by Nomi Eve
Zohar realized that the reason the doctor had wanted him to come was to see that a child with deformed hands and feet could accomplish something. Could collect butterflies, and know many things about their spots and colors and the shapes of their wings. But later, when it became apparent that their own baby was not only physically deformed but also mentally afflicted, and catastrophically so, Zohar would think back to that visit. He would shut his eyes and see those butterflies, all one hundred and forty-two varieties of them—their brilliant, intricate wings in blues and magentas and yellows. He wondered if the doctor had known then that the baby’s condition was much more severe than a deformity of the toes and fingers. And he wondered if it was not the boy he had sent them to see, but the butterflies. Because there certainly was a similarity between the baby that had been born to Miriam in the hospital, and those beautiful creatures pinned to the wall, or kept waiting for death in a cage.
Zohar returned to the hospital. He looked at Miriam and she looked at him. Their gazes were made of grief. And though they were not a religious couple, the words on their lips turned to prayers. They named their son with a prayer, they called him a psalm, they asked every angel for an answer. They called him Gavriel. Gavri El, which means “God Will Help Him Overcome.” They held their baby and they took his tiny blunted hands in their own. Zohar thought about the trees this boy would never graft. Miriam thought about the way people would stare at his deformity. And when he slept, they slept too, while their eldest child, Eliezer, hovered around their bed, aware of strange shadows falling on the faces of his parents.
On the morning of the baby’s brit, Zohar walked into the orchard, the baby clutched to his chest, its face pressed into his shirt so as not to be scratched by leaves and branches. He walked deeper and deeper until he reached a clearing in between four trees where he stopped and lifted the child above his head. Gabi was so light. He didn’t weigh anything. Zohar pressed Gabi higher up, higher up still, and then he stood for several seconds. Gabi floated in the citrus air like some sort of opposite anchor, mooring them both in place by virtue of the absence of any heaviness at all. They stood there like this for what seemed ten thousand minutes but was really a single minute, stretched to full capacity. Finally, Zohar brought the tiny baby back down to the layer of leaves and trunks and branches. And then he brought himself down to the layer of roots and stones and worms. It was bitter here, and deathly dark, but at least in the dark he was comfortable. Zohar pressed the baby back into his chest, which was heaving with sobs, and together they came out of the orchard.
One night, when Gabi was several weeks old, Miriam went over everything in her mind. When the three children were finally all in bed, she lay down and went over the possibilities. The first was the most awful. The first possibility was that she herself had caused the ruin of this child. She did not know when exactly she had reached the decision or if she had ever really reached it at all. It was in her second month, before she had even started showing. She didn’t even know if she had reached it alone, or if Zohar had whispered, persuaded, persisted. She didn’t know. She couldn’t tell. The memory seemed to her in retrospect a mess of yesses and noes that her own mouth may or may not have uttered. She remembered feeling, as she had taken the envelope from the nurse’s hand, as if she were stepping out of one version of her life into another.
She had walked home slowly that day. Taking a circuitous route, around Amnon Tered’s orchard, past the bomb shelter, through the old chicken coops and then around again, around the back of the school where children were playing. And no matter how she had tried to make these moments last they resisted. She had reached home, and walked through the gate, and up the front walk, up the porch steps and into the house.
In the kitchen, she had paused for a moment. Then she had opened the envelope and examined the powder. It was white. Just white. Dipping a finger in, she had taken a tiny bit out and tasted it. But it didn’t taste like anything at all. For a few seconds she paused and tried to tell herself why she was doing this thing. But when she spoke to herself of rationing and shortages, and of not having nearly enough food to feed the two children they had already, she began to panic and forced herself to stop thinking. She got herself a glass of water, poured some of the white powder in, and mixed it up. Then she had stared at it for a couple more seconds before drinking it.
But the pregnancy had continued. The nurse at the clinic told her it must have been fake, the powder, flour probably, nothing dangerous. They had been tricked. Miriam knew that it hadn’t tasted like flour, and she tried to convince herself that the nothing she had tasted had been nothing indeed. Sometimes she believed it. Other times throughout the pregnancy, she felt a panicky fire flaming in her head, on the inside of her skull. And to be alone, to be quiet, was to feel that conflagration, the fear that she had indeed destroyed something.
Miriam was a smart woman. She did not blame herself completely for the darkness they now suffered. Intuitively, she knew that the nurse had not comforted her with empty words all those months ago and that there was indeed a strong possibility that the powder she had taken to abort the pregnancy had been harmless, a fake. The land was awash in pills and syrups and powders that were impotent. Miriam told herself over and over again that it was possible that Gabi was born the way he was born not through any fault of her own. The doctors had said that Gabi’s condition could very well be the result of a congenital abnormality in the family that had been previously hidden. She had taken some solace in these pronouncements—especially in the latter, and found herself repeating those final words, “previously hidden,” over and over again in her mind, like a totem to ward off the torture of self-blame and also to ward off the possibility that this “abnormality” could reappear again in a future generation.
And there were other possibilities, too. In her fourth month, Miriam had been stepping out of a bus from a visit to her parents in Petach Tikvah when the woman behind her had tripped, falling down the steps and straight into Miriam who had then fallen down to the ground. It was quite a fall. She had landed face down. Everyone had helped her up. She was okay, somewhat bruised, shaken up, but really okay. The small crowd that gathered didn’t quite believe her. The women especially. They wore expressions of great concern on their faces, for they could see she was pregnant.
Now, Miriam rose from bed and walked over to the crib where the baby was sleeping. She watched him while trying to locate the disaster in time and space. Though she couldn’t really remember what the woman who had fallen into her had looked like, now she imagined that she saw her face clearly. She gave her full lips and a big nose. Miriam shut her eyes and watched the woman falling over and over again down the bus steps and into her life with a bang and a crash that left no survivors.
I TELL:
No, I do not write to hurt her. I write to build a word-museum. In my museum there is a hall of images. They are arranged in a series of subtly shifting life-sized pictures so that if you view them all, you are viewing one completed action, like a flip-book. One series of images shows my grandmother, a young woman, throwing a stone. Her feet are planted firmly apart, and her right arm is raised over her shoulder. She holds in her hand a heavy round stone. In the distance, to the right are the tree and the babies, you can just see them. In the next image the arm, bent at the elbow, is even farther forward, and her whole body, taut, energized, wears the anticipation of the throw as if it were a garment. In the next image her fingers are open, the stone still in her hand. But by the next image she has let the stone fly. It explodes forward like a grenade and her body becomes the ricochet, reeling backward, but she doesn’t lose her balance. Then there are several stills of the stone flying through the air. A single image of the stone hitting the target, which is a clump of thistles to the left of a crumbly stone wall. Then, there is the final image. She stands with her hands on her hips, her face satisfied, proud of hitting the mark. Grandmother, I museum you and you museum me, for what is a family but a living hall of a loved
one’s many faces?
I WRITE:
When Gabi was several months old, it became apparent that not only were his hands and feet deformed but that there was something horribly wrong inside of his head. Miriam and Zohar had suspected this when he had first been born, but the doctors had assured them otherwise and had urged them to take him home and treat him like a “ normal baby.” But he wasn’t a normal baby. He was not alert like his older brothers had been. Especially not like Tomer, his senior by only eleven months. Tomer was a wild, precocious spark. By the time Gabi was six months old, Tomer, a year and a half, was already talking.
Gabi at six months couldn’t hold up his own head. He didn’t try to roll over. His eyes were always unfocused. Zohar and Miriam went back to the doctors and they ran tests and they ran more tests and all the while Miriam held the baby to her breast. As he suckled, she imagined that his soul had not come out of her womb. That it was still inside of her and that perhaps it would come out with her milk, into his lips, and flow like the Jordan River into the banks of his tiny body, which, though misshapen, was still pink and sweet and warm.
THE RIVER JORDAN
She would hold Gabi for hours as Eliezer learned to amuse himself. Tomer toddled wildly around the village, and the housework was left undone. Miriam would hold Gabi and rock him to sleep in her arms and daydream. Miriam knew that she was crying. She cried all the time now. While he was still asleep, Miriam set Gabi down in a bassinet in the little porch to the side of the house—the little porch was closed in with a concrete lattice. Often she would leave him there as she tried to get some housework done. She began to clean some potatoes for dinner, but the baby woke up almost immediately and she had to go to him.
Years passed. And the child heavied Miriam’s breasts and arms until she had no more breasts and no more arms and only the body of a spent woman who could not carry herself any longer in this way. Zohar, too, suffered. But his suffering was different. Miriam suffered from the heaviness of the child while Zohar suffered from his lightness. When they would walk with the baby through the village, he began to fear that Gabi would rise up. Rise up above the houses and the tops and the trees. He would take them with him. Not to heaven, but to a kind of floating hell. A hell of idiot angels whose eyes are empty and whose blessings are all for naught.
Nor did the earth seem much of a haven. Nor did the heavens seem to have much interest or influence in making good their lot. They lived in two tiny rooms in a concrete house. She cooked on a tiny primus stove and since there was never enough food to go around, she and her neighbor would share. Half a fish was a holiday. Two eggs for two families. If there was milk it was only for the children, of course. Bread, a piece now and then. A ration of coffee, sometimes some oil, some sugar. Meanwhile, the war was everywhere. It was in Miriam’s own hands as she reached up and threw the stone, its awful arc exploding phantom or not, against the target. The war was in Gabi’s eyes. When she took him from his crib in the morning she would try to get him to look at her. To focus on her face. But he just stared and stared, acknowledging neither her existence nor his own. And when she put him to bed at night she sometimes imagined that the war was being fought in his own little head. Even though it was clear to her that this was a battle long lost, she kissed his forehead anyway and tried with her mother’s lips to stop this one private field from raging.
Miriam bent down to kiss her sleeping older boys. First she went to Eliezer. This boy, she thought, has the face and countenance of a deer—a serene and dreamy animal whose camouflaged coat blends so perfectly with the desert that sometimes you didn’t even know he was there. She bent down and pressed her lips to the brow of her dreamy thoughtful older son. And then she turned to the other one, Tomer. His sleeping face was so different than his waking one. Asleep, he really was an angel. Miriam sat down by Tomer’s bed, and then leaned to kiss his smooth, cool, relaxed forehead. “Ma yeeye im Tomer?” she whispered. What will be with Tomer? Nightly she prayed that this one would make it out of childhood safely, not because he was sickly like Gabi, but because he was the exact opposite—he had almost too much life in him. He was always getting into such trouble. Although neither of them would ever admit it, both Zohar and Miriam were proud of Tomer’s wildness, proud of the life force fizzing and burning under his skin. Miriam shut her eyes and for a moment tried to feel her elder sons’ souls adorning the darkness. She mused, “If Eliezer is a deer, then this one is a wild zebra, his improbable stripes demanding attention, the pounding of his hooves dangerous, fast, and different.” She pressed her lips to Tomer’s brow and kept them there extra long, breathing him in.
Chapter 9
THE DOUBLE TREE
MY FATHER WRITES:
In the years leading up to the War of Independence in 1948 there were several groups of Jews in Palestine actively resisting British rule. One, which I have already mentioned, was the Haganah. Some of the groups were more militant than others, a difference that led to occasional flare-ups of internecine friction. There was a group called Etzel, which was particularly militant and claimed responsibility for many of the bombings and booby-trappings of that era. In May 1947, the British hanged two militant Jews from the resistance cell Etzel. In retaliation, Etzel kidnapped and threatened to execute two British soldiers. They kidnapped the soldiers from outside a pub in Netanya, the city near our home.
The incident with the British sergeants occurred when I was ten years old and it had a strange and dramatic effect on our family. First, when the sergeants were kidnapped, the British put our entire valley under curfew and then they cordoned us off and wouldn’t let us leave.
But what happened next was much more memorable. After a few weeks of holding the sergeants in a secret prison, Etzel hung them from a citrus tree in one of the local orchards. The night after the murders was my uncle Moshe’s wedding. He was marrying Dina Yisraeli, a local girl.
I WRITE:
In those days, all the guests came with food. The feast was prepared from rationed morsels by so many separate hands. The night of the wedding, Dina wore a lavender dress someone had brought her from England. She had lilies in her dark blond hair, and a pearl-inlay brooch above her left breast. Moshe stomped on the glass. Everybody yelled, Mazel Tov! and drank to the young couple’s health. Then the dancing began. Zohar, like a Middle Eastern Astaire on the dirt-packed dance floor, waltzed with Miriam and tangoed with the bride. Then he folded his arms across his barrel chest, squatted low to the earth, and kicked up his legs like a Cossack to the tune of Russian music that for several minutes made most of the guests forget they had ever emigrated.
Then the groom joined in. Moshe also squatted down low to the ground; the twins danced together, kicking up their legs with equal energy, both yelling Ha! Ha! Ha! as the crowd clapped and cheered them on. Next they stood face-to-face and wrapped their arms around each other’s shoulders. They began to spin and spin, their foreheads touching, their legs kicking back up in the air, spinning, spinning.
Then it happened. The dancing had ended. Moshe and Zohar were wiping the sweat off their foreheads. People were beginning to sit down. But before even one bite of the precious food was eaten, Amnon Avishai rushed into the party and stopped the festivities with a two-fingered whistle. His news was this: the British army was hunting through all the surrounding orchards for the corpses of the two British soldiers. Once the bodies were found, they would burn the closest village. The bodies were not in Shachar, but Amnon Avishai, who had a “contact” (though no one asked who) had heard that Etzel was going to try to move the bodies into an innocent orchard and in this way slough off the guilt and sure burden of retribution from their own people.
Not all weddings are consummated in the usual way, especially in times of war, when ordinary rituals unravel. What happened was that everybody, including the bride and groom, left the party immediately. The men stood all night long and deep into morning in a protective ring around Shachar’s orchards. Throughout the night the women took the uneate
n wedding feast and walked from man to man, feeding them. And so they warded off the sins of their own kind.
MY FATHER WRITES:
The kidnapping and execution of the British sergeants was an important event in the history of the emergence of the state. Etzel’s fearsome success was accomplished against a background of the disintegration of British rule. The hanging preceded the British pullout by almost exactly a year. It was all over the newspapers for weeks, and all anyone spoke about for a very long time. In our family, though, mention of the “two poor sergeants” was always a reference to Moshe and Dina’s strange but beautiful wedding.