A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [221]
"Praise be to God for permitting us to see you here in our land, though I do not understand why your dear parents were not vouchsafed to be among the living. But who am I to understand? The Lord has the answers. We can merely wonder. Please, I'm sorry, will you allow me to feel your dear face? It is only because my eyes have failed."
Aunt Rauha said of my father: "Blessed be his memory, he was the dearest of men! He had such a noble spirit! Such a humane spirit!" And of my mother she said: "Such a suffering soul, peace be upon her! She had many sufferings, because she saw into the heart of people, and what she saw was not so easy for her to bear. As the prophet Jeremiah says, 'The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?'"
Outside, in Helsinki, sleet was falling. The daylight was low and murky, and the snowflakes were gray and did not settle. The two old women were wearing almost identical dark dresses and thick brown socks, like girls from a respectable boarding school. When I kissed them, they both smelled of plain washing soap, brown bread, and bedding. A small maintenance man hurried past us, with a battery of pencils and pens in the pocket of his overalls. Aunt Rauha took a brown paper packet out of a big bag that was under the table and handed it to me. I recognized the bag: it was the same gray hessian bag from which they used to hand out small bars of soap, woolen socks, rusks, matches, candles, radishes, or a precious packet of powdered milk during the siege of Jerusalem, thirty years previously.
I opened the packet, and there was a Bible printed in Jerusalem, in Hebrew and Finnish on facing pages, a tiny music box made of painted wood with a brass lid, and an assortment of dried flowers, unfamiliar Finnish flowers that were beautiful even in their death, flowers that I could not name and that I had never seen before that morning.
"We were very fond," Aunt Aili said, her unseeing eyes seeking mine, "of your dear parents. Their life on this earth was not easy, and they did not always dispense grace to each other. There was sometimes much shadow between them. But now that finally they dwell in the secret of Almighty in the shelter of the wings of the Lord, now there is certainly only grace and truth between your parents, like two innocent children who have known no thought of iniquity, only light, love, and compassion between them forever, his left hand under her head and her right hand embraces him, and every shadow has long since departed from them."
For my part, I had intended to present two copies of the Finnish translation of my book to the two aunts, but Aunt Rauha refused: A Hebrew book, she said, a book about Jerusalem written in the city of Jerusalem, we must please read it in Hebrew and not in any other language! And besides, she said with an apologetic smile, truly Aunt Aili can no longer read anything because the Lord has taken to himself the last of the light of her eyes. I read to her, morning and evening, only from the Old and New Testament, from our prayer book, and the books of the saints, although my eyes are also growing dim, and soon we shall both be blind.
And when I am not reading to her and Aunt Aili is not listening to me, then we both sit at the window and look out at trees and birds, snow and wind, morning and evening, daylight and night lights, and we both give thanks in all humility to the good Lord for all his mercies and all his wonders: His will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Do you not also see sometimes, only when you are at rest, how the sky and the earth, the trees and the stones, the fields and the woods, are all full of great wonders? They are all bright and shining and they all together like a thousand witnesses testify to the greatness of the miracle of grace.
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