A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [244]
Pause. A crafty, innocent smile spread like a sunrise across the wrinkled landscape of his rich, fascinating face: "In which case why, maybe someone can explain to me, why do they insist on telling me that the one and only exception to the rule, the one and only thing that is doomed to perdition, that can become nothing, the one and only thing that is destined for cessation in the whole wide universe in which not so much as an atom can be destroyed, is my poor soul? Will everything, every speck of dust, every drop of water continue to exist eternally, albeit in different forms, except for my soul?"
"Nobody," murmured a clever young genius from a corner of the room, "has ever seen the soul."
"No," Bergman agreed at once. "You don't meet the laws of physics or mathematics in a café either. Or wisdom, or foolishness, or desire or fear. No one has yet taken a little sample of joy or longing and put it in a test tube. But who is it, my young friend, who is talking to you right now? Is it Bergman's humors? His spleen? Is it perhaps Bergman's large intestine speaking? Who was it, if you will excuse my saying so, who spread that none-too-pleasant smile on your face? Was it not your soul? Was it your cartilages? Your gastric juices?"
On another occasion he said:
"What is in store for us after we die? No-o-obody knows. At any rate not with a knowledge that is susceptible of proof or demonstration. If I tell you this evening that I sometimes hear the voice of the dead and that it is much clearer and more intelligible to me than most of the voices of the living, you are entitled to say that this old man is in his dotage. He has gone out of his mind with terror at his impending death. Therefore I will not talk to you this evening about voices, this evening I will talk mathematics: since no-o-obody knows if there is anything on the other side of our death or if there is nothing there, we can deduce from this complete ignorance that the chances that there is something there are exactly the same as the chances that there is nothing there. Fifty percent for cessation and fifty percent for survival. For a Jew like me, a Central European Jew from the generation of the Nazi Holocaust, such odds in favor of survival are not at all bad."
Gershom Scholem, Bergman's friend and rival, was also fascinated and possibly even tormented by the question of life after death. The morning the news of his death was broadcast, I wrote:
Gershom Scholem died in the night. And now he knows.
Bergman too knows now. So does Kafka. So do my mother and father. And their friends and acquaintances and most of the men and women in those cafés, both those I used to tell myself stories about and those who are forgotten. They all know now. Someday we will know too. And in the meantime we will continue to gather little details. Just in case.
51
I WAS A fiercely nationalistic child when I was in the fourth and fifth grades at Tachkemoni School. I wrote a historical novel in installments called The End of the Kingdom ofJudah, and several poems about conquest, and about national greatness, which resembled Grandpa Alexander's patriotic verses and aimed to imitate Vladimir Jabotinsky's nationalistic marching songs such as the Beitar Anthem: "...Spill your blood and offer up your soul! / Raise high the fire: / Repose is like mire; / We fight for a glorious goal!" I was also influenced by the song of the Jewish partisans in Poland and the ghetto rebels: "...What if our blood we spill? / Surely our spirit with heroic deeds shall thrive!" And poems by Saul Tchernikhowsky that Father used to read to me with wavering pathos in his voice: "...a tune of blood and fire! / So climb the hill and crush the vale, whate'er you see—acquire!" The poem that excited