by Nomi Eve
MY FATHER WRITES:
Yochanan Schine was a very forward-thinking man. Though he himself lived in the house on Rav Pinchas Street all of his life, in 1870 he built another house outside the city walls. This property, in the neighborhood of what is today called Nachlat Shiva, or “the settlement of the seven,” was in the tiny heart of the nascent Jewish community outside the walls. It was the first two-story building outside the Old City walls, and the eighth house ever to be built by Jews outside of the Old City. Yochanan maintained the house as a rental property.
I WRITE:
The house in the New City was a grand affair. It had six rooms—four on the first floor, two on the second. Yochanan only rented out five of them, leaving the smallest of the second-floor rooms for his own occasional use. This room was decorated sparsely but elegantly with a bed and a desk, a comfortable cushioned chair and an imported Egyptian rug woven with bright colors in an intricate geometric pattern that made everyone who ever looked at it a trifle dizzy. The rest of the house was rented to an Austrian musician of some renown. The musician was a kind man with a graying mustache and a prominent forehead that shaded his eyes and made it seem as if he were seeking shelter from the sun even when it was cloudy. The musician always greeted Yochanan warmly, but the two were of different temperaments and never really made much conversation. There was no separate entrance to the little room, and so Yochanan had to walk through the musician’s house, as it were, in order to reach his own space. But the musician never seemed to mind and respected Yochanan’s privacy whenever he was there.
Yochanan was a man of regular habits and could be counted upon to visit his house at three-thirty on Tuesday afternoons at the beginning of each month when his civic meeting convened in the New City to broach subjects pertaining to modern municipal business. On these days, in addition to his civic meeting, Yochanan would check on his business interests or visit a friend who had recently moved, or just peruse the growth of the new neighborhoods of which he was at once proud and suspicious. After he finished his business or his visiting, he would stop by the house for a short rest before starting back to the Old City and his house on Rav Pinchas Street.
During these “reposes,” as he liked to call them, he would sometimes drift off to sleep in his comfortable cushioned chair, or if he was very tired he would lie in the bed. As he slept he would dream that he actually lived in the New City and that he had always lived here and because of this, his entire life was several shades different. In these dreams he always saw his first wife, Esther, down in the parlor of this house. They would both of them be young in the dreams, younger than when Esther had died. Yochanan would approach her from behind and, as he reached the chair in which she was sitting, she would turn around and smile at him with her head half-tilted. He would put his hands on her shoulders and plant a kiss on her head. They would stay like this for a moment before Esther began telling him something mundane in an astonishing way or something astonishing mundanely. In the part of his sleeping soul that was conscious, Yochanan would note happily that Esther’s gift of creative speech had survived the journey to the Next World, and in the part of his sleeping soul that was truly sleeping Yochanan would delight in his first love’s lopsided diction, loving to hear her sidewinded stories again and again and again.
Yochanan never dreamed of Esther while he was lying in his bed in the house on Rav Pinchas Street. He only dreamed of her here, in this house she had never even seen. Of course, he thought it very strange that she should appear to him outside the geographic realm they had shared. But he never thought about this too long, and instead, as the years passed, and the dreams kept coming to him, he grew more and more grateful to this new house in the New City, grateful for the new dreams of his old life that it so kindly afforded him.
The first time Eliezer and Golda knocked on the musician’s door and asked to “rest” in their father’s room, the musician happily obliged. It was quite a long walk from the Old City and it made perfect sense that they should want to sit down for a while before starting back. But after they began to “rest” regularly in their father’s abode, it became clear to the musician exactly what kind of “repose” the “siblings” were up to. He was aware of the history of the family, and knew that the two were not blood-related. He would watch them ascend the steps to the little room. Golda always went up first. She was so light on her feet, it almost seemed to him that she flew to the high branches of the house while Eliezer followed after, his heavier steps more earthborn and mysterious.
At first the musician was not quite sure that he approved of the young couple using his house as the site of their illicit liaisons. He was the sort of musician who could hear whole symphonies in his head. He understood the intricate workings of the many different instruments and could hear notes speaking to each other from in between octaves and movements. He often heard his own life as a symphony—the different instrumental people he knew casually overlapping or reaching intense crescendos that filled his inner landscape with a constant music. His fingers were ever recreating this music on the strings of his own violin. And he had a talent for hearing other people’s life symphonies. A talent for hearing their secret songs. When they first started to use the little bedroom for their trysts, the musician could only hear Eliezer and Golda’s seventeen-year-old drums—taut, eager instruments beating with nubile passion that shook the stones of the house and made him somewhat uncomfortable. But as time passed and they kept coming to the house, he began to hear more deeply the true music of their connection. As they smiled hello to him, and then shyly made their way upstairs (Golda flying, Eliezer stepping hard on each step), he could hear the airy flutes, lutes, lyres, and harps of their love and he soon decided that their lust was natural and their attraction was as spiritual as it was sexual.
As they lay together on the little bed, Eliezer’s arms around Golda’s slight shoulders, the musician would serenade them from down below. And because he was a man who appreciated intrigue and had had his own grand and secret passion in his youth, the musician found that he played better, stronger, and with greater purpose when the young lovers were in his house. The pair grew used to embracing to the melody of the often quite naughty notes floating up the staircase and through the floor. They appreciated the beautiful music, and were also grateful that the sounds of their lovemaking were naturally muffled by the normal goings-on of the house that Yochanan had built in the New City. They would lie on the bed and Golda would lift her arms and open them up to embrace as much space as she could while saying, “This is our enchanted castle,” and Eliezer would believe her. She would take in the whole room with a hungry, happy gaze and say, “We are the keepers of this magic chamber,” and then she would bend over him and make him raise his neck and as he shut his eyes she would kiss him on the sensitive skin of his throat, saying, “Here are the keys we need to lock the door. Here are the spells we need to become invisible.” But this last thought would make both of them somewhat sad, because their love was so visible to them that it hurt to have to hide it from their parents and from the rest of the world. And yet they also craved invisibility, needed to be not seen, needed to hide, needed no one to really know who they were, who they had become together. Eliezer would say, “Tell me more about the castle.” And she would point to the walls of the little room and say, “The walls of the castle are as thick as a full-grown man is tall. And the castle is surrounded by a moat in which there are alligators and sharks always swimming.” He would say, “Alligators?” And she would say, “Yes, but we are safe inside the castle. We are invisible here, safe behind these walls.”
No, Yochanan did not come too often to the Beit Hachadash, the New House, as he called it. No more than once a month. And whenever he returned to his real house, he always felt somewhat guilty as he kissed his second wife, and he always avoided her for most of that evening—for he greatly feared that she, this new wife, who was dear to him too, could somehow tell that he had been keeping company with a beloved ghos
t who lived inexplicably outside the walls of their neighborhood. He did not want to hurt Ruchama, and yet he could not resist his New City naps, his unearthly Esther dreams. In the dream he sometimes reached out and touched Esther on her breasts, rubbing his palms against her hardening nipples, and she would look at him with delight and desire, but most of all with surprise—for in her lifetime he had never been so casual with their lovemaking, they had certainly never made love in the parlor, only in the bedroom with the lights out, the curtains drawn. He would rub her nipples and then take hold of her full breasts, squeezing them over and over again as she would pull him to her, her mouth wide open in a smile of such perfect pleasure, and he would fall over her, and then lift her up and place her gently on the Egyptian rug whose wild, puzzling pattern made them both dizzy, and in their dizziness they would consummate the dream with a passion of such tenderness and intensity that when Yochanan finally woke up alone in his little chamber he would often be sweaty, light-headed, blessedly shaken.
CASTLE
Sometimes, as he made his way back home from the New City, Yochanan would muse at how strange it was that as an old man—he was now almost sixty—he would find himself involved in perpetrating a betrayal against his own, very-much-living wife, Ruchama. He, Yochanan! He, who knew what it felt like to be on the other side of desire’s door, leaning heavily against a love that had locked him out and yet also queerly had included him. Yochanan was a deeply spiritual man, and even though Esther only came to him ethereally, he still felt as if he were cheating when he lay his hands on her dear shoulders, or bent down with passionately aching lips to kiss her on the top of her sweet curly head. He would walk more slowly when he had these thoughts. Or if he were in his carriage, he would sometimes forget to cluck and the horse would slow down to an almost-stop. Then Yochanan would suddenly come out of his thoughts and cluck the horse or begin walking again. And as he made his way home, passing through the Old City walls, crossing the Street of Death’s Angels, life would seem a very strange thing to him. Sometimes, in the house on Rav Pinchas Street he dreamed that the tiny New City was hovering just over the sprawling Old City and all the inhabitants of both domains were climbing onto their roofs and singing psalms in a language he could not recognize. Yes, it was all very odd, but over the years he had learned not to fear the strangeness at all.
They surreptitiously visited the musician’s house for many months. During this time Eliezer and Golda loved to pretend that the entire house was theirs and that they were a proper couple, husband and wife, living in it. After spending time alone in the little room they would venture outside and take long walks around the new neighborhood, commenting on the local style of architecture, their favorite subject being the subtle variations of color in the stones used in each dwelling. They made a game of trying to name the palette of a particular mountain from whence the stones had come. The house closest to theirs they called Ruby Rose of Sharon, the next one was Golden Gift, then Rainbow Glow, Angel’s Blush, and Laughing Sunrise for the stones of the house of the British adventuress with smoky blue eyes. But Yochanan’s new house they did not name. And when they were back in their little room and they shut their eyes and saw the stone in their heads they were both embarrassed and stunned by the beauty and intimacy of the color. The stones of the house that Yochanan built and that now surrounded them seemed like flesh to them.
Of course all the stones in the city were more similar than different, all of them golden and blushing in the Jerusalem sun. In the evening, Golda and Eliezer would walk toward a little well at the bottom of the small settlement where rose bushes grew wild. There they would smell the roses, rest for a bit, and then walk a little farther before leaving the New City and heading back for the house on Rav Pinchas Street where their parents were expecting them for dinner.
As they walked home, Eliezer would glance over at Golda and think. He knew that Golda was no regular sister. He knew that he was no proper brother, but they were bound together by these pale integument words while the other words—lover, beloved, husband, wife—floated out of reach. He knew and feared the prohibitions all too well, knew that as the daughter of his father’s wife, she was technically forbidden to him, that their union was considered incest. And yet, the part of him that prayed, prayed for her, and the part of him that blessed, blessed her, and the part of him that danced on Shabbat, danced for her and the part of him that believed in God, believed in a God of different dictionaries, a God of great wizardly books whose words leapt off the pages and dressed your life in the right syllables and stories, no matter who or what or how you were.
Later Eliezer went over it in his mind. How the door had opened quickly, without a sound. How Golda had been sitting up in the bed, naked. How she had first tried to cover her breasts, but then hesitated, and instead covered her face in her hands. How he had reached for her, and tried to cover her with his own body, and how they had been pulled apart, and how the faces of their father (his) and their mother (hers) had been so angry, but also at the same time full of love and sorrow and forgiveness. Ruchama had thrown a blanket around Golda and then hustled her out of the room. Yochanan had ordered his son to dress and then he had led him out of the house, nodding austerely at the musician who was standing just inside the front door, cradling his violin like a baby. The musician had not given them away. Yochanan himself had found his children out. He had grown suspicious one night after getting up for a drink of water and finding Golda’s door open, her bed empty. Soon after, he and Ruchama had followed them to the new house one afternoon. When they had appeared at the door the musician, who was really a good man and did not mean to betray anyone or anything, had confessed the truth. The musician confessed because the refrain of reality was already in Yochanan’s sad and wavering voice, and he could not bear to go against the score of such delicate and dangerous music.
Eliezer walked behind his father with his head down. They walked out of the little neighborhood and then got into an old carriage that was waiting for them by the rose bushes, by the well. Eliezer could not look at his father. Nor did Yochanan look at his son as he heaved himself up into the carriage. Eliezer focused on the horse’s rear, and watched its muscular undulations as it pulled them away from the house where he had so often lain with Golda. He had no idea what his father would do, and for a few minutes he feared that Yochanan would hit him, that he would just turn around in the seat and begin to pummel him with his fists that were speckled with age, the knuckles beginning to grow knobby. Eliezer clenched his gut in anticipation of defending himself—he would cover his head with his hands, he would crawl up in a little ball, he would become invisible. But Yochanan did no such thing, and instead he just drove them both through the various skeletal new neighborhoods without saying anything. When they finally entered the Old City walls and began making their way back to their own house, Yochanan turned to Eliezer and asked him, very simply, if his intentions toward Golda were honorable. Eliezer heard himself answer and saw his father nod, and then saw Yochanan nod again pensively, and then pull at his long beard before continuing once more toward home. They rode under the split half arch, down the Street of Death’s Angels, and then around to Rav Pinchas Street.
Inside, the house was quiet. But Eliezer could see from the coats in the hallway that his stepmother and Golda were there. He looked at the hallway, the coatrack, the fading painting from Sheinlanka hanging above the stairs, and then he looked at the floors, the ceiling, the walls, and that was when Eliezer realized that the walls of their house had always been hollow but that he had it all backward—the secret rooms were the ones they inhabited every day. And the other rooms, the hidden ones, were hidden not because they contained treasure but because they didn’t.
Nobody noticed that evening when Golda slipped out of the house, but soon they realized she was missing. Eliezer found her. He found her sitting on the ground in front of the city wall to the left of the Tower of David, just beside the Jaffa Gate. The Gate, having closed over an hour bef
ore, was quiet but for a trio of Turkish gendarmes playing some game with colored stones and a big red stick. When Eliezer came to her she lifted her arms and they held each other tightly in a way that was most improper for married couples out of the privacy of one’s bedroom, let alone for unmarried couples out on the streets. Eliezer nuzzled Golda’s head. She pressed her face into his chest. He held her so tightly, her spine, her hips, the small of her back. Her hands were just above his buttocks, holding him tightly in the small of his back. And as they stood there together, embracing, Eliezer had the strangest feeling. He felt that when he and Golda hugged like this someone else was there too. Putting its arms around their shoulders. Hugging them, and by hugging them, recognizing them, like they had recognized each other in their first conversation. Eliezer wondered if every couple had one of these—a secret spouse, cosmic and gentle, who fell in love with them at the same time they fell in love with each other. “This creature,” he mused, “is partner to our privacy. It comes when the soul wants witness.” Golda was breathing deeply. He could feel that she was shaking. After several minutes, Golda took herself out of his arms and walked away from him. Her eyes were dry, but very tired-looking. Her face was pale, her hair tousled. When she reached the wall she stopped. She lifted a hand and brushed its cool dusty surface. Then she leaned forward and pressed her forehead against the huge old white-gray wall stone, her fingers spread wide out on either side of her face. She stood there like that without speaking. And even though Eliezer was several feet away, he could feel the cool of the stone on her forehead, and he could feel the weight of the stone on her forehead, and he could feel all the world’s walls rising up, called by her evening voice, which was both lower and higher, sadder and happier than her voices of the day or night, to do the hard work of protection.