A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [157]
When my father was not at home, as I sat at the kitchen table sorting lentils while my mother stood with her back to me, peeling vegetables or squeezing oranges or shaping meatballs on the work surface, she would tell me all sorts of strange and, yes, frightening stories. Little Peer, the orphan son of Jon, the grandson of Rasmus Gynt, must have been just like me, as he and his poor widowed mother sat alone in their mountain cabin on those long, windy, snowy nights, and he absorbed and stored in his heart her mystical, half-crazed stories, about Soria-Moria Castle beyond the fjord, the snatching of the bride, the trolls in the hall of the mountain king, and the green ghouls, the button-molder, and the imps and pixies and also about the terrible Boyg.
The kitchen itself, with its smoke-blackened walls and sunken floor, was as narrow and low as a solitary confinement cell. Next to the stove we had two matchboxes, one for new matches and one for used matches, which, for reasons of economy, we used to light a burner or the Primus from a burner that was already lit.
My mother's stories may have been strange, frightening, but they were captivating, full of caves and towers, abandoned villages and broken bridges suspended above the void. Her stories did not begin at the beginning or conclude with a happy ending but flickered in the half light, wound around themselves, emerged from the mists for a moment, amazed you, sent shivers up your spine, then disappeared back into the darkness before you had time to see what was in front of your eyes. That is how her story about the old man Alleluyev was, and the one about Tanitchka and her three husbands, the blacksmith brothers who killed one another, the one about the bear who adopted a dead child, the ghost in the cave that fell in love with the woodman's wife, or the ghost of Nikita the waggoner that came back from the dead to charm and seduce the murderer's daughter.
Her stories were full of blackberries, blueberries, wild strawberries, truffles, and mushrooms. With no thought for my tender years my mother took me to places where few children had ever trodden before, and as she did so, she opened up before me an exciting fan of words, as though she were picking me up in her arms and raising me higher and higher to reveal vertiginous heights of language: her fields were sun-dappled or dew-drenched, her forests were dense or impenetrable, the trees towered, the meadows were verdant, the mountain, a primeval mountain, loomed up, the castles dominated, the turrets towered, the plains slumbered and sprawled, and in the valleys, which she called vales, springs, streams, and rivulets were constantly gushing, babbling, and purling.
My mother lived a solitary life, shut up at home for most of the time. Apart from her friends Lilenka, Esterka, and Fania Weissmann, who had also been at the Tarbuth gymnasium in Rovno, my mother found no sense or interest in Jerusalem; she did not like the holy places and the many ancient sites. The synagogues and rabbinic academies, churches, convents, and mosques all seemed much of a muchness to her, dreary and smelling of religious men who did not wash often enough. Her sensitive nostrils recoiled from the odor of unwashed flesh, even under a thick cloud of incense.
My father did not have much time for religion either. He considered the priests of every faith as rather suspect, ignorant men who fostered antique hatreds, promoted fears, devised lying doctrines, shed crocodile tears, and traded in fake holy objects and false relics and all kinds of vain beliefs and prejudices. He suspected everyone who made a living from religion of some kind of sugared charlatanism. He enjoyed quoting Heine's remark that the priest and the rabbi both smell (or in Father's toned-down version, "Neither of them has a rosy smell! And