A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [235]
So here it is. Here and now, in Arad on an autumn day at half past six in the morning, I can suddenly see perfectly sharply the image of me and my friend Lolik walking down Jaffa Road near Zion Square, one cloudy lunchtime in the winter of 1950 or 1951, and Lolik punches me lightly in the ribs and whispers, Hey, take a look at that, isn't that your Dad sitting in there? Let's scamper before he spots us and realizes we've cut Avisar's class. So we made off, but as we went, I saw my father through the glass front of Sichel's Café, sitting just inside, laughing, with a young woman who had her back to the window, and holding her hand—she was wearing a bracelet—to his lips; and I ran away from there, I ran away from Lolik, and I haven't quite stopped running since.
Grandpa Alexander kissed every lady's hand. Father did it sometimes, but otherwise he just took her hand and bent over it to look at her wristwatch and compare it with his own, he was always doing that, to almost everybody, watches were his hobby. That was the only time I ever skipped a class, and I did it this time especially to go and see the burned-out Egyptian tank they put on display in the Russian Compound. I would never cut a class again. Ever.
I hated him. For a couple of days. Out of shame. And after a couple of days I started hating my mother, with her migraines and her play-acting and her sit-in in her chair by the window, she was the one who was to blame because she had pushed him to look for signs of life. Then I hated myself because I had let Lolik tempt me like the fox and the cat in Pinocchio to skip Mr. Avisar's class. Why didn't I have a single ounce of strength of character? Why was I so easily influenced? And a week later it had completely slipped my mind, and I recalled what I had seen through the window of Sichel's Café only one bad night at Kibbutz Hulda when I was about sixteen. I forgot, just as I forgot all about the morning I came home early from school and found my mother sitting quietly in her blue flannel dressing gown, not in her chair by the window but outside in the yard, in a deck chair, under the bare pomegranate tree, sitting there calmly with an expression on her face that looked like a smile but wasn't; her book was lying as usual upside down open on her lap and torrential rain was pouring down on her and must have been doing so for an hour or two because when I stood her up and dragged her indoors, she was soaked and frozen like a drenched bird that would never fly again. I got her to the bathroom and fetched her some dry clothes from her closet and I told her off like a grown-up and I gave her instructions, through the bathroom door, and she didn't answer but she did everything I told her to do, only she didn't stop smiling that smile that wasn't a smile. I didn't say a word to Father, because Mother's eyes asked me to keep it a secret. And to Aunt Lilia all I said was something like this:
"But you're completely wrong, Auntie Lilia. I'll never be a writer or a poet, or a scholar either, there's no way I will, because I haven't got any feelings. Feelings disgust me. I'm going to be a farmer. I'm going to live in a kibbutz. Or maybe someday I'll be a dog poisoner. With a syringe full of arsenic."
In the spring she felt better. On the morning of the spring festival of Tu Bishvat, the day that Chaim Weizmann, as president of the Provisional Council of State, opened the meeting of the Constituent Assembly that became the First Knesset, my mother put on her blue dress and asked Father and me to join her in a little outing to the Tel Arza woods. I thought she carried herself well and looked pretty in this dress, and when we finally left our book-laden basement and went out into the spring sunlight, there was a warm sparkle of affection in her eyes. Father put his arm in hers and I ran a little way ahead of them, like a puppy, to give them a chance to talk to each other, or maybe just because I