Accidents: A Novel

by Yael Hedaya

  One morning after Dana left for school and they were sitting in the kitchen, he asked again why she didn’t bring her things to the apartment. “You’re right,” she said. “I’m just lazy.” She hoped he would take advantage of her lie—she could tell by his amused expression that he was on to her—to tell her finally that maybe she should move in with them, it was a pity to waste money on rent when she spent most of her time here anyway, he was glad she was here and it seemed natural to him, even though it had only been five months since they met—five months that had made him forget his previous life, a life he didn’t wish to remember.

  He smiled and said, “You are lazy.” She said she’d pack up a few things that morning, and he asked if she needed help and she said she didn’t, it was just a few bags.

  “What are you going to do this morning, write?” she asked. He said he wouldn’t, that he would go and price some air-conditioning units, and maybe even order one if he found something cheap. She said it was about time, and he said summer was almost over. “You can use it next summer then,” she said.

  He repeated her words, humming. “Isn’t there a song that goes like that? Something about ‘next summer’?”

  She said she thought the lyrics were “this summer.”

  “Really?”

  “‘This summer you’ll wear white,’” she said.

  “Oh, yes. I hate that song.”

  She said she did too, but still found herself humming it as she crossed Meir Park, after they had parted with a kiss on the corner of Allenby and he had wished her luck with the packing, and she with the air conditioner.

  She hadn’t written for five months either, although, unlike Yonatan, who claimed he must not have anything to say now that he was happy, she felt she did have something to say. But she held back, not even turning on her computer, out of some strange sense of loyalty, afraid that what she had to say would threaten his silence. But that morning, after she stopped at the corner shop for some cardboard boxes, she sat down at the computer and opened the abandoned file that contained her new novel. She read through all twenty pages of it—pages that represented her life until five months ago—and found she did not despise it. It wasn’t bad at all, in fact, and it depicted, with chillingly prophetic precision, her relationship with Yonatan, minus Dana. She kept on writing for three or four hours, and when she was done she saved the new pages, unsure whether this sudden inspiration was the result of her happiness or if she was motivated by her suspicion that the past few months, which she had just described, were a gift mistakenly given to her.

  When she went back to the apartment that afternoon, carrying two boxes and giving Yonatan the car keys so he could go down and bring up the other two, she felt guilty, as if she had spent the morning betraying him. She asked what he had done all day, how things went with the air conditioner, and he said it hadn’t worked out, they were too expensive, and tomorrow he’d drive out to a place he’d heard about in Rishon Lezion, where they had cheaper units. “Want to come?” he asked.

  “Tomorrow morning?” He nodded and she didn’t know what to say, because she wanted to keep writing. “We’ll see. I have a translation job to do.”

  He asked what she had done all morning, and she said not much; it took her a long time to pack—another lie, because she had filled up the four boxes in minutes, having packed them in her mind thousands of times.

  “Did you talk to your dad today?” he asked, because ever since he had been discharged without diagnosis yet again, she called him every morning, sometimes twice a day. She said she had. “How is he doing?”

  “Same as usual.” She was disturbed by her lies and wanted to confess that in fact she had spent the morning writing. But she knew that if she told him, she would do so with such matter-of-factness, in a way that would so belittle its importance, that the nonchalance itself would be a huge lie. “He’s starting to get used to the idea of having some help at home,” she said.

  “Really?” Yonatan took some eggs out of the fridge. “Do you want an omelet?”

  She nodded. “He hasn’t exactly agreed yet, but when I talked to him yesterday, all of a sudden, without my even bringing it up, he asked how one goes about getting a Filipino, and I told him to leave it to me.”

  “And that’s it?”

  She nodded again and said it was a big step, because up until a month ago he wasn’t prepared to hear about having help.

  “That’s true. I wonder what happened.”

  He asked how many eggs she wanted, and she said one. He called out to Dana, who was in her room—she had been shutting herself up in there for weeks now—and asked if she wanted an egg, and Dana said she wasn’t hungry. He cracked the eggs into the frying pan and said lately she wasn’t eating and he was worried she’d become anorexic like half the girls in her class; it was exactly the right age.

  Shira said she wouldn’t.

  “How do you know?” he asked.

  “Because she’s kind of like me, the way I was at her age.”

  “So what? What does that have to do with anything?”

  “She’ll find more sophisticated ways to torment herself.”

  “Such as?”

  She sensed the confession bubbling up inside her, and said, “Oh, she might decide to become a writer.”

  Yonatan smiled and turned the gas off and slid her half of the omelet onto her plate.

  “I’ll slice some tomato,” she said, and got up to get one out of the fridge. Standing by the counter, she said, “Actually, I did some writing today.”

  “You did?” He cut a few slices of bread from yesterday’s loaf.

  “Yes. I just sat down and wrote all of a sudden, for about two hours straight. I don’t even know where it came from.”

  “Great.”

  At night, before they fell asleep, without knowing whether it was to ingratiate herself or calm her fears, she told him about her bread shop complex, how for five months she hadn’t been able to go in there because that was where they had met. “Remember?” she asked, and he nodded as he lay in bed reading the paper, without looking at her. “I know it’s idiotic, but that moment, when we met, even before we really met, when you were horrible to me, remember?” He nodded again. “Well, for some reason that moment has taken on mythic proportions, and I’m afraid that if I go there now something will go wrong and we’ll break up.” She looked at him, but he seemed unmoved by the confession. “I feel guilty because I know my dad loves their onion bread, and I go by there at least once a day. But I can’t go in.”

  “I’ll buy it for you then,” he said, still not taking his eyes off the paper.

  “You don’t understand,” she said, and he said he did. “What do you understand?” she asked, and held back an urge to touch him, to strip off the new underwear she and Dana had bought him when they’d gone shopping together. She wanted to put an end to this silly disclosure, which instead of relief had brought her to a dead end. “Come on, what do you understand?” She snatched his newspaper away and threw it to the floor.

  He turned around on his side and pulled the sheet up to his neck and kissed her shoulder and closed his eyes. “That you’re silly. That’s what I understand.”

  ( 8 )

  In the mornings, after she went back to her apartment to write, he would go downstairs and wander the streets like someone who has been abandoned and is looking for amusement. Later, and the closer winter got—and although you couldn’t feel it yet, you could already hope for it—it became something he enjoyed; he took comfort from his regular route, which was his and his only, almost intimate, like a new book, the one he would never write. For the first time in his life he did not feel paralyzed but liberated, and hoped he could learn to enjoy the freedom he gained by not wanting to write.

  His daily walks took him first to the square, then down the steps by the old City Hall, and from there to Bograshov, whose usual traffic and ugliness always surprised him after the beauty of the old buildings on Bialik, all of which were
being renovated and preserved, one by one, except his own, which apparently had no historic value. From Bograshov he would go up to King George, where he would decide whether to turn left and keep going to Masaryk Square and then back, across the street and up Ben Zion Boulevard to meet Rothschild Boulevard, where he would continue to pepper his excursion with impressive architecture, or turn right toward Allenby and the market. The Allenby option always made him feel cowardly, as if he were heading home when his walk had barely begun, and yet he almost always chose it.

  Near the corner of Borochov, he would slow down or come to a stop and think about her. Even though it had only been an hour since they’d parted, he thought of her as if she were someone who had left his life long ago, although he knew he would see her again in a few hours, when she came back from her morning of writing and unlocked the door with the key he had copied for her, and which she had attached to her key chain, a big silver lucky charm, a hamsa. When he thought about the hamsa he was flooded with love for her and her superstitions, her annoying and touching fears, as if they were physical defects: moles or scars that he sometimes wished weren’t there and other times wanted to touch, to hold and protect from himself, from his critical gaze. When he left Borochov behind, he felt free again, as if that corner were only a small obstacle on his course, something that needed to be bypassed, like the large rocks the city had placed on the sidewalks to stop drivers from parking on them, and which pedestrians always walked into.

  When she had a bad day—she gladly shared the bad days and spared him the good ones, though if the situation were reversed he would do exactly the same—he consoled her by saying that at least she was writing. Anticipating her reaction, he would hurriedly add that he wasn’t saying this because he felt sorry for himself, quite the opposite: He was fine with not writing, he had never felt so free and light, as if years of dieting were finally showing results. When she looked at him skeptically he would say he was so fine with the situation that he wasn’t sure whether he wanted it to be temporary or permanent. When she dared, once in a while, to include him in a good day, she invited him to join her in the wonderful dreaminess—“wakeful dreaminess,” she called it, and he agreed—that takes over after a successful day of writing. He felt no frustration from watching the dreaminess from the sidelines—that reward he knew so well from his own writing days—but was only happy for her. His happiness surprised him; he never imagined he would feel so supportive toward someone who should have been threatening, which suggested a clear line where his career ended and hers began.

  Every so often, like a man pausing to tie his shoelaces, he would stop to ask himself why he loved her. He would stand outside a store selling hardware, bathroom fittings, or cheap shoes, and wonder, Why her? How could he have found room in his life for her so easily, even though it had seemed too crowded to contain a single other item like an air conditioner? Then he would keep walking, slightly confused or sometimes the opposite, determined to continue on his route without further disturbance, to think only of what he needed to think about: what they would have for dinner that night, or what would happen with his daughter, whom he hadn’t been able to transfer to a different school after all, and who had been leaving the house depressed and defeated every morning for two months now, so different from the girl she had been last year, from the girl for whom he used to have answers.

  Once she had asked him what happened to people when they died. She was four and they were spending the afternoon together, waiting for Ilana to get back from a daylong symposium in the English literature department. She sat on the rug in the living room and chattered with her dolls, held their heads near one another, leaned over, and whispered secrets in their ears. He played her some classical music, one of his favorite pieces, which he now could not remember—perhaps it was the Schubert quartet he listened to so often in those days. But he remembered how he had watched her from the couch as he read the paper and had tried to hear the music through her ears. As she knelt, she seemed focused on her low, crowded world on the rug, the world where she made the rules, and she hummed something that sounded like a song from one of her videotapes. Then suddenly she raised her head and asked him what happened to people when they die. He remembered what his mother had told him when he had asked the same question as a boy: “Nothing,” she had said dismissively. But he hadn’t believed her; nothing seemed impossible.

  “What happens when people die?” He repeated his daughter’s question, looking at her inquisitive eyes.

  She nodded.

  “You mean, what happens to them? What do they do?”

  She nodded again.

  “Lots of things.”

  “What things?” she asked.

  “All kinds.”

  “Yes, but what?”

  “Everything! All the things they did when they were alive, except they do them differently.”

  “Different how?”

  “Quietly. For example, they don’t speak.”

  “Why? Aren’t they allowed?”

  “They are allowed, but they don’t feel like it,” he said.

  “Do they think?”

  “Of course.”

  “And do they sleep?”

  “All the time.”

  “All the time?”

  “Well, not all the time. Sometimes they’re awake.”

  “And what do they do when they’re awake?”

  “Whatever they did when they were alive.”

  “Do they eat?”

  “A little. They don’t need much.”

  “Do they play?”

  “Yes. They love playing,” he replied.

  “Do they have toys?”

  “Yes, I suppose they do.”

  “Dolls?”

  “Could be.”

  “Do they watch TV?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “And do they listen to music?”

  “Yes, all the time.”

  “Like the kind we listen to?”

  “This kind?” He pointed at the stereo system, unsure which answer she would prefer, afraid that perhaps his mother’s reply was wiser after all, more reassuring.

  She nodded eagerly again.

  “That kind too,” he said. “They have lots of CDs. They can pick whatever they like.”

  “So they aren’t bored?” she inquired, clearly troubled, as she walked a naked Barbie whose wardrobe was lost toward another, larger doll, which she held with her other hand.

  “No, of course not.”

  “So they have fun?”

  “Yes. I think so.”

  She bashed the two dolls together, let out a whistle, and then said, “Boom!” She looked at him, smiling, and waved the Barbie in the air. “Look! I killed one! Now she’ll have fun.”

  * * *

  For her eleventh birthday, which they celebrated at a Japanese restaurant with Rona and Tamar, Dana had asked for her own television set. “It can even be a used one,” she said. She had already found out how much it would cost to get a second cable connection, and she would pay for it herself, from pocket money she had saved up.

  “She wants privacy,” Shira said. “I can understand that.”

  Even though he also understood her, and even though he bought a small TV set, he felt as if the two of them were abandoning him, that the fantasy he had recently started nurturing—that they would soon become a family—was being ridiculed by his adolescent daughter and the woman he loved.

  It occurred to him that he wasn’t truly happy for Shira. Not because he was afraid to see her succeed while he was completely forgotten and his books disappeared from the shelves, but because he was used to being the axis around which the household turned: the creaky, moody axis, the one you couldn’t make noise because of. Now Shira had usurped this indulged spot. She was the one whose face was scrutinized curiously after a workday, as they tried to guess what she had written. Then, perversely, he realized that unexpectedly, in a way that defied all logic, he actually was happy.


  Sometimes he missed Ilana. She was his first love, except that now he began to suspect that perhaps Shira was his first true love and he had loved Ilana but in a quiet, comfortable, arrogant way, because he always felt stronger and was never afraid to lose her. But he had lost her. That love now seemed like child’s play compared to what he faced now, every morning at the end of his route, when he went upstairs to his crowded, empty apartment and cooked complicated dinners that his daughter disdained, preferring to eat a bowl of cornflakes or half a pita in her room—meals that his beloved happily devoured after her hard day of work. Or he would tidy the house or masturbate, as if all the years during which he hadn’t dared touch himself had now erupted like a disease, bursting out at night or early in the morning on Shira’s various body parts: her stomach or her breasts or her thighs or the small of her back—he absolutely refused to come inside her—or the palm of his hand. This is my new career, he told himself, amused, as he tossed the evidence of his activities into the laundry hamper—a soiled pillowcase, dish towels dirtied while he cooked. He would soon be forty-six and he was in love like a child, masturbating like a teenager, and cooking like crazy.

  But mainly, he was old, he told himself, as he went into a big record store and bought a Doors anthology. Shira and Dana both complained that they were sick of the one CD he played over and over again. The anthology was on sale because it must have been popular only among aging widowers. Every three months he went to the money changer and redeemed the check his father-in-law had sent, wondering if he would keep sending them if it weren’t for Dana and feeling he no longer deserved them, because not only had he found another woman, he had also stopped pretending to be writing. As he deposited the shekels into his account, he thought about how he had relieved himself of two jobs at once: widower and artist. The idea amused him, but he soon sank into depression, and then he would sit in a nearby café and watch the passersby on Allenby, feeling for his wallet every so often. He remembered the Saturday at the end of last winter when they had met at the pedestrian crossing, and how the three of them had sat here, and how childish Dana had been then when she sat between them and planned out the picture she would later draw for Shira. He wondered where that picture was now, if she had kept it or thrown it in the trash. He missed that tension between them, not only because it was gone, but because it had signified two possibilities: that something would happen between them and that it might not.