A Tale of Love and Darkness

by Amos Oz

Outside, in Helsinki, sleet was falling. The daylight was low and murky, and the snowflakes were gray and did not settle. The two old women were wearing almost identical dark dresses and thick brown socks, like girls from a respectable boarding school. When I kissed them, they both smelled of plain washing soap, brown bread, and bedding. A small maintenance man hurried past us, with a battery of pencils and pens in the pocket of his overalls. Aunt Rauha took a brown paper packet out of a big bag that was under the table and handed it to me. I recognized the bag: it was the same gray hessian bag from which they used to hand out small bars of soap, woolen socks, rusks, matches, candles, radishes, or a precious packet of powdered milk during the siege of Jerusalem, thirty years previously.

  I opened the packet, and there was a Bible printed in Jerusalem, in Hebrew and Finnish on facing pages, a tiny music box made of painted wood with a brass lid, and an assortment of dried flowers, unfamiliar Finnish flowers that were beautiful even in their death, flowers that I could not name and that I had never seen before that morning.

  "We were very fond," Aunt Aili said, her unseeing eyes seeking mine, "of your dear parents. Their life on this earth was not easy, and they did not always dispense grace to each other. There was sometimes much shadow between them. But now that finally they dwell in the secret of Almighty in the shelter of the wings of the Lord, now there is certainly only grace and truth between your parents, like two innocent children who have known no thought of iniquity, only light, love, and compassion between them forever, his left hand under her head and her right hand embraces him, and every shadow has long since departed from them."

  For my part, I had intended to present two copies of the Finnish translation of my book to the two aunts, but Aunt Rauha refused: A Hebrew book, she said, a book about Jerusalem written in the city of Jerusalem, we must please read it in Hebrew and not in any other language! And besides, she said with an apologetic smile, truly Aunt Aili can no longer read anything because the Lord has taken to himself the last of the light of her eyes. I read to her, morning and evening, only from the Old and New Testament, from our prayer book, and the books of the saints, although my eyes are also growing dim, and soon we shall both be blind.

  And when I am not reading to her and Aunt Aili is not listening to me, then we both sit at the window and look out at trees and birds, snow and wind, morning and evening, daylight and night lights, and we both give thanks in all humility to the good Lord for all his mercies and all his wonders: His will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Do you not also see sometimes, only when you are at rest, how the sky and the earth, the trees and the stones, the fields and the woods, are all full of great wonders? They are all bright and shining and they all together like a thousand witnesses testify to the greatness of the miracle of grace.

  47

  IN THE winter between 1948 and 1949 the war ended. Israel signed an armistice agreement with the neighboring countries, first with Egypt, then with Trans-Jordan, and finally with Syria and Lebanon. Iraq withdrew its expeditionary force without signing any document. Despite all these agreements, all the Arab countries continued to proclaim that one day they would embark on a "second round" of the war so as to put an end to a state that they refused to recognize; they declared that its very existence was an act of continuing aggression, and they called it the "artificial state," "ad-dawla al-maz'uma."

  In Jerusalem the Trans-Jordanian commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Abdullah al-Tall, and the Israeli commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Moshe Dayan, met several times to draw a demarcation line between the two parts of the city and to reach an agreement about the passage of convoys to the university campus on Mount Scopus, which remained as an isolated Israeli enclave within the area under the control of the Trans-Jordanian army. High concrete walls were erected along the line, to block streets that were half in Israeli Jerusalem and half in Arab Jerusalem. Here and there corrugated iron barriers were put up to conceal passersby in West Jerusalem from the view of the snipers on the rooftops of the eastern part of the city. A fortified strip of barbed wire, minefields, firing positions, and observation posts crossed the whole city, enclosing the Israeli section to the north, east, and south. Only the west was left open, and a single winding road linked Jerusalem to Tel Aviv and the rest of the new state. But as part of this road was still in the hands of the Arab Legion, it was necessary to build a bypass road and to lay a new water pipeline along it, in place of the pipeline laid by the British, parts of which had been destroyed, and to replace the pumping stations that remained under Arab control. The new road was called the Burma Road. A year or two later a new bypass road was laid and asphalted; it was named the Road of Heroism.

  Nearly everything in the young state in those days was named for those who had died in battle, or for heroism, or for the struggle, the illegal immigration and the realization of the Zionist dream. The Israelis were very proud of their victory and entrenched in the justice of their cause and their feelings of moral superiority. People did not think much about the fate of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees and displaced persons, many of whom had fled and many others of whom had been driven out of the towns and villages conquered by the Israeli army.

  War was a terrible thing, of course, and full of suffering, people said, but who asked the Arabs to start it? After all, we had accepted the partition compromise that was agreed by the United Nations, and it was the Arabs who had rejected any compromise and tried to butcher us all. In any case, it was well known that that every war claims its victims, millions of refugees from World War II were still wandering around Europe, entire populations had been uprooted and others had been settled in their place, the newly created states of Pakistan and India had exchanged millions of people, and so had Greece and Turkey. And after all, we had lost the Jewish Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem, we had lost the Etzion bloc, Kfar Darom, Atarot, Kaliya, and Neve Yaakov, just as they had lost Jaffa, Ramla, Lifta, el-Maliha, and Ein Karim. Instead of the hundreds of thousands of displaced Arabs, hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees who had been driven out of the Arab countries had arrived here. People were careful to avoid the word "expulsion." The massacre at Deir Yassin was laid at the door of "irresponsible extremists."

  A concrete curtain came down and divided us from Sheikh Jarrah and the other Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem.

  From our roof I could see the minarets of Shuafat, Biddu, and Ramallah, the solitary tower atop Nebi Samwil, the Police Training School (from which a Jordanian marksman had shot and killed Yoni Abramski when he was playing in the yard outside his house), beleaguered Mount Scopus and the Mount of Olives, now held by the Arab Legion, and the roofs of Sheikh Jarrah and the American Colony.

  Sometimes I imagined I could identify, among the thick treetops, a corner of the roof of Silwani Villa. I believed that they were much better off than we were: they had not been shelled for long months, they had not been subjected to hunger and thirst, they had not been made to sleep on mattresses in foul-smelling basements. And yet I often talked to them in my heart. Just like Mr. Gustav Krochmal, the doll repairer from Geula Street, I longed to put on my best clothes and go to them at the head of a deputation for peace and reconciliation, to prove to them that we were in the right, to apologize and receive their apology, to be treated to biscuits and sugared orange peel, to demonstrate our forgiveness and magnanimity, to sign an agreement of peace, friendship, and mutual respect with them, and maybe also to convince Aisha and her brother and all the Silwani family that the accident had not been entirely my fault, or not only my fault.

  Sometimes we were woken in the early hours by machine-gun salvos from the direction of the armistice line, a mile or so from where we lived, or the wailing of the muezzin on the other side of the new border: like a hair-raising lament, the howl of his prayer penetrated our sleep.

  Our apartment was emptied of all the visitors who had sought refuge in it. The Rosendorffs went back to their apartment on the next floor up; the vacant old lady and her daughter folded their be
dding away into a sack and disappeared; Gita Miudovnik, the widow of the man who wrote the arithmetic textbook, whose mangled body had been identified by my father because of the socks he had lent him, also left. And Uncle Joseph with his sister-in-law Haya Elitsedek returned to the Klausner house in Talpiot, with the brass plate bearing the motto Judaism and humanity over the front door. They had to do some work on the house because it had been damaged in the fighting. For several weeks the old professor mourned the thousands of books that had been swept off the shelves and thrown on the floor or used to make barricades and shelters against bullets fired through the windows of the house, which had become firing positions. Ariel Elitsedek, the prodigal son, was found safe and sound after the war, but he kept arguing and cursing the wretched Ben-Gurion, who could have liberated the Old City and the Temple Mount and had not done so, who could have driven all the Arabs out to the Arab countries and had not done so, all because he and his fellow reds who had seized the leadership of our beloved state had been perverted by socialistic pacifism and Tolstoyan vegetarianism. Soon, he believed, a new, proud national leadership would arise, and our forces would be unleashed to liberate every part of the fatherland at last from the yoke of the Arab conqueror.

  Most Jerusalemites, however, did not yearn for more war, and were not concerned about the fate of the Wailing Wall and Rachel's tomb, which had vanished behind the concrete curtain and the minefields. The shattered city licked its wounds. All through that winter and throughout the following spring and summer, long gray lines formed in front of the grocers, greengrocers, and butchers. The austerity regime had arrived. Lines formed behind the ice man's cart, lines formed behind the paraffin seller's cart. Food was distributed in exchange for coupons from ration books. The sale of eggs and a little bit of chicken was restricted to children and invalids with medical certificates. Milk was measured out in limited quantities. Fruit and vegetables were rarely seen in Jerusalem. Oil, sugar, grits, and flour appeared intermittently, monthly or fortnightly. If you wanted to buy simple clothes, shoes, or furniture you had to use up precious coupons from your dwindling ration books. Shoes were made from reused leather, and their soles were as thin as cardboard. The furniture was shoddy. Instead of coffee people drank ersatz coffee or chicory, and powdered eggs and milk replaced the real thing. And we all came to hate the frozen cod fillets we had to eat every day, surplus stock from Norway that the new government bought at a cut-rate price.

  In the early months after the war you even needed a special permit to leave Jerusalem to go to Tel Aviv and the rest of the country. But all sorts of clever or pushy people, anyone with a bit of money who knew the way to the black market, anyone with connections to the new administration, hardly felt the shortages. And some people managed to grab themselves apartments and houses in the prosperous Arab neighborhoods whose residents had fled or been expelled, or in the closed zones where British army and civil service families had lived before the war: Katamon, Talbieh, Bakaa, Abu Tor, and the German Colony. The poorer Arabs from Musrara, Lifta, and el-Maliha were replaced by thousands and thousands of poor Jewish families who had fled or been thrown out of the Arab countries. Huge transit camps were set up in Talpiot, the Allenby Barracks, and Beit Mazmil, rows of corrugated iron shacks with no electricity, drains, or running water. In winter the paths between the huts became a gooey porridge, and the cold pierced the bone. Accountants from Iraq, goldsmiths from Yemen, tradesmen and shopkeepers from Morocco, and watchmakers from Bucharest were crowded into these huts and employed for a pittance on government schemes of rock clearing and reforesting in the Jerusalem hills.

  Gone were the "heroic years" of World War II, the genocide of European Jewry, the partisans, mass enlistment in the British army and the Jewish Brigade, which the British set up for the war against Nazism, the years of the struggle against the British, the underground, the illegal immigration, the new "tower and stockade" villages settlements, the war to the death against the Palestinians and the regular armies of five Arab states.

  Now that the years of euphoria were over, we were suddenly living in the "morning after": gray, gloomy, damp, mean, and petty. These were the years of blunt Okava razor blades, tasteless Shenhav toothpaste, smelly Knesset cigarettes, the roaring sports commentators Nehemia Ben-Avraham and Alexander Alexandroni on the Voice of Israel, cod-liver oil, ration books, Shmulik Rozen and his quiz shows, the political commentator Moshe Medzini, the Hebraization of surnames, food rationing, government work schemes, lines at the grocer's, larders built into kitchen walls, cheap sardines, Inkoda canned meat, the Mixed Israeli-Jordanian Armistice Committee, Arab infiltrators from the other side of the armistice line, the theater companies—Ohel, Habima, Doh-Re-Mi, Chisbatron—Djigan and Schumacher the comedians, the Mandelbaum Gate crossing, retaliatory raids, washing children's hair with paraffin to get rid of the lice, "Help for the Transit Camps," "abandoned property," the Defense Fund, no-man's-land, and "Our blood will no longer be shed with impunity."

  And once more I went to school each morning at the Tachkemoni Religious Boys' School on Tachkemoni Street. The pupils were poor children, schooled to beatings, whose parents were artisans, manual workers, and small traders; they came from families of eight or ten, some of them were always hungry for my sandwiches; some had shaved heads, and we all wore black berets at an angle. They would gang up on me at the water fountains in the playground and splash me, because they quickly discovered that I was the only only child, the weakest among them, and that I was easily offended or upset. When they went out of their way to devise new humiliations for me, I sometimes stood panting in the middle of a circle of my sneering tormentors, beaten up, covered with dust, a lamb among wolves, and suddenly to the astonishment of my enemies I would start to beat myself, scratch myself hysterically, and bite my arm so hard that a bleeding watch shape appeared. Just as my mother did in my presence two or three times when she was overwhelmed.

  But sometimes I made up stories of suspense for them in installments, breathtaking tales in the spirit of the action films we used to watch at the Edison Cinema. In these stories I never hesitated to introduce Tarzan to Flash Gordon or Nick Carter to Sherlock Holmes, or to mix the cowboys-and-Indians world of Karl May and Mayne Reid with Ben Hur or the mysteries of outer space or gangs of thugs in the suburbs of New York. I used to give them an installment each break, like Scheherazade postponing her fate with her tales, always stopping at the moment of greatest tension, just when it seemed as though the hero was doomed and beyond hope, leaving the sequel (which I had not invented yet) ruthlessly to the following day.

  So I used to walk around in the playground during breaks like Rabbi Nahman with his flocks of students eager to drink in his teachings; I would turn this way and that surrounded by a tight crush of listeners afraid of missing a single word, and among them would sometimes be my leading persecutors, whom I would make a point of magnanimously inviting into the innermost circle and favoring with a precious clue to a possible twist in the plot or some hair-raising event that would figure in the next installment, thus promoting the recipient into an influential figure who had the power to reveal or withhold invaluable information at will.

  My first stories were full of caves, labyrinths, catacombs, forests, ocean depths, dungeons, battlefields, galaxies inhabited by monsters, brave policemen and fearless warriors, conspiracies, terrible betrayals accompanied by wonderful acts of chivalry and generosity, baroque twists, unbelievable self-sacrifice, and highly emotional gestures of self-denial and forgiveness. As far as I recall, the characters in my early works included both heroes and villains. And there were a number of villains who repented and atoned for their sins by acts of self-sacrifice or by a heroic death. There were also bloodthirsty sadists, and all sorts of scoundrels and mean cheats, as well as unassuming characters who sacrificed their lives with a smile. The female characters, on the other hand, were all, without exception, noble: loving despite being exploited, suffering yet compassionate, tormented and even humiliated, yet always pro
ud and pure, paying the price for male insanities yet generous and forgiving.

  But if I tightened the string too much, or not enough, then after a few episodes, or at the end of the story, at the moment when wrongdoing was confounded and magnanimity finally received its reward, that was when this poor Scheherazade was thrown into the lions' den and showered with blows and insults to his ancestry. Why could he never keep his mouth shut?

  Tachkemoni was a boys' school. Even the teachers were all male. Apart from the school nurse no woman ever appeared there. The bolder boys sometimes climbed onto the wall of the Laemel Girls' School to get a glimpse of life on the other side of the iron curtain. Girls in long blue skirts and blouses with short puffy sleeves, so the rumor went, walked around the playground in pairs during break, played hopscotch, braided each other's hair, and occasionally splashed each other with water from the fountains just like us.

  Apart from me, almost all the boys at Tachkemoni had older sisters, sisters-in-law, and female cousins, and so I was the last of the last to hear the whispers about what it was that girls had and we didn't, and vice versa, and what the older brothers did to their girls in the dark.

  At home not a word was spoken on the subject. Ever. Except, perhaps, if some visitor got carried away and joked about bohemian life, or about the Bar-Yizhar-Itselevitches who were so meticulous about observing the commandment to be fruitful and multiply, but he would immediately be silenced by the others with the rebuke: Shto's toboi?! Vidish malchik ryadom's nami!! (Can't you see the boy is here!)

  The boy may have been there, but he understood nothing. If his classmates hurled the Arabic word for what girls have at him, if they huddled together and passed a picture of a scantily dressed woman from hand to hand, or if someone brought along a ballpoint pen inside which was a girl dressed for tennis, and when you turned it upside down, the clothes disappeared, they would all chortle hoarsely, elbowing each other in the ribs, trying hard to sound like their older brothers, and only I felt a terrible dread, as though some vague disaster was taking shape far away on the horizon. It was not here yet, it did not touch me yet, but it was already blood-curdlingly frightening, like a forest fire on the faraway hilltops. Nobody would escape from it unscathed. Nothing would be the same as it was before.