A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [123]
I was angry with her for leaving without saying good-bye, without a hug, without a word of explanation: after all, my mother had been incapable of parting even from a total stranger, a delivery man or a pedlar at the door, without offering him a glass of water, without a smile, without a little apology and two or three pleasant words. All through my childhood, she had never left me alone at the grocer's or in a strange courtyard or in a public garden. How could she have done it? I was angry with her on Father's behalf too, whose wife had shamed him thus, had shown him up, had suddenly vanished like a woman running away with a stranger in a comic film. Throughout my childhood, if I ever disappeared even for an hour or two, I was shouted at and punished: it was a fixed rule that anyone who went out always had to say where they were going and for how long and what time they would be back. At least they had to leave a note in the usual place, under the vase.
All of us.
Is that the way to leave, rudely, in the middle of a sentence? She herself had always insisted on tact, politeness, considerate behavior, a constant effort not to hurt others, attentiveness, sensitivity! How could she?
I hated her.
After a few weeks the anger subsided. And with the anger I seemed to lose a protective layer, a kind of lead casing that had protected me in the early days against the shock and pain. From now on I was exposed.
As I stopped hating my mother, I began to hate myself.
I still had no free corner in my heart for my mother's pain, her loneliness, the suffocation that had closed in around her, the terrible despair of the last nights of her life. I was still living out my own crisis rather than hers. Yet I was no longer angry with her, but rather the opposite, I blamed myself: if only I had been a better, more devoted, son, if I had not scattered my clothes all over the floor, if I had not pestered and nagged her, if I had done my homework on time, if I had taken the rubbish out every evening willingly, without being shouted at to do it, if I had not made a nuisance of myself, made a noise, forgotten to turn out the light, come home with a torn shirt, left muddy footprints all around the kitchen. If I had been more considerate of her migraines. Or if at least I had tried to do what she wanted, and been a bit less weak and pale, eaten everything she cooked for me and put on my plate and not been so difficult, if for her sake I had been a more sociable child and a bit less of a loner, a bit less skinny and more suntanned and athletic, as she had wanted me to be!
Or perhaps the opposite? If I had been much weaker, chronically ill, confined to a wheelchair, consumptive, or even blind from birth? Surely her kindliness and her generous nature would never have allowed her to abandon such a disadvantaged child, leave him to his misery and just disappear? If only I had been a handicapped child with no legs, if only while there was still time I had run under a passing car and been run over and had both my legs amputated, perhaps my mother would have been filled with compassion? Would not have left me? Would have stayed to go on looking after me?
If my mother had abandoned me like that, without a backward glance, surely it was a sign that she had never loved me: if you love someone, she herself had taught me, you forgive them for everything, except betrayal. You even forgive them for nagging, for losing their cap, for leaving the squash on their plate.
To forsake is to betray. And she had forsaken both of us, Father and me. I would never have left her like that, despite her migraines, even though I now knew that she had never loved us, I would never have left her, despite all her long silences, her shutting herself up in a darkened room, and all her moods. I'd have lost my temper