A Tale of Love and Darkness

by Amos Oz

  ***

  That Wednesday I finished school at one, and I asked to be let off the two hours' work we had to do after lunch (I was working in the chicken coop at the time). Nevertheless, after my last class I dashed back to change into dusty blue work clothes and heavy work boots, then I ran to the tractor shed, found the keys of the Massey-Ferguson hidden under the seat cushion, started the engine, and roared up to the bus stop in a cloud of dust a couple of minutes after the Tel Aviv bus got in. My father, whom I had not seen for more than a year, was already there, sheltering his eyes from the sun with his hand and waiting nervously to see where his help would come from. He was dressed—to my utter amazement—in khaki trousers, a light-blue short-sleeved shirt and a kibbutz-type hat, without a trace of a jacket and tie. From a distance he almost looked like one of our "oldies." I imagine he had thought hard before dressing in this way, as a gesture of respect to a culture that he felt some esteem for, even if it did not conform to his own ethos and principles. In one hand he was carrying his battered briefcase, and in the other he held a handkerchief with which he was mopping his brow. I roared up to him, braked almost in front of his nose, and, leaning toward him with one hand on the wheel and the other posed proprietorially on the wing, I said: Shalom. He looked up at me with eyes magnified by his glasses so that he looked like a frightened child and hurriedly returned my greeting, although he was not entirely sure who I was. When he did identify me, he looked startled.

  After a moment he said:

  "Is that you?"

  And after another moment:

  "You've grown so much. You're looking healthier."

  And finally, when he had recovered himself:

  "Permit me to remark that it wasn't very safe, that stampede of yours. You might have run me over."

  I asked him to wait there, out of the sun, and returned the Massey-Ferguson to the shed: its role in the drama was over. Then I took my father to the dining hall, where we suddenly both became aware that we were the same height now; we were embarrassed, and my father made a joke about it. He felt my muscles curiously, as though he was wondering whether to buy me, and he made another joke about the dark color of my skin, compared to his pale skin: "Little Black Sambo! You're as dark as a Yemenite!"

  In the dining hall most of the tables had been cleared; there was only one that was laid, and I served my father some boiled chicken with carrots and potatoes and a bowl of chicken soup with croutons. He ate very carefully, with meticulous table manners, ignoring my own deliberately noisy, peasantlike way of eating. While we drank sweet tea from plastic cups, he struck up a polite conversation with Tsvi Butnik, one ofthe old-timers, who was sitting at our table. Father was very careful not to touch on any topic that might degenerate into an ideological argument. He inquired which country Tsvi had come from, and when he said he was from Romania, my father's face lit up and he started speaking Romanian, which for some reason Tsvi had trouble understanding from the way my father spoke it. Then he moved on to the beauty of the landscape of the coastal plain, the biblical prophetess Hulda and the Hulda Gates in the Temple, topics that must have seemed to him beyond any risk of disagreement. But before we parted from Tsvi, Father could not resist asking him how they were enjoying having his son here. Was he managing to acclimatize? Tsvi Butnik, who had not the faintest idea whether or how I was acclimatizing in Hulda, said:

  "What a question! Very well!"

  And Father replied:

  "Well, for that I am most grateful to you all."

  As we were leaving the dining hall, he remarked to Tsvi without sparing my feelings, like someone collecting a dog from a boarding kennels:

  "He was rather out of condition in some ways when he came, and now he seems to be in tip-top form."

  I dragged him off for a comprehensive tour of the length and breadth of Hulda. I did not bother to ask if he would rather rest. I did not bother to offer him a cold shower, or show him the toilets. Like a sergeant-major on a base for new recruits I rushed my poor father along, red-faced, panting, mopping his face all the time, from the sheep pens to the chicken coops and the barns, and then on to the carpentry shop and the locksmith's shop and the olive-oil plant at the top of the hill, and all the time I lectured him about the principles of the kibbutz, agricultural economy, the advantages of socialism, the contribution of the kibbutz to Israel's military victories. I didn't spare him a single detail. I was possessed by a kind of vindictive didactic zeal that was too strong to contain. I did not let him utter a word. I rebuffed his attempts to ask questions. I talked and I talked and I talked.

  From the children's block I dragged him, with his last remaining strength, to see the veterans' quarters, the clinic, and the schoolrooms, until finally we reached the culture hall and the library, where we found the librarian Sheftel, the father of Nily, who was to become my wife a few years later. Kindhearted, smily Sheftel was sitting in blue work clothes, humming a Hasidic melody under his breath and typing something with two fingers on a wax stencil sheet. Like a dying fish that by some miracle has been thrown back into the water at the last minute, my father, who was gasping from the heat and dust and stifled by the smell of manure, revived: the sight of books and a librarian suddenly brought him back to life, and at once he started pouring forth opinions.

  They chatted for ten minutes or so, the two future in-laws, about whatever librarians talk about. Then Sheftel's shyness got the better of him, and Father left him and turned to inspect the layout of the library and all its nooks and crannies, like an alert military attaché observing with a professional eye the maneuvers of a foreign army.

  Then we walked around a bit longer, Father and I. We had coffee and cakes in the home of Hanka and Oizer Huldai, who had volunteered to be my adoptive family. Here Father displayed the full extent of his knowledge of Polish literature, and after studying their bookcase for a moment, he even had a lively conversation with them in Polish: he quoted from Julian Tuwim, and Hanka replied by quoting Slowacki; he mentioned Mickiewicz, and they responded with Iwaszkiewicz, he mentioned the name of Rejmont, and they answered with Wyspianski. Father seemed to be treading on tiptoe as he talked to the people in the kibbutz, as though being very careful not to let slip something terrible whose consequences might be irretrievable. He spoke to them with great delicacy, as though he saw their socialism as an incurable disease whose unfortunate carriers did not realize how grave their condition was, and he, the visitor from outside who saw and knew, had to be careful not to say something accidentally that might alert them to the seriousness of their plight.

  So he took care to express admiration for what he had seen, he showed polite interest, asked a few questions ("Are your crops doing well?" "How is the livestock doing?"), and reiterated his admiration. He did not drown them in a display of his erudition, nor did he attempt any puns. He kept himself under control. Perhaps he was afraid he might harm me.

  But toward evening a sort of melancholy descended upon him, as though his witticisms had run out and his fountain of anecdotes had dried up. He asked if we could sit down together on a shady bench behind the culture hall and wait for the sunset. When the sun was setting, he stopped talking and we sat together side by side in silence. My brown forearm, which already boasted a blond fuzz, rested on the back of the bench not far from his pale arm with its black hair. This time my father did not address me as Your Highness or Your Honor, he did not even behave as though he were responsible for banishing any silence. He looked so awkward and sad that I almost touched his shoulder. But I didn't. I thought he was trying to say something to me, something important and even urgent, and that he was unable to get started. For the first time in my life, my father seemed afraid of me. I would have liked to help him, even to start the conversation instead of him, but I was as inhibited as he was. Eventually he suddenly said:

  "Well then."

  And I repeated after him:

  "Well."

  And we fell silent again. I suddenly remembered the vegetable garden we had tri
ed to create together in the concrete-hard ground of our backyard in Kerem Avraham. I remembered the letter opener and the household hammer that were his agricultural equipment. The seedlings he brought from the Pioneering Women's House or the Working Women's Farm and planted in the night behind my back to make up for the failure of the seeds we had sown.

  My father brought me a present of two of his own books. On the title page of The Novella in Hebrew Literature he had written this dedication: "To my chicken-breeding son, from your (ex-)librarian father," while the inscription he wrote in his History of Literature may have contained a veiled reproach expressing his own disappointment: "To my son Amos, in the hope that he will carve out a place for himself in our literature."

  We slept in an empty dormitory with two children's beds and a packing chest fitted with a curtain for hanging clothes. We undressed in the dark, and in the dark we talked for ten minutes or so. About the NATO alliance and the Cold War. Then we said good-night and turned our backs to each other. Perhaps, like me, my father found it hard to get to sleep. His breath sounded labored, as if he did not have enough air, or as if he were breathing through his mouth with his teeth clenched. We had not slept in the same room for several years, not since my mother's death, since her last days when she moved into my room and I ran away and slept next to him in the double bed, and the first nights after her death, when he had to come and sleep on a mattress on the floor in my room because I was so terrified.

  This time, too, there was a moment of terror. I woke up in a panic in the early hours, imagining in the moonlight that my father's bed was empty and that he had silently pulled up a chair and was sitting by the window, quiet, motionless, his eyes open, staring all night at the moon or counting the passing clouds. My blood froze.

  But in fact he was sleeping deeply and peacefully in the bed I had made up for him, and what had looked like someone sitting quietly on the chair with open eyes staring at the moon was not my father or a ghost but his clothes, the khaki trousers and plain blue shirt that he had chosen so thoughtfully so as not to seem superior to the kibbutz members. So as not to hurt their feelings, heaven forbid.

  In the early 1960s my father returned to Jerusalem from London with his wife and children. They settled in a suburb called Beit Hakerem. Once more he went to work every day in the National Library, not in the newspaper department but in the bibliographical section, which was started at that time. Now that he finally had a doctorate from London University and a handsome yet modest visiting card attesting to the fact, he made another attempt to obtain a teaching post, if not in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, his late uncle's fiefdom, then perhaps at least in one of the new universities: Tel Aviv, Haifa, Beersheba. He even tried his luck on one occasion at the religious university, Bar Ilan, though he saw himself as an avowed anticlericalist.

  In vain.

  In his fifties now, he was too old to become a teaching assistant or a junior lecturer, and not sufficiently well thought of to be in the running for a senior academic position. He was not wanted anywhere. (This was also a time when Professor Joseph Klausner's reputation suffered a dramatic decline. All Uncle Joseph's work on Hebrew literature had by the 1960s begun to seem antiquated and rather naive.) As Agnon writes about one of his characters, in the story "Forever":

  For twenty years Adiel Amzeh conducted research into the secrets of Gumlidatha, which was a great city and the pride of mighty nations until the Gothic hordes descended upon it and made it into a heap of dust and its inhabitants into eternal slaves, and all the years during which he labored he did not show his face to the sages of the universities or to their womenfolk and children; now that he came to ask them for a favor, their eyes radiated such cold anger that their spectacles glinted as they addressed him in these terms: Who are you, sir, we do not know you. His shoulders sagged and he departed from them a disappointed man. Nevertheless, the matter was not without benefit, for he had learned the lesson that if one wishes to be recognized by people, one must be close to them. He was not, however, a man who knew how to be close to people...*

  *S. Y. Agnon, "Forever," in Complete Works of S. Y. Agnon, vol. 8 (Jerusalem/Tel Aviv, 1962), pp. 315-14.

  My father never learned "how to be close to people," even though he always tried his hardest to do so, by means of jokes and wisecracks, displays of erudition and plays on words, a constant willingness to shoulder any task without counting the cost. He never knew how to flatter, and he did not master the art of attaching oneself to academic power groups and cabals; he was nobody's lackey, and he wrote in praise of people only after their death.

  Eventually he seems to have accepted his fate. For another ten years or so he spent his days sitting meekly in a windowless cell in the bibliographical section in the new National Library building in Givat Ram, accumulating footnotes. When he came home from work, he sat down at his desk and compiled entries for the Hebrew Encyclopedia, which was taking shape at the time. He mainly wrote about Polish and Lithuanian literature. Slowly he converted some chapters of his doctoral dissertation about I. L. Peretz into articles that he published in Hebrew journals, and once or twice he even managed to publish in French. Among the copies that I have here in my home in Arad I have found articles on Saul Tchernikhowsky ("The Poet in His Homeland"), Immanuel of Rome, Longus's Daphnis and Chloe, and one entitled "Mendele Studies," which my father dedicated

  To the memory of my wife, a woman of discrimination and good taste, who left me on 8 Tebeth 5712*

  In 1960, just a few days before Nily and I were married, my father had his first heart attack. It prevented him from attending the ceremony, which took place in Hulda under a canopy held up on the points of four pitchforks. (It was a fixed tradition in Hulda to support the bridal canopy on two rifles and two pitchforks, symbolizing the union of work, defense, and the kibbutz. Nily and I caused quite a scandal by refusing to marry in the shadow of rifles. In the kibbutz assembly Zalman P. called me a "bleeding heart," while Tzvi K. inquired mockingly whether the army unit I was serving in allowed me to go on patrol armed with a pitchfork or a broom.)

  My father recovered two or three weeks after the wedding, but his face did not look the same: he was gray and tired. From the mid-1960s on, his liveliness gradually left him. He still got up early in the morning enthusiastic and eager for work, but after lunch his head would start drooping wearily onto his chest, and he would lie down and rest at the end of the afternoon. Then his stamina began to ebb at midday. In the end he only had the first two or three hours of the morning, after which he became gray and faded.

  He still liked jokes and wordplay, and he still got pleasure from explaining to me, for example, that the Hebrew word for a faucet, berez, was derived from the Modern Greek vrisi, a spring, and that Hebrew mahsan, a store, like the English word "magazine," came from Arabic mahzan, a storeroom, which may be derived from a Semitic root HSN meaning strong. As for the word balagan, mess or confusion, he said, which was wrongly considered by many to be a Russian word, it actually came from Persian balakan, denoting an unobtrusive veranda where unwanted rags were thrown, from which the English word "balcony" was derived.

  *January 6,1952, in the Roman calendar.

  He repeated himself more and more. Despite his once-sharp memory, he would now repeat a joke or explanation twice in the same conversation. He was tired and withdrawn and sometimes found it hard to concentrate. In 1968, when my third book, My Michael, came out, he read it in a few days and then phoned me in Hulda to say that "there were some quite convincing descriptions, but in the end the book lacks a certain spark of inspiring vision, it lacks a central idea." And when I sent him my story "Late Love," he wrote me a letter in which he expressed his joy that

  your daughters are so splendid, and the main thing is that we shall see each other soon ... As for the story, it is not bad. Apart from the main character, however, the rest are mere caricatures in my humble opinion. But the main character, unappealing and ridiculous as he is, is alive. A few observations: 1.p. 3,
"the mighty river of the galaxies": "Galaxy" comes from Greek gala, milk, and means "the milky way." The singular is preferable. To the best of my knowledge there is no basis for the plural. 2.p. 3 (and elsewhere), "Liuba Kaganovska": This is the Polish form; in Russian it should be "Kaganovskaya." 3. On p. 7 you have written viazhma: it should be viazma (z, not zh!).

  And so on and so forth, up to observation no. 23, by which time he only had a tiny space left at the end of the page to write "Regards from all of us, Dad."