A Tale of Love and Darkness (44 page)

Clothes, objects, hairdos, and furniture interested my mother only as peepholes through which she could peer into people's inner lives. Whenever we went into someone's home, or even a waiting room, my mother would always sit up straight in a corner, with her hands folded across her chest like a model pupil in a boarding school for young ladies, and stare carefully, unhurriedly, at the curtains, the upholstery, the pictures on the walls, the books, the china, the objects displayed on the shelves, like a detective amassing details, some of which might eventually combine to yield a clue.

Other people's secrets fascinated her, but not on the level of gossip—who fancied whom, who was going out with whom, who had bought what. She was like someone studying the placing of tiles in a mosaic or of the pieces in a huge jigsaw puzzle. She listened attentively to conversations, and with that faint smile hovering unawares on her lips she would observe the speaker carefully, watching the mouth, the wrinkles on the face, what the hands were doing, what the body was saying or trying to hide, where the eyes were looking, any change of position, and whether the feet were restless or still inside the shoes. She rarely contributed to the conversation, but if she came out of her silence and spoke a sentence or two, the conversation usually did not go back to being as it was before she intervened.

Maybe it was that in those days women were allotted the role of the audience in conversations. If a woman suddenly opened her mouth and said a sentence or two, it caused some surprise.

Now and then my mother gave private lessons. Occasionally she went to a lecture or a literary reading. Most of the time, though, she stayed at home. She did not sit around, but worked hard. She worked silently and efficiently. I never heard her humming or grumbling while she was doing the housework. She cooked, baked, did the washing, put the shopping away, ironed, cleaned, tidied, washed the dishes, sliced vegetables, kneaded dough. But when the apartment was perfectly tidy, the washing up was done, and the laundry had been folded and put away neatly, then my mother curled up in her corner and read. At ease with her body, breathing slowly and gently, she sat on the sofa and read. With her bare feet tucked under her legs, she read. Bent over the book that was propped on her knees, she read. Her back curved, her neck bent forward, her shoulders drooping, her whole body shaped like a crescent moon, she read. With her face, half hidden by her dark hair, leaning over the page, she read.

She read every evening, while I played outside in the yard and my father sat at his desk writing his research on cramped index cards, and she also read after the supper things were washed up, she read while my father and I sat together at his desk, my head slanting, lightly resting on his shoulder, while we sorted stamps, checked them in the catalogue, and stuck them in the album, she read after I had gone to bed and Father had gone back to his little cards, she read after the shutters had been shut and the sofa had been turned over to reveal the double bed that was hidden inside it, and she went on reading even after the ceiling light had been switched off and my father had taken off his glasses, turned his back to her, and fallen into the sleep of well-meaning people who firmly believe that everything will turn out well, and she went on reading: she suffered from insomnia that grew worse with time, until in the last year of her life various doctors saw fit to prescribe strong pills and all sorts of sleeping potions and solutions and recommended a fortnight's real rest in a family hotel in Safed or the Health Fund sanatorium in Arza.

Consequently my father borrowed a few pounds from his parents and volunteered to look after the child and the house, and my mother really did go off alone to the sanatorium in Arza. But even there she did not stop reading; on the contrary, she read almost day and night. From morning to evening she sat in a deck chair in the pine woods on the flank of the hill and read, and in the evening she read on the lit veranda while
the other guests danced or played cards or took part in all sorts of other activities. And at night she would go down to the little sitting room next to the reception desk and read for most of the night, so as not to disturb the woman who shared her room. She read Maupassant, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Gnessin, Balzac, Flaubert, Dickens, Chamisso, Thomas Mann, Iwaszkiewicz, Knut Hamsun, Kleist, Moravia, Hermann Hesse, Mauriac, Agnon, Turgenev, as well as Somerset Maugham, Stefan Zweig, and André Maurois—she hardly took her eyes off a book for the whole of her break. When she came back to Jerusalem, she looked tired and pale, with dark shadows under her eyes, as if she had been living it up every night. When Daddy and I asked her how she had enjoyed her holiday, she smiled and said: "I haven't really thought about it."

Once, when I was seven or eight, my mother said to me, as we sat on the last seat but one on the bus to the clinic or the shoe shop, that while it was true that books could change with the years just as much as people could, the difference was that whereas people would always drop you when they could no longer get any advantage or pleasure or interest or at least a good feeling from you, a book would never abandon you. Naturally you sometimes dropped them, maybe for several years, or even forever. But they, even if you betrayed them, would never turn their backs on you: they would go on waiting for you silently and humbly on their shelf. They would wait for ten years. They wouldn't complain. One night, when you suddenly needed a book, even at three in the morning, even if it was a book you had abandoned and erased from your heart for years and years, it would never disappoint you, it would come down from its shelf and keep you company in your moment of need. It would not try to get its own back or make excuses or ask itself if it was worth its while or if you deserved it or if you still suited each other, it would come at once as soon as you asked. A book would never let you down.

What was the title of the very first book I read on my own? That is, Father read me the book in bed so often that I must have ended up knowing it by heart, word for word, and once when Father could not read
to me, I took the book to bed with me and recited the whole of it to myself, from beginning to end, pretending to read, pretending to be Father, turning the page at the precise gap between two words where Father used to turn it every night.

Next day I asked Father to follow with his finger as he read, and I followed his finger, and by the time we had done this five or six times, I could identify each word by its shape and its place in the line.

Then the moment came to surprise them both. One Saturday morning I appeared in the kitchen, still in my pajamas, and without saying a word I opened the book on the table between them, my finger pointed to each word in turn and I said the word aloud just as my finger touched it. My parents, dizzy with pride, fell into the trap, unable to imagine the enormity of the deception, both convinced that the special child had taught himself to read.

But in the end I really did teach myself. I discovered that each word had its own special shape. As though you could say, for instance, that "dog" looks like a round face, with a nose drawn in profile on one side and a pair of glasses on the other; while "eye" actually looks like a pair of eyes with the bridge of a nose between them. In this way I managed to read lines and even whole pages.

After another couple of weeks I started making friends with the letters themselves. The F of Flag looks like a flag waving at the beginning of the flag. The S of Snake looks just like a snake. Daddy and Mummy are the same at the end, but the rest is quite different: Daddy has a pair of boots in the middle with legs sticking up from them, while Mummy has a row of teeth that look like a smile.

The very first book I can remember was a picture book about a big, fat bear who was very pleased with himself, a lazy, sleepy bear that looked a bit like our Mr. Abramski, and this bear loved to lick honey even when he wasn't supposed to. He didn't just lick honey, he stuffed himself with it. The book had an unhappy ending followed by a very unhappy ending, and only after that did it come to the happy ending. The lazy bear was horribly stung by a swarm of bees, and in case that was not enough, he was punished for being so greedy by suffering from toothache, and there was a picture of him with his face all swollen, and a white cloth
tied right around his head and ending with a big knot on top, just between his ears. And the moral was written in big red letters:

IT'S NOT GOOD TO EAT TOO MUCH HONEY!

In my father's world there was no suffering that did not lead to redemption. Were the Jews miserable in the Diaspora? Well, soon the Hebrew State would be established and then everything would change for the better. Had the pencil sharpener got lost? Well, tomorrow we'd buy a new and better one. Did we have a bit of a tummy ache today? It would get better before your wedding. And as for the poor, stung bear, whose eyes looked so miserable that my own eyes filled with tears looking at him? Well, here he was on the next page healthy and happy, and he was no longer lazy because he had learned his lesson: he had made a peace treaty with the bees, to the benefit of both sides, and there was even a clause in it granting him a regular supply of honey, admittedly a reasonable, moderate amount, but forever and ever.

And so on the last page the bear looked jolly and smiling, and he was building himself a house, as though after all his exciting adventures he had decided to join the ranks of the middle class. He looked a bit like my father in a good mood: he looked as though he was about to make up a rhyme or pun, or call me Your Honorable Highness ("only in fun!").

All this more or less was written there, in a single line on the last page, and this may actually have been the first line in my life that I read not by the shapes of the words but letter by letter, the proper way, and from now on every letter would be not a picture but a different sound:

TEDDY BEAR IS VERY HAPPY!
TEDDY BEAR IS FULL OF JOY!

Except that within a week or two my hunger had turned into a feeding frenzy. My parents were unable to separate me from books, from morning till evening and beyond.

They were the ones who had pushed me to read, and now they were the sorcerer's apprentice: I was the water that couldn't be stopped. Just come and look, your son is sitting half naked on the floor in the middle of the corridor, if you please, reading. The child is hiding under the table, reading. That crazy child has locked himself in the bathroom again and
he's sitting on the toilet reading, if he hasn't fallen in, book and all, and drowned himself. The child was only pretending to fall asleep, he was actually waiting for me to leave, and after I left the room, he waited a few moments, then switched the light on without permission, and now he seems to be sitting with his back against the door so that you and I can't get in, and guess what he's doing. The child can read fluently without vowels. Do you really want to know what he's doing? Well, now the child says he'll just wait for me to finish part of the newspaper. Now we've got another newspaper addict in the house. That child didn't get out of bed the whole weekend, except to go to the toilet. And even then he took his book with him. He reads all day long, indiscriminately, stories by Asher Barash or Shoffmann, one of Pearl Buck's Chinese novels,
The Book of Jewish Traditions, The Travels of Marco Polo, The Adventures of Magellan and Vasco da Gama, Advice for the Elderly in Case of Influenza
, the
Newsletter of the Beit Hakerem District Council, The Kings of Israel and Judah, Notable Events of
1929
, pamphlets about agricultural settlement, back issues of
Working Women's Weekly
, if it goes on like this, he'll soon be eating bindings and drinking compositor's ink. We're going to have to step in and do something. We must put a stop to this: it's already becoming odd and in fact rather worrying.

THE BUILDING
down Zechariah Street had four apartments. The Nahlielis' apartment was on the first floor, at the back. Its windows overlooked a neglected backyard, partly paved and the other part overgrown with weeds in winter and thistles in summer. The yard also housed washing lines, garbage cans, traces of a bonfire, an old suitcase, a corrugated iron lean-to, and the wooden remains of a ruined sukkah. Pale blue passionflowers bloomed on the wall.

The apartment contained a kitchen, a bathroom, an entrance passage, two rooms, and eight or nine cats. After lunch Isabella, who was a teacher, and her husband Nahlieli the cashier used the first room as their living room, and at night they and their army of cats slept in the tiny second room. They got up early every morning and pushed all the furniture out into the passage and set out three or four school desks in each of the rooms, with three or four benches, each of which could seat two children.

Thus between eight a.m. and noon their home became the Children's Realm Private Elementary School.

There were two classes and two teachers at Children's Realm, which was all the small apartment could hold, with eight pupils in the first grade and another six in the second grade. Isabella Nahlieli was the proprietor of the school and served as headmistress, storekeeper, treasurer, syllabus organizer, sergeant major of discipline, school nurse, maintenance woman, cleaner, class teacher of the first grade, and responsible for all practical activities. We always called her Teacher Isabella.

She was a loud, jolly, broad woman in her forties, with a hairy mole that looked like a stray cockroach above her upper lip. She was irascible, temperamental, strict, yet overflowing with a rough warmheartedness. In her plain loose cotton-print frocks with their many pockets she looked like a thickset, sharp-eyed matchmaker from the shtetl, who could weigh your character, inside and out, with a single look of her experienced eye and a couple of well-aimed questions. In a moment she had got to the bottom of who you were, with all your secrets. While she interrogated you, her raw red hands would be fidgeting restlessly in her innumerable pockets, as though she was just about to pull out the perfect bride for you, or a hairbrush, or some nose drops, or at least a clean hankie to wipe away that embarrassing green booger on the end of your nose.