A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [148]
After supper the three of us stood in line, as though on parade, first Father then Mother then me, facing the wall that was stained black from the Primus stove and the paraffin cooker, with our backs to the room. Father bent over the sink, washed and rinsed each plate and glass in turn, and placed each one on the draining board, from where mother picked them up and dried them and put them away. I was responsible for drying the forks and spoons, and I also sorted them out and put them away in the drawer. From the time I was six, I was allowed to dry the table knives, but I was absolutely forbidden to handle the bread knife or the kitchen knives.
For them it was not enough for me to be intelligent, rational, good, sensitive, creative, and thoughtful with the dreamy vision of an artist. In addition, I also had to be a seer and a fortune-teller, a kind of family oracle. After all, everyone knew that children were closer to nature, to the magical bosom of creation, not having been corrupted yet by lies or poisoned by selfish considerations.
And so I had to play the role of the Delphic oracle or the holy fool. As I climbed the consumptive pomegranate tree in the yard, or ran from wall to wall without treading on the lines between the paving stones, they called out to me to give them and their guests some spontaneous sign from heaven to help them to settle a dispute, whether or not to go and visit their friends in Kibbutz Kiriat Anavim, whether or not to buy (in installments) a round brown table with four chairs, whether or not to endanger the lives of the survivors by smuggling them into the country on decrepit boats, or whether or not to invite the Rudnickis to supper on Friday night.
My task was to utter some vague, ambiguous thought, beyond my years, some obscure sentence based on fragments of ideas that I had heard from the grown-ups and shaken up and stirred well, something that could be taken either way, something that was open to all sorts of interpretations. If possible, it should include some vague simile, or feature the phrase "in life." For example: "Every journey is like opening a drawer." "In life there is morning and evening, summer and winter." "Making small concessions is like avoiding treading on little creatures."
Such enigmatic sentences, "out of the mouths of babes and sucklings," made my parents overflow with emotion; their eyes sparkled, they turned my words this way and that, discovering in them an oracular expression of the pure, unconscious wisdom of nature itself.
Mother would clasp me warmly to her breast on hearing such beautiful sayings, which I always had to repeat or reproduce in the presence of astonished relatives or friends. I soon learned how to mass-produce such utterances to order, at the request of my excited public. I succeeded in extracting not one but three separate pleasures from each prophecy. First, the sight of my audience fixing their hungry eyes on my lips, waiting excitedly for what would come out, and then plunging into a mass of contradictory interpretations. Second, the dizzying experience of sitting in judgment like Solomon between these grown-ups ("Didn't you hear what he said to us about small concessions? So why do you keep insisting we shouldn't go to Kiriat Anavim tomorrow?"). The third pleasure was the most secret and delicious of all: my generosity. There was nothing I enjoyed more in the world than the delight of giving. They were thirsty, they needed me, and I gave them what they wanted. How fortunate that they had me! What would they do without me?
34
I WAS ACTUALLY a very easy child, obedient, hard-working, unknowingly supporting the established social order (Mother and I were subject to Father, who sat at the feet of Uncle Joseph, who in turn—despite his critical opposition—obeyed Ben-Gurion and the "authorized institutions"). Apart