In a back row of more modest stalls, he notices portraits of her in varying sizes here and there: Elisheva being thoughtful and Elisheva sleeping, Elisheva dancing, Elisheva dreaming, winking, Elisheva dressed, naked, breast-feeding.
There is a stall selling her own creations. Letters she wrote are displayed under a large glass pane. And lists of every kind—she is mad about lists, he smiles to himself—and work reports, and compositions she wrote as a child. He stands on tiptoe and glimpses at the titles over the broad shoulders of the crowds: “I Was a Little Raindrop,” and “The Righteous Are Delivered Out of Trouble.” There are papers from high school and university, birthday toasts, even shopping lists. There are also bundles of letters tied with red ribbons, and on the side there is a little sign telling buyers to ask the seller about special letters he keeps in a hidden drawer. And a special offer for collectors: highlights from her diary. Shaul didn’t even know she kept a diary, although, on second thought, why not? He reads the price tags with astonishment: even if he wanted to, he couldn’t afford to buy them!
But some people have money, and they make purchases, and offer to barter—one guy is willing to trade a diary excerpt from August 20 for one of her bras, any color, and another offers the May 4 page to the highest bidder. Apparently there are many takers, and a kind of public auction is held, and Shaul tries to push his way in, he has to know exactly what happened to her on August 20 and May 4, and where he was then. But there is such excitement over these two items that he is pushed out of the circle and watches brokenhearted as the bra changes hands—the thin, pure white bra, which he liked to open with two fingers when Elisheva was lying on her stomach; he would melt with passion at the sight of her lovely, long, smooth back and her round shoulders, and sink his tongue into the soft hairline on her nape, her hair, which had turned gray at some moment when Shaul must have been looking away—
The market stretches on and on into the horizon, dogs scurry between people’s feet, and nimble peddlers sell hot corn on the cob and pink cotton candy and little candied apples, all the market trivialities which Elisheva actually likes. And there are a few crooks, of course. One of them is trying to make a fortune off one of her curls, which lies frizzy and innocent and impudent on a bed of velvet in a little box. Another offers miniature bottles, whose content he does not even disclose; he just waves this bottle or another in his hand and winks and blinks and snickers in the most disgusting and despicable manner. Shaul holds back from running over and strangling him with his own hands and taking over the whole inventory, opening the sealed bottles and dousing himself with her precious nectar. But he must hurry, skip along, he has no choice, because in a few minutes they will reach the hut where she resides and there are still things he has to see before he gets to her, still more loathsome blows to hit him with complete surprise on this haunted-house ride which he boards every year, a set course that cannot be changed. It seems that today he’ll have to give up the public trial, with all its details and minutiae, a kind of field court-martial that is held for him to determine how he could allow such a thing to happen to his wife. But as it happens, there is a little more time, a couple of minutes, just to taste. The presiding judge uses an expedited procedure and asks if anyone in the crowd has a personal claim against him. After a long silence, a man steps forward, not a young man, heavy and sad—it is Paul, of course, he made it here after all, of course he did. He slowly makes his way until he is standing opposite Shaul, and a long and detailed debate ensues, right there in front of everyone, with examinations and cross-examinations that Paul conducts against him. It turns out that Paul knows all his secrets and all his little shames, knows exactly where to press and where to push and how to tear his life into shreds in front of everyone. Finally, the surprising verdict is handed down: a duel, in the nude, between him and the “public representative”—namely, Paul. But this will not be just a fistfight. That would be too easy—one man is hit and falls down, and that’s the end of it. No, they must also hold an intellectual battle, that is the catch, and it must be in Shaul’s fields of expertise. But it turns out that Paul knows more about these too, much more, always more, and Elisheva will suddenly emerge from one of the crevices on the mountain above, will stand with one leg slightly folded, like a doe, will look at them both, from Paul to him and back again, and her thin nostrils will suddenly widen with the tremble of decision
Esti slowed down. Little lights flickered far down the road. A roadblock. A tall, thin Ethiopian soldier with shiny eyes leaned in and asked for papers. He peered through the back window and noticed the figure lying there, huddled, covered with a blanket.
It’s all right, Esti said, he’s with me.
Have to see his face, the soldier said. Esti didn’t understand. She looked back and saw that Shaul’s hand was covering his face as he slept.
Leave him alone, she said angrily, he’s sleeping. But she was surprised that Shaul had fallen asleep again, and that the flashlight and the strange voice hadn’t woken him.
Have to see his face, the soldier insisted.
Shaul, she whispered softly.
He opened one eye and blinked at the light. There was a long silence. Esti tapped the wheel with her finger.
Oh, the soldier said, you came again today?
He handed the papers back to her, lightly patted the side of the car, and went back to his sandbag post. Esti closed the window slowly. Placed both hands on the wheel. They drove on.
And on and on.
Her left hand dropped to her thigh and pressed down hard. She felt her flesh being crushed. She pressed harder, then let go and concentrated entirely on the pain. But the pain passed and she remained. She stared at the dashboard. She would need to fill the car soon. The thought of the drive back troubled her. She was afraid she wouldn’t be able to drive home alone after dropping him off. It takes two, she thought, to bear this weight. And again she saw how he had hidden his face with his hand, how he had blinked at the light. The hardest thing, she thought, is waking up someone who is pretending to be asleep.
When I got back—he finally ripped through the silence, unloading his confession impatiently, indifferently even—yesterday, you know, I was knocked out, it must have been 3 a.m. I drove into a telephone pole. We passed it earlier, just past Sde Boker—didn’t you see? I took half a transformer with me.
She nodded. Some things took a while to sink in. And the day before yesterday you also went, she determined later, thoughtfully and very quietly.
He crossed his arms over his chest. Closed his eyes.
And every day Elisheva has been there, she thought, and every year when she goes to be alone. She could hear his breaths. She jostled her knees against each other a few times. Tell me, she said.
He opened a cloudy eye.
Yes, she said with sudden eagerness.
But I’m crazy, he mumbled, I’m a piece of shit.
You could say so, she said, but I want to hear.
Why?
Why? What could she say, where could she start? You ask as if there’s only one reason.
Give me one.
When you talk about it, she said, I suddenly breathe differently.
Okay, that’s a reason. He smiled pathetically.
I haven’t told you about the wedding yet—he was barely audible, and she glanced in the mirror and saw him sinking further and further into himself, choking down his bleeding self—their wedding, which of course has no significance from a legal standpoint, but they did it anyway. The symbolic aspect, you see, was very important to them, it seems.
She shifted in her seat. Massaged her aching back against the seat. It was hard for her now, almost unbearable to go back there with him.
I think about it a lot, he said. I sometimes wonder when exactly they decided on it. Maybe it was the day Tom graduated from high school. That evening we were at the graduation with all the other students and their parents, and it was important to Elisheva to celebrate something meaningful with Paul too, at lun
chtime. She listened. His voice, as usual, became stronger by the minute and filled with the blood of the story. Or did it happen after her mother died? Maybe she realized life was short and decided she wanted to finally take a real, uncompromising step.
His lips thickened as he pondered again, for the thousandth time, how and at what moment in life a person makes such a fateful decision. How one manages to hide from one’s partner the difficulty of the decision making, the sighs of unease, the expansion of the heart when one suddenly feels it’s the right thing to do and that one is in a place where laws and norms do not reign. Sometimes I think, he added, that perhaps I noticed a new expression on her face that day, the day she made the decision, but I didn’t realize what it was. Or I try to remember a period of time, let’s say a few days or a week, when she was unusually elated—a burst of happiness or something wild, irrational, maybe even a sense of vengeful glee toward me, over her finally being completely free of me, on a symbolic level, of course.
Then they deliberated over whether or not they should invite any friends, he went on, and even though they both knew right away that they didn’t want any strangers at the ceremony—and for them, he snickered, a “stranger” is any human being at all—they still couldn’t overcome the pleasure of amusing themselves with the thought that their close friends would be with them, you see, that for once they would be looked at lovingly from the outside too.
She nodded, eyes glazed over, trapped again and again in the burgeoning conversation that spread out for her within those two “hellos,” in the silence, in the sigh. She thought: How can he still pull me out of my life like a hair from a ball of dough? Sighing, almost begging him to let her go, to release—
And just think, Shaul said from somewhere far away, how many of their days—I mean, their few hours—they wasted on planning the wedding. Although it’s certainly possible that they didn’t see it as a waste. He shrugged. Maybe dealing with it actually made them feel they were more, I don’t know, real? Tangible? They definitely made lists. Or rather, Elisheva did. You know how fond she is of lists. He smiled, and Esti smiled dully with him, remembering the little yellow notes that always floated around Elisheva. And they wrote down for themselves all the pros and cons, whom to invite and whom not to, whom they could trust and who might blab, and tried to guess each person’s reaction to the invitation, and I have to ask you—
She didn’t even have to stop and think: Yes, I would have come.
He contemplated a little. She could tell he liked her answer. I don’t blame you, he said.
Look, he sighed, this whole thing isn’t easy for me. Sometimes I’m really enraged inside. I think, for example, of the wanderings my job has imposed on both of them. Over the past ten years we’ve been on two sabbaticals, one in Washington and one in Boston, and each time the sabbatical came up she didn’t even try to protest, didn’t look for excuses to get out of it, but just accepted it simply and even managed to seem happy. I remember how it amazed me then: she said it wouldn’t be a bad thing for us to breathe some fresh air, for both of us to refresh ourselves a little together. She was really excited about it, even though I knew that such a long trip, for them, meant a huge, complicated, and completely unnecessary organizational effort. And think about him, about her Paul, who had to uproot himself from here and become an immigrant again in a strange country. He had to rent an apartment to be close to us, somewhere she could reach within her almost-hour of swimming, which she didn’t give up anywhere, in any country on any day—his voice trembled—because she couldn’t give it up, because without it she probably would die. It’s as simple as that. Esti looked at him and for a moment he seemed even more exposed, almost naked in his clothes. And you have to understand, it’s not easy for me to think that the second I announced the move she agreed immediately, and took it upon herself to get this whole trip off the ground, all the uprooting. Maybe she felt as if that way she was cleansing her sins somehow, I don’t know. But sometimes the thought of her huge efforts, theirs, around those two trips, illuminates me in a rather unpleasant light, he said, as if they know something about me that I prefer not to know, not to think of. What? she asked feebly. What do you mean? As if I’m a person—he hesitated, his bottom lip trembling—whose grasp on life is tenuous, pathetic, like that of someone with a chronic illness, terminal even, or like one of those children who have to be kept in a sterile bubble their whole life.
Hypnotized, she hovers in the space of his sealed pod, a human flake carried this way and that on the current of a strong breeze. Thoughts pass through her, chills of consciousness, alien headlines, ridiculing, but she doesn’t want them. Maybe later. Tomorrow. And she knows: as early as dawn. And she hopes she won’t betray what she felt then either. And if she does, she hopes she at least knows that she is betraying. And that she remembers how excited she is now by this power of his to insist on keeping the ember that burns inside him alive, as if there is no one with him and he has no shame, no truth or lies, nothing forbidden or ugly. It excites her to think that he has, quite simply, shown her the cogwheels and levers and pistons of the abstract mechanism that generates—in his soul and in hers too—the dreams and nightmares and hallucinations and terrors and yearnings. They are all exposed to her, gaping generously in a way no one has ever given her before, and it is good for her there, she knows, it is so warm … She reaches back and feels around and finds his hand, envelops it with her fingers, squeezes, sending him strength, drawing it from him.
But they did have flowers, he laughs exaggeratedly, excited by her touch and not pulling his hand back. If there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that Elisheva wanted the house to be full of flowers. Because when she’s with him, in their home, flowers always give her a sense of space and freedom. You should see how she sniffs the bouquet she buys for Shabbat from the Yemenite guy by the post office—such a smiler, that one, with big lips, almost purple—and how she arranges the flowers in a vase, her seriousness, and how much time she spends on them, and the way suddenly, listen, as if she can’t take it anymore, she leans over swiftly and puts her face in and inhales them as hard as she can—
He speaks quickly, grasping her hand as if trying to push away what will happen soon, what he will see in a few minutes. How did she manage not only, he says, to take off the veil she must have worn, not only the dress she bought for the ceremony and probably left in his closet among the other dresses, but how did she hide everything else? That’s what I don’t get: the excitement, the trembling knees when he lifted her veil to kiss her, the ring he bought her—after all, he put a ring on her finger, and then he had to take it off as soon as the ceremony was over, and that’s the ring he puts on her finger every time she shows up at his door, and that way, every day they have a new little wedding ceremony. Maybe she even forgot to take the ring off that day, he thinks suddenly, and only when she left the apartment and stood at the steps to blow him one last kiss, only then did he notice it and, alarmed, whisper to her to return, and she didn’t understand what for, but went up happily for another kiss, and he pulled the ring off and kissed her bare finger. Shaul chokes, and Esti sees his eyes glaze over in the mirror and his lips pucker for an imagined kiss, and her heart tears with compassion. That is the essence of his life, she thinks. These thoughts and fancies, they are more alive in him than anything else, they may even be more—something jolts in her—than what he has with Elisheva herself.
A few minutes later they drove past the entrance gate and into the cabin area. They saw no one. The headlights lit up a cabin wall every so often, or a tent, or a hut covered with palm fronds.
Straight and farther down, he said, no lights.
The car rocked heavily. Gravel flicked under the wheels.
Farther, farther down.
The path became a slope, twisted and more rocky.
Farther, all the way down.
Esti thought she’d never be able to get back up. It seemed to her as if the entire desert could hear the Volvo screeching and gr
oaning.
That’s it.
They were on the edge of a cliff.
Turn it off.
She killed the engine, straightened up a bit, and saw, on the plain beneath her, a small dark cabin. Bamboo walls, a roof of mats and branches.
The sudden silence filled up quickly with crickets and nocturnal rustles. She saw his face come and go in the mirror, and then settle there, a pale yellowish stain against the back window. They sat quietly. The mist had lifted and the sky over the desert was cloudless. Esti thought about Elisheva breathing beyond those thin walls. Asleep or awake. Maybe watching them.
Do you need help? she whispered.
What? Her voice had shocked him, and only then did she realize she was disturbing him.
I thought—should I help you out of the car?
No … I don’t need anything.
His eyes were closed tight, and he bit his lower lip. Maybe he needs me to get out, she thought, maybe he wants to be left alone. But she didn’t move, not wanting to disturb him. She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. And felt him erase her again. She did not exist, and for a long moment she delighted in the feeling.
She lost track of time. Years shed away from her. She might have slept. Maybe just hallucinated. When she opened her eyes once in a while, she saw his constricted face, and no longer tried to guess what was going through his mind. She was part of his imagination, an image flickering at the edge of his hallucinatory scene. She closed her eyes again and gave herself over to him and became the thing he saw, the back hiding the cabin in which Elisheva was writhing on her bed with a man, perhaps two, perhaps with all the men in the world.
Lovers and Strangers Page 14