Accidents: A Novel

by Yael Hedaya

  She got up and asked if he wanted some more coffee, and he shook his head. “Something cold, then, a beer?” He nodded as if he hadn’t heard but agreed, and she went to the kitchen, took two bottles out of the fridge, and opened them. She went back to the study and asked, “Do you drink it in a glass?” He shook his head again, and she stood behind him and put a bottle down by the keyboard, on his right side. He murmured, “Thanks,” and took a short sip.

  She looked at the back of his neck. All men, she thought, have something childish about their napes, the spot where the hairline meets the back of their ears, something forlorn and defenseless.

  He took the last diskette out of the drive and stretched. “That’s it, we’re done. Do you have Solitaire?”

  She said she did.

  “I feel like playing a round.” He turned his head around and smiled at her. “Do you play?”

  “Sometimes. But I try not to, it’s addictive.”

  “I know, that’s why I uninstalled it.” He was already displaying the cards on the screen. “Do you mind if I play?”

  “No. No problem.” Within seconds he became engrossed in the game, his hand covering the mouse, his eyes penetrating the screen.

  “If you’re sick of this, just let me know,” he said, when the computer beat him for the third time straight, but she said it was all right, she would wash dishes in the meantime and he should make himself at home.

  “Play as much as you want,” she said and, again resisting the temptation to touch his nape, went into the kitchen.

  She stood slowly washing the dishes, lathering each one with exaggerated thoroughness, trying to kill time, to calm herself: He feels comfortable here. Through the window, over the rooftop of the next building, she saw the sky growing darker. She glanced at the clock and realized it was already after five, it was evening already, and she hadn’t had anything to eat all day except a few biscuits at her father’s. She thought about the invitation for leftovers at Rona’s and was filled with optimism, because she now had plans for the evening, and they included the two of them.

  She went back and stood behind him again, drinking out of her bottle and staring at the soft spot behind his ear, as if another man could be found there, not this man who seemed as if he would never finish playing. Then he asked what time it was and she said, “Five-twenty.”

  “Wow,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “No reason. It’s kind of late.” She was worried that he would get up and leave and forget that Rona had invited them over. “I’m finishing this game and that’s it, I swear.”

  She stared quietly over his shoulder at the screen and noticed that he’d changed the pattern on the back of the cards—instead of her diamonds there were now fish floating there—and she felt her heart contract again, felt the soft spot behind his ear grow and broaden and turn into Yonatan in his entirety, a Yonatan who awakened new longings in her: to sit with him on the balcony and drink more beer, together this time, slowly this time, not with these huge gulps that tried to silence the fearful mumblings of her ego as it darted, with her, back and forth from the kitchen to the balcony, noticing on the way that today too, like last night, she was dressed horribly, that her hair looked wild, as if it too were afraid; since she couldn’t change her clothes or wash her hair, she had slipped into the bathroom earlier and sprayed a little perfume on herself.

  Now she wanted not to be the person who wants so much and is afraid to end up with nothing. Now she wanted not to be afraid and not to ask and not even to achieve. Now she wanted to be quiet with him and to silence herself a little, not to do anything, to like him without falling in love with him first, because she had once known only passion or repulsion, not what lay between them.

  “I got a little carried away,” Yonatan said, and stood up suddenly. “My foot fell asleep.” He hopped on one leg. “Wow, it’s dark already.” He looked outside and gathered up the three diskettes. “Can I pay you for these?”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Well, I don’t know. I don’t want to feel like I’m taking advantage of you.” He gave a big yawn. “I came, I copied, I drank, I played.”

  “Big deal. At least I finally did the dishes.”

  “You should come over and play on my computer, maybe I’ll finally do the dishes too. Should we call Rona? Ask her what time she wants us?”

  He said us so naturally it seemed obvious to her that he wasn’t interested in her; the thought hadn’t even crossed his mind. If he had wanted her, he wouldn’t have dared tie them both together in the same sentence. “I think she said we should come whenever we want. It’s leftovers, nothing formal.”

  “It’s a little early to go now, though, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. We could have another beer in the meantime.”

  He agreed, and as she went to get them he said he would just call to check on Dana and say they’d be over soon. “What do you say, in an hour?”

  “Something like that!” she yelled from the kitchen.

  “What?” he shouted. “I can’t hear you.”

  “Tell her we’ll be there in an hour.”

  Feeling like a wife—and liking the feeling—she took two bottles of beer out of the fridge. She didn’t really want one. She was a little tipsy from the first beer, on an empty stomach, but was afraid that if she didn’t drink another, he wouldn’t either, and if he didn’t drink he might decide to leave and tell her they’d meet at Rona’s. So she stood by the counter, hesitating, her heart saying beer but her stomach begging for tea.

  She went into the living room and saw him standing by the bookshelf. For a moment she felt a chill and said, “I’m making some herbal tea, I don’t feel like beer.”

  Yonatan took his fingers off the book he was about to pull out and said, “Me too. Great idea.” When she asked what kind he wanted, he said, “Whatever you’re having.”

  They sat on the balcony that faced the backyard. He asked if she visited her father every Shabbat, and she said she did. “And you? How often do you go see your mother?”

  “Not as often as I should. But Dana is very attached to her, so we go once a month or so.”

  “Doesn’t she come to visit you?”

  “Hardly ever anymore. It’s hard for her, she’s almost eighty.” He paused for a while. “Wow! My mother will be eighty this year! I just realized it.”

  “When was she born? Which month?”

  “May.”

  “Same as my father. He’s a Taurus.” She suddenly didn’t mind sounding like someone who was interested in astrology, although it was obvious that Yonatan was not one of the people who, like her, turned to the horoscopes in the weekend paper before reading anything else.

  Yonatan sipped his tea. “It’s tasty. What is it?”

  “Raspberry and grapefruit. So your mother’s a Taurus?”

  “Definitely. And your father?”

  She said he was becoming less of one every day, and more of an “I don’t know what.”

  “A creature of some kind?”

  “Yes. A creature of some kind. Something from outer space.”

  “I know. My father also turned into a kind of extraterrestrial in his final days.” He corrected himself quickly and said, “Not that your father is in his final days or anything.”

  “He is.” She thought about how, even when she was a little girl, she had always thought he was going to die.

  She told him about her father, and as she talked she heard soft sounds in her voice that she had not known were there. She felt as if she were talking about someone else, not her father, or perhaps someone else was talking about him—someone who loved him more than she did—because the man being described to Yonatan, as he sat smoking on the balcony, listening to her thoughtfully, was someone with a personality and not just fragments of qualities. She told Yonatan about a different man, parts of whom she knew and parts of whom she was sorry she would never know, someone whose remnants were now fighting for recognition, even in retrospec
t, and who was shouting out, This is not how I want my daughter to see me: an old man dipping a biscuit in instant coffee. I’m someone else!

  As she talked, her voice hypnotized him and he thought about his father: first the cactus chin, then the rest of his face. He could hardly remember his body, because at the end he was always covered with a sheet or a blanket, and Yonatan had preferred to ignore the outline beneath because it hurt his eyes. He remembered blue eyes, which always looked so watery, one moment begging for something, then indifferent. And thin lips, that turned as white as his face at the end, completely merged with it, as if he no longer needed them once he stopped talking. He saw his father’s large nose, reddish and covered with purple blood vessels, the nose that right up to the end had looked independent and full of life. Yonatan smiled and Shira asked, “What?”

  “What?”

  “You were smiling.”

  “I was just remembering my dad.”

  “What did you remember?”

  “No, you go on.”

  “No, tell me.”

  “Someday I’ll tell you.” She was happy to hear him say someday, because that meant there would be another opportunity. Or maybe he was saying, This is not the last opportunity. Or, in fact, that this was not about opportunities at all; that’s not how it worked.

  She went on talking: about her father’s architecture office, about the trips down Allenby.

  “I hate Allenby,” Yonatan said.

  “I love it,” she said, and felt like a PR agent representing Max Klein, architect, the man who, according to her mother, was once a sought-after bachelor and not the old man dozing in his armchair with the transistor radio humming in his lap, the TV flickering in front of him, and every single light in the house turned on, as if his life depended on the electricity around him.

  She remembered the Shabbat when he had rescued her from the military youth camp they were supposed to do in high school. She was sixteen and didn’t want to go, but she gave in to pressure from her friends, who promised it would be nice and scolded her that it was important to do that kind of thing, to contribute. They were the same ones who were no longer her friends after that summer and were replaced by Galia, who never even considered going to the camp, which made everyone happy, particularly the teachers, who didn’t even ask to hear her excuse.

  When she got on the bus early in the morning, she realized she’d made a mistake and that she wouldn’t survive the week with her classmates. The drive out of town frightened her. The city always gave her protection from the frameworks she hated so much and allowed her a sense of freedom; mainly, it meant she could be alone. Tel Aviv, she told Yonatan, especially North Tel Aviv, was dotted with beloved stations along her escape route. The little grocery across the street from school, for example, where she would buy a sandwich with cheese and pickles during recess, and a pack of cigarettes that she hid deep in her backpack.

  “Time, Nelson, or Noblesse?”

  “Noblesse, how did you know?”

  “How many choices did young smokers have back then?”

  “I don’t really remember.” She smiled. “God, how I miss that sandwich! It was so simple.”

  “Simple and perfect.”

  “But you know what? I don’t like it anymore, that combination.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Sometimes I really feel like eating it, so I go and buy all the ingredients and put a lot of effort into making it, but as soon as I take the first bite I don’t want it anymore.”

  “I wonder what changed, our taste or the sandwich?”

  “The context.”

  He nodded in agreement and suddenly wanted to touch her, a little touch of identification, a caress of consolation for the loss of things that were perfectly simple, for the palate that never stops looking for them but will never find them again, because the search, by breaking the thing down into separate components and insisting on identifying each one precisely, ruins the perfect simplicity.

  She told him about the other stations near her school, little everyday places that protected her because they gave her the security of knowing there was another life, outside of school, outside of home, perhaps even outside of adolescence. There was a certain bookstore, for example, that no longer exists. “Do you remember it?” she asked, convinced he would.

  “No,” he said apologetically, “I’m from Jerusalem.”

  “That’s right,” she said and envied him again for being a Jerusalemite—now he seems foreign again, she thought.

  The camp, she told him, cut her off from her daily route, and even before they got onto the highway she started feeling the claustrophobia of a social unit and missed the freedom of being alone. She almost faked a last-minute illness, but the joy of her classmates, who for some incomprehensible reason treated their confinement to the bus as the ultimate freedom, paralyzed her. She promised herself she would try to have a good time, but after four hours of driving that were full of laughter and unruliness that infected even the driver, who started telling dirty jokes over the microphone, the effort became depressing in and of itself.

  “I can so relate to that,” he said, almost to himself, and he wanted to touch her again—a simple caress. But he knew there was no such thing. “So? What happened? I’m on the edge of my seat.” He sipped his tea.

  “I broke down. That’s what happened. I just collapsed.”

  The evening before leaving, she had fought with her father. At the time they were fighting constantly, but this row was so bad that in the morning, when she left early—it was still dark—she was happy about not seeing him for a whole week. He didn’t like the way she looked, she told Yonatan. He objected to her choice of clothes. “You look like a tramp,” he said, and called her a bag lady. He claimed she looked derelict, as if she didn’t have a home, as if she were an orphan. That evening, she had slammed back at him, “What do you mean, as if? I am an orphan.”

  Yonatan smiled. He said he was the exact opposite as a kid: a complete nerd, neatly combed, dressed like a refugee from Europe. “All I was missing was a beat-up leather suitcase,” he said. And what was strange, he admitted, was that he didn’t even have anyone to blame, because he chose his clothes and that style himself—professorial, he thought it then—in an attempt to be like his father, who did in fact look like an Oxford professor with his soft sweaters, some of which had elbow patches, and the pipe he smoked in his study or in the garden, scattering a scent of distant elegance into the air.

  “But I interrupted you,” Yonatan said, and she smiled as she looked at this man—who seemed so self-assured and unattainable in his jeans and gray sweatshirt and his green Chuck Taylors with loosely tied laces, sitting with his legs crossed, smoking—and tried to imagine him as a boy who didn’t know what a sexy man he would be; perhaps he still didn’t know.

  “What else did you fight about?” he asked, and she said they fought about everything. When she was fourteen, she had started trying to drag him out of his silence and his sadness, turning it into a duel, a kind of daily workout, whether over clothes or school or his demand that she come home early at night so he wouldn’t worry about her, or his stakeouts on the balcony. She said she was embarrassed to come home, that her friends made fun of him. “There’s your dad,” they would say, when they turned down her street after a party or a youth group meeting and caught him slipping into the apartment like a lizard as soon as he saw them. “He moves so fast!” they said. “Like the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. One minute he’s there, the next minute he’s gone.”

  The fights would begin as negotiations, but they quickly turned, she realized years later, into a kind of communication to which they both became addicted. They waited for it like a meal or a favorite TV show. “I would love to fight with him today,” she said. “Not that I enjoyed it then, I really didn’t; I hated it. You know? I hated him with a passion, like only a sixteen-year-old can hate someone, especially her father. It was a principle, you know what I mean?”

 
“Yes.” He knew that hatred well. To this day he was not completely weaned off it.

  “But there was something so alive in our yelling and screaming, something happy, even. It was like breathing for me—as long as it was there I knew he was okay, that he was healthy, that at least there was a little action at home. And I think…” She paused, and their eyes met in the dimness, softened by the yellow light of the lamp in the living room. “I think he liked those fights too. He enjoyed them.”

  Yonatan sat quietly while she smoked for a few moments, and in their quiet there was a certain foggy appeal. He wondered if she felt it too, or whether she was so involved in the story that she could have told it in the same way to anyone, with the same calm hypnotic strength. In the night air, in which the smoke from their cigarettes lingered until a breeze blew it away, on the balcony, where they sat very close, in the yellow light that suddenly looked like the light of a second chance—in this air, on this balcony, in this semidarkness, he felt he was falling in love.

  She had spent the first night at camp listening to her tent mates whispering and gossiping. They fell asleep long before she did. The next day she started planning her escape. It was obvious that she wouldn’t survive a whole week; it had only been twenty-four hours since leaving Tel Aviv, and she already felt as if she had been gone for a month. She felt even worse because it was Friday, and on Fridays she used to cut gym class and sit with the weekend papers in a café on Jabotinsky Street, watching people, feeling like her own person in a big city, not a high school student or somebody’s daughter. “It’s strange the way today I would actually love to feel like someone’s daughter.”

  “Maybe you need to have a child. Sometimes I feel like my daughter’s child.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. It’s a kind of second childhood. Except this time you have no one to hate.”

  She smiled and turned to him, wondering if the melancholic lines of his profile were true, particular to him, or whether anyone sitting in the dark on a balcony would look that way.

  “So what happened?” he asked, and she wondered whether she’d ever see this face hovering above her own, see his eyes shut, his lips open slightly to let out sighs of pleasure, murmurings of love.