A Tale of Love and Darkness

by Amos Oz

  We talked about politics, about the assassination of King Abdullah, or about Begin and Ben-Gurion. We talked like equals. My heart filled with love for this tired man when he concluded gravely:

  "It seems there remain considerable areas of disagreement between us. So for the time being we shall have to agree to differ."

  Then we would talk about household matters. We would jot down on one of Father's little cards what we still had to do, and cross out what we'd already seen to. Father even discussed money matters with me sometimes: still a fortnight to go till pay day, and we had already spent such and such a sum. Every evening he would ask me about my homework, and I would hand him my list of assignments from school and the exercise books in which I had completed the allotted tasks, for comparison. Sometimes he took a look at what I had done and made appropriate comments; he knew more about virtually every subject than my teachers and even than the authors of the textbooks. Mostly he would say:

  "There's no need to check up on you. I know I can rely on you and trust you absolutely."

  Secret pride and gratitude flooded through me when I heard these words. Sometimes I also felt a rush of pity.

  For him, not for Mother. I had no pity for her at that time: she was just a long series of daily duties and demands. And a source of embarrassment and shame, because I had to explain somehow to friends why they could never come over to my place, and I had to answer neighbors who quizzed me sweetly at the grocer's about why they never saw her. What had happened to her? Even to uncles and aunts, even to Grandpa and Grandma, Father and I did not tell the whole truth. We played it down. We said she had the flu even when she didn't. We said: Migraine. We said: A particular sensitivity to daylight. Sometimes we said: She's very tired, too. We tried to tell the truth but not the whole truth.

  We didn't know the whole truth. But we did know, even without exchanging notes, that neither of us told anyone everything we both knew; we only shared a few facts with the outside world. The two of us never discussed her condition. All we ever talked about was the work to do tomorrow, sharing the daily chores, and the needs of the household. Not once did we talk about what was wrong with her, apart from Father's repeated refrain: "Those doctors, they don't know anything. Not a thing." We didn't talk after her death, either. From the day of my mother's death to the day of my father's death, twenty years later, we did not talk about her once. Not a word. As if she had never lived. As if her life was just a censured page torn from a Soviet encyclopedia. Or as if, like Athena, I had been born straight from the head of Zeus. I was a sort of upside-down Jesus: born of a virgin man by an invisible spirit. And every morning, at dawn, I was awoken by the sound of a bird in the branches of the pomegranate tree in the yard, which greeted the day with the first five notes of Beethoven's Für Elise: "Ti-da-di-da-di!" And again, more excitedly: "Ti-da-di-da-di!" And under my blanket I completed it with feeling: "Da-di-da-da!" In my heart I called the bird Elise.

  I was sorry for my father at that time. As though he had fallen victim, through no fault of his own, to some protracted act of abuse. As though my mother were maltreating him on purpose. He was very tired, and sad, even though as usual he tried to be cheery and chatty the whole time. He always hated silences and blamed himself for any silence that occurred. His eyes, like Mother's, had dark half moons beneath them.

  Sometimes he left work during the day to take her for tests. What didn't they test in those months: her heart, lungs, and brain waves, digestion, hormones, nerves, women's problems, and circulation. To no effect. He spared no expense, he called various doctors and took her to see private specialists; he may even have had to borrow sums of money from his parents, although he hated having debts and loathed the way his mother, Grandma Shlomit, enjoyed being "put in the picture" and sorting out his marriage for him.

  My father got up before dawn every morning to tidy the kitchen, sort the laundry, squeeze fruit, and bring Mother and me the juice at room temperature, to make us stronger, and he also managed to write hasty replies to a few letters from editors and scholars before he left for work. Then he rushed to the bus stop, with a string shopping bag folded up in his battered briefcase, to get to work on time at Terra Sancta Building, where the Newspaper Department of the National Library was transferred when the Mount Scopus campus of the university was cut off from the rest of the town in the War of Independence.

  He would come home at five o'clock, having stopped on the way at the grocer's, the electrician's, or the pharmacist's, and would hurry straight in to Mother to see if she was feeling better, hoping that she might have dozed off for a bit while he was out. He would try to spoonfeed her some potato purée or boiled rice that he and I had somehow learned to cook. Then he locked the door on the inside, helped her to change, and tried to talk to her. He may even have attempted to entertain her with jokes that he had read in the paper or brought back from the library. Before it got dark, he would hurry out to the shops again, take care of various things, not resting, peering at the instructions that accompanied some new medicine, without even sitting down, trying to draw Mother into a conversation about the future of the Balkans.

  Then he would come to my room to help me change my sheets or to put mothballs in my closet for the winter, while singing some sentimental ballad to himself, criminally out of tune, or try to draw me into an argument about the future of the Balkans.

  After nightfall we sometimes had a visit from Auntie Lilenka—Aunt Lilia, Aunt Leah Kalish-Bar-Samkha—Mother's best friend, who came from the same town, Rovno, and had been in the same class at the Tar-buth gymnasium, the one who had written two books about child psychology.

  Aunt Lilia brought some fruit and a plum cake. Father served tea and biscuits and her plum cake, while I washed and put out the fruit, with plates and knives, and then we left the two of them alone together. Aunt Lilia sat shut up with my mother for an hour or two, and when she emerged, her eyes were red. Whereas my mother was as calm and serene as always. Father overcame the dislike he felt toward this lady sufficiently to invite her politely to stay for supper. Why don't you give us a chance to spoil you a little? And it would make Fania happy too. But she always apologized embarrassedly, as though she had been asked to take part in an indecent act. She didn't want to be in the way, God forbid, and anyway she was expected at home, and they'd start worrying about her soon.

  Sometimes Grandpa and Grandma came, dressed up as though for a ball. Grandma, in high heels and a black velvet dress with her white necklace, made a tour of the kitchen before she sat down next to Mother. Then she examined the packets of pills and the little bottles, pulled Father toward her and looked inside his collar, and screwed up her face in disgust as she inspected the state of my fingernails. She saw fit to remark sadly that medical science was now aware that most if not all illnesses had their origin in the mind rather than the body. Meanwhile, Grandpa Alexander, always charming and restless like a playful puppy, kissed my mother's hand and praised her beauty, "even in sickness, and all the more so when you are restored to full health, tomorrow, if not this very evening. Nu, what! You're already blossoming! Perfectly enchanting! Krasavitsa!"

  My father still insisted adamantly that my light had to be out by nine o'clock precisely every evening. He tiptoed into the other room, the book room, the living-room-study-and-bedroom, wrapped a shawl around my mother's shoulders because autumn was on the way and the nights were getting cooler, sat down beside her, took her cold hand into his hand, which was always warm, and tried to rouse her into a simple conversation. Like the prince in the story, he tried to wake Sleeping Beauty. But even if he kissed her, he was unable to wake her: the apple's spell could not be broken. Perhaps he did not kiss her right, or else she was not waiting in her dreams for a bespectacled chatterbox who was an expert in every branch of knowledge, never stopped cracking jokes, and worried about the future of the Balkans, but some other kind of prince entirely.

  He sat next to her in the dark, because she could not stand the light at that time. Every
morning before he went off to work or before I went to school, we had to close all the shutters and draw the curtains as though my mother had become the terrifying mad woman in the attic in Jane Eyre. He sat in the dark, silently holding my mother's hand, without moving. Or he may have held both her hands in his.

  But he was unable to sit without moving for more than three or four minutes, either beside my sick mother or anywhere else apart from at his desk with his little cards. He was an active, busy man, always bustling, arranging things, talking nonstop.

  When he could not take any more of the darkness and the silence, he took his books and his innumerable cards out to the kitchen, cleared himself a space on the oilcloth, sat down on a stool, and worked for a bit. But he was soon dispirited by this solitary confinement in the soot-blackened kitchen. So once or twice a week he would get up, sigh, change into his suit, comb his hair, brush his teeth well, splash on some of his aftershave, and peep quietly into my room to see if I was fast asleep (for his sake I always pretended I was). Then he went in to Mother, said whatever he said, promised her whatever he promised, and she certainly did not stop him, on the contrary, she used to stroke his head and say, Go, Arieh, go and play, they're not all as dozy as I am.

  When he went out, with a Humphrey Bogart hat on his head and a just-in-case umbrella swinging on his arm, my father walked past my window singing to himself, terribly out of tune, and with a distinct Ashkenazi accent: "...my head found rest upon your breast, and my distant prayers found a nest," or "like a pair of doves your lovely eyes, and your voice like the's-ou-ou-nd of a be-e-ll!"

  I did not know where he was going and yet I did know without knowing and yet I did not want to know and yet I forgave him. I hoped he enjoyed himself there a bit. I had absolutely no desire to picture to myself what went on there, in that "there" of his, but what I didn't want to picture to myself came to me in the night and threw me in a whirl and would not let me sleep. I was a twelve-year-old boy. My body had begun to be a pitiless foe.

  Sometimes I had the feeling that when the house emptied every morning, Mother actually did get into bed and slept during the daylight hours. And sometimes she got up and walked around the house, always barefoot, despite my father's entreaties and the slippers he brought to her: to and fro, to and fro my mother sailed along the corridor that had been our shelter during the war and was now piled with books and with its wall maps served as the operations room from which my father and I supervised the security of Israel and the defense of the Free World.

  Even during the day the corridor was pitch black, unless you switched the light on. In the black my mother floated to and fro, unvaryingly, for half an hour or an hour, as prisoners walk around their prison yard. And sometimes she began to sing, as though to compete with my father, but with far fewer wrong notes. Her singing voice was dark and warm, like the taste of mulled wine on a winter evening. She did not sing in Hebrew, but in sweet-sounding Russian, in dreamy Polish, or occasionally in Yiddish, with a sound like choked tears.

  On the nights when he went out, my father always kept his promise and came back before midnight. I could hear him undressing down to his underwear, then making himself a glass of tea, sitting on a stool in the kitchen and humming quietly to himself as he dunked a biscuit in his sweet tea. Then he would take a cold shower (to get hot water, you had to heat the boiler three-quarters of an hour beforehand with wood that you had to sprinkle with paraffin first). Then he would come into my room on tiptoe to make sure I was asleep and to straighten my bedclothes. Only then did he tiptoe to their room. Sometimes I could hear the two of them talking in low voices until I fell asleep at last. And sometimes there was total silence as though there was no living being there.

  Father began to fear that he himself was responsible for my mother's insomnia, because he was in the big bed. Sometimes he insisted on putting her to bed in the sofa bed every night (when I was little, we called it the "barking sofa" because when you opened it up, it looked like the jaws of an angry dog), and he himself slept on her chair. He said it would really be better for everyone if he slept on the chair and she in the bed, because he slept like a log wherever he was put, "even on a hot griddle." In fact, he would sleep much better on the chair knowing that she was sleeping in the bed, than he would in the bed knowing that she was awake for hours on end on the chair.

  One night, toward midnight, the door of my room opened silently and Father's silhouette bent over me in the dark. As usual, I hastily feigned sleep. Instead of straightening my bedclothes, he lifted them and got into bed with me. Like that time. Like on November 29, after the vote for the creation of the state, when my hand saw his tears. I was terrified and hastily drew my knees up and pressed them hard against my stomach, hoping and praying that he would not notice what it was that had stopped me getting to sleep: if he did, I would die on the spot. My blood froze when Father got into bed with me, and I was in such a panic not to be caught out being filthy, that it was quite a while before I realized, as though in a nightmare, that the silhouette that had slipped into bed with me was not my father's.

  She pulled the covers up over both our heads and cuddled me, and whispered, Don't wake up.

  And in the morning she was not there. The next night she came to my room again, but this time she brought one of the two mattresses from the "barking sofa" with her and slept on the floor at the foot of my bed. The following night I firmly insisted, doing my best to imitate my father's authoritative manner, that she should sleep in my bed and I would sleep on the mattress at her feet.

  It was as if we were all playing an improved version of musical chairs called musical beds. First round: normal—both my parents in their double bed and me in my bed. Then in the next round Mother slept in her chair, Father on the sofa, and I was still in my bed. In the third round Mother and I were in my single bed while Father was alone in the double bed. In the fourth round my father was unchanged and I was alone again in my bed and my mother on the mattress at my feet. Then she and I swapped over, she went up, I went down, and Father stayed where he was.

  But we weren't finished yet.

  Because after a few nights when I slept on the mattress in my room at my mother's feet, she frightened me in the middle of the night with broken sounds that were almost but not quite like coughing. Then she calmed down, and I went back to sleep. But a night or two later I was woken again by her coughs that weren't coughs. I got up, with my eyes stuck together, went down the corridor in a daze with my blanket wrapped around me, and climbed in with my father into the double bed. I fell asleep again at once. And I slept there the following nights, too.

  Almost to her last days my mother slept in my room, in my bed, and I slept with my father. After a couple of days all her tablets and bottles of medicine and tranquilizers and migraine pills moved to her new place.

  We did not exchange a word about the new sleeping arrangements. None of us mentioned them. It was as if it had happened all by itself.

  And it really had. Without any family decision. Without a word.

  But the week before the last one Mother did not spend the night in my bed but returned to her chair by the window, except that the chair was moved from our room—mine and Father's—to my room, which had become her room.

  Even when it was all over, I did not want to go back to that room. I wanted to stay with my father. And when I did eventually return to my old room, I couldn't get to sleep: it was as if she were still there. Smiling at me without a smile. Coughing without a cough. Or as if she had bequeathed me the insomnia that had pursued her to the end and was now pursuing me. The night I went back to my own bed was so terrifying that the following nights my father had to drag one of the mattresses from the "barking sofa" to my room and sleep there with me. For a week or maybe two he slept at the foot of my bed. After that he went back to his place, and she, or her insomnia, followed him.

  It was as though a great whirlpool had swept us up, thrown us together and apart, hurled us around and around and jumbled us up, unti
l each of us was thrown up on a shore that was not our own. And we were all so tired that we silently accepted the move. Because we were very tired. It was not only my mother and father who had dark half moons under their eyes: in those weeks I saw them under my eyes, too, in the mirror.

  We were bound and stuck together that autumn like three prisoners sharing the same cell. Yet each of us was on his or her own. For what could my parents know about the sordidness of my nights? The filthi-ness of my cruel body? How could my parents know that I warned myself over and over again, with my teeth clenched in shame, If you don't give that up, if you don't stop it tonight, then I swear by my life that I'll swallow all Mother's pills and that'll be the end of it.

  My parents suspected nothing. A thousand light-years divided us. Not light-years: dark years.

  But what did I know about what they were going through?

  And how about the two of them? What did my father know about her ordeal? What did my mother understand about his suffering?

  A thousand dark years separated everyone. Even three prisoners in a cell. Even that day in Tel Arza, that Saturday morning when Mother sat with her back against the tree and my father and I laid our heads on her knees, one head on each knee, and Mother stroked us both, even at that moment, which is the most precious moment of my childhood, a thousand lightless years separated us.

  54

  IN THE COLLECTED poems of Jabotinsky, after "With blood and sweat we'll raise a race," "Two banks has the Jordan," and "From the day I was called to the wonder / of Beitar, Zion, and Sinai," came his melodic translations from world poetry, including Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" and "Annabel Lee," Edmond Rostand's "The Princess Faraway," and Paul Verlaine's heartrending "Autumn Song."