Pain

by Zeruya Shalev

  Let’s see what Mickey says, she thinks as her children speak together easily and laugh, let’s see if he’s so calm now and makes fun of her for worrying for no reason. His mother’s pain tormented him throughout his childhood and adolescence, though she did everything to protect him from his father, who was many years older than she and insanely jealous and violent. It wasn’t until Mickey was a married man that together they managed to help her leave his father. But she fell ill a short time later, and instead of enjoying her new life as a free woman, she became totally enslaved to her illness, her treatments, and her suffering, until she died exhausted, almost with a sigh of relief. Meanwhile, his father was growing older with a new wife, and since Mickey had cut off all contact with him, they never knew whether she had enjoyed a better fate than her predecessor.

  “He reminds me of my father,” Mickey would occasionally admit, mortified, when Omer was having one of his tantrums. “It must have skipped a generation and gone straight to him.” But it would be worse for him to feel what she feels now, that their daughter, who has come home from the big city for a short visit, has brought with her an alarming whiff of enslavement.

  “Hi sweetie,” he says joyfully when the elevator ejects him straight into her arms, and Iris sees that she also moves quickly out of his embrace and avoids his glance with the same forced cheerfulness. Then Alma hurries to the kitchen counter, grabs the packet of biscuits that weren’t dipped in milk, and eats them nervously one after the other.

  “Don’t fill up on biscuits,” Iris says quickly, “there’s a ton of food,” because she thinks that’s what a normal mother is supposed to say at such a moment. Then she adds with a bright smile, “I was just making you the cake you love.” A normal mother in a normal family consisting of two parents and two children, because look, Omer snatches a few biscuits from her hand and goes to stretch out on the large blue couch, Alma sits down beside him, Mickey pours himself a glass of water and joins them. They seem to be waiting for Iris to sit down on the flowered couch across from them and enjoy a tiny bit of well-being, a tiny bit of pride in the normal family they have built despite the fact that they don’t come from normal families, but she is unable to feel part of the pleasant gathering. The sight of her daughter pains her so much that she can’t sit down across from her and pretend to be content. So she mumbles, “I’ll just make a salad,” and turns her back to them.

  “Is everything okay, Iris?” Mickey asks, and he explains to Alma that Mom’s pelvic pain, which radiates down her leg, is back and she’s been suffering a lot lately.

  “Everything’s perfectly fine,” Iris says, because she doesn’t feel comfortable taking refuge in the shadow of the event that caused her daughter more than enough suffering in the past. She takes the vegetables out of the fridge and cuts them into thick pieces, trying to calm down. What happened to her daughter? But perhaps Alma was right when she asked, what happened to you, Mom, because no one has noticed anything and everyone looks pleased, she is the only one whose heart is pounding with apprehension, and it isn’t clear why.

  So she cut her hair, threw the long hair she took such care of for so many years into the trash can of some hair salon, or maybe she did it at home, considering how sloppily it was cut. Then she turned the beautiful chestnut brown into jet black, which isn’t a disaster either, but the change upsets a certain balance in her face, and together with the clothes she chose to wear, a tattered black T-shirt and gray jeans, she looks very unattractive. No one will turn to look at her the way they used to when she wore her very short dresses and had long flowing hair. But why the panic? For years she had chided her daughter for spending so much time on her appearance, so she should be happy about the sudden turnabout. But it isn’t the temporary loss of her beauty that bothers her so much, it is the loss of something—freedom, perhaps?—in her expression.

  It’s hard to define an expression, and perhaps it’s the sudden resemblance to Grandma Hana that is causing her to make a mountain out of a molehill. What connection can there be between that hardworking woman who married a violent, controlling man against her will and the young girl living alone in the big city who has her entire future before her? She takes a few deep breaths, sprinkles coarse salt on the salad, and squeezes lemon juice over it. The quiche she put in the oven is bubbling. “Come eat,” she calls, “Omer, where are the lentils? Don’t tell me you finished them off.”

  “We have fantastic lentils at the bar,” Alma says as she sits down in her usual place. “We serve them with melted goat butter.”

  Iris tries to smile at her daughter and says, “Sounds like you’re really happy at work.”

  Alma nods, “I really am! It’s like home, all the waitresses are my friends, and Boaz is thrilled to pieces with me, starting next week, I’ll be a shift manager.” She attacks her food and eats with a healthy appetite, so there seems to be nothing to worry about, but the way she says Boaz echoes in her ears even after she moves on to another subject. She said his name with special emphasis and pride, and there was an aura of secrecy about it.

  “How old is Boaz?” she asks as if trying to remember.

  Her daughter evades the question. “I don’t know exactly, about your age.”

  “And he’s nice?” Iris asks with great affability to avoid arousing her daughter’s suspicion. “He treats you all well?”

  Her daughter falls right into the trap, saying, “He’s a very nice person. He runs the bar to make a living, but what he really cares about is guiding us back to our true inner selves. There are a few girls there that he really saved.”

  “Saved from what?” she asks, the fork in her hand beginning to shake, which her daughter notices and tries to ignore.

  “Nothing,” she replies, “just, you know, they were kind of lost, looking for themselves, he helps them do the spiritual work to find their true inner selves.”

  Trying to steady her voice and her hand, she asks, “Did he help you too, Alma?”

  Immediately arming herself with her disdainful tone, her daughter says, “What kind of help do I need, in your opinion? I’m a kid from a good home, I have parents who worry about me, I don’t need any help.”

  Alma adamantly refuses to sleep at home, even though Iris has taken everything out of her room, changed the sheets, and urged her to stay. “You can sleep late, and when you get up, I’ll leave work and we’ll have coffee together,” she says, trying to tempt her. But it must sound like a threat, because her daughter promptly refuses, saying that she likes to sleep at home, and it turns out that the place she calls home is no longer their home. She feels more comfortable going back at night than in the afternoon when it’s hot and traffic is heavy. So after a quick hug, she disappears into the elevator with her father, who volunteers to drive her.

  Iris remains frozen in front of the stainless steel doors, waiting for Mickey to return so she can repeat to him those prickly words, spoken so ironically, “What help do I need, in your opinion? I’m a kid from a good home, I have parents who worry about me, I don’t need any help!”

  “Don’t tell me that you took it at face value!” she reproaches Mickey when he comes back from the central bus station.

  “I understood it exactly as she meant it,” he replies in surprise. He pours himself a glass of water from the fridge and sits down across from her at the dining room table. “She saw that you were worried and wanted to reassure you. What irony are you talking about? She doesn’t have parents who worry about her? Just look at how worried you are about her now! Listen Iris, I’m afraid that something’s gone wrong with you. Maybe it’s because of all those painkillers. Everyone knows they cause hallucinations. We need to go back to the pain clinic and start serious treatment. Maybe we’ll go straight to the unit chief, even though he seems to be a bit of a psycho.”

  “Psycho?” she says in surprise. “Why?” She feels oddly cheerful, perhaps he’s right, perhaps she is hallucinating, perha
ps she needs to see the unit chief. Of course she needs to see him again, just look at how eager she is now, despite all the decisions and vows, to gossip about him with Mickey, and she asks again, “Why do you think he’s a psycho?”

  “You didn’t notice that he’s strange?” Mickey says with a laugh. “He literally ran out of the office without even looking at us, afraid of his own shadow.”

  “Or of ours,” she says, because for the first time, the possibility occurs to her that he recognized her and ran for his life.

  Now it’s Mickey’s turn to wonder, “Why should he be afraid of us?” Immediately he tries to answer his own question: “He’s probably just a misanthrope. But I heard he’s a good doctor. There’s a girl at work who said he really helped her.”

  “Really? Who is she?” she asks, surprised at the flow of information suddenly gushing from an unexpected source.

  He stands up and says, “Someone new, you don’t know her. She’s the one who told me to take you to him when the pains started, but I didn’t want to wait that long for an appointment, and he costs an awful lot.”

  “Oh, Mickey,” she sighs, “you have no idea.” She follows him to the bedroom, where her things are now, back home, the earplugs, eye cream, nightgown, open book. The small bathroom mirror shows her the top of her head beside his ear, her high forehead and straight, faded hair. Standing side by side, they brush their teeth thoroughly, but just as she plans to spit the contents of her mouth into the sink, a strange new feeling of embarrassment stops her. She feels uncomfortable spitting out the repulsive stream, which is pink from bleeding gums, and she expects him to precede her. But he seems to be uncomfortable as well and continues to move the brush in his mouth until she turns aside and spits into the toilet, wondering what it says about them, about their intimacy. He takes advantage of her turned head to get rid of the mixture of toothpaste and water in his mouth, spitting it out hard into the sink. Almost against her will, she remembers that there was never any barrier between her and the boy she loved so much, neither when they woke up in the morning nor when they went to bed at night, she fell asleep in his arms, inhaling the air he exhaled.

  We were children, she sighs, there’s no comparison, and she looks at her graying hair with dissatisfaction, maybe she’ll go to the hair salon near the school tomorrow and have it dyed the same jet-black color as her daughter’s. Maybe the artificial resemblance it creates will bring them closer even now at this late stage, when she surprises her at the entrance to the restaurant, because she is not reassured, she is not convinced.

  “To what do I owe this honor?” Mickey says when she lies down beside him in bed. “I’ve already gotten used to sleeping alone. You’re sure you haven’t started snoring in the meantime?” She moves closer to him, puts her head on his smooth chest—she has always loved the feel of it, soft and hard at the same time.

  “Tell me,” she says, stretching out the words as she formulates the rest of the sentence, “what else did she tell you, that girl from work? What kind of pain did she have? How exactly did he help her?”

  To her surprise, he replies eagerly, “She had unbearable lower back pain, she suffered terribly, couldn’t function at all. And she has a little girl she’s raising alone. Nothing helped her until she went to see him. He gave her a cortisone injection that absolutely saved her.”

  “Wow, you really are up to date! I didn’t know you took such an interest in the people around you.”

  Immediately defensive, he says, “I don’t take any special interest, but when a girl sitting next to you cries all day, you can’t remain indifferent.”

  “Now I understand why you even thought of that clinic. I really did wonder,” she says, trying to shift the subject to the doctor, not the patient—what does she care about her.

  But Mickey does seem to care about her, so much so that he attacks. “What’s been going on with you lately? I can’t talk to you! Everything makes you suspicious, first the morning of the explosion and now the poor girl I tried to help.”

  “Exactly how did you try to help her?” she asks.

  “Nothing special. I once drove her to see that doctor when she couldn’t drive herself because she was in so much pain.”

  “Good for you, Mickey,” she laughs. “I didn’t know I was married to such a good Samaritan. So how come you always get annoyed when Omer asks you to drive him somewhere?” But what’s the point in letting the conversation go there, that isn’t the main thing, and she tries again: “What else did she tell you about him?”

  “Nothing special. He’s treating her and her condition has really improved.”

  Iris sighs. “Great, I’m happy for her.”

  She hasn’t received the information she hoped for. Instead, she’s received different information that is almost upsetting—to him, apparently—because he gets out of bed angrily and says, “I’m going to the computer. I’m not tired anymore.”

  “What’s going on with you, Mickey? You’ve become as sensitive as a teenage girl,” she calls after him. “It looks like you really do have something to hide.” But he is already moving his pawns and doesn’t hear her words. Maybe that’s better, she thinks, because something about our use of words has gone awry lately, we use them to hide instead of to reveal. We have betrayed our words, and perhaps that’s even worse than betraying each other. We have betrayed our words and now they are punishing us.

  SEVEN

  “Jet black,” she tells the hairdresser, “the blackest black there is.” As the color is being absorbed by her hair, which has grown longer lately, she looks in the mirror expectantly. She has never done anything extreme with her hair, she has never done anything extreme at all, but this morning, her youth seems to be sneaking up on her through a mysterious window she unconsciously left open, stirring the spirit of rebellion in her. She won’t go back to work today, she’ll do something different. For too many years, she did what she had to do, now it’s time to do what she wants. After the dye is washed out of her hair, she looks at herself curiously. Not bad at all, she thinks, her hair reaches almost to her shoulders, and its darkness brings out her pale complexion and green eyes. Since she’s lost weight recently, her cheekbones are prominent, and the blue linen dress she bought a few days before the terrorist attack and has never worn fits her well now. And here she is—different.

  “See, you look ten years younger!” the hairdresser says enthusiastically, and Iris smiles, she really didn’t expect such a big change. Uncharacteristically, she takes a picture of herself and sends it to Alma, who, also uncharacteristically, replies immediately, “Cool!”

  “Are you free in the next few hours?” she asks after Alma swallows the bait. “I have a meeting in Tel Aviv. Can I come to see you afterward?”

  But to her disappointment, her daughter rebuffs her quickly. “No way,” she writes, “I have a really crazy day! A double shift and I have to close up too.”

  What did you think, that if you dyed your hair black like hers, the new color would erase everything? Do you think you can buy her off so cheaply, although it isn’t really cheap, she thinks as she pays the hairdresser, not for me and definitely not for her. How many shifts does she work to make herself so ugly? The new black hair suits her, but not her daughter, that’s how different they are in looks and coloring.

  “Hi, Dafi,” she says when, in the stifling heat of the car, she hears her friend’s voice sounding exhausted and impatient.

  But Dafna revives immediately. “Iris, I didn’t notice it was you! Finally! To what do I owe this honor?”

  “What’s this honor thing you all have? How are you? How was Barcelona?”

  Dafna sighs, “I have so much work that I’ve already forgotten. How’s the pain?”

  “With the pills, it’s bearable. Listen, I think I understand why I was injured.”

  “You were injured because of a conflict that’s been going on for at l
east one hundred years. But let’s not get into politics.”

  “It’s not politics, Dafna,” she says. “I was injured because Mickey was having an affair, that’s why he didn’t take the kids to school that morning.”

  “That’s crap! Mickey? It can’t be! Where’d you get that idea all of a sudden?”

  “I think he’s having an affair now and that’s a sign he was having one then. How can we learn about the past if not from the present?”

  They meet in the café next to Dafna’s office.

  “All he did was help a poor girl, what do you want from him?” Dafna’s expressive face is agitated. “What’s happening to you? We haven’t spoken for two weeks and the sky has fallen! I don’t believe that I left work for crap like this on the busiest day of the year!”

  “Alma has a busy day too,” Iris says.

  They’re used to talking about their daughters, Dafna’s Shira and her Alma, who have been close friends since kindergarten, and their mothers have followed suit. She still hasn’t told her the main thing, and she can’t decide whether she will—that she saw Eitan. Remember my telling you about Eitan? My first boyfriend? Sometimes Dafna can’t control herself and tells her husband, and he, with his big mouth, might say something when the four of them get together. No, she won’t tell her because she needs to tell Eitan first, it’s their secret, after all, because now, after almost thirty years of total separation, they have a common secret. Even if he’s still unaware of it, it exists and connects them to each other, or perhaps he does know, and that’s why he left the room in such a hurry. Perhaps since then he has been waiting for her to come to see him alone, looking for her name on his list of appointments, peering occasionally into the corridor. She remembers how sometimes he used to wait for her after school, and when she came out of class and saw him, she would feel a sense of pleasure unlike any she had ever known. She would walk over to him as excited as a bride walking to her groom as he waited for her under the wedding canopy. She feels suddenly breathless now, she feels that she can no longer restrain herself, just as the biblical Joseph felt when he sent everyone away before making himself known to his brothers.