Chapter 12 A Tale of Love and Darkness (12)

Sometimes I was left overnight at my grandparents' house.My grandma would often point to furniture or clothes or people out of the blue and say to me, "So ugly, it's almost beautiful." Sometimes she would say, "So smart, so smart, I don't know anything." Either: It hurts, it hurts, it hurts so much that I'm about to laugh. She hummed a little song to herself all day long. The song came from the place where she used to live. Obviously, there was no need to fear germs, and there was no wildness. She complained that the wildness also polluted everything here. "Like a beast!" ’ she suddenly hissed in disgust for no apparent reason, nothing provocative or anything, not bothering herself to explain to us who she was comparing to a beast. Even at night I sat on a park bench, sitting Beside her, no one else to be seen in the park, the breeze gently touching the treetops, perhaps trembling with unreal touches with invisible fingertips, Grandma would burst out, full of disgust, in a trembling, shocked, furious voice:" That's true! How could it be! Worse than a beast. After a while, she hummed softly the tune I was not familiar with. She always hummed to herself, in the kitchen, in front of the mirror, on the deck chair on the balcony, even at night. Sometimes, after I took a shower, After I brushed my teeth and picked out my ears with an orange stick wrapped in cotton balls, I was put on her big bed. (Before I was born, my grandma threw away or evicted the double bed.) Grandma told me a story or two Stories, stroked my cheek, kissed my forehead, then wiped it with a little perfume-moistened handkerchief, which she always kept in her left sleeve, and wiped or crushed germs with it, then turned off the light. Even then she went on humming in the dark, or rather expelled from the depths of her heart a distant dreamlike voice, a sorrel voice, a dark and cozy voice that gradually purified into one An echo, a color, a smell, a soft roughness, a reddish-brown warm current and lukewarm amniotic fluid—all night. But all these pleasures of the night she brings you, morning first About to be brutally scrubbed off, before you've even had a glass of cocoa with skin. The sound of Grandpa thumping on the blanket woke me up from bed, and he was already engaged in a routine dawn battle with the bedding. Even your eyes Unopened, a steaming hot bath is already waiting for you, because the water has an antibacterial solution added to it, and it smells like a bathroom. There is already a toothbrush on the tub, and the ivory-colored toothpaste is curled up like a strip The white worms are already lying on the mane. Your responsibility is to soak yourself, soap yourself all over, wipe yourself with a loofah, rinse yourself with water, and then grandma comes and lifts you kneeling in the bathtub. Come out, hold your arm tight, and wipe you from head to toe, and then again, with the formidable long-haired horse brush that reminds you of the iron combs of the wicked Romans, who used iron Combs tear apart the flesh of Rabbi Akiwa and other martyrs of the Bar Kabbah uprising until the skin is red like raw meat, then Grandma makes you close your eyes tightly while she pours shampoo on your head, Beating you on the head continuously, scratching your scalp with pointed nails like Job scratching himself with tiles. She keeps explaining to you in a gloomy and nice voice that the glandular tissue of the body secretes filth and sludge during sleep , such as sticky sweat, various oil secretions, plus skin flakes, hair loss, thousands of dead cells, and many, many dirty secretions that you better not know about, you fall asleep when all this scum and effluent smears all over your body, mixes together, invites, yes, actively invites bacteria, invites BCG, invites viruses, gathers all over your body, not to mention those scientific All things that have not yet been discovered, things that cannot be seen with the strongest telescopes. And even if they can't be seen, they crawl all over you at night with countless horrible hairy legs, like the legs of cockroaches, but small. Gotta keep you from seeing, even scientists can't see, these little legs are covered with nasty bristles that crawl back into our bodies through the nose and mouth and through places I don't need to tell you climb in, especially peopleWe are in those bad places, don't take a shower, just wipe our body, it is not clean at all, instead, it just spreads the dirty secretions into thousands of small pores on our skin, getting dirtier , becoming more and more disgusting.Especially the dirt that the body secretes day and night is mixed with the external dirt that comes from touching unhygienic things, you don't know who has handled these objects before you, such as coins, newspapers, stair railings , doorknobs, even the groceries you bought, after all, when you touch these things, who knows who has sneezed on them, or even, sorry, wiped their noses, and even snotted their noses on these beautiful wrapping papers, you put them on the street. They were picked up and ended up going straight to the bed where people sleep, not to mention the bottle stoppers you picked straight out of the dumpster, let alone the corn your mom, God bless her, bought straight from whoever , that man may not have washed his hands after he unloaded, how shall we know if he is healthy? Has he ever had tuberculosis, or cholera, or typhus, or jaundice, or dysentery? Or an abscess, Or enteritis, or eczema, or psoriasis, or impetigo, or boils? He wasn't even Jewish.Do you know how many diseases there are here? How many Levantine plagues are there? I'm only talking about diseases that are known to everyone, not diseases that are not yet known to everyone and not yet discovered by medical science. For a long time, the people of the Levantine Die like flies from parasites or bacilli or microbes or microscopic worms that doctors don't even know, especially in this hot country full of flies, mosquitos, moths, ants, cockroaches, midges , and unrecognizable things, people here sweat endlessly, they are always touching or rubbing inflammation, secretions, sweat and bodily waste from another person, best your age Don't know all about all this stinking excrement, anyone can easily get someone else wet, another person can't even feel glued on in such a crowded place, one handshake is enough to get all of them wet When the disease is transmitted, there is no need to even touch it. Just by breathing the air, others can inhale all the bacteria and bacillus in ringworm, trachoma and schistosomiasis into the lungs.Sanitation here is nothing like Europe, as for hygiene, half the people here have never even heard of it, the air is filled with all kinds of Asian insects, disgusting winged flying insects straight from Arab villages Or even straight up here from Africa, who knows what weird diseases and germs and secretions they've been carrying, the Levant here is full of germs.Now you can dry yourself well, like a big kid, don't get wet anywhere, and put some talcum powder on, you know where to put it first, where to put it, don't leave it anywhere, I want you to rub some on your neck Antler cream in this tube and then put on the clothes that I put in here that your mom made for you God bless her I just ironed it on a hot iron to sanitize and sterilize everything that breeds in there Kill, do better than the laundry, then come to me in the kitchen, get your hair done, I'll get you a nice cocoa, and you have breakfast.She would mutter to herself as she left the bathroom, not in anger, but with a kind of deep sadness: "Like a brute. Even worse than a brute."

A door, paneled with frosted glass panels decorated with geometric patterns, separated Grandma's bedroom from Grandpa's small room called "Grandpa Alexander's Study."Grandpa has his own private passage here, from which he walks into the garden, outside, into the city, into freedom.In one corner of the hut stood a sofa brought from Odessa, narrow and hard like a plank, on which Grandpa slept at night.Under this sofa, seven or eight pairs of shoes are neatly lined up like recruits marching in procession, all black and shiny, like the hats collected by Grandma Shlomit, green, brown, brown Fuchsia, she kept them as prizes in a round hat box, so Grandpa Alexander liked to be in charge of the whole fleet of shoes, and he polished them to shine like crystal, some were hard and had thick soles , some with round toes, some with pointed toes, some with rough leather, some with shoelaces, some with clips, and some with buttons.Opposite the sofa stood his little desk, always tidy, with an inkwell and olive wood blotter on it.The blotter always looked to me like a tank, or a lumbering funnel boat (funnel boat), sailing to a trio of three shiny silver containers, one full of paper clips, the other of thumbtacks, The third is like a viper's nest, where rubber bands are curled up and huddled together.On the desk is a set of rectangular metal filing trays, one for incoming letters, one for outgoing letters, a third for clipped newspapers, another for city administration and bank documents, and one for the liberal movement Jerusalem Branch letters.There was also an olive wood box filled with stamps of various denominations, and express mail, registered mail, and airmail labels were placed in separate compartments.There is also a grid for envelopes, another for postcards, and behind it is a revolving silver shelf in the shape of the Eiffel Tower. It is divided into categories and contains pens and pencils of different colors, including a wonderful pencil with red and blue tips.In the corner of Grandpa’s desk, next to stacks of documents, there is always a tall black bottle filled with foreign wine, and beside it are three or four green goblets, which look like a water snake woman.Grandpa likes beauty and hates all ugly things.He liked to have an occasional sip of cherry brandy alone, to cheer up his passionate lonely soul.The world doesn't understand him.The wife doesn't understand him either.No one really knows him.His heart was always yearning for some kind of loftiness, but all conspired to cut off his wings: his wife, his friends, his business associates, everyone conspired to force him to plunge headfirst into seventy-seven, forty Nine different kinds of raising a family, cleaning, tidying up, negotiating business, and a thousand little burdens and obligations.He is even-tempered, easy to get angry, and easy to calm down.Whenever he sees any responsibility, whether family, social, or moral, he stoops to shoulder it.But then he sighs and complains about the burden, and everyone, especially Granny, takes advantage of his good temper and loads him with a thousand and one missions that have killed his poetic spark, and treats him like a servant boy handle.At that time, Grandpa Alexander worked as a business representative and clothing salesman, acting as an agent in Jerusalem for the Lodzia Textile Factory and several other respected firms.The walls of Grandpa's study were almost lined with shelves, and he kept colorful samples in small boxes on the shelves. There were fabrics, shirts, ribbed and gabardine trousers, socks, towels of all kinds, square handkerchiefs, and curtains.I can use these sample boxes, but not open them, and use them to build pagodas, forts, and protective walls.Grandpa sat on a chair with his back leaning against the desk, his legs stretched out, his pink face usually shone with kindness and contentment, and he smiled happily at me, as if the tower of boxes was getting taller and taller under my hands. It would eclipse the pyramids, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Great Wall of China.It was Grandpa Alexander who told me about the Great Wall of China, the pyramids, the gardens in the sky and the wonders of the human spirit, such as the Parthenon, the Roman Amphitheater, the Suez and Panama Canals, the Empire State Building, the Kremlin Churches, and the Venice Canal , Arc de Triomphe and Eiffel Tower.Late at night, at a desk in a lonely study, facing a goblet of cherry brandy, Grandpa Alexander is a sentimental poet who, in Russian, sprinkles poems of love, joy, passion and longing for an alienated world.