A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [278]
One day, on October 11,1970, some four months after his sixtieth birthday, my father got up early as usual, long before the rest of the household, shaved, splashed on some toilet water, wetted his hair before brushing it back, ate a roll and butter, drank two glasses of tea, read the newspaper, sighed a few times, glanced at the diary that always lay open on his desk so that he could cross things out when he had done them, put on a jacket and tie, made himself a little shopping list, and drove down the street to Denmark Square, where Beit Hakerem Road meets Herzl Avenue, to buy some items of stationery from the little basement shop where he used to purchase whatever he needed for his desk. He parked and locked the car, went down the half-dozen steps, got in line and even gave up his place politely to an elderly woman, bought everything on his list, joked with the woman who owned the shop about the fact that the word "clip" can be both a noun and a verb, said something to her about the negligence of the city council, paid, counted his change, picked up his bag of shopping, thanked the shopkeeper with a smile, asked her not to forget to pass on his greetings to her dear husband, wished her a good and successful day, greeted two strangers who were in line behind him, turned and walked to the door, and dropped dead of a heart attack. He left his body to science, and I inherited his desk. These pages are being written on it, not tearfully, because my father was fundamentally opposed to tears, particularly in men.
This is what I found written in his desk diary: "Stationery: l. Writing pad. 2. Spiral-bound notebook. 3. Envelopes. 4. Paper clips. 5. Ask about cardboard folders." All these items, including the folders, were in the shopping bag that his fingers were still clutching. So when I reached my father's home in Jerusalem, after an hour or an hour and a half, I picked up my father's pencil and crossed off the list, just as Father always used to cross things off as soon as he had done them.
57
WHEN I LEFT home and went to live in the kibbutz, at the age of fifteen, I wrote down some resolutions that I set for myself as a test that I absolutely must not fail. If I was really to start a brand-new life, I must start by getting a tan within a fortnight so that I looked just like one of them; I must stop daydreaming once and for all; I must change my last name; I must take two or three cold showers every day; I must absolutely force myself to give up doing that filthy stuff at nights; I must not write any more poems; I must stop chattering; and I must not tell stories: I must appear in my new home as a silent man.
Then I tore up the list. For the first four or five days I actually managed not to do the filthy stuff and not to chatter. When I was asked a question like, Will one blanket be enough? or Do you mind sitting in the corner of the classroom near the window?, I replied with a movement of the head, without any sound. To the questions Was I interested in politics? and Would I consider joining a newspaper-reading circle? I answered Ahem. If I was asked about my previous life in Jerusalem, I answered in fewer than ten words, which I held back for a few seconds on purpose, as though I was deep in thought: let them know that I'm a reserved, secretive kind of man, with an inner life. I even succeeded in the matter of the cold showers, although it took an act of heroism to force myself to strip naked in the boys' showers. It even looked as though for the first weeks I could manage to stop writing.
But not reading.
Every day after work and school the kibbutz