A Tale of Love and Darkness (85 page)

Around midday she returned to her sister's, where they were shocked at her appearance because she was frozen and soaked through and because she jokingly complained that there were no handsome young men in the streets of Tel Aviv: if only she had found some, she might have tried to seduce them, men always looked at her with desire in their eyes, but soon, very soon there would be nothing left to desire. Her sister Haya hurried to run her a hot bath, and my mother got in; she refused to taste a crumb of food because any food made her feel sick; she slept for a couple of hours, and in the late afternoon she dressed, put on the wet
raincoat and the boots that were still damp and cold from her morning walk, and went out again as the doctor had ordered to search the streets of Tel Aviv for handsome young men. And this afternoon, because the rain had let up a bit, the streets were not so empty and my mother did not wander aimlessly, she found her way to the corner of Dizengoff Street and JNF Boulevard and from there she walked down Dizengoff Street past the junctions with Gordon Street and Frishman Street with her pretty black handbag hanging from her shoulder, looking at the beautiful shop windows and cafés and getting a glimpse of what Tel Aviv considered as Bohemian life, although to her it all looked tawdry and secondhand, like an imitation of an imitation of something she found pathetic and miserable. It all seemed to deserve and need compassion, but her compassion had run out. Toward evening she went home, refused to eat anything again, drank a cup of black coffee and then another, and sat down to look at some book that fell upside down at her feet when her eyes closed, and for some ten minutes or so Uncle Tsvi and Auntie Haya thought they heard light, irregular snoring. Then she woke up and said she needed to rest, that she had a feeling that the specialist had been quite right when he told her to walk around the town for several hours every day, and she had a feeling that tonight she would fall asleep early and would finally manage to sleep very deeply. By half past eight her sister had made her bed again with fresh sheets, and slid a hot-water bottle under the quilt because the nights were cold and the rain had just started up again and was beating against the shutters. My mother decided to sleep fully dressed, and to make quite sure that she didn't wake up again to spend an agonized night in the kitchen, she poured herself a glass of tea from the vacuum flask that her sister had left by her bedside, waited for it to cool down a little, and when she drank it, she took her sleeping pills. If I had been there with her in that room overlooking the backyard in Haya and Tsvi's apartment at that moment, at half past eight or a quarter to nine on that Saturday evening, I would certainly have tried my hardest to explain to her why she mustn't. And if I did not succeed, I would have done everything possible to stir her compassion, to make her take pity on her only child. I would have cried and I would have pleaded without any shame and I would have hugged her knees, I might even have pretended to faint or I might have hit and scratched myself till the blood flowed as I had seen her do in moments of despair. Or I would have attacked her like a murderer, I would have smashed a vase over her head without hesitation. Or hit her with the iron that stood on a shelf in a corner of the room. Or taken advantage of her weakness to lie on top of her and tie her hands behind her back, and taken away all those pills and tablets and sachets and solutions and potions and syrups of hers and destroyed the lot of them. But I was not allowed to be there. I was not even allowed to go to her funeral. My mother fell asleep, and this time she slept with no nightmares, she had no insomnia, in the early hours she threw up and fell asleep again, still fully dressed, and because Tsvi and Haya were beginning to suspect something, they sent for an ambulance a little before sunrise, and two stretcher bearers carried her carefully, so as not to disturb her sleep, and at the hospital she would not listen to them either, and although they tried various means to disturb her good sleep, she paid no attention to them, or to the specialist from whom she had heard that the psyche is the worst enemy of the body, and she did not wake up in the morning either, or even when the day grew brighter, and from the branches of the ficus tree in the garden of the hospital the bird Elise called to her in wonderment and called to her again and again in vain, and yet it went on trying over and over again, and it still tries sometimes.

Amos Oz is the author of numerous works of fiction and essay collections. He has received the Koret Jewish Book Award, the Prix Femina, the Israel Prize, and the Frankfurt Peace Prize, and his books have been translated into more than thirty languages. Amos Oz lives in Israel.

Nicholas de Lange is a professor at the University of Cambridge and writes on a variety of subjects. He has won many prizes for his translations.