Accidents: A Novel

by Yael Hedaya

  When he watched her sleeping, he asked himself if he were a miracle for her too, or perhaps more of a catastrophe. Or maybe—and this thought sent shivers down his spine—he was neither a miracle nor a catastrophe but rather something that she referred to, when she told him about past relationships of hers—particularly about someone called Idan, who must have been especially traumatic or beloved—as “an ongoing fling.” He tried to reassure himself with the thought that he had never been anyone’s fling, that they had all loved him in the end. But he also knew there was always a first time, and the fact that he was forty-six did not mean he could not be a fling. In fact, it might make it all the more likely, he thought, as he reached out to touch her, trying not to wake her but hoping she would wake, because watching her became unbearable at these moments. And once, when he put his fingers close to her lips to feel her breath and she woke up and blinked at him, he tried to give his voice a playful tone and said, “Hey, is this a fling?” She said, What? and closed her eyes. He asked what he was for her, if he was a fling, and she mumbled into the pillow, Of course not. Are you crazy? He said, “Are you sure?” She said, Sure, and fell asleep.

  Later, when they drank their coffee in the kitchen, she asked what the early morning interrogation had been about, and he said, “Nothing. Anxiety attack.”

  That winter, which turned to spring almost before it had even begun, they went to look at houses on moshavim almost every Saturday. They got to know the greater Tel Aviv area well, and even broadened their search to the coastal plain on some weekends. But from one Saturday to the next, they realized they were not going to move to the country. They kept going, though, and debating, with or without agents, and here and there they fell in love, separately or together, with some house that seemed full of potential, that had always been rented by the time they decided they wanted it, until Yonatan got a call, one day in May, from an old student friend who was now a professor of literature at Hebrew University, asking him to teach a course there the next year.

  “But what exactly would I teach?” Yonatan wanted to know.

  “Whatever you want,” his friend said.

  He said he’d think about it and wasn’t sure which made him happier, the job offer or the fact that he was still considered a big name. He liked the idea of being able to go up to Jerusalem once or twice a week, to make a gradual return, symbolic and noncommittal, to the city he so missed, the city that had a winter, where you could sometimes wear a coat without sweating. He could see himself roaming the drafty hallways of the Mount Scopus campus, the eternal wind whistling outside, rattling the windows. He would wear his favorite corduroy pants and soft sweaters, but not give up his Chuck Taylors—not conform completely to the respectable professor look. His students would be required to read his books and give them serious thought, and as he stood before them, he would summon up his cynicism and humor—all but forgotten since the anxieties of being in love had left him humorless—and would turn into an improved, more likable version of his father.

  When he told Shira about the offer, he could tell she was relieved and even happier than he was to be rid of his burden of continuous idleness, and for a moment he was hurt, but he was too happy to be truly insulted. “I’ll feel less guilty about writing,” she said, with candid simplicity.

  It surprised him, but he suddenly heard himself say, “I really do need something to do.” Yes, she said, and he thought she wanted to get up and hug him, but she restrained herself. “But I’ve never taught before,” he worried.

  “So what? You’ll be there as a famous author; you can do whatever you want.”

  And he said, “The pay’s probably lousy,” and she said it might not be, and wanted to add that he wouldn’t be doing it for the money, but said nothing.

  She could tell he was already there on Mount Scopus in his imagination, far away from her, and she said, “They’ll love you.” And he said, You think? “Especially the coeds,” she said, and he smiled and she hated herself for her patronizing tone, too encouraging, which she knew from conversations with her father. Then she heard herself say, “Who knows? Maybe we’ll end up moving to Jerusalem.”

  He had often fantasized about the house in the German Colony. The idea that he would one day inherit it both excited and scared him; his mother was already eighty, but he could not imagine the day when she would no longer be alive. When he inherited the house, he would become a wealthy man, a man with options. He would have to decide if he should sell it—with the money it would bring, plus the sale of the apartment on Bialik, they could buy an estate—or if perhaps—and this was such a revolutionary and improbable idea that he enjoyed amusing himself with it—he should renovate it and move back in, as a family. In this fantasy, he was already planning to send Dana to the Music Academy high school—maybe she’d want to take up playing again—and he would put Shira in his father’s study, build himself a flourishing academic career, and get a dog. He had always wanted to see the overly manicured garden, which, like the city itself, reminded him of a depressive beauty, turned into a different place—a place where it would be nice to raise a child one day. He didn’t really want a child; he preferred to keep fantasizing about what he would do with his life as a millionaire and only regretted that this required the death of his mother. One step at a time, he told himself, after he called his friend and said he would be happy to accept the offer. No need to hurry. First he would get reaccustomed to the city and make sure his love for it was real.

  ( 13 )

  On the day Shira was supposed to bring the young Filipino for an interview, her father was hospitalized. She had arranged to pick up Sam in the afternoon, from the southern part of town, and had already planned what to tell him on the way. She would explain how to make her father like him, and she imagined him answering, “Okay, no problem,” in his cheerful English. But that morning, when she called her father to make sure he remembered they were coming, there was no answer. She reasoned that he must have just gone down to the store or the deli, or perhaps he was in the bathroom shaving for the meeting, but she knew he wasn’t, and as she drove there, one clear picture flashed in front of her eyes: her father lying on the hallway floor. She couldn’t get rid of the image; it gained control the way her parents’ telephone number had taken over during her exam on the morning her mother died.

  She didn’t even bother to ring the doorbell. She opened the door with her key and found him lying on the floor in her old room, which she had worked all week to clear so it would be ready for Sam to live in. Her father had spent the week sitting on the youth bed, mumbling and gesturing as she transferred documents and maps into boxes. She taped the boxes up and wrote each one’s contents on it with a black marker, following his mute instructions.

  He looked unconscious. She shouted, “Dad! Dad!” but he didn’t move, and for a moment she wasn’t sure if he was breathing. He lay on his stomach with one knee hunched up to his chest and one arm bent backwards, as if he had jumped off a rooftop. He wore his slippers, and a robe was bunched up around his hips, exposing not the familiar pajamas but a pair of smart gray slacks she hadn’t seen him wear for years and an elegant thin leather belt around his waist, still unbuckled. She wanted to phone Yonatan, but he had gone to Jerusalem to meet his friend at the university and she didn’t know how to get hold of him. She called an ambulance, then sat on the floor next to her father and waited. She tried alternately shaking and cradling him, and eventually managed to pry out a sigh. The paramedics came quickly and she opened the door and led them to her father. They laid him on a stretcher and rolled him out and took him carefully down the stairs, and in the ambulance he suddenly woke up. They even had a conversation, but she could never remember what they talked about, as if the conversation was composed not of words but of the codes she would later use to file it away in her brain.

  He was suffering from kidney failure. No one at the hospital was talking about depression or exhaustion anymore, nor did she receive the kind of looks of accusation s
he usually got from social workers and orderlies, who generally made it clear that the main suspect in a parent’s dismal condition is always the child. Now they had a diagnosis: Her father was a genuine patient, as if within seconds he had been upgraded and no one would now try to send him home. He was admitted to one of the Internal Medicine wards, which was full of mostly elderly people. His two roommates looked as if they had spent most of their lives there. One sat on the edge of his bed, reading Psalms. There were framed photographs of babies on his bedside table. The other man was rinsing a glass out in the sink, lathering it with slow ceremonial motions, and then he went out to the hallway, came back with his glass half full of Turkish coffee, and stood drinking it by the window, which looked down on the hospital laundry.

  As she sat next to her father, who stared ahead indifferently, she tried to think what she could do for him, what she could bring to make him also feel at home here, some pictures or belongings, and then she remembered Sam, who was supposed to wait for her on the street in half an hour—Sam who had suddenly become irrelevant. She hurried to call him from the pay phone at the end of the hallway, and a woman with a foreign accent answered and said, “Sam no here.” She left a message, enunciating every word and knowing the woman hadn’t understood a thing, despite her “No problem” assurances. She put the phone down and went back to the room, taking in the geriatric patients sprawled in wheelchairs, scattered around the hallway like environmental sculptures and walking in slow motion. She wanted to be Sam or his heavily accented wife, to belong to a different world, one full of foreign scents and colors and sounds, a world where old men like her father were a way to make a living.

  When she got back to the room, she saw the old man standing at the sink again, soaping his glass and trying to strike up a conversation with her father. She was happy to think he might make new friends in this place, the same happiness she felt every time Emmanuel Herman came to visit. But her father was silent, failing to acknowledge his roommate even with a nod or a sign. Shira thought she saw disdain, for the first time in many years. She remembered the disdain with which he looked at the prostitutes on Allenby when he took walks there with her as a child, and how she pitied the prostitutes on the one hand but also liked seeing her father strong. Now, though, there were no sparks in his disdain, only weakness. His roommate gave up and went back to his window, where he stood with his hands linked behind his back and rocked on his heels to the rhythm of a tune he hummed to himself. She thought about Emmanuel Herman, who must have given up too, as he hadn’t been to visit her father for months. Or perhaps he had become frightened, because he had started to sense an illness which, unlike his own, had no name.

  She remembered what Yonatan had told her about his father, how at the end he was full of indiscriminate disdain for everything and everyone, especially the religious orderly who took care of him. She wondered if that was what was happening to her father now, if it was a final eruption of volcanic hatred. She missed their walks, when she was able to be, for an hour or two, just the daughter of a conservative man who was afraid of prostitutes and tried to protect her from them. She missed those walks because she knew that her father’s look had also involved curiosity and perhaps a little pity.

  A nurse came in with folded pajamas and placed them on the bed. “Will you help him?” she asked, and Shira nodded. She hoped he would refuse her help, that he would suddenly jump up, take the pajamas to the bathroom, and get dressed in there. She took off his slippers and put them on the floor. His ankles were swollen. She still hoped he would protest that he didn’t need her help, but he said nothing. She wondered who had helped the other two men with their pajamas. They looked healthy, as if they could get dressed on their own, as if they were here because there was no room for them at the old-age home, and they were patiently waiting at this temporary stop. The relief she had felt only a short while ago about his hospitalization disappeared as she began to grasp that she and her father had entered a place where time had no meaning. The nurse came back with an IV drip hanging from a pole and asked why the father wasn’t in his pajamas yet. Shira said she didn’t want to wake him, and thought of how his status had changed instantly from her father to the father. The nurse looked at his chart and called out, “Mr. Max, time to get up!” When he opened his eyes in alarm, she kept using the same tone while she set up the drip. “You have to get your pajamas on. The daughter will help you.” The nurse said she’d come back in a few minutes to hook him up to the drip, and before she left she patted the folded pajamas, drew the curtain around the bed, and said, “Let’s go, we don’t have all day.”

  She supported his back and helped him sit up. “Would you like to get dressed on your own?” she asked, but he didn’t answer. He reached out to the pajamas and felt them with his fingertips, as if evaluating the quality and condition of the fabric, and she hoped he was about to send her out, but he rocked back and forth as if he were on a ship deck, and then lay on his side and sighed. “Come on,” she said tenderly, “I’ll help you,” and sat him up again. She spread the pajama top on the bed and said it might be too small. Then she looked at her father lying on the edge of the bed, leaning forward, his eyes fixed on the floor, and said maybe it wasn’t after all. She untied his robe and pulled it down off his shoulders, carefully holding his elbow and trying to extricate his arm from the sleeve. “Help me a little,” she whispered, and he obediently lifted one arm and then the other. The robe slid down around his waist, and she unbuttoned his white shirt—she thought of Sam again and wondered if he’d got the message on time or if he was waiting for her on the street—and asked if she should take off his undershirt, and he shook his head. He had not one drop of energy left, she thought, but he knew what he wanted. After she put the pajama top on, she asked him firmly to get up, in an attempt to dull the spreading panic. He held her arm and stood up, and she swiftly opened the button and zipper of his pants, pulled them down to his ankles, and told him to sit down. She held the pajama bottoms and looked at his legs. She knew he was thin but didn’t know thinness could look like this, helpless and aggressive at the same time, a thinness that assailed its observer with pleading and defiance: Look how low I’ve sunk. Look how low you too will sink one day. And when she saw his hips, which seemed to have the same circumference as his knees and calves, she thought, We are protected from our parents’ aging until the moment we have to undress them, and then they actually undress us, strip us of everything we know about ourselves and about them, crumble the walls we have built, walls that collapse in a moment, with a violent kick, at the sight of such thighs. Neither human nor birdlike, they seemed to belong to no familiar person or creature; even his white underwear looked empty.

  She put his feet into the pajama bottoms and pulled them up over his knees, and asked him to stand up again, which he did, his trembling hand digging into her shoulder. She pulled the bottoms up over his waist and helped him lie down on his side, covered him with a sheet and the thin woolen blanket, and told him she was going out to get something to drink and she’d be right back. She asked if he wanted anything and didn’t wait for an answer. She quickly crossed the hallway until she reached the elevator area, where there were several large ashtrays. She lit a cigarette and took a deep drag, and even before she finished smoking she knew she’d want another, one wouldn’t be enough—all the cigarettes in the world wouldn’t be enough now—and she lit the next cigarette with the first one. Outside, two workers were unloading crates of vegetables from a parked truck, stacking them on the asphalt. She put her face to the window, and waited for someone to come and take the carrots, and thought about the colorfulness of the vegetables against the backdrop of the gray building and the black asphalt, spotted with oil stains. The orange of the carrots, the red tomatoes, the green peppers, and especially, she thought, the lettuces and bunches of parsley sticking out from the gaps in the crates, all looked strange against this background, as if the delivery had arrived at the wrong address. But then two men wearing aprons a
nd rubber boots came out and took the produce inside. On the way back to her father’s room, she stopped at the vending machine and bought a chocolate bar and sat on one of the orange plastic chairs and ate slowly, knowing there was no reason to hurry back, knowing that this time her father wouldn’t leave this place. A quiet, foreign, official voice told her: This is the end.

  ( 14 )

  Jerusalem behaved like an old betrayed lover that morning, alternately flirting with him and spitting in his face but also willing, under certain conditions, to make up.

  The meeting at the university finished early, and before going to eat at his mother’s, he decided to walk around downtown. He hadn’t been downtown for years, avoiding it as if it were the hub of the noise that had taken over the town, the area where the deepest and most dangerous cracks were revealed. He left his car in the parking lot at Independence Park and started walking toward Nahalat Shiva, planning to continue on through Zion Square to the Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall. It was late morning, and the streets looked busy and happy, and he remembered how he always used to think that Jerusalem was a town that preferred mornings, out of some inner knowledge that afternoons would bring a certain sadness. Like an experienced manic-depressive, it hurried to recharge with healthy urbanity before its self-imposed curfew.