Today I’m torn. Our history lecturer, en route to tackling the birth of Zionism, has chosen to detour through medieval Jewish history. Speaking with his usual intensity, he’s assembling an array of double-dealing European princes and false messiahs for our consideration. It’s new material, and the Hebrew is rapid as ever. If I want to understand anything I need to give it my full attention. But Michal, seated beside me for the first time in weeks, gossips incessantly. Orit is absent, gone north on a long weekend, and Michal seems intent on proving her friendship with chatter.
“What’s in the messianic age for us?” she whispers. “Do you think my hair will stop frizzing?”
Definitely not, I tell her. The redemption of the world is one thing, but for smooth hair she needs to use product.
“So the dead’ may rise, but I’ll still be Jewish and so will my hair.” She twirls the smooth wave of my ponytail. “How come you got so lucky?”
“A gift from my non-Jewish father.”
Michal pulls back her hand. “Wow. I didn’t know that.”
I shrug. “I hardly know him. He left when I was ten.”
While Michal searches for a response, I turn my eyes back to the lectern.
In the warm hall, with its rows of squeaking chairs, the professor’s speech seems to accelerate. His Hebrew blurs, so that I can’t understand a third of what he says. I guess at phrases and dates, transliterate unfamiliar words into the margins of my notebook for later examination. The other students slump across armrests, blinking their protest at the harsh fluorescent lights. I take notes furiously, pretending not to notice the student who snickers at my concentration. The professor goes on about medieval society, about persecution, about the plague and Europe and families who kept a packed suitcase by the door, to be ready in case the Messiah came in the middle of the night.
“What product?” Michal whispers.
In the evenings, Gil returns late from the art gallery. He kicks off his sandals, pours himself a glass of water, and sits at his drawing table. I have to be quiet while he’s working, because the slightest sound makes his back stiffen with reproof. I sit cross-legged on the sofa, puzzling over my history assignment with a dictionary propped against my ankles. From time to time I look up to see a child in a Jerusalem alley, the face of a middle-aged man, the huddled form of a woman, flying out from under Gil’s hands like newly minted souls. These are just sketches, Gil has told me, warm-ups for what he wants to do next. He considers the lines emerging beneath his charcoal. I imagine his evaluating gaze as a keen and bright light.
Some nights Gil can’t stop talking about his boss, Roni, and the artists who frequent the gallery. The owner of the gallery is impressed with Gil. He’s already talking about giving him a promotion, even though Gil has worked there only two months. And in the fall, a co-worker recently confided, Gil might even have a chance to exhibit his own work.
With each passing week, Gil becomes more intent on this possibility. Every night he works later at the gallery. By now I know not to expect him until well after dark. Sometimes we sit on the balcony after his return, Gil pondering aloud his ideas for a show. Old work, or some thing new? A scattering of themes, or a single motif? Over and over, he holds a notion up to scrutiny, explains its pros and cons, then rejects it. He doesn’t want to do just any collection of drawings. He wants to mount an exhibit that will demonstrate just how much he can do.
This evening I’ve bought shnitzel and vegetables for our dinner. The packages wait in the refrigerator. I know that Gil doesn’t need me to delay my own meal for him, but I avoid the kitchen all the same, ignoring the growling of my stomach in the hope that he’s on his way home. I consider calling him at work, but don’t. Last week when I called, Gil was short with me on the telephone. And when he returned to the apartment he was tight-lipped with anger; I could only sit on the sofa and nurse my own stunned misery. I’d embarrassed him in front of Roni, he informed me. There he was, in the middle of an important conversation about his exhibit, and someone had to come get him because his girlfriend was on the telephone. “Just don’t try to control my life,” he told me. “We’ll be fine if you can remember that one thing.”
Sitting on the balcony, I watch the sky dim, darken, and turn a deep cobalt. I wait for the breezes to begin trailing luminous Mediterranean clouds across this quivering Jerusalem sky.
As I wait, a sound declares itself: the low rhythm of feet stamping. Hundreds of feet, muffled by the stone walls of one of the yeshivas across the street. I realize now that this sound has been growing for some time. There is music, too, though faint, and scattered voices singing along.
When the music grows suddenly louder, I guess that someone has opened a door to let in the cooling wind. I am surprised to recognize the melody. For some reason I’m convinced it’s a wedding song. Although I think there must be women present at the gathering, it’s only the men I hear; I picture them singing together, dancing with their black hats and flying sidelocks.
I find myself humming bits of melody under my breath.
It was my mother who sang this song to me. I recall a hand, thin but firm, stroking my forehead; a patch of warmth where she sat on my bed as I drifted to sleep. I must have been still young enough to pretend I needed this sendoff at night. But old enough to watch for the signs of her sickness. In the dark, I measured the sharpness of her profile. She’d learned these songs back in the days before she almost got on that ship to Haifa, she told me; she pronounced the words like a mystery we would puzzle out together. Her wavering whisper was soft and beautiful, different from the efficient daytime voice that instructed me not to slouch, not to be shy with strangers. I longed to turn on a light and see her, confirm that this sharer of nighttime secrets was indeed my mother; that she was, for these few minutes, all mine; that she was indeed well again, as the doctors had promised. Instead, I pedaled my feet beneath the covers, as close as I could to the warmth of her. And when I thought she was distracted, I slipped a hand into hers. “I would have gone,” she told me then. “I was ready to start my whole life over in Israel. Ready to work on a kibbutz, or wherever help was most needed. I wanted a grand adventure, an adventure with purpose.” She fell silent. I listened to her breathing. “But I got involved with the movement here in America. And met your father. And once you were born and I’d started the Center, I knew this was home for good. I almost never think about that old plan anymore. But back then, it was the world to me.”
She sang until she thought I’d fallen asleep. I lay with my eyes shut, committing every phrase to memory, adding each melody, each new bit of information, to my trove. Long after my mother had left the room, I recited the litany in a whisper—every item a talisman to ward off a return of her illness. My father, passing down the hall, was a momentary silhouette in the doorway, his footsteps stiff and hesitant as they receded.
That was when I was just a child, and still my mother’s confidante. Before the divorce, before I became the daughter who hardly cared about anything—who cared only about twirling her days away in the dance studio, and failed even at that.
The men across the street sing on in a noisy chorus. If they were to hear my voice from the balcony, would they call it an omen, call me an evil spirit, and a curse on the wedding? As I imagine them dancing in a huddle, I am convinced that they never feel alone, or sit for hours watching the clouds pass overhead on the way to a forbidden country. Waiting for someone to come.
I stand at the balcony rail. My voice is soft, a tuneless whisper.
It is nearly eight o’clock when Gil arrives, tired and preoccupied. After we’ve eaten dinner, he immediately sits down to work. He works without interruption for almost an hour before he calls to me.
I rise, stretch, and stand before him; he pulls me nearer.
I stand inside the V of his open knees and look down into his pale, drawn face. He reaches around me, then clasps his hands behind my back and rocks me slightly, side to side.
There is a sorrow on his fac
e that I don’t recognize, and I hunt for a way to unloose his smile. I spin in his embrace, a pirouette ending in a flourish, and as my arms descend he catches my hands in his.
“I want to show people something with my art.” His serious expression doesn’t waver. “I want to make people see. Like Chagall did in his day. I want to show our world, our problems.”
“You will.” I giggle. I try to spin again, but he holds me still with his knees.
“You’re the one I want by my side when I do it.”
I balance my palms on his. My fingertips reach only the second knuckle of his callused hands. The apartment is quiet. “Why me?” I attempt a joke. “I’m naive.”
He squeezes my hands, hard. “You’ll understand. You’ll understand what I’m doing and why. What it all means.”
Looking into his eyes, I feel at one instant more loved and more unsure of myself than ever in my life. I bite my lip to keep from blurting, What am I going to understand? And how do you know I will, what if I don’t?
Instead, I move behind Gil and examine the drawing before him. Centered on the page is a soldier in uniform—a tall and angular man in his forties with a bright questioning gaze, his jaw shadowed with stubble. The man looks like he’s about to speak. One shoulder strains forward, and he gazes out from the paper as if offering a strong and warm embrace. Something about him is familiar. In one hand he holds a small leather pouch.
With a brief nod, Gil acknowledges the man on the page. “My father. The day before he died.”
I set my hands on the yoke of Gil’s broad shoulders—so broad they’re almost an unfair burden on his light, tapered frame. “Nineteen seventy-three?” I ask. Only once, the first week I met him, has Gil mentioned his father’s death in the Yom Kippur War.
The man in the drawing wears unlaced boots. Gil indicates the rumpled shirt half tucked into the man’s pants. “He was called up during the surprise attack. He didn’t even have time to find the belt for the uniform.”
Gil’s father is so real I feel shy in his presence. “What’s he holding?” I ask.
“Those are his field glasses. A birthday gift, from my mother. They were in his satchel when he died.”
Gil lifts his pencil, hesitates. Then, in one tight motion, he draws a halo around his father’s head. Leaning back so that his head rests heavily between my breasts, he regards his handiwork. “After he died, I would listen to my mother talk about him. It didn’t take long for her to dream up a different man from the one she talked about while he was alive. ‘My husband was a hero,’ she said at the shiva. As if she’d loved him.”
“You don’t think she loved him?”
“My mother?” His laughter rings against the walls. “My mother, the war widow.” He reaches for his glass of water and lifts it in salute to the drawing. “Let’s toast to the grief of the war widow,” he says. But he doesn’t drink. He sets the glass down and, so suddenly that I start backward, tears the page from the drawing table and sends it skittering, crumpled, across the floor.
Gil sits rigid in his seat, and I know not to speak. I move to retrieve the drawing.
“Don’t,” Gil says. The word is an exhalation of sadness.
I wait. After a few minutes I call his name, but he doesn’t respond.
I leave him sitting there, and although I lie awake in our bedroom well past the hour when he usually stops working, he doesn’t come to bed. I drift off at last to the sound of pencil scratching against paper.
Later, Gil is beside me. He reaches for me, and I wrap myself around him. When he kisses me, he’s so tender I lie motionless with amazement. “I’m sorry about your father,” I say.
He’s silent for a long while, and I don’t know whether he’s asleep. When at last he speaks, his voice cracks with exhaustion. “No one understands,” he says. “The fucking army didn’t understand.”
I keep my breath as soft as possible.
“This country hurts my heart,” he says.
After a few minutes, I can tell he’s fallen into a deep sleep.
I lie beside him and remember how he held me when he first told me he loved me. I wonder when he will tell me he loves me again, and then am ashamed of myself for the thought.
5
I hate the American. With her flat footsteps tromping up the stairs. Her music playing, her chair creaking. Her lazy footsteps sliding down.
Making noises that drive my hands to my ears, making dust that hurts my eyes, making the milk go sour in my refrigerator.
I know about Americans. Big, slow faces that look like they never expected to see you. Like they never expected it, any of it, like they think wrong things happen only to wrong people. Americans wear clothing that smells of toothpaste and glittering stores. Opening their mouths so big when they talk, too, a person could walk in and out of the mouth of an American while he talks and he wouldn’t know.
Every morning they leave together, the Israeli for work because he carries no bag, the American for school because she does. A heavy bag. For eternity their apartment is silent. In the afternoon, when heat has settled deep into concrete crevices, she returns.
The American gets mail. I see these things. I see everything. The letters wait in the box with a bent nail for a latch, and when the American finds them her step on the stairs is slow, slower, stopping completely. She stands on the landing in front of my door, she reads and cannot even wait to climb up to her own apartment. I can watch her through the peephole for a long time, then.
They are not married. On nights when they make sex they are almost as loud as the cats wailing outside, but there is no ring on her finger. And when I climb, so silent no one could ever imagine my presence, then I see two different names on the door. There are other ways to tell also, even were I not clever I would know she is not married, for there is a missing look in her eyes. Married girls are angels, Mother would chide Halina whenever she turned down a suitor. They are happy, so happy. Never sad.
And she, she chatters happiness but she is sad. A sad American.
Americans have no reason to be sad.
This night she cooks their dinner and I smell bland, American smells. Smells that come with gravy and heavy sauces, ketchup and round puffy rolls like the food the soldiers fed us, after.
In my dreams the blacks dance before me. A celebration, their eyes shine. The men’s peyes sail with joy, the women’s skirts balloon with wind. There will be three signs, they sing in their wordless melodies. Three signs to announce the coining of our redeemer. Their harmonies ring in my head, I wake into this dark echoing bedroom.
The sound of the telephone mystifies me. Who would call at two in the afternoon? The country is on siesta, everyone is asleep.
I reach the phone on the fourth ring. “Shalom?” I remember to say.
“Maya!”
“Yes?”
“And why haven’t we heard from you?”
It seems I ought to know who this is, but my mind offers nothing.
Girlish laughter breaks the silence on the line. “Your mother writes that you’ve been trying to get in touch. I said to myself, Perhaps our American relative needs some help navigating the telephone system in this godawful country.”
Relieved, I cradle the receiver on my shoulder and ask, “Is this Tami Shachar?”
There is more pleased laughter, and I realize my mistake. This woman is much older than Tami would be, though her voice is so clear she first sounded younger. “This is Fanya Gutman. Tami is my daughter. I’m calling from Tel Aviv. Your mother writes that you’ve been in Jerusalem some time now, poor thing.”
I’m not sure how to take this. “Yes,” I reply with caution. “It’s been wonderful.”
I might as well have admitted a fondness for the gulag. I’m immediately reminded of the provincialism of Jerusalem and the relative advantages of Tel Aviv, with its international character, although of course the deficiencies of life in the Middle East cannot be understated. “And what’s a city without a river,” Fanya co
ncludes with a sigh, before launching into her questions. What am I studying, what do I think of Israeli students, what do I hear from my mother?
“I’ll be in Jerusalem again the weekend after next,” she tells me when I’ve satisfied her curiosity. “Call Tami’s house before Friday. We’ll go to the museum. We’ll have a picnic. For heaven’s sake, we can go to the ballet, your mother says you dance. We’ll get acquainted.”
Before I know it, I’m off the telephone. My head is humming with the whirlwind conversation, and I start to laugh. That wasn’t so hard after all, was it?
It’s late afternoon when the mail carrier’s tread tamps the dust of the garden path. By now I’ve learned to identify this sound among the others of the neighborhood: the bustle of the yeshivas letting out for dinner, the cries of the Arab rug peddler wandering the streets. I’ve learned, too, to recognize the vibrating emptiness of the air in the instant before the Friday-evening siren begins, warning the faithful that the sabbath is approaching. This is the same siren, I’ve been told, that warned of incoming missiles during the Gulf War. It rises and falls in a different pattern so people know not to be alarmed, but it’s the identical sky-flooding blast. I’ve grown to expect the rush of activity that follows, as children are called home to dress before candle-lighting and a flurry of prayer ascends from the synagogue. For my part, I contribute the quiet slap of my flat sandals on the stairs. I know to listen for the soft click of a door shutting on the second-floor landing, and the low whine of its reopening once I’ve passed.
When I reach the bottom of the stairs, I swivel the nail and pry the small wooden door forward. Lately I’ve been rewarded with a thin envelope from Brooklyn every few days: a featherweight white rectangle with blue and red stripes around its edges, containing a single delicate page. This afternoon I’m not disappointed. On my way up the stairs I tear the flap open with a clumsy finger, and my steps slow as I unfold the letter.
From a Sealed Room Page 10