A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [225]
So I used to walk around in the playground during breaks like Rabbi Nahman with his flocks of students eager to drink in his teachings; I would turn this way and that surrounded by a tight crush of listeners afraid of missing a single word, and among them would sometimes be my leading persecutors, whom I would make a point of magnanimously inviting into the innermost circle and favoring with a precious clue to a possible twist in the plot or some hair-raising event that would figure in the next installment, thus promoting the recipient into an influential figure who had the power to reveal or withhold invaluable information at will.
My first stories were full of caves, labyrinths, catacombs, forests, ocean depths, dungeons, battlefields, galaxies inhabited by monsters, brave policemen and fearless warriors, conspiracies, terrible betrayals accompanied by wonderful acts of chivalry and generosity, baroque twists, unbelievable self-sacrifice, and highly emotional gestures of self-denial and forgiveness. As far as I recall, the characters in my early works included both heroes and villains. And there were a number of villains who repented and atoned for their sins by acts of self-sacrifice or by a heroic death. There were also bloodthirsty sadists, and all sorts of scoundrels and mean cheats, as well as unassuming characters who sacrificed their lives with a smile. The female characters, on the other hand, were all, without exception, noble: loving despite being exploited, suffering yet compassionate, tormented and even humiliated, yet always proud and pure, paying the price for male insanities yet generous and forgiving.
But if I tightened the string too much, or not enough, then after a few episodes, or at the end of the story, at the moment when wrongdoing was confounded and magnanimity finally received its reward, that was when this poor Scheherazade was thrown into the lions' den and showered with blows and insults to his ancestry. Why could he never keep his mouth shut?
Tachkemoni was a boys' school. Even the teachers were all male. Apart from the school nurse no woman ever appeared there. The bolder boys sometimes climbed onto the wall of the Laemel Girls' School to get a glimpse of life on the other side of the iron curtain. Girls in long blue skirts and blouses with short puffy sleeves, so the rumor went, walked around the playground in pairs during break, played hopscotch, braided each other's hair, and occasionally splashed each other with water from the fountains just like us.
Apart from me, almost all the boys at Tachkemoni had older sisters, sisters-in-law, and female cousins, and so I was the last of the last to hear the whispers about what it was that girls had and we didn't, and vice versa, and what the older brothers did to their girls in the dark.
At home not a word was spoken on the subject. Ever. Except, perhaps, if some visitor got carried away and joked about bohemian life, or about the Bar-Yizhar-Itselevitches who were so meticulous about observing the commandment to be fruitful and multiply, but he would immediately be silenced by the others with the rebuke: Shto's toboi?! Vidish malchik ryadom's nami!! (Can't you see the boy is here!)
The boy may have been there, but he understood nothing. If his classmates hurled the Arabic word for what girls have at him, if they huddled together and passed a picture of a scantily dressed