A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [299]
As a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old boarder at the kibbutz, I viewed the joy that radiated from Nily the way one looks at a full moon: distant, unattainable, but fascinating and delightful.
Of course, only from a distance. I was unworthy. Such radiant lights as these the likes of me were permitted only to look at. For the last two years of school and during my military service I had a girlfriend outside Hulda, while Nily had a shining string of princely suitors, and around this string she had a second circle of dizzy, bewitched followers, and then a third circle of meek, humble votaries, and a fourth circle of distant admirers, and the fifth and sixth circles included me, a little weed that was occasionally touched unawares by a single extravagant ray, which could not imagine what its passing touch had done.
When I was caught scribbling poems in the shabby back room of the culture building in Hulda, it was finally clear to everyone that no good would ever come of me. Nevertheless, to make the best of a bad job they decided to give me the task of composing appropriate verses for various occasions: festivities, family celebrations, weddings, and festivals, and when necessary, also funeral eulogies and lines for memorial booklets. As for my soulful poems, I managed to hide them (deep in the straw of an old mattress), but sometimes I could not restrain myself and I showed them to Nily.
Why Nily, of all people?
Perhaps I had a need to check which of my poems of darkness would crumble to nothing the moment they were exposed to the rays of the sun, and which if any would survive. To this day Nily is my first reader. When she finds something in a draft that is wrong she says: That just doesn't work. Cross it out. Sit down and write it again. Or: We've heard that before. You've already written it somewhere. No need to repeat yourself. But when she likes something, she looks up from the page and gives me a certain look, and the room gets bigger. And when something sad comes off, she says, that passage makes me cry. Or if it's something funny, she bursts into peals of laughter. After her, my daughters and my son read it: they all have sharp eyes and a good ear. After a while, a few friends will read what I have written, and then the readers, and after them come the literary experts, the scholars, the critics, and the firing squads. But by then I'm not there anymore.
In those years Nily went out with the lords of creation, and I did not set my sights high: if the princess, surrounded by a swarm of suitors, walked past a serf's cottage, at most he might look up at her for a moment, be dazzled, and bless his fortune. Hence the sensation in Hulda, and even in the surrounding villages, when it emerged one day that the sunlight had suddenly lit up the dark side of the moon. That day, in Hulda, the cows laid eggs, wine came out of the ewes' udders, and the eucalyptus trees flowed with milk and honey. Polar bears appeared from behind the sheep shed, the emperor of Japan was seen wandering beside the laundry reciting from the works of A. D. Gordon, the mountains dripped wine, and all the hills melted. The sun stood still for seventy-seven hours above the cypress trees and refused to set. And I went to the empty boys' showers, locked myself in, stood in front of the mirror and asked aloud, Mirror mirror on the wall, tell me, how did this happen? What have I done to deserve it?
61
MY MOTHER was thirty-eight when she died. At the age I am today, I could be her father.
After her funeral, my father and I stayed at home for several days. He did not go to work, and I did not go to school. The door ofthe apartment was