A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [303]
My father, too, sometimes asked me for a hint or two about the aunts, their families or my grandparents in Kiriat Motskin, but two minutes after I began to reply, his face turned yellow with pain and he gestured to me to stop and not go into further details. When my Grandma Shlomit died, in 1958, my aunts and my grandparents on my mother's side asked me to convey their condolences to Grandpa Alexander, whom the Mussmans considered the only member of the Klausner family who had a really warm heart. And fifteen years later, when I told Grandpa Alexander about the death of my other grandfather, he wrung his hands and then covered his ears with his hands and raised his voice, more in anger than in sorrow, and said: "Bozhe moi! He was such a young man still! A simple man, but an interesting one! Deep! You now, tell them all that my heart weeps for him! Make sure you tell them with these very words: Alexander Klausner's heart weeps at the untimely death of dear Mr. Hertz Mussman!"
Even after the mourning period was over, when the apartment was finally empty and my father and I locked the door and were alone together, we hardly talked. Except about the most essential things. The kitchen door is jammed. There was no mail today. The bathroom's free but there's no toilet paper. We also avoided meeting each other's eyes, as though we were ashamed of something we had both done that it would have been better if we hadn't, and at the very least it would have been better if we could have been ashamed quietly without a partner who knew everything about you that you knew about him.
We never talked about my mother. Not a single word. Or about ourselves. Or about anything that had the least thing to do with emotions. We talked about the Cold War. We talked about the assassination of King Abdullah and the threat of a second round of fighting. My father explained to me the difference between a symbol, a parable, and an allegory, and the difference between a saga and a legend. He also gave me a clear and accurate account of the difference between liberalism and social democracy. And every morning, even on these gray, damp, misty January mornings, at first light there always came from the soggy bare branches outside the pitiful chirping of the frozen bird, Elise: "Ti-da-di-da-di—," but in the depth of this winter it did not repeat the song several times as it had done in the summer, but said what it had to say once, and fell silent. I have hardly ever spoken about my mother till now, till I came to write these pages. Not with my father, or my wife, or my children or with anybody else. After my father died, I hardly spoke about him either. As if I were a foundling.
During the first weeks after the disaster the house went to the dogs. Neither my father nor I cleared away the leftover food from the oilcloth-covered kitchen table, we did not touch the dishes that we submerged in the murky water in the sink, until there were no clean ones left and we had to fish out a couple of plates, forks, and knives, and rinse them under the faucet, and after we had used them, we put them back on the pile of dishes that was beginning to stink. The garbage can overflowed and smelled because neither of us wanted to empty it. We threw our clothes over the nearest chair, and if we needed a chair, we simply threw anything that was on it to the floor, which was thick with books and papers and fruit peel and dirty handkerchiefs and yellowing newspapers. Gray coils of dust drifted around the floors. Even when the toilet was getting blocked, neither of us lifted a finger. Piles of dirty laundry overflowed from the bathroom into the corridor, where it met a jumble of empty bottles, cardboard boxes, used envelopes, and wrapping paper. (This was more or less how I described Fima's apartment in Fima.)
And yet, in all the chaos, a deep mutual consideration prevailed in our silent home. My father