A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [106]
Take a look at this, please: I've got something here that I can show you and you can feel it with your fingers, so you'll know that everything I've told you isn't just stories. Look at this please—no, it's not a tablecloth, it's a pillowcase, embroidered the way young ladies from good homes learned to embroider in the old days. It was embroidered for me as a present by the Princess—or Countess?—Lyubov Nikitichna. The head that's embroidered here, she told me herself, is the silhouette of the head of Cardinal Richelieu. Who he was, that Cardinal Richelieu, I don't remember anymore. Perhaps I never knew, I'm not clever like Haya and Fania: they were sent off to get their matriculation, and then to Prague, to study at the university. I was a bit thick. People always said about me: that Sonichka, she is so cute but she's a bit thick. I was sent to the Polish military hospital to learn how to be a qualified nurse. But still I remember very well, before I left home, that the princess told me it was the head of Cardinal Richelieu.
Perhaps you know who Cardinal Richelieu was? Never mind. Tell me another time, or don't bother. At my age, it's not so important to me if I end my days without the honor of knowing who Cardinal Richelieu was. There are plenty of cardinals, and most of them are none too fond of our people.
Deep down in my heart I'm a bit of an anarchist. Like Papa. Your mother was also an anarchist at heart. Of course, among the Klausners she could never express it: they thought her pretty strange as it was, although they always behaved politely toward her. In general with the Klausners manners were always the most important thing. Your other grandfather, Grandpa Alexander, if I didn't snatch my hand away quickly, would have kissed it. There's a children's story about Puss-in-Boots. In the Klausner family your mother was like a captive bird in a cage hanging in Puss-in-Boots's drawing room.
I'm an anarchist for the very simple reason that nothing good ever came from any Cardinal Richelieu. Only Ivanuchka Durachok, do you remember, the village idiot in our maid Xenyuchka's story who took pity on the ordinary people and didn't begrudge the little bread he had to eat, but used it to stop the hole in the bridge and because of that he was made king—only someone like him might take pity on us, too, occasionally. All the rest, the kings and rulers, have no pity on anyone. In fact, we ordinary people don't have much pity for each other either: we didn't exactly have pity for the little Arab girl who died at the road block on the way to the hospital because apparently there was some Cardinal Richelieu of a soldier there, without a heart. A Jewish soldier—but still a Cardinal Richelieu! All he wanted was to lock up and go home, and so that little girl died, whose eyes should be piercing our souls so none of us can sleep at night, though I didn't even see her eyes because in the papers they only show pictures of our victims, never theirs.
Do you think ordinary people are so wonderful? Far from it! They are just as stupid and cruel as their rulers. That's the real moral of Hans Christian Andersen's story about the emperor's new clothes, that ordinary people are just as stupid as the king and the courtiers and Cardinal Richelieu. But Ivanuchka Durachok didn't care if they laughed at him; all that mattered to him was that they should stay alive. He had compassion for people, all of whom without exception need some compassion. Even Cardinal Richelieu. Even the Pope, and you must have seen on television how sick and feeble he is, and here we were so lacking in compassion, we made him stand for hours in