A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [82]
In the morning, who knows, the mothers may have burst into the room, armed with towels and washbasins, anxious to discover whether or how their children had survived their wrestling bout, and what damage they had inflicted on each other.
But a few days later the husband and wife were to be seen happily running around the yard and playing together barefoot and noisily. The husband even built a little treehouse for his wife's dolls, while he himself went back to playing with wheels and watercourses that he channeled across the yard into streams, lakes, and waterfalls.
His parents, Herz and Sarah Mussman, supported the young couple until they reached the age of sixteen. Kest-Kinder was the Yiddish name given in those days to young couples who relied on their parents' support. When he came of age, Ephraim Mussman combined his love of wheels with his love of running water and set up a flour mill in the village of Trope. The mill wheel was turned by running water power. His business never prospered: he was dreamy and childishly naive, an idler and a spendthrift, argumentative and yet never stuck to his guns. He was inclined to engage in idle conversations that lasted from morning till evening. Haya-Duba and Ephraim lived a life of poverty. His little bride bore Ephraim three sons and two daughters. She trained to be a midwife and domestic nurse. She was in the habit of treating poor patients for nothing, secretly. She died in the prime of her life, of consumption. My great-grandmother was twenty-six at her death.
The handsome Ephraim swiftly married another child bride, a sixteen-year-old who was named Haya like her predecessor. The new Haya Mussman lost no time in banishing her stepchildren from her home. Her weak husband made no attempt to stop her: he seemed to have expended his entire modest share of boldness and resolution all at one go, the evening when he knocked heroically on the rabbi's door and demanded in the name of the Torah and all the jurists the right to consummate his marriage. From that night of bloodshed until the end of his days he always behaved unassertively: he was meek and mild, always yielding to his wives, happy to defer to anyone who resisted his will, yet with strangers he acquired over the years the enigmatic manner of a man of hidden depths of mystery and sanctity. His bearing suggested a certain self-importance wrapped in humility, like a rustic wonder worker or a Russian Orthodox holy man.
And so his firstborn, my grandfather, Naphtali Hertz, at the age of twelve, became an apprentice on the Vilkhov estate, near Rovno, which belonged to an eccentric unmarried noblewoman named Princess Rav-zova. Within three or four years the princess had discovered that the young Jew whom she had acquired virtually for nothing was agile, sharp-witted, charming, and amusing, and in addition to all these qualities he had also learned a thing or two about flour milling as a result of growing up in his father's mill. There was possibly something else about him, too, that aroused maternal feelings in the shriveled, childless princess.
And so she decided to buy a plot of land on the outskirts of Rovno, opposite the cemetery at the end of Dubinska Street, and build a flour mill. She placed in charge of this mill one of her nephews and heirs, Konstantin Semyonovich Steletsky, an engineer, and appointed the sixteen-year-old Hertz Mussman as his assistant. My grandfather very soon revealed the organizing abilities, tact, and empathy that endeared him to all who met him, and that sensitivity to others that enabled him to divine what people were thinking or what they wanted.
By the age of seventeen my grandfather was the real manager of the mill. ("So very quick he rose in the favor of that princess! Just like in that story about the righteous Joseph in Egypt and that what's her name? Lady Potiphar, wasn't it? That Engineer Steletsky, everything he fixed he smashed up again himself when he was drunk. He was a terrible alcoholic!