Accidents: A Novel

by Yael Hedaya

  He wanted to ask her why she needed this dubious package of eight friends, why she couldn’t make friends with just one or two girls, but he kept quiet. Dana, as if reading his mind, said, “They won’t take me anyway.” He asked why not, and she said, “Because I don’t fit in.” He wanted to know why she was going to the party in that case, but instead asked why she didn’t fit in. “It’s just not that important to me,” she said, adding that she didn’t like those girls, except for Tamar.

  Yonatan knew Tamar Peretz, whose mother was a single parent. He liked her and Rona, her mother, who was a psychologist; they lived in a big apartment on Hess Street. He wondered if Dana liked Tamar because she only had one parent. Dana said, “Tamar is the smartest, and she hates parties too.” Like you? Yonatan said, and she said, “Yes.” Although he was proud of his daughter, who, like him, hated groups and made friends with other group-haters, what he really wanted to know was what was going on with the Girl Scouts, because she hadn’t gone to meetings for a few weeks. He guessed she was unhappy there, and then pictured what would happen to her at the party. He couldn’t do anything to spare her, or even promise that these exhausting attempts to join a group would stop when she got older, when she became like him, because he knew it was a lie; she would never be like him. He knew that however similar she grew, however she mimicked him and his patterns of happiness and sadness—he could see her doing it expertly and could do nothing to prevent this either—she would be someone else, one day a stranger to him.

  Dana sighed and put her baubles of bribery back in the bag and said she still had to wrap the presents in the gift wrap she had bought with the change. She took the roll out to show him: shiny blue paper with pictures of golden teddy bears in pajamas and hats. He asked if she wanted him to help, and she said, “Are you kidding? You’re terrible at wrapping.” He laughed but was a little hurt.

  ( 3 )

  The combination of two left hands and a sense of impatience made Yonatan helpless and sometimes even harmful when it came to minor tasks such as tying shoelaces, folding shirtsleeves, pulling out splinters, or wrapping gifts. Ilana was no good at them either—she was just as clumsy as he was—but she was patient and rarely ruffled. Sometimes, when he was angry at her, he wondered if she really was just calm or whether it was something closer to passivity, the kind you see in large friendly dogs. But even when he felt irritated and compared her to animals, he knew he was jealous. Whether she had true tranquillity or a blessed simplicity, he did not possess it, and after Dana was born, but especially after Ilana died, his need to take pleasure in life had become suddenly urgent, as if joie de vivre were yet another of the new arenas of responsibility that had fallen to him.

  When he was single, he used to fantasize about the woman he would eventually choose to live with. He knew it would be a female version of himself, an identical twin, if he could find such a person. He had wanted someone stormy and brilliant and unpredictable, because that was how he saw himself, but then he was surprised to discover how many such replicas there were, or at least, how many women pretended to be like him until he would get scared and hurriedly put an end to his ties before they became real relationships.

  When he was thirty, a large publisher agreed to publish his debut novel based on the first fifty pages he had submitted, and out of pride and a sense of victory he shut himself in his rented apartment and wrote. He was a young author at the start of his career and he behaved accordingly: He was demanding and moody and made it clear to the women he dated that his only real commitment in life was to his writing, and in all probability that was how it would always be, although even then he knew these were lines taken from some parody of a young writer’s life and not something he was really able or willing to stand behind.

  A few years later, still spinning from the success of his first book, he found himself growing apart from his university friends, most of whom had married and had children, and becoming closer to aging bachelors and divorcés in their forties and fifties. Among them were two authors, one of whom had published a failed book while the other claimed he didn’t write for publication anyway; a theater actor who had once enjoyed mediocre success; and a historian whose notions were too radical for any university to hire him. His new friends saw themselves as true bohemians and were not particularly bothered by the fact that there was no longer a true bohemia to belong to.

  He sat with them in cafés and bars and listened to them complain about the bourgeoisie, which to him, much like bohemia, was a concept that had all but consumed itself. They mocked the married writers who had the best of both worlds—stability and the lack thereof—and claimed you couldn’t be a serious artist if you had a house to go home to, kids, debts, home-cooked meals, and regular sex. Yonatan drank beers and smoked weed with them and pretended to be quietly absorbing their words and hoping for a life like theirs. He tried to persuade them that he was scornful of his own success, but his real scorn was directed toward them. He pitied them and they bored him.

  Around the time he decided that misery as a permanent state was no longer for him, Ilana quietly entered his life as if she had been standing in the wings all along, listening with amusement to the usual circular conversations that hovered above his head, waiting for the right moment to introduce herself, and then, with the cunning of a seasoned saleswoman, to present to him gradually the contingency plan of a family and kids, debts, home-cooked meals, and regular sex.

  She was in her final year of a BA in East Asian Studies—she had been attracted by the color of the Far East, she said, particularly the spices and the cuisine. He had started a PhD in the Hebrew literature department but was dropping out to write his second book, an act that Ilana supported. It was the first indecision he let her in on. They had only been dating for three months, but Ilana knew what he wanted to hear: He wanted to be released from the university, which he couldn’t stand anyway, and he wanted permission—not just from the publisher, who had quickly signed another contract and paid a handsome advance—to sit at home and write. She gladly gave it to him. At first he suspected she was making things easy for him so he’d like her, that she had no opinion of her own, that maybe she was a little too simple for him. Before they met, and while they were going out, he dated other women too, who impressed and exhausted him with their verbal skills. A large part of what he found attractive was the violence of their conversations. It never occurred to him that he could be attracted to someone who was so supportive.

  He was convinced that his relationship with Ilana was temporary, a place to rest until he moved on to his next stormy affair. But he very quickly found himself addicted to her support, and then he began falling in love with her. His criticism turned into quiet astonishment: at the way she lived, at her rhythm—he imagined her as the left hand in a piano composition, the musical babysitter of the right hand—and at her kind of strength, made up not of elements so familiar to him, like ambition and anxiety, but rather of optimism. He was surprised to find that she was happy with him, that he wasn’t able to make her miserable, but even more surprising was that from the very beginning, when she came up to him in the cafeteria and asked if she could sit down without waiting for an answer, he didn’t even try to.

  He remembered their first conversation, the way he had scrutinized her every word and every movement, convinced he was about to fail her. They had talked about the cafeteria food and he said it was inedible and expected her to agree with him, but Ilana said she liked the food, especially the schnitzel, which they were out of today so she had to get meatballs. He said he must have taken the last schnitzel, and when he told her she was welcome to eat it because he wasn’t hungry, she reached over to his plate with her fork, speared the chicken, transferred it to her plate, drowned it in ketchup, and gobbled it up with a glee that was somehow childish and unself-conscious; it both repelled him and aroused his curiosity. Then she polished off her meatballs as well, and when he chuckled and made some comment about her appetite, she said meatballs were one
of the things she couldn’t resist. He said he couldn’t either, but only if they were made properly, and Ilana invited him for Friday-night dinner at her sister’s—“the queen of meatballs,” she called her—and he accepted her offer, which was the oddest proposal he had ever received from a strange woman. And so, on a wintry Friday evening, he met Nira and Zvi and their baby boy, and found himself immediately liking Nira and detesting her husband the chemist, who shook his hand and said, “I hear you’re an author. You must be a leftist.” Later, happily wolfing down meatballs, he sensed himself very calmly being attracted to Ilana, who brought a cake she baked for dessert, which was a failure.

  She was his complete opposite, and something in him recognized that and lashed out, but he was wise enough, and lonely enough, not to reject her up front. It took him years to understand that Ilana was not the left hand and he was not the right; they were not even playing the same composition; rather, that they were more like two musicians in a huge conservatory, separately practicing their own—different—instruments in adjacent rooms.

  He missed her. He missed her voice, with its hint of an American accent, and the scent of her body, and sometimes he missed her clothes, but more than anything he missed her talent for experiencing life instead of thinking it to death. Like one organ projecting pain onto another, Ilana had spent ten years showering him with daily doses of the complete opposite of pain, the complete opposite of himself. Losing those gifts was, for him, the essence of being a widower.

  ( 4 )

  He remembered the first time he went to a support group for widowers, the summer after his wife died. He spent the whole afternoon trying to decide what to wear to the meeting, and this surprised him because he had never been bothered by such things before. He did not consider himself a handsome man, although he knew there was something sexy about him. He knew it had something to do with his face, and on good days managed to convince himself that it might be somehow related to his body, but he did not dwell on his appearance—at first naturally, then later almost as policy.

  That scorching summer afternoon, he found himself wondering what his clothes said about him; the question made him embarrassed, not only because he had never engaged in these thoughts before but because the audience to whom they were directed was composed of widowed men, which made him think that perhaps he was dressing not for them but for their dead wives. He was so taken by the notion of flirting with the dead that he hurried to his study and made a note to himself to work up the idea somewhere in the novel he had begun writing a year ago. Then he went back to the bedroom and continued to deliberate in front of the closet.

  Dana, who was six at the time, sat near him on the bed, humming songs from The Jungle Book, which was her favorite movie of the moment. She started folding up the shirts he had taken out of the closet and spread on the bed, as if it were a game. She tried to copy her mother’s method of folding the sleeves in half, crossing them over the front of the shirt, then folding it over twice so it always looked like a brand-new article of clothing on a shelf in a store. With great concentration, Dana managed to fold one sleeve, crawl around the shirt, and fold the other one, but when she tried to fold the whole shirt, the sleeves came undone. She repeated her crawl-and-fold act over and over again. Yonatan could hear her frustration, as well as her stubborn optimism, in the rise and fall of her humming. Eventually she gave up on her mother’s method and invented her own: she folded the shirt in two, then in four, then quickly rolled it up without giving the sleeves a chance to revolt, until finally the shirt was defeated; it did not look like the shirts on a store shelf, but like an object that had just been through a tussle. Her method touched him. It was like his own.

  He looked at the growing pile of shirts on the bed and at Dana, who surrounded the heap with her arms, embracing it, perhaps estimating how long it would take her to fold them all up again. He sat on the edge of the bed, took off his T-shirt, held it up to his face and smelled it, then tossed it on Dana’s head. As she giggled and squirmed, he hugged her, nibbled her nose through the fabric, and asked, “Is it stinky?” When she nodded, he put it back on, muttered to himself that he didn’t need this business now, the widowers would just have to take him as he was, slightly smelly, and then he went into the living room, lit a cigarette, and waited for Nira.

  He didn’t have a babysitter yet, back then. Before Ilana was killed they had Ziv, the teenager who lived upstairs. He used to come down to their apartment barefoot, hiding two or three cigarettes in the waistband of his shorts, intending to smoke them secretly while he babysat. But Ziv had started his army service a short while before the accident. As a goodwill gesture, and perhaps in an attempt to overcome the embarrassment that struck him whenever he ran into the new widower in the stairwell, Ziv offered to look after Dana sometimes—for free, he emphasized generously—when he came home on leave. But that was during his basic training; he didn’t yet know that, due to a suddenly diagnosed heart defect, he would be posted at the local army base and would spend all his evenings at home anyway, with nothing to do. Even so, Yonatan never asked him and Ziv never offered his services again, because they both knew that the babysitting contract had been terminated when Ilana died. Ever since, when they met in the stairwell, they would smile at each other politely. Ziv would ask how Dana was and Yonatan would ask about Ziv, who would always sigh and say, “It’ll all turn out fine,” like an old man. Then he would hurry about his business, which was undoubtedly the business of being a young man; that first summer without Ilana, when Ziv’s parents went on a safari trip to Kenya and Yonatan sat on the balcony smoking at nights after putting Dana to bed—which was, in those days, a long ordeal because of the series of questions she had about death and about her mother’s new place in the world—he heard Ziv having sex in his parents’ bedroom, whose window faced the backyard. It was short and noisy sex, full of groaning, and here and there a young girl’s peals of laughter, and a loud sigh at the end. Then there would be footsteps, the ones Yonatan remembered from the babysitting days, with the explicit sound of feet carrying a hundred and sixty-odd pounds of horniness to the kitchen or bathroom.

  Nira came over to look after Dana. Her children, Evyatar and Michal, were already old enough to stay on their own, and anyway his brother-in-law Zvi, the tight-lipped chemist, was always at home, immersed in research in his study—a closed-in balcony off the living room—and sometimes Yonatan thought Nira was so generous with her babysitting not only out of a sense of obligation but also because she wanted to exchange the silence of her own home for that of another.

  He wondered whether Nira was happily married, although he couldn’t imagine how anyone could be happy with Zvi, who was not only taciturn but was also the only right-winger in the family. Ilana had volunteered no information about her sister’s marriage, and Yonatan never inquired. When he went to their house to drop off Dana or pick her up, he exchanged polite greetings with Zvi, who, during the first years of Yonatan’s widowhood, would ceremoniously get up from his desk and come over to shake Yonatan’s hand or pat him on the back. He also adopted the annoying gesture of condolence of offering Yonatan a glass of local brandy from a dusty bottle he kept in his cabinet of chemistry books, even if it was morning or lunchtime. Yonatan always refused the drink, but found himself politely drawn into small talk. Their conversations sounded more like the exchange of grunts between two animals who feared each other, and they both carefully avoided talking about the accident or about politics, which was particularly difficult for Zvi because he had something to say about both topics. It was unclear whom he hated more: Israeli drivers or the left. Yonatan, who did not recoil from talking about Ilana or view political arguments as a desecration of his grief, enjoyed the diplomacy and restraint his brother-in-law imposed upon himself and never bothered, even a year or two later, to signal to Zvi that it was all right for him to go back to chatting about his favorite subjects. Conversations with Zvi had always bored him, and he saw no reason to deny himself the exemption he
had been granted.

  Even so, there was one occasion when Zvi was unable to restrain himself. A few months after the accident, when Yonatan came over with Dana for dinner on Friday night, his brother-in-law called him into the closed-off balcony and presented to him, shyly but with an unconcealed degree of pride, a massive diagram of the road on which Ilana had been crushed to death. It was full of numbers and measurements and arrows, and childish little drawings of the two vehicles: the truck and the Subaru, one in the lane heading south and one in the lane heading north, one red and the other green. “It’s a little something I made for you,” said Zvi, alternately examining his creation and scrutinizing Yonatan’s face, and when he detected no signs of curiosity or protest, he considered himself at liberty to proceed. He spread the poster out on the table, placed improvised paperweights on the corners, and said, “If you don’t mind, I’ll explain it to you simply.” He invited Yonatan with a sweep of the arm to sit down, but Yonatan remained standing.

  Zvi, who was extremely methodical, had gathered data from the police and the Ministry of Transportation about accidents that had occurred on that road during the past five years. There were thirty-seven of them, nine of which involved fatalities, and one morning, he confessed to Yonatan, he had driven out there and taken his own measurements. Yonatan listened as Zvi held forth about various laws of physics, driving speeds, braking distances, and statistical probabilities, and very soon found himself losing track of his brother-in-law’s voice—which, as usual, was at once enthusiastic and monotonous—but he continued hypnotically to follow his index finger, whose gnawed fingernail and inflamed cuticles stole the show for a moment. The finger traced the course of the accident with soft circles and zigzags, and the sleepiness that had descended upon Yonatan was replaced by anger. He had no idea why his brother-in-law insisted on reconstructing the accident, and the combination of his scientific explanation and its horrifying content seemed like a double dose of abuse. But then he saw the injured finger rapping decisively on the roof of the green car, their Subaru, and heard Zvi’s voice saying, “No one could have survived it, Yonatan. Believe me. No one,” and he suddenly realized that his brother-in-law’s intent was to console him. This entire project—the poster, the rulers, the colored pens, and the secret journey up north—had a purpose besides satisfying Zvi’s methodical cravings and his constant desire to prove that he was right, and that purpose was to offer Yonatan some real scientific consolation, something that could not be refuted, something far stronger than a shot of brandy in the middle of the day and yet, Yonatan thought as his eyes welled up, just as cheap.