At the time, Avner had smiled and accepted it as a blessing, but lately he’d been thinking about those words. He’d bailed up one of his older daughters and asked her if she thought he’d been abusive when they all lived together, and when she’d said yes, he’d begun to cry. His latest conquest, Perel, has him afraid to flush the toilet without rolling over each poop and spraying it with Febreze. He is afraid of her PTSD-induced temper, and – for the first time – he understands what it is like to live with someone whose moods can swing so radically.
His son Hendel has more compassion for Perel than he does, understands that war changes people, and he finds this endearing. For once, he looks at his child and likes what he sees: the seriousness, the quirky sense of humour, the generosity.
‘She’s a piece of work,’ says Avner. ‘That’s for sure.’ It’s the most he’s ever admitted. ‘Yes,’ says Hendel eagerly, and this time when he leans against his father, Avner allows the closeness. Hendel is nine and he already knows all kinds of things about his father that he shouldn’t. Among them this: a well-crafted lie can please his father. And though it’s not his custom, his father sometimes tells the truth to please Hendel.
2.
It rains almost every day they are in Italy and their house is so high in the Alps that when Perel looks outside in the morning, it’s as if she has gone blind. Clouds surround the villa, pressing damply on the windows, the same grey as the stuccoed stone walls within. Swallows sing invisibly through the rain. Bees emerge from underneath the terracotta roof tiles during a brief lull and one falls when it is struck by a late droplet. It seems right to Perel that it should rain during a free trip.
To keep warm she lies in bed with the electric blanket turned on high, reading a book of poems Avner bought for her in Florence, in the Libreria delle donne, on Via Fiesolana, also on a rainy day.
‘What are those stories about?’ Hendel asks, and Perel hands the book to him.
He reads haltingly out loud: ‘Let the world’s sharpness, like a clasping knife, shut in upon itself and do no harm.’
He asks, ‘Why does morbida mean soft, and not death?’ but since Afghanistan, since the shouts and the cries of the men who arrived at the hospital in many pieces, Perel is not curious about language and is also in a bad mood because she is unable to update her social networking sites and because today, the first of May, is a national holiday in Italy, despite being a Wednesday, and nothing is open.
‘I could sleep at home for the same price,’ she says. ‘And be warm.’
‘I’ll make you warm, my princess,’ says Avner, leaning over the bed to kiss her. Hendel backs away and puts a finger down his throat and makes a gagging noise. The wind rises and comes fluttering from the tiny bathroom, as if a bird is trapped and beating itself against the stones. The bath is festooned with damp bras and stockings and jocks, stirred by the wind, almost alive. Perel generally manages to avoid interacting with Hendel, whom she thinks of as anal and a space cadet. She warns her own child, who is four years old and still malleable, not to go near Hendel. She tells him that Hendel is a weirdo. He appears to be the kind of boy who can look at her and see everything she doesn’t want him to know.
Perel conceived her only child while she was in Afghanistan, three years before she met Avner, when she directed a medical clinic in an FOB near Kandahar, through an excess of sympathy for a young guy from Indiana. The soldier wasn’t even eighteen. He’d been blown into several large pieces before he could get married, before he could even walk into a bar and get a beer. He’d cried and cried in the emergency tent when he thought he was bleeding to death, saying that his death would kill his mother too, that there was no-one to carry on the family name. He hadn’t died just then. It had been later, after Perel got pregnant, that a box containing five hundred Ken dolls wearing fatigues had fallen out of a military helicopter and hit him on the head as he lay outside the hospital, getting some fresh air. Perel’s little boy is all that’s left of the Indiana man-child-soldier now and she wants the world to be whole for him, beautiful and shiny and fresh in a way that it isn’t really but that she wishes it were.
Hendel doesn’t know all of this; he just knows that Perel throws frying pans when she smells burning meat and that she is ultra-protective of the spoiled stepbrother. He thinks of Perel as the Evil Stepmother, and spends many evenings telling his mother exaggerated horror stories about Perel’s bingeing on macarons from Paris, her obsession with bikini waxing, the irritating side hugs she gives him as he passes.
Their villa is the second last in a line of five, perched on the edge of Monte Spranga, at about five hundred metres above the Mediterranean, which they can see on a clear day.
Most of the village is empty – it’s too early for tourists – except for an elderly Englishman, Basil, who makes marble sculptures in the old Etruscan tower, and a young Scotsman, Rupert, who has been planting the huge terracotta pots with flowers for the season.
Perel hasn’t looked twice at Rupert. Once was enough to know that he was exactly the kind of man she finds attractive, the kind of man the Indiana soldier had been before his arms and leg came off, and since she is now travelling with Avner and Avner’s two youngest children, since she is a married woman, she avoids Rupert’s stares and silently grits her teeth when he whistles underneath her window as he beds geraniums.
When it stops raining, about an hour before nightfall, Perel ventures outside wearing her oldest yoga pants and a thin wife-beater, not wanting to provoke anything, but, sensing Rupert’s eyes brushing her bra-less chest, she stiffens. Every time she gets a half glimpse of him he seems to be smirking, and this fills her with shame and frustration. She is sure he sees her as a gold-digger, a woman who wants trips to Italy and pedicures and new cars instead of a satisfying job and a real relationship and children who love her. She wants him to know that she sacrificed her medical career to give someone the last wish of his life. She wants him to know that she is still sending charity to the people of Afghanistan, to their women’s clinics. When she sees Rupert looking weedy Avner up and down, she imagines that the gardener somehow knows she is thinking about the Indiana soldier when she comes.
She wants, desperately, to give Rupert the finger, but since she is supposed to be taking Hendel and Grunie to see the pool now that it’s stopped raining, she takes their hands instead. Her middle fingers, the ones she wanted to flash at Rupert, feel smothered in the palms of the children.
In the tower, Basil is throwing clay out of the window and yelling. He’s tried for years to live up to the reputation of the sculptor who restored the village but has, so far, only made a series of marble cubes that now dot the long grass, looking like dice that have been run over with tanks. Each night, he and Rupert repair to the village of Agliano to eat pizza and drink beer and whine about the bad manners of the Americans. Occasionally they are joined by Lara, the villa’s cook, who has been ousted from her job temporarily since the Americans are Jews who keep kosher; who prepare their own food even when they are on holiday, even though their meals smell, to Lara, like cat food. Lara is desired neither by Basil, who has not had the urge in over a decade, nor by Rupert, who desires Perel and has told them so, repeatedly. ‘Have you seen her legs?’ he asks them, whistling. ‘I’d take them fried, on a pizza.’
‘Can I go and talk to Rachel and Julia?’ Hendel asks Perel as he dodges a piece of flying clay on the way to the pool. He only wants to search the owners’ home for his stuffed otter, which has been misplaced since the first day of the trip, but Perel is afraid he will ask the eighty-year-old women, again, if they are married and if they have children and would they adopt a little American boy if only for a week and how would pregnancy work for them since they are two women and they don’t produce seed. When the two elderly Italians heard the serious little boy say ‘seed’ they both blushed. Perel cannot understand why they don’t ban Hendel from their villa. Under the circumstances, she would.
3.
When Perel and the chi
ldren return, after frowning at the mould-clogged pool, an hour before sunset, Hendel asks again if he can go for a real walk. All day he has been mapping the villa. The place is filled with hard edges. Thirteen stone steps down from his father’s bedroom to the living room, three more steps down from there to the bathroom with its low ceiling, adequate for Hendel but causing Avner to stoop. A step up to the bath and two steps up to the toilet where even he, nine years old, can hit his head on the heavy chestnut beams if he forgets and stands up quickly.
Beyond the bathroom, another two stone steps down to Hendel and Grunie’s room. A leather pillow has been nailed to the lintel, presumably because taller people smack their heads on the stone when they go down into the room. Seventeen stone steps down from the living room to the dining room and another four tiny steps down to the kitchen, which must, in former times, have been the cow byre. Forty-seven steep and uneven stone steps down to the main road, a road that is barely wide enough for human beings. Their car is parked two kilometres down the track, near the entrance to La Via Francigena, the Pilgrim’s Way.
Before leaving the United States, Hendel stepped on a nail. He didn’t tell anyone until they were on the plane and then only because he couldn’t get his shoe back on. His stepmother, Perel, had been a nurse in Afghanistan and Rwanda, places where people did horrifying things to each other, and she told Avner they didn’t need to waste a day of their trip stuck in an emergency room, getting billed through the nose for a tetanus shot. She could handle it. So each night she reopened Hendel’s wound by poking it with a just-extinguished match. It’s the one fortunate thing about all this rain, Perel thinks, because otherwise Avner might have to carry the little hypochondriac all over Florence. I can’t believe she is really a nurse, Hendel thinks. She would have been perfect in Auschwitz. Hendel has affected a limp and a series of grimaces so they can’t forget his injury. The people Perel worked with in Afghanistan never complained when she performed this procedure with the match on them, in the absence of vaccinations. They brought her presents and kissed her like they meant it.
‘Please may I go?’ Hendel asks again, and Perel, annoyed at the wasted day, snaps, ‘Yes. If you go with your sister.’ Perhaps now, with the children out from under her feet and Avner asleep, she can get some colour on the upstairs porch. Before the children are even out the door, she has forgotten about them. Below her, just visible, is Rupert, pulling up wild garlic.
Down at the car park, Hendel steps between two houses and beckons to Grunie. ‘It’s this way,’ he says, though how he knows, she’s not sure. The path is very narrow, and at this hour, seven, it’s abandoned except for an old man admiring his peonies.
‘Sera,’ he says, straightening.
‘È sera,’ says Hendel, serious as always.
‘Sì.’ The man smiles, though whether at the boy’s Italian, or at the child’s observation that it is, indeed, evening, it is hard to say.
‘Come si dice?’ asks Hendel, pointing to a purple flower growing out of the stone wall. The old man shrugs. ‘Margherita,’ he says.
Hendel repeats the word after him, takes a few more steps and then asks again, ‘Come si dice?’ This time it’s a tall hedge of rosemary.
‘Rosmarino,’ says the man. He smiles, wishing his own grandsons showed some interest in plant life. Instead, they are off chasing tail in Camaiore. He continues walking with the boy and Grunie trails behind, resentful that she can’t understand what they are talking about and angry that no-one forced her to learn a few words in Italian before she came here.
‘Recinto,’ says the man. ‘Felci … olivi … clematis … violetta … castagne … papavero … lauro.’ In his twenties Hendel will leave Judaism and study marine biology in San Luis Obispo and Woods Hole. He’ll never forget the stuffed otter he lost in Italy or the old man who named the plants for him. He’ll call chestnuts castagne his whole life.
When the old man pulls down a branch so that Hendel can pick some kind of citrus that looks vaguely like an orange, Hendel won’t mention the sharp thorn that drives down under his nail, all the way to the cuticle. It won’t feel right to him, to ruin the nameless feeling that has sprung up between him and the Italian. The old man will think, from the boy’s tears, that Hendel is strangely moved by his gesture with the fruit, and he’ll say words excusing himself that Hendel won’t understand and then the Italian will walk back the way they came.
The track, though, is clearly marked with small lime arrows that have been painted on the stone walls, so Hendel and Grunie continue their walk. ‘Look,’ says Grunie, who is in front. ‘The clouds are falling down the mountain.’ The path has begun to rise steeply between two high earthen walls, covered in ferns and wild flowers and grass. It is no longer stone underfoot, but a slippery wet clay, ridged with pebbles and branches, and now, instead of being wide enough for a person, the path is only just wide enough for Hendel’s sneaker. A large woodpecker flies overhead. It’s a bird Hendel knows, but he doesn’t call out its Latin name as he usually does, because the hole in his foot is hurting again.
When Hendel had opened the shutters that morning and stood there on one foot, taking in, between the falling clouds, slivers of the spectacular view down to the valley and across to Pedona and the Mediterranean Sea, he’d heard a chit chit chit. It was a swallow building a nest in the gutter just above the window. Hirundo rustica. Seeing him, the bird hovered at the open window, less than twenty centimetres away from Hendel’s face, in a way that he had previously associated with hummingbirds. It cocked its head to look at him with each eye. Opening its beak, it said again, chit chit. Then it flew away. In all that time, Hendel had been drinking in the details of the swallow’s chest feathers, the delicately spread tail, the talons clenched into its belly, its glossy blue-black head and gleaming white-rimmed eyes. What the bird had decided about him, Hendel didn’t know. He couldn’t decide anything about himself either. In its strangeness, the bird, la rondine, had seemed like a sign, something talking to him from his grown-up life, but Hendel hadn’t yet learnt the language. The bird remained a bird.
Now Grunie and Hendel come over a rise and the path widens out a little before entering a wood. Hendel is limping, and because of the faint sounds Hendel makes with each step, Grunie begins to think it may be a real limp. Between the trees it is very dark, and both children think of their mother, at home in New Haven, writing in the bathtub at night, and they wish she were with them. Hendel, because he is fair-minded, tries also to wish that Perel were with them. To the right there is a ravine, perhaps a hundred metres deep, and to the left, a series of crumbling caves cut back into the mountain, each of which exhales dank unhappiness.
‘I’m going back,’ says Grunie suddenly. She doesn’t say, ‘This is creepy,’ because Hendel is younger than she is and might be scared, but she wants to. When she said goodbye, back in New Haven, her mother whispered in her ear, ‘Please watch out for Hendel,’ and Grunie takes this responsibility seriously. Her father sometimes dislikes Hendel, and Perel is afraid of him. It’s up to Grunie to do all the loving while they are in Italy.
‘Okay,’ says Hendel, and he turns back, just as it begins to rain again. The visibility drops. Grunie, leading, is no longer sure they are on the path, but she is unwilling to admit to this. She is watching out for Hendel.
After ten minutes of walking in silence though, they find themselves on the steeply descending narrow path they remember. They drop between the high green walls, only this time, instead of walking on slippery clay, there is a cascade of muddy water flooding down the bottom of the gully. Hendel and Grunie stop. There does not appear to be any other way off the mountain, the water in the gully is already knee deep and the rain is heavier. The last rays of the sun illuminate the blades of grass at the tops of the walls and, despite the noise of the water, Grunie can hear Hendel’s quick breaths, full of pain from his foot.
‘Damn,’ she says, before remembering that she is responsible for Hendel’s moral education too. ‘Darn it.’
Hendel pushes past her, oblivious to her concerns, and puts his sore foot into the stream. ‘The water’s cold,’ he sighs. ‘But not too strong.’ ‘Come back,’ Grunie says. Hendel’s feet fall into the stream, plop plop. Grunie is now alone at the top of the path. She looks up to check whether she can see their villa, or the tower where the madman is throwing clay, or even their mountain but the clouds have closed in again. Looking down, she realises she can no longer see her brother either.
‘Hendel?’ she calls into the swirling greyness.
‘I’m fine,’ he calls back. Despite the rushing water and the fog and his pain, he speaks with the same calm, slightly distant voice he always uses. He might as well be saying that they have chicken for dinner. ‘Come down. The water is safe.’
She expects Hendel to return for her, but when he doesn’t, she puts one foot into the water. Her flimsy sandals are useless now. Inwardly she curses Perel, who would not let her buy Doc Martins. Let Perel, who wanted men like Rupert to look at her, wear strappy sandals. She, Grunie, was a practical sort who needed shit-kicking boots.
She no longer notices the flowers sprouting from the walls of the track. In silence, she picks her way down, one hand on the muddy bank to support herself. The water is thigh high now, pushing hard against the backs of her legs. Small twigs are tangling in a dam behind her when she hears a splash above the din and then a yelp.
‘Hendel,’ she says softly. She has always imagined that he will die by drowning. As a newborn he could float on his back without any support, and their mother would sometimes leave him for a few seconds, to grab the soap. Now Grunie is frozen, the way she was frozen the first time Perel threw a frying pan at their father. She feels drugged, although she will have no idea what that really means until she travels to Israel in her late teens and smokes pot with some friends. Her reactions are slow and her limbs are numb, whether from the cold water and the rain or from fear, she isn’t sure.
The Best Australian Stories 2015 Page 2