A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [147]
They frequently conversed with me about topics that were certainly not considered suitable for young children in other homes. My mother liked telling me stories about wizards, elves, ghouls, enchanted cottages in the depths of the forest, but she also talked to me seriously about crimes, emotions, the lives and sufferings of brilliant artists, mental illness, and the inner lives of animals. ("If you just look carefully, you'll see that every person has some dominant characteristic that makes him resemble a particular animal, a cat or a bear or a fox or a pig. A person's physical features also point to the animal he most closely resembles") Father, meanwhile, introduced me to the mysteries of the solar system, the circulation of the blood, the British White Paper, evolution, Theodor Herzl and his astonishing life story, the adventures of Don Quixote, the history of writing and printing, and the principles of Zionism. ("In the Diaspora the Jews had a very hard life; here in the Land of Israel it's still not easy for us, but soon the Hebrew State will be established, and then everything will be made just and rejuvenated. The whole world will come and marvel at what the Jewish people is creating here.")
My parents and grandparents, sentimental family friends, well-meaning neighbors, all sorts of gaudy aunties, with their bear hugs and greasy kisses, were constantly amazed at every word that came out of my mouth: the child is so marvelously intelligent, so original, so sensitive, so special, so precocious, he's so thoughtful, he understands everything, he has the vision of an artist.
For my part, I was so amazed at their amazement that I inevitably ended up amazing myself. After all, they were grown-ups, in other words creatures who knew everything and were permanently right, and if they were always saying that I was so clever, then, of course, I must be. If they found me interesting, I was not unnaturally inclined to agree with them. And if they thought I was a sensitive, creative child and rather something and quite something else (both in some foreign language), and also so original, so advanced, so intelligent, so logical, so cute, etc., well...
Being conformist and respectful as I was of the grown-up world and its prevailing values, and having no brothers or sisters or friends to counterbalance the personality cult that surrounded me, I had no alternative but to concur, humbly but thoroughly, with the grown-ups' opinion of me.
And so, unconsciously, by the age of four or five I had become a little show-off whose parents together with the rest of the adult world had invested a considerable fortune in me and offered generous fuel to my arrogance.
Sometimes on winter evenings the three of us would sit and chat around the kitchen table after supper. We spoke softly because the kitchen was so small and cramped, and we never interrupted each other. (Father considered this a precondition of any conversation.) We would talk, for instance, about what a blind man or a creature from another planet would make of our world. Perhaps fundamentally we were all rather like some blind alien? We talked about children in China and India, children of Bedouin and Arab peasants, children of the ghetto, children of the illegal immigrants, and children in the kibbutzim who did not belong to their parents but by my age were already living independent communal lives that they were themselves responsible for, cleaning their own rooms by rotation and deciding by vote what time they would turn the lights out and go to sleep.
The pale-yellow electric light lit the shabby little kitchen even in the daytime. Outside in the street, which was already empty by eight in the evening, whether because of the British curfew or simply out of habit, a hungry wind whistled on winter nights. It rattled the garbage can lids outside the houses,