Accidents: A Novel

by Yael Hedaya

  She walked around the apartment holding the newspaper, until her happiness turned to paralysis, then to disturbance. The phone rang and Rona was on the line to congratulate her, and Shira heard Tamar shouting in the background, “Mazal tov! Tell her mazal tov from me!”

  Rona said, “Can you hear your fan?”

  “Yes, tell her thanks.”

  The seven-year-old Tamar grabbed the phone from her mother and said, “Please accept my happiness.”

  Shira smiled. “You say, ‘Please accept my condolences.’”

  “What do you say when you’re happy?”

  “‘I’m happy for you.’”

  “Then I’m happy for you,” Tamar said. “So when are you coming over? You probably won’t come anymore. You’ll probably be busy with guys, now that you’re so famous.”

  Rona took the phone back and said, “We really are so happy for you.”

  She pictured them sitting at the kitchen table, across from each other, the girl swinging her legs, her mother perusing the literature supplement, scanning the bestseller list as she ate, with the radio and the TV on in the living room, blurring the National Geographic Channel or the kids’ station together with the Voice of Music. It was an impossible and yet reassuring combination, the music of home. She imagined them eating a light dinner, maybe an omelet and salad and cream cheese—things that always taste so good at other people’s houses—without it occurring to them to invite her to join them, certain that their home was the last place she would want to celebrate her moment of glory.

  Regretting it already, she phoned Eitan. He was surprised to hear her voice, even a little alarmed. She asked if he’d seen Ha’aretz today and he said he hadn’t had time yet. “Guess what?” she said, as if months had not passed since they last spoke.

  “What?” he asked. She told him that the novel had landed in first place. “Mazal tov!” he said with a grand voice. “Wow, I’m so happy for you!” and in the background she heard someone asking who he was talking to.

  “Do you have someone over?” she asked. “Am I interrupting something?”

  “No, not at all,” he replied. She heard the voice again, getting closer and breathing into the phone. “Why mazal tov? Did someone have a baby?” Eitan said, “I’ll tell you in a minute.”

  “Well, I just wanted to let you know,” Shira said. “I thought you’d like to know.”

  When the other voice wafted away, Eitan asked softly, “Are you all right? Is everything okay?”

  “Everything’s fine,” she replied, more excited than she thought she would be. “I thought maybe you’d like to go out to celebrate together.”

  After a long silence, Eitan said, “I’d be happy to go out for a drink sometime. I’d really like to, but I’m living with someone now.”

  “I understand.”

  “Wow, I’m embarrassed.”

  “Don’t be.”

  “We’ve been together for almost two months. We just moved in together this week.”

  “She moved in with you?”

  “Yeah. There’s more room here. You’ve never been to my new apartment, have you?”

  “No. What does she do?” she asked, because an interview seemed like the least painful type of conversation.

  “Who, Ayelet?”

  “Yes. Ayelet.”

  “She’s finishing up a master’s in psychology.”

  “Sounds good.”

  She wanted to ask him what she looked like, but Eitan said, “So listen, I’m really happy for you. Honestly. I’m really proud of you. I’ll go and have a look in the newspaper, I hope Ayelet bought one.” Shira said it wasn’t that important, and Eitan said it was. “Ayelet!” she heard him yell. “Do we have Ha’aretz?” What? she heard a voice from the other room. “Ha’aretz!” he repeated.

  “Never mind, Eitan, it doesn’t matter.”

  “I’m sure we have it, but worse comes to worst we’ll get it from someone.” He promised to call soon so they could go out and celebrate, the three of them. “She liked your book a lot,” he said.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. She even bought it as a gift for someone.”

  “Wow.” She didn’t know what else to say.

  “So lots of best wishes. And hugs.”

  “To you too.”

  “What for?”

  “For the apartment, for Ayelet, for everything.”

  He thanked her and said, “So we really should go out someday, the three of us. Ayelet would really like that. She’s doing exams now, so we’re not going out much.”

  “Okay, we’ll be in touch, then.”

  He said he was happy for her again and when she put the phone down she felt an urgent need to go out; she folded the paper up and put it in her bag and walked to her father’s.

  ( 7 )

  Up until a few years ago, her father had owned a small architectural firm that carried on practically by force of inertia. The two young architects who worked for him were always encouraging him to computerize the office, to modernize, to bid on large contracts, but her father kept working with a couple of old contractors who gave him little projects that made the office archaic and superfluous and depressed and bored the two young men. A short while after her mother died, they resigned and left her father alone in his huge office, in an old building on Yavneh Street.

  When she was little, Shira liked to stare at the geometrical patterns on the office floor tiles, which had a hypnotizing power. Or she would sit on the deep windowsill and look out onto Allenby Street, which always fascinated her and which she still loved; something in its madness and filth reassured her. A few times a week, when her mother went to her courses or to the pool and left her with her dad in the office, they would go down together and sit at a café whose name she could not remember. At the time it struck her as a very brown place, with four Formica-topped tables that looked scratched, although her father said that was just their pattern. There were silver-colored ashtrays and a counter with an espresso machine, behind which stood a woman with gray hair and bitter brown eyes. Her father would order a Lungo and soda water, and Shira drank chocolate milk and ate napoleons.

  She remembered how her father would try to engage her in conversation, taking an interest in what happened at school and who her friends were. She always gave him the same reports, spreading a wide net of little details, sometimes negligible ones, designed to prevent the penetration of silence. She knew he wasn’t listening, even though he looked as if he were, because she recognized in him a lack of concentration—a combination of anxiety and contemplation—that resembled her own lack of concentration at school and with her friends, one she had learned, over time, to camouflage beneath a serious mask of attention.

  She thought that if she could find a way to engage him, she would be able to rescue him from his usual condition, the one her mother so hated and which, she claimed when they fought, was destructive and morbid and harmful, mainly for the child. Shira envied her mother for being able to hate his condition so much without feeling guilty. To her, the condition was part of who her father was; it was one of his limbs, like the brown jacket he always wore, and his hat, and the clean handkerchief he kept in his trousers pocket, and the little pair of scissors he used to cut his fingernails when he sat at his drafting table, and the checkbook whose register he always filled out meticulously, and his reading glasses. To hate his condition, she thought, would be to hate him.

  Her father liked Allenby Street too. He always had errands to run there—banks, stationery stores, a tailor he visited every few months—and when she accompanied him to these places she spent an hour or two with a different father: busy, energetic, sometimes almost happy. When he retired, his restlessness turned to apathy. He spent his days at home, sitting on an armchair on the balcony that overlooked the street, listening to the morning shows and the hourly news on the radio with great anticipation, as if he were expecting to hear some message for himself in the broadcast. On rainy days he sat in the living room
and watched TV, and after the late-night news he dragged himself to the bedroom, took off the robe he wore all day over his clothes, put on the pajamas he kept folded beneath his pillow, made sure several times he had locked the doors properly, left a light on in the hallway, and went to sleep.

  When Eitan started coming with her to see her father, the trips almost seemed like normal visits children make to healthy parents. There was no pity, and above all they did not have the alarm that arose in her every time she saw how from day to day her father was becoming a kind of sideways-walking crab; it was unclear whether he was retreating or advancing. Eitan did not see these mental zigzags, and everything that bothered her about his approach to her became a kind of solace regarding her father. Eitan, with his practicality, was like a great wave that erased the marks her father left in the sand.

  Each time they visited, Eitan would fix a broken blind or a leaking tap or do some other odd job. Her father looked very pleased when he stood next to Eitan, who was a head taller, and handed him a hammer or screwdriver, or when he walked him to the fuse box in the stairwell. When Eitan had finished the repair jobs, the three of them would sit and watch TV, her father in his armchair, Eitan alongside her on the couch, and everything seemed very normal. Sometimes they even ate dinner together, and her father seemed to enjoy the food. Later, while she washed the dishes, she listened to their conversation in the living room, which kept coming back to the topic of computers; Eitan tried to explain the basic concepts to her father, but he never understood. From the kitchen, she listened to their voices: Eitan’s was confident and calm while her father’s voice, despite the hoarse roughness of old age, sounded suddenly clear and curious. At those moments she felt as if they were almost those other people she had wanted to be when she was a girl—they were almost the same as everyone: a man and a woman and a father, who was their child.

  ( 8 )

  Eitan’s parents were in their fifties and had young names: Oded and Leora. They lived on a kibbutz in the south. They were lively and energetic people who went on organized nature hikes on Saturdays and every so often came to visit Tel Aviv, bringing Shira and Eitan crates full of fruits and vegetables; they always remembered to bring a little parcel for Shira’s father too.

  Once Shira and Eitan took her father to Eitan’s parents’ kibbutz for Passover. He didn’t ask where he was going, and he sat in the car the entire way humming songs that might have been his own inventions or distorted versions of old tunes he liked. He kept humming to himself as they sat down for the seder meal, and when his turn came to read from the Haggadah, Eitan, who was sitting to his right, pointed at the lines in the book for him, but he had forgotten to bring his reading glasses and Eitan read the paragraph instead, as her father sat staring ahead, crumbling a piece of matzo. She watched Eitan’s parents as they gave her father warm glances, and she looked at all the other people she didn’t know, sitting at the long table with their children and grandchildren, and she envied Eitan’s parents for having this place to grow old in, although they seemed to have no intention of growing old. For a moment she wanted to rush over to her father, put a sticker on his lapel that said MAX KLEIN: AVAILABLE FOR ADOPTION, kiss his cheek, and abandon him there.

  At night, after Eitan’s parents walked them to the guesthouse where they were staying, she sat outside on the front porch, smoking a cigarette, and let Eitan help her father put his pajamas on and get into the little cot, as if he were putting a doll to bed. She did not yet know how much she would miss this moment and how she would miss the two of them: her father, a minute before his depression metastasized to his internal organs, and Eitan, who came out to the porch and leaned over her and hugged her shoulders and said her father was asleep and asked if she wasn’t cold.

  They broke up a few months later, in August, and at first she didn’t know what she would tell her father when he asked where Eitan was and why he didn’t come around anymore. But her father, who had started falling asleep in his clothes in the living room armchair, with the radio and the TV and all the lights turned on, didn’t ask.

  * * *

  That evening, when she arrived at her father’s apartment with the bestseller list, she found him lying on the floor in the hallway that led from the living room to the bedroom. She didn’t know how long he’d been lying there, and when he saw her standing over him shouting “Dad!” he looked at her gratefully. She helped him up carefully and walked him to his armchair, next to which, on a little table, was a cup of coffee that was still hot. He sat down heavily, his flannel robe falling open to expose a pajama top soiled with fresh food and coffee stains and some older, more faded spots—as if the top were snitching on her father, as if it were the true mirror of his life.

  She tried to find out what had happened, how he had fallen, but her father couldn’t explain it. “Did you get up to go to the bathroom?” she asked, and he nodded, still grasping her hand, his palm transmitting alternating currents of old age and childhood, both his and hers. “But how did you fall?” she asked. “I fell,” he said. She realized there was no point in interrogating him, and since her father seemed indifferent, she concluded it was not the first time it had happened.

  She sat at his feet on the rug, still holding the folded newspaper, and asked how many times he had fallen. For a moment he looked as if he were concentrating on the question, but then he repeated, “I fell,” and looked down at the newspaper. “You brought the paper?” he asked, as if he had forgotten that a moment before he was lying on the floor in a fetal position, and asked her to bring his reading glasses from his bedside table.

  She brought his glasses—they were old-fashioned ones, with square brown plastic frames—and he glanced at his watch and said the news was on soon. “Yes,” she said distractedly and went back into the hallway, still trying to figure out what had happened and whether there was an obstacle of some sort there. But apart from a crumpled pink tissue that had fallen out of his pocket, she found nothing.

  She went into the kitchen, opened the fridge, and threw out everything that had accumulated since her last visit, a few days earlier. There was a blackened avocado with only one wedge missing; a glass dish with a mound of yellowish rice and lentils, which her father would sometimes make from a packet; one apple that still looked all right; a carton of eggs; and a little container of low-fat UHT milk. She went back into the living room and found her father immersed in the paper, reading the headlines, with the literary supplement tossed on the rug at his feet. She asked if he’d eaten and her father nodded.

  “What did you have?” she asked.

  Without looking up, he answered, “Some yogurt and a pear.”

  “My book made the first place in the bestseller list,” she said, with the same dryness with which he had previously said, I fell.

  He looked at her happily for a moment, but still slightly perplexed and lost. “Really?”

  “Yes. Today. Here it is.” She pointed to the supplement.

  “Well done,” he said. He stared at the TV screen and the news anchor and asked her to turn the volume up. She asked if he was sure he didn’t want anything to eat—she could make him an omelet—and he shook his head and took off his glasses and put them in his lap. She took the literary supplement and put it in her bag and took out her cigarettes and lighter and sat on the couch smoking, watching the news with her father.

  “It’s not good to smoke,” he said.

  “I know.”

  As they watched the news, he mumbled every so often, “Well done, really, well done.” Just before the weather forecast, he fell asleep.

  She was afraid to leave him sleeping, worried that when he woke up, still sleepy, he would forget about the dizzy spells and the instability and leap out of the armchair as if he were a healthy man but collapse after a few steps like a wind-up toy.

  She watched a talk show—she didn’t have anything to do at home anyway—but she was restless and wanted to leave. She looked at him sleeping. His head drooped forward onto his ch
est, he snored slightly and looked very tranquil, and she wondered if he was miserable in his sleep too, or if sleep was a time of grace for him. When she was little, she sometimes used to hear him walking around the house in the middle of the night, turning taps on and off, coughing, rustling the newspaper. In her half-awake state she had wanted to get up and join him on his nocturnal journeys, but she always fell back asleep, and her sleep was full of his insomnia.

  Her father woke up suddenly. His head snapped up, his eyes looked frightened for a moment, as if he didn’t know where he was, but they emptied out instantly. He glanced at his watch instinctively, then saw her sitting on the couch smoking and asked if she hadn’t just smoked a cigarette. She said, “Did you sleep a little?”

  “A little.”

  She asked if he felt well, if he wanted her to help him into bed. She pictured the day when he wouldn’t be able to live on his own anymore and wondered whether they were both denying that the day was already here.

  Her father yawned and said, “Shiraleh.”

  “What?”

  “Well done,” he said, and put his hands on his reading glasses and said he would watch TV for a while longer and then go to sleep, and she should leave the paper for him.

  On the way home she stopped at a pay phone and called Rona, hoping she would sense the distress in her voice and invite her over, but the babysitter answered and said Rona had gone to a seminar and would be back late. She went home and got into bed and, surprisingly, fell asleep immediately, but she woke up again a little after midnight and sat up in bed. Three new facts flickered in the dark: Eitan would not be coming back, her father was slowly dying, and her book was a success.

  ( 9 )

  She rang the bell at Rona’s apartment at exactly eight o’clock. The bell, followed by the sound of little feet running and Tamar’s singsong voice, “Come in! Come in!” on the other side of the door—the way kids used to call out “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” when they played hide-and-seek—and finally the quiet turning of the lock aroused her from what suddenly seemed like a very long and exhausting journey. All at once she felt the cold stabbing her cheeks and ears, and the moisture in her hair, and the heaviness of the plastic bag with the wine and ice cream, its handles wrapped around her fingers. It was one of the longest short walks she had even taken, and although she had still arrived on time, she was relieved that the voyage was over.