A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [67]
"Oh, those jetons of yours. Here they are. Nu, take them, little bed-wetter, take your jetons along with the holes in the middle of them, take them, only be sure to count them. Never accept anything from anyone without counting properly first."
"But why didn't you use them?"
"The jetons7. Nu, what. I don't believe in jetons."
And when he was ninety-three, three years after my father died, Grandpa decided that the time had come and that I was old enough for a man-to-man conversation. He summoned me into his den, closed the windows, locked the door, sat down solemnly and formally at his desk, motioned to me to sit facing him on the other side of the desk. He didn't call me "little bed-wetter," he crossed his legs, rested his chin in his hands, mused for a while, and said:
"The time has come we should talk about women."
And at once he explained:
"Nu. About woman in general."
(I was thirty-six at the time, I had been married fifteen years and had two teenage daughters.)
Grandpa sighed, coughed into his palm, straightened his tie, cleared his throat a couple of times, and said:
"Nu, what. Women have always interested me. That is to say, always. Don't you go understanding something not nice! What I am saying is something completely different, nu, I am just saying that woman has always interested me. No, not the 'woman question'! Woman as a person."
He chuckled and corrected himself:
"—interested me in every way. All my life I am all the time looking at women, even when I was no more than a little chudak, nu, no, no, I never looked at a woman like some kind of paskudniak, no, only looking at her with all respect. Looking and learning. Nu, and what I learned, I want to teach you now also. So you will know. So now you, listen carefully please: it is like this."
He paused and looked around, as though to make certain that we were really alone, with no one to overhear us.
"Woman," Grandpa said, "nu, in some ways she is just like us. Exactly the same. But in some other ways," he said, "a woman is entirely different. Very very different."
He paused here and pondered it for a while, maybe conjuring up images in his mind, his childlike smile lit his face, and he concluded his lesson:
"But you know what? In which ways a woman is just like us and in which ways she is very very different—nu, on this," he concluded, rising from his chair, "I am still working."
He was ninety-three, and he may well have continued to "work" on the question to the end of his days. I am still working on it myself.
He had his own unique brand of Hebrew, Grandpa Alexander, and he refused to be corrected. He always insisted on calling a barber (sapar) a sailor (sapan), and a barber's shop (mispara) a shipyard (mispana). Once a month, precisely, this bold seafarer strode off to the Ben Yakar Brothers' shipyard, sat down on the captain's seat, and delivered a string of de-tailed, stern orders, instructions for the voyage ahead. He used to tell me off sometimes: "Nu, it's time you went to the sailor, what do you look like! A pirate!" He always called shelves shlevs, even though he could manage the singular, shelf, perfectly well. He never called Cairo by its Hebrew name, Kahir, but always Cairo; I was called, in Russian, either khoroshi malchik (good boy) or ty durak (you fool); Hamburg was Gamburg; a habit was always a habitat: sleep was spat, and when he was asked how he had slept, he invariably replied "excellently!" and because he did not entirely trust the Hebrew language, he would add cheerfully in Russian "Khorosho! Ochen khorosho!!" He called a library biblioteka, a teapot chainik, the government partats, the people oilem goilem, and the ruling Labor Party, Mapai, he sometimes called geshtankt (stink) or iblaikt (decay).
And once, a couple of years before he passed away, he spoke to me about his death: "If, heaven forbid, some young soldier dies in battle, nineteen-years-old, maybe twenty-years-old boy, nu, it is a terrible disaster but it's not a tragedy. To die at my age though—that's a tragedy! A man like me, ninety-five