A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [143]
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The others have all gone to the Tel Arza woods without me, and because I didn't have the guts to blow, I'm lying here on my back on the concrete at the end of the yard behind the washing lines. Watching the light of day gradually surrendering. Soon it will be night.
Once I watched from the Ali Baba's cave I had in the space between the wardrobe and the wall when Grandma, my mother's mother, who had come to Jerusalem from the tar-papered shack on the edge of Kiriat Motskin, lost her temper with my mother, gesticulating at her with the iron, her eyes flashing, and spat terrible words at her in Russian or Polish mixed with Yiddish. Neither of them imagined that I was squeezed into that space holding my breath, peering out, seeing and hearing everything. My mother didn't reply to her mother's thunderous curses but just sat on the hard chair that had lost its back, which stood in the corner, she sat up straight with her knees pressed together and her hands motionless on her knees and her eyes also fixed on her knees, as though everything depended on her knees. My mother sat there like a scolded child, and as her mother shot one venomous question at her after another, all of them soaked and sizzling with sibilants, she said nothing in reply, but her eyes focused even more fixedly on her knees. Her continued silence only redoubled Grandma's fury, she seemed to have gone right out of her mind: her eyes flashing, her face wolflike with rage, flecks of foam whitening the corners of her open lips, and her sharp teeth showing, she hurled the hot iron she was holding, as though to smash it against the wall, then kicked the ironing board over and stormed out of the room, slamming the door so hard that the windowpanes, the vase, and the cups all rattled.
My mother, unaware that I was watching, suddenly stood up and began punishing herself, she slapped her cheeks and tore her hair, she grabbed a clothes hanger and hit her head and back with it until she wept, and I too in my space between the wardrobe and the wall began to cry silently and to bite both my hands so hard that painful marks appeared. That evening we all ate sweetened gefilte fish that Grandma had brought with her from the tar-papered shack on the edge of Kiriat Mot-skin, in a sweet sauce with sweet boiled carrot, and they all talked to each other about speculators and the black market, about the state construction company and free enterprise and the Ata textile factory near Haifa, and they finished the meal with a cooked fruit salad that we called compote, which was also made by my mother's mother and which had also turned out sweet and sticky like a syrup. My other grandma, the one from Odessa, Grandma Shlomit, politely finished her compote, wiped her lips on a white paper napkin, took a lipstick and pocket mirror out of her leather handbag, and redrew the line of her lips, and then, while she carefully retracted her red dog's erection of a lipstick into its sheath, she observed:
"What can I say to you? I have never tasted sweeter food in my whole life. The Almighty must be very fond of Vohlynia, to have soaked it so in honey. Even your sugar is much sweeter than ours, and your salt is sweet, and your pepper, and even the mustard in Vohlynia has a taste of jam, and your horseradish, your vinegar, your garlic, they're all so sweet you could sweeten the Angelofdeath himself with them."
As soon as she had spoken these words, she fell silent, as though in fear of the wrath of the angel whose name she had dared to take so lightly.
At which my other grandma, my mother's mother, adopted a pleasant smile, not at all vindictive or gloating, but a well-meaning smile as pure and innocent as the singing of the cherubs, and to the charge that her cooking was sweet enough to sweeten vinegar or horseradish and even the angel of death Grandma Ita replied to Grandma Shlomit with a sing-song lilt: