by Nomi Eve
MY FATHER WRITES:
Tomer and Sheila have three daughters—a pair of twin girls named Maayan and Zahava, who were born in 1972, and Vered, who was born in 1975. They built a house on my parents’ property and live in Shachar.
After twenty years of marriage, Rebecca and I were divorced in 1985. Three years later, I married my wife, Andrea Davis. Andrea works as a decorator for an interior design company. We have a daughter whom we named Zoe, after my father, Zohar. My father died on August 7, 1990. Zoe was born on November 5, 1994.
I TELL:
When I was a little girl going to day camp in Israel, once a summer our counselors would take us down into the village bomb shelter to watch Charlie Chaplin movies. There was no war on. It was always the hottest part of the summer and the bomb shelter was simply the coolest place with a movie screen. I made up a name for what took place underground. I called it “silence speaking.” The characters on the screen talked and talked, but they never really said anything. All their talking was just a ruse, a way of communicating nothing while everyone was busy trying to decipher something from faces and gestures of hands. The actors all “silence spoke,” saying much while telling nothing. For a long time I thought that my first experience with silence-speaking was down in that bomb shelter. But as time passed and the silences in my family’s house became more definite and deafening, I realized that it wasn’t.
Real silence-speaking is the kind that comes out of people’s mouths when they’ve got a secret stuck on the back of their tongues. I’m not sure if people silence-speak in order to drown the secret by covering it under so many other words, or if they silence-speak in order to dislodge the secret from the back of the tongue— using all the other words as elaborate levers and pulleys and in this way bring it to the front of the mouth, and then out into the open. Probably for both reasons. At least in our family it seems to me that this was true.
Part Six
Chapter 21
NOMI AND JEREMY
I TELL:
Now, my love, in order to graft our story onto the stories that came before, I choose the ayin method. The rootstock has already been planted. So I cut the eye in the sapling, careful not to damage the hump of precious embryonic cells. Next, I cut the T in the rootstock, open its lips, and slide our story into the mouth of the old story that grows from this soil and is hardy, and will bear fruit for many generations. Then I bind the wound with bandages and blessings. Finally, I shut my eyes, and imagine that before me is a full-grown tree.
I WRITE:
The night that Nomi saw Jeremy for the first time in four years was the night before Purim, two weeks after she had gone to see Gabi for the first time. Already the streets of Jerusalem were beginning to fill with people in costumes—downtown the midrachov was made merry by giant rabbits, astronauts, belly dancers, caricatures of political figures wearing brightly colored three-cornered hats. Nomi and Amanda hurried through the crowd, toward the dance hall, which was just behind the old cinema. They were late.
When they walked into the hall, she saw Jeremy immediately. He was turned sideways, his hair falling down into his eyes. He was talking to a man in a blue shirt. When she saw him, Nomi was shocked. He was across the room, in the middle of all the dancers. He didn’t see her. The hall was very crowded, But since Jeremy was so tall—the tallest man in the crowd—he stood out. The music was starting. The entire room was joining hands.
Nomi didn’t know a thing about Israeli dancing. She had never been able to get the hang of it. Her lack of any spatial sense whatsoever made all of the dances seem impossible to her. Any time she had tried to learn, growing up, she had found herself lost on the dance floor, as estranged from her own legs and feet as from the other dancers, whose grace and syncopation seemed to Nomi like some foreign language that her own body had no idea how to speak. But this night, Nomi had agreed to come. “Just watch,” Amanda had said. “Just watch, and maybe if you want, join in the beginners’ circle. People are nice, and patient. You’ll see.”
When they had walked in, Amanda had smiled at Nomi and then gone immediately to one of the inner circles. Nomi didn’t even take off her coat. She kept pressing herself back into the hallway wall, and then peeking around the doorway to catch glimpses of the man who had been her lover in college. She watched him dance, and even though she was filled with a sharp and panicked uncertainty—What would he say when he saw her? Was he seeing anyone now? What was he doing here? What would happen this time? Would they start again? Would they be able to get over their old end?—Nomi found herself smiling.
Jeremy danced with the same elegant physicality that had always marked all of his movements. He danced as if he had both the strength to lift the dance when it was heavy and the grace to hold it carefully with his whole body when it was light. Nomi pressed herself further back into the wall. She looked for Amanda and tried to catch her friend’s eyes, but Amanda was immersed in the dancing and didn’t see her. So Nomi, with a questioning kind of confidence, and a panicky kind of passion that was second cousin to the strongest kind of hope, shut her eyes and swayed to the lusty drumming music that was filling the whole room. When she opened her eyes again, the dancers were stamping their feet and raising their arms and arranging their bodies, it seemed to Nomi, into the geometric and yet organic forms of fields, birds, and flowers. Nomi kept her eyes open and tapped her own fingers in rhythm against the wall while holding on tight to the vision of the man in the middle of the room. She wondered what it would be like to dance with him, Jeremy Starr, this time around. She put her hands on her hips and then she arched her back and cracked it. The tiny cracks around her spine felt so good. The music was softer now, the circles moving slower. Nomi tried to catch Jeremy’s eyes and then the same instant, just before he could see her, she ducked behind the wall and felt her face fill with blood, her body tingle with an electricity that almost hurt. Then she peeked out again. Jeremy was sweating, smiling, twirling, hopping, moving. He didn’t see her. Nomi kept watching him dance. And she knew then that even though she didn’t know the steps, and even though she doubted she could ever learn them, her body was aching to join the kinetic fray his body was a part of. She bit her lower lip.
Nomi watched the dances all night. It seemed to her as if the dancers were acting out part of the country’s history. They joined hands and plowed the fields with their footsteps and then their footsteps grew stronger, louder, harder, and they were shocking the land with their own rhythmic and absolute attempts to make the weapons with which to protect the same earth they danced on. Quiet. Breathing. Sweat wiped from the brow. Another dance. They gathered in two lines and hiked through the desert on gentle music as delicate as flowing sand and then the music became rowdier and less refined, but their hands were still clasped while their bodies seemed possessed of alternate energies. Then the dancers were no longer holding hands but were dancing alone, their arms up, their legs kicking, their faces glowing, as if they were an entire room full of King Davids, dancing before the ark of the covenant asking God with their bodies to bless the people and rain down centuries of glory on the earth.
Jeremy was dancing a couples’ dance with the pretty blond woman. Nomi had heard someone announce the dance, calling it Etz Harimon, the pomegranate tree, and she thought that it looked incredibly romantic. The couples were all turning and facing each other and then turning around and doing these little hops, but as their bodies were turning, they kept gazing back at each other and then hopping and turning to a complicated intense rhythm, all along keeping eye contact as they moved. Nomi couldn’t bear to watch. Jeremy’s partner was wearing a tight red shirt and jeans. When she danced she tilted her head to the right, and the other dancers seemed to look at her and Jeremy and take their lead.
Pressing her body back against the wall, Nomi was filled with memories of her time with Jeremy. She turned away, looked toward the door. They had been together for two years—the last two years of college. They had broken up for reasons that had little t
o do with who they were, and a lot to do with who they had both needed to become. Nomi knew that she in particular had had a lot of becoming to do. Four years’ worth, at least. She peeked her head around the corner and watched Jeremy finish Etz Harimon and then start another couples’ dance, with the same woman.
Nomi was filled with specific memories of their romance. She saw his hands buttering toast and placing it on the plate of the first breakfast they ever shared. She saw his curly hair submerged in water and then breaking the surface in the pool after they graduated from college. She saw the earring in his right ear, a little silver hoop. She saw, or rather, she felt him reaching for her in the middle of the night when they were both asleep and they had made love in darkness, the peace of their dreams borne aloft by passion. And they had reached for each other and then they reached for each other again and again and again. Nomi was breathing deeply. She felt as if the whole hall were filled with visions and potent icons of the time she and Jeremy had spent together. She wondered if these visions were their rootstock, and if they were, if perhaps in their own particular orchard, their roots had needed more than just a single year before they were ready for grafting. One year, two, three, four. You cut the top so that it will branch out. It will branch out.
Nomi breathed in deeply and even though the music in the room was playing loudly she couldn’t really hear it. She was floating in a bubble, the world sounded to her like it does underwater, her head was filled with an echoing cottony gurgle, and as she stared at the whirr of moving dancers she marveled that they could breathe in such an atmosphere, let alone dance in it. The dancers moved constantly and never seemed to tire. The various circles never seemed to stay the same and so there was a fluidity coursing through the room, dappling the dance floor with movement in every direction. Sometimes Jeremy, moving between circles, came dangerously close to Nomi’s hallway. When this happened, she walked to the other end of the hall, near the door, and stayed there until the dance was over. Jeremy continued to dance all of the couples’ dances with the tall blond woman. Nomi thought of the tools her father had shown her that were used in grafting: the grafting knife for cutting, the turia for digging, rafia for binding, and a good strong sealant to cover the scar. Nomi wondered if the tools her grandfather had used to make his garden grow were manifestations of the tools she had, over the past four years, painfully collected, or if perhaps the relationship between things went the other way. Were the tools that people needed just to be people modeled after the tools that gardeners regularly hold in their hands? A tool with which to dig, a saw with which to cut, a tool with which to perform elegant surgery revealing all that is embryonic underneath the surface, a bandage for the wound, a balm for the scar. Nomi watched Jeremy kick up his legs, he was in a line with other men, their arms were linked, and they were kicking up fast, faster. They kicked and then tapped, and then kicked and then turned, and then kicked again while moving their hips side to side, now looking straight ahead, now looking to the right, and then left. The music sounded eastern, Yemenite, the beat had a peppery intensity, and Nomi thought that Jeremy and the other men were so beautiful and sexy. They danced as if on top of the music, high up on the hard shiny shell of something simultaneously familiar and exotic. Nomi had suspected back then, and told herself now, that Jeremy had had the tools to love her properly when they were in college. And she suspected that even if he hadn’t had them, he would have persevered with whatever blunt or ill-suited instruments he did have in his possession. And with perseverance, he would have loved her long and well, perhaps forever. But she had turned away from him. And driven away from him with a fist in her belly not because she didn’t love him, but because of the bruising emptiness in her own soul and arms.
When they finally spoke it was for only a few minutes. They made plans to have coffee the next day at a cafe on the midrachov, in the center of town. When they greeted each other in the cafe it was awkward. They kissed, but it was a clumsy kiss, and when they sat down both of them were blushing.
That day, they began to get reacquainted. And they continued to get reacquainted for the better part of that year. They spent time together. Sitting in cafes, walking around the Old City, wandering through the streets and alleys of golden stone. They told each other everything. They talked for hours and hours, thirsty to know, hungry to confess all of the crowbar words and worries that had formerly, in their first incarnation, kept them apart. Looking back, Nomi knew that if she could have held those months in her hand they would weigh more than most of the other months of her life, not because of what they held, but because of the promise of all that they would deliver. They were patient and yet impatient. They were chaste. He was faithful to his girlfriend, even as his relationship with her was ending. What Nomi and Jeremy mostly did was talk, and talk, and talk. Now they found that they could say everything that they hadn’t been able to say before. And even though they were chaste, and even though they were only friends, each word they traded on those Jerusalem streets seemed to bind them more tightly together.
TOOLS
As the days went by the evenings began to grow cool and Nomi began more and more to ache to feel Jeremy’s arms around her. She would sit late at night at her desk writing, wearing thick wool socks and extra sweaters. It was so cold in her apartment, she dreaded getting into bed, the cold sheets never comforting. But as she looked up from her work and glanced across the room at her bed she had a sudden image of herself and Jeremy lying there, embracing. She knew that she would be warm with him there, beside her in bed. And she smiled, thinking of how she would kiss his neck, his ears, his cheeks and how in the middle of the night she would wake up and watch him sleeping, his sweet reassuring presence soothing the room so that by the time they both woke up the atmosphere in her apartment would be as soft as petals or cotton. But then the vision disappeared and she was left alone.
Jeremy was not with her, but with his girlfriend, on the other side of town, perhaps curled up in bed or sharing a late dinner. Nomi was alone, sitting at her desk with her pages, in which the characters she regularly created were also just incarnations. Visions of sorts. But she believed in them. Esther looking lopsidedly at the world out from under the brim of her big floppy hat; Golda and Eliezer illicitly embracing; Avra stealing precious pieces from an ancient mosaic; Nachum Sepher approaching the Russian draft board with an invisible pin stuck between his toes; Zohar and Moshe “attending” to the redheaded queen; Miriam, a beautiful little girl, sewing mischievous incantations into cloth; and, last of all, Nomi’s own father, Eliezer, in the orchard, trying with all of his might to conjure a golem from out of the ground by the mango tree. They were all real to her. Nomi rubbed her eyes and stretched her arms out and then pressed down hard on the keyboard, which made the table legs squeak. She bit her lips and told herself as she worked, that just as she believed in the existence of the people in her pages, so she also believed in the existence of the two lovers whom she had just seen lying happily entangled under crumpled covers on the bed. So she wrote herself toward them.
In the beginning of November Jeremy went back to the States for a month. He returned alone. His girlfriend was no longer his girlfriend. The day after he came back, Nomi and Jeremy went together to an observation tower in Jerusalem. Jeremy had never been there before. On the way, Nomi told him that the first time she had ever gone up into the tower she had realized that she had come upon a very important part of her own private theology—a midrash in stone, or maybe even a whole Torah jutting up out of the earth. The building was so beautiful, and the tower, with its bells and reliefs and golden stones, seemed to her like a kind of prayer.
They took the little elevator to the top and walked up a small stone flight of stairs and into the observation tower. The tower had four glass walls with four glass doors leading out to four stone ledges. On each ledge was an old bronze relief map nailed to the stone. The maps were of the city view seen from each of the four vantages. In between the ledges were statues of the Christian
apostles carved in Jerusalem stone. They walked out onto the eastern ledge, the one facing the Old City. It came up to Nomi’s chest. At first, she leaned into the ledge, and Jeremy put his arms around her body, resting his hands on her hips. Then she raised her hands to the map and he lifted his hands over hers. Together, they traced the raised buildings. The metal was cool, and they pressed hard on it so that the lines linking names to places indented themselves into Nomi’s fingers. David’s Tower, the Monastery of the Cross, the Post Office, Hebrew University, the Russian Compound. Reading out loud, they found the places signified on the map, and then they looked up and located the real places signified in the real city; a place that some people, over the centuries, have called only half-real but wholly representative of a mystical municipality of fire and air and heavenly water. The King David Hotel, the Valley of Jehoshaphat, Sultan’s Pool, the Valley of Gehinom, and in the distance, on top of everything else, they read the Dead Sea, a thin blue paragraph stretched atop the hazy tan pages of the Judean desert. They said the names out loud, and with outstretched arms and pointing fingers, they finally located themselves on top of the tower.