A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [298]
It was a wonder. It exasperated me but fascinated me: like a firefly.
Kibbutz Hulda was surrounded by deep darkness. Every night a black abyss started a couple of yards beyond the yellow circles of light from the lamps along the perimeter fence and continued to the ends of the night, to the distant stars in the sky. Beyond the barbed-wire fence lurked empty fields, deserted orchards, hills without a living soul, plantations abandoned to the night wind, ruins of Arab villages—not like today, when you can see closely packed blocks of lights all around. In the 1950s the night outside Hulda was still totally empty. And in this great emptiness infiltrators, fedayeen, crept through the heart of the night. And in this great emptiness there was the wood on the hill, the olive grove, fields of crops, among which drooling jackals roamed, whose lunatic, blood-curdling howls penetrated our sleep and froze our blood toward dawn.
Even inside the fenced and guarded compound of the kibbutz there was not much light at night. Here and there a weary lamp cast a faint puddle of light, and then thick darkness reigned until the next lamp. Muffled night watchmen did their rounds among the chicken houses and barns, and every half hour or hour the woman on watch duty in the babies' quarters put down her knitting and went on a round from the nursery to the children's houses and back.
We had to make a noise every evening so as not to fall prey to the emptiness and sadness. Every evening we got together and did something noisy, almost wild, until midnight or later, to prevent the darkness from creeping into our rooms and into our bones and snuffing out our souls. We sang, we shouted, we stuffed ourselves, we argued, we swore, we gossiped, we joked, all to drive away the darkness, the silence, and the howling of the jackals. In those days there was no television, no video, no stereo, no Internet or computer games, there weren't even discos and pubs, and there was no disco music; there was only a film at Herzl House or on the main lawn once a week, on Wednesdays.
Every evening we had to get together and try to create some light and fun for ourselves.
Among the older members of the kibbutz, whom we called the oldies even though most of them were barely forty, there were quite a few whose inner light had faded from too many duties, commitments, disappointments, meetings, committees, fruit-picking details, discussions, duty rosters, study days, and party activities, too much culturalism and the friction of daily routines. Quite a few of them were already extinguished. By half past nine or a quarter to ten the faint lights went out one after another in the windows of the little apartments in the veterans' quarters: tomorrow they had to get up at half past four again, to pick fruit, milk the cows, work in the fields or the communal kitchens. On those nights, light was a rare and precious commodity in Hulda.
And Nily was a firefly. More than a firefly: a generator, a whole powerhouse.
She exuded abundant joie de vivre. Her joy was unconfined and unrestrained, it had no rhyme or reason, no grounds or motive, nothing had to happen to make her overflow with jollity. Of course, I sometimes saw her momentarily sad, weeping openly when she thought rightly or wrongly that someone had insulted her, or shamelessly sobbing in a sad film, or crying over a poignant page in a novel. But her sadness was always firmly enclosed within brackets of powerful joy, like hot spring water that no snow or ice could cool because its heat flowed straight from the core of the earth.
It may well have come from