The last time, ill and afraid, she crept toward the building like a thief, but now, she returns on the wide path to the front door, unconsciously running her hand along the hedge before she rings the bell. The door has certainly been changed, but his childhood surname is still inscribed on it, alongside the surname of his adulthood. He opens it quickly, wearing gray shorts and a faded T-shirt, his appearance combining both periods of his life. Once again, his youthful body, almost completely incongruent with his middle-aged face, surprises her, but when he smiles, the years are erased from his face as well.
“Rissi,” he says softly, “it feels like another thirty years have passed since we saw each other. What did you bring? You were right not to trust me. I didn’t have time to prepare anything. I thought we’d order something or go out to eat. Ah, I forgot, you can’t be seen with me. Tell your husband I was here first.” He prattles on entertainingly. “How much time do you have for me? Until midnight, let’s say? I’ve never been with a married woman, I feel like a mistress.”
She unpacks the bags in the small kitchen. How will she tell him that plans have changed, that she has to go to see Alma tonight? She doesn’t want to tell him about Alma, she doesn’t want to burden their young relationship with that weight. In any case, she isn’t a mother when she’s with him, mothers don’t have this feeling, this egocentric and domineering love that excludes all other things.
For the first time, it occurs to her how alien the totality of feeling actually is to her. She has been without him for decades, shifting between her fear of pain and the inconstancy of happiness. For the first time, it occurs to her that her daughter may be feeling the same thing now, that it is what she is missing in her life. Does Alma feel that totality of emotion for Boaz, and has it led to blind obedience? She is horrified by the thought, but she won’t tell him, even though he keeps asking what’s bothering her. Once again, she thinks about the daughter that wasn’t born to them and whether she would have been a better mother to her because of the total love she feels for her father. But sometimes it’s like that, and sometimes it’s the opposite, when the intensity of the parents’ relationship leaves no room for the child.
She has seen so many possibilities during these years of being responsible for hundreds of children and knowing their families. Sometimes children end up receiving vestiges of their parents’ unreciprocated love, they win or lose, it is difficult to set rules. But Alma has surely lost, not only because her mother didn’t love her father with every fiber of her being, but because, when she gave birth to her, she had not yet recovered from her breakdown and was still grieving for the life she had lost. That means that he is to blame for all this, so she can tell him and even be angry with him. But how can she be angry with him when he is so charming, opening the bottle of wine she brought, pouring her a tall glass and saying, “To you, my beautiful love, I’ve missed you. Every day that I don’t see you, my heart breaks.”
“To you,” she says, thirstily drinking in those glorious words. What has she wished for her entire life if not precisely those words? She thirstily drinks the dark wine, her face suddenly burning with a hot flash that reminds her of her age, her situation. Have the words come too late, like dreams that come true in inappropriate circumstances and instead of a blessing, become a curse? What will she do with those words, she thinks as her phone rings and Mickey’s name flashes on the screen. She won’t answer, she has the right to ignore him after he hurt her so much that morning, and she will ignore her age as well. The years vanish when she is with him anyway, and the pain has also vanished suddenly, though she hasn’t taken a pill for several hours. Even her concern for her daughter fades when she is with him. Maybe Shira was exaggerating after all. A cult? A guru? Why should she believe unfounded rumors?
“Is that your husband?” he asks, placing a large pot of water on the gas range. “Leave him, Rissi,” he says quietly.
She looks at him, her heart pounding. “What did you say?”
He goes over to her as excited as a young boy, with his beautiful long legs and shining eyes. “Listen, I’ve been thinking about this constantly on the days we weren’t together. Something phenomenal has happened to us, Rissi, do you realize that? Do you understand what’s happened to us, against all odds, almost at the last minute?”
She smiles at him, of course I understand, she wants to say, that’s the only thing I think about all the time instead of thinking about how to help my daughter.
“We’ve been given a second chance,” he says, “a last chance. We can’t let it go by.” His fingers stroke her face, his upper lip trembles. “Come back to me, Rissi, there’s a reason we met again after all those years. We’ve never stopped loving each other, that breakup was a terrible mistake. I thought I was choosing life, but it was suicide for me.”
“It was probably an especially fatal combination of murder and suicide,” she says, “because I almost died too.” She sits him down on the couch and tells him what she never intended to tell him, what she has never told any living soul, what she has never spoken about even with the few witnesses. It isn’t about herself that she speaks, but about a seventeen-year-old girl who didn’t get out of bed for long weeks, who didn’t speak, didn’t eat or drink, didn’t respond to her surroundings, whose body was frozen in a single position. “They wanted to hospitalize me, but my mother wouldn’t let them,” she says. “They went along with her only because she was a nurse and they let her hook me up to an IV at home.”
He listens to her, sorrowful, mortified, his eyes downcast, his hand covering his mouth. “I didn’t know,” he mumbles, “I didn’t think.”
She almost reprimands him, “So what did you think? Did you even think about me?”
“Not enough, apparently. I felt so guilty. Now I understand why your mother threw me out.”
Iris protests, “She didn’t, that didn’t happen!”
“She did, she screamed at me like a madwoman. She had a cup of tea in her hand and threw it at me and it shattered.”
Stunned, she asks, “When was that? Why haven’t you told me until now?”
“I was ashamed, Rissi. It was one of the most shameful moments of my life. I don’t know what I was thinking. It was a short time before I got married. I was in the neighborhood and decided to try. I thought maybe you still lived there, but she opened the door and the minute she recognized me, she started screaming like a crazy person.”
Listening to him, Iris suddenly has a vague recollection of a scorching afternoon when she brought Alma, still a baby, to her mother’s house and found her furiously cleaning the stairwell. “A cup broke. Watch out for the glass,” she said angrily, as if they were to blame. Iris picked Alma up quickly and asked, not really interested, “How did it happen?” Her mother muttered some complaint about the neighbors as Iris took Alma into the living room and then hurried off to a meeting. “Mickey will pick her up at six,” she said on her way out, unwittingly stepping on the shards of her wish, which had almost come true.
“What are we going to do about all this?” Eitan mumbles, resting his elbows on his knees, his back bent, like someone standing before a pile of ruins. Out of an old habit, she runs her fingers along his back, up and down, along the prominent vertebrae, feeling his heavy breaths, and for a moment, it seems as if he is about to burst into tears as he did at his mother’s grave after saying Kaddish. His legs had buckled and he fell onto his knees, remaining there, stooped over before the mounds of earth. “Come back to me, come back to me,” he cried, and she knelt beside him and stroked his back just as she is doing now. Suddenly she is choked by such intense sorrow that she can hardly breathe, because it seems to her that, in fact, they are both already buried under the earth, and even if they manage to dig a dark, narrow tunnel between their graves where they can entwine their dirt-covered fingers, their meeting is merely an illusion.
Alarmed, she runs her hands over his body and says, “You’re
real, you’re alive?”
“As far as I know,” he says with a sigh. “Only a living person could feel this kind of pain.” She presses closer to him and rests her head on his shoulder, the heat of his body soothing her a bit, the smell of him, his breathing, the steam rising from the bubbling pot. They sit side by side on the couch, their backs bent like survivors of a pogrom who know that their persecutors will soon be back. Finally he stands up, adds water to the pot and wine to the glasses. “Let’s make love,” he says, “we have thirty years to catch up on. You know how much lovemaking that is?”
She can tell that he is trying to sound cheerful, to erase the oppressive past, but what do we have left without it, she thinks, the past brought us here, for better and for worse. Nonetheless, she still tries to respond so that he will not say again, you remind me of that terrible year, you remind me of the disease. She sips her wine, turns a blind eye to how quickly he can shrug off the past, she is even happy about it. She lies down under him on the couch, the water in the pot boils as he kisses her. A toy car suddenly lurches along the rug, and he pulls the remote out from under her back. Inanimate becomes animate, so animate that she can feel his closeness on the tender, underside of her skin, not on her rough outer skin, making the feel of him on her body so intense and piercing that it is almost painful. This is surely the way a newborn feels when it is touched for the first time. Does he feel as she does? There seem to be tears in his eyes—he always cried easily. She still remembers how embarrassed he was when he told her tearfully of his mother’s illness, and her heart went out to him, the empty heart of a longtime orphan opening to embrace the pain of a soon-to-be orphan. She pulls his face close now and kisses his damp eyes. “My love,” she whispers, her fingers at the roots of his hair, his fingers at the roots of her body, coaxing from it pure bliss, thick and sticky, for a layer of hot glue joins her to him. When the glue cools and coagulates, she realizes that she cannot pull herself away from him even if she wants to, and she does not want to. There is nothing that makes it worth separating her arms from his, her stomach from his, her thighs from his.
“I have to put more water in the pot,” he whispers, “it’s going to burn in a minute.” But he doesn’t break away from her body.
“Let it burn,” she whispers, and she repeats a haiku Mickey once recited to her about a poet who came back from a period of seclusion to find that his house had gone up in flames. Instead of mourning, the poet wrote, “The storeroom burned down, nothing hides the moon.”
“That’s interesting,” he says, “to call the house a storeroom is powerful, very appropriate to this particular house.” He repeats the words loudly and points to the full moon shining in at them through the window, a giant orange egg, like that of a huge extinct animal.
“The world is full of miracles,” she says.
“Yes, miracles and disasters.” In the glow of the moonlight, he points to the scar on her lower abdomen, near her thigh, “I’m so sorry I didn’t know, I would have come to treat you if I had known, I would have transferred you to my department. When exactly did it happen?”
Although it turns out that he was in the States at the time, he continues to lament the lost opportunity. “I wouldn’t have let any other doctor touch you without my supervision, I would have anesthetized you myself before the operation, I would have been there for all the operations and kissed the inside of you. We lost ten years.” She thinks about those ten years, about her school, her life’s work, could she have done that with him at her side? Would it have been possible not to be swallowed up by his love?
“We would have had time to make a baby together,” he goes on, as if he is enjoying the sadness.
“I don’t think so. Everything down there was injured.”
“I would have fixed it. I’ve done more complicated things, believe me.”
She smiles. “I believe you. I love you.” Day after day, hour after hour, lost moment after lost moment—what can we do with all of this? She caresses his face, lingering on the curly gray beard. “Since when have you had this?” she asks.
“Many years, forever, in fact. After all, I’m in mourning, did you forget?”
“But I don’t remember you with a beard.”
“Because I hardly had any hair on my face then. But when it grew, I left it, at first because of the mourning, and then because I got used it.”
Unable to restrain herself, she says, “I thought you wanted to escape from the mourning, that’s what you told me. It seems that in the end, I was what you wanted to escape from.”
“Enough, please,” he begs, “let’s not go over that again. I was in mourning for my mother and for you too. I couldn’t separate the two of you.”
“The mourning for me is over. Can you shave off the beard? I want to see you the way you were.”
“Are you sure that the mourning for you is over? Because I’m afraid it’s just starting all over again.”
“Yes, I’m sure,” she whispers, and looks around for a moment as if she wants to be certain there is no witness to her promise.
He follows her gaze and suddenly remembers, “The pot!” and hurries into the kitchen naked and fills it with water. When he returns to the living room, he’s wearing black underpants and has a razor and a shaving cream brush in his hand. He looks intently at himself in the hallway mirror and says, “Come here, I’m in your hands.
“Come on, they do heart surgery faster,” he laughs as she moves the razor hesitantly and gently along his face, afraid to injure the white skin being exposed. “My patients will be frightened. I’m as white as a ghost.” The steam rising from the pot smells of scorched metal, fogging the mirror in the hallway, and their images are as blurry as a hallucination in the turquoise-painted wooden frame.
“You keep moving,” she scolds him. “I forgot how fidgety you are.”
“Because you’re tickling me. Being overcautious is dangerous. Will you let me finish it?”
But she refuses. “Of course not. Just look at me without moving. When did you get so tall? I don’t remember you so tall.”
“Sorry, I developed late in every sense of the word. But you, unlike me, have become more beautiful.”
“Really?” she protests happily. “That can’t be!”
“It absolutely can. There’s more life in your face. You were so delicate and thin and pale, like an idea. Now you’re much more womanly. Come on, let me finish this.” He takes the razor from her and in two quick strokes exposes the high cheekbones she remembers. Her breath catches at the sight of the face restored with such spine-tingling accuracy.
“Only now do I really believe it’s you,” she gushes. “I’ve been pretending until now. Look, you’ve hardly changed at all.” His face is still soft and smooth, and except for the slightly sunken cheeks and the drooping skin around his chin, he is her young Eitan. At the sight of him, tears rise in her eyes as she shakes her head again and again and bites her lips in wonder. The face emerging from his face fills her with painful longing the way suddenly discovered pictures of deceased loved ones do after many years, shedding bright light on the unknown past.
Here is his face in their school, coming into her classroom at recess, smiling bashfully. Here is his head resting on a pillow on her bed, his thick lashes shading his eyelids as he sleeps. Here is his face glowing at her on that most golden day in the narrow interval of spring after the cold and before the heat. The feel of the hot stones on her back, the lush foliage of the mulberry tree a canopy above them, her handsome boy stroking her breasts, his mouth slightly open, his blue eyes flashing, his cheeks slightly pink from the sun like a baby’s cheeks, and she curls herself around him with the utmost certainty that nothing will ever separate them.
“Who is that? I don’t know him!” he says, examining himself suspiciously, feeling his cheeks, twisting his lips. “What did you do to me? I feel like I’ve switched identities. The chi
ldren will be in shock! I’m completely exposed.” He covers his face with his hands and walks into the kitchen, fills the pot with water for the third time. Then he takes some tomatoes out of the fridge and cuts them into small cubes, leaving her alone in front of the mirror.
It appears that recently, a covering has been removed from her face as well. Since she met him again, she looks different, everyone tells her that, bigger eyes in a thinner face. Teachers in the school who have seen her every day for ten years wonder, “How come I never noticed that you have such beautiful eyes?” Perhaps it’s her expression that has changed—how had he put it, “There’s more life in your face.” Unwilling to lose even a single minute, she quickly returns her gaze to him.
How swiftly time passes when she’s with him. It’s already eight, and she can hear the opening of the evening news broadcast coming from the apartment above them. The worried little boy is apparently with his mother today and the father is free to watch the depressing events of the day, which are far more upsetting than thieves in the garden. She’ll go in about an hour. She can’t leave him like this, cooking them dinner, she hasn’t even told him that she’s pressed for time.
“What can I do, Tani?” she asks.
“Leave your husband,” he replies quietly, still chopping vegetables.
“I mean, what can I do to help make dinner. It wasn’t an existential question.” The deprecation in his voice when he said “husband” was a bit hurtful, and she looks over at her cell phone, momentarily afraid that Mickey can hear them in some mysterious way, perhaps even watch them, as round and silent as the moon.
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