Two She-Bears

by Meir Shalev

That’s what he said, and I just laughed. I didn’t imagine what was coming. I never had that famous intuition, the foreknowledge attributed to women, especially to mothers. Even on the day of the disaster itself I didn’t sense a thing.

  Hikes for guys. Just the two of them together. The little guy has to learn from the big guy all the nonsense that a father has to teach his son—how to light a campfire, to know which leaves could be used for tea, to walk barefoot on the ground—and girls were likely to get nervous: “What if he steps on broken glass?” And “What if there’s a snake?” And “Even Grandpa Ze’ev always walks in his work boots.”

  “If a snake shows up we’ll deal with it, right, Neta?”—that’s what we called him, our son, who grew up complaining: “They laugh at me in kindergarten. Why did you give me a girl’s name?”

  “Laugh back at them.”

  And how to find the North Star and drive the old pickup truck—Neta on his father’s lap, his three-, four-, five-, and six-year-old hands gripping the wheel with excitement—and how to tie a hitch knot, and improve night vision by looking to the side, and to identify and recognize everything the ear hears and the finger feels and the nose smells and the eye sees: “This is a porcupine quill, and this is a snakeskin, feel how delicate and thin it is. Touch it, Neta, don’t be afraid, it’s just his skin, he’s not here, he shed his skin and slithered away. And even if he were here—I’m here, protecting you.

  “You hear that, Neta? Listen carefully—that’s the cawing of a jaybird and that’s the trilling of a falcon and that’s the wailing of a curlew and that’s the chirping of a finch and that’s the tsk-tsking of a robin redbreast. Every year a redbreast like that comes to our yard, always to the same tree. We planted the tree, that’s true, but in his opinion it’s his tree. Now smell: this yellow flower is called inula. Your mother thinks it stinks. Smell it and tell me what you think. It’s like camphor, not bad. Close your eyes. You should smell things with your eyes closed. Just with your nose. You can remember smells better than what you see and what you hear. This smell is inula, this is common rue, this is the mastic tree, this is thyme, and, best of all—sage. Sage is our friend. If you can remember all the names, I’ll tell Grandpa Ze’ev and he’ll be really happy. Maybe he’ll take you to the big carob tree in his wadi and the cave next to it, and he’ll also teach you the names of plants and tell you about the caveman that once lived there and make a wooden club for you too, in case a bad dog might come or a poisonous snake or a bad person. And when you get a little bigger, he’ll teach you to shoot his old Mauser and hit the bull’s-eye.

  “And these are the tracks of a hyena, it looks like a big dog, with a low butt and high shoulders. Look, Neta: the footprints of the front legs are bigger than the footprints of the back legs. What are you laughing about? Daddy said ‘butt’? You say ‘butt’ too. We’ll say it together: Butt. Butt. Butt. Butt.

  “And here’s another thing, really interesting: this stone. Every stone in the field has an upper side and a lower side, the side of the earth and darkness and the side of the sun and light. You see? The underside is smooth. There’s only a little dirt on it and a bit of spiderweb. And the top, the sunlight side, is rough. Touch it, feel this. This is called lichen. If a stone has lichen on the bottom it means that somebody turned it upside down. Somebody picked it up and didn’t put it back the right way.”

  “Nature looks like one big mess,” he told her more than once, “but it’s not. Everything in nature is in its place.” And she smiled to herself as she remembered, because that’s what he would say when they were making love: “What a mess in this bed! One leg there, one leg here, and this little friend, what’s he doing here? Let’s put him in place. Here. Much better when everything’s organized.”

  “So come, Neta, let’s put the stone back in its place. Here, the way it was. You see these little sprouts? How here they’re totally white and only their tips are green? They sprouted underneath, crawled sideways to escape, and only when they got into the light did they become green. Everything white was under the stone, and everything green was outside. And that tells us one more thing—that it was moved recently. This is interesting, right, Neta? We’re like police detectives.”

  “Hikes for guys,” he told her. He looked at their son, their son looked at him, and the two of them—like generous winners—at her. Who could top a pair of guys like this, a father and son, smiling at each other, sharing secrets and schemes? Hikes for guys on hills in the south, hikes for guys in the big cornfields north of the moshava, where they picked fresh ears of the sweet corn she loved so much.

  “We’ll roast them for Mommy on the fire. Come here, I’ll show you how.”

  “I brought you this, Mommy, is it yummy?”

  “Eat, just for you.”

  I ate. I enjoyed. I got angry.

  And hikes for guys along the rocks on the seashore, and over the rocks behind the Crusader fortress, where at Hanukkah time the cyclamen are already in bloom. “Lookee here, what a miracle,” Grandpa Ze’ev told me when he was alive and I was a girl. “These flowers are blooming, and their green leaves haven’t even pushed through the dirt. This only happens here, by us. So close to the village and nobody knows. Just you and me.”

  And a hike for guys in the desert, for the first and last time, twelve years ago exactly, the hike after which they never hiked again, not the guys alone or me with them—and to tell the truth, we never did anything together again. Twelve years have passed, which for me seem like a hundred.

  3

  I see him getting ready to go. I know him and don’t know him. I again take note of the changes in him. Were it not for the disaster that caused them I could happily smile inside. Despite the time gone by and everything that happened, I still look young, as I see reflected in the mirror and the eyes of my students and their parents, the misty gaze of men and women in the street. And he, you, my man—that’s what I called you then—became a different man, you lost your looks.

  I know: It can’t just be dismissed as aging. Aging is slow, always preserving some youthful features, which is gratifying at first and, later—when it’s clear that they linger only to remind us and taunt us—is annoying. Whereas in your case the change is complete, like an insect’s metamorphosis.

  And I look at him and again count the ways: His smile is erased. His fire, his eternal flame, is extinguished. His golden skin, the delight of my fingers and eyes, has paled and chilled and lost its luster. His good smell, the myrrh of early manhood, has evaporated. His body—once the body of a youth—became thick and clumsy. He didn’t get fat and weak; he actually got stronger. His arms, once shapely and nimble, became the heavy arms of a bear with a fearsome hug.

  My man, my first husband, golden and lean, has disappeared. A second husband—white and thick and different—has taken his place. His thickness is pure power. His whiteness is the whiteness of death. The eye of the sun does not tan him, and human eyes are averted.

  I remember: One day he cut himself, and blood flowed from his finger. He didn’t even look at me when I bandaged it, but I was filled with joy: He’s alive. His blood is as red as ever. If only I could, I would have taken that second white and strange husband and cut him open, birthing my other husband from inside him.

  4

  I looked at him, all set to go: I was confident that he had prepared thoroughly and happy for the small details that had returned to his mind and his hands. He put the food into two plastic containers that he took from the kitchen cupboard. He tucked the containers in his pack along with two bottles of water and did something, strange and new, that he’d never done before on those hikes of ours—he wrote down on a slip of paper all the items he was taking. Like a grocery list: “6 slices of bread,” “2 cucumbers,” “3 granola bars,” “1 sour cream,” “2 hard-boiled eggs.” Also “2 plastic containers,” “thermos,” “spoon,” “2 water bottles,” “backpack,” “toilet paper,” “this note,” and “pen.”

  He stuck the note and pen in hi
s pocket, then surprised me with one more thing: he took our thick little bath mat and walked out of the house, taking it and the backpack to the plant nursery.

  I followed him: the wife knowing the events to come, the mother imagining them, the granddaughter happily anticipating—Come, bring it on, breathe life into our dry bones—and watching and remembering every detail. From the tool rack in the nursery he took items not taken on an ordinary hike: pruning shears, a sinister Japanese folding handsaw, a roll of green duct tape.

  The slow, purposeful pace of his activity suddenly quickened. More items were added to the list and the backpack—a spool of cord, a pocketknife, and, of course, the constant friend: the small pickax used for uprooting the bulbs of wildflowers, which in his hands, I knew, was likely to be a terrible weapon. All these he wrote down on the slip of paper, adding “car keys” to the list. He pocketed the keys, went out to the pickup truck in the carport, and put the pack on the backseat.

  Now he returned to the tool rack, took down the big scissors, and cut the bath mat into two equal pieces. He bored holes along their edges and attached pieces of the cord and placed them near the knapsack. From a pile in the corner of the carport he pulled a faded-green tarpaulin with metal-rimmed holes along the sides and slipped pieces of cord through them too and fastened them with knots. He put the canvas tarp in the back of the pickup and threw in a leaf rake and small broom; he rinsed out and cleaned the portable sprayer, filled it with water, pumped the compressor, sprayed some water on the ground, and then released the pressure valve, opened the tank, poured plastic glue into the water, closed and shook it, and compressed it again, put it in the back of the pickup truck, and added it to his list, along with “tarp,” “rake,” “broom,” and “sheep-shoes.” What sheep-shoes are and why one wears them I discovered only the next day, when he returned from the place he had gone and from the deed he had gone there to do.

  Now he turned to the old storeroom in the yard, a small wooden shed, a vestige of the early days of Grandpa Ze’ev and Grandma Ruth in the village, and emerged after a few minutes with a bundle in his hand: something long, rolled up in an old blanket with faded flower embroidery and tied with rope, like a corpse in a shroud bound at the ankles and neck.

  He laid the bundle on the floor by the backseat of the pickup, wrote down “rope,” “blanket,” and “the rifle,” the definite article. He bent down and locked the front wheel hubs manually the way guys do on trips for guys in treacherous off-road terrain, then sat down in the driver’s seat and shoved a hand in his shirt pocket, suddenly recalling the pack of cigarettes that had sat there for years, which he tossed with perfect aim into the trash bin.

  I was thrilled: something in the movement of his hand reminded me of his old agility.

  I said, “Eitan.”

  He did what he hadn’t done for twelve years: he looked into my eyes.

  I asked, “Eitan, where are you going?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Don’t worry. I won’t tell anybody.”

  Silence.

  “You want me to come with you? Do you remember how to drive? You haven’t driven in twelve years.”

  Silence. Ignition.

  He remembers, of course he remembers, I reassured myself. A man like him would not forget. Not how to drive, how to walk on the trail. Not camouflage, ambush, sharpshooting.

  “Eitan,” I said again.

  Again he looked at me.

  “I know where you’re going. I know what you’re going to do. Just know that I’m with you in this but be careful. Please.”

  The pickup moved forward, exited the gate of the nursery.

  “And come back on time,” I called out. “You hear me? We have a funeral tomorrow.”

  He drove off. Not to the right, to the main road, but left, into the fields.

  5

  I imagine: He got on the road a few kilometers later and met up with the wadi around sunset. He didn’t turn on the pickup’s headlights, kept driving slowly for another few hundred meters, up to the parallel wadi. Here he downshifted twice, and without braking or signaling he turned right onto a short dirt road that led to a pumping station at the edge of the gully. Without stopping, he expertly downshifted the sticks to second low gear and inched the pickup forward as slowly as possible, so as not to make noise or spray pebbles or leave deep tire tracks.

  I imagine: A few dozen meters before the pumping station he swung behind a stand of oak trees and came to a halt with a gentle pull on the hand brake. He switched the interior light to the off position, opened the door, extended his legs, and keeping his feet in the air he wrapped the pieces of bath mat around his boots. He tightened the cords in a diagonal pattern and stepped out of the vehicle in his covered footgear. He hung the knapsack and the spray gun on the branch of an oak, and the rifle—concealed in its blanket like a snake—on an adjacent branch, picked up some stones, and positioned them around the pickup truck, which he covered with the tarp till it vanished underneath.

  As the sunlight waned he hastened his activity. He tied the tarp to the stones he had arranged, sprayed it with diluted glue, scattered fistfuls of dirt and dry leaves, which stuck to it at once. With the rake he quickly erased any trace of a moved stone, a footprint, or tire tread, then lifted an edge of the tarp and slipped the sprayer and rake under it. He stepped back a bit and checked his handiwork, then hoisted the knapsack on his shoulder, picked up the rifle wrapped in the blanket, emerged from the oak trees, and headed up the wadi.

  For years he hadn’t walked like this, on a narrow, dark, and rocky trail, not cleared by pickax and bulldozer or leveled by steamroller but blazed by the paws of animals and the shoes of humans and the hooves of time. But his feet instantly remembered the art of quiet, confident nighttime walking that left no imprint except upon his face: an old, inscrutable smile, slightly askew, of facial muscles that for twelve years had not smiled nor kissed nor spoken, just ate a bit and drank a bit and clenched one jaw to another.

  I know the route. I’ve walked it more than once. After a kilometer and a half, at the third bend of the wadi, he climbed southward to the lower shelf of the ridge, lay down a moment on his belly, listened and looked, proceeded in a slow diagonal crouch, and went down the slope. He quickly arrived at the mastic tree and the oak that grew side by side a few dozen meters above a sharp turn in the adjacent wadi. The oak is taller and its branches are wider, and the mastic is typically small and thick, its aromatic branches bunched together, kissing the ground.

  Here he stopped, set the rifle and knapsack on a nearby rock, turned to look at the big carob tree he knew well, which grew in the wadi below him. In the darkness the tree looked like a huge black lump, which sharpened when he looked at it sideways and blended into the night when he gazed at it directly. In a few more hours, when he will lie, rifle in hand, in the hiding place he has prepared, the sun will rise from behind him, he will see everything clearly, and the man who will come, a man whose name and face he doesn’t know, but for whom he waits and whose life he intends to take, will be blinded by its rays if he looks toward him.

  He undid the rope from the blanket and took out the rifle from its folds: a veteran Mauser, heavy, accurate, more than a hundred years old, fired by German soldiers and Turkish soldiers and Grandpa Ze’ev, and he himself had shot it more than once. He inserted it between branches of the mastic tree and propped it on its stock. He took the small pickax from his knapsack and put it on a rock, spread out the blanket and sat on it, untied and removed the covers from his boots and laid them on the ground.

  He took off the boots, placed them on top of their covers, and rolled his socks and stuck them in the shoes to deter snakes and scorpions. He lay down on half the blanket, covered himself with the other half, reached out and felt the rifle on his left and pickax on the right, pulled over a fieldstone, placed it under his head, and took a deep breath. He had a few more hours of darkness ahead, and he hoped that tonight, perhaps, he might have a reprieve from his insomnia.<
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  I put the little pieces together: People do not walk here at night; wild animals will not approach him. If wandering dogs do not come near, if nobody notices the pickup truck he camouflaged—everything will go as planned. The single shot he will fire in the morning is not a problem: there are hunters in the area, and there are soldiers on leave who shoot in the woods near their villages. No one will go out looking for the shooter or contact the police because of one shot—and if they do, no policeman will bother to come.

  He was sure he would hear birdsong before sunrise, but to be on the safe side he fixed an hour in his mind so that the birds of his body would wake him too. Despite what was about to happen he felt at ease, a surprising, forgotten sense of well-being. It was good to know that he was about to do what was right and necessary. Good to know that he had the talent and the tools to do it well. Good to lie on the ground and feel its touch, hard and soft at the same time. To close his eyes under the dark, open sky, to breathe air that streamed from the starry heavens. And good to feel again the ability to feel what was good—I’m back, it’s me, as he would say when he would surprise me with a hug from behind, when he came home, to the bed, to my flesh. That’s what he always said to me: “I’m back. It’s me.”

  I feel: his head resting on the stone pillow, his eyes canvassing the vastness of space. The sky curving above him like a woman. Soon he will touch her through closed eyelids and curtains of darkness. His body is heavy and soft as he sinks into sleep. So easily, for the first time in twelve years, unbothered by dreams.

  We awoke at the appointed hour. For a few seconds we lay still. Eitan there, on the ground overlooking the carob in Grandpa Ze’ev’s wadi, and I here in our house, in bed. He with eyes shut, ears sharp, listening to the familiar set of predawn sounds—Is anything different? Disrupted?—and I wait for his return, my eyes shut like his and my ears also perked: distant loudspeakers of a muezzin, joined by a chorus of wailing jackals, and then the noises nearby—the joyful screeches of the stone curlews, celebrating the end of night, followed by the jaybirds from the wadi below him and our jays from here at the plant nursery.