A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [306]
It rained heavily almost without a break all over Israel through that winter of 1951-52. The River Ayyalon, Wadi Musrara, burst its banks and flooded the Montefiore district of Tel Aviv and threatened to flood other districts as well. Heavy flooding did extensive damage to the transit camps with their tents and their corrugated iron or canvas huts, which were crowded with hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees who had fled from Arab lands leaving everything behind them and refugees from Hitler from Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Some transit camps were cut off by the floods, and there was a risk of starvation and epidemic. The state of Israel was less than four years old, and a little over a million citizens lived in it; almost a third of them were penniless refugees. Because of the heavy cost of defense and the absorption of immigrants and because of an inflated bureaucracy and clumsy management, the coffers of the state were empty, and the education, health, and welfare services were on the verge of collapse. At the beginning of that week, David Horowitz, the director-general of the Treasury, had flown to America on an emergency mission to obtain short-term credit to the tune of ten million dollars in a matter of a day or two so as to stave off disaster. My father and I discussed all these subjects when he got back from Tel Aviv. He had taken my mother to Auntie Haya and Uncle Tsvi's on Thursday and spent the night there, and when he got back on Friday, he learned from Grandma Shlomit and Grandpa Alexander that I seemed to have caught a cold but had nevertheless insisted on getting up and going to school. Grandma suggested we stay and celebrate Sabbath with them: she thought we both looked as though we were starting some sort of virus. But we opted to go home. On the way home from their house in Prague Lane, Father saw fit to report to me earnestly, like one grown-up to another, that when they got to Auntie Haya's, my mother's state of mind had immediately improved: the four of them had gone out together on Thursday night to a little café on the corner of Dizengoff Street and Jabotinsky Street, a stone's throw from Haya and Tsvi's. They had intended to stay out for only a short while, but they had ended up sitting there till closing time, talking about people and books. Tsvi had recounted all sorts of interesting stories about hospital life, and Mother had looked well and joined in the conversation, and that night she had slept for several hours, though she had apparently woken up in the small hours of the morning and gone to sit in the kitchen so as not to disturb anyone. Early in the morning when my father had left to get back to Jerusalem in time to put in a few hours at work, my mother had promised that there was no need to worry about her, the worst was over, and she had asked him to take very good care of the child: when they had left for Tel Aviv the previous day, she had had the impression that he was coming down with a cold.
Father said:
"Your mother was quite right about the cold, so let's hope she was right about the worst being over, too."
I said:
"I've only got a little bit of homework left. When I've finished, would you have time to stick some of the new stamps in the album?"
On Saturday, it rained for most of the day. It rained and it rained. It didn't stop. My father and I spent a few hours poring over our stamp collection. Our heads sometimes touched. We compared each stamp with its picture in the big fat British catalogue, and Father found the right place for it in the album, either in a set we had already started or on a new page. On Saturday afternoon we both lay down and rested, he in his bed and I back in my room, in the bed that had become my mother's sick bed recently. After our rest we were invited to Grandpa and Grandma's again, to eat gefilte fish in a golden