A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [27]
Two doors opened off the entrance hall: one, a glass door whose panes were decorated with flowers and festoons, led to the living room, which also served as a dining room; the other, a heavy, somber door, led us into the professor's study, sometimes known as the "library."
Uncle Joseph's study seemed to me the antechamber to some palace of wisdom. There are more than twenty-five thousand volumes, Father once whispered to me, in your uncle's private library, among them priceless old tomes, manuscripts of our greatest writers and poets, first editions inscribed to him personally, volumes that were smuggled out of Soviet Odessa by all sorts of devious subterfuges, valuable collectors' items, sacred and secular works, virtually the whole of Jewish literature and a good deal of world literature as well, books that Uncle bought in Odessa or acquired in Heidelberg, books that he discovered in Lausanne or found in Berlin or Warsaw, books he ordered from America and books the like of which exist nowhere but in the Vatican Library, in Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, classical and modern Greek, Sanskrit, Latin, medieval Arabic, Russian, English, German, Spanish, Polish, French, Italian, and languages and dialects I had never even heard of, like Ugaritic and Slovene, Maltese and Old Church Slavonic.
There was something severe and ascetic about the library, about the straight black lines of the dozens of bookshelves extending from the floor to the high ceiling and even over the doorways and windows, a sort of silent, stern grandeur that brooked no levity or frivolity and compelled all of us, even Uncle Joseph himself, always to speak in a whisper here.
The smell of my uncle's enormous library would accompany me all the days of my life: the dusty, enticing odor of seven hidden wisdoms, the smell of a silent, secluded life devoted to scholarship, the life of a secretive hermit, the severe silence of ghosts billowing up from the deepest wells of knowledge, the whisper of dead sages, outpourings of secret thoughts of long-buried authors, the cold caress of the desires of preceding generations.
From the study too, through three tall, narrow windows, could be seen the gloomy, rather overgrown garden, immediately beyond whose wall began the desolation of the Judaean desert and the rocky slopes that cascaded down toward the Dead Sea. The garden was hemmed in by tall cypresses and whispering pines, among which stood occasional oleanders, weeds, unpruned rose bushes, dusty thujas, darkened gravel paths, a wooden garden table that had rotted under the rain of many winters, and an old, stooped, and half-withered pride of India. Even on the hottest days of summer there was something wintry, Russian, and downcast about this garden, whose cats were fed by Uncle Joseph and Aunt Zip-pora, childless as they were, on kitchen scraps, but where I never saw either of them stroll or sit in the evening breeze on one of the two discolored benches.
I was the only one who wandered in this garden, always alone, on those Sabbath afternoons, escaping from the tedious conversation of the scholars in the sitting room, hunting leopards in its undergrowth, digging under its stones for a hoard of ancient parchments, dreaming of conquering the arid hills beyond its wall with a wild charge of my troops.
All four high, wide walls of the library were covered with crowded but well-ordered books, rank upon rank of precious blue-, green-, and black-bound volumes embossed in gold or silver. In places they were so cramped that two rows of books were forced to stand one behind the other on a single shelf. There were sections with florid Gothic lettering that made me think of spires and turrets, and zones of Jewish holy books, Talmuds and prayer books and law codes and Midrashic