A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [260]
Then he would come to my room to help me change my sheets or to put mothballs in my closet for the winter, while singing some sentimental ballad to himself, criminally out of tune, or try to draw me into an argument about the future of the Balkans.
After nightfall we sometimes had a visit from Auntie Lilenka—Aunt Lilia, Aunt Leah Kalish-Bar-Samkha—Mother's best friend, who came from the same town, Rovno, and had been in the same class at the Tar-buth gymnasium, the one who had written two books about child psychology.
Aunt Lilia brought some fruit and a plum cake. Father served tea and biscuits and her plum cake, while I washed and put out the fruit, with plates and knives, and then we left the two of them alone together. Aunt Lilia sat shut up with my mother for an hour or two, and when she emerged, her eyes were red. Whereas my mother was as calm and serene as always. Father overcame the dislike he felt toward this lady sufficiently to invite her politely to stay for supper. Why don't you give us a chance to spoil you a little? And it would make Fania happy too. But she always apologized embarrassedly, as though she had been asked to take part in an indecent act. She didn't want to be in the way, God forbid, and anyway she was expected at home, and they'd start worrying about her soon.
Sometimes Grandpa and Grandma came, dressed up as though for a ball. Grandma, in high heels and a black velvet dress with her white necklace, made a tour of the kitchen before she sat down next to Mother. Then she examined the packets of pills and the little bottles, pulled Father toward her and looked inside his collar, and screwed up her face in disgust as she inspected the state of my fingernails. She saw fit to remark sadly that medical science was now aware that most if not all illnesses had their origin in the mind rather than the body. Meanwhile, Grandpa Alexander, always charming and restless like a playful puppy, kissed my mother's hand and praised her beauty, "even in sickness, and all the more so when you are restored to full health, tomorrow, if not this very evening. Nu, what! You're already blossoming! Perfectly enchanting! Krasavitsa!"
My father still insisted adamantly that my light had to be out by nine o'clock precisely every evening. He tiptoed into the other room, the book room, the living-room-study-and-bedroom, wrapped a shawl around my mother's shoulders because autumn was on the way and the nights were getting cooler, sat down beside her, took her cold hand into his hand, which was always warm, and tried to rouse her into a simple conversation. Like the prince in the story, he tried to wake Sleeping Beauty. But even if he kissed her, he was unable to wake her: the apple's spell could not be broken. Perhaps he did not kiss her right, or else she was not waiting in her dreams for a bespectacled chatterbox who was an expert in every branch of knowledge, never stopped cracking jokes, and worried about the future of the Balkans, but some other kind of prince entirely.
He sat next to her in the dark, because she could not stand the light at that time. Every morning before he went off to work or before I went to school, we had to close all the shutters and draw the curtains as though my mother had become the terrifying mad woman in the attic in Jane Eyre. He sat in the dark, silently holding my mother's hand, without moving. Or he may have held both her hands in his.
But he was unable to sit without moving for more than three or four minutes, either beside my sick mother or anywhere else apart from at his