by Amos Oz
That back door opened straight into our kitchen, which was enormous, bigger than this whole apartment, with a table in the middle and chairs for sixteen people. There was a kitchen range with twelve hobs of different sizes, and cupboards with yellow doors, and quantities of porcelain and crystal. I remember that we had a huge long dish on which you could serve a whole fish wrapped in leaves on a bed of rice and carrots. What happened to that dish? Who knows? It may still be adorning the sideboard of some fat hohol. And there was a kind of podium in one corner with an upholstered rocking chair and a little table next to it where there was always a glass of sweet fruit tea. This was Mama's—your grandmother's—throne, where she would sit, or sometimes stand with her hands on the back of the chair, like a captain on the bridge, giving orders to the cook and the maid and anyone who came into the kitchen. And not only the kitchen: her podium was arranged in such a way that she had a clear view to the left, through the door into the corridor, so that she could survey the doors to all the rooms, and to the right she could see through the hatch into the wing, to the dining room and the maid's room, where Xenia lived with her pretty daughter Dora. From this vantage point, which we all called Napoleon's Hill, she could command all her battlefields.
Sometimes Mama stood there breaking eggs into a basin, and she made Haya, Fania, and me swallow the raw yolks, in such quantities that we loathed them, because there was a theory at that time that egg yolks made you resistant to all illnesses. It may even be true. Who knows? It's a fact that we were rarely ill. Nobody had heard of cholesterol in those days. Fania, your mother, was made to swallow the most egg yolks, because she was always the weakest, palest child.
Of the three of us, your mother was the one who suffered most from our mother, who was a strident, rather military woman, like a Feldwebel, a sergeant. From morning to evening she kept sipping her fruit tea and giving instructions and orders. She had some mean habits that exasperated Papa, she was obsessively mean, but mostly he was wary of her and gave way to her, and this irritated us: we were on his side because he had right on his side. Mama used to cover the fauteuils and the fine furniture with dustcovers, so that our drawing room always looked as though it were full of ghosts. Mama was terrified of the tiniest speck of dust. Her nightmare was that children would come and walk on her beautiful chairs with dirty shoes.
Mama hid the porcelain and crystal, and only when we had important guests or at New Year or Passover did she bring it all out and remove the dustcovers in the drawing room. We hated it so. Your mother especially detested the hypocrisy: that sometimes we kept kosher and sometimes we didn't, sometimes we went to synagogue and sometimes we didn't, sometimes we vaunted our wealth and sometimes we kept it hidden under white shrouds. Fania took Papa's side even more than we did, and resisted Mama's rule. I think that he, Papa, was also especially fond of Fania. I can't prove it, though—there was never any favoritism—he was a man with a very strong sense of fairness. I've never known another man like your grandpa, who so hated hurting people's feelings. Even with scoundrels he always tried very hard not to hurt their feelings. In Judaism, upsetting someone is considered worse than shedding their blood, and he was a man who would never hurt a soul. Never.
Mama quarreled with Papa in Yiddish. Most of the time they conversed in a mixture of Russian and Yiddish, but when they fought, it was only in Yiddish. To us daughters, to Papa's business partner, to the lodgers, the maid, the cook, and the coachman they spoke only Russian. With the Polish officials they spoke Polish. (After Rovno was annexed by Poland, the new authorities insisted that everyone speak Polish.)
In our Tarbuth school all the pupils and teachers spoke almost exclusively Hebrew. Among the three of us sisters, at home, we spoke Hebrew and Russian. Mostly we spoke Hebrew, so that our parents wouldn't understand. We never spoke Yiddish to each other. We didn't want to be like Mama: we associated Yiddish with her complaints and bossiness and arguments. All the profits that Papa made by the sweat of his brow from his mill she extorted from him and spent on expensive dressmakers who made her luxurious dresses. But she was too mean to wear them: she saved them up at the back of her closet, and most of the time she wore an old mouse-colored housecoat. Only a couple of times a year she got herself up like the Tsar's carriage to go to synagogue or to some charity ball, so the whole town could see her and burst with envy. Yet she shouted at us that we were ruining Papa.
Fania, your mother, wanted to be talked to quietly and reasonably, not shouted at. She liked to explain, and she wanted to be explained to. She couldn't stand commands. Even in her bedroom she had her own special way of ordering things—she was a very tidy girl—and if someone disturbed the order, she was very upset. Yet she held her peace. Too much: I don't recall her ever raising her voice. Or telling someone off. She responded with silence even to things that she shouldn't have.
In one corner of the kitchen there was a big baking oven, and sometimes we were allowed as a treat to take the lopata, the paddle, and put the Sabbath chollas in the oven. We pretended we were putting the wicked witch Baba Yaga and the black devil, chyorny chyort, in the fire. There were smaller cookers too, with four cooktops and two dukhovki, for baking biscuits and roasting meat. The kitchen had three huge windows looking out on the garden and the orchard, and they were nearly always steamed up. The bathroom opened off the kitchen. Hardly anybody in Rovno had a bathroom inside their house at that time. The rich families had a little shed in the yard, behind the house, with a wood-burning boiler that served for baths and also for the laundry. We were the only ones who had a proper bathroom, and all our little friends were green with envy. They used to call it the "sultan's delight."
When we wanted to take a bath, we would put some logs and sawdust in the opening under the big boiler, then light the fire and wait an hour or an hour and a half for the water to heat up. There was enough hot water for six or seven baths. Where did the water come from? There was a kolodets, a well, in the neighbor's yard, and when we wanted to fill our boiler, they shut off their water and Philip or Anton or Vassia pumped the water up with the squeaky hand pump.
I remember how once, on the eve of the Day of Atonement, after the meal, two minutes before the fast began, Papa said to me: Sureleh, mein Tochterl, please bring me a glass of water straight from the well. When I brought him the water, he dropped three or four sugar lumps in it and stirred it with his finger, and when he had drunk it, he said: Now thanks to you, Sureleh, the fast will be lighter for me. (Mama called me Sonichka, my teachers called me Sarah, but to Papa I was always Sureleh.)
Papa liked to stir with his finger and eat with his hands. I was a little girl then, maybe five or six. And I can't explain to you—I can't even explain to myself—what joy, what happiness his words brought me, and the thought that thanks to me the fast would be lighter for him. Even now, eighty years later, I feel happy, just as I did then, whenever I remember it.
But there's also an upside-down sort of happiness, a black happiness, that comes from doing evil to others. Papa used to say that we were driven out of paradise not because we ate from the tree of knowledge but because we ate from the tree of evil. Otherwise, how can you explain black happiness? The happiness we feel not because of what we have but because of what we have and others haven't got? That others will be jealous of? And feel bad? Papa used to say, every tragedy is something of a comedy and in every disaster there is a grain of enjoyment for the bystander. Tell me, is it true there's no word for Schadenfreude in English?
Opposite the bathroom, on the other side of the kitchen, was the door that led to the room that Xenia shared with her daughter Dora, whose father was rumored to be the previous owner of the house, Mayor Lebe-devski. Dora was a real beauty, she had a face like the Madonna, a full body but a very thin wasplike waist, and big brown doe's eyes, but she was already a little weak in the head. When she was fourteen or sixteen, she fell in love with an older Gentile called Krynicki, who was also said to be her mother's lover.
Xenia made her Dora onl
y one meal a day, in the evening, and then she would tell her a story in installments, and the three of us would run there to listen, because Xenia knew how to tell such strange stories, they sometimes made your hair stand on end, I've never met anyone who could tell stories like her. I still remember one story she told. Once upon a time there was a village idiot, Ivanuchka, Ivanuchka Durachok, whose mother sent him every day across the bridge to take a meal to his elder brothers working in the fields. Ivanuchka himself, who was foolish and slow, was given only a single piece of bread for the whole day. One day a hole suddenly appeared in the bridge, or the dam, and the water started to come through and threatened to flood the whole valley. Ivanuchka took the single piece of bread that his mother had given him and stopped the hole in the dam with it, so the valley would not be flooded. The old king happened to be passing and was amazed, and he asked Ivanuchka why he had done such a thing. Ivanuchka replied, What do you mean, Your Majesty? I did it so there wouldn't be a flood, otherwise the people would all be drowned, heaven forbid! And was that your only piece of bread? asked the old king. So what will you eat all day? Nu, so if I don't eat today, Your Majesty, so what? Others will eat, and I shall eat tomorrow! The old king had no children, and he was so impressed by what Ivanuchka had done and by his answer that he decided there and then to make him his Crown Prince. He became King Durak (which means King Fool), and even when Ivanuchka was king, all his subjects still laughed at him, and he even laughed at himself, he sat on his throne all day making faces. But gradually it transpired that under the rule of King Ivanuchka the Fool there were never any wars, because he did not know what it was to take offense or to seek revenge. Of course eventually the generals killed him and seized power, and of course at once they took offense at the smell of the cattle pens that the wind carried across the border from the next-door kingdom, and they declared war, and they were all killed, and the dam that King Ivanuchka Durak had once stopped with his bread was blown up, and they all drowned happily in the flood, both kingdoms submerged.
***
Dates. My grandfather, Naphtali Hertz Mussman, was born in i889.My grandmother Itta was born in 1891. Aunt Haya was born in 1911. Fania, my mother, was born in 1913. Aunt Sonia was born in 1916. The three Mussman girls went to the Tarbuth school in Rovno. Then Haya and Fania, each in turn, were sent for a year to a private Polish school that issued matriculation certificates. These enabled Haya and Fania to attend the university in Prague, because in anti-Semitic Poland in the 1920s hardly any Jews gained admittance to the universities. Aunt Haya came to Palestine in 1933 and obtained a public position in the Zionist Workers' Party and in the Tel Aviv branch of the Working Mothers' Organization. Through this activity she met some of the leading Zionist figures. She had a number of keen suitors, including rising stars in the Workers' Council, but she married a cheerful, warm-hearted worker from Poland, Tsvi Shapiro, who later became an administrator in the Health Fund and eventually ended up as executive director of the Donnolo-Tsahalon Hospital in Jaffa. One of the two rooms in Haya and Tsvi Shapiro's ground-floor apartment at 175 Ben Yehuda Street in Tel Aviv was sublet to various senior commanders of the Haganah. In 1948, during the War of Independence, Major General Yigael Yadin, who was head of operations and deputy chief of staff of the newly established Israeli army, lived there. Conferences were held there at night, with Israel Galili, Yitzhak Sadeh, Yaakov Dori, leaders of the Haganah, advisers and officers. Three years later, in the same room, my mother took her own life.
Even after little Dora fell in love with her mother's lover, Pan Krynicki, Xenia did not stop cooking the evening meal and telling her stories, but the food she made was drenched with tears and so were the stories. The two of them would sit there in the evening, one weeping and eating, the other weeping and not eating; they never quarreled, on the contrary, they embraced each other and wept together, as if they had both caught the same incurable disease. Or as if the mother had unintentionally infected the daughter, and now she was nursing her lovingly, compassionately, with endless devotion. At night we would hear the creaking of the wicket gate, that little kalitka in the garden fence, and we knew that Dora had returned and that soon her mother would slip away to the same house. Papa always said that every tragedy is something of a comedy.
Xenia watched over her daughter assiduously, to make sure she did not fall pregnant. She explained to her endlessly, do this, don't do that, and if he says this, you say that, and if he insists on this, you do that. In this way we also heard something and learned, because no one had ever explained such not-nice things to us. But it was all to no avail: little Dora became pregnant, and it was said that Xenia had gone to Pan Krynicki to ask for money, and he had refused to give her anything and pretended he didn't know either of them. That's how God created us: wealth is a crime and poverty is a punishment, though the punishment is given not to the one who sinned but to the one who hasn't got the money to escape the punishment. The woman, naturally, cannot deny that she is pregnant. The man denies it as much as he likes, and what can you do? God gave men the pleasure and us the punishment. To the man He said, in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, which is a reward not a punishment, anyway, take away a man's work and he goes out of his mind—and to us women He gave the privilege of smelling their sweat of thy face close up, which is not such a big pleasure, and also the added promise of "in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children." I know that it is possible to see it differently.
Poor Dora, when she was nine months pregnant, they came and took her away to a village, to some cousin of Xenia's. I think that Papa gave them some money. Xenia went with Dora to the village, and a few days later she came back sick and pale. Xenia, not Dora. Dora came back after a month, neither sick nor pale but red-faced and plump, like a juicy apple, she came back without a baby and she did not seem in the least sad, only, as it were, even more childish than she had been before. And she had been very childish before. After she came back from the village, Dora spoke to us only in baby talk, and she played with dolls, and when she cried, it sounded just like the crying of a three-year-old. She started sleeping the hours a baby sleeps too: that girl slept for twenty hours a day.
And what happened to the baby? Who knows. We were told not to ask and we were very obedient daughters: we did not ask questions and nobody told us anything. Only once, in the night, Haya woke me and Fania saying that she could hear very clearly from the garden, in the dark—it was a rainy, windy night—the sound of a baby crying. We wanted to dress and go out but we were frightened. By the time Haya went and woke Papa, there was no baby to be heard, but still Papa took a big lantern and went out in the garden and checked every corner, and he came back and said sadly, Hayunia, you must have been dreaming. We did not argue with our father, what good would it do to argue? But each of us knew very well that she had not been dreaming, but that there really had been a baby crying in the garden: such a thin high-pitched cry so piercing, so frightening, not like a baby that is hungry and wants to suck, or a baby that's cold, but like a baby in terrible pain.
After that pretty Dora fell ill with a rare blood disease, and Papa paid again for her to go and be examined by a great professor in Warsaw, a professor as famous as Louis Pasteur, and she never came back. Xenia Dimitrovna went on telling stories in the evening, but her stories ended up wild, that is to say not very proper, and occasionally words crept into her stories that were not so nice and that we didn't want to hear. Or if we did want to, we denied ourselves, because we were well-brought-up young ladies.
And little Dora? We never spoke about her again. Even Xenia Dim-itrovna never pronounced her name, as though she forgave her for taking her lover but not for disappearing to Warsaw. Instead Xenia raised two dear little birds in a cage on the porch and they thrived until the winter, and in the winter they froze to death. Both of them.
24
MENAHEM GELEHRTER, who wrote the book about the Tarbuth gymnasium (secondary school) in Rovno, was a teacher there himself. He taught Bible, literature, and
Jewish history. Among other things in his book I found something of what my mother and her sisters and friends studied as part of their Hebrew curriculum in the 1920s. It included stories from the rabbis, selected poems from the Jewish Golden Age in Spain, medieval Jewish philosophy, collected works of Bialik and Tchernikhowsky and selections from other modern Hebrew writers, and also translations from world literature, including such authors as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Turgenev, Chekhov, Mickiewicz, Schiller, Goethe, Heine, Shakespeare, Byron, Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Jack London, Tagore, Hamsun, the Epic of Gilgamesh in Tchernikhowsky's translation, and so on. The books on Jewish history included Joseph Klausner's History of the Second Temple.
Every day (Aunt Sonia continues), before the day begins, at six or even earlier, I go slowly down the stairs to empty the liner in the garbage can outside. Before I climb up again, I have to rest there for a moment, I have to sit on the low wall by the garbage cans because the stairs leave me breathless. Sometimes I bump into a new immigrant from Russia, Varia, who sweeps the pavement in Wessely Street each morning. Over there, in Russia, she was a big boss. Here—she sweeps the pavements. She has hardly learned any Hebrew. Sometimes the two of us stay for a few minutes by the garbage cans and talk a little in Russian.
Why is she a street sweeper? To keep two talented daughters at the university, one in chemistry, one in dentistry. Husband—she has none. Family in Israel—she has none either. Food—they save on that too. Clothes—they save on. Accommodation—they share a single room. All so that for tuition and textbooks they won't be short. It was always like that with Jewish families: they believed that education was an investment in the future, the only thing that no one can ever take away from your children, even if, heaven forbid, there's another war, another revolution, another migration, more discriminatory laws—your diploma you can always fold up quickly, hide it in the seams of your clothes, and run away to wherever Jews are allowed to live.
