A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [280]
Oizer, if he was not pacing briskly up and down the path in front of his house with his hands behind his back and his jutting chin slicing the air in front of him, would be sitting in his corner, smoking, humming to himself, and reading. Or inspecting some flowering plant through his magnifying glass while leafing through his botanical handbook. Hanka, meanwhile, would be striding vigorously around the room with a military gait, straightening a mat, emptying and rinsing an ashtray, her lips pursed, adjusting the bedspread, or cutting ornamental shapes out of colored paper. Dolly would welcome me with a couple of barks before Oizer startled her with a thunderous rebuke: "Shame on you, Dolly! Look who you're barking at! Look who you're daring to raise your voice at!" Or sometimes: "Really! Dolly! I'm shocked! I'm truly shocked at you! How could you?! How come your voice didn't tremble?! You're only letting yourself down with this shameful performance!"
The dog, at the sound of these torrents of prophetic rage, shrank like a deflated balloon, looked around desperately for somewhere to hide her shame, and ended up crawling under the bed.
Hanka Huldai beamed at me and addressed an invisible audience: "Look! Just look who's here! Cup of coffee? Cake? Or some fruit?" No sooner had these options left her lips than, as if a magic wand had been waved, the coffee, cake, and fruit landed on the table. Meekly but with a warm glow inside I politely drank the coffee, ate some fruit, in moderation, and chatted with Hanka and Oizer for a quarter of an hour about such pressing matters as the death penalty, whether human nature was truly good from birth and only corrupted by society, or whether our instincts were innately wicked and only education could improve them to some degree and in certain conditions. The words "decadence," "refinement," "character," "values," and "improvement" often filled that refined room with its white bookshelves, so different from the shelves in my parents' home in Jerusalem, because here the books were divided up by pictures, figurines, a collection of fossils, collages of pressed wildflowers, well-tended potted plants, and in one corner a gramophone with masses of records.
Sometimes the conversation about refinement, corruption, values, liberation, and oppression was accompanied by the mournful sound of a violin or the quiet bleating of a recorder: curly-headed Shai would be standing there playing, his back to us. Or Ron would be whispering to his violin, skinny Ronny who was always called "the little one" by his mother, and whom it was better not to try to talk to, even how-are-you-what's-new, because he was always entrenched in his smiling shyness and only rarely treated you to a short sentence like "Fine" or a longer sentence like "No problem." Almost like the dog Dolly who hid under the bed until her master's rage had subsided.*
Sometimes I found all three Huldai boys, Oizer, Shai, and Ronny, sitting on the grass or on the steps of the front porch, like a klezmer group from the shtetl, stirring the evening air with long-drawn-out, haunting notes on the recorder that gave me a pleasant sense of longing tinged with a pang of sadness for my worthlessness, my otherness, for the fact that no suntan in the world could make me really one of them, I would always be just a beggar at their table, an outsider, a restless little runt from Jerusalem, if not simply a wretched impostor. (I endowed Azaria Gitlin in my book A Perfect Peace with some of this feeling.)
At sunset I took my book to Herzl House, the cultural center at the edge of the kibbutz. There was a newspaper room here where on any evening you could find a few of the older bachelors of the kibbutz, gnawing their way through the daily papers and the weeklies, engaging each other in fierce political debates that reminded me a little