A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [141]
32
LATE ONE summer afternoon. It is the end of the first grade, or maybe the beginning of the second grade, or the summer between the two. I am alone in the yard. The others have all gone off without me, Danush, Alik, Uri, Lulik, Eitan, and Ammi, they've gone to look for those things among the trees on the slope of the Tel Arza woods, but they wouldn't have me in the Black Hand gang because I wouldn't blow. Danush found one among the trees, full of smelly sticky stuff that had dried up, and he washed it out under the tap, and anyone who didn't have the guts to blow it up wasn't fit to belong to the Black Hand, and anyone who didn't have the guts to put it on and pee into it a bit, like an English soldier, there was no question of his being admitted to the Black Hand. Danush explained how it worked. Every night English soldiers take girls to the Tel Arza woods and there, in the dark, it goes like this. First they kiss a long time, on the mouth. Then he touches her body in all sorts of places, even under her clothes. Then he pulls both their pants down and puts one of those things on and he lies on top of her and so on and in the end he wets. And this thing was invented so that she wouldn't get wet from him at all. And that's the way it goes every night in Tel Arza woods, and that's the way it goes every night with everyone. Even Mrs. Sussmann, the teacher, her husband does it to her at night. Even your parents. Yes, yours too. And yours. All of them. And it gives you all sorts of nice feelings in your body and it builds up your muscles and it's also good for cleansing the blood.
They've all gone off without me and my parents are out too. I'm lying on my back on the concrete at the end of the yard behind the washing lines and watching the remains of the day. The concrete is cold and hard under your body in a vest. Thinking, but not right to the end, that everything that's hard and everything that's cold will stay hard and cold forever and everything that's soft and everything that's warm is only soft and warm for the time being. In the end everything has to pass over to the cold, hard side. Over there you don't move, you don't think, you don't feel, you don't warm anything. Forever.
You're lying on your back, and your fingers find a small stone and put it inside your mouth, which can taste dust and plaster and something else that's kind of salty but not exactly salty. The tongue explores all sorts of little projections and depressions as though the stone is a world like ours and it has mountains and valleys. And what if it turns out that our earth, or even our whole universe, is just a little stone on the concrete in the yard of some giants? What will happen if, in the next moment, some huge child, it's impossible to imagine how big he is, and his friends have made fun of him and gone off without him and that child simply picks up our whole universe between two of his fingers and puts it all in his mouth and also starts exploring us with his tongue? And he also thinks that maybe this stone that's inside his mouth is really a whole universe with Milky Ways and suns and comets and children and cats and washing hanging on the line? And who knows, maybe that huge boy's universe, the boy in whose mouth we are just a tiny stone, is actually nothing more than a little stone on the ground in the yard of an even bigger boy, and he and his universe, and so on and so forth, like Russian dolls, a whole universe inside a tiny stone inside a universe inside a stone, and it's just the same when it gets smaller as when it gets bigger?