A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [78]
I count two or three writers among my best friends, friends who have been close to me and dear to me for decades, yet I am not certain that I could do for one of them what Israel Zarchi did for my father. Who can say if such a generous ruse would have even occurred to me. After all, he, like everyone else in those days, lived a hand-to-mouth existence, and the three copies of The Novella in Hebrew Literature must have cost him at least the price of some much-needed clothes.
Mr. Zarchi left the room and came back with a cup of warm cocoa without skin on it, because he remembered from his visits to our apartment that that was what I drank in the evening. I thanked him as I had been told to, politely, and I really wanted to say something else, but I could not, and so I just sat there on the sofa in his room not uttering a peep, so as not to distract him from his work, even though in fact he did not work that evening but just skimmed backward and forward through the newspaper until my parents returned from the cinema, thanked the Zarchis, and hurriedly said good-night and took me home, because it was very late and I had to brush my teeth and go straight to bed.
That must have been the same room where, one evening some years earlier, in 1936, my father had first brought home a certain reserved, very pretty student, with olive skin and black eyes, who spoke little but whose very presence caused men to talk and talk.
She had left Prague University a few months previously and come to Jerusalem to study history and philosophy at the university on Mount Scopus. I do not know how or when or where Arieh Klausner met Fania Mussman, who was registered here by her Hebrew name, Rivka, although on some documents she is called Zippora and in one place she is registered as Feiga, but her family and her girlfriends always called her Fania.
He loved talking, explaining, analyzing, and she knew how to listen and hear even between the lines. He was very erudite, and she was sharp-eyed and something of a mind reader. He was a straightforward, decent, hard-working perfectionist, while she always understood why someone who clung firmly to a particular view did so, and why someone else who furiously opposed him felt such a powerful need to argue. Clothes interested her only as a peephole into their wearers' inner selves. When she was sitting in a friend's home, she always cast an appraising glance at the upholstery, the curtains, the sofas, the souvenirs on the window ledge, and the knicknacks on the bookshelf, while everyone else was busy talking: as though she were on a spying mission. People's secrets always fascinated her, but when there was gossip going on, she mostly listened with her faint smile, that hesitant smile that looked as though it was about to snuff itself out, and said nothing. She was often silent. But whenever she broke her silence and spoke a few sentences, the conversation was never the same as it had been before.
When Father spoke to her, there was sometimes something in his voice that suggested a mixture of timidity, distance, affection, respect, and fear. As though he had a fortune-teller living in his home under an assumed identity. Or a clairvoyant.
20
THERE WERE three wicker stools around our kitchen table with its flower-patterned oilcloth. The kitchen itself was small, low-ceilinged, and dark; its floor had sunk a little, its walls were sooty from the paraffin cooker and the Primus stove, and its one little window looked out on the basement yard surrounded by gray concrete walls. Sometimes, when my father had gone off to work, I used to sit on his stool so as to be opposite my mother, and she told me stories while she peeled and sliced vegetables or sorted lentils, picking out the black ones and putting them in a saucer. Later I would feed these to the birds.
My mother's