A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [126]
For many years now I have been trailing this old murderer, this cunning ancient seducer, this revolting old rake, deformed by old age yet disguising himself time and again as a youthful prince charming. This crafty hunter of the broken-hearted, this vampire wooer with a voice as bittersweet as that of a cello on a lonely night, a subtle, velvety charlatan, a master of stratagems, a magic piper who draws the desperate and lonely into the folds of his silken cloak. The ancient serial killer of disappointed souls.
*Roughly the population of Arad, where I now live, and more than the total number killed on the Jewish side in a hundred years of war against the Arabs.
29
WHAT DOES my memory begin with? The very first memory is a shoe, a little brown fragrant new shoe, with a soft warm tongue. It must have been one of a pair, but memory has only salvaged the one. A new, still slightly stiff shoe. I was so entranced by its delightful smell of new, shiny, almost living leather, and of pungent, dizzying glue that apparently I first tried to put my new shoe on my face, on my nose, like a sort of snout. So I could get drunk on the smell.
My mother came into the room, followed by my father with various uncles and aunts or mere acquaintances. I must have looked cute but funny, with my little face stuck inside the shoe, because they all burst out laughing and pointed at me, and somebody roared and slapped his knees with both hands, and somebody else grunted and called hoarsely, Quick, quick, somebody fetch a camera!
There was no camera in our apartment, but I can still see that baby: all of two or two and a quarter, his hair flaxen and his eyes big, round, and surprised. But immediately under the eyes, instead of the nose, mouth, and chin, sprouted the heel of a shoe, and a shiny new virgin sole that had never been walked on. From the eyes up it was a pale-faced infant, and from the cheeks down what looked like a hammerfish or some kind of primeval, heavy-cropped bird.
What was the baby feeling? I can answer that question quite precisely, because I have inherited from that baby what he felt at that moment: a piercing joy, a wild, dizzying joooy, springing from the fact that the whole crowd of people was focused on him alone, surprised at him, enjoying him, pointing at him. At the same time, without any contradiction, the infant was also frightened and alarmed by the abundance of their attention, which he was too small to contain, because his parents and strangers and all of them were bellowing-laughing-pointing at him and his snout, and laughing again as they shouted to one another, a camera, quick, fetch a camera.
And also disappointed because they cut off right in the middle the intoxicating sensual pleasure of inhaling the fresh smell of leather and the dizzying fragrance of glue that made his insides tremble.
In the next picture there is no audience. Just my mother putting a soft warm sock on me (because it was cold in the room), and then encouraging me, push, push hard, harder, as if she were a midwife helping the fetus of my tiny foot travel down the virginal birth canal of my fragrant new shoe.
To this day, whenever I strain to push my foot into a boot or shoe, and even now as I sit and write this, my skin reexperiences the pleasure of my foot tentatively entering the inner walls of that first shoe, the trembling of the flesh as it entered for the first time in its life this treasure cave whose stiff yet soft walls enfolded it caressingly as it thrust deeper and deeper while my mother's voice, soft and patient, encouraged me, push, push just a bit more.
One hand gently pushed my foot deeper inside while the other, holding the sole lightly, thrust against me, apparently opposing my movement but really