A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [55]
"The female heart! In vain have the great poets attempted to reveal its mysteries. Look, Schiller wrote somewhere that in the whole of creation there is no secret as deep as a woman's heart, and that no woman has ever revealed or will ever reveal to a man the full extent of the female mystique. He could simply have asked me: after all, I've been there."
Sometimes he joked in his unfunny way: "Of course I chase skirts sometimes, like most men, if not more so, because I used to have plenty of skirts of my own, and suddenly they were all taken away from me."
Once he said something like this: "If we had a daughter, she would almost certainly be a beauty." And he added: "In the future, in generations to come, the gap between the sexes may well narrow. This gap is generally considered to be a tragedy, but one day it may transpire that it is nothing but a comedy of errors."
15
IT WAS Grandma Shlomit, the distinguished lady who loved books and understood writers, who turned their home in Odessa into a literary salon—perhaps the first Hebrew literary salon ever. With her sensitivity she grasped that the sour blend of loneliness and lust for recognition, shyness and extravagance, deep insecurity and self-intoxicated egomania that drives poets and writers out of their rooms to seek one another out, to rub shoulders with one another, bully, joke, condescend, feel one another, lay a hand on a shoulder or put an arm around a waist, to chat and argue with little nudges, to spy a little, sniff out what is cooking in other pots, flatter, disagree, collide, be right, take offense, apologize, make amends, avoid one another, and seek one another's company again.
She was the perfect hostess, and she received her guests unpretentiously but graciously. She offered everyone an attentive ear, a supportive shoulder, curious, admiring eyes, a sympathetic heart, homemade fish delicacies or bowls of thick, steaming stew on winter evenings, poppy-seed cakes that melted in the mouth, and rivers of scalding tea from the samovar.
Grandpa's job was to pour out liqueurs expertly, and keep the ladies supplied with chocolates and sweet cakes, and the men with papirosi, those pungent Russian cigarettes. Uncle Joseph, who at the tender age of twenty-nine had inherited from Ahad Ha'am the editorship of Hashiloach, the leading periodical of modern Hebrew culture (the poet Bialik himself was the literary editor), ruled Hebrew literature from Odessa and promoted or demoted writers by his word. Aunt Zippora accompanied him to his brother and sister-in-law's "soirees," careful to wrap him well in woolen scarves, warm overcoats, and earmuffs. Menahem Ussishkin, the leader of those forerunners of Zionism, the Lovers of Zion, smartly turned out, his chest puffed out like a buffalo's, his voice as coarse as a Russian governor's, as effervescent as a boiling samovar, reduced the room to silence with his entrance: everyone stopped talking out of respect, someone or other would leap up to offer him a seat, Ussishkin would stride across the room with the gait of a general, seat himself expansively with his large legs spread wide, and tap the floor twice with his cane to indicate his consent that the conversations in the salon should continue. Even Rabbi Czernowitz (whose nom de plume was Rav Tsair) was a regular visitor. There was also a plump young historian who had once paid court to my grandmother ("But it was hard for a decent woman to be close to him—he was extremely intelligent and interesting, but he always had all sorts of disgusting stains on his collar, and his cuffs were grimy, and sometimes you could see bits of food caught in the folds of his trousers. He was a total shlump, shmutsik, fui!").
Occasionally Bialik would drop in for an evening, pale with grief or shivering with cold and anger—or quite the contrary: he could also be the life and soul of the party. "And how!" said my grandmother. "Like a kid, he was! A real scalawag! No holds barred! So risqué! Sometimes he would joke with us in Yiddish till he made the ladies blush, and Chone Rawnitski