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By Root 1161 0

stories were strange: they were nothing like the stories that were told in other homes at that time, or the stories I told my own children, but were veiled in a kind of mist, as though they did not begin at the beginning or end at the end but emerged from the undergrowth, appeared for a while, arousing alienation or pangs of fear, moved in front of me for a few moments like distorted shadows on the wall, amazed me, sometimes sent shivers up my spine, and slunk back to the forest they had come from before I knew what had happened. I can remember some of my mother's stories almost word for word to this day. For instance, there's the one about the very old man, Alleluyev:

Once upon a time, beyond the high mountains, beyond deep rivers and desolate steppes, there was a tiny, out-of-the-way village, with tumbledown huts. At the edge of this village, in a dark fir forest, lived a poor, dumb, blind man. He lived all on his own, without any family or friends, and his name was Alleluyev. Old Alleluyev was older than the oldest men in the village, older than the oldest men in the valley or the steppe. He was not just old, he was ancient. So old was he that moss had begun to grow on his bent back. Instead of hair, black mushrooms grew on his head, and instead of cheeks he had hollows where lichens spread. Brown roots had begun to sprout from his feet, and glowing fireflies had settled in his sunken eyesockets. This old Alleluyev was older than the forest, older than the snow, older than Time himself. One day a rumor spread that in the depths of his hut, whose shutters had never been opened, lodged another old man, Cherni-chortyn, who was much, much older than old Alleluyev, and even blinder and poorer and more silent, more bent, deafer, more motionless, and worn as smooth as a Tartar coin. They said in the village, on the long winter nights, that old Alleluyev looked after the ancient Chernichortyn, washing his wounds, setting the table for him, and making his bed, feeding him on berries from the forest washed down with well water or melted snow, and sometimes at night he sang to him, as one sings to a baby: Lula, lula, lula, don't be scared my treasure, lula, lula, lula, don't tremble my darling. And so they slept, the two of them, snuggled up together, the old man and the even older man, while outside there was nothing but wind and snow. Ifthey have not been eaten by wolves, they are still living there, the two of them, to this day, in their miserable hut, while the wolf howls in the forest and the wind roars in the chimney.

Alone in bed before I fell asleep, trembling with fear and excitement, I whispered to myself over and over again the words "old," "ancient," "older then Time himself." I closed my eyes and saw in my mind's eye, with delicious dread, the moss slowly spreading over the old man's back, the black mushrooms and lichens, and those greedy brown wormlike roots growing in the darkness. I tried to visualize behind my closed eyes the meaning of"worn as smooth as a Tartar coin." And so I swathed myself in sleep to the sound of the wind shrieking in the chimney, a wind that could never come near our home, sounds I had never heard, the chimney I had never seen except in the pictures in children's books where every house had a tiled roof and a chimney.

I had no brothers or sisters, my parents could hardly afford to buy me any toys or games, and television and computers had not yet been born. I spent my whole childhood in Kerem Avraham in Jerusalem, but where I really lived was on the edge of the forest, by the huts, the steppes, the meadows, the snow in my mother's stories, and in the illustrated books that piled up on my low bedside table: I was in the east, but my heart was in the farthermost west. Or the "farthermost north," as it said in those books. I wandered dizzily through virtual forests, forests of words, huts of words, meadows of words. The reality of the words thrust aside the suffocating backyards, the corrugated iron spread on top of stone houses, balconies laden with washtubs and washing lines. What surrounded