A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [159]
She read every evening, while I played outside in the yard and my father sat at his desk writing his research on cramped index cards, and she also read after the supper things were washed up, she read while my father and I sat together at his desk, my head slanting, lightly resting on his shoulder, while we sorted stamps, checked them in the catalogue, and stuck them in the album, she read after I had gone to bed and Father had gone back to his little cards, she read after the shutters had been shut and the sofa had been turned over to reveal the double bed that was hidden inside it, and she went on reading even after the ceiling light had been switched off and my father had taken off his glasses, turned his back to her, and fallen into the sleep of well-meaning people who firmly believe that everything will turn out well, and she went on reading: she suffered from insomnia that grew worse with time, until in the last year of her life various doctors saw fit to prescribe strong pills and all sorts of sleeping potions and solutions and recommended a fortnight's real rest in a family hotel in Safed or the Health Fund sanatorium in Arza.
Consequently my father borrowed a few pounds from his parents and volunteered to look after the child and the house, and my mother really did go off alone to the sanatorium in Arza. But even there she did not stop reading; on the contrary, she read almost day and night. From morning to evening she sat in a deck chair in the pine woods on the flank of the hill and read, and in the evening she read on the lit veranda while the other guests danced or played cards or took part in all sorts of other activities. And at night she would go down to the little sitting room next to the reception desk and read for most of the night, so as not to disturb the woman who shared her room. She read Maupassant, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Gnessin, Balzac, Flaubert, Dickens, Chamisso, Thomas Mann, Iwaszkiewicz, Knut Hamsun, Kleist, Moravia, Hermann Hesse, Mauriac, Agnon, Turgenev, as well as Somerset Maugham, Stefan Zweig, and André Maurois—she hardly took her eyes off a book for the whole of her break. When she came back to Jerusalem, she looked tired and pale, with dark shadows under her eyes, as if she had been living it up every night. When Daddy and I asked her how she had enjoyed her holiday, she smiled and said: "I haven't really thought about it."
Once, when I was seven or eight, my mother said to me, as we sat on the last seat but one on the bus to the clinic or the shoe shop, that while it was true that books could change with the years just as much as people could, the difference was that whereas people would always drop you when they could no longer get any advantage or pleasure or interest or at least a good feeling from you, a book would never abandon you. Naturally you sometimes dropped them, maybe for several years, or even forever. But they, even if you betrayed them, would never turn their backs on you: they would go on waiting for you silently and humbly on their shelf. They would wait for ten years. They wouldn't complain. One night, when you suddenly needed a book, even at three in the morning, even if it was a book you had abandoned and erased from your heart for years and years, it would never disappoint you, it would come down from its shelf and keep you company in your moment of need. It would not try to get its own back or make excuses or ask itself if it was worth its while or if you deserved it or if you still suited each other, it would come at once as soon as you asked. A book would