A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [125]
The outburst that Aunt Sonia recalled seventy years later, when the sixteen-year-old Fania with an uncharacteristic access of rage suddenly poured scorn and almost spat on the picture of the gentle shepherdess with the dreamy expression and the profusion of silk petticoats, may have been the spark of my mother's life-force vainly trying to free itself from the darkness that was already beginning to enfold it.
Behind the curtained windows that protected Fania Mussman's childhood so well, Pan Zakrzewski one night shot a bullet into his thigh and another into his brain. Princess Ravzova hammered a rusty nail into her hand to receive some of the Savior's pain and bear it in His stead. Dora the housekeeper's daughter was pregnant by her mother's lover, drunk Steletsky lost his wife at cards, and she, Ira, his wife, was eventually burned to death when she set fire to the handsome Anton's empty hut. But all these things happened on the other side of the double glazing, outside the pleasant, illuminated circle of the Tarbuth school. None of them could break in and seriously harm the pleasantness of my mother's childhood, which was apparently tinged with a hint of melancholy that did not mar but merely colored and sweetened it.
A few years later, in Kerem Avraham, in Amos Street, in the cramped, damp basement apartment, downstairs from the Rosendorffs and next door to the Lembergs, surrounded by zinc tubs and pickled gherkins and the oleander that was dying in a rusty olive drum, assailed all day by smells of cabbage, laundry, boiled fish, and dried urine, my mother began to fade away. She might have been able to grit her teeth and endure hardship and loss, poverty, or the cruelty of married life. But what she couldn't stand, it seems to me, was the tawdriness.
By 1943 or 1944, if not earlier, she knew that everybody had been murdered there, just outside Rovno. Somebody must have come and reported how Germans, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians, armed with submachine guns, had marched the whole city, young and old alike, to Sosenki Forest, where they had all loved to go for walks on fine days, for scout games, for sing-songs around campfires, to sleep in sleeping bags on the banks of a stream under starry skies. There, among boughs, birds, mushrooms, currants, and berries, the Germans opened fire and slaughtered on the edge of pits, in two days, some twenty-five thousand souls.* Almost all my mother's classmates perished. Together with their parents, and all of their neighbors, acquaintances, business rivals, and enemies; well-to-do and proletarian, pious, assimilated, and baptized, communal leaders, synagogue functionaries, pedlars and drawers of water, Communists and Zionists, intellectuals, artists, and village idiots, and some four thousand babies. My mother's schoolteachers also died there, the headmaster, Issachar Reiss, with his charismatic presence and hypnotic eyes, whose look had pierced the dreams of so many adolescent schoolgirls, sleepy, absentminded Isaac Berkowski, hot-tempered Eliezer Buslik, who had taught Jewish culture, Fanka Zeidmann, who had taught geography and biology and also PE, and her brother Shmuel the painter, and pedantic, embittered Dr. Moshe Bergmann, who through almost clenched teeth had taught general and Polish history. All of them.
Not long afterward, in 1948, when the Arab Legion was shelling Jerusalem, another friend of my mother's, Piroshka, Piri Yannai, was also killed, by a direct hit from a shell. She had only gone outside to fetch a bucket and floorcloth.
Perhaps something of the childhood promise was already infected by a kind of poisonous, romantic crust that associated the Muses with death? Something in the overrefined curriculum of the Tarbuth school? Or perhaps it was a melancholy Slavic bourgeois trait that I encountered a few years after my mother's death in