Authors: Amos Oz
I only got around to reading your letter at one o’clock this morning. It lay waiting for me all day, hidden in my handbag, like a viper, between my handkerchief and my lipstick. In the evening Michel fell asleep in front of the television as usual. During “Sermon for the Day” I woke him up, so he could watch the midnight news. Yitzhak Rabin, in his opinion, is not a Jewish prime minister at all but an American general who just happens to speak a little broken Hebrew and is selling the state to Uncle Sam. Once again the non-Jews are ruling us and we are kowtowing to them. Whereas he considers me to be the most beautiful woman in the whole world. So saying he kissed me on the forehead, stretching on tiptoe. I bent down before him to undo the childish bows in his shoelaces. He was tired and half-asleep. His voice was cracked from smoking. When I put him to bed and tucked him in he said that the most mysterious psalm in the book is the one that begins “To the Chief Musician, on a remote, mute dove.” He delivered a sort of sermon on the words
remote, mute.
He called me his “mute dove.” And while he was still talking he fell asleep, lying on his back, like a baby. Only then did I sit down to read your catalogue of woes, to the sound of his peaceful breathing mingled with the chorus of crickets in the wadi that divides us from the Arab village. I translated word for word your darts of vicious wit into agonized cries of pain. But when I got to the sword of Goliath and your dying dragon I wept inside. I couldn’t go on reading. I hid your letter under the evening paper and went out to the kitchen to make myself lemon tea. Then I returned to you, and at the window there was a sharp Muslim moon cloaked in seven veils of mist.
I read and reread your concentrated seminar, the carnivorous plants, Bernanos and Ecclesiastes and Jesus, those who live by the sword shall die by the sword, and here a shivering chill took hold of me too. Just like you on the night of the sirens in Chicago. Even though here in Jerusalem it is a clammy, slightly milky summer’s night, with no lightning, no storms on lakes, only distant barking on the shores of the desert.
I am not up to taking issue with you. Your razor-sharp brain always works on me like the barking of a machine gun: a deadly accurate burst of facts, inferences, and explanations from which there is no recovery. But nevertheless, this time I will answer back. Jesus and Bernanos were right, while you and Ecclesiastes may perhaps deserve only pity. There is happiness in the world, Alec, and suffering is not its opposite but the narrow passage through which stooping, crawling among nettles, we reach the silent clearing in the forest bathed in lunar silver.
You probably recall the famous statement at the beginning of
Anna Karenina,
in which Tolstoy, donning there the cloak of a calm village deity and hovering over the void full of benign toleration and loving kindness, declares from on high that all happy families resemble one another, while unhappy families are all unhappy in their own way. With all due respect to Tolstoy I’m telling you that the opposite is true: Unhappy people are mainly plunged in conventional suffering, living out in sterile routine one of five or six threadbare clichés of misery. Whereas happiness is a rare, fine vessel, a sort of Chinese vase, and the few people who have reached it have shaped and formed it line by line over the course of years, each in his own image and likeness, each in his own character, so that no two happinesses are alike. And in the molding of their happiness they have instilled their own suffering and humiliation. Like refining gold from ore. There
is
happiness in the world, Alec, even if it is more ephemeral than a dream. Indeed in your case it is beyond your reach. As a star is beyond the reach of a mole. Not “the satisfaction of approval,” not praise and advancement and conquest and domination, not submission and surrender, but the thrill of fusion. The merging of the I with another. As an oyster enfolds a foreign body and is wounded and turns it into its pearl while the warm water still surrounds and encompasses everything. You have never tasted this fusion, not once in your whole life. When the body is a musical instrument in the hands of the soul. When Other and I strike root in each other and become a single coral. And when the drip of the stalactite slowly feeds the stalagmite until the two of them become one.
Think for example what it is like at precisely ten past seven on a summer evening in Jerusalem. The ridges of the mountains touched by jets of sunset. The last light starting to dissolve the stone-lined side streets as though stripping them of their stoniness. The sound of Arab pipes rising from the wadi with a prolonged moan, beyond joy or sorrow, as though the soul of the mountains were straining to lull their body to sleep and depart on its night journey. Or a couple of hours later, when stars come out over the Judaean desert and the silhouette of the minaret stands erect among the shadowy mud huts. When your fingers feel the rough weave of the upholstery, and outside the window an olive tree shines silver as it receives a gift of light from the table lamp inside your room, and for a moment the boundary between your fingertip and the material fades and the toucher is the touched and also the touch. The bread in your hand, the teaspoon, the glass of tea, the simple, speechless things are suddenly ringed with a fine primordial radiation. Lit up from within your soul and lighting it up in return. The joy of being and its simplicity descends and covers everything with the mystery of things that were here even before the creation of knowledge. The original things that you have been banished from eternally, exiled to the steppes of darkness over which you wander howling at a dead moon, roaming from whiteness to whiteness, searching to the edges of the tundra for something lost long since, even though you have forgotten what it was you lost or when or why: “His life is his prison while his death is limned to him as a prospect of paradoxical resurrection, a promise of miraculous redemption from his vale of tears.” The quotation comes from your book. The wolf howling in the darkness at the moon on the steppe is my own contribution.
The love was also my contribution. Which you rebuffed. Have you ever loved anybody? Me? Perhaps your son?
Lies, Alec. You have never loved anyone. You conquered me. And then you abandoned me, like an objective that has lost its value. Now you have decided to launch an offensive against Michel to wrest Boaz from him. All these years you saw your son as nothing more than a sort of meaningless sandhill, until you received information from me that the enemy had suddenly seen some value in that sandhill and was trying to hold onto it. And then you summoned your forces for a lightning assault. And won again, almost as an afterthought. Love is alien to you. You don’t even know the meaning of the word. To destroy, to smash, to shatter, to flatten, to wipe out, to mop up, to screw, to terminate, to annihilate, to expunge, to incinerate—these are the measures of your world and the moonscapes among which you roam, with Zakheim as your Sancho Panza. And that is where you are now trying to banish our son as well.
Now I’ll reveal something that is bound to cause you pleasure: Your money has already begun to corrupt my life with Michel. For six years Michel and I have been struggling, like two survivors of a shipwreck, to build a rough hut for shelter in some corner of a desert island. To make it warm and light. I used to get up early in the morning to make him his sandwiches, fill his blue plastic thermos bottle with coffee, fetch his morning paper, pack it all in his worn briefcase and send him off to work. Then I would get Yifat dressed and feed her. Do the housework to the sound of music on the radio. Take care of the garden and the potted plants on the veranda (various kinds of herbs that Michel grows in old crates). Between ten and twelve, while the child was still at the crèche, I would go out to shop. Find the time occasionally to read a book. One of my neighbors would come in for a chat in the kitchen. At one o’clock I would feed Yifat and warm up Michel’s meal. When he got in I would serve him cold mineral water in summer or hot chocolate on a cold day. During his private lessons I would retreat to the kitchen to peel vegetables for the next day, bake a cake, wash the dishes, read a little more. Serve him Turkish coffee. Listen to a concert on the radio while doing the ironing, until the child woke up. After his private lessons, when he settled down to his marking, I would send her out to play in the yard with the neighbors’ children and stand at the window watching the mountains and the olive trees. On sunny Saturdays in winter, when Michel had finished reading his way through two newspapers, we would go for a walk, the three of us, in the Talpiyyot woods, on the hill of the High Commissioner’s Residence, or to the foot of Mar Elias Monastery. Michel was good at inventing amusing games. He did not stand on his dignity. He would mimic a furious billy goat, a frog, a speaker at a party meeting, and the two of us would laugh till the tears ran. When we got back, he would fall asleep surrounded by the weekend supplements in his threadbare armchair, the child would sleep on the rug at his feet, and I would read one of the novels that Michel always remembered to borrow for me at the city library. Even though he used to tease me for my “frivolous reading,” he never forgot to bring one or two home for me each week on his way back from work. Nor did he ever omit to buy me a small bunch of flowers every Sabbath eve. Which he would hand to me with a funny little French bow. Sometimes he would surprise me with a handkerchief, a bottle of scent, some picture magazine he thought I might find interesting, which he himself would inevitably end up consuming from cover to cover, reading passages aloud to me.
At the end of the Sabbath it was our custom to go out on the veranda, sit on deck chairs, and eat peanuts while watching the sunset. Sometimes Michel would start to tell me, in his warm, scorched voice, about his time in Paris. He would describe his wanderings among the museums “tasting the delights of Europe,” depicting the bridges and boulevards in pseudo-modest terms, as though he himself had designed them, joking about his poverty and his degradation. Sometimes he would amuse Yifat with animal fables and tall stories. Occasionally, when the sun went down, we would decide not to turn on the light on the veranda, and my daughter and I in the dark would learn from him his strange family songs, tunes in which guttural joy almost verged upon wailing. Before bedtime, pillow fights would break out among us, until the time came to put Yifat to sleep with a fairy tale. Then we would sit on the settee, holding hands like children, and he would lecture me on his views, analyze the political situation, let me share his visions, which he would quickly dismiss with a wave of the hand, as though he had merely been joking.
So, like people slowly saving a nest egg, we built up our meager stock of happiness evening by evening. We shaped our Chinese vase. We feathered a love nest for mute doves. In bed I initiated him into ecstasies he had not imagined in his wildest dreams, and Michel repaid me from his reserves of silent, fervent adoration. Until you opened up the windows of heaven on him and flooded him with your money, like an airplane spraying a field with poisonous pesticides, and at once everything began to wither and fade.
At the end of the school year Michel decided to resign from his job as a teacher of French at Isaac’s Tent school. He explained to me that the time had come for him to “escape from bondage to liberty” and that he would soon demonstrate to me how “the moss on the wall would flourish like the cedar in Lebanon.”
His new-found wealth he has decided for some reason to entrust to Zakheim and his son-in-law.
Ten days ago we were even privileged to receive a visit from the Etgars. Dorit, Zakheim’s daughter, a bustling Tel Aviv beauty, who called Michel “Micky” and me “darling,” led her tubby little husband along on a lead; he was polite and nervous, and was wearing a tie, despite the heat, and frameless spectacles, and had a Kennedy haircut. They brought us a present of a wall-hanging featuring monkeys and tigers, which they had bought on their last trip to Bangkok. For Yifat they brought a windup doll with three speeds. Our flat did not suit them; no sooner had they arrived than they begged us to join them in their American car, which looked like a pleasure cruiser, and treat them to a “nice, wholesome tour round the pedigreed, nontourist Jerusalem.” They took us to lunch at the Intercontinental Hotel. Evidently they had completely forgotten about the problem of kosher food: Michel was too shy to mention it, and invented a stomach upset. In the end all we ate there was hard-boiled eggs and cream cheese. They talked between themselves about politics, about the prospects for the opening up of the Sinai and the West Bank to private enterprise, and Zakheim’s daughter tried to involve me in a discussion of the “just unbelievable” price of a Saint Bernard puppy and the equally unbelievable cost of keeping one in Israel. The bespectacled young man insisted on beginning every sentence with “Let’s say that,” and his wife classified everything under the sun as either “frightful” or “just fantastic,” until I wanted to scream. When we parted they issued an invitation to us to spend a weekend with them in their house in Kfar Shmaryahu, with a choice between the sea and their private pool for swimming. Afterward, when I said to Michel that as far as I was concerned he could go and stay with them as often as he liked but without me, my husband replied, “Let’s say that you’ll think it over.”
And then a week ago I learned, by accident, that Michel is selling our flat (with the unfinished extension) to one of his cousins, with whom he has signed a contract to purchase a new home in the restored Jewish Quarter in the Old City. Perhaps because I did not manage to look surprised, Michel teased me by calling me “Vashti.” He has also rejoined the National Religious Party, and simultaneously decided to take out a subscription to the newspaper
Haarets.