A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [236]
Mother had made some cheese sandwiches with slices of tomato, hard-boiled egg, red pepper, and anchovy, and Father had made a flask of lukewarm orange juice that he had squeezed himself. When we got to the woods, we spread out a small tarpaulin and sprawled on it, inhaling the smell of the pines that had drunk their fill of the winter rains. Rocky slopes that had grown a deep fuzz of green peeped at us through the trees. We could see the houses of the Arab village of Shuafat across the border, and the minaret of Nebi Samwil rose slim and tall on the horizon. Father observed that the word for "woods" in Hebrew was similar to the words for "deaf," "silent," "industry," and "plowing," which led into a short lecture about the charms of language. Since Mother was in such a good mood, she gave him a list of other similar words.
Then she told us about a Ukrainian neighbor, an agile, good-looking boy who could predict exactly which morning the rye would start sprouting and the first shoots of beetroot would appear. All the Gentile girls were crazy about this boy, Stephan, Stepasha they called him, or Stiopa, but he was madly in love with a Jewish teacher at the Tarbuth school, so much so that he once tried to drown himself in a whirlpool in the river, but he was such a wonderful swimmer that he could not drown, he was carried along to an estate on the bank of the river, and the woman who owned the estate seduced him, and a few months later she bought an inn for him, and he's probably still there, ugly and gross from too much drinking and womanizing.
For once Father forgot to silence her when she used the word "womanizing," and didn't even shout, "Vidish Malchik!" He laid his head on her knee, stretched out on the tarpaulin, and chewed a blade of grass. I did the same: I lay down on the tarpaulin, put my head on Mother's other knee, chewed a blade of grass, and filled my lungs with the intoxicating warm air, full of fresh scents and the hum of insects drunk with the spring, and washed clean by the winter wind and rain. How good it would be to stop time, and to stop writing this too, a couple of years before her death, with the picture of the three of us in the Tel Arza woods on that spring festival: my mother in her blue dress, with a red silk scarf tied gracefully around her neck, sitting upright and looking pretty, then leaning back against the trunk of a tree, with my father's head on one knee and mine on the other, stroking our faces and hair with her cool hand, as throngs of birds shrilled overhead in the spring-cleaned pine trees.
She was really much better that spring. No longer did she sit day and night in her chair facing the window; she didn't recoil from the electric light or start at every noise. She no longer neglected the housework and the hours of reading that she loved. She had fewer migraines, and she almost recovered her appetite. And once again it was enough for her to spend five minutes in front of the mirror, a dab of powder, a touch of lipstick and eyeshadow, a brush of the hair, another couple of minutes carefully making her choice in front of the open closet door, to appear to all of us mysterious, pretty, and radiant. The usual visitors reappeared at our apartment, the Bar-Yitzhar-Itselevitches, the Abramskis, devout Revisionists who loathed the Labor government, Hannah and Hayim Toren, the Rudnickis, and Tosia and Gustav Krochmal from Danzig, who had the dolls' hospital in Geula Street. The men sometimes shot a hasty, embarrassed look at my mother and hurriedly looked away again.
And we resumed going on Friday evenings to light candles and eat gefilte fish or stuffed chicken neck sewn up with a needle and thread at Grandma Shlomit and Grandpa Alexander's round table. On Saturday mornings we sometimes went to visit the Rudnickis, and after lunch, almost every Sabbath, we crossed the whole of Jerusalem, from north to south, on the pilgrimage to Uncle Joseph in Talpiot.
Once, over supper, Mother suddenly told us about a standard lamp that had stood beside her armchair in her rented room