A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [121]
I was a compulsively polite child. To her first question, what did I think about, I therefore replied politely: All sorts of things. To the volley of questions What-excited-me-What-frightened-me I answered: Nothing in particular. While to her offer of friendship I responded tactfully: "Thank you, Auntie Lilia, that's very kind of you."
"If ever you feel a need to talk about something that you don't find it easy to talk to your parents about, you won't hesitate? You'll come to me? And tell me? And of course I'll keep the secret. We can discuss it together."
"Thank you."
"The things you have nobody to talk to about? Thoughts that make you feel a bit lonely?"
"Thank you. Thank you truly. Would you like me to fetch you a glass of water? My mother will be home soon. She's just around the corner at Heinemann the pharmacist's. Or would you like to read the paper while you're waiting, Auntie Lilia? Shall I put the fan on for you?"
28
TWENTY YEARS later, on July 28,1971, a few weeks after my book Unto Death was published, I received a letter from this friend of my mother's, who was then in her sixties:
I feel I haven't behaved properly to you since your late father's death. I have been very depressed and am unable to do anything. I have shut myself up at home (our apartment is frightening ... but I have no energy to change anything) and I am afraid to go out—that's the simple truth. In the man in your story "Late Love" I recognized some common traits—he seemed so familiar and so close. "Crusade" I heard dramatized on the radio once, and you read some excerpts in a television interview. It was wonderful to see you so unexpectedly on the television in the corner of my room. I am curious to know what the sources of the story are—it is unique. It's hard for me to imagine what was going on inside you when you wrote those descriptions of horror and dread. It's chilling. The descriptions of the Jews—strong figures, definitely not victims ... impressed me. And also the description of water eating away iron ... and the picture of a Jerusalem that is not a reality nor is it the journey's end, it is just longing and yearning for something that is not a place in the world. Death appears to me from the pages of your book as something I had never imagined—and yet I craved it not so long ago ... I am reminded now more than usually of your mother's words—she foresaw my failure in life. And I prided myself that my weakness was only superficial, that I was resilient. Now I feel disintegration—strange, for so many years I dreamed of returning to the Land, and now that it has become a reality—I am living here as in a nightmare. Don't pay any attention to what I'm saying. It just slipped out. Don't react. The last time I saw you, in your heated exchange with your father, I didn't sense in you the gloomy man ... All my family send regards to yours. I'm going to be a grandma soon! With friendship and affection, Lilia (Lea).
And in another letter, from August 5, 1979, Lilka wrote to me:
...but enough of that for the time being, maybe some day we'll meet after all and then we'll chat about lots of questions that your words have raised for me. What are you hinting at now, in the "Autobiographical Note" in your book ... when you talk of your mother dying "out of disappointment or longing. Something had gone wrong"? Please forgive me, I'm touching a wound. Your late father's wound, your wound especially, and even—my own. You can't know how much I miss Fania, especially lately. I am left so much on my own in my narrow little world. I long for her. And for another friend of ours, Stefa she was called, who departed this world from grief and suffering in 1963 ... She was a pediatrician, and her life consisted of one disappointment after another, maybe because she trusted men. Stefa simply refused to grasp what some men are capable of. The three of us were very close in the 1930s.