A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [160]
What was the title of the very first book I read on my own? That is, Father read me the book in bed so often that I must have ended up knowing it by heart, word for word, and once when Father could not read to me, I took the book to bed with me and recited the whole of it to myself, from beginning to end, pretending to read, pretending to be Father, turning the page at the precise gap between two words where Father used to turn it every night.
Next day I asked Father to follow with his finger as he read, and I followed his finger, and by the time we had done this five or six times, I could identify each word by its shape and its place in the line.
Then the moment came to surprise them both. One Saturday morning I appeared in the kitchen, still in my pajamas, and without saying a word I opened the book on the table between them, my finger pointed to each word in turn and I said the word aloud just as my finger touched it. My parents, dizzy with pride, fell into the trap, unable to imagine the enormity of the deception, both convinced that the special child had taught himself to read.
But in the end I really did teach myself. I discovered that each word had its own special shape. As though you could say, for instance, that "dog" looks like a round face, with a nose drawn in profile on one side and a pair of glasses on the other; while "eye" actually looks like a pair of eyes with the bridge of a nose between them. In this way I managed to read lines and even whole pages.
After another couple of weeks I started making friends with the letters themselves. The F of Flag looks like a flag waving at the beginning of the flag. The S of Snake looks just like a snake. Daddy and Mummy are the same at the end, but the rest is quite different: Daddy has a pair of boots in the middle with legs sticking up from them, while Mummy has a row of teeth that look like a smile.
The very first book I can remember was a picture book about a big, fat bear who was very pleased with himself, a lazy, sleepy bear that looked a bit like our Mr. Abramski, and this bear loved to lick honey even when he wasn't supposed to. He didn't just lick honey, he stuffed himself with it. The book had an unhappy ending followed by a very unhappy ending, and only after that did it come to the happy ending. The lazy bear was horribly stung by a swarm of bees, and in case that was not enough, he was punished for being so greedy by suffering from toothache, and there was a picture of him with his face all swollen, and a white cloth tied right around his head and ending with a big knot on top, just between his ears. And the moral was written in big red letters:
IT'S NOT GOOD TO EAT TOO MUCH HONEY!
In my father's world there was no suffering that did not lead to redemption. Were the Jews miserable in the Diaspora? Well, soon the Hebrew State would be established and then everything would change for the better. Had the pencil sharpener got lost? Well, tomorrow we'd buy a new and better one. Did we have a bit of a tummy ache today? It would get better before your wedding. And as for the poor, stung bear, whose eyes looked so miserable that my own eyes filled with tears looking at him? Well, here he was on the next page healthy and happy, and he was no longer lazy because he had learned his lesson: he had made a peace treaty with the bees, to the benefit of both sides, and there was even a clause in it granting him a regular supply of honey, admittedly a reasonable, moderate amount, but forever and ever.
And so on the last page the bear looked jolly and smiling, and he was building himself a house, as though after all his exciting adventures he had decided to join the ranks of the middle class. He looked a bit like my father in a good mood: he looked as though he was about to make up a rhyme or pun, or call me Your Honorable Highness ("only in fun!").
All this more or less was written there, in a single line on the last page, and this may actually have been the first line in my life that I read not by the shapes of the words but letter