Accidents: A Novel

by Yael Hedaya

  Rika and Amos Kahane’s bedroom did not fit Yonatan’s theories about bad yuppy taste, theories he was always happy to bolster with new evidence, which had been supplied in abundance during this short tour. The “parents’ wing” was charming and exactly to his taste, especially the complete disarray. It seemed as if people other than Rika and Amos lived in this room, people whose common disorganization reminded him of his and Ilana’s own mess when they still lived on Montefiore and had a huge bedroom like this one. He was standing in the doorway with Dana and peeking inside when they suddenly heard high heels clicking up the stairs, and Rika was saying, “Oh, my goodness! You weren’t supposed to come here. I forgot to tell you; there’s a terrible mess.” She pulled them away and closed the door, and the remainder of the tour was conducted under her strict supervision.

  “Did you sleep well?” he asked Dana, when they left Lilach’s room, where sleeping bags lay scattered around the white carpet. He had asked Dana where she had slept, and she pointed to a sleeping bag that had her backpack on it; it was surrounded with shreds of the teddy-bear gift wrap. Before she could answer, Rika said, “They all slept great! They were partying all night and only got to sleep at three!” Yonatan gently squeezed Dana’s hand, to tell her that he had missed her, and felt her fist burning.

  Yonatan saw that Rika had laid some refreshments out on the patio table, but the girls didn’t seem particularly interested, perhaps because they had already sampled them the day before and that morning. He sat down next to Tamar and asked how her mother was, and Tamar said she was fine. “Give her my regards,” he said, and then Tamar went to sit with Dana, who had gone back to the swing. There was a French-press coffeepot and a pitcher of milk on the table, and a pile of blue glass dessert plates. Savory pastries were arranged on a large platter; Rika pointed to each of them and explained what they were and where they were purchased. She especially recommended that Yonatan try the olive rolls and the mozzarella shells and said she’d be right back with the sweets.

  The girls stopped their conversation and watched him, curious to see what he would put on his plate. He smiled and said, “What do you recommend?” Lilach said the olive rolls were really good, and he looked at the girl sitting next to her and asked, “And what about you?” The girl said she hated olives but the mozzarella ones weren’t bad, and Yonatan asked her name. “I’m Orit,” she said. “Oh, you’re Orit?” he said, and immediately regretted it because he had given away the fact that he had heard about her before. He took an olive roll and reassured himself that perhaps these laws of discretion did not apply to children. Orit straightened up in her chair and smoothed her hair back with her hand and said, “You know me from school, right?” He chewed and nodded, and Orit said, “And one time you gave me a ride home.” “Yeah, I remember,” he said, even though he didn’t. “What are you talking about?” Lilach said. “You’re getting mixed up; it wasn’t Dana’s dad at all.” Orit said, “Yes it was, it was in the third grade, don’t you remember? You were with us too.” Lilach said, “Me? Are you nuts?” Yonatan, who had given rides to countless children over the last four years, took a mozzarella shell and asked, “Where do you live?” Orit gave the name of a street and Yonatan said, “Yes, of course I remember,” but the two girls kept arguing eagerly, while the others around the table supported Lilach’s version, and then the conversation moved on to the topic of cars and jeeps and which was better.

  Rika came out holding a platter with two half cakes and one whole. It was the one Yonatan had bought, and for a minute he was glad to see it was still whole and impressive, but then he realized that meant no one had touched it; he turned back to his daughter, but Dana was busy talking with Tamar. “This is the Pavlova, which Liat and I baked for the girls,” Rika said. “And this is the Mozart. Hila brought it.” She smiled at one of the girls. “And this beautiful cake is yours.” Yonatan blushed. At the bakery, the nameless cake had seemed like a winner, but now, standing tall with its ringlets of icing, it looked ludicrous—more like a parody than a real cake.

  Rika called out toward the swings, “Girls, come and eat with us,” and the two walked over to the table reluctantly and both squeezed onto one chair. Yonatan tried to catch Dana’s eye, but she wouldn’t pick her head up. He knew that look of hers, the downcast one reserved for times when she felt trapped and knew no one would come to rescue her. He knew that look because he had invented it.

  “Which kind would you like?” Rika asked Dana.

  Tamar quickly answered for her. “We’re not hungry.” “Are you sure?” Rika checked, and they both nodded. The other girls asked for slices of the Pavlova and the Mozart, and when Rika asked Yonatan, he said, “I’ll try that one,” pointing to the loser cake. Dana looked up briefly and peeked at him, and he smiled at her. Rika put a huge slice of the cake on his plate and said, “Enjoy!” Then she asked, “Anyone else?” Tamar straightened up suddenly and said, “Actually, I also want some of that,” and Yonatan and his little ally ate their cake obediently, down to the last crumb; it turned out to be nothing more than a flamboyant version of a dry pound cake.

  ( 10 )

  During the moments when he was able to overcome the terror of what lay ahead for them, Yonatan managed to enjoy filling the roles of two parents. He enjoyed other things too, things he could not quite identify; they had tried to define them in the support group, but he found the definitions insulting to his intelligence, even if they were sometimes correct. The scene of eight men crowded into the living room of a north Tel Aviv apartment, with two large fans spinning slowly at their feet, turning first to one sad face and then to another like microphones, all approximately his age (except for a young moshavnik whose wife had died during childbirth and left him with a malpractice case and a fussy baby), all trying to get the most out of a common affliction: the scene made him think that this framework for talking about all the things you couldn’t really talk about—what’s best for the child, what’s best for the father, the advantages of the new smaller family, trying to reorganize the unit like an amoeba—was supportive of nothing other than itself. And since he hated frameworks, he left after three meetings, persuading himself with the thought that he would have derived no benefit from it and that he was doing the group a favor by leaving, because not only had he never opened his mouth at the meetings, he had felt he was spreading a mood of cynicism and desperation. Even so, over the next few years, he found himself wondering sometimes what had happened to those men and their children.

  Once, on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, a few months after abandoning the group, he met one of the widowers standing in line at the ATM. Yonatan couldn’t remember his name but remembered he was a geography or history teacher and had been the joker of the group. The man stood behind him holding a thick wallet. He pressed up against Yonatan while he was punching in his secret code and said, “So. Getting cash, eh?” Yonatan couldn’t tell if the man was making some kind of joke, so he said, “What else?” And the man, who was wearing a T-shirt and Bermuda shorts, fanned himself with his wallet and hummed.

  Yonatan was suddenly flooded with the embarrassment of a chance meeting with an old fling and decided to drop the other transactions he was planning to make and just get his cash. The man said, “So. Shopping for the new year?” He said yes, and smiled, wanting to end this flirtation imposed on him by the other widower, but when he pulled out the bills from the slot and moved aside, the man examined him, scanning his green Chuck Taylors, his jeans and slightly dirty white T-shirt, lingering on his face for several seconds. Yonatan hadn’t shaved that morning, and he ran his fingers over his chin defensively. The man asked, “So. Are we writing?” Yonatan sighed and said again, “What else?” He quickly shoved the bills into his pocket and said, “I’ll see you around.” The man nodded a little sadly as he waited for his cash and tapped the ATM screen with his fingers, one of which still bore a gold wedding band. He looked over his shoulder as Yonatan crossed the street and suddenly called out after him, “Luria! Happy New Y
ear!” Without turning back, Yonatan raised his arm in a kind of reverse salute and walked away.

  He thought of himself as an unemployed actor who suddenly gets the part of a lifetime and reads his lines for the first time. It was a huge part and filled him with a sense of power, which was sometimes replaced by confusion and helplessness, then exchanged again for power and the knowledge that he had the skill to pull it off and only he had that skill. Sometimes he wondered what would have happened, had he been in the car with Ilana when the truck whose brakes failed in the opposite lane had homed in on their Subaru like a smart bomb. He wondered whether he could have done anything, because if they had been in the car together he would have been driving instead of her. What would have happened if he had been in the driver’s seat?

  The summer after the accident, he drove up on his own to that road in the Upper Galilee, where Ilana had gone to visit a friend who had moved with her husband to some hilltop village. He sat on the shoulder of the road in the new Subaru, the smaller one, which he had bought with the insurance settlement, and examined through dark sunglasses the steep incline down which the truck had come. The driver, a contractor in his fifties, had called him on the anniversary of the accident, introduced himself, and burst into tears. Yonatan had listened silently to the sobs of the contractor, whose license had been revoked for eight months, and tried to understand what he was saying, although he had meant to slam the phone down on him. Apart from sentence fragments that sounded like have kids and I also, and a few words screamed hoarsely into the receiver (family, poor things, and God), he couldn’t make out anything, and the contractor suddenly hung up and never phoned again.

  Yonatan sat behind the wheel for almost an hour, watched the cars coming up from his left and down opposite him, and tried to imagine possible accidents. The windows were closed and the air-conditioning was turned all the way up, slamming the cigarette smoke back into his face through the ventilators. He envisioned dozens of accidents, some of them minor and some fatal, giving the drivers and the passengers various degrees of injuries, some of them crippled for life, some walking miracles. Then a semi charged down the hill and roused him from his daydreams. He merged into the traffic and climbed slowly up the hill, which was higher and steeper than he had imagined. He was stuck behind a bus full of kids and didn’t dare pass it; the convoy of cars behind him reprimanded his cowardliness with flashing lights and adventurous sallies into the opposite lane. Feeling suddenly hungry, he stopped at a little restaurant with a wooden painted sign that said HOMEMADE GOAT’S CHEESE.

  It was late morning, and he was the only customer. He sat in the left corner, next to one of the large windows. The waitress, who looked like a young girl, brought him a handwritten menu and cleared the extra dishes and silverware off the table, which was set for four. He asked what she recommended, and she said everything was good. When she saw he couldn’t make up his mind, she said, “Hang on, I’ll get my mom,” and disappeared behind the bar. A woman who looked too young to be her mother came over to Yonatan, carrying the Ha’aretz weekend supplement in one hand and a pen in the other. She put the paper down on the table and told him about the different kinds of cheese, and Yonatan realized he had taken her away from doing the crossword. Eventually he ordered a cheese plate, which the woman assured him was very filling, and a basket of homemade bread.

  He looked out the window, chewing the bread slowly. It was fresh but did not offer the bursts of flavor he had hoped for. There were kernels of something tough in it—corn—which he took out of his mouth and placed in the little clay ashtray. He went on chewing and staring at the purplish-gray mountains and the square fields of brown and green, which separated the restaurant from the highway that stretched out in the distance, and at a few little sheep that were closer and clearer. As he picked out the kernels, he suddenly noticed the road he had parked on earlier, which wound around the mountain and disappeared and then turned up again and surprised him right beneath the window. Only now—he gave up on the bread and put it back in the basket—did he realize he was sitting in the ideal vantage point for that road, and that from here, behind the double-glazed windows isolating him from the noise, he could see what he hadn’t seen before: the twists and turns, the cars driving up and down, the impossible shoulders, the stone wall on one side of the road and the chasm on the other—this time as a viewer comfortably watching a movie, not someone trapped inside a three-dimensional fantasy. He wondered what you could see from the other windows. He got up and went to the one nearby, leaned on the table with his elbows, and looked out. From here you could see a gas station and the intersection connecting the little road with the highway. Then he went to the window on the right, which looked out onto the backyard of a two-story stone house that looked new and well cared for.

  “Nice view,” he said, when he noticed the proprietress watching him as she leaned on the bar with her newspaper.

  “The nicest view is from where you’re sitting. You chose the best seat.”

  Yonatan smiled and went back to his table.

  He wanted to move to a different seat, but he didn’t want to bother the girl or her mother and knew that if he moved they would think something was wrong. He was suddenly ashamed of the evidence of his dissatisfaction that he had left in the ashtray. The presence of the road distressed him. He would have preferred to look out on the yard while he ate, but he was too shy to get up.

  He had never liked nature and preferred to enjoy it from a distance, but now, sitting by the large window with its polished frame, on his one side the thicket of roads and traffic, which he couldn’t hear, because of the air-conditioning and the double-glazing, but whose vibrations he thought he could sense, and on his other side a little family hermeticity that was also transmitting vibrations from the bar, where the mother kept on calmly solving her crossword while her daughter sat beside her sorting through receipts, and behind him the house and the big yard, and somewhere perhaps also a goat paddock that produced cheeses—now he felt as if something was very wrong with his life and that perhaps he should take his daughter and move to the Galilee. Here he would have the quietude to write, and Dana could run around carefree in the big yards with girls who looked like the daughter, who in fact—and Yonatan glanced at her again—didn’t look any different from the girls in Tel Aviv, with her nervous gauntness and the overdone makeup and the midriff shirt and overall air of hostility.

  Even so, something here seemed optimistic and, if not for the modern road, which was definitely too busy for its narrow proportions and, like any alleyway in Israel, served as a main traffic artery; and if not for the sign in the entrance that said they took all major credit cards; and if not for a man around his age who suddenly came in wearing tailored light linen pants, an elegant shirt, and a tie, put his keys and cell phone down on the bar, and went over to the girl and stroked her hair; and if not for the girl’s navel ring; and if the radio the proprietor turned on had not broadcast the beeps signaling the twelve-o’clock news, he could have believed for a minute that the lap of nature was the perfect solution for his daughter and himself.

  When the woman saw he hadn’t touched his food she sent her husband over. The man leaned down, placing both hands on the table, and asked, “Is everything okay?” Yonatan smiled and said, “Yes, thanks, everything’s fine,” and dug his fork into a slice of cheese. It tasted familiar, like the feta he bought at the supermarket, except with a spoiled flavor. The piece next to it had a hard texture and was saltier; he tasted the olives, hoping to find in them what he had vainly searched for in the bread and cheese, but they were dry and salty too, and he wondered if they were also made locally. He ignored the tomato and dug his fork into a slice of cheese with a pepper-coated rind that looked interesting, then tried a slice coated with sesame. One after the other, he tried them all, as well as a few of the Israeli herbs, and halfheartedly ate a pale slice of tomato and a couple of olives, and more than cheated he felt sad.

  ( 11 )

  He went to
the store and bought two cartons of apple juice and two packs of Winstons. When he started walking toward the pharmacy, he remembered that the fridge was empty and he should get some bread and dairy products, in case Dana’s fever went down and she was hungry later. But he suddenly had a better idea: he would make her some tomato soup, not the frozen kind they sometimes had but the kind Ilana used to make with fresh tomatoes and cream. The recipe was still scrawled on a piece of paper, slipped between the pages of a French cookbook that was too complex and pretentious and served mainly as a file folder for other recipes. He knew he needed whipping cream and butter but couldn’t remember what else, so he decided to go past the pharmacy, then back home, and go out shopping again later that afternoon. He crossed Allenby going west but then remembered the bread shop on King George and quickly crossed back again before the light turned red. He hoped they still had some of the onion bread Dana liked. He glanced at his watch and saw it was almost one. He was glad his writing day was already a loss. This time it was not his fault.

  The onion bread was sold out. A young woman was standing in line to pay, holding the last loaf. The shopkeeper, who could see how disappointed he was, tried to console him with a loaf of rye. As he looked at it, trying to decide, she handed the woman her change and the woman said, “Sorry.” He smiled and said, “It’s all right.” “It’s for my dad,” the woman said. “It’s the only kind of bread he likes; otherwise I would gladly let you have it.” He said, “I wouldn’t if it were me”; when she left the store with her onion bread wrapped in a paper bag, he suddenly regretted saying that, although he knew it was true.

  His father hated bread. It was a bizarre hatred, and Yonatan never really believed him. He understood his father’s hatred of the religious, as well as his hatred of the extreme right wing, which over the years became an abhorrence of the right wing in general and of what used to be the center, which, like bohemia, had disbanded. Yonatan suspected him of also hating the left, because as he grew older his hatred became more sweeping and democratic—he hated everybody and hated them harshly—but Yonatan never understood how you could hate bread. When he was a child, he would watch his father closely every time he went into the kitchen, hoping to catch him in the act of slicing himself a piece of the caraway-seed bread stored in the bread bin, but it never happened. At dinner, he would take a mental picture of the length of the loaf before his mother put it back in the bread bin, and in the morning he would force himself to get up before everyone else, slip into the kitchen, take the loaf out, and measure it between his hands; but the bread, like his father, remained the same.