A Tale of Love and Darkness

  I hated him. For a couple of days. Out of shame. And after a couple of days I started hating my mother, with her migraines and her play-acting and her sit-in in her chair by the window, she was the one who was to blame because she had pushed him to look for signs of life. Then I hated myself because I had let Lolik tempt me like the fox and the cat in Pinocchio to skip Mr. Avisar's class. Why didn't I have a single ounce of strength of character? Why was I so easily influenced? And a week later it had completely slipped my mind, and I recalled what I had seen through the window of Sichel's Café only one bad night at Kibbutz Hulda when I was about sixteen. I forgot, just as I forgot all about the morning I came home early from school and found my mother sitting quietly in her blue flannel dressing gown, not in her chair by the window but outside in the yard, in a deck chair, under the bare pomegranate tree, sitting there calmly with an expression on her face that looked like a smile but wasn't; her book was lying as usual upside down open on her lap and torrential rain was pouring down on her and must have been doing so for an hour or two because when I stood her up and dragged her indoors, she was soaked and frozen like a drenched bird that would never fly again. I got her to the bathroom and fetched her some dry clothes from her closet and I told her off like a grown-up and I gave her instructions, through the bathroom door, and she didn't answer but she did everything I told her to do, only she didn't stop smiling that smile that wasn't a smile. I didn't say a word to Father, because Mother's eyes asked me to keep it a secret. And to Aunt Lilia all I said was something like this:

  "But you're completely wrong, Auntie Lilia. I'll never be a writer or a poet, or a scholar either, there's no way I will, because I haven't got any feelings. Feelings disgust me. I'm going to be a farmer. I'm going to live in a kibbutz. Or maybe someday I'll be a dog poisoner. With a syringe full of arsenic."

  In the spring she felt better. On the morning of the spring festival of Tu Bishvat, the day that Chaim Weizmann, as president of the Provisional Council of State, opened the meeting of the Constituent Assembly that became the First Knesset, my mother put on her blue dress and asked Father and me to join her in a little outing to the Tel Arza woods. I thought she carried herself well and looked pretty in this dress, and when we finally left our book-laden basement and went out into the spring sunlight, there was a warm sparkle of affection in her eyes. Father put his arm in hers and I ran a little way ahead of them, like a puppy, to give them a chance to talk to each other, or maybe just because I was so happy.

  Mother had made some cheese sandwiches with slices of tomato, hard-boiled egg, red pepper, and anchovy, and Father had made a flask of lukewarm orange juice that he had squeezed himself. When we got to the woods, we spread out a small tarpaulin and sprawled on it, inhaling the smell of the pines that had drunk their fill of the winter rains. Rocky slopes that had grown a deep fuzz of green peeped at us through the trees. We could see the houses of the Arab village of Shuafat across the border, and the minaret of Nebi Samwil rose slim and tall on the horizon. Father observed that the word for "woods" in Hebrew was similar to the words for "deaf," "silent," "industry," and "plowing," which led into a short lecture about the charms of language. Since Mother was in such a good mood, she gave him a list of other similar words.

  Then she told us about a Ukrainian neighbor, an agile, good-looking boy who could predict exactly which morning the rye would start sprouting and the first shoots of beetroot would appear. All the Gentile girls were crazy about this boy, Stephan, Stepasha they called him, or Stiopa, but he was madly in love with a Jewish teacher at the Tarbuth school, so much so that he once tried to drown himself in a whirlpool in the river, but he was such a wonderful swimmer that he could not drown, he was carried along to an estate on the bank of the river, and the woman who owned the estate seduced him, and a few months later she bought an inn for him, and he's probably still there, ugly and gross from too much drinking and womanizing.

  For once Father forgot to silence her when she used the word "womanizing," and didn't even shout, "Vidish Malchik!" He laid his head on her knee, stretched out on the tarpaulin, and chewed a blade of grass. I did the same: I lay down on the tarpaulin, put my head on Mother's other knee, chewed a blade of grass, and filled my lungs with the intoxicating warm air, full of fresh scents and the hum of insects drunk with the spring, and washed clean by the winter wind and rain. How good it would be to stop time, and to stop writing this too, a couple of years before her death, with the picture of the three of us in the Tel Arza woods on that spring festival: my mother in her blue dress, with a red silk scarf tied gracefully around her neck, sitting upright and looking pretty, then leaning back against the trunk of a tree, with my father's head on one knee and mine on the other, stroking our faces and hair with her cool hand, as throngs of birds shrilled overhead in the spring-cleaned pine trees.

  She was really much better that spring. No longer did she sit day and night in her chair facing the window; she didn't recoil from the electric light or start at every noise. She no longer neglected the housework and the hours of reading that she loved. She had fewer migraines, and she almost recovered her appetite. And once again it was enough for her to spend five minutes in front of the mirror, a dab of powder, a touch of lipstick and eyeshadow, a brush of the hair, another couple of minutes carefully making her choice in front of the open closet door, to appear to all of us mysterious, pretty, and radiant. The usual visitors reappeared at our apartment, the Bar-Yitzhar-Itselevitches, the Abramskis, devout Revisionists who loathed the Labor government, Hannah and Hayim Toren, the Rudnickis, and Tosia and Gustav Krochmal from Danzig, who had the dolls' hospital in Geula Street. The men sometimes shot a hasty, embarrassed look at my mother and hurriedly looked away again.

  And we resumed going on Friday evenings to light candles and eat gefilte fish or stuffed chicken neck sewn up with a needle and thread at Grandma Shlomit and Grandpa Alexander's round table. On Saturday mornings we sometimes went to visit the Rudnickis, and after lunch, almost every Sabbath, we crossed the whole of Jerusalem, from north to south, on the pilgrimage to Uncle Joseph in Talpiot.

  Once, over supper, Mother suddenly told us about a standard lamp that had stood beside her armchair in her rented room in Prague when she was a student there. Father stopped on his way home from work the next day at two furniture shops in King George Street and an electrical goods shop in Ben Yehuda Street: he compared, went back to the first shop, and came home with the most beautiful standard lamp. It had cost him nearly a quarter of his monthly salary. Mother kissed us both on our foreheads and promised us with her strange smile that the lamp would give us light long after she had gone. Father, drunk on victory, did not hear these words of hers because he was never a good listener and because his torrent of verbal energy had already swept him on, to the proto-Semitic root meaning light, NWR, the Aramaic form menarta and the Arabic equivalent manar.

  I heard but I didn't understand. Or I understood but I didn't grasp the significance.

  Then the rain started again. Once again Father asked permission, after I had been sent to bed, to "go out and see some people." He promised to come back not too late, and not to make a noise, he brought her a cup of warm milk, and went out with his super-shiny shoes, with a triangle of white handkerchief peering out of his jacket pocket, like his father, trailing a scent of aftershave. As he went past my window, I heard him open his umbrella with a click, humming out of tune, "What delicate hands she had, no man dared to tou-ou-ouch her," or "Her eyes were like the northern star, but her heart was as hot as the de-e-e-sert."

  But Mother and I deceived him while his back was turned. Although he was so strict about lights-out for me, "nine on the dot and not a second later," as soon as the sound of his footsteps faded down the wet street I leaped out of bed and ran to her, to hear more and more stories. She sat in her chair in a room whose walls were lined with row upon row of books, with more piled up on the floor, and I knelt on the rug at her feet in my pajamas, with my head resting on her warm thigh, li
stening with my eyes closed. There were no lights on in the apartment apart from the new standard lamp by her chair. The wind and rain pounded at the shutters. Occasional volleys of low thunder rolled across Jerusalem. Father had gone off and left me and Mother with her stories. Once, she told me about the empty apartment above her rented room in Prague when she was a student. No one had lived there for two years except, so the neighbors said, in a whisper, the ghosts of two little dead girls. There had been a big fire in the apartment, and it had been impossible to save the girls, Emilia and Jana. After the tragedy, the girls' parents had emigrated. The soot-blackened apartment was locked and shuttered. It was not renovated or rented. Sometimes, the neighbors whispered, muffled sounds of laughter and mischief were heard, or crying in the middle of the night. I never heard sounds like that, Mother said, but sometimes I was almost certain that faucets were turned on, furniture was moved, bare feet pattered from room to room. Perhaps somebody was using the empty apartment for secret love-making or for some other shady purpose. When you grow up, you'll discover that almost everything your ears hear at night can be interpreted in more than one way. In fact, not only at night and not only your ears. What your eyes see, too, even in broad daylight, can almost always be understood in various ways.

  On other nights she told me about Eurydice and Orpheus. She told me about the eight-year-old daughter of a well-known Nazi, a brutal killer who was hanged by the Allies at Nuremberg after the war: his little daughter was sent to an institution for juvenile delinquents just because she was caught decorating his photograph with flowers. She told me about a young timber merchant from one of the villages near Rovno who got lost in the forest one stormy night in winter and disappeared, but six years later somebody secretly deposited his worn-out boots at the foot of his widow's bed in the middle of the night. She told me about old Tolstoy, who left his home at the end of his life and expired in a station master's cottage at a remote railway junction called Astapovo.

  My mother and I were like Peer Gynt and his mother Ase on those winter nights:

  My young lad and I were companions in grief ...

  As we sat in our home there, my young Peer and I—

  seeking solace from sorrow and blessed relief ...

  So all sorts of adventures we started to spin

  of princes and trolls and all manner of beasts;

  and of bride-rapes as well. Oh, but who would have thought

  that those devilish tales would have stuck in his head?*

  Often we played a game on those nights, making up a story alternately: Mother would start a story, I would continue it, then the thread passed back to her, and then to me again, and so on. My father would get home just before or after midnight, and at the sound of his footsteps outside, we instantly switched off the lamp, jumped into bed like a pair of naughty children, and pretended to be sleeping the sleep of the just. Half asleep, I heard him moving about the little apartment, undressing, drinking some milk from the icebox, going to the bathroom, turning on the faucet, turning it off, flushing the toilet, turning the faucet on and off again, humming an old love song under his breath, drinking some more milk, and padding barefoot to the book room and the sofa, which had been opened into a double bed, presumably lying down next to Mother, who was feigning sleep, internalizing his humming, humming inside himself for another minute or two, then dropping off to sleep, and sleeping like a babe until six in the morning. At six he woke first, shaved, dressed, and put on Mother's apron to squeeze us both some oranges, warming the juice, as always, over a pan of boiling water, because cold juice is well known to give you a chill, then bringing each of us a glass of juice in bed.

  One of those nights my mother couldn't sleep again. She didn't like lying on the sofa bed next to Father, who was sleeping soundly while his glasses slept quietly on the shelf next to him, so she got up and instead of going to sit in her chair facing the window or to the gloomy kitchen, she got into bed with me, cuddled me, and kissed me till I woke up. Then she asked me in a whisper, right into my ear, if I minded if we whispered together tonight. Just the two of us. I'm sorry I woke you up but I really need to talk to you tonight. And this time in the dark I heard in her voice a smile that was a real smile, not a shadow of one.

  When Zeus discovered that Prometheus had managed to steal a spark from the fire that he had withheld from the mortals as a punishment, he almost exploded with rage. Rarely had the other gods seen their king so sullen and angry. Day after day he let his thunder roll, and no one dared approach him. In his rage the furious father ofthe gods decided to bring a great disaster upon the race ofmortals in the guise of a wonderful present. So he commanded Hephaestus, the blacksmith god, to form a beautiful woman out ofclay. The goddess Athena taught her to spin and sew and clothed her in fine garments. The goddess Aphrodite endowed her with graceful charms that beguiled all men and enflamed their desires. Hermes, the god of merchants and thieves, taught her to lie without batting an eyelid, to captivate and to deceive. The beautiful temptress was named Pandora, meaning "She who possesses all gifts." And then Zeus, thirsty for vengeance, ordered her to be given as a bride to Prometheus's foolish brother. In vain did Prometheus warn his brother to beware of the gifts of the gods. When the brother saw this beauty queen, he leaped with joy upon Pandora, who had brought with her as a dowry a casket filled with gifts from all the gods of Olympus, which she was instructed never to open. One day Pandora lifted the lid of the casket of gifts, and out flew illness, loneliness, injustice, cruelty, and death. That is how all the troubles that we see around us came into this world. If you haven't fallen asleep, I wanted to tell you that in my opinion the troubles existed already. There were the troubles of Prometheus and Zeus, and the troubles of Pandora herself, not to mention simple people like us. The troubles did not come out of Pandora's box, Pandora's box was invented because of troubles. It was opened because of troubles, too. Will you go and have your hair cut after school tomorrow? Just look how long it's grown.

  *Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt, act II, scene 2.

  50

  SOMETIMES MY parents took me with them when they went "into town," that is to say to King George Street or Ben Yehuda Street, to one of the three or four main cafés that may have been reminiscent of cafés in the cities of Central Europe in the interwar years. In these cafés Hebrew and foreign-language newspapers were at the disposal of customers, fixed into long sticks, as well as a selection of weeklies and monthlies in various languages. Beneath the brass and crystal chandeliers a subdued foreign murmur mingled with blue-gray cigarette smoke and a whiff ofother worlds, in which tranquil lives of study and companionship proceeded at a peaceful pace.

  Well-groomed ladies and distinguished-looking gentlemen sat at the tables, conversing quietly. Waiters and waitresses in white jackets with white tea towels folded neatly over their arms floated among the tables serving piping-hot coffee on top of which floated pure, curly angels of whipped cream, Ceylon tea with the essence served separately in little china pots, liqueur-filled pastries, croissants, apple strudel with cream, chocolate cake with vanilla icing, mulled wine on winter evenings, and little glasses of brandy and cherry brandy. (In 1949 and 1950 there still was only ersatz coffee, and the chocolate and cream were probably ersatz too.)

  In these cafés my parents sometimes met a different group of acquaintances, far removed from their usual circle of doll menders or the post office. Here we conferred with such valuable acquaintances as Mr. Pfeffermann, who was Father's boss in the newspaper department at the library, Joshua Czaczik the publisher, who came to Jerusalem occasionally from Tel Aviv on business, promising young philologists and historians of my parents' age who were embarking on a university career, and other young scholars, including professors' assistants, whose future seemed assured. Sometimes my parents met a small group of Jerusalem writers whom Father felt honored to know: Dov Kimche, Shraga Kadari, Yitzhak Shenhar, Yehuda Yaari. Today they are almost forgotten, and even most of their readers have gone the way of all flesh, but i
n their time they were very well known, and their books were widely read.

  Father would prepare for these meetings by washing his hair, polishing and buffing his shoes till they shone like jet, securing his favorite tie, the gray-and-white striped one, with a silver tie clip, and explaining to me not once but several times the rules of polite behavior and my duty to reply to any question with brevity and good taste. Sometimes he shaved before we left home, even though he had already shaved in the morning. My mother would mark the occasion by putting on her coral necklace, which set off her olive complexion perfectly and added an exotic touch to her rather withdrawn beauty, making her look Italian or possibly Greek.

  The well-known scholars and writers were impressed by Father's acuity and erudition. They knew they could always rely on his extensive knowledge whenever their dictionaries and reference works let them down. But even more than they made use of my father and took advantage of his expertise, they were openly pleased by my mother's company. Her profound, inspirational attentiveness urged them on to tireless verbal feats. Something in her thoughtful presence, her unexpected questions, her look, her remarks, would shed a new, surprising light on the subject under discussion, and made them talk on and on as though they were slightly intoxicated, about their work, their creative struggles, their plans and their achievements. Sometimes my mother would produce an apposite quotation from the speaker's own writings, remarking on a certain similarity to the ideas of Tolstoy, or she would identify a stoic quality in what was being said, or observe with a slight inclination of the head—at such moments her voice would take on a dark, winelike quality—that here her ear seemed to catch an almost Scandinavian note in the work of a writer who was present, an echo of Hamsun or Strindberg, or even of the mystical writings of Emmanuel Swedenborg. Thereupon my mother would resume her previous silence and alert attentiveness, like a finely tuned instrument, while they enchantedly lavished on her whatever they did or did not have on their minds as they competed for her attention.