by Yael Hedaya
Not long ago, at the supermarket, he saw they were selling the same candy in big family-size bags, so he bought some. When Dana asked him why he’d gotten all that disgusting coconut, he said it was stardust, and she said, “Very funny.”
He wanted to open the chest, but went to the open closet instead. Drooping down from one of the shelves were the sleeves and legs of various jumpsuits, her winter pajamas. For the party, she had chosen the cool gray one with the hood, which Ilana’s parents had sent her from the States; they had also sent one in his size. He closed the closet door, then turned off the light and went back to the kitchen, and started washing the plate again. Then he thought he’d wash the dishes later because he needed to write now, precisely when he was so restless, and he put down the plate once more, dried his hands, went to sit at the computer, and thought perhaps he had been wrong not to shelve the novel he had started writing before the accident.
It was supposed to be a great love story. Love in the Time of Cholera was his model, and he envied García Márquez for the restraint and maturity and patience that permeated every line of his novel, almost as a separate plotline. Sometimes he had wondered if you really had to be old and experienced and successful, like Márquez, to write like that, or whether it was enough to be forty, with a wife and a little girl and thoughts of another pregnancy. The fifty pages he had written over the past five years were hidden in his hard drive and now seemed toxic and hateful in their disingenuity, and when he turned on the computer and opened the single file called “new novel,” he called it up as you summon an obdurate dog whom you never liked but do not have the courage to get rid of. He knew he did not have the restraint or the maturity or the patience—nor the fame or even the talent, and that scared him—to write a true love story. Not a tale of wild lust, like his first novel, which he had named, with manipulative simplicity, Passion, and of which he was ashamed precisely because it was so successful. And not an allegory about relationships with near-proverbial quips, like the second novel, Silence, which was less successful. Not those, but the great work he had always wanted to write.
He got up and went to the bathroom and urinated in short spurts, a staccato that reminded him of his writing, and thought maybe he should go into therapy after all. He occasionally thought about therapy after he had abandoned the support group and had almost called Tamar’s mother for a referral—she knew him and would be able to match him up with a therapist at his level, a man, because with a woman he was liable to fall in love—but he didn’t. Although he liked Rona, he didn’t want to get too close, and as he zipped up his pants, it suddenly occurred to him that maybe Dana liked Tamar so much because she hoped they would become sisters one day.
Last week, when Dana was washing the dishes after dinner, she had said matter-of-factly, without looking at him (it scared him to see how quickly she was learning the game), that Rona was having a dinner party for some friends next Friday, and had invited her, and could she go. He said yes, as long as they walked her home, because although Rona lived on the next street over, he was afraid of Allenby Street, which connected the two. Then Dana added, “Oh, and she said you’re invited too.” He immediately said he couldn’t go, but to tell her thanks. Dana said, “See how you feel. You may change your mind,” and he realized that perhaps her pain and longing for Ilana were making way for a search for another mother, and more than being insulted on Ilana’s behalf he was insulted himself. He wanted to tell Dana he would be a good dad. But how could he make that promise, knowing full well that between himself and his daughter, between her room and his, between the kitchen and the balcony and the car and the school and his study, there was something like suffocation, the kind that only the presence of another person could relieve?
He sat down on the old rattan armchair on the balcony and sipped the coffee he didn’t even want and swore to himself, as he did almost every night, that starting tomorrow he would reduce his coffee intake, because it made him feel bad. He could tell that his nerves were on end and his fingers trembled a little as they held the cigarette, and although he knew the coffee was not the culprit, it reassured him to think that he had control over his life, real control and not just the pretense of it for Dana, who was improving her own pretending techniques with worrying skill.
She had always been a quiet child, but her new quietness had a frightening presence because it was a silent echo of his own. Before Ilana died the house was noisy, full of kids from Dana’s kindergarten and their parents who came to drop them off and pick them up and stayed to chat with Ilana, and Nira, who spent many hours there with Evyatar and Michal, who were now too grown-up for Dana. The noise had disturbed his work, because in those days he was working rather than pretending, but he never complained; on the contrary, he was grateful for it, saw it as vocal evidence of some kind of blessed normalcy, proof that he had a family and the family was noisy because that’s how families are. The truth was that the noise not only did not disturb him but was sometimes his inspiration; the breaks in his writing rhythm weren’t so scary as long as he could hear the family metronome ticking outside his room.
Now he listened to the sounds of a television coming from the neighbors’ windows and to a distant ambulance or police siren, and when he looked into the empty mug on the floor, he reminded himself again about cutting down on the caffeine—and the nicotine, while we’re at it, he thought. Perhaps he would call Rona after all, to apologize for not being able to come to dinner on Friday. They would probably talk about Dana a little—Rona, like other parents, was always impressed by the girl’s maturity and he knew it embodied implicit criticism of him: a child who is too mature does not speak well of the parents. He would say he wanted to ask her something but maybe not over the phone, although perhaps he shouldn’t make a big deal out of it: He was thinking of going into therapy and hoped she could recommend someone. It would need to be a man, he’d probably be more comfortable with that, a woman is a bit of a problem; but whatever she thinks, he’s not sure.
The decision never to let a new woman into their lives suddenly seemed about as valid as the decision he’d made five years ago to write his life’s work; it was based more on how it sounded than on any true desire. He knew at the time he was not ready for someone else—he was incapable of it—and Ilana’s death was only an excuse. Who was he to make these decisions for his daughter? Who was he to make these decisions for himself? Yes, tomorrow he would start off the day with a cup of herbal tea; they had some herbal tea in the house. Although perhaps he shouldn’t make drastic changes that he wouldn’t be able to stick to later, and one cup of coffee in the morning wouldn’t do any harm. He’d phone Rona to help him find someone to cancel out for him all the big decisions he’d ever made. The idea of phoning Rona filled him with optimism, and he went into the living room and closed the balcony door, because although it wasn’t raining it was getting cold. He put the mug on the plate in the sink, emptied the ashtray into the trash can, took a new pack of cigarettes from the box on top of the fridge, and went back to the study and sat determinedly at the computer. His fingers hovered over the keyboard. It doesn’t have to be a great love story, just a story, he told himself. Let’s see you do it—no great expectations. And suddenly his new plan filled him with fear that was worse than the restlessness that had preceded it. He suddenly felt like getting into the car and driving to Jaffa, flying past the sea, which he didn’t really like and never would no matter how hard he tried. He would park outside the Kahanes’ mansion, ring the intercom, apologize for the time, and go in and find Dana—who would probably come out with her new friends, wearing pajamas and wrapped in secretiveness—and whisper to his daughter that something had happened and they had to go home, not something serious, no need to worry. Dana wouldn’t ask any questions but would pack her things and put her coat on over her pajamas, and he would throw a fake smile to Lilach’s mother, who would say goodbye to Dana with apologetic sweet words, and the girls would huddle around and say in a chorus that they were so
sorry, except for Tamar, who really would be sorry. And in the car he wouldn’t tell her what had happened, because there would be nothing he could say, and when they got home she would go into her room and take off her gray pajamas, which she hated sleeping in (he did too, because they were warm and bunched up and the hood got in the way), and maybe before she went to bed she’d pluck up the courage to ask him what happened, and he’d know it was best to tell her the truth, that nothing had happened in fact, that he was living his life in appearance only, for her, and that he had missed her. But she wouldn’t ask, she’d come in the kitchen wearing her old blue sweats, which she liked but which didn’t quite fit her anymore, and would fill a glass of water from the tap, and he would beg her with his eyes to ask, to scream, What have you done to me? But she would stand facing him in her too-short sweats and socks, and quietly drink her water in little sips, and her eyes would watch him over the rim of the glass, and then she’d go over and give him a good-night kiss on his cheek, and he would feel that her face was a little too warm, that she was getting sick again, and then he’d collapse, fall apart, not caring that she was just a little girl. Or maybe he would keep pretending nothing had happened, that it was not her or her mother he missed, but rather the life he thought he could have had, and before she put the glass in the pile in the sink and went to her room, he would ask her, in passing, whether there was anything she collected.
( 9 )
When he went to pick up Dana the following afternoon, Rika Kahane invited him to come in and have some cake on the patio with everyone. He tried to get out of it by saying he was parked illegally, but Rika put her hand on his shoulder and said it was all right on Shabbat, so he followed her into the paved inner courtyard. There was a marble birdbath at its center. He had never seen a birdbath in Israel before and it looked pretentious and incongruous, both for Israeli birds and for Israelis. Before he had time to make a mental note of yet another strike against Rika (he didn’t really know why he couldn’t stand her—perhaps because she was the mother of the girl who led the group that had abducted his daughter for the weekend), a sparrow landed on the rim of the birdbath, tipped its head from side to side, hopped cheerfully into the water, splashed around for a moment, then jumped back to the rim and shook off its feathers.
They entered the vast living room, which had three levels of ceramic tiled floors; at first glance Yonatan thought it looked like a furnished swimming pool. On the highest level, the smallest, there was a black grand piano with a matching bench. The middle level was a kind of sitting area with two antique couches facing each other and a low round table between them, with a copper Turkish coffee set on a tray. The lowest level must have been the living room itself, furnished with a huge couch upholstered in off-white canvas, two matching armchairs, and a low coffee table with curved metal legs supporting a thick slab of rough stone. Yonatan had seen this stylish table in other houses. It reminded him of Ilana’s gravestone.
According to the carver who had helped him and Nira pick the stone out, it was considered a modest choice. Nira chose it after methodically paging through the catalog of gravestones with that special, almost delirious look on her face that Ilana used to get when she leafed through foreign fashion magazines. He told Nira that whatever she chose would be fine; he trusted her taste and knew nothing about gravestones. She looked up from the catalog for a moment to give him a look that said, But who does? Then she kept on turning the pages. He asked her to call him back when she found one and said he was going outside to smoke. He stood outside for a long time, chain-smoking, until Nira came out to him, wiping her eyes with a tissue, and said, “This is the simplest one but it’s expensive.” He touched her arm and went into the office and sat across from the stonecarver, who offered him some cold water. When Yonatan didn’t reply, the man got up, went over to the water cooler, and put a plastic cup down on the table, next to the open catalog. Yonatan sipped his water while he wrote out a check.
Ilana’s parents paid for the gravestone, and after an exhausting telephone argument they agreed to give up Our Beloved Daughter, which they had wanted to inscribe on the stone. Yonatan explained to them—and although he was used to talking with them in English, this conversation sounded extremely foreign—that Our Beloved Daughter would also necessitate My Beloved Mother and My Beloved Wife, and that seemed sentimental and too crowded. When Maxine sobbed and said, “Don’t talk to me about sentimentality,” and took the opportunity to accuse him of always being a cynic, he explained to her quietly that Ilana wouldn’t have liked it, which worked its wonders on her parents and helped everyone compromise on OUR BELOVED.
The financial assistance had started even before the wedding, when Gerry and Maxine went all over Tel Aviv with them, looking for a home. They finally bought them a two-bedroom apartment on Bialik Street, which looked a little like the one on Montefiore, in spirit if not in square footage. Instead of floral tiles with different colors in each room, it had cracked tiles in a faded shade of orange. Ilana fell in love with the apartment immediately and told Yonatan it wasn’t all that different from where they lived—after all, both buildings were old and decrepit. Yonatan explained that the building on Montefiore was built in the early twenties and the building on Bialik was from the thirties. She saw no difference, but he claimed there was one: the ceiling at Bialik was almost four inches lower than the one at Montefiore. When Ilana hugged him and asked, “What exactly are you planning to do with the ceilings?” he was a little annoyed by her lack of interest in architecture, and that she didn’t seem to miss the floral floor tiles at all.
After they got married, Gerry sent them a check in dollars every three months, which Yonatan converted to shekels at the money changers. The checks came with a little note that said at the end, And this is for you, children. When Dana was born, the sums doubled and the notes read And this is for Dana. After Ilana was killed, the sums were doubled again, now reaching three thousand dollars a month. The notes, which became shorter and shorter, were signed And this is for you, as if his industrialist father-in-law had decided that Yonatan deserved greater support, not only because he was the beloved husband of his late daughter and the father of his granddaughter but because he believed in him as an author, which was ridiculous, of course, because Gerry Fisher, despite having spent eighteen miserable years in Israel, did not read a word of Hebrew. But Yonatan liked to amuse himself with the idea that he had a patron; it turned his idleness, his paralysis, into an almost legitimate way of life—a full-time job.
He stared at the ugly table and Rika asked if he liked it, and he smiled an inscrutable smile. She said it was commissioned from a stonemason in Ramallah and had cost them a fortune. He said, “I would imagine so,” and Rika said they were a little sorry they had bought it because it had turned out to be a problem—it was impossible to move. Yonatan asked when they would want to move it, and she said, “When the house gets cleaned. And anything you spill on it stains.”
Three large arched windows faced the patio; he could see the girls out there sitting on garden chairs at a round wooden table. Tamar spotted him through the window and waved. He couldn’t see Dana and was briefly worried. He complimented Rika on how beautiful the room was and she said, “Really? You like it?” in a way that suggested she was filing away the compliment with all the others she had received, most of which were as fake as her tone. Yonatan, who was starting to enjoy their game of housewifely Ping-Pong, said, “And it’s so clean in here!” It sounded like a stupid thing to say, but at least it was true. Rika smiled, and he wondered how nine little girls could have spent twenty-four hours here without leaving a trace.
They went out to the patio and Lilach said, “Hi, Yonatan,” as if there was no thirty-five-year difference between them, and the other girls smiled at him like old friends. Lilach twisted around toward a little patch of lawn and yelled, “Dana, your dad’s here!” and only then did he notice a swing set near the stone wall, where Dana was sitting with a little dog on her lap. The dog leape
d out of her arms, rolled around on the lawn, got up and sneezed, and then rushed toward Yonatan, barking. Yonatan waved to Dana somewhat shyly. She got off the swing and gave him a strange little smile. Then she leaned down to the dog and reassured him: “Quiet, Rudy.” She picked him up, but the dog leaped to the ground and started sniffing Yonatan’s shoes suspiciously, grunting and sneezing.
“I’m making coffee,” Rika said. “Sit down with the girls in the meantime.” Before he could sit on the vacant garden chair, Rika turned back and suggested that Dana take him on a tour, if he wanted, because she knew the house. Yonatan looked at his daughter and asked, “Do you want to?” She smiled her new grin again and said, okay, and called to the dog, but Rudy, after having done his duty by making a symbolic attempt to banish the intruder, jumped back on the swing with the agility of a circus animal.
“This is the living room,” Dana said, and gestured at the trilevel space like a museum docent with a broad sweep of the arm. Yonatan nodded and said it was lovely. She walked unenthusiastically to the staircase that led to the second floor and started going upstairs, her hand on the banister, and he followed her. The steps led to another sitting area, which also had an arched window that faced the backyard, and it also had two couches and a table. Instead of a Turkish coffee set, there was a series of architecture magazines in English and German. Dana said, “This is the sitting area, and here, on the right, is the parents’ wing.” Now she sounded like a real estate agent, and he wondered who had taught her this text.
“Is this Rika and—I forget Lilach’s dad’s name—is it their bedroom?”
“Amos,” she said, standing in the bedroom doorway.