A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [119]
In honor of Sabbaths and festivals my mother would get a carp, which she bought early, in the middle of the week. All day long the fish would swim relentlessly back and forth in the bathtub, from side to side to side, searching tirelessly for some secret underwater passage from the bath to the open sea. I fed it on breadcrumbs. Father taught me that in our own secret language a fish was called Noon. I quickly made friends with Noonie: he could distinguish my footsteps from a distance and hurried to the side of the bath to greet me, raising out of the water a mouth that reminded me of things it's best not to think about.
Once or twice I got up and crept along in the dark to check whether my friend really slept in the cold water all night, which seemed to me strange and even contrary to the laws of nature, or whether maybe after lights out Noonie's working day was over and he wriggled out and crawled slowly on his belly into the laundry basket and curled up and slept in the warm embrace of the towels and underwear, till in the morning he secretly slipped back into the bath to serve his time in the navy.
Once, when I was left at home on my own, I decided to enrich this poor bored carp's life with islands, straits, headlands, and sandbanks made from various kitchen utensils that I dropped in the bath. As patient and persistent as Captain Ahab I hunted my Moby Dick with a ladle for a long time, but time and again he wriggled away and escaped to the submarine lairs that I had scattered for him myself on the seabed. At one point I touched his cold, sharp scales, and I shuddered with disgust and fear at this new, spine-chilling discovery: until that morning, every living thing, whether chick, child, or cat, was always soft and warm; only what was dead turned cold and hard. And now this paradox of the carp, cold and hard but alive, all damp, slippery, and oily, scaly, with gills, wriggling and struggling strongly, stiffening and chill between my fingers, stabbed me with such a sudden panic that I hurriedly released my catch and shook my fingers, then washed, soaped, and scrubbed them three times. So I gave up the chase. Instead of hunting Noonie, I spent a long time trying to look at the world through the round, still eyes of a fish, without eyelids, without eyelashes, without moving.
And that's how Father, Mother, and retribution found me, because they came home and crept into the bathroom without my hearing them, and they caught me sitting motionless like a Buddha on the toilet lid, my mouth slightly open, my face frozen, my glazed eyes staring unblinkingly like a pair of glass beads. At once the kitchen utensils that the crazy child had sunk to the bottom of the carp water to serve as an archipelago or the underwater defenses of Pearl Harbor came to light. "His Highness," Father said sadly, "will once again be compelled to suffer the consequences of his deeds. I am sorry."
On Friday night, Grandpa and Grandma came, and so did Mother's friend Lilenka with her rotund husband Mr. Bar-Samkha, whose face was covered with a thick curly beard like steel wool. His ears were different sizes, like an Alsatian that has pricked up one ear and let the other flop.
After the chicken soup with kneidlach, Mother suddenly placed on the table the corpse of my Noonie, complete with head and tail but bearing a series of seven knife gashes along its side, as splendid as the body of a king being borne on a gun carriage to the Pantheon. The regal corpse reposed in a rich cream-colored sauce upon a couch of gleaming rice, embellished with stewed prunes and slices of carrot, scattered with decorative green