A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [86]
He considered all human beings to be reckless children who brought great disappointment and suffering upon themselves and each other, all of us trapped in an unending, unsubtle comedy that would generally end badly. All roads led to suffering. Consequently virtually everyone, in Papa's view, deserved compassion, and most of their deeds were worthy of forgiveness, including all sorts of machinations, pranks, deceptions, pretensions, manipulations, false claims, and pretenses. From all these he would absolve you with his faint, mischievous smile, as though saying (in Yiddish): Nu, what.
The only thing that tested Papa's amused tolerance were acts of cruelty. These he abhorred. His merry blue eyes clouded over at the news of wicked deeds. "An evil beast? What does the expression mean?" he would reflect in Yiddish. "No beast is evil. No beast is capable of evil. The beasts have yet to invent evil. That is our monopoly, the lords of creation. So maybe we ate the wrong apple in the Garden of Eden after all? Maybe between the tree of life and the tree of knowledge there was another tree growing there in the Garden of Eden, a poisonous tree that is not mentioned in scripture, the tree of evil" (the tree of rishes, he called it in Yiddish) "and that was the one we accidentally ate from? That scoundrel of a serpent deceived Eve, he promised her that this was definitely the tree of knowledge, but it was really the tree of rishes he led her to. Perhaps if we had stuck to the trees of life and knowledge, we would never have been thrown out of the garden?"
And then, with his eyes restored to their merry sparkling blue, he went on to explain clearly, in his slow, warm voice and his picturesque, orotund Yiddish, what Jean-Paul Sartre was to discover only years later: "But what is hell? What is paradise? Surely it is all inside. In our homes. You can find hell and paradise in every room. Behind every door. Under every double blanket. It's like this. A little wickedness, and people are hell to each other. A little compassion, a little generosity, and people find paradise in each other.
"I said a little compassion and generosity, but I didn't say love: I'm not such a believer in universal love. Love of everybody for everybody—we should maybe leave that to Jesus. Love is another thing altogether. It is nothing whatever like generosity and nothing whatever like compassion. On the contrary. Love is a curious mixture of opposites, a blend of extreme selfishness and total devotion. A paradox! Besides which, love, everybody is always talking about love, love, but love isn't something you choose, you catch it, like a disease, you get trapped in it, like a disaster. So what is it that we do choose? What do human beings have to choose between every minute of the day? Generosity or meanness. Every little child knows that, and yet wickedness still doesn't come to an end. How can you explain that? It seems we got it all from the apple that we ate back then: we ate a poisoned apple."
21
THE CITY of Rovno (Polish Rowne, German Rowno), an important railway junction, grew up around the palaces and moated parks of the princely family of Lubomirsky. The River Uste crossed the city from south to north. Between the river and the marsh stood the citadel, and in the days of the Russians there was still a beautiful lake with swans. The skyline of Rovno was formed by the citadel, the Lubomirsky palace, and a number of Catholic and Orthodox churches, one adorned with twin towers. The city boasted some sixty thousand inhabitants