Touch The Water, Touch The Wind

Contents

Cover

About the Book

About the Author

Also by Amos Oz

Title Page

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

About the Book

As the Germans advance into Poland in 1939, Elisha Pomeranz, a Jewish mathematician and watchmaker, escapes into the wintry forest, leaving behind his beautiful, intelligent wife, Stefa. After the war, having evaded the concentration camps, they begin to build new lives – Stefa in Stalin’s Russia and Elisha in Israel, where, as they seek their reunion, another war is brewing.

About the Author

Born in Jerusalem in 1939, Amos Oz is the internationally acclaimed author of many novels and essay collections, translated into thirty languages. His novels include My Michael, Black Box, To Know a Woman, The Same Sea and most recently A Tale of Love and Darkness. He has received several international awards, including the Prix Fémina, the Israel Prize and the Frankfurt Peace Prize. He lectures at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev. He is married with two daughters and a son, and lives in Arad, Israel.

Also by Amos Oz

Fiction

My Michael

Elsewhere, Perhaps

Unto Death

The Hill of Evil Counsel

Where the Jackals Howl

A Perfect Peace

Black Box

To Know a Woman

Fima

Don’t Call it Night

Panther in the Basement

The Same Sea

A Tale of Love and Darkness

Non-Fiction

In the Land of Israel

The Slopes of Lebanon

Under this Blazing Light

Israel, Palestine & Peace

For Children

Soumchi

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Epub ISBN 9781448163212

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Published by Vintage 2004

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Amos Oz has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

First published in Great Britain in 1975 by Chatto & Windus

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Poland. Early winter. 1939.

A JEWISH SCHOOLMASTER by the name of Pomeranz had fled from the Germans and gone into hiding in the forest. He was a short man with tiny eyes and thick, vicious jaws. He looked like a spy in an American comedy.

He was a teacher of mathematics and physics in the Mickiewicz National Gymnasium in the town of M——. His spare hours were given over to some kind of theoretical research; the secrets of Nature aroused a powerful passion in him. Rumour had it that he was on the verge of producing a discovery in the field of electricity or magnetism. And above his upper lip he lovingly cultivated a thin, nervous moustache.

At first Pomeranz hid in the depths of the forest in a deserted hut which had belonged to a woodcutter named Dziobak Przywolski. This Przywolski had been killed the previous spring by the peasants. They had chopped him to death with an axe because he always walked about the forest wearing an orange pointed hat and red boots, casually performed small wonders in front of the villagers, and claimed to have been born of a virgin. Among other things he had the power of healing an aching tooth by means of spells, of seducing a young peasant girl with the help of liturgical chants, of rousing the shepherd dogs to mad barking and then calming them down with a wave of the hand, and of levitating slightly at night, if only the wind was right. He was also in the habit of belching, and of stealing chickens left and right.

One Good Friday the woodcutter boasted to the peasants that if they hit him with all their might with his axe the axe would break. So they hit him, and the axe did not break.

Pomeranz sat alone in the abandoned hut, contemplating the gradual disintegration of the roof beams, listening with strained ears to the restlessness of the forest at night, to the savage wind lashing the cowering treetops, to the whispering sadness of leaves.

He was left to himself day and night. He thought about many different things.

Far off down the forest slopes, where the undergrowth lapped at the river, German engineers dynamited all the railway bridges. Because of the murky distance and the thick moist air there was a delay, a hesitation almost, between the flash of each explosion and the low rumble of thunder. This delay, momentary though it was, gave an almost comical appearance to the whole spectacle, so that Pomeranz in his hideout was assailed by doubts. And, indeed, a few days later, on receipt of fresh orders, the same engineers reappeared, in the grip of a feverish enthusiasm, and began measuring the river and furiously rebuilding everything as it had been before; they stretched steel cables, planted concrete piles, erected a pair of twin prefabricated bridges, and restored everything to its former state.

But once again the distance and the autumn light bestowed an unreal, almost absurd, character on the frantic activity at the foot of the slope: tiny human figures, voices losing themselves among the hills, and the patient grey skyline. Time and again at evening melancholy forces landed and overran the forests and hills with dull, murky darkness.

Bread and water were provided him by an old sorceress from the village.

Terrified peasants would approach on tiptoe, occasionally depositing a roast goose at a safe distance from the hut, and vanishing instantly into the bosom of the forest. Dziobak Przywolski, the belching son of a virgin, had warned them in advance that he would soon return in another guise.

Or perhaps there were no peasants and no sorceress, and no roast geese, but Pomeranz lived there in a state of pure spirit, lacking all physical needs.

STEFA POMERANZ DID not go into hiding in the forest with her husband, but stayed behind in her home in the town of M——. She taught German thought in the same Mickiewicz Gymnasium, and even maintained a postal and telepathic correspondence with Martin Heidegger, the famous philosopher.

She was not in the least apprehensive of the Germans. In the first place, she abhorred wars, et cetera, and had no faith in them. Secondly, from the racial point of view she was only Jewish up to a point, and in outlook she was a devoted European. Moreover, she was a fully paid-up member of the Goethe Society.

Stefa stayed alone all day long in her artistically furnished little apartment, where she spent a few hours each day preparing the latest studies of Professor Zaicek for publication. Outside, disturbing things happened: Pomeranz ran away, Poland collapsed, German planes bombed the factories to the south, the railway repair sheds, and the army barracks, armoured cars streamed down Jaroslaw Avenue all night, at dawn flags were changed, and Stefa closed every single shutter in the house in disgust, and the windows too.

Long and lean on the sideboard in her study stood an African warrior carved in wood and covered in war paint. The warrior seemed poised to spring at a dainty pink nude girl in a Matisse painting on the wall opposite, threatening her night and day with his huge fierce manhood.

Two ancient Siamese cats, Chopin and Schopenhauer, kept Stefa company. They slept curled up together on the rug in front of the open fire, filling the apartment with calm and tenderness. Sometimes Stefa thought she heard Pomeranz’s slippered footsteps in the hall and his low cough, and once in the early hours of the morning her name was distinctly whispered. Here were his shaving things, here was his dressing gown, a smell of tobacco, a reminder of his silence. Everywhere there reigned an aggressive, uncompromising cleanness, shining kitchen and gleaming bathroom, tidy shelves and sparkling chandeliers. Stefa stayed alone all these days, behind her closed shutters. Gradually the apartment filled with a faint smell of perfume. From the picture rail, high above the piano and the many vases of flowers, a menacing bear’s head stared down glassy-eyed at the sleeping Siamese cats.

The bear’s expression was one of patient irony, verging on ultimate tranquillity.

Stefa was a beautiful, proud woman. From her youth on, all the local intelligentsia had wooed her with ideas and literature. Such an intelligent, artistic young lady, they had said, and now in a fit of caprice she suddenly gives herself to the dreamy son of a simple watchmaker. Such whims, they said, always die away as quickly as they are born. And the very name Pomeranz is absurdly incongruous for Stefa.

And indeed, when the Germans began to surround the town of M——, the dreamy son of a watchmaker fled alone to the forest, abandoning Stefa to her admirers, the local intelligentsia.

She hoped that he would succeed in surviving the present events and that she would see him again someday. She did not want to call her feelings by one name or another, but she sighed for him and had great faith in his powers.

Night by night the German guards made shooting sounds in the distance. The electricity was subject to frequent interruptions. The tradesmen became noticeably slacker. The dustman and postman neglected their duties. The drunken gardener, who was nicknamed by everybody ‘Run-Jesus,’ suddenly without asking permission took to living in the woodshed at the bottom of the garden, insolence and a secret menace flashing in his eyes. He grinned, flattered, spoke a lot, came and went as he pleased. And the maid, Martha Pinch-me-not, as suddenly abandoned poor Professor Zaicek, in whose house she had worked for the past seven years. She was criticized by everyone, and there were those who saw in her move a bad omen for the future. Professor Zaicek, the pride of the city, was an elderly widowed scholar, whose name was well known all over Europe. He possessed a Karl Marx face deeply scored by suffering and wisdom.

The military governor of the town, a certain Baron Joachim von Topf, issued an edict: the army was compelled to requisition the Gymnasium buildings. For the time being all classes were cancelled. The Baron saw fit to append to the edict a word of apology to the citizens: the hardships of war-time would soon be over, and before long a new order would be established.

But the difficulties increased. The streetcars stopped running, prices soared, and the ancient belfry of St Stephen’s Church – an architectural gem in Florentine style—was damaged by a stray bomb. Nightly the sound of bricks was heard clattering in the ruined church. Sometimes the falling bricks struck the bell at night, giving rise to numerous superstitious rumours. Even in the circles of the Catholic intelligentsia the view was expressed that everything was possible.

Various people, including some eminent citizens, abandoned the city. In the middle of Jaroslaw Avenue stood a burned-out streetcar, and a chestnut tree lay uprooted for several weeks. Professor Zaicek several times complained to intimate friends of an acute inflammation of the bladder. Grim and even wild rumours spread: women in the marketplace said that poor Jews, or priests, or perhaps only consumptives, were being transferred elsewhere by the authorities. The rumours were virtually impossible to trace, verify, or substantiate. In back alleys petty speculators proliferated nauseatingly. Even the library was temporarily closed.

Stefa was smitten by a secret disappointment. The war, for all its horrors and its vulgarity, had offered a certain possibility of rejuvenating Europe, of refreshing worn-out ideas, and of being a participating observer of a mighty historical event, but in fact on all sides there was nothing but drabness and pettiness. One night some drunken soldiers smashed the historic stained-glass windows of the Concert Hall. The statue of Adam Mickiewicz was defaced with a thin moustache which bore a remarkable resemblance to that of the vanished teacher of physics and mathematics; unruly soldiers, or schoolboys who had run riot in the night. On the corner of Magdalen Lane a Swabian corporal addressed Stefa in such illiterate German that she was appalled. Suddenly it dawned: time was running out. Stefa had never been very strong; she suffered from migraines in the morning.

Worst of all, postal communications with the outside world were rapidly deteriorating. The old stamps were withdrawn from circulation. Pianos were requisitioned from several houses. The new order tarried in coming. Over all, with sly tranquillity, the bear’s glass eyes looked down. And from the grocers’ shops Portuguese sardines vanished as if they had never existed.

EARLY IN 1940, with the first breaths of a bizarrely out-of-place spring, Pomeranz sallied forth from the hut in which he had hidden all through the winter and began to move from place to place. He assumed by turns the various garbs of herdsman and railwayman, peasant and priest. Gently, pensively, he glided south, southwest, and south again, a slow, almost bashful caressing movement across the dense forests. When the hunt was near he hid all day in barns on the outskirts of God-forsaken villages. At the onset of dusk he would leave his hiding-place and stand lean and erect in the darkness until he was cloaked in night, and then he would play softly on a mouth organ. The Polish air was instantly saturated with music. Pomeranz pawed the muddy ground, gathered an inner momentum, belched, sweated, leaned his elbows on the music he had discharged round about him, flailed with his arms, struggled and pulled, got the wind behind him, and finally uttered a soft grunt and wrenched himself free from the grip of gravity.

He rose and floated on the dark air, his body slack after the effort, borne high and silent over woods and meadows, over churches, huts, and fields.

So he overcame all the obstacles in his way.

He had once learned, perhaps from his wife, that time is subjective, an affection of the mind. And so he had a low opinion of it.

Even material objects, if you plumb their depths, are no more than vague images. In brief: ideas cannot be perceived, and perceptible objects can never be grasped by thought.

Ergo, nothing exists.

Germans, forests, huts, ghosts, wolves, dawn-stench of villages, haystacks, vampires, muddy streams, snowy expanses, all seemed to him a clumsy, ephemeral convergence of abstract energies. Even his own body appeared to him to be a wilful tide of transient energy.

As he passed his frostbitten fingers across his brow he suddenly seemed to touch a star. Or as he clasped his frozen legs together in the snow in the forest at night he seemed to be struggling to reconcile two opposing ideas. He learned to devour whole marrows and pumpkins and follow them with raw mushrooms.

Yet he spared the music, and for the time being refrained from reducing it to its mathematical structure. He was saving this possibility for a moment of despair, a last resort, an ultimate weapon. In the same way he dispelled the memory of his wife and his home: longing was a poisoned snare, a lethal dart. Throughout his journey he kept in his pocket a little mouth organ. He could rise in the air, soar high into the night, even discard his body, by means of a change of tune. And into his worn red boots he stuffed sackcloth against the biting cold.

Solitude and wandering trained this educated Jew to eat raw potatoes, to quench his thirst with handfuls of snow, to mislead the noses of old wolves, to plant his footprints backward in the snow to baffle all pursuit. He had the power of feeling his way, using his thoughts like radar beams, through the tangled network of forest paths. So he eluded the German guards and bands of partisans, avoided minefields and trip wires, made his circuitous way along the valleys among hostile villages, untouched by foxes, vampires, or villagers with axes. And in his tattered sleeve he carried a grubby certificate of baptism in the name of Dziobak Przywolski, son of Mary.

If suffering got the better of him, he would forget his pride and emerge at dusk from the forest darkness, aided by the long shadows and deceptive twilight, scare a solitary peasant woman and plunder a goose or some eggs or a woollen kerchief. These forest regions, cursed by damp and darkness, were unloving and unloved. Closing in on all sides, offering no escape. So he passed on from darkness to darkness as if he too were cloaked in darkness.

DAYS AND NIGHTS passed, and his foot became painfully inflamed. Melancholy overcame him, or perhaps for a moment he was carried away by longing. In one of the caves he lost his seven-league boots, or his hood of invisibility fell apart. In short, the music died away and the dreamy son of a watchmaker grew weaker and weaker until he was captured by a German patrol.

A lame, rotund major with rimless spectacles took the certificate of baptism from the prisoner and studied it so thoroughly that the writing grew faint. Then he raised a single, narrow eyebrow and ordered the short Son of Mary to be taken to the cells: the brow, the vicious eyes, the heavy jaws, his smell, and that insolent moustache, the expression of a spy in a comic film, and on top of all the torn robe of an itinerant priest, everything about him was obviously suspicious. Furthermore, the boredom and the fleas were playing havoc with the major and his men.

The cell was nothing more than the filthy cellar of an abandoned monastery or seminary: crosses and obscene drawings covered the walls. And the cold was piercing and tormenting.

Pomeranz suddenly recalled a conversation which had taken place years before. Stefa had taken him to the Philosophical Soirée of the Goethe Society. The intelligentsia of the town of M—— were involved in a discussion of political vis-à-vis metaphysical wrong. Bright, bespectacled young men, all of them thin, gazed covertly at Stefa’s legs, then at her plain, silent husband, and back again at her long-lashed eyes. Dream-stricken Stefa. When the first exchange of witticisms had died down, Professor Zaicek spoke about conflicting ideas and their universal tendency to circularity. His Karl Marx face silently radiated, as always, an agonized wisdom, and his voice when he spoke was tender and tired. Eventually they drank tea and nibbled cakes, and in the small hours of the morning they beguiled Stefa into playing some sad études, while they all gazed at her waist with moist eyes.

In the afternoon Pomeranz was brought up out of the cellar and interrogated tediously and offhandedly: where, when, why, what he had seen, about the potato crop in the Poznan region and the fish in the Vistula. In the middle of the interrogation they lost interest in him; three corporals came into the room and some others arrived and they started to play cards and left Dziobak Przywolski alone till the telephone was mended or Reutenberg came and decided or something.

But he did not leave his captors alone.

Those Germans turned out to be coarse men.

In vain did he try to discern in them even a spark of dark demonic fire: hour after hour they played cards, swore, shot with their submachine guns at a bottle on the gutter of the roof, fried pork in pork fat all night long.

This prisoner, for his part, never stopped talking to all of them. He tried to entertain them and to win their sympathy; he tried to make them laugh, to play his mouth organ for them, even to start an argument. By means of conflicting ideas tending to circularity he attempted to establish some kind of fundamental agreement wih his jailors. After all, both he and they were part of the same perpetual structure, and without either side the structure could never materialize.

They were delighted. The spate of high-flown, unintelligible words revived in some of them childhood memories which were vague but strangely sweet. First they gave him beer mixed with salt to drink. This amused them and gave rise to fresh witticisms. They had the idea of dusting him with sneezing powder so as to make him sneeze more and more until he could not stop. Then, slobbering and slurping as they gorged themselves on pork fried in pork fat, they threw crusts of bread at him and feigned innocence. There was great merriment.

There was a babyface among them, pure, pink, and pathetic, who coaxed and implored the guest to turn water into wine, wine into fire, fire into water. And another, a gloomy corporal, a diligent, dedicated schoolboy in a uniform too big for him, looking like Young Werther, stretched out on the filthy floor and pleaded with the sneezing stranger to stop leading them into temptation, for it was too great for them, they were but weak, base matter. There were also numerous drooling drunkards, running with brotherly tears, who tended Dziobak Przywolski continuously, giving him to drink, picking out his lice, and rolling him on to his back and over on to his stomach again. The air was thick with coarse tobacco, frying fat, and stale wine. Till early morning peals of laughter re-echoed, and tears too flowed freely.

The prisoner, however, did not relax his grip on ideas all night long. He addressed them all with devotion and didactic enthusiasm, in excellent, elevated German, speaking at length with both wit and warmth, sneezing frantically, making abundant use of paradox, introducing astounding hypothetical possibilities, arresting syntheses, mathematical speculations, dialectics and more savage sneezes, he conclusively proved that he was of a virgin truly born, they might test him with axe or gun, he was dead and risen again, and sent to bring salvation, vomit and beer were baptism and prayer, atishoo amen, and he wiped their spittle from his face as he groped with words for a synthesis and in desperation even performed a few small miracles, but all in vain.

In short, he with his Germanic thought, with signs and wonders, and they for their part with pork fat.

And yet beneath their uniforms these Germans were nothing but brutish peasants, lumps of clay of Silesia or Lower Saxony, endlessly guzzling beer and staring vacantly into space: cloudy glassy bear’s eyes.

Even the lame major, a stuffed Viking with fake gold hair, was an elderly man convulsed with hiccups, who was carried away all that night with high-pitched weeping.

And the guard post itself, formerly a convent or a village seminary, was filthy enough to arouse disgust in a soul which appreciated Culture.

So it happened that Pomeranz suddenly grew tired of his captors.

With an inner shrug he completely abandoned the intellectual confrontation, the synthesis, and in his heart he took his final leave of the nauseating Germans.

Toward morning he began to belch and paw the ground. Far away in the Promised Land, All our hopes will be fulfilled. The mouth organ discharged a few sad notes and the man, dreamy and forlorn, rose into the air. Up through the chimney he floated and away into the forest: metaphysical wrong cannot be perceived, while perceptible wrong emits a powerful stench of pork fat.

STEFA TOOK PROFESSOR Zaicek into her home.

Flaxen-haired Martha, his servant, had abandoned the scholar’s house when the Germans had entered the town. And the Professor, who was adept at discovering hidden links between St Augustine and Friedrich Nietzsche, had never managed to learn to tie his own tie.

He was a lonely, helpless old man. When he bent over the grate to light the fire he covered himself with coal dust, and when he put more coal on he singed the ends of his beard. The smoke blinded him and filled his eyes with tears which buried themselves in his bushy white beard. Despite everything his close friends told him, the Professor continued to maintain the belief that Martha had left him and his house for a man, and that she would be sure to return when her love cooled down. Was that not just what had happened with Martha’s cat—she too had disappeared and come back when her time was past. Even his postal links with scattered friends all over Europe progressively deteriorated. Worst of all, the Goethe Society had ceased to function, and the Goetheans themselves seemed to have vanished into thin air.

Perhaps they had all fled to the cellars, to the forests, and only he was forgotten?

There, in their dark hideout, by candlelight, all the Goetheans would be meeting every night and holding whispered conferences. They would draw up a sensational document which would instantly bring the world back to its senses. Germany herself would open her eyes and be smitten with shame. And meanwhile Stefa came; the drunken gardener, Run-Jesus, piled several suitcases, bags, files of documents, photographs and woollen underwear on a small handcart, and that night the Professor was taken into Stefa’s house. Times were not easy.