A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [257]
And suddenly, again without any warning, in the full flow of his monologue, almost in the middle of a sentence, he had had enough.
He leaped up from his chair as though shot from a gun, made me stand up too, and as he pushed me toward the door—pushed me physically, just as his secretary had pushed me in some three-quarters of an hour previously—he said warmly:
"It's good to chat! Very good! And what have you been reading lately? What is the youth reading? Please come and see me any time you're in town. Just drop in, don't be afraid!"
And while he pushed me, with my studded army boots and my white Sabbath-best shirt, through the door, he went on shouting cheerily:
"Drop in! Any time! My door is always open!"
More than forty years have passed since that Spinoza morning in Ben-Gurion's Spartan office. I have met famous people since then, including political leaders, fascinating personalities, some of whom exuded great personal charm, but nobody has left such a sharp impression of their physical presence on me, or of their electrifying willpower. Ben-Gurion had, at least on that morning, a hypnotic energy.
Isaiah Berlin was right in his cruel observation: Ben-Gurion was no intellectual, Plato and Spinoza notwithstanding. Far from it. As I see it, he was a visionary peasant. There was something primeval about him, something not of this day and age. His simplicity of mind was almost biblical; his willpower resembled a laser beam. As a young man in the shtetl of Plonsk in eastern Poland he had two simple ideas: that the Jews must reestablish their homeland in the Land of Israel, and that he was the right man to lead them. Throughout his life he never budged from these two decisions of his youth; everything else was subordinated to them.
He was an honest, cruel man; like most visionaries he did not stop to count the cost. Or perhaps he did stop for a moment and decided: let it cost whatever it costs.
As a child growing up among the Klausners and all their fellow anti-leftists in Kerem Avraham, I was always taught that Ben-Gurion was responsible for all the troubles of the Jewish people. Where I grew up he was the baddie, the embodiment of all the plagues of the leftist regime.
As I grew up, however, I opposed Ben-Gurion from the opposite angle, from the Left. Like many of the Israeli intelligentsia of my time, I saw him as an almost despotic personality, and I recoiled from the tough way he treated the Arabs in the War of Independence and the reprisal raids. It is only in recent years that I have begun to read about him and wonder whether I was right.
There is no simple way of summing him up.
And suddenly, as I write the words "the tough way," I can see again with perfect clarity the way Ben-Gurion held his glass of cheap fruit drink, which he had poured for himself first. The glass was cheap too, it was made of thick glass, and his tough fingers were thick and short as they clasped it like a hand grenade. I was alarmed: if I put a foot wrong and said something that would trigger his rage, Ben-Gurion might well dash the contents of the glass into my face, or hurl the glass at the wall. Or he might tighten his grip on the glass and crush it. That was the awesome way he held that glass. Until he suddenly brightened and showed me that he knew all about my attempts at writing poetry, and smiled with pleasure at the sight of my discomfiture, and for a brief moment he looked almost like a merry joker who had pulled off a little trick and was now asking himself: What next?
53
IN THE autumn, toward the end of 1951, my mother's condition took another turn for the worse. Her migraines came back, and so did her insomnia. Once again she sat all day