“What are you talking about? His mother died almost thirty years ago,” Iris protests in a weak voice. “You couldn’t have seen her!” Nonetheless, she seems to have met someone who knew Eitan, because at least one correct detail is buried in that mishmash, which means that other details might be accurate as well. Why shouldn’t he be married to a doctor, why shouldn’t he have three children, why shouldn’t he have forgotten her, erased her? What is the point of appearing before him with her scarred pelvis, with the pain caused by nerves that hadn’t healed properly? She’ll cancel the appointment or she just won’t show up and he’ll wait in vain, so at least his wallet will suffer. Maybe she’ll make an appointment every week and not show up, maybe she’ll even ask to be listed by her maiden name—that will arouse his curiosity—but will never show up. Or maybe, instead, she’ll go there every day, sit in the corridor among the waiting patients and tell them the real truth, tarnish his good name. “That doctor increases the amount of pain in the world,” she’ll whisper to them, “how does he dare to call himself a pain specialist?!” The rumor will spread quickly and the number of appointments will decrease until she is the only one waiting in the corridor when he opens the door, surprised that no one needs him. Then he’ll see her, his only patient, the last one left to him, and he’ll take her in his arms and heal her.
Her mother laughs defiantly once again, and as she moves her mouth closer, Iris can smell the pungent odor of disinfectant—does she brush her teeth with bleach? “Don’t tell my Iris,” she whispers, “no one knows about it, but that dreadful boy is still trying to find her! Can you believe it?” Now she begins to shout. “But I gave him a piece of my mind, I told him that if he tried to get in touch with her, he’d have me to deal with!”
Stunned, Iris listens to her, shakes her head, and mumbles, “You didn’t, Mother, you’re just saying that. You wouldn’t do such a thing to me.” But she quickly gets a grip on herself, and having no other choice, takes on the role of the guest from America. “Well done,” she praises her, “that’s the way a dreadful person like him should be treated! When was that?”
Her mother peers at her suspiciously. “Many years ago. Before Iris was married, he tried two or three times and then stopped. I think he went off to study where you live, in America. Did you happen to see him there?”
Iris shakes her head. No, I didn’t see him, I didn’t know, and I don’t know if I believe you now either, I don’t even know if I want to believe you. She puts her head in her hands as the dragon of pain begins to raise hell in her body once again.
“You cup tea?” Parshant says, bending over in front of her.
“I am not a cup of tea,” she replies angrily, but immediately apologizes. “Thank you Parshant, but it’s too hot for tea.”
He sits down beside her mother on the couch, puts his arm around her shoulders, and says, “Mama is good boy.” He pats her on the shoulder and adds, “Mama behave good.” Her mother giggles at him like an old baby. In her light-colored cotton pants and checked blouse, she lacks not only gender, but also age, and her fading awareness has transformed her into a much more frivolous and relaxed person than she had ever been.
“Parshant proposed to me and I accepted,” she announces, resting her head on the shoulder of her caregiver, who has not only a bulging potbelly but also the hint of a pair of breasts above it. “We’re going to Sri Lanka to get married, we’re sailing there on a ship!”
Iris averts her gaze hopelessly. Mom’s in love! Even that old dream has turned into a nightmare! Her mother has lost her sanity and won love, but first she drove away her daughter’s chance for love without even asking her, and now Iris insists on setting things straight. “Mother, Parshant has a wife and children in Sri Lanka,” she informs her with vengeful sweetness. “He’s not your fiancé, he takes care of you.”
Her mother shakes her head in shock, pales, and says, “That can’t be! He never told me he had a wife and children! Is it true? What my guest is saying, is it true? Get out of here right now, you charlatan! Deceiving a war widow!”
“Maybe mama salad?” Parshant scrambles to his feet and asks automatically, clearly unable to follow the conversation. “Maybe mama lentil soup?”
Iris closes her eyes. Her mother struggled to raise three children, none of whom take care of her, and now this stranger calls her “mama” as if he is her fourth child, gives her food and drink, while she is convinced that he is her fiancé. What distortions await us at the end of our lives! But now she is more concerned about the distortions of the beginning of life, and she almost pleads, “Mother, try to remember, are you sure he was looking for me? When exactly was it? How come you didn’t tell me?”
For a moment, the familiar, hard look jumps out at her. “You were pregnant with Alma. Alma’s your daughter’s name, right? You became pregnant right after the wedding, right? I couldn’t tell you, so you wouldn’t regret it, right?”
“Right,” Iris mutters distractedly, and immediately becomes skeptical once again. “But a minute ago you said it was before I got married.”
To her surprise, her mother’s withered lips smile broadly. “Right,” she says, her trembling hands reaching out for the bowl of soup Parshant hands her.
Iris shakes her head, it can’t be, either she’s fantasizing or she’s lying. She enjoys tormenting her, was always jealous of her father’s great love for her, and now old age lets it all show without defenses or restraint. The slow, heavy overhead fan squeaks, pushing blazing air from place to place through the tiny living room, hurling the conflicting words at her, words that sting like wasps. Her mother was also jealous of Eitan’s love for her, and especially envious of her devotion to his sick mother. “Why are you pushing yourself into their lives? Let him say goodbye alone. She’s his mother, not yours, thank God!” She commented on it at every opportunity, refusing to understand that it was through Eitan’s prolonged parting from his mother that Iris was trying to part from her own father, drafted at noon on Yom Kippur while she was taking the afternoon nap her mother was never willing to forgo. But later she realized that her mother had been absolutely right, even though she didn’t understand her reasons, for if she had listened to her, Eitan would not have seen her as part of the contaminated circle and might not have abandoned her. Did he really look for her?
“This is unbelievable! Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” she says. “You’ve been hiding this from me for more than twenty years?”
But her mother looks at her calmly over the bowl of soup and says with extravagant politeness, “Eat with me, I’m sure that they don’t have soup like this even in America.”
Though she isn’t hungry, she has some of the murky lentil soup and grimaces. She has no doubt that Parshant keeps most of the generous allowance he receives for her mother’s food. She doesn’t check the receipts, but of course she would do the same if she had hungry children in a far-off country. Nevertheless, she asks him, “When did you make this soup, Parshant? Do you cook for my mother every day?” and he replies, “Today morning, I swear, Iris, you come tomorrow morning you see.”
“And how are your children?” she asks.
He rolls his eyes heavenward and says, “Thank God.”
“And how are your children? Remind me how many you have,” her mother asks, and immediately clucks her tongue when she hears her answer. “Only two children, are you sure? Didn’t you have three?”
“You have three, Mother,” Iris taunts her, even though she thinks of her twin brothers as almost a single body, and to her great surprise, her mother suddenly begins to cry.
“I had three, but only two are left! Didn’t you hear that my Iris was killed in a terrorist attack a few years ago?”
“Stop it, Mother,” she bursts out and shakes her mother’s emaciated arm. “It’s me, I wasn’t killed, only injured, and now I’m fine. This is me, Iris, your daughter. Recognize me already.”
But her mother, always repelled by any extreme emotion, looks at her reproachfully and says, “Enough! Why are you so upset? It only proves that you’re not my Iris. That’s not how I brought her up.”
“Oh really, you’re just impossible,” she mutters. “Why do I bother to come here at all if you’re convinced I died?” But she knows that today, at least, she didn’t come for her mother’s sake, but for her own, to share the secret with her. And in return, she has been told another secret, a more shocking and depressing one. Did Eitan really look for her?
FIVE
They are always tired, her teachers. Especially in the morning, at the first meeting. They yawn, nod off, those poor, exhausted creatures. Some of them drink more and more coffee in order to wake up, others overeat. By noon, their facial features will stabilize, but in the morning, this one is droopy-eyed and that one slack-jawed. The younger they are, the more tired they are. She was like them once, but now she can hardly remember why. What a waste, and to what end? Those babies that keep you up at night become angry adolescents in no time at all, and the homes you work so hard to cultivate will be a prison for them. The family you make so much effort to build and watch over will become a burden to them, and even worse, to you. That husband of yours you sacrifice your time for so he can finish his degree or move up at work will leave you in another twenty years for a younger woman, and even if he doesn’t leave, he will most likely become aging, grumpy, and ungrateful, and you’ll find yourselves wishing for a different life. Some of you may try to realize your dream, but only a few will be lucky enough to get another chance, which won’t necessarily be better than the previous one.
Yes, ladies, she wants to say as they sit around the large, elongated table in her office, I too have been young and tired, and now, in retrospect, it seems totally unjustifiable. Again and again, we make life difficult for ourselves just to see how much we can cope with, how much we can take upon ourselves, another child, another job, another mortgage, ridiculous Sisyphuses that we are. Perhaps that’s what we need to talk about, dear ladies, and not about the discipline problems in one of the fifth-grade classes or the new program for multiculturalism. Let’s talk about the pointlessness of female effort, which overlaps with the pointlessness of human effort. But this morning, it seems even more blatant when you’re collapsing, bleary-eyed, on your chairs around me.
“What’s going on, Sharoni? Everyone’s waiting for you,” she says to one of the teachers, who is whispering feverish instructions into her cell phone, and she ends the call quickly. “She’s sick all the time,” she complains about her one-year-old. “From the minute I put her into day care, she has been home all the time with my mother, who is collapsing.”
Iris tries to give her an encouraging smile. “It’s always like that at first, but in a few months she’ll be immunized.” She finds it strange to be older and more experienced than any of them. She was always the youngest, the youngest mother in the kindergarten, the youngest principal. In the early years, she was also the youngest teacher, but recently all of that has changed, and only the secretary and counselor are older than her. She has lost her youth, so much so that he didn’t recognize her.
When they exit her office, leaving behind the familiar atmosphere you can almost feel with your hands, a blend of complaint and hope, she leans back with a sigh of relief. She managed to run the meeting as if nothing has happened, as if she hadn’t seen him with his white coat and gray beard, like an angel of destruction. She won’t let him destroy everything she has built since then—did he really look for her? Exhausted from the effort, she stands up and stumbles to the secretary’s office adjoining hers.
“Do you have anything for pain, Ofra? I’ve finished off my daily dose.”
The longtime secretary, looking concerned, hands her a packet of pills. “You can’t go on like this. It can’t be that there’s no solution!”
“Why not, Ofra?” she chuckles. “Since when is there a solution to every problem? If only the world worked that way. Usually you just have to adjust.” She pours herself a glass of water and limps back to her desk, which is almost entirely covered with yellow Post-its, each noting something else she has to do. Set a date for a Home Front Command training session, secure city funding for the third-grade field trip, set up an appointment with parents threatening to take their children out of school, find a new assistant teacher to replace the one who left this week even though she had promised to stay until the end of the year, send an email about a community welcoming-the-Sabbath ceremony, sit with the Arabic teacher on the “Language as a Cultural Bridge” program, write her weekly principal’s letter, complete the discussion on basic guidelines for filling out report cards—and all that in addition to the daily chores written on the huge calendar on her right, which covers almost the entire wall.
Every Sunday there is a meeting with the homeroom and subject-area teachers of a particular class, during which they discuss the emotional, social, and scholastic performance of each child. At noon on every Tuesday, there is a meeting of all the homeroom teachers to discuss educational programs, and in the evenings, the meeting with the Central Parents Committee, the meeting of the Educational Forum, and of course there are days of principal training courses and seminars. There’s no room on that calendar for days of pain, there never has been, but her hand tightens on the eraser as she struggles with the urge to erase everything and leave a clean slate, to begin afresh. If he did look for her, if he did want her, then she can’t continue her previous life. It changes the entire picture, the entire calendar.
Did he really look for her? She sits down in her chair with a sigh, peels off and sticks more and more yellow Post-its on her desk. Did she really miss her chance with him? Bile rises in her throat—for almost three weeks, she has been living mainly on painkillers. Did he really regret leaving her? Did he want to take her back, to give her back his love? Even if she was about to marry, even if she was about to give birth, she would have gone back to him. What vile news her mother gave her, sawing off the branch on which she built her flimsy nest. She puts her head down on her desk, eyes closed, lids as sticky as the yellow Post-its, but then there’s a knock on her door and the custodian comes in to complain about vandalized school property, followed immediately by two pupils in the heat of an argument—when the homeroom teachers are out, the pupils always come to her with their disputes. Then a pupil who doesn’t feel well comes in with his father, who came to pick him up, and since he’s there anyway, offers to help with the new computers. Whenever the door is open, they enter en masse. Today, she actually welcomes it, but Ofra protests out of habit.
“Hey, leave my principal alone,” she says as she strides into the room and tries to empty it. “You won’t believe it, I saved us five hundred shekels,” she announces happily, as if it were her own money. “I received a refund on the water bill we paid.”
“You’re the best, Ofra, what would I do without you?” Iris says, observing her lively gestures with affection. She has surrounded herself with good people, people who care, and she sometimes thinks that, despite the heavy workload, managing a school with three hundred pupils and forty teachers is easier than managing a family of four.
It’s when the room empties that she becomes restless, so she goes out to the corridor, walks slowly past the closed classroom doors. Everything is quiet at the moment, the days of her absence haven’t cracked the strong structure she built with so much effort. A pupil returning from the bathroom enters his classroom immediately without lingering at the game corner, and when the door opens, she can hear verses from a Bible lesson taking place inside. Sharon is reading the end of Genesis to her pupils:
Then Joseph could not refrain himself before all them that stood by him; and he cried: “Cause every man to go out from me.” And there stood no man with him, while Joseph made himself known unto his brethren. And he wept aloud; and the Egyptians heard, and the house of Pharaoh heard. And Joseph said unto h
is brethren: “I am Joseph; doth my father yet live?” And his brethren could not answer him; for they were affrighted at his presence. And Joseph said unto his brethren: “Come near to me, I pray you.” And they came near. And he said: “I am Joseph your brother, whom ye sold into Egypt. And now be not grieved, nor angry with yourselves, that ye sold me hither; for God did send me before you to preserve life.”
Iris stands beside the slightly open door, her body trembling involuntarily at the sound of the verses. Yes, for years she too hoped to learn that she was cast into that pit to preserve life, and yes, there have been many such moments in her life, proof that, in the end, everything has worked out. But this moment is not one of them. Her gaze wanders down the corridor, stopping at the large stone plaque carved with the names of school graduates who fell in Israel’s wars. Not far from where she stands, on another stone plaque, her father’s name, Gabriel Segal, is carved. He was the first casualty of the school he had attended, her first casualty. Will he be the last? As Omer grows older, she is haunted by the letters of his name inscribed on a memorial plaque. omer eilam, the letters assemble for her, beautiful, symmetrical, bowing their heads in subdued pain. She shifts her damp eyes to the new poster about Eliezer ben Yehuda, reviver of the Hebrew language. They hang across from each other like cause and effect, and she stands between them. Is it for the sake of the Hebrew language that we die? Do we bury our young fathers and young men just emerging from childhood only so that their names can be written in Hebrew on cold stone plaques throughout this turbulent country?
You must not think such thoughts, she chides herself, what choice do we have? It’s not the language, it’s our very existence, for we have learned time and time again that we cannot exist anywhere else, even if such an illusion sometimes crops up. But lately she has become more convinced that it is actually Jewish existence here in the land of the Hebrew language that is an illusion soon to be shattered, perhaps not in her generation, perhaps not even in Alma and Omer’s generation. Once again she sees the name engraved on the memorial plaque, omer eilam, and once again she averts her gaze. Stop it, she thinks, he hasn’t even received his first draft notice. Maybe they’ll take pity on her, after all, she’s a war orphan, she was injured in a terrorist attack, maybe they’ll take him off their list. Until the first draft notice arrives, she can still hope, and until then, he’s hers, or rather he’s his own person.
Pain Page 5