A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [39]
Occasionally Mrs. Agnon would make some remark in a sharp, commanding voice, and once Mr. Agnon said to her, with his head a little to one side and with a hint of a sarcastic smile: "Kindly permit me to be master in my own house so long as our guests are with us. Once they have left, you shall be the mistress." I remember this sentence clearly, not only because of the unexpected mischievousness it contained (which nowadays we would term subversive), but principally because of his use of the word "mistress," which is rare in Hebrew. I came across it again many years later when I read his story "The Mistress and the Pedlar." I have never come across anyone else apart from Mr. Agnon who used the word "mistress" to mean the lady of the house. Although perhaps in saying "mistress" he meant something slightly different.
It is hard to tell: after all, he was a man with three or more shadows.
My mother behaved toward Mr. Agnon, how should I say, as though she were on tiptoe all the time. Even when she was sitting down, she seemed to be sitting on tiptoe. Mr. Agnon himself hardly spoke to her, he spoke almost exclusively to my father, but as he spoke to my father, his glance seemed to rest for a moment on my mother's face. Strangely, on the rare occasions when he addressed a remark to my mother, his eyes seemed to avoid her and turn to me. Or to the window. Or maybe this is not how it was, but simply the way it is etched in my imagination: living memory, like ripples in water or the nervous quivering of a gazelle's skin in the moment before it takes flight, comes suddenly and trembles in a single instant in several rhythms or various focuses, before being frozen and immobilized into the memory of a memory.
In the spring of 1965, when my first book, Where the Jackals Howl, was published, I sent a copy with some trepidation to Agnon, with an inscription on the flyleaf. Agnon sent me a nice letter in reply, said some things about my book, and concluded as follows:
"What you wrote to me about your book conjured up the image of your late mother. I recall her once some fifteen or sixteen years ago bringing me a book from your father. You may have been with her. She stood upon the doorstep, and her words were few. But her face remained with me in all its grace and innocence/honesty for many days. Yours sincerely, S.Y. Agnon."
My father, who at Agnon's request translated the article "Buczacz" for him from a Polish encyclopedia when Agnon was writing A City and the Fullness Thereof, would twist his lips as he defined him as a "Diaspora writer": his stories lack wings, he said, they have no tragic depth, there is not even any healthy laughter but only wisecracks and sarcasm. And if he does have some beautiful descriptions here and there, he does not rest or put down his pen until he has drowned them in pools of verbose buffoonery and Galician cleverness. I have the impression my father saw Agnon's stories as an extension of Yiddish literature, and he was not fond of Yiddish literature. In keeping with his temperament of a rationalistic Lithuanian Misnaged, he loathed magic, the supernatural, and excessive emotionalism, anything clad in foggy romanticism or mystery, anything intended to make the senses whirl or to blinker reason—until the last years of his life, when his taste changed. Admittedly, just as on the death certificate of my grandmother Shlomit, the one who died of an excess of cleanliness, it is recorded simply that she died of a heart attack, so my father's curriculum vitae states merely that his last research was on an unknown manuscript of Y. L. Peretz. These are the facts. What the truth is I do not know, because I hardly ever spoke to my father about the truth. He hardly ever talked to me about his childhood, his loves, love in general, his parents, his brother's death, his own illness, his suffering, or suffering in general. We never even talked about my mother's death. Not a word. I did not make it easy for him either, and I never wanted to start a conversation that might lead