A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [96]
Later Fania wrote me a philosophical letter from Prague. I was about sixteen and she was a nineteen-year-old student, her letters to me were perhaps a bit too much de haut en bas, because I was always considered a silly little girl, but I can still remember that it was a long, detailed letter about heredity versus environment and free will.
I'll try to tell you what she said, but of course it will be in my own words, not Fania's: I don't know many people who are capable of expressing what Fania could express. So this is more or less what Fania wrote to me: that heredity and the environment that nurtures us and our social class—these are all like cards that are dealt out at random before the game begins. There is no freedom about this: the world gives, and you just take what you're given, with no opportunity to choose. But, she wrote to me from Prague, the question is what each person does with the cards that are dealt out to him. Some people play brilliantly with poor cards, and others do the opposite: they squander and lose everything even with excellent cards. And that is what our freedom amounts to: how to play with the hand we have been dealt. But even the freedom to play well or badly, she wrote, depends ironically on each person's luck, on patience, intelligence, intuition, or adventurousness. And in the last resort surely these too are simply cards that are or are not dealt to us before the game begins. And if so, then what is left of our freedom of choice?
Not much, your mother wrote, in the last resort maybe all we are left with is the freedom to laugh at our condition or to lament it, to play the game or to throw in our hand, to try more or less to understand what is and isn't the case, or to give up and not try to understand—in a nutshell, the choice is between going through this life awake or in a kind of stupor. That is, roughly, what Fania, your mother, said, but in my words. Not in her words. I can't say it in her words.
Now that we're talking about fate versus freedom of choice, now that we're talking about cards, I have another story for you ... Philip, the Mussman family's Ukrainian coachman, had a dark, good-looking son called Anton: black eyes that sparkled like black diamonds, a mouth that turned down slightly at the corners, as if from contempt, and strength, broad shoulders, a bass voice like a bull's, the glasses in the kommoda tinkled when Anton roared. Every time he passed a girl in the street, this Anton deliberately walked more slowly, and the girl unconsciously walked a little faster, and her breath came a little faster too. I remember that we used to make fun of one another, we sisters and our girlfriends: who had arranged her blouse just so for Anton? Who had put a flower in her hair for Anton? And who had gone out walking in the street for Anton with a starched pleated skirt and snow-white short socks?
Next door to us on Dubinska Street lived Engineer Steletsky, the nephew of Princess Ravzova whom your grandfather was sent to work for when he was twelve. It was the same poor engineer who founded the flour mill that Papa started out working for and finally bought him out. Steletsky's wife simply ran off clutching a little blue suitcase straight to the little hut opposite, which Anton had built for himself beyond our front garden, at the edge of the built-up area. Actually it was a field where cows grazed.