durashka's chin. The moment Fania introduced Bashka's revolting wart right in the middle of Plato and Beethoven, we all burst out laughing again, except for your mother, who just stared at us all in amazement, as though it wasn't the cauliflower that was so funny, but us.

  Later Fania wrote me a philosophical letter from Prague. I was about sixteen and she was a nineteen-year-old student, her letters to me were perhaps a bit too much de haut en bas, because I was always considered a silly little girl, but I can still remember that it was a long, detailed letter about heredity versus environment and free will.

  I'll try to tell you what she said, but of course it will be in my own words, not Fania's: I don't know many people who are capable of expressing what Fania could express. So this is more or less what Fania wrote to me: that heredity and the environment that nurtures us and our social class—these are all like cards that are dealt out at random before the game begins. There is no freedom about this: the world gives, and you just take what you're given, with no opportunity to choose. But, she wrote to me from Prague, the question is what each person does with the cards that are dealt out to him. Some people play brilliantly with poor cards, and others do the opposite: they squander and lose everything even with excellent cards. And that is what our freedom amounts to: how to play with the hand we have been dealt. But even the freedom to play well or badly, she wrote, depends ironically on each person's luck, on patience, intelligence, intuition, or adventurousness. And in the last resort surely these too are simply cards that are or are not dealt to u
s before the game begins. And if so, then what is left of our freedom of choice?

  Not much, your mother wrote, in the last resort maybe all we are left with is the freedom to laugh at our condition or to lament it, to play the game or to throw in our hand, to try more or less to understand what is and isn't the case, or to give up and not try to understand—in a nutshell, the choice is between going through this life awake or in a kind of stupor. That is, roughly, what Fania, your mother, said, but in my words. Not in her words. I can't say it in her words.

  Now that we're talking about fate versus freedom of choice, now that we're talking about cards, I have another story for you ... Philip, the Mussman family's Ukrainian coachman, had a dark, good-looking son called Anton: black eyes that sparkled like black diamonds, a mouth that turned down slightly at the corners, as if from contempt, and strength, broad shoulders, a bass voice like a bull's, the glasses in the kommoda tinkled when Anton roared. Every time he passed a girl in the street, this Anton deliberately walked more slowly, and the girl unconsciously walked a little faster, and her breath came a little faster too. I remember that we used to make fun of one another, we sisters and our girlfriends: who had arranged her blouse just so for Anton? Who had put a flower in her hair for Anton? And who had gone out walking in the street for Anton with a starched pleated skirt and snow-white short socks?

  Next door to us on Dubinska Street lived Engineer Steletsky, the nephew of Princess Ravzova whom your grandfather was sent to work for when he was twelve. It was the same poor engineer who founded the flour mill that Papa started out working for and finally bought him out. Steletsky's wife simply ran off clutching a little blue suitcase straight to the little hut opposite, which Anton had built for himself beyond our front garden, at the edge of the built-up area. Actually it was a field where cows grazed. It's true she had reasons to run away from her husband: he may have been a bit of a genius, but he was a drunken genius, and sometimes he lost her at cards, that is, he handed her over for a night in lieu of payment, if you see what I mean.

  I remember asking my mother about it, and she turned pale and said to me, Soniechka! Oy vey! You should be ashamed of yourself! Just you stop, do you hear me?! Just you stop even thinking about nasty things like that this minute and start thinking about beautiful things instead! Because it's well known, Soniechka, that a girl who thinks nasty thoughts in her heart starts growing hair in all sorts of parts of her body, and she develops an ugly deep voice like a man, and after that no one will ever want to marry her!

  That was the way we were brought up in those days. And the truth? I myself didn't want to think thoughts like that at all, about a woman who had to go off with some drunken wretch to some filthy hut at night as his prize. Thoughts about the fate of many women whose husbands lose us. Because there are other ways of losing a woman. Not just at cards! But thoughts are not like television, where if you see unpleasant things you simply press the button and run away to another program. Nasty thoughts are more like worms in the cauliflower!

  Aunt Sonia remembers Ira Steletskaya as a frail, miniature woman with a sweet, slightly surprised expression. "She always looked as though she'd just been told that Lenin was waiting for her outside in the courtyard."

  She lived in Anton's hut for several months, maybe half a year, and her husband forbade the children to go to her or even to answer her if she addressed them, but they could see her every day in the distance and she could see them. Her husband could also see her all the time, in the distance, in Anton's hut. Anton liked to pick Ira up off the ground—after giving birth to two children she still had the slim, beautiful body of a sixteen-year-old—and he liked to lift her in his hands like a puppy, swing her in circles, throw her up and catch her, hop hop hop, and Ira used to scream with fear and pummel him with her tiny fists that must hardly have tickled him. Anton was as strong as an ox: he could straighten out the shaft of our carriage with his bare hands if it got bent. It was simply a tragedy without words: every day Ira Steletskaya could see her home and her children and her husband opposite, and every day they could see her in the distance.

  Once this unfortunate woman, who already drank more than was good for her—she started drinking in the morning too—well, once she simply hid by the gate of their house and waited for her younger daughter, Kira, to come home from school.

  I happened to be passing and I saw from close up how Kiruchka wouldn't let her mother pick her up in her arms, because her father forbade any contact. The child was afraid of her father, she was afraid even to say a few words to her mother, she pushed her away, kicked her, called for help, until Kasimir, Engineer Steletsky's manservant, heard her cries and came out on the steps. At once he started waving his hands at her, like that, and making noises as if shooing a chicken away. I shall never forget how Ira Steletskaya went away and cried, not quietly, like a lady, no, she cried like a servant, like a muzhik she cried, with terrifying, inhuman howls, like a bitch whose whelp is taken away and killed in front of her eyes.

  There's something like it in Tolstoy, you surely remember, in Anna Karenina, when one day Anna slips into her house while Karenin is away at his office, she manages to slip inside the house that was once hers, and even manages to see her son for a moment, but the servants drive her away. Except in Tolstoy it is much less cruel than what I saw when Irina Matveyevna ran away from Kasimir the servant, she passed me, as close as I am to where you are sitting—after all, we were neighbors—but she didn't greet me, and I heard her broken howls and I smelled her breath and I saw from her face that she was no longer entirely sane. In her look, the way she cried, her walk, I could see clearly the signs of her death.

  And after a few weeks or months Anton threw her out, or rather he went off to another village, and Irina went home, she went down on her knees to her husband, and apparently Engineer Steletsky took pity on her and took her back, but not for long: they kept taking her off to the hospital, and in the end male nurses came and bound her eyes and arms and took her away by force to a lunatic asylum in Kovel. I can remember her eyes, even now as I am talking to you I can see her eyes, and it's so strange, eighty years have passed, and there was the Holocaust, and there were all the wars here and our own tragedy, and illnesses, everyone apart from me is dead, and even so her eyes still pierce my heart like a pair of sharp knitting needles.

  Ira came home to Steletsky a few times, calmed; she looked after the children, she even planted new rosebushes in the garden, fed the birds, fed the cats, but one day she ran away again, to the forest, and when they caught her, she took a can of petrol and went to the little hut that Anton had built himself in the pasture. The hut was roofed with tar paper—Anton hadn't lived there for a long time—and she lit a match and burned down the hut with all his rags and herself too. In the winter, when everything was covered with white snow, the blackened beams of the burned hut rose out of the snow, pointing to the clouds and the forest like sooty fingers.

  Some time later Engineer Steletsky went off the rails and made a complete fool of himself; he remarried, lost all his money, and finally sold Papa his share of the mill. Your grandfather had managed to buy Princess Ravzova's share even before that. And to think that he started out as her apprentice, just a serf, a poor twelve-and-a-half-year-old boy who had lost his mother and been thrown out of the house by his stepmother.

  Now see for yourself what strange circles fate draws for us: weren't you exactly twelve and a half when you lost your mother? Just like your grandfather. Although they didn't farm you out to some half-crazed landowner. You were sent to a kibbutz instead. Don't imagine I don't know what it means to come to a kibbutz as a child who wasn't born there: it was no paradise. By the age of fifteen your grandfather was virtually managing Princess Ravzova's mill for her, and at the same age you were writing poems. A few years later the whole mill belonged to Papa, who in his heart always despised property. He didn't just despise it, it choked him. My father, your grandfather, had persistence and vision, generosity, and even a special wor
ldly wisdom. The one thing he didn't have was luck...

  23

  AROUND THE garden, Aunt Sonia says, we had a picket fence that was painted white every spring. Every year too the trunks of the trees were whitewashed to keep off the insects. The fence had a little kalitka, a wicket gate, through which you could go out into the ploshchadka, a sort of square or open space. Every Monday the tsiganki, the Gypsy women, came. They used to park their painted caravan there, with its large wheels, and erect a big tent of tarpaulin on the side of the square. Beautiful Gypsy women went barefoot from door to door: they came to the kitchens to read the cards, to clean the toilets, to sing songs for a few kopeks, and if you weren't watchful, to pilfer. They came into our house by the servants' entrance, the chyorny khod I told you about, which was to one side, in the wing.