A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [170]
Only Zelda, my teacher, listened to me. Not like a kindly aunt wearily lending an experienced ear out of pity to a frantic youngster who had suddenly boiled over on her. No, she listened to me slowly and seriously, as if she was learning things from me that pleased her or aroused her curiosity.
Furthermore, Zelda, my teacher, did me the honor of gently fanning my flames when she wanted me to speak, putting twigs on my bonfire, but when she had had enough, she did not hesitate to say:
"That's enough for now. Please stop talking."
Other people stopped listening after three minutes but let me go prattling on to my heart's content for an hour or more, all the time pretending to listen while they thought their own thoughts.
All this was after the end of the second grade, after I'd finished at Children's Realm School and before I started at Tachkemoni. I was only eight, but I had already got into the habit of reading newspapers, newsletters, and all sorts of magazines, on top of the hundred or two hundred books I had devoured by then (almost anything that fell into my hands, quite indiscriminately: I scoured my father's library and whenever I found a book written in modern Hebrew, I dug my teeth into it and took it off to gnaw on it in my corner).
I wrote poetry too: about Hebrew battalions, about the underground fighters, about Joshua the conqueror, even about a squashed beetle or the sadness of autumn. I presented these poems to Zelda, my teacher, in the morning, and she handled them carefully, as though conscious of her responsibility. What she said about each poem I don't remember. In fact, I have forgotten the poems.
But I do remember what she said to me about poems and sounds: not the sound of voices from above speaking to the poet's soul, but about the different sounds that various words make: "rustling," for example, is a whispering word, "strident" is a screeching word, "growl" has a deep, thick sound, while "tone" has a delicate sound and the word "noise" is itself noisy. And so forth. She had a whole repertoire of words and their sounds, and I am asking more of my memory now than it is capable of yielding.
I may also have heard this from Zelda, my teacher, that summer when we were close: if you want to draw a tree, just draw a few leaves. You don't need to draw them all. If you draw a man, you don't have to draw every hair. But in this she was not consistent: one time she would say that at such and such a place I had written a bit too much, while another time she would say that actually I should have written a little more. But how do you tell? I am still looking for an answer to this day.
Teacher Zelda also revealed a Hebrew language to me that I had never encountered before, not in Professor Klausner's house or at home or in the street or in any of the books I had read so far, a strange, anarchic Hebrew, the Hebrew of stories of saints, Hasidic tales, folk sayings, Hebrew leavened with Yiddish, breaking all the rules, confusing masculine and feminine, past and present, pronouns and adjectives, a sloppy, even disjointed Hebrew. But what vitality those tales had! In a story about snow, the writing itself seemed to be formed of icy words. In a story about fires, the words themselves blazed. And what a strange, hypnotic sweetness there was in her tales about all sorts of miraculous deeds! As though the writer had dipped his pen in wine: the words reeled and staggered in your mouth.
Teacher Zelda also opened up books of poetry to me that summer, books that were really, but really, unsuitable for someone of my age: poems by Leah Goldberg, Uri Tzvi Greenberg, Yocheved Bat-Miriam, Esther Raab, and Y. Z. Rimon.
It was from her that I learned that there are some words that need to have total silence all around them, to give them enough space, just as when you hang pictures there are some that cannot abide having neighbors.
I learned a great deal from her,