by Amos Oz
62
MY MOTHER ended her life at her sister's apartment in Ben Yehuda Street, Tel Aviv, in the night between Saturday and Sunday, January 6, 1952. There was a hysterical debate going on in the country at the time about whether Israel should demand and accept reparations from Germany on account of property of Jews murdered during the Hitler period. Some people agreed with David Ben-Gurion that the murderers must not be allowed to inherit the looted Jewish property, and that the monetary value should definitely be repaid in full to Israel to help with the absorption of the survivors. Others, headed by the opposition leader Menachem Begin, declared with pain and anger that it was immoral and a desecration of the memory of those who had been killed that the victims' own state should sell easy absolution to the Germans in exchange for tainted lucre.
It rained heavily almost without a break all over Israel through that winter of 1951-52. The River Ayyalon, Wadi Musrara, burst its banks and flooded the Montefiore district of Tel Aviv and threatened to flood other districts as well. Heavy flooding did extensive damage to the transit camps with their tents and their corrugated iron or canvas huts, which were crowded with hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees who had fled from Arab lands leaving everything behind them and refugees from Hitler from Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Some transit camps were cut off by the floods, and there was a risk of starvation and epidemic. The state of Israel was less than four years old, and a little over a million citizens lived in it; almost a third of them were penniless refugees. Because of the heavy cost of defense and the absorption of immigrants and because of an inflated bureaucracy and clumsy management, the coffers of the state were empty, and the education, health, and welfare services were on the verge of collapse. At the beginning of that week, David Horowitz, the director-general of the Treasury, had flown to America on an emergency mission to obtain short-term credit to the tune of ten million dollars in a matter of a day or two so as to stave off disaster. My father and I discussed all these subjects when he got back from Tel Aviv. He had taken my mother to Auntie Haya and Uncle Tsvi's on Thursday and spent the night there, and when he got back on Friday, he learned from Grandma Shlomit and Grandpa Alexander that I seemed to have caught a cold but had nevertheless insisted on getting up and going to school. Grandma suggested we stay and celebrate Sabbath with them: she thought we both looked as though we were starting some sort of virus. But we opted to go home. On the way home from their house in Prague Lane, Father saw fit to report to me earnestly, like one grown-up to another, that when they got to Auntie Haya's, my mother's state of mind had immediately improved: the four of them had gone out together on Thursday night to a little café on the corner of Dizengoff Street and Jabotinsky Street, a stone's throw from Haya and Tsvi's. They had intended to stay out for only a short while, but they had ended up sitting there till closing time, talking about people and books. Tsvi had recounted all sorts of interesting stories about hospital life, and Mother had looked well and joined in the conversation, and that night she had slept for several hours, though she had apparently woken up in the small hours of the morning and gone to sit in the kitchen so as not to disturb anyone. Early in the morning when my father had left to get back to Jerusalem in time to put in a few hours at work, my mother had promised that there was no need to worry about her, the worst was over, and she had asked him to take very good care of the child: when they had left for Tel Aviv the previous day, she had had the impression that he was coming down with a cold.
Father said:
"Your mother was quite right about the cold, so let's hope she was right about the worst being over, too."
I said:
"I've only got a little bit of homework left. When I've finished, would you have time to stick some of the new stamps in the album?"
On Saturday, it rained for most of the day. It rained and it rained. It didn't stop. My father and I spent a few hours poring over our stamp collection. Our heads sometimes touched. We compared each stamp with its picture in the big fat British catalogue, and Father found the right place for it in the album, either in a set we had already started or on a new page. On Saturday afternoon we both lay down and rested, he in his bed and I back in my room, in the bed that had become my mother's sick bed recently. After our rest we were invited to Grandpa and Grandma's again, to eat gefilte fish in a golden sauce surrounded with slices of boiled carrot, but since by now we both had severe colds and coughs and it was still pouring with rain outside, we decided that we would be better off staying at home. The sky was so overcast that we had to turn the lights on at four o'clock. Father sat at his desk and worked for a couple of hours on an article for which he had already extended the deadline twice, with his glasses slipping down his nose, bent over his books and little cards. While he worked, I lay on the rug at his feet reading a book. Later we played checkers: he beat me once, I won once, and the third time we drew. It is hard to say if he meant it to turn out like that or if it just happened. We had a light snack and drank some hot tea and we both took a couple of Palgin or APC tablets from Mother's collection of pills. To help us fight our colds. Then I went to bed, and we both got up at six o'clock, and at seven Tsippi the pharmacist's daughter came over to tell us that we'd just had a phone call from Tel Aviv and they would ring again in ten minutes, Mr. Klausner was to go to the pharmacy immediately, and her father had said to say it was rather urgent please.
Auntie Haya told me that on Friday Uncle Tsvi, who was the administrative director of Tsahalon Hospital, had called in a specialist from the hospital, who had volunteered to come over after work. The specialist examined my mother thoroughly, unhurriedly, pausing to chat with her and continuing his examination, and when he had finished, he had said that she was tired, tense, and a little run down. Apart from the insomnia he could not find anything specifically wrong with her. Often the psyche is the worst enemy of the body: it doesn't let the body live, it doesn't let it enjoy itself when it wants to or get the rest it is begging for. If only we could extract it the way we extract the tonsils or the appendix, we would all live healthy and contented lives till we were a thousand years old. He thought that there was not much point now in having the tests at the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem on Monday, but they couldn't do any harm. He recommended complete rest and avoidance of any excitement. It was particularly important, he said, that the patient should get out of the house for at least an hour or even two hours every day, she could even dress up warmly and take an umbrella and simply walk around town, looking at shop windows or at handsome young men, it didn't matter what, the crucial thing was to get some fresh air. He also wrote her a prescription for some new, very strong sleeping pills that were apparently even newer and stronger than the new pills that the new doctor in Jerusalem had prescribed. Uncle Tsvi hurried out to the duty pharmacist's in Bugrashov Street to buy the pills, because it was Friday afternoon and all the other pharmacists had already closed for Sabbath.
On Friday night Auntie Sonia and Uncle Buma had come over with a tin food container with a handle, soup for everyone and fruit compote for dessert. The three sisters had crowded into the little kitchen for an hour or so preparing dinner. Auntie Sonia had suggested that my mother should go and stay with her, in Wessely Street, to give Haya a break, but Auntie Haya wouldn't hear of it, and even told her younger sister off for this strange suggestion. Auntie Sonia was offended, but said nothing. At the Sabbath dinner table the atmosphere was a little dampened by Sonia's umbrage. My mother seems to have taken on my father's usual role and tried to keep the conversation going somehow. At the end of the evening she complained of feeling tired and apologized to Tsvi and Haya for not having the strength to help them clear away and wash up. She took the new tablets that the Tel Aviv specialist had prescribed, and to be on the safe side she also took some of the tablets that the Jerusalem specialist had given her. She fell into a deep sleep at ten o'clock but woke up a couple of hours later and made herself a strong cup of coffee in the kitchen, and spent the rest of the night sitting on a kit
chen stool. Just before the War of Independence the room where my mother was staying had been let to the head of Haganah intelligence, Yigael Yadin, who later, when the state was established, became Major-General Yigael Yadin, deputy chief of staff and head of operations of the newly formed Israeli army, but he continued to rent that room. Consequently the kitchen where my mother sat up that night, and the previous night too, was a historic kitchen, because during the war several informal meetings were held there that crucially shaped the course of the conflict. There is no way of knowing whether my mother thought about this in the course of that night, between one strong coffee and the next, but if she did, it is doubtful that she found it of interest.
***
On Saturday morning she told Haya and Tsvi that she had decided to go for a walk and look at handsome young men, as per the doctor's instructions. She borrowed an umbrella and a pair of lined rubber boots from her sister and went for a walk in the rain. There cannot have been many people in the streets of north Tel Aviv that wet and windy Saturday morning. That morning, January 5,1952, the temperature in Tel Aviv was five or six degrees Celsius. My mother left her sister's apartment in 175 Ben Yehuda Street at eight or eight-thirty. She may have crossed Ben Yehuda Street and turned left, or northward, toward Nordau Boulevard. She hardly encountered any shop windows on her walk, apart from the unlit window of the Tnuva Dairy where a greenish poster was fixed to the inside of the glass with four strips of brown sticky paper, showing a plump village girl against a background of verdant meadows, and above her head, against the bright blue sky, a cheery legend declared: "Milk every morning and milk every night will give you a life of good health and delight." There were still many vacant lots, the remains of the sand dunes, between the buildings in Ben Yehuda Street that winter, full of dead thistles and squills densely covered with white snails as well as scrap iron and rain-soaked rubbish. My mother saw the rows of plastered buildings that already, three or four years after they were erected, showed signs of dilapidation: peeling paint, crumbling plaster turning green with mildew, iron railings rusting in the salt sea air, balconies closed in with hardboard and plywood as in a refugee camp, shop signs that had come off their hinges, trees that were dying in the gardens for want of loving care, run-down storage sheds between the buildings, made of reused planks, corrugated iron, and sheets of tarpaulin. Rows of garbage cans, some of which had been overturned by alley cats, the contents spilling out onto the gray concrete pavement. Washing lines stretched across the street from balcony to balcony. Here and there rain-soaked white and colored underwear whirled helplessly on the lines in the high wind. My mother was very tired that morning, and her head must have been heavy from lack of sleep, hunger, and all the black coffee and sleeping pills, so that she walked slowly like a sleepwalker. She may have left Ben Yehuda Street before she reached Nordau Boulevard and turned right into Belvedere Alley, which despite its name had no view but only low plastered buildings made of concrete blocks, with rusting iron railings, and this alley led her to Motskin Avenue, which was not an avenue at all but a short, wide, empty street, only half built and partly unpaved, and from Motskin Avenue her tired feet took her to Tahon Lane and on to Dizengoff Street, where it began to rain heavily, but she forgot about the umbrella that was hanging on her arm and walked on bareheaded in the rain, with her pretty handbag hanging from her shoulder, and she crossed Dizengoff Street and went wherever her feet carried her, perhaps to Zangwill Street and then on to Zangwill Alley, and now she was really lost, without the faintest idea how to get back to her sister's or why she had to get back, and she did not know why she had come out except to follow the instructions of the specialist who had told her to walk the streets of Tel Aviv to look at handsome young men. But there were no handsome young men this rainy Saturday morning, either in Zangwill Street or in Zangwill Alley, or in Sokolov Street from which she came to Basle Street, or in Basle Street or anywhere else. Perhaps she thought about the deep shady orchard behind her parents' house in Rovno, or about Ira Steletskaya, the engineer's wife from Rovno who burned herself to death in the abandoned hut belonging to Anton the coachman's son. Or about the Tarbuth gymnasium and the vistas of river and forest. Or the lanes of old Prague and her student days there, and someone about whom apparently my mother never told us, or her sisters, or her best friend, Lilenka. Occasionally someone ran past, in a hurry to get out of the rain. Occasionally a cat went by, and my mother called to it, trying to ask something, to exchange views, or feelings, to ask for some simple feline advice, but every cat she addressed fled from her in a panic as though even from a distance it could smell that she was doomed.
Around midday she returned to her sister's, where they were shocked at her appearance because she was frozen and soaked through and because she jokingly complained that there were no handsome young men in the streets of Tel Aviv: if only she had found some, she might have tried to seduce them, men always looked at her with desire in their eyes, but soon, very soon there would be nothing left to desire. Her sister Haya hurried to run her a hot bath, and my mother got in; she refused to taste a crumb of food because any food made her feel sick; she slept for a couple of hours, and in the late afternoon she dressed, put on the wet raincoat and the boots that were still damp and cold from her morning walk, and went out again as the doctor had ordered to search the streets of Tel Aviv for handsome young men. And this afternoon, because the rain had let up a bit, the streets were not so empty and my mother did not wander aimlessly, she found her way to the corner of Dizengoff Street and JNF Boulevard and from there she walked down Dizengoff Street past the junctions with Gordon Street and Frishman Street with her pretty black handbag hanging from her shoulder, looking at the beautiful shop windows and cafés and getting a glimpse of what Tel Aviv considered as Bohemian life, although to her it all looked tawdry and secondhand, like an imitation of an imitation of something she found pathetic and miserable. It all seemed to deserve and need compassion, but her compassion had run out. Toward evening she went home, refused to eat anything again, drank a cup of black coffee and then another, and sat down to look at some book that fell upside down at her feet when her eyes closed, and for some ten minutes or so Uncle Tsvi and Auntie Haya thought they heard light, irregular snoring. Then she woke up and said she needed to rest, that she had a feeling that the specialist had been quite right when he told her to walk around the town for several hours every day, and she had a feeling that tonight she would fall asleep early and would finally manage to sleep very deeply. By half past eight her sister had made her bed again with fresh sheets, and slid a hot-water bottle under the quilt because the nights were cold and the rain had just started up again and was beating against the shutters. My mother decided to sleep fully dressed, and to make quite sure that she didn't wake up again to spend an agonized night in the kitchen, she poured herself a glass of tea from the vacuum flask that her sister had left by her bedside, waited for it to cool down a little, and when she drank it, she took her sleeping pills. If I had been there with her in that room overlooking the backyard in Haya and Tsvi's apartment at that moment, at half past eight or a quarter to nine on that Saturday evening, I would certainly have tried my hardest to explain to her why she mustn't. And if I did not succeed, I would have done everything possible to stir her compassion, to make her take pity on her only child. I would have cried and I would have pleaded without any shame and I would have hugged her knees, I might even have pretended to faint or I might have hit and scratched myself till the blood flowed as I had seen her do in moments of despair. Or I would have attacked her like a murderer, I would have smashed a vase over her head without hesitation. Or hit her with the iron that stood on a shelf in a corner of the room. Or taken advantage of her weakness to lie on top of her and tie her hands behind her back, and taken away all those pills and tablets and sachets and solutions and potions and syrups of hers and destroyed the lot of them. But I was not allowed to be there. I was not even allowed to go to her funeral. My mother fell asleep, and this time s
he slept with no nightmares, she had no insomnia, in the early hours she threw up and fell asleep again, still fully dressed, and because Tsvi and Haya were beginning to suspect something, they sent for an ambulance a little before sunrise, and two stretcher bearers carried her carefully, so as not to disturb her sleep, and at the hospital she would not listen to them either, and although they tried various means to disturb her good sleep, she paid no attention to them, or to the specialist from whom she had heard that the psyche is the worst enemy of the body, and she did not wake up in the morning either, or even when the day grew brighter, and from the branches of the ficus tree in the garden of the hospital the bird Elise called to her in wonderment and called to her again and again in vain, and yet it went on trying over and over again, and it still tries sometimes.
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Amos Oz is the author of numerous works of fiction and essay collections. He has received the Koret Jewish Book Award, the Prix Femina, the Israel Prize, and the Frankfurt Peace Prize, and his books have been translated into more than thirty languages. Amos Oz lives in Israel.
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Nicholas de Lange is a professor at the University of Cambridge and writes on a variety of subjects. He has won many prizes for his translations.
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