“Never mind,” Alma says dismissively, “maybe it never even happened. I just remembered the first morning you came home from the hospital. I got up really early to make you breakfast and arranged everything nicely on a tray for you, but you didn’t want it, or maybe it just seemed that way to me.”
“Oh Alma, I’m so sorry, I don’t remember anything like that, but I was so groggy from the morphine. Why didn’t I want it?”
“You were nauseous, you didn’t want us to come into your room at all. I was so anxious for you to come home, but even when you did, we hardly saw you. Come on, don’t cry. Now I’m sorry I told you.”
“I’m not crying,” Iris mumbles, “I never cry,” and then she bursts out laughing at the contradiction between her words and her actions. “Forgive me, Almush, that was a terrible time. I didn’t want you to see me suffering. When you were with me, I tried to show you that I was fine, and that was so exhausting. It’s hard to be a mother who isn’t functioning, it goes against the essence of motherhood. And it was even harder to be a mother who needs to be taken care of.”
“But I wanted to take care of you, I wanted to give you a nice surprise after disappointing you, to show you that I know how to take care of you.”
“Disappointing me? Of course not! Why did you think I was disappointed in you?”
“I don’t know,” Alma says, “for not being the best student? For not sticking with any of my afternoon courses? For watching too much TV? I wanted you to see that I was good at taking care of you. I bought a cookbook and learned how to make a few things for you, but you didn’t want them.”
“Oh Alma, I had no idea. I remember that at first, I really preferred to be alone, but when I started to feel a bit better and tried to join the family again, I found you pretty indifferent.”
“I give up quickly, you know. I don’t stick with things. By the way, who’s Eitan?”
Iris, suddenly unable to breathe, mumbles, “Eitan? Why do you ask?”
“You must have been dreaming about him. When I woke up I heard you mumbling something, like you were calling him?”
“Really?” Iris dissembles. “He’s someone I loved thirty years ago when I was even younger than you. It’s strange that I suddenly dreamed about him.”
“My dreams go backward too. This last year, I dreamed a lot about the attack, that you were, like, injured and I was trying to save you and was injured myself.”
Shaking her head, Iris says, “Why didn’t you tell me, how come we never talked about this?”
“It was hard for me to talk. I was too closed. Boaz helps me open up. Thanks to him, I can say a lot more today.”
Trying to hide her disappointment at the enemy’s reappearance, Iris forces herself to ask softly, “How exactly does he help you?”
“It’s part of the spiritual work, changing things about myself that bother me. I felt that my life couldn’t go on the way it was, that here I had a chance for real change.”
Iris says gently, “I understand,” even though she mostly wants to scream: but why this particular change? How can you not see how twisted it is? But it’s better not to utter a single word of doubt right now, this isn’t the time for preaching, only for quiet, steady giving. She will take care of her daughter and her daughter will take care of her, and perhaps that way, they can slowly defuse the bomb that has been laid at their doorstep.
“I’m glad you’re sharing this with me,” she adds. Suddenly, she doesn’t know what else to say, because on the one hand, her daughter is here, beside her, slowly growing closer to her, but on the other, someone else is pulling her strings, as if she were doomed to raise her along with a stranger, a dangerous one, as Sasha said.
Just as she thinks about him, Alma asks, “What about your pupil? When is he coming?” For the first time, it occurs to her that his presence might interest her, and perhaps, as she explained to parents many times, several elements are usually needed to achieve change when none of them can do it alone.
“Sasha? I really should get back to him. My phone is here on the bed, isn’t it? Maybe under the tray?”
Alma finds it in the sheets and stares at the display. “Pain called,” she says. “Who’s Pain? Sorry I looked, it just caught my eye. Since when does Pain have a phone number?”
Iris sighs, she can easily improvise a lie, after all, she’s been specializing in it recently, but her lies have come back to haunt her. “It has to do with what I told you before about my first boyfriend,” she admits, “I met him by accident in the pain clinic a few weeks ago.”
Alma listens with interest, then says, “You met him out of the blue after thirty years? So that’s why you dreamed about him last night! It really does sound like a dream.”
“You’re right, it has nothing to do with reality.” Iris chooses her words cautiously now that she has been found out. “It’s kind of an escape from reality.”
“What’s wrong with escaping?”
Iris hesitates a bit before replying, “When you escape, you’re not free.”
“But what about love?” Alma persists for some reason. It’s strange that she’s so interested, strange that she doesn’t identify with her father as usual.
“Love has many faces, sometimes it’s cut off from life like a kite without a string. You know it’s gliding in the sky, but you have to let it go because you don’t want other things that are more important to you to fall.”
“Oh, Mom, that’s sad,” Alma sighs.
“I’ve seen much sadder things in my life.” Is this really how their love story will end, or are these words meant only for her daughter?
Now is not the time for decisions, it’s the time to wrap her wounds with the bandages Sasha brings with him as he enters the apartment, and though it hurts to move her fingers, it is possible, so she refuses once again to be examined. “I’m sure I didn’t break anything, I’m just banged up. I know because I have something to compare it to,” she assures him, “let’s wait another day.” She is glad to see that, though he is watching Alma, he keeps his distance.
Her daughter, relaxed and charming, offers him the remains of their breakfast. “Even if you don’t look like someone who would be satisfied with leftovers,” she giggles.
Sasha takes a slice of bread and vegetables and smiles, “For starters, this is great.” As he eats, he tells her about apartments he’s seen recently, and she recommends one Web site or another. Actually, she tells him, a room in a friend’s apartment is available, not far from here. As Iris watches them surreptitiously, she sees them glowing with the beginnings of life. Despite everything, they shine with the miraculous glow that might still heal the damage, or at least hide it. Their skin is so smooth, and under it, their bodies are young, their bones mend quickly, and despite everything, Alma is still naive, still believes in love. Iris doesn’t listen to what they say, merely looks at the light reflecting off their skin, their bare arms, the sunbeams dancing on their foreheads, the golden radiance glowing above their heads like halos.
Would she return there if time flowed backward, as it does in dreams? Would she return to that day, the most wonderful day in her life, when it was neither too hot nor too cold? Their blossoming wadi has become a building project that houses hundreds of people, people who love and suffer, who are born and die. It is only in her memory that the wildflowers bloom once again, but if she was visited by such happiness once in her life, it might return one day, perhaps even today. She shakes her head, she has grown so used to reaching into that empty place that her fingers have been lost in the deep, hollow pocket of her life, and now, when she puts her hand in her other pocket, it is full to the brim. The sun dazzles her and she can’t see anything. Even when she closes her eyes, the light penetrates her lids, a gold blanket spreads over her, a weave of gold threads absorbs her pain. She hears steps in the room, a faucet is turned on and off, dishes are washed, words are whisper
ed, doors are opened and closed, car horns beep, voices rise in angry arguments, street noises blend with the noises in the apartment.
It’s her cell phone ringing, or maybe on the other side of the window, on the sidewalk, another woman will answer for her? She reaches out from within the twilight of her sleep and gropes blindly for the smooth phone. Someone must have answered, because she hears the sound of crying. Is it her daughter? “Come back to me, come back to me,” he pleads, and she shakes her head in puzzlement. What is he talking about? Who is he talking to? She died almost thirty years ago, right before your eyes, she died slowly, lingering so you could say goodbye. “Rissi, come back to me,” he continues, and she opens her eyes to the last rays of the sun. “I know you never stopped loving me,” he says, his voice somewhat steadier.
“I will never stop loving you,” she hears herself whisper, but he doesn’t hear her.
“You promised me you would come back,” he persists, “that you would give us a second chance.”
“Maybe there are no second chances, only a first chance for something else.”
It’s strange that he doesn’t hear her, because she hears him so clearly when he says, “I have to hang up, I’m waiting for you.”
She drops the phone and calls out in the suddenly darkening room, “Alma? Where’s Alma?” Has the call she answered unthinkingly caused a disaster?
But there is Sasha standing in the doorway, saying, “Alma went to work.”
“Oh no!” she screams. “Why did you let her go?”
“Her boss was here, didn’t you hear the shouting?”
“No,” she moans. “I didn’t know what I was hearing, whether it was from here or from outside, I must have fallen asleep. What are we going to do, Sasha?”
“Believe in her, Iris, like you used to tell my mother, we’ll show him the path and he’ll take it.”
But she protests, “This is nothing like that, you were still a child.”
“She’s still a child too. Go back to sleep, Iris, I’ll stay here for the time being. She asked me to wait for her.”
Everyone is waiting for everyone else, she thinks, and no one comes. Is this the chance we were given, the chance to part? Because the storeroom burned, there was nothing to hide the moon. She hears herself muttering all sorts of sayings. It feels as if Eitan is lying beside her and she is trying to tutor him for his exams. The past has passed, she says to him, everything has changed and nothing has been resolved. We think that cause precedes effect, but it is always the effect that leads to the cause. We were together day after day, night after night, and so I too was enslaved, controlled by a cruel, uncompromising tyrant. The past controlled me, and I have no idea why I am speaking in the past tense.
“Did you call me?” Sasha says, coming over to her, and when she shakes her head, he says, “I’ll be right back. I’m going out for a minute to see an apartment not far from here.”
“Just check to see that there are no mulberry trees and no springs there.”
He chuckles, “What are you talking about?”
“I’ll explain when you come back. It’s an old story with one beginning and many endings.”
To her surprise, he returns immediately. Is it because he wants to hear her story? His large body is on the threshold. “Irissi,” he says, “you took a really bad fall.”
She laughs, “Is that you, Mickey? I’ve been waiting for you! Don’t worry, it could have been much worse.”
“No doubt about it, we’ve already seen that.”
“I’m sorry, Mickey, I didn’t understand you properly before. You’re right, it really is better to stay here for the time being.”
“I’m not sure anymore. It looks worse than I thought. You have to get x-rayed.”
“But it hurts less already, and the sun here is so pleasant, it’ll heal me. And it isn’t too hot or too cold here.”
“The sun set a while ago,” he says with a chuckle, and his broad face seems to split into two, a sort of miraculous masculine birth.
Then a young voice says, “Hey Mom, what’s all this weird talk?” For some reason, she is extremely excited to see him, as if they haven’t seen each other in years, and she reaches out toward him.
“Omy! I’m so glad you came, how was your civics exam?”
“Awesome,” he says. “Dad nailed it. The questions on the exam were exactly the same ones we worked on together.”
“That’s wonderful!” she says. “Aren’t you the lucky one!”
“Not really, look at the letter I got today.” He hands her a folded page with a depressing logo embossed on it, a thin olive leaf coiled around a wide sword, imprisoned inside a star, so familiar to her from childhood, because that symbol decorated most of the letters that reached their home. Concealed beneath it were sorrow and loss in the form of invitations to camps and special fun days for the children of fallen soldiers, meetings of widows and bereaved parents.
But still, she doesn’t understand, and asks, “What’s this?”
“Don’t you see? My first draft notice!”
“Draft notice? Already? But you were just born!”
With her swollen, throbbing fingers, she unfolds the form and reads an invitation, or more accurately, an order, for Omer Eilam to appear at the Jerusalem recruitment office in accordance with the national service law on such and such a date, which will arrive only too soon. They even provided him with a travel pass and a new acronym, NMSR—New Military Service Recruit.
Omer Eilam, the letters crowd together for her on the memorial plaque, bending their heads in suppressed pain, and she shakes her head. How do they even know he was born? After all, it was a strictly private matter, only she and Mickey and the midwife were there, and not a single representative of the army or the state, so what do they want from him now? And how do they know exactly where he lives? They even know the postal code, which she always forgets.
“Now that he finally learned civics, he stops being a civilian,” Mickey jokes.
But she crushes the flickering letters into a small paper ball and says, “I won’t allow it, Mickey, enough, I’ve given enough! I gave my father, I gave my body, I won’t give my son. We’ll hide out here, at Alma’s place.”
Mickey looks at her, surprised. “It’s not like you to talk like that, Iris, you with all your educational messages! And why do you even think this is about you?”
“So who is it about, the country?” she says.
“First of all, it’s about him,” pointing at Omer, who sits down on the edge of the bed, rubbing his shaved temples.
“I’m not even me anymore,” Omer mutters. “I’m just an NMSR. What the hell is an NMSR anyway?”
Mickey says, “I’ve already explained it to you twice, New Military Service Recruit.”
“New Military Service Slave is more like it.”
Mickey sits down beside him and puts his hand on his shoulder. “Calm down, it’s only your first draft notice. You still have time to get used to the idea, right Rissi?”
“What did you call me?” she asks. She never let him call her that, but now, for some reason, it doesn’t bother her. The past has opened, she suddenly feels. Is this the chance she has been given? The chance to open the sweet, suffocating, cursed cavern of the past and let its contents blend with the sun, the wind, and the voices of the present?
“What’s this, family day?” she suddenly hears Alma’s voice. How did she not see her enter in her yellow dress like a sunbeam?
She calls to her apprehensively, afraid that their presence might cause her to run back to where she just came from. “Alma, you’re here? When did you come in?”
“I just came for a minute to make you dinner,” her daughter says, walking over to her.
Iris says, “Look,” handing her the crumpled paper ball as if asking for mercy.
“What’s that?�
�� Alma asks suspiciously, then recognizes it. “What an honor, your first draft notice! I’m so glad that’s all behind me! Don’t worry. Believe me, if I survived, you will too.”
She tosses him the threatening paper ball, and Omer grumbles, “How can you even compare the two,” as he catches it and tosses it back.
“It’ll make you less spoiled,” she teases him as the ball rolls under the bed next to the spider’s corpse. “And it’s about time.”
“I’m spoiled? Look who’s talking! You’re the one who’s spoiled! ‘Mom, make me a half-ponytail, I won’t go out of the house without a half-ponytail!’ ”
“Don’t remind me of that!” Alma warns him, her face darkening. “For years I thought that Mom was hurt because I wanted a half-ponytail!”
Omer says, “You’re kidding! I was sure it was because I was hiding in the bathroom! How long has it been Mom, ten years?”
“Ten years and seven weeks,” Iris says, looking at them in surprise. The caverns of the past have opened for them as well, its stories blending with other events, woven into the large fabric of their lives. How can it be that they never talked about it, she thinks, what have we actually been doing until now?
“It has absolutely nothing to do with either of you,” Mickey sighs. “It’s all my fault because I left early.”
“So honestly, why did you leave early?” Alma asks.
He looks into her deep black eyes and says, “It’s an old story—”
Iris interrupts him. “Mostly, it doesn’t matter anymore. I recovered, can’t you see that I recovered?”
“You’re not very convincing with all those bandages,” Omer says.
Alma sits down on the bed beside them and says quietly, “This time it really is my fault.”
“It’s not your fault,” Iris says, “it’s thanks to you.” Is this the chance she has been given? Not the chance to love him again, but to love her life for what it is, not to long for what it isn’t.
“Where did I put that?” Mickey suddenly asks himself, rummaging through in his pockets. “You got a letter today too, Iris, I completely forgot.” He pulls out a thick, wrinkled piece of paper. “I found it on the windshield of your car when I picked it up at the interchange.” He hands it to her, his expression inscrutable, and she pales at the sight of the clear letters, blue on white, “Come back to me.”
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