And how could he recognize her? She was seventeen when he saw her last and today she is forty-five, almost thirty years have passed. Before the injury, she maintained her youthful appearance—long hair and slender body despite the births—but after the explosion, when her hair had almost gone up in flames, she cut it quite short and in no particular style. Her no longer active body widened, to her dismay, but she is too busy to spend time on her appearance, and he sees before him now a woman who is no longer young, her hair graying and neglected, her heavy, scarred pelvis exposed to above her groin. Will he recognize the two beauty marks on the left side of her navel which, together, create an astronomical trio? The sun, the moon, and the earth, he used to call them, and she thinks that they are the only detail of her physical appearance that hasn’t changed over the years. His appearance has also changed radically, she honestly didn’t recognize him at all under that cloak of hair, not even the blue eyes, which are slightly darker against the background of the grayness of his cheeks. But her body suddenly begins to tremble uncontrollably and Mickey asks, “Are you cold?” He immediately covers her with a sheet patterned with a Star of David, as if he is deliberately hiding the sun, the moon, and the earth, and she looks at him hostilely, forgetting how happy she was to lean on his arm only a few minutes earlier.
Why didn’t she come without him? How will she reintroduce herself to her first love with him there? Or is it better this way, to cover the identifying marks, to avoid eye contact? He certainly doesn’t recognize her, she changed her surname, she looks different, and anyway, it’s the x-rays he is studying so carefully, not the actual person, in the way of all senior physicians. If she doesn’t identify herself, he won’t recognize her, and she won’t identify herself because Mickey is beside her and because she isn’t prepared for this meeting. She steals glances at him, pulling the sheet up almost to her eyes, maybe it isn’t him at all, maybe he merely looks like Eitan, or more precisely, the way Eitan might look today.
He appears older than his age, maybe this isn’t him at all. It isn’t probable that Eitan would become a doctor because like her, he was much more interested in literature than science, and unlike her, he wasn’t at all a good student. Nonetheless her body insists it’s him, and she watches him breathlessly, hears him explain to the young doctor as if he is the patient and not she, that he believes this to be a case of damaged nerves that didn’t heal properly and are transmitting pain to the brain even when there is no problem in the tissues.
“Send her for a pelvic ultrasound,” he says, “though I don’t think they’ll find anything. Give her the minimum dose of painkillers for the time being and set up an appointment with her in a month. There is sometimes a delay in nerve pain, so let’s hope it passes just as abruptly as it appeared.” Leaving his diagnosis behind, he walks out of the room quickly without even glancing at her.
“What does that mean?” Mickey asks just as she asks, “Who is that?” and the young doctor looks at them dubiously, like a boy embarrassed by his dimwitted parents.
“That’s the unit chief, Dr. Rosen,” he says.
“Did his name used to be Rosenfeld?” she asks at the same time that Mickey asks, “So the pain isn’t real?” His question drowns out hers, the doctor can’t hear it and she can’t hear his answers in the extreme agitation in the room, which they all feel in some way and are unable to shake off.
“So it turns out that the pain is a defense mechanism.” Mickey repeats the doctor’s explanation as they drive up the hilly road. “The nervous system produces the pain to warn you that something is wrong with the tissues, but when it’s damaged, it’s like a smoke alarm that keeps on beeping even after the fire is out. Do you get the picture? It’s absolutely fascinating! He says that sometimes, it’s actually the healing process that causes the problem. The damaged nerve that heals and comes back to life begins to transmit distress. It’s called post-traumatic pain.”
“I’m glad you find it so exciting,” she says, “because I find it depressing.” She fixes her glance on the window, and the sickeningly familiar scenery looks suddenly new because Eitan sees that tree every morning, because he takes this bend in the road. She wants so much to be back there that she can barely keep herself from saying to Mickey, Take me back to the hospital, drop me off and drive away, or alternatively, from opening the car door while it’s still moving and getting out without saying anything. In that brief, wordless meeting, her life had appeared to her as a worn-out body, scarred and useless. She hasn’t recovered and never will, she has only been pretending for thirty years. Maybe the time has come to give up, today, after seeing him again, and that meeting filled her with dread, as if she were seeing the terrorist who had exploded the bomb on the bus. When that happens, you can either cling to life with all your strength or give up on it, there is no middle way, so she will open the door and let her pain-wracked body fall onto the side of the road. Cars will pass her, and maybe on his way home to the family he must certainly have, he will pass her too and not stop. After all, she reminds him of that terrible year, of his sick mother, which is why he ran away from her then. But now he has returned and dedicated his life to illness by becoming a doctor, he has returned to the same place he fled as a young man, though not to her.
Did he search for her, did he ever try to find her? It’s so much easier to locate people today than it was twenty or thirty years ago, but if he really wanted to, he would have succeeded. Probably he eventually married a woman he loved who didn’t remind him of the wretched young man he had been, and with her, he ultimately returned to the world of the sick not as a powerless orphan, but rather as someone who could help, and by doing so heal himself. And what about her? Has she been given the chance to find the light in a sea of darkness, to turn weakness into strength, anguish into achievement? Has she given herself that chance? On the surface, it seems as if she has, her mother often praised her for that over the first few years. In fact, until recently and on less appropriate occasions, of course, she had said, “I thought that dreadful boy had ruined your life. I didn’t think you’d ever have a family or a career. Do you have any idea what became of him?” She spoke with complete disregard for her daughter’s clear aversion to the subject, and Iris would reply coldly, “I have no interest in knowing. I’m not in contact with anyone from those years.” But her mother would reproach her, “How could you not? You had such good friends. What about Dina, or Ella?” and then she would say again, “I have no idea, Mother. Why do you care so much?”
Of course, she knows that her mother was making a valiant effort to keep her daughter’s youth fresh because that was when she’d still had a share in her life, and she seemed to remember it better than Iris herself did—her girlfriends who slept over, her girlfriends’ parents, her teachers at school. She loved to remind her of significant events, mostly embarrassing trivialities, loved to describe enthusiastically her random encounters with one girlfriend or another, taking a crumpled bit of paper from her bag with a phone number on it that she’d gotten for her. “Na’ama would be really happy if you called. I gave her your number too,” she’d say with pleasure, even though Iris had asked her over and over again not to force her to hear voices from the past.
Thinking about it now, as they are nearing home, she can’t help gloating over the fact that her mother’s brain is withering away quickly and she can no longer set such traps for her. Nonetheless, she feels an urgent need to tell her, even if she won’t understand: I saw him, Mother, I saw what became of him. So when Mickey turns off the engine in the building parking area, she says, “You know what, since I’m already in the car, I should drive over to see my mother. I haven’t been there for two weeks.”
“You’re sure you can drive?” he asks, as surprised as if she has been resurrected, and quickly offers, “I’ll go with you,” and restarts the car. But he would be superfluous there—to speak privately with her mother, to return to being a teenager with a secret she will tel
l only to her mother, that is what she wants, even if she can no longer understand what is being said to her.
“No, it’s all right,” she says, getting out of the car and walking around it, slowly and resolutely, leaning on the hot metal for support, until she’s standing at his door. He gets out, the familiar complaining expression on his face: I’ll never understand you, and alongside it, a look of relief: You’re yourself again, it’s a good thing we didn’t make an appointment with that specialist and pay that outrageous fee. But that’s what she does a second or two later as he is disappearing in the elevator—she calls the hospital and tries to arrange an appointment for the beginning of next month, a private appointment, at an obscenely high price, with the unit chief, Dr. Eitan Rosen.
“Dr. Rosen no longer accepts new patients,” the receptionist informs her in a metallic voice, and she hears herself say, “I’m not a new patient. I was his first patient, actually his second, after his mother.” The receptionist ignores that bit of intimate information and asks, “What’s your ID number? You’re not in our files.” And she persists, “He examined me an hour ago, your computer hasn’t been updated.” But after the receptionist is convinced, she herself begins to feel uncertain, she won’t go back there at the beginning of the month, she won’t ever go back there. She is no longer a teenager in love, she is a busy woman with a full life, almost too full, her cell phone is overflowing with messages, her mailbox is flooded with emails she doesn’t even have time to read, hundreds of people await her recovery, her decisions, her solutions to various problems that have arisen. Tonight she will take the strong pills prescribed for her and return to running her life without looking back. The fire has long since gone out, even if the smoke alarm continues to buzz.
Once again, she is surprised when a man opens her mother’s door, the door to the house a man hasn’t set foot in since her father died in the Yom Kippur War. This is the house of a woman who has avoided every attempt to find a replacement for her deceased husband, and not because of her great love for him or the depth of her loyalty to his memory, but rather out of an existential anger and profound contempt for what life offers. And now, at the end of her days, she is forced to share her life with a man she would never have deigned to look at—short and smiling, a sagging potbelly, fleshy lips under his black mustache, and when they open to speak, appallingly ungrammatical sentences emerge in both Hebrew and English. She wonders once again how her mother, who always used precise, elevated language and never ceased correcting them even after they were grown up, has become accustomed to the way he speaks.
We finally found you a match, Mother, she thinks as she stands in front of him. You were so picky, no one was right for you after Dad, who wasn’t really right for you either—your list of complaints against him expanded after his death. Perhaps this is our bittersweet revenge on you for being so stubborn and proud. But on the other hand, she reminds herself, they brought one female caregiver after another and her mother threw them out of the house one after the other until one of her brothers suggested that they try a male caregiver. To their surprise, that seemingly hopeless idea turned out to be the perfect solution, because their mother became attached to the kindhearted, devoted Parshant in a way she had never become attached to anyone else.
“Oh, your mama said you not come!” he says as she enters. “Now mama happy, Iris come!” He is using the masculine form of the verbs and she can’t help making the necessary corrections, saying, “Mother is a woman, not a man.” But she thinks there may be some truth in what he says because, as they near her mother, who is sitting in the living room in front of the TV, which is showing a muted Indian film, she thinks that she might easily be mistaken for a man, with her short white hair, her gaunt body, her flat chest. She has always been slightly masculine, and now, in her old age, when the differences are blurred in any case, the masculinity has triumphed over the femininity. And what about me, she thinks, catching a glimpse of herself in the hallway mirror? He also uses the masculine form when addressing me. Her pale reflection looks at her with dissatisfaction—years of neglect have left their mark, but it isn’t too late, she can still grow her hair, color it, lose weight, wear makeup, emphasize the light-colored, wide eyes she inherited from her father, which are so different from the small brown ones fixed on her now.
“Welcome to my home!” her mother says loudly.
“I’m delighted to be here,” she replies, once again embarrassed to hear her mother speak to her in the formal language she always reserved for strangers.
“Do come in, sit down! How many years has it been since we’ve seen each other? How are things with all of you? Are you still in America? Have you come back home for a visit?” She showers her daughter with eager questions, and Iris looks at her hopelessly, trying to identify the character she is playing in her mother’s imagination this time. Sometimes she is willing to accept the role her mother assigns her, avoiding corrections that would be received with ridicule in any case, in the hope that she can clarify the mysteries of the old woman’s inner world.
But now, this afternoon, she longs to be her daughter Iris, sharing with her the memory of a dark time, and so she protests firmly, “Enough Mother, we don’t live in America, we live in Jerusalem, not far from you, and we saw each other two weeks ago. Listen, Mother, I have to tell you something! You won’t believe who I saw today.”
Her mother suddenly bursts into laughter and says, “You won’t believe who I saw!” Then she gestures for Iris to come closer as if she wants to share a secret with her. “I saw Parshant, and he proposed to me again! What do you say about that?” She chuckles smugly and quotes Sarah from the Bible, “Now that I am old, I shall have pleasure.”
“Congratulations, well done!” Iris sighs, staring distractedly at the Indian movie, which also appears to be showing a festive marriage proposal. What distortions lie in wait for us at the end of our lives!
Not long ago, during a rare moment of lucidity, her mother had said to her, “You all left me, and the empty space was filled by strange creatures. They felt the vacuum around me and pushed their way in,” and she said, “We didn’t leave you, Mom, we only left the house. That’s the way of the world. Listen, Alma isn’t living at home anymore either.” Remembering Alma now, she again feels the familiar waves of concern. Yes, Alma left the house and is making her own way in the world. What sights does she see there? She tells them so little, and it’s convenient for them to believe that if she doesn’t get in touch, it means that everything is fine, the important thing is that she’s happy, she tries to believe, more important than her relationship with us. But is she happy? Is that what her silence means?
She herself never dared to cut herself off from her mother so openly, even if she had profound misgivings. A parental child, that’s what it’s called nowadays. A poor child, that’s what it was called then, a child whose father was killed when she was four and she had to help her mother raise the twins born after his death. Today, many women raise their children without a father and do it so naturally that men seem to have become a burden, that’s how greatly their status has declined. But back then, the father was the knight who protected the family, he was the rock, the foundation, and a family without a father was like a house without a door.
She remembers how much pleasure she took in the word “Daddy” after she gave birth to Alma. “Daddy’s coming soon,” she would promise the baby girl who still understood nothing. Maybe that was why she was in such a hurry to get married and become pregnant, to savor raising a little girl who had a father, who wouldn’t be jealous of others the way she had been, who wouldn’t ask the electrician who came to repair a short circuit to teach her how to play chess. During those years, she thought that a father was all a little girl needed to be happy, but apparently she was wrong, because her little girl was tense and worried most of the time, even though she had a father, and only now that she is far away from both of them does she seem to be a bi
t more relaxed.
“Mother, listen to me for a minute,” she again asks the old woman, who is totally focused on some sensational events taking place on the TV screen—has a marriage promise been broken, why is the future bride crying so bitterly? But Iris won’t give up on her this time, there has to be a way to bring her back, if only for a moment, and if not to the present, then at least to the past. She moves closer to her, and a pungent odor rises from her skin, as if she had washed with bleach. “Mother, you won’t believe who I saw today!” she shouts into her ear, “Eitan Rosenfeld! You remember Eitan?”
“Of course I remember that dreadful boy,” her mother says with a snort of victory, abandoning the screen with surprising ease, “him and his dreadful mother! I saw her at the clinic recently. She bragged that he became a famous doctor and his wife was a doctor too and they had three children. But I didn’t let her act superior to me. I told her that my daughter was a school principal—do you know that my Iris is a principal already, or didn’t that news reach you in America?”
Pain Page 4