Amos Oz - Black Box

First Mariner Books edition 2012

Copyright 1987 by Amos Oz and Am Oved Publishers, Ltd., Tel Aviv

English translation copyright 1988 by Nicholas de Lange

Originally published in Hebrew as Kufsah shehora.

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhbooks.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Oz, Amos.

[Kufsah shehorah. English]

Black box / Amos Oz; translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange in collaboration with the author.

p. cm.

Translation of: Kufsah shehorah.

ISBN 978-0-547-74759-0 (pbk.)

I. Title.

PJ5054.O9K8413 2012

892.4'36dc23 2012005735

eISBN 978-0-547-75199-3
v1.1012

I am grateful to William Jovanovich and the Colorado College community for providing me with a peaceful year in which I could write the major part of this novel.

But you, you knew the night is still and silent,
And I alone remain alert and brood.
I am the only victim of your weeping:
The beast has fixed his eye on me to be his only food.

At times I shudder suddenly and tremble,
I wander, lost, and panic drives me wild:
I hear you calling me from all directions,
I feel like a blind man being tormented by a child.

But you, you hid your face. You did not stop me,
With pigeons blood and darkness in your tears,
Entangled in the dark, remotely sobbing,
Where memory or sense or understanding disappears.

From Weeping by Natan Alterman

Dr. Alexander A. Gideon

Political Science Department

Midwest University

Chicago, Ill., U.S.A.

Jerusalem
5.2.76

Dear Alec,

If you didnt destroy this letter the moment you recognized my handwriting on the envelope, it shows that curiosity is stronger than hatred. Or else that your hatred needs fresh fuel.

Now you are going pale, clenching your wolfish jaws in that special way of yours, so that your lips disappear, and storming down these lines to find out what I want from you, what I dare to want from you, after seven years of total silence between us.

What I want is that you should know that Boaz is in a bad way. And that you should help him urgently. My husband and I cant do anything, because Boaz has broken off all contact. Like you.

Now you can stop reading, and throw this letter straight on the fire. (For some reason I always imagine you in a long, book-lined room, sitting alone at a black desk, with white snow-covered plains stretching away beyond the window opposite. Plains without hill or tree, dazzling arid snow. And a fire blazing in the fireplace on your left, and an empty glass, and an empty bottle on the empty desk in front of you. The whole image is in black and white. You too: monkish, ascetic, haughty, and all in black and white.)

Now you crumple up the letter, humming in a British sort of way, and shoot it accurately onto the fire: what do you care about Boaz? And, in any case, you dont believe a word Im saying. Here you fix your grey eyes on the flickering fire and say to yourself: Shes trying to pull a fast one again. That female wont ever give up or let be.

Why then am I writing to you?

In despair, Alec. Of course, when it comes to despair, youre a world authority. (Yes, naturally, I readlike everybody elseyour book The Desperate Violence: A Study in Comparative Fanaticism.) But what I am talking about now is not your book but the substance of which your soul is fashioned: frozen despair. Arctic despair.

Are you still reading? Feeding your hatred of us? Tasting schadenfreude like expensive whisky, in small sips? If so, Id better stop teasing you, and concentrate on Boaz.

The plain fact is that I havent the faintest idea how much you know. I shouldnt be the least bit surprised if it turned out that you knew every detail, that you have instructed your lawyer, Zakheim, to send you monthly reports about our lives, that youve been keeping us on your radar screen all these years. On the other hand, I wouldnt be astonished to discover that you dont know anything at all: neither that Ive married a man called Michael (Michel-Henri) Sommo, nor that Ive had a daughter, nor whats become of Boaz. It would be just like you to turn your back with one brutal gesture and cut us once and for all out of your new life.

After you kicked us out, I took Boaz and we went to stay with my sister and her husband in their kibbutz. (We didnt have anywhere else to go, and we didnt have any money, either.) I lived there for six months and then I came back to Jerusalem. I worked in a bookshop. Meanwhile Boaz stayed in the kibbutz for another five years, until he was thirteen. I used to go and see him every three weeks. Thats how it was until I married Michel, and ever since then the boy has called me a whore. Just like you. He didnt come to see us once in Jerusalem. When we told him our daughter (Madeleine Yifat) was born, he slammed the phone down.

Then two years ago he suddenly turned up one winters night at one oclock in the morning to inform me that he was through with the kibbutz, and either I send him to an agricultural high school or hell go and live on the streets and thatll be the last Ill hear from him.

My husband woke up and told him to get out of his wet clothes, eat something, have a good wash, and go to bed, and tomorrow morning wed talk. And the boy (even then, at thirteen and a half, he was a good bit taller and broader than Michel) replied, as though he were crushing an insect underfoot, And who are you, anyway? Who asked you? Michel chuckled and answered, I suggest you step outside, chum, calm down, change the cassette, knock on the door, and come in all over again, and this time try to act like a human being instead of a gorilla.

Boaz turned toward the door. But I put myself between him and the doorway. I knew he wouldnt touch me. The baby woke up and started crying, and Michel went off to change her and warm some milk for her in the kitchen. I said, All right, Boaz. You can go to agricultural school if thats what you really want. Michel, standing there in his underwear holding the baby, who was quiet, added, Only on condition you say sorry to your mother and ask nicely and then say thank you. What are you, anyway, a horse? And Boaz, his face contorted with that desperate loathing and contempt hes inherited from you, whispered to me, And you let that thing fuck you every night? and immediately afterward he stretched his hand out and touched my hair and said, in a different voice, which wrings my heart when I remember it, But your babys quite pretty.

Then (thanks to the influence of Michels brother) we got Boaz into Telamim Agricultural High School. That was two years ago, at the beginning of 1974, not long after the war that youso I was toldcame back from America to take part in as commander of a tank battalion in the Sinai, before running off again. We even gave in to his request not to go and visit him. We paid the fees and kept quiet. That is to say, Michel paid. Well not exactly Michel, either.

We did not receive so much as a single postcard from Boaz during these two years. Only alarms from the headmistress. The boy is violent. The boy got in a quarrel and smashed open the night watchmans head. The boy disappears at night. The boy has a police record. The boy has been put on probation. The boy will have to leave the school. This boy is a monster.

And what do you remember, Alec? The last thing you saw was a creature of eight, long and thin and sandy, like a cornstalk, standing silently for hours on end on a stool, leaning on your desk, concentrating, making model airplanes out of balsa for you from do-it-yourself booklets you brought hima careful, disciplined, almost timid child, although even then, at the age of eight, he was capable of overcoming humiliations with a kind of silent, controlled determination. And in the meantime, like a genetic time bomb, Boaz is now sixteen, six foot three and still growing, a bitter, wild boy whose hatred and loneliness have invested him with astonishing physical strength. And this morning the thing that I have been expecting for a long time finally happened: an urgent telephone call. They have decided to throw him out of the boarding school, because he assaulted one of the women teachers. They declined to give me the details.