by Yael Hedaya
“Come home,” her aunt said, in a broken voice. “Things are not good.”
“Is she dead?”
“She had a stroke,” Malka continued. “She had a very bad stroke.”
“When?”
“This morning, at eight. It happened as soon as she woke up. Dad found her in the bathroom. We tried to call you.”
“I had an exam. I’m on campus now.” The two students walked by and cast her a How was it? look. Shira made a face that said very bad and thought of the life she had had five minutes ago and the one she would have from now on. She missed her old life.
“Come quick, Shiraleh,” her aunt sobbed.
“Where is Mom now?” she asked, and dug around in her purse to see if she had enough money for a cab.
“They’ve taken her away already,” said Malka, and blew her nose. Shira asked who took her, but her aunt broke into tears again and said, “Come quick, Shiraleh. Your father needs you here with him now.” She thought it sounded strange for Aunt Malka to say your father rather than just Dad, and the word your, which had been absent from Mom didn’t feel well, was now very present and demanding. At that moment Shira understood what she had always known: that the death of one parent would instantly turn her into the parent of the one who remained.
( 4 )
She stood on Tchernikowsky Street and considered crossing the park again, in the opposite direction this time, and walking along King George, then turning right onto Allenby and right again onto Hess, which might buy her a few minutes of tardiness. But she kept standing where she was. She knew that to go back the way she’d come, something she’d never done before, would constitute an escalation of the endless preoccupation with killing time, a low point that might well conceal even lower points, and she wondered if she might not find herself, one day soon, walking back and forth across the balcony of her apartment on Borochov Street, waiting for someone—a partner, even a delivery boy—as her father used to do when she was a child.
She used to see him from a distance, leaning on the railing with his elbows, looking down at the street as if he were bored rather than anxious. From afar she would catch him retreating into the apartment as soon as he spotted her, and when she was with her girlfriends she quickly distracted them so they wouldn’t see him. Sometimes she saw her mother too, motioning with her hands, trying to persuade him to come inside, not to embarrass his daughter in front of her friends. She would see him follow her mother inside, but not before throwing another glance at the sidewalk, and when she neared the building she knew he was still scanning the street in his imagination, as he shifted uncomfortably in his armchair until he heard her come in. When he asked how it went at the Scouts meeting or visiting her friends or later, at parties, his voice was full of feigned indifference, like her mother’s eyes.
To tell him how it went, how it really went, was impossible, because even when she spent time out of the house, she was still in tune with him, with his waiting, and when she was a child, something told her he was not only waiting for her to get home safely but for something else, something greater, as if her father was waiting for the moment when his current life would be over and a different one would begin. When he stood on the balcony, looking down and to the sides, and sometimes also up, perhaps he was expecting a miracle, maybe even the very same miracle she was expecting: to be like everyone else.
Everyone else had younger fathers, athletic men who wore jeans and T-shirts and looked like boys next to her father, who always wore suits. These fathers smelled of sweat, not aftershave, and the mothers always looked in love with them. Families who went away on Sukkot and Passover, went camping in the Sinai Desert, families who talked about sports and politics and gossiped about other people. But what typified them more than anything were the smells: the smell of the soap the other fathers used to wash their cars on Shabbat—her father had a car too, but he hated driving and usually preferred to take the bus—and the smell of the other kids’ laundry, but mainly the smell that to this day prompted in her a sense of longing: the waft of cheesecake that hung in the stairwells in her friends’ buildings on countless Friday afternoons, heavy and soft and disapproving, as if the baking of cheesecake was a neighborhood scheme the other mothers had concocted after seeing her mother leave the expensive bakery.
When Rona had called that morning and invited her for dinner, she had asked what to bring. Rona said nothing, but she was already planning to buy Rona’s favorite red wine and the ice cream from the Italian gelateria that Tamar liked, and her day suddenly took on structure and meaning and had a beginning, a middle, and an end, like a good writing day. She had not had such a day for a long time, because since her novel had been published, three years ago, she hadn’t been able to write, and when she did the words behaved like chromosomes, forming the wrong combinations or not connecting at all. She forced herself to write every morning, if only to prove to herself that physically she was still doing it. There were mornings that started out promisingly, and mornings when the sentences crawled along the screen and created a lazy paragraph or two, but because they were written out of desperation and alarm, she knew even before she saved them that the defective creature she had birthed would not survive to the next day.
Her computer was full of files containing no more than a page or two; when she opened them, she did so with the distance of a pathologist interested only in his subjects’ cause of death, not their lives or the lives they could have had. During the time that had passed since her first novel came out and climbed to the top of the bestseller list, there were mornings when she treated these writing attempts—no longer intended to be a new book but rather a kind of writing reflex—not as failures, necessarily, but as the loyal representatives of her talent. Her novel’s success, she sometimes thought, was what had been the mistake, the true mutation. The dozens of files with promising names, containing words that refused to cooperate and fragments of pages and paragraphs that kept their distance from one another with disgust—these were her true genetic makeup.
She enjoyed the success but was unable to feel it. People knew her name, readers sent her letters saying how her book had changed their lives, which was strange because it had not changed her life at all. Sometimes she thought her success had only made life seem even more miserable, deepening the chasm that lay between what others thought of her and what she knew about herself—so much so that on particularly bad days she thought that the chasm was not what separated these two things but was the only thing that truly existed.
But there were more forgiving mornings too, when staring at the screen and typing a few apologetic keystrokes did not seem like punishment for her success but like waiting. And although waiting was also a form of punishment, and although she did not know exactly what she was waiting for, these mornings were colored by a certain pathos, like a little boy who suddenly appears in his pajamas in a living room full of people in the midst of a fervent argument about politics or sex or money or justice: When they notice him standing there, rubbing his eyes and yawning, they fall silent.
She had had one of those mornings today. The rain had begun to fall at night, and by early morning it was pounding down in her bedroom balcony. Shortly after sunrise, when the rain turned to hail, she heard in her sleep a familiar and beloved sound, as if a truck were unloading gravel, and she got out of bed and raised the blinds covering the door to the balcony and looked at the frenetic stuff covering the tiles, and the stones of ice jumping off the railing and the potted plants. She went back to bed and got under the covers and listened to the other melodies of the storm, which had joined the hail in harmony—gutters ringing, the window shuddering, thunder, and a car alarm set off by the hail—to her, this was the most wonderful way to wake up.
She got up and went into the kitchen and turned on the electric kettle, and when she got back from the bathroom and the kettle switch flipped, she decided this was a morning that should be celebrated with real coffee. She took the mocha pot off the shelf; it had b
een a gift from Eitan, and she had only recently started using it because for the past three years, since they broke up, she hadn’t been able to. He bought it for her, like his other gifts, after they had visited friends who served coffee made in a mocha pot, and Shira said it was about time they also started drinking good coffee at home. She never gave it another thought, but Eitan, who kept a mental list of ways to make her happy because he believed in the cumulative power of little details, called the friends the next day and asked which model it was and where they had bought it. As it turned out, the pot was simple and cheap, and that same day he went and bought one and had it gift-wrapped, and at night he hid the box in his side of the closet beneath a pile of sweaters.
Then, when Shira woke up—she always woke up before him, especially during those days when their breakup was hovering above them like an ugly chandelier—and went into the kitchen, the electric kettle had disappeared, and in its place on the countertop was a box wrapped in colorful shiny paper. She opened the box and smiled, and for a minute she wanted to shake Eitan awake and give him a grateful hug, but she knew there would only be embarrassment and guilt in the hug, because she knew she was going to leave him, and she knew he knew too, but as usual he was also clueless. In any case, she couldn’t be bothered to start fiddling with the pot. She guessed where Eitan had hidden the kettle, as she had been guessing things he would do and say for months, and she took it out of the cabinet under the sink and made herself a cup of instant coffee.
Eitan woke up and came into the kitchen in his underwear. He saw her sitting at the table and the pot in its box on the countertop. He looked at her with sleepy wonderment that quickly turned to sadness, and she hurried over to him and kissed him on the cheek and said, “Thanks! What a surprise! But I didn’t know how to use it, so I waited for you,” which softened the insult a little. He said it was easy and he’d show her soon, and she asked if he wanted some instant coffee in the meantime and he nodded and rubbed his eyes and his underwear suddenly looked several sizes too big for him. He went to the bathroom, and she listened from the kitchen as the short bursts of urine turned into a steady stream, and heard him flushing the toilet and turning on the tap in the bathroom sink, which made the kitchen pipes vibrate. She heard him splash cold water on his face and pat his cheeks, then the little scrubbing sounds of his toothbrush, which sounded like a small animal munching. Then she heard him spit into the sink, and when the kettle switch flipped and she poured boiling water into his mug, she knew they would never drink coffee together from the mocha pot.
They broke up a few days later, the morning after the surprise party Eitan threw for her at a club in south Tel Aviv. He invited everyone she knew and all their common friends. There were dozens of people there, some of whom she hadn’t talked to for years, but they came, which both touched and annoyed her. She walked into the dark club, whose walls were shaking from the force of the bass, believing she had been invited to a surprise party for someone else. Eitan hugged her as soon as she entered and shoved a plastic cup of beer into her hand, and then she saw all those friends and acquaintances and imagined Eitan locating everyone and introducing himself, and telling everyone about her book, expecting them to be as excited as he was, inviting them to the party and asking them not to say anything if they talked to her. As she stood blinking, holding her beer, she realized that during all those weeks when she was busy with herself and the book, Eitan had found himself a project that, as usual, was connected with her and with ways to make her happy.
On the bar, next to little dishes of snacks, was a stack of her books; they looked as if they didn’t belong, not just to the place but to her. In the corner, next to a bathroom sign that was spray-painted with graffiti, behind a massive speaker, she saw her father sitting straight up on a chair, his brimmed hat on his lap, his hands folded on the hat. On the floor next to him were a cup of beer and a plastic plate with some pretzels. Eitan whispered to her, “Your dad’s here; come and say hello to him.” She made her way through the crowds of people, who touched her and kissed her and congratulated her and said, “Mazal tov! Mazal tov! You’re great! Way to go!” and she thought about Eitan, who had driven several hours earlier to pick up her dad from his house. He had escorted him down the seventeen steps, with the natural patience she herself never had, especially lately, when her father had begun having dizzy spells and sometimes rocked on his feet when they walked down the street together, falling and fearfully grabbing hold of her arm. Although he was very thin and light, he transferred a huge weight into her body as he grasped her, as well as sadness, which was replaced by anger that melted into compassion. With him gripping her arm she imagined a kitten clinging to her sweater, because there was something kittenish about her father and his touch was fragile, and when they stood like that she tried to picture herself rocking that way, one day, on some street, and wondered whose arm her fingers would grasp, and both hated herself ahead of time for the burden she would be and feared she would have no one to burden. During those moments when she steadied her father on his feet and said, “Oops!” with a kind of artificial cheerfulness, in a tone reserved for babies learning to walk, or when she said, “Let’s rest for a moment,” and watched him standing on the sidewalk, staring ahead, his fingers loosening their grip on her arm—during those moments she did not yet know that these terrible scenes would one day seem even more terrible when, in the evening in the kitchen, or in front of the TV, or in bed, she would have no one to report them to.
She looked at her father sitting behind the speaker and imagined Eitan opening the car door for him and gently helping him in, fastening his seat belt and driving carefully, looking for a radio station appropriate for the journey, constantly trying to strike up a conversation with her father, whose hat—which he wore in winter and summer, because his head was always cold—was squashed against the Fiat Uno’s roof and who had no idea where he was going.
They had arrived first, and Eitan had sat him behind the speaker so the dancers wouldn’t step over him. He went to the bar and came back with the beer and pretzels, although her father didn’t drink and at that time had also lost his appetite. He put the refreshments down on the floor and said, “It’s here, Mr. Klein. See?” Her father nodded without looking and mumbled thank-you-very-much, and then people started to arrive, and Eitan expertly maneuvered between them and the old man, who only a few months previously, when he was still capable of liking anyone, had liked Eitan very much and asked why they didn’t get married. (Shira had said there was still time, and Eitan had said everything would be okay.)
Her publisher and her editor were also there, and they came over to her as she knelt by her father, shouting something in his ear. She stood up and shook their hands and they each gave her an awkward embrace. “This is my father,” she said. The two men, who were both around fifty, shook his hand ceremoniously, and the publisher said, “Well, so what do you think of Shira?” Her father looked at him vacantly and said thank you, and the editor smiled embarrassedly and stared at the floor. Shira bent over and said, “Dad, this is Eli Davidoff, my publisher, and this is Reuben Tamari; he’s the one who edited the book. You remember I told you about them?” Her father held his hand out to be shaken, and the publisher and the editor shook it again, and the three of them stood there silently, the publisher moving to the sounds of the music and Shira staring down at the cup and the plastic plate, which looked as if they had been placed there for a dog or a cat, until Eitan came over, sweating and laughing and dragging two teenage girls behind him whom Shira did not recognize. They asked her to sign the book they had just bought at the bar with a 50 percent discount. One of the girls gave her the book to sign while she held her change in her other hand, and Shira asked if she had a pen. The girl said she didn’t, and apologized and said she felt bad. Eitan dug through his pockets, and the other girl said, “Whoa, what a nuisance,” and the publisher and the editor also looked through their pockets for a pen and couldn’t find one. The first girl said, “No big
deal, then,” but Shira turned around and leaned down to her father and gently pulled out the Parker he always kept in the coat pocket of his brown jacket. The girls stood dancing in their spots, waiting for their inscription. Shira asked for their names, and when they told her she wanted to ask who they were and how they had even ended up here, but she wrote on the inside jacket, For Noga and Meital, with much love from Shira, and may you have a beautiful life. They thanked her excitedly and disappeared into the crowd, and Eitan held her arm and said something, but the noise drowned out his voice. Shira yelled, “What?” He leaned over and shouted into her ear, “Those are your first buyers!” Shira said, “No. You’re my first buyer,” but Eitan couldn’t hear her and yelled, “What?” Shira said, “Never mind,” and followed him to the dance floor.
Eitan had bought a hundred books at full price and sold them at half price. She tried to figure out how much it must have cost him, how much money he had lost, and in the smoke and darkness she suddenly noticed a cardboard sign hanging behind the bar: SHIRA KLEIN’S BOOK WEEK. All around her, people she didn’t know were dancing and smiling at her, and some of them held books in their hands and waved them at her as if they were part of the dance. She smiled back at them and suddenly felt closer to her father, who sat staring into the darkness, than to the man who loved her in a way that always made her love him less.
( 5 )
They had met on a blind date. Shira’s upstairs neighbor, Dalit, who would occasionally invite her to the student apartment she shared with two roommates, and who was bothered by the fact that Shira didn’t have a boyfriend—she herself was planning to move in with the guy she had been dating since her army service—set her up with him. “Why can’t you go out with someone who isn’t an intellectual for once? Try it, just for fun,” she pleaded with Shira one evening, when they were drinking coffee in her room. They were sitting on a mattress on the floor covered with dozens of dolls and stuffed animals, which Shira found both charming and alarming.