by Amos Oz
The gentle-mannered secretary ignored my shaking body and strangled throat; he briefed me, with an almost intimate warmth, as though plotting with me behind the back of the divinity in the next room:
"The Old Man," he began, using the affectionate nickname that had been in common use since Ben-Gurion was in his fifties, "has, you understand, how shall we say, a tendency these days to get carried away by long philosophical conversations. But his time, I'm sure you can imagine, is like gold dust. He still deals with virtually all affairs of state himself, from preparations for war and relations with the Great Powers to the postal workers' strike. You will, of course, beat a tactful retreat after twenty minutes, so that we can somehow rescue his diary for the rest of the day."
There was nothing in the whole wide world that I wanted better than to "beat a tactful retreat," not after twenty minutes but right away. At once. The very thought that the Almighty himself was here, in person, just behind that gray door, and that in another minute I would be in his power, almost made me faint from awe and dread.
So much so that the secretary had no alternative but to push me gently from behind into the Holy of Holies.
The door was closed behind me, and I stood there, silently, with my back against the door I had just come in by, and my knees were shaking. King David's office was an ordinary, sparsely furnished room, hardly bigger than one of our modest kibbutz living rooms. Facing me was a window, covered with a rustic curtain, that added a little daylight to the electric light. On either side of the window stood a metal filing cabinet. A large glass-topped desk stood in the middle of the room, taking up about a quarter of its area; on it there were three or four piles of books, magazines, and newspapers, and various papers and folders, some open and some closed. On either side of the desk there was a bureaucratic gray metal chair, of the sort you could see in those days in every administrative or military office, and they were always inscribed, on the underside, with the words "Property of the State of Israel." There were no other chairs in the room. An entire wall, from ceiling to floor and from corner to corner, was taken up by a huge map of the whole Mediterranean basin and the Middle East, from the Straits of Gibraltar to the Persian Gulf. Israel, the size of a postage stamp, had been marked out with a thick line. Another wall had three shelves loaded and piled with books, as if someone might suddenly be seized here with an urgent reading frenzy that brooked no delay.
In this Spartan room there was a man pacing to and fro with rapid little steps, his hands clasped behind his back, his eyes on the floor, his big head thrust forward as though to butt. The man looked exactly like Ben-Gurion, but there was no way he could actually be Ben-Gurion. Every child in Israel, even in kindergarten, in those days knew in his sleep what Ben-Gurion looked like. But since there was no television yet, it was obvious to me that the Father of the Nation was a giant whose head reached the clouds, whereas this impostor was a short, tubby man whose height was less than five foot three.
I was alarmed. Almost offended.
Nevertheless, during the two or three minutes of uninterrupted silence that felt like an eternity, with my back still pressed against the door in terror, I feasted my eyes on the strange, hypnotic form of this compact, powerfully built little man, something between a tough, patriarchal highlander and an ancient, energetic dwarf, who was restlessly pacing to and fro with his hands behind his back, his head thrust forward like a battering ram, sunk in thought, remote, not bothering to give the slightest indication that he was aware that somebody, something, a speck of floating dust, had suddenly landed in his office. David Ben-Gurion was about seventy-five at the time, and I was barely twenty.
He had a prophetic shock of silvery hair that surrounded his bald patch like an amphitheater. At the lower margin of his massive brow were two thick, bushy gray eyebrows, beneath which a pair of sharp gray-blue eyes pierced the air. He had a wide, coarse nose, a shamelessly ugly nose, a pornographic nose, like an anti-Semitic caricature. His lips, on the other hand, were thin and indrawn, but his jaw looked to me like the prominent, defiant jaw of an ancient mariner. His skin was rough and red like raw meat. Under a short neck his shoulders were broad and powerful. His chest was massive. His open-necked shirt revealed a hand's-breadth of hairy chest. His shamelessly protruding belly, like a whale's hump, looked as solid as if it were made of concrete. But all this magnificence terminated, to my bewilderment, in a dwarf-like pair of legs that, if it were not blasphemous, one would be tempted to call almost ridiculous.
I tried to breathe as little as possible. I may have envied Gregor Samsa in Kafka's Metamorphosis, who managed to shrink himself into a cockroach. The blood fled from my extremities and collected in my liver.
The first words that broke the silence came in the piercing, metallic voice that we all heard virtually every day on the radio, and even in our dreams. The Almighty shot me an angry look, and said:
"Nu! So why aren't you sitting! Sit!"
I sat down in a flash on the chair facing the desk. I sat bolt upright, but only on the edge of the chair. There was no question of leaning back.
Silence. The Father of the Nation continued to pace to and fro, with hasty little steps, like a caged lion or someone who was determined not to be late. After half an eternity he suddenly said:
"Spinoza!"
And he stopped. When he had walked away as far as the window, he whirled around and said:
"Have you read Spinoza? You have. But maybe you didn't understand? Few people understand Spinoza. Very few."
And then, still pacing to and fro, to and fro, between the window and the door, he burst into a protracted dawn lecture on Spinoza's thought.
In the middle of the lecture, the door hesitantly opened a crack and the secretary poked his head in meekly, smiled, and tried to mumble something, but the roar of a wounded lion was unleashed on him:
"Get out of here! Go! Do not disturb! Can't you see that I'm having one of the most interesting conversations I've had in a long time? So be off with you!"
The poor man vanished in a flash.
So far I had not uttered a single word. Not a sound.
But Ben-Gurion, it turned out, was enjoying lecturing on Spinoza before seven o'clock in the morning. And he did indeed continue for a few minutes without interruption.
Suddenly he stopped in the middle of a sentence. I could almost feel his breath on the back of my petrified neck, but I dared not turn around. I sat rigid, my tightly pressed knees forming a right angle and my thighs at a right angle to my tense back. Without a hint of a question mark in his voice Ben-Gurion hurled at me:
"You haven't had any breakfast!"
He did not wait for an answer. I did not utter a sound.
All of a sudden Ben-Gurion sank out of sight behind his desk like a large stone in water; even his silvery mane vanished from view.
After a moment he resurfaced, holding two glasses in one hand and a bottle of cheap fruit drink in the other. Energetically he poured a glass for himself, then he poured one for me and declared:
"Drink it!"
I drank it all, in a single gulp. Down to the last drop.
David Ben-Gurion, meanwhile, took three noisy swallows, like a thirsty peasant, and resumed his lecture on Spinoza.
"As a Spinozist I say to you without a shadow of doubt that the whole essence of Spinoza's thought can be summed up as follows. A man should always stay composed! He should never lose his calm! All the rest is hair-splitting and paraphrase. Composure! Calm in any situation! And the rest—frippery!" (Ben-Gurion's peculiar intonation stressed the last syllable of each word with something like a little roar.)
By now I could not take the slur on Spinoza's honor any longer. I could not remain silent without betraying my favorite philosopher. So I summoned up all my courage, blinked, and by some miracle I dared to open my mouth in the presence of the Lord of All Creation, and even to squeak in a small voice:
"It's true that there is calm and composure in Spinoza, but surely it's not right to sa
y that that's the whole essence of Spinoza's thought? Surely there's also—"
Then fire and brimstone and streams of molten lava erupted over me from the mouth of the volcano:
"I've been a Spinozist all my life! I've been a Spinozist since I was a young man! Composure! Calm! That is the essence of the whole of Spinoza's thought! That's the heart of it! Tranquility! In good or in evil, in victory or in defeat, a man must never lose his peace of mind!
Never!"
His two powerful, woodcutter's fists landed furiously on the glass top of the desk, making our two glasses jump and rattle with fear.
"A man must never lose his temper!" The worlds were hurled at me like the thunder of judgment day. "Never! And if you can't see that, you don't deserve to be called a Spinozist!"
At this he calmed down. He brightened up.
He sat down opposite me and spread his arms out wide on his desk as though he was about to clasp everything on it to his breast. A pleasant, heart-melting light radiated from him when he suddenly smiled a simple, happy smile, and it seemed not only as though it was his face and his eyes that smiled but as though his whole fistlike body relaxed and smiled with him, and the whole room smiled too, and even Spinoza himself. Ben-Gurion's eyes, which had turned from a cloudy gray to bright blue, scrutinized me all over, with no thought for good manners, as though he were feeling me with his fingers. There was something mercurial about him, something restless and ferocious. His arguments were like punches. And yet when he suddenly brightened without warning, he was transformed from a vengeful deity to a delightful old grandfather, radiating good health and satisfaction. A seductive warmth gushed from him, and for a moment he displayed the charming quality of a cheeky child with an insatiable curiosity.
"And what about you? You write poetry? Yes?"
He winked mischievously. As though he had laid a playful little trap for me. And had won the game.
I was startled again. All I had authored at that time were two or three worthless poems in out-of-the-way quarterlies published by the kibbutz movement (which I hope have crumbled to dust by now together with my miserable attempts at poetry). But Ben-Gurion must have seen them. He was reportedly in the habit of poring over everything that was published: gardening monthlies, magazines for lovers of nature or chess, studies in agricultural engineering, statistical journals. His curiosity knew no bounds.
He also apparently had a photographic memory: once he had seen something, he never forgot it.
I mumbled something.
But the prime minister and minister of defense was no longer with me. His restless spirit had moved on. Now that he had explained once and for all, in one crushing blow, everything that had been left unexplained in the thought of Spinoza, he started to lecture me with passion about other matters: the loss of Zionistic fervor in our youth, or modern Hebrew poetry, which was dabbling in all kinds of weird experiments instead of opening its eyes and celebrating the miracle that was happening here daily in front of our eyes: the rebirth of the nation, the rebirth of the Hebrew language, the rebirth of the Negev Desert!
And suddenly, again without any warning, in the full flow of his monologue, almost in the middle of a sentence, he had had enough.
He leaped up from his chair as though shot from a gun, made me stand up too, and as he pushed me toward the door—pushed me physically, just as his secretary had pushed me in some three-quarters of an hour previously—he said warmly:
"It's good to chat! Very good! And what have you been reading lately? What is the youth reading? Please come and see me any time you're in town. Just drop in, don't be afraid!"
And while he pushed me, with my studded army boots and my white Sabbath-best shirt, through the door, he went on shouting cheerily:
"Drop in! Any time! My door is always open!"
More than forty years have passed since that Spinoza morning in Ben-Gurion's Spartan office. I have met famous people since then, including political leaders, fascinating personalities, some of whom exuded great personal charm, but nobody has left such a sharp impression of their physical presence on me, or of their electrifying willpower. Ben-Gurion had, at least on that morning, a hypnotic energy.
Isaiah Berlin was right in his cruel observation: Ben-Gurion was no intellectual, Plato and Spinoza notwithstanding. Far from it. As I see it, he was a visionary peasant. There was something primeval about him, something not of this day and age. His simplicity of mind was almost biblical; his willpower resembled a laser beam. As a young man in the shtetl of Plonsk in eastern Poland he had two simple ideas: that the Jews must reestablish their homeland in the Land of Israel, and that he was the right man to lead them. Throughout his life he never budged from these two decisions of his youth; everything else was subordinated to them.
He was an honest, cruel man; like most visionaries he did not stop to count the cost. Or perhaps he did stop for a moment and decided: let it cost whatever it costs.
As a child growing up among the Klausners and all their fellow anti-leftists in Kerem Avraham, I was always taught that Ben-Gurion was responsible for all the troubles of the Jewish people. Where I grew up he was the baddie, the embodiment of all the plagues of the leftist regime.
As I grew up, however, I opposed Ben-Gurion from the opposite angle, from the Left. Like many of the Israeli intelligentsia of my time, I saw him as an almost despotic personality, and I recoiled from the tough way he treated the Arabs in the War of Independence and the reprisal raids. It is only in recent years that I have begun to read about him and wonder whether I was right.
There is no simple way of summing him up.
And suddenly, as I write the words "the tough way," I can see again with perfect clarity the way Ben-Gurion held his glass of cheap fruit drink, which he had poured for himself first. The glass was cheap too, it was made of thick glass, and his tough fingers were thick and short as they clasped it like a hand grenade. I was alarmed: if I put a foot wrong and said something that would trigger his rage, Ben-Gurion might well dash the contents of the glass into my face, or hurl the glass at the wall. Or he might tighten his grip on the glass and crush it. That was the awesome way he held that glass. Until he suddenly brightened and showed me that he knew all about my attempts at writing poetry, and smiled with pleasure at the sight of my discomfiture, and for a brief moment he looked almost like a merry joker who had pulled off a little trick and was now asking himself: What next?
53
IN THE autumn, toward the end of 1951, my mother's condition took another turn for the worse. Her migraines came back, and so did her insomnia. Once again she sat all day at the window counting the birds or the clouds. She sat there at night too, with her eyes wide open.
My father and I shared the household chores. I peeled vegetables, and he chopped them up to make a fine salad. He sliced bread, and I spread it with margarine and cheese or margarine and jam. I swept and washed the floors and dusted all the surfaces, and my father emptied the garbage cans and bought a third of a block of ice for the icebox every two or three days. I went shopping at the grocer's and the greengrocer's, while Father took care of the butcher and the pharmacist. Both of us added items as necessary to the shopping list that we wrote on one of Father's index cards and pinned up on the kitchen door. As we bought items, we crossed them off the list. Every Saturday evening we started a new list:
Tomatoes. Cucumber. Onion. Potatoes. Radishes.
Bread. Eggs. Cheese. Jam. Sugar.
Find out if any clementines yet and when oranges start.
Matches. Oil. Candles for power failures.
Washing-up liquid. Washing soap. Shenhav toothpaste.
Paraffin.
A 40-watt lightbulb. Get iron mended. Batteries.
New washer for faucet in bathroom basin. Fix the faucet because it doesn't turn off completely.
Yogurt. Margarine. Olives.
Buy woolen socks for Mother.
At that time my handwriting grew more and more like my father's, so that it was almos
t impossible to say which of us had written "paraffin" or who had added, "We need a new floorcloth." To this day my writing looks like my father's: vigorous, not always legible, but always energetic, sharp, and revealing strong pressure on the pen, unlike my mother's calm, rounded, pearl-like letters, leaning slightly backward, precise and pleasant to look at, written with a light, disciplined hand, letters as perfect and well-spaced as her teeth.
We were very close to one another at that time, Father and I: like a pair of stretcher bearers carrying an injured person up a steep slope. We took her a glass of water and made her take the tranquilizers that were prescribed by two different doctors. We had one of Father's little cards for that too: we wrote down the name of each medicine and the times she had to take it, and we put a tick by each one that she took and a cross by the ones she refused to swallow or that she brought up. Mostly she was obedient and took her medicine even when she was feeling queasy. Sometimes she forced herself to give us a little smile, which was even more painful than her pallor or the dark half moons that appeared under her eyes, because it was such a hollow smile, as if it had nothing to do with her. And sometimes she motioned to us to lean over and she stroked both our heads with a uniform circular movement. She stroked us both for a long time, until Father gently removed her hand and laid it on her bosom. And I did the same.
Every evening, at supper time, Father and I held a kind of daily staff meeting in the kitchen. I filled him in on my day at school, and he told me something about his day at work, at the National Library, or described an article he was trying to finish in time for the next issue of Tarbiz or Metsuda.
