A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [310]
cried and I would have pleaded without any shame and I would have hugged her knees, I might even have pretended to faint or I might have hit and scratched myself till the blood flowed as I had seen her do in moments of despair. Or I would have attacked her like a murderer, I would have smashed a vase over her head without hesitation. Or hit her with the iron that stood on a shelf in a corner of the room. Or taken advantage of her weakness to lie on top of her and tie her hands behind her back, and taken away all those pills and tablets and sachets and solutions and potions and syrups of hers and destroyed the lot of them. But I was not allowed to be there. I was not even allowed to go to her funeral. My mother fell asleep, and this time she slept with no nightmares, she had no insomnia, in the early hours she threw up and fell asleep again, still fully dressed, and because Tsvi and Haya were beginning to suspect something, they sent for an ambulance a little before sunrise, and two stretcher bearers carried her carefully, so as not to disturb her sleep, and at the hospital she would not listen to them either, and although they tried various means to disturb her good sleep, she paid no attention to them, or to the specialist from whom she had heard that the psyche is the worst enemy of the body, and she did not wake up in the morning either, or even when the day grew brighter, and from the branches of the ficus tree in the garden of the hospital the bird Elise called to her in wonderment and called to her again and again in vain, and yet it went on trying over and over again, and it still tries sometimes.
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Amos Oz is the author of numerous works of fiction and essay collections. He has received the Koret Jewish Book Award, the Prix Femina, the Israel Prize, and the Frankfurt Peace Prize, and his books have been translated into more than thirty languages. Amos Oz lives in Israel.
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Nicholas de Lange is a professor at the University of Cambridge and writes on a variety of subjects. He has won many prizes for his translations.
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Table of Contents
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