A Tale of Love and Darkness

by Amos Oz

  60

  I WAS ABOUT fifteen when I went to Hulda, two and a half years after my mother's death: a paleface among the suntanned, a skinny youth among well-built giants, a tireless chatterbox among the taciturn, a versifier among agricultural laborers. All my new classmates had a healthy mind in a healthy body, only I had a dreamy mind in an almost transparent body. Worse still: I was caught a couple of times sitting in out-of-the-way corners of the kibbutz trying to paint watercolors. Or hiding in the study room behind the newspaper room on the ground floor of Herzl House, scribbling away. A McCarthyite rumor soon went around that I was somehow connected to the Herut party, that I had grown up in a Revisionist family, and I was suspected of having obscure links with the hated demagogue Menachem Begin, the archenemy of the Labor Movement. In short: a twisted upbringing and irreparably screwed-up genes.

  The fact that I had come to Hulda because I had rebelled against my father and his family did not help me. I was not given credit for being a renegade from Herut, or for my helpless laughter during Begin's speech at the Edison auditorium: the brave little boy from "The Emperor's New Clothes," of all people, was suspected here in Hulda of being in the pay of the crooked tailors.

  In vain did I endeavor to excel in farm work and fail at school. In vain did I grill myself like a steak in my efforts to be as brown as the rest of them. In vain did I show myself in the Current Affairs Discussion Group to be the most socialist socialist in Hulda, if not in the entire working class. Nothing helped me: to them I was some kind of alien, and so my classmates harassed me pitilessly to make me give up my strange ways and become a normal person like them. Once they sent me off on the double to the barn without a flashlight in the middle of the night, to check and report back if any of the cows was in heat and required the urgent attention of the bull. Another time they put me down for toilet-polishing duty. And yet another time I was sent to the children's farm to sex the ducklings. Heaven forbid that I should ever forget where I had come from or have any misapprehensions about where I had landed.

  As for me, I took it all with humility, because I knew that the process of getting Jerusalem out of my system rightly entailed suffering, the pangs of rebirth. I considered the practical jokes and the humiliation justified not because I was suffering from some inferiority complex but because I really was inferior. They, those solidly built boys scorched by dust and sun and those proud-walking girls, were the salt of the earth, the lords of creation. As handsome as demigods, as beautiful as the nights in Canaan.

  All except for me.

  No one was taken in by my suntan: they all knew perfectly well—I knew it myself—that even when my skin was finally tanned a deep brown, I would still be pale on the inside. Though I forced myself to learn how to lay irrigation hoses in the hayfields, drive a tractor, hit the target in the rifle range with the old Czech rifle, I had still not managed to change my spots: through all the camouflage nets I covered myself with you could still see that weak, soft-hearted, loquacious town boy, who fantasized and made up all sorts of strange stories that could never have happened and didn't interest anyone here.

  Whereas they seemed to me glorious: those big boys who could score a goal from twenty yards with their left foot, wring a chicken's neck without batting an eyelid, break into the stores at night to pilfer provisions for a midnight feast, and those bold girls who could do a twenty-mile hike carrying a sixty-five-pound pack on their backs and still have enough energy left afterward to dance late into the night with their blue skirts whirling as though the force of gravity had been suspended in their honor, then sit in a circle with us till dawn and sing to us under the starry sky, sing heartrending songs in rounds and canons, sing leaning back to back, sing while radiating an innocent glow that swept you off your feet precisely because it was so innocent, so heavenly, as pure as the angelic choirs.

  Yes, indeed: I knew my place. Don't get too big for your boots. Don't get ideas above your station. Don't stick your nose into what's meant for your betters. True, all people are born equal, that is the fundamental principle of kibbutz life, but the field of love belongs to the realm of nature, not to the Egalitarianism Committee. And the field of love belongs to mighty cedars, not to little weeds.

  Still, even a cat may look at a king, as the proverb says. So I looked at them all day long, and in bed at night too, when my eyes were closed, I never stopped looking at them, those tousled beauties. And I especially looked at the girls. How I looked. I fixed my feverish eyes on them. Even in my sleep I turned my wistful calf's eyes on them helplessly. Not that I nursed any false hopes: I knew they were not meant for me. Those boys were magnificent stags, and I was a miserable worm. The girls were graceful gazelles, and I was a stray jackal howling behind the fence. And among them—the clapper in the bell—was Nily.

  Every one of those girls was as radiant as the sun. Every single one. But Nily—she was always surrounded by a trembling circle of joy. Nily always sang as she walked, on the path, on the lawn, in the wood, between the flower beds, she sang to herself as she walked. And even when she walked without singing, she looked as though she were singing. What's the matter with her, I would ask myself sometimes from the depths of my tormented sixteen years, why is she always singing? What is so good about this world? How, "from such a cruel fate / from poverty and sorrow / from unknown yesterday / and visionless tomorrow," could one draw such joy? Hadn't she heard that "The mountains of Ephraim / have received a new young victim /...and just like you we'll offer / for the nation's sake our lives..."?

  It was a wonder. It exasperated me but fascinated me: like a firefly.

  Kibbutz Hulda was surrounded by deep darkness. Every night a black abyss started a couple of yards beyond the yellow circles of light from the lamps along the perimeter fence and continued to the ends of the night, to the distant stars in the sky. Beyond the barbed-wire fence lurked empty fields, deserted orchards, hills without a living soul, plantations abandoned to the night wind, ruins of Arab villages—not like today, when you can see closely packed blocks of lights all around. In the 1950s the night outside Hulda was still totally empty. And in this great emptiness infiltrators, fedayeen, crept through the heart of the night. And in this great emptiness there was the wood on the hill, the olive grove, fields of crops, among which drooling jackals roamed, whose lunatic, blood-curdling howls penetrated our sleep and froze our blood toward dawn.

  Even inside the fenced and guarded compound of the kibbutz there was not much light at night. Here and there a weary lamp cast a faint puddle of light, and then thick darkness reigned until the next lamp. Muffled night watchmen did their rounds among the chicken houses and barns, and every half hour or hour the woman on watch duty in the babies' quarters put down her knitting and went on a round from the nursery to the children's houses and back.

  We had to make a noise every evening so as not to fall prey to the emptiness and sadness. Every evening we got together and did something noisy, almost wild, until midnight or later, to prevent the darkness from creeping into our rooms and into our bones and snuffing out our souls. We sang, we shouted, we stuffed ourselves, we argued, we swore, we gossiped, we joked, all to drive away the darkness, the silence, and the howling of the jackals. In those days there was no television, no video, no stereo, no Internet or computer games, there weren't even discos and pubs, and there was no disco music; there was only a film at Herzl House or on the main lawn once a week, on Wednesdays.

  Every evening we had to get together and try to create some light and fun for ourselves.

  Among the older members of the kibbutz, whom we called the oldies even though most of them were barely forty, there were quite a few whose inner light had faded from too many duties, commitments, disappointments, meetings, committees, fruit-picking details, discussions, duty rosters, study days, and party activities, too much culturalism and the friction of daily routines. Quite a few of them were already extinguished. By half past nine or a quarter to ten the faint lights went out one after another in th
e windows of the little apartments in the veterans' quarters: tomorrow they had to get up at half past four again, to pick fruit, milk the cows, work in the fields or the communal kitchens. On those nights, light was a rare and precious commodity in Hulda.

  And Nily was a firefly. More than a firefly: a generator, a whole powerhouse.

  She exuded abundant joie de vivre. Her joy was unconfined and unrestrained, it had no rhyme or reason, no grounds or motive, nothing had to happen to make her overflow with jollity. Of course, I sometimes saw her momentarily sad, weeping openly when she thought rightly or wrongly that someone had insulted her, or shamelessly sobbing in a sad film, or crying over a poignant page in a novel. But her sadness was always firmly enclosed within brackets of powerful joy, like hot spring water that no snow or ice could cool because its heat flowed straight from the core of the earth.

  It may well have come from her parents. Her mother Riva could hear music in her head even when there was no music around. And Sheftel, the librarian, would sing as he walked around the kibbutz in his gray T-shirt, he would sing as he worked in the garden, sing as he carried heavy sacks on his back, and when he said to you, "It'll be OK," he always believed it was true, without a shadow of a doubt or reservation: Don't worry, it'll be OK, soon.

  As a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old boarder at the kibbutz, I viewed the joy that radiated from Nily the way one looks at a full moon: distant, unattainable, but fascinating and delightful.

  Of course, only from a distance. I was unworthy. Such radiant lights as these the likes of me were permitted only to look at. For the last two years of school and during my military service I had a girlfriend outside Hulda, while Nily had a shining string of princely suitors, and around this string she had a second circle of dizzy, bewitched followers, and then a third circle of meek, humble votaries, and a fourth circle of distant admirers, and the fifth and sixth circles included me, a little weed that was occasionally touched unawares by a single extravagant ray, which could not imagine what its passing touch had done.

  When I was caught scribbling poems in the shabby back room of the culture building in Hulda, it was finally clear to everyone that no good would ever come of me. Nevertheless, to make the best of a bad job they decided to give me the task of composing appropriate verses for various occasions: festivities, family celebrations, weddings, and festivals, and when necessary, also funeral eulogies and lines for memorial booklets. As for my soulful poems, I managed to hide them (deep in the straw of an old mattress), but sometimes I could not restrain myself and I showed them to Nily.

  Why Nily, of all people?

  Perhaps I had a need to check which of my poems of darkness would crumble to nothing the moment they were exposed to the rays of the sun, and which if any would survive. To this day Nily is my first reader. When she finds something in a draft that is wrong she says: That just doesn't work. Cross it out. Sit down and write it again. Or: We've heard that before. You've already written it somewhere. No need to repeat yourself. But when she likes something, she looks up from the page and gives me a certain look, and the room gets bigger. And when something sad comes off, she says, that passage makes me cry. Or if it's something funny, she bursts into peals of laughter. After her, my daughters and my son read it: they all have sharp eyes and a good ear. After a while, a few friends will read what I have written, and then the readers, and after them come the literary experts, the scholars, the critics, and the firing squads. But by then I'm not there anymore.

  In those years Nily went out with the lords of creation, and I did not set my sights high: if the princess, surrounded by a swarm of suitors, walked past a serf's cottage, at most he might look up at her for a moment, be dazzled, and bless his fortune. Hence the sensation in Hulda, and even in the surrounding villages, when it emerged one day that the sunlight had suddenly lit up the dark side of the moon. That day, in Hulda, the cows laid eggs, wine came out of the ewes' udders, and the eucalyptus trees flowed with milk and honey. Polar bears appeared from behind the sheep shed, the emperor of Japan was seen wandering beside the laundry reciting from the works of A. D. Gordon, the mountains dripped wine, and all the hills melted. The sun stood still for seventy-seven hours above the cypress trees and refused to set. And I went to the empty boys' showers, locked myself in, stood in front of the mirror and asked aloud, Mirror mirror on the wall, tell me, how did this happen? What have I done to deserve it?

  61

  MY MOTHER was thirty-eight when she died. At the age I am today, I could be her father.

  After her funeral, my father and I stayed at home for several days. He did not go to work, and I did not go to school. The door ofthe apartment was open all day long. We received a constant flow of neighbors, acquaintances, and relations. Kind neighbors volunteered to make sure there were soft drinks for all the visitors, and coffee, cakes, and tea. From time to time I was invited to their homes for a while, for a hot meal. I politely sipped a spoonful of soup and downed half a rissole, then hurried back to Father. I did not want him to be there alone. Not that he was alone. From morning until ten or ten-thirty in the evening our apartment was packed with comforters. The neighbors rustled up some chairs and arranged them in a circle around the walls of the book room. Strange coats were piled on my parents' bed all day long.

  Grandpa and Grandma were banished to the other room for most of the day, at Father's request, because he found their presence too much. Grandpa Alexander would suddenly burst into noisy Russian weeping, punctuated by hiccups, while Grandma Shlomit never stopped running back and forth between the visitors and the kitchen, wresting their cups and cake plates from them almost by force, washing them carefully with dish-washing liquid, rinsing them well, drying them, and putting them away in the cupboard. Any teaspoon that was not washed immediately after use seemed to my Grandma Shlomit to be a dangerous agent of the forces that had brought about the disaster.

  So my grandfather and grandmother sat in the other room with those of the visitors who had finished sitting with Father and me and yet felt it proper to stay a little longer. Grandpa Alexander, who had loved his daughter-in-law and always dreaded her sadness, walked up and down the room nodding his head with a kind of furious irony and occasionally bursting into loud wails:

  "Why? Oh why? So beautiful! So young! And so talented! So gifted! Why? Explain to me why?"

  And he stood in a corner with his back to the room, sobbing aloud as though he were hiccuping, his shoulders trembling violently.

  Grandma rebuked him:

  "Zussia, stop that please. That's enough. Lonya and the child can't stand it when you behave like this. Stop it! Control yourself! Really! Learn a lesson from Lonya and the child, how to behave! Really!"

  Grandpa obeyed her instantly, sat down, and buried his face in his hands. But a quarter of an hour later another helpless bellow would burst from his heart:

  "So young! So beautiful! Like an angel! So young! So talented! Why?! Explain to me why?!"

  My mother's friends came: Lilia Bar-Samkha, Ruchele Engel, Esterka Weiner, Fania Weissmann, and another woman or two, childhood friends from the Tarbuth gymnasium. They sipped tea and talked about their schooldays. They reminisced about my mother as a girl, about their charismatic headmaster, Issachar Reiss, whom all the girls had secretly been in love with, and his rather unsuccessful marriage. They talked about other teachers, too. Then Aunt Lilenka had second thoughts, and asked Father delicately if he minded them talking in this way, reminiscing, telling stories. Would he rather they talked about something else?

  But my father, who sat all day long wearily, unshaven, in the chair where my mother had spent her sleepless nights, only nodded apathetically and motioned for them to continue.

  Aunt Lilia, Dr. Lilia Bar-Samkha, insisted that she and I must have a heart-to-heart chat, although I tried to get out of it politely. Since the other room was occupied by Grandpa and Grandma and some other members of my father's family, and the kitchen was full of kind neighbors, and Grandma Shlomit was constantly
coming and going to scrub every bowl and teaspoon, Aunt Lilia took me by the hand and led me to the bathroom, where she locked the door behind us. It felt strange and rather repellent to be in a locked bathroom with this woman. But Aunt Lilia beamed at me, sat down on the covered toilet seat, and sat me down facing her on the edge of the bath. She eyed me in silence for a minute or two, compassionately, with tears welling in her eyes, and then she started talking, not about my mother or the school in Rovno but about the great power of art and the connection between art and the inner life of the soul. What she was saying made me cringe.

  Then, in a different voice, she talked to me about my new grownup responsibility, to look after my father from now on, to bring some light into his dark life and give him a little satisfaction, for example, by doing especially well at school. Then she went on to talk about my feelings: she had to know what I had thought when I heard what had happened. What were my feelings at that moment? What were my feelings now? To help me, she started to enumerate various names of feelings, as though inviting me to make my choice, or cross out the ones that did not apply. Sadness? Fear? Anxiety? Longing? A little anger perhaps? Surprise? Guilt? Because you have probably heard or read that guilt feelings can sometimes arise in such cases? No? And what about a feeling of disbelief? Pain? Or a refusal to accept the new reality?