A Tale of Love and Darkness (40 page)

My mother, unaware that I was watching, suddenly stood up and began punishing herself, she slapped her cheeks and tore her hair, she grabbed a clothes hanger and hit her head and back with it until she wept, and I too in my space between the wardrobe and the wall began to cry silently and to bite both my hands so hard that painful marks appeared. That evening we all ate sweetened gefilte fish that Grandma had brought with her from the tar-papered shack on the edge of Kiriat Mot-skin, in a sweet sauce with sweet boiled carrot, and they all talked to each other about speculators and the black market, about the state construction company and free enterprise and the Ata textile factory near Haifa, and they finished the meal with a cooked fruit salad that we called compote, which was also made by my mother's mother and which had also turned out sweet and sticky like a syrup. My other grandma, the one from Odessa, Grandma Shlomit, politely finished her compote, wiped her lips on a white paper napkin, took a lipstick and pocket mirror out of her leather handbag, and redrew the line of her lips, and then, while she carefully retracted her red dog's erection of a lipstick into its sheath, she observed:

"What can I say to you? I have never tasted sweeter food in my whole life. The Almighty must be very fond of Vohlynia, to have soaked it so in honey. Even your sugar is much sweeter than ours, and your salt is sweet, and your pepper, and even the mustard in Vohlynia has a taste of jam, and your horseradish, your vinegar, your garlic, they're all so sweet you could sweeten the Angelofdeath himself with them."

As soon as she had spoken these words, she fell silent, as though in fear of the wrath of the angel whose name she had dared to take so lightly.

At which my other grandma, my mother's mother, adopted a pleasant smile, not at all vindictive or gloating, but a well-meaning smile as pure and innocent as the singing of the cherubs, and to the charge that her cooking was sweet enough to sweeten vinegar or horseradish and even the angel of death Grandma Ita replied to Grandma Shlomit with a sing-song lilt:

"But not you, dear mother-in-law of my daughter!"

The others are not back yet from the Tel Arza woods and I am still on my back on the concrete, which seems to have become a little less cold and hard. The evening light is growing cooler and grayer above the points of the cypresses. As though someone is surrendering there, on the awesome heights above the treetops, the rooftops, and everything that is stirring here in the street, the backyards and kitchens, high above the smells of dust, cabbage, and rubbish, high above the twittering of the birds, as high as the sky is above the earth, above the wailing sounds of prayer coming in ragged tatters from the synagogue down the road.

Lofty, clear, and indifferent it is unfolding now above the water heaters and the washing hung out on every roof here and above the abandoned junk and the alley cats and above all sorts of longings and
above all the corrugated iron lean-tos in the yards and above the schemes, the omelettes, the lies, the washtubs, the slogans pasted up by the Underground, the borscht, the desolation of ruined gardens and remains of fruit trees from the times when there was an orchard here, and now, right now, it is spreading and creating the calm of a clear, even evening, making peace in the high heavens above the garbage cans and above the hesitant, heartrending piano notes repeatedly attempted by a plain girl, Menuchele Schtich, whom we nicknamed Nemucheleh, Shortie, trying over and over again to play a simple ascending scale, stumbling over and over again, always in the same place, and each time trying again. While a bird replies to her, over and over again, with the first five notes of Beethoven's
Für Elise.
A wide, empty sky from horizon to horizon at the end of a hot summer day. There are three cirrus clouds and two dark birds. The sun has set beyond the walls of the Schneller Barracks, though the firmament has not let go of the sun but has seized it in its claws and managed to tear the train of its many-colored cloak and now is trying on its booty, using the cirrus clouds as a dressmaker's dummy, putting on light like a garment, removing it, checking how well necklaces of greenish radiance suit it, or the coat of many colors with its golden glow and its halo of bluish purple, or how some fragile strips of silver curl along their length, shivering like the broken lines sketched underwater by a fast-moving school of fish. And there are some flashes of purple-tinged pink and lime green, and now it strips quickly and dresses in a reddish mantle from which trail rivers of dull crimson light and after a moment or two puts on a different robe, the color of bare flesh that is suddenly stabbed and stained by several strong hemorrhages while its dark train is being gathered up beneath folds of black velvet, and all at once it is no longer height upon height but depth upon depth upon depth, like the valley of death opening up and expanding in the firmament, as if it were not overhead and the one lying on his back underneath, but the opposite, all the firmament an abyss and the one lying on his back no longer lying but floating, being sucked, plunging rapidly, falling like a stone toward the velvety depth. You will never forget this evening: you are only six or at most six and a half, but for the first time in your little life something enormous and very terrible has opened up for you, something serious and grave, something that extends from infinity to infinity, and it takes you, and like a mute giant it enters you and
opens you, so that you too for a moment seem wider and deeper than yourself, and in a voice that is not your voice but may be your voice in thirty or forty years' time, in a voice that allows no laughter or levity, it commands you never to forget a single detail of this evening: remember and keep its smells, remember its body and light, remember its birds, the notes of the piano, the cries of the crows and all the strangeness of the sky running riot from one horizon to the other before your eyes, and all of this is for you, all strictly for the attention of the addressee alone. Never forget Danush, Ammi, and Lulik, or the girls with the soldiers in the woods, or what your grandma said to your other grandma, or the sweet fish floating, dead and seasoned, in a sauce of carrots. Never forget the roughness of the wet stone that was in your mouth more than half a century ago, an echo of whose grayish taste of chalk, plaster, and salt still seduces the tip of your tongue. And all the thoughts that stone conjured up you are never to forget, a universe inside a universe inside a universe. Remember the vertiginous sense of time within time within time, and the whole host of heaven trying on, blending, and hurting the innumerable hues of light just after the sun has set, purple lilac lime orange gold mauve crimson scarlet blue and dull red with gushing blood, and slowly there descends over all a deep dim blue-gray color like the color of silence with a smell like that of the repeated notes on the piano, climbing and stumbling over and over again up a broken scale, while a single bird answers with the five opening notes of
Für Elise:
Ti-da-di-da-di.

MY FATHER
had a weakness for the momentous, whereas my mother was fascinated by yearning and surrender. My father was an enthusiastic admirer of Abraham Lincoln, Louis Pasteur, and the speeches of Churchill, "blood, sweat, and tears," "never have so many owed so much," "we shall fight them on the beaches." My mother, with a gentle smile, identified with the poetry of Rahel, "I have not sung to you, my land, or praised your name with deeds of heroism, only a path have my feet trodden down..." My father, at the kitchen sink, would suddenly erupt into a spirited recital, with no prior warning, of Tchernikhowsky:
"...and in this Land will rise a brood / that breaks its iron chains / looking the light straight in the eye!" Or sometimes Jabotinsky: "...Jotapata, Masada / and captured Beitar / shall rise again in might and splendor! O Hebrew—whether pauper, / slave, or wanderer / you were born a prince / crowned with David's royal diadem."When the spirit descended upon him, Father would roar out, with a tunelessness that would startle the dead, Tchernikhowsky's "My country, oh my land, bare rock-covered highland!" Until Mother had to remind him that the Lembergs next door and probably the other neighbors, the Buchovskis and the Rosendorffs, must be listening to his recital and laughing, whereupon father would stop sheepishly, with an embarrassed smile, as though he had been caught stealing sweets.

As for my mother, she liked to spend the evening sitting on the bed that was disguised as a sofa, with her bare feet folded underneath her, bent over a book on her knees, wandering for hours on end along the paths of autumnal gardens in the stories of Turgenev, Chekhov, Iwaszkewicz, André Maurois, and U. N. Gnessin.

Both my parents had come to Jerusalem straight from the nineteenth century. My father had grown up on a concentrated diet of operatic, nationalistic, battle-thirsty romanticism (the Springtime of Nations, Sturm und Drang), whose marzipan peaks were sprinkled, like a splash of champagne, with the virile frenzy of Nietzsche. My mother, on the other hand, lived by the other Romantic canon, the introspective, melancholy menu of loneliness in a minor key, soaked in the suffering of broken-hearted, soulful outcasts, infused with vague autumnal scents of fin de siècle decadence.

Kerem Avraham, our suburb, with its street hawkers, shopkeepers and little middlemen, its fancy-goods sellers and Yiddishists, its pietists with their wailing chants, its displaced petite bourgeoisie and its eccentric world reformers, suited neither of them. There was always a hesitant dream hovering over our home of moving to a more cultured neighborhood, such as Beit Hakerem or Kiryat Shemuel, if not to Tal-piot or Rehavia, not right away but someday, in the future, when it was a possibility, when we'd put something by, when the child was a bit older, when Father had managed to get his foot on the academic ladder, when Mother had a regular teaching position, when the situation improved, when the country was more developed, when the English left,
when the Hebrew State came into being, when it was clearer what was going to happen here, when things finally got a little easier for us.

"There, in the land our fathers loved," my parents used to sing when they were young, she in Rovno and he in Odessa and Vilna, like thousands of other young Zionists in Eastern Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century, "all our hopes will be fulfilled. There to live in liberty, there to flourish, pure and free."

But what were all the hopes? What sort of "pure and free" life did my parents expect to find here?

Perhaps they vaguely thought they would find in the renewed Land of Israel something less petit-bourgeois and Jewish and more European and modern; something less crudely materialistic and more idealistic; something less feverish and voluble and more settled and reserved.

My mother may have dreamed of living the life of a bookish, creative teacher in a village school in the Land of Israel, writing lyric poetry in her spare time, or perhaps sensitive, allusive stories. I think that she hoped to forge gentle relationships with subtle artists, relationships marked by baring one's breast and revealing one's true feelings, and so to break free at last of her mother's noisy, domineering hold on her, and to escape from the stifling puritanism, poor taste, and base materialism that were apparently rampant where she came from.

My father, on the other hand, saw himself as destined to become an original scholar in Jerusalem, a bold pioneer of the renewal of the Hebrew spirit, a worthy heir to Professor Joseph Klausner, a gallant officer in the cultured army of the Sons of Light battling against the forces of darkness, a fitting successor to a long and glorious dynasty of scholars that began with the childless Uncle Joseph and continued with his devoted nephew who was as dear to him as a son. Like his famous uncle, and no doubt under his inspiration, my father could read scholarly works in sixteen or seventeen languages. He had studied in the universities of Vilna and Jerusalem (and even wrote a doctoral thesis later, in London). For years, neighbors and strangers had addressed him as "Herr Doktor," and then, at the age of fifty, he finally had a real doctorate. He had also studied, mostly on his own, ancient and modern history, the history of literature, Hebrew linguistics and general philology,
biblical studies, Jewish thought, archaeology, medieval literature, philosophy, Slavonic studies, Renaissance history, and Romance studies: he was equipped and ready to become an assistant lecturer and to advance through the ranks to senior lecturer and eventually professor, to be a path-breaking scholar, and indeed to end up sitting at the head of the table every Saturday afternoon and delivering one monologue after another to his awestruck tea-time audience of admirers and devotees, just like his esteemed uncle.

But nobody wanted him, or his learned accomplishments. So this Treplev had to eke out a wretched existence as a librarian in the newspaper department of the National Library, writing his books about the history of the novella and other subjects of literary history at night, with what remained of his strength, while his Seagull spent her days in a basement apartment, cooking, laundering, cleaning, baking, looking after a sickly child, and when she wasn't reading novels, she stood staring out of the window while her glass of tea grew cold in her hand. Whenever she could, she gave private lessons.

I was an only child, and they both placed the full weight of their disappointments on my little shoulders. First of all, I had to eat well and sleep a lot and wash properly, so as to improve my chances of growing up to fulfill something of the promise of my parents when they were young. They expected me to learn to read and write even before I reached school age. They vied with each other to offer me blandishments and bribes to make me learn the letters (which was unnecessary, as letters fascinated me anyway and came to me of their own accord). And once I learned to read, at the age of five, they were both anxious to provide me with a tasty but also nutritious diet of reading, rich in cultural vitamins.

They frequently conversed with me about topics that were certainly not considered suitable for young children in other homes. My mother liked telling me stories about wizards, elves, ghouls, enchanted cottages in the depths of the forest, but she also talked to me seriously about crimes, emotions, the lives and sufferings of brilliant artists, mental illness, and the inner lives of animals. ("If you just look carefully, you'll see that every person has some dominant characteristic that makes him resemble a particular animal, a cat or a bear or a fox or a pig. A person's physical features also point to the animal he most closely resembles") Father, meanwhile, introduced me to the mysteries of the solar system, the circulation of the blood, the British White Paper, evolution, Theodor Herzl and his astonishing life story, the adventures of Don Quixote, the history of writing and printing, and the principles of Zionism. ("In the Diaspora the Jews had a very hard life; here in the Land of Israel it's still not easy for us, but soon the Hebrew State will be established, and then everything will be made just and rejuvenated. The whole world will come and marvel at what the Jewish people is creating here.")