by Yael Hedaya
“So what? We’ll still have cold days, and I’ll have them for next winter.”
“Whatever you want. Buy them in a few different colors, even.” He suggested they go to the mall some day this week to shop for clothes, because he needed some new things too.
They went into a café on Sheinkin that was too busy. Dana chose it. She said she didn’t mind the crowds and preferred somewhere full to somewhere empty; an empty place was like sitting at home, only with a menu and waiters. He thought she was right, but then he was sorry that they’d even left home and that he hadn’t shaved.
They got a little table near the restrooms. An irritable waitress handed them menus, smiled at Dana, and disappeared. It seemed to him as if the place was full of people he knew and that everyone was looking at him. At the table by the window he recognized the journalist from Ha’aretz who had interviewed him a few years ago, when his first book came out, but the reporter didn’t see him. He was practically a kid back then, nervous and perspiring through the interview, and he had chain-smoked and not stopped complimenting Yonatan on his book. Now he was eating lunch with a beautiful woman, a three- or four-year-old girl, and a baby in a plastic high chair pushed up against the table. The journalist was talking loudly on his cell phone, and with the other hand he was shoving little pieces of focaccia into the baby’s mouth.
Yonatan thought back to the days when he used to sit with Ilana in cafés, when Dana was a baby, each of them busy reading a different section of the newspaper and both busy with Dana, who had loved bustling cafés since the day she was born. He remembered the mornings when Ilana went to her job at the university while he was working on his second book. He would take Dana out in her stroller and wander around Sheinkin with her, sometimes going into a café or sitting outside if the weather was nice, reading the paper and smoking, stirring his coffee, feeding her little pieces of croissant or toast or a teaspoonful of froth. He would look at her as she watched the world from her stroller, and the world would watch her back, leaning over her, smiling, responding to her gurgles with a gurgle. How calm he had been as they sat in cafés, this one too, although they had seemed friendlier back then, and he had enjoyed the attention he received via his daughter as she sat in a crumb-filled stroller, waving her little fists.
Now she perused the menu, concentrating, thinking out loud, mumbling different possibilities to herself—she did feel like meat, she didn’t feel like meat, maybe she’d have pasta, perhaps she wouldn’t. “What are you getting, Dad?” She roused him from his nostalgic daydream. He took a menu and started murmuring to himself too, and the waitress came over and asked if they wanted to hear about the specials. They both nodded, and she recited the names of different dishes and pronounced them all incorrectly, and he said they needed another minute. She said, “Take your time,” with a look that begged them to hurry. Yonatan knew there was no need to agonize; he should take a gamble. But he had lost his appetite and felt his stubble growing quickly and turning into an ugly beard that drew everyone’s attention. He told Dana he thought he’d go for the fettuccine Alfredo, but he pronounced it the way the waitress had: pettuccine. Dana smiled and said, “Then I’ll get the veal masala!” She burst out laughing at her deliberate mispronunciation. Yonatan said, “Nice! Two points!” and was proud of her. He remembered that when she was little and had just started learning to read and write, he used to play a simplified alphabet game with her, which involved coming up with names of food beginning with each letter. Every time they got to C, Dana would say, “C for cesame,” and he would say, “That’s with an S. How about carrot?” And when his turn came he would say things like coq au vin or crème caramel, just to make her laugh.
The waitress came back and took their orders. Within the surrounding chaos, he heard organ music playing over the speakers and was insulted for Bach to be heard that way, in the tumult of children shouting, the noisy espresso machine, and fragments of cell-phone conversations, and with smells of deep-frying, too much rosemary, and fashionable androgynous perfumes. He remembered the organ music he used to listen to sometimes at the YMCA in Jerusalem. He had discovered it by chance, a little after his bar mitzvah, when he was walking home from the center of town. He liked to find new routes, little streets he didn’t know, shortcuts and alleys between buildings, and he always found them, excited each time and pleased with himself and in love with his city, which offered endless opportunities for getting lost as well as a comforting familiarity. Strangely, getting lost gave him a sense of power, because the city suddenly seemed as if it belonged to him and played games with him, long before it had lost its sense of humor.
One Sunday, coming back from sports practice, he made his way down through the old Mamilla neighborhood and started going up King David Street. He knew the YMCA building from when his father used to take him on Saturdays to eat ice cream at the snack bar. It was locally made ice cream and tasted different from the other kinds he knew, and they both liked it—he because it always had little slivers of ice in it, and a yellowish color, and his father because he derived satisfaction from sitting in a busy snack bar on the Sabbath, licking ice cream made by Christians.
That afternoon he decided to go into the YMCA through the rear entrance, so he could walk down the hallway with the high arched ceiling that led from the concert hall, whose acoustics everyone always praised, to the large square in front of the building. As he passed the concert hall’s heavy wooden doors, he heard sounds that reminded him of the music that accompanied the old horror movies he watched with his mother at the Smadar cinema, in black and white, movies that never really scared him. But as he stood outside the doors and listened, he began to feel true fear: not the fear caused by vampires or lonely distorted creatures who lived in church basements and bell towers but fear of an emotion that paralyzed his body and fueled his mind, a deep and metallic fear, like the sound produced by the organ.
He stood there for a long time, holding his breath, until he dared open the doors a crack and peek inside, afraid they would creak, but they opened silently. The sun was shining in through the tall windows, illuminating the front of the hall with what struck him at the time as the light of a foreign religion. Yonatan could see the back of an older man, bent over, his hands spread to the sides and his feet hitting the pedals as if he were riding a celestial bicycle. Without the dimming effect of the wooden doors, the notes sounded even more dangerous and inviting, and Yonatan found himself inside the hall, leaving the banality of Sunday afternoon behind. Entirely captivated, he leaned against the doors and followed the man’s movements. From behind, he reminded Yonatan a little of his father, bent over his books at his desk across from the window that looked out onto the garden where his mother always puttered around—an amateur gardener dressed in work clothes and rubber boots. His mother had once offered him his father’s antique desk, but he had refused, convinced he would not be able to write at it.
His father taught medieval history at the university, but when Yonatan was a boy he retired and delved into research. He was a poor teacher and his students never liked him. When he lectured, they thought he was talking to himself, and when they came to consult with him, he would insist on lecturing them eagerly. Every so often the students would be courageous enough to visit their professor at his home. They would give a short buzz on the bell, smile at his mother, who welcomed them quietly and led them like a receptionist into the garden, where the consultations were held during summer, or to the study in winter, and offer them coffee or tea with homemade cake.
His mother was an anthropologist. She met his father a few months before she was to begin her PhD, having returned, bronzed and enthused, from a research trip in Africa. She got a grant and was about to go and study in London, but his father was offered a position at Hebrew University. In love but reluctant to give up her trip, his mother, who was thirty-three at the time, suggested to his father, who was five years younger, that they postpone their marriage a year or two and, in the meantime, meet every few m
onths. She promised to come to Israel for the summers. “We’ll miss each other,” she said, as they sat together in her rented room in Rehavia. “It will be good for us,” she said, in a voice that tried to sound clinging but did not succeed because she was too independent and strong and different from the handful of women his father had loved before he met her. “We’ll love each other even more,” she promised, in a tone that faked neediness, and sat on his father’s lap. He was not a handsome man, but something in his eyes, the same something Yonatan had inherited, won women over in an instant, particularly women who had been on their own for too long and who saw in the eyes both a challenge and a type of salvation. Only when Nathaniel Luria gave her an ultimatum did Rachel Levin realize that her neediness was not fake but real.
“I’m sorry,” he announced in his distant tone, “but two years is too long. Even a year is too long.” He held her hand, which was stroking his chest. “And to tell you the truth, Rachel, I don’t know what you’re waiting for. I want to marry you now, but if you have time to spare, you’d better find someone who does too; I’m sure it won’t be difficult for you.”
She was hurt that he threw her age at her but recognized what she had forgotten during her year of studies, delegations, travels, and sleeping in tents: She was old, almost too old. She got off his lap and sat on the floor.
“You can get your doctorate here,” he said, trying to appease her. “There’s nothing preventing you from getting your doctorate here.” Then he got up, made a pile of the books he had left at her place over the months, loaded them in his arms, and said, “I’d like you to think about it.” He stopped by the door to kiss her cheek coldly. He ignored her lips as they tried to divert his from their calculated course, and when she said she would give it some thought, he said, “I would really like you to.” Three months later they were married in the courtyard of the King David Hotel.
She started her PhD studies at Hebrew University and tried, unsuccessfully, to get pregnant. The first doctor she saw advised her to give up her studies. “Emotional stress has a negative affect on fertility,” he said, and sent her on her way. Another doctor conjectured that it might be caused by the malaria she had suffered years ago, but a third doctor said, “Nonsense. It’s not stress and it’s not malaria. You’re just too old.” In the end, after having abandoned her studies because they no longer interested her, and having begun to accept the fact that she would never be a mother, and after they had signed up for adoption, she got pregnant and gave birth to Yonatan. There were labor complications that almost cost her her life, and she had to have a hysterectomy.
Yonatan listened to the organ playing. Shivers ran up and down his body, but not just his body; he felt as if his entire being were shivering. It was pleasant but also something of a commitment, because he knew, after he tiptoed out and closed the wooden doors behind him and went on walking down the hallway as if nothing had happened and out into the sunlight flooding the square, that he would be a different person. He would be someone who had been through something, who would spend his whole life searching for ways to feel that shiver over and over again, because the organ had heralded a sense of great gravity in his life, as if its sounds announced a struggle against death as well as the very touch of death itself.
( 7 )
Max Klein had a guest. Emmanuel Herman was an elderly construction engineer who had been widowed at the age of seventy. He was as happy as a child and full of plans for the future, despite the recent amputation of his left leg at the knee because of diabetes complications. He visited Shira’s father sometimes, without calling ahead, and spent an hour or two on the couch in the living room, sipping instant coffee and nibbling sesame cookies, chatting happily and overriding the silence and the frightened glances her father stole at his stump.
He was her father’s last remaining friend, and like a mother worrying over her unpopular son, grateful for any boy or girl who came to visit, Shira was glad whenever her father told her, grumblingly, that Emmanuel had stopped by, or when she found him there on Saturday afternoons—his favorite visiting time—sitting in the living room, cheerful and flushed and covered with crumbs.
Every time he left, moving slowly to the door on his crutches, they would both watch him from the balcony as he got into the old Volvo he had owned even before he became handicapped. Then her father would go inside and sit down grumpily in his armchair and turn on the TV or the radio. She would take the coffee cups into the kitchen and rinse them, sit across from him in the other armchair, which was still warm from Emmanuel’s visit, and ask why he didn’t invite Emmanuel over more often. Her father would say he didn’t invite him at all, he came without calling, just like that, in the middle of the day, at a time when people wanted to rest—especially on Saturday. He claimed it was annoying and added that he might say something about it one of these days. Shira asked why, but her father continued the private conversation he had been having with the world for many years and said that if he could tell Emmanuel not to come anymore he would gladly do so, but cultured people didn’t do such things. Shira, who always felt insulted on Emmanuel’s behalf and angry at her father for letting himself be picky when he was so lonely, asked, “But why do you hate him so much?” With no fear in his voice, simply stating a dry fact, her father said, “Just because. He’s the angel of death.”
For years, she had mocked him but lately she had come to understand him better. Galia, an old high school friend whom she hadn’t seen for eighteen years, had called her out of the blue one day. Shira remembered her as a very beautiful confused girl who wanted to be an actress. In high school Galia had taught her how to smoke weed. They would slip out during recess to the park across the street, where, on a bench hidden among overgrown shrubbery, Galia would reach into her bra for a little fabric purse with cigarette papers and marijuana leaves and would roll a joint for them, wetting it with her lips in a movement that was both skilled and panicked.
They talked mostly about sex. Galia described her sexual encounters with young actors and students at the drama school. Shira talked about the flings she longed for as if they had already happened. “You’ll be a great writer,” Galia would say to her, leaning back on the bench, turning her head up to the sun and closing her eyes. “I can tell just by your descriptions.” Shira would look at her and know even then that Galia would never be an actress; she would fail before she even tried.
When she was seventeen, in the winter of the eleventh grade, Shira lost her virginity to a boy her age whom she met in a creative writing workshop. When she told Galia about it the next day, as they sat on their folded coats on the bench, still wet from the night rainfall, Galia told her it was a pity she had wasted her first time on someone so young and inexperienced. Shira found herself defending Ariel, even though she agreed with Galia and envied her because her first time had been in the ninth grade, with a twenty-five-year-old actor who had a small part in a movie. By the time she reached the eleventh grade, Galia had slept with twenty-two men, she claimed, and she gave each of them a cruel nickname afterward, like Tiny, The Moaner, Black and Decker, Red Chest, and Honeysuckle.
She was very thin and seemed to shed a few pounds every time she went from one man to the next, from nickname to nickname. She was pale, with sunken cheekbones and greasy strands of black hair that dropped over her beautiful eyes. Her advice to Shira about sex was, “Men like you to tell them when you’re coming, it excites them.” When Shira asked how she was supposed to tell them, Galia said, “Just say you’re coming.”
“Just say ‘I’m coming’? Doesn’t that sound kind of funny?”
“No,” Galia said with extreme gravity. “It’s not funny at all. It really turns them on.”
When Shira asked how you could tell if sex was good, Galia said that good sex should always feel like the last time you’d ever have sex in your life.
Shira and Ariel used to make out in his bedroom. He lived alone with his mother, who owned a little café on Ibn Gvirol and was out at nigh
ts. They would lie on his firm youth bed, under a comforter that smelled of teenage sweat and weighed on their hasty hand movements. When he came on her inner thigh before being able to penetrate her, she was surprised by the sticky warmth of the semen, which burned her throbbing skin slightly as he lay over her like a corpse, his face in her neck, wetting her cheek with tears.
When she asked why he was crying, he shook his head and said nothing, but after a few moments he murmured, “Because I wasn’t able to pleasure you; because you didn’t even come; because I’m lousy.” At that moment she understood that true maturation did not occur the first time you had sex, as she had always thought, but the first time your body was flooded, soiled like her inner thigh, with compassion and with the knowledge—still distant then, merely fluttering like a moth around a lamp in the room—that within the tenderness she summoned up to console this boy who had failed between her legs, a tiny computer had just been switched on.
She stroked his hair and his forehead and wiped the tears from his cheek, then put her hand on his back, beneath the thick sweater he hadn’t had time to take off—they had both only taken off their pants and underwear—and ran her fingers up and down his spine, feeling his breath relaxing and his sniffles subsiding. His heart kept beating against her, and beneath him her hips throbbed like a metronome that keeps ticking even after the music has stopped.