A Tale of Love and Darkness (72 page)

Even during the day the corridor was pitch black, unless you switched the light on. In the black my mother floated to and fro, unvaryingly, for half an hour or an hour, as prisoners walk around their prison yard. And sometimes she began to sing, as though to compete with my father, but with far fewer wrong notes. Her singing voice was dark and warm, like the taste of mulled wine on a winter evening. She did not sing in Hebrew, but in sweet-sounding Russian, in dreamy Polish, or occasionally in Yiddish, with a sound like choked tears.

On the nights when he went out, my father always kept his promise and came back before midnight. I could hear him undressing down to
his underwear, then making himself a glass of tea, sitting on a stool in the kitchen and humming quietly to himself as he dunked a biscuit in his sweet tea. Then he would take a cold shower (to get hot water, you had to heat the boiler three-quarters of an hour beforehand with wood that you had to sprinkle with paraffin first). Then he would come into my room on tiptoe to make sure I was asleep and to straighten my bedclothes. Only then did he tiptoe to their room. Sometimes I could hear the two of them talking in low voices until I fell asleep at last. And sometimes there was total silence as though there was no living being there.

Father began to fear that he himself was responsible for my mother's insomnia, because he was in the big bed. Sometimes he insisted on putting her to bed in the sofa bed every night (when I was little, we called it the "barking sofa" because when you opened it up, it looked like the jaws of an angry dog), and he himself slept on her chair. He said it would really be better for everyone if he slept on the chair and she in the bed, because he slept like a log wherever he was put, "even on a hot griddle." In fact, he would sleep much better on the chair knowing that she was sleeping in the bed, than he would in the bed knowing that she was awake for hours on end on the chair.

One night, toward midnight, the door of my room opened silently and Father's silhouette bent over me in the dark. As usual, I hastily feigned sleep. Instead of straightening my bedclothes, he lifted them and got into bed with me. Like that time. Like on November 29, after the vote for the creation of the state, when my hand saw his tears. I was terrified and hastily drew my knees up and pressed them hard against my stomach, hoping and praying that he would not notice what it was that had stopped me getting to sleep: if he did, I would die on the spot. My blood froze when Father got into bed with me, and I was in such a panic not to be caught out being filthy, that it was quite a while before I realized, as though in a nightmare, that the silhouette that had slipped into bed with me was not my father's.

She pulled the covers up over both our heads and cuddled me, and whispered, Don't wake up.

And in the morning she was not there. The next night she came to my room again, but this time she brought one of the two mattresses from the "barking sofa" with her and slept on the floor at the foot of my bed. The following night I firmly insisted, doing my best to imitate my father's authoritative manner, that she should sleep in my bed and I would sleep on the mattress at her feet.

It was as if we were all playing an improved version of musical chairs called musical beds. First round: normal—both my parents in their double bed and me in my bed. Then in the next round Mother slept in her chair, Father on the sofa, and I was still in my bed. In the third round Mother and I were in my single bed while Father was alone in the double bed. In the fourth round my father was unchanged and I was alone again in my bed and my mother on the mattress at my feet. Then she and I swapped over, she went up, I went down, and Father stayed where he was.

But we weren't finished yet.

Because after a few nights when I slept on the mattress in my room at my mother's feet, she frightened me in the middle of the night with broken sounds that were almost but not quite like coughing. Then she calmed down, and I went back to sleep. But a night or two later I was woken again by her coughs that weren't coughs. I got up, with my eyes stuck together, went down the corridor in a daze with my blanket wrapped around me, and climbed in with my father into the double bed. I fell asleep again at once. And I slept there the following nights, too.

Almost to her last days my mother slept in my room, in my bed, and I slept with my father. After a couple of days all her tablets and bottles of medicine and tranquilizers and migraine pills moved to her new place.

We did not exchange a word about the new sleeping arrangements. None of us mentioned them. It was as if it had happened all by itself.

And it really had. Without any family decision. Without a word.

But the week before the last one Mother did not spend the night in my bed but returned to her chair by the window, except that the chair was moved from our room—mine and Father's—to my room, which had become her room.

Even when it was all over, I did not want to go back to that room. I wanted to stay with my father. And when I did eventually return to my old room, I couldn't get to sleep: it was as if she were still there. Smiling at me without a smile. Coughing without a cough. Or as if she had bequeathed me the insomnia that had pursued her to the end and was now pursuing me. The night I went back to my own bed was so terrifying
that the following nights my father had to drag one of the mattresses from the "barking sofa" to my room and sleep there with me. For a week or maybe two he slept at the foot of my bed. After that he went back to his place, and she, or her insomnia, followed him.

It was as though a great whirlpool had swept us up, thrown us together and apart, hurled us around and around and jumbled us up, until each of us was thrown up on a shore that was not our own. And we were all so tired that we silently accepted the move. Because we were very tired. It was not only my mother and father who had dark half moons under their eyes: in those weeks I saw them under my eyes, too, in the mirror.

We were bound and stuck together that autumn like three prisoners sharing the same cell. Yet each of us was on his or her own. For what could my parents know about the sordidness of my nights? The filthi-ness of my cruel body? How could my parents know that I warned myself over and over again, with my teeth clenched in shame, If you don't give that up, if you don't stop it tonight, then I swear by my life that I'll swallow all Mother's pills and that'll be the end of it.

My parents suspected nothing. A thousand light-years divided us. Not light-years: dark years.

But what did I know about what they were going through?

And how about the two of them? What did my father know about her ordeal? What did my mother understand about his suffering?

A thousand dark years separated everyone. Even three prisoners in a cell. Even that day in Tel Arza, that Saturday morning when Mother sat with her back against the tree and my father and I laid our heads on her knees, one head on each knee, and Mother stroked us both, even at that moment, which is the most precious moment of my childhood, a thousand lightless years separated us.

IN THE COLLECTED
poems of Jabotinsky, after "With blood and sweat we'll raise a race," "Two banks has the Jordan," and "From the day I was called to the wonder / of Beitar, Zion, and Sinai," came his melodic translations from world poetry, including Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" and "Annabel Lee," Edmond Rostand's "The Princess Faraway," and Paul Verlaine's heartrending "Autumn Song."

Very soon I knew all these poems by heart and walked around all day drunk on the romantic anguish and macabre torments that enveloped them.

Side by side with the militaristic patriotic verses that I composed in the splendid black notebook that was a present from Uncle Joseph, I started to write poems of Weltschmerz as well, full of storm, forest, and sea. And some love poems too, before I even knew what was what. Or didn't know but vainly tried to find some accommodation between the westerns in which whoever slew the most Indians won the pretty girl as the prize and the tearful vows of Annabel Lee and her partner and their love beyond the grave. It was not easy to reconcile them. And much harder still to make some sort of peace between all of this and the school nurse's labyrinth of sheaths-eggs-and-Fallopian-tubes. And the nocturnal filth that tormented me so mercilessly that I wanted to die. Or to go back to being as I had been before I fell into the clutches of those jeering night hags: night after night I resolved to kill them off once and for all, and night after night those Scheherazades revealed to my startled gaze such uninhibited plots that all day long I waited impatiently to be in bed at night. Sometimes I could not wait and locked myself in the smelly toilets in the playground at Tachkemoni or our bathroom at home and emerged a few minutes later with my tail between my legs and as wretched as a rag.

The love of girls and everything associated with it seemed to me to be a catastrophe, a terrible trap from which there was no way out: you start out floating dreamily into an enchanted crystal palace, and you wake up immersed up to here in a cesspool.

I ran away and sought refuge in the fortress of sanity of books of mystery, adventure, and battle: Jules Verne, Karl May, James Fenimore Cooper, Mayne Reid, Sherlock Holmes,
The Three Musketeers, Captain Hatteras, Montezuma's Daughter, The Prisoner of Zenda, With Fire and Sword
, De Amicis's
The Heart of a Boy, Treasure Island, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, Through the Desert and Jungle, The Gold ofCaxa-malca, The Mysterious Island, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Last of the Mohicans, The Children of Captain Grant
, the darkest recesses of Africa, grenadiers and Indians, wrongdoers, cavalrymen, cattle thieves, robbers, cowboys, pirates, archipelagos, hordes of bloodthirsty natives in feathered headdresses and war paint, blood-chilling battle cries, magical
spells, knights of the dragon and Saracen horsemen with curved scimitars, monsters, wizards, emperors, bad guys, hauntings, and especially stories about pale little adolescents who are destined for great things when they have managed to overcome their own wretchedness. I wanted to be like them and I wanted to be able to write like the people who wrote them. Perhaps I did not make a distinction yet between writing and winning.

Jules Verne's
Michael Strogoff
imprinted something on me that is with me to this day. The Russian tsar has sent Strogoff on a secret mission to take a fateful message to the beleaguered Russian forces in remotest Siberia. On the way he has to cross regions that are under Tartar control. Michael Strogoff is captured by Tartar guards and taken to their leader, the Great Khan, who orders his eyes to be put out by being touched with a white-hot sword, so that he will be unable to continue with his mission to Siberia. Strogoff has memorized the fateful message, but how can he slip through the Tartar ranks and reach Siberia if he cannot see? Even after the glowing iron touches his eyes, the faithful messenger continues to grope his way blindly eastward, until at a crucial moment in the plot it is revealed to the reader that he has not lost his sight after all: the white-hot sword as it approached his eyes was cooled by his tears! Because at the crucial moment Michael Strogoff thought of his beloved family whom he would never see again, and the thought filled his eyes with tears, which cooled the blade and saved his sight as well as his fateful mission, which is crowned with success and leads to the victory of his country over all its foes.

So it was Strogoff's tears that saved him and the whole of Russia. But where I lived, men were not allowed to shed tears! Tears were shameful! Only women and children were permitted to weep. Even when I was five, I was ashamed of crying, and at the age of eight or nine I learned to suppress it so as to be admitted to the ranks of men. That is why I was so astonished on the night of November 29 when my left hand in the dark encountered my father's wet cheek. That is why I never talked about it, either to Father himself or to any other living soul. And now here was Michael Strogoff, a flawless hero, a man of iron who could endure any hardship or torture, and yet when he suddenly
thinks of love, he shows no restraint: he weeps. Michael Strogoff does not weep from fear, or from pain, but because of the intensity of his feelings.

Moreover, Michael Strogoff's crying does not demote him to the rank of a miserable wretch or a woman or a wreck of a man; it is acceptable both to the author, Jules Verne, and to the reader. And as if it were not enough that it is suddenly acceptable for a man to weep, both he and the whole of Russia are saved by his tears. And so this manliest of men defeats all his foes thanks to his "feminine side," which rose up from the depths of his soul at the crucial moment, without impairing or weakening his "masculine side" (as they brainwashed us to say in those days): on the contrary, it complemented it and made peace with it. So perhaps there was an honorable way out of the choice that tormented me in those days, the choice between emotion and manliness? (A dozen years later, Hannah in
My Michael
would also be fascinated by the character of Michael Strogoff.)

And then there was Captain Nemo in
Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea
, who detested exploitative regimes and the oppression of nations and individuals by heartless bullies and selfish powers. He had a hatred for the arrogant condescension of the northwestern countries that is reminiscent of Edward Said, if not Franz Fanon, so he decided to dissociate himself from all of it and to create a little utopia under the ocean.

This apparently aroused in me, among other things, a throb of Zionist responsiveness. The world always persecuted us and treated us unjustly: that was why we had retreated sideways, to create our own little independent bubble where we could live "a life of purity and freedom," far from the cruelty of our persecutors. But, like Captain Nemo, we would not go on being helpless victims but by the power of our creative genius we would arm our own
Nautilus
with sophisticated death rays. No one would ever dare to plot against us again. Our long arm would reach to the end of the world if necessary.