A Tale of Love and Darkness (11 page)

I, too, was a child of the underground; more than once I drove out the British with a flanking movement of my troops, sank His Majesty's fleet after a daring ambush at sea, kidnapped and court-martialed the High Commissioner and even the King of England himself, and with my own hands I raised the Hebrew flag (like those soldiers raising the Stars and Stripes at Iwo Jima on an American stamp) on the flagpole at Government House on the Hill of Evil Counsel. After driving them out, I would sign an agreement with the conquered, perfidious British to set up a front of the so-called civilized, enlightened nations against the waves of savage orientals with their ancient curly writing and their curved scimitars that threatened to burst out of the desert to kill, loot, and burn us with bloodcurdling guttural shrieks. I wanted to grow up to be like the good-looking, curly-haired, tight-lipped statue of David by Bernini, reproduced on the title page of Uncle Joseph's
When a Nation Fights for Its Freedom.
I wanted to be a strong, silent man with a slow, deep voice. Not like Uncle Joseph's reedy, slightly querulous voice. I didn't want my hands to be like his soft, old lady's hands.

He was a wonderfully frank man, my great-uncle Joseph, full of self-love and self-pity, vulnerable and craving recognition, brimming with childlike merriment, a happy man who always pretended to be miserable. With a kind of cheery contentment he loved to talk endlessly about his achievements, his discoveries, his insomnia, his detractors, his experiences, his books, articles, and lectures, all of which without exception had caused a "great stir in the world," his encounters, his work plans, his greatness, his importance, and his magnanimity.

He was at once a kind man and a selfish, spoiled one, with the sweetness of a baby and the arrogance of a wunderkind.

There, in Talpiot, which was intended to be a Jerusalemite replica of a Berlin suburb, a peaceful wooded hill where, in the fullness of time, red-tiled roofs would gleam among the foliage and villas would each provide a calm and comfortable home for a famous writer or renowned scholar, Uncle Joseph would go for a stroll sometimes in the evening breeze along the little street that was later to become Klausner Street, his thin arm entwined with the plump arm of Aunt Zippora, his mother, his wife, the child of his old age, and his right-hand person. They walked with tiny, delicate steps just past the house of the architect Kornberg, who occasionally took in paying guests of a polite and cultured kind, at the end of the cul-de-sac that was also the end of Talpiot, the end of Jerusalem, and the end of the settled land: beyond stretched the grim, barren hills of the Judaean desert. The Dead Sea sparkled in the distance like a platter of molten steel.

I can see them standing there, at the end of the world, on the edge of the wilderness, both very tender, like a pair of teddy bears, arm in arm, with the evening breeze of Jerusalem blowing above their heads, the rustle of pine trees, and a bitter smell of geraniums floating on the clear dry air, Uncle Joseph in a jacket (which he suggested should be called in Hebrew "jacobite") and tie, wearing slippers on his feet, his white hair bare to the breeze, and Auntie in a flowery, dark silk dress with a gray woolen wrap around her shoulders. The whole width of the horizon is occupied by the blue bulk of the hills of Moab beyond the Dead Sea; beneath them passes the old Roman Road that continues to the walls of the Old City, where before their eyes the domes of the mosques are turning gold, the crosses on the church towers and the crescents atop the minarets gleam in the glow of the setting sun. The walls themselves are turning gray and heavy, and beyond the Old City one can see Mount Scopus, crowned by the buildings of the university that is so dear to Uncle Joseph, and the Mount of Olives, on whose slopes Aunt Zippora will be buried, though his own wish to be buried there will not be granted because at the time of his death East Jerusalem will be under Jordanian rule.

The evening light intensifies the pink color of his babylike cheeks and his high brow. On his lips floats a distracted, slightly bewildered smile, as when a man knocks on the door of a house where he is a regular visitor and where he is used to being very warmly received, but when the door opens, a stranger suddenly looks out at him and recoils in surprise, as though asking, Who are you, sir, and why exactly are you here?

My father, my mother, and I would leave him and Aunt Zippora to stand there for a while longer; we quietly took our leave and made for the stop of the No. 7 bus, which would surely arrive in a few minutes from Ramat Rahel and Arnona, because the Sabbath was over. The No. 7 took us to the Jaffa Road, where we caught the 3B to Zephaniah Street, a five-minute walk from our home. Mother would say:

"He doesn't change. Always the same sermons, the same stories and anecdotes. He has repeated himself every Sabbath as long as I've known him."

Father would reply:

"Sometimes you are a little too critical. He's not a young man, and we all repeat ourselves sometimes. Even you."

Mischievously, I would add my parody of a line from Jabotinsky's "Beitar Hymn":

"With blood and
zhelezo
we'll raise a
gezho.
" (Uncle Joseph could hold forth at length about how Jabotinsky chose his words. Apparently, Jabotinsky could not find a suitable rhyme in Hebrew for the word
geza
, "race," so he provisionally wrote the Russian word
zhelezo
, "iron." And so it came out: "With blood and
zhelezo
/ We'll raise a race / Proud, generous, and tough," until his friend Baruch Krupnik came along and changed
zhelezo
to the Hebrew word
yeza
, "sweat": "With blood and sweat / We'll raise a race / Proud, generous, and tough."

My father would say:

"Really. There are some things one doesn't joke about."

And Mother said:

"Actually, I don't think there are. There shouldn't be."

At this Father would interpose:

"That's quite enough for one day. As for you, Amos, remember you're having a bath tonight. And washing your hair. No, I'm certainly
not letting you off. Why should I? Can you give me one good reason to put off washing your hair? No? In that case you should never even try to start an argument, if you haven't got the slightest shadow of a reason. Remember this well from now on: 'I want' and 'I don't want' aren't reasons, they can only be defined as self-indulgence. And, incidentally, the word 'define' comes from a Latin word meaning 'end' or 'limit,' and every act of definition denotes tracing a limit or border dividing what is inside it from what is outside, in fact it may well be related to the word 'defense,' and the same image is mirrored in the Hebrew word from definition, derived as it is from the word for 'fence.' Now, cut your fingernails, please, and throw all the dirty clothes in the laundry basket. Your underwear, your shirt, your socks, the lot. Then into your pajamas, a cup of cocoa, and bed. And that's enough of you for today."

AND SOMETIMES
, after we had taken our leave of Uncle Joseph and Aunt Zippora, if it wasn't too late, we would linger for twenty minutes or half an hour to call on the neighbors across the road. We would sneak, as it were, to the Agnons' house, without telling Uncle and Auntie where we were going, so as not to upset them. Sometimes we bumped into Mr. Agnon as he came out of the synagogue while we were on our way to the No. 7 bus stop, and he tugged at my father's arm and warned him that if he, that is to say my father, declined to visit the Agnon home and treat it to the radiance of the lady's face, it, that is to say the Agnon home, would be deprived of her radiance. In this way Agnon brought a smile to my mother's lips, and my father would accede to his invitation, saying: "Very well, but only for a few minutes, if Mr. Agnon will forgive us, we shall not stay long, we have to get back to Kerem Avraham, as the child is tired and has to get up for school in the morning."

"The child is not tired at all," I said.

And Mr. Agnon said:

"Hearken, pray, good Doctor: out of the mouths of babes and sucklings thou hast established strength."

The Agnons' house was set in a garden surrounded by cypresses, but to be on the safe side it was built with its back to the street, as though hiding its face in the garden. All you could see from the street were four or five slit windows. You entered through a gate concealed among the cypresses, walked along a paved path by the side of the house, climbed four or five steps, rang the bell at the white door, and waited for the door to be opened and for you to be invited to turn to your right and to climb the half-dark steps to Mr. Agnon's study, from which you reached a large paved rooftop terrace that looked out onto the Judaean desert and the hills of Moab, or else to turn left, to the small, rather cramped living room whose windows looked into the empty garden.

There was never full daylight in the Agnons' house, it was always in a kind of twilight with a faint smell of coffee and pastries, perhaps because we visited just before the end of the Sabbath, toward evening, and they would not switch on the electric light until three stars at least had appeared at the window. Or perhaps the electric light was on, but it was that yellow, miserly Jerusalem electricity, or Mr. Agnon was trying to economize, or there was a power failure and the only light came from a paraffin lamp. I can still remember the half darkness, in fact I can almost touch it; the grilles on the windows seemed to imprison and accentuate it. The reason for it is hard to tell now, and it may have been hard to tell even then. Whatever the reason, whenever Mr. Agnon stood up to pull out a book from the shelves that looked like a crowded congregation of worshippers dressed in shabby dark clothes, his form did not cast one shadow but two or three or even more. That is the way his image was engraved on my childhood memory and that is the way I remember him today: a man swaying in the half-light, with three or four separate shadows around him as he walked, in front of him, to his right, behind him, above him, or beneath his feet.

Occasionally Mrs. Agnon would make some remark in a sharp, commanding voice, and once Mr. Agnon said to her, with his head a little to one side and with a hint of a sarcastic smile: "Kindly permit me to be master in my own house so long as our guests are with us. Once they have left, you shall be the mistress." I remember this sentence clearly, not only because of the unexpected mischievousness it contained (which nowadays we would term subversive), but principally because of his use of the word "mistress," which is rare in Hebrew. I came across it again many years later when I read his story "The Mistress and the Pedlar." I have never come across anyone else apart from Mr. Agnon who used the
word "mistress" to mean the lady of the house. Although perhaps in saying "mistress" he meant something slightly different.

It is hard to tell: after all, he was a man with three or more shadows.

My mother behaved toward Mr. Agnon, how should I say, as though she were on tiptoe all the time. Even when she was sitting down, she seemed to be sitting on tiptoe. Mr. Agnon himself hardly spoke to her, he spoke almost exclusively to my father, but as he spoke to my father, his glance seemed to rest for a moment on my mother's face. Strangely, on the rare occasions when he addressed a remark to my mother, his eyes seemed to avoid her and turn to me. Or to the window. Or maybe this is not how it was, but simply the way it is etched in my imagination: living memory, like ripples in water or the nervous quivering of a gazelle's skin in the moment before it takes flight, comes suddenly and trembles in a single instant in several rhythms or various focuses, before being frozen and immobilized into the memory of a memory.

In the spring of 1965, when my first book,
Where the Jackals Howl
, was published, I sent a copy with some trepidation to Agnon, with an inscription on the flyleaf. Agnon sent me a nice letter in reply, said some things about my book, and concluded as follows:

"What you wrote to me about your book conjured up the image of your late mother. I recall her once some fifteen or sixteen years ago bringing me a book from your father. You may have been with her. She stood upon the doorstep, and her words were few. But her face remained with me in all its grace and innocence/honesty for many days. Yours sincerely, S.Y. Agnon."

My father, who at Agnon's request translated the article "Buczacz" for him from a Polish encyclopedia when Agnon was writing
A City and the Fullness Thereof
, would twist his lips as he defined him as a "Diaspora writer": his stories lack wings, he said, they have no tragic depth, there is not even any healthy laughter but only wisecracks and sarcasm. And if he does have some beautiful descriptions here and there, he does not rest or put down his pen until he has drowned them in pools of verbose buffoonery and Galician cleverness. I have the impression my father saw Agnon's stories as an extension of Yiddish literature, and he was not fond of Yiddish literature. In keeping with his temperament of a rationalistic Lithuanian
Misnaged
, he loathed magic, the supernatural,
and excessive emotionalism, anything clad in foggy romanticism or mystery, anything intended to make the senses whirl or to blinker reason—until the last years of his life, when his taste changed. Admittedly, just as on the death certificate of my grandmother Shlomit, the one who died of an excess of cleanliness, it is recorded simply that she died of a heart attack, so my father's curriculum vitae states merely that his last research was on an unknown manuscript of Y. L. Peretz. These are the facts. What the truth is I do not know, because I hardly ever spoke to my father about the truth. He hardly ever talked to me about his childhood, his loves, love in general, his parents, his brother's death, his own illness, his suffering, or suffering in general. We never even talked about my mother's death. Not a word. I did not make it easy for him either, and I never wanted to start a conversation that might lead to who knew what revelations. If I started to write down here all the things we did not talk about, my father and I, I could fill two books. My father left me a great deal of work to do, and I'm still working.