A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [259]
"There's no need to check up on you. I know I can rely on you and trust you absolutely."
Secret pride and gratitude flooded through me when I heard these words. Sometimes I also felt a rush of pity.
For him, not for Mother. I had no pity for her at that time: she was just a long series of daily duties and demands. And a source of embarrassment and shame, because I had to explain somehow to friends why they could never come over to my place, and I had to answer neighbors who quizzed me sweetly at the grocer's about why they never saw her. What had happened to her? Even to uncles and aunts, even to Grandpa and Grandma, Father and I did not tell the whole truth. We played it down. We said she had the flu even when she didn't. We said: Migraine. We said: A particular sensitivity to daylight. Sometimes we said: She's very tired, too. We tried to tell the truth but not the whole truth.
We didn't know the whole truth. But we did know, even without exchanging notes, that neither of us told anyone everything we both knew; we only shared a few facts with the outside world. The two of us never discussed her condition. All we ever talked about was the work to do tomorrow, sharing the daily chores, and the needs of the household. Not once did we talk about what was wrong with her, apart from Father's repeated refrain: "Those doctors, they don't know anything. Not a thing." We didn't talk after her death, either. From the day of my mother's death to the day of my father's death, twenty years later, we did not talk about her once. Not a word. As if she had never lived. As if her life was just a censured page torn from a Soviet encyclopedia. Or as if, like Athena, I had been born straight from the head of Zeus. I was a sort of upside-down Jesus: born of a virgin man by an invisible spirit. And every morning, at dawn, I was awoken by the sound of a bird in the branches of the pomegranate tree in the yard, which greeted the day with the first five notes of Beethoven's Für Elise: "Ti-da-di-da-di!" And again, more excitedly: "Ti-da-di-da-di!" And under my blanket I completed it with feeling: "Da-di-da-da!" In my heart I called the bird Elise.
I was sorry for my father at that time. As though he had fallen victim, through no fault of his own, to some protracted act of abuse. As though my mother were maltreating him on purpose. He was very tired, and sad, even though as usual he tried to be cheery and chatty the whole time. He always hated silences and blamed himself for any silence that occurred. His eyes, like Mother's, had dark half moons beneath them.
Sometimes he left work during the day to take her for tests. What didn't they test in those months: her heart, lungs, and brain waves, digestion, hormones, nerves, women's problems, and circulation. To no effect. He spared no expense, he called various doctors and took her to see private specialists; he may even have had to borrow sums of money from his parents, although he hated having debts and loathed the way his mother, Grandma Shlomit, enjoyed being "put in the picture" and sorting out his marriage for him.
My father got up before dawn every morning to tidy the kitchen, sort the laundry, squeeze fruit, and bring Mother and me the juice at room temperature, to make us stronger, and he also managed to write hasty replies to a few letters from editors and scholars before he left for work. Then he rushed to the bus stop, with a string shopping bag folded up in his battered briefcase, to get to work on time at Terra Sancta Building, where the Newspaper Department of the National Library was transferred when the Mount Scopus campus of the university was cut off from the rest of the town in the War of Independence.
He would come home at five o'clock, having stopped on the way at the grocer's, the electrician's, or the pharmacist's, and would hurry straight in to Mother to see if she was feeling better, hoping that she might have dozed off for a bit while he was out. He would try to spoonfeed her some potato purée or boiled rice that