A Tale of Love and Darkness (39 page)

"From this," my father said sadly, "follows the grave but inescapable conclusion that we must decidedly have gone wrong somewhere along the line. So now we are definitely under an obligation to labor tirelessly and uncompromisingly to determine the root and cause of our failure. Did we put on too much fertilizer? Did we water excessively? Or, on the contrary, did we omit some essential step? When all is said and done, we are not peasants and sons of peasants but mere amateurs, inexperienced suitors paying court to the earth but unfamiliar as yet with the golden mean."

That very day, when he came back from his work in the National Library on Mount Scopus, he brought with him two thick tomes he had borrowed about gardening and vegetable growing (one of them was in German) and studied them carefully. His attention soon turned to other
matters, and to totally different books, the decline of certain minority languages in the Balkans, the influence of medieval courtly poetry on the origins of the novella, Greek words in the Mishnah, the interpretation of Ugaritic texts.

But one morning, as he was setting off to work with his rather battered briefcase, Father saw me bent over the dying shoots with tears in my eyes, absorbed in a last desperate effort to rescue them by means of some nose or ear drops that I had taken without permission from the medicine chest in the bathroom and was now administering to the withered shoots, one drop each. At that moment Father's pity was stirred toward me. He picked me up and hugged me, but lost no time in putting me down again. He was perplexed, embarrassed, at a loss. Before he left, as though fleeing the field of combat, he nodded his head three or four times and muttered thoughtfully, to himself rather than to me, the words: "We'll see what else can be done."

On Ibn Gabirol Street in Rehavia there used to stand a building called Pioneering Women's House, or it may have been Working Women's Farm, or something of the sort. Behind it there was a small agricultural reserve, a kind of commune, a women's farm, just a quarter of an acre or so of fruit trees, vegetables, poultry, and beehives. On this site in the early 1950s President Ben-Zvi's famous official prefab would be erected.

Father went to this experimental farm after work. He must have explained to Rachel Yannait or one of her assistants the whole story of our agricultural defeat, sought advice and guidance, and finally left and came home by bus bearing a small wooden box in whose soil there were some twenty or thirty healthy seedlings. He smuggled his booty into the apartment and hid it from me behind the laundry basket or under the kitchen cupboard, waited till I was asleep, and then crept outside, armed with his flashlight, his screwdriver, his heroic hammer, and his letter opener.

When I got up in the morning, Father addressed me in a matter-of-fact voice, as though reminding me to tie my shoelaces or button up my shirt. Without taking his eyes off his paper he said:

"Right. I have the impression your medicine from yesterday has done some good to our ailing plants. Why don't you go and have a look for yourself, Your Highness, and see if there's any sign of recovery? Or was it just my impression? Please go and check, and come back to let me
know what you think, and we'll see if we both share the same opinion, more or less, shall we?"

My tiny shoots, which the day before had been so withered and yellowed that they were no more than sad threads of straw, had suddenly overnight, as though by magic, into sturdy, vigorous plants, bursting with health, full of sap and a deep green color. I stood there stunned, overwhelmed by the magical power of ten or twenty nose or ear drops.

As I went on staring, I realized that the miracle was even greater than it had appeared at first glance. The radish seedlings had jumped over into the cucumber bed in the night. While in the radishes' bed some plants I didn't recognize at all had settled, perhaps eggplants or carrots. And the most wondrous thing of all: all along the left-hand row, where we had put the tomato seeds that had not germinated, the row where I had not seen any point in using my magic drops at all, there were now three or four bushy young plants, with yellow buds among their upper shoots.

A week later disease struck our garden again, the death throes began all over again, the saplings bowed their heads and once more started looking as sickly and weak as persecuted Diaspora Jews, their leaves dropped, the shoots withered, and this time neither nose drops nor cough syrup did any good: our vegetable patch was drying out and dying. For two or three weeks the four pegs continued to grow there, joined by the grubby strings, and then they too died. Only my Hitler scarecrow flourished for a little longer. Father sought consolation in the exploration of the sources of the Lithuanian romance or the birth of the novel from troubadour poetry. As for me, I scattered the yard with galaxies crammed with strange stars, moons, suns, comets, and planets, and set out on a perilous journey from star to star, in search of other signs of life.

LATE ONE
summer afternoon. It is the end of the first grade, or maybe the beginning of the second grade, or the summer between the two. I am alone in the yard. The others have all gone off without me, Danush, Alik, Uri, Lulik, Eitan, and Ammi, they've gone to look for those things among the trees on the slope of the Tel Arza woods, but they wouldn't have me in the Black Hand gang because I wouldn't blow. Danush found one among the trees, full of smelly sticky stuff that had dried up, and he washed it out under the tap, and anyone who didn't have the guts to blow it up wasn't fit to belong to the Black Hand, and anyone who didn't have the guts to put it on and pee into it a bit, like an English soldier, there was no question of his being admitted to the Black Hand. Danush explained how it worked. Every night English soldiers take girls to the Tel Arza woods and there, in the dark, it goes like this. First they kiss a long time, on the mouth. Then he touches her body in all sorts of places, even under her clothes. Then he pulls both their pants down and puts one of those things on and he lies on top of her and so on and in the end he wets. And this thing was invented so that she wouldn't get wet from him at all. And that's the way it goes every night in Tel Arza woods, and that's the way it goes every night with everyone. Even Mrs. Sussmann, the teacher, her husband does it to her at night. Even your parents. Yes, yours too. And yours. All of them. And it gives you all sorts of nice feelings in your body and it builds up your muscles and it's also good for cleansing the blood.

They've all gone off without me and my parents are out too. I'm lying on my back on the concrete at the end of the yard behind the washing lines and watching the remains of the day. The concrete is cold and hard under your body in a vest. Thinking, but not right to the end, that everything that's hard and everything that's cold will stay hard and cold forever and everything that's soft and everything that's warm is only soft and warm for the time being. In the end everything has to pass over to the cold, hard side. Over there you don't move, you don't think, you don't feel, you don't warm anything. Forever.

You're lying on your back, and your fingers find a small stone and put it inside your mouth, which can taste dust and plaster and something else that's kind of salty but not exactly salty. The tongue explores all sorts of little projections and depressions as though the stone is a world like ours and it has mountains and valleys. And what if it turns out that our earth, or even our whole universe, is just a little stone on the concrete in the yard of some giants? What will happen if, in the next moment, some huge child, it's impossible to imagine how big he is, and his friends have made fun of him and gone off without him and that
child simply picks up our whole universe between two of his fingers and puts it all in his mouth and also starts exploring us with his tongue? And he also thinks that maybe this stone that's inside his mouth is really a whole universe with Milky Ways and suns and comets and children and cats and washing hanging on the line? And who knows, maybe that huge boy's universe, the boy in whose mouth we are just a tiny stone, is actually nothing more than a little stone on the ground in the yard of an even bigger boy, and he and his universe, and so on and so forth, like Russian dolls, a whole universe inside a tiny stone inside a universe inside a stone, and it's just the same when it gets smaller as when it gets bigger? Every universe is a stone, and every stone is a universe. Until it begins to make your head spin, and meanwhile your tongue explores the stone as though it were a sweet, and now your tongue itself has a chalky taste. Danush, Alik, Uri, Lulik, Eitan, and Ammi and the rest of the Black Hand, in another sixty years they'll be dead and then everyone who remembers them will die and then everyone who remembers everyone who remembers everyone who remembers them. Their bones will turn to stone like this stone that's in my mouth. Maybe the stone in my mouth was children who died trillions of years ago? Maybe they went to look for those things in the woods too and there was someone they made fun of because he didn't have the guts to blow it up and put it on? And they left him alone in his yard too, and he also lay on his back and put a stone in his mouth, and the stone was also a boy once and the boy was once a stone. Dizzy. And meanwhile this stone is getting a bit of life and it's not quite so cold and hard anymore, it's become wet and warm, it's even beginning to stir in your mouth and gently return the tickles it's getting from the tip of your tongue.

Behind the cypress trees behind the fence at the Lembergs' someone's put the electric light on, but lying here you can't see who's there, Mrs. Lemberg or Shula or Eva, who put the light on, but you can see the yellow electricity pouring out like glue that's so thick it's hard to spill, it can hardly move, it can barely make its heavy way, the way viscous liquids do; dull and yellow and slow, it advances like heavy motor oil across the evening, which is a little gray-blue now, and the breeze stirs and licks it for a moment. And fifty-five years later, as I sit and write that evening in an exercise book at the garden table in Arad, that very same evening breeze stirs and from the neighbors' window again this evening too there flows a thick, slow, yellow electric light like heavy motor oil—we know each other, we've known each other for a long time, it's as if there are no more surprises. But there are. That evening of the stone in the mouth in the yard in Jerusalem didn't come here to Arad to remind you of what you've forgotten or to revive old longings, but the opposite: it's come to assault this evening. It's like a woman you've known for a long time, you no longer find her attractive or unattractive, whenever you bump into each other, she always says more or less the same few worn-out words, always offers you a smile, always taps you on the chest in a familiar way, only now, only this time, she doesn't, she suddenly reaches out and grabs your shirt, not casually but with her all, her claws, lustfully, desperately, eyes tight shut, her face twisted as though in pain, determined to have her way, determined not to let go, she doesn't care anymore about you, about what you are feeling, whether or not you want to, what does she care, now she's got to, she can't help herself, she reaches out now and strikes you like a harpoon and starts pulling and tearing you, but actually she's not the one who's pulling, she just digs her claws in and you're the one who's pulling and writing, pulling and writing, like a dolphin with the barb of the harpoon caught in his flesh, and he pulls as hard as he can, pulls the harpoon and the line attached to it and the harpoon gun that's attached to the line and the hunters' boat that the harpoon gun is fixed to, he pulls and struggles, pulls to escape, pulls and turns over and over in the sea, pulls and dives down into the dark depths, pulls and writes and pulls more; if he pulls one more time with all his desperate strength, he may manage to free himself from the thing that is stuck in his flesh, the thing that is biting and digging into you and not letting go, you pull and you pull and it just bites into your flesh, the more you pull, the deeper it digs in, and you can never inflict a pain in return for this loss that is digging deeper and deeper, wounding you more and more because it is the catcher and you are the prey, it is the hunter and you are the harpooned dolphin, it gives and you have taken, it is that evening in Jerusalem and you are in this evening here in Arad, it is your dead parents, and you just pull and go on writing.

***

The others have all gone to the Tel Arza woods without me, and because I didn't have the guts to blow, I'm lying here on my back on the concrete at the end of the yard behind the washing lines. Watching the light of day gradually surrendering. Soon it will be night.

Once I watched from the Ali Baba's cave I had in the space between the wardrobe and the wall when Grandma, my mother's mother, who had come to Jerusalem from the tar-papered shack on the edge of Kiriat Motskin, lost her temper with my mother, gesticulating at her with the iron, her eyes flashing, and spat terrible words at her in Russian or Polish mixed with Yiddish. Neither of them imagined that I was squeezed into that space holding my breath, peering out, seeing and hearing everything. My mother didn't reply to her mother's thunderous curses but just sat on the hard chair that had lost its back, which stood in the corner, she sat up straight with her knees pressed together and her hands motionless on her knees and her eyes also fixed on her knees, as though everything depended on her knees. My mother sat there like a scolded child, and as her mother shot one venomous question at her after another, all of them soaked and sizzling with sibilants, she said nothing in reply, but her eyes focused even more fixedly on her knees. Her continued silence only redoubled Grandma's fury, she seemed to have gone right out of her mind: her eyes flashing, her face wolflike with rage, flecks of foam whitening the corners of her open lips, and her sharp teeth showing, she hurled the hot iron she was holding, as though to smash it against the wall, then kicked the ironing board over and stormed out of the room, slamming the door so hard that the windowpanes, the vase, and the cups all rattled.