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By Root 955 0

your hair. No, I'm certainly not letting you off. Why should I? Can you give me one good reason to put off washing your hair? No? In that case you should never even try to start an argument, if you haven't got the slightest shadow of a reason. Remember this well from now on: 'I want' and 'I don't want' aren't reasons, they can only be defined as self-indulgence. And, incidentally, the word 'define' comes from a Latin word meaning 'end' or 'limit,' and every act of definition denotes tracing a limit or border dividing what is inside it from what is outside, in fact it may well be related to the word 'defense,' and the same image is mirrored in the Hebrew word from definition, derived as it is from the word for 'fence.' Now, cut your fingernails, please, and throw all the dirty clothes in the laundry basket. Your underwear, your shirt, your socks, the lot. Then into your pajamas, a cup of cocoa, and bed. And that's enough of you for today."

11

AND SOMETIMES, after we had taken our leave of Uncle Joseph and Aunt Zippora, if it wasn't too late, we would linger for twenty minutes or half an hour to call on the neighbors across the road. We would sneak, as it were, to the Agnons' house, without telling Uncle and Auntie where we were going, so as not to upset them. Sometimes we bumped into Mr. Agnon as he came out of the synagogue while we were on our way to the No. 7 bus stop, and he tugged at my father's arm and warned him that if he, that is to say my father, declined to visit the Agnon home and treat it to the radiance of the lady's face, it, that is to say the Agnon home, would be deprived of her radiance. In this way Agnon brought a smile to my mother's lips, and my father would accede to his invitation, saying: "Very well, but only for a few minutes, if Mr. Agnon will forgive us, we shall not stay long, we have to get back to Kerem Avraham, as the child is tired and has to get up for school in the morning."

"The child is not tired at all," I said.

And Mr. Agnon said:

"Hearken, pray, good Doctor: out of the mouths of babes and sucklings thou hast established strength."

The Agnons' house was set in a garden surrounded by cypresses, but to be on the safe side it was built with its back to the street, as though hiding its face in the garden. All you could see from the street were four or five slit windows. You entered through a gate concealed among the cypresses, walked along a paved path by the side of the house, climbed four or five steps, rang the bell at the white door, and waited for the door to be opened and for you to be invited to turn to your right and to climb the half-dark steps to Mr. Agnon's study, from which you reached a large paved rooftop terrace that looked out onto the Judaean desert and the hills of Moab, or else to turn left, to the small, rather cramped living room whose windows looked into the empty garden.

There was never full daylight in the Agnons' house, it was always in a kind of twilight with a faint smell of coffee and pastries, perhaps because we visited just before the end of the Sabbath, toward evening, and they would not switch on the electric light until three stars at least had appeared at the window. Or perhaps the electric light was on, but it was that yellow, miserly Jerusalem electricity, or Mr. Agnon was trying to economize, or there was a power failure and the only light came from a paraffin lamp. I can still remember the half darkness, in fact I can almost touch it; the grilles on the windows seemed to imprison and accentuate it. The reason for it is hard to tell now, and it may have been hard to tell even then. Whatever the reason, whenever Mr. Agnon stood up to pull out a book from the shelves that looked like a crowded congregation of worshippers dressed in shabby dark clothes, his form did not cast one shadow but two or three or even more. That is the way his image was engraved on my childhood memory and that is the way I remember him today: a man swaying in the half-light, with three or four separate shadows around him as he walked, in front of him, to his right, behind