A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [180]
Somebody is passing the house now in a little red van; he stops at the mailbox on the corner and extracts the letters I posted yesterday. Somebody else has come to replace the broken curbstone of the pavement opposite. I must find some way to thank them all, the way a bar mitzvah boy publicly thanks everyone who has helped him come this far: Aunt Sonia, Grandpa Alexander, Greta Gat, Teacher Zelda, the Arab man with bags under his eyes who rescued me from the dark cell where I was trapped in that clothes shop, my parents, Mr. Zarchi, the Lembergs next door, the Italian prisoners of war, Grandma Shlomit with her war on germs, Teacher Isabella and her cats, Mr. Agnon, the Rudnickis, Grandpa Papa the carter from Kiriat Motskin, Saul Tchernikhowsky, Auntie Lilenka Bar Samkha, my wife, my children, my grandchildren, the builders and electricians who made this house, the carpenter, the newspaper boy, the man in the red mail van, the musician playing his violin on the corner of the square who reminded me of Einstein and Bergman, the Bedouin woman and the three goats I saw this morning before dawn, or did I just imagine them, Uncle Joseph who wrote Judaism and Humanity, my neighbor Shmuelevich who is afraid of another Holocaust, his granddaughter Daniella who played the Moonlight Sonata yesterday, Minister Shimon Peres who went to talk to Arafat again yesterday in the hope of finding some compromise formula despite everything, and the turquoise bird that sometimes visits my lemon tree. And the lemon tree itself. And especially the silence of the desert just before sunrise, that has more and more silences wrapped up inside it. That was my third coffee this morning. That's enough. I put the empty mug down at the edge of the table, taking particular care not to make the slightest noise that would injure the silence that has not vanished yet. Now I will sit down and write.
40
I HAD NEVER seen a house like it in my life before that morning.
It was surrounded by a thick stone wall that concealed an orchard shady with vines and fruit trees. My astonished eyes looked instinctively for the tree of life and the tree of knowledge. There was a well in front of the house set in a wide terrace paved with blocks of smooth pinkish stone with delicate pale-blue veins. An arbor of thick vines shaded a corner of this terrace. Some stone seats and a low, wide stone table tempted you to linger in this arbor, to take your ease, to rest in the shade of the vines and listen to the buzzing of the summer bees, the singing of the birds in the orchard, and the trickle of the fountain—because at one end of the arbor there was a little pool in the form of a five-pointed star made of stone and lined with blue tiles decorated with Arabic writing. In the middle of the pool a fountain bubbled quietly. Groups of goldfish swam slowly to and fro among the clumps of water lilies.
From the terrace the three of us, excited, polite, and humble, walked up the stone steps to a wide veranda with a view of the northern walls of the Old City with the minarets and domes beyond. Wooden chairs with cushions and footstools and some mosaic-covered tables were scattered around the veranda. Here too, as in the arbor, one felt an urge to sprawl facing the view of the city walls, to doze in the shade of the foliage or calmly drink in the silence of the hills and the stone.
We did not linger in the orchard or in the arbor or on the veranda but pulled the bell pull next to the double iron doors, which were painted the color of mahogany and skillfully carved in relief with all sorts of pomegranates, grapes, winding tendrils, and symmetrical flowers. While we waited for the door to open, Uncle Staszek turned his head to us again and put his finger to his lips one more time, as though to signal a final warning to Auntie Mala and me: manners! composure! diplomacy!
Along all four walls of