Accidents: A Novel

by Yael Hedaya

  “Of course you will,” he said.

  “But not like them.”

  “No, of course not, maybe not at first, but who knows? Maybe in a few years.”

  “No way,” she said, and asked which pianist he liked better.

  “Gould,” he replied, in a tone so decisive it sounded like a reprimand. “Can you hear how precise he is? Can you hear how clean? Listen to that cleanness! Nothing in the world is that clean!”

  She said he sounded like a laundry detergent commercial.

  “Then who do you like better?”

  “The other one,” she said.

  “Lipatti?”

  “Yes, him.”

  “Why?” he asked, disappointed but a little curious.

  “Because he makes more mistakes. I don’t like perfect things.”

  “No?” he said, trying to overcome the insult. “Then how come you like me?”

  “Who says I do?” she said with a poker face. Then she sat down to practice one of the little pieces she was playing, which now sounded silly next to the prelude and fugue they had just heard twice.

  She was the one who wanted, a few weeks after her mother’s death, to learn how to play. Irma Gutt said perhaps they should wait a year, but Dana insisted, so, once a week, on Sunday afternoons, he would drive her a few blocks to the teacher’s home, or walk with her and wait at a café on Bograshov until she was finished. When he listened to her practice or watched her skip down the steps from her teacher’s apartment, clutching her music case under her arm—an old leatherette case that used to belong to him—it never occurred to him that she was suffering.

  As he bit into his falafel, he told himself that when she came home from school today he would talk to her about it; if she didn’t want to keep going she didn’t have to. He polished off the falafel and ordered another half-portion and finished that one in a few purposeful bites, leaning against the falafel counter as drops of rain slid off his umbrella and wet his nose and hands.

  ( 12 )

  Shira spent Sunday in the ER with her father. When she sat down at the computer in the morning and tried to distract herself from the past two days with Yonatan, tried to redirect the frenzy in her heart to her writing, the phone rang. She let the machine answer and listened, hoping it was Yonatan or at least Rona—someone who would turn the fantasy, which this morning had shed its final remnants of tentativeness, into reality. If it was Rona, she decided, she would pick up. If it was Yonatan, she would resist. Then she heard the beep.

  An old man with a Hungarian accent introduced himself as the owner of the delicatessen where her father bought his weekly supply of plastic containers which she later threw out, full or half full, on the weekends, and she hurried to pick up the phone. Her father had passed out in the deli half an hour ago, the elderly man reported in an accusatory tone—no one likes a fragile old man passing out in his deli, even if it is a loyal customer, even if he himself sounds like a fragile old man—and for a moment she hated him for his lack of empathy, but then she thought perhaps this was his usual tone, an accusing tone, like the one her father had also adopted lately, reminiscent of crying.

  He said her father had come in that morning and stood in the line, which wasn’t long—two or three customers at most, he insisted, absolving himself of any responsibility—and when his turn came they greeted each other as they always did, and he could see that her father was swaying a little, “but that’s normal,” he said, and the word normal suddenly sounded irritating, as if the bleak swaying reality of her father, the one she had grown accustomed to, had now been replaced by something else, and from now on the old form would arouse not sadness or anxiety but nostalgia.

  “And then, down he went!” the man said. “Collapsed on my floor!” Again she thought she heard grumbling in his voice, as if her father’s fall had permanently stained his deli—after all, he could have fainted somewhere else, in the bank or the post office or on the street, somewhere that didn’t belong to anyone and was dirty anyway, or at home, quietly. But she knew he did pass out at home sometimes, and it was quite possible that he had collapsed outside too, dozens or even hundreds of times, but no one was there to see and he would wake up and find himself slumped on a park bench or sitting on the path leading to his building. It was a good thing he no longer walked around Allenby, because there he would have been mistaken for a drunk and ignored, and maybe, she thought, this was not really new, but an old, secret routine, from which she had been protected until this morning, until there was someone to report it to her.

  She asked where he was now, and the man said they had taken him to the hospital and that her father, who had woken up when they wheeled him into the ambulance, had asked that she be called and had given the number, so here he was calling—doing his duty, as they say—and she thanked him. “I hope he gets well soon,” he said in his accusatory tone, and she thanked him again, and when she put the phone down and went into her bedroom to get dressed, she heard the rain, which had been only a drizzle a few moments before, slamming down on the balcony floor, and for a moment she was flooded with the automatic joy that rain always brought her, but the joy turned to anger: This morning could have been perfect, with winter restored and her writing renewed and the possibility of Yonatan hovering over it all, if not for her father passing out in that grumbling Hungarian’s deli, reminding her of possibilities she knew only too well, of fear and illness and great responsibility.

  She was in such a hurry that she forgot to take her umbrella, and by the time she reached the car, which was parked on the next block, she was completely soaked. She could see herself sitting for hours in damp clothes drying on her body, sealing in the hospital smells of urine and disinfectants.

  In the ER, after she had peeked behind a few screens, looking apologetically at the families surrounding other patients, she found her father lying on a bed at the far end of the room near an exit. He was awake and seemed slightly bored. He appeared neither happy nor sad to see her. He looked as if they had long ago agreed to meet here.

  “I passed out,” he said, when she came up to him. “I passed out at the ready-made food.”

  She took his hand in hers and asked, “Did you not feel well?”

  “No, I felt well.”

  “Do you pass out a lot, Dad?” He sighed. “Do you, Dad? Tell me the truth. Does this happen often?”

  “It happens,” he said, and the dryness of his words was like the white crust on his lips.

  “Has a doctor seen you?”

  “Yes. He’ll come soon.”

  She turned around and saw the doctors rushing among the screens in a chaotic sort of way which, their sealed faces conveyed, involved a logic and order that would never be comprehensible to the patients or to their families, who looked at the doctors urgently, imploringly, and she knew that no doctor was coming soon, because soon in the ER was a concept that transcended time.

  Suddenly the doctors rushed to a bed near the front, and the woman sitting in the line for X-rays—which extended almost all the way to her father’s bed—said, “There was a bad accident. They just brought the casualties in. I heard there were some people killed too.”

  Shira wanted to take her father home, smuggle him out of here, because what good would the doctors be now? But as if reading her thoughts, or perhaps having seen her look worriedly at the distant doctors, her father said, “You have to be patient.” So she smiled and stroked his hand as if she had all the patience in the world.

  She watched people in the hospital using cell phones, despite the signs prohibiting their use. They talked loudly with their relatives—husbands with wives, wives with husbands, brothers and sisters with each other, parents with their children at home and vice versa—and it struck her that great clans were crowded at the other end of these phone lines, their sole duty to hear news and arrange and console; and the loneliness she always felt with her father, the claustrophobic bitterness that could be navigated or forgotten when they were in his home—because
despite the plastic containers of rotting food, she could pretend, as her father did, that this was a relatively healthy way to be—that loneliness now became intolerable.

  She wanted to cry but couldn’t imagine crying now. She stood over her father’s bed as he dozed peacefully, as if the very fact of her arrival had tranquilized him, and studied his body, beneath the hospital sheet, and his face. He did look a little like an alien, as Yonatan had described his own father—that head with the sunken cheeks and prominent eyes, so large in comparison to the withered body, and especially the ears, which if not for the soft tufts of hair sticking out of them would have looked like little satellite dishes—and you could really imagine that her father came from outer space, if not for his shoes, which peeked out at the bottom of the sheet. He wore his black shoes, old people’s moccasins, and gray stretchy socks pulled up to his ankles, which he always bought in packs of six and threw away when they wore out, but today he was wearing a pair that looked as old and tired as he did, with frayed elastic.

  Seeing the shoes and ankles peeking out beneath the sheet, Shira remembered the Saturdays when her parents used to take her to the beach. It was a short walk, but they always arrived exhausted, silently fuming at each other. Her father would tread through the sand, holding in one hand the big basket containing towels and the sheet they always took to the beach, and two thermoses, one for juice and the other for coffee, his knuckles whitening from the weight of the basket, and in the other hand carrying his brown rubber sandals. Her mother walked ahead of them in slender flip-flops that filled with sand and emptied out with each step she took, holding a plastic bag with sandwiches and fruit, already wrinkling in the heat, and sunblock and a book. She would examine the beach, sheltering her eyes with her free hand, seeking out the ideal spot to set up their tired camp.

  But they never found that spot, and every place they chose turned out to be problematic, whether because of proximity to or distance from the sea, or because of noisy paddleball players, or a smelly trash can overflowing, or the angle of the sun. But Shira, who was six or seven at the time, was determined to have fun. After they spread the sheet out on the sand and her mother and father put their sandals down as weights on the four corners, she stood with her back to her mother, who sat cross-legged on the sheet, so she could slather her with sunblock. Then she ran to the edge of the water and splashed around, under her parents’ watchful eyes but far away from them. She would come back every so often to eat or drink or put a handful of shells she had found on the sheet—“Look after them for me,” she would order, and her parents would nod, but when they came home the little treasures were always left behind.

  Unlike her father, her mother loved the sea. Sometimes she would get up, smear sunblock over her arms and legs, and walk to the water, and the two of them would swim out to the point where her mother could no longer reach the bottom. Her father never went in the water. “Jerusalemite,” her mother called him, even though he was born in Tel Aviv. He sat on the sheet with his legs outstretched, ankles crossed, leaning back on his arms, wearing white shorts and a button-down short-sleeved shirt, beneath which he always wore an undershirt. He never wore swim trunks, even though he had a pair in his closet: they were wide and made of wine-colored shiny nylon, and reminded Shira of a balloon. Her father seemed sadder than usual at the sea.

  Once, when she and her mother returned from the water, breathless and laughing with their hands full of broken shells, they discovered that a little dog had adopted her father. He had a wet black coat, spotted with grains of sand, droopy ears, and a very dry snout. He was sprawled out beside her father with his head resting on his lap and his tail slowly, hesitantly, beating the sheet, as if he knew his host disliked dogs and feared the moment when his error would be discovered and he would be banished. Her father sat stiffly with his arms behind him and looked back and forth from Shira and her mother as they dried themselves, looking questioningly at each other and to the dog, who shut his eyes tightly and pretended to be asleep. Shira’s heart filled with hope. She had always wanted a dog, but her father had refused. For years, she and her mother tried to convince him, making all sorts of promises, but in vain. One summer, when he went to a conference in Italy, her mother brought home a tiny puppy she had taken from a friend whose dog had had a litter, telling Shira that her father would just have to learn to accept a done deal. They spent a guilt-ridden week of happiness together, she and her mother and the puppy, but two days before her father’s return, her mother got scared and told Shira they had to take the dog back. It wasn’t fair to Dad, she said; it was a hasty act and she was very sorry and promised to make it up to her. She suggested they go to the pet shop and buy a rabbit, even two, but Shira quietly refused, without crying, and said she was afraid of rabbits.

  The dog napping in her father’s lap looked like a rabbit. Shira sat down carefully on the sheet and stroked the back of the dog’s neck. He couldn’t resist wagging his tail, with open joy this time, like someone who knows he has nothing to lose. Her mother also sat down and started rummaging through the plastic bag, and the smell of hard-boiled eggs and salami teased the tense quiet, and the dog’s dry snout shuddered. She dug through the bag very noisily but did not say a word, afraid, like Shira, that the moment she said something, the moment someone acknowledged the fact that a dog was sprawled between them with his head resting on hostile hips, her father would cast him out.

  “What do we have to eat today?” her father suddenly asked, and shook his thighs as if they were full of sand, and the dog perked up his head and sat up.

  “Salami and hard-boiled egg, and there’s also one with feta cheese for Shira.”

  “I’m not hungry,” Shira said angrily. The sandwiches had broken the spell, but she suddenly had an idea. “Let’s give the dog something. Maybe he’s hungry?”

  “Why not?” said her mother, and turned to her father—“Max, what do you say, do you think we should feed him?”—as if it were his dog.

  “No. Absolutely not. We’ll never get rid of him if we do.”

  Shira’s eyes filled with tears. Her father and mother ate heartily, but she refused her sandwich with a shrug. She swore to herself that she’d never eat again in her life; the food had ruined everything. She wouldn’t even have juice. She couldn’t understand how her parents could eat their sandwiches—from the corner of her eye she saw their profiles as they chewed and she despised them both—how could they have appetites after the chance to become a happy family, or at least a normal one, had been taken from them? The dog sat sniffing the air, his velvety ears perked up halfway, drooping with each sniff. He was a beautiful dog, even though he looked like a rabbit.

  “Dad,” Shira said, when her father had finished his second sandwich and was opening the thermos, “why can’t we take him?”

  “You know very well why,” he said, and poured coffee into the thermos’s plastic top, which was also a cup. “I don’t want a dog in the house. When you grow up and live on your own, you may have as many dogs as you like.”

  “Max,” her mother said, “he looks nice, actually. He looks trained.”

  “I’m asking you,” her father said. “Naomi, I’m asking you, please.” And her mother stuffed the used napkins into the plastic bag and took out a bunch of grapes, and with that the discussion was over.

  As if he had been waiting for the verdict, the dog got up, walked off the sheet, stretched his legs, turned his head back for a moment to see if someone might have a change of heart, and then shook himself off, shedding the remains of their petting, and ran across the sand until he disappeared.

  “He probably belongs to someone,” her father said, and took a sip of coffee, the smell of the plastic cup blending with the aroma.

  “He doesn’t have a collar,” her mother said.

  “He doesn’t belong to anyone,” Shira said. “He’s a street dog.”

  “An ocean dog,” her father joked, and she hated him. “He probably has diseases,” he added, as he shook th
e last drops of coffee out on the sand. “And ticks.”

  “Oh, Max, really,” her mother said, and opened her book and started reading.

  “Then why did you let him lie on you?” Shira asked, and the sob she had stifled cracked through her voice. “Why did you even touch him? Why did you get his hopes up?”

  “I’m not a bad person. He came over here and acted as if he’d known me forever, so I thought if he wanted to rest here a little, let him rest. I’m not a monster!”

  “You are!” she shouted, and ran to the water. She turned her head back and saw him sitting cross-legged, staring at the ocean. He had an old-fashioned white bucket hat on his head, because the sun was high, and her mother sat with her back to him, lost in her book. From that distance he still looked like a monster, but a pitiful monster, and when she came back from the water and sat down beside him, he draped a towel over her shoulders; shivering slightly, she took the sandwich he handed her.

  Now she watched him sleep and her eyes filled with tears. She thought they were the same tears that had streamed from her eyes that Saturday at the beach, the Saturday with the dog, which was how she had thought of it for years. These same tears had dropped from her cheeks into the water as she sat in the wet sand, drawing circles of hatred and self-pity and guilt, but the tears too seemed to have grown old and turned heavy and slow, barely able to squeeze out of her eyes. Now when she watched him sleeping, his head drooping to one side and his mouth open, his shoes pointing in different directions, he looked like a pitiful monster again. She tried to remember when exactly she had become the stronger one, when the tables had turned, and knew it wasn’t any one moment but a series of moments that had accumulated and would go on piling up until the day he died. Then the wheel might turn again, when her longing and guilt would make him stronger than her, and she thought how odd it was, how unfair that dying restored a parent’s authority and infallibility.