A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [258]
My father and I shared the household chores. I peeled vegetables, and he chopped them up to make a fine salad. He sliced bread, and I spread it with margarine and cheese or margarine and jam. I swept and washed the floors and dusted all the surfaces, and my father emptied the garbage cans and bought a third of a block of ice for the icebox every two or three days. I went shopping at the grocer's and the greengrocer's, while Father took care of the butcher and the pharmacist. Both of us added items as necessary to the shopping list that we wrote on one of Father's index cards and pinned up on the kitchen door. As we bought items, we crossed them off the list. Every Saturday evening we started a new list:
Tomatoes. Cucumber. Onion. Potatoes. Radishes.
Bread. Eggs. Cheese. Jam. Sugar.
Find out if any clementines yet and when oranges start.
Matches. Oil. Candles for power failures.
Washing-up liquid. Washing soap. Shenhav toothpaste.
Paraffin.
A 40-watt lightbulb. Get iron mended. Batteries.
New washer for faucet in bathroom basin. Fix the faucet because it doesn't turn off completely.
Yogurt. Margarine. Olives.
Buy woolen socks for Mother.
At that time my handwriting grew more and more like my father's, so that it was almost impossible to say which of us had written "paraffin" or who had added, "We need a new floorcloth." To this day my writing looks like my father's: vigorous, not always legible, but always energetic, sharp, and revealing strong pressure on the pen, unlike my mother's calm, rounded, pearl-like letters, leaning slightly backward, precise and pleasant to look at, written with a light, disciplined hand, letters as perfect and well-spaced as her teeth.
We were very close to one another at that time, Father and I: like a pair of stretcher bearers carrying an injured person up a steep slope. We took her a glass of water and made her take the tranquilizers that were prescribed by two different doctors. We had one of Father's little cards for that too: we wrote down the name of each medicine and the times she had to take it, and we put a tick by each one that she took and a cross by the ones she refused to swallow or that she brought up. Mostly she was obedient and took her medicine even when she was feeling queasy. Sometimes she forced herself to give us a little smile, which was even more painful than her pallor or the dark half moons that appeared under her eyes, because it was such a hollow smile, as if it had nothing to do with her. And sometimes she motioned to us to lean over and she stroked both our heads with a uniform circular movement. She stroked us both for a long time, until Father gently removed her hand and laid it on her bosom. And I did the same.
Every evening, at supper time, Father and I held a kind of daily staff meeting in the kitchen. I filled him in on my day at school, and he told me something about his day at work, at the National Library, or described an article he was trying to finish in time for the next issue of Tarbiz or Metsuda.
We talked about politics, about the assassination of King Abdullah, or about Begin and Ben-Gurion. We talked like equals. My heart filled with love for this tired man when he concluded gravely:
"It seems there remain considerable areas of disagreement between us. So for the time being we shall have to agree to differ."
Then we would talk about household matters. We would jot down on one of Father's little cards what we still had to do, and cross out what we'd already seen to. Father even discussed money matters with me sometimes: still a fortnight to go till pay day, and we had already spent such and such a sum. Every evening he would ask me about my homework, and I would hand him my list of assignments from school and the exercise books in which I had completed the allotted tasks, for comparison. Sometimes he took a look at what I had done and made appropriate comments; he knew more about virtually every subject than my teachers and even than