A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [261]
When he could not take any more of the darkness and the silence, he took his books and his innumerable cards out to the kitchen, cleared himself a space on the oilcloth, sat down on a stool, and worked for a bit. But he was soon dispirited by this solitary confinement in the soot-blackened kitchen. So once or twice a week he would get up, sigh, change into his suit, comb his hair, brush his teeth well, splash on some of his aftershave, and peep quietly into my room to see if I was fast asleep (for his sake I always pretended I was). Then he went in to Mother, said whatever he said, promised her whatever he promised, and she certainly did not stop him, on the contrary, she used to stroke his head and say, Go, Arieh, go and play, they're not all as dozy as I am.
When he went out, with a Humphrey Bogart hat on his head and a just-in-case umbrella swinging on his arm, my father walked past my window singing to himself, terribly out of tune, and with a distinct Ashkenazi accent: "...my head found rest upon your breast, and my distant prayers found a nest," or "like a pair of doves your lovely eyes, and your voice like the's-ou-ou-nd of a be-e-ll!"
I did not know where he was going and yet I did know without knowing and yet I did not want to know and yet I forgave him. I hoped he enjoyed himself there a bit. I had absolutely no desire to picture to myself what went on there, in that "there" of his, but what I didn't want to picture to myself came to me in the night and threw me in a whirl and would not let me sleep. I was a twelve-year-old boy. My body had begun to be a pitiless foe.
Sometimes I had the feeling that when the house emptied every morning, Mother actually did get into bed and slept during the daylight hours. And sometimes she got up and walked around the house, always barefoot, despite my father's entreaties and the slippers he brought to her: to and fro, to and fro my mother sailed along the corridor that had been our shelter during the war and was now piled with books and with its wall maps served as the operations room from which my father and I supervised the security of Israel and the defense of the Free World.
Even during the day the corridor was pitch black, unless you switched the light on. In the black my mother floated to and fro, unvaryingly, for half an hour or an hour, as prisoners walk around their prison yard. And sometimes she began to sing, as though to compete with my father, but with far fewer wrong notes. Her singing voice was dark and warm, like the taste of mulled wine on a winter evening. She did not sing in Hebrew, but in sweet-sounding Russian, in dreamy Polish, or occasionally in Yiddish, with a sound like choked tears.
On the nights when he went out, my father always kept his promise and came back before midnight. I could hear him undressing down to his underwear, then making himself a glass of tea, sitting on a stool in the kitchen and humming quietly to himself as he dunked a biscuit in his sweet tea. Then he would take a cold shower (to get hot water, you had to heat the boiler three-quarters of an hour beforehand with wood that you had to sprinkle with paraffin first). Then he would come into my room on tiptoe to make sure I was asleep and to straighten my bedclothes. Only then did he tiptoe to their room. Sometimes I could hear the two of them talking in low voices until I fell asleep at last. And sometimes there was total silence as though there was no living being there.
Father began to fear that he himself was responsible for my mother's insomnia, because he was in the big bed. Sometimes he insisted on putting her to bed in the sofa bed every night (when I was little, we called it the "barking sofa" because when you opened it up, it looked like the jaws of an angry dog), and he himself slept on her chair. He said it would really be better for everyone if he slept on the chair and she in the bed, because he slept like a log wherever he was put, "even on a hot griddle."