A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [113]
We had some other wonderful teachers too. There was Menahem Gelehrter, who taught Bible studies as though he had been personally present at the Valley of Elah or Anathoth or the Philistine temple in Gaza. Every week he took us on a trip "in the Land," one day in Galilee, another in the new villages in Judaea, another day in the plain of Jericho, another through the streets of Tel Aviv. He would bring maps and photographs, newspaper cuttings and bits of poetry and prose, examples from the Bible, geography, history, and archaeology, until you ended up feeling pleasantly tired, as if you had really been there, not just in your thoughts but as if you'd really walked in the sun and the dust, among the citrus trees and the lodge in the vineyard and the cactus hedges and the pioneers' tents in the valleys. And so I came to the Land long before I actually arrived here.
26
IN ROVNO, your mother had a boyfriend, a deep, sensitive student whose name was Tarla or Tarlo. They had a sort of little union of Zionist students that included your mother, Tarlo, my sister Haya, Esterka Ben Meir, Fania Weissmann, possibly also Fania Sonder, Lilia Kalisch, who was later called Lea Bar-Samkha, and a few others. Haya was the natural leader until she went off to Prague. They would sit around concocting all sorts of plans, how they would live in the Land of Israel, how they would work there to reinvigorate the artistic and cultural life, how they would keep the Rovno connection alive. After the other girls left Rovno, either to study in Prague or to emigrate to the Land, Tarlo started courting me. He would wait for me every evening at the entrance to the Polish Military Hospital. I would come out in my green dress and white headband, and we would stroll together down Trzecziego Maya and Topolyova Streets, which had been renamed Pilsudski Street, in the Palace Gardens, in Gravni Park, sometimes we walked toward the River Ostia and the old quarter, the Citadel District, where the Great Synagogue and the Catholic cathedral stood. There was never anything more between us than words. We may have held hands two or three times at most. Why? That's hard for me to explain to you because your generation would never understand anyway. You might even make fun of us. We had a terrible sense of modesty. We were buried under a mountain of shame and fear.
That Tarlo, he was a great revolutionary by conviction, but he used to blush at everything: if ever he happened to utter a word like "women" or "suckle" or "skirt," or even "legs," he would flush red to his ears, like a hemorrhage, and he'd start apologizing and stuttering. He would talk to me endlessly about science and technology, whether they were a blessing or a curse for mankind. Or both. He would talk enthusiastically about a future where there would soon be no more poverty or crime or illness or even death. He was a bit of a Communist, but it didn't help him much: when Stalin came in '41, Tarlo was simply taken away, and he disappeared.
Of the whole of Jewish Rovno there's barely a soul left alive—only those who came to the Land while there was still time, and the few who fled to America, and those who somehow managed to survive the knives of the Bolshevik regime. All the rest were butchered by the Germans, apart from those who were butchered by Stalin. No, I have no desire to go back for a visit: what for? To start longing again from there for a Land of Israel that no longer exists and may never have existed outside our youthful dreams? To grieve? If I want to grieve, I don't have to leave Wessely Street or even set foot outside my own apartment. I sit here in my armchair