by Yael Hedaya
“Did Dana go on her school trip in this rain?” she asked, worried.
“No, it’s tomorrow.”
“Thank God. Let’s hope it clears up by then.”
“Of course it will.” He realized suddenly, as if for the first time, that his mother had only one son and one granddaughter; that was all. “It will clear up soon. This isn’t typical rainfall for the season.”
“It could keep raining, though.”
“It’ll stop, don’t worry.”
“This kind of rain, where they didn’t say when it would start, there’s no way to tell when it will stop,” she said, and he smiled. When had she become so fearful? When had her logic become so hermetic that you could not argue with it? Was it possible, he wondered with alarm, that his real mother was gone? That the broad-shouldered woman with the well-groomed faded honey hair, now flattened in separate strands on her head like doll’s hair, had already gone without him on that journey everyone talked about?
“Poor thing,” she said, as she stirred the soup.
“Who?”
“The bird.”
“Yes.” He sighed. “Poor thing.… You know what? I taught my first class today.”
“Oh, yes!” She turned to him with a guilty look on her face. “I forgot to ask you how it went, because of all this chaos. So, how was it?”
“It was all right.” He listened to the rain, to the lid dancing on the pot, and then asked, teasingly, “So what kind of soup do we have today?”
“Chicken,” she said apprehensively. “Because of the rain. I defrosted a chicken I had in the freezer. Is that all right?”
He smiled, his heart, damp from compassion, broadening: If she had a chicken in the freezer, that must mean she hadn’t gone too far. He nodded and barely held back from getting up to hug her. “Don’t you know I love your chicken soup?”
“Really?”
“Come on, didn’t you know that?”
“Of course I did. But maybe I forgot.” She ladled soup into a bowl and asked if he wanted a piece of celery in it.
He thought to himself, Why not? Why shouldn’t I get up and hug her? Nothing big that would demand an explanation, just a little hug. “Yes. Put some celery in. Put anything in.” He watched her trembling hand holding the ladle and fishing out some celery for him.
“Carrot?”
“What’s the matter with you today, Mom? Are you going senile?”
“Well, for all I know you don’t like it anymore.”
“I like it,” he said, and got up from his chair. “I like it a lot.” He was going to walk up to her and wrap his arms around her, but he went to the window and touched the frame. “Dry.”
“Good job.” She carefully put the bowl of soup on the little table in the corner. “The way you knew exactly what to do right away. I wouldn’t have known.”
He stood close to her and raised his hand to put it on her shoulder. “I just guessed.” But his mother turned to him and suspiciously eyed his hand, which had now dropped to his side. “What’s wrong?” he said.
“I forgot to buy oyster crackers.”
He said it was all right, he didn’t need any.
“Wait, I do have some! I just remembered, I bought some last week! They’re in the cabinet up top.”
He said he’d get them, and went to the cabinet over the fridge, and the phone rang and she hurried to the living room. “Don’t slip!” he called after her. He poured a handful of crackers out, tossed them into his mouth, and stood inspecting the window with satisfaction.
“It’s Shira,” his mother said, when she came back. Then she whispered, “I think she’s crying.”
( 26 )
It was still not the crying she was hoping for but something close, and she thought she could hear, in its hiccuping sobs, the beginnings of the question: Was there some other kind of crying, massive and wild, the great crying of her fantasies, or perhaps this was it—there was no other.
When the doctors made their visit, they asked her to leave the room for a few minutes, but the minutes turned into an hour and a half, and she stood in the hallway of Internal H, leaning on the wall, her cell phone in one hand and, in the other, a large bunch of keys she had distractedly taken from her bag and was now holding as if she were on her way out.
Her father used to hold his keys too. His wallet had its regular place in his back hip pocket, his reading glasses and pens always peeked out from his shirt pocket, but he could never find a place for the keys—as a child, she believed they had preferential status, like her own—and when they walked down Allenby he would clutch both the keys and her hand in his own, the serrated edges sticking through the patchwork of their fingers. Sometimes she wondered why he didn’t use his other hand, why he preferred to hold his two most precious assets with one grip, but she never asked, and she never told him that the keys dug into her flesh and pressed on her knuckles.
The pride she felt on those walks with her busy energetic father, who, with his disdain, tried to banish the whores and beggars from her field of vision; the admiration she felt when she sat across from this handsome, introverted man in the café that no longer existed and which had been replaced with a bustling hovel that sold pirated tapes, reduced the pain to a pulsating spot in her palm. She adapted her walk to his hasty pace, looked where he did, became friends, in her heart, with the people he stopped to chat with, holding her hand the whole time. She held her breath when they went into stores because she hoped he would find what he was looking for. Their intimacy, which did not yet have a name, seemed so fragile, like a spiderweb that could be ruined with one touch, however light and curious. She said nothing because she loved him. If he loved her too, she reasoned, he couldn’t be hurting her. The pain was not real. What was real were the magical afternoon hours that hung like a rope bridge between the mornings, which he spent far away from her at work, and the evenings, when he came home and became distant. The pain, she thought with childish heroism, was worth it all.
She stood in the hallway, guessing by the time the doctors were spending in his room that her father’s situation had deteriorated. She wondered where his keys were now. She couldn’t remember seeing them in the cabinet with his things and couldn’t remember what he had been wearing on the day he was hospitalized. Perhaps she had put the keys in his jacket pocket; perhaps she had put them down somewhere in a safe place now forgotten. She tried to remember if she had seen them the last time she visited his apartment and thought of how, in an instant, the one thing he had been so afraid to lose had disappeared—the thing that had been part of their skin, his and hers. When the door opened and two young doctors came out, passing her and ignoring her questioning eyes, she thought, Maybe it’s better that they’re lost, because with the other items, even the reading glasses, she could somehow cope, but what did one do with a bunch of keys for doors that would soon—in her gut she knew how soon it would be—become irrelevant?
A few minutes after four. She had no idea what had happened to all the hours since they brought her father down here. She had the sudden sensation that time was passing quickly and yet also standing still, leaning, as she was, on a wall and waiting. She tried to remember when she had talked to Yonatan. It was an hour or two ago, but those were normal hours, whose dimensions matched the outside world; here, at 4 P.M. in this hallway, they were a foreign code. “Hi,” she had said, when he’d picked up the phone and said Shira? in a worried voice, full of munching sounds. “What are you eating?” she asked and realized she hadn’t had anything to eat all day. He said he was having some soup and she heard him swallow and ask what was going on, and in a stifled sob she told him about her father. “He’s going to die,” she said, and the words, like time, lost their meaning. He said he would leave right away, and she asked if it was raining there, and he said it was pouring; was it raining where she was? As if they were in two different countries. She said it had rained earlier but now she didn’t know, and she searched for an outside window, not one that faced an
other hallway, like the one next to her father’s new bed, which was covered with a light-blue curtain and looked onto another closed window, covered with the same curtain. “I don’t know,” she said, and he said he’d be there in an hour or an hour and a half and hung up. She remembered the stick in the neighbors’ trash can, with its fading blue stripe, and saw herself sitting on the bathroom floor. She had hidden the kit in her bag for two weeks, and every time she reached for something, her date book or cigarettes or keys, her fingers met the outline of the cardboard box. Just out of curiosity, she had told herself this morning when she took the box out of her bag, and now it seemed impossible that she had done the test today, that right now an egg was moving through her body and had been with her all day, going up and down in the elevators, waiting for orderlies and doctors, and now leaning on this wall, opposite her father’s room; perhaps it would be with her later, perhaps it wouldn’t—this egg that knew no guilt or terror, or what it meant to miss someone.
The nurse came out and said, “You can go in now. The doctor wants to talk to you.” She looked at her and saw a body in uniform and a face without features, as if her eyes had tired of giving detailed reports or had realized there was no point in details anymore; this strange, quick, and static time in which she was now located was like those afternoon hours with her father, a rope bridge connecting two times—the one in which he existed and the one in which he didn’t—and they were both the same. She disconnected from the wall and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “But please turn off your cell phone,” the nurse said, “there are instruments in here.” Shira said it was off, looked at it to make sure, and threw it in her bag. But she kept holding the keys as she went into the room.
The doctor now seemed irrelevant too. She glanced at him and then looked at her father. The doctor said there had been a deterioration over the last hour, the antibiotics hadn’t stopped the infection from spreading, his blood pressure was very low, his breathing was shallow and irregular, and there wasn’t much time left.
She looked at her father and said she thought he wasn’t breathing anymore.
“He is breathing.” The doctor had a foreign accent, but she no longer cared where he was from. “It’s hard to see, but he is breathing.”
She was overcome by anger, tired and grumbling anger. They had just taken the elevator down here; she knew the orderly who had taken them down from Intensive Care and had even been happy to see him. “How is the father?” he had asked, his big stomach pushing against the foot of the bed, his arms leaning on the steel rests on either side of it.
“Not good,” she had said, and looked at him pleadingly, as if he were a new doctor who had come to give a diagnosis in the elevator.
“Everything will be all right,” the orderly said. “What’s his name?”
“Max. Max Klein,” she said, as if he couldn’t be saved without his last name.
“Everything will be all right, Mr. Klein,” he said, looking at her father’s white face. He hadn’t been shaved that morning, and gray stubble covered his chin and cheeks like a soft layer of moss. “Everything will be all right.” His voice echoed between the service elevator’s metal walls. “And where is the boyfriend?” he asked.
“He’s at the university.”
“Studying?”
“Teaching.”
“Very nice. What does he teach, computers?”
“Literature.”
“Literature is interesting,” he said, and the doors opened to the hallway of the Internal Medicine ward. “Literature is important.”
When the nurse instructed him to take the bed into this room, which had three empty beds in it, she had stood deliberating over which one to choose until the orderly determined unequivocally: next to the window. In the middle was no good, he said, too crowded, and by the entrance there was a sink, no privacy. Best is by the window. All that couldn’t have happened today, she thought, and when she glanced at her watch she desperately missed eight-fifty, that first trip in the elevator, in the previous time. Right after they moved her father into the bed, the doctors came and asked her to leave, and since it was only for a few minutes, she decided to put off going to his old room for his things. Later, she thought, she’d go and also get something to eat. The croissants had looked reasonable but she had never been hungry enough here to try them, and she pictured herself drinking café latte in a huge glass, the kind that would be suitable for her current thirst, and smoking a cigarette or two and then going up to the ward and reorganizing her father’s things. She had stood for an hour and a half outside his room until she was suddenly called in, and from that moment on there was no later.
“Look,” she said to the doctor. “He’s not breathing.”
“He is breathing. It’s weak breath, I know it’s hard to see, but he’s breathing.”
“But how will I know when he stops?” she said, panicking, as if her father were planning a trick: slipping out of the room on his tiptoes, exiting the world in absolute silence, with that same quiet elegance in which he used to get dressed. He would be sucked out all at once and leave his sloughed body on the bed, so she would keep looking at him without ever knowing if he was there or not.
“We’ll let you know,” the doctor said and looked at her watching her father. She did not take her eyes off him for a second, as if her look were respirating him. “We’ll let you know,” he repeated, and she thought she could hear true sadness in his voice, in his foreign accent. “But I think you’ll be able to tell.”
( 27 )
Just after leaving Jerusalem, he realized he’d forgotten to remove the bird. Even though he told her he had to hurry because Shira’s father was in critical condition, his mother had insisted on packing a lunch for him, and he had put on his socks and shoes, still wet, and watched her rummaging through the kitchen cabinets, looking for plastic containers—the normally neat cabinets were chaotic—and said he really had to run. “One second,” his mother had said, breathing heavily as she poured his soup into a container and pressed the lid down firmly. “Be careful, it’s hot.”
“It’ll just spill in the car,” he protested.
“No, it won’t, you’ll drive slowly.” She filled another container with brisket and potatoes. She kept clicking her tongue, and asked, “But what does he have?”
“An infection. He’s lost consciousness. I think this is it, Mom.”
She walked him to the door, and he asked her not to come out but she insisted. “It’s stopped raining,” she said, and held her palm out to the sky.
He told himself he would call her later, and then realized that, before going to the hospital, he would have to go home and put the food in the fridge—his mother was delaying him again, he thought, putting tasty obstacles in his way. In any case, he would have to go home to make sure Dana had everything she needed for the trip, give her some money, and have a little talk with her—he wouldn’t see her for five days. He might suggest that she spend the night at Tamar’s because he didn’t know when he and Shira would get home.
He listened to the three o’clock news. There had been record rainfall that morning all over the country, even in the Negev Desert and the Arava, the announcer said, but the sky had cleared now, shreds of clouds were hovering in deceptive laziness, and if not for the glimmering road dotted with puddles, one could imagine that the dramatically reported storm had been a collective fantasy.
He thought about Shira, about her crying, how she had cried the first time they had been together too, in her apartment—only a year and a half had passed, but that time suddenly seemed sweet and almost collegiate—how he had looked at her leaning against the bookshelf, talking with her father, who was only a telephone presence at the time, a generic father, a disturbance; how he had examined her tense body stretched over the phone cord like a splint and wanted to interrogate it, to rape it, to comfort it—that body, like her father, was now a part of his life.
He felt guilty for having had a wonderful morning. While s
he had been running back and forth between hospital wards, he had basked in the glory of his students’ admiration, much as he had bathed himself in spring sunlight that morning at the café on Sheinkin with that director. How was it he was always absent when needed? He hit the gas pedal hard and the speedometer needle jumped up, but even before he had time to chastise himself for speeding dangerously, his foot had to move to the brake, the other joining in listlessly and pressing down on the clutch; the traffic was backed up to just after the Latrun intersection. He didn’t know if it was because of an accident or the rain, or if it was one of those traffic jams that had no reason, as if a supreme power had decided to amuse itself and put the road into a coma, freeze the drivers, and then suddenly wake them up, without having any idea of what had happened to them. Something told him this was a serious holdup. He looked around at the cars on either side of him, trying to decide, as he always did when he was stuck, if he should move to the outside lane, where traffic seemed to be moving faster. But he decided to stay where he was, calm down, and give in to the passivity enforced upon him, which was somehow pleasant, excusing.
He had been crawling behind a truck for twenty minutes, memorizing its license plates and the sound its brakes made, which reminded him of a peacock’s scream. He had not moved more than a mile or two and was already feeling his enforced calm dissipating, aware of its unreliability, how the passivity moved impatiently inside him and made way for restlessness, which became, when traffic came to a standstill again, true anger. He listened to the traffic reports on two stations, but neither one mentioned his holdup. He thought about Shira and wondered where she was now, if she was taking her father for a test, listening to a doctor’s explanations, or sitting in her usual corner by the vending machine, smoking a cigarette. How lucky he was that he had been saved from having to watch his father die; the phone call had come afterward, so he could only imagine the final moments, do with them as he wished, write hundreds of scripts, rewrite, develop, and then reject them all. He looked at a luxury car with diplomatic license plates that was now positioned between him and the truck and knew Shira was not in any of the places he had pictured; even if he could position her somewhere, she would always be somewhere else. She had told him once, a few weeks after they met, when they sat on the balcony one night drinking beer, that she no longer believed in absolute unity, in that fusion that had existed between her first novel’s protagonists.