A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [140]
That very day, when he came back from his work in the National Library on Mount Scopus, he brought with him two thick tomes he had borrowed about gardening and vegetable growing (one of them was in German) and studied them carefully. His attention soon turned to other matters, and to totally different books, the decline of certain minority languages in the Balkans, the influence of medieval courtly poetry on the origins of the novella, Greek words in the Mishnah, the interpretation of Ugaritic texts.
But one morning, as he was setting off to work with his rather battered briefcase, Father saw me bent over the dying shoots with tears in my eyes, absorbed in a last desperate effort to rescue them by means of some nose or ear drops that I had taken without permission from the medicine chest in the bathroom and was now administering to the withered shoots, one drop each. At that moment Father's pity was stirred toward me. He picked me up and hugged me, but lost no time in putting me down again. He was perplexed, embarrassed, at a loss. Before he left, as though fleeing the field of combat, he nodded his head three or four times and muttered thoughtfully, to himself rather than to me, the words: "We'll see what else can be done."
On Ibn Gabirol Street in Rehavia there used to stand a building called Pioneering Women's House, or it may have been Working Women's Farm, or something of the sort. Behind it there was a small agricultural reserve, a kind of commune, a women's farm, just a quarter of an acre or so of fruit trees, vegetables, poultry, and beehives. On this site in the early 1950s President Ben-Zvi's famous official prefab would be erected.
Father went to this experimental farm after work. He must have explained to Rachel Yannait or one of her assistants the whole story of our agricultural defeat, sought advice and guidance, and finally left and came home by bus bearing a small wooden box in whose soil there were some twenty or thirty healthy seedlings. He smuggled his booty into the apartment and hid it from me behind the laundry basket or under the kitchen cupboard, waited till I was asleep, and then crept outside, armed with his flashlight, his screwdriver, his heroic hammer, and his letter opener.
When I got up in the morning, Father addressed me in a matter-of-fact voice, as though reminding me to tie my shoelaces or button up my shirt. Without taking his eyes off his paper he said:
"Right. I have the impression your medicine from yesterday has done some good to our ailing plants. Why don't you go and have a look for yourself, Your Highness, and see if there's any sign of recovery? Or was it just my impression? Please go and check, and come back to let me know what you think, and we'll see if we both share the same opinion, more or less, shall we?"
My tiny shoots, which the day before had been so withered and yellowed that they were no more than sad threads of straw, had suddenly overnight, as though by magic, into sturdy, vigorous plants, bursting with health, full of sap and a deep green color. I stood there stunned, overwhelmed by the magical power of ten or twenty nose or ear drops.
As I went on staring, I realized that the miracle was even greater than it had appeared at first glance. The radish seedlings had jumped over into the cucumber bed in the night. While in the radishes' bed some plants I didn't recognize at all had settled, perhaps eggplants or carrots. And the most wondrous thing of all: all along the left-hand row, where we had put the tomato seeds that had not germinated, the row where I had not seen any point in using my magic drops at all, there were now three or four bushy young plants, with yellow buds among their upper shoots.
A week later disease struck our garden again, the death throes began all over again, the saplings bowed their heads and once more started looking as sickly and weak as persecuted Diaspora Jews, their leaves dropped, the shoots withered, and this time neither nose drops nor cough syrup did any good: our vegetable patch was drying out and