A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [3]
I pictured these pioneers as strong, serious, self-contained people, capable of sitting around in a circle and singing songs of heartrending longing, or songs of mockery, or outrageous songs of lust; or of dancing so wildly that they seemed to transcend the physical. They were capable of loneliness and introspection, of living outdoors, sleeping in tents, doing hard labor, singing, "We are always at the ready," "Your boys brought you peace with a plowshare, today they bring peace with a gun," "Wherever we're sent to, we go-o-o"; they could ride wild horses or wide-tracked tractors; they spoke Arabic, knew every cave and wadi, had a way with pistols and hand grenades, yet read poetry and philosophy; they were large men with inquiring minds and hidden feelings, who could converse in a near whisper by candlelight in their tents in the small hours of the morning about the meaning of our lives and the grim choices between love and duty, between patriotism and universal justice.
Sometimes my friends and I went to the Tnuva delivery yard to watch them arriving from over the hills and far away on a truck laden with agricultural produce, "clad in dust, burdened with arms, and with such heavy boots," and I used to go up to them to inhale the smell of hay, the intoxicating odors of faraway places: it's where they come from, I thought, that great things are happening. That's where the land is being built and the world is being reformed, where a new society is being forged. They are stamping their mark on the landscape and on history, they are plowing fields and planting vineyards, they are writing a new song, they pick up their guns, mount their horses, and shoot back at the Arab marauders: they take our miserable human clay and mold it into a fighting nation.
I secretly dreamed that one day they would take me with them. And make me into a fighting nation too. That my life too would become a new song, a life as pure and straightforward and simple as a glass of water on a hot day.
Over the hills and far away, the city of Tel Aviv was also an exciting place, from which came the newspapers, rumors of theater, opera, ballet, and cabaret, as well as modern art, party politics, echoes of stormy debates, and indistinct snatches of gossip. There were great sportsmen in Tel Aviv. And there was the sea, full of bronzed Jews who could swim. Who in Jerusalem could swim? Who had ever heard of swimming Jews? These were different genes. A mutation. "Like the wondrous birth of a butterfly out of a worm."
There was a special magic in the very name of Tel Aviv. As soon as I heard the word "Telaviv," I conjured up in my mind's eye a picture of a tough guy in a dark blue T-shirt, bronzed and broad-shouldered, a poet-worker-revolutionary, a man made without fear, the type they called a Hevreman, with a cap worn at a careless yet provocative angle on his curly hair, smoking Matusians, someone who was at home in the world: all day long he worked hard on the land, or with sand and mortar, in the evening he played the violin, at night he danced with girls or sang them soulful songs amid the sand dunes by the light of the full moon, and in the early hours he took a handgun or a sten out of its hiding place and stole away into the darkness to guard the houses and fields.
How far away Tel Aviv was! In the whole of my childhood I visited it five or six times at most: we used to go occasionally to spend festivals with the aunts, my mother's sisters. It's not just that the light in Tel Aviv was different from the light in Jerusalem, more than it is today, even the laws of gravity were different. People didn't walk in Tel Aviv: they leaped and floated, like Neil Armstrong on the moon.
In Jerusalem people always walked rather like mourners at a funeral, or latecomers at a concert. First they put down the tip of their shoe and tested the ground. Then, once they had lowered their foot, they were in no hurry to move it: we had waited two thousand years to gain a foothold in Jerusalem