A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [124]
All mothers love their children: that's a law of nature. Even a cat or a goat. Even mothers of criminals and murderers. Even mothers of Nazis. Or of drooling retards. Even mothers of monsters. The fact that only I couldn't be loved, that my mother had run away from me, only proved that there was nothing in me to love, that I didn't deserve love. There was something wrong with me, something very terrible, something repulsive and truly horrifying, more loathsome than a physical or mental defect, or even madness. There was something so irreparably detestable about me, something so terrible, that even a sensitive woman like my mother, who could lavish love on a bird or a beggar or a stray puppy, couldn't stand me anymore and had to run away from me as far as she could go. There is an Arabic saying, Kullu qirdin bi-'ayni ummihi ghazalun—"Every monkey is a gazelle to its mother." Except for me.
If only I were also sweet, just a little, as all children in the world are to their mothers, even the ugliest and naughtiest children, even those violent, disturbed children who are always being thrown out of school, even Bianca Schor who stabbed her grandfather with a kitchen knife, even Yanni the pervert, who has elephantiasis and unzips his fly in the street and takes out his thing and shows it to the girls—if only I were good, if only I had behaved the way she asked me to a thousand times, and like an idiot I didn't listen to her—if only after Seder night I hadn't broken her blue bowl that had come down to her from her great-grandmother—if only I'd brushed my teeth properly every morning, top and bottom and all around and in the corners, without cheating—if only I hadn't pinched that half-pound note from her handbag and then lied and denied I'd taken it—if only I'd stopped thinking those wicked thoughts and never let my hand stray inside my pajama bottoms at night—if only I'd been like everyone else, deserving a mother, too—
After a year or two, when I'd left home and gone to live in Kibbutz Hulda, I slowly started to think about her, too. At the end of the day, after school and work and a shower, when all the kibbutz kids had showered and dressed for the evening and gone to spend time with their parents, leaving me all alone and odd among the empty children's houses, I would go and sit on my own on the wooden bench inside the reading room.
I would sit there in the dark for half an hour or an hour, conjuring up, picture by picture, the end of her life. In those days I was already trying to imagine a little of what had never been spoken about, either between my mother and me, or between me and my father, or apparently even between the two of them.
My mother was thirty-eight when she died: younger than my elder daughter and a little older than my younger daughter on the day these lines were written. Ten or twenty years after they completed their studies at the Tarbuth secondary school, when my mother, Lilenka Kalisch, and their group of friends experienced the buffeting of reality in a Jerusalem of heat waves, poverty, and malicious gossip, when those emotional Rovno schoolgirls suddenly found themselves in the rough terrain of everyday life, diapers, husbands, migraines, queues, smells of mothballs and kitchen sinks, it transpired apparently that the curriculum of the school in Rovno in the 1920s was of no help to them. It only made things worse.
Or it may have been something else, something neither Byronic nor Chopinic but closer to that haze of melancholy loneliness that surrounds introverted, well-born young ladies in the plays of Chekhov and in the stories of Gnessin, a sort of childhood promise that is inevitably frustrated, trampled underfoot, and even ridiculed by the monotony of life itself. My mother grew up surrounded by an angelic cultural vision of misty beauty whose wings were finally dashed on a hot dusty pavement of Jerusalem stone. She had grown up as the pretty, refined miller's daughter, she had come of age in the