A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [268]
So in Over the Ruins the whole generation of the wilderness has evaporated, leaving behind happy, light-footed orphans, as free as a flock of birds in the clear blue sky. There is no one left to nag them in a Diaspora accent, to speechify, to enforce musty manners, to spoil life with all kinds of depressions, traumas, imperatives, and ambitions. Not one of them has survived to moralize all day long—this is permitted, that is forbidden, that is disgusting. Just us. Alone in the world.
The death of all the grown-ups concealed a mysterious, powerful spell. And so at the age of fourteen and a half, a couple of years after my mother's death, I killed my father and the whole of Jerusalem, changed my name, and went on my own to Kibbutz Hulda to live there over the ruins.
55
I KILLED HIM particularly by changing my name. For many years my father had lived under the wide shadow of his learned uncle with his "worldwide reputation" (a concept that my father would voice in piously hushed tones). For many years Yehuda Arieh Klausner had dreamed of following in the footsteps of Professor Joseph Gedalyahu Klausner, the author of Jesus of Nazareth, From Jesus to Paul, A History of the Second Temple, A History of Hebrew Literature, and When a Nation Fights for Its Freedom. In his heart of hearts my father even dreamed of succeeding the childless professor when the time came. That is why he learned no fewer foreign languages than his uncle had mastered. That is why he sat huddled over his desk at night while the little cards piled up around him. And when he began to despair of being a famous professor someday, he may have begun to pray in his heart of hearts that the torch would pass to me, and that he would be there to see it.
My father sometimes jokingly compared himself to the insignificant Mendelssohn, the banker Abraham Mendelssohn, whose fate it was to be the son of the famous philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and the father of the great composer Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. ("First I was my father's son, then I became my son's father," Abraham Mendelssohn once said jokingly.)
As though in jest, as though he was making fun of me out of stunted feelings of affection, my father insisted on addressing me, from an early age, as "Your Honor," "Your Highness." It was only many years later, the night of the day he died, that it suddenly occurred to me that behind this fixed, irritating joke there may have lurked his own disappointed ambitions, and the sad necessity to reconcile himself to his own mediocrity, as well as the concealed wish to entrust me with the mission to achieve in his name, when the time came, the goals that had eluded him.
My mother, in her loneliness and depression, told me stories ofwon-ders, horrors, and ghosts that were possibly not much different from those that the widow Ase told the young Peer Gynt on winter nights. My father, in his own way, was Jon Gynt, Peer's father, to my mother's Ase, hoping for "great things."
"The kibbutz," Father remarked sadly, "may be a not insignificant phenomenon, but it requires tough manual workers of average intelligence. You know by now that you are decidedly not average. I do not wish to cast aspersions on the kibbutz as such, kibbutzim have distinct merits in the life of the state, but you will not be able to develop there. Consequently I am afraid I cannot agree to this. In any way. And that's that. End of discussion."
After my mother's death, and his remarriage a year or so later, he and I talked almost only about the necessities of everyday life, politics, new scientific discoveries, or values and moral theories. (By now we were living in the new apartment, at 28 Ben Maimon Avenue, in Rehavia, the area of Jerusalem where he had longed to live for years.) The anxieties of my adolescent