AMOSOZ
553
ligent." And there were words that Father used without realizing that they
made Mother sad. Carpathians, for example. Or belfry. Also opera, carriage,
ballet, cornice, clock square. (What is a cornice, in fact? Or a gable? A
weather vane? A porch? What does a groom look like? Or a chancellor? A
gendarme? A bell ringer?)
According to our fixed agreement my father or mother would come to
my room at precisely ten-fifteen to make sure I had really turned my bed–
side light off. My mother would sometimes stay for five or ten minutes; she
would sit on the edge of my bed and reminisce. Once she told me how,
when she was a little girl of eight, she had sat one summer morning on the
bank of a stream in the Ukraine, next to a flour mill. The water was dotted
with ducks. She described the bend in the river where it disappeared into
the forest . That was where things that the water carried away always disap–
peared: bark from trees or fallen leaves. In the yard of the mill she found a
broken shutter painted pale blue and threw it into the stream. She imagined
that this stream, which came out of the forest and vanished into it again,
had more bends inside the forest that completed a circle. So she sat there for
two or maybe three hours, waiting for her shutter to complete the circuit
and reappear. But only ducks came back.
At school she had been taught that water always flows downhill because
such are the laws of nature and not otherwise. But surely in bygone times
people believed in different natural laws; for instance, they believed that the
earth was flat and that the sun went around the earth and that the stars were
put in the sky to watch over us. Maybe the natural laws of our own time
were also temporary laws, and would soon be replaced by new ones?
The next day she went back to the stream, but the blue shutter had not
returned. On the days that followed she would sit and wait for half an hour
or an hour on the bank of the stream, although she had worked out that the
failure of the shutter to return proved nothing: the stream might well be cir–
cular, but the shutter might be stuck in the bank somewhere. Or in shallow
water. Or it might already have floated past the mill, once or twice or even
more often, but it could have happened at night, or at mealtimes, or perhaps
it was while she was sitting waiting but at the precise moment it went past
she had been looking up at a flight of birds and had missed it. Because large
flocks of birds used to fly past in the autumn, the spring, even in summer,
with no relation to the times of migration. In fact, how could you tell how
big the circle was that the stream described before coming back to the mill?
A week? A year? Maybe more? Perhaps at that very moment, when she was
sitting on my bed telling me about the shutter, during the curfew in
Jerusalem in nineteen forty-seven, the blue shutter from her childhood was
still floating on the stream there, in the Ukraine, or in the valleys of the
Carpathian Mountains, passing laundries, fountains , cornices, and belfries.
