A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [64]
All his life he longed for worlds of love and emotional generosity. (He never seems to have made the distinction between love and admiration, thirsting for an abundance of both.)
Sometimes in desperation he rattled his chains, champed at the bit, drank a couple of glasses of brandy in the solitude of his study, or on bitter, sleepless nights particularly, he drank a glass of vodka and smoked sadly. Sometimes he went out alone after dark and roamed the empty streets. It was not easy for him to go out. Grandma had a highly developed, supersensitive radar screen on which she kept track of us all: at any given moment she could check the inventory, to know precisely where each of us was, Lonya at his desk in the National Library on the fourth floor of the Terra Sancta Building, Zussya at Café Atara, Fania sitting in the B'nai B'rith Library, Amos playing with his best friend Eliyahu next door at Mr. Friedmann the engineer's, in the first building on the right. Only at the edge of her screen, behind the extinguished galaxy, in the corner from which her son Zyuzya, Zyuzinka, with Malka and little Daniel, whom she had never seen or washed, were supposed to flicker back at her, all she could see by day or night was a terrifying black hole.
Grandpa would stroll down the Street of the Abyssinians with his hat on, listening to the echo of his footsteps, breathing in the dry night air, saturated with pine trees and stone. Back at home, he would sit down at his desk, have a little drink, smoke a cigarette or two, and write a soulful Russian poem. Ever since that shameful lapse when he had fallen for someone else on the boat to New York, and Grandma had had to drag him off by force to the rabbi, it had never crossed his mind to rebel again: he stood before his wife like a serf before a lady, and he served her with boundless humility, admiration, awe, devotion, and patience.
She, for her part, called him Zussya, and on rare occasions of profound gentleness and compassion she called him Zissel. Then his face would suddenly light up as though the seven heavens had opened before him.
17
HE LIVED for another twenty years after Grandma Shlomit died in her bath.
For several weeks or months he continued to get up at daybreak and drag the mattresses and bedclothes to the balcony railing, where he beat them mercilessly to crush any germs or goblins that might have insinuated themselves into the bedding overnight. Perhaps he found it hard to break the habit; perhaps it was his way of paying his respects to the departed; perhaps he was expressing his longing for his queen; or perhaps he was afraid of provoking her avenging spirit if he stopped.
He did not immediately stop disinfecting the toilet and washbasins, either.
But slowly, with the passage of time, Grandpa's smily cheeks grew pink as they had never done before. They always had a cheerful look. Although he remained very particular to his last day about cleanliness and tidiness, being by nature a dapper man, the violence had gone out of him: there were no more furious beatings or frantic sprays of Lysol or chlorine. A few months after Grandma's death his love life began to blossom in a tempestuous and wonderful way. At about the same time, I have the impression that my seventy-seven-year-old grandfather discovered the joy of sex.
Before he had managed to wipe the dust of Grandma's burial off his shoes, Grandpa's home was full of women offering condolences, encouragement, freedom from loneliness,