A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [295]
"Are you all right, Mother?"
That was because my mother, ignoring the rules of etiquette, had turned her chair slightly and was staring fixedly at the two women. At that moment it struck me that my mother's face had turned very pale again, the way it was all the time she was ill. After a little while she said she was very sorry, she was feeling a little tired and wanted to go home and lie down a little. Father nodded, got up, asked the waitress where the nearest phone booth was, and went off to call a taxi. As we left the restaurant, Mother had to lean on Father's arm and shoulder; I held the door open for them, warned them about the step, and opened the door of the taxi for them. When we had got Mother into the backseat, Father went back into the restaurant to settle the bill. She sat up very straight in the taxi, and her brown eyes were wide open. Too wide.
That evening the new doctor was sent for, and when he had left, Father sent for the old one as well. There was no disagreement between them: both doctors prescribed complete rest. Consequently Father put Mother to bed in my bed, which had become her bed, took her a glass of warm milk and honey, and begged her to take a few sips with her new sleeping pills. He asked how many lights she wanted him to leave on. A quarter of an hour later I was sent to peep through the crack in the door, and I saw that she was asleep. She slept till next morning, when she woke up early again and got up to help Father and me with the various morning chores. She made us fried eggs again while I set the table and Father chopped various vegetables very fine for a salad. When it was time for us to go, Father to Terra Sancta Building and me to Tachkemoni School, Mother suddenly decided to go out too, and to walk me to school, because her good friend Lilenka, Lilia Bar-Samkha, lived near Tachkemoni.
Later we discovered that Lilenka had not been at home, so she had gone to see another friend, Fania Weissmann, who had also been a fellow pupil at the Tarbuth gymnasium in Rovno. From Fania Weiss-mann's she had walked just before midday to the Egged Central Bus Station halfway down Jaffa Road and boarded a bus bound for Tel Aviv, to see her sisters, or perhaps she intended to change buses in Tel Aviv and go on to Haifa and Kiriat Motskin, to her parents' hut. But when my mother got to the Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv, she apparently changed her mind: she had a black coffee in a café and returned to Jerusalem late in the afternoon.
When she got home, she complained of feeling very tired. She took another two or three of the new sleeping pills. Or perhaps she tried going back to the old ones. But that night she could not get to sleep, the migraine came back, and she sat up fully dressed by the window. At two o'clock in the morning my mother decided to do some ironing. She put the light on in my room, which had become her room, set up the ironing board, filled a bottle with water to sprinkle on the clothes, and ironed for several hours, until dawn broke. When she ran out of clothes, she took the bed linen out of the cupboard and ironed it all over again. When she had finished that, she even ironed the bedspread from my bed, but she was so tired or weak that she burned it: the smell of burning woke Father, who woke me too, and the two of us were astonished to see that my mother had ironed every sock, handkerchief, napkin, and tablecloth in the place. We rushed to put out the burning bedspread in the bathroom, and then we sat Mother down in her chair and got down on our knees to remove her shoes: my father took off one, and I took off the other. Then Father asked me to leave the