Black Box by Amos Oz

Author:Amos Oz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2014-09-22T16:00:00+00:00

The memory of the photograph brought back to me the smell of tobacco, sadness, and vodka that always surrounded your father and his many rooms. It was like the smell of the sea and the desert that our son exhales now. Am I really your disaster? Or is it the other way around? Has disaster made its home in you and was it hopeless of me to try to bring back what could not be brought back and to put right what could never be put right?

I started to walk along the fence until I found a gap, and by bending down managed to force my way through the barbed wire. I circled the house at a distance through a thicket of wild vegetation. Again I was startled by the barking bird. Thistles as high as my shoulders pierced my clothes and my skin as I forced my way through them to reach the rear courtyard. Beside the garden shed in the shade of the twisted eucalyptus in which you built a tree house as a child I found a cracked bench. Scratched and dusty I collapsed onto it. From the house came silence. A pigeon flew in at one window and out another. A snakelike lizard darted under a heap of stones. At my feet a dung beetle struggled to push its tiny ball. The barking bird sounded a stone’s throw away but I could not see it. A pair of wasps locked in a life-or-death struggle or in furious copulation traced a winding line in the air before landing with a thud on the bench. Crash landing? Reconciliation? Fusion? I did not dare lean over them. The place seemed deserted. Had Boaz disappeared again? I was seized by panic. There was a faint smell, tinged with scents of eucalyptus. I made up my mind to rest for a few minutes longer and then to leave.

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