A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [136]
Some agriculturally minded visitors, Mala and Staszek Rudnicki from Chancellor Street, once brought me a gift of three little paper bags containing radish, tomato, and cucumber seeds. So Father suggested we should make a vegetable patch. "We'll both be farmers," he said enthusiastically. "We'll make a little kibbutz in the space by the pomegranate tree, and bring forth bread from the earth by our own efforts!"
No family in our street had a spade, fork, or hoe. Such things belonged to the new, suntanned Jews, who lived over the hills and far away—in the villages and kibbutzim in Galilee, the Sharon, and the Valleys. So Father and I set out to conquer the wilderness and make a vegetable garden almost with our bare hands.
Early on Saturday morning, when Mother was still asleep and the whole neighborhood too, the two of us crept outside, wearing white vests and khaki shorts and hats, skinny, narrow-chested, townies to our slim fingertips, as pale as two sheets of paper but well protected by the thick coating of cream that we had rubbed into each other's shoulders. (The cream, called Velveta, was calculated to frustrate all the wiles of the spring sun.)
Father led the parade, wearing boots and armed with a hammer, a screwdriver, a kitchen fork, a ball of string, an empty sack, and the letter opener from his desk. I marched behind, all excited, full of the fierce joys of agriculture, carrying a bottle of water, two glasses, and a small box containing a plaster, a little bottle of iodine, a little stick to apply the iodine with, a strip of gauze, and a bandage, first aid in case of mishaps.
First Father brandished the letter opener ceremoniously, bent down, and drew four lines on the ground. In this way he marked out once and for all the boundaries of our plot, which was about two meters square, or just a little larger than the world map that hung on the wall of our corridor between the doors of the two rooms. Then he instructed me to get down on my knees and hold tightly, with both hands, a sharpened stick that he called a peg. His plan was to hammer a peg into each corner of the plot and surround it all with a border of taut string. The trodden earth, however, was as hard as cement and resisted all Father's efforts to hammer in the pegs. So he put down the hammer, with a martyred expression removed his glasses, deposited them carefully on the kitchen windowsill, returned to the battlefield, and redoubled his efforts. He sweated profusely as he battled, and without his glasses he once or twice narrowly missed my fingers, which were holding the peg for him. The peg, meanwhile, was fast becoming flattened.
By dint of hard work we finally managed to pierce the top crust and make a shallow depression. The pegs were embedded to the depth of half a finger's length and refused to go any farther. We were obliged to support each peg with two or three large stones and to compromise on the tautness of the string, because every time we tightened the string, the pegs threatened to come out of the ground. So the plot was marked out with four lines of slack string. Despite everything we had managed to create something out of nothing: from here to here was inside, in fact our vegetable garden, and everything beyond was outside, in other words the rest of the world.
"That's it," said Father modestly, and nodded his head several times, as though to agree with himself and confirm the validity of what he had done.
And I repeated after him, unconsciously imitating his nods:
"That's it."
This was Father's way of announcing a short break. He instructed me to wipe off my sweat, drink some water, sit down on the step, and take a rest. He himself did not sit down next to me but put his glasses back on, stood beside our square of string, inspected the progress of our project so far, mulled it over, considered the next stage of the campaign, analyzed our mistakes, drew the conclusions, and instructed me to remove