A Tale of Love and Darkness

by Amos Oz

  When they whispered breathlessly in recess about some "halfwitted Tali who lives down the alley," who hangs around in the Tel Arza woods and gives it to anyone who hands her half a pound, or the fat widow from the kitchen goods shop who takes a few boys from class 8 to the storeroom behind her shop and shows what she's got in exchange for watching them jerk off, I felt a pang of sorrow nibbling at my heart, as though some great horror was lying in wait for everybody, men and women alike, a cruel, patient horror, a creeping horror that was slowly spinning a slimy invisible web, and maybe I was already infected without knowing it.

  When we got to class 6 or 7, the school nurse, a gruff, military woman, suddenly came into our classroom, and stood there for a whole double lesson, alone in front of thirty-eight dazed boys, revealing to us all the facts of life. Fearlessly she described organs and functions, drew diagrams of the plumbing in colored chalks on the blackboard, she spared us nothing: seeds and eggs, glands, sheaths and tubes. Then she moved on to the horror show and treated us to terrifying descriptions of the two monsters lurking at the gateway, the Frankenstein's monster and the werewolf of the world of sex: the twin calamities of pregnancy and infection.

  Dazed and shamefaced, we left the lecture and went out into the world, which now appeared to me as a gigantic minefield or a plague-ridden planet. The child I was then grasped, more or less, what was supposed to be pushed into what, what was supposed to receive what, but for the life of me I could not understand why a sane man or woman would want to get caught in those labyrinthine dragon's lairs. The bold nurse who had not hesitated to lay everything bare for us, from hormones to rules of hygiene, had forgotten to mention, even obliquely, that there might be some pleasure involved in all those complicated, dangerous procedures, either because she wanted to protect our innocence or because she simply did not know.

  Our teachers at Tachkemoni mostly wore threadbare dark-gray or brown suits or ancient jackets and constantly demanded our respect and fear: Mr. Monzon, Mr. Avisar, Mr. Neimann Senior and Mr. Neimann Junior, Mr. Alkalai, Mr. Duvshani, Mr. Ophir, Mr. Michaeli, the imperious Mr. Ilan the headmaster, who always appeared in a three-piece suit, and his brother, also Mr. Ilan but only in a two-piece suit.

  We had to get to our feet when each of these men entered the classroom, and we could not sit down until he had graciously indicated that we were worthy to do so. We addressed the teachers as "my teacher," and always in the third person. "My teacher asked me to bring a note from my parents, but my parents have gone to Haifa. Would he please let me bring the note on Sunday instead?" Or: "Please, my teacher, doesn't he think he's laying it on a bit thick here?" (The second "he" in this sentence does not, of course, refer to the teacher—whom none of us would ever have dared accuse of laying it on a bit thick—but merely the prophet Jeremiah, or the poet Bialik, whose blazing anger we were studying at the time.)

  As for us, the pupils, we lost our first names completely from the moment we crossed the threshold of the school. Our teachers called us only Bozo, Saragosti, Valero, Ribatski, Alfasi, Klausner, Hajaj, Schleifer, De La Mar, Danon, Ben-Naim, Cordovero, and Axelrod.

  They had a plethora of punishments, those teachers at Tachkemoni School. A slap on the face, a ruler blow across an outstretched hand, shaking us by the scruff of the neck and banishing us to the playground, summoning our parents, a black mark in the class register, copying out a chapter from the Bible twenty times, writing out five hundred lines: "I must not chatter during class" or "Homework must be done on time." Anyone whose handwriting was not neat enough was made to write pages upon pages at home in calligraphic writing "as pure as a mountain stream" Anyone whose fingernails were untrimmed, whose ears were not immaculate, or whose shirt collar was a bit grimy was sent home in disgrace, but not before being made to stand in front of the class and recite loud and clear: "I'm a dirty boy, being dirty is a sin; if I don't have a wash, I'll end up in the bin!"

  The first lesson every morning at Tachkemoni began with the singing of "Modeh ani":

  I give thanks unto thee, O living and eternal King,

  who hast restored my soul unto me in mercy: great is thy faithfulness.

  After which we all trilled shrilly but with gusto:

  O universal Lord, who reigned ere any creature yet was formed ...

  And after all things pass away, alone the dreaded one shall reign...

  Only when all the songs and the (abbreviated) morning prayers were complete did our teachers order us to open our textbooks and exercise books and prepare our pencils, and generally they launched straight into a long, boring dictation that went on until the bell for recess rang, or sometimes even longer. At home we had to learn by heart: chunks of the Bible, entire poems, and sayings of the rabbis. To this day you can wake me up in the middle of the night and get me to recite the prophet's reply to Rab-shakeh, the envoy of the king of Assyria: "The virgin, the daughter of Zion / hath despised thee, and laughed thee to scorn; / the daughter of Jerusalem / hath shaken her head at thee. / Whom hast thou reproached and blasphemed? / and against whom has thou exalted thy voice?... I will put my hook in thy nose, / and my bridle in thy lips, / and I will turn thee back by the way by which thou camest." Or the Ethics of the Fathers: "On three things the world stands ... Say little and do much ... I have found nothing better for a body than silence ... Know what is above thee ... Separate thyself not from the congregation, neither trust in thyself until the day of thy death, and do not judge thine associate until thou comest to his place ... and in a place where there are no men endeavor to be a man."

  At Tachkemoni School, I studied Hebrew. It was as if the drill had struck a rich vein of minerals, which I had touched for the first time in Teacher Zelda's class and in her yard. I was powerfully drawn to the solemn idioms, the almost forgotten words, the exotic syntax, and the linguistic byways where barely a human foot had trodden for centuries, and the poignant beauty of the Hebrew language: "And it came to pass, that in the morning, behold, it was Leah"; "ere any creature yet was formed"; "uncircumcised of heart"; "a seah of suffering"; or "Warm thyself by the fire of the wise; but beware of their glowing coals, lest thou be burnt, for their bite is the bite of a fox, and their sting is the scorpion's sting ... and all their words are like coals of fire."

  Here, at Tachkemoni, I studied the Pentateuch with Rashi's witty, light-winged commentary, here I soaked up the wisdom of the sages, lore and law, prayers, hymns, commentaries, supercommentaries, Sabbath and festival prayer books and the laws of the Prepared Table. I also encountered familiar friends from home, like the wars of the Maccabees, the Bar Kochba Revolt, the history of Jewish communities of the Diaspora, lives of the great rabbis, and Hasidic tales with the moral attached. Something too of the rabbinic jurists, and of the Hebrew poetry of Spain and Bialik, and occasionally, in Mr. Ophir's music lessons, some song of the pioneers in Galilee and the Valley, which was as out of place in Tachkemoni as a camel in the snows of Siberia.

  Mr. Avisar, the geography teacher, would take us with him on adventure-laden trips to Galilee, the Negev, Trans-Jordan, Mesopotamia, the pyramids, and the hanging gardens of Babylon, with the aid of wall maps and occasionally a battered magic lantern. Mr. Neimann Junior declaimed the fury of the prophets at us in thunderous cascades, followed at once by gentle rivulets of comfort and consolation. Mr. Monzon, the English teacher, hammered into us the eternal difference between "I do," "I did," "I have done," "I have been doing," "I would have done," "I should have done," and "I should have been doing": "Even the King of England in person!" he would thunder like the Lord from Mount Sinai, "even Churchill! Shakespeare! Gary Cooper!—all obey these rules of language with no excuses, and only you, honorable sir, Mister Abulafia, are apparently above the law! What, are you above Churchill?! are you above Shakespeare?! are you above the King of England?! Shame on you! Disgrace! Now please note this, pay attention all the class, write it down, get it right: It is a shame, but you, the Right Honorable Master Abulafia, you are a disgrace!!!"

  But my
favorite teacher of all was Mr. Michaeli, Mordechai Michaeli, whose soft hands were always perfumed like a dancer's and whose face was sheepish, as though he was forever ashamed of something; he used to sit down, take off his hat, put it on the desk in front of him, adjust his little skullcap, and, instead of bombarding us with knowledge, he would spend hours telling us stories. From the Talmud he would move on to Ukrainian folk tales, and then he would plunge suddenly into Greek mythology, Bedouin stories, and Yiddish slapstick, and he would go on until he came to the tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen and his own stories, which he composed, just like me, by telling them.

  Most of the boys in my class took advantage of sweet Mr. Michaeli's good nature and absentmindedness, and they dozed through his lessons with their heads resting on their arms on the desk. Or sometimes they passed notes around or even tossed a paper ball between the desks: Mr. Michaeli did not notice, or perhaps he did not care.

  I did not care either. He fixed me with his weary, kindly eyes and told his stories to me alone. Or just to two or three of us, who did not take our eyes off his lips, which seemed to be creating entire worlds in front of us.

  48

  FRIENDS AND neighbors started appearing in our little yard again on summer evenings, to talk about politics or cultural affairs over a glass of tea and a piece of cake. Mala and Staszek Rudnicki, Hayim and Hannah Toren, the Krochmals, who had reopened their tiny shop in Geula Street and were once more repairing dolls and making hair grow on balding teddy bears. Yakov-David and Zerta Abramski were also regular visitors. (They had both gone very gray in the months since their son Yoni was killed. Mr. Abramski had become even more talkative than before, while Zerta had turned very quiet.) My father's parents, Grandpa Alexander and Grandma Shlomit, also came sometimes, very elegant and robed in Odessan self-importance. Grandpa Alexander would briskly dismiss everything his son said with a "Nu, what" and a scornful wave of his hand, but he never found the courage to disagree with Grandma Shlomit about anything. Grandma would plant two wet kisses on my cheeks, and immediately wipe her lips with a paper napkin and my cheeks with another one, wrinkle her nose at the refreshments Mother had prepared, or the napkins that weren't folded the right way, or her son's jacket, which seemed to her too loud and verging on Oriental bad taste:

  "But really, Lonya, it's so cheapl Where did you find that rag? In some Arab shop in Jaffa?" And without favoring my mother with so much as a glance she added sadly: "Only in the tiniest shtetls, where culture was barely more than a rumor, might you have seen somebody dressing like that!"

  They would sit in a circle around the black tea cart that had been taken outside to serve as a garden table, unanimously bless the cool evening breeze, and over tea and cakes analyze Stalin's latest devious move or President Truman's determination, discuss the decline of the British Empire or the partition of India, and from there the conversation moved on to the politics of the young state and became more animated. Staszek Rudnicki raised his voice while Mr. Abramski ridiculed him with expansive movements of his hand and in high-flown, biblical Hebrew. Staszek believed firmly in the kibbutzim and the new collective farms and maintained that the government ought to send all the new immigrants there en masse, straight off the ships, whether they wanted to go or not, to be cured once and for all of their Diaspora mentality and their persecution complexes; it was there, through hard work in the fields, that the New Hebrew Man would be molded.

  My father expressed his resentment of the Bolshevik despotism of the Histadrut leadership who withheld work from those not in possession of their red card. Mr. Gustav Krochmal timidly advanced the view that Ben-Gurion, despite his faults, was the hero of the age: he had been sent to us providentially at a time when petty-minded party hacks might have been put off by the enormity of the undertaking and missed the opportune moment to establish a state. "It was our youth!" Grandpa Alexander shouted loudly, "It was our wonderful youth that gave us the victory and the miracle! Without no Ben-Gurion! The youth!" At which Grandpa leaned toward me and patted me absentmindedly a couple of times, as though to reward the younger generation for winning the war.

  Women hardly ever joined in the conversation. In those days it was customary to compliment women on being "such marvelous listeners," on the cakes and biscuits, on the pleasant atmosphere, but not on their contribution to the conversation. Mala Rudnicki, for instance, would nod happily whenever Staszek spoke and shake her head if anyone interrupted him. Zerta Abramski clasped her shoulders with her hands as though she felt cold. Ever since Yoni's death she would sit, even on warm evenings, with her head inclined as though she was looking at the tops of the cypresses in the next-door garden, hugging her shoulders with her hands. Grandma Shlomit, who was a strong-minded, opinionated woman, would sometimes interpose in that deep alto voice of hers: "How very true!" or "It's much worse than you said, Staszek, much, much worse!" Or else: "N-o! What do you mean, Mr. Abramski! That is simply not possible!"

  Only my mother sometimes subverted this rule. When there was a moment's silence, she would say something that at first might seem irrelevant but then could be seen to have gently shifted the center of gravity completely, without changing the subject or contradicting those who had spoken before, but rather as though she were opening a door in some back wall of the conversation that up to then had not seemed to have a doorway in it.

  Once she had made her remark, she shut up, smiling agreeably and looking triumphantly not at the visitors or at my father but at me. After my mother had spoken, the whole conversation seemed to shift its weight from one foot to another. Soon afterward, still smiling her delicate smile that seemed to be doubting something while deciphering something else, she would get up and offer her guests another glass of tea: Please? How strong? And another slice of cake?

  To the child I was then my mother's brief intervention in the men's conversation was rather distressing, perhaps because I sensed an invisible ripple of embarrassment among the speakers, an almost imperceptible search for a way out, as though there were a vague momentary fear that they might inadvertently have said or done something that had caused my mother to snigger at them, but none of them knew what it was. Maybe it was her withdrawn, radiant beauty that always embarrassed those inhibited men and made them fear she might not like them, or find them just a little repulsive.

  As for the women, my mother's interventions stirred in them a strange mixture of anxiety and hope that one day she would finally lose her footing, and perhaps a mite of pleasure at the men's discomfiture.

  Hayim Toren, the writer and writers' union hack, might say, for example:

  "Surely everyone must realize that you cannot run a state the way you might run a grocer's shop. Or like the town council in some godforsaken shtetl."

  My father says:

  "It may be too early to judge, my dear Hayim, but everyone with eyes in his head occasionally discerns cause for profound disappointment in our young state."

  Mr. Krochmal, the dolls' doctor, adds shyly:

  "Apart from which, they don't even mend the pavement. Two letters I've written to the mayor, and I haven't had a single reply. I'm not saying that to disagree with what Mr. Klausner was saying, but in the self-same spirit."

  My father ventures one of his puns:

  "The only things that work in this country of ours are the road works."

  Mr. Abramski quotes:

  "'And blood toucheth blood,' saith the prophet Hosea, 'therefore shall the land mourn.' The remnant of the Jewish nation has come here to rebuild the kingdom of David and Solomon, to lay the foundation of the Third Temple, and we have all fallen into the sweaty hands of assorted bloated kibbutz treasurers of little faith, and other red-faced hacks of uncircumcised heart, 'whose world is as narrow as that of an ant.' Rebellious princes and companions of thieves the lot of them, who are sharing among themselves plot by plot the paltry strip of the Fatherland that the nations have left in our hands. It was to them and no one else that the prophet Ezekiel was referring
when he said: 'The suburbs shall shake at the sound of the cry of thy pilots.' "

  And Mother, with her smile hovering on her lips and barely touching them:

  "Perhaps when they've finished sharing out the plots, they'll start mending the pavements? And then they'll mend the pavement in front of Mr. Krochmal's shop."

  Now, fifty years after her death, I imagine I can hear in her voice as she says these words, or something like them, a tense mixture of sobriety, skepticism, sharp, fine sarcasm, and ever-present sadness.

  In those years something gnawed at her. A slowness started to make itself felt in her movements, or something resembling a slight absence of mind. She had stopped giving private history and literature lessons. Sometimes, for a paltry payment, she would correct the grammar and style of articles written in limping Germanic Hebrew by professors from Rehavia and edit them for publication. She still did all the housework herself, ably and nimbly: she spent each morning cooking, frying, baking, shopping, slicing, mixing, drying, cleaning, scraping, washing, hanging out, ironing, folding, until the whole place was gleaming, and after lunch she sat in an armchair reading.

  She had a strange way of sitting when she read: the book always rested on her knees, and her back and neck were bent over it. She looked like a young girl shyly lowering her eyes to her knees when she sat reading like that. Often she stood at the window looking out for a long time at our quiet street. Or she took her shoes off and lay on her back on the bedspread, fully dressed, with her open eyes fixed on a particular spot on the ceiling. Sometimes she would suddenly stand up, feverishly put on her outdoor clothes, promise to be back in a quarter of an hour, straighten her skirt, smooth down her hair without looking in the mirror, hang her plain straw handbag on her shoulder, and go out briskly, as though she was afraid of missing something. If I asked to go with her, or if I asked her where she was going, my mother would say: