A Tale of Love and Darkness

by Amos Oz

"Good," I said, because I wanted her to stop talking about things that had nothing to do with me and talk about something else instead. We hadn't talked for weeks, and it was a pity to waste this walking time that was just hers and mine. As we approached the city center, she slipped her arm through mine again, gave a little laugh, and asked suddenly:

  "What would you say to a little brother? Or sister?"

  And without waiting for a reply, she added with a sort of jocular sadness, or rather a sadness wrapped in a smile that I could not see but that I heard in her voice as she spoke:

  "One day when you get married and have a family of your own, I very much hope you won't take me and your father as an example of what married life ought to be."

  I am not just re-creating these words from memory, as I did a dozen lines earlier with her words about love and friendship, because I remember this plea not to take my parents' marriage as an example exactly as it was said to me, word for word. And I remember her smiling voice precisely, too. We were on King George Street, my mother and I, walking arm in arm past the building called Talitha Kumi on our way to Terra Sancta Building to take Father away from his work. The time was one-thirty p.m. A cold wind mixed with sharp drops of rain was blowing from the west. It was strong enough to make passersby close their umbrellas so they would not blow inside out. We did not even attempt to open ours. Arm in arm, Mother and I walked in the rain, past Talitha Kumi and the Frumin Building, which was the temporary home of the Knesset, and then we passed the Hamaalot Building. It was at the beginning of the first week of January 1952. Five or four days before her death.

  And as the rain grew heavier, Mother said, with an amused tone to her voice:

  "Shall we go to a café for a bit? Our Father won't run away."

  We sat for half an hour or so in a German Jewish café at the entrance to Rehavia, in JNF Street, opposite the Jewish Agency Building, where the prime minister's office was also located at the time. Till the rain stopped. Meanwhile, Mother took a little powder compact and a comb from her handbag and repaired the damage to her hair and face. I felt a mixture of emotions: pride at her looks, joy that she was better, responsibility to guard and protect her from some shadow whose existence I could only guess at. In fact I did not guess, I only half sensed a slight strange uneasiness in my skin. The way a child sometimes grasps without really grasping things that are beyond his understanding, senses them and is alarmed without knowing why:

  "Are you all right, Mother?"

  She ordered a strong black coffee for herself and for me a milky coffee, even though I was never allowed coffee-is-not-for-children, and a chocolate ice cream, even though we all knew perfectly well that ice cream gives you a sore throat, especially on a cold winter day. And before lunch to boot. My sense of responsibility forced me to eat only two or three spoonfuls and to ask my mother if she didn't feel cold sitting here. If she didn't feel tired. Or dizzy. After all she'd only just recovered from an illness. And be careful, Mummy, when you go to the toilet, it's dark and there are two steps. Pride, earnestness, and apprehension filled my heart. As though as long as the two of us were sitting here in Café Rosh-Rehavia, her role was to be a helpless girl who needed a generous friend, and I was her cavalier. Or perhaps her father:

  "Are you all right, Mother?"

  When we got to Terra Sancta Building, where several departments of the Hebrew University were relocated after the road to the campus on Mount Scopus was blocked in the War of Independence, we asked for the newspaper department and went up the stairs to the second floor. (It was on a winter's day like this that Hannah in My Michael slipped on these very stairs, and might have twisted her ankle, and the student Michael Gonen caught her by the elbow and said he liked the word "ankle." Mother and I may well have walked past Michael and Hannah without noticing them. Thirteen years separated the winter's day when I was in Terra Sancta Building with my mother from the winter's day when I began to write My Michael.)

  When we entered the newspaper department, we saw facing us the director, gentle, kindly Dr. Pfeffermann, who looked up from the pile of papers on his desk, smiled, and beckoned us with both his hands to come in. We saw Father too, from behind. For a long moment we did not recognize him, because he was wearing a gray librarian's coat to protect his clothes from the dust. He was standing on a small stepladder, with his back to us and all his attention concentrated on the big box files he was taking down from a high shelf, leafing through and returning to the shelf, before taking down another and another file, because apparently he could not find what he was looking for.

  All this time, kind Dr. Pfeffermann did not make a sound, but sat comfortably in the chair behind his big desk, his smile growing broader and broader in an amused sort of way, and two or three other people who worked in the department stopped working and smirked as they looked at us and at Father's back without saying anything, as though they were sharing in Dr. Pfeffermann's little game and watching with amused curiosity to see when the man would finally notice his visitors, who were standing in the doorway patiently watching his back, the pretty woman's hand resting on the little boy's shoulder.

  From where he was standing on the top step of the ladder Father turned to his head of department and said, "Excuse me, Dr. Pfeffermann, I believe there is something—," and suddenly he noticed the director's broad smile—and he may have been alarmed because he could not understand what was making him smile—and Dr. Pfeffermann's eyes guided Father's bespectacled gaze from the desk to the doorway. When he caught sight of us, I believe his face went white. He returned the large box file he was holding with both hands to its place on the top shelf and carefully climbed down the ladder, looked around, and saw that all the other members of staff were smiling, and as though he had no choice, he remembered to smile too, and said to us, "What a surprise! What a great surprise!" and in a quieter voice he asked if everything was all right, if anything had happened, heaven forbid.

  His face was as strained and anxious as that of a child who in the middle of a kissing game at a party with his classmates looks up and notices his parents standing sternly in the doorway, and who knows how long they have been standing there quietly watching or what they have seen.

  First of all he tried to shoo us outside very gently, with both hands, into the corridor, and looking back he said to the whole department and particularly to Dr. Pfeffermann: "Excuse me for a few minutes?"

  But a minute later he changed his mind, stopped edging us out, and pulled us back inside, into the director's office, and started to introduce us, then he remembered and said: "Dr. Pfeffermann, you already know my wife and son." And then he turned us around and formally introduced us to the rest of the staff of the newspaper department with the words: "I'd like you to meet my wife, Fania, and my son Amos. A schoolboy. Twelve and a half years old."

  When we were all outside in the corridor, Father asked anxiously, and a little reproachfully:

  "What has happened? Are my parents all right? And your parents? Is everyone all right?"

  Mother calmed him down. But the issue of the restaurant made him apprehensive: after all, it was not anyone's birthday today. He hesitated, started to say something, changed his mind, and after a moment he said:

  "Certainly. Certainly. Why not. We'll go and celebrate your recovery, Fania, or at any rate the distinct and sudden amelioration in your condition. Yes. We must definitely celebrate."

  His face as he spoke, however, was anxious rather than festive.

  But then my father suddenly cheered up, and fired with enthusiasm he put his arms around both our shoulders, got permission from Dr. Pfeffermann to leave work a little early, said good-bye to his colleagues, took off his gray dust coat, and treated us to a thorough tour of several departments of the library, the basement, the rare manuscripts section, he even showed us the new photocopying machine and explained how it worked, and he introduced us proudly to everyone we met, as excited as a teenager introducing his famous parents to the staff of his school.

  The
restaurant was a pleasant, almost empty place tucked away in a narrow side street between Ben Yehuda Street and Shammai or Hillel Street. The rain started again the moment we arrived, which Father took as a good sign, as though it had been waiting for us to get to the restaurant. As though heaven were smiling on us today.

  He corrected himself immediately:

  "I mean, that is what I would say if I believed in signs, or if I believed that heaven cares at all about us. But heaven is indifferent. Apart from homo sapiens, the whole universe is indifferent. Most people are indifferent too, if it comes to that. I believe indifference is the most salient feature of all reality."

  He corrected himself again:

  "And anyway, how could I say that heaven was smiling on us when the sky is so dark and lowering and it's raining cats and dogs?"

  Mother said:

  "No, you two order first because it's my treat today. And I'll be very pleased if you choose the most expensive dishes on the menu."

  But the menu was a modest one, in keeping with those years of shortages and austerity. Father and I ordered vegetable soup and chicken rissoles with mashed potato. I conspiratorially refrained from telling Father that on the way to Terra Sancta I'd been allowed to taste coffee for the very first time. And to have a chocolate ice cream before my lunch, even though it was winter.

  Mother stared at the menu for a long time, then placed it face down on the table, and it was only after Father reminded her again that she finally ordered a bowl of plain boiled rice. Father apologized amiably to the waitress and explained vaguely that Mother was not entirely recovered. While Father and I tucked into our food with gusto, Mother pecked at her rice for a little as though she were forcing herself, then stopped and ordered a cup of strong black coffee.

  "Are you all right, Mother?"

  The waitress returned with a cup of coffee for my mother and a glass of tea for my father, and she placed in front of me a bowl of quivering yellow jelly. At once Father impatiently took his wallet out of his inside jacket pocket. But Mother insisted on her rights: Put it right back, please. Today you are both my guests. And Father obeyed, not before cracking some forced joke about her inheriting an oil well apparently, which explained her newfound wealth and her extravagance. We waited for the rain to let up. My father and I were sitting facing the kitchen, and Mother's face opposite us was looking between our shoulders at the stubborn rain through the window that gave onto the street. What we spoke about I can't remember, but presumably Father chased away any silence. He may have talked to us about the Christian Church's relations with the Jewish people, or treated us to a survey of the history of the fierce dispute that broke out in the middle of the eighteenth century between Rabbi Jacob Emden and the adherents of Shabbetai Zvi, particularly Rabbi Jonathan Eybeschutz, who was suspected of Sabbataean leanings.

  The only other customers in the restaurant that rainy lunchtime were two elderly ladies who were talking in very refined German in low, well-mannered voices. They looked alike, with steely gray hair and birdlike features accentuated by prominent Adam's apples. The elder of the two looked over eighty, and at second glance I supposed that she must be the other one's mother. And I decided that the mother and daughter were both widows, and that they lived together because they had no one else left in the whole wide world. In my mind I dubbed them Mrs. Gertrude and Mrs. Magda, and I tried to imagine their tiny, scrupulously clean apartment, perhaps somewhere in this part of town, roughly opposite the Eden Hotel.

  Suddenly one of them, Mrs. Magda, the younger of the two, raised her voice and hurled a single German word at the old woman opposite. She pronounced it with venomous, piercing rage, like a vulture pouncing on its prey, and then she threw her cup against the wall.

  In the deeply etched lines on the cheeks of the older woman, whom I had named Gertrude, tears began to run. She wept soundlessly and without screwing up her face. She wept with a straight face. The waitress bent down and silently picked up the pieces of the cup. When she had finished, she disappeared. Not a word was spoken after the shout. The two women went on sitting opposite each other without uttering a sound. They were both very thin, and they both had curly gray hair that started a long way up their foreheads, like a man's receding hairline. The older widow was still weeping silent tears, with no contortion of her face; they drained down to her pointed chin, where they dripped onto her breast like stalactites in a cave. She made no attempt to control her weeping or to dry her tears. Even though her daughter, with a cruel expression on her face, silently held out a neatly ironed white handkerchief. If indeed it was her daughter. She did not withdraw her hand, which lay extended on the table in front of her with the neatly ironed handkerchief on top of it. The whole image was frozen for a long time, as though mother and daughter were just an old, fading sepia photograph in some dusty album. Suddenly I asked:

  "Are you all right, Mother?"

  That was because my mother, ignoring the rules of etiquette, had turned her chair slightly and was staring fixedly at the two women. At that moment it struck me that my mother's face had turned very pale again, the way it was all the time she was ill. After a little while she said she was very sorry, she was feeling a little tired and wanted to go home and lie down a little. Father nodded, got up, asked the waitress where the nearest phone booth was, and went off to call a taxi. As we left the restaurant, Mother had to lean on Father's arm and shoulder; I held the door open for them, warned them about the step, and opened the door of the taxi for them. When we had got Mother into the backseat, Father went back into the restaurant to settle the bill. She sat up very straight in the taxi, and her brown eyes were wide open. Too wide.

  That evening the new doctor was sent for, and when he had left, Father sent for the old one as well. There was no disagreement between them: both doctors prescribed complete rest. Consequently Father put Mother to bed in my bed, which had become her bed, took her a glass of warm milk and honey, and begged her to take a few sips with her new sleeping pills. He asked how many lights she wanted him to leave on. A quarter of an hour later I was sent to peep through the crack in the door, and I saw that she was asleep. She slept till next morning, when she woke up early again and got up to help Father and me with the various morning chores. She made us fried eggs again while I set the table and Father chopped various vegetables very fine for a salad. When it was time for us to go, Father to Terra Sancta Building and me to Tachkemoni School, Mother suddenly decided to go out too, and to walk me to school, because her good friend Lilenka, Lilia Bar-Samkha, lived near Tachkemoni.

  Later we discovered that Lilenka had not been at home, so she had gone to see another friend, Fania Weissmann, who had also been a fellow pupil at the Tarbuth gymnasium in Rovno. From Fania Weiss-mann's she had walked just before midday to the Egged Central Bus Station halfway down Jaffa Road and boarded a bus bound for Tel Aviv, to see her sisters, or perhaps she intended to change buses in Tel Aviv and go on to Haifa and Kiriat Motskin, to her parents' hut. But when my mother got to the Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv, she apparently changed her mind: she had a black coffee in a café and returned to Jerusalem late in the afternoon.

  When she got home, she complained of feeling very tired. She took another two or three of the new sleeping pills. Or perhaps she tried going back to the old ones. But that night she could not get to sleep, the migraine came back, and she sat up fully dressed by the window. At two o'clock in the morning my mother decided to do some ironing. She put the light on in my room, which had become her room, set up the ironing board, filled a bottle with water to sprinkle on the clothes, and ironed for several hours, until dawn broke. When she ran out of clothes, she took the bed linen out of the cupboard and ironed it all over again. When she had finished that, she even ironed the bedspread from my bed, but she was so tired or weak that she burned it: the smell of burning woke Father, who woke me too, and the two of us were astonished to see that my mother had ironed every sock, handkerchief, napkin, and tablecloth in the place. We rushed to put o
ut the burning bedspread in the bathroom, and then we sat Mother down in her chair and got down on our knees to remove her shoes: my father took off one, and I took off the other. Then Father asked me to leave the room for a few minutes and kindly close the door behind me. I closed the door, but this time I pressed myself against the door because I wanted to hear. They spoke to each other for half an hour in Russian. Then Father asked me to look after my mother for a few minutes, and he went to the pharmacist's and bought some medicine or syrup, and while he was there, he phoned Uncle Tsvi in his office at Tsahalon Hospital in Jaffa and he also phoned Uncle Buma at work at the Zamenhof clinic in Tel Aviv. After these calls Father and Mother agreed that she should go to Tel Aviv that very morning, Thursday, to stay with one of her sisters, to get some rest and a change of air and atmosphere. She could stay as long as she liked, till Sunday or even till Monday morning, because on Monday afternoon Lilia Bar-Samkha had managed to get her an appointment for a test at Hadassah Hospital in Heneviim Street, an appointment that without Aunt Lilenka's good connections we would have had to wait several months for.

  And because Mother was feeling weak and complained of dizziness, Father insisted that this time she should not travel to Tel Aviv alone, but that he would go with her and take her all the way to Auntie Haya and Uncle Tsvi's, and he might even stay the night: if he took the first bus back to Jerusalem the next morning, Friday, he could manage to get to work for a few hours at least. He took no notice of Mother's protests, that there was no need for him to travel with her and miss a day's work, she was perfectly capable of taking the bus to Tel Aviv on her own and finding her sister's house. She wouldn't get lost.

  But Father would not hear of it. He was gray and stubborn this time, and he absolutely insisted. I promised him that after school I would go straight to Grandma Shlomit and Grandpa Alexander's in Prague Lane, explain what had happened, and stay overnight with them till Father got back. Only don't be a nuisance to Grandma and Grandpa, help them nicely, clear the table after supper, and offer to take the rubbish out. And do all your homework: don't leave any of it for the weekend. He called me a clever son. He may even have called me young man. And from outside we were joined at that moment by the bird Elise, who trilled her morning snatch of Beethoven for us three or four times with clear, limpid joy: "Ti-da-di-da-di..." The bird sang with wonderment, awe, gratitude, exaltation, as though no night had ever ended before, as if this morning was the very first morning in the universe and its light was a wondrous light the like of which had never before burst forth and traversed the wide expanse of darkness.