A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [262]
One night, toward midnight, the door of my room opened silently and Father's silhouette bent over me in the dark. As usual, I hastily feigned sleep. Instead of straightening my bedclothes, he lifted them and got into bed with me. Like that time. Like on November 29, after the vote for the creation of the state, when my hand saw his tears. I was terrified and hastily drew my knees up and pressed them hard against my stomach, hoping and praying that he would not notice what it was that had stopped me getting to sleep: if he did, I would die on the spot. My blood froze when Father got into bed with me, and I was in such a panic not to be caught out being filthy, that it was quite a while before I realized, as though in a nightmare, that the silhouette that had slipped into bed with me was not my father's.
She pulled the covers up over both our heads and cuddled me, and whispered, Don't wake up.
And in the morning she was not there. The next night she came to my room again, but this time she brought one of the two mattresses from the "barking sofa" with her and slept on the floor at the foot of my bed. The following night I firmly insisted, doing my best to imitate my father's authoritative manner, that she should sleep in my bed and I would sleep on the mattress at her feet.
It was as if we were all playing an improved version of musical chairs called musical beds. First round: normal—both my parents in their double bed and me in my bed. Then in the next round Mother slept in her chair, Father on the sofa, and I was still in my bed. In the third round Mother and I were in my single bed while Father was alone in the double bed. In the fourth round my father was unchanged and I was alone again in my bed and my mother on the mattress at my feet. Then she and I swapped over, she went up, I went down, and Father stayed where he was.
But we weren't finished yet.
Because after a few nights when I slept on the mattress in my room at my mother's feet, she frightened me in the middle of the night with broken sounds that were almost but not quite like coughing. Then she calmed down, and I went back to sleep. But a night or two later I was woken again by her coughs that weren't coughs. I got up, with my eyes stuck together, went down the corridor in a daze with my blanket wrapped around me, and climbed in with my father into the double bed. I fell asleep again at once. And I slept there the following nights, too.
Almost to her last days my mother slept in my room, in my bed, and I slept with my father. After a couple of days all her tablets and bottles of medicine and tranquilizers and migraine pills moved to her new place.
We did not exchange a word about the new sleeping arrangements. None of us mentioned them. It was as if it had happened all by itself.
And it really had. Without any family decision. Without a word.
But the week before the last one Mother did not spend the night in my bed but returned to her chair by the window, except that the chair was moved from our room—mine and Father's—to my room, which had become her room.
Even when it was all over, I did not want to go back to that room. I wanted to stay with my father. And when I did eventually return to my old room, I couldn't get to sleep: it was as if she were still there. Smiling at me without a smile. Coughing without a cough. Or as if she had bequeathed me the insomnia that had pursued her to the end and was now pursuing me. The night I went back to my own bed was so terrifying that the following nights my father had to drag one of the mattresses from the "barking sofa" to my room and sleep there with me. For a week or maybe two he slept at the foot of my bed. After that he went back to his place, and she, or her insomnia, followed him.
It was as though a great whirlpool had swept us up, thrown us together and apart, hurled us around and around and jumbled us up, until each of us was