A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [109]
And in 1934, a year or so after her parents and her elder sister Haya and four years before her younger sister Sonia, Fania too reached the Land of Israel. People who knew her said that she had had a painful love affair in Prague; they couldn't give me any details. When I visited Prague and on several successive evenings walked in the warren of ancient cobblestone streets around the university, I conjured up images and composed stories in my head.
A year or so after she arrived in Jerusalem, my mother registered to continue her history and philosophy studies at the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus. Forty-eight years later, apparently with no notion of what her grandmother had studied in her youth, my daughter Fania decided to study history and philosophy at Tel Aviv University.
I do not know if my mother broke off her studies at Charles University only because her parents' money had run out. How far was she pushed to emigrate to Palestine by the violent hatred of Jews that filled the streets of Europe in the mid-1930s and spread to the universities, or to what extent did she come here as the result of her education in a Tar-buth school and her membership in a Zionist youth movement? What did she hope to find here, what did she find, what did she not find? What did Tel Aviv and Jerusalem look like to someone who had grown up in a mansion in Rovno and arrived straight from the Gothic beauty of Prague? What did spoken Hebrew sound like to the sensitive ears of a young lady coming with the refined, book-learned Hebrew of the Tar-buth school and possessing a finely tuned linguistic sensibility? How did my young mother respond to the sand dunes, the motor pumps in the citrus groves, the rocky hillsides, the archaeology field trips, the biblical ruins and remains of the Second Temple period, the headlines in the newspapers and the cooperative dairy produce, the wadis, the hamsins, the domes of the walled convents, the ice-cold water from the jarra, the cultural evenings with accordion and harmonica music, the cooperative bus drivers in their khaki shorts, the sounds of English (the language of the rulers of the country), the dark orchards, the minarets, strings of camels carrying building sand, Hebrew watchmen, suntanned pioneers from the kibbutz, construction workers in shabby caps? How much was she repelled, or attracted, by tempestuous nights of arguments, ideological conflicts, and courtships, Saturday afternoon outings, the fire of party politics, the secret intrigues of the various underground groups and their sympathizers, the enlisting of volunteers for agricultural tasks, the dark blue nights punctuated by howls of jackals and echoes of distant gunfire?
By the time I reached the age when my mother could have told me about her childhood and her early days in the Land, her mind was elsewhere and set on other matters. The bedtime stories she told me were peopled by giants, fairies, witches, the farmer's wife and the miller's daughter, remote huts deep in the forest. If she ever spoke about the past, about her parents' house or the flour mill or the bitch Prima, something bitter and desperate would creep into her voice, something ambivalent or vaguely sarcastic, a kind of suppressed mockery, something too complicated or veiled for me to catch, something provocative and disconcerting.
Maybe that is why I did not like her to talk about these things and begged her to tell me simple stories I could relate to instead, like that of Matvey the Water Drawer and his six bewitched