A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [168]
I was standing outside her window before eight every morning, with my hair plastered down with some water and my clean shirt tucked neatly into the top of my shorts. I had willingly volunteered to help her with her morning chores. I ran off to the shops for her, swept the yard, watered her geraniums, hung her little washing out on the line and brought in the clothes that had dried, fished a letter for her out of the letter box, whose lock was rusted up. She offered me a glass of water, which she called not simply water but limpid water. The gentle west wind she called the "westerly," and when it stirred the pine needles, it dabbled among them.
When I had finished the few household chores, we would take two rush stools out into the backyard and sit under Teacher Zelda's window facing north toward the Police Training School and the Arab village of Shuafat. We traveled without moving. Being a map child, I knew that beyond the mosque of Nebi Samwil, which was on top of the farthest and highest hills on the horizon, was the valley of Beit Horon, and I knew that beyond it were the territories of Benjamin and Ephraim, Samaria, and then the Mountains of Gilboa, and after them the Valleys, Mount Tabor and Galilee. I had never been to those places: once or twice a year we went to Tel Aviv for one of the festivals; twice I had been to Grandma-Mama and Grandpa-Papa's tar-papered shack on the edge of Kiryat Motskin behind Haifa, once I went to Bat Yam, and apart from that I had not seen anything. Certainly not the wonderful places that Teacher Zelda described to me in words, the stream of Harod, the mountains of Safed, the shores of Kinneret.
The summer after our summer, Jerusalem would be shelled from the tops of the hills facing which we sat all through the morning. Next to the village of Beit Iksa and by the hill of Nebi Samwil the guns of the British artillery battery, which was at the service of the Transjordanian Arab Legion, would be dug in and would rain thousands of shells on the besieged and starving city. And many years later all the hilltops we could see would be covered with densely packed housing, Ramot Eshkol, Ramot Alon, Ma'alot Dafna, Ammunition Hill, Giv'at Hamivtar, French Hill, "and all the hills shall melt." But in the summer of 1947 they were all still abandoned rocky hills, slopes dappled with patches of light rock and dark bushes. Here and there the eye lingered over a solitary, stubborn old pine tree, bent by the powerful winter winds that had bowed its back forever.
She would read to me what she might have been intending to read anyway that morning: Hasidic tales, rabbinic legends, obscure stories about holy kabbalists who succeeded in combining the letters of the alphabet and working wonders and miracles. Sometimes, if they did not take all the necessary precautions, while these mystics were endeavoring to save their own souls or those of the poor and oppressed or even those of the entire Jewish people, they caused terrible disasters that always resulted from an error in the combinations or a single grain of impurity that got into the sacred formulae of mental direction.
She replied to my questions with strange, unexpected answers. Sometimes they seemed quite wild, threatening to undermine in a terrifying way my father's firm rules of logic.
Sometimes, however, she surprised me by giving me an answer that was predictable, simple yet as nutritious as black bread. Even the most expected things came out of her mouth in an unexpected way, though. And I loved her and was fascinated by her, because there was something strange and disturbing, almost frightening, in virtually everything she said and did. Like the "poor in spirit," of whom she said that they belong to Jesus of Nazareth but that there is a