A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [122]
And again, in a letter dated September 28,1980:
Your mother came from an unhappy family, and she damaged your family. But she is not to blame ... I recall that once, in 1963, you sat in our apartment ... and I promised you that I would write to you about your mother someday ... But it's very hard for me to carry it out.Even to write a letter is hard for me ... Ifyou only knew how much your mother wanted to be an artist, to be a creative person—from her childhood! If only she could see you now! And why didn't she manage it? Maybe in a personal conversation I could be more daring and tell you things that I don't dare put in writing. Yours affectionately, Lilia.
My father, before he died (in 1970), was able to read my first three books, which he did not entirely enjoy. My mother was able to see only some stories I wrote at school and a few childish verses that I penned in the hope of touching the Muses, whose existence she liked to tell me about. (My father did not believe in the Muses, just as he always despised fairies, witches, wonder-working rabbis, elves, any kind of saint, intuition, miracles, and ghosts. He saw himself as a man with a secular worldview; he believed in rational thought and hard intellectual work.)
If my mother had read the two stories in Unto Death, would she, too, have responded to them with words similar to those written by her friend Lilenka Kalisch, "longing and yearning for something that is not a place in the world"? It is hard to know. A misty veil of dreamy sadness, unexpressed emotions, and romantic suffering enfolded those well-to-do Rovno young ladies, as though their lives there were painted forever within the walls of their secondary school with a palette that contained only two colors: either melancholy or festive. Although my mother sometimes rebelled against this upbringing.
Something in the curriculum of that school in the 1920s, or maybe some deep romantic mustiness that seeped into the hearts of my mother and her friends in their youth, some dense Polish-Russian emotionalism, something between Chopin and Mickiewicz, between the Sorrows of Young Werther and Lord Byron, something in the twilight zone between the sublime, the tormented, the dreamy, and the solitary, all kinds of will-o'-the-wisps of "longing and yearning" deluded my mother most of her life and seduced her until she succumbed and committed suicide in 1952. She was thirty-eight when she died. I was twelve and a half.
In the weeks and months that followed my mother's death I did not think for a moment of her agony. I made myself deaf to the unheard cry for help that remained behind her and that may have always hung in the air of our apartment. There was not a drop of compassion in me. Nor did I miss her. I did not grieve at my mother's death: I was too hurt and angry for any other emotion to remain. When, for example, I noticed her checked apron, which still hung on a hook on the back of the kitchen door several weeks after her death, I was as angry as though it were pouring salt on my wounds. My mother's toilet things, her powder box, her hairbrush on her green shelf in the bathroom hurt me as though they had remained there deliberately to mock me. Her books. Her empty shoes. The echo of