A Tale of Love and Darkness (81 page)

He corrected himself again:

"And anyway, how could I say that heaven was smiling on us when the sky is so dark and lowering and it's raining cats and dogs?"

Mother said:

"No, you two order first because it's my treat today. And I'll be very pleased if you choose the most expensive dishes on the menu."

But the menu was a modest one, in keeping with those years of shortages and austerity. Father and I ordered vegetable soup and chicken rissoles with mashed potato. I conspiratorially refrained from telling Father that on the way to Terra Sancta I'd been allowed to taste coffee for the very first time. And to have a chocolate ice cream before my lunch, even though it was winter.

Mother stared at the menu for a long time, then placed it face down on the table, and it was only after Father reminded her again that she finally ordered a bowl of plain boiled rice. Father apologized amiably to the waitress and explained vaguely that Mother was not entirely recovered. While Father and I tucked into our food with gusto, Mother pecked at her rice for a little as though she were forcing herself, then stopped and ordered a cup of strong black coffee.

"Are you all right, Mother?"

The waitress returned with a cup of coffee for my mother and a glass of tea for my father, and she placed in front of me a bowl of quivering
yellow jelly. At once Father impatiently took his wallet out of his inside jacket pocket. But Mother insisted on her rights: Put it right back, please. Today you are both my guests. And Father obeyed, not before cracking some forced joke about her inheriting an oil well apparently, which explained her newfound wealth and her extravagance. We waited for the rain to let up. My father and I were sitting facing the kitchen, and Mother's face opposite us was looking between our shoulders at the stubborn rain through the window that gave onto the street. What we spoke about I can't remember, but presumably Father chased away any silence. He may have talked to us about the Christian Church's relations with the Jewish people, or treated us to a survey of the history of the fierce dispute that broke out in the middle of the eighteenth century between Rabbi Jacob Emden and the adherents of Shabbetai Zvi, particularly Rabbi Jonathan Eybeschutz, who was suspected of Sabbataean leanings.

The only other customers in the restaurant that rainy lunchtime were two elderly ladies who were talking in very refined German in low, well-mannered voices. They looked alike, with steely gray hair and birdlike features accentuated by prominent Adam's apples. The elder of the two looked over eighty, and at second glance I supposed that she must be the other one's mother. And I decided that the mother and daughter were both widows, and that they lived together because they had no one else left in the whole wide world. In my mind I dubbed them Mrs. Gertrude and Mrs. Magda, and I tried to imagine their tiny, scrupulously clean apartment, perhaps somewhere in this part of town, roughly opposite the Eden Hotel.

Suddenly one of them, Mrs. Magda, the younger of the two, raised her voice and hurled a single German word at the old woman opposite. She pronounced it with venomous, piercing rage, like a vulture pouncing on its prey, and then she threw her cup against the wall.

In the deeply etched lines on the cheeks of the older woman, whom I had named Gertrude, tears began to run. She wept soundlessly and without screwing up her face. She wept with a straight face. The waitress bent down and silently picked up the pieces of the cup. When she had finished, she disappeared. Not a word was spoken after the shout. The two women went on sitting opposite each other without uttering a sound. They were both very thin, and they both had curly gray hair that started a long way up their foreheads, like a man's receding hairline. The
older widow was still weeping silent tears, with no contortion of her face; they drained down to her pointed chin, where they dripped onto her breast like stalactites in a cave. She made no attempt to control her weeping or to dry her tears. Even though her daughter, with a cruel expression on her face, silently held out a neatly ironed white handkerchief. If indeed it was her daughter. She did not withdraw her hand, which lay extended on the table in front of her with the neatly ironed handkerchief on top of it. The whole image was frozen for a long time, as though mother and daughter were just an old, fading sepia photograph in some dusty album. Suddenly I asked:

"Are you all right, Mother?"

That was because my mother, ignoring the rules of etiquette, had turned her chair slightly and was staring fixedly at the two women. At that moment it struck me that my mother's face had turned very pale again, the way it was all the time she was ill. After a little while she said she was very sorry, she was feeling a little tired and wanted to go home and lie down a little. Father nodded, got up, asked the waitress where the nearest phone booth was, and went off to call a taxi. As we left the restaurant, Mother had to lean on Father's arm and shoulder; I held the door open for them, warned them about the step, and opened the door of the taxi for them. When we had got Mother into the backseat, Father went back into the restaurant to settle the bill. She sat up very straight in the taxi, and her brown eyes were wide open. Too wide.

That evening the new doctor was sent for, and when he had left, Father sent for the old one as well. There was no disagreement between them: both doctors prescribed complete rest. Consequently Father put Mother to bed in my bed, which had become her bed, took her a glass of warm milk and honey, and begged her to take a few sips with her new sleeping pills. He asked how many lights she wanted him to leave on. A quarter of an hour later I was sent to peep through the crack in the door, and I saw that she was asleep. She slept till next morning, when she woke up early again and got up to help Father and me with the various morning chores. She made us fried eggs again while I set the table and Father chopped various vegetables very fine for a salad. When it was time for us to go, Father to Terra Sancta Building and me to Tachkemoni School, Mother
suddenly decided to go out too, and to walk me to school, because her good friend Lilenka, Lilia Bar-Samkha, lived near Tachkemoni.

Later we discovered that Lilenka had not been at home, so she had gone to see another friend, Fania Weissmann, who had also been a fellow pupil at the Tarbuth gymnasium in Rovno. From Fania Weiss-mann's she had walked just before midday to the Egged Central Bus Station halfway down Jaffa Road and boarded a bus bound for Tel Aviv, to see her sisters, or perhaps she intended to change buses in Tel Aviv and go on to Haifa and Kiriat Motskin, to her parents' hut. But when my mother got to the Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv, she apparently changed her mind: she had a black coffee in a café and returned to Jerusalem late in the afternoon.

When she got home, she complained of feeling very tired. She took another two or three of the new sleeping pills. Or perhaps she tried going back to the old ones. But that night she could not get to sleep, the migraine came back, and she sat up fully dressed by the window. At two o'clock in the morning my mother decided to do some ironing. She put the light on in my room, which had become her room, set up the ironing board, filled a bottle with water to sprinkle on the clothes, and ironed for several hours, until dawn broke. When she ran out of clothes, she took the bed linen out of the cupboard and ironed it all over again. When she had finished that, she even ironed the bedspread from my bed, but she was so tired or weak that she burned it: the smell of burning woke Father, who woke me too, and the two of us were astonished to see that my mother had ironed every sock, handkerchief, napkin, and tablecloth in the place. We rushed to put out the burning bedspread in the bathroom, and then we sat Mother down in her chair and got down on our knees to remove her shoes: my father took off one, and I took off the other. Then Father asked me to leave the room for a few minutes and kindly close the door behind me. I closed the door, but this time I pressed myself against the door because I wanted to hear. They spoke to each other for half an hour in Russian. Then Father asked me to look after my mother for a few minutes, and he went to the pharmacist's and bought some medicine or syrup, and while he was there, he phoned Uncle Tsvi in his office at Tsahalon Hospital in Jaffa and he also phoned Uncle Buma at work at the Zamenhof clinic in Tel Aviv. After these calls Father and Mother agreed that she should go to Tel Aviv that very
morning, Thursday, to stay with one of her sisters, to get some rest and a change of air and atmosphere. She could stay as long as she liked, till Sunday or even till Monday morning, because on Monday afternoon Lilia Bar-Samkha had managed to get her an appointment for a test at Hadassah Hospital in Heneviim Street, an appointment that without Aunt Lilenka's good connections we would have had to wait several months for.

And because Mother was feeling weak and complained of dizziness, Father insisted that this time she should not travel to Tel Aviv alone, but that he would go with her and take her all the way to Auntie Haya and Uncle Tsvi's, and he might even stay the night: if he took the first bus back to Jerusalem the next morning, Friday, he could manage to get to work for a few hours at least. He took no notice of Mother's protests, that there was no need for him to travel with her and miss a day's work, she was perfectly capable of taking the bus to Tel Aviv on her own and finding her sister's house. She wouldn't get lost.

But Father would not hear of it. He was gray and stubborn this time, and he absolutely insisted. I promised him that after school I would go straight to Grandma Shlomit and Grandpa Alexander's in Prague Lane, explain what had happened, and stay overnight with them till Father got back. Only don't be a nuisance to Grandma and Grandpa, help them nicely, clear the table after supper, and offer to take the rubbish out. And do all your homework: don't leave any of it for the weekend. He called me a clever son. He may even have called me young man. And from outside we were joined at that moment by the bird Elise, who trilled her morning snatch of Beethoven for us three or four times with clear, limpid joy: "Ti-da-di-da-di..." The bird sang with wonderment, awe, gratitude, exaltation, as though no night had ever ended before, as if this morning was the very first morning in the universe and its light was a wondrous light the like of which had never before burst forth and traversed the wide expanse of darkness.

I WAS ABOUT
fifteen when I went to Hulda, two and a half years after my mother's death: a paleface among the suntanned, a skinny youth among well-built giants, a tireless chatterbox among the taciturn, a versifier among agricultural laborers. All my new classmates had a healthy mind in a healthy body, only I had a dreamy mind in an almost transparent body. Worse still: I was caught a couple of times sitting in out-of-the-way corners of the kibbutz trying to paint watercolors. Or hiding in the study room behind the newspaper room on the ground floor of Herzl House, scribbling away. A McCarthyite rumor soon went around that I was somehow connected to the Herut party, that I had grown up in a Revisionist family, and I was suspected of having obscure links with the hated demagogue Menachem Begin, the archenemy of the Labor Movement. In short: a twisted upbringing and irreparably screwed-up genes.

The fact that I had come to Hulda because I had rebelled against my father and his family did not help me. I was not given credit for being a renegade from Herut, or for my helpless laughter during Begin's speech at the Edison auditorium: the brave little boy from "The Emperor's New Clothes," of all people, was suspected here in Hulda of being in the pay of the crooked tailors.

In vain did I endeavor to excel in farm work and fail at school. In vain did I grill myself like a steak in my efforts to be as brown as the rest of them. In vain did I show myself in the Current Affairs Discussion Group to be the most socialist socialist in Hulda, if not in the entire working class. Nothing helped me: to them I was some kind of alien, and so my classmates harassed me pitilessly to make me give up my strange ways and become a normal person like them. Once they sent me off on the double to the barn without a flashlight in the middle of the night, to check and report back if any of the cows was in heat and required the urgent attention of the bull. Another time they put me down for toilet-polishing duty. And yet another time I was sent to the children's farm to sex the ducklings. Heaven forbid that I should ever forget where I had come from or have any misapprehensions about where I had landed.

As for me, I took it all with humility, because I knew that the process of getting Jerusalem out of my system rightly entailed suffering, the pangs of rebirth. I considered the practical jokes and the humiliation justified not because I was suffering from some inferiority complex but because I really was inferior. They, those solidly built boys scorched by dust and sun and those proud-walking girls, were the salt of the earth, the lords of creation. As handsome as demigods, as beautiful as the nights in Canaan.

All except for me.

No one was taken in by my suntan: they all knew perfectly well—I knew it myself—that even when my skin was finally tanned a deep brown, I would still be pale on the inside. Though I forced myself to learn how to lay irrigation hoses in the hayfields, drive a tractor, hit the target in the rifle range with the old Czech rifle, I had still not managed to change my spots: through all the camouflage nets I covered myself with you could still see that weak, soft-hearted, loquacious town boy, who fantasized and made up all sorts of strange stories that could never have happened and didn't interest anyone here.

Whereas they seemed to me glorious: those big boys who could score a goal from twenty yards with their left foot, wring a chicken's neck without batting an eyelid, break into the stores at night to pilfer provisions for a midnight feast, and those bold girls who could do a twenty-mile hike carrying a sixty-five-pound pack on their backs and still have enough energy left afterward to dance late into the night with their blue skirts whirling as though the force of gravity had been suspended in their honor, then sit in a circle with us till dawn and sing to us under the starry sky, sing heartrending songs in rounds and canons, sing leaning back to back, sing while radiating an innocent glow that swept you off your feet precisely because it was so innocent, so heavenly, as pure as the angelic choirs.