A Tale of Love and Darkness (35 page)

Or it may have been something else, something neither Byronic nor Chopinic but closer to that haze of melancholy loneliness that surrounds introverted, well-born young ladies in the plays of Chekhov and in the stories of Gnessin, a sort of childhood promise that is inevitably frustrated, trampled underfoot, and even ridiculed by the monotony of life itself. My mother grew up surrounded by an angelic cultural vision of misty beauty whose wings were finally dashed on a hot dusty pavement of Jerusalem stone. She had grown up as the pretty, refined miller's daughter, she had come of age in the mansion in Dubinska Street, with an orchard, a cook, and maids, where she was probably brought up just like the shepherdess in that picture that she hated, that prettified pink-cheeked shepherdess with three petticoats.

The outburst that Aunt Sonia recalled seventy years later, when the sixteen-year-old Fania with an uncharacteristic access of rage suddenly poured scorn and almost spat on the picture of the gentle shepherdess with the dreamy expression and the profusion of silk petticoats, may have been the spark of my mother's life-force vainly trying to free itself from the darkness that was already beginning to enfold it.

Behind the curtained windows that protected Fania Mussman's childhood so well, Pan Zakrzewski one night shot a bullet into his thigh and another into his brain. Princess Ravzova hammered a rusty nail into her hand to receive some of the Savior's pain and bear it in His stead. Dora the housekeeper's daughter was pregnant by her mother's lover, drunk Steletsky lost his wife at cards, and she, Ira, his wife, was eventually burned to death when she set fire to the handsome Anton's empty hut. But all these things happened on the other side of the double glazing, outside the pleasant, illuminated circle of the Tarbuth school. None of them could break in and seriously harm the pleasantness of my mother's childhood, which was apparently tinged with a hint of melancholy that did not mar but merely colored and sweetened it.

A few years later, in Kerem Avraham, in Amos Street, in the cramped, damp basement apartment, downstairs from the Rosendorffs and next door to the Lembergs, surrounded by zinc tubs and pickled gherkins and the oleander that was dying in a rusty olive drum, assailed all day by smells of cabbage, laundry, boiled fish, and dried urine, my mother began to fade away. She might have been able to grit her teeth and endure hardship and loss, poverty, or the cruelty of married life. But what she couldn't stand, it seems to me, was the tawdriness.

By 1943 or 1944, if not earlier, she knew that everybody had been murdered there, just outside Rovno. Somebody must have come and reported how Germans, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians, armed with submachine guns, had marched the whole city, young and old alike, to Sosenki
Forest, where they had all loved to go for walks on fine days, for scout games, for sing-songs around campfires, to sleep in sleeping bags on the banks of a stream under starry skies. There, among boughs, birds, mushrooms, currants, and berries, the Germans opened fire and slaughtered on the edge of pits, in two days, some twenty-five thousand souls.* Almost all my mother's classmates perished. Together with their parents, and all of their neighbors, acquaintances, business rivals, and enemies; well-to-do and proletarian, pious, assimilated, and baptized, communal leaders, synagogue functionaries, pedlars and drawers of water, Communists and Zionists, intellectuals, artists, and village idiots, and some four thousand babies. My mother's schoolteachers also died there, the headmaster, Issachar Reiss, with his charismatic presence and hypnotic eyes, whose look had pierced the dreams of so many adolescent schoolgirls, sleepy, absentminded Isaac Berkowski, hot-tempered Eliezer Buslik, who had taught Jewish culture, Fanka Zeidmann, who had taught geography and biology and also PE, and her brother Shmuel the painter, and pedantic, embittered Dr. Moshe Bergmann, who through almost clenched teeth had taught general and Polish history. All of them.

Not long afterward, in 1948, when the Arab Legion was shelling Jerusalem, another friend of my mother's, Piroshka, Piri Yannai, was also killed, by a direct hit from a shell. She had only gone outside to fetch a bucket and floorcloth.

Perhaps something of the childhood promise was already infected by a kind of poisonous, romantic crust that associated the Muses with death? Something in the overrefined curriculum of the Tarbuth school? Or perhaps it was a melancholy Slavic bourgeois trait that I encountered a few years after my mother's death in the pages of Chekhov, Turgenev, Gnessin, and even some of the poetry of Rahel. Something that made my mother, when life failed to fulfill any of the promises of her youth, envisage death as an exciting but also protective, soothing lover, a last, artistic lover, who would finally heal the wounds of her lonely heart.

For many years now I have been trailing this old murderer, this cunning ancient seducer, this revolting old rake, deformed by old age yet
disguising himself time and again as a youthful prince charming. This crafty hunter of the broken-hearted, this vampire wooer with a voice as bittersweet as that of a cello on a lonely night, a subtle, velvety charlatan, a master of stratagems, a magic piper who draws the desperate and lonely into the folds of his silken cloak. The ancient serial killer of disappointed souls.

*Roughly the population of Arad, where I now live, and more than the total number killed on the Jewish side in a hundred years of war against the Arabs.

WHAT DOES
my memory begin with? The very first memory is a shoe, a little brown fragrant new shoe, with a soft warm tongue. It must have been one of a pair, but memory has only salvaged the one. A new, still slightly stiff shoe. I was so entranced by its delightful smell of new, shiny, almost living leather, and of pungent, dizzying glue that apparently I first tried to put my new shoe on my face, on my nose, like a sort of snout. So I could get drunk on the smell.

My mother came into the room, followed by my father with various uncles and aunts or mere acquaintances. I must have looked cute but funny, with my little face stuck inside the shoe, because they all burst out laughing and pointed at me, and somebody roared and slapped his knees with both hands, and somebody else grunted and called hoarsely, Quick, quick, somebody fetch a camera!

There was no camera in our apartment, but I can still see that baby: all of two or two and a quarter, his hair flaxen and his eyes big, round, and surprised. But immediately under the eyes, instead of the nose, mouth, and chin, sprouted the heel of a shoe, and a shiny new virgin sole that had never been walked on. From the eyes up it was a pale-faced infant, and from the cheeks down what looked like a hammerfish or some kind of primeval, heavy-cropped bird.

What was the baby feeling? I can answer that question quite precisely, because I have inherited from that baby what he felt at that moment: a piercing joy, a wild, dizzying joooy, springing from the fact that the whole crowd of people was focused on him alone, surprised at him, enjoying him, pointing at him. At the same time, without any contradiction, the infant was also frightened and alarmed by the abundance of their attention, which he was too small to contain, because his parents and strangers and all of them were bellowing-laughing-pointing at him
and his snout, and laughing again as they shouted to one another, a camera, quick, fetch a camera.

And also disappointed because they cut off right in the middle the intoxicating sensual pleasure of inhaling the fresh smell of leather and the dizzying fragrance of glue that made his insides tremble.

In the next picture there is no audience. Just my mother putting a soft warm sock on me (because it was cold in the room), and then encouraging me, push, push hard, harder, as if she were a midwife helping the fetus of my tiny foot travel down the virginal birth canal of my fragrant new shoe.

To this day, whenever I strain to push my foot into a boot or shoe, and even now as I sit and write this, my skin reexperiences the pleasure of my foot tentatively entering the inner walls of that first shoe, the trembling of the flesh as it entered for the first time in its life this treasure cave whose stiff yet soft walls enfolded it caressingly as it thrust deeper and deeper while my mother's voice, soft and patient, encouraged me, push, push just a bit more.

One hand gently pushed my foot deeper inside while the other, holding the sole lightly, thrust against me, apparently opposing my movement but really helping me get right inside, until that delicious moment when, as if overcoming a final obstacle, my heel made one last effort and slid in so that the foot entirely filled the space, and from now on you were all there, inside, enfolded, held, secure, and already Mother was pulling the laces, tying them, and finally, like a last delicious lick, the warm tongue stretched under the laces and the knot, that stretching that always gives me a kind of tickling sensation along the instep. And here I was. Inside. Clasped, held in the tight, pleasurable embrace of my very first shoe.

That night I begged to be allowed to sleep in my shoes: I didn't want it to end. Or begged at least to be allowed to have my new shoes next to my head, on the pillow, so that I could fall asleep with that scent of leather and glue. Only after protracted and tearful negotiations did they finally agree to put the shoes on a chair by the head of my bed—on condition you didn't so much as touch them till morning, because you've washed your hands, you can just look, you can peep every minute into
their dark jaws that are smiling at you and inhale their smell until you drop off facing them, smiling to yourself in your sleep with a sensual pleasure, as if you are being stroked.

In my third memory I am locked in, alone, in a dark kennel.

When I was three and a half, nearly four, I was entrusted several times a week for a few hours to a middle-aged widowed neighbor who had no children of her own, a woman who smelled of damp wool and, less strongly, of washing soap and frying. Her name was Mrs. Gat, but we always called her Auntie Greta, except for my father, who occasionally put his arm around her shoulder and called her Gretchen, or Gret, and he would make up joky rhymes, as was his custom, in the manner of an old-world schoolboy: "Never let us forget that dear Gret is a pet!" (This was apparently his way of paying court to women.) Auntie Greta would blush, and because she was ashamed of blushing, she would immediately blush a deeper blood red, verging on purple.

Auntie Greta's blond hair was arranged in a thick plait that she coiled like a rope around her round head. The hair at her temples was turning gray, like thistles growing at the edge of a field of yellow. Her plump, soft arms were dotted with masses of pale brown freckles. Under the rustic cotton dresses she liked to wear she had heavy, very wide thighs that suggested a carthorse. An embarrassed, apologetic smile sometimes hung around her lips as though she had been caught doing something very naughty, or telling a fib, and she was frankly shocked at herself. She always had two of her fingers bandaged, or at least one, and occasionally three, either because she had cut herself while chopping vegetables or slammed her hand in the kitchen drawer or brought the lid of the piano down on her fingers; despite her constant misadventures with her fingers, she gave private piano lessons. She was also a private child sitter.

After breakfast my mother would stand me on a wooden stool in front of the basin in the bathroom, wipe the traces of porridge off my cheeks and chin with a damp towel, moisten my hair, and comb a sharp, straight side parting, then hand me a brown paper bag containing a banana, an apple, a piece of cheese, and some biscuits. And so, scrubbed, combed, and miserable, I was taken to the backyard of the fourth building to the right of ours. On the way there I had to promise to be good, to do whatever Auntie Greta said, not to make a nuisance of myself, and above all on no account to scratch the brown crust that had grown on the wound on my knee, because the crust, which is called a scab, is part of the healing process and it will soon fall off by itself, but if you touch it, heaven forbid, it might get infected and then there will be nothing for it, they'll have to give you another injection.

At her door my mother wished me and Auntie Greta a good time together and left. At once Auntie Greta took off my shoes and put me down in my socks to play nicely and quietly on a mat, in one corner of which I was awaited every morning by bricks, teaspoons, cushions, napkins, an agile felt tiger, and some dominoes, as well as a threadbare princess doll that smelled a little musty.

This inventory sufficed me for several hours of battles and of heroic deeds. The princess had been captured by a wicked wizard (the tiger), who had imprisoned her in a cave (under the piano). The teaspoons were a fleet of airplanes that were all flying in search of the princess over the sea (the mat) and beyond the mountains (cushions). The dominoes were the dreaded wolves that the wizard had scattered around the cave of the imprisoned princess.

Or the other way around: the dominoes were tanks, the napkins Arab tents, the soft doll was transformed into the English High Commissioner, the cushions were built into the walls of Jerusalem, while the teaspoons, under the command of the tiger, were promoted by me to become Hasmonean fighters or the guerrilla troops of Bar Kochba.

Halfway through the morning Auntie Greta would bring me thick, slimy raspberry juice in a heavy cup that was unlike any we had at home. Sometimes she carefully lifted the hem of her dress and sat down next to me on the mat. She made all sorts of chirruping sounds and other signs of affection that always ended in sticky, jammy kisses. Sometimes she allowed me to dabble—gently!—on the piano. If I finished up all the food Mummy had put in my paper bag, Auntie Greta would treat me to a couple of squares of chocolate or cubes of marzipan. The shutters in her apartment were always closed because of the sunlight. The windows were shut because of the flies. As for the flowery curtains, they were always kept drawn and firmly joined together, like a pair of chaste knees, for greater privacy.

Sometimes Auntie Greta would put on my shoes, put on my head a little khaki cap with a stiff peak like an English policeman's or a Hamekasher bus driver's. Then she would scrutinize me with a quizzical look, rebutton my shirt, lick her finger and scrape off the encrusted remains of chocolate or marzipan around my mouth, and put on her round straw hat, which hid half her face but accentuated the roundness of her body. When all these preparations were concluded, the two of us would go out together for a couple of hours, "to see what's going on in the wide world."