A Tale of Love and Darkness (43 page)

MY PARENTS
put on my shoulders everything that they had not managed to achieve themselves. In 1950, on the evening of the day they first met by chance on the steps of Terra Sancta College, Hannah and Michael (in the novel My Michael) meet again in Café Atara in Ben Yehuda Street in Jerusalem. Hannah encourages shy Michael to talk about himself, but he tells her instead about his widowed father:

His father cherished high hopes for him. He refused to recognize that his son was an ordinary young man.... His father's greatest wish was for Michael to become a professor in Jerusalem, because his paternal grandfather had taught natural sciences in the Hebrew teachers' seminary in Grodno.... It would be nice, Michael's father thought, if the chain could pass on from one generation to another.

"A family isn't a relay race, with a profession as the torch," [Hannah] said.*

For many years my father did not abandon the hope that eventually the mantle of Uncle Joseph would alight on him, and that he might pass it on to me when the time came, if I followed the family tradition and became a scholar. And if, because of his dreary job that left him only the night hours for his research, the mantle passed over him, perhaps his only son would inherit it.

I have the feeling that my mother wanted me to grow up to express the things that she had been unable to express.

In later years they repeatedly reminded me, with a chuckle combined with pride they reminded me, in the presence of all their guests they reminded me, in front of the Zarchis and the Rudnickis and the Hananis and the Bar Yitzhars and the Abramskis they always reminded me how, when I was only five years old, a couple of weeks after I learned the letters of the alphabet, I printed in capital letters on the back of one of
Father's cards the legend amos klausner writer, and pinned it up on the door of my little room.

*My Michael
, trans. Nicholas de Lange (New York: Random House, 1972), p. 6.

I knew how books were made even before I knew how to read. I would sneak in and stand on tiptoe behind my father's back as he bent over his desk, his weary head floating in the pool of yellow light from his desk lamp, as he slowly, laboriously made his way up the winding valley between the two piles of books on the desk, picking all sorts of details from the tomes that lay open in front of him, plucking them out, holding them up to the light, examining them, sorting them, copying them onto little cards, and then fitted each one in its proper place in the puzzle, like stringing a necklace.

In fact, I work rather like him myself. I work like a watchmaker or an old-fashioned silversmith: one eye screwed up, the other fitted with a watchmaker's magnifying glass, with fine tweezers between my fingers, with bits of paper rather than cards in front of me on my desk on which I have written various words, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, and bits of dismantled sentences, fragments of expressions and descriptions and all kinds of tentative combinations. Every now and again I pick up one of these particles, these molecules of text, carefully with my tweezers, hold it up to the light and examine it carefully, turn it in various directions, lean forward and rub or polish it, hold it up to the light again, rub it again slightly, then lean forward and fit it into the texture of the cloth I am weaving. Then I stare at it from different angles, still not entirely satisfied, and I take it out again and replace it with another word, or try to fit it into another niche in the same sentence, then remove it, file it down a tiny bit more, and try to fit it in again, perhaps at a slightly different angle. Or deploy it differently. Perhaps farther down the sentence. Or at the beginning of the next one. Or should I cut it off and make it into a one-word sentence on its own?

I stand up. Walk around the room. Return to the desk. Stare at it for a few moments, or longer, cross out the whole sentence or tear up the whole page. I give up in despair. I curse myself aloud and curse writing in general and the language as a whole, despite which I sit down and start putting the whole thing together all over again.

Writing a novel, I said once, is like trying to make the Mountains of Edom out of Lego blocks. Or to build the whole of Paris, buildings, squares, and boulevards, down to the last street bench, out of matchsticks.

If you write an eighty-thousand-word novel, you have to make
about a quarter of a million decisions, not just decisions about the outline of the plot, who will live or die, who will fall in love or be unfaithful, who will make a fortune or make a fool of himself, the names and faces of the characters, their habits and occupations, the chapter divisions, the title of the book (these are the simplest, broadest decisions); not just what to narrate and what to gloss over, what comes first and what comes last, what to spell out and what to allude to indirectly (these are also fairly broad decisions); but you also have to make thousands of finer decisions, such as whether to write, in the third sentence from the end of that paragraph, "blue" or "bluish." Or should it be "pale blue"? Or "sky blue"? Or "royal blue"? Or should it really be "blue-gray"? And should this "grayish blue" be at the beginning of the sentence, or should it only shine out at the end? Or in the middle? Or should it simply be caught up in the flow of a complex sentence, full of subordinate clauses? Or would it be best just to write the three words "the evening light," without trying to color it in, either "gray-blue" or "dusty blue" or whatever?

From my early childhood on I was the victim of a thorough, protracted brainwashing: Uncle Joseph's temple of books in Talpiot, Father's strait-jacket of books in our apartment in Kerem Avraham, my mother's refuge of books, Grandpa Alexander's poems, our neighbor Mr. Zarchi's novels, my father's index cards and word play, and even Saul Tcherni-khowsky's pungent hug, and Mr. Agnon, who cast several shadows at once, with his currants.

But the truth is that secretly I turned my back on the card I had pinned to the door of my room. For several years I dreamed only of growing up and escaping from these warrens of books and becoming a fireman. The fire and water, the uniform, the heroism, the shiny silver helmet, the wail of the siren, and the stares of the girls and the flashing lights, the panic in the street, the thunderous charge of the red engine, leaving a trail of terror in its wake.

And then the ladders, the hose uncoiling endlessly, the glow of the flames reflected like gushing blood in the red of the engine, and finally, the climax, the girl or woman carried unconscious on the shoulder of her gallant rescuer, the self-sacrificing devotion to duty, the scorched skin, eyelashes, and hair, the infernal suffocating smoke. And then immediately afterward—the praise, the rivers of tearful love from dizzy
women swooning toward you in admiration and gratitude, and above all the fairest of them all, the one you bravely rescued from the flames with the tender strength of your own arms.

But who was it that through most of my childhood I rescued in my fantasies over and over again from the fiery furnace and whose love I earned in return? Perhaps that is not the right way to ask the question, but rather: What terrible, incredible premonition came to the arrogant heart of that foolish, dreamy child and hinted to him, without revealing the outcome, signaled to him without giving him any chance to interpret, while there was still time, the veiled hint of what would happen to his mother one winter's evening?

Because already at the age of five I imagined myself, over and over again, as a bold, calm fireman, resplendent in uniform and helmet, bravely darting on his own into the fierce flames, risking his life, and rescuing her, unconscious, from the fire (while his feeble, verbal father merely stood there stunned, helplessly staring at the conflagration).

And so, while embodying in his own eyes the fire-hardened heroism of the new Hebrew man (precisely as prescribed for him by his father), he dashes in and saves her life, and in doing so he snatches his mother forever from his father's grasp and spreads his own wings over her.

But from what dark threads could I have embroidered this oedipal fantasy, which did not leave me for several years? Is it possible that somehow, like a smell of faraway smoke, that woman, Irina, Ira, infiltrated my fantasy of the fireman and the rescued woman? Ira Stelet-skaya, the wife of the engineer from Rovno whose husband used to lose her every night at cards. Poor Ira Steletskaya, who fell in love with Anton the coachman's son and lost her children, until one day she emptied a can of paraffin and burned herself to death in his tar-papered shack. But all that happened fifteen years before I was born, in a country I had never seen. And surely my mother would never have been so crazy as to tell a terrible story like that to a four- or five-year-old child?

When my father was not at home, as I sat at the kitchen table sorting lentils while my mother stood with her back to me, peeling vegetables
or squeezing oranges or shaping meatballs on the work surface, she would tell me all sorts of strange and, yes, frightening stories. Little Peer, the orphan son of Jon, the grandson of Rasmus Gynt, must have been just like me, as he and his poor widowed mother sat alone in their mountain cabin on those long, windy, snowy nights, and he absorbed and stored in his heart her mystical, half-crazed stories, about Soria-Moria Castle beyond the fjord, the snatching of the bride, the trolls in the hall of the mountain king, and the green ghouls, the button-molder, and the imps and pixies and also about the terrible Boyg.

The kitchen itself, with its smoke-blackened walls and sunken floor, was as narrow and low as a solitary confinement cell. Next to the stove we had two matchboxes, one for new matches and one for used matches, which, for reasons of economy, we used to light a burner or the Primus from a burner that was already lit.

My mother's stories may have been strange, frightening, but they were captivating, full of caves and towers, abandoned villages and broken bridges suspended above the void. Her stories did not begin at the beginning or conclude with a happy ending but flickered in the half light, wound around themselves, emerged from the mists for a moment, amazed you, sent shivers up your spine, then disappeared back into the darkness before you had time to see what was in front of your eyes. That is how her story about the old man Alleluyev was, and the one about Tanitchka and her three husbands, the blacksmith brothers who killed one another, the one about the bear who adopted a dead child, the ghost in the cave that fell in love with the woodman's wife, or the ghost of Nikita the waggoner that came back from the dead to charm and seduce the murderer's daughter.

Her stories were full of blackberries, blueberries, wild strawberries, truffles, and mushrooms. With no thought for my tender years my mother took me to places where few children had ever trodden before, and as she did so, she opened up before me an exciting fan of words, as though she were picking me up in her arms and raising me higher and higher to reveal vertiginous heights of language: her fields were sun-dappled or dew-drenched, her forests were dense or impenetrable, the trees towered, the meadows were verdant, the mountain, a primeval mountain, loomed up, the castles dominated, the turrets towered, the plains slumbered and sprawled, and in the valleys, which she called vales,
springs, streams, and rivulets were constantly gushing, babbling, and purling.

My mother lived a solitary life, shut up at home for most of the time. Apart from her friends Lilenka, Esterka, and Fania Weissmann, who had also been at the Tarbuth gymnasium in Rovno, my mother found no sense or interest in Jerusalem; she did not like the holy places and the many ancient sites. The synagogues and rabbinic academies, churches, convents, and mosques all seemed much of a muchness to her, dreary and smelling of religious men who did not wash often enough. Her sensitive nostrils recoiled from the odor of unwashed flesh, even under a thick cloud of incense.

My father did not have much time for religion either. He considered the priests of every faith as rather suspect, ignorant men who fostered antique hatreds, promoted fears, devised lying doctrines, shed crocodile tears, and traded in fake holy objects and false relics and all kinds of vain beliefs and prejudices. He suspected everyone who made a living from religion of some kind of sugared charlatanism. He enjoyed quoting Heine's remark that the priest and the rabbi both smell (or in Father's toned-down version, "Neither of them has a rosy smell! And nor has the Muslim Mufti, Haj Amin the Nazi-lover!"). On the other hand, he did believe at times in a vague providence, a "presiding spirit of the people" or "Rock of Israel," or in the wonders of the "creative Jewish genius," and he also pinned his hopes on the redeeming and reviving powers of art: "The priests of beauty and the artists' brush," he used to recite dramatically from Tchernikhowsky's sonnet cycle, "and those who master verse's mystic charm / redeem the world by melody and song." He believed that artists were superior to other human beings, more perceptive, more honest, unbesmirched by ugliness. The question of how some artists, despite all this, could have followed Stalin, or even Hitler, troubled and saddened him. He often argued with himself about this: artists who were captivated by the charms of tyrants and placed themselves at the service of repression and wickedness did not deserve the title "priests of beauty." Sometimes he tried to explain to himself that they had sold their souls to the devil, like Goethe's Faust.

The Zionist fervor of those who built new suburbs, who purchased and cultivated virgin land and paved roads, while it intoxicated my father to some extent, passed my mother by. She would usually put the newspaper down after a glance at the headlines. Politics she considered a disaster. Chitchat and gossip bored her. When we had visitors, or when we went to call on Uncle Joseph and Aunt Zippora in Talpiot, or the Zarchis, the Abramskis, the Rudnickis, Mr. Agnon, the Hananis, or Hannah and Hayim Toren, my mother rarely joined in the conversation. Yet sometimes her mere presence made men talk and talk with all their might while she just sat silent, smiling faintly, as though she was trying to decipher from their argument why Mr. Zarchi maintained that particular view and Mr. Hanani the opposite one: would the argument be any different if they suddenly changed around, and each defended the other's position while attacking the one he had argued for previously?