My Michael by Amos Oz Read Free Book Online Page B

crowd. I was alone. Women screamed. Two men appeared and carried me off in their arms. They were hidden in their flowing robes. Only their eyes showed, glinting. Their grasp was rough and painful. They dragged me down winding roads to the outskirts of the town. The place looked like the steep alleys behind the Street of the Abyssinians in the east of new Jerusalem. I was pushed down a long flight of stairs into a cellar lit by a dirty paraffin lamp. The cellar was black. I was thrown to the ground. I could feel the damp. The air was fetid. Outside I could hear muffled, crazed barking. Suddenly the twins threw off their robes. We were all three the same age. Their house stood opposite ours, across a patch of wasteland, between Katamon and Kiryat Shmuel. They had a courtyard surrounded on all sides. The house was built round the yard. Vines grew up the walls of the villa. The walls were built of the reddish stone which was popular among the richer Arabs in the southern suburbs of Jerusalem.

    I was afraid of the twins. They made fun of me. Their teeth were very white. They were dark and lithe. A pair of strong gray wolves. "Michael, Michael," I screamed, but my voice was taken from me. I was dumb. A darkness washed over me. The darkness wanted Michael to come and rescue me only at the end of the pain and the pleasure. If the twins remembered our childhood days, they gave no sign of it. Except their laughter. They leaped up and down on the floor of the cellar as if they were freezing cold. But the air was not cold. They leaped and bounced with seething energy. They effervesced. I couldn't contain my nervous, ugly laughter. Aziz was a little taller than his brother and slightly darker. He ran past me and opened a door I had not noticed. He pointed to the door and bowed a waiter's bow. I was free. I could leave. It was an awful moment. I could have left but I didn't. Then Halil uttered a low, trembling groan and closed and bolted the door. Aziz drew out of the folds of his robe a long, glinting knife. There was a gleam in his eyes. He sank down on all fours. His eyes were blazing. The whites of his eyes were dirty and bloodshot. I retreated and pressed my back against the cellar wall. The wall was filthy. A sticky, putrid moisture soaked through my clothes and touched my skin. With my last strength I screamed.
    In the morning my landlady, Mrs. Tarnopoler, came into my room to tell me that I had cried out in my sleep. If Miss Green-baum cries out in her sleep two nights before her marriage, that is surely a sign of some great trouble. In our dreams we are shown what we must do and what we are forbidden to do. In our dreams we are made to pay the price of all our misdeeds, Mrs. Tarnopoler said. If she were my mother—she had to say it even if it made me angry with her—she would not permit me suddenly to marry some man I happened to have met in the street. I might have chanced to meet someone entirely different, or no one at all! Where would it all lead? To disaster. "You people get married at the spin of a bottle, like in the Purim game. I was married by a
shadchan
who knew how to bring about what is written in heaven because he knew both the families well and he had examined carefully what the bridegroom was made of and what the bride was made of. After all, your family is what you are. Parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters. Just as the well is the water. Tonight, before you go to bed, I'll make you a glass of mint tea. It's a good remedy for a troubled soul. Your worst enemies should have such dreams before their wedding night. All this has come upon you, Miss Greenbaum, because you people get married just like the idolators in the Bible: A maiden meets a strange man without knowing what he is made of and arranges the terms with him and sets the date for her own wedding as if people were alone in the world."

    As Mrs. Tarnopoler said the word "maiden" she smiled a worn-out smile. I did not speak.

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