Free Soumchi by Amos Oz

In Which Love Blossoms

    Â 
And in which facts will at last be revealed that have been kept secret to this day; love and other feelings among them.
    Â 
    Near us in Zachariah Street lived a girl called Esthie. I loved her. In the morning, sitting at the breakfast table and eating a slice of bread, I'd whisper to myself, "Esthie."
    To which my father would return; "One doesn't eat with one's mouth open."
    While, in the evenings, they'd say of me: "That crazy boy has shut himself in the bathroom again and is playing with water."
    Only I was not playing with water at all, merely filling up the hand basin and tracing her name with my finger across the waves on its surface. At night sometimes I dreamed that Esthie was pointing at me in the street, shouting, "Thief, thief!" And I would be frightened and begin to run away and she would pursue me; everyone would pursue me, Bar-Kochba Sochobolski and Goel Germanski and Aldo and Elie Weingarten, everyone, the pursuit continuing across empty lots and backyards, over fences and heaps of rusty junk, among ruins and down alleyways, until my pursuers began to grow tired and gradually to lag behind, and at last only Esthie and I would be left running all alone, reaching almost together some remote and distant spot, a woodshed, perhaps, or a washhouse on a roof, or the dark angle under the stairs of a strange house, and then the dream would become both sweet and terrible—oh, I'd awake at night sometimes and weep, almost, from shame. I wrote two love poems in the black notebook that I lost in the Tel Arza wood. Perhaps it was a good thing I lost it.
    But what did Esthie know?
    Esthie knew nothing. Or knew and wondered.
    For example; once I put my hand up in a geography lesson and stated authoritatively:
    "Lake Hula is also known as Lake Soumchi." The whole classroom of course immediately roared with loud and unruly laughter. What I had said was the truth; the exact truth in fact, it's in the encyclopedia. In spite of which, our teacher, Mr. Shitrit, got confused for a moment and interrogated me furiously: "Kindly sum up the evidence by which you support your conclusion," But the class had already erupted, was shouting and screaming from every direction:
    "Sum it up, Soumchi, sum it up, Soumchi." While Mr. Shitrit swelled like a frog, grew red in the face and roared as usual:
    "Let all flesh be silent!" And then, besides: "Not a dog shall bark!"
    After five more minutes the class had quieted down again. But, almost to the end of the eighth grade, I remained Soumchi, I've no ulterior motive in telling you all this. I simply want to stress one significant detail; a note sent to me by Esthie at the end of that same lesson, which read as follows:
    You're nuts. Why do you always have to say things that get you into trouble? Stop it!
    Only then she had folded over one comer at the bottom of the note and written in it, very small:
But it doesn't matter. E.
    So what did Esthie know?
    Esthie knew nothing, or perhaps she knew and wondered. As for me, in no circumstance would it have occurred to me to hide a love letter in her satchel as Elie Weingarten did in Nourit's, nor to send her a message via Ra'anana, our class matchmaker, like Tarzan Bamberger, also to Nourit. Quite the reverse: this is what I did; on every possible occasion I'd pull Esthie's plaits; time and again I stuck her beautiful white jumper to her chair with chewing gum.
    Why did I do it? Because. Why not? To show her. And I'd twist her two thin arms behind her back nearly as hard as I could, until she started calling me names and trying to scratch me, yet she never begged for mercy. That's what I did to Esthie. And worse besides. It was me who first nicknamed her Clementine (from the song that the English soldiers at the Schneller Barracks were spreading round Jerusalem those days: "
Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling Clementine!
"—the girls in our class, surprisingly, picked it up quite gleefully, and even at