A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [85]
In 1909 or 1910, at the age of twenty-one, Naphtali Hertz Mussman married Itta Gedalyevna Schuster, the capricious daughter of Gedaliah Schuster and his wife Pearl (née Gibor). Of my great-grandmother Pearl, I was informed by Aunt Haya that she was a tough woman, "as shrewd as seven traders," with a sixth sense for village intrigues, sharp-tongued, fond of money and power, and desperately mean. ("The story goes that she always collected every lock of hair that was cut off at the hairdresser's for stuffing cushions. She cut every lump of sugar into four precise little cubes with a knife.") As for great-grandfather Gedaliah, his granddaughter Sonia remembered him as a grumpy, thickset man, overflowing with appetites. His beard was black and unkempt, and his manner was noisy and domineering. It was said of him that he could belch loud enough to rattle the windowpanes, and that his roar was like the sound of rolling barrels. (But he was scared to death of animals, including dogs, cats, and even kids and calves.)
Their daughter Itta, my grandmother, always behaved like a woman whom life had not treated as gently as she deserved. She was pretty when she was young, and had many suitors, and it seems she was pampered. She ruled her own three daughters with an iron hand, and yet behaved as though she wanted them to treat her like a younger sister or a sweet little child. Even in her old age she continued to treat her grandchildren to all sorts of little bribes and coquettish gestures, as though begging us to make a fuss of her, to be captivated by her charms, to pay court to her. At the same time, she was capable of behaving with polite ruthlessness.
The marriage of Itta and Hertz Mussman endured, with gritted teeth, through sixty-five years of insults, wrongs, humiliations, truces, shame, restraint, and pursed-lipped mutual politeness. My maternal grandparents were desperately different and remote from each other, yet this desperation was always kept under lock and key. Nobody in my family talked about it, and if I ever managed to sense it in my childhood, it was like a faint whiff of flesh being singed on the other side of a wall.
Their three daughters, Haya, Fania, and Sonia, sought ways to relieve the misery of their parents' married life. All three unhesitatingly took their father's side against their mother. All three loathed and feared their mother; they were ashamed of her and considered her a depress-ingly vulgar and domineering mischief maker. When they quarreled, they would say to each other accusingly: "Just look at yourself! You're becoming exactly like Maman!"
Only when her parents were old and when she was getting old herself did Aunt Haya manage finally to separate her parents, putting her father in a home for the elderly in Givatayim and her mother in a nursing home near Nes Tsiyona. She did this despite the protests of Aunt Sonia, who thought such enforced separation was totally wrong. But by then the schism between my two aunts was at its height. They did not speak a single word to each other for nearly thirty years, from the late 1950s until Aunt Haya's death in 1989. Aunt Sonia did attend her sister's funeral, where she remarked to us sadly: "I forgive her for everything. And I pray in my heart that God too will forgive her—and it won't be easy for Him, because he will have an awful lot to forgive her for." Aunt Haya, a year before her death, had said the very same thing to me about her sister Sonia.
The fact is that all three Mussman sisters, in their different ways, were in love with their father. My grandfather, Naphtali Hertz (whom we all, his daughters, sons-in-law, and grandchildren, called Papa), was a warmhearted, paternal, kindly, fascinating man. He had a swarthy complexion and a warm voice, and he had inherited his father's clear blue eyes, those piercing sharp eyes that concealed a smile. Whenever