Next year, as part of the program, our pupils will meet with peers from the Arab sector and celebrate Jewish and Arab holidays, learn about their common traditions and get to know each other directly. If there is any hope left here, it will grow from this encounter.
Exhausted by the writing, she puts her laptop on the bedside table and closes her eyes. She’ll continue tomorrow, she isn’t focused, and no one reads her tiring manifestos to the end anyway, brimful of good intentions though they might be. They are ineffective in any case. The power of the street is always stronger, and the street has become more and more extreme. It is easier to hate than love, even though, recently, she herself has been finding it so easy to love. She has been implementing the “The Other Is Me” program fiercely, with every inch of her being. The Other is part of her flesh and blood, she herself is the Other, the betrayer is now the beloved, the stranger who now resides within her, the many faces of her love, all directed at him.
In amazement, she remembers the long years during which school was the center of her world, because now it merely flickers at the edges of her life, and her main concern is to avoid disaster. Meanwhile, she tries to put out the fires from her bed, aiming water hoses at the various conflagrations. The end of the school year is approaching and the burden is doubled: she has to close the year and open the next one; many teachers are sick and there aren’t enough substitutes; they haven’t yet finished the protracted discussion on report cards, an issue she thought was crucial until only a few weeks ago—on what basis should a child be evaluated, how much of a part should the personal touch play. For years, she has been trying to turn report cards into a report with greater depth. But now she thinks it is too late, it no longer interests her, they will have to continue the discussion without her. She also has to interview teachers and meet with parents. Her assistant seems to be growing quickly into the job of principal, justifying her belief in her. She will clearly be happy to replace her, and at the moment, Iris likes that idea much better than the idea of getting out of bed.
How can she go out into the world if she hasn’t recovered yet? It seems to her that her life has been knit together again in a complex surgery, because the time she has been lying ill in bed at home is directly connected to that time in the past when she lay almost motionless in her mother’s house. It seems that her prayers from then are being answered now. Then is joined to now and the years between have vanished, as if her head has been sewn onto her legs, leaving the organs in the middle outside of her new body. In the middle are Mickey, the children, and her job, in the middle is everything she has built in her adult life, which now seems lackluster, a faded substitute for the true joys of life. Now that he has come back to her, she knows that it is to that girl he has returned, the girl who prayed for that miracle night and day as she lay on her bed in her mother’s house: come back and say you made a mistake, come back and say that the separation is over, that you can’t live without me just as I can’t live without you. We are a pair from the beginning of creation, like sand and sea, thunder and lightning, clouds and rain, like bow and arrow, like sound and echo. She used to listen for hours, against her will, to the sounds of the house and the street, the twins fighting and her mother scolding them, news broadcasts beginning or ending, neighbors talking on their balconies, steps hurrying along the street. Come, if only to see whether I’m dead or alive. It can’t be that you don’t care one way or the other, she prayed, repeating the syllables of his name over and over again. And now he has finally heard her, has come back to her, knocking on the door when the house is empty, her mother at work and the twins at school. All at once, she is borne aloft on a wave of joy and hope, all her pain gone, all her suffering eradicated.
“Today we sit in the living room,” she says, pulling him to the large couch. Omer didn’t feel well in the morning and might suddenly appear. “Today we have coffee and talk like old friends.”
He smiles his boyish smile at her, the smile that lights up his face, and says, “I can’t talk to you without touching you. It’s too harsh a prohibition for me.”
She reprimands him with pretended severity. “You managed for almost thirty years without touching me.”
“It really was very hard.”
She ruffles his hair. “You poor thing. I feel so sorry for you.”
“In my way,” he protests quickly, “I was faithful to you. It’s a fact that I didn’t last with anyone, which can’t be said about you.” He gestures at the apartment. “You built a home and a family.” It seems to her that she hears ridicule in his voice.
“You didn’t leave me much choice, my dear,” she says. “Don’t forget that you left me.”
“Believe me, I haven’t forgotten it for a minute. I was an idiot.” He pulls her to him and says, “But you forgive me, don’t you? I’ll kiss you until you forgive me.”
In an instant she is on his lap, her short housedress exposing her thighs. “I won’t forgive you if it means you’ll stop kissing me.” Did she say those words or did she only think them? The boundaries are blurred, and does it matter? Nothing matters, neither age nor family situation. They are acting like teenagers with no worries or responsibilities, like Omer and his redheaded girlfriend. The thought of Omer makes her move away from him, hurry to the kitchen, and return with two cups of coffee and a bowl of grapes. I still haven’t seen you eat, still haven’t seen you sleep, show me more of yourself. But the clinic calls him again and he has to leave again, and tomorrow is Friday and the day after, Saturday. So many hours would pass until she sees him again.
“Hurry and get well so we can be at my place. We’ve played doctor long enough, let’s move forward,” he says.
“Forward to where?” she asks.
“That’s a good question, Rissi.”
“Do you have a good answer?”
He stands in front of her, leaning against the door, looking intently at her, the wrinkle between his eyes deepening. “People don’t usually get a second chance in this life,” he says quietly. “But we’ve been given one. This time it’s your turn, Rissi. I chose wrong last time, now you choose.” He kisses the tip of his finger and places it on her lips as if she is a mezuzah. Then he opens the door and goes out, leaving her standing at the door that has just closed, so stunned and agitated by the explicit words that she doesn’t see the elevator stop in their living room or hear Omer’s chuckle behind her.
“Hey Mom, what do you see there? Ghosts?”
She turns slowly and looks at him, her little boy who has become a young man. Projected before her eyes is the crucible in which they were fused together, and now they are about to split apart. Will he forgive her? Will he identify with his abandoned father and punish her? Will this morning be engraved in his mind as the morning his life changed?
“What’s with you? Did you see a thief? A rapist?” he asks with a smile, but he doesn’t wait for an answer. Interest in others is limited at that age, the age that many of his sex never grow out of. “I caught your flu,” he complains. “I feel awful.”
“Get into bed,” she says quickly, “take your temperature while I make you some tea.” She calms herself with the traditional role. Her lips, only just kissed, now graze the forehead of her son—he is the young man now, not Eitan, she must not mistake the time periods even though everything is so confused. She gives him tea with lemon and cooks the cereal he likes. In the future, when he is so very angry at her, will he remember how devoted she was? After all, it was so difficult to raise him, with his frequent tantrums and extreme reactions, his aggressiveness and constant provocations, and Mickey, who retreated from him again and again, was of very little help.
With perseverance and consistency, aided by professionals and all the knowledge and experience she had accumulated, she did almost the impossible, helping him to develop his ability to control himself, to empathize with and consider other people. She never gave up, neither on him nor on herse
lf, and succeeded beyond expectation. Her success was so great that even now, at the height of adolescence, he is relatively pleasant and easygoing and hasn’t worsened or weakened. As if she wants to plead her case to him before he falls asleep, she sits on the edge of his bed and looks at his cheeks, flushed with fever, his fleshy open mouth, his brushed-back mane of hair stiff with gel.
On the wall behind him is a picture of the boy he was, laughing with missing teeth, holding high some basketball championship cup from a camp he attended. How much he has changed since then, and how much more he will still change. She tries to imagine him as an adult, the slight hint of a line between his beautiful eyebrows will become a wrinkle, the thin hair on his cheeks will become thick, and in another few years, when she is no longer here, it will turn gray like Eitan’s beard. How will he remember her? Will she become the woman who destroyed his family, shattered his youth? But he is no longer a child, and he will leave home anyway to make his way in the world. But the home he leaves—what will it be like? Whether he leaves behind a solid base or the broken pieces of a family depends entirely on her, on her decision. It seems to her now that the issue is between Omer and Eitan, not between her and Mickey, as if she has to choose between two young men and two futures, between the familiar one awaiting her in this house and an exciting new stomach-churning future. She strokes her son’s burning hand, he radiates heat like a huge oven, inflaming her as well. They say that fever is healthy, heat destroys germs, but with her illness, the germs of infidelity are thriving.
She remembers how frightened he was of germs when he was a child, always refusing to drink from a bottle she drank from. If she absentmindedly touched one of his friends, he went crazy, jealous and controlling. “You’ll never touch me again,” he would scream, his two anxieties blending. How will he react? It’s true that he has become more moderate the last few years, but a crisis like that might rouse all the demons, especially now that the army is waiting impatiently, threatening both him and her. And how will her daughter react? Obviously she will side with her father without hesitation, will give her the cold shoulder—her shoulders are cold as it is, she thinks, recalling the stiffness of her touch the last time she was home, she is angry at her anyway. And Mickey himself, what will his life be like? He certainly won’t remain alone, but he’ll be hurt forever, he’ll never forgive her. She shakes her head, trying to rid herself of the weight of the future, the enormity of the price. Why are you in such a hurry? What’s the rush? This is not the time to decide! You don’t know Eitan, he’s a complete stranger as far as you’re concerned. He isn’t that boy anymore, and you didn’t really know that boy either. It’s a fact that he surprised you when he so surely and unhesitatingly delivered the ax blow to your love, to your neck. How can you trust him again?
Sweat drips from her body, and she stands up from her son’s bed angrily. “Second chance,” he said, his eyes clouded. But once again, she is the one who will pay the price, just as she did then. “I felt nothing,” he said, and now too, if he grows tired of her he will feel nothing and lose nothing, but she will hurt the people most precious to her. “Now it’s your turn,” he said, as if they were playing Snakes and Ladders. Now it’s your turn. Either you’ll land on a ladder that will raise you up high or on a snake that will push you all the way down to the tip of its tail.
“For you it’s easy,” she mutters angrily, “you have nothing to lose. How dare you talk as if it’s such an easy step for me to take.” She showers quickly, her strength returning and along with it, anger and anxiety. She strips her bed and washes away all signs of her illness in the washing machine. I’m cured now, she thinks resolutely, I’m cured of you, I have a family, I have a school to run. It was nice of you to come back, but for me, it’s too late. Moving brusquely, she returns the bowl of grapes to the fridge, washes and rewashes the coffee cups that are contaminated by the germs of infidelity, puts them in the dishwasher and turns it on, even though it is almost empty.
The humming of electrical appliances usually soothes her, but not now, as she stands at the kitchen window, straining to see signs of the desert between the buildings. To her dismay, the neighbors have the view of the Dead Sea, leaving them only the banal landscape to the west. She remembers that Alma took her side in her dispute with Mickey about the view, and she took pleasure in her rare support, intensifying the argument only to bring her closer. “What’s the point of living in Jerusalem if we don’t see anything that’s special about the city from the window? We might as well live in Tel Aviv,” she and Alma said to him when they were still trying to decide which apartment to buy. But there was a big difference in price, and Mickey really craved the elevator, so the connection to Alma faded completely when she was injured a short time after they moved to the new apartment. To this day, she cannot understand why her daughter became estranged from her at that terrible time, as if she chose to be away from home, to be confined to bed. Since then, Alma has only grown further away from her, and in the end, she actually did move to Tel Aviv, and not only because of the absence of the Dead Sea. There she cut off her gorgeous hair and dyed what was left of it black, and her face has taken on an unfamiliar, sickly hue, as if she is rotting from within.
Suddenly, Iris feels sharp stabs of anxiety at the thought, mixed with anger: at her daughter, who did not forgive her for being injured in a terrorist attack; at herself for never clarifying the situation and not fighting for her, but letting her grow distant; at Eitan, who suddenly returned and made her forget her concern for her daughter. Now he wants her to forget all her obligations, wants to turn her into his beloved with nothing in her life but him.
To her surprise, her anger keeps growing, and she goes back to the computer to read the emails she only skimmed this week because she has been so preoccupied with him. What a nerve he has, assuming that if he’s available, she is too, that if it’s easy for him, it’s easy for her too. “You built a home and a family,” he said mockingly, gesturing at the bourgeois living room. But the family she built is not to be mocked and will not crumble just because it suits him now to take her back into his life for a brief trial period and toss her back after a while, as he apparently did with his two wives. Naively, she didn’t even ask, didn’t demand to know. She stupidly believed that he was waiting for her and that was the only reason his marriages failed, when the real reasons are undoubtedly much less complimentary to both him and her.
Deceived, deceived, deceived, she hears herself muttering. She won’t be enticed this time, she’ll text him now. Let’s stop before it’s too late. I was happy to see you and I wish you a painless life. Yes, that’s what she’ll write to him and end this madness. She walks firmly to her cell phone to compose the right words, but awaiting her there is a message from him. How can he still sense her thoughts the way he did then, when they were so profoundly close? “No pressure, my love,” he wrote. “I’m ready to wait for you for another thirty years,” and she throws the phone onto the rug exactly the way Omer used to when he was having one of his tantrums. I hope it breaks, I hope it breaks and I never get his phone number again. But she immediately kneels down to pick it up, breathing a sigh of relief when she sees that it isn’t broken.
No pressure, my love, she reads over and over again, memorizing the words before she deletes them. I’m ready to wait for you for another thirty years, no pressure, my love. It’s difficult for her to delete the message, but she has no choice, she has to be careful so that when the right time comes to make the right decision—is there even a right decision?
ELEVEN
“Now everything is clear!” Dafna announces with a sour smile. “I finally understand why you’ve disappeared on me recently. To meet your first love! I’m almost jealous of you.”
“I’m jealous of myself too,” Iris chuckles, “it’s crazy, it isn’t just that I met him, I met with my youth itself, with love itself. Time suddenly froze, it’s like nothing else!” She feels as if she can go on desc
ribing it until dawn, can tell her friend every single detail, because, until now, she has told only herself, reliving the miracle again and again in her mind. She expects Dafna to be excited as she listens—she always encouraged Iris to deviate from her workaholic routine. “You live like an ant,” Dafna sometimes said, but now she looks troubled and doesn’t share her enthusiasm.
“What’s wrong, Dafi? Another fight with Gidi?” she asks.
Her friend studies the menu. “Absolutely not. Who has the strength for those fights?…What do you feel like eating?…There’s nothing like first love. The truth is that not too long ago, I looked for my first boyfriend on Facebook, but he doesn’t exist, he completely evaporated.” Her eyes are glued to the menu, as if she might find him there.
“Put the menu down. You’ll only order a salad anyway,” Iris says.
Dafna finally looks at her. “I’m starving, sweetie. Not everyone lives on love, like you. You’ve become anorexic! I’ll eat whatever you eat, maybe your luck will rub off on me. Tell me more. What does he look like? Is he married? Have you slept with him already?” But above her smile, her narrow eyes avoid Iris’s gaze, and despite the plethora of questions, Iris feels as if her friend isn’t open to hearing anything.
“Not really,” she hears herself lying even to her best friend, to be on the safe side. She suddenly doesn’t feel sure about her.
“Not really? What are you waiting for? Until you’re eighty? Do it, sleep with him already, get over it and move on. Life moves forward, not backward!”
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