Accidents: A Novel

by Yael Hedaya

  Since that time, he learned to treat Zvi with forgiveness, because he appreciated Zvi’s attempt to encourage him, much the way adults appreciate useless gifts that children make for them with their own hands. And, so as not to insult him, he had even accepted his offer to take the diagram home—in case he wanted to look at it again, as Zvi said. But he never had looked at it again, and the thing stayed in the trunk of his new car for almost a year until he needed the spare tire one day and found it, crumpled and dusty, rolled up in the rubber band Zvi had put around it, and threw it in the trash.

  He was fond of Nira, though. During his first year without Ilana, she helped him overcome some of the daily difficulties he only identified later, when she saw that he was getting along and withdrew from his day-to-day routine a little. He was grateful to her for having taken control of his life and sometimes found himself missing that period, the days when she treated him as unstable and helpless. He also liked her because she was so similar to his wife. Ilana was five years younger than her sister, but their faces were almost identical: the same light brown eyes, slender eyebrows, and eyelashes that were practically translucent; the same dark-blond wavy hair and the same haircut. They both had fair, freckled complexions, very narrow lips, and little upturned noses that looked utterly goyish—they both joked about them and called them “Waspish noses”—and they both had the same figure.

  Sometimes, when he looked at Nira as she walked around his apartment, especially when she was busy cooking and cleaning or hanging laundry, when she had to stand on her tiptoes and stretch out of the bedroom window over the laundry line—when she made those movements, he saw Ilana and remembered what he knew when he met her but forgot when he fell in love with her: that initially he had not liked that body.

  When he first saw her in the campus cafeteria holding a tray, leaning against the counter, she had been standing up on tiptoe to see what was in the stainless steel vats, even though she knew just as well as he and all the other students what was in them, but she was an optimist. She stood then in the same pose as she did years later, when she hung laundry, and just as Nira stood when she hung the laundry during that long year after Ilana’s death. Back then he had thought that Ilana was a midget. She wasn’t terribly short—in fact, she was of average height—but she had the body language of a short person: something apologetic and yet full of energy. And she had a strange backside. It was flat, almost invisible, and when she stood she always tried to make it stick out, planting her hands on her hips and leaning back. When they became a couple she told him how much she hated her rear end, but it made no impression on him because he had never met a woman who didn’t. Now, when he thought of it, he regretted never having told her what she must have wanted to hear, what she had tried unsuccessfully to squeeze out of him: that he loved it. It’s great, he thought, when he saw her naked; how had they lived together for ten years without his ever telling her that?

  He remembered saying to himself in the cafeteria that day, as he sat opposite her at the sticky table and poked his fork into a mound of mashed potatoes, that he would never be attracted to her. He looked at her, and at the other female students standing in line, and made a mental note of his level of attraction to each of them. Very, Depends on the circumstances, No, and Never: those were his categories, and Ilana oscillated between the latter two. A few weeks later, he slept with her in the backseat of his Citroën DS.

  She claimed to have fallen in love with the car long before she fell in love with him. The car made her curious, and after the curiosity, she told him, came the fantasies: she wondered who owned the car. She couldn’t explain why, but she was certain it was a man, and every time she walked by the charming Citroën parked outside campus, she tried to guess what its owner looked like. She was sure he was a Humanities student, or at least she hoped he was, and she bet he was either arrogant with too much self-awareness or a poor bohemian type who had no idea what he was driving and didn’t much care either. Then she said it occurred to her that he could be a combination of both. It turned out Ilana had asked around long before she saw him in the cafeteria, and someone had pointed to him as the owner of the car, so when he watched her that day he had no idea that Ilana was watching him back and that all her movements were calculated to attract his attention.

  The only area in which the sisters were unalike was the way they dressed. Ilana liked loose colorful clothing with distracting prints, chiffon, and Indian fabrics, and when batik came back into fashion she bought blouses and skirts with patterns that always looked like dart-boards to Yonatan. Her sister treated clothing as a necessary nuisance, and in that respect she resembled him.

  * * *

  Nira came in and put her handbag down on the couch, complained that the apartment was too hot, told him there was a sale on air conditioners, and said that all in all he looked well, as if she had been keeping a meticulous record of his progress since that December morning. Then she went into the kitchen and put the meatballs she had brought into the freezer. She asked if Dana had eaten and said, before he could answer, “I’ll make her an omelet.” He said okay and stood by the fridge for a moment. “Go on, go already, you’re late,” she told him, and before she closed the door behind him, as Dana stood next to her, tightly grasping the collar of one of the shirts she had dragged out of the bedroom, she said he should take his time and not rush. Although he knew she was referring to the meeting, he thought about that sentence in the car and decided to use it if they forced him to talk. “Me,” he would say, if the moderator asked how he was coping, “I’m taking my time and not rushing.” He knew it would make a good impression because it was the type of thing support groups liked.

  But how could he know what support groups would like? And why the cynicism? After all, he was going for Dana, not for himself. When he parked and got out of the car and wondered if the other cars parked outside the building belonged to its residents or to the widowers, he asked himself if that was the truth, because he knew he was not going only for his daughter, and perhaps not for her at all but for himself, only for himself (in the group they’d probably tell him it was all right to be selfish). Six months had passed since Ilana died and he felt lost, and above all he felt childish and angry, as if he were conducting a secret life, like Ziv, but without the hormones or the future.

  He was the last to arrive, twenty minutes late. It seemed as if they were sitting there waiting, angry at him for holding them up; they had little kids too and they had managed to get there on time. But he knew it was arrogance to assume that the sadness in the air was because of his tardiness, as if the fact that he was an author—he assumed the moderator had informed the group members—gave him the special status of some kind of senior widower, someone who knew more about life than they did, someone who had something meaningful to say about death.

  ( 5 )

  Ilana had believed in God. She wasn’t religious, but her Jewish-American upbringing had given her certain habits that he found annoying: She lit candles on Friday nights, and on Yom Kippur she fasted and went to a Reform synagogue. When she moved in with him, to the massive apartment he rented on Montefiore Street, he would tease her about her “pagan tendencies” and watch with amusement as she lit candles, covering her face with her hands, and sang the blessing. Sometimes he would try to catch her eye through her fingers or distract her by making faces, blowing cigarette smoke at her or hugging her from behind and tickling her; then he would pull her to the bed and have sex with her as if that would somehow shake off the crumbs of traditionalism.

  When they talked about getting married, he made it clear that a religious wedding was out of the question. But Ilana and Nira and Gerry and Maxine created a long-distance alliance with his mother—who, more than being supportive of the rabbinate, was simply bored—and they defeated him. During one particular argument with Ilana in their huge square kitchen, Nira, who was pregnant with her daughter at the time, spat at him, “Why are you such a Nazi?”

  He put on his insole
nt look and said, “Nazi? You’re calling me a Nazi? You and your sister, who grew up in New Jersey and Ramat Hasharon, do you even know what religious oppression is? I grew up in Jerusalem, so I can tell you exactly what it is. You think I want to live in Tel Aviv? I hate Tel Aviv. I despise this place, but I had no choice.”

  “What does that have to do with it?” Nira said.

  “Yes, Yonatan,” Ilana said softly. “I don’t understand what that has to do with a Jewish wedding. Why do you have to be so extreme?”

  “Why? Because I’m not the one who made things extreme. That’s it—the days when you could be moderate and enjoy a little Yiddishkeit are over. Believe me, I’d love to be moderate, but it’s no longer possible. The market has no moderate positions to offer.”

  Nira said it had nothing to do with religion, it was just part of his personality. Ilana said, “Don’t exaggerate, Nira,” and her American r reminded Yonatan of why he loved her and why he hated her. He thought to himself that Nira wasn’t exaggerating, that he was born an extremist, that he must have inherited extremist genes from his father, who spent his whole life a fervent secularist, as he liked to call himself, and wouldn’t even give Yonatan a bar mitzvah. But he had eventually given in to Yonatan’s mother, and when Yonatan was a soldier, serving at a military administrative office in Jerusalem, his father had said to him, “Finish your army service and get the hell out of this city, because we’ve already lost this war.” Yonatan never forgave him when suddenly, at the age of seventy-nine, from his bed in the old-age home where he would shoot looks of contempt at the religious orderly who bathed him and changed his sheets, that from there of all places, three months before he died, he commanded Yonatan to have a rabbinical wedding. “But why?” Yonatan asked him. “Because it won’t do any harm,” his father said, and that was when Yonatan knew with certainty that these were his father’s final days.

  During those moments, he was sorry he was an only child and had no brother or sister to support him, or at least accompany him down his father’s winding path of betrayal. When Yonatan asked if he was saying it to please his mother, which was what he desperately wanted to hear, his father said, “What difference would that make now?” Yonatan swore to himself that his future child would never be lonely. He glanced at his father, who had a defeated look in his eyes, and although Yonatan knew the look had nothing to do with the war between the secular and the religious anymore, he prayed that the religious orderly would come into the room, with its greasy chicken soup odor wafting in from the kitchen, and his father would straighten up in bed and motion toward the man with his chin, rather than talk to him. But the orderly did not come in, and his father fell asleep with his sharp chin drooping onto his chest; his chin was covered with white stubble, which Yonatan thought looked like cactus.

  His father died one morning in September, three months after the wedding. They had borrowed a donated wheelchair from Yad Sarah for him, and he had sat dozing in a corner at the ceremony, covered with a blanket from the old-age home; the guests would walk up to him and gently pull back the woolen blanket to shake his hand. Ilana heard the news of his death over the phone and waited for Yonatan to get back from the supermarket. When he came home, she told him to put the shopping bags down on the floor, took a Time cigarette out of her pack, lit it, and said, “Your father died.” Before he could say anything, she put the cigarette out and went to him and hugged him, and he said, “I have to call my mom.” She nodded into his neck and he said, “We have to call the Chevra Kadisha for the burial.” Ilana tightened her grip on his back, and he said, “I don’t even know who we’re supposed to call.” She stroked his back, and he felt that she was tense and waiting for something. She said, “Let’s sit in the living room for a minute,” and he said okay.

  They sat on the couch and he stared at the blank television screen and then looked into her face, which also seemed tense and expectant, and asked, “Do you think they’re listed in the Yellow Pages?” She said nothing, and he mumbled, “We don’t have the Jerusalem Yellow Pages,” and she said they could call Information. He asked her to bring him a cigarette, and she said okay but remained sitting. Then he remembered. “Actually, we do have the Yellow Pages for Jerusalem. I brought it home from my mom’s once. It must be in the study. Do you think they’ll be listed under C?” She took his hand in hers, predicting his imminent disintegration, held it up to her lips and kissed his fingers, and he burst into tears. She hugged him and he sobbed in her arms and all the rest could wait.

  For the rest of the day he walked around the apartment in a daze, making phone calls and arranging whatever needed to be arranged. Ilana watched him quietly, and every so often he turned to her and hugged her, and at night they sat on the balcony, on the rattan armchairs, holding hands like two strange vacationers. The next day at the funeral, supporting his mother with one arm and crushing Ilana’s fingers with the other hand, Yonatan looked at the Chevra Kadisha men lowering his father into the pit, and at once the fears awakened in him by the thought of spending the rest of his life with one woman dissipated, and for a moment he was flooded with tranquillity.

  ( 6 )

  They were stuck in the usual traffic jam on King George Street, listening to classical music on the Voice of Music. Yonatan looked at Dana out of the corner of his eye. She was lost in thought, as always. A drop of snot hung from her nose, and he almost reached out to wipe it away, as he used to do when she was little, but instead he asked if she needed a tissue. She turned around and leaned over to the backseat and pulled a roll of toilet paper from beneath the piles of newspapers and ad sheets. Before she could tear off a piece, the drop fell on the back of the seat, and she wet her finger with saliva and quickly wiped it away. Yonatan smiled and said, “Never mind, the car’s filthy anyway.”

  He remembered his Citroën DS fondly. The huge car, which looked like an elderly frog, had been his first and had belonged to his landlord. He was thirty years old, living in an apartment with three enormous rooms, high ceilings, and ornate floor tiles. The rent was so low he didn’t need roommates.

  Dana watched him driving and he took his hand off the wheel and touched her forehead, and since they were almost home he asked what kind of juice she wanted. She said she didn’t care and he said, “Apple?” because he knew it was her favorite. Dana nodded, and he said after they went upstairs he’d go down to the corner store and also stop by the pharmacy before it closed. She reminded him that the thermometer was broken and he said, “It’s a good thing you reminded me, I’ll get a thermometer too. Maybe this time we’ll finally buy a digital one.” Dana asked him to buy the new one she’d seen advertised on TV, which takes your temperature through your ear, and Yonatan said he thought it was for babies. Dana said that in the commercial they said it was good for big babies too and showed the sick baby’s dad, who was also sick, making a sorry face. Yonatan said she shouldn’t be fooled by commercials. He asked how high her temperature had been when the nurse took it, and she said 101.8 degrees. She figured when he went down to the store and the pharmacy she’d have time to finish thinking about the slumber party. If she had any time left over, she’d think about the other things too.

  When he was at home she couldn’t concentrate. She was always listening to him, whether he was in his study, in the living room, or on the balcony. Sometimes he would listen to a CD from his massive collection, mostly classical music. He liked old Israeli folk music too, and he would play The High Windows continuously for a whole afternoon; it had been her mother’s favorite album, and someone once told her she looked a little like their lead singer. Dana liked the music he liked, and when she would ask him what to put on, unless he felt like something in particular, he would say, “Whatever you want.” This flattered her but also put her under pressure, so she always chose something she knew he liked but hadn’t heard for a few days. When she knelt by the stereo and slowly turned up the volume, she would hear him shout out from his study or from the kitchen where he was making dinner, “I h
aven’t heard that in ages!” or “How did you know?” and she was glad she had made a good choice. She liked his music but hated his cooking. If she could make a reasonable guess at his mood based on the music he was playing, his choice of dishes left no room for doubt: roast chicken and meatballs meant a good mood, schnitzel and pasta were neutral, and frozen hamburgers or hot dogs had the distinct flavor of sadness.

  They both loved meat, and every few weeks they went out to a restaurant together to enjoy filet mignon with cream and mushroom sauce, or else they would stay home and grill steaks in a heavy iron skillet. She preferred the homemade steaks. She never saw her dad happier than when he was chatting with the butcher and choosing the cuts of meat and, later, melting butter in the skillet and throwing in the beef, and especially when he was pouring a little brandy in the skillet and lighting it up over the meat. At the butcher shop and in the kitchen, her dad had the movements of a dancer, and it seemed as if even the Voice of Music, which accompanied them from the living room, cooperated by playing cheerful compositions.