A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [0]
Amos Oz
* * *
Translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange
* * *
A Harvest Book • Harcourt, Inc.
ORLANDO AUSTIN NEW YORK SAN DIEGO TORONTO LONDON
* * *
Copyright © 2003 by Amos Oz and Keter Publishing House Ltd.
Translation copyright © 2004 by Nicholas de Lange
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publisher.
Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be
mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc.,
6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.
www.HarcourtBooks.com
This is a translation of Sipour Al Ahava Vehoshekh.
First published in the UK by Chatto & Windus.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Oz, Amos.
[Sipur 'al ahavah ve-hoshekh. English]
A tale of love and darkness/Amos Oz;
translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange.
p. cm.
1. Oz, Amos—Childhood and youth. 2. Authors, Israeli—Biography. I. Title.
PJ5054.O9Z47313 2004
892.4'36—dc22 2004007302
ISBN-13: 978-0151-00878-0 ISBN-10: 0-15-100878-7
ISBN-13: 978-0156-03252-0 (pbk.) ISBN-10: 0-15-603252-x (pbk.)
Text set in Minion
Designed by Cathy Riggs
Printed in the United States of America
First Harvest edition 2005
A C E G I K J H F D B
1
I WAS BORN and bred in a tiny, low-ceilinged ground-floor apartment. My parents slept on a sofa bed that filled their room almost from wall to wall when it was opened up each evening. Early every morning they used to shut away this bed deep into itself, hide the bedclothes in the chest underneath, turn the mattress over, press it all tight shut, and conceal the whole under a light gray cover, then scatter a few embroidered oriental cushions on top, so that all evidence of their night's sleep disappeared. in this way their bedroom also served as study, library, dining room, and living room.
Opposite this room was my little green room, half taken up with a big-bellied wardrobe. A narrow, low passage, dark and slightly curved, like an escape tunnel from a prison, linked the little kitchenette and toilet to these two small rooms. A lightbulb imprisoned in an iron cage cast a gloomy half-light on this passage even during the daytime. At the front both rooms had just a single window, guarded by metal blinds, squinting to catch a glimpse of the view to the east but seeing only a dusty cypress tree and a low wall of roughly dressed stones. Through a tiny opening high up in their back walls the kitchenette and toilet peered out into a little prison yard surrounded by high walls and paved with concrete, where a pale geranium planted in a rusty olive can was gradually dying for want of a single ray of sunlight. On the sills of these tiny openings we always kept jars of pickles and a stubborn cactus in a cracked vase that served as a flowerpot.
It was actually a basement apartment, as the ground floor of the building had been hollowed out of the rocky hillside. This hill was our next-door neighbor, a heavy, introverted, silent neighbor, an old, sad hill with the regular habits of a bachelor, a drowsy, still wintry hill, which never scraped the furniture or entertained guests, never made a noise or disturbed us, but through the walls there seeped constantly toward us, like a faint yet persistent musty smell, the cold, dark silence and dampness of this melancholy neighbor.
Consequently through the summer there was always a hint of winter in our home.
Visitors would say: it's always so pleasant here in a heat wave, so cool and fresh, really chilly, but how do you manage in the winter? Don't the walls let in the damp? Don't you find it depressing?
Books filled our home. My father could read sixteen or seventeen languages and could speak eleven (all with a Russian accent). My mother spoke four or five languages and read seven or eight. They conversed