A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz Read Free Book Online

little compositions. It may be because I was an only child: I had no brothers and sisters, and very few friends, who soon tired of me because they wanted action and couldn't adjust to the epic pace of my games.
    Sometimes I would start a new game on Monday, then spend the whole of Tuesday morning at school thinking out the next move, make one or two moves that afternoon, and leave the rest for Wednesday or Thursday. My friends hated it, they went outside and played at chasing one another around the backyards, while I went on pursuing my own game of history on the floor day after day, moving troops, besieging a castle or a city, routing, taking by storm, starting a resistance movement in the mountains, attacking fortresses and defense works, liberating and then reconquering, extending or contracting frontiers marked out by matchsticks. If a grown-up accidentally trod on my little world, I would declare a hunger strike or a moratorium on teeth brushing. But eventually doomsday would come, and my mother, unable to stand the accumulation of dust, would sweep everything away, ships, armies, cities, mountains, coasts, entire continents, like a nuclear holocaust.
    Once, when I was about nine, an elderly uncle by the name of Nehemia taught me a French proverb: "In love as in war." I knew nothing at that time about love, except for the obscure connection in the Edison Cinema between love and dead Indians. But from what Uncle Nehemia had said I drew the inference that it was best not to hurry. In later years I realized that I had been totally mistaken, at least so far as warfare was concerned: on the battlefield, speed is of the essence. Perhaps my mistake came from the fact that Uncle Nehemiah himself was a slow-moving man who hated change. When he was standing up, it was almost impossible to make him sit down, and once he was seated, he could not be induced to stand up. Get up, Nehemiah, they would say to him, for goodness sake, make a move, what's the matter with you, it's very late, how long are you going to go on sitting there, till tomorrow morning, till next year, till kingdom come?
    And he would answer: At least.
    Then he would reflect, scratch himself, smile slyly to himself as though he had fathomed our ruse, and add: Where's the fire?
    His body, like all bodies, had a natural disposition to remain where it was.
    I am not like him. I'm very fond of change, encounters, travel. But I was fond of Uncle Nehemiah too. Not long ago I looked for him, without success, in Givat Shaul Cemetery. The cemetery has grown; soon it'll reach the edge of Lake Beit Neqofa or the outskirts of Motsa. I sat on a bench for half an hour or so; in the cypress trees a stubborn wasp hummed and a bird repeated the same phrase five or six times, but all I could see were gravestones, trees, hills, and clouds.
    A thin woman dressed in black with a black headscarf walked past me, with a five- or six-year-old child holding on to her. The child's little fingers were gripping the side of her dress, and both of them were crying.

4
    ALONE AT home one late winter afternoon. It was five or half past, and outside it was cold and dark, windswept rain lashed the closed iron shutters, my parents had gone to have tea with Mala and Staszek Rudnicki in Chancellor Street, on the corner of the Street of the Prophets, and would be back, they had promised me, just before eight, or at a quarter past or twenty past eight at the latest. And even if they were late, there was nothing to worry about, after all they were only at the Rudnickis', it wasn't more than a quarter of an hour away.
    Instead of children Mala and Staszek Rudnicki had two Persian cats, Chopin and Schopenhauer. There was also a cage in a corner of the salon containing an old, half-blind bird. So the bird wouldn't feel lonely they had put another bird into its cage, made by Mala Rudnicki from a painted pinecone on stick legs, with multicolored paper wings embellished with a few real feathers. Loneliness, Mother