A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [117]
I do not know how or when my parents became close, and I do not know whether there was still any love between them before I knew them. They were married at the beginning of 1938 on the roof of the Rabbinate building on Jaffa Road, he in a black pinstripe suit and a tie, with a triangle of white handkerchief peeping from his top pocket, she in a long white dress that accentuated the pallor of her skin and the beauty of her black hair. Fania moved with her few belongings from her shared room in Zephaniah Street to Arieh's room in the Zarchi family's apartment in Amos Street.
A few months later, when my mother was pregnant, they moved to a building across the road, to the two-room semibasement apartment. Here their only child was born. Sometimes my father joked in his rather anemic way that in those days the world was decidedly not a fit place to bring babies into (he was fond of the word "decidedly," as well as "nevertheless," "indeed," "in a certain sense," "unmistakably," "promptly," "on the other hand," and "utter disgrace"). In saying that the world was not a fit place to bring babies into, he may have been uttering an implied reproach to me, for being born so recklessly and irresponsibly, contrary to his plans and expectations, decidedly before he had achieved what he had hoped to achieve in his life, and hinting that because of my birth he had missed the boat. Or he may not have been hinting anything, just being clever in his usual way: quite often my father made some joke or other just to break the silence. He always imagined that silence was somehow directed against him. Or that it was his fault.
27
WHAT DID poor Ashkenazim eat in Jerusalem in the 1940s? We ate black bread with slices of onion and olives cut in half, and sometimes also with anchovy paste; we ate smoked fish and salt fish that came from the depths of the fragrant barrels in the corner of Mr. Auster's grocery; on special occasions we ate sardines, which were considered a delicacy.
We ate squash and eggplant, boiled or fried or made into an oily salad with slivers of garlic and chopped onion.
In the morning there was brown bread with jam, or occasionally with cheese. (The first time I went to Paris, straight from Kibbutz Hulda, in 1969, my hosts were amused to discover that in Israel there were only two kinds of cheese: white cheese and yellow cheese.) In the morning I was given Quaker Oats that tasted of glue, and when I went on strike, they replaced it with semolina and a sprinkling of cinnamon. My mother drank lemon tea in the morning, and sometimes she dunked a dark biscuit in it. My father's breakfast consisted of a slice of brown bread with thick yellow jam, half a hard-boiled egg with olives, slices of tomato, green pepper, and cucumber, and some Tnuva sour cream that came in a thick glass jar.
My father always got up early, an hour or an hour and a half before my mother and me. By five-thirty he was already standing at the bathroom mirror, brushing the snow on his cheeks into a thick lather, and while he shaved he softly sang a folk song that was hair-raisingly offkey. Afterward he would drink a glass of tea alone in the kitchen while he read the paper. In the citrus season he would squeeze some oranges with a little hand squeezer and bring my mother and me a glass of orange juice in bed. And because the citrus season was in the winter, and because in those days it was thought that you could catch a chill from drinking cold drinks on a cold day, my diligent father used to light the Primus stove before he squeezed the oranges and put a pan of water