From a Sealed Room

by Rachel Kadish

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One

  1

  Part Two

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  Part Three

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  Part Four

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  Part Five

  17

  18

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  First Mariner Books edition 2006

  Copyright © 1998 by Rachel Kadish

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhbooks.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Kadish, Rachel

  From a sealed room / Rachel Kadish.—Ist Mariner books ed.

  p. cm

  “A Mariner book.”

  ISBN-13. 978-0-618-56241-1 (pbk.)

  ISBN-10. 0-618-56241-9 (pbk.)

  1. Women—Jerusalem—Fiction. 2. Americans—Jerusalem—Fiction. 3 Jerusalem—Fiction. 4. Jewish fiction. I. Title.

  PS3561.A358F7 2006

  81'.54—dc22 2006016624

  eISBN 978-0-547-58668-7

  v4.0219

  A portion of this novel appeared, in different form, in Bomb.

  The quotation of Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi on page v is from Rodger Kamenetz’s The Jew in the Lotus.

  Excerpt from “The Last Summer,” copyright © 1995, reprinted with permission of Max Gat-Mor.

  They say not a blade of grass grows without

  an angel saying, “Grow, grow, grow.”

  —Talmudic teaching, as rendered by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi

  I cannot adequately express my gratitude to the angels who urged the growth of this book and of its author. Much of the novel was written in rich communities of family, friends, teachers, and fellow writers; their faith and encouragement made all the difference.

  I am grateful to the Corporation of Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony for the precious gift of time; to the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and the Barbar Deming Memorial Fund for their support; and to the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute, for a life-changing year.

  I owe a debt to my cousin Yaron Galai, who patiently answered not only the questions I asked, but those I did not know enough to ask.

  My thanks as well to Faith Sale, Aimée Taub, and Anna Jardine for their dedication, and Gail Hochman and Marianne Merola for making it all happen.

  For my family

  near and far

  Most people interviewed perceived that the defenses were there to protect them, and nobody expressed a wish that they be removed.

  —CAMILO JOSÉ VERGARA, The New American Ghetto

  For the sky is large and tears are small

  Close your eyes every first rain

  And think of me.

  —MAX GAT-MOR, “The Last Summer”

  (song performed at a 1995 memorial service for Yitzhak Rabin)

  Part One

  1

  Long after the war was over they made love in the sealed room, she on top of him and he with his hands pressed in the flesh of her hips, and no more missiles hurtling through the night sky. She had been wondering for some time whether her love for Nachum had not faded beyond her ability to recall it, and now, in this room with its windows still edged with tape to ward off chemical death, its shelf piled with boxes of baking soda and gauze pads to make into poultices for chemical burns, and its corners cluttered with Ariela’s dolls and books to distract the girl from too much fear, Tami could not feel a whisper of love for this man who had been her husband for twenty-one years.

  It was their son Dov’s room that they had sealed when this war had begun. Under one of the windows was a wooden desk, and pictures of coral reefs cut from scuba-diving magazines decorated the wall above a low chest of drawers. On the floor under the single bed were Dov’s high school yearbook and a snapshot of a girl Tami did not recognize. The rest of Dov’s things Tami and Nachum had piled into his closet. “When your commander next gives you weekend leave, we’ll help you sort it out,” Nachum told Dov over the telephone, and laughed at a response Tami could not hear.

  They had chosen this room because its two small windows made it the easiest to seal. Tami and Nachum had made a game of the sealing for Ariela, who concentrated cross-legged over the slow chewing progress of her plastic-handled scissors. Tami trimmed the mangled ends of the tape before standing on the desk to stick the strips to the window frames. Nachum curled streamers out of purple ribbon, and while Ariela watched, they decorated her gas mask. They saved their good humor for the child; they gave Tami’s mother, Fanya, their bedroom because it was the most comfortable, and spread their own necessities on the dresser and sills of the sealed room. To each other they barely spoke. The American cousin telephoned to ask once more: Was there anything they needed, anything she could send them?

  With the double mattress on the floor beside the single bed, they could all gather in the room on the nights when the sirens rose one after another to merge and wail across the sky. Tami and Nachum, tumbled to opposite sides of the mattress, woke into a firmament of sound. They blinked into the darkness as the Silent Station came alive, its nightlong static broken by the voice of the radio announcer repeating instructions in language after language. Ariela’s wild knock at the door was followed a few minutes later by the appearance of Fanya in her long cotton nightgown, hair freshly combed. Outside, sirens pinioned the sky. Still breathing deeply from his sleep, Nachum shut the door and sealed its edges in the dark. He rolled himself up onto Dov’s single bed, Fanya and Ariela joined Tami on the mattress on the floor, and they unpacked their masks, the purple streamers on Ariela’s crushed by the brown plastic case. The first nights of sirens they had been too alert for quiet, so they sang the songs Ariela had learned in school, and played the games suggested over the radio. Fanya could think of more words spelled with the letters in “Saddam Hussein” than Tami and Nachum and Ariela combined, and as they waited for the all-clear to be called for their sector they moved on to Bush and Baker, Shamir and Levi and Netanyahu. Fanya won every time.

  After the all-clear they put their masks aside, and Nachum began snoring almost immediately. Lying on the mattress, Tami felt the woman and the girl on either side of her shifting as they passed into sleep. Fanya rested a lilac-smelling hand on Tami’s shoulder. It was more to brace herself than to embrace, Tami knew, but she was entranced by the unfamiliar touch all the same. She held as still as she could, so as not to jar her mother’s hand, and she hugged Ariela’s sweet small body to her. It seemed to Tami that the three of them were something simple, like animals in a burrow. It passed through her mind that they would never leave this room of half-shadows and silent urgency, daily clutter and slow layered breathing. Tami thought she had never felt so close to understanding who she was.

  On the nights when there were no sirens and the Silent Station was quiet, Fanya sighed from down the hall and Ariela breathed softly in her bedroom. Tami and Nachum stayed alone in the sealed room. They reached for each other and they listened to the static on the radio.

  The war was over; they slept in the sealed room now only as a temporary arrangement. Aft
er the cease-fire and the dancing in the streets, when they had returned to the apartment, they had opened one window partially. Nachum ripped off tape and paint together, letting in the cold, wet night air. Jerusalem was bursting in fireworks all around them. Tami’s head ached from the waves of sound. Out on the street she had held tight to Ariela’s hand, while Fanya threw herself into the dance steps and glared at the ever rougher crowd and somewhere in an inner circle Nachum jostled shoulders with the workers from his shop. Back in the apartment at last, Tami tucked Ariela into bed to the accompaniment of shouts and whisdes. Outside the window, explosions lit the sky. When Dov next came home they would finish removing the tape, repaint the window frames, take the baking soda off the shelf and replace it with Dov’s magazines. Only a few days more and Fanya would pack her bag and return to Tel Aviv, Tami and Nachum would return to their bedroom. But for now the room remained as it was. The noise from the street all but obscured the sound of the telephone: the American cousin calling to congratulate them for enduring, her voice brimming with relief.

  Because their sleeping in the room was only temporary, Tami and Nachum did not bother with screening the sun from their eyes but let the shutter stay open instead, all day and all night, until a bird nested in the pulley’s track and they could not have closed it if they had wanted to. Ariela’s hair ribbons lay forgotten under the bed; Nachum’s papers from the electronics shop, graphs and charts and technical magazines, were strewn about the floor. The view of the botanical gardens and the road to the Knesset building looked in on them continuously. Long rectangles of light stretched across the mattress. On the rim of the Valley of the Cross stood buildings of thumbnail-colored stone, hardened planes whittled against the pale-blue sky.

  “Tami, shalom, it’s Yael.”

  “Yael!” Tami settled on one of the kitchen chairs. “How are you?”

  “Me, I’m fine. You’re the one who disappears off the face of the earth for days at a time. What do you do with yourself?”

  “You know what I do with myself. I work.”

  “What, three afternoons a week? Four? So what’s this nonsense, ‘work’? I tell you, Tami, if I didn’t chase after you I’d never see you. During the war I understood—everybody was going mad in their own house. But it’s three weeks since cease-fire and I still don’t see you around. A human being doesn’t spend so much time alone, it’s not normal. And don’t argue with me, because you know it’s true. Even in the army you were like this, if we hadn’t been roommates we never would have spoken. And believe me, back then it was work too. Tell me, what do you hear from Dov?”

  Tami drew a deep breath. “Fine, he’s fine.”

  “Fine? He can’t say more than ‘fine’? My Benny is in Dov’s same unit, and he can’t get over telling me the craziness they put them through in their training.”

  “Yes, well. Of course he talks about that.”

  “Benny says Dov is considering trying out for officer, is it true?”

  “Mm,” Tami agreed.

  “Dov would be excellent. Benny says the commander already picked him as a favorite.”

  Tami lifted a cooling hand to her cheek. “Nachum spoke with him last night, Nachum would know the latest stories.”

  For a moment Yael was silent. “Dov still doesn’t speak to you?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it, Yael.”

  “But what on earth does he think you ever did wrong to him?”

  “Tell me about Yoram’s new job.”

  “Oh, this job of Yoram’s!” Yael’s laughter was full of grievance and pleasure. “This job and this new schedule of his are wonderful, so wonderful they will kill him and the rest of us within a year. But who can complain? At least the new salary helps with the overdraft.” She sighed heartily. “So tell me, how is Fanya? Has she found some man to follow her to the ends of the earth yet this week?”

  “I don’t know,” Tami answered. “She’s been out almost constantly since the end of the war.”

  “Good for her. The SCUDs flushed a lot of sociable people from Tel Aviv, maybe our guests will improve the nightlife here before they leave us. How long is she staying?”

  “Who knows—she planned to return to Tel Aviv two weeks ago already.”

  “She’s probably out singing at all the cultured folks’ soirees. Charming them silly as usual.”

  “I told you, I hardly see her. She’s out all the time. I don’t have that many friends in Jerusalem, and I live here.” Tami caught the bitterness in her voice, too late.

  “And why should that bother you?” Yael shot back. “Be happy she’s up and about. Many people Fanya’s age aren’t so lucky.”

  “I didn’t say I wasn’t happy,” Tami replied. “Of course I’m happy.”

  It was Dov that Tami thought about during the stifling afternoons of green printed forms and heavily resealed boxes. She stamped packages “Cleared” or “Suspicious,” she sipped cup after cup of Turkish coffee, and she imagined her son’s wind-chapped face. He had Nachum’s face, that same wide nose and square jaw, the dark eyes that could brim with amusement. And he was broad like Nachum; the two looked more similar every year. The hesitant boy with upturned nose and thin arms existed only in her memory. Even the muscles of Dov’s face seemed hardened now, his freckles long since faded.

  “I said I don’t feel like explaining.” Dov had cut her off the previous evening on the telephone.

  “I was just wondering what your unit is doing, that’s all. I just wondered what’s new.” She fingered the telephone cord. “Is the training very difficult?”

  “It’s fine.”

  Tami heard a noise outside, the squeal of a bus slowing to a halt across the street. “Do you like your unit?” she murmured.

  “Yes.”

  “Oh. So . . .” Her fingers were woven in the cord. Unbidden, the list ran in her mind: see to Ariela’s bath, put her to bed, ask Nachum about the broken kitchen clock. “Have a good week,” she said.

  There was silence on the line. Tami heard the bus door opening and closing, then the laboring of the engine as the bus started up the hill. “Dov?” She searched into the clicking on the line.

  Time after time she reached for one memory that would explain to her when the change had begun, but there was nothing to tell her precisely when it had happened. She knew only that at some point, as she had nodded to his account of some planned scout activity, she turned to find disappointment in the eyes of her eleven-year-old son. Another time, later, there was accusation: Dov’s fists tight at his sides, his voice strident. Aren’t you listening to anything I say? Don’t you care about anything? She did not remember what she had replied, what assurance she had offered as she stared out the window, trying to retain what she had been musing about while he had been talking. Something, it seemed, about the way the trees in Jerusalem grew differently from those in Haifa or in Tel Aviv.

  Only last month Nachum had remarked that Dov was growing into quite a man. “He substituted for Moti in the shop this Friday, and do you know, he was answering customers’ electronics questions with no training but correctly. The boy has a brain in his head,” Nachum said with a trace of awe.

  Once it had been possible to pacify Dov, to salve his hurt with light words. Until he began to repeat the words back to her. She would blush with shame. For a time she told herself that his scorn for her must pass, that he would understand that even though she somehow could not concentrate on his rambling stories through to their finish, the rhythm of his voice soothed her and she wanted only for it to continue.

  That last year when he was in high school, there were days when she thought she would do anything to break through the disdain on his face. Standing over the stove, foolish unstoppable tears rolling down her cheeks and hissing in the pan of sweet onions, Tami searched for something to hold him, to make him turn to her and say anything at all. “Tell me what you think I did wrong,” she said once, his reactionless face more than she could stand. “You used to smile at me.” S
he heard the quaver in her voice and could not stop it, so instead she fell silent. Dov walked into the living room without answering her. Through the kitchen doorway she watched him pick up a newspaper and cast it back to the table with barely a glance. Nachum, leafing through a magazine on the sofa, looked up and lowered his glasses. “Dov,” he said.

  Dov stared down at the day-old copy of Ma’ariv.

  “Dov,” Nachum repeated. “Dov. Noodnik. Come here.”

  With a sour expression, Dov stepped toward the couch. “What?”

  Nachum doubled over and scooped something from the floor. The soccer ball hit Dov in the chest, hard, but his hands shot up and caught it. Tami held her breath. Nachum was laughing, and Dov was laughing too.

  “So you’re learning something even if you never go to school when you’re supposed to. At least you’re learning how to catch a soccer ball.”

  “I am, I’m better than you are now.” Dov lifted his chin in that new way of his and looked at his father.

  “You’re better than your father, says who?”

  “You want to go to Sacher Park and I’ll show you?”

  Nachum was on his feet, the magazine left open on the sofa. “Let’s pick up Rafi and his father and we’ll be two against two.”

  They passed through the kitchen without a word to Tami, who was cutting tomatoes at the table. She listened to their voices fading down the stairs.

  When, last summer, Dov had seen her with the man from the greengrocer’s, she had known that his contempt for her was now assured, and that it was all her fault that her son did not love her. She had tried telling him later that there was nothing to what he had seen. Nothing had happened, she would never do such a thing to Nachum or to him or to Ariela. But her words made no difference; he only averted his eyes from her.

  And now he was doing his army service. Late at night, in her son’s sealed bedroom, she worried that he would be reckless. He would play ringleader as he always did, and this time he would get himself hurt. In her mind he lay on a stretcher, his bruised face coated with dust. “Why did you do something so stupid?” his commander begged, and Dov answered with a last, pained breath, “Because I hate my mother.” But then she thought, No. Why would he trouble himself to do something so dramatic for her sake?