Black Box

by Amos Oz

  “Why should I hate him? I don’t hate him. I’m against hating. What I think is like this: I have nothing to do with him. It’s a pity he left the country. I’m against people leaving the country while it’s got troubles. Even though I quite fancy traveling myself—and I will as soon as the country gets out of trouble.”

  “And why did you agree to accept this house from him?”

  “Why should I care about taking money from him? Or from Michel? Or from both of them? Either way nobody ever earned that money by hard work. It just grew on trees. So they might as well give some of it to me. No problem. I happen to have something to do with the money, what’s more. Here, the water’s boiling. Let’s have a cup of coffee. Drink this—you’ll feel better. It’s sugared and stirred. What are you looking at me like that for?”

  What was it that provoked me to reply that I was superfluous? That I wouldn’t mind dying. That they’d all be better off that way.

  “Yallah. Cool it. That’s enough of that bullshit. Yifat is barely three years and a month old. What’s all this about dying? Have you been hit on the head? You oughta take up voluntary work. Looking after new immigrants. Knitting hats for the troops. Are you short of things to do? What’s your trouble?”

  “It’s . . . it’s just that everything I’ve touched has gone horribly wrong. Can you understand that, Boaz?”

  “You want the truth? No, I don’t. But that don’t signify much, ’cause I’m a bit soft in the head. But what I do understand is that you’re not busy enough. You don’t do anything, Ilana.”

  “How about you?”

  “It’s like this. Right now I’m here with these two chicks, making them work and giving them a good time, eating, working a little, fucking, looking after his house for him in return for monthly wages, and doing the odd repair job too. In another month or two there’s going to be one less ruin in this country. Why don’t you move in too? It’s better than dying. There are too many people dying in this country anyway. Killing and dying the whole time instead of living it up. Whichever way you look, the whole place is full of wise guys riding tanks. Today we’re starting on a vegetable garden. You can stay. You won’t be in my way at all and I won’t get in yours. You can do whatever you want to here, you can bring Yifat, you can bring whoever you want to. I’ll give you work and food. Crying again? Life is not handling you gently enough? Stay as long as you want. There’s no shortage of work here, and Cindy plays the guitar to us in the evenings. You can do the cooking. Or how about taking care of the goats? There’s going to be a shed for them soon. I’ll show you how.”

  “May I ask you something?”

  “Ask ahead—it don’t cost anything.”

  “Tell me this: Have you ever loved anybody? I don’t mean . . . sex. You don’t have to answer.”

  He said nothing. Shook his head from right to left, in the negative, as though in despair at my stupidity. And then, sadly and gently: “Of course I have. Do you mean to say you’ve never even noticed?”

  “Who?”

  “You, Ilana. And him. When I was just so big and I thought of you as parents. Your shouting and fighting used to drive me crazy. I thought it was all because of me. How could I know? Every time you committed suicide and they took you away to the hospital I wanted to murder him. When you screwed with his friends I wanted to poison them. Instead I used to beat up anyone who came within range. I was an idiot. Now I’m against beating people up unless they do it to me first. Then I just hit back a little. Now I’m only in favor of working and taking it easy. I only care about myself and the country.”

  “The country?”

  “Sure. Are you blind or something? Can’t you see what’s going on? These wars and all the bullshit? Quarreling and killing all the time, instead of living it up? Eating their hearts out and then shooting and planting bombs. I’m against the situation. I happen to be quite a Zionist, if you must know.”

  “You’re what?”

  “A Zionist. Wanting everyone to be okay. And for everyone to do just a little for the country, even something really tiny, just half an hour a day so they can feel good and know that they’re still needed. If you don’t do anything, very soon you start getting into trouble. Take you and your husbands for instance. Not one of the three of you knows what it means to really live. You just fuss all the time instead of doing something. Including that saint and his mates from the territories. They’re living off the Bible, living off politics, living off speeches and arguments, instead of living off life. It’s the same thing with the Arabs. They’ve learned from the Jews how to eat their hearts out and how to eat each other and how to eat people instead of ordinary food. I’m not saying the Arabs aren’t bastards. They are, and worse. So what? Bastards are still human beings. Not shit. It’s a shame for them to die. In the end the Jews will finish them off or they’ll finish the Jews off or they’ll finish each other off and there’ll be nothing left in this country again except the Bible and the Koran and the foxes and burned ruins.”

  “What’ll you do when they call you up?”

  “Oh, they’ll manage without someone like me. Substandard and all that. So what? I don’t give a damn. Even without the army I’m going to do something with my life: at sea, perhaps, or maybe in optics. Or else I’ll start a commune here in Zikhron for the loonies. They can make things grow instead of making trouble. So there’ll be food for the state. A commune of nut cases. The first thing I did was burn the shit those chicks brought with them. I’m against getting stoned. Better to work all day and live it up at night. Crying again? Did I say something wrong? I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to get on your nerves. Sorry. Don’t forget you’re not the first mother who’s had a nut case for a child. At least you’ve got Yifat. Only don’t let Sommo fill her head with his Bible and his bullshit.”

  “Boaz.”

  “What?”

  “Have you got some time now? A couple of hours?”

  “What for?”

  “Come to Haifa with me. Let’s go and visit your grandfather. You remember you’ve got a sick grandfather in Haifa? The one who built this house for you?”

  He said nothing. Suddenly he moved his massive hand like lightning, and landed a gorilla blow on his naked chest, brushing the squashed horse fly to the ground.

  “Boaz?”

  “Yes. I remember. Just. But what’s all this about going to visit him all of a sudden? What do I need from him? Anyway, whenever I go out, even just here in Zikhron to buy building stuff, either I get on people’s nerves or they get on mine or a fight starts. Tell you what: You tell him from me that if he’s got anything saved up he can send me some money too. Tell him the idiot takes from anyone who’s giving. I fancy building a really serious telescope. Something straight out of the movies. So at night from here you’d be able to watch the spaceships flying over the country. And the sea with no water that’s up there on the moon; maybe you’ve heard about it. If only people took a little more notice of the stars and that, they’d take less notice of the hassle they get the whole time. And after that, we’ll see. Perhaps a yacht. We’re not short of a plank or two. We’ll be able to cruise on the sea. It clears all the bullshit out of your head.

  “Right, food’s ready. Look, over there behind the window; there’s the tap I fixed yesterday. Go and wash your face and let’s forget about all the soul-searching. Your make-up’s got all smudged. I had Cindy crying last night too. Never mind, it rinses out the soul. Sandra. Put food for my mother, also. No? Leaving? Had enough of me? Because I said ‘fuck’ and all that? That’s the way it is, Ilana. There’s a bus stop two hundred yards from the back gate. So go out that way. Maybe it might have been better for you if you’d never come—you were okay when you arrived and now you’re leaving in tears. Wait. I found these coins down in the cellar. Underneath the old man’s boiler. Give them to Yifat and tell her they’re from me, Bozaz [sic!], and I’m going to eat her little nose. Don’t forget you can come back whenever you want to and stay as long as you like. Free as ai
r.”

  Why did you do it, Alec? Why did you plant him in that ghost-ridden house? Was it really just because you were dying to beat Michel at his own game? To tear the fine web of affection that was beginning to join my little man and that overgrown savage? To push your son back into the jungle? Like a prison guard separating a pair of convicts who strike up a friendship in their cell and putting them in solitary confinement. “As after a plane crash,” you wrote in your neon light letter, “we analyzed together, by correspondence, the black box of our lives.”

  We deciphered nothing, Alec. We only exchanged poisoned arrows. My lust for revenge is slowly ebbing. Dead and done for. I’ll give up. Just let me be in your arms. Resting my fingers on the nape of your neck. Smoothing your tousled grey hair. Squeezing a little blackhead occasionally on your shoulder or in the corner of your chin. Sitting beside you in the wind-lashed jeep, careering along a remote mountain road, getting a thrill from your driving, which is as aggressive as a sword thrust yet as careful and precise as a good tennis shot. Sneaking up behind you with bare feet and sinking my fingers in your hair as you sit bent over your desk in the early hours of the morning, glowing in the electric aura of your desk lamp, decoding with surgical precision some savage mystical text or other. I’ll be your wife and servant. La commedia è finita. From now on, thy will be done. I’m waiting.

  Ilana

  Notes made by Prof. A. A. Gideon on little cards.

  185. Faith out of loss of faith: the more his faith in himself is destroyed, the stronger grows his feverish faith in salvation, the more powerful his urgent need to be saved. The redeemer is as mighty as you are tiny, worthless, of no account. Henri Bergson says: It is not true that faith moves mountains. On the contrary, the essence of faith is the ability no longer to notice anything, not even mountains moving in front of your eyes. A kind of hermetic screen, absolutely fact-proof.

  186. In proportion as he loses his self-esteem, his raison d’être, the very significance of his life, so there is magnified, exalted, glorified, and sanctified the justification of his religion, his people, his race, the ideal he has clung to or the movement to which he has sworn allegiance.

  186a. To assimilate entirely, therefore, the I within the We. To shrink to a blind cell within a gigantic, timeless, omnipotent, sublime organism. To blend to the point of self-denial, to the utmost limit, in the nation, the movement, the race, like a drop in the ocean of the faithful. Hence: the various kinds of uniform.

  187. A man minds his own private business as long as he has business and as long as he has privacy. In their absence, for fear of the emptiness of his life, he turns feverishly to other people’s business. To straighten them out. To chastise them. To enlighten every fool and crush every deviant. To bestow favors on others or to persecute them savagely. Between the altruistic zealot and the murderous zealot there is of course a difference of moral degree, but there is no difference in kind. Murderousness and self-sacrifice are simply two sides of the same coin. Domination and benevolence, aggression and devotion, repression and self-repression, saving the souls of those who are different from you and annihilating them: these are not pairs of opposites but merely different expressions of man’s emptiness and worthlessness. “His insufficiency to himself,” in the phrase of Pascal (who was infected himself).

  188. “For want of anything to do with his empty, sterile life, he falls on the necks of others or reaches for their throats” (Eric Hoffer, The True Believer).

  189. And this is the secret of the surprising similarity between the charitable maiden who labors night and day for the outcasts of society and the ideological brigand, the head of a secret service, whose life is utterly dedicated to the elimination of rivals, or aliens, or enemies of the revolution: their modesty. Their making do with little. Their sanctimoniousness, which can be sniffed from afar. Their habit of secret self-pity, and hence their radiation of megawatts of guilt feelings. The shared hostility of the maiden and the inquisitor toward anything that might be taken for “luxury” or “self-indulgence.” Dedicated missionary and bloodthirsty purge-master: the same gentle manners. The same flowery politeness. The same smell of undefined sourness emanates from the two of them. The same ascetical style of dress. The same taste (trite, sentimental) in music and art. And, in particular, the same active vocabulary, characterized by hackneyed flourishes, affected modesty, avoidance of all vulgarity—toilet instead of lavatory, pass away instead of die, solution instead of annihilation, purge instead of slaughter. And, of course, salvation, redemption. The shared slogan: “I am only a humble instrument.” (I am an “instrument,” therefore I am: “cog”—ergo sum?!)

  190. Torturer and victim. Inquisitor and martyr. Crucifier and crucified. The mystery of the mutual understanding, of the secret fellowship that frequently grows up between them. The interdependence. The covert mutual admiration. The ease with which they are able to exchange roles with changing circumstances.

  191. “Sacrificing private life on the altar of sacred ideals” is nothing more than a desperate clinging to ideals when private life has died.

  200. In other words: with the death of the soul the walking corpse turns into a totally public being.

  201. “The sanctity of duty”: a convulsive grasping of any life raft that floats within reach. The nature of the life raft almost incidental.

  202. “Purging oneself of all trace of selfishness”: a selfish survival stratagem, verging on blind instinct.

  ***

  Prof. A. Gideon

  Midwest University

  Chicago, Ill., U.S.A.

  Jerusalem

  13.8.76

  My dear Dr. Strangelove,

  At this moment in time it is not clear to me whether I am fired or not. Our purchaser is prepared to pay you thirteen for the property in Zikhron, swears that that is his final offer, and threatens to withdraw if he has not received a positive answer within a fortnight. As for poor Roberto, I have almost managed to persuade him to return your files to me of his own free will. Apparently he is beginning to realize what sort of customer he is dealing with. While I, for my part, have decided to wipe away the spittle and carry on: I shall not abandon you to your lunacy or allow you to bring calamity on yourself. Apparently you suspect me of selling you to Sommo, but the truth is the contrary: All my efforts have been directed to buying him for ourselves, and to put a bridle on him (in the form of my son-in-law Zohar). And in the meantime, in accordance with the instructions you sent me in your last cable, here is a summary of the latest news: It transpires that Baron de Sommo is buying himself a fancy apartment in the refurbished Jewish Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem. All the evidence points to its being a bargain deal between him and one of the members of his tribe. In addition to which he is learning to drive and making plans to buy a car. An expensive suit of clothes he has now (although when he is wearing the alarming object he has selected, I regret bitterly ever having advised him to buy one). His Jewish Fellowship organization he has recently converted into a sort of reconnaissance unit or security guard in the service of an investment company called Tentpeg that he and Zohar Etgar have set up in partnership with a group of pious investors and with some discreet backing from Paris, anent which I shall report to you once I am convinced that you have returned to your senses. The joint financial handle of this Tentpeg is held, of course, by Zohar (with my Holy Spirit illuminating it from on high). The various devout partners take care of the ethical side of the business, that is to say, they have managed to convince the revenue authorities to recognize them as a sort of orphanage, brackets “charitable status.”

  Meanwhile, our Sommo is starring in the role of foreign minister. He is involved in expert lobbying. He is swimming around in the corridors of power like a fish or a seaweed. Spending his days and his nights in the company of party hacks, MPs, secretary generals, and director generals. Circulating in and around his brother’s court, expounding Jewish love to the officials of the Military Administration, planting the longing for re
demption in the Ministry of Trade and Industry, causing messianic stirrings among the staff of the Israel Land Authority, preaching, beseeching, cajoling, quoting Holy Writ, spreading a thick cloud of guilt feelings, with one hand upon his heart and the other around his interlocutor’s shoulder, sweetening the whole thing with Biblical honey, dusting it with homilies, seasoning it with a pinch of gossip, rolling up permits and certificates, and, in sum, tirelessly paving the way for the Last Days and also speedily consolidating our investments to the south of Jerusalem. At the head of the third chapter of your excellent book you quote an epigram from Jesus of Nazareth, who admonished his disciples to be simultaneously “as cunning as vipers and as innocent as doves.” On the basis of this specification Sommo might be promoted to the rank of senior apostle. Soon, according to information from our good friend Shlomo Zand, he is intending to set out on an urgent mission to Paris with his French passport, and I’ll wager that he will return home laden with goodies. The final outcome will be that, thanks to him, we—that is, you and I, Alex—shall receive a double invitation to Paradise because of our part in the redemption of the land.