A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [171]
Only some of them, though. For instance, I had not the slightest idea, and she never gave me the faintest hint, that besides being my teacher, my beloved, she was also Zelda the poet, some of whose poems had been published in literary supplements and in one or two obscure magazines. I did not know that, like me, she was an only child. Nor did I know that she was related to a famous dynasty of Hasidic rabbis, that she was a first cousin of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneersohn (their fathers were brothers). And I did not know that she had also studied drawing, or that she belonged to a drama group, or that even then she enjoyed a modest reputation among small circles of poetry lovers. I did not imagine that my rival, her other suitor, was Rabbi Chayim Mishkowsky, or that two years after our summer, hers and mine, he would marry her. I knew almost nothing about her.
At the beginning of the autumn in 1947 I entered the third grade of the Tachkemoni Religious Boys' School. New thrills filled my life. And anyway, it wasn't appropriate for me to go on being tied like a baby to the skirts of a teacher from the elementary classes: neighbors were raising their eyebrows, their children had begun to make fun of me, and I even made fun of myself. What's wrong with you that you keep running to her every morning? What will you look like when the whole neighborhood starts talking about the crazy little boy who takes down her washing and sweeps her yard and probably even dreams of marrying her in the middle of the night when the stars are shining?
A few weeks after that, violent clashes broke out in Jerusalem, then came the war, the shelling, the siege and starvation. I drifted away from Teacher Zelda. I no longer ran around at seven o'clock in the morning, washed and scrubbed with my hair plastered down, to sit with her in her yard. I no longer took her poems I had written the night before. If we met in the street, I would mumble hurriedly, "Good morning, how are you, Teacher Zelda," without a question mark, and run away without waiting for an answer. I was ashamed of everything that had happened. And I was also ashamed of the way I had ditched her so suddenly, without even bothering to tell her I had ditched her and without even offering an explanation. And I was ashamed of her thoughts, because she must surely know that in my thoughts I had not ditched her yet.
After that we were finally freed from Kerem Avraham. We moved to Rehavia, the area my father had dreamed of. Then my mother died and I went to live and work in the kibbutz. I wanted to leave Jerusalem behind me once and for all. All the links were severed. Now and then I would come across a poem by Zelda in a magazine and so I knew that she was still alive and that she was still a person with feelings. But after my mother's death I had recoiled from all feelings, and I especially wanted to put a distance between myself and women with feelings. In general.
The year my third book, My Michael, the action of which takes place more or less in our neighborhood, was published, Zelda's first collection, Leisure, also appeared. I thought of writing her a few words to congratulate her, but I didn't. I thought of sending her my book, but I didn't. How could I know if she still lived in Zephaniah Street or if she had moved somewhere else? In any case, I had written My Michael to draw a line between myself and Jerusalem, not to reconnect with her. Among the poems in Leisure I discovered Teacher Zelda's family and I also met some of our neighbors. Then two more books of poems appeared, The Invisible Carmel and Neither Mountain nor Fire, which aroused the love of thousands of readers and earned her eminent literary prizes and salvos of acclaim, which Teacher Zelda, a solitary woman, seems to have dodged, and to which she appeared indifferent.
All Jerusalem in my childhood, in the last years of British rule, sat at home and wrote. Hardly anyone had a radio in those days,