A Tale of Love and Darkness (63 page)

Most of the boys in my class took advantage of sweet Mr. Michaeli's good nature and absentmindedness, and they dozed through his lessons with their heads resting on their arms on the desk. Or sometimes they passed notes around or even tossed a paper ball between the desks: Mr. Michaeli did not notice, or perhaps he did not care.

I did not care either. He fixed me with his weary, kindly eyes and told his stories to me alone. Or just to two or three of us, who did not take our eyes off his lips, which seemed to be creating entire worlds in front of us.

FRIENDS AND
neighbors started appearing in our little yard again on summer evenings, to talk about politics or cultural affairs over a glass of tea and a piece of cake. Mala and Staszek Rudnicki, Hayim and Hannah Toren, the Krochmals, who had reopened their tiny shop in Geula Street
and were once more repairing dolls and making hair grow on balding teddy bears. Yakov-David and Zerta Abramski were also regular visitors. (They had both gone very gray in the months since their son Yoni was killed. Mr. Abramski had become even more talkative than before, while Zerta had turned very quiet.) My father's parents, Grandpa Alexander and Grandma Shlomit, also came sometimes, very elegant and robed in Odessan self-importance. Grandpa Alexander would briskly dismiss everything his son said with a "
Nu
, what" and a scornful wave of his hand, but he never found the courage to disagree with Grandma Shlomit about anything. Grandma would plant two wet kisses on my cheeks, and immediately wipe her lips with a paper napkin and my cheeks with another one, wrinkle her nose at the refreshments Mother had prepared, or the napkins that weren't folded the right way, or her son's jacket, which seemed to her too loud and verging on Oriental bad taste:

"But really, Lonya, it's so
cheapl
Where did you find that rag? In some Arab shop in Jaffa?" And without favoring my mother with so much as a glance she added sadly: "Only in the tiniest shtetls, where culture was barely more than a rumor, might you have seen somebody dressing like that!"

They would sit in a circle around the black tea cart that had been taken outside to serve as a garden table, unanimously bless the cool evening breeze, and over tea and cakes analyze Stalin's latest devious move or President Truman's determination, discuss the decline of the British Empire or the partition of India, and from there the conversation moved on to the politics of the young state and became more animated. Staszek Rudnicki raised his voice while Mr. Abramski ridiculed him with expansive movements of his hand and in high-flown, biblical Hebrew. Staszek believed firmly in the kibbutzim and the new collective farms and maintained that the government ought to send all the new immigrants there en masse, straight off the ships, whether they wanted to go or not, to be cured once and for all of their Diaspora mentality and their persecution complexes; it was there, through hard work in the fields, that the New Hebrew Man would be molded.

My father expressed his resentment of the Bolshevik despotism of the Histadrut leadership who withheld work from those not in possession of their red card. Mr. Gustav Krochmal timidly advanced the view that Ben-Gurion, despite his faults, was the hero of the age: he had been sent to us providentially at a time when petty-minded party hacks
might have been put off by the enormity of the undertaking and missed the opportune moment to establish a state. "It was our youth!" Grandpa Alexander shouted loudly, "It was our wonderful youth that gave us the victory and the miracle! Without no Ben-Gurion! The youth!" At which Grandpa leaned toward me and patted me absentmindedly a couple of times, as though to reward the younger generation for winning the war.

Women hardly ever joined in the conversation. In those days it was customary to compliment women on being "such marvelous listeners," on the cakes and biscuits, on the pleasant atmosphere, but not on their contribution to the conversation. Mala Rudnicki, for instance, would nod happily whenever Staszek spoke and shake her head if anyone interrupted him. Zerta Abramski clasped her shoulders with her hands as though she felt cold. Ever since Yoni's death she would sit, even on warm evenings, with her head inclined as though she was looking at the tops of the cypresses in the next-door garden, hugging her shoulders with her hands. Grandma Shlomit, who was a strong-minded, opinionated woman, would sometimes interpose in that deep alto voice of hers: "How very true!" or "It's much worse than you said, Staszek, much, much worse!" Or else: "N-o! What do you mean, Mr. Abramski! That is simply not possible!"

Only my mother sometimes subverted this rule. When there was a moment's silence, she would say something that at first might seem irrelevant but then could be seen to have gently shifted the center of gravity completely, without changing the subject or contradicting those who had spoken before, but rather as though she were opening a door in some back wall of the conversation that up to then had not seemed to have a doorway in it.

Once she had made her remark, she shut up, smiling agreeably and looking triumphantly not at the visitors or at my father but at me. After my mother had spoken, the whole conversation seemed to shift its weight from one foot to another. Soon afterward, still smiling her delicate smile that seemed to be doubting something while deciphering something else, she would get up and offer her guests another glass of tea: Please? How strong? And another slice of cake?

To the child I was then my mother's brief intervention in the men's
conversation was rather distressing, perhaps because I sensed an invisible ripple of embarrassment among the speakers, an almost imperceptible search for a way out, as though there were a vague momentary fear that they might inadvertently have said or done something that had caused my mother to snigger at them, but none of them knew what it was. Maybe it was her withdrawn, radiant beauty that always embarrassed those inhibited men and made them fear she might not like them, or find them just a little repulsive.

As for the women, my mother's interventions stirred in them a strange mixture of anxiety and hope that one day she would finally lose her footing, and perhaps a mite of pleasure at the men's discomfiture.

Hayim Toren, the writer and writers' union hack, might say, for example:

"Surely everyone must realize that you cannot run a state the way you might run a grocer's shop. Or like the town council in some godforsaken shtetl."

My father says:

"It may be too early to judge, my dear Hayim, but everyone with eyes in his head occasionally discerns cause for profound disappointment in our young state."

Mr. Krochmal, the dolls' doctor, adds shyly:

"Apart from which, they don't even mend the pavement. Two letters I've written to the mayor, and I haven't had a single reply. I'm not saying that to disagree with what Mr. Klausner was saying, but in the self-same spirit."

My father ventures one of his puns:

"The only things that work in this country of ours are the road works."

Mr. Abramski quotes:

"'And blood toucheth blood,' saith the prophet Hosea, 'therefore shall the land mourn.' The remnant of the Jewish nation has come here to rebuild the kingdom of David and Solomon, to lay the foundation of the Third Temple, and we have all fallen into the sweaty hands of assorted bloated kibbutz treasurers of little faith, and other red-faced hacks of uncircumcised heart, 'whose world is as narrow as that of an ant.' Rebellious princes and companions of thieves the lot of them, who are sharing among themselves plot by plot the paltry strip of the Fatherland that the
nations have left in our hands. It was to them and no one else that the prophet Ezekiel was referring when he said: 'The suburbs shall shake at the sound of the cry of thy pilots.' "

And Mother, with her smile hovering on her lips and barely touching them:

"Perhaps when they've finished sharing out the plots, they'll start mending the pavements? And then they'll mend the pavement in front of Mr. Krochmal's shop."

Now, fifty years after her death, I imagine I can hear in her voice as she says these words, or something like them, a tense mixture of sobriety, skepticism, sharp, fine sarcasm, and ever-present sadness.

In those years something gnawed at her. A slowness started to make itself felt in her movements, or something resembling a slight absence of mind. She had stopped giving private history and literature lessons. Sometimes, for a paltry payment, she would correct the grammar and style of articles written in limping Germanic Hebrew by professors from Rehavia and edit them for publication. She still did all the housework herself, ably and nimbly: she spent each morning cooking, frying, baking, shopping, slicing, mixing, drying, cleaning, scraping, washing, hanging out, ironing, folding, until the whole place was gleaming, and after lunch she sat in an armchair reading.

She had a strange way of sitting when she read: the book always rested on her knees, and her back and neck were bent over it. She looked like a young girl shyly lowering her eyes to her knees when she sat reading like that. Often she stood at the window looking out for a long time at our quiet street. Or she took her shoes off and lay on her back on the bedspread, fully dressed, with her open eyes fixed on a particular spot on the ceiling. Sometimes she would suddenly stand up, feverishly put on her outdoor clothes, promise to be back in a quarter of an hour, straighten her skirt, smooth down her hair without looking in the mirror, hang her plain straw handbag on her shoulder, and go out briskly, as though she was afraid of missing something. If I asked to go with her, or if I asked her where she was going, my mother would say:

"I need to be on my own for a bit. Why don't you be on your own too?" And again: "I'll be back in a quarter of an hour."

She always kept her word: she'd be back very soon, with a sparkle in her eyes and color in her cheeks, as though she had been in very cold air. As though she'd run all the way. Or as though something exciting had happened to her on the way. She was prettier when she returned than when she left.

Once I followed her out of the house without her noticing me. I trailed her at a distance, clinging to walls and bushes, as I'd learned to do from Sherlock Holmes and from films. The air was not very cold and my mother did not run, she walked briskly, as though afraid she'd be late. At the end of Zephaniah Street she turned right and stepped out jauntily in her white shoes until she reached the bottom of Malachi Street. There she stopped beside the mailbox and hesitated. The young detective who was trailing her came to the conclusion that she went out to mail letters secretly, and I was bristling with curiosity and vague apprehension. But my mother did not mail any letter. She stood for a moment beside the mailbox, lost in thought, and then she suddenly put a hand to her forehead and turned to go home. (Years later that red mailbox still stood there, set into a concrete wall, and inscribed with the letters GR, for King George V.) So I cut through a yard that led me to a shortcut through a second yard, and I got home a minute or two before she arrived, a little out of breath, her cheeks colored as though she'd been in snow, with a mischievous, affectionate sparkle in her piercing brown eyes. At that moment my mother looked very much like her father, Grandpa-Papa. She took my head and pressed it lightly to her tummy and said something like this to me:

"Of all my children, you're the one I love best. Can you tell me once and for all what it is about you that makes me love you the most?"

And also:

"It's especially your innocence. I've never encountered innocence like yours in all my life. Even when you've lived for many long years and had all sorts of experiences, your innocence will never leave you. Ever. You'll always stay innocent."

And also:

"There are some women who just devour the innocent, and there are others, and I'm one of them, who love innocent men and feel an inner urge to spread a protective wing over them."

And also:

"I think you will grow up to be a sort of prattling puppydog like your father, and you'll also be a man who is quiet and full and closed like a well in a village that has been abandoned by all its inhabitants. Like me. You can be both, yes. I do believe you can. Would you like us to play at making up a story now? We'll take it in turns to make up a chapter. Shall I start? Once upon a time there was a village that had been abandoned by all its inhabitants. Even the cats and dogs. Even the birds had abandoned it. So the village stood silent and abandoned for years upon years. The thatched roofs were lashed by the rain and the wind, the walls of the cottages were cracked by hail and snow, the vegetable gardens were overgrown, and only the trees and bushes went on growing, and with no one to prune them, they grew thicker and thicker. One evening, in the autumn, a traveler who had lost his way arrived in the abandoned village. Hesitantly he knocked at the door of the first cottage, and ... would you like to carry on?"

Around that time, in the winter between 1949 and 1950, two years before her death, she began to have frequent headaches. She often had the flu and sore throats, and even when she recovered, the migraines did not go away. She put her chair near the window and sat for hours in a blue flannel dressing gown staring at the rain, with her book open upside-down on her lap, but instead of reading she drummed on its cover with her fingers. She sat stiffly staring at the rain or at some sodden bird for an hour or two hours and never stopped drumming on the book with all ten fingers. As though she were repeating the same piece over and over again on the piano.

Gradually she had to cut down on the housework. She still managed to put away the dishes, tidy up, and throw out every scrap of paper and crumb. She still swept the apartment every day and washed the floor once every two or three days. But she did not cook complicated meals anymore. She made do with simple food: boiled potatoes, fried eggs, raw vegetables. Occasionally bits of chicken floating in chicken soup. Or boiled rice with canned tuna. She hardly ever complained about her piercing headaches, which sometimes continued for days. It was my father who told me about them. He told me quietly, not in her presence, in a kind of man-to-man conversation. He put his arm around my shoulder and
asked me to promise to keep my voice down from now on when Mother was at home. Not to shout or make a racket. And I must especially promise not to slam doors, windows, or shutters. I must be careful not to drop pots or cans or saucepan lids. And not to clap my hands indoors.