A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [237]
I heard but I didn't understand. Or I understood but I didn't grasp the significance.
Then the rain started again. Once again Father asked permission, after I had been sent to bed, to "go out and see some people." He promised to come back not too late, and not to make a noise, he brought her a cup of warm milk, and went out with his super-shiny shoes, with a triangle of white handkerchief peering out of his jacket pocket, like his father, trailing a scent of aftershave. As he went past my window, I heard him open his umbrella with a click, humming out of tune, "What delicate hands she had, no man dared to tou-ou-ouch her," or "Her eyes were like the northern star, but her heart was as hot as the de-e-e-sert."
But Mother and I deceived him while his back was turned. Although he was so strict about lights-out for me, "nine on the dot and not a second later," as soon as the sound of his footsteps faded down the wet street I leaped out of bed and ran to her, to hear more and more stories. She sat in her chair in a room whose walls were lined with row upon row of books, with more piled up on the floor, and I knelt on the rug at her feet in my pajamas, with my head resting on her warm thigh, listening with my eyes closed. There were no lights on in the apartment apart from the new standard lamp by her chair. The wind and rain pounded at the shutters. Occasional volleys of low thunder rolled across Jerusalem. Father had gone off and left me and Mother with her stories. Once, she told me about the empty apartment above her rented room in Prague when she was a student. No one had lived there for two years except, so the neighbors said, in a whisper, the ghosts of two little dead girls. There had been a big fire in the apartment, and it had been impossible to save the girls, Emilia and Jana. After the tragedy, the girls' parents had emigrated. The soot-blackened apartment was locked and shuttered. It was not renovated or rented. Sometimes, the neighbors whispered, muffled sounds of laughter and mischief were heard, or crying in the middle of the night. I never heard sounds like that, Mother said, but sometimes I was almost certain that faucets were turned on, furniture was moved, bare feet pattered from room to room. Perhaps somebody was using the empty apartment for secret love-making or for some other shady purpose. When you grow up, you'll discover that almost everything your ears hear at night can be interpreted in more than one way. In fact, not only at night and not only your ears. What your eyes see, too, even in broad daylight, can almost always be understood in various ways.
On other nights she told me about Eurydice and Orpheus. She told me about the eight-year-old daughter of a well-known Nazi, a brutal killer who was hanged by the Allies at Nuremberg after the war: his little daughter was sent to an institution for juvenile delinquents just because she was caught decorating his photograph with flowers. She told me about a young timber merchant from one of the villages near Rovno who got lost in the forest one stormy night in winter and disappeared, but six years later somebody secretly deposited his worn-out boots at the foot of his widow's bed in the middle of the night. She told me about old Tolstoy, who left his home at the end of his life and expired in a station master's cottage