Free A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz Page B

round face smiling at you in welcome. She was always the first to ask how you were, and usually didn't wait for your answer but launched straight into news of our dear Joseph, who hadn't slept a wink again all night, or whose stomach was back to normal again after protracted problems, or who had just had a wonderful letter from a very famous professor in Pennsylvania, or whose gallstones were tormenting him again, or who had to finish an important long article by tomorrow for Ravidovitch's
Metsuda,
or who had decided to ignore yet another insult from Eisig Silberschlag, or who had finally decided to deliver a crushing response to the abuse issuing from one of those leaders of the Brit Shalom gang.
    After this news bulletin Aunt Zippora would smile sweetly and lead us into the presence of the uncle himself.
    "Joseph is waiting for you in his drawing room," she would announce with a peal of laughter, or "Joseph is in the living room already, with Mr. Krupnik and the Netanyahus and Mr. Jonitchman and the Schochtmans, and there are some more honored guests on their way." And sometimes she said: "He's been cooped up in his study since six
o'clock this morning, I've even had to take him his meals there, but no matter, no matter, just you come straight through, do come along, he'll be glad, he's always so glad to see you, and I'll be glad too, it's better for him to stop working for a while, to take a little break, he is ruining his health! He doesn't spare himself at all!"

    Two doors opened off the entrance hall: one, a glass door whose panes were decorated with flowers and festoons, led to the living room, which also served as a dining room; the other, a heavy, somber door, led us into the professor's study, sometimes known as the "library."
    Uncle Joseph's study seemed to me the antechamber to some palace of wisdom. There are more than twenty-five thousand volumes, Father once whispered to me, in your uncle's private library, among them priceless old tomes, manuscripts of our greatest writers and poets, first editions inscribed to him personally, volumes that were smuggled out of Soviet Odessa by all sorts of devious subterfuges, valuable collectors' items, sacred and secular works, virtually the whole of Jewish literature and a good deal of world literature as well, books that Uncle bought in Odessa or acquired in Heidelberg, books that he discovered in Lausanne or found in Berlin or Warsaw, books he ordered from America and books the like of which exist nowhere but in the Vatican Library, in Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, classical and modern Greek, Sanskrit, Latin, medieval Arabic, Russian, English, German, Spanish, Polish, French, Italian, and languages and dialects I had never even heard of, like Ugaritic and Slovene, Maltese and Old Church Slavonic.
    There was something severe and ascetic about the library, about the straight black lines of the dozens of bookshelves extending from the floor to the high ceiling and even over the doorways and windows, a sort of silent, stern grandeur that brooked no levity or frivolity and compelled all of us, even Uncle Joseph himself, always to speak in a whisper here.
    The smell of my uncle's enormous library would accompany me all the days of my life: the dusty, enticing odor of seven hidden wisdoms, the smell of a silent, secluded life devoted to scholarship, the life of a secretive hermit, the severe silence of ghosts billowing up from the deepest wells of knowledge, the whisper of dead sages, outpourings of secret
thoughts of long-buried authors, the cold caress of the desires of preceding generations.
    From the study too, through three tall, narrow windows, could be seen the gloomy, rather overgrown garden, immediately beyond whose wall began the desolation of the Judaean desert and the rocky slopes that cascaded down toward the Dead Sea. The garden was hemmed in by tall cypresses and whispering pines, among which stood occasional oleanders, weeds, unpruned rose bushes, dusty thujas,