A Tale of Love and Darkness (71 page)

IN THE
autumn, toward the end of 1951, my mother's condition took another turn for the worse. Her migraines came back, and so did her insomnia. Once again she sat all day at the window counting the birds or the clouds. She sat there at night too, with her eyes wide open.

My father and I shared the household chores. I peeled vegetables, and he chopped them up to make a fine salad. He sliced bread, and I spread it with margarine and cheese or margarine and jam. I swept and washed the floors and dusted all the surfaces, and my father emptied the garbage cans and bought a third of a block of ice for the icebox every two or three days. I went shopping at the grocer's and the greengrocer's, while Father took care of the butcher and the pharmacist. Both of us added items as necessary to the shopping list that we wrote on one of Father's index cards and pinned up on the kitchen door. As we bought items, we crossed them off the list. Every Saturday evening we started a new list:

Tomatoes. Cucumber. Onion. Potatoes. Radishes.
Bread. Eggs. Cheese. Jam. Sugar.
Find out if any clementines yet and when oranges start.
Matches. Oil. Candles for power failures.
Washing-up liquid. Washing soap. Shenhav toothpaste.
Paraffin.

A 40-watt lightbulb. Get iron mended. Batteries.
New washer for faucet in bathroom basin. Fix the faucet because it doesn't turn off completely.
Yogurt. Margarine. Olives.
Buy woolen socks for Mother.

At that time my handwriting grew more and more like my father's, so that it was almost impossible to say which of us had written "paraffin" or who had added, "We need a new floorcloth." To this day my writing looks like my father's: vigorous, not always legible, but always energetic, sharp, and revealing strong pressure on the pen, unlike my mother's calm, rounded, pearl-like letters, leaning slightly backward, precise and pleasant to look at, written with a light, disciplined hand, letters as perfect and well-spaced as her teeth.

We were very close to one another at that time, Father and I: like a pair of stretcher bearers carrying an injured person up a steep slope. We took her a glass of water and made her take the tranquilizers that were prescribed by two different doctors. We had one of Father's little cards for that too: we wrote down the name of each medicine and the times she had to take it, and we put a tick by each one that she took and a cross by the ones she refused to swallow or that she brought up. Mostly she was obedient and took her medicine even when she was feeling queasy. Sometimes she forced herself to give us a little smile, which was even more painful than her pallor or the dark half moons that appeared under her eyes, because it was such a hollow smile, as if it had nothing to do with her. And sometimes she motioned to us to lean over and she stroked both our heads with a uniform circular movement. She stroked us both for a long time, until Father gently removed her hand and laid it on her bosom. And I did the same.

Every evening, at supper time, Father and I held a kind of daily staff meeting in the kitchen. I filled him in on my day at school, and he told me something about his day at work, at the National Library, or described an article he was trying to finish in time for the next issue of
Tarbiz
or
Metsuda.

We talked about politics, about the assassination of King Abdullah, or about Begin and Ben-Gurion. We talked like equals. My heart filled with love for this tired man when he concluded gravely:

"It seems there remain considerable areas of disagreement between us. So for the time being we shall have to agree to differ."

Then we would talk about household matters. We would jot down on one of Father's little cards what we still had to do, and cross out what we'd already seen to. Father even discussed money matters with me sometimes: still a fortnight to go till pay day, and we had already spent such and such a sum. Every evening he would ask me about my homework, and I would hand him my list of assignments from school and the exercise books in which I had completed the allotted tasks, for comparison. Sometimes he took a look at what I had done and made appropriate comments; he knew more about virtually every subject than my teachers and even than the authors of the textbooks. Mostly he would say:

"There's no need to check up on you. I know I can rely on you and trust you absolutely."

Secret pride and gratitude flooded through me when I heard these words. Sometimes I also felt a rush of pity.

For him, not for Mother. I had no pity for her at that time: she was just a long series of daily duties and demands. And a source of embarrassment and shame, because I had to explain somehow to friends why they could never come over to my place, and I had to answer neighbors who quizzed me sweetly at the grocer's about why they never saw her. What had happened to her? Even to uncles and aunts, even to Grandpa and Grandma, Father and I did not tell the whole truth. We played it down. We said she had the flu even when she didn't. We said: Migraine. We said: A particular sensitivity to daylight. Sometimes we said: She's very tired, too. We tried to tell the truth but not the whole truth.

We didn't know the whole truth. But we did know, even without exchanging notes, that neither of us told anyone everything we both knew; we only shared a few facts with the outside world. The two of us never discussed her condition. All we ever talked about was the work to do tomorrow, sharing the daily chores, and the needs of the household. Not once did we talk about what was wrong with her, apart from Father's repeated refrain: "Those doctors, they don't know anything. Not a thing." We didn't talk after her death, either. From the day of my mother's death to the day of my father's death, twenty years later, we did not talk about her once. Not a word. As if she had never lived. As if her life was just a censured page torn from a Soviet encyclopedia. Or as if, like Athena, I
had been born straight from the head of Zeus. I was a sort of upside-down Jesus: born of a virgin man by an invisible spirit. And every morning, at dawn, I was awoken by the sound of a bird in the branches of the pomegranate tree in the yard, which greeted the day with the first five notes of Beethoven's
Für Elise:
"Ti-da-di-da-di!" And again, more excitedly: "Ti-da-di-da-di!" And under my blanket I completed it with feeling: "Da-di-da-da!" In my heart I called the bird Elise.

I was sorry for my father at that time. As though he had fallen victim, through no fault of his own, to some protracted act of abuse. As though my mother were maltreating him on purpose. He was very tired, and sad, even though as usual he tried to be cheery and chatty the whole time. He always hated silences and blamed himself for any silence that occurred. His eyes, like Mother's, had dark half moons beneath them.

Sometimes he left work during the day to take her for tests. What didn't they test in those months: her heart, lungs, and brain waves, digestion, hormones, nerves, women's problems, and circulation. To no effect. He spared no expense, he called various doctors and took her to see private specialists; he may even have had to borrow sums of money from his parents, although he hated having debts and loathed the way his mother, Grandma Shlomit, enjoyed being "put in the picture" and sorting out his marriage for him.

My father got up before dawn every morning to tidy the kitchen, sort the laundry, squeeze fruit, and bring Mother and me the juice at room temperature, to make us stronger, and he also managed to write hasty replies to a few letters from editors and scholars before he left for work. Then he rushed to the bus stop, with a string shopping bag folded up in his battered briefcase, to get to work on time at Terra Sancta Building, where the Newspaper Department of the National Library was transferred when the Mount Scopus campus of the university was cut off from the rest of the town in the War of Independence.

He would come home at five o'clock, having stopped on the way at the grocer's, the electrician's, or the pharmacist's, and would hurry straight in to Mother to see if she was feeling better, hoping that she might have dozed off for a bit while he was out. He would try to spoonfeed her some potato purée or boiled rice that he and I had somehow
learned to cook. Then he locked the door on the inside, helped her to change, and tried to talk to her. He may even have attempted to entertain her with jokes that he had read in the paper or brought back from the library. Before it got dark, he would hurry out to the shops again, take care of various things, not resting, peering at the instructions that accompanied some new medicine, without even sitting down, trying to draw Mother into a conversation about the future of the Balkans.

Then he would come to my room to help me change my sheets or to put mothballs in my closet for the winter, while singing some sentimental ballad to himself, criminally out of tune, or try to draw me into an argument about the future of the Balkans.

After nightfall we sometimes had a visit from Auntie Lilenka—Aunt Lilia, Aunt Leah Kalish-Bar-Samkha—Mother's best friend, who came from the same town, Rovno, and had been in the same class at the Tar-buth gymnasium, the one who had written two books about child psychology.

Aunt Lilia brought some fruit and a plum cake. Father served tea and biscuits and her plum cake, while I washed and put out the fruit, with plates and knives, and then we left the two of them alone together. Aunt Lilia sat shut up with my mother for an hour or two, and when she emerged, her eyes were red. Whereas my mother was as calm and serene as always. Father overcame the dislike he felt toward this lady sufficiently to invite her politely to stay for supper. Why don't you give us a chance to spoil you a little? And it would make Fania happy too. But she always apologized embarrassedly, as though she had been asked to take part in an indecent act. She didn't want to be in the way, God forbid, and anyway she was expected at home, and they'd start worrying about her soon.

Sometimes Grandpa and Grandma came, dressed up as though for a ball. Grandma, in high heels and a black velvet dress with her white necklace, made a tour of the kitchen before she sat down next to Mother. Then she examined the packets of pills and the little bottles, pulled Father toward her and looked inside his collar, and screwed up her face in disgust as she inspected the state of my fingernails. She saw fit to remark sadly that medical science was now aware that most if not all illnesses had their origin in the mind rather than the body. Meanwhile, Grandpa
Alexander, always charming and restless like a playful puppy, kissed my mother's hand and praised her beauty, "even in sickness, and all the more so when you are restored to full health, tomorrow, if not this very evening.
Nu
, what! You're already blossoming! Perfectly enchanting!
Krasavitsa!
"

My father still insisted adamantly that my light had to be out by nine o'clock precisely every evening. He tiptoed into the other room, the book room, the living-room-study-and-bedroom, wrapped a shawl around my mother's shoulders because autumn was on the way and the nights were getting cooler, sat down beside her, took her cold hand into his hand, which was always warm, and tried to rouse her into a simple conversation. Like the prince in the story, he tried to wake Sleeping Beauty. But even if he kissed her, he was unable to wake her: the apple's spell could not be broken. Perhaps he did not kiss her right, or else she was not waiting in her dreams for a bespectacled chatterbox who was an expert in every branch of knowledge, never stopped cracking jokes, and worried about the future of the Balkans, but some other kind of prince entirely.

He sat next to her in the dark, because she could not stand the light at that time. Every morning before he went off to work or before I went to school, we had to close all the shutters and draw the curtains as though my mother had become the terrifying mad woman in the attic in
Jane Eyre.
He sat in the dark, silently holding my mother's hand, without moving. Or he may have held both her hands in his.

But he was unable to sit without moving for more than three or four minutes, either beside my sick mother or anywhere else apart from at his desk with his little cards. He was an active, busy man, always bustling, arranging things, talking nonstop.

When he could not take any more of the darkness and the silence, he took his books and his innumerable cards out to the kitchen, cleared himself a space on the oilcloth, sat down on a stool, and worked for a bit. But he was soon dispirited by this solitary confinement in the soot-blackened kitchen. So once or twice a week he would get up, sigh, change into his suit, comb his hair, brush his teeth well, splash on some of his aftershave, and peep quietly into my room to see if I was fast
asleep (for his sake I always pretended I was). Then he went in to Mother, said whatever he said, promised her whatever he promised, and she certainly did not stop him, on the contrary, she used to stroke his head and say, Go, Arieh, go and play, they're not all as dozy as I am.

When he went out, with a Humphrey Bogart hat on his head and a just-in-case umbrella swinging on his arm, my father walked past my window singing to himself, terribly out of tune, and with a distinct Ashkenazi accent: "...my head found rest upon your breast, and my distant prayers found a nest," or "like a pair of doves your lovely eyes, and your voice like the's-ou-ou-nd of a be-e-ll!"

I did not know where he was going and yet I did know without knowing and yet I did not want to know and yet I forgave him. I hoped he enjoyed himself there a bit. I had absolutely no desire to picture to myself what went on there, in that "there" of his, but what I didn't want to picture to myself came to me in the night and threw me in a whirl and would not let me sleep. I was a twelve-year-old boy. My body had begun to be a pitiless foe.

Sometimes I had the feeling that when the house emptied every morning, Mother actually did get into bed and slept during the daylight hours. And sometimes she got up and walked around the house, always barefoot, despite my father's entreaties and the slippers he brought to her: to and fro, to and fro my mother sailed along the corridor that had been our shelter during the war and was now piled with books and with its wall maps served as the operations room from which my father and I supervised the security of Israel and the defense of the Free World.