A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [100]
Fania, your mother, wanted to be talked to quietly and reasonably, not shouted at. She liked to explain, and she wanted to be explained to. She couldn't stand commands. Even in her bedroom she had her own special way of ordering things—she was a very tidy girl—and if someone disturbed the order, she was very upset. Yet she held her peace. Too much: I don't recall her ever raising her voice. Or telling someone off. She responded with silence even to things that she shouldn't have.
In one corner of the kitchen there was a big baking oven, and sometimes we were allowed as a treat to take the lopata, the paddle, and put the Sabbath chollas in the oven. We pretended we were putting the wicked witch Baba Yaga and the black devil, chyorny chyort, in the fire. There were smaller cookers too, with four cooktops and two dukhovki, for baking biscuits and roasting meat. The kitchen had three huge windows looking out on the garden and the orchard, and they were nearly always steamed up. The bathroom opened off the kitchen. Hardly anybody in Rovno had a bathroom inside their house at that time. The rich families had a little shed in the yard, behind the house, with a wood-burning boiler that served for baths and also for the laundry. We were the only ones who had a proper bathroom, and all our little friends were green with envy. They used to call it the "sultan's delight."
When we wanted to take a bath, we would put some logs and sawdust in the opening under the big boiler, then light the fire and wait an hour or an hour and a half for the water to heat up. There was enough hot water for six or seven baths. Where did the water come from? There was a kolodets, a well, in the neighbor's yard, and when we wanted to fill our boiler, they shut off their water and Philip or Anton or Vassia pumped the water up with the squeaky hand pump.
I remember how once, on the eve of the Day of Atonement, after the meal, two minutes before the fast began, Papa said to me: Sureleh, mein Tochterl, please bring me a glass of water straight from the well. When I brought him the water, he dropped three or four sugar lumps in it and stirred it with his finger, and when he had drunk it, he said: Now thanks to you, Sureleh, the fast will be lighter for me. (Mama called me Sonichka, my teachers called me Sarah, but to Papa I was always Sureleh.)
Papa liked to stir with his finger and eat with his hands. I was a little girl then, maybe five or six. And I can't explain to you—I can't even explain to myself—what joy, what happiness his words brought me, and the thought that thanks to me the fast would be lighter for him. Even now, eighty years later, I feel happy, just as I did then, whenever I remember it.
But there's also an upside-down sort of happiness, a black happiness, that comes from doing evil to others. Papa used to say that we were driven out of paradise not because we ate from the tree of knowledge but because we ate from the tree of evil. Otherwise, how can you explain black happiness? The happiness we feel not because of what we have but because of what we have and others haven't got? That others will be jealous of? And feel bad? Papa used to say, every tragedy is something of a comedy and in every disaster there is a grain of enjoyment for the bystander. Tell me, is it true there's no word for Schadenfreude in English?
Opposite the bathroom, on the other side of the kitchen, was the door that led to the room that Xenia shared with her daughter Dora, whose father was rumored to be the previous owner of the house, Mayor Lebe-devski. Dora was a real beauty, she had a face like the Madonna, a full body but a very thin wasplike waist, and big brown doe's eyes, but she was already a little weak in the head. When she was fourteen or sixteen, she fell in love with an older Gentile called Krynicki, who was also said to be her mother's lover.
Xenia made her Dora only one meal a day, in the evening, and then