A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [178]
Mr. Shmuelevich told me once, on one of those long summer evenings when you think the evening light will never fade, when the two of us were sitting in vests and sandals on his garden wall, how he was taken to the Maidanek death camp when he was about twelve with his parents, his three sisters, and their grandmother, and he was the only one who survived. He didn't want to tell me how he survived. He promised he'd tell me some other time. But every other time he chose instead to open my eyes, so I shouldn't believe in peace, so I should stop being naive, so I should get it firmly in my head that their only aim is to butcher us all and all their talk of peace is a trap, or a sleeping draught that the whole world has helped them brew and given us to lull us to sleep. Just as then.
I decide to put off writing the article. An unfinished chapter of this book is waiting for me on my desk in a heap of scribbled drafts, crumpled notes, and half pages full of crossings out. It's the chapter about Teacher Isabella Nahlieli from Children's Realm School and her army of cats. I'm going to have to make some concessions there and delete some incidents about cats and about Getzel Nahlieli, the cashier. They were quite amusing incidents, but they do not contribute anything to the progress of the story. Contribute? Progress? I don't know what can contribute to the progress of the story, because as yet I have no idea where this story wants to go, and in fact why it needs contributions. Or progress.
Meanwhile the eleven o'clock news has finished and I've had a second mug of coffee and I'm still staring out the window. A pretty little turquoise-colored bird peers at me for a moment out of the lemon tree: it moves to and fro, leaps from a branch to a twig, and shows off the lightning of its feathers in the dappled light and shade. Its head is nearly violet, its neck is a dark metallic blue, and it is wearing a delicate yellow waistcoat. Welcome back. What have you come to remind me about this morning? The Nahlielis? Bialik's poem "A twig fell on a wall and dozed"? My mother, who used to spend hours standing at the window, with a glass of tea getting cold in her hand, with her face to the pomegranate bush and her back to the room? That's enough. I must get down to work. Now I have to use the rest of the calm I stored up in the wadi this morning before the sun rose.
Just before noon I drive into town to sort out one or two things at the post office, the bank, the clinic, and the stationer's. A tropical sun is scorching the streets and their dusty, thin-looking trees. The desert light is white-hot now and so cruel to your eyes that they turn of their own accord into two narrow slits.
There is a short line at the cash dispenser and another one at Ouak-nine's newspaper stand. In Tel Aviv, in the summer holiday of 1950 or 1951, not far from Auntie Haya and Uncle Tsvi's apartment at the north end of Ben Yehuda Street, my cousin Yigal pointed out to me a newspaper kiosk that was kept by David Ben-Gurion's brother and told me that anyone who wanted to could simply go up and talk to him, to this brother of Ben-Gurion's, who really looked a lot like him. You could even ask him questions. Like, How are you, Mr. Gruen? How much is a chocolate wafer, Mr. Gruen? Is there going to be another war soon, Mr. Gruen? The only thing you mustn't do is ask him about his brother. That's the way it is. He really doesn't like being asked questions about his brother.
I was very jealous of the people in Tel Aviv. In Kerem Avraham we didn't have any celebrities or even brothers of celebrities. All we had were the Minor Prophets in our street names: Amos Street, Obadiah Street, Zephaniah Street, Haggai, Zechariah, Nahum, Malachi, Joel, Habakkuk, Hosea, Micah, and Jonah. The lot.
A Russian immigrant is standing on the corner of the square in the center