From a Sealed Room

by Rachel Kadish

  “Who said anything about love?”

  “You did, you with your art and culture and love.” She was becoming irritable and confused; she had lost track of her point. She wished that Fanya would come out, so Shmuel Roseman would leave.

  “Love, what kind of love can you have in a sealed room?” He lifted his eyepiece to stare at her.

  “I don’t know,” she mumbled.

  “Of course you don’t,” Shmuel answered, snapping the face of the watch back into place. “Not even Houdini knew. True love,” he said conspiratorially, “comes in a forest. The Jerusalem Forest. On a picnic. On a Wednesday afternoon.” He smiled a faraway smile. “Fresh air, that’s what’s needed for love. You can’t have love without fresh air.”

  Tami’s head hurt. “Maybe that’s only what you think.”

  “It’s what I know. Love in a sealed room? Feh. That would be no kind of love. What your mother and I have, now that’s love. She doesn’t know it yet, but she will soon.”

  “What’s all this talk?” Fanya stood in the doorway, freshly made up and wearing light-green pants and a white sweater.

  “We were just saying how lovely you look today.” Shmuel beamed up at her.

  “Oh?” Fanya arched her brows and smiled. “As long as you’re staying out of trouble.”

  “You can be certain of that.” Shmuel rose and, removing the strap from his head, winked at Tami. He crossed to the doorway and tucked Fanya’s arm under his elbow. “We’ll be going, then,” he said. “You have a good afternoon.”

  It was Yael on the telephone. Tami dried her hands on a dish towel and sat at the kitchen table.

  “Tami, you must be so proud of Dov, Benny tells me he’s decided to train as an officer. You know that’s no small thing for a paratrooping unit. He’ll have his work cut out for him.”

  “I am proud,” Tami said.

  “Our boys, an unstoppable team, right? To tell you the truth, the training they have to do terrifies me. Benny came home last week shivering, they had been camping in the rain, and after a hot bath his temperature was still too low, Tami, let me tell you, I was frightened. I almost called his commander, but Benny would have hated me for it. I try not to ask. I guess it’s better for the mothers not to know, right?”

  There was a long pause. Yael spoke again. “Don’t tell me you didn’t know about Dov’s decision.”

  “Yael, I don’t want to—”

  “All right, it’s all right. So he didn’t tell you, it’s no big deal. It’s not.” Yael inhaled steeply, then let out her breath. “You’ll see, Tami. The army will change them, grow them up. It will be good.”

  It had been hamsin when Dov’s hatred for her became irrevocable, a day when the air felt thick and heavy with demands. The sky was white and merged with the light-colored buildings on the hills beyond the Valley of the Cross. It hurt to look across the valley; it hurt to look at anything beyond arm’s reach.

  Nachum had returned from reserve duty the previous evening. Tami stayed up half the night before his return, cooking in the relentless heat, making shnitzel, tomato-eggplant salad, kibbeh, and lemon-and-strawberry mousse for dessert. She knew it was nothing compared with what some of the other women in the building did for a homecoming dinner; she had never liked to fuss in the kitchen, and avoided her co-workers’ weekly conversations about how many and which dishes they were planning for Friday night. But this time Tami lined the kitchen with cookbooks. She worked with the grim determination that Nachum’s return would chase away the loneliness she had not been able to contain lately, so that sometimes at the office she stared at familiar forms as if she had never seen them before.

  They ate the meal in silence. Nachum was exhausted, and close-mouthed about exercises in the heat and dust. He ate some of everything and took extra helpings of mousse, and while Tami was washing dishes he fell asleep at the table with Ariela in his lap. “Nachum,” Tami said, and he opened his eyes, set Ariela on the floor, and walked to the bedroom without a word. When Tami entered moments later, he was asleep.

  The next morning, when Tami awoke, her head throbbing with the heat, Nachum had already left for the shop. In her T-shirt and underwear she shuffled into the kitchen and, eyes half closed, took a glass out of the cabinet. The sponge she had used to wash dishes the previous night was so dry she could have snapped it in two, and her eyes filled with tears as she opened the tap and let cool water splash into the glass.

  She dressed carefully to go to the greengrocer’s. She wore her blue tank top and brown shorts, and the sandals with the leather straps that cut into her ankles when she walked. Before leaving the apartment, she reached into the back of a dresser drawer and pulled out a bottle of perfume, one Fanya had left behind on a visit years before and Tami had never bothered to return. She dabbed some on her wrists.

  The greengrocer’s smelled of sour milk and overripe fruit. Behind the register a girl painted her nails, and in the doorway a boy stood talking to the girl and leaning on a push-broom that he did not seem intent on pushing anywhere. Tami circled the store, filling her basket. She picked up carrots, juices—peach for Ariela, mango for Nachum—pitas in a blue plastic bag, a package of cheese, and four heavy bags of milk, and still she did not see him.

  When she took her basket to the counter, the girl was gone; he stood in her place, smiling at her with those black eyes that had so many times sent Tami’s own gaze fleeing to the Uttered floor.

  His name was Nissim. For years he had rung up her groceries, helped her find misshelved cans of soup, and told her what she owed with a soft smile that made her blush. He was dark-skinned, Sephardic, at least ten years younger than she. He kept accounts in his head, and dismissed her apologies on those occasions when she did not have enough money with her. “You’re a good customer, you always pay your bill, so who needs to write it down?” he said. “When a woman like you says she’ll pay, she’ll pay.” He would offer to carry her groceries to the apartment for her. She had always refused.

  “Will that be all?” he asked her now.

  “Yes, thank you.” She met his eyes and then looked away, fidgeting with her purse. “And could you bring the groceries to my apartment for me? They’re heavy, and I’m not feeling so well today.”

  “Of course,” he said, as if he did not know what she meant.

  She sat in the apartment waiting for him; she thought to herself that this was crazy. She was the mother of two children, one already grown. Her stomach was flabby and pale, she had not worn her bikini to the beach in more summers than she could remember. Here she was, waiting for her Nissim from the greengrocer’s to climb the stairs to her apartment. It was ridiculous; she would not answer the door when he came.

  The doorbell rang, and she jumped, froze for a moment, then, cursing herself, unlocked the door. He was out of breath from the stairs, and he walked past her and set the box of groceries on the kitchen table with a thump.

  “Thank you, Nissim.” She fingered the money she had counted out in advance. She could hear her heartbeat.

  He waited. She took a pitcher from the refrigerator and poured him a glass of cold water. She thrust it into his hands. “Here,” she said.

  They stood on opposite sides of the narrow kitchen table, and she watched his Adam’s apple rise and fall as he swallowed.

  When he had finished he placed the glass on the table. “Thank you,” he said.

  In one hand she clutched the money she owed him. Before she could hesitate, she lifted her other hand and brushed her palm against his tight dark curls, and at the same moment that she registered the shock on his face and realized she had made a terrible mistake, the door banged open and Dov was staring at the two of them from across the kitchen.

  She dropped her hand and Nissim turned and fled, clattering down the stairs in his sandals without the money she still clutched in her hand. “Dov,” she said, but her son turned and left the apartment without a word. The door closed so gently behind him that she held her breath to hear it, and
the heat that filled the kitchen in the silence that followed told her everything.

  They made a quiet Passover together that year, after the winter rains were over. Nachum and Dov raced together through the words of the Haggadah, making a game of their speed-reading at the dining room table while Tami and her mother carried in the dishes and Ariela chewed on carrot sticks. Nachum paused only once, at a passage about deliverance from slavery, to tweak Ariela’s chin. “And what do you think that means this year, Ariela?”

  “It means no more gas masks!” she shouted, and Nachum laughed and let her have a sip of wine from his cup. “That’s my girl,” he said more than once during dinner, and rested a hand on her head. Ariela had retreated into her usual silence, her excitement at the praise discernible only in the pink crest of her cheeks.

  After the holiday they drove Fanya back to Tel Aviv. “Jerusalem is wearing on me,” she had told Tami the week before. “No decent cafes at all. Not to mention all the religious fanatics spilling into the modern neighborhoods. Those black hats make me itch.”

  Once in her own apartment, Fanya shook out pillows and opened windows. Tami cleaned the refrigerator.

  “Tami,” Fanya said, stepping into the kitchen. Her forehead was uncharacteristically creased. “Hold on to that Nachum of yours.”

  “What do you mean?” Tami straightened, a wad of paper towels in her hand.

  “I mean what I said, hold on to him.”

  “There’s nothing wrong between us.”

  Fanya pursed her lips, and the thought flitted through Tami’s mind that her mother looked worried.

  “Did I say there was something wrong?” Fanya asked.

  “So what do you mean, then?”

  Fanya studied the back of her left hand, then looked Tami directly in the eyes. “I’m your mother, that’s all.”

  Tami’s face was growing hot with confusion. “What about Shmuel Roseman?” she accused.

  “What about him?”

  “Aren’t you going to hold on to him?”

  Fanya gave a light laugh. “Oh, who knows, Tami? Who knows, does that really matter? Shmuel Roseman falls in love easily, and he’ll fall out of love easily.”

  “But he said—”

  “He said what?”

  “He said.” Tami shook her head. “He said love was . . .” She stopped; she could not remember what it was that he had said.

  “Shmuel Roseman is a sweet man.” Fanya smiled. “But what makes you think he knows anything about love?”

  “It’s just that—”

  Fanya turned for the living room. “What does it matter, Tami? Why does it matter to you so much. Don’t break your head about these things.”

  They had moved back into their bedroom, but Nachum’s graphs and magazines stayed in the sealed room, and some nights he fell asleep over his work. When Tami woke him and he had stumbled down the hall, she might sit on her son’s bed for a while before returning to their bedroom. Sometimes she fell asleep, and in the morning woke, curled on Dov’s bed, to the sound of Nachum mixing his mango juice in the kitchen doorway.

  Still they reached for each other at night, less often but with that same detached intensity, like two young people who had not yet realized that time was not something that could be snatched and prevented from passing. She wondered whether Nachum saw someone on the overnight trips he took to Tel Aviv for business, but she did not ask. And she knew, after all, that he did not. He would never be as weak as she, to try something like that. It was only she who had somehow fallen into a crack in this great collective society; only she who had somehow, for all her effort, never understood what everyone else seemed to know intuitively. Lying awake next to Nachum one night, she reflected with a start of guilt that it had been years since she had smiled at his capers. A petty punishment, she saw, for his failure to do the one thing she had trusted him with all her heart to do: make her be like everyone else.

  Hamsin again, and the dripping laundry that Tami had strung from the balcony before waking Ariela was stiff and gritty with dust by the time the girl left for school. Tami filled the tub with cool water and stripped off her T-shirt and underwear to sit in it for a few minutes before leaving for the office. She left a note on the refrigerator door for Ariela with instructions not to go out to play until she had had three full glasses of water, no cheating. Writing the note gave her satisfaction. At least Ariela still listened.

  Nachum was tight-lipped when he dropped the evening paper on the kitchen table. He sat down and, resting his elbows on the table, pushed his face into his hands as though trying to seal his eyes shut by force. “Did you hear?” he asked.

  “Hear what?”

  “Three soldiers died in a training accident in the Negev. Dehydrated.”

  Dov was in the desert for more training this week; Tami had been trying not to think about him in this heat, going along with whatever craziness his commander ordered.

  “Didn’t the officers know to—”

  “One of them was Rafi,” Nachum interrupted her.

  “Rafi?”

  Nachum did not answer or remove his hands from his face.

  She grabbed the newspaper from the tabletop. On the front page were the pictures of three boys. She recognized the photograph of Rafi from Dov’s high school yearbook. He was grinning from the depthless paper.

  “Oh.” Tami said. She lowered herself into the chair next to Nachum. “Does Dov know?”

  “Who knows? Who knows where he is? It must be on the radio by now.”

  The two of them sat without moving and without touching until the kitchen was dark.

  They came unsummoned to the apartment that night, dozens of Dov’s former classmates in uniform who had been allowed to leave their bases to make the trip to Jerusalem. Guns cluttered the sealed room, covered the bed and spilled onto the floor. Once the weapons were inside Dov’s room, Nachum locked the door, and the girls held Ariela on their laps in the living room so she wouldn’t go near. They sat in the living room in silence, the hamsin hanging in the air. No one spoke. Tami put out cups and a pitcher of water, and her son’s friends—those same friends who for years had treated her like a road sign on the way to Dov—thanked her quietly. She stepped through the room, patting a girl’s hair, brushing a hand over a boy’s dusty uniformed shoulder, wanting to touch them all, as if her touch could heal, or at least hold them in place so that they would not disappear. No one moved.

  When Dov pushed open the front door, they stared at him: perhaps, now that he had come, there would be an answer. After removing the key from the lock, he turned in the hallway and, instead of entering the living room, walked to his room. He took the single key from its hook on the wall and opened the door.

  From the hallway, Tami could see the guns piled on his bed. Dov stood motionless. Then he rested his own gun against one wall of his room and stepped out. He closed the door behind him, locked it without a sound, and walked into the living room. One of the girls, whom Tami now recognized from the photograph on the floor in Dov’s room, came over to him. Tears ran down her cheeks as she hugged him hard. Dov’s arms clasped her waist, but Tami could see that he was not reacting to her; he was only staring at the wall beyond the girl’s back.

  The telephone rang.

  “Shalom, Tami, I heard.” It was Fanya. “Is Dov with you?”

  “Yes.” Tami felt feverish at the sound of her mother’s voice. Her mouth was dry, she held on to the wall for support. “They’ve given him three days’ leave.”

  “I don’t believe it, I don’t believe they could allow something so stupid to happen. A bullet I understand, a bomb, hut the sun? They should have known what can happen out there, they should never have them train during a hamsin as bad as this one. Even if they force them to drink, it’s still not enough in heat like this.”

  “You’re right.”

  “I hear there’s going to be a military investigation. Three boys, dead like that, just like that, it’s not to be believed. But they’ll inv
estigate, they’ll get to why and how and when and what happened. Does Dov know there’s going to be an investigation?”

  “What?”

  “Does he know yet?”

  Tami’s head felt so heavy she could barely hold it up. “I don’t think this is the time.”

  “Let me talk to him,” Fanya said.

  A protest formed in Tami’s mind, but she found herself unable to utter it. Who was she to judge, who was she to protect her son?

  She watched Dov hold the receiver to his ear. “Yes, I know,” he answered Fanya, and then, “Just a few minutes ago.” There was a long silence, at the end of which Dov opened his mouth and seemed ready to speak, but then only nodded and hung up. He walked out of the kitchen without looking at Tami.

  From the balcony Tami watched them pass down the street, arms and heads pressed together, gathering strength on their way to the apartment on Radak Street where they would find Rafi’s parents and sister. Only Dov walked alone, stepping straight ahead and ignoring anyone who approached him. Nachum was putting Ariela to bed. “But why did they let Rafi go out in hamsin without drinking enough?” Tami heard her daughter ask for the third time that night, but she did not hear Nachum’s reply. She went into Dov’s room; it was strangely empty, its door ajar. Dov had remembered to lock his gun in the living room cabinet, and there was nothing on the floor but some of Nachum’s papers and the yearbook still open under the bed. Tami collected the papers and carried them into the living room. She closed the yearbook and put it on the shelf over Dov’s desk. She folded the letter the American cousin had written to Fanya but generously addressed to Tami as well: dense pages of stilted Hebrew about another world; policies and progress and someone named Rodney King. Tami slipped the letter back into its envelope.

  This time when the telephone rang it was Yael. She spoke quietly. “I hear something like this and I get so frightened. Tomorrow it could be my Benny, war or no war. I know about losing people in wars, Tami, you know my uncle died in ‘seventy-three, but these accidents, these accidents, Tami, are something else entirely.”