Jerusalem Beach

by Iddo Gefen

  “Another move is hardly what the girl needs right now,” I said. “And if I go back to work, who exactly is going to take care of her?”

  Nelly nodded, finding my reply reassuring, happy she didn’t have to feel like a career-crazed woman. Shira spent the entire ride home sitting in the back seat staring out the window. When we arrived, she unbuckled her seat belt and opened the car door even before I’d switched off the engine. She got out of the car and started running toward the red hill. We were so excited by that sudden display of animation that we left the keys in the ignition and ran after her. She was moving with incredible speed while we panted behind her, laughing that we could barely keep up, then arguing who she had gotten her athletic genes from. And I started thinking that maybe it had all just been a bad, absurd dream, that by tomorrow the girl would be back in school, maybe even cashing in on her classmates’ empathy to win the election for student council.

  My hopes were dashed once she made it to the top and immediately collapsed onto the ground. She lay on the sand, arms splayed, staring at the sky. We called out: Shira, Shirale, Shirush. We tried everything, but she didn’t answer. It took us an hour until she agreed to get up—or more like didn’t refuse. On the way down, we held her on either side so she wouldn’t fall. We led her to her room and laid her on her bed, quickly tucking the blanket around her, as if it was a straitjacket that would protect her from herself. That evening, Nelly told me she didn’t know what she would have done without me. That she didn’t know any other man who would take upon himself running a farm with forty sheep and one fading child. She admitted it was hard on her, too hard. That she couldn’t bear to see her little girl falling apart before her very eyes. And just like that, with one brief sentence, she shifted the responsibility for our daughter’s care over to me.

  It began with the typical tasks, putting her to bed at night and making her three hearty meals a day, but very soon it became clear it wasn’t enough. Because the girl was barely functional, the circumstances demanded more: help with brushing her teeth, changing her clothes, and taking her on daily walks to the hilltop became an integral part of the job description. And I, who thought I had already missed out on Shira, had gotten a second chance to raise her.

  Only tending to the sheep turned out to be a much more complicated task than I had imagined. The one time I tried leading them to the nearby meadow it took me the whole day and I lost two sheep along the way. After that little incident, I decided I ought to keep them within the perimeters of the farm, convincing myself they didn’t actually need anything other than food and water. And even if they did, they’d manage. Nabil had left his white plastic chair on the farm, and Shira liked sitting on it and looking at me while I fed the sheep. Sometimes she’d start laughing when she saw what a miserable mess I was making of it, and I’d look at her, hoping she’d never stop. I was the only one who got to see those bursts of life. Those few brief moments, once or twice a day, when the girl smiled or even spoke, emerging from her burned-out soul. One morning, on the hilltop, she said she liked breathing in the desert. And one evening, she asked for another omelet. Said she liked it best when I made it with onions. Nelly didn’t believe me, said she needed to see it with her own eyes. I told her that’s what drove me crazy; it was one thing if the girl had disappeared completely, but it was clear that beneath it all, Shira was still there.

  Two weeks later, Nelly took the girl for a checkup in Beersheba. She offered to drop me off in Mitzpe, so I could take a break for a few hours, get some fresh air. I didn’t want to, but Nelly insisted and while she didn’t come out and say it, what she meant was that she needed me to take a break so she’d know she was allowed to as well. Because the conference in Tel Aviv was in two weeks’ time, and she needed to know it was okay for her to go away for three days.

  I gave in, and a moment after she dropped me off at a café, I crossed the street and sat down on a bench as an act of protest. So no one could say I was having a cappuccino while my little girl was having an MRI. But soon enough the Mitzpe sun bested me, forcing me to get up and embark on a quest for the last remnants of shade. Passing by the public library, I negotiated a compromise with myself—I’d sit in the air-conditioned space only if I spent that time trying to figure out what was going on with Shira. It was a small library with a frayed green carpet running the length of the floor, gray steel bookcases lining the walls, and a librarian wearing sunglasses and holding a white cane pacing back and forth by the front door. I wanted to go on the internet, but a few kids who had skipped school were sitting at the only computer station. The kids ignored my presence completely, and I found it rather pleasant thinking I was both there and not there. I spent three hours skimming through all the medical books stacked on the shelf beside the reflexology and shiatzu books. My mind was spinning with the countless illnesses that could have attacked Shira; the various ways in which a person can simply cease to exist were truly unfathomable. Nicolai called me while I was standing with a book in my hand, but the librarian’s stern shushing solved my dilemma as to whether I should answer.

  When Nelly texted me that they were heading back from Beersheba, I quickly took myself to the café, ordered two cappuccinos, and even drank one so I could tell her they didn’t know how to make a proper coffee.

  “How was it?” Nelly asked when I got into the car.

  “Life altering,” I replied, and Nelly laughed. So did Shira. We both swerved our heads toward the back seat.

  “See? See?” I told Nelly, who covered her mouth in shock.

  “Dad’s funny, right?” she said, just to make the girl talk.

  “The funniest,” Shira said and smiled. Nelly and I looked at each other as if our daughter had just uttered her first word.

  “We have to get this on tape,” Nelly said and took her phone out of her bag, but her hands were trembling so badly she couldn’t unlock the screen. The girl leaned forward into the radio that was playing “Dreamer” by theAngelcy and looked at it intently, as if the song itself was appearing right before her eyes, a defined shape and volume in space.

  “I can’t take it anymore,” she said and leaned her head back. She closed her eyes, the gap between her words and her indifferent gaze unbridgeable.

  “Can’t take what?” I asked, but the girl was gone. We sat there in silence, the three of us, until Nelly released the handbrake and started driving.

  * * *

  I couldn’t fall asleep that night. That sentence, “I can’t take it anymore,” kept haunting me. It drove me crazy thinking that maybe there were moments in which Shira was aware of her condition. That her consciousness was trapped in a locked-up body. My mind started racing with all the illnesses I had read about in the library. Meningitis and all kinds of tumors and ALS and epilepsy. I counted them one by one like sheep, and at some point I leaped out of bed in a panic and ran to her room. The dream catcher was hung over her bed and her closet was open. The light from the kitchen illuminated her face with a dull yellow glow. Only after watching her chest rise and fall for an entire minute did I allow myself to calm down. I was thinking of stroking her hair and tried to pinpoint when exactly this had happened—when touch stopped being an instinctive action and became one that demanded an explanation and rationale. And before I could find a reason, I saw it before me. I kept studying her from every angle to make sure I didn’t get it wrong, and realized Nelly had been right from the very beginning. The clue was there, in her eyes.

  A sketch from one of the dozens of library books popped into my head. An illustration that demonstrated how pupils move during a dream, from side to side, back and forth. But beneath her thin eyelids I saw Shira’s pupils move differently. In circles, and fast. Too fast.

  7.

  SHIRA LAY IN bed at the sleep lab, hooked up to all kinds of electrodes and wires.

  “You look like a captive alien,” I said. Shira didn’t laugh. I covered her with the blanket up to her waist because I couldn’t tell whether she was actually cold. She f
ell asleep after a few moments. When she was seven years old, there was a period in which she struggled with sleep but felt bad waking us up, so we didn’t know about it until one day Nelly woke up in the middle of the night and found her sitting in the living room staring at the ceiling. It turned out it had been going on for five days. Ever since, every night at bedtime, Nelly would sit on Shira’s bed and try to get her to confess, as if Nelly was some Irish priest. She wouldn’t let go until Shira spilled her heart out, telling her about the teacher who had yelled at her at school and the boy who whispered to her in the hallway that he loved her. Nelly said she had to know everything. It drove her crazy thinking there might be thoughts buzzing through her daughter’s mind that she wasn’t privy to. I looked at Shira again and wondered whether her silence was a conscious choice. Maybe she knew exactly what was troubling her, but didn’t want to burden us.

  I went out into the hallway and sat in one of the chairs. I decided to wait out the night there in the unlikely event that Shira woke up looking for me. An older woman with short red hair sat in front of me, and an agitated old man stood not far from us yelling at one of the technicians.

  “Why isn’t anyone getting her a pillow? I don’t get it,” he grumbled. “I just don’t get it!”

  The technician tried to calm him down, asking what his wife’s name was. “Lilian, her name is Lilian,” he said and in a huff took to the chair to my left, noticing I was staring at him.

  “What are you looking at, huh?”

  “Nothing, nothing,” I said, and quickly closed my eyes in a conciliatory gesture. I don’t know if I’d slightly nodded off before I heard the doctor rushing into the technician’s room. The old man, the woman with the red hair, and I all stretched out simultaneously.

  “Looks like something serious happened,” the woman said.

  I got up and stood by the door.

  “Can you hear anything?” the old man asked.

  I said I couldn’t.

  A few moments later, the door opened and the doctor darted out into the hallway. He tried sidestepping me without making eye contact, but I leaned slightly to the left, bumping into his shoulder. He looked at me and apologized.

  “Is there a problem with one of the patients?” I asked.

  He glanced at the two others waiting in the hallway, then looked back at me.

  “Are you Shira’s father?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I replied, and felt in the back of my neck two twinges of relief.

  * * *

  “I can’t say anything for sure yet. We’ve discovered a few abnormal findings, but we have to run more tests,” he said, and apologized for having to rush off. If Nelly knew I didn’t try to stop him, she would have divorced me then and there.

  Shira spent the three following nights at the sleep lab. Not that she even noticed. With every night the number of doctors pacing the hallways grew. They didn’t try to hide the fact that it had to do with Shira. Unlike with other patients, who got their wake-up call at 6:00 A.M. and were promptly discharged, a doctor came to examine Shira every morning for a whole hour. All the technicians and doctors I tried talking to said more tests had to be run before they could say anything with any certainty, but sometimes they were willing to drop a few hints. Her REM was three times the normal average. Her brain wave activity was abnormal and her breathing erratic. A collection of symptoms that refused to form a definitive diagnosis. On the fourth night, Nelly insisted on coming. She showed up without notice at midnight with a box of cookies and a small pillow, resting her head on my shoulder and commenting that we were already used to sleeping together in uncomfortable places. She set her alarm clock for seven, but one of the technicians woke us up half an hour before it was to go off, asking that we go see the director of the institute for an update on the situation.

  I instantly shot up. Nelly remained seated. “Maybe it’s better not knowing,” she said. I was afraid she was right. We walked into the director’s office and sat down. Nelly yawned and stretched her arms while I scanned the room, as if the answer to what had befallen Shira was somewhere within those four walls. A few diplomas boasting Dr. Mendelson’s name were hung on the wall behind the desk. The desk itself was rather bare, with nothing on it but a large keyboard, green reading lamp, and a wooden-framed photo of what seemed to be her two blond children. They were wearing buttoned-up shirts and jeans, smiling against the white background of the photography studio.

  “Straight out of a Gap catalog,” I whispered to Nelly, who then glanced at the photo.

  She snorted. “More like a propaganda poster for the Aryan race. Who shot that photo, Goebbels?” she asked just as the director of the institute walked into the room. I covered my mouth, trying not to laugh, doing my best to look like a concerned parent.

  The director sat down in front of us, lowering a few thick black notebooks onto the desk. Then she placed her elbows on the desk and crossed her arms, looking at us with a solemn expression and asking how we were holding up.

  “Not too great,” Nelly said. She gave me a side-glance, saw that I was still trying to suppress my laughter. Dr. Mendelson’s German looks didn’t help.

  “What can I say, Doctor. It’s been …,” Nelly said with a thin smile only I could see, “a real holocaust.”

  I cracked up. No matter how hard I tried to get my act together, I just couldn’t stop laughing. Which made Nelly laugh, even louder than me. She didn’t even try to fight it. I saw the doctor’s stern gaze, all the thoughts running through her head about the two wacko parents sitting in front of her. Maybe she got it right, but at that moment, it didn’t matter. Dr. Mendelson nudged the stack of notebooks in our direction and opened the top one.

  “What’s that?” I stuttered between fits of laughter, trying to settle my breathing without much success.

  “Shira’s dreams,” she announced. “We asked her every morning to write down what she could remember from her dreams.”

  We stopped laughing. We peeked at the pages. There were thousands of misshapen, illegible words, like the doodling of a little girl. “As you know more than anyone, Shira’s fine motor skills have suffered a serious deterioration, which is why her handwriting is basically indecipherable,” Dr. Mendelson said. She told us one of the technicians tried letting her type her dreams onto a computer, but the result was a nonsensical sequence of letters. She took out a yellow marker from the front pocket of her lab coat. “In the notebook, however, we did find a few words we could make out. Mostly single words, here and there a few short sentences. I’d appreciate it if you could go over it. Maybe there are things you could identify better than us.”

  We were silent. Dr. Mendelson said she’d give us some time alone and left the room. We stared at the jumbled words in fearful awe. Nelly reached out to the open notebook and pulled it closer to us, then started leafing through the pages slowly. At first she didn’t dare look, and once she did, she couldn’t understand. The handwriting was crabbed and minuscule, a mishmash of letters bumping into each other as if Shira had wanted to make sure no one could read it. I picked up the marker, and we started going over the text, digging for clues. Slowly, very slowly, the words started to surface—mostly unconnected, but sometimes fragmented, illogical sentences.

  Who is Netta Lifschitz? Who did she marry? Who’s going to come? A girl? How did she know Bob Dylan? Robert? Who the hell is Robert?

  Fragments of Shira flashed before us, and we pored over every word, slowly, sifting through traces of the girl’s consciousness. And every few moments we backtracked, afraid we might have missed a word and disappointed to find out we hadn’t. Her words trampled over each other on the page until they had lost all meaning, contracting and spilling onto the back cover.

  “How can someone dream so much, Ofer?” Nelly asked. Like always, she got what this was about before I did. When Dr. Mendelson returned, she started talking about the brain, using all these terms Nelly and I didn’t understand, like sleep cycles and EEG. She explained that when we sle
ep, we cycle through several stages, one of them being REM sleep—a stage characterized by rapid eye movement, when most dreams occur. She further explained that Shira’s dreams in each cycle were longer than those of other children her age, but it was a negligible difference, a few minutes at most. “It isn’t the actual duration of her dreams, but her subjective experience of that duration. It seems she experiences it as a very long period of time.” The doctor believed that was the root of the problem.

  “What do you mean? How long?” Nelly asked her. Dr. Mendelson offered only vague answers, but Nelly wouldn’t let it go. “When we ask most people to write down their dreams, they write anything between half a page and a page and a half,” the doctor said, and then tilted her head toward the notebook. “Shira, on the other hand, wrote eighty pages the first night, and almost a hundred last night.” She said they tried finding a precedent in the professional literature but couldn’t.

  “I don’t understand, how long does Shira feel every dream lasts?”

  “It really wouldn’t be professional to give you a precise number.”

  “Seven? Eight hours?”

  “I would estimate more.”

  “A day?” Nelly asked, lowering her fist onto the table.

  Dr. Mendelson reached for one of the notebooks, picked it up, and gazed at the words. Then she looked up at us. “There are no certainties, we’re still very much in the dark here. But I believe it’s highly probable that Shira feels as though every dream lasts years,” she said, and quickly reiterated that it was merely an initial estimation.

  “Days?” I asked, as if I had misheard. Dr. Mendelson turned the notebook in our direction and pointed at a series of numbers that appeared at the top of the page. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed these markings,” she said and began flipping through the pages, showing us that they appeared every few pages.