A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [156]
From my early childhood on I was the victim of a thorough, protracted brainwashing: Uncle Joseph's temple of books in Talpiot, Father's strait-jacket of books in our apartment in Kerem Avraham, my mother's refuge of books, Grandpa Alexander's poems, our neighbor Mr. Zarchi's novels, my father's index cards and word play, and even Saul Tcherni-khowsky's pungent hug, and Mr. Agnon, who cast several shadows at once, with his currants.
But the truth is that secretly I turned my back on the card I had pinned to the door of my room. For several years I dreamed only of growing up and escaping from these warrens of books and becoming a fireman. The fire and water, the uniform, the heroism, the shiny silver helmet, the wail of the siren, and the stares of the girls and the flashing lights, the panic in the street, the thunderous charge of the red engine, leaving a trail of terror in its wake.
And then the ladders, the hose uncoiling endlessly, the glow of the flames reflected like gushing blood in the red of the engine, and finally, the climax, the girl or woman carried unconscious on the shoulder of her gallant rescuer, the self-sacrificing devotion to duty, the scorched skin, eyelashes, and hair, the infernal suffocating smoke. And then immediately afterward—the praise, the rivers of tearful love from dizzy women swooning toward you in admiration and gratitude, and above all the fairest of them all, the one you bravely rescued from the flames with the tender strength of your own arms.
But who was it that through most of my childhood I rescued in my fantasies over and over again from the fiery furnace and whose love I earned in return? Perhaps that is not the right way to ask the question, but rather: What terrible, incredible premonition came to the arrogant heart of that foolish, dreamy child and hinted to him, without revealing the outcome, signaled to him without giving him any chance to interpret, while there was still time, the veiled hint of what would happen to his mother one winter's evening?
Because already at the age of five I imagined myself, over and over again, as a bold, calm fireman, resplendent in uniform and helmet, bravely darting on his own into the fierce flames, risking his life, and rescuing her, unconscious, from the fire (while his feeble, verbal father merely stood there stunned, helplessly staring at the conflagration).
And so, while embodying in his own eyes the fire-hardened heroism of the new Hebrew man (precisely as prescribed for him by his father), he dashes in and saves her life, and in doing so he snatches his mother forever from his father's grasp and spreads his own wings over her.
But from what dark threads could I have embroidered this oedipal fantasy, which did not leave me for several years? Is it possible that somehow, like a smell of faraway smoke, that woman, Irina, Ira, infiltrated my fantasy of the fireman and the rescued woman? Ira Stelet-skaya, the wife of the engineer from Rovno whose husband used to lose her every night at cards. Poor Ira Steletskaya, who fell in love with Anton the coachman's son and lost her children, until one day she emptied a can of paraffin and burned herself to death