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

said, is like a hammer blow that shatters glass but hardens steel. Father treated us to a learned discourse on the etymology of the word "hammer," with all its ramifications in various languages.
    My father was fond of explaining to me all sorts of connections between words. Origins, relationships, as though words were yet another complicated family from Eastern Europe, with a multitude of second and third cousins, aunts by marriage, great-nieces, in-laws, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Even words like "aunt" or "cousin" had their own family history, their own network of relationships. Did we know, for example, that "aunt" came from the Latin
amita,
which properly denotes a father's sister, while "uncle" came from the Latin
avunculus,
which means specifically a mother's brother? The Hebrew word for uncle,
dod,
also means a lover, although I am not convinced that it was really the same word originally. You must remind me some time, Father said, to have a look in the big dictionary and check precisely where these words came from and how their use has changed over the generations. Or rather, don't remind me, go and fetch the dictionary right away and let's educate ourselves here and now, you and I, and while you're at it, take your dirty cup to the kitchen.

    In the yards and in the street the silence is so black and wide that you can hear the sound of the clouds flying low among the roofs, stroking the tops of the cypresses. A dripping faucet in the bath and a rustling or scratching sound so faint that it is barely audible, you sense it at the tips of the hairs on the back of your neck, coming from the space between the wardrobe and the wall.
    I switch on the light in my parents' room, and from my father's desk I take eight or nine paper clips, a pencil sharpener, a couple of small notebooks, a long-necked inkwell full of black ink, an eraser, and a packet of thumbtacks, and use all these to construct a new frontier kibbutz. A wall and a tower in the depth of the desert on the rug; arrange the paper clips in a semicircle, stand the pencil sharpener and eraser on either side of the tall inkwell that is my water tower, and surround the whole with a fence made of pencils and pens and fortified with thumbtacks.
    Soon there will be a raid: a gang of bloodthirsty marauders (a couple of dozen buttons) will attack the settlement from the east and south, but we will play a trick on them. We'll open the gate, let them advance into the farmyard where the blood bath will take place, the gate will be barred behind them so that they cannot escape, then I shall give the order to fire, and at that instant, from every rooftop and the top of the inkwell that serves as the water tower, the pioneers, represented by my white chessmen, will open fire, and with a few furious salvos they will wipe out the trapped enemy force, "chanting hymns of glory, singing loud the story of the slaughter gory, then I'll raise a song of praise" and promote the rush mat to serve as the Mediterranean Sea, with the bookcase standing for the coast of Europe, the sofa as Africa, the Straits of Gibraltar passing between the legs of the chair, a scattering of playing cards representing Cyprus, Sicily, and Malta, the notebooks can be aircraft carriers, the eraser and pencil sharpeners destroyers, the thumbtacks mines, and the paper clips will be submarines.

    It was cold in the apartment. Instead of putting on another pullover, as I was told to do, to save electricity, I would put on the electric heater, just for ten minutes or so. The heater had two elements, but there was an economy switch that was always set to light only one of them. The lower one. I stared at it and watched the coil begin to glow. It lit up gradually: at first you couldn't see anything, you just heard a series of crackling sounds, as when you walk on grains of sugar, and after that a pale purplish gleam appeared at either end of the element and a hint of pink began to spread toward the center,