A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [255]
I was alarmed. Almost offended.
Nevertheless, during the two or three minutes of uninterrupted silence that felt like an eternity, with my back still pressed against the door in terror, I feasted my eyes on the strange, hypnotic form of this compact, powerfully built little man, something between a tough, patriarchal highlander and an ancient, energetic dwarf, who was restlessly pacing to and fro with his hands behind his back, his head thrust forward like a battering ram, sunk in thought, remote, not bothering to give the slightest indication that he was aware that somebody, something, a speck of floating dust, had suddenly landed in his office. David Ben-Gurion was about seventy-five at the time, and I was barely twenty.
He had a prophetic shock of silvery hair that surrounded his bald patch like an amphitheater. At the lower margin of his massive brow were two thick, bushy gray eyebrows, beneath which a pair of sharp gray-blue eyes pierced the air. He had a wide, coarse nose, a shamelessly ugly nose, a pornographic nose, like an anti-Semitic caricature. His lips, on the other hand, were thin and indrawn, but his jaw looked to me like the prominent, defiant jaw of an ancient mariner. His skin was rough and red like raw meat. Under a short neck his shoulders were broad and powerful. His chest was massive. His open-necked shirt revealed a hand's-breadth of hairy chest. His shamelessly protruding belly, like a whale's hump, looked as solid as if it were made of concrete. But all this magnificence terminated, to my bewilderment, in a dwarf-like pair of legs that, if it were not blasphemous, one would be tempted to call almost ridiculous.
I tried to breathe as little as possible. I may have envied Gregor Samsa in Kafka's Metamorphosis, who managed to shrink himself into a cockroach. The blood fled from my extremities and collected in my liver.
The first words that broke the silence came in the piercing, metallic voice that we all heard virtually every day on the radio, and even in our dreams. The Almighty shot me an angry look, and said:
"Nu! So why aren't you sitting! Sit!"
I sat down in a flash on the chair facing the desk. I sat bolt upright, but only on the edge of the chair. There was no question of leaning back.
Silence. The Father of the Nation continued to pace to and fro, with hasty little steps, like a caged lion or someone who was determined not to be late. After half an eternity he suddenly said:
"Spinoza!"
And he stopped. When he had walked away as far as the window, he whirled around and said:
"Have you read Spinoza? You have. But maybe you didn't understand? Few people understand Spinoza. Very few."
And then, still pacing to and fro, to and fro, between the window and the door, he burst into a protracted dawn lecture on Spinoza's thought.
In the middle of the lecture, the door hesitantly opened a crack and the secretary poked his head in meekly, smiled, and tried to mumble something, but the roar of a wounded lion was unleashed on him:
"Get out of here! Go! Do not disturb! Can't you see that I'm having one of the most interesting conversations I've had in a long time? So be off with you!"
The poor man vanished in a flash.
So far I had not uttered a single word. Not a sound.
But Ben-Gurion, it turned out, was enjoying lecturing on Spinoza before seven o'clock in the morning. And he did indeed continue for a few minutes without interruption.
Suddenly he stopped in the middle of a sentence. I could almost feel his breath on the back of my petrified neck, but I dared not turn around. I sat rigid, my tightly pressed knees forming a right angle and my thighs at a right angle to my tense back. Without a hint of a question mark in his voice Ben-Gurion hurled at me:
"You haven't had any breakfast!"
He did not wait for an answer. I did not utter a sound.
All of a sudden Ben-Gurion sank out of sight behind his desk like a large