A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [285]
And so I chose myself a corner table in the deserted study room, and here every evening I opened my brown school exercise book on which was printed "utility" and also "forty pages." Next to it I laid out a ballpoint pen called Globus, a pencil with a rubber tip, printed with the name of the trade-union retail outlets, and a beige plastic cup of tap water.
And this was the center of the universe.
*Years later I managed to repay a few pence of my debt. In America the wonderful Sherwood Anderson, friend and contemporary of William Faulkner, was almost forgotten; only in a handful of English departments were his stories still twitching with life. Then one day I received a letter from his publishers (Norton), who were reissuing a collection of his stories, titled Death in the Woods and Other Stories, and had heard that I was an admirer: would I kindly write a couple of lines of praise for the back cover of the book? I felt like a humble fiddle player in a restaurant who is suddenly asked if he would let his name be used to promote the music of Bach.
In the newspaper room, on the other side of the thin wall, Moishe Kalker, Alyoshka, and Alec are having a furious argument about Moshe Dayan's speech, which has "thrown a stone through the window of the fifth floor" in the Trade Union Building, where the Central Committee meets. Three men, none of them good-looking or young anymore, arguing among themselves in the singsong tones of yeshiva students. Alec, a vigorous, energetic man, always tries to play the part of the good sport who likes plain talking. His wife, Zushka, is not well, but he mostly spends his evenings with the single men. He is vainly attempting to interpose a sentence between Alyoshka and Moishe Kalker: "Just a moment, you've both got it wrong," or: "Give me just a minute to tell you something that will resolve your dispute."
Alyoshka and Moishe Kalker are both bachelors, and they have opposing views about almost everything, despite which they are hardly ever apart in the evening: they always eat together in the dining hall, take a stroll together afterward, and go to the newspaper room together. Alyoshka, who is as shy as a little boy, is a modest, good-natured man with a smiling round face, but his puzzled eyes are always downcast as though his life itself is something shameful. But when he is arguing, he sometimes heats up and starts flashing sparks, and his eyes almost start out of their sockets. Then his gentle childlike face looks not so much angry as panicky and offended, as though it is his own views that humiliate him.
Moishe Kalker, the electrician, on the other hand, is a thin, wry, sardonic man, and when he is arguing, he screws up his face and gives you an almost salacious wink, he smiles at you with a mischievous, self-satisfied air and winks again with Mephistophelian glee, as if he finally discovered what he has been searching for all these years, the whereabouts of some quagmire that you have managed to hide from the world but that you cannot conceal from those eyes of his, which pierce your disguises and take pleasure in the very swamp they have uncovered inside you: everyone thinks of you as such a reasonable, respectable man, such a positive figure, but both of us know the unsavory truth, even though most of the time you manage to hide it under seventy-seven veils. I can see through everything, chum, including your vile nature, everything is exposed to my gaze and I take nothing but pleasure in it.
Alec gently tries to quell the argument between Alyoshka and Moishe Kalker, but the two opponents gang up on him and both shout at him, because in their view he has not even