A Tale of Love and Darkness (33 page)

WHAT DID
poor Ashkenazim eat in Jerusalem in the 1940s? We ate black bread with slices of onion and olives cut in half, and sometimes also with anchovy paste; we ate smoked fish and salt fish that came from the
depths of the fragrant barrels in the corner of Mr. Auster's grocery; on special occasions we ate sardines, which were considered a delicacy.

We ate squash and eggplant, boiled or fried or made into an oily salad with slivers of garlic and chopped onion.

In the morning there was brown bread with jam, or occasionally with cheese. (The first time I went to Paris, straight from Kibbutz Hulda, in 1969, my hosts were amused to discover that in Israel there were only two kinds of cheese: white cheese and yellow cheese.) In the morning I was given Quaker Oats that tasted of glue, and when I went on strike, they replaced it with semolina and a sprinkling of cinnamon. My mother drank lemon tea in the morning, and sometimes she dunked a dark biscuit in it. My father's breakfast consisted of a slice of brown bread with thick yellow jam, half a hard-boiled egg with olives, slices of tomato, green pepper, and cucumber, and some Tnuva sour cream that came in a thick glass jar.

My father always got up early, an hour or an hour and a half before my mother and me. By five-thirty he was already standing at the bathroom mirror, brushing the snow on his cheeks into a thick lather, and while he shaved he softly sang a folk song that was hair-raisingly offkey. Afterward he would drink a glass of tea alone in the kitchen while he read the paper. In the citrus season he would squeeze some oranges with a little hand squeezer and bring my mother and me a glass of orange juice in bed. And because the citrus season was in the winter, and because in those days it was thought that you could catch a chill from drinking cold drinks on a cold day, my diligent father used to light the Primus stove before he squeezed the oranges and put a pan of water on, and when the water was almost boiling he carefully lowered the two glasses of juice into the pan and stirred them well with a spoon so that the juice close to the edge was not warmer than the juice in the middle of the glass. Then, shaved and dressed, with my mother's checked kitchen apron tied around his waist over his cheap suit, he would wake my mother (in the book room) and me (in the little room at the end of the corridor) and hand each of us a glass of warmed orange juice. I used to drink this lukewarm juice as though it were poison, while Father stood next to me in his checked apron and his quiet tie and his threadbare suit, waiting for me to give him back the empty glass. While I drank the juice, he would look for something to say: he always felt guilty about silence. He would rhyme in his unfunny way:

"Drink the juice my boy, I don't wish to annoy."

Or:

"If you drink your juice each day, you'll end up feeling merry and gay."

Or even:

"Every sip, so I've been tol', builds the body and the soul."

Or sometimes, on mornings when he was feeling more discursive than lyrical:

"Citrus fruit is the pride of our land! Jaffa oranges are appreciated all over the world. By the way, the name Jaffa, like the biblical name Japheth, apparently derives from the word for beauty,
yofi
, a very ancient word that may come from the Akkadian
faya
, and in Arabic has the form
wafi
, while in Amharic, I believe, it is
tawafa.
And now, my young
beauty
"—by now he would be smiling modestly, taking quiet satisfaction in his play on words—"finish your
boo-tiful
Jaffa juice and permit me to take the glass back to the kitchen as my
booty.
"

Such puns and witticisms, that he called
calembours
or paronomasia, always aroused in my father a kind of well-intentioned good-humor. He felt that they had the power to dispel gloom or anxiety and spread a pleasant mood. If my mother said, for instance, that our neighbor Mr. Lemberg had come back from the hospital looking more emaciated than when he went in and they said he was in dire straits, Father would launch into a little lecture on the origin and meaning of the words "dire" and "straits," replete with biblical quotations. Mother expressed amazement that everything, even Mr. Lemberg's serious illness, sparked off his childish pleasantries. Did he really imagine that life was just some kind of school picnic or stag party, with jokes and clever remarks? Father would weigh her reproach, apologize, but he had meant well, and what good would it do Mr. Lemberg if we started mourning for him while he was still alive? Mother said, Even when you mean well, you somehow manage to do it with poor taste: either you're condescending or you're obsequious, and either way you always have to crack jokes. At which they would switch to Russian and talk in subdued tones.

When I came home from Mrs. Pnina's kindergarten at midday, my mother fought with me, using bribery, entreaties, and stories about princesses and ghosts, to distract my attention until I had swallowed
some runny-nose squash and mucous squash (which we called by its Arabic name,
kusa)
, and rissoles made from bread mixed with a little mince (they tried to disguise their breadiness with bits of garlic).

Sometimes I was forced to eat, with tears, disgust, and fury, all sorts of spinach rissoles, leaf spinach, beetroot, beetroot soup, sauerkraut, pickled cabbage, or carrots, raw or cooked. At other times I was condemned to cross wastelands of grits and bran, to chew my way through tasteless mountains of boiled cauliflower and all kinds of depressing pulses such as dried beans and peas and lentils. In summer Father chopped a fine salad of tomatoes, cucumbers, green peppers, spring onions, and parsley, gleaming with olive oil.

Every now and then a piece of chicken made a guest appearance, sunk in rice or run aground on a sandbank of potato purée, its mast and sails adorned with parsley and with a tight guard of boiled carrots with rickets-smitten squash standing around its deck. A pair of pickled cucumbers served as the flanks of this destroyer, and if you finished it all up, you were rewarded with a pink milk pudding made from powder, or a yellow jelly made from powder, which we called by its French name gelée, which was only a step away from Jules Verne and the mysterious submarine
Nautilus
, under the command of Captain Nemo, who despaired of the whole human race and set off for the depths of his mysterious realm under the oceans and where, so I had decided, I should be joining him soon.

In honor of Sabbaths and festivals my mother would get a carp, which she bought early, in the middle of the week. All day long the fish would swim relentlessly back and forth in the bathtub, from side to side to side, searching tirelessly for some secret underwater passage from the bath to the open sea. I fed it on breadcrumbs. Father taught me that in our own secret language a fish was called Noon. I quickly made friends with Noonie: he could distinguish my footsteps from a distance and hurried to the side of the bath to greet me, raising out of the water a mouth that reminded me of things it's best not to think about.

Once or twice I got up and crept along in the dark to check whether my friend really slept in the cold water all night, which seemed to me strange and even contrary to the laws of nature, or whether maybe after lights out Noonie's working day was over and he wriggled out and crawled slowly on his belly into the laundry basket and curled up and slept in the warm embrace of the towels and underwear, till in the morning he secretly slipped back into the bath to serve his time in the navy.

Once, when I was left at home on my own, I decided to enrich this poor bored carp's life with islands, straits, headlands, and sandbanks made from various kitchen utensils that I dropped in the bath. As patient and persistent as Captain Ahab I hunted my Moby Dick with a ladle for a long time, but time and again he wriggled away and escaped to the submarine lairs that I had scattered for him myself on the seabed. At one point I touched his cold, sharp scales, and I shuddered with disgust and fear at this new, spine-chilling discovery: until that morning, every living thing, whether chick, child, or cat, was always soft and warm; only what was dead turned cold and hard. And now this paradox of the carp, cold and hard but alive, all damp, slippery, and oily, scaly, with gills, wriggling and struggling strongly, stiffening and chill between my fingers, stabbed me with such a sudden panic that I hurriedly released my catch and shook my fingers, then washed, soaped, and scrubbed them three times. So I gave up the chase. Instead of hunting Noonie, I spent a long time trying to look at the world through the round, still eyes of a fish, without eyelids, without eyelashes, without moving.

And that's how Father, Mother, and retribution found me, because they came home and crept into the bathroom without my hearing them, and they caught me sitting motionless like a Buddha on the toilet lid, my mouth slightly open, my face frozen, my glazed eyes staring unblinkingly like a pair of glass beads. At once the kitchen utensils that the crazy child had sunk to the bottom of the carp water to serve as an archipelago or the underwater defenses of Pearl Harbor came to light. "His Highness," Father said sadly, "will once again be compelled to suffer the consequences of his deeds. I am sorry."

On Friday night, Grandpa and Grandma came, and so did Mother's friend Lilenka with her rotund husband Mr. Bar-Samkha, whose face was covered with a thick curly beard like steel wool. His ears were different sizes, like an Alsatian that has pricked up one ear and let the other flop.

After the chicken soup with kneidlach, Mother suddenly placed on the table the corpse of my Noonie, complete with head and tail but bearing a series of seven knife gashes along its side, as splendid as the body of a king being borne on a gun carriage to the Pantheon. The regal corpse
reposed in a rich cream-colored sauce upon a couch of gleaming rice, embellished with stewed prunes and slices of carrot, scattered with decorative green flakes. But Noonie's alert, accusing, gaze was fixed unyieldingly on all his murderers in motionless reproach, in silent torment.

When my eyes met his terrifying gaze, his piercing eye cried Nazi betrayer and murderer, and I began to cry silently, dropping my head on my chest, trying not to let them see. But Lilenka, my mother's best friend and confidante, the soul of a kindergarten teacher in a china doll body, was alarmed and hastened to comfort me. First she felt my forehead and declared, No, he hasn't got a temperature. Then she kept stroking my arm and said, But yes, he is shivering a little. Then she bent over me until her breath almost took my breath away, and said: It looks as though it's something psychological, not physical. With that she turned to my parents and concluded, with self-righteous pleasure, that as she had already told them a long time ago, this child, like all vulnerable, complicated, sensitive future artists, was apparently entering puberty very early, and the best thing was simply to let him be.

Father mulled this over, weighed it, and pronounced judgment: "Very well. But first of all you will please eat your fish like everyone else."

"No."

"No? And why not? Is His Highness by any chance contemplating sacking his team of cooks?"

"I can't."

At this point Mr. Bar-Samkha, overflowing with sweetness and the urge to mediate, started to wheedle in his reedy, placatory voice:

"Well, why don't you just have a tiny bit? Just one symbolic piece, eh? For the sake of your parents and the Sabbath day?"

But Lilka, his wife, a soulful, emotional person, cut in on my behalf:

"There's no point in forcing the child! He has a psychological block!"

Lea Bar-Samkha, also known as Lilenka, formerly Lilia Kalisch,* was a frequent visitor to our apartment during most of my childhood in Jerusalem. She was a small, sad, pale, frail woman with drooping shoulders. She had worked for many years as a schoolmistress and had even written two books about the mentality of the child. From behind she looked like a slim twelve-year-old girl. She and my mother spent hours whispering together, sitting on the wicker stools in the kitchen or on chairs that they had taken out into the garden, chatting or poring over some open book or a picture book of artistic gems, head to head and hand to hand.

*I have changed some of the names, for various reasons.

Mostly Lilka came when my father was out at work. I have a feeling that she and my father maintained that polite mutual loathing that is commonly found between husbands and their wives' best friends. If I approached my mother when she was chatting to Lilenka, they both shut up at once and only resumed their conversation when I was out of earshot. Lilia Bar-Samkha looked at me with her wistful, I-understand-and-forgive-everything-on-emotional-grounds smile, but my mother asked me to buck up and say what I needed and leave them alone. They had a lot of shared secrets.

Once Lilenka came when my parents were out. She eyed me for a while with understanding and sorrow, nodded her head as though she was definitely agreeing with herself, and began a conversation. She had truly, but truly, been so fond of me since I was so small, and interested in me. Not interested like those boring grown-ups who always asked if I was good at school, if I liked soccer, or if I still collected stamps, and what did I want to be when I grew up, and silly things like that. No! She was interested in my thoughts! My dreams! My mental life! She considered me such a unique, original child! The soul of an artist in the making! She would like to try one day—not necessarily right now—to make contact with the inner, vulnerable side of my young personality (I was about ten at the time). For example, what did I think about when I was completely alone? What happened in the secret life of my imagination? What really made me happy and sad? What excited me? What frightened me? What repelled me? What kinds of scenery did I find attractive? Had I ever heard of Janusz Korczak? Had I ever read his book
Yotam the Magician?
Did I have any secret thoughts yet about the fair sex? She would love to be my, how to put it, my listening ear. My confidante. Despite the difference in our ages, etc.

I was a compulsively polite child. To her first question, what did I think about, I therefore replied politely: All sorts of things. To the volley
of questions What-excited-me-What-frightened-me I answered: Nothing in particular. While to her offer of friendship I responded tactfully: "Thank you, Auntie Lilia, that's very kind of you."