A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [127]
That night I begged to be allowed to sleep in my shoes: I didn't want it to end. Or begged at least to be allowed to have my new shoes next to my head, on the pillow, so that I could fall asleep with that scent of leather and glue. Only after protracted and tearful negotiations did they finally agree to put the shoes on a chair by the head of my bed—on condition you didn't so much as touch them till morning, because you've washed your hands, you can just look, you can peep every minute into their dark jaws that are smiling at you and inhale their smell until you drop off facing them, smiling to yourself in your sleep with a sensual pleasure, as if you are being stroked.
In my third memory I am locked in, alone, in a dark kennel.
When I was three and a half, nearly four, I was entrusted several times a week for a few hours to a middle-aged widowed neighbor who had no children of her own, a woman who smelled of damp wool and, less strongly, of washing soap and frying. Her name was Mrs. Gat, but we always called her Auntie Greta, except for my father, who occasionally put his arm around her shoulder and called her Gretchen, or Gret, and he would make up joky rhymes, as was his custom, in the manner of an old-world schoolboy: "Never let us forget that dear Gret is a pet!" (This was apparently his way of paying court to women.) Auntie Greta would blush, and because she was ashamed of blushing, she would immediately blush a deeper blood red, verging on purple.
Auntie Greta's blond hair was arranged in a thick plait that she coiled like a rope around her round head. The hair at her temples was turning gray, like thistles growing at the edge of a field of yellow. Her plump, soft arms were dotted with masses of pale brown freckles. Under the rustic cotton dresses she liked to wear she had heavy, very wide thighs that suggested a carthorse. An embarrassed, apologetic smile sometimes hung around her lips as though she had been caught doing something very naughty, or telling a fib, and she was frankly shocked at herself. She always had two of her fingers bandaged, or at least one, and occasionally three, either because she had cut herself while chopping vegetables or slammed her hand in the kitchen drawer or brought the lid of the piano down on her fingers; despite her constant misadventures with her fingers, she gave private piano lessons. She was also a private child sitter.
After breakfast my mother would stand me on a wooden stool in front of the basin in the bathroom, wipe the traces of porridge off my cheeks and chin with a damp towel, moisten my hair, and comb a sharp, straight side parting, then hand me a brown paper bag containing a banana, an apple, a piece of cheese, and some biscuits. And so, scrubbed, combed, and miserable, I was taken to the backyard of the fourth building to the right of ours. On the way there I had to promise to be good, to do whatever Auntie Greta said, not to make a nuisance of myself, and above all on no account to scratch the brown crust that had grown on the wound on my knee, because the crust, which is called a scab, is part of the healing process and it will soon fall off by itself, but if you touch it, heaven forbid, it might get infected and then there will be nothing for it, they'll have to give you another injection.
At her door my mother wished me and Auntie Greta a good time together and left. At once Auntie Greta took off my shoes and put me down in my socks to play nicely and quietly on a mat, in one corner