A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [45]
As she left the bathroom, she would mutter to herself, not angrily but with a kind of deep sadness:
"Like animals. Or worse."
A door with a pane of frosted glass decorated with geometrical flower shapes separated Grandma's bedroom from the little cubicle that was known as "Grandpa Alexander's study." From here Grandpa had his own private way out into the veranda and from there into the garden and finally outside, to the city, to freedom.
In one corner of this tiny room stood the sofa from Odessa, as narrow and hard as a plank, on which Grandpa slept at night. Underneath this sofa, like recruits on parade, seven or eight pairs of shoes stood in a neat row, all black and shiny; just like Grandma Shlomit's collection of hats, in green and brown and maroon, that she guarded as her prize possession in a round hatbox, so Grandpa Alexander liked to be in command of a whole fleet of shoes that he polished until they shone like crystal, some hard and thick-soled, some round-toed or pointed, some brogued, some fastened with laces, some with straps, and others with buckles.
Opposite the sofa stood his small desk, always neat and tidy, with an inkwell and an olivewood blotter. The blotter always looked to me like a tank or a thick-funneled boat sailing toward a jetty formed by a trio of bright silvery containers, one full of paper clips, the next of thumbtacks, while in the third, like a nest of vipers, the rubber bands coiled and swarmed. There was a rectangular metal nest of trays on the desk, one for incoming mail, one for outgoing mail, a third for newspaper cuttings, another for documents from the municipality and the bank, and yet another for correspondence with the Herut Movement, Jerusalem Branch. There was also an olivewood box full of stamps of different values, with separate compartments for express, registered, and airmail stickers. And there was a container for envelopes and another for postcards, and behind them a revolving silvery stand in the form of the Eiffel Tower that contained an assortment of pens and pencils in different colors, including a wonderful pencil with a point at either end, one red and the other blue.
In one corner of Grandpa's desk, next to the files of documents, there stood a tall dark bottle of foreign liqueur and three or four green goblets that looked like narrow-waisted women. Grandpa loved beauty and hated everything ugly, and he liked to fortify his passionate, lonely heart occasionally with a little sip of cherry brandy, on his own. The world did not understand him. His wife did not understand him. Nobody really understood him. His heart always longed for what was noble, but everyone conspired to clip his wings: his wife, his friends, his business partners, they were all part of a plot to force him to plunge into two score and nine different kinds of breadwinning, hygiene, tidying up, business dealings, and a thousand petty nuisances and obligations. He was an even-tempered man, irascible but easily calmed. Whenever he saw some duty on the ground, whether a family or public or moral duty, he always bent down, picked it up, and shouldered it. But then he would sigh and complain about the weight of his burden and say