Pain

by Zeruya Shalev

  But Alma says, “I’m in a hurry, I’m just getting on a bus.”

  “What time did you come home? I’m so sorry I missed you. Why didn’t you let me know you were coming?”

  “I didn’t know myself. I had a ride and all of a sudden I found myself in Jerusalem.”

  “What do you mean, you didn’t know where you were going?” she asks sharply, which of course closes the gates with a bang.

  “It doesn’t matter, it’s hard to explain,” Alma mutters. “I’ll come next week.”

  But Iris won’t let it go. “It matters to me. Who gave you a ride? You got into a car without knowing where it was headed?”

  “Can’t hear you, Mom, there’s a lot of noise on the bus, bye for now.”

  What did she give in exchange for that lift? Did it have anything to do with the cult? Maybe Shira wasn’t exaggerating, but actually minimizing? The most terrible images fill her mind now, fucking in the back seat, strange men, drugs, violence, what can she do about those hideous sights? Should she get into her car and block Alma’s bus before it leaves the station, threaten the driver? Let me see my daughter or I’ll hurt you all, she’ll say. It will be a new kind of terror attack, a maternal terror attack, that’s what they’ll probably call it in the news reports, because she thinks she is capable of anything now. For years she hasn’t been able to look at buses, but today that seems to be the least of her problems. She’ll take control of the bus, hold the passengers hostage, and say to her daughter, I won’t release any of them until you come home with me. Or maybe she herself will be injured, a totally personal suicide attack. Come home or I’ll throw myself under the bus that’s taking you to disaster.

  “Is everything okay?” her secretary asks her as she enters her office with a pile of forms to sign.

  “Nothing is okay today,” she replies.

  “Just today?” Ofra asks. “It seems like a long time already. Can I help you, Iris? You take care of everyone here and you never let anyone help you.”

  “No one can help me,” she says in a cold voice and repeats the words in surprise, as if only now has she recognized that sad fact. “No one can help me.”

  Ofra looks at her sadly. “So make just this one last effort to end the year, it’ll be vacation soon.”

  “What vacation?!” she says. “You know how many teachers I still have to interview, how many seminars I have to organize, not to mention the renovations of the first-grade classrooms.”

  “That’s small change for you.” Of course, Ofra is right. Iris is ready to renovate the entire building and replace all the teachers just so she doesn’t have to think about that daughter who is making her worst nightmares come true with such shocking thoughtlessness.

  In the teachers’ room, she sees the young woman who has just joined the staff. She isn’t much older than Alma, but a huge abyss seems to divide them—one has work and love, and the other is involved in something shady that horrifies her more the more she thinks about it. “I found myself in Jerusalem,” Alma said, “I found myself in Jerusalem.” Iris sits down across from the young teacher, seized by a powerful urge to know her better, to hear about her family, especially her mother. Maybe it will become clear that the difference lies there. But what will she ask, was your mother abandoned by her first love, which caused her to have a severe breakdown? Did your mother marry your father without passion, without joy? Was she disappointed when she looked at you the first time, realizing that you weren’t the baby she had dreamed of because you weren’t the daughter of the man she loved?

  She can ask all sorts of other questions, but what’s the point, after all, whether she is or isn’t to blame for everything or anything, she has to do all she can to rescue her daughter. Nonetheless, unable to restrain herself, she asks with a forced smile on her face, “So how’s it going? Are you still in love?”

  Ya’ara replies with a broad smile that is both embarrassed and certain, “Yes, it’s a dream, just a dream.”

  “I’m so happy for you. Did you have a model for that kind of happiness at home? Are your parents in love that way too?”

  To her disappointment, the young teacher replies enthusiastically, her eyes glowing. “My parents are really something. After thirty years, they still hold hands!”

  Iris nods sadly, absorbing the information, until another teacher interrupts the conversation: “That doesn’t mean anything. My parents separated when I was little, but I still have a good marriage.” Then the science teacher contributes contradictory information about lovebird parents who have a twice-divorced daughter, but Iris clings to the most depressing story, “They still hold hands after thirty years!”

  Did Alma ever see them holding hands? Not very often, that’s not their style. They quickly became sarcastic and unromantic with each other, but they didn’t function badly as parents, as a family. No, it wasn’t her relationship with Mickey, it was her relationship with Alma, that’s where the failure lay, her failure to make her daughter feel unequivocally that she loved her. Devastated, she returns to her office, leaving behind the ongoing conversation.

  She needs to talk to Mickey, whatever he saw. It doesn’t matter now, they will always be Alma’s parents and everything between them is irrelevant at the moment. Once again, she reads the text that he may have seen: “When are you coming, I’m waiting for you, Come soon, my love, I’m home.” Poor Mickey, how terrible to find a text like that on your wife’s phone. Such disappointment, such deceit, and yet he didn’t seem upset, he seemed almost excited, amused, his broad hand handing her the phone through the window, his large face composed. Is he also having an affair, as she recently suspected, and did this discovery liberate him? She has to call and talk to him about Alma, but her finger hesitates above the touch screen. She taps the name of the bar, which is called, for some reason, Sinai. The Sinai Bar-Restaurant.

  Apprehensively, she reads the information that leads her to the name Boaz Gerber. Why hasn’t she done this sooner? But on the other hand, it would have been pointless, because even the sophisticated search engine can’t tell her a thing about her daughter and doesn’t upload even a single photo of that Boaz or link him to any cult or to Alma. But it does have an abundance of frightening information about cults and leaves her to navigate her way through the links by herself. She reads with horror about the enormous number of people damaged by cults in contrast to the scanty public debate on the subject, about the critical importance of locating them in the early stages, and on the other hand, about how difficult it is to locate them. She reads with alarm about the warning signs, changes in the manner of dress and behavior, severed relations with family and friends. Nausea rises in her throat and her stomach roils. “Alma, no,” she mumbles, “Alma, no,” as if her daughter is on the roof of a tall building, her legs already dangling in the air, and she remembers all the tension related to her eating. Even then, she pictured her that way, in constant danger, in need of rescue.

  “I finished early today, want to meet up?” Eitan’s text overlays the ominous reports, and she swoops down on it as if it were prey. “Sure. Where?”

  It’s good that he suggested this place outside the city, in an Arab village on a hilltop where there is no chance they will see anyone they know. She has never been here, and she stares at the serene pastoral sights, the chickens pecking the ground, two skinny cows ambling through a dry field. Of course, it’s an illusion, disasters can be hidden under every roof in the city and outside of it, in palaces and in tents. The simple life is no guarantee, and yet the clean, harvest-scented air soothes her a bit. She sits down at the last table in the garden, almost outside the restaurant, where she can look out over the road that leads to the hilltop, can see his silver car speeding toward her. What a miraculous, incredible sight—sunbeams collect on its roof, and for a moment she thinks it is going up in flames, like the chariots and horsemen described in the Bible. She stands up to greet him, overwhelmed, as
she is every time she sees him. So many years have passed, and she has already been nearing the end of her life without seeing him. Many people her age fall ill and die, even on that morning ten years ago, death was closer to her than life. And yet, if it hadn’t been for that catastrophe, they would not have met again, and that thought is just as unbearable as the thought of the catastrophe itself. When the car door opens and he gets out, tall and disheveled, she can’t believe it’s him, her Eitan, who has come back to her. It is inconceivable that the pain, which split them apart, has now brought them together again only to have them separate once more.

  His pale, beardless face is astonishingly beautiful, surrounded by a full head of gray hair, and the sun in his eyes illuminates the mesmerizing blue rings around his pupils. She gives him a long hug, almost hanging on his thin body. There is no one there but the owner, who is busy in the kitchen and doesn’t know her, but he apparently knows Eitan well because he hurries out to them, waving his arms in excitement and almost pushing into their embrace. “Doctor!” he shouts. “Welcome, I was worried about you, you haven’t been here in a long time.”

  Eitan claps him on the back affectionately and says, “You know how it is, no time to breathe. How’s everything with you? How’s your mother?” Then he explains to her, “Moussa’s mother is an old patient of mine.”

  “He saved her,” Moussa adds. “She suffered so much, she used to cry from the pain. Thanks to him, she goes on with her life, even takes care of the grandchildren.” He leads them to the table and begins to fuss around them. He turns the fan in their direction, brings them a jug of cold water with mint leaves and lemon, and three glasses of arak, one for himself, because he immediately sits down beside them.

  “Orit will be sorry she missed you, she’s working late today.”

  Eitan asks, “How is she? How is life together?”

  “What can I tell you, it’s not easy, as you know.”

  Eitan explains, smiling broadly, “Moussa made the mistake of his life by marrying a Jewish woman. Instead of taking a simple girl from the village, he got mixed up with an opinionated city girl who argues with him about everything.”

  Moussa laughs, picks up his glass and drinks to his wife. “I’m nuts about her, but she drives me crazy. When will you find a cure for that disease?”

  She listens to their conversation, fascinated. Since finding each other again, they have always been alone, only the two of them in the oasis of their return to the past. In fact, even when they were young, they didn’t socialize very much, they were so preoccupied with his mother’s illness. Now she enjoys seeing him in a lighthearted conversation, enjoys being this man’s woman, in this place, which is almost utopian anyway, in this beautiful, friendly Arab village in the Jerusalem hills, in the home of this mixed-marriage couple who are living the most exciting fantasy in the region—coexistence.

  The drink makes her dizzy, and she looks admiringly at Eitan’s sharp face. If they can do it, so can we, she promises herself, we haven’t been given a second chance only to fail again. Maybe Mickey will be pleased about it as well and it will be astonishingly easy. They’ll separate as dispassionately as they had married, and the first love of her life will become the last love of her life. She must have unintentionally laughed, because they break off speaking and look at her. “What’s funny, Rissi?” Eitan asks softly and puts his hand on her thigh. She drapes her arm around his shoulders and rests her spinning head in the hollow of his neck, her lips longing to kiss him in the sight of the slowly departing sun, in the sight of their host. Here is a witness, and she has to prove to him that it’s real, that she had belonged to this man from the days of her youth. As her fingers caress his cheek, she realizes that she wants to live in this village with him, in an isolated house on the hilltop, to raise cows and goats and never leave. She laughs again, inhaling deeply the familiar smell of him that she loves so much, the smell of soap and medicine, the smell of his orphanhood. She’s a bit disappointed when her witness leaves the table hastily, as if fleeing from their intimacy, but he returns immediately with full plates. He covers the table with a profusion of dishes that Eitan has clearly eaten before and likes. She’s so hungry, but except for a plate of yellow rice, everything is meat, and she is slightly put off.

  “Dig in,” Moussa urges her as Eitan attacks the food.

  She explains, somewhat apologetically, “I’m a vegetarian.”

  Eitan puts down his fork in surprise. “I didn’t know!” He adds almost angrily, “You didn’t use to be a vegetarian!” Turning to Moussa in disappointment he says, “What are we going to do with her?”

  But Moussa reassures them, “No problem, I’ll make a vegetable dish for you.” She is sorry once again that he leaves their table and watches him move away, clad in a white shirt and bursting with goodwill. Then she returns her gaze to Eitan, who is chewing away at pieces of a pinkish steak, a kind of juicy kebab, and a chicken cutlet, his jaws moving quickly. A cloud of burnt blood rises from their table and nausea rises in her throat.

  “How long have you been a vegetarian?”

  “More than twenty years. When I married Mickey, we decided that we wouldn’t eat dead animals.” She feels uncomfortable about admitting the existence of the person she has spent so many years with, who shares her worldviews, her eating habits.

  Eitan shakes his head in annoyance. “You take B-12, I hope.”

  “Of course, when I remember,” she replies, happy to reduce the subject, so important to her, Mickey, and the children, to an insignificant detail. Couples overcome such large differences, she thinks, trying to cheer herself up, and yet it is hard to watch him chewing away so comfortably, as if it isn’t a living creature that once had a conscious mind lying there on his plate, as if he has never even thought about it.

  “I didn’t know you were so unevolved,” she finally says, unable to stop herself. “They’re animals like you and me! How can you eat them?”

  He recoils as if he has been struck. “So go back to your husband if it bothers you so much,” he hisses, his jaws moving constantly, and when he takes a sip of arak, the inside of his mouth looks black and hollow.

  “I haven’t left him yet.”

  He moves his face closer to hers. “Of course you’ve left him. You wouldn’t be here otherwise.” His eyes, grown dark in the sunset, fix on her. “You’re coming back to me.” He shoves a piece of meat into his mouth and chews it defiantly. Then he raises her chin and crushes her lips with his until they part and her mouth fills with the forgotten, repulsive taste of roasted blood. To her horror, she feels a lump of chewed meat being thrust onto her tongue. She tries to break away from his lips, tries to push the lump back into his mouth, but can’t. Her stomach churns and her lungs empty of air until her power to resist weakens and she swallows the lump of chewed meat from his mouth with a bitter sense of defeat. Only then does he take his lips from hers.

  “You’ve gone too far,” she says, gasping for air, knowing that she sounds like a self-righteous old schoolteacher. “What was that supposed to be?”

  To her surprise, he laughs. “Lighten up. Where’s your sense of humor? Are all vegetarians so uptight, or is it just you?”

  She leaves the table angrily and hurries to the restroom, fills her mouth with water and soap, and spits it out over and over again. No, she doesn’t think it’s funny, definitely not. But neither does she think it’s funny when she recalls feeding Alma the same way when she was a baby, shoving mashed-up globs into her small mouth as she begged, threatened, coaxed, persisting even when she felt the child’s revulsion. How could she have done that? How could he have done that? She hears the sound of a moving car, and for a moment, she hopes it’s him, that when she returns to the table he will no longer be there—is that what she really hopes for? Someone has to disappear, he or she, or Mickey, or Alma, or all living creatures. But she finds him waiting for her at the restroom door.

&n
bsp; “I’m sorry, Rissi, I’ve been acting like a love-struck teenage idiot,” he says and wraps his arms around her. There are more people in the restaurant now, and she glances quickly at the faces, hoping she doesn’t know anyone, and even more that they don’t know her. Keeping her head down, she breaks away from his embrace and hurries outside to their table under the grape arbor. All the dishes have been removed and only her plate of roasted vegetables awaits her beside the bowl of cold yellow rice, but the taste of soap is in her mouth and she doesn’t want to eat anything.

  “I must be jealous,” he says jokingly.

  “You? I don’t remember you being jealous.”

  “I don’t remember you being a vegetarian, I mean married.”

  She smiles, how can she be angry at him? She’d rather not, now that she’s the one making the choices. “That reminded me of the way I used to force my daughter to eat. It must have been awful for her, but I had to do it. I was afraid she’d die.”

  “Die?” he says in surprise. “You were really overreacting! Children don’t die of hunger in situations like that.”

  “I made a terrible mistake. I thought I was saving her. She never asked to eat, was never hungry, and she didn’t grow. I didn’t know what to do.”

  “Maybe she just wanted to eat meat. If you’d fed her meat, she would have devoured it.”

  She shakes her head. “It’s not funny, Eitan,” she says, sounding like a schoolteacher again.

  “Maybe, but it’s not tragic either, assuming that nowadays you don’t force her to eat anymore.”

  “Nowadays someone else is forcing her to do other things.” Suddenly she feels an urgent need to share this with him. “I’m terribly worried about her, Eitan. I think she’s in trouble.”