Accidents: A Novel

by Yael Hedaya

  My love, he whispered in his heart as he walked along Yoel Salomon Street, amused by the nostalgic wave that had swept over him. My pale, sickly love. He looked on without anger, with compassion even, at a noisy group of American kids sitting outside a café that must have been new. It had an American name, and when he glanced at the menu hanging by the front door, he read that they served bagels with cream cheese and lox and that the place had a glatt kosher certificate, which hung at the entrance like another menu. On his right was another unfamiliar café, with a menu identical to the first one.

  By the time he reached the pedestrian mall he felt depressed. Huge plastic signs, shockingly colorful, hung on the sooty stone walls over storefronts, bazaars, falafel and shwarma stands, and pizzerias that displayed kashrut certificates instead of menus. Some of the stores he remembered had become souvenir shops. I’m ugly, his ex declared, enjoying the pain she was inflicting upon him. I’m loud and vulgar, and I’m not yours anymore.

  He missed Shira. Precisely because she did not know the city the way it used to be, she could look at it as a tourist, and perhaps through her eyes he would be able to fall in love again. He drove away from the city center as if escaping someone but when he reached the German Colony, he calmed down a little. Emek Refa’im Street looked like an extension of downtown, but the narrow side streets, which were now crowded with cars parked on the sidewalks, still had a certain lush green beauty. He drove in and out of them, taking the long way to his mother’s house, lingering over the houses with their beautiful stone walls, as if they were a dam against the fundamentalist torrent that had flooded the town. He was proud of these houses and walls for not changing all these years, for being steadfast and arrogant, cold Jerusalemites, like his mother’s stone house, which would one day be his. When he turned onto Rachel Imenu, he thought, Perhaps, after they settled in here, after the three of them shut themselves up behind their wall, he might consider starting a new family. He wanted to call Shira and wished he had a cell phone—she had already got one, but he still resisted—because he urgently needed to make sure she hadn’t changed over the course of the morning, that she still wanted him, his city, his child, and he could barely stop from pulling over by a pay phone, even though his mother’s house was around the corner. He parked by the house, got out of the car, and went in through the iron gate.

  His mother looked slightly startled when he hugged her. She came out to greet him as usual, and he hurried to her and enveloped her in his arms, pressed her to his chest, and then quickly let go when he realized he was hugging his mother and that the last time he had done this was when his father died. Once inside, she asked what had happened and he said nothing, that he had to make a phone call, and he went into his father’s study. He tried the apartment on Borochov—he rarely called her there because he didn’t want to disturb her—and when there was no answer he tried at home, but she wasn’t there either. He sat at the desk for a few more minutes, stroking the shiny oak surface, wondering where she could be. The large dining table was already set, and as soon as he sat down his mother put a bowl of soup in front of him. He asked what it was and she said it was something new, cream of spinach. He asked, “A recipe from the paper?” When she looked defensive, he said, “It looks wonderful,” and ate the soup heartily, complimenting her several times.

  She sat opposite him with her back to the big window, her gray hair lit up by the sun, and he could tell that she was eyeing him suspiciously. She clutched an old dish towel that had a print of cows on it, part of a set that Ilana’s parents once sent them. His mother had seen one of the towels at their place and loved it, and Ilana said, “Take them all.” His mother protested, but it was clear that she had fallen in love with the cows, and Ilana packed the set up for her: six towels, an oven mitt, and matching apron.

  He felt a wave of generosity toward his mother, and when she took the empty soup bowl to the kitchen and asked if he wanted a leg or a breast, he said, “You mean you don’t remember what I like anymore?”

  She said, “You’re always changing your mind.”

  He said, “You’re right,” and smiled. “I’ll have a leg.” And when she came back with a plate of chicken, new potatoes, and the cauliflower with tomato sauce that he had consistently liked all these years, he said, “We’re thinking, maybe, of moving to Jerusalem.”

  He could see her struggling to contain her joy. Not only was her hair glowing now, her entire face seemed lit up from inside, as if a flashlight were roaming beneath her skin, and he thought he also noticed the little tremor in her hands that attacked her when she tried to disguise stress or excitement. He sipped the grapefruit juice she poured him—she knew he was coming and had bought fresh juice—and when he realized that with his sudden generosity he had given her something that did not belong to him—he had never seriously discussed moving to Jerusalem with Shira or Dana—he said, “But it’s just an idea, so don’t get too excited yet.”

  She shook her head eagerly and said, “No, no, I understand.” After a pause, she asked, “But what made you decide to move back?”

  “We haven’t decided anything yet, Mom. It’s just an option for the future; it’s not even relevant now.”

  “Why not? Because of her father?”

  He remembered Max, whom he had failed to take into account in his Jerusalem fantasy. His mother got up to bring him a dish of compote, and he heard her open and close the door of the cabinet where she kept the little glass dishes, the ones he had eaten out of as a child. It always amazed him that she had managed to keep them in one piece all these years. She came back, and only then did he notice that she was dragging her leg. She sat down again and sighed to herself, and since he didn’t want to completely divest her from the gift he had given, he said, “For now it’s just an idea, it still needs to be thought through.”

  “It’s a good idea.”

  He asked if she still had the whole set of dishes or if any had broken.

  “The whole set,” she said, and asked if he wanted some more compote.

  Although he was full, he said he would love some more, because he wanted to flatter her, and when she went into the kitchen again he wondered if after he inherited the set he would also manage to keep it intact, and he knew he wouldn’t. He could already see the little dishes breaking one by one, shattering on the floor or in the sink, dropped by clumsy hands, until not a single dish remained.

  ( 15 )

  No one was home when she got out of school. The nurse didn’t ask any questions when Dana lied and said she was sick; she let her go without even calling her father, who in any case was in Jerusalem and couldn’t be contacted. “Just promise me you’ll go straight home,” Esti said, and Dana promised.

  When she went up to the classroom to get her backpack, she met Tamar, who asked where she was going. “I don’t feel well,” she said, and Tamar asked what was wrong, and she said she had a sore throat.

  “I’ll call you later then,” Tamar said.

  Dana ran down the steps and out into the street through the gate and heard the bell ringing for recess. She felt free and a little excited, as if she were setting off on a great adventure.

  She tried to decide where to go—to hang around Sheinkin, or maybe Dizengoff Center, or the market; it occurred to her that she could also go to the beach if she wanted—but her feet carried her to Allenby, and within minutes she found herself close to home, and she sat down at the café on the corner. The waitress gave her a menu as if she were a regular customer. She dug around the inside pocket of her backpack to count her money and ordered a lemonade. Even though she had enough money to get something to eat, she didn’t dare, afraid she might have counted wrong and would get stuck with a check she couldn’t pay, and the owners wouldn’t believe her when she swore she lived a few houses down and her dad would come and pay them that afternoon, and they would call the police. On the other hand, she thought, everyone had believed her today: Esti, Tamar, the waitress, and her father, who was at his meeting in
Jerusalem now and was certainly unaware that his daughter had cut class for the first time in her life.

  She drank her lemonade and counted her money again, but she still didn’t have the courage to order a piece of cake or a sandwich. She was sorry she wasn’t the calm person she had hoped to be; she wasn’t the opposite of her father; even with the huge distance that separated them now, you could still see how similar they were. She suddenly had no idea what to do with her free morning. She wondered if this was how unemployed adults felt—free and confused and vaguely guilty—and if this was how her father felt. He had looked so happy before leaving this morning, relieved that he finally had somewhere real to go. She suddenly missed school and thought perhaps she had made a mistake, because her excitement and freedom had been overcome by fear, by a feeling that although her home was only a few yards away, she had left it very far behind.

  She had never sat in a café on her own before. She watched the passersby who filled the street. No one looked at her as she sat at the outside table, sucking the last drops of lemonade through a straw, a back-pack on her knees. She wondered if a few years from now she would remember this morning and say to herself, That was the first time I sat in a café alone. She didn’t know whether this morning was important. She asked for the check, and when the waitress put it down on a little dish in front of her, she calculated the tip; her father left ten or fifteen percent, depending on his mood, but she left twenty. The check was so low she was afraid to leave less. Then she got up, disappointed at the hollowness of this adventure, heaved her backpack onto her shoulders, turned onto Bialik, and went upstairs to the apartment.

  It was strange to be home without them. Despite the heat wave, there was a coolness inside, as in a cave or an abandoned ruin, both pleasant and troubling. Usually, when she came home from school, all the windows were open, the music from the living room blaring down into the street, as if a sixteen-year-old lived there rather than her father. The apartment always smelled of the dishes he cooked, which she refused to taste on principle because that represented reconciliation with someone who had no idea how to fight with her.

  She went into her room and lay down on her bed. Now she wished she had found the guts to order something to eat at the café. Their sandwiches, which came on big platters with lettuce and arugula salad, looked very good. She was hungry, but she knew what was in the fridge: leftovers from a Shabbat lunch with Rona and Tamar. She was sick of these communal meals, sometimes at their place and sometimes at Rona’s. “I’m sick of it!” she had hurled at her father once, when she refused to go with them to Friday-night dinner.

  “You’re sick of everything,” he replied indifferently, as if stating a fact, as if he weren’t angry.

  She yelled from her room, “That’s right, I am sick of everything. Especially of you!” and pictured him rushing to her room from the bathroom, where he was shaving, and standing in her doorway and asking firmly what was up with her lately, demanding that she tell him everything, sitting on the edge of her bed with bits of shaving cream on his cheeks, looking at her tenderly—not his new tenderness, which was fearful and demanding, but the old kind, the automatic unsophisticated kind. But her father just yelled from the bathroom that he was sick of the way she talked, and then she heard him wash his face and spit into the sink, and Shira knocked on the door, which was ajar, and came in and stood opposite her, drying her hair with a towel, and asked what was wrong, what was really wrong.

  “Can we talk?” she asked.

  Dana said no, and when Shira asked why not, she said, “Because there’s nothing to talk about.”

  Shira said, “Well, when there is, will we talk?” She said no again, because there wouldn’t be anything to talk about ever, and Shira smiled and said, “Okay,” and left the room.

  She didn’t want understanding, she wanted anger. She remembered the terrible fight between Rika Kahane and her eldest daughter, Liat. It was at the slumber party last year, which now seemed far away, impossible—how could she have wanted to join the team? It was still going, rejecting some girls, accepting others, and Tamar, despite her repeated proclamations, was still part of it. The others had all been asleep when Liat came home late from a party. Rika, whose nervous pacing on the ground floor had kept Dana company in the too-quiet room, followed her daughter upstairs. She whispered something, and then a door slammed, and then there were more whispers. Then she heard their hushed voices in the next room, and the door opened, and there was the sound of Liat’s bare feet running down the stairs, then her mother’s high heels clicking after her. They kept on fighting in the kitchen. Dana could hear every word, as if the stairwell served as a megaphone. Liat called her mother evil, a castrator; Rika told her to watch her mouth; her daughter told her to watch her husband. Rika asked what exactly she was implying and that if she had something to say she should come out and say it, without playing games. Liat shouted, “Don’t play innocent. You know exactly what kind of games Dad is playing, and you know who with!”

  “Who?” Rika screamed, and then she repeated her question quietly. “Who, Liat?”

  “Come on, Mom!” Liat screeched, “don’t make out as if you don’t know!”

  “I don’t,” Rika said, and she sounded like a child. “You tell me.”

  “Boys!” Liat screamed, and her scream turned to a wail midway. “Dad’s screwing boys—”

  Her mother broke in. “Shut your mouth, Liat. I’m warning you.”

  “I won’t!” Liat sobbed. “You may be willing to keep quiet, but I’m not. I’m calling him in Germany right now and telling him we’re not having him back.”

  “You will do no such thing,” Rika said firmly. “I’m warning you, you shut your big mouth.”

  “It’s Dad who should shut his big mouth, if he could stop giving blow jobs for one minute!” Then she heard a shriek, different from the previous ones, and Liat sobbed, “Are you crazy? What are you hitting me for? Are you nuts?” Then she heard the fridge door open and close, and the microwave bleep, and the sound of a chair being dragged across the marble floor. Dana had been astonished to discover that people could fight and eat at the same time.

  After a few minutes of silence, during which Dana tried to guess what they were eating, she heard Liat yell, “Stop it, leave me alone! Get away from me!” There were sounds of crying, but she wasn’t sure whose until she heard Rika declare, “Liati, you’re high. You’ve been smoking something, that’s why you’re so hungry. You never come home hungry.” Then Liat’s voice again, sobbing with her mouth full, “Leave me alone!” The chair was dragged across the floor again; she heard water running in the sink, and Rika told her daughter this was the last time she was going to any parties, that she was not having a fourteen-year-old girl smoking drugs, she wanted to know what the other parents thought of it, and she was calling to ask them tomorrow, but tonight she didn’t want to see her face anymore.

  “Go to your room and stop stuffing yourself like a stoned cow,” she said. Liat started wailing again, the desperate wails of a little girl. “Mom,” she cried, “Dad’s a homo!”

  “So what?” her mother said. “He’s your dad. It doesn’t matter what he does, whether he’s gay or straight; it shouldn’t make any difference to you. Liati, he’s a wonderful man and he’s a wonderful father, and that’s what matters, do you hear me?” She heard her voice coming closer to the stairs. “Come here, where are you going? Liati?” “I’m going to throw up!” the girl screamed.

  At that moment Dana asked herself why none of the girls in the room had woken up from the noise. She heard footsteps running up the stairs again, and the door of the bathroom Liat shared with Lilach slammed shut. Dana couldn’t tell if the sounds coming through the wall were vomiting or sobbing, and when she heard the toilet being flushed she realized it was both, and then she heard Rika coming slowly up the stairs, and the door to the master bedroom slammed too.

  That was the anger she wanted, the kind that leaves cracks in the walls, which then seem to k
eep standing as if nothing had happened: the next day there was no trace of the fight, and at breakfast—which they all ate on the patio, and which was described by Rika, who looked serene and smily as always, as “brunch”—you couldn’t guess what the two of them had been through that night: the daughter, who pushed her spinach-ricotta omelet around the plate with her fork and said she felt nauseated, and her mother, who with loving, perfectly made-up eyes, begged her to eat. Dana wanted someone to beg her to eat too, but no one did.

  Now she lay on her bed and felt a lump in her throat and tried to remember the last time she had cried. It was over a year ago, in the kitchen, on the day she stopped piano lessons, when her father started going out with Shira. She couldn’t remember why she had cried, but she remembered he had hugged her, and even though she had already felt uncomfortable at his touch, there was something wondrous about his arms. That must have been their last hug, she thought.

  A few days ago, Tamar told her she needed a bra. “You need a size zero,” she determined, eyeballing her chest like an experienced lingerie saleswoman. “If you’d like, we can go together. I don’t need one but I’ll go with you.” Dana agreed. “Or we could ask my mom to get you one,” she continued. “Or Shira, ask Shira, or you can get one on your own, and if you go on your own, ask for size zero, remember.” Dana said okay and prayed for Tamar to shut up.

  She lay on her stomach, swallowed her tears, and felt the two lumps on her chest crushed against the mattress. Lately she felt like a collection of lumps. Her brain felt like a lump, and her stomach, and in her heart was a permanent lump of insult; she also sensed the presence of a lump between her legs, smaller and harder than the others. I have cancer, she thought, teenage cancer. She pressed her thighs together and her stomach into the mattress, and suddenly there was something pleasant about that hard tension, as if she could see the precise location of the lump, feel it with her fingers, break it open. She moved carefully, almost imperceptibly, on the bed, and held her breath. Something told her to stop, the same something that filled her with shame, but something else made her continue. She rocked back and forth on the mattress, which was soft, submissive, lessening the tension instead of focusing it. She slid her hand under her stomach. Now she moved on her fist, flinching at first from the pain caused by her knuckles, as if her fist was trying to punish her for what she was doing; it occurred to her that her father or Shira could come home any minute and maybe she should put her key in the lock. But she couldn’t get up; she was afraid she would never again find the precise location of that lump which was waiting, full of expectation. She kept moving rhythmically on her fist, taut inside but keenly aware of every external noise, knowing instinctively where she was going but not getting there. It was the most wonderful frustration she had ever experienced.