A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [134]
It had not been a dream. Dreams dissolve with time and make way for other dreams, while that dwarf witch, that elderly child, the face of the killed fox, still sniggers at me with sharp teeth, among which is a single gold incisor.
And there was not only the witch: there was also the snail I had brought back from the forest, the snail I hid from my father and mother, and that sometimes, when I was alone, I dared to take out and play with under the bedclothes, causing it long erections and lightning retreats back into the depth of its lair.
A brown man with big bags under his kind eyes, neither young nor old, with a green-and-white tailor's tape measure around his neck and both ends dangling down onto his chest. He moved in a weary sort of way. His brown face was wide and sleepy, and a shy smile flickered for a moment and died under his soft gray mustache. The man leaned over me and said something to me in Arabic, something I could not understand but that I nevertheless translated into words in my heart, Don't be frightened, child, don't be frightened anymore now.
I remember that my rescuer had square, brown-framed reading glasses, which suited not an assistant in a women's clothes shop but rather, perhaps, a heavily built carpenter getting on in years, who hums to himself as he walks along dragging his feet, with a dead cigarette butt between his lips and a worn folding ruler peeping out of his shirt pocket.
The man eyed me for a moment, not through the lenses of his glasses, which had slipped down his nose, but over the top of them, and after scrutinizing me closely and hiding another smile or shadow of a smile behind his neat mustache, he nodded to himself two or three times and then reached out and took my hand, which was cold with fear, into his warm hand, as though he were warming a freezing chick, and drew me out of that dark recess, raised me high in the air, and squeezed me quite hard to his chest, and at that I began to cry.
When the man saw my tears, he pressed my cheek against his slack cheek, and said, in his low, dusty voice, pleasantly reminiscent of a shaded dirt road in the country at dusk, in Arabs' Hebrew, question, answer, and summing up:
"Everything all right? Everything all right. OK."
And he carried me in his arms to the office, which was located in the bowels of the shop, and there the air was full of smells of coffee and cigarettes and woolen cloth and the aftershave lotion of the man who had found me, different from my father's, much sharper and fuller, a smell that I wanted my father to have too. And the man who had found me said a few more words to the assembled company in Arabic, because there were people in the office standing and sitting between me and Auntie Greta, who was weeping in a corner, and he said one sentence to Auntie Greta too, and she blushed very deeply, and with that, with a long, slow, responsible movement, like a doctor feeling to find out where exactly it hurts, the man passed me over into Auntie Greta's arms.
But I was not so keen to be in her arms. Not quite yet. I wanted to stay a little longer pressed to the chest of the man who had rescued me.
After that they talked for a while, the others, not my man, he did not talk but just stroked my cheek and patted me twice on the shoulder and left. Who knows what he was called? Or if he's still alive? Is he living in his home? Or in dirt and poverty, in some refugee camp?
Then we went home on the No. 3A bus. Auntie Greta washed her face and mine too, so that it wouldn't show that we'd been crying. She gave me some bread and honey, a bowl of boiled rice, and a glass of lukewarm milk, and for dessert she gave me two pieces of marzipan. Then she undressed me and put me to bed in her bed, and she gave me lots of cuddles and mewing sounds that ended in sticky kisses, and as she tucked me in, she said, Sleep, sleep a little, my darling child. Perhaps she was hoping to wipe away the evidence.