Black Box

by Amos Oz

  So what do I want this time? What more can the fisherman’s wife ask the golden fish to give her? Another hundred thousand? Or a palace of emerald?

  Nothing, Alec. I have no request. I am only writing so as to talk to you. Even though I already know all the answers. Why you have such long ears. And why your eyes are flashing and sparkling at me. And why such sharp teeth.

  There’s nothing new, Alec.

  At this point you can crumple the letter up and throw it on the fire. The paper will flare up for a moment and then vanish to another world, a tongue of flame will stretch up and die down as though kindled by an empty passion, a fine charred strip will take off and flutter around the room, perhaps to land at your feet. And you will be alone again. You can pour yourself a whisky and celebrate your victory, all alone: there she is, groveling at my feet. She has lost interest in her African discovery and now she is begging for mercy.

  Because apart from malicious glee you have never known any other joy in your life, wicked, solitary Alec. So read this and rejoice. Read this and laugh silently to the moon at the end of the snow at your window.

  This time I am writing to you behind Michel’s back. And without telling him. At ten-thirty he switched off the television, went around the flat systematically turning out the lights, covered the child, checked that the door was bolted, put a sweater around my shoulders, wrapped himself up in a blanket, glanced at the evening paper, muttered something, and fell asleep. Now his spectacles and his cigarettes are on the desk next to me, his gentle breathing blends in with the ticking of the brown clock, which was a present from his parents. And I am sitting at his desk and writing to you, and so I am sinning both against him and against our child. This time I cannot even use Boaz. Your son is all right: your money and Michel’s wisdom extricated him from trouble. The friends of the Sommo family got his police record closed. Little by little Michel is finding his way toward Boaz. Like making a way through a thicket. Can you believe it? He managed to make Boaz come and see us here in Jerusalem last weekend, and several times I could not help laughing at the sight of my tiny husband and my giant of a son competing with each other all day for the favors of the little girl, who seemed to be enjoying the contest and even fanning the flames. When the Sabbath was over, Michel made us all a salad with olives and hot peppers, hamburgers and fried potatoes, and asked the neighbors’ son to baby-sit so we could go to the second show at the cinema.

  Does this rapprochement complicate your strategy? I’m sorry. You have lost a point. How did you put it to me once? When the battle is at its height there is no more sense in the initial briefings. In any case, the enemy now knows about the briefing and does not act in accordance with it. That’s how it happened to you that Boaz and Michel are almost friends now, while I watch and smile: for instance, when Michel climbed up on Boaz’s shoulders to change a light bulb on the veranda. Or when Yifat tried to put Michel’s slippers on Boaz’s feet.

  Why am I telling you all this?

  In fact we ought to have gone back to our established silence. From now to the end of our days. To accept your money and say nothing. But there is a will-o’-the-wisp that persists in flickering over the marsh at night, and neither of us can take our eyes off it.

  If despite everything you have decided to go on reading these pages, if you have not shot them onto the fire burning in your room, I suspect that at this moment your face is wearing that mask of contempt and arrogance that suits you so well and gives you an air of arctic strength. The frozen ray at the touch of which I melt as though under a spell. Right from the start. I melt and hate you. I melt and give myself to you.

  I know: from the letter you are holding in your hands right now there is no going back.

  But then, my two previous letters would be enough for you, if you want to destroy me.

  What have you done with my previous letters? Are they in the fire, or in the safe?

  As a matter of fact, there’s hardly any difference.

  Because you do not trample to death, Alec, you sting. Your poison is fine and slow; it does not slay at once but destroys and dissolves me over the years.

  Your prolonged silence: For seven years I tried to withstand it, to exorcise it with the noises of my new home. And in the eighth year I have given in.

  I was not lying to you when I wrote you my first and second letters in February. All the details I brought to your knowledge about Boaz were accurate, as Zakheim has no doubt already confirmed to you. And yet, it was all a lie. I was deceiving you. I was setting a trap for you. In my heart I was perfectly certain, from the very first moment, that it was Michel who would rescue Boaz from his troubles. Michel, not you. And so indeed it turned out. And I knew from the very first moment that Michel, even without your money, would do the right thing. And at the right time and in the right way.

  And I knew this too, Alec: that even if the Devil made you try to help your son, in fact you would not know what to do. You would not even know where to begin. You have never in your whole life known how to do something on your own. Even when you made up your mind to propose to me, you couldn’t go through with it. Your father had to ask me for you. All your Olympian wisdom and all your titanic powers always begin and end with one thing—your checkbook. Or else with transatlantic telephone calls to Zakheim or to some government minister or general from your old gang (and they, in their turn, call you when the time comes to get their sons into some prestigious college or to fix themselves a nice cushy sabbatical year).

  And what else can you do? Spread charm or icy fear with your air of drowsy condescension. Classify historic zealots. Send thirty tanks charging across the desert to crush and trample Arabs. Dispatch a woman and a child with a cold knockout. Have you ever managed, at any time in your life, to arouse a single smile of joy on the face of a man or a woman? To wipe a tear from any eye? Checks and phone calls, Alec. A small-time Howard Hughes.

  And indeed it was not you, but Michel, who picked Boaz up and found a place for him.

  So, if I knew in advance that it would turn out like that, why did I write to you?

  You’d better stop here. Have a little pause. Light your pipe. Let your grey glance roam a little over the snow. Emptiness meeting emptiness. Then try to concentrate and read what follows with the same surgical severity with which you analyze a text by a nineteenth-century Russian nihilist or a virulent patristic sermon.

  My real motive for writing those two letters to you in February was a desire to place myself in your hands. Do you really not understand? It’s not at all like you to have your enemy in the center of your sights and to forget to pull the trigger.

  Or perhaps I wrote to you like a beautiful damsel in a fairy story sending to the faraway knight the sword with which he can slay the dragon and set her free. There, now that predatory smile of yours is spreading on your face, that bitter, fascinating smile. Do you know, Alec, I’d like to dress you up one night in a black robe and put a black cowl over your head. You wouldn’t regret it, because it’s an image that excites me.

  Or perhaps I reckoned anyway that you could somehow help Boaz. But much more than this, I wanted you to send me the bill. I was longing to pay.

  Why didn’t you come? Have you really forgotten what you and I can do to each other? The fusing of fire and ice?

  That was a lie too. I knew you wouldn’t come. I shall now remove my last veil: the real truth is that even in my most lunatic longing I never forgot for an instant what you are. And I knew that I would never receive a punch from your fist or an order to report. I knew that the only thing I would get from you would be an arctic gust of pale, deathly silence. Or at most a spit of venomous contempt. No less, but no more, either. I knew that it was all lost.

  And yet I have to admit that your spit when it came stunned me completely. Of all the thousand and one things I might have anticipated, it never occurred to me that you would simply pull out the plug and drown Michel in money. This time you’ve left me reeling. That’s what I always loved. There
’s no limit to your devilish talent for invention. And from the puddle you’ve rolled me into, I offer you myself fouled with mud. That’s what you always loved, Alec. That’s what we both loved.

  So, nothing is lost after all?

  There is no going back from this letter. There never will be. I am deceiving Michel just as I deceived you so many times for six of the nine years of our marriage.

  A born harlot.

  Yes, I knew you would say that, with your oceanic wickedness glimmering like the northern lights in the depths of your grey eyes. But no, Alec. You are mistaken. This deceit is different: every time I deceived you with your friends, with your superiors in the army, with your pupils, with the electrician or the plumber, I was always trying to approach you by deceiving you. It was always you I had in my mind. Even when I was screaming aloud. Especially then. As it is written in letters of gold above the Holy Ark in Michel’s synagogue: I have placed the Lord before me always.

  And now it is two o’clock in the morning here in Jerusalem, Michel is curled up fetuslike between the sweat-soaked sheets, the smell of his hairy body mingles in the warm air with the smell of pee that comes from a pile of the child’s sheets in a corner of the cramped room, a hot dry wind comes from the desert through my open window and blows hatefully in my face. I am in my nightdress, sitting at Michel’s desk surrounded by exercise books, writing to you by the light of a hunchbacked table lamp, with a demented mosquito humming overhead and distant Arab lights looking back at me from the other side of the wadi, writing to you out of the depths and by so doing deceiving Michel and deceiving my child in an entirely different way. In a way that I never deceived you. And deceiving him precisely with you. And deceiving him after years in which not the faintest shadow of a lie has passed between us.

  Am I going out of my mind? Have I gone mad like you?

  My husband Michel is a rare man. I have never met anyone like him. “Daddy,” I call him, ever since before Yifat was born. And there are times when I call him child, and hug his thin, hot body as though I were his mother. Even though in fact Michel is not only my father and my child but above all my brother. If we have some sort of life after we die, if we ever get to some world where lies are impossible, Michel will be my brother there.

  But you were and remain my husband. My lord and master. Forever. And in the life after life Michel will hold my arm and lead me to the bridal canopy to my marriage ceremony with you. You are the lord of my hatred and my longing. The master of my dreams at night. Ruler of my hair and my throat and the soles of my feet. Sovereign of my breasts my belly my private parts my womb. Like a slave girl I am in thrall to you. I love my lord. I do not want to be set free. Even if you sent me away in disgrace to the ends of the kingdom, to the desert like Hagar with her son Ishmael, to die of thirst in the wilderness, it would be thirst for you, my lord. Even if you dismissed me from your presence to be a plaything for your servants in the dungeons of the palace.

  But you have not forgotten, my solitary evil Alec. You cannot fool me. Your silence is transparent to me, like tears. The spell I cast on you gnaws you to the bone. In vain do you hide in a cloud like a barren deity. There are a thousand things in the world that you can do a thousand times better than me—but deception is not one of them. No, in that department you don’t come up to my knees, and you never will.

  “Your honor,” you said to the judge before the verdict was given on our case, in your drowsy, indifferent voice, “it has been demonstrated here beyond all possible doubt that this lady is a pathological liar. Even when she sneezes it is very dangerous to believe her.”

  That’s what you said. And as you said it a sort of dirty chuckle ran around the chamber. You smiled faintly and didn’t look in the least then like a cuckolded husband whose hundred horns made him the laughingstock of the whole town. On the contrary, at that moment you seemed to me higher than the lawyers, higher than the judge on his dais, higher than yourself. You looked like a knight who has killed a dragon.

  Even now, after seven years, at nearly three o’clock in the morning, as I record the memory of that moment, my body reaches out for you. Tears fill my eyes and there is a kind of shivering in the tips of my nipples.

  Well, Alec, have you read? Twice? Three times? Did you get a thrill? Is it over? Have I just managed to make a single sapling of joy sprout in the wilderness of your loneliness?

  If so, the time has come for you to pour yourself a fresh whisky. Fill a new pipe. Because now, Mister God of Vengeance, you are going to need your little whisky.

  “Like a knight who has killed a dragon,” I wrote a moment ago. But don’t be too quick to celebrate. Your arrogance is at least premature, sir: for you are the crazy knight who slew the dragon and then turned and slew the damsel and finally dispatched himself as well.

  In fact, you are the dragon.

  And this is the delightful moment for me to reveal to you that Michel-Henri Sommo is much better than you are even in bed. In everything to do with the body, Michel has had perfect pitch since birth. At any moment he can always offer me, in plenty, what my body still does not know how much it yearns to receive. To hold me spellbound for half the night with voyages of love back and forth between the shores of pleasure, like a leaf caught by the breeze, through meadows of patient grace, through cunning and longing, through dappled forests and turbid rivers and pounding seas to the point of fusion.

  Have you crushed your whisky glass yet? Say hello from Ilana to your pen, your pipe, your reading glasses too. Wait, Alec. I haven’t finished yet.

  As a matter of fact, it’s not just Michel. Almost all of them could give you a lesson or two. Even that albino boy who was your driver in the army. Chaste as a lamb and perhaps barely eighteen, guilty, terrified, meeker than a blade of grass, all atremble, his teeth chattering, almost pleading with me to let him off, almost bursting into tears, and suddenly starting to spurt even before he’d managed to touch me, and letting out a howl like a puppy dog, and yet, Alec, at that moment that boy’s baffled eyes gave me such a pure glow of gratitude, of wonderment, of dreamy adoration, as innocent as the singing of angels, that he made my body and heart shudder more than you ever managed to do in all our years together.

  Shall I tell you what you are, Alec, compared to the others I’ve had? You are a bare, rocky mountain. Just like the song. You’re an igloo in the snow. Do you remember Death in The Seventh Seal? Death winning the game of chess? That’s you.

  And now you get up and destroy the pages of my letter. No, this time you don’t tear them carefully into pedantic squares, but throw them in the fire. And perhaps when it’s all over you sit down again and start hitting your grey head against the black desk top; the blood spills from your hair into your eyes. And so at long last your grey eyes run. I hug you.

  A fortnight ago, when Zakheim handed over to Michel your amazing check, he saw fit to warn Michel with the words: Bear in mind, sir, that two can play at that game. I quite fancy that little sentence, and I’m inclined to send it to you now by way of wishing you good night. You will not liberate yourself from me, Alec. You won’t succeed in buying your freedom with money. You won’t turn over a new leaf.

  And by the way, your hundred thousand: we are grateful. The money is in good hands, never fear. Your wife and son are in good hands too. Michel is extending the flat and we’ll all be able to live here. Boaz will make Yifat a slide and a sandbox in the garden. I shall have a washing machine. We’ll have a stereo set. We’ll buy a bicycle for Yifat, and Boaz will have a telescope.

  I’ll close now. I shall get dressed and go out alone into the dark empty street. I’ll walk to the mailbox. I’ll send you this letter. Then I’ll come home and get undressed again and wake Michel and hide myself away in his arms. Michel is a simple, tender man.

  Which is more than one can say about you. Or about me, my love. We are both, as you know, despicable, rotten creatures. And that is the reason for the hug that the slave girl is sending now to the faraway marble dragon.
/>   Ilana

  ***

  To Boaz Brandstetter

  c/o Fuchs

  4 Lemon St.

  Ramat Hasharon

  By the Grace of G-d

  Jerusalem

  2nd of Iyyar 5736 (2.5.76)

  Greetings Boaz, thou perverse and rebellious donkey!

  Don’t think I’m calling you names because I’ve suddenly seen red. I actually fought hard against my baser instincts and delayed writing this letter until I caught you this morning on the telephone and also heard with my own ears your version of what happened. (I couldn’t come to see you because your mother was taken ill, and in my opinion that was also because of you.) Now that we have spoken on the phone I can tell you, Boaz, that you are still an infant and not a man. And I’m beginning to be afraid that you are never going to grow into one. Maybe your destiny is to grow up into a hotheaded hoodlum. Maybe the time you hit that teacher in Telamim and when you beat up the night watchman were not just unfortunate episodes but a warning sign that we are going to have a mule growing up in our midst. Although “growing up” is hardly the right phrase in your case—it might be better if you stopped growing like some sort of beanstalk and matured a bit for a change.