A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [104]
Now it's a new world. Now at last women are given more opportunity to live lives of their own. Or is it just an illusion? Maybe in the younger generations too women still cry into their pillows at night, while their husbands are asleep, because they feel they have to make impossible choices? I don't want to be judgmental: it's not my world anymore. To make a comparison I'd have to go from door to door checking how many mothers' tears are wept every night into the pillow when husbands are asleep, and to compare the tears then with the tears now.
Sometimes I see on television, sometimes I see even here, from my balcony, how young couples after a day's work do everything together—wash the clothes, hang them out, change diapers, cook, once I even heard in the grocer's a young man saying that the next day he and his wife were going—that's what he said, tomorrow we're going—for an amniocentesis. When I heard him say that, I felt a lump in my throat: maybe the world is changing a little after all?
It's certain that malice, rishes, hasn't lost ground in politics, between religions, nations, or classes, but maybe it's receding a little in couples? In young families? Or maybe I'm just deceiving myself. Maybe it's all just play-acting, and in fact the world carries on as before—the mother cat suckles her kittens, while Mr. Puss-in-Boots licks himself all over, twitches his whiskers, and goes off in search of pleasures in the yard?
Do you still remember what is written in the book of Proverbs? A wise son maketh a glad father, but a foolish son is the heaviness of his mother! If the son turns out wise, then the father rejoices, boasts of his son, and scores full marks. But if, heaven forbid, the son turns out unsuccessful, or stupid, or problematic, or deformed, or a criminal—nu, then it's bound to be the mother's fault, and all the care and suffering falls on her. Once your mother said to me: Sonia, there are just two things—no, I've got a lump in my throat again. We'll talk about this another time. Let's talk about something else.
Sometimes I'm not quite sure that I remember correctly whether that princess, Lyubov Nikitichna, who lived behind the curtain in our house with her two girls, Tasia and Nina, and slept with them in the same antique bed, I'm not quite sure: was she really their mother? Or was she just the gouvernantka, the governess, of the two girls? Who apparently had two different fathers? Because Tasia was Anastasia Ser-geyevna, while Nina was Antonina Boleslavovna. There was something a bit foggy. Something we didn't talk about much, and when we did, it was an awkward subject. I remember that the two girls both called the Princess "Mama" or "Maman," but it might have been because they couldn't remember their real mother. I can't tell you for certain, either way, because the cover-up already existed. There were many cover-ups in life two or three generations ago. Today perhaps there are fewer. Or have they just changed? Have new ones been invented?
Whether the cover-up is a good thing or a bad thing I really don't know. I am not qualified to judge today's habits because I may well have been brainwashed, like all the girls of my generation. Still, I sometimes think that "between him and her," as they say, perhaps in these times it has all become simpler. When I was a girl, when I was what they called a young lady from a good home, it was full of knives, poison, terrifying darkness. Like walking in the dark in a cellar full of scorpions with no shoes on. We were completely in the dark. It simply wasn't talked about.
But they did talk all the time—chatter, jealousy, and rishes, malicious gossip—they talked about money, about diseases, they talked about success, about a good family versus who knows what sort of family, this was an endless topic, and about character they talked endlessly too, this one has such and such a character and that one has such and such a character. And how much they talked about ideas! It's unimaginable today! They talked about Judaism, Zionism, the Bund, Communism, they talked about anarchism