A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [263]
We were bound and stuck together that autumn like three prisoners sharing the same cell. Yet each of us was on his or her own. For what could my parents know about the sordidness of my nights? The filthi-ness of my cruel body? How could my parents know that I warned myself over and over again, with my teeth clenched in shame, If you don't give that up, if you don't stop it tonight, then I swear by my life that I'll swallow all Mother's pills and that'll be the end of it.
My parents suspected nothing. A thousand light-years divided us. Not light-years: dark years.
But what did I know about what they were going through?
And how about the two of them? What did my father know about her ordeal? What did my mother understand about his suffering?
A thousand dark years separated everyone. Even three prisoners in a cell. Even that day in Tel Arza, that Saturday morning when Mother sat with her back against the tree and my father and I laid our heads on her knees, one head on each knee, and Mother stroked us both, even at that moment, which is the most precious moment of my childhood, a thousand lightless years separated us.
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IN THE COLLECTED poems of Jabotinsky, after "With blood and sweat we'll raise a race," "Two banks has the Jordan," and "From the day I was called to the wonder / of Beitar, Zion, and Sinai," came his melodic translations from world poetry, including Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" and "Annabel Lee," Edmond Rostand's "The Princess Faraway," and Paul Verlaine's heartrending "Autumn Song."
Very soon I knew all these poems by heart and walked around all day drunk on the romantic anguish and macabre torments that enveloped them.
Side by side with the militaristic patriotic verses that I composed in the splendid black notebook that was a present from Uncle Joseph, I started to write poems of Weltschmerz as well, full of storm, forest, and sea. And some love poems too, before I even knew what was what. Or didn't know but vainly tried to find some accommodation between the westerns in which whoever slew the most Indians won the pretty girl as the prize and the tearful vows of Annabel Lee and her partner and their love beyond the grave. It was not easy to reconcile them. And much harder still to make some sort of peace between all of this and the school nurse's labyrinth of sheaths-eggs-and-Fallopian-tubes. And the nocturnal filth that tormented me so mercilessly that I wanted to die. Or to go back to being as I had been before I fell into the clutches of those jeering night hags: night after night I resolved to kill them off once and for all, and night after night those Scheherazades revealed to my startled gaze such uninhibited plots that all day long I waited impatiently to be in bed at night. Sometimes I could not wait and locked myself in the smelly toilets in the playground at Tachkemoni or our bathroom at home and emerged a few minutes later with my tail between my legs and as wretched as a rag.
The love of girls and everything associated with it seemed to me to be a catastrophe, a terrible trap from which there was no way out: you start out floating dreamily into an enchanted crystal palace, and you wake up immersed up to here in a cesspool.
I ran away and sought refuge in the fortress of sanity of books of mystery, adventure, and battle: Jules Verne, Karl May, James Fenimore Cooper, Mayne Reid, Sherlock Holmes, The Three Musketeers, Captain Hatteras, Montezuma's Daughter, The Prisoner of Zenda, With Fire and Sword, De Amicis's The Heart of a Boy, Treasure Island, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, Through the Desert and Jungle, The Gold ofCaxa-malca, The Mysterious Island, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Last of the Mohicans, The Children of Captain Grant, the darkest recesses of Africa, grenadiers and Indians, wrongdoers,