by Amos Oz
But there was her letter box, the one out of which I used to fish her mail when I was little, because the lock had rusted up and it was impossible to open it. Now the door hung open: somebody, certainly a man, must have been more impatient than Teacher Zelda and me, and had smashed the lock once and for all. The wording had changed too: instead of "Zelda Schneersohn" it now said "Schneersohn Mishkowsky." No more Zelda, but no hyphen or "and" either. And what would I do if it was her husband who opened the door to me? What could I say to him? Or to her?
I almost turned tail and fled, like a startled suitor in a comedy film. (I hadn't known she was married, or that she had been widowed, I had not worked it out that I was eight when I left her apartment and now I was thirty-seven, older than she had been when I left her.)
This time, as then, it was quite early in the morning.
I really should have phoned her before coming to see her. Or written her a note. Perhaps she was angry with me? Perhaps she had not forgiven me for walking out on her? For this long silence? For not congratulating her on either the publication of her books or the literary prizes she had won? Perhaps, like some other Jerusalemites, she resented my spitting in the well from which I had drunk, in My Michael. Suppose she had changed beyond recognition? What if she was an entirely different woman now, twenty-nine years later?
I stood in front of the door for some ten minutes, I went out into the yard, I smoked a cigarette or two, I touched the washing lines from which I once used to pluck her modest brown or gray skirts. I identified the cracked paving stone that I cracked myself once when I tried to break almonds open with a stone. And I looked out beyond the red roofs of the Bukharian Quarter, toward the desolate hills there used be to the north. Now, though, the hills were no longer desolate but smothered in housing developments: Ramot Eshkol, Ma'alot Dafna, Givat Hamivtar, French Hill, and Ammunition Hill.
But what should I say to her? Hello, Dear Teacher Zelda? I hope I'm not disturbing you. My name is, ahem, such and such? Good morning Mrs. Schneersohn-Mishkowsky? I was a pupil of yours once, I don't know if you remember? Excuse me, may I take just a few minutes of your time? I like your poetry? You still look marvelous? No, I haven't come to interview you?
I must have forgotten how dark little ground-floor apartments in Jerusalem could be, even on a summer morning. Darkness opened the door to me: darkness full of brown smells. And out of the darkness the fresh voice that I remembered, the voice of a confident girl who loved words, said to me:
"Come on in, Amos."
And immediately afterward:
"You probably want us to sit outside in the yard?"
And then:
"You like your iced lemonade weak."
And then:
"I have to correct myself: you used to like your lemonade weak. But maybe there has been a change since then?"
Naturally I am reconstructing that morning and our conversation from memory—like trying to restore an ancient ruined building on the basis of seven or eight stones that are still left standing. But among the few stones left standing exactly as they were, neither reconstructed nor invented, are these words: "I have to correct myself:...But maybe there has been a change since then?" That is exactly what Zelda said to me on that summer morning in late June 1976. Twenty-nine years after our honey summer. And twenty-five years before the summer morning that I am writing this page (in my study in Arad, in an exercise book full of crossings out, on July 30, 2001: this is therefore a recollection of a visit that was also meant, in its day, to conjure up a recollection or to scratch at old wounds. In all these recollections, my task is a bit like that of someone trying to build something out of old stones that he is digging out of the ruins of something that was also, in its day, built out of stones from a ruin).
"I have to correct myself," Teacher Zelda said. "Maybe there has been a change since then?"
She could have said it in so many different ways. For instance, she might have said: Maybe you don't like lemonade anymore? Or: Maybe you like it very strong now? Or she might have asked, quite simply: What would you like to drink?
She was a person of precision. Her intention was to allude at once, happily, without a hint of bitterness, to our private past, hers and mine (lemonade, not too strong), but to do so without subordinating the present to the past ("Maybe there has been a change since then?"—with a question mark—thus offering me the choice, and also shouldering me with the responsibility for the continuation, for the rest of the visit. Which I had initiated).
I said (certainly not without a smile):
"Thank you. I'd love to have some lemonade like before."
She said:
"That's what I thought, but I felt I ought to ask."
Then we both drank iced lemonade (instead of the icebox there was now a little refrigerator, an obsolete model that was showing signs of its age). We reminisced. She had indeed read my books, and I had read hers, but we passed over all that in five or six sentences, as though hurrying past an unsafe stretch of road.
We talked about what had happened to the Nahlielis, Isabella and Getzel. About other common acquaintances. About the changes that had taken place in Kerem Avraham. My parents and her late husband, who had passed away some five years before my visit, we also mentioned at a run, then went back to walking pace to talk about Agnon and perhaps also about Thomas Wolfe (Look Homeward, Angel was translated into Hebrew around that time, although it is possible that we had both read it in English). As my eyes became accustomed to the darkness, I was amazed to see how little the apartment had changed. The dreary brown dresser with its thick coat of varnish was still crouching in its usual corner like an old dog. The china tea set still dozed behind its glass panes. On the dresser there were photographs of Zelda's parents, who looked younger than she did, and a picture of a man who I imagined must be her husband, but I still asked who he was. Her eyes suddenly lit up and sparkled mischievously; she grinned at me as though we had just done something naughty together, then she pulled herself together and said simply:
"That's Chayim."
The round brown table seemed to have shrunk over the years. In the bookcase there were old prayer books in battered dark covers, and a few big new religious books in splendid leather bindings with gold tooling, as well as Schirmann's history of Hebrew poetry in Spain, a lot of books of poetry and modern Hebrew novels, and a row of paperbacks. When I was a child, this bookcase had loomed very, very large; now it only loomed shoulder-height. On the dresser and various shelves there were silver Sabbath candlesticks, a number of Hanukkah lamps, little ornaments made of olive wood or copper, and a sad potted plant on the chest of drawers and a couple more on the windowsill. The whole scene was dominated by a dim light saturated with brown smells: it was unmistakably the room of a religious woman. Not an ascetic place, but one that was withdrawn and reserved, and also somehow depressing. There had indeed been, as she had put it, a change. Not because she had aged, or because she had become loved and famous, but perhaps because she had become earnest.
Yet she had always been a person of precision, earnestness, and inner seriousness. It's hard to explain.
I never saw her again after that morning. I heard that she finally moved to a new area. I heard that over the years she had a number of close women friends who were younger than herself and younger than me. I heard that she had cancer, and that one Friday night in 1984 she died in terrible pain. But I never went back to see her, I never wrote to her, I never sent her any of my books, and I never set eyes on her again except a couple of times in literary supplements and once more, on the day of her death, for less than half a minute, toward the end of the TV news (and I wrote about her, and her room, in The Same Sea).
When I stood up to go, it turned out that the ceiling had become lower over the years. It almost touched my head.
The years had not changed her much. She had not become ugly, or fat, or shriveled, the lightning of her eyes still flashed out occasionally while we talked, like a beam sent to search all
my hidden recesses. Yet even so, something had changed. As though over the decades that I had not seen her, Teacher Zelda had grown to resemble her old-fashioned apartment.
She was like a silver candlestick, like a candlestick glowing dimly in a dark void. And I should like to be as precise here as it is possible to be: in that last meeting Zelda seemed to me like the candle, the candlestick, and the dark void.
39
EVERY MORNING, a little before or a little after sunrise, I am in the habit of going out to discover what is new in the desert. The desert begins here in Arad at the end of our road. An easterly morning breeze comes from the direction of the Mountains of Edom, stirring little eddies of sand here and there that try unsuccessfully to rise up from the ground. Each of them struggles, loses its whirlwind shape, and dies down. The hills themselves are still hidden by the mist that comes up from the Dead Sea and covers the rising sun and the highlands with a gray veil, as though it were autumn already instead of summer. But it is a false autumn: in another couple of hours it will be dry and hot again here. Like yesterday. Like the day before yesterday, like a week ago, like a month ago.
In the meantime the cool of the night is still holding its own. There is a pleasant smell of dust that has soaked up a lot of dew, blended with a faint smell of sulfur, goat droppings, thistles, and dead campfires. This is the smell of the Land of Israel from time immemorial. I go down into the wadi and advance along a winding path to the edge of the cliff from which I have a view of the Dead Sea, nearly three thousand feet below, fifteen and a half miles away. The shadow of the hills to the east falls on the water and gives it the color of old copper. Here and there a sharp needle of light manages to pierce the cloud for a moment and touch the sea. The sea responds with a dazzling shimmer, as though there is an electric storm raging under the surface.
From here to there stretch empty slopes of limestone dappled with black rocks. Among these rocks, exactly on the horizon at the top of the hill facing me, suddenly there are three black goats and with them a human figure standing motionlessly draped in black from head to foot. A Bedouin woman? And is that a dog next to her? And suddenly they've all disappeared beyond the line of the hills, the woman, the goats, and the dog. The gray light casts doubt on every movement. Meanwhile other dogs give voice in the distance. A little farther on, among the rocks by the side of the path, lies a rusty shell casing. How did it end up here? Maybe one night a camel caravan of smugglers passed here on their way from Sinai to the southern part of Mount Hebron, and one of the smugglers lost the shell casing, or threw it away after wondering what he would do with it.
Now you can hear the full depths of the desert silence. It isn't the quiet before the storm, or the silence of the end of the world, but a silence that only covers another, even deeper, silence. I stand there for three or four minutes inhaling silence like a smell. Then I turn back. I walk back up from the wadi to the end of my road, arguing with an angry chorus of dogs that start barking at me from every garden. Perhaps they imagine that I'm threatening to help the desert invade the town.
In the branches of the first tree in the garden of the first house a whole parliament of sparrows are deep in a noisy argument, all interrupting each other with deafening shrieks: they seem to be roaring rather than chirping. As though the departure of the night and the breaking of the day are unprecedented developments that justify an emergency meeting.
Along the road an old car is starting up with a hoarse coughing fit, like a heavy smoker. The newspaper boy vainly tries to make friends with an uncompromising dog. A thickset, tanned neighbor, with a thicket of gray hair on his bare chest, a retired colonel, whose foursquare body reminds me of a tin trunk, is standing half naked in blue running shorts, watering the bed of roses in front of his house.
"Your roses are looking wonderful. Good morning, Mr. Shmuelevich."
"What's so good about it?" he assails me. "Has Shimon Peres finally stopped selling out the whole country to Arafat?"
And when I remark that some people see it differently, he adds bitterly:
"It seems one holocaust wasn't enough to teach us a lesson. Do you really call this disaster peace? Have you ever heard of the Sudetenland? Or Munich? Or Chamberlain? Well?"
I do indeed have a detailed, reasoned reply to this, but thanks to the reserves of calm I have built up earlier, in the wadi, I bring up the words:
"Somebody was playing the Moonlight Sonata in your house about eight o'clock last night. I was walking past and I even stopped to listen for a few minutes. Was it your daughter? She played beautifully. Tell her."
He moved the hose to the next bed and smiled at me like a shy schoolboy who has suddenly been chosen as class monitor by secret ballot. "That wasn't my daughter," he says, "she's gone off to Prague. That was her daughter. My granddaughter, Daniella. She came third out of the whole Southern Region in the Young Talent Competition. Though everyone without exception says she should have been second. She writes beautiful poems too. So sensitive. Would you have time to take a look at them? Maybe you could give her some encouragement. Or even send them to a newspaper, for publication. They'd be bound to publish them if you sent them."
I promise Mr. Shmuelevich that I'll read Daniella's poems when I have a chance. Gladly. Certainly. Why not. Don't mention it.
In my heart I enter this promise as my contribution to the advancement of peace. Back in my study, with a mug of coffee in my hand and the morning paper spread out on the sofa, I stand at the window for another ten minutes. I hear on the news about a seventeen-year-old Arab girl who has been seriously injured by a round of bullets after she tried to stab an Israeli soldier with a knife at a roadblock outside Bethlehem. The early morning light, which was blended with a gray mist, has begun to glow and turned to a harsh, uncompromising blue.
***
At my window there is a little garden, a few shrubs, a vine, and a sickly lemon tree: I don't know yet if it will live or die, its foliage is pale, its trunk is bent like an arm that someone is forcing backward. The Hebrew word for "bent," which happens to begin with the letters AK, reminds me of what my father used to say, that every word that begins with AK signifies something bad. "And you must have noticed yourself, Your Highness, that your own initials, whether by chance or not, are also AK."
Maybe I should write an article today for Yediot Aharonot, to try to explain to Mr. Shmuelevich that getting out of the conquered territories will not weaken Israel but actually strengthen us. And that it's a mistake to see the Holocaust and Hitler and Munich everywhere.
Mr. Shmuelevich told me once, on one of those long summer evenings when you think the evening light will never fade, when the two of us were sitting in vests and sandals on his garden wall, how he was taken to the Maidanek death camp when he was about twelve with his parents, his three sisters, and their grandmother, and he was the only one who survived. He didn't want to tell me how he survived. He promised he'd tell me some other time. But every other time he chose instead to open my eyes, so I shouldn't believe in peace, so I should stop being naive, so I should get it firmly in my head that their only aim is to butcher us all and all their talk of peace is a trap, or a sleeping draught that the whole world has helped them brew and given us to lull us to sleep. Just as then.
I decide to put off writing the article. An unfinished chapter of this book is waiting for me on my desk in a heap of scribbled drafts, crumpled notes, and half pages full of crossings out. It's the chapter about Teacher Isabella Nahlieli from Children's Realm School and her army of cats. I'm going to have to make some concessions there and delete some incidents about cats and about Getzel Nahlieli, the cashier. They were quite amusing incidents, but they do not contribute anything to the progress of the story. Contribute? Progress? I don't know what can contribute to the progress of the story, because as yet I have no idea where this story wants to go, and in fact why it needs contributions. Or progress.
Meanwhile the eleven o'clock news has finished and I've had a second mug of coffee and I
'm still staring out the window. A pretty little turquoise-colored bird peers at me for a moment out of the lemon tree: it moves to and fro, leaps from a branch to a twig, and shows off the lightning of its feathers in the dappled light and shade. Its head is nearly violet, its neck is a dark metallic blue, and it is wearing a delicate yellow waistcoat. Welcome back. What have you come to remind me about this morning? The Nahlielis? Bialik's poem "A twig fell on a wall and dozed"? My mother, who used to spend hours standing at the window, with a glass of tea getting cold in her hand, with her face to the pomegranate bush and her back to the room? That's enough. I must get down to work. Now I have to use the rest of the calm I stored up in the wadi this morning before the sun rose.
Just before noon I drive into town to sort out one or two things at the post office, the bank, the clinic, and the stationer's. A tropical sun is scorching the streets and their dusty, thin-looking trees. The desert light is white-hot now and so cruel to your eyes that they turn of their own accord into two narrow slits.
There is a short line at the cash dispenser and another one at Ouak-nine's newspaper stand. In Tel Aviv, in the summer holiday of 1950 or 1951, not far from Auntie Haya and Uncle Tsvi's apartment at the north end of Ben Yehuda Street, my cousin Yigal pointed out to me a newspaper kiosk that was kept by David Ben-Gurion's brother and told me that anyone who wanted to could simply go up and talk to him, to this brother of Ben-Gurion's, who really looked a lot like him. You could even ask him questions. Like, How are you, Mr. Gruen? How much is a chocolate wafer, Mr. Gruen? Is there going to be another war soon, Mr. Gruen? The only thing you mustn't do is ask him about his brother. That's the way it is. He really doesn't like being asked questions about his brother.
