A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [137]
Father struggled on until midday, heroically, against the compacted earth. Bent double, with an aching back, pouring with sweat, gasping for breath like a drowning man, his eyes looking bare and helpless without the glasses, time after time he brought his hammer down on the stubborn ground. But the hammer was too light: it was a domestic hammer, meant not for storming fortifications but for cracking nuts or hammering a nail into the back of the kitchen door. Time after time Father brandished his pathetic hammer, like David with his sling against the mighty armor of Goliath, or as though he were assailing the battlements of Troy with a frying pan. The forked part of the hammer, intended for pulling nails out, served as spade, fork, and hoe rolled into one.
Large blisters soon rose on the soft cushions of his hands, but Father gritted his teeth and ignored them, even when they burst and released their fluid and became open wounds. Nor did he take any notice of the blisters that appeared on the sides of his scholar's fingers. Time and again he raised his hammer, brought it down, pounded and smote and raised it again, and as he wrestled with the elements of nature and the primeval wilderness, his lips muttered fevered imprecations to the unyielding soil in Greek and Latin and for all I know in Amharic, Old Slavonic, and Sanskrit.
At one point he brought the hammer down with all his force on the toe of his shoe and groaned with pain; he bit his lip, took a rest, used the word "decidedly" or "definitely" to reproach himself for his carelessness, wiped his brow, sipped some water, wiped the mouth of the bottle with his handkerchief, and insisted that I take a swig, returned to the field of combat limping but determined, and heroically renewed his unrelenting efforts.
Eventually the compacted earth took pity on him, or perhaps it was just astonished at his dedication, and began to crack. Father lost no time in inserting the tip of his screwdriver into the cracks, as though he was afraid the soil might change its mind and turn to concrete once again. He worked at the cracks, deepened and widened them, and with his bare fingers turning white with effort he detached thick clods that he piled up one by one at his feet, like slain dragons belly up. Severed roots protruded from these clods of earth, twisting and turning like sinews torn from living flesh.
My task was to advance in the rear of the assault echelon, open up the clods of earth with the letter opener, detach the roots and put them in the sack, remove any stones or bits of gravel, break up and crumble each clod, and finally, using the kitchen fork as a rake or harrow, comb the hair of the loosened soil.
Now came the time to fertilize. We had no animal or poultry manure, and the pigeon droppings on the roof were out of the question because of the risk of infection, so Father had prepared in advance a saucepanful of leftover food. It was a murky swill of grit water, fruit and vegetable peelings, rotten pumpkins, muddy coffee grounds with tea leaves floating on them, remains of porridge and borscht and boiled vegetables, fish trimmings and burnt frying oil, sour milk and various other viscous liquids and murky slops full of dubious lumps and particles in a sort of thick soup that had turned rancid.
"This will enrich our poor soil," Father explained to me as we rested side by side on the step in our sweat-soaked vests, feeling like a pair of real working men, and fanned our faces with the khaki hats. "We absolutely must feed the soil with anything that may turn from kitchen waste into a humus rich in organic substances, to give our plants the nourishment without which they will grow stunted