A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [282]
Arch of Triumph, a pacifist novel by Erich Maria Remarque set in the 1930s, opens with a description of a lonely woman leaning on the parapet of a bridge at nighttime, about to end her life by jumping into the river. At the last minute a strange man stops and speaks to her, seizes her arm, saves her life, and spends a torrid night with her. That was my fantasy: that was how I, too, would encounter love. She would be standing alone on a deserted bridge one stormy night, and I would turn up at the last moment to save her from herself, and slay the dragon—not a dragon of flesh and blood like the ones I used to slay by the dozen when I was little, but the inner dragon of despair.
I would slay this inner dragon for the woman I loved and receive my reward from her, and so the fantasy developed in directions that were too sweet and awesome for me to contemplate. It did not occur to me at the time that the desperate woman on the bridge was, again and again, my dead mother. With her despair. Her own dragon.
Or take Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, a book I read four or five times in those years, populated by femmes fatales and tough-looking men who concealed a poetic soul behind their rough exterior. I dreamed that one day I would be like them: a gruff, virile man with the body of a bullfighter and a face full of contempt and sorrow, perhaps a little like the photograph of Hemingway himself. And if I did not manage to be like them someday, at least I would learn to write about such men: courageous men who knew how to scoff and to loathe, or how to punch some bully on the chin if the need arose, who knew precisely the right thing to order in a bar, and what to say to a woman, a rival or a comrade in arms, how to use a gun and how to make love superbly. And also about noble women, vulnerable yet unattainable temptresses, enigmatic, mysterious women, who lavished their favors generously but only on selected men who knew how to mock and despise, drink whisky, punch hard, etc.
The films that were shown every Wednesday in the hall at Herzl House or on a white cloth set up on the lawn outside the dining hall gave firm evidence that the big wide world was peopled mainly by men and women out of the pages of Hemingway or Knut Hamsun. The same picture emerged from the stories told by the red-bereted soldiers of the kibbutz who came home on weekend leave straight from reprisal raids by the famed Unit 101, strong, silent men resplendent in their paratroopers' uniforms, armed with Uzis, "clad in workaday garb, shod in heavy boots, and wet with the dew of Hebrew youth."
I almost gave up in despair: surely to write like Remarque or Hemingway you had to get out of here into the real world, go to places where men were as virile as a fist and women as tender as the night, where bridges spanned wide rivers and the evenings sparkled with the lights of bars where real life really happened. No one who lacked experience of that world could get even half a temporary permit to write stories or novels. The place of a real writer was not here but out there, in the big wide world. Until I got out and lived in a real place, there was not a hope that I could find anything to write about.
A real place: Paris, Madrid, New York, Monte Carlo, the African deserts, or the Scandinavian forests. In a pinch one could write about a country town in Russia or even a Jewish shtetl in Galicia. But here, in the kibbutz, what was there? A hen house, a barn, children's houses, committees, duty rosters, the small supplies store. Tired men and women who got up early every morning for work, argued, showered, drank tea, read a little in bed, and fell asleep exhausted before ten o'clock. Even in Kerem Avraham where I came from there did not seem to be anything worth writing about. What was there there, apart from dull people leading gray, tawdry lives? Rather like here in Hulda. I had even missed the War of Independence: I was born too late to get more than a few miserable crumbs, filling sandbags, collecting empty bottles, running with