A Tale of Love and Darkness (18 page)

Yet here too occasionally in the early evening some minor writers, two or three intellectually inclined businessmen, or some promising young scholars were invited over. Admittedly there was no more Bialik or Tchernikhowsky, there were no more large, jolly dinner parties. Their limited budget, cramped conditions, and daily hardships forced Grandma to lower her sights: Hannah and Chaim Toren, Esther and Israel Zarchi, Zerta and Jacob-David Abramski, and occasionally one or two of their friends from Odessa or Vilna, Mr. Scheindelevitch from Isaiah Street, Mr. Katchalsky the shopkeeper from David Yellin Street, whose two sons were already considered to be famous scientists with some enigmatic position in the Hagganah, or the Bar-Yitzhars (Itzeleviches) from Mekor Baruch, he a lugubrious haberdasher and she a maker of women's wigs and corsets to order, both of them devout right-wing Zionist Revisionists who loathed the Labor Party heart and soul.

Grandma would lay out the food in military fashion in the kitchen, dispatching Grandpa into the fray over and over again, laden with trays, to serve cold borscht with a hefty iceberg of sour cream floating on it, peeled fresh clementines, seasonal fruit, walnuts, almonds, raisins, dried figs, candied fruits, candied orange peel, various jams and preserves, poppy-seed cakes, jam sponges, apple strudel, and an exquisite tart that she made from puff pastry.

Here too they discussed current affairs and the future of the Jewish people and the world, and reviled the corrupt Labor Party and its defeatist, collaborationist leaders who ingratiated themselves obsequiously with the Gentile oppressor. As for the kibbutzim, from here they looked like dangerous Bolshevik cells that were anarcho-nihilist to boot, permissive, spreading licentiousness and debasing everything the nation held sacred, parasites who fattened themselves at the public expense and spongers who robbed the nation's land. Not a little of what was later to be said against the kibbutzim by their enemies from among radical Middle Eastern Jews was already "known for a fact," in those years, to visitors to my grandparents' home in Jerusalem. Apparently the discussions did not bring much joy to the participants; otherwise why did they often fall silent the moment they caught sight of me, or change to Russian, or shut the door between the sitting room and the castle of sample cases I was building in Grandpa's study?

Here is what their little apartment in Prague Lane was like. There was a single, very Russian sitting room, crammed with heavy furniture and with various objects and glass cases, thick smells of boiled fish, boiled carrot and pasties mingled with the odors of DDT and Lysol; around the walls were huddled chests, stools, a dark masculine wardrobe, a thick-legged table, a sideboard covered with ornaments and souvenirs. The whole room was full of white muslin mats, lace curtains, embroidered cushions, souvenirs, and on every available surface, on the windowsill were crowds of little knickknacks, such as a silver crocodile that opened its jaws to crack a nut when you raised its tail, or the life-size white poodle, a gentle, silent creature with a black nose and round glass eyes that always lay at the foot of Grandma Shlomit's bed and never barked or asked to be let out into the Levant, from which it might have brought
in who knew what, insects, bedbugs, fleas, ticks, worms, lice, eczema, bacilli, and other plagues.

This amiable creature, whose name was Stakh or Stashek or Stashinka, was the mildest and most obedient dog ever, because he was made of wool and stuffed with rags. He had followed the Klausners faithfully in all their migrations from Odessa to Vilna and from Vilna to Jerusalem. For the sake of his health this poor dog was made to swallow several mothballs every few weeks. Every morning he had to put up with being sprayed by Grandpa. Now and again, in the summer, he was placed in front of the open window to get some air and sunlight.

For a few hours Stakh would sit motionless on the windowsill, raking the street below with unfathomable longing in his melancholy black eyes, his black nose raised in vain to sniff at the bitches in the little street, his woolen ears pricked up, straining to catch the myriad sounds of the neighborhood, the wail of a lovesick cat, the cheerful chirruping of the birds, noisy shouting in Yiddish, the rag-and-bone man's bloodcurdling cry, the barking of free dogs whose lot was better by far than his own. His head was cocked thoughtfully to one side, his short tail tucked sadly between his hind legs, his eyes had a tragic look. He never barked at passersby, never cried for help to dogs in the street, never burst out howling, but his face as he sat there expressed a silent despair that tugged at my heartstrings, a dumb resignation that was more piercing than the most dreadful howl.

One morning Grandma, without a second thought, wrapped her Stashinka up in newspaper and threw him in the trash, because all of a sudden she was smitten with suspicions of dust or mold. Grandpa was no doubt upset but didn't dare utter a peep. And I never forgave her.

This overcrowded living room, whose smell, like its color, was dark brown, doubled as Grandma's bedroom, and from it opened Grandpa's monastic cell of a study, with its hard couch, its office shelves, the piles of sample cases, the bookcase, and the little desk that was always as neat and tidy as the morning parade of a bright and shiny troop of Austro-Hungarian hussars.

Here in Jerusalem, too, they eked out an existence on Grandpa's precarious earnings. Once again he bought here and sold there, storing up
in the summer to bring out and sell in the autumn, going around the clothes shops on Jaffa Road, King George V Avenue, Agrippa Street, Luncz Street, and Ben-Yehuda Street with his cases of samples. Once a month or so he went off to Holon, Ramat Gan, Netanya, Petah Tikva, sometimes as far as Haifa, to talk to towel manufacturers, or haggle with underwear makers or suppliers of ready-made clothing.

Every morning, before he went out on his rounds, Grandpa made up parcels of clothes or cloth for the mail. Sometimes he was awarded, lost, or regained the position of local sales representative for some wholesaler or factory. He did not enjoy trading and was not successful at it—he barely made enough to keep himself and Grandma alive—but what he did enjoy was walking the streets of Jerusalem, always elegant in his Tsarist diplomat's suit, with a triangle of white handkerchief protruding from his top pocket, with his silver cufflinks, and he loved to spend hours sitting in cafés, ostensibly for business purposes but in reality for the conversations and arguments and steaming tea and leafing through the newspapers and magazines. He also liked eating in restaurants. He always treated waiters like a very particular yet magnanimous gentleman.

"Excuse me. This tea is cold. I ask you bring me right away hot tea: hot tea, that means the essence also must be very very hot. Not just the water. Thank you very much."

What Grandpa loved best were the long trips out of town and the business meetings in the offices of the firms in the coastal towns. He had an impressive business card, with a gold border and an emblem in the form of intertwined rhombuses, like a little heap of diamonds. The legend on the card read: "Alexander Z. Klausner, Importer, Authorized Representative, General Agent and Accredited Wholesaler, Jerusalem and District." He would hold out his card with an apologetic, childlike little laugh:

"Nu, what. A man has to live somehow."

His heart was not in his business but in innocent, illicit love affairs, romantic yearnings, like a seventy-year-old schoolboy, vague longings and dreams. If he had only been allowed to live his life again, according to his choice and the real inclination of his heart, he would certainly have chosen to love women, to be loved, to understand their hearts, to enjoy their company in summer retreats in the bosom of nature, to row
with them on lakes beneath snow-capped mountains, to write passionate poetry, to be good-looking, curly-haired, and soulful yet masculine, to be loved by the masses, to be Tchernikhowsky. Or Byron. Or, better still, Vladimir Jabotinsky, sublime poet and prominent political leader combined in a single wonderful figure.

All his life he longed for worlds of love and emotional generosity. (He never seems to have made the distinction between love and admiration, thirsting for an abundance of both.)

Sometimes in desperation he rattled his chains, champed at the bit, drank a couple of glasses of brandy in the solitude of his study, or on bitter, sleepless nights particularly, he drank a glass of vodka and smoked sadly. Sometimes he went out alone after dark and roamed the empty streets. It was not easy for him to go out. Grandma had a highly developed, supersensitive radar screen on which she kept track of us all: at any given moment she could check the inventory, to know precisely where each of us was, Lonya at his desk in the National Library on the fourth floor of the Terra Sancta Building, Zussya at Café Atara, Fania sitting in the B'nai B'rith Library, Amos playing with his best friend Eliyahu next door at Mr. Friedmann the engineer's, in the first building on the right. Only at the edge of her screen, behind the extinguished galaxy, in the corner from which her son Zyuzya, Zyuzinka, with Malka and little Daniel, whom she had never seen or washed, were supposed to flicker back at her, all she could see by day or night was a terrifying black hole.

Grandpa would stroll down the Street of the Abyssinians with his hat on, listening to the echo of his footsteps, breathing in the dry night air, saturated with pine trees and stone. Back at home, he would sit down at his desk, have a little drink, smoke a cigarette or two, and write a soulful Russian poem. Ever since that shameful lapse when he had fallen for someone else on the boat to New York, and Grandma had had to drag him off by force to the rabbi, it had never crossed his mind to rebel again: he stood before his wife like a serf before a lady, and he served her with boundless humility, admiration, awe, devotion, and patience.

She, for her part, called him Zussya, and on rare occasions of profound gentleness and compassion she called him Zissel. Then his face would suddenly light up as though the seven heavens had opened before him.

HE LIVED
for another twenty years after Grandma Shlomit died in her bath.

For several weeks or months he continued to get up at daybreak and drag the mattresses and bedclothes to the balcony railing, where he beat them mercilessly to crush any germs or goblins that might have insinuated themselves into the bedding overnight. Perhaps he found it hard to break the habit; perhaps it was his way of paying his respects to the departed; perhaps he was expressing his longing for his queen; or perhaps he was afraid of provoking her avenging spirit if he stopped.

He did not immediately stop disinfecting the toilet and washbasins, either.

But slowly, with the passage of time, Grandpa's smily cheeks grew pink as they had never done before. They always had a cheerful look. Although he remained very particular to his last day about cleanliness and tidiness, being by nature a dapper man, the violence had gone out of him: there were no more furious beatings or frantic sprays of Lysol or chlorine. A few months after Grandma's death his love life began to blossom in a tempestuous and wonderful way. At about the same time, I have the impression that my seventy-seven-year-old grandfather discovered the joy of sex.

Before he had managed to wipe the dust of Grandma's burial off his shoes, Grandpa's home was full of women offering condolences, encouragement, freedom from loneliness, sympathy. They never left him alone, nourishing him with hot meals, comforting him with apple cake, and he apparently enjoyed not letting them leave him alone. He was always attracted to women—all women, both the beautiful ones and those whose beauty other men were incapable of seeing. "Women," my grandfather once declared, "are all very beautiful. All of them without exception. Only men," he smiled, "are blind! Completely blind!
Nu
, what. They only see themselves, and not even themselves. Blind!"

After my grandmother's death Grandpa spent less time on his business. He would still sometimes announce, his face beaming with pride and
joy, "a very important business trip to Tel Aviv, to Grusenberg Street," or "an extremely important meeting in Ramat Gan, with all the heads of the company" He still liked to proffer to anyone he met one of his many impressive business cards. But now he was busy most days with his tempestuous affairs of the heart: issuing or receiving invitations to tea, dining by candlelight in some select but not too expensive restaurant ("with Mrs. Tsitrine,
ty durak
, not Mrs. Shaposhnik!").

He sat for hours at his table on the discreet upstairs floor of Café Atara in Ben Yehuda street, dressed in a navy blue suit, with a polka-dot tie, looking pink, smiling, gleaming, well groomed, smelling of shampoo, talcum powder, and aftershave. A striking sight in his starched white shirt, his gleaming white handkerchief in his breast pocket, his silver cufflinks, always surrounded by a bevy of well-preserved women in their fifties or sixties: widows in tight corsets and nylons with seams running down the back, well made up divorcees, adorned with an abundance of rings, earrings, and bracelets, finished off with a manicure, a pedicure, and a perm, matrons who spoke massacred Hebrew with a Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, or Bulgarian accent. Grandpa loved their company, and they were melted by his charms: he was a fascinating, entertaining conversationalist, a gentleman in the nineteenth-century mold, who kissed ladies' hands, hurried forward to open doors for them, offered his arm at every stairway or slope, never forgot a birthday, sent bouquets of flowers and boxes of sweets, noticed and made a subtle compliment on the cut of a dress, a change of hair style, elegant shoes, or a new handbag, joked tastefully, quoted a poem at the appropriate moment, chatted with warmth and humor. Once I opened a door and caught sight of my ninety-year-old grandfather kneeling before the jolly, dumpy brunette widow of a certain notary. The lady winked at me over my enamored grandfather's head, and smiled gaily, revealing two rows of teeth too perfect to be her own. I left, closing the door gently, before Grandpa was aware of my presence.