Accidents: A Novel

by Yael Hedaya

  Rona showed her the article and asked if Shira would be able to finish the translation before she gave birth. Shira said she would, she didn’t have much work at the moment, and when Rona asked how much she charged, she gave a price that was much lower than her usual rate.

  “That’s not much. I thought it would cost more,” Rona said.

  “You’re not supposed to bargain up.”

  “Okay, but I’ll have you over for dinner sometime.” Shira asked if she cooked a lot, and Rona said, “All the time. It’s my hobby. Are you hungry? I could heat something up for you. There’s some roast beef in the fridge.”

  “Really? Did you make it?” She didn’t know people who had roast beef in their fridges.

  “I had guests yesterday. I can carve a few slices for you and heat them up.”

  Shira said she liked it cold too. She wanted to taste the roast beef, not because she was hungry but because she wanted to linger in this apartment, but she refused and said she was full and had eaten too much tart. She got up and asked if she could use the bathroom, and Rona reminded her where it was.

  The bathroom window had little diamonds of blue glass set in it; this window also looked out onto the yard with the strange palm trees that must have been planted, decades ago, by someone dreaming of another city. She sat on the toilet and wanted to keep sitting there, smelling the laundry softener, which was the same kind she used at home but here it had a completely different scent, and the smell of the clear bar of soap that lay in a little dish on the counter, and the shampoo on the windowsill. From the moment she had entered the apartment she felt assailed by a barrage of soft scents: the kitchen and bathroom smells, the smell of the pears and the dough, the tea aroma, the fresh whitewash on the walls. And there were hidden scents: the conversation smell, the pregnancy smell, the smell of the day when she too would have roast beef in her fridge, and the smell of her fear that the day would never come.

  When she came back to the kitchen, Rona asked if she wanted some more tea, and Shira said she would, that herbal tea really was calming. Rona smiled, and Shira asked where she bought it. It started to rain. Instead of the clarinet quintet, the radio was now playing Brahms’s first piano concerto, which Shira especially liked because it was the first piece of classical music she had heard, when she was eight, on her mother’s old gramophone. It was a winter day just like this one, in their apartment in north Tel Aviv, whose windows did not overlook a courtyard but looked into other windows, into their neighbors’ lives; Shira always wanted to trade places with them, or at least be able to stand sometimes at their windows and look in on her parents. Their apartment had three rooms, a long narrow kitchen, and a bathroom and toilet with a little window that opened onto an air shaft, into which sounds poured from the other bathrooms—funny sounds, sometimes disgusting or scary, but all preferable to her parents’ silence.

  No one was at home that day she fell in love. She came home early from school because she had the flu. She let herself into the apartment with her key and lay down on the couch in the living room and watched the educational programs on TV until it was time for the math program, which she couldn’t stand. Then she went into the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea. She had a fever and was shivering a little, and as she stood waiting for the water to boil, her knees suddenly felt weak. But it wasn’t just the flu; there was something adventurous, something airy and cheerful, about being in the empty apartment during the late morning hours.

  She took her tea into the living room and dragged her comforter over to the couch from her bedroom. She thought about calling her dad at his office, or her mom, who was probably at her sister’s, and letting them know she’d been sent home early. She had promised the school nurse she’d call as soon as she got home, but now it seemed unnecessary. She didn’t feel that bad. In fact, there was something pleasant about this weakness, and one of them would be home soon to make her lunch anyway. She wondered who it would be today, him or her, because you could never know, and she was curious as to whether they coordinated it, and how, in the middle of mutual anger, which the three of them woke up to every morning, they remembered that someone had to come home at lunchtime. Two or three years later she was no longer impressed by her parents’ sense of responsibility and their excellent memory, but as she lay on the couch, huddled up in the comforter, and stared at the black-and-white TV screen and at the math teacher who reminded her of a big goose, she felt protected.

  Next to the couch was a little cabinet with a gramophone on top. There were rows and rows of records stuffed into the shelves below. She turned down the TV volume, sat on the rug with the heavy comforter around her shoulders, and pulled out the first record she could extract. The cardboard cover was faded and slightly stained and showed a bearded old man with a penetrating look, whose large hands hovered over a piano. The record collection was one of several of her mother’s belongings that Shira could never imagine her using, because they didn’t fit the woman she knew at all: the sewing machine that sat in the porch off the kitchen, covered with a thick sheet of plastic; a big old food processor that stood on the counter, also covered, looking like a miniaturized replica of the sewing machine; and large philosophy and poetry books that lined an out-of-reach shelf in the bookcase. It was as if her mother had a previous life that she had frozen when she got married, or perhaps these items belonged to a life she had planned to have, when she married, but that had never materialized.

  Her mother did not sew or cook or listen to music. On Fridays she would buy fancy expensive cakes with foreign names at the bakery; Shira’s friends were always impressed by the cakes. In her spare time, she read one mystery after another, and Shira sometimes thought she had abandoned the things she loved as a form of protest against her father, who wanted a normal family but lived, like a reclusive camper, in a tent of anxiety set up in the middle of the house, which he folded and carried if ever he went anywhere. Over time, the protest turned into apathy, which her mother fought to combat with the courses she signed up for, the lectures she attended at the university, her ever-expanding fields of interest, the long-standing pool membership, and the hours she spent at her sister’s. When she came home, her mother returned with her suspect energy and an exaggerated joie de vivre, which she sprayed over them as if she had opened a bottle of champagne. She would stand in the living room, telling Shira and her father where she had been and what she had seen, and Shira could detect two languages in her speech: the minor scale, which was meant for her father, and the strained major scale, which was for her. Nonetheless, or perhaps because of that great strain, her mother seemed even sadder than her father at those moments.

  Shira didn’t know that the elderly pianist on the cover was meant to be Brahms, but the minute she placed the needle on the record, the moment she heard the first demanding chords, serious and threatening like her mother’s big books, and then the piano, which seemed to have no intention of surrendering to the threat, she fell in love with him.

  She listened to the concerto over and over again, chilled by her fever, with shivers running through her. She turned the volume up a little higher each time she played the record, so she didn’t hear the key turning in the door and her father’s footsteps as he hurried into the living room. He was alarmed to see her lying on the couch with her eyes closed, her hands floating above the blanket mimicking a conductor’s gestures. When she heard him call her name, she opened her eyes, leaped onto the rug, and turned the volume down. He asked what she was doing home, and she said she was sick. He asked why they hadn’t called him from school, and she said she had promised the nurse she would call as soon as she got home, but at home she felt better.

  Her father picked up the album cover off the floor and asked why she was suddenly listening to classical music, and she said she didn’t know, she was bored. “Brahms of all things?” he said, and she quickly filed the name in her memory. Her father handed her the sleeve and said, “Your mother likes him too.” Then he bent over and touched her for
ehead. He asked if she was hungry, and she said she wasn’t, and he offered to make her a salad or an omelet anyway, but she said she wanted to sleep for a while.

  Her father phoned her mother, and half an hour later she came home and he went back to his office. Her mother looked tired, but she smiled and asked Shira how high her temperature had been when the nurse had taken it, and Shira said she couldn’t remember. “I’ll get you some juice,” she said, and went into the kitchen, and Shira quickly put the album back among the other records. She wanted to listen to it again, with her mother, but she suddenly felt the need to protect her new love with a coat of secrecy. When her mother sat opposite her on the armchair and turned the TV up so they could watch it together, a sense of guilt diluted her excitement.

  But her love of classical music survived, and when she found herself alone at home again, she looked for other records with the illustration of the bearded man with the penetrating look; she couldn’t find any, although there were many Brahms albums in the collection. Since she couldn’t read English at the time but could recognize the letters, she always chose the albums with a large B on their covers, so by the time she grew up, she had fallen in love with Bach and Beethoven, too, and with the Berlioz requiem. Eventually, she moved the album collection into her room, where she listened to the records on a new stereo her parents bought for her bat mitzvah. Her love was diminished somewhat by the sense that she was continuing some struggle on her mother’s behalf, and the battlefield was the earphones, through which the sounds flowed in full volume; still, the silence on the other end always trickled through.

  ( 3 )

  Rona stirred a teaspoon of honey into her tea. “I hear you write,” she said, and the conversation abruptly took on an ominous tone.

  “A little,” Shira said.

  “Prose?”

  “I wouldn’t really call it prose yet. It’s at a very embryonic stage. Preembryonic, even.”

  “I envy creative people,” said Rona.

  “I don’t know if I’d call myself creative. So far I haven’t really created much of anything other than expectations.”

  “But you’re getting there.”

  “Yes, I suppose so, but I have no idea where I’m getting,” Shira said thoughtfully, and suddenly wished the psychologist in Rona would answer her small cry of distress as promptly as she had earlier offered her the roast beef.

  Rona asked, “So, do you write on a computer or on paper?”

  “Computer,” Shira replied. “It’s impossible otherwise.”

  “And do you work every day?”

  “I try to. But lately I’m really not into it. I can’t concentrate.”

  “I know what that’s like,” said Rona.

  “You do?”

  “I haven’t been able to concentrate on anything either recently.”

  “Well, you have good reason,” she said, and pointed to Rona’s belly.

  Rona smiled and said, “Yes, I suppose I do.”

  “Have you chosen a name yet?” Shira asked.

  “Tamar.”

  “That’s a lovely name.”

  “I like it too. I thought of Shira at first, but then I decided on Tamar.”

  “Tamar is definitely nicer.”

  “They’re both nice, but I wanted a name that would sound different from mine. Rona and Shira sounded wrong somehow. Like Sally and Molly.”

  “And Tamar ends with an r and Rona begins with an r,” said Shira.

  “That’s true. I never thought of that.”

  “It’s as if you continue each other.”

  “Yes,” Rona said. “I pick up where she leaves off. But shouldn’t it be the other way around?”

  “I’m not sure,” Shira replied, fearing she might be wading into a swamp of symbolism. “Don’t you sometimes feel like our parents are more an extension of us than we are of them?”

  Rona took her time to reply. She wasn’t the type to answer quickly or feel compelled to show off her conversational skills, agility, or wit. Shira envied her, the way she sat there, stirring her tea, resting her other hand on her belly as she considered—not because she wished to prove anything but rather out of curiosity—whether or not she had anything to say.

  “I don’t know,” she said finally. “But it’s interesting, what you said.”

  “I’m not sure it’s all that interesting. Maybe it’s not really interesting at all.”

  “No, no, it is,” said Rona.

  “Well, perhaps.”

  “Are your parents still alive?” Rona asked.

  “My father is. My mother died two years ago.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s been quite a while.”

  “Two years is not such a long time,” said Rona. “How did she die?”

  “She had a brain aneurysm. It was very quick and sudden, and fatal.”

  “How old was she?”

  “Fifty-nine,” Shira said, and looked outside at the palm trees’ fanned branches thrashing about in the rain. She remembered the day her mother had died. It had been scorching hot. But she did not need to call the day up from memory because it was always with her, expanding and contracting like an accordion, sometimes taking up only the polite space of a reminder, other times, if it caught her at an especially bad moment, taking control and transporting itself into the present.

  On such days she would wake up with the same feeling she had had that June morning when she took the bus to the university for her final exam in logic. She knew she would flunk it, so she hadn’t bothered to stay up all night trying to make sense of the material. She’d gone to bed early and slept well, and when the alarm clock rang at seven she had sat up feeling very calm. On the bus, she stared out the window, without taking even one last obligatory peek at the highlighted lecture notes prepared for her by Nurit, her classmate. She sensed the calm that precedes a foreseen failure, a pleasant surrender of the brain, suddenly free to deal with other things. But her head was empty that morning—which was odd for her, because one way or another it was always full of thoughts—completely empty, as she sat in the café on campus and drank a latte and chain-smoked. It remained empty as she walked into the building and went up the stairs and looked at the groups of students huddled outside the exam room, exchanging frantic last-minute information. She liked the emptiness so much and she wondered whether she’d ever feel it again or whether this was perhaps the first and last empty moment of her life borrowed from someone else—someone whose life was more tranquil and didn’t need it.

  But when she sat down in one of the rows in the middle of the auditorium, pen and watch laid out in front of her, and when the proctor laconically explained the exam rules, she suddenly felt as if she was not supposed to be there just then, and not because she had no chance of passing but because something fateful was happening elsewhere; her mind, which had been empty all night and that morning, flooded with a torrent of anxiety.

  The proctor handed her the exam sheet and Shira picked up her pen and began filling in her personal information in the answer booklet, She looked back at Nurit, who was sitting two rows behind, smiling. The exam was in fact very easy, she found out later, but she was incapable of grasping the questions. She turned back again and Nurit smiled and signaled various numbers with her fingers, some of which Shira managed to take in and jot down on the margins: two, five, six, and ten. But suddenly the numbers were replaced by others, the digits that made up her parents’ telephone number, and they stubbornly hummed inside her head and flashed in front of her eyes, and her lips began mouthing the figures in a silent mantra.

  Shira glanced at Nurit again, but she was engrossed in the exam. She looked around. Everyone seemed calm, scribbling in their answer books. She tried to solve the second question, which began with: “X is a black cat,” and remembered how amused she had been by this image when she first heard it in class; in her mind’s eye she had seen a black alley cat with a big X on its back and someone trying to catch it so they could put it in a l
ogic problem. She made an effort to read the question again but went on to the fifth one, which had no black cat, but there was no point because her body had become her parents’ phone number and she suddenly understood that the pleasant emptiness she had felt before was not true emptiness but the incubation of the fear that now overcame her, and she was then convinced that the black cat with the X was a sign that something terrible had happened.

  She put her watch and pen into her bag, got up and went to the front of the auditorium, placed her empty booklet on the desk, and told the proctor she had to leave. The proctor asked if she was sure, because there was still time left—there was something maternal about her—but Shira shook her head and said, No, there was no point. As she walked out she saw Nurit watching her questioningly, and Shira waved and hurried out to the pay phone and called her parents.

  Her Aunt Malka answered the phone. Shira asked where her mother was and Malka said, “Dad’s here. You’d better come over.”

  “Tell me what’s happened,” Shira insisted.

  “Mom didn’t feel well,” her aunt said, and Shira recognized the words and the tone because she’d heard them dozens of times from her father when she was little and used to come home from school to find him in the kitchen making her a sandwich for lunch. When she’d ask where her mother was, he would lean heavily on the roll and squash it down with both hands and say, “Mom didn’t feel well. She went to rest awhile at Aunt Malka’s.” For a moment Shira hoped that this Mom didn’t feel well, uttered by her mother’s younger sister, who had now begun to cry on the other side of the line, was that same Mom didn’t feel well intended to blur the truth for her as an act of kindness. But she knew this time it was both a lie and the truth, because this time her mother really hadn’t felt well and she wasn’t alive anymore.

  “You’d better come home,” said Aunt Malka firmly.

  “But what happened?” Out of the corner of her eye she saw two students she knew; as they left the exam hall, they laughed with relief and lit up cigarettes. They waved to her.