A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [133]
I remember that I did not shout there in the total darkness. I did not make a sound. I did not try to shake the locked door or hammer on it with my little fists, maybe because I was still trembling with fear that the witch with the killed fox's face was still sniffing around after me. I remember that the fear was replaced there, at the bottom of that silent sea of ink, by a strange sweetness: being there was a little like snuggling up warmly to my mother under a winter blanket while gusts of cold and darkness touched the windowpanes from the outside. And a bit like playing at being a deaf and blind child. And a bit like being free of all of them. Completely.
I hoped they would soon find me and get me out of there. But only soon. Not right away.
I even had a small, solid object there, a sort of round metal snail, smooth and pleasant to touch. Its dimensions exactly matched my hand, and my fingers thrilled as they closed around it, felt it, stroked it, clenched a little and relaxed a little, and sometimes pulled and drew out—only a little—the tip of the thin, lithe lodger within, like the head of a snail that peeps out for a moment, curiously, curls this way and that, and instantly retreats inside its shell.
It was a retractable measuring tape, a thin, lithe strip of steel, coiled within a steel case. I amused myself with this snail for a long while in the dark, unsheathing it, stretching it, extending it, letting go suddenly and causing the steel snake to dart back into the shelter of its lair with the speed of lightning until the case had drawn it all back into its belly, received its entire length, and responded with a final slight shudder, a quivering click that was very pleasant to my enfolding hand.
And again unsheathing, releasing, stretching, and this time I extended the steel snake to its full length, sending it far away into the depth of the dark space, feeling with it for the end of the darkness, listening to the popping of its delicate joints as it stretched and its head moved farther and farther away from its shell. Eventually I allowed it to come home gradually, releasing just a tiny bit and stopping, another tiny bit and stopping again, trying to guess—because I'd seen nothing, literally nothing—how many soft puk-puk pulses there would be before I heard the decisive tluk of the final locking that indicated that the snake had vanished from head to tail back into the womb from which I had allowed it to emerge.
How had this good snail suddenly come into my possession? I can't remember whether I had snatched it as I went past, in my knight-errant journey, in one of the twists and turns of the maze, or if my fingers had come across it inside that kennel, after the stone was rolled back to seal the mouth of my tomb.
One may reasonably imagine that, on reflection, Auntie Greta decided that from every angle it would be best not to tell my parents. She certainly saw no reason to alarm them after the event, when everything had ended well and safely. She may have feared that they would judge her to be an insufficiently responsible child sitter, and that she would thereby lose a modest but regular and much-needed source of income.
Between me and Auntie Greta the story of my death and resurrection in the Arab clothes shop was never mentioned or even hinted at. There was not so much as a conspiratorial wink. She may have hoped that in time the memory of that morning would fade and we would both come to think that it had never happened, that it had been only a bad dream. She may even have been a little ashamed of her extravagant excursions to clothes shops: after that winter's morning she never again made me her partner in crime. She may even have managed, thanks to me, to recover somewhat from her addiction to dresses. A few weeks or months later I was taken away from Auntie Greta and sent to Mrs. Pnina Shapiro's kindergarten in Zephaniah Street. We continued, however, for a few years