A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [94]
Beyond that, at the edge of the field, was a little building we called the ofitsina, where, in the first room, there was a black boiler for the laundry. We played at being prisoners of the wicked witch Baba Yaga who puts little girls in the boiler. Then there was a little back room where the gardener lived. Behind the ofitsina were the stables, where Papa's phaeton was kept, and a big chestnut horse lived there too. Next to the stable stood a sleigh with iron runners in which Philip, the coachman, or his son Anton, drove us to the hairdresser on icy or snowy days. Sometimes Hemi came with us—he was the son of Rucha and Arie Leib Pisiuk, who were very rich. The Pisiuks owned a brewery and supplied the whole district with beer and yeast. The brewery was enormous, and it was managed by Hertz Meir Pisiuk, Hemi's grandfather. The famous men who visited Rovno always stayed with the Pisiuks: Bialik, Jabotinsky, Tchernikhowsky. I think that boy, Hemi Pisiuk, was your mother's first love. Fania must have been about thirteen or fifteen, and she always wanted to ride in the carriage or the sleigh with Hemi but without me, and I always deliberately came between them; I was nine or ten, I didn't let them be alone, I was a silly little girl. That's what I was called at that time. When I wanted to irritate Fania, I called her, in front of everybody, Hemuchka, which comes from Hemi. Nehemiah. Hemi Pisiuk went to study in Paris, and that's where they killed him. The Germans.
Papa, your grandfather, was fond of Philip, the coachman, and he was very fond of the horses, he even liked the smith who used to come and grease the carriage, but the one thing he really hated was to ride in the carriage, wearing a fur coat with a fox-fur collar, like a squire, behind his Ukrainian coachman. He preferred to walk. Somehow he didn't enjoy being a wealthy man. In his carriage, or in his fauteuil, surrounded by buffets and crystal chandeliers, he felt a bit like a komediant.
Many years later, when he had lost all his possessions, when he came to Israel almost empty-handed, he actually didn't think it was too terrible. He didn't miss his possessions at all. On the contrary: he felt lightened. He didn't mind sweating in the sun, with a gray vest on, with a thirty-kilo sack of flour on his back. Only Mama suffered terribly, she cursed, she shouted at him and insulted him, why had he come down in the world? Where were the fauteuils, the crystal and the chandeliers? Did she deserve at her age to live like a mujik, like a hoholka, without a cook or a hairdresser or a seamstress? When would he finally pull himself together and build a new flour mill in Haifa, so that we could recover our lost position? Like the fisherman's wife in the story, that's what Mama was like. But I forgave her for everything. May God forgive her too. And he will have plenty to forgive! May God forgive me too for talking about her like this, may she rest in peace. May she rest in peace the way she never gave Papa a moment's peace in his life. For forty years they lived in this country, and every day, morning to night, she did nothing but poison his life. They found themselves a sort of tumbledown hut in a field of thistles behind Kiriat Motskin, a one-room hut with no water and no toilet, roofed with tar paper—do you remember Papa and Mama's hut? Yes? The only faucet was outside among the thistles, the water was full of rust, and the toilet was a hole in the ground in a makeshift shelter at the back that Papa built himself out of bits of wood.
Maybe it's not entirely Mama's fault that she poisoned his life so. After all, she was very unhappy there. Desperately! She was an unhappy woman altogether. She was born unhappy. Even the chandeliers and the crystal did not make her happy. But she was the kind of unhappy person who has to make other people miserable too; that was your grandfather's bad luck.
As soon as he came to Israel, Papa found work in Haifa, in a bakery. He used to go around Haifa Bay with a horse and cart: they saw that he