A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [275]
But toward evening a sort of melancholy descended upon him, as though his witticisms had run out and his fountain of anecdotes had dried up. He asked if we could sit down together on a shady bench behind the culture hall and wait for the sunset. When the sun was setting, he stopped talking and we sat together side by side in silence. My brown forearm, which already boasted a blond fuzz, rested on the back of the bench not far from his pale arm with its black hair. This time my father did not address me as Your Highness or Your Honor, he did not even behave as though he were responsible for banishing any silence. He looked so awkward and sad that I almost touched his shoulder. But I didn't. I thought he was trying to say something to me, something important and even urgent, and that he was unable to get started. For the first time in my life, my father seemed afraid of me. I would have liked to help him, even to start the conversation instead of him, but I was as inhibited as he was. Eventually he suddenly said:
"Well then."
And I repeated after him:
"Well."
And we fell silent again. I suddenly remembered the vegetable garden we had tried to create together in the concrete-hard ground of our backyard in Kerem Avraham. I remembered the letter opener and the household hammer that were his agricultural equipment. The seedlings he brought from the Pioneering Women's House or the Working Women's Farm and planted in the night behind my back to make up for the failure of the seeds we had sown.
My father brought me a present of two of his own books. On the title page of The Novella in Hebrew Literature he had written this dedication: "To my chicken-breeding son, from your (ex-)librarian father," while the inscription he wrote in his History of Literature may have contained a veiled reproach expressing his own disappointment: "To my son Amos, in the hope that he will carve out a place for himself in our literature."
We slept in an empty dormitory with two children's beds and a packing chest fitted with a curtain for hanging clothes. We undressed in the dark, and in the dark we talked for ten minutes or so. About the NATO alliance and the Cold War. Then we said good-night and turned our backs to each other. Perhaps, like me, my father found it hard to get to sleep. His breath sounded labored, as if he did not have enough air, or as if he were breathing through his mouth with his teeth clenched. We had not slept in the same room for several years, not since my mother's death, since her last days when she moved into my room and I ran away and slept next to him in the double bed, and the first nights after her death, when he had to come and sleep on a mattress on the floor in my room because I was so terrified.
This time, too, there was a moment of terror. I woke up in a panic in the early hours, imagining in the moonlight that my father's bed was empty and that he had silently pulled up a chair and was sitting by the window, quiet, motionless, his eyes open, staring all night at the moon or counting the passing clouds. My blood froze.
But in fact he was sleeping deeply and peacefully in the bed I had made up for him, and what had looked like someone sitting quietly on the chair with open eyes staring at the moon was not my father or a ghost but his clothes, the khaki trousers and plain blue shirt that he had chosen so thoughtfully so as not to seem superior to the kibbutz members. So as not to hurt their feelings, heaven forbid.
In the early 1960s my father returned to Jerusalem from London with his wife and children. They settled in a suburb called Beit Hakerem. Once more he went to work every day in the National Library, not in the newspaper department but in the bibliographical section, which was started at that time. Now that he finally had a doctorate from London University