A Tale of Love and Darkness

  In fact, I work rather like him myself. I work like a watchmaker or an old-fashioned silversmith: one eye screwed up, the other fitted with a watchmaker's magnifying glass, with fine tweezers between my fingers, with bits of paper rather than cards in front of me on my desk on which I have written various words, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, and bits of dismantled sentences, fragments of expressions and descriptions and all kinds of tentative combinations. Every now and again I pick up one of these particles, these molecules of text, carefully with my tweezers, hold it up to the light and examine it carefully, turn it in various directions, lean forward and rub or polish it, hold it up to the light again, rub it again slightly, then lean forward and fit it into the texture of the cloth I am weaving. Then I stare at it from different angles, still not entirely satisfied, and I take it out again and replace it with another word, or try to fit it into another niche in the same sentence, then remove it, file it down a tiny bit more, and try to fit it in again, perhaps at a slightly different angle. Or deploy it differently. Perhaps farther down the sentence. Or at the beginning of the next one. Or should I cut it off and make it into a one-word sentence on its own?

  I stand up. Walk around the room. Return to the desk. Stare at it for a few moments, or longer, cross out the whole sentence or tear up the whole page. I give up in despair. I curse myself aloud and curse writing in general and the language as a whole, despite which I sit down and start putting the whole thing together all over again.

  Writing a novel, I said once, is like trying to make the Mountains of Edom out of Lego blocks. Or to build the whole of Paris, buildings, squares, and boulevards, down to the last street bench, out of matchsticks.

  If you write an eighty-thousand-word novel, you have to make about a quarter of a million decisions, not just decisions about the outline of the plot, who will live or die, who will fall in love or be unfaithful, who will make a fortune or make a fool of himself, the names and faces of the characters, their habits and occupations, the chapter divisions, the title of the book (these are the simplest, broadest decisions); not just what to narrate and what to gloss over, what comes first and what comes last, what to spell out and what to allude to indirectly (these are also fairly broad decisions); but you also have to make thousands of finer decisions, such as whether to write, in the third sentence from the end of that paragraph, "blue" or "bluish." Or should it be "pale blue"? Or "sky blue"? Or "royal blue"? Or should it really be "blue-gray"? And should this "grayish blue" be at the beginning of the sentence, or should it only shine out at the end? Or in the middle? Or should it simply be caught up in the flow of a complex sentence, full of subordinate clauses? Or would it be best just to write the three words "the evening light," without trying to color it in, either "gray-blue" or "dusty blue" or whatever?

  From my early childhood on I was the victim of a thorough, protracted brainwashing: Uncle Joseph's temple of books in Talpiot, Father's strait-jacket of books in our apartment in Kerem Avraham, my mother's refuge of books, Grandpa Alexander's poems, our neighbor Mr. Zarchi's novels, my father's index cards and word play, and even Saul Tcherni-khowsky's pungent hug, and Mr. Agnon, who cast several shadows at once, with his currants.

  But the truth is that secretly I turned my back on the card I had pinned to the door of my room. For several years I dreamed only of growing up and escaping from these warrens of books and becoming a fireman. The fire and water, the uniform, the heroism, the shiny silver helmet, the wail of the siren, and the stares of the girls and the flashing lights, the panic in the street, the thunderous charge of the red engine, leaving a trail of terror in its wake.

  And then the ladders, the hose uncoiling endlessly, the glow of the flames reflected like gushing blood in the red of the engine, and finally, the climax, the girl or woman carried unconscious on the shoulder of her gallant rescuer, the self-sacrificing devotion to duty, the scorched skin, eyelashes, and hair, the infernal suffocating smoke. And then immediately afterward—the praise, the rivers of tearful love from dizzy women swooning toward you in admiration and gratitude, and above all the fairest of them all, the one you bravely rescued from the flames with the tender strength of your own arms.

  But who was it that through most of my childhood I rescued in my fantasies over and over again from the fiery furnace and whose love I earned in return? Perhaps that is not the right way to ask the question, but rather: What terrible, incredible premonition came to the arrogant heart of that foolish, dreamy child and hinted to him, without revealing the outcome, signaled to him without giving him any chance to interpret, while there was still time, the veiled hint of what would happen to his mother one winter's evening?

  Because already at the age of five I imagined myself, over and over again, as a bold, calm fireman, resplendent in uniform and helmet, bravely darting on his own into the fierce flames, risking his life, and rescuing her, unconscious, from the fire (while his feeble, verbal father merely stood there stunned, helplessly staring at the conflagration).

  And so, while embodying in his own eyes the fire-hardened heroism of the new Hebrew man (precisely as prescribed for him by his father), he dashes in and saves her life, and in doing so he snatches his mother forever from his father's grasp and spreads his own wings over her.

  But from what dark threads could I have embroidered this oedipal fantasy, which did not leave me for several years? Is it possible that somehow, like a smell of faraway smoke, that woman, Irina, Ira, infiltrated my fantasy of the fireman and the rescued woman? Ira Stelet-skaya, the wife of the engineer from Rovno whose husband used to lose her every night at cards. Poor Ira Steletskaya, who fell in love with Anton the coachman's son and lost her children, until one day she emptied a can of paraffin and burned herself to death in his tar-papered shack. But all that happened fifteen years before I was born, in a country I had never seen. And surely my mother would never have been so crazy as to tell a terrible story like that to a four- or five-year-old child?

  When my father was not at home, as I sat at the kitchen table sorting lentils while my mother stood with her back to me, peeling vegetables or squeezing oranges or shaping meatballs on the work surface, she would tell me all sorts of strange and, yes, frightening stories. Little Peer, the orphan son of Jon, the grandson of Rasmus Gynt, must have been just like me, as he and his poor widowed mother sat alone in their mountain cabin on those long, windy, snowy nights, and he absorbed and stored in his heart her mystical, half-crazed stories, about Soria-Moria Castle beyond the fjord, the snatching of the bride, the trolls in the hall of the mountain king, and the green ghouls, the button-molder, and the imps and pixies and also about the terrible Boyg.

  The kitchen itself, with its smoke-blackened walls and sunken floor, was as narrow and low as a solitary confinement cell. Next to the stove we had two matchboxes, one for new matches and one for used matches, which, for reasons of economy, we used to light a burner or the Primus from a burner that was already lit.

  My mother's stories may have been strange, frightening, but they were captivating, full of caves and towers, abandoned villages and broken bridges suspended above the void. Her stories did not begin at the beginning or conclude with a happy ending but flickered in the half light, wound around themselves, emerged from the mists for a moment, amazed you, sent shivers up your spine, then disappeared back into the darkness before you had time to see what was in front of your eyes. That is how her story about the old man Alleluyev was, and the one about Tanitchka and her three husbands, the blacksmith brothers who killed one another, the one about the bear who adopted a dead child, the ghost in the cave that fell in love with the woodman's wife, or the ghost of Nikita the waggoner that came back from the dead to charm and seduce the murderer's daughter.

  Her stories were full of blackberries, blueberries, wild strawberries, truffles, and mushrooms. With no thought for my tender years my mother took me to places where few children had ever trodden before, and as she did so, she opened up before me an exciting fan of words, as though
she were picking me up in her arms and raising me higher and higher to reveal vertiginous heights of language: her fields were sun-dappled or dew-drenched, her forests were dense or impenetrable, the trees towered, the meadows were verdant, the mountain, a primeval mountain, loomed up, the castles dominated, the turrets towered, the plains slumbered and sprawled, and in the valleys, which she called vales, springs, streams, and rivulets were constantly gushing, babbling, and purling.

  My mother lived a solitary life, shut up at home for most of the time. Apart from her friends Lilenka, Esterka, and Fania Weissmann, who had also been at the Tarbuth gymnasium in Rovno, my mother found no sense or interest in Jerusalem; she did not like the holy places and the many ancient sites. The synagogues and rabbinic academies, churches, convents, and mosques all seemed much of a muchness to her, dreary and smelling of religious men who did not wash often enough. Her sensitive nostrils recoiled from the odor of unwashed flesh, even under a thick cloud of incense.

  My father did not have much time for religion either. He considered the priests of every faith as rather suspect, ignorant men who fostered antique hatreds, promoted fears, devised lying doctrines, shed crocodile tears, and traded in fake holy objects and false relics and all kinds of vain beliefs and prejudices. He suspected everyone who made a living from religion of some kind of sugared charlatanism. He enjoyed quoting Heine's remark that the priest and the rabbi both smell (or in Father's toned-down version, "Neither of them has a rosy smell! And nor has the Muslim Mufti, Haj Amin the Nazi-lover!"). On the other hand, he did believe at times in a vague providence, a "presiding spirit of the people" or "Rock of Israel," or in the wonders of the "creative Jewish genius," and he also pinned his hopes on the redeeming and reviving powers of art: "The priests of beauty and the artists' brush," he used to recite dramatically from Tchernikhowsky's sonnet cycle, "and those who master verse's mystic charm / redeem the world by melody and song." He believed that artists were superior to other human beings, more perceptive, more honest, unbesmirched by ugliness. The question of how some artists, despite all this, could have followed Stalin, or even Hitler, troubled and saddened him. He often argued with himself about this: artists who were captivated by the charms of tyrants and placed themselves at the service of repression and wickedness did not deserve the title "priests of beauty." Sometimes he tried to explain to himself that they had sold their souls to the devil, like Goethe's Faust.

  The Zionist fervor of those who built new suburbs, who purchased and cultivated virgin land and paved roads, while it intoxicated my father to some extent, passed my mother by. She would usually put the newspaper down after a glance at the headlines. Politics she considered a disaster. Chitchat and gossip bored her. When we had visitors, or when we went to call on Uncle Joseph and Aunt Zippora in Talpiot, or the Zarchis, the Abramskis, the Rudnickis, Mr. Agnon, the Hananis, or Hannah and Hayim Toren, my mother rarely joined in the conversation. Yet sometimes her mere presence made men talk and talk with all their might while she just sat silent, smiling faintly, as though she was trying to decipher from their argument why Mr. Zarchi maintained that particular view and Mr. Hanani the opposite one: would the argument be any different if they suddenly changed around, and each defended the other's position while attacking the one he had argued for previously?

  Clothes, objects, hairdos, and furniture interested my mother only as peepholes through which she could peer into people's inner lives. Whenever we went into someone's home, or even a waiting room, my mother would always sit up straight in a corner, with her hands folded across her chest like a model pupil in a boarding school for young ladies, and stare carefully, unhurriedly, at the curtains, the upholstery, the pictures on the walls, the books, the china, the objects displayed on the shelves, like a detective amassing details, some of which might eventually combine to yield a clue.

  Other people's secrets fascinated her, but not on the level of gossip—who fancied whom, who was going out with whom, who had bought what. She was like someone studying the placing of tiles in a mosaic or of the pieces in a huge jigsaw puzzle. She listened attentively to conversations, and with that faint smile hovering unawares on her lips she would observe the speaker carefully, watching the mouth, the wrinkles on the face, what the hands were doing, what the body was saying or trying to hide, where the eyes were looking, any change of position, and whether the feet were restless or still inside the shoes. She rarely contributed to the conversation, but if she came out of her silence and spoke a sentence or two, the conversation usually did not go back to being as it was before she intervened.

  Maybe it was that in those days women were allotted the role of the audience in conversations. If a woman suddenly opened her mouth and said a sentence or two, it caused some surprise.

  Now and then my mother gave private lessons. Occasionally she went to a lecture or a literary reading. Most of the time, though, she stayed at home. She did not sit around, but worked hard. She worked silently and efficiently. I never heard her humming or grumbling while she was doing the housework. She cooked, baked, did the washing, put the shopping away, ironed, cleaned, tidied, washed the dishes, sliced vegetables, kneaded dough. But when the apartment was perfectly tidy, the washing up was done, and the laundry had been folded and put away neatly, then my mother curled up in her corner and read. At ease with her body, breathing slowly and gently, she sat on the sofa and read. With her bare feet tucked under her legs, she read. Bent over the book that was propped on her knees, she read. Her back curved, her neck bent forward, her shoulders drooping, her whole body shaped like a crescent moon, she read. With her face, half hidden by her dark hair, leaning over the page, she read.

  She read every evening, while I played outside in the yard and my father sat at his desk writing his research on cramped index cards, and she also read after the supper things were washed up, she read while my father and I sat together at his desk, my head slanting, lightly resting on his shoulder, while we sorted stamps, checked them in the catalogue, and stuck them in the album, she read after I had gone to bed and Father had gone back to his little cards, she read after the shutters had been shut and the sofa had been turned over to reveal the double bed that was hidden inside it, and she went on reading even after the ceiling light had been switched off and my father had taken off his glasses, turned his back to her, and fallen into the sleep of well-meaning people who firmly believe that everything will turn out well, and she went on reading: she suffered from insomnia that grew worse with time, until in the last year of her life various doctors saw fit to prescribe strong pills and all sorts of sleeping potions and solutions and recommended a fortnight's real rest in a family hotel in Safed or the Health Fund sanatorium in Arza.

  Consequently my father borrowed a few pounds from his parents and volunteered to look after the child and the house, and my mother really did go off alone to the sanatorium in Arza. But even there she did not stop reading; on the contrary, she read almost day and night. From morning to evening she sat in a deck chair in the pine woods on the flank of the hill and read, and in the evening she read on the lit veranda while the other guests danced or played cards or took part in all sorts of other activities. And at night she would go down to the little sitting room next to the reception desk and read for most of the night, so as not to disturb the woman who shared her room. She read Maupassant, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Gnessin, Balzac, Flaubert, Dickens, Chamisso, Thomas Mann, Iwaszkiewicz, Knut Hamsun, Kleist, Moravia, Hermann Hesse, Mauriac, Agnon, Turgenev, as well as Somerset Maugham, Stefan Zweig, and André Maurois—she hardly took her eyes off a book for the whole of her break. When she came back to Jerusalem, she looked tired and pale, with dark shadows under her eyes, as if she had been living it up every night. When Daddy and I asked her how she had enjoyed her holiday, she smiled and said: "I haven't really thought about it."

  Once, when I was seven or eight, my mother said to me, as we sat on the last seat but one on the bus to the clinic or the shoe shop, that while it was true that books could chan
ge with the years just as much as people could, the difference was that whereas people would always drop you when they could no longer get any advantage or pleasure or interest or at least a good feeling from you, a book would never abandon you. Naturally you sometimes dropped them, maybe for several years, or even forever. But they, even if you betrayed them, would never turn their backs on you: they would go on waiting for you silently and humbly on their shelf. They would wait for ten years. They wouldn't complain. One night, when you suddenly needed a book, even at three in the morning, even if it was a book you had abandoned and erased from your heart for years and years, it would never disappoint you, it would come down from its shelf and keep you company in your moment of need. It would not try to get its own back or make excuses or ask itself if it was worth its while or if you deserved it or if you still suited each other, it would come at once as soon as you asked. A book would never let you down.

  What was the title of the very first book I read on my own? That is, Father read me the book in bed so often that I must have ended up knowing it by heart, word for word, and once when Father could not read to me, I took the book to bed with me and recited the whole of it to myself, from beginning to end, pretending to read, pretending to be Father, turning the page at the precise gap between two words where Father used to turn it every night.

  Next day I asked Father to follow with his finger as he read, and I followed his finger, and by the time we had done this five or six times, I could identify each word by its shape and its place in the line.