A Tale of Love and Darkness

by Amos Oz

  Years later, when I happened to bump into one or two of them, they informed me that my mother had been a very charming woman and a truly inspired reader, the sort of reader every writer dreamed of when hard at work in the solitude of his study. What a pity she left no writings of her own: it was possible that her premature death had deprived us of a highly talented writer, at a time when women writing in Hebrew could be counted on the fingers of one hand.

  If these notables met my father at the library or in the street, they would chat with him briefly about Education Minister Dinur's letter to the heads of the university, or Zalman Shneour's attempt to become Walt Whitman in his old age, or who would get Professor Klausner's chair when he retired, and then they would pat him on the back and say, with a gleam in their eyes and a beaming expression, please greet your lady wife warmly from me, what a truly wonderful woman, such a cultivated, discerning woman! So artistic!

  As they patted him affectionately on the shoulder, in their heart of hearts they may have envied him his wife and wondered what she had seen in him, that pedant, even if he was extraordinarily knowledgeable, industrious, and even, relatively speaking, a not insignificant scholar, but, between ourselves, a rather scholastic, totally uncreative person.

  I had a specific role in these conversations at the café. First of all I had to give polite, intelligent answers, just like a grown-up, to such difficult questions as how old I was, what class I was in at school, did I collect stamps or have a scrapbook, what did they teach us these days in geography, what did they teach us in Hebrew, was I a good boy, what had I read by Dov Kimche (or Yaari, or Kadari, or Even-Zahav, or Shenhar), did I like all my teachers? And occasionally: had I started to take an interest in young ladies yet? And what would I be when I grew up—a professor too? Or a pioneer? Or a field marshal in the armies of Israel? (I came to the conclusion at that time that writers were phony and even somewhat ridiculous.)

  Secondly, my task was not to get in the way.

  I had to be nonexistent, invisible.

  Their café talk lasted at least seventy hours at a time, and for the whole of this eternity I had to embody an even more silent presence than the softly humming fan on the ceiling.

  The penalty for breach of trust in the presence of strangers might be complete house arrest, from the moment I got home from school, every day for a fortnight, or the loss of the privilege of playing with friends, or cancellation of the right to read in bed for the next twenty days.

  The big prize for a hundred hours of solitude was an ice cream. Or even corn on the cob.

  I was hardly ever allowed ice cream because it was bad for the throat and gave one a chill. As for corn on the cob, that was sold on street corners from a container of boiling water set on top of a Primus stove, the hot, fragrant corn on the cob that the unshaven man wrapped in a green leaf for you and sprinkled with cooking salt. I was hardly ever allowed it because the unshaven man looked distinctly unwashed, and his water was probably teeming with germs. "But if Your Highness behaves impeccably at Café Atara today, you will be allowed a free choice on our way home: ice cream or corn on the cob, whichever you prefer."

  So it was in cafés, against a background of endless conversations between my parents and their friends about politics, history, philosophy, and literature, about power struggles among professors and intrigues of editors and publishers, conversations whose content I was unable to understand, that I gradually became a little spy.

  I developed a secret little game that I could play for hours on end without moving, without speaking, with no accessories, not even a pencil and paper. I would look at the strangers in the café and try to guess, from their clothes and gestures, from the paper they were reading or the drinks they had ordered, who they all were, where they came from, what they did, what they had done just before they came here, and where they were going afterward. That woman over there who had just smiled to herself twice—I tried to deduce from her expression what she was thinking. That thin young man in a cap who had not taken his eyes off the door and was disappointed every time anyone came in: what was he thinking about? What did the person he was waiting for look like? I sharpened my ears and stole snatches of conversation out of the air. I leaned over and peeped to see what everyone was reading, I observed who was in a hurry to leave and who was just settling down.

  On the basis of a few uncertain outward signs, I made up complicated but exciting life stories for them. That woman with the embittered lips and the low-cut dress, for example, sitting at a corner table in a thick cloud of cigarette smoke: three times in the space of an hour by the big clock on the wall behind the counter she has stood up, disappeared into the ladies', then returned to sit in front of her empty cup, chain smoking with her brown cigarette holder, casting an occasional glance at the tanned figure in the vest sitting at a table near the hat stand. Once she stood up and went over to the man in the vest, bent over, said a few words to which he replied only with a nod, and now she's sitting smoking again. How many possibilities there are! How dizzyingly rich the kaleidoscope of plots and stories I can weave from these fragments! Or maybe she just asked him if she could have the newspaper he was reading when he was finished with it.

  My eyes attempt in vain to escape the profile of the woman's ample bosom, but when I close them, it comes closer, I can feel its warmth, it almost enfolds my face. My knees begin to shake. The woman is waiting for her lover, who has promised to come but forgotten, and that's why she's sitting there chain smoking so desperately, drinking one black coffee after another, to soothe the lump in her throat. She disappears to the ladies' from time to time to powder her face and hide the signs of her tears. The waitress has brought the man in the vest a goblet of liqueur, to drown his sorrow because his wife has left him for a younger man. Perhaps at this very moment the pair are sailing away on some love boat, dancing cheek to cheek by the light of the moon, which is reflected in the ocean, at a ball given by the captain, dreamy music from the Edison Cinema wafting around them as they dance, on their way to some outrageous resort: St. Moritz, San Marino, San Francisco, Sao Paulo, Sans Souci.

  I go on weaving my web. The young lover, whom I visualize in the form of the proud, manly sailor depicted on the packet of Nelson Navy Cut, is actually the man who promised the chain-smoking woman to meet her here this evening, and now he's a thousand miles away. She is waiting in vain. "Have you, too, sir, been abandoned to your fate? Have you, like me, been left all alone?" That, in the language of old romantic stories, is how she addressed the man in the vest when she went over to his table a moment ago and bent over him, and he answered with a nod. Soon the forsaken couple will walk out of the café together, and outside in the street they will link arms without another word needing to be spoken.

  Where will they go together?

  My imagination paints avenues and parks, a moonlit bench, a lane leading to a little house behind a stone wall, candlelight, closed shutters, music, and here the story becomes too sweet and terrible for me to tell it to myself or to bear, and I hasten to take my leave of it. Instead I fix my eyes on two middle-aged men at a table close to ours, playing chess and talking Germanic Hebrew. One of them is sucking and stroking a cold pipe made of reddish wood, the other occasionally wipes invisible perspiration from his high brow with a checkered handkerchief. A waitress comes over and whispers something to the man with the pipe, and he begs the other's pardon in his Germanic Hebrew, apologizes to the waitress too, and goes across to the telephone next to the serving hatch. When he has finished talking, he hangs up, stands for a moment looking forlorn and lost, then stumbles back to his table and apparently asks his chess partner again to excuse him, then he explains something to him, in German this time, hurriedly puts some coins down on the table and turns to leave; his friend is angry and tries almost by force to put the coins back in his pocket, but the other resists, and suddenly the coins are rolling on the floor under several tables, and the two gentlemen have stopped parrying and have gone down on their knees t
o pick them up.

  Too late: I have already decided for them that they are cousins, the only survivors of a family that was murdered by Germans. I have already enriched their story with an enormous legacy and an eccentric will under the terms of which the winner of the game of chess will receive two-thirds of the inheritance while the loser will have to make do with one-third. Then I introduce to the story an orphan girl of my own age, who has been sent from Europe with Youth Aliya to some kibbutz or educational institution, and she, not the chess players, is the real heir. At this point I step into the story myself, in the role of the knight in shining armor, the protector of orphans, who will wrest the legendary inheritance from those who are not entitled to it and restore it to its rightful owner, not for nothing but in exchange for love. But when I get to the love, my eyes close again and I have an urgent need to cut the story short and start spying on another table. Or on the lame waitress with her deep black eyes. This, it seems, was the beginning of my life as a writer: in cafés, waiting for ice cream or corn on the cob.

  To this day I pickpocket in this way. Especially from strangers. Especially in busy public places. In line at the clinic, for instance, or in some bureaucratic waiting room, at the railway station or the airport. Even sometimes when I am driving, in a traffic jam, peeping into the car next to me. Peeping and making up stories. Peeping again, and making up more stories. Where does she come from, by her clothes, her expression, her gestures as she touches up her makeup? What is her home like? What is her man like? Or take that boy over there with the unfashion-ably long sideburns, holding his mobile phone in his left hand while his other hand describes slicing movements, exclamation marks, distress signals: why exactly is he getting ready to fly to London tomorrow? What is his failing business? Who is waiting for him there? What do his parents look like? Where do they come from? What was he like as a child? And how is he planning to spend the evening, and the night, after he lands in London? (Nowadays I no longer stop in terror at the bedroom door: I float invisibly in.)

  If strangers intercept my inquisitive look, I smile absently at them by way of apology and look away. I have no desire to embarrass. I live in fear of being caught in the act and asked to explain myself. But, anyway, after a minute or two I have no need to keep peeping at the heroes of my casual stories: I've seen enough. Half a minute, and they're caught in my invisible paparazzi camera.

  Waiting at the supermarket check-out, for instance: the woman in front of me is short and plump, in her mid-forties, very attractive because something in her pose or expression suggests that she's tried everything and is unshockable now, even the most bizarre experience will do no more than arouse her amused curiosity. The wistful-looking young soldier behind me, who is only about twenty, is staring at this knowing woman with a starved look in his eyes. I take half a step sideways, not to block his view, and prepare a room with a deep-pile carpet for them, I shut the shutters, stand leaning back against the door, and now the vision is in full flow, in all its details, including the comic touch of his coy feverishness, and the moving touch of her compassionate generosity. Until the woman at the till has to raise her voice: Next, please! In an accent that is not exactly Russian, but perhaps comes from one of the Central Asian republics? And already I'm in Samarkand, in beautiful Bukhara: Bactrian camels, pink stone mosques, round prayer halls with sensual domes, and soft, deep carpets accompany me out into the street with my shopping.

  After my military service, in 1961, the Committee of Kibbutz Hulda sent me to Jerusalem to study for two years at the Hebrew University. I studied literature because the kibbutz needed a literature teacher urgently, and I studied philosophy because I insisted on it. Every Sunday, from four to six p.m., a hundred students gathered in the large hall in the Meiser Building to hear Professor Samuel Hugo Bergman lecture on "dialectical philosophy from Kierkegaard to Martin Buber." My mother Fania also studied philosophy with Professor Bergman, in the 1930s, when the university was still on Mount Scopus, before she married my father, and she had fond memories of him. By 1961 Bergman was already retired, he was an emeritus professor, but we were fascinated by his lucid, fierce wisdom. I was thrilled to think that the man standing in front of us had been at school with Kafka in Prague, and, as he once told us, had actually shared a bench with him for two years, until Max Brod turned up and took his place next to Kafka.

  That winter Bergman invited five or six of his favorite or most interesting pupils to come to his house for a couple of hours after the lectures. Every Sunday, at eight o'clock, I took the No. 5 bus from the new campus on Givat Ram to Professor Bergman's modest apartment in Re-havia. A pleasant faint smell of old books, fresh bread, and geraniums always filled the room. We sat down on the sofa or on the floor at the feet of our great master, the childhood friend of Kafka and Martin Buber and the author of the books from which we learned the history of epistemology and the principles of logic. We waited in silence for him to pronounce. Samuel Hugo Bergman was a stout man even in old age. With his shock of white hair, the ironic, amused lines around his eyes, a piercing glance that looked skeptical yet as innocent as that of a curious child, Bergman bore a striking resemblance to pictures of Albert Einstein as an old man. With his Central European accent he walked in the Hebrew language not with a natural stride, as though he were at home in it, but with a sort of elation, like a suitor happy that his beloved has finally accepted him and determined to rise above himself and prove to her that she has not made a mistake.

  Almost the only subject that concerned our teacher at these meetings was the survival of the soul, or the chances, if there were any, of existence after death. That is what he talked to us about on Sunday evenings through that winter, with the rain lashing at the windows and the wind howling in the garden. Sometimes he asked for our opinions, and he listened attentively, not at all like a patient teacher guiding his pupils' footsteps but more like a man listening for a particular note in a complicated piece of music, so as to decide if it was right or wrong.

  "Nothing," he said to us on one of the Sunday evenings, and I have not forgotten, so much so that I believe I can repeat what he said almost word for word, "ever disappears. The very word 'disappears' implies that the universe is, so to speak, finite, and that it is possible to leave it. But no-o-othing" (he deliberately drew the word out) "can ever leave the universe. And nothing can enter it. Not a single speck of dust can appear or disappear. Matter is transformed into energy, and energy into matter, atoms assemble and disperse, everything changes and is transformed, but no-o-othing can ever change from being to not-being. Not even the tiniest hair growing on the tail of some virus. The concept of infinity is indeed open, infinitely open, but at the same time it is also closed and hermetically sealed. Nothing leaves and nothing enters."

  Pause. A crafty, innocent smile spread like a sunrise across the wrinkled landscape of his rich, fascinating face: "In which case why, maybe someone can explain to me, why do they insist on telling me that the one and only exception to the rule, the one and only thing that is doomed to perdition, that can become nothing, the one and only thing that is destined for cessation in the whole wide universe in which not so much as an atom can be destroyed, is my poor soul? Will everything, every speck of dust, every drop of water continue to exist eternally, albeit in different forms, except for my soul?"

  "Nobody," murmured a clever young genius from a corner of the room, "has ever seen the soul."

  "No," Bergman agreed at once. "You don't meet the laws of physics or mathematics in a café either. Or wisdom, or foolishness, or desire or fear. No one has yet taken a little sample of joy or longing and put it in a test tube. But who is it, my young friend, who is talking to you right now? Is it Bergman's humors? His spleen? Is it perhaps Bergman's large intestine speaking? Who was it, if you will excuse my saying so, who spread that none-too-pleasant smile on your face? Was it not your soul? Was it your cartilages? Your gastric juices?"

  On another occasion he said:

  "What is in store for us
after we die? No-o-obody knows. At any rate not with a knowledge that is susceptible of proof or demonstration. If I tell you this evening that I sometimes hear the voice of the dead and that it is much clearer and more intelligible to me than most of the voices of the living, you are entitled to say that this old man is in his dotage. He has gone out of his mind with terror at his impending death. Therefore I will not talk to you this evening about voices, this evening I will talk mathematics: since no-o-obody knows if there is anything on the other side of our death or if there is nothing there, we can deduce from this complete ignorance that the chances that there is something there are exactly the same as the chances that there is nothing there. Fifty percent for cessation and fifty percent for survival. For a Jew like me, a Central European Jew from the generation of the Nazi Holocaust, such odds in favor of survival are not at all bad."

  Gershom Scholem, Bergman's friend and rival, was also fascinated and possibly even tormented by the question of life after death. The morning the news of his death was broadcast, I wrote:

  Gershom Scholem died in the night. And now he knows.

  Bergman too knows now. So does Kafka. So do my mother and father. And their friends and acquaintances and most of the men and women in those cafés, both those I used to tell myself stories about and those who are forgotten. They all know now. Someday we will know too. And in the meantime we will continue to gather little details. Just in case.