by Yael Hedaya
He decided to take the long route to his mother’s. He continued south on Hebron Road, to his left the narrow winding streets of Abu Tor, which in his childhood had seemed mysterious and perilous and now looked romantic, until he came to the Talpiot intersection and turned right into Baka. At the bus stop on the corner of Bethlehem Road, a woman in a long coat and head scarf got off a bus, and a girl helped her carry a stroller down to the sidewalk; he wondered if she was one of those American religious women who had taken over the neighborhood. But he had stopped caring. He had never loved the city as he did now. The screen of rain distanced him from the streets, which seemed hallucinatory and powerful in the way Jerusalem streets can. He loved the place of his birth as someone who knows he will never go back to live there. He wanted a city, just a city, not a constant fantasy or a continuous disappointment, not a femme fatale, who might suddenly slap her lover’s cheek, out of coquettish neurosis rather than true insult. He wanted a real imperfect lover, one who hugged him with heavy arms and whose breath was warm and smoky, but when he was with her his steps were light and he breathed easily and did not miss a beat.
( 24 )
In the Intensive Care unit, she met a stranger. He did not look like her father, did not resemble in any way the man she had left in his bed yesterday, sleeping on his side with a blanket pulled up to his chin. The man on the wide convoluted bed looked soft and subdued under the mess of rubber tubes that came out of his nostrils and squirmed over his arms. His mouth, which was always tight, was now hidden behind an oxygen mask covered with misty breath, as if it was winter inside the mask too. This man was not her father. He wore different pajamas, which looked fresh and crisp; there was no bedside table and no personal items, even the slippers that always sat at the foot of his bed (although he no longer needed them) were gone. The man lying in Intensive Care was nothing more than a patient, with no accessories or roommates or consciousness.
When she came up to his bed and leaned over him, as if called to identify the body, she found he had no smell. The previous father had had a rich repertoire of scents; his hands, neck, and cheeks smelled of aftershave, his mouth gave off the whiff of fasting, his thinned hair smelled like grease and skin, and the pajamas gave away the events of the day: a test he had undergone that left rust-colored iodine stains on the top or bottom, an IV needle that had come loose and squirted drops of blood on his sleeve; or breakfast, bits of which always remained on his collar. But this old man was pure, completely new, as if his life were just beginning. The stains and the sounds, the sorrow and the stench—all these had vanished; her father looked so much like a baby that, for the first time since she was a child, she wanted to touch him.
“We’ll be transferring him to Internal H soon,” said Dr. Amir, whom she had forgotten was standing behind her.
“Why?” she asked, worried: This new father looked peaceful and at home.
“He’ll be monitored there, he’ll get fluids and oxygen to make it easier for him, and we’ll continue the IV antibiotics, just like here.”
In the elevator she had asked if Amir was his first name or his last. “First,” he said. When the doors slid open to the Intensive Care unit, he gestured gracefully and waited for her to step out. Like a doorman at the gates of hell, she thought. Now she turned from her father to him. He wasn’t just short, he was practically a midget. She wondered if other children used to make fun of his height. She wondered if he had a wife who loved him. His square face now looked rigid and mechanical, like a robot’s. “The Internal Medicine wards are your cemetery,” she said, violating the pleasant silence, the monotonous tranquillity of the beeping machines.
Dr. Amir smiled. “That’s not true.”
“It is,” she insisted childishly. “And the higher the ward letter, the more like a cemetery.”
“I don’t know what your name is—” he said, and she quickly told him, as if it were vital information needed to save her father. “Shira,” he said, with a friendliness in which she now detected anger. “There are excellent doctors in the Internal Medicine wards, in all the wards, in all the letters. We’ll make sure your father gets excellent care and that he does not suffer needlessly.”
“What is needless suffering?” she asked, and her voice sounded screechy again. “All suffering is needless.”
“Shira,” he said calmly. “May I call you Shira?”
“Of course you may. What sort of a question is that? What else would you call me?”
“I apologize. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”
“No.” She was rocked by waves of numbing confusion, waiting for them to carry her out to the parking lot, to the guard she missed. “I don’t understand the meaning of all this sudden politeness. And if I said no, you can’t call me Shira, what would you call me? Ms. Klein?”
“Yes. I would call you whatever you asked me to call you.”
“I notice the nurses call you Dr. Amir.”
“Yes. So what?”
“Doesn’t that strike you as ridiculous? It’s your first name. Either you’re formal or you’re not, make up your mind.”
He said nothing.
“Can’t we leave him here?” she said, as if suddenly struck by a brilliant idea.
“No, we can’t.”
“Why, because it’s more expensive?”
“That has nothing to do with it.”
“What do you care, then? Why schlep him around again? You yourself said you wanted to prevent needless suffering.”
“Shira,” he said quietly, and now her name sounded pornographic coming from him, like a lecherous whisper. “I understand you’re having a difficult time, and I repeat my recommendation that you ask someone close to be with you here. You have to understand that in Intensive Care we pull out all the stops, so to speak, and we’re not going to pull out those stops for your father unless you want us to.”
“Can’t you just pull out some of the stops?” Tears started streaming down her face, but despite the relief it was not yet the crying she had anticipated. “Look at him,” she said, and hated the young doctor who was about to abandon them. “How can you even think of moving him? He’ll die on the way, he’ll die in the elevator.” Because after agreeing to let him go, she had to change her mind in some way, to protest, or at least put a few obstacles in his final path.
The doctor, as if considering her words, went up to her father, looked at the monitor that was measuring his blood pressure, glanced at his watch, and wrote something on the chart. He turned to her. “He won’t die in the elevator, Shira.” His feline eyes had turned satanic.
“I wish he would,” she mumbled to herself. Everything seemed to have changed. Her father had gone from being a patient whose life was being fought for to a nuisance they were deciding where to store for a few hours.
“What?” the doctor asked.
“Nothing. I was talking to myself.” She remembered her trip to Greece with Eitan, a few months after they met, and how furious she had been when they were seated separately on the airplane. She had demanded that the airline seat them together, and had addressed the ground crew in the same tone she now used with the doctor. Eitan had tried to calm her down. “It’s only a short flight,” he said. But she insisted, planting her elbows on the counter, where they had just checked in their duffel bags, clutching the boarding passes and threatening to sue. “What exactly would you sue us for?” the attendant asked. “For separating you for an hour?” Some of the people standing in line behind them giggled, and she knew there was no chance of her enjoying this vacation, there had never been a chance, and her scene at the airport was a last-ditch effort to cancel the trip.
“Come on, someone will switch with you on the plane,” a girl behind her grumbled. “Why are you being such a fussbudget?” When she saw Eitan nodding in agreement, she said she wasn’t a fussbudget, it was a matter of principle. Finally, a more senior attendant showed up, smelling of expensive aftershave. He glanced at the computer screen, hit a button, and,
without saying a word or looking at her, reached out for their boarding passes and replaced them with new ones.
She wondered how Eitan was. She hadn’t thought of him for two years. How many children did he have, three? She knew he was a wonderful father.
“What about his things?” she asked.
“What things?” Dr. Amir asked, and his beeper went off.
“Personal items,” she said quietly, tasting the strange, chalky quality of the words.
“You can bring them to the ward; the nurse will give you a bag.” He touched her arm and said he would receive updates on her father’s condition throughout the day and would try and go down to visit him every so often.
“Down? It’s downstairs?” she asked. He nodded and left the room. “What time is it?” she asked the nurse who came up to her father, as if she didn’t have a watch, or as if it wasn’t displaying the correct time for this ward.
“Twenty to eleven,” the nurse said without looking at her, as she changed one of the IV drips.
“What’s that?” Shira asked.
“Fluids.”
“And that one?” She pointed to the other bag.
“Antibiotics.” The nurse wrote something down on the chart.
“What does he need that for?” she asked angrily.
“He has an infection,” the nurse said. She was much younger than Nurse Olga, and not the type to blow comforting kisses in the air.
“I know. But what does he need it for?”
“I don’t know,” the nurse said, about to leave the room. “Ask the doctor.”
“But the doctor left.”
“Ask in Internal H, when you go down.”
“Now?” she said, as if their flight had been announced.
“Soon. I’ll call the orderly.” When she turned her back and walked to the door, Shira saw a ladder running down her stockings, from the back of her knee to her ankle.
“Excuse me!” she called after the nurse, her voice piercing the civilized foreign silence of the room.
“Yes?” The nurse turned her head.
“The doctor said you’d give me a bag for his belongings, his personal items.”
“Ask in Internal. We don’t have any bags here.”
( 25 )
His mother came out to greet him in a state. “The house is flooded!” she announced breathlessly. “The whole kitchen is flooded!” She clutched her coat collar. He had been here only two weeks ago, but now he saw how much she had aged, and although she was never a small woman—he always thought she had masculine shoulders—she looked fragile, faded. “A flood!” she said. “Everything’s flooded!” She made sounds that could have been water or wind, as if it weren’t enough to hear the noise of the storm slamming down on the ground, crashing against the gravel path they both walked up quickly, he holding her elbow, leading her home.
A drainpipe over the kitchen window was clogged. She stood behind him as he put his head out the window into the rain and told him it had happened quickly. “I couldn’t do anything,” she apologized, as if she could have prevented the flood had she acted faster. He clutched the window frame and stretched his neck out to find the source of the leak, the rain drowning out his mother’s voice as she kept talking to him from the kitchen. He pulled his head back into the kitchen and caught his mother saying something about taking her coffee into the study, where she was sorting through paperwork—“Paperwork,” he said, “what paperwork?”—She said, “All sorts of old things that belonged to Dad and me.”
“To you?”—now he noticed she had taken off her coat and hung it on the back of a chair and was wearing a wine-colored robe he didn’t recognize. “What do you mean, you?”
“I’m putting things straight, so I may as well tackle everything.”
She stood on tiptoe and tried to dry his hair with a kitchen towel, but he shook her away—there was fear in his heart—and said, “Why did you suddenly decide to tackle your paperwork?”
“No reason,” she said. “I was just taking advantage of the time while I was waiting for you.” When she went from the study into the kitchen, she continued, after maybe an hour, even less, everything was flooded—everything! She spread out her arms and indicated the floor, which still had little puddles where the tiles had sunk, even though she had dried the flood. It would cost a fortune to fix this house up, he thought, and as he looked over the floor, he noticed that the edges of his mother’s slippers were damp.
“Do you have a stick or a broom?” he asked. “I think the drainpipe’s clogged with leaves; there’s a leak right at the joint, above.”
She said of course she had one and handed him the mop that stood behind the fridge, quickly and too gratefully. “Will a mop work? I just used it to clean up in here.”
He nodded. “I think I should do this from outside, I don’t have good access from here,” he said, in the authoritative tone of a son who knows how to fix things.
“But it’s raining. Maybe you should wait a little.”
“We can’t wait, Mom. If everything’s clogged up, it will keep dripping and you’ll have a big mess in here again.” He walked decisively to the door, holding the mop, with no idea of what he would do with it. He had never dealt with drainpipes.
His mother pulled the umbrella out of the stand in the entrance; it always held just one, his father’s. He said he didn’t need an umbrella, and she said he did. “Go on, I’ll come out with you.”
“Put your coat on,” he said, and she said she didn’t need to, it wasn’t that cold. They walked down the path leading to the backyard, he in front, she holding the umbrella high above his head, as if he were a foreign dignitary whose airplane had landed on a rainy day. “You’re getting wet, Mom,” he said, without looking back.
“Just a little, it’s all right, the rain won’t kill me.” She kept holding the umbrella over him as he shoved the mop handle into the opening of the drainpipe and tried to push it up.
“It’s completely clogged,” he said, struggling. “I don’t know if I can open it.”
“You don’t?” Her worried voice came from behind the umbrella.
“No. It might not even be leaves.”
“But what else could it be?” Her question was punctuated by lightning.
“I have no idea, Mom.” He felt the edge of the umbrella poking his neck.
“What a storm!” she said, as he held the mop with both hands and tried again to force it up the metal sleeve, making strenuous sounds. “They didn’t say it would be like this on the weather forecast,” she complained. “They said it would drizzle.”
“Mom, move the umbrella, it’s just getting in my way.”
“But you’ll get wet!” Along with the familiar worry, he detected in her voice a gleefulness, as if they had both gone camping and were caught in a storm.
“Stop it, Mom! You’re stabbing me.”
“Sorry, sorry, I didn’t mean to.”
“Move. Move back; I don’t want you to get hit.” From the fixing son he had become the policeman son.
“Sorry, did I hurt you?” Her cold fingers touched the back of his neck.
“Mom, stop it; really, I can’t work like this.”
She retreated, and he turned to look at her and saw an old lady with broad shoulders standing under an umbrella in a wine-colored rain-drenched robe, which now looked like a furry wet animal. He made fists with his hands, and hit one fist with the other and whacked the drainpipe, letting out a battle cry, and suddenly felt something dislodge. The mysterious blockage had burst, the mop went up easily, and a dead bird fell to the ground.
He felt the umbrella tickling his neck again. “What is that?” his mother whispered.
“A bird,” he said.
“What kind of bird?” she wondered, leaning forward with the umbrella, which now scratched his cheek. “A pigeon?”
“I don’t think so. It’s the size of a pigeon, but that’s not what it is.”
They both looked at the wet pile of feathe
rs, which had a small yellow beak peaking out from one side and two claws on the other, straight up and frozen.
“But how did it get into the drainpipe?” his mother asked, and her voice sounded apologetic again.
“I haven’t a clue,” he said, and his wet clothes clung to his body coldly. “Maybe it had a nest under the eaves and the nest fell.”
“But why didn’t it fly away?” his mother asked, suddenly childish and angry.
“Maybe it was struck by lightning.”
“Lightning?” she said, and he said it happened. “Of course, it happens in the movies, but to people, not to birds. How could it happen to a bird? I saw a movie where it happened to a person, but a bird?”
In the feathery mess he saw an eye, open just a crack.
“It’ll start to smell bad,” his mother said, as she leaned over the tiny corpse. “We have to throw it away.”
“Later. Before I leave. Let’s go in, you’re soaked.” He took the umbrella, held it over her, lowered his head, put a hand on her shoulder, and walked her down the path, his eyes staring at her wet slippers, made of velvety fabric decorated with a golden embroidery that was unraveling. Through the rhythmical squishing sounds that accompanied her steps, he heard her mumbling that she didn’t want a dead bird in her yard, and he promised again to clear it away later.
“But you’ll forget,” she said, when they went inside.
“I won’t forget, you’ll remind me.”
* * *
His heart swelled, as if it too were drenched with rain, as he watched her put a pot of soup on the stove, dressed now in a different robe, a more familiar yolk-colored one, and thick woolen socks; he was afraid she would slip in them. He moved the toes of his bare feet on the floor and looked at his shoes and socks, drying opposite the seldom-used space heater he had once bought her, her own slippers keeping them company. He leaned back in his chair—she had wanted to eat in the dining area, but he preferred the kitchen—and stretched out the sleeves of his father’s old sweater, which he wore instead of his own wet one. It was a soft sweater, a couple of sizes too small for him, that he remembered his father wearing a few times.