A Tale of Love and Darkness

by Amos Oz

  "Drink the juice my boy, I don't wish to annoy."

  Or:

  "If you drink your juice each day, you'll end up feeling merry and gay."

  Or even:

  "Every sip, so I've been tol', builds the body and the soul."

  Or sometimes, on mornings when he was feeling more discursive than lyrical:

  "Citrus fruit is the pride of our land! Jaffa oranges are appreciated all over the world. By the way, the name Jaffa, like the biblical name Japheth, apparently derives from the word for beauty, yofi, a very ancient word that may come from the Akkadian faya, and in Arabic has the form wafi, while in Amharic, I believe, it is tawafa. And now, my young beauty"—by now he would be smiling modestly, taking quiet satisfaction in his play on words—"finish your boo-tiful Jaffa juice and permit me to take the glass back to the kitchen as my booty."

  Such puns and witticisms, that he called calembours or paronomasia, always aroused in my father a kind of well-intentioned good-humor. He felt that they had the power to dispel gloom or anxiety and spread a pleasant mood. If my mother said, for instance, that our neighbor Mr. Lemberg had come back from the hospital looking more emaciated than when he went in and they said he was in dire straits, Father would launch into a little lecture on the origin and meaning of the words "dire" and "straits," replete with biblical quotations. Mother expressed amazement that everything, even Mr. Lemberg's serious illness, sparked off his childish pleasantries. Did he really imagine that life was just some kind of school picnic or stag party, with jokes and clever remarks? Father would weigh her reproach, apologize, but he had meant well, and what good would it do Mr. Lemberg if we started mourning for him while he was still alive? Mother said, Even when you mean well, you somehow manage to do it with poor taste: either you're condescending or you're obsequious, and either way you always have to crack jokes. At which they would switch to Russian and talk in subdued tones.

  When I came home from Mrs. Pnina's kindergarten at midday, my mother fought with me, using bribery, entreaties, and stories about princesses and ghosts, to distract my attention until I had swallowed some runny-nose squash and mucous squash (which we called by its Arabic name, kusa), and rissoles made from bread mixed with a little mince (they tried to disguise their breadiness with bits of garlic).

  Sometimes I was forced to eat, with tears, disgust, and fury, all sorts of spinach rissoles, leaf spinach, beetroot, beetroot soup, sauerkraut, pickled cabbage, or carrots, raw or cooked. At other times I was condemned to cross wastelands of grits and bran, to chew my way through tasteless mountains of boiled cauliflower and all kinds of depressing pulses such as dried beans and peas and lentils. In summer Father chopped a fine salad of tomatoes, cucumbers, green peppers, spring onions, and parsley, gleaming with olive oil.

  Every now and then a piece of chicken made a guest appearance, sunk in rice or run aground on a sandbank of potato purée, its mast and sails adorned with parsley and with a tight guard of boiled carrots with rickets-smitten squash standing around its deck. A pair of pickled cucumbers served as the flanks of this destroyer, and if you finished it all up, you were rewarded with a pink milk pudding made from powder, or a yellow jelly made from powder, which we called by its French name gelée, which was only a step away from Jules Verne and the mysterious submarine Nautilus, under the command of Captain Nemo, who despaired of the whole human race and set off for the depths of his mysterious realm under the oceans and where, so I had decided, I should be joining him soon.

  In honor of Sabbaths and festivals my mother would get a carp, which she bought early, in the middle of the week. All day long the fish would swim relentlessly back and forth in the bathtub, from side to side to side, searching tirelessly for some secret underwater passage from the bath to the open sea. I fed it on breadcrumbs. Father taught me that in our own secret language a fish was called Noon. I quickly made friends with Noonie: he could distinguish my footsteps from a distance and hurried to the side of the bath to greet me, raising out of the water a mouth that reminded me of things it's best not to think about.

  Once or twice I got up and crept along in the dark to check whether my friend really slept in the cold water all night, which seemed to me strange and even contrary to the laws of nature, or whether maybe after lights out Noonie's working day was over and he wriggled out and crawled slowly on his belly into the laundry basket and curled up and slept in the warm embrace of the towels and underwear, till in the morning he secretly slipped back into the bath to serve his time in the navy.

  Once, when I was left at home on my own, I decided to enrich this poor bored carp's life with islands, straits, headlands, and sandbanks made from various kitchen utensils that I dropped in the bath. As patient and persistent as Captain Ahab I hunted my Moby Dick with a ladle for a long time, but time and again he wriggled away and escaped to the submarine lairs that I had scattered for him myself on the seabed. At one point I touched his cold, sharp scales, and I shuddered with disgust and fear at this new, spine-chilling discovery: until that morning, every living thing, whether chick, child, or cat, was always soft and warm; only what was dead turned cold and hard. And now this paradox of the carp, cold and hard but alive, all damp, slippery, and oily, scaly, with gills, wriggling and struggling strongly, stiffening and chill between my fingers, stabbed me with such a sudden panic that I hurriedly released my catch and shook my fingers, then washed, soaped, and scrubbed them three times. So I gave up the chase. Instead of hunting Noonie, I spent a long time trying to look at the world through the round, still eyes of a fish, without eyelids, without eyelashes, without moving.

  And that's how Father, Mother, and retribution found me, because they came home and crept into the bathroom without my hearing them, and they caught me sitting motionless like a Buddha on the toilet lid, my mouth slightly open, my face frozen, my glazed eyes staring unblinkingly like a pair of glass beads. At once the kitchen utensils that the crazy child had sunk to the bottom of the carp water to serve as an archipelago or the underwater defenses of Pearl Harbor came to light. "His Highness," Father said sadly, "will once again be compelled to suffer the consequences of his deeds. I am sorry."

  On Friday night, Grandpa and Grandma came, and so did Mother's friend Lilenka with her rotund husband Mr. Bar-Samkha, whose face was covered with a thick curly beard like steel wool. His ears were different sizes, like an Alsatian that has pricked up one ear and let the other flop.

  After the chicken soup with kneidlach, Mother suddenly placed on the table the corpse of my Noonie, complete with head and tail but bearing a series of seven knife gashes along its side, as splendid as the body of a king being borne on a gun carriage to the Pantheon. The regal corpse reposed in a rich cream-colored sauce upon a couch of gleaming rice, embellished with stewed prunes and slices of carrot, scattered with decorative green flakes. But Noonie's alert, accusing, gaze was fixed unyieldingly on all his murderers in motionless reproach, in silent torment.

  When my eyes met his terrifying gaze, his piercing eye cried Nazi betrayer and murderer, and I began to cry silently, dropping my head on my chest, trying not to let them see. But Lilenka, my mother's best friend and confidante, the soul of a kindergarten teacher in a china doll body, was alarmed and hastened to comfort me. First she felt my forehead and declared, No, he hasn't got a temperature. Then she kept stroking my arm and said, But yes, he is shivering a little. Then she bent over me until her breath almost took my breath away, and said: It looks as though it's something psychological, not physical. With that she turned to my parents and concluded, with self-righteous pleasure, that as she had already told them a long time ago, this child, like all vulnerable, complicated, sensitive future artists, was apparently entering puberty very early, and the best thing was simply to let him be.

  Father mulled this over, weighed it, and pronounced judgment: "Very well. But first of all you will please eat your fish like everyone else."

  "No."

  "No? And why not? Is His Highness by any chance contemplating
sacking his team of cooks?"

  "I can't."

  At this point Mr. Bar-Samkha, overflowing with sweetness and the urge to mediate, started to wheedle in his reedy, placatory voice:

  "Well, why don't you just have a tiny bit? Just one symbolic piece, eh? For the sake of your parents and the Sabbath day?"

  But Lilka, his wife, a soulful, emotional person, cut in on my behalf:

  "There's no point in forcing the child! He has a psychological block!"

  Lea Bar-Samkha, also known as Lilenka, formerly Lilia Kalisch,* was a frequent visitor to our apartment during most of my childhood in Jerusalem. She was a small, sad, pale, frail woman with drooping shoulders. She had worked for many years as a schoolmistress and had even written two books about the mentality of the child. From behind she looked like a slim twelve-year-old girl. She and my mother spent hours whispering together, sitting on the wicker stools in the kitchen or on chairs that they had taken out into the garden, chatting or poring over some open book or a picture book of artistic gems, head to head and hand to hand.

  *I have changed some of the names, for various reasons.

  Mostly Lilka came when my father was out at work. I have a feeling that she and my father maintained that polite mutual loathing that is commonly found between husbands and their wives' best friends. If I approached my mother when she was chatting to Lilenka, they both shut up at once and only resumed their conversation when I was out of earshot. Lilia Bar-Samkha looked at me with her wistful, I-understand-and-forgive-everything-on-emotional-grounds smile, but my mother asked me to buck up and say what I needed and leave them alone. They had a lot of shared secrets.

  Once Lilenka came when my parents were out. She eyed me for a while with understanding and sorrow, nodded her head as though she was definitely agreeing with herself, and began a conversation. She had truly, but truly, been so fond of me since I was so small, and interested in me. Not interested like those boring grown-ups who always asked if I was good at school, if I liked soccer, or if I still collected stamps, and what did I want to be when I grew up, and silly things like that. No! She was interested in my thoughts! My dreams! My mental life! She considered me such a unique, original child! The soul of an artist in the making! She would like to try one day—not necessarily right now—to make contact with the inner, vulnerable side of my young personality (I was about ten at the time). For example, what did I think about when I was completely alone? What happened in the secret life of my imagination? What really made me happy and sad? What excited me? What frightened me? What repelled me? What kinds of scenery did I find attractive? Had I ever heard of Janusz Korczak? Had I ever read his book Yotam the Magician? Did I have any secret thoughts yet about the fair sex? She would love to be my, how to put it, my listening ear. My confidante. Despite the difference in our ages, etc.

  I was a compulsively polite child. To her first question, what did I think about, I therefore replied politely: All sorts of things. To the volley of questions What-excited-me-What-frightened-me I answered: Nothing in particular. While to her offer of friendship I responded tactfully: "Thank you, Auntie Lilia, that's very kind of you."

  "If ever you feel a need to talk about something that you don't find it easy to talk to your parents about, you won't hesitate? You'll come to me? And tell me? And of course I'll keep the secret. We can discuss it together."

  "Thank you."

  "The things you have nobody to talk to about? Thoughts that make you feel a bit lonely?"

  "Thank you. Thank you truly. Would you like me to fetch you a glass of water? My mother will be home soon. She's just around the corner at Heinemann the pharmacist's. Or would you like to read the paper while you're waiting, Auntie Lilia? Shall I put the fan on for you?"

  28

  TWENTY YEARS later, on July 28,1971, a few weeks after my book Unto Death was published, I received a letter from this friend of my mother's, who was then in her sixties:

  I feel I haven't behaved properly to you since your late father's death. I have been very depressed and am unable to do anything. I have shut myself up at home (our apartment is frightening ... but I have no energy to change anything) and I am afraid to go out—that's the simple truth. In the man in your story "Late Love" I recognized some common traits—he seemed so familiar and so close. "Crusade" I heard dramatized on the radio once, and you read some excerpts in a television interview. It was wonderful to see you so unexpectedly on the television in the corner of my room. I am curious to know what the sources of the story are—it is unique. It's hard for me to imagine what was going on inside you when you wrote those descriptions of horror and dread. It's chilling. The descriptions of the Jews—strong figures, definitely not victims ... impressed me. And also the description of water eating away iron ... and the picture of a Jerusalem that is not a reality nor is it the journey's end, it is just longing and yearning for something that is not a place in the world. Death appears to me from the pages of your book as something I had never imagined—and yet I craved it not so long ago ... I am reminded now more than usually of your mother's words—she foresaw my failure in life. And I prided myself that my weakness was only superficial, that I was resilient. Now I feel disintegration—strange, for so many years I dreamed of returning to the Land, and now that it has become a reality—I am living here as in a nightmare. Don't pay any attention to what I'm saying. It just slipped out. Don't react. The last time I saw you, in your heated exchange with your father, I didn't sense in you the gloomy man ... All my family send regards to yours. I'm going to be a grandma soon! With friendship and affection, Lilia (Lea).

  And in another letter, from August 5, 1979, Lilka wrote to me:

  ...but enough of that for the time being, maybe some day we'll meet after all and then we'll chat about lots of questions that your words have raised for me. What are you hinting at now, in the "Autobiographical Note" in your book ... when you talk of your mother dying "out of disappointment or longing. Something had gone wrong"? Please forgive me, I'm touching a wound. Your late father's wound, your wound especially, and even—my own. You can't know how much I miss Fania, especially lately. I am left so much on my own in my narrow little world. I long for her. And for another friend of ours, Stefa she was called, who departed this world from grief and suffering in 1963 ... She was a pediatrician, and her life consisted of one disappointment after another, maybe because she trusted men. Stefa simply refused to grasp what some men are capable of. The three of us were very close in the 1930s. I am one of the last of the Mohicans—of friends who no longer exist. Twice I tried, in '71 and '73, to take my own life, and I didn't succeed. I won't try again ... The time has not yet come for me to talk to you about things to do with your parents ... Years have gone by since ... No, I'm not ready yet to express in writing everything I'd like to say. To think that once I could only express myself in writing. Maybe we'll meet again—and many things may change before then ... And by the way, you ought to know that your mother and I and some other members of our group in Hashomer Hatsair in Rovno considered the petite bourgeoisie to be the worst of all things. We all came from similar backgrounds. Your mother was never a "rightist"...Although when she married into the Klausner family, she may have pretended she was like them.

  And again, in a letter dated September 28,1980:

  Your mother came from an unhappy family, and she damaged your family. But she is not to blame ... I recall that once, in 1963, you sat in our apartment ... and I promised you that I would write to you about your mother someday ... But it's very hard for me to carry it out.Even to write a letter is hard for me ... Ifyou only knew how much your mother wanted to be an artist, to be a creative person—from her childhood! If only she could see you now! And why didn't she manage it? Maybe in a personal conversation I could be more daring and tell you things that I don't dare put in writing. Yours affectionately, Lilia.

  My father, before he died (in 1970), was able to read my first three books, which he did not entirely enjoy. My mother was able to se
e only some stories I wrote at school and a few childish verses that I penned in the hope of touching the Muses, whose existence she liked to tell me about. (My father did not believe in the Muses, just as he always despised fairies, witches, wonder-working rabbis, elves, any kind of saint, intuition, miracles, and ghosts. He saw himself as a man with a secular worldview; he believed in rational thought and hard intellectual work.)

  If my mother had read the two stories in Unto Death, would she, too, have responded to them with words similar to those written by her friend Lilenka Kalisch, "longing and yearning for something that is not a place in the world"? It is hard to know. A misty veil of dreamy sadness, unexpressed emotions, and romantic suffering enfolded those well-to-do Rovno young ladies, as though their lives there were painted forever within the walls of their secondary school with a palette that contained only two colors: either melancholy or festive. Although my mother sometimes rebelled against this upbringing.