by Amos Oz
By dint of hard work we finally managed to pierce the top crust and make a shallow depression. The pegs were embedded to the depth of half a finger's length and refused to go any farther. We were obliged to support each peg with two or three large stones and to compromise on the tautness of the string, because every time we tightened the string, the pegs threatened to come out of the ground. So the plot was marked out with four lines of slack string. Despite everything we had managed to create something out of nothing: from here to here was inside, in fact our vegetable garden, and everything beyond was outside, in other words the rest of the world.
"That's it," said Father modestly, and nodded his head several times, as though to agree with himself and confirm the validity of what he had done.
And I repeated after him, unconsciously imitating his nods:
"That's it."
This was Father's way of announcing a short break. He instructed me to wipe off my sweat, drink some water, sit down on the step, and take a rest. He himself did not sit down next to me but put his glasses back on, stood beside our square of string, inspected the progress of our project so far, mulled it over, considered the next stage of the campaign, analyzed our mistakes, drew the conclusions, and instructed me to remove the pegs and string provisionally and lay them neatly next to the wall: it would be better, in fact, to dig the plot first and mark it out afterward, otherwise the string would get in our way. It was also decided to pour four or five buckets of water on the soil and wait for twenty minutes or so for it to work its way in and soften the iron plating, and only then to renew our onslaught.
Father struggled on until midday, heroically, against the compacted earth. Bent double, with an aching back, pouring with sweat, gasping for breath like a drowning man, his eyes looking bare and helpless without the glasses, time after time he brought his hammer down on the stubborn ground. But the hammer was too light: it was a domestic hammer, meant not for storming fortifications but for cracking nuts or hammering a nail into the back of the kitchen door. Time after time Father brandished his pathetic hammer, like David with his sling against the mighty armor of Goliath, or as though he were assailing the battlements of Troy with a frying pan. The forked part of the hammer, intended for pulling nails out, served as spade, fork, and hoe rolled into one.
Large blisters soon rose on the soft cushions of his hands, but Father gritted his teeth and ignored them, even when they burst and released their fluid and became open wounds. Nor did he take any notice of the blisters that appeared on the sides of his scholar's fingers. Time and again he raised his hammer, brought it down, pounded and smote and raised it again, and as he wrestled with the elements of nature and the primeval wilderness, his lips muttered fevered imprecations to the unyielding soil in Greek and Latin and for all I know in Amharic, Old Slavonic, and Sanskrit.
At one point he brought the hammer down with all his force on the toe of his shoe and groaned with pain; he bit his lip, took a rest, used the word "decidedly" or "definitely" to reproach himself for his carelessness, wiped his brow, sipped some water, wiped the mouth of the bottle with his handkerchief, and insisted that I take a swig, returned to the field of combat limping but determined, and heroically renewed his unrelenting efforts.
Eventually the compacted earth took pity on him, or perhaps it was just astonished at his dedication, and began to crack. Father lost no time in inserting the tip of his screwdriver into the cracks, as though he was afraid the soil might change its mind and turn to concrete once again. He worked at the cracks, deepened and widened them, and with his bare fingers turning white with effort he detached thick clods that he piled up one by one at his feet, like slain dragons belly up. Severed roots protruded from these clods of earth, twisting and turning like sinews torn from living flesh.
My task was to advance in the rear of the assault echelon, open up the clods of earth with the letter opener, detach the roots and put them in the sack, remove any stones or bits of gravel, break up and crumble each clod, and finally, using the kitchen fork as a rake or harrow, comb the hair of the loosened soil.
Now came the time to fertilize. We had no animal or poultry manure, and the pigeon droppings on the roof were out of the question because of the risk of infection, so Father had prepared in advance a saucepanful of leftover food. It was a murky swill of grit water, fruit and vegetable peelings, rotten pumpkins, muddy coffee grounds with tea leaves floating on them, remains of porridge and borscht and boiled vegetables, fish trimmings and burnt frying oil, sour milk and various other viscous liquids and murky slops full of dubious lumps and particles in a sort of thick soup that had turned rancid.
"This will enrich our poor soil," Father explained to me as we rested side by side on the step in our sweat-soaked vests, feeling like a pair of real working men, and fanned our faces with the khaki hats. "We absolutely must feed the soil with anything that may turn from kitchen waste into a humus rich in organic substances, to give our plants the nourishment without which they will grow stunted and sickly."
He must have guessed correctly at a horrible idea that had come into my mind, because he hastened to add reassuringly: "And don't make the mistake of worrying that we might end up eating through the vegetables that we grow what may now appear to be disgusting rubbish. No, and no again! On no account! Manure is not filth, it is a hidden treasure—generations upon generations of peasants and farmers have sensed this mysterious truth instinctively. Tolstoy himself speaks somewhere about the mystical alchemy that is constantly taking place within the womb of the earth, that wonderful metamorphosis that translates rot and decay into compost, compost into rich soil and thence into cereals, vegetables, fruit, and all the rich produce of field, garden, and orchard."
While we fixed the pegs back in the four corners of our plot and stretched the string carefully between them, Father explained the words to me simply, precisely, and in order: rot and decay, compost, organic, alchemy, metamorphosis, produce, Tolstoy, mystery.
By the time Mother came out to warn us that lunch would be ready in half an hour, the project of conquering the wilderness was complete. Our new garden extended from peg to peg and from string to string, surrounded on all sides by the barren earth of the backyard, but distinguished from it by its dark, brown color and its crumbly, tilled soil. Our vegetable plot was beautifully hoed and raked, manured and sown, divided into three equal, elongated waves or hillocks, one for the tomatoes, one for the cucumbers, and one for the radishes. And as temporary labels, like those that are put up at the head of graves that have not yet been covered with a tombstone, we placed a stick at the end of each row with an empty seed packet on each stick. Thus we had, for the time being, at least until the vegetables themselves grew, a colorful garden of pictures: a vivid image of a fiery red tomato with two or three transparent dewdrops trickling down its cheeks; a picture of some cucumbers in an attractive shade of green; and an appetizing illustration of a bunch of radishes, washed and bursting with health, gleaming in red, white, and green.
After spreading the fertilizer and sowing the seeds, we watered and rewatered each of the pregnant hillocks gently with an improvised watering can made from a water bottle and the little strainer from the kitchen that in civilian life hung on the kettle and caught the tea leaves when we made tea.
Father said:
"So from now on every morning and every evening we'll water our vegetable beds, we mustn't overwater or underwater them, and you will no doubt run and check every morning, as soon as you get up, for the first signs of germination, because in a few days' time tiny shoots will start to raise their heads and shake the grains of soil aside, like a naughty boy shaking his cap off his head. Every plant, the Rabbis say, has its own private angel that stands over it, taps it on the head, and says, 'Grow!'"
Father also said:
"Now Your sweaty, grubby Honor will kindly take out clean underwear, shirt, and trousers and jump in the bath. Your Highness will remember to use plenty of soap, especially you-know-where. And don't fa
ll asleep in the bath as usual, because your humble servant is waiting patiently for his turn."
In the bathroom I stripped down to my underpants and then climbed on the toilet seat and peeped out through the little window. Was there anything to see yet? A first shoot? A green sprout? Even if it was just the size of a pinhead?
As I peeped out, I saw my father lingering for a few minutes beside his new garden, modest and humble, as happy as an artist posing beside his latest creation, tired, still limping from when he hit his toe with the hammer, but as happy as a conquering hero.
My father was a tireless talker, always overflowing with quotations and proverbs, always happy to explain and to quote, eager to treat you on the spot to the benefit of his extensive knowledge. Had you ever reflected on the way the Hebrew language links certain roots together by their sounds, for instance, to uproot and to rend, to stone and to drive away, to till and to be lacking, to plant and to dig up, or the etymological link between earth-red-man-blood-silence? A regular torrent of allusions, associations, connotations, and wordplays poured out of him, whole forests of facts and analogies, piles upon piles of explanations, rebuttals, and arguments, desperately straining to entertain or amuse those present, to spread happiness, even to play the fool, not sparing his own dignity, so long as silence had no dominion, even for a moment.
A lean, tense figure, in a sweat-drenched T-shirt and khaki shorts that were too wide and reached almost down to his nobby knees. His thin arms and legs were very pale and covered with thick black hair. He looked like a dazed Talmud student who had suddenly been dragged out of the darkness of the house of study, dressed up in the khaki garb of the pioneer, and ruthlessly led out into the dazzling blue of midday. His hesitant smile fixed you for a moment as though begging, as though plucking your sleeve and beseeching you to show him some affection. His brown eyes stared at you absentmindedly or even in a panic through his round-framed glasses, as though he had just remembered that he had forgotten something, who knows what, but it was the most important and urgent thing of all, something that he must not at any cost forget. But what it was that he had forgotten he completely failed to recall. Excuse me, perhaps you happen to know what I've forgotten? Something important. Something that can't be delayed. Would you be kind enough to remind me what it was? If I may make so bold.
The following days I ran to our vegetable garden every two or three hours, impatient to discover signs of germination, if only some tiny movement in the loosened soil. Again and again I watered the plot, until the soil turned to mud. Every morning I leaped out of bed and ran barefoot in my pajamas to check whether the longed-for miracle had occurred during the night. And after a few days, early one morning, I found that the radishes had taken the lead and put up their tiny, closely packed periscopes.
I was so happy that I watered them again and again.
And I erected a scarecrow dressed in an old slip of my mother's, with an empty tin can for a head, on which I drew a mouth and a mustache and a forehead with black hair falling across it like Hitler, and eyes one of which came out slightly crooked, as though he was winking or mocking.
A couple of days later the cucumbers came up too. But whatever it was the radishes and cucumbers saw must have saddened or terrified them, because they changed their minds, turned pale, their bodies bent double overnight as though in deep dejection, their tiny heads touched the ground, and they became shriveled, thin, gray, until they were no more than miserable threads of straw. As for the tomatoes, they never even sprouted: they examined the prevailing conditions, discussed what to do, and decided to give us up. Maybe our yard was incapable of growing anything, since it was so low-lying, surrounded by high walls and shaded by tall cypress trees, so that not a ray of sunlight reached it. Or perhaps we had overdone the watering. Or the fertilizer. It is possible that my Hitler scarecrow, which left the birds completely unimpressed, terrified the tiny shoots to death. So that was the end of our attempt to create a kind of little kibbutz in Jerusalem and someday to eat the fruit of the labor of our own hands.
"From this," my father said sadly, "follows the grave but inescapable conclusion that we must decidedly have gone wrong somewhere along the line. So now we are definitely under an obligation to labor tirelessly and uncompromisingly to determine the root and cause of our failure. Did we put on too much fertilizer? Did we water excessively? Or, on the contrary, did we omit some essential step? When all is said and done, we are not peasants and sons of peasants but mere amateurs, inexperienced suitors paying court to the earth but unfamiliar as yet with the golden mean."
That very day, when he came back from his work in the National Library on Mount Scopus, he brought with him two thick tomes he had borrowed about gardening and vegetable growing (one of them was in German) and studied them carefully. His attention soon turned to other matters, and to totally different books, the decline of certain minority languages in the Balkans, the influence of medieval courtly poetry on the origins of the novella, Greek words in the Mishnah, the interpretation of Ugaritic texts.
But one morning, as he was setting off to work with his rather battered briefcase, Father saw me bent over the dying shoots with tears in my eyes, absorbed in a last desperate effort to rescue them by means of some nose or ear drops that I had taken without permission from the medicine chest in the bathroom and was now administering to the withered shoots, one drop each. At that moment Father's pity was stirred toward me. He picked me up and hugged me, but lost no time in putting me down again. He was perplexed, embarrassed, at a loss. Before he left, as though fleeing the field of combat, he nodded his head three or four times and muttered thoughtfully, to himself rather than to me, the words: "We'll see what else can be done."
On Ibn Gabirol Street in Rehavia there used to stand a building called Pioneering Women's House, or it may have been Working Women's Farm, or something of the sort. Behind it there was a small agricultural reserve, a kind of commune, a women's farm, just a quarter of an acre or so of fruit trees, vegetables, poultry, and beehives. On this site in the early 1950s President Ben-Zvi's famous official prefab would be erected.
Father went to this experimental farm after work. He must have explained to Rachel Yannait or one of her assistants the whole story of our agricultural defeat, sought advice and guidance, and finally left and came home by bus bearing a small wooden box in whose soil there were some twenty or thirty healthy seedlings. He smuggled his booty into the apartment and hid it from me behind the laundry basket or under the kitchen cupboard, waited till I was asleep, and then crept outside, armed with his flashlight, his screwdriver, his heroic hammer, and his letter opener.
When I got up in the morning, Father addressed me in a matter-of-fact voice, as though reminding me to tie my shoelaces or button up my shirt. Without taking his eyes off his paper he said:
"Right. I have the impression your medicine from yesterday has done some good to our ailing plants. Why don't you go and have a look for yourself, Your Highness, and see if there's any sign of recovery? Or was it just my impression? Please go and check, and come back to let me know what you think, and we'll see if we both share the same opinion, more or less, shall we?"
My tiny shoots, which the day before had been so withered and yellowed that they were no more than sad threads of straw, had suddenly overnight, as though by magic, into sturdy, vigorous plants, bursting with health, full of sap and a deep green color. I stood there stunned, overwhelmed by the magical power of ten or twenty nose or ear drops.
As I went on staring, I realized that the miracle was even greater than it had appeared at first glance. The radish seedlings had jumped over into the cucumber bed in the night. While in the radishes' bed some plants I didn't recognize at all had settled, perhaps eggplants or carrots. And the most wondrous thing of all: all along the left-hand row, where we had put the tomato seeds that had not germinated, the row where I had not seen any point in using my magic drops at all, there were now three or four bushy young plants, with yellow buds among th
eir upper shoots.
A week later disease struck our garden again, the death throes began all over again, the saplings bowed their heads and once more started looking as sickly and weak as persecuted Diaspora Jews, their leaves dropped, the shoots withered, and this time neither nose drops nor cough syrup did any good: our vegetable patch was drying out and dying. For two or three weeks the four pegs continued to grow there, joined by the grubby strings, and then they too died. Only my Hitler scarecrow flourished for a little longer. Father sought consolation in the exploration of the sources of the Lithuanian romance or the birth of the novel from troubadour poetry. As for me, I scattered the yard with galaxies crammed with strange stars, moons, suns, comets, and planets, and set out on a perilous journey from star to star, in search of other signs of life.
32
LATE ONE summer afternoon. It is the end of the first grade, or maybe the beginning of the second grade, or the summer between the two. I am alone in the yard. The others have all gone off without me, Danush, Alik, Uri, Lulik, Eitan, and Ammi, they've gone to look for those things among the trees on the slope of the Tel Arza woods, but they wouldn't have me in the Black Hand gang because I wouldn't blow. Danush found one among the trees, full of smelly sticky stuff that had dried up, and he washed it out under the tap, and anyone who didn't have the guts to blow it up wasn't fit to belong to the Black Hand, and anyone who didn't have the guts to put it on and pee into it a bit, like an English soldier, there was no question of his being admitted to the Black Hand. Danush explained how it worked. Every night English soldiers take girls to the Tel Arza woods and there, in the dark, it goes like this. First they kiss a long time, on the mouth. Then he touches her body in all sorts of places, even under her clothes. Then he pulls both their pants down and puts one of those things on and he lies on top of her and so on and in the end he wets. And this thing was invented so that she wouldn't get wet from him at all. And that's the way it goes every night in Tel Arza woods, and that's the way it goes every night with everyone. Even Mrs. Sussmann, the teacher, her husband does it to her at night. Even your parents. Yes, yours too. And yours. All of them. And it gives you all sorts of nice feelings in your body and it builds up your muscles and it's also good for cleansing the blood.
