A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [139]
A lean, tense figure, in a sweat-drenched T-shirt and khaki shorts that were too wide and reached almost down to his nobby knees. His thin arms and legs were very pale and covered with thick black hair. He looked like a dazed Talmud student who had suddenly been dragged out of the darkness of the house of study, dressed up in the khaki garb of the pioneer, and ruthlessly led out into the dazzling blue of midday. His hesitant smile fixed you for a moment as though begging, as though plucking your sleeve and beseeching you to show him some affection. His brown eyes stared at you absentmindedly or even in a panic through his round-framed glasses, as though he had just remembered that he had forgotten something, who knows what, but it was the most important and urgent thing of all, something that he must not at any cost forget. But what it was that he had forgotten he completely failed to recall. Excuse me, perhaps you happen to know what I've forgotten? Something important. Something that can't be delayed. Would you be kind enough to remind me what it was? If I may make so bold.
The following days I ran to our vegetable garden every two or three hours, impatient to discover signs of germination, if only some tiny movement in the loosened soil. Again and again I watered the plot, until the soil turned to mud. Every morning I leaped out of bed and ran barefoot in my pajamas to check whether the longed-for miracle had occurred during the night. And after a few days, early one morning, I found that the radishes had taken the lead and put up their tiny, closely packed periscopes.
I was so happy that I watered them again and again.
And I erected a scarecrow dressed in an old slip of my mother's, with an empty tin can for a head, on which I drew a mouth and a mustache and a forehead with black hair falling across it like Hitler, and eyes one of which came out slightly crooked, as though he was winking or mocking.
A couple of days later the cucumbers came up too. But whatever it was the radishes and cucumbers saw must have saddened or terrified them, because they changed their minds, turned pale, their bodies bent double overnight as though in deep dejection, their tiny heads touched the ground, and they became shriveled, thin, gray, until they were no more than miserable threads of straw. As for the tomatoes, they never even sprouted: they examined the prevailing conditions, discussed what to do, and decided to give us up. Maybe our yard was incapable of growing anything, since it was so low-lying, surrounded by high walls and shaded by tall cypress trees, so that not a ray of sunlight reached it. Or perhaps we had overdone the watering. Or the fertilizer. It is possible that my Hitler scarecrow, which left the birds completely unimpressed, terrified the tiny shoots to death. So that was the end of our attempt to create a kind of little kibbutz in Jerusalem and someday to eat the fruit of the labor of our own hands.
"From this," my father said sadly, "follows the grave but inescapable conclusion that we must decidedly have gone wrong somewhere along the line. So now we are definitely under an obligation to labor tirelessly and uncompromisingly to determine the root and cause of our failure. Did we put on too much fertilizer? Did we water excessively? Or, on the contrary, did we omit some essential step? When all is said and done, we are not peasants and sons of peasants but mere amateurs, inexperienced suitors paying court to the earth but unfamiliar as yet with