A Tale of Love and Darkness Read Online Free PDF

of such shame and disgrace.

    Here was another typical dilemma: should one or should one not send flowers for a birthday? And if so, what flowers? Gladioli were very expensive, but they were cultured, aristocratic, sensitive flowers, not some sort of half-wild Asiatic weed. We could pick as many anemones and cyclamen as we liked, but they were not considered suitable for sending to someone for a birthday, or for the publication of a book. Gladioli conjured up recitals, grand parties, the theater, the ballet, culture—deep, fine feelings.
    So we'd send gladioli. And hang the expense. But then the question was, wasn't seven overdoing it? And wasn't five too few? Perhaps six then? Or should we send seven after all? Hang the expense. We could surround the gladioli with a forest of asparagus fern, and get by with six. On the other hand, wasn't the whole thing outdated? Gladioli? Who on earth sends gladioli nowadays? In Galilee, do the pioneers send one another gladioli? In Tel Aviv, do people still bother with gladioli? And what are they good for anyway? They cost a fortune, and four or five days later they end up in the trash. So what shall we give instead? How about a box of chocolates? A box of chocolates? That's even more ridiculous than gladioli. Maybe the best idea would be simply to take some serviettes, or one of those sets of glass holders, curly ones made of silvery metal, with cute handles, for serving hot tea, an unostentatious gift that is both aesthetic and very practical and that won't get thrown away but will be used for many years, and each time they use them, they'll think, just for an instant, of us.

3
    EVERYWHERE YOU could discern all kinds of little emissaries of Europe, the promised land. For example, the manikins, I mean the little men who held the shutters open during the day, those little metal figures: when you wanted to close the shutters, you swiveled them around so that all night long they hung head down. The way they hung Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci at the end of the World War. It was terrible, it was scary, not the fact that they were hanged, they deserved that, but that they were hanged head down. I felt almost sorry for them, although I shouldn't: are you crazy or something? Feeling sorry for Mussolini? It's almost like feeling sorry for Hitler! But I tried an experiment, I hung upside down by my legs from a pipe attached to the wall, and after a couple of minutes all the blood rushed to my head and I felt I was going to faint. And Mussolini and his mistress were hung like that not for a couple of minutes but for three days and nights, and that was after they were killed! I thought that was an excessively cruel punishment. Even for a murderer. Even for a mistress.
    Not that I had the faintest idea what a mistress was. In those days there wasn't a single mistress in all of Jerusalem. There were "companions," "partners," "lady friends, in both senses of the word," there may even have been the odd affair. It was said, very cautiously, for instance, that Mr. Tchernianski had something going on with Mr. Lupatin's girlfriend, and I sensed with a pounding in my heart that "something going on with" was a mysterious, fateful expression that concealed something sweet and terrible and shameful. But a mistress?! That was something altogether biblical. Something larger than life. It was unimaginable. Maybe in Tel Aviv things like that existed, I thought, they always have all sorts of things that don't exist or aren't allowed here.

    I started to read almost on my own, when I was very young. What else did we have to do? The evenings were much longer then, because the earth revolved more slowly, because the galaxy was much more relaxed than it is today. The electric light was a pale yellow, and it was interrupted by the many power cuts. To this day the smell of smoky candles or a sooty paraffin lamp makes me want to read a book. By seven o'clock we were confined to our homes because of the curfew