A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [190]
He did not see or hear or imagine or beware, this eager brother's keeper, this flying lion, even though nemesis was well on the way, and everything was ready for the horror to come. The rusty iron ball at the end of the rusty chain was whirling in the air, threatening to wrench his arm out of his shoulder socket. His arrogance. His folly. The poison of his rising virility. The intoxication of vainglorious chauvinism. The branch he was lying on to perform his demonstration was already groaning under his weight. And the delicate, thoughtful girl with the thick black eyebrows, the poetess, was looking up at him with a pitying smile, not a smile of admiration or awe for the new Hebrew man but a faintly contemptuous expression, an amused, indulgent smile, as if to say, that's nothing, all those efforts of yours, it's nothing at all, we've seen much more than that already, you can't impress us with that, if you really want to surprise me someday, you'll have to try seven times as hard.
(And from the depth of some dark well there may have flashed before him for a brief instant a faint memory of a thick forest in a women's clothes shop, a primeval jungle through which he had once pursued a little girl, and when he finally caught up with her, she turned out to be a horror.)
And her brother was still there, at the foot of the mulberry tree, he had finished making his precise, mysterious circles out of fallen leaves and now, tousled, serious, responsible-looking, and sweet, he was toddling after a white butterfly in his shorts and red shoes when suddenly from the top of the mulberry tree someone called his name in a terrified roar, Awwad Awwad run, and he may just have had time to look up into the tree with his round eyes, he may just have had time to see the rusty iron apple that had broken free from the end of the chain and was rushing toward him like a shell straight toward him getting darker and bigger and flying straight at the child's eyes, and it would surely have smashed his skull in if it had not missed his head by an inch and whizzed right down past the child's nose to land with a heavy dull thud crushing his little foot through his tiny red shoe, the doll-like shoe that was suddenly covered with blood and started to fountain blood through the lace holes and to gush out through the seams and over the top of the shoe. Then a single long, piercing, heartrending shriek of pain rose above the tops of the trees and then your whole body was seized with trembling like frosty needles and everything was silent all around you in an instant as though you had been shut up inside an iceberg.
***
I don't remember the unconscious child's face when his sister carried him away in her arms, I don't remember if she screamed too, if she called for help, if she spoke to me, and I don't remember when or how I got down from the tree or if I fell down with the branch that collapsed beneath me, I don't remember who dressed the cut on my chin that trickled blood down onto my best shirt (I still have a mark on my chin), and I can hardly remember anything that happened between the injured boy's only shriek and the white sheets that evening, as I lay still shivering all over curled up fetus-like with several stitches in my chin in Uncle Staszek and Auntie Mala's double bed.
But I do remember to this day, like two sharp burning coals, her eyes beneath the mourning border of her black eyebrows that joined in the middle: loathing, despair, horror, and flashing hatred came from her eyes, and beneath the loathing and the hatred there was also a sort of gloomy nod of the head, as though she were agreeing with herself, as if to say I could