A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [19]
But Grandma could not give up her baths. Her fear of germs was too strong for her. She died in the bath.
Her heart attack is a fact, but the truth is that she died from an excess of hygiene. Facts have a tendency to obscure the truth. It was cleanliness that killed her. Although the motto of her life in Jerusalem, "The Levant is full of germs," may testify to an earlier, deeper truth than the demon of hygiene, a truth that was repressed and invisible. After all, Grandma Shlomit came from northeastern Europe, where there were just as many germs as there were in Jerusalem, not to mention all sorts of other noxious things.
Here then is a peephole that may afford us a glimpse of the effect of the sights of the orient, its colors and smells, on my grandmother and perhaps on other immigrants and refugees who like her came from gloomy shtetls in Eastern Europe and were so disturbed by the pervasive sensuality of the Levant that they resolved to defend themselves from its menace by constructing their own ghetto.
Menace? Or perhaps the truth is that it was not the menace of the Levant that made my grandmother mortify and purify her body with those boiling-hot ablutions morning, noon, and night every day that she lived in Jerusalem but rather its seductive sensual charms, and her own body, and the powerful attraction of those teeming markets that made her breathing tight and her knees weak with that abundance of un-familiar vegetables, fruit, spicy cheeses, pungent odors, and guttural foods that so tormented and excited her, and those lustful hands that groped and burrowed into the most intimate recesses of fruit and vegetables, the chilis and spicy olives and the nudity of all that ripe, bare red meat, dripping blood, hanging shamelessly naked from the butchers' hooks, and the dizzying array of spices, herbs, and powders, all the multicolored lascivious lures of that pungent, highly seasoned world, not to mention the penetrating aromas of freshly roasted, cardamom-flavored coffee, and the glass containers full of colorful drinks with lumps of ice or slices of lemon in them, and those powerfully built, deeply tanned, hirsute market porters, naked to the waist, the muscles of their backs rippling with effort under their hot skin that gleamed as rivulets of perspiration ran down it in the sun. Perhaps Grandma's cult of cleanliness was nothing more or less than a hermetic, sterile spacesuit. An antiseptic chastity belt that she had voluntarily buckled on, since her first day here, and secured with seven locks, destroying all the keys?
Or maybe it was neither the hygiene nor her desires nor the fear of her desires that killed her but her constant secret anger at this fear, a suppressed, malignant anger, like an unlanced boil, anger at her own body, at her own longings, and also a deeper anger, at the very revulsion these longings gave rise to, a murky, poisonous anger directed both at the prisoner and at her jailer, years and years of secret mourning for the ceaseless passage of desolate time and the shriveling of her body and the desires of that body, the desires, laundered and cleansed and scraped and disinfected and boiled a thousand times, for that Levant, filthy, sweaty, bestial, exciting to the point of swooning, but swarming with germs.
6
ALMOST SIXTY years have gone by, yet I can still remember his smell. I summon it, and it returns to me, a slightly coarse, dusty, but strong and pleasant smell, reminiscent of touching rough sackcloth, and it borders on the memory of the feel of his skin, his flowing locks, his thick mustache that rubbed against the skin of my cheek and gave me a pleasant feeling, like being in a warm, dark old kitchen on a winter day. The poet Saul Tchernikhowsky died in the autumn of 1943, when