by Amos Oz
Something in the curriculum of that school in the 1920s, or maybe some deep romantic mustiness that seeped into the hearts of my mother and her friends in their youth, some dense Polish-Russian emotionalism, something between Chopin and Mickiewicz, between the Sorrows of Young Werther and Lord Byron, something in the twilight zone between the sublime, the tormented, the dreamy, and the solitary, all kinds of will-o'-the-wisps of "longing and yearning" deluded my mother most of her life and seduced her until she succumbed and committed suicide in 1952. She was thirty-eight when she died. I was twelve and a half.
In the weeks and months that followed my mother's death I did not think for a moment of her agony. I made myself deaf to the unheard cry for help that remained behind her and that may have always hung in the air of our apartment. There was not a drop of compassion in me. Nor did I miss her. I did not grieve at my mother's death: I was too hurt and angry for any other emotion to remain. When, for example, I noticed her checked apron, which still hung on a hook on the back of the kitchen door several weeks after her death, I was as angry as though it were pouring salt on my wounds. My mother's toilet things, her powder box, her hairbrush on her green shelf in the bathroom hurt me as though they had remained there deliberately to mock me. Her books. Her empty shoes. The echo of her smell that continued for some time to waft in my face every time I opened "Mother's side" of the closet. Everything moved me to impotent rage. As though one of her sweaters, which had somehow crept into my pile of sweaters, was gloating at me with a vile grin.
I was angry with her for leaving without saying good-bye, without a hug, without a word of explanation: after all, my mother had been incapable of parting even from a total stranger, a delivery man or a pedlar at the door, without offering him a glass of water, without a smile, without a little apology and two or three pleasant words. All through my childhood, she had never left me alone at the grocer's or in a strange courtyard or in a public garden. How could she have done it? I was angry with her on Father's behalf too, whose wife had shamed him thus, had shown him up, had suddenly vanished like a woman running away with a stranger in a comic film. Throughout my childhood, if I ever disappeared even for an hour or two, I was shouted at and punished: it was a fixed rule that anyone who went out always had to say where they were going and for how long and what time they would be back. At least they had to leave a note in the usual place, under the vase.
All of us.
Is that the way to leave, rudely, in the middle of a sentence? She herself had always insisted on tact, politeness, considerate behavior, a constant effort not to hurt others, attentiveness, sensitivity! How could she?
I hated her.
After a few weeks the anger subsided. And with the anger I seemed to lose a protective layer, a kind of lead casing that had protected me in the early days against the shock and pain. From now on I was exposed.
As I stopped hating my mother, I began to hate myself.
I still had no free corner in my heart for my mother's pain, her loneliness, the suffocation that had closed in around her, the terrible despair of the last nights of her life. I was still living out my own crisis rather than hers. Yet I was no longer angry with her, but rather the opposite, I blamed myself: if only I had been a better, more devoted, son, if I had not scattered my clothes all over the floor, if I had not pestered and nagged her, if I had done my homework on time, if I had taken the rubbish out every evening willingly, without being shouted at to do it, if I had not made a nuisance of myself, made a noise, forgotten to turn out the light, come home with a torn shirt, left muddy footprints all around the kitchen. If I had been more considerate of her migraines. Or if at least I had tried to do what she wanted, and been a bit less weak and pale, eaten everything she cooked for me and put on my plate and not been so difficult, if for her sake I had been a more sociable child and a bit less of a loner, a bit less skinny and more suntanned and athletic, as she had wanted me to be!
Or perhaps the opposite? If I had been much weaker, chronically ill, confined to a wheelchair, consumptive, or even blind from birth? Surely her kindliness and her generous nature would never have allowed her to abandon such a disadvantaged child, leave him to his misery and just disappear? If only I had been a handicapped child with no legs, if only while there was still time I had run under a passing car and been run over and had both my legs amputated, perhaps my mother would have been filled with compassion? Would not have left me? Would have stayed to go on looking after me?
If my mother had abandoned me like that, without a backward glance, surely it was a sign that she had never loved me: if you love someone, she herself had taught me, you forgive them for everything, except betrayal. You even forgive them for nagging, for losing their cap, for leaving the squash on their plate.
To forsake is to betray. And she had forsaken both of us, Father and me. I would never have left her like that, despite her migraines, even though I now knew that she had never loved us, I would never have left her, despite all her long silences, her shutting herself up in a darkened room, and all her moods. I'd have lost my temper sometimes, maybe even not talked to her for a day or two, but not abandoned her forever. Never.
All mothers love their children: that's a law of nature. Even a cat or a goat. Even mothers of criminals and murderers. Even mothers of Nazis. Or of drooling retards. Even mothers of monsters. The fact that only I couldn't be loved, that my mother had run away from me, only proved that there was nothing in me to love, that I didn't deserve love. There was something wrong with me, something very terrible, something repulsive and truly horrifying, more loathsome than a physical or mental defect, or even madness. There was something so irreparably detestable about me, something so terrible, that even a sensitive woman like my mother, who could lavish love on a bird or a beggar or a stray puppy, couldn't stand me anymore and had to run away from me as far as she could go. There is an Arabic saying, Kullu qirdin bi-'ayni ummihi ghazalun—"Every monkey is a gazelle to its mother." Except for me.
If only I were also sweet, just a little, as all children in the world are to their mothers, even the ugliest and naughtiest children, even those violent, disturbed children who are always being thrown out of school, even Bianca Schor who stabbed her grandfather with a kitchen knife, even Yanni the pervert, who has elephantiasis and unzips his fly in the street and takes out his thing and shows it to the girls—if only I were good, if only I had behaved the way she asked me to a thousand times, and like an idiot I didn't listen to her—if only after Seder night I hadn't broken her blue bowl that had come down to her from her great-grandmother—if only I'd brushed my teeth properly every morning, top and bottom and all around and in the corners, without cheating—if only I hadn't pinched that half-pound note from her handbag and then lied and denied I'd taken it—if only I'd stopped thinking those wicked thoughts and never let my hand stray inside my pajama bottoms at night—if only I'd been like everyone else, deserving a mother, too—
After a year or two, when I'd left home and gone to live in Kibbutz Hulda, I slowly started to think about her, too. At the end of the day, after school and work and a shower, when all the kibbutz kids had showered and dressed for the evening and gone to spend time with their parents, leaving me all alone and odd among the empty children's houses, I would go and sit on my own on the wooden bench inside the reading room.
I would sit there in the dark for half an hour or an hour, conjuring up, picture by picture, the end of her life. In those days I was already trying to imagine a little of what had never been spoken about, either between my mother and me, or between me and my father, or apparently even between the two of them.
My mother was thirty-eight when she died: younger than my elder daughter and a little older than my younger daughter on the day these lines were written. Ten or twenty years after they completed their studies at the Tarbuth secondary school, when my mother, Lilenka Kalisch, and their group of friends experienced the buffeting of reality in a Jerusalem of heat waves, poverty, and malicious
gossip, when those emotional Rovno schoolgirls suddenly found themselves in the rough terrain of everyday life, diapers, husbands, migraines, queues, smells of mothballs and kitchen sinks, it transpired apparently that the curriculum of the school in Rovno in the 1920s was of no help to them. It only made things worse.
Or it may have been something else, something neither Byronic nor Chopinic but closer to that haze of melancholy loneliness that surrounds introverted, well-born young ladies in the plays of Chekhov and in the stories of Gnessin, a sort of childhood promise that is inevitably frustrated, trampled underfoot, and even ridiculed by the monotony of life itself. My mother grew up surrounded by an angelic cultural vision of misty beauty whose wings were finally dashed on a hot dusty pavement of Jerusalem stone. She had grown up as the pretty, refined miller's daughter, she had come of age in the mansion in Dubinska Street, with an orchard, a cook, and maids, where she was probably brought up just like the shepherdess in that picture that she hated, that prettified pink-cheeked shepherdess with three petticoats.
The outburst that Aunt Sonia recalled seventy years later, when the sixteen-year-old Fania with an uncharacteristic access of rage suddenly poured scorn and almost spat on the picture of the gentle shepherdess with the dreamy expression and the profusion of silk petticoats, may have been the spark of my mother's life-force vainly trying to free itself from the darkness that was already beginning to enfold it.
Behind the curtained windows that protected Fania Mussman's childhood so well, Pan Zakrzewski one night shot a bullet into his thigh and another into his brain. Princess Ravzova hammered a rusty nail into her hand to receive some of the Savior's pain and bear it in His stead. Dora the housekeeper's daughter was pregnant by her mother's lover, drunk Steletsky lost his wife at cards, and she, Ira, his wife, was eventually burned to death when she set fire to the handsome Anton's empty hut. But all these things happened on the other side of the double glazing, outside the pleasant, illuminated circle of the Tarbuth school. None of them could break in and seriously harm the pleasantness of my mother's childhood, which was apparently tinged with a hint of melancholy that did not mar but merely colored and sweetened it.
A few years later, in Kerem Avraham, in Amos Street, in the cramped, damp basement apartment, downstairs from the Rosendorffs and next door to the Lembergs, surrounded by zinc tubs and pickled gherkins and the oleander that was dying in a rusty olive drum, assailed all day by smells of cabbage, laundry, boiled fish, and dried urine, my mother began to fade away. She might have been able to grit her teeth and endure hardship and loss, poverty, or the cruelty of married life. But what she couldn't stand, it seems to me, was the tawdriness.
By 1943 or 1944, if not earlier, she knew that everybody had been murdered there, just outside Rovno. Somebody must have come and reported how Germans, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians, armed with submachine guns, had marched the whole city, young and old alike, to Sosenki Forest, where they had all loved to go for walks on fine days, for scout games, for sing-songs around campfires, to sleep in sleeping bags on the banks of a stream under starry skies. There, among boughs, birds, mushrooms, currants, and berries, the Germans opened fire and slaughtered on the edge of pits, in two days, some twenty-five thousand souls.* Almost all my mother's classmates perished. Together with their parents, and all of their neighbors, acquaintances, business rivals, and enemies; well-to-do and proletarian, pious, assimilated, and baptized, communal leaders, synagogue functionaries, pedlars and drawers of water, Communists and Zionists, intellectuals, artists, and village idiots, and some four thousand babies. My mother's schoolteachers also died there, the headmaster, Issachar Reiss, with his charismatic presence and hypnotic eyes, whose look had pierced the dreams of so many adolescent schoolgirls, sleepy, absentminded Isaac Berkowski, hot-tempered Eliezer Buslik, who had taught Jewish culture, Fanka Zeidmann, who had taught geography and biology and also PE, and her brother Shmuel the painter, and pedantic, embittered Dr. Moshe Bergmann, who through almost clenched teeth had taught general and Polish history. All of them.
Not long afterward, in 1948, when the Arab Legion was shelling Jerusalem, another friend of my mother's, Piroshka, Piri Yannai, was also killed, by a direct hit from a shell. She had only gone outside to fetch a bucket and floorcloth.
Perhaps something of the childhood promise was already infected by a kind of poisonous, romantic crust that associated the Muses with death? Something in the overrefined curriculum of the Tarbuth school? Or perhaps it was a melancholy Slavic bourgeois trait that I encountered a few years after my mother's death in the pages of Chekhov, Turgenev, Gnessin, and even some of the poetry of Rahel. Something that made my mother, when life failed to fulfill any of the promises of her youth, envisage death as an exciting but also protective, soothing lover, a last, artistic lover, who would finally heal the wounds of her lonely heart.
For many years now I have been trailing this old murderer, this cunning ancient seducer, this revolting old rake, deformed by old age yet disguising himself time and again as a youthful prince charming. This crafty hunter of the broken-hearted, this vampire wooer with a voice as bittersweet as that of a cello on a lonely night, a subtle, velvety charlatan, a master of stratagems, a magic piper who draws the desperate and lonely into the folds of his silken cloak. The ancient serial killer of disappointed souls.
*Roughly the population of Arad, where I now live, and more than the total number killed on the Jewish side in a hundred years of war against the Arabs.
29
WHAT DOES my memory begin with? The very first memory is a shoe, a little brown fragrant new shoe, with a soft warm tongue. It must have been one of a pair, but memory has only salvaged the one. A new, still slightly stiff shoe. I was so entranced by its delightful smell of new, shiny, almost living leather, and of pungent, dizzying glue that apparently I first tried to put my new shoe on my face, on my nose, like a sort of snout. So I could get drunk on the smell.
My mother came into the room, followed by my father with various uncles and aunts or mere acquaintances. I must have looked cute but funny, with my little face stuck inside the shoe, because they all burst out laughing and pointed at me, and somebody roared and slapped his knees with both hands, and somebody else grunted and called hoarsely, Quick, quick, somebody fetch a camera!
There was no camera in our apartment, but I can still see that baby: all of two or two and a quarter, his hair flaxen and his eyes big, round, and surprised. But immediately under the eyes, instead of the nose, mouth, and chin, sprouted the heel of a shoe, and a shiny new virgin sole that had never been walked on. From the eyes up it was a pale-faced infant, and from the cheeks down what looked like a hammerfish or some kind of primeval, heavy-cropped bird.
What was the baby feeling? I can answer that question quite precisely, because I have inherited from that baby what he felt at that moment: a piercing joy, a wild, dizzying joooy, springing from the fact that the whole crowd of people was focused on him alone, surprised at him, enjoying him, pointing at him. At the same time, without any contradiction, the infant was also frightened and alarmed by the abundance of their attention, which he was too small to contain, because his parents and strangers and all of them were bellowing-laughing-pointing at him and his snout, and laughing again as they shouted to one another, a camera, quick, fetch a camera.
And also disappointed because they cut off right in the middle the intoxicating sensual pleasure of inhaling the fresh smell of leather and the dizzying fragrance of glue that made his insides tremble.
In the next picture there is no audience. Just my mother putting a soft warm sock on me (because it was cold in the room), and then encouraging me, push, push hard, harder, as if she were a midwife helping the fetus of my tiny foot travel down the virginal birth canal of my fragrant new shoe.
To this day, whenever I strain to push my foot into a boot or shoe, and even now as I sit and write this, my skin reexperiences the pleasure of my foot tentatively entering the inner walls of that first shoe, the t
rembling of the flesh as it entered for the first time in its life this treasure cave whose stiff yet soft walls enfolded it caressingly as it thrust deeper and deeper while my mother's voice, soft and patient, encouraged me, push, push just a bit more.
One hand gently pushed my foot deeper inside while the other, holding the sole lightly, thrust against me, apparently opposing my movement but really helping me get right inside, until that delicious moment when, as if overcoming a final obstacle, my heel made one last effort and slid in so that the foot entirely filled the space, and from now on you were all there, inside, enfolded, held, secure, and already Mother was pulling the laces, tying them, and finally, like a last delicious lick, the warm tongue stretched under the laces and the knot, that stretching that always gives me a kind of tickling sensation along the instep. And here I was. Inside. Clasped, held in the tight, pleasurable embrace of my very first shoe.
That night I begged to be allowed to sleep in my shoes: I didn't want it to end. Or begged at least to be allowed to have my new shoes next to my head, on the pillow, so that I could fall asleep with that scent of leather and glue. Only after protracted and tearful negotiations did they finally agree to put the shoes on a chair by the head of my bed—on condition you didn't so much as touch them till morning, because you've washed your hands, you can just look, you can peep every minute into their dark jaws that are smiling at you and inhale their smell until you drop off facing them, smiling to yourself in your sleep with a sensual pleasure, as if you are being stroked.
