A Tale of Love and Darkness (34 page)

"If ever you feel a need to talk about something that you don't find it easy to talk to your parents about, you won't hesitate? You'll come to me? And tell me? And of course I'll keep the secret. We can discuss it together."

"Thank you."

"The things you have nobody to talk to about? Thoughts that make you feel a bit lonely?"

"Thank you. Thank you truly. Would you like me to fetch you a glass of water? My mother will be home soon. She's just around the corner at Heinemann the pharmacist's. Or would you like to read the paper while you're waiting, Auntie Lilia? Shall I put the fan on for you?"

TWENTY YEARS
later, on July 28,1971, a few weeks after my book
Unto Death
was published, I received a letter from this friend of my mother's, who was then in her sixties:

I feel I haven't behaved properly to you since your late father's death. I have been very depressed and am unable to do anything. I have shut myself up at home (our apartment is frightening ... but I have no energy to change anything) and I am afraid to go out—that's the simple truth. In the man in your story "Late Love" I recognized some common traits—he seemed so familiar and so close. "Crusade" I heard dramatized on the radio once, and you read some excerpts in a television interview. It was wonderful to see you so unexpectedly on the television in the corner of my room. I am curious to know what the sources of the story are—it is unique. It's hard for me to imagine what was going on inside you when you wrote those descriptions of horror and dread. It's chilling. The descriptions of the Jews—strong figures, definitely not victims ... impressed me. And also the description of water eating away iron ... and the picture of a Jerusalem that is not a reality nor is it the journey's end, it is just longing and yearning for something that
is not a place in the world. Death appears to me from the pages of your book as something I had never imagined—and yet I craved it not so long ago ... I am reminded now more than usually of your mother's words—she foresaw my failure in life. And I prided myself that my weakness was only superficial, that I was resilient. Now I feel disintegration—strange, for so many years I dreamed of returning to the Land, and now that it has become a reality—I am living here as in a nightmare. Don't pay any attention to what I'm saying. It just slipped out. Don't react. The last time I saw you, in your heated exchange with your father, I didn't sense in you the gloomy man ... All my family send regards to yours. I'm going to be a grandma soon! With friendship and affection, Lilia (Lea).

And in another letter, from August 5, 1979, Lilka wrote to me:

...but enough of that for the time being, maybe some day we'll meet after all and then we'll chat about lots of questions that your words have raised for me. What are you hinting at now, in the "Autobiographical Note" in your book ... when you talk of your mother dying "out of disappointment or longing. Something had gone wrong"? Please forgive me, I'm touching a wound. Your late father's wound, your wound especially, and even—my own. You can't know how much I miss Fania, especially lately. I am left so much on my own in my narrow little world. I long for her. And for another friend of ours, Stefa she was called, who departed this world from grief and suffering in 1963 ... She was a pediatrician, and her life consisted of one disappointment after another, maybe because she trusted men. Stefa simply refused to grasp what some men are capable of. The three of us were very close in the 1930s. I am one of the last of the Mohicans—of friends who no longer exist. Twice I tried, in '71 and '73, to take my own life, and I didn't succeed. I won't try again ... The time has not yet come for me to talk to you about things to do with your parents ... Years have gone by since ... No, I'm not ready yet to express in writing everything I'd like to say. To think that once I could only express myself in writing. Maybe we'll meet again—and many things may change before then ... And by the way, you ought to know that your mother and I and some other members of our group in Hashomer Hatsair in Rovno considered
the petite bourgeoisie to be the worst of all things. We all came from similar backgrounds. Your mother was never a "rightist"...Although when she married into the Klausner family, she may have pretended she was like them.

And again, in a letter dated September 28,1980:

Your mother came from an unhappy family, and she damaged your family. But she is not to blame ... I recall that once, in 1963, you sat in our apartment ... and I promised you that I would write to you about your mother someday ... But it's very hard for me to carry it out.Even to write a letter is hard for me ... Ifyou only knew how much your mother wanted to be an artist, to be a creative person—from her childhood! If only she could see you now! And why didn't she manage it? Maybe in a personal conversation I could be more daring and tell you things that I don't dare put in writing. Yours affectionately, Lilia.

My father, before he died (in 1970), was able to read my first three books, which he did not entirely enjoy. My mother was able to see only some stories I wrote at school and a few childish verses that I penned in the hope of touching the Muses, whose existence she liked to tell me about. (My father did not believe in the Muses, just as he always despised fairies, witches, wonder-working rabbis, elves, any kind of saint, intuition, miracles, and ghosts. He saw himself as a man with a secular worldview; he believed in rational thought and hard intellectual work.)

If my mother had read the two stories in
Unto Death
, would she, too, have responded to them with words similar to those written by her friend Lilenka Kalisch, "longing and yearning for something that is not a place in the world"? It is hard to know. A misty veil of dreamy sadness, unexpressed emotions, and romantic suffering enfolded those well-to-do Rovno young ladies, as though their lives there were painted forever within the walls of their secondary school with a palette that contained only two colors: either melancholy or festive. Although my mother sometimes rebelled against this upbringing.

Something in the curriculum of that school in the 1920s, or maybe
some deep romantic mustiness that seeped into the hearts of my mother and her friends in their youth, some dense Polish-Russian emotionalism, something between Chopin and Mickiewicz, between the
Sorrows of Young Werther
and Lord Byron, something in the twilight zone between the sublime, the tormented, the dreamy, and the solitary, all kinds of will-o'-the-wisps of "longing and yearning" deluded my mother most of her life and seduced her until she succumbed and committed suicide in 1952. She was thirty-eight when she died. I was twelve and a half.

In the weeks and months that followed my mother's death I did not think for a moment of her agony. I made myself deaf to the unheard cry for help that remained behind her and that may have always hung in the air of our apartment. There was not a drop of compassion in me. Nor did I miss her. I did not grieve at my mother's death: I was too hurt and angry for any other emotion to remain. When, for example, I noticed her checked apron, which still hung on a hook on the back of the kitchen door several weeks after her death, I was as angry as though it were pouring salt on my wounds. My mother's toilet things, her powder box, her hairbrush on her green shelf in the bathroom hurt me as though they had remained there deliberately to mock me. Her books. Her empty shoes. The echo of her smell that continued for some time to waft in my face every time I opened "Mother's side" of the closet. Everything moved me to impotent rage. As though one of her sweaters, which had somehow crept into my pile of sweaters, was gloating at me with a vile grin.

I was angry with her for leaving without saying good-bye, without a hug, without a word of explanation: after all, my mother had been incapable of parting even from a total stranger, a delivery man or a pedlar at the door, without offering him a glass of water, without a smile, without a little apology and two or three pleasant words. All through my childhood, she had never left me alone at the grocer's or in a strange courtyard or in a public garden. How could she have done it? I was angry with her on Father's behalf too, whose wife had shamed him thus, had shown him up, had suddenly vanished like a woman running away with a stranger in a comic film. Throughout my childhood, if I ever disappeared even for an hour or two, I was shouted at and punished: it was
a fixed rule that anyone who went out always had to say where they were going and for how long and what time they would be back. At least they had to leave a note in the usual place, under the vase.

All of us.

Is that the way to leave, rudely, in the middle of a sentence? She herself had always insisted on tact, politeness, considerate behavior, a constant effort not to hurt others, attentiveness, sensitivity! How could she?

I hated her.

After a few weeks the anger subsided. And with the anger I seemed to lose a protective layer, a kind of lead casing that had protected me in the early days against the shock and pain. From now on I was exposed.

As I stopped hating my mother, I began to hate myself.

I still had no free corner in my heart for my mother's pain, her loneliness, the suffocation that had closed in around her, the terrible despair of the last nights of her life. I was still living out my own crisis rather than hers. Yet I was no longer angry with her, but rather the opposite, I blamed myself: if only I had been a better, more devoted, son, if I had not scattered my clothes all over the floor, if I had not pestered and nagged her, if I had done my homework on time, if I had taken the rubbish out every evening willingly, without being shouted at to do it, if I had not made a nuisance of myself, made a noise, forgotten to turn out the light, come home with a torn shirt, left muddy footprints all around the kitchen. If I had been more considerate of her migraines. Or if at least I had tried to do what she wanted, and been a bit less weak and pale, eaten everything she cooked for me and put on my plate and not been so difficult, if for her sake I had been a more sociable child and a bit less of a loner, a bit less skinny and more suntanned and athletic, as she had wanted me to be!

Or perhaps the opposite? If I had been much weaker, chronically ill, confined to a wheelchair, consumptive, or even blind from birth? Surely her kindliness and her generous nature would never have allowed her to abandon such a disadvantaged child, leave him to his misery and just disappear? If only I had been a handicapped child with no legs, if only while there was still time I had run under a passing car and been run over and had both my legs amputated, perhaps my mother would have
been filled with compassion? Would not have left me? Would have stayed to go on looking after me?

If my mother had abandoned me like that, without a backward glance, surely it was a sign that she had never loved me: if you love someone, she herself had taught me, you forgive them for everything, except betrayal. You even forgive them for nagging, for losing their cap, for leaving the squash on their plate.

To forsake is to betray. And she had forsaken both of us, Father and me. I would never have left her like that, despite her migraines, even though I now knew that she had never loved us, I would never have left her, despite all her long silences, her shutting herself up in a darkened room, and all her moods. I'd have lost my temper sometimes, maybe even not talked to her for a day or two, but not abandoned her forever. Never.

All mothers love their children: that's a law of nature. Even a cat or a goat. Even mothers of criminals and murderers. Even mothers of Nazis. Or of drooling retards. Even mothers of monsters. The fact that only I couldn't be loved, that my mother had run away from me, only proved that there was nothing in me to love, that I didn't deserve love. There was something wrong with me, something very terrible, something repulsive and truly horrifying, more loathsome than a physical or mental defect, or even madness. There was something so irreparably detestable about me, something so terrible, that even a sensitive woman like my mother, who could lavish love on a bird or a beggar or a stray puppy, couldn't stand me anymore and had to run away from me as far as she could go. There is an Arabic saying,
Kullu qirdin bi-'ayni ummihi ghazalun
—"Every monkey is a gazelle to its mother." Except for me.

If only I were also sweet, just a little, as all children in the world are to their mothers, even the ugliest and naughtiest children, even those violent, disturbed children who are always being thrown out of school, even Bianca Schor who stabbed her grandfather with a kitchen knife, even Yanni the pervert, who has elephantiasis and unzips his fly in the street and takes out his thing and shows it to the girls—if only I were good, if only I had behaved the way she asked me to a thousand times, and like an idiot I didn't listen to her—if only after Seder night I hadn't broken her blue bowl that had come down to her from her great-grandmother—if only I'd brushed my teeth properly every morning, top
and bottom and all around and in the corners, without cheating—if only I hadn't pinched that half-pound note from her handbag and then lied and denied I'd taken it—if only I'd stopped thinking those wicked thoughts and never let my hand stray inside my pajama bottoms at night—if only I'd been like everyone else, deserving a mother, too—

After a year or two, when I'd left home and gone to live in Kibbutz Hulda, I slowly started to think about her, too. At the end of the day, after school and work and a shower, when all the kibbutz kids had showered and dressed for the evening and gone to spend time with their parents, leaving me all alone and odd among the empty children's houses, I would go and sit on my own on the wooden bench inside the reading room.

I would sit there in the dark for half an hour or an hour, conjuring up, picture by picture, the end of her life. In those days I was already trying to imagine a little of what had never been spoken about, either between my mother and me, or between me and my father, or apparently even between the two of them.

My mother was thirty-eight when she died: younger than my elder daughter and a little older than my younger daughter on the day these lines were written. Ten or twenty years after they completed their studies at the Tarbuth secondary school, when my mother, Lilenka Kalisch, and their group of friends experienced the buffeting of reality in a Jerusalem of heat waves, poverty, and malicious gossip, when those emotional Rovno schoolgirls suddenly found themselves in the rough terrain of everyday life, diapers, husbands, migraines, queues, smells of mothballs and kitchen sinks, it transpired apparently that the curriculum of the school in Rovno in the 1920s was of no help to them. It only made things worse.