EIGHT
What were you thinking, that he’d answer you in the middle of dinner? That he’d say to his wife, “Excuse me, it’s my former lover,” get up from the table and speak quietly to you on the balcony so no one could hear? That he’d say to his daughter Miriam, “It’s someone who was once your age, and I loved her until I left her. If anyone leaves you like that, I’ll kill him”? Or maybe he also has small children and he’s reading them a bedtime story and doesn’t notice that her call is waiting to be answered, so she leaves a bland message and tosses the phone onto the seat beside her.
Why did you wait for it to be so late? You fell asleep on the refrigerated morgue slab as if you hadn’t slept in years. Even if he was excited to see you, he has probably calmed down since then, understands what is at stake and has decided to break off the new-old relationship before it begins. If he left you when you were seventeen, at full bloom, when your love was at its most intense, then he’ll have no problem leaving you again now that you’re forty-five and already withered, despite the dyed jet-black hair. You should have struck while the iron was hot, should have called immediately and arranged to see him, or ambushed him in the corridor when his last patient left, but the iron apparently froze in the morgue. No wonder you are still shivering with cold and there are pins stuck in your throat, you have to get home quickly, have to get into bed. Mickey is worried about you and even Omer said that he felt your absence, you promised to help him study for a Hebrew test tonight.
But it isn’t to them that she drives, her teeth chattering, but to the house she saw in her sleep, his mother’s house. She feels her temperature rising and her head is already lolling the way his sick mother’s did. She knows she won’t find either one of them there, the small apartment has certainly been sold or rented. Their meeting won’t continue there, only their parting remains in that house like a burnt-out corpse with smoke still rising from it.
She didn’t dare to go anywhere near it for decades, and now she is driving with her eyes almost closed, much too fast, as if someone is waiting for her in that neglected ground-floor apartment in a neighborhood that looked old right after it was built. The car seems to remember the way it never knew, and she parks at the bus stop where they used to sit on their way to school or the hospital, their arms around each other, after nights of making love as they slept and sleeping as they made love. Sometimes she had to go home to help her mother with the twins, and he usually waited with her, always holding her hand or putting his arm around her shoulder, their young bodies intertwining effortlessly, wordlessly.
These days, the buses come more frequently—two had already passed the empty stop—but back then they came rarely. If she missed one, she had a long wait, and sometimes, if she had to sit there without him in the morning, she would return to him for another sweet farewell and climb into his bed if he was still sleeping. By the time she left, she would have missed another bus, but never regretted it because she had gained more time with him. It was from there that she left that morning at the end of the shiva when he sent her away, and that morning, she suddenly remembers, when she had nowhere to go, the bus came right away.
A high, thick hedge surrounds the ground floor of the building, which the years have been kind to, lending it an aura of dignity. She walks toward the main entrance, trying to find a way into the garden, where she can look into the windows of the apartment. Apart from several carob trees and one plum tree, nothing grows in that garden, which was always empty and neglected. It was only during the shiva that it filled with life, when group after group of visitors sat there in the pleasant breeze of an early summer evening. Some lit candles, some played guitar, and she would walk among them, gathering consoling words for him, appropriating a few for herself. Eitan almost never got up from his seat, she remembers now, but she walked among the round tables the neighbors lent them, speaking with friends and relatives, secretly enjoying her role. Occasionally, she would join his table, sit on his lap if there wasn’t an empty chair, put her arm around his shoulder. “You two look so much alike,” someone said, “just like brother and sister,” because they were both tall and thin, had dark hair and light eyes. She thought he was much more beautiful than she, even though when she glanced at her reflection in the mirror hanging in the hallway, she was very nearly satisfied with the reedy girl who had flowing hair and eyes that glowed like a bride’s on her wedding day. Yes, that was the heart of it, she thought in horror now, that must have been the original sin she was punished for—feeling like a bride in that small garden during those seven days of mourning that had been like the seven days of her wedding celebration, saturated with solemn joy, with bitter pleasure, spurting now like water from a sprinkler through the hedge, directed entirely at her. She can almost hear them there, singing and playing guitars, laughing and crying, drinking and smoking. Day after day, night after night, we were together, all the rest has long since been forgotten.
What is the point in returning to that garden now, in peering into the windows of the apartment he has obviously not visited for years. There is no point, and yet she doesn’t leave. It’s the only thread she has that leads back to the past, and she will pull it, or let it pull her, because an unfamiliar force is pushing her through the hedge, pulling her to find an opening. A thorny branch scratches her cheek, but she is already there, inside the hedge as if it were a living creature that has swallowed her up. Suddenly she is alarmed by the sound of steps approaching the building, apparently those of a father and his son, who speaks in a shrill voice that sounds familiar, perhaps one of her pupils, she thinks in horror—she has several from this place. If only they don’t see her, the rumor of their principal losing her mind will spread like wildfire.
“Daddy, thieves wear white clothes, right?” the boy asks. “Daddy, thieves only come to the ground floor, right?” The father nods distractedly, lingering at the entrance, foraging around in the mailbox—she’ll never be able to explain her presence here in the bushes. But now they’re walking up to the safer first floor and the boy continues to voice his fears, saying, “Daddy, thieves make a lot of noise, right?”
Only then does the father listen for the first time, and instead of reassuring him, he decides to go for accuracy: “No, of course not, thieves try to be very quiet so they won’t get caught.”
“No they don’t,” the frightened boy protests. “You don’t know anything about thieves!” But luckily for him, the door closes behind their conversation at the exact moment a branch snaps under her weight and, surprised, she falls deep into the bush. She tries to forge a way out, or rather a way in to the garden. It seems as if she will be trapped there forever, but the branches enclosing her don’t let go and she stretches her legs inside the tangle of shrubbery, flails her arms and bangs her head against the thick greenery as if she is a baby trying to pass through the birth canal. She feels a branch scrape her other cheek, her hair catches on the thorns, but she can’t stop. She grabs hold of the branches and pushes them back until her body falls forward and drops onto the other side of the hedge.
She never imagined it was so difficult to break through a hedge, and now she doesn’t know how she will get out of there, unless she is discovered in the garden and the residents of the ground-floor apartment call the police, who will make sure she is thrown out. Or perhaps it will be the first-floor residents, because she can already hear the screams of the frightened boy, “Daddy, did you hear that noise? There are thieves here!” But fortunately for her, his father pays no attention and admonishes him to finish his cornflakes instead of talking nonsense. So she stands up cautiously and, holding on to the building walls, tries to walk silently around it to the large living room window.
To her sorrow, it is completely dark, as is the garden on this moonless night, and she continues on to the bedroom window, where the shutters are half closed. The light is dim, and the sound of running water is the only indication that the apartment isn’t empty. She waits, her e
yes fixed on the window as they were earlier on the small screen. She has been waiting all day, all her life. What is she doing here, shivering with cold, though her breath is burning, her face scratched and her dress torn, clutching the bars of the window as if she has taken leave of her senses? Does he still have the power to unhinge her so much that she will return home soon to lie motionless on her bed as she did then? A broken heart at the age of forty-five—who would have believed it?
What is she looking for here? The apartment is probably rented to a pair of students or a young family, although there are no toys in the garden to indicate the presence of children. In fact, there is no evidence at all of anyone’s presence or of the time that has passed. In the weak light, it seems to her that nothing has been added or removed from among the scrawny carob trees and the plum tree she remembers so well. During the shiva, they decided to start cultivating the garden, they’d plant flowers and maybe even vegetables, but then he deserted her and certainly this place as well, which reminded him of the illness. He probably planted flowers and vegetables in a different garden, the one where he lived with his family, his daughter Miriam and her mother, and perhaps another child or two. Though he caressed her face and kissed her lips, he will give her up because it was first love, which has nothing to do with adult life, because they are no longer what they were then, because a lifetime has passed and all the momentous choices are already behind them, because encounters with the past are barren, like this garden, because their good years are already behind them and there is no going back. She will return to her car now, in the hope that the branches take pity on her, and drive home. The present tenants of that apartment do not know the noble woman who once lived here with her only son and can shed no light on either her past or future life, so she walks slowly back, holding on to the carob trees.
For a moment, she is terrified by the sudden appearance of light, but it is only the light being turned on in the bedroom she is standing in front of. Through the slats, she is shocked to see a bearded, older man who turns his skinny back to her, clad only in underpants. She shakes her head in disbelief, or is it the chill she feels that is causing her head to move back and forth? It can’t be, it’s inconceivable, but it seems to be him, he lives here, this is the place he returned to in the end. Where is Miriam, his daughter, where is his wife? There don’t seem to be any other people in the house, will they be returning soon? Is it possible that he lives alone, waiting only for her? She watches him go into the living room, where the light comes on, then he opens the fridge and takes out a bottle of beer. If he sees her here, he won’t believe his eyes, won’t believe that she has willingly returned to the place he banished her from.
The apartment has barely changed since then, and is as gray and shabby as she remembers it, showing no signs of a woman’s presence. Is he alone, available to her, available to continue that mourning? She watches him put on a gray button-down shirt and light-colored shorts and she knows that he will leave the shirt open, that the water dripping from his hair will leave spots on the fabric. She sees him go into the living room, then sit down in front of a computer that is on the kitchen table and begin to type quickly, his expression grim and his back slightly stooped. Will he be happy to see her, or will he be alarmed—after all, he didn’t bother to answer her message. Perhaps he thought it was from an annoying patient and didn’t even listen to it. She’ll try again now that she can watch him, she’ll try again and discover the truth in real time. She sees him stand up slowly, probably looking for his cell phone, and then he disappears into the bedroom and she hears his voice twice, through the phone and through the window, drifting out to her on the evening breeze.
“Hello?” he says, and when she doesn’t speak, he continues. “Is that you, Rissi? I didn’t know if it was appropriate for me to call you back at this hour. You might be with the family,” he explains—using the word “family” as only a general term.
She murmurs in reply, “I’m not with the family, Eitan. I’m with you, I’m here in the garden.”
“You’re in the garden?” he asks in surprise, his voice smiling at her. “You’re not!” And she drops to the dry ground, her teeth chattering, knowing that he will open the living room door and walk down the four or five rickety stairs, the cell phone in his hand, its bluish light illuminating her. “Here you are,” he says, and instead of taking her hand and leading her into the house, he lies down beside her. “What are you doing here, Rissi? I don’t believe you’re here,” he whispers, examining her face in the light of the phone. “You look ill.” He puts his hand on her forehead. “You have fever. Your face is scratched and your dress is torn. Why didn’t you come in through the door? How did you even know I was here?”
“I didn’t,” she mumbles. “I didn’t know who lived here.”
“You always had a strong sense of intuition, always knew what had to be done and what was going to happen.”
“Absolutely not,” she protests, “the fact is that I had no idea you were going to leave me.”
Surprising her, he says, “Neither did I.” He glances at his watch. “How will you get home? What will you tell your husband?”
“I’ll tell him that I ran into some thieves,” she whispers.
“Really? And what did they steal from you?”
“Everything, my entire life. I gave them everything so they would leave me alone.”
“You did the right thing. You think he’ll believe you?”
“Of course he will. I never lie.”
He laughs, “My good little girl. You always were a good girl.” He tries to cool her forehead with his beer bottle. “When I saw you earlier, you didn’t have fever. Are you ill because of me?”
“Obviously. Now you have to heal me.”
“I’ll do my best,” he says and offers her some beer. She drinks it thirstily, and his hair, damp from his shower, drips onto her face as he leans on his arm and looks at her, lying limply on the ground at the foot of the plum tree.
She’s more comfortable on the dry ground than in her bedroom, more comfortable on the ground with his familiar body at her side because this ground is hers. It seems to her that her footsteps from then have remained imprinted there, like the footprints of the first man to walk on the moon, because in the absence of wind and rain, in the absence of weather, nothing changes. She has returned to her moon now, the ground beneath her embraces her body, the sky rises above her and she lies between them. This is where she belongs, to this plum tree whose fruit was always a bit unripe or slightly rotten, it was good only one day a year. Nonetheless she used to devour the plums, hot from the sun, and when she strains her eyes, she can see tiny fruits among the branches now. “Have the plums improved since then?” she asks.
He looks indifferently at the tree and says, “Not really. They taste like olives. The tree must be an olive-plum hybrid. I haven’t improved either, by the way,” he adds with a smile.
Mesmerized, she looks into his deep-set eyes, which are shaded by thick, dark eyebrows, and whispers, “You weren’t supposed to improve. I thought you were wonderful just the way you were.”
“Funny, no woman after you ever thought that.”
“You see,” she says with a smile, “you should have stayed with me.”
He sighs loudly and says, “Oh, Rissi, you think I don’t know that?”
“Daddy, there are thieves in the garden! I hear them! I hear voices!” The boy’s sharp cry from above interrupts them, and his father admonishes him, “Enough of that! A new story every night, anything not to go to sleep!”
“I want to sleep with Mommy,” the boy wails, “there are no thieves there!”
Sighing, Eitan says, “Poor kid, he’s so anxious. He reminds me of my little boy.”
Surprised, she asks, “You have a little boy? How old is he?”
“Nine.”
Then she asks, her tone suddenly formal, as befit
s the nature of the question, “So how many children do you actually have?”
“I have two children and two wives. From two different wives, I mean. Neither one of them lives with me.”
She gives a sigh of relief at this new information, as if she really believed that he was not only unavailable, but also married to two women. How wonderful the new information is, even if the smallest doubt stirs in her as he describes what seems to be an especially disastrous love life. She cannot dwell on it. This isn’t the time for interrogations and demands, it’s the time to delight in the incredible encounter she supposedly hasn’t anticipated, hoped for, fantasized about, or expected. But now she realizes that it is only for this encounter that she has lived since then, that everything she has done since then—her studies, her marriage, her children, her career—has been merely passing time in a waiting room, doing what was expected of her.
“Come,” he says, standing up and giving her his hand, “let’s go inside. Take pity on my upstairs neighbor.”
She stands up heavily, the night darkness penetrating her eyes so she is almost unable to see, and without his support, she would fall. He leads her inside, almost carries her, the way a groom takes his bride into the home he has prepared for her, returning her to the place he banished her from almost thirty years earlier. Just as she sees the face he had then when she looks at his face now, so she sees the apartment both as it is now and as it was then, a double, deeper image that seems now to be the only image of any value. From the threshold, she sees the small living room. The couch has been changed, but it stands on exactly the same spot the old one did then, when she came there for the first time and saw a narrow back covered by a blanket, the long, well-groomed hair flowing onto it, and heard Eitan say softly, “Mama, Iris is here.”
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