Free Soumchi by Amos Oz Page B

loudly in a voice that mooed and brayed and broke,
    "
Oh, show me the way to go home....
"
    At which they would whisper together, very worried and in Yiddish so that I wouldn't understand, but always with the word
meshuggener,
which I knew meant madman. But though they said this of Uncle Zemach, he struck me rather—when he burst out with this song or any other—as not at all a mad man, but simply very sad.
    And sometimes he wasn't sad either. Not at all: quite the reverse, he'd be joyous and funny. For instance, he would sit with my parents and my unmarried Aunt Edna on our balcony at dusk and discuss matters which ought not under any circumstances to have been discussed in front of children.
    Bargains and profits, building lots and swindles, shares and lirot, * scandals and adulteries in Bohemian circles. Sometimes, until they silenced him furiously, he used dirty language, "Quiet, Wetmark," they would say, "what's the matter with you, are you crazy, have you gone completely out of your mind? The boy's listening to everything and he's no baby any more."
    And the presents he would bring me. He kept on thinking up the most amazing, even outrageous, presents. Once, he brought me a Chinese stamp album that twittered when you opened it. Once, a game like Monopoly, only in Turkish. Once, a black pistol that squirted water in your enemy's face. And once he brought me a little aquarium with a pair of live fish swimming about in it, except they were not a pair, as it turned out, but both indubitably male. Another time, he brought me a dart gun ("Are you out of your mind, Wetmark? The boy's going to put someone's eye out with that thing, God forbid"). And one winter weekend I got from Uncle Zemach a Nazi bank note—no other boy in our neighborhood had anything like it ("Now, Wetmark, this time you have really gone too far"). And, on Seder night, he presented me with six white mice in a cage ("So what else are you going to bring the boy? Snakes? Bedbugs? Cockroaches, perhaps?").
    This time, Uncle Zemach marked the feast of Shavuot by riding alt the way from the Egged bus station in the Jaffa Road to the courtyard of our house on a second-hand Raleigh bicycle, complete with every accessory: it had a bell, also a lamp, also a carrier, also a reflector at the back; all it lacked was the crossbar joining the saddle to the handlebars. But, in my first overwhelming joy, I overlooked just how grave a shortcoming that was.
    Mother said: "Really, this is excessive, Zemach. The boy is still only eleven. What are you proposing to give him for his Bar Mitzva?"
    "A camel," said Uncle Zemach at once, and with an air of such total indifference, he might have prepared himself for this very question all along.
    Father said: "Would it be worth your considering at least once the effects on his education? Seriously, Zemach, where's it all leading to?"
    I did not wait for Uncle Zemach's reply. Nor did it matter to me in the least where things were leading. Crazy with pride and joy, I was galloping my bicycle to my private place behind the house. And there, where no one could see me, I kissed its handlebars, then kissed the back of my own hands again and again and, in a whisper as loud as a shout, chanted: "Lord God Almighty, Lord God Almighty, LORD GOD ALMIGHTY." And, afterwards, in a deep, wild groan that broke from the depths of my being: "HI—MA—LA—YA."
    And after that, I leaned the bicycle against a tree and leaped high into the air. It was only when I calmed down a little that I noticed Father. He stood in a window above my head and watched in unbroken silence until I had quite finished. Then he said:
    "All right. So be it. All I beg is that we should make a little agreement between us. You may ride your new bicycle for up to an hour and a half each day. No more. You'll ride always on the right-hand side, whether there is traffic in the street or not. And you will remain always, exclusively, within the boundaries set by the